Azkenazim Jews

The Lie that Jews in Israel today are not real Jews

Out of all the false teachings doing the rounds today, probably the most farfetched is the notion that all Eastern European Jews, known as “Ashkenazim ,” (German Jews) who currently reside in Israel are not really Jews, but imposters descended from the Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people. The belief is founded on the premise that following the conversion to Judaism of Khazarian royalty and aristocracy between the 8th and 9th century, a significant portion of the general populace followed suite leading to the emergence of a Jewish majority aided by flourishing Jewish communities that supposedly already held a majority in the population as early as 670. 
Racial studies conducted in late 19th century Europe frequently cited the above theory to assert that modern day Jews are not true descendants of Israel and thus their ancestral claims to the State of Israel were unfounded. As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that a convert who has truly joined himself to Israel becomes Israel regardless of his former racial heritage and therefore this whole argument (based on this Scriptural premise alone) is a completely muted point and just serves as a point of extreme ignorance on the part of a Messianic who agrees with such a wild and illogical claim. But the concept itself has no substance as the reader will see.

It was Ernest Renan, a racial theorist, who in 1883, first disputed the idea that the Jews constituted a unified racial entity in a biological sense, stating that the Jew were “limited by dogmatism and lacked a cosmopolitan conception of civilisation,” concluding that the Jews were “an incomplete race.” This type of attack on the Jew made his theory unpalatable for racialised anti-Semitists, but was absorbed by the anti-Zionist regime. American historian and anti-immigration advocate, Lothrop Stoddard perpetuated Renan’s theory in an article called the Pedigree of Judah in which he stated that Ashkenazi Jews were a mixed race, of which the Khazars were a dominating element. He and Renan based these assertions on variations on facial features and presumed accompanying character traits caused by the corrupting effects of intermarriage and other vagaries. The Anglo-Israelite movement, a group that believes all native born British folk are direct descendants of Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, leapt on these claims in the hopes of invalidating Jewish claims to the Holy Land.

Southern Methodist University professor, John O. Beaty came forward in 1951 with a book called The Iron Curtain over America in which he insisted that “Khazar Jews were attempting to subvert Western Christianity and establish communism throughout the world.” With the support of wealthy American millionaire J. Russell Maguire, the Khazar theory had become an entrenched belief amongst right wing Christian groups across America by the 1960s.
Another angle was covered by John Bagot Glubb, a British soldier, scholar, author and one-time commander of the Transjordan Arab Legion, who “claimed that Palestinians were more closely related to the ancient Judeans than were Jews.”

The foundation of the Khazars imposter belief is fairly well documented, and there is really no excuse for falling for this false teaching that’s doing the rounds in some Messianic communities. Even if it was true, which it isn’t, Sephardic Jews, Jews who occupied Spain and Islamic countries and Yemenite Jews, Jews from Ethiopia and Chochin, also make up a growing proportion of the population who currently reside in Israel, so they would be exempt from the Khazars imposter belief and ousting Jews based on this premise would not affect all the Jews anyway (if it was done with any fairness, heaven forbid). Added to this, Scripture as I have briefly mentioned, completely accepts the Jewish convert as having the same privileges as a native born Jew, so his clemency to the Land of Israel stands alongside an observant native born Jew with no less privileges. Scripture itself goes one step further by proclaiming that if the Almighty wanted to, He could raise up full-blooded descendants of Abraham from the stones of the ground. “And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones Elohim can raise up children for Abraham” (Matthew 3:9). So to save face, the subscribers to the Khazars imposter belief say that it’s all a conspiracy; they only posed as Jews, secretly denouncing it with the goal of taking possession of the Holy Land. So we are meant to believe that over the course of hundreds of years the Khazars, a race whose empire stretched from modern-day European Russia to northeastern Turkey, submerged their identity within a Jewish one just to one day claim the Holy Land? Seems like it would be much easier for them to just convert to Judaism with no agenda and become residence of the Holy Land anyway. 

While there were certainly Turkic people who converted to Judaism, it is a far cry to assume that they make up the entire population of Israel and that their conversion was on mass and done as a conspiracy to supplant an original people. This is pure science fiction and shows very clearly that there are no angles of attack on Jews that are too stupid for the enemy to muster. If you hear this theory floated in your general direction I encourage you to put it swiftly to the floor and leave.

Congregations that adhere to or even associate with other groups that adhere to any of these false teachings that I have enumerated here are like a cancer attacking its own body. Error can start slowly and on relatively small matters, but error swiftly escalates. Eventually there is the very real risk of eventually heading down a road of total error. The reason is that some small theological error inevitably multiplies itself with more theological error. This is like accepting a poorly built aspect to an otherwise good foundation, which compromises the rest of the foundation and eventually leads to the whole structure’s collapse. In the same way I have seen error slowly bankrupt a believer until he’s left with nothing. It is as though the Almighty repays an individual with a falsehood by giving him further falsehoods. One such example is disbelief in a certain book’s authenticity. For whatever reason, the Book of Hebrews might get tossed to the side and then before long another book is rejected, then another and another and before long the whole of the Netzarim Ketuvim is called into question. Sure, there are groups that also retain other false teachings that I have not listed, such as the Trinity and not wearing head coverings, but these ones are fairly obvious and usually get sorted out early in a Nazarenes development. “…avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the Torah, because these are unprofitable and useless” (Titus 3:9). “Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels” (2 Timothy 2:23).