May 29, 2025
Dear editor;
In the May 22, 2025 issue of “The Voice,” Charles Coddington asserted, for what I believe is third time in his column, the largely discredited hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from Biblical Israelites, but rather from Khazars who converted to the religion of Judaism in the 8th Century CE. The implication of this notion is that the Jewish population of the modern State of Israel has no valid ancestral claim to a homeland in the Middle East.
Acknowledging that Mr. Coddington incorporates humor and hyperbolic self-assurance in his writing style, if we take him at his word that “History – as always – is on my side,” then it’s appropriate to rebut his claim. What’s known as the “Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry” is not an incontrovertible fact.
First of all, this claim is not supported by genetics. Doron Behar wrote a paper for Wayne State University Press, “we found that Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations and, among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East. No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews to populations from the Caucasus is evident, particularly populations that most closely represent the Khazar region” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25079123). Despite the superficially European racial appearance of the Ashkenazi, explained in part by intermarriage between Jewish and other European groups, genetic studies show that the Ashkenazi are in the same family as Sephardic (Iberian) and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews.
Secondly, as Dr. Henry Abramson points out (www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MkA8Qu_how), there is essentially no linguistic evidence pointing to an Ashkenazi origin from among the Khazar people. The most common language of the Ashkenazi is Yiddish, which is related to German. This would indicate that the Eastern European population of Ashkenazi would more likely be explained by migration from Germany east into Slavic lands, rather than by migration northwest from the Western Turkic Khaganate.
I don’t intend by this letter to try to prove Mr. Coddington wrong. But on multiple occasions it seems that he’s tried to deprive the Ashkenazi Jews of their identity based on medieval documents of questionable authenticity. I didn’t think such statements should be left unchallenged.
Respectfully,
Matt Kruszewski, Aurora