The Thirteenth Tribe

The Thirteenth Tribe (English The Thirteenth Tribe ) is a non-fiction book published in 1976 by ​​Arthur Koestler, the popular science deals with the controversial thesis that the eastern Jews descended from the people of the Khazars. This made in the early Middle Ages, a kingdom in southern Russia and took, at least in part, the Jewish religion. Koestler refers to Abraham N. Poliak.

Although the thesis in public attracted attention, it was rejected by the established historians. More recent genetic research that argue against a significant proportion of Khazar ancestry among living today Ashkenazim, contradicted the Israeli geneticist Eran Elhaik, who found a high correlation between the genome of the Ashkenazi Jews and the peoples of the Caucasus in a DNA analysis. Received support from the Israeli historian Shlomo work Elhaiks sand in his book sees this as a confirmation of the theses The invention of the Jewish people.

Many anti-Zionists and anti-Semites invoked later on Koestler's work to deny the legitimacy of the State of Israel. Koestler himself the risk of abuse was well aware of and wrote: " Whether the chromosomes of its people now contain genes of Khazar or those Semitic, Roman or Spanish origin, is irrelevant and can not affect the destruction of Israel - nor the moral obligation every civilized people, whether Jew or non- Jew, to defend that right. "

Expenditure

• The Thirteenth Tribe. The Khazar Empire and its Heritage. Hutchinson, London, 1976, ISBN 0-09-125550-3
• The Thirteenth Tribe. The kingdom of the Khazars and his legacy. From the English transferred from John Eidlitz. Molden, Vienna / Munich / Zurich 1977, ISBN 3-217-00790-5; Pawlak, Herrsching, 1991, ISBN 3-88199-878-0