Following the current flare up of the Israel/Palestine
conflict, a meme has been circulating around the Internet. In
it, Laurence Fishburne, as the
character Morpheus in The Matrix, is sitting in a
comfy chair calmly explaining the hidden nature of reality to
Neo:
“What if I told you that Israelis have no historic or
genetic connection to Palestine but in fact originate from the
Caucasus and a people called the
Khazars?”
In the corner of the image is web address: davidicke.com.
The question here is about the origin of Eastern European
Ashkenazi Jews, who comprise around three-quarters of the
global Jewish population, a large
percentage of American Jewry, and about half of the Jews in
modern Israel. The meme is expressing an idea that is the end
result of a long evolution which
is partly rooted in the British colonial rule of Palestine in
the late 19th century. The argument in Britain went something
like this: “The Holy Land plays
an important part in the final days and the return of Christ.
The British Empire currently—and likely will for a long
time—governs the Holy Land.
Therefore, we British are preordained to play some important
role in the Second Coming. We knew we were special.”
This in turn led to a movement called British-Israelism, the
idea that the British are in fact genetically tied to the Jews
of the Old Testament,
essentially one of the lost tribes. The belief, when it hopped
the pond to the Americas, became the ideological progenitor of
the Christian Identity
movement, which posits that God’s chosen people are
really white American Christians.
Hence, the idea that there are false Jews.
Really.
The earliest incarnation of the idea that the Ashkenazi Jews
descended from Khazars in the Black Sea region appears in 1883
in a lecture given by French
scholar Ernest Renan. Michael Barkun traces the subsequent
development of this idea in his
Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian
Identity Movement, an excellent and detailed book.
In the US, the idea can be traced back through a Klan leader
in the 1920s, Reuben H. Sawyer, who popularized the idea that
the “authentic Jews” were
Sephardic Jews (those from the Iberian Peninsula and North
Africa) and who decried Ashkenazi Jews as imposters who were
hell-bent on destroying
Christendom. In the later ‘20s, the popular racial
theorist Lothrop Stoddard opined that ancient Hittite
sculpture looked really sort of Jewish (Barkun
127), ushering in the idea of a tainted bloodline.
In the 1940s, this idea metastasized in a religious tract
called, When? When Gog Attacks, which was authored by
an obscure group called the
Anglo-Saxon Christian World Movement. Barkun notes this tract
formulated some notions that would reappear in Christian
Identity-style anti-Semitism,
including: “Cain as the founder of the ‘synagogue
of Satan’; the ‘Turko-Mongol’ origin of
Ashkenazi Jews; the blood of fallen angels among Jews; and
the
historicity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
As the pamphlet’s author concludes, ‘The
Ashkenazim are neither Jews nor Semitic by blood or
race’” (51). (Indeed, in the extreme form of this
belief in modern Christian Identity, the root of Jewishness
can be found in the union of Eve and the
serpent in the Garden of Eden, which will become an important
point when we consider David Icke.)
The idea that the Ashkenazi bloodlines come from Asia (and the
corollary notion that Eastern European Jews were mostly
converts) denied them any historical
claim to the Holy Land, and this became very important after
the Second World War, which saw the dawn of the Cold War and
the establishment of the state of
Israel in 1948. Eastern European Jews had long been
scapegoated as being responsible for the rise of communism,
and Zionism was seen as the mechanism by
which Jews would ascend to global hegemony.
The racist right in the US could look confidently at the
establishment of Israel and its subsequent population with
Jews from Eastern Europe as justifying
both Cold War fears and religious paranoia. Denying the
population of Israel both genetic and historical claims to
Palestine was a method of resisting the
commie-globalist Jewish cabal.
Is there any truth to the idea that the Ashkenazi Jews are
Khazar? The genetic history of the Jews is complicated
(Elhiak, Costa). The Jewish people are
diasporic, widespread throughout the Mediterranean for at
least 2000 years. The global migration of Jewry has been the
subject of much historical research,
and genetics promises to add additional context to that
history. In fact, modern genetics have already shed some light
on the ancestry of the Ashkenazi.
According to geneticist Harry Ostrer, the Ashkenazi are
genetically more similar to Sephardic Jews of the
Mediterranean than they are to their geographic
neighbors, who would presumably share the most genes with the
historical Khazars (Yandel).
There are some surprises in the Ashkenazi genome, for instance
that mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited exclusively through
the maternal line, shows that
half of Ashkenazi Jews share DNA from just four women. There
has been much debate about where those women came from, and
the evidence suggests they were
European women from the north Mediterranean. While the size of
the European contribution to the Ashkenazi genome is the
subject of ongoing research,
geneticists seem to agree that the Sephardic and Ashkenazi
Jews are genetically linked and that they share those genetic
markers with Jewish populations
from the Middle East (Fischman).
And with Palestinians.
So, why is David Icke circulating the Matrix meme? David Icke
is a retired British footballer, sports broadcaster, and Green
Party spokesperson who has
embarked on a fourth career as a New Age guru who claims that
the world is controlled by capitalist reptilian bloodlines.
Icke has adopted a version of the Matrix meme, that the world
is decidedly not as it seems, but is a false image projected
into our minds from the hollow
moon, which is also a spaceship. So, the imagery appeals to
him. Secondly, it’s often really hard to distinguish the
things that Icke says about the lizard
people and the things that run of the mill anti-Semites say
about the Jewish New World Order, and I think that the far
racist right hears a dog whistle
when he says “reptilian,” which they interpret as
“Jews.” It probably confuses things further that
the American Christian Identity movement actually thinks
that the people they believe are imposter Jews are descended
from the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Furthermore, Icke has never exactly done much to dissuade
people who have made their minds up that he is an anti-Semite.
He does, however, seem to think
that the Jews as a group are controlled by outside alien
entities, as are Muslims, the Council on Foreign Relations,
the UN, the Freemasons, and all other
social institutions. In Icke’s schema, everyone is a
pawn, including the Jews.
The scheming that he believes puts Khazars in Israel is not necessarily that of the Jews themselves, which… maybe?… makes it less racist? Maybe?
Works Cited
Barkun, Michael. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Print.
Costa, M.D. et al. 2013. “A Substantial
Prehistoric European Ancestry Amongst Ashkenazi Maternal
Lineages.” Nature Communications. 4:2543
doi: 10.1038/ncomms3543.
Elhaik, Eran. 2012. "The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypothesis." Genome Biology and Evolution 5: 61-74.
Fischman, Josh. 2012. "The Chosen Genes." The Chronicle of Higher Education. Online at: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Chosen-Genes/131481/
Yandell, Kate. 2013. "Genetic Roots of the Ashkenazi
Jews." The Scientist. Online at:
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37821/title/Genetic-Roots-of-the-Ashkenazi-Jews/