Question: There seems to be an increasing belief among many Christians that the Jews in Israel and ...

May 1, 1996

TBC Staff

Question: There seems to be an increasing belief among many Christians that the Jews in Israel and most of those around the world today are not real Jews descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but descendants of the Khazars who adopted the Jewish religion. Is this true? And also, didn’t most of Israel disappear when the ten tribes were lost, and weren’t the rest of the Jews lost through intermarriage?

Response: No. It is true that the Khaganor ruler of the Khazars adopted Judaism for himself and his people in the eighth century, but these “Jews” by conversion were never confused with the ethnic Jews living among them. Furthermore, when the Khazar state was overthrown in 965, the Khazars fled and soon disappeared as a people through intermarriage. The last vestiges of the Khazars in the Crimea were wiped out in about 1016 by the Greeks and Russians. There is no evidence that the Khazars intermarried with the Jews to such an extent that Jews were lost as a people. Such a theory is unreasonable because only a small fraction of world Jewry was living among the Khazars.

It is the Khazars who disappeared, and to suggest that all of the Jews all over the world were somehow absorbed by them or that they became known as Jews is neither logical nor supported by history. It is a myth that the Ashkenazim Jews of Russia and Europe are not real Jews but Khazars who migrated there when their country was overrun by invaders.

As for the so-called “ten lost tribes,” that is another myth. They were not lost. We dealt with this question in the November 1992 newsletter. Both of these ideas are a form of anti-Semitism. Rather than putting the Jews in the ovens, they are exterminated by simply denying that those known as Jews are the descendants of Jacob.

No historic research is needed to recognize that all theories are false which deny that the Jews in Israel and around the world are real Jews from all twelve tribes. The Bible promises that Israel shall not cease from being a nation forever (Jer:31:35-36) and that Israel’s scattered survivors will return to their promised land where the Messiah will reign over His chosen people from the throne of His father David. We have the choice of believing the promises in God’s Word or these anti-Semitic theories.