ALTERNATE ORIGINS

was driven from his throne by the power of Jupiter. Evidence of this is sought in the name. There is a famous mountain saved the tiny ethnic Palestinian Jewish population in the diaspora from total extinction. The major non-Jewish contribu-in Crete called Ida; the neighbouring tribe, the Idaei, came to be called Judaei by a barbarous lengthening of the national tors to the ethnogenesis of the Ashkenazic Jews were Slavs, though there was probably also a minor Turkic strain – both name. Others assert that in the reign of Isis the overflowing population of Egypt, led by Hierosolymus and Judas, dis-in the Caspian-Black Sea area (the descendants of the Khazars, a mainly Turkic group that converted to Judaism in the charged itself into the neighbouring countries. Many, again, say that they were a race of Ethiopian origin, who in the time eighth century) and in the Balkans and Hungary. In all of these areas, the Turkic population early became submerged of king Cepheus were driven by fear and hatred of their neighbours to seek a new dwelling-place. Others describe them with the coterritorial Slavs.

as an Assyrian horde who, not having sufficient territory, took possession of part of Egypt, and founded cities of their own In addition to Yiddish terms of Slavic, Greek, Romance and German origin which express aspects of the Jewish reli-in what is called the Hebrew country, lying on the borders of Syria. Others, again, assign a very distinguished origin to gion and folk culture, the book shows that many elements of Ashkenazic folklore and religion themselves were of Slavic the Jews, alleging that they were the Solymi, a nation celebrated in the poems of Homer, who called the city which they origin – either West (Sorbian and Polabian) or Balkan Slavic. There is a lengthy discussion of the evidence for widespread founded Hierosolyma after their own name.

conversion to Judaism in Asia Minor, southern Europe and the Germano-Sorbian lands up to the twelfth century and the

–Tacitus

reasons why pagan and Christian Slavs converted to Judaism. While historians have been disputing the extent of conversion to Judaism, Wexler thinks the linguistic and ethnographic evidence make the conversion evidence highly plausible.

In addition, Jewish linguistic evidence refutes the traditional claims that Yiddish is a variant of High German and

Khazars

that Modern Hebrew is a “revived” form of Old Hebrew; new hypotheses are proposed: that Yiddish began as a Slavic

language (specifically a Judaized form of Sorbian) that was re-lexified to High German at an early date, and that Modern According to an article published at the World Zionist Organization’s (WZO) website:

Hebrew is, in turn, Yiddish that became re-lexified to Hebrew, and thus is also a form of Sorbian. These facts support the

“REMARKABLY, the Khazars, a people of Turkic origin, converted to the Jewish religion sometime in the 9th century, author’s hypothesis of the Slavic origins of the Ashkenazic Jews, and the bulk of their religion and folk culture.

beginning with the royal house and spreading gradually among the general populace. Judaism is now known to have been more The book proceeds to show how, under the conditions of relative separation from the non-Jewish population that

widespread among the Khazar inhabitants of the Khazar kingdom than was previously thought. In 1999, Russian archaeologists developed after the twelfth century, the north European Jews developed elaborate processes of “Judaizing” their pagan announced that they had successfully reconstructed a Khazarian vessel from the Don River region, revealing 4 inscriptions of and Christian Slavic religion and folk culture – by inserting unusually large amounts of Hebrew elements into colloquial the word “Israel” in Hebrew lettering. It is now the accepted opinion among most scholars in the field that the conversion of the Judeo-Sorbian/Yiddish and by reinterpreting and recalibrating religious and ethnographic practices according to bibli-Khazars to Judaism was widespread, and not limited merely to the royal house and nobility. Ibn al-Faqih, in fact, wrote “All of cal and talmudic precedents; customs known to be obsolete among the Christians were retained by the Jews as “Jewish”

ethnographic and religious evidence is taken mainly from discussions in the Germano-Slavic Hebrew religious literature of the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries which reveal that many rabbis were quite aware of the non-Jewish origins of At least 10% of the Roman Empire was Jewish. Jews converted Gentiles. Then Christians – most of whom were Jews – con-Ashkenazic folklore and religious practices. Where the rabbis could not convince the masses to abandon pagan-Christian verted Jews to Christianity. Some original Jews drifted back; probably more remained Christians. Moslems also converted Jews, customs, they were obliged to retain them, but in a “Judaized” form.

though the feeling wasn’t mutual. It is hard to resist reprinting this recent book review if you’re interested in the parameters of the The book offers a correction to the unsubstantiated views of the late Arthur Koestler in his The Thirteenth Tribe

already noted question: Do today’s Ashkenazic Jews descend from the ancient Jews of Israel?

(London 1976), that the Ashkenazic Jews are largely descended from Turkic Khazars who converted to Judaism in the

Caucasus in the eighth century. Wexler believes Koestler was right about a Slavo-Turkic basis for the north European The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in

Jews – but that he erred in assuming the preponderence of Turks over other ethnic groups, and in placing the “homeland”

Search of a Jewish Identity

of the Ashkenazic Jews in the Caucasus. Where Koestler’s evidence, mainly non-linguistic, was scanty and totally unreliable, Yiddish and Ashkenazic folk culture and religion provide a wealth of varied evidence that support a primarily Slavic Paul Wexler

ethnic origin for the Ashkenazic Jews. In opposition to the popular view that the Slavic imprint in Ashkenazic Jewish culture is a “late borrowing”, Wexler sees the Slavic elements as an “inheritance” from the pagan Slavic cultures which This book, a linguist’s reassessment of early European Jewish history, will be of interest to anyone who has ever wondered were to become for the most part submerged and reformed under the impact of Christianity.

how the Jewish people, lacking their own territorial base and living as a minority among often hostile non-Jewish peoples Hence, Ashkenazic Judaism is essentially a Judaized form of Slavic pagan and Christian culture and religion (rather over the four corners of the globe, succeeded in preserving a separate identity for close to two thousand years.

than an uninterrupted evolution of Palestinian Judaism) – and the best repository of pagan Slavic folk culture that sur-The book makes a number of innovative and controversial claims about the relationship of the contemporary Jews

vives to our days. Wexler also proposes that the other Jewish diasporas – e.g. the Sephardic, the Arab, Iranian, Chinese, to the Old Palestinian Jews. Recognizing the limitations of historical documentation, this book shows how facts about Indian, Ethiopian and Yemenite – are also largely of non-Jewish origin. The book compares the notion of Jewish people-Yiddish and Modern Israeli Hebrew (presented in four recent books) can assist historians and archeologists in evaluat-hood with attempts at rewriting the past found in many other societies.

ing known data and artifacts as well as generate a new hypothesis about the origins of the Ashkenazic Jews, the north European Jews who have consituted the majority of the Jews in the world for the last several centuries.

In Wexler’s view, the Ashkenazic Jews most likely descend from a minority ethnic Palestinian Jewish emigre popula-

tion that intermarried with a much larger heterogeneous population of converts to Judaism from Asia Minor, the Balkans and the Germano-Sorb lands (the Sorbs are a West Slavic population that still numbers about 70,000 in the former

German Democratic Republic). Widespread conversions to Judaism that began in Asia Minor in the Christian era and

ended with the institutionalization of Christianity among the Western Slavs in the beginning of the second millennium 555

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