Jewish Khazars Poem by gershon hepner

Jewish Khazars



A Jew told his friends: “It’s bizarre:
they tell me that you’re a Khazar.
Though you are a Levite,
and staunchly Aqivite,
I’m not really sure what you are.”

The Jews said: My Y haplotype
is Levite and Khazar in type,
not Sephardi or Farsee,
for I’m Ashkenazi
and smoking—put that in your pipe.

Inspired by an article by Hillel Halkin in the September issue of Commentary in which he discusses data that, according to David B. Goldstein (Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of History) , support the view that Ashkenazi Jews are partly descended from the Khazars, a group of people living between the Black and Caspian Seas who converted to Judaism in the 8th century and left it in the 11th century when the kingdom was destroyed. According to a recent Hebrew University study, Ashkenazim are more closely related to other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than to their host population in Eastern Europe, but have an elevated frequency of R-M117, the dominant Y-chromosome haplotype in Eastern Europeans. The frequency of the R-M117 haplotype is especially high in Levites, suggesting that when Jewish Khazars fled to Europe several claimed to be Levites in order to add verisimilitude to their claim to Jewish. Since I am a Levite, this observation is of particular interest to me.


8/30/08

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