When this work was published at the very beginning of the 1970s, it notoriously caused a scandal. A renowned Jewish writer, friend of great figures like Camus or Malraux, a staunch supporter of liberties to the point of questioning his communist affiliation after the Moscow Trials, and a committed advocate of the Zionist cause, dared to question the origin of the Ashkenazim: these Jewish populations from the supposed northeast of France, Flanders, and Rhineland would not, according to him, be of Jewish origin. Arthur Koestler explains in his book “The Thirteenth Tribe” that they are descendants of a tribe located between the Danube, Don, and Volga known as the “Khazars”. His particularly detailed study, which deserves applause for its republication in the “Texto” collection by Tallandier, supports the thesis of D.M. Dunlop, a British historian. The latter developed the idea of a massive conversion to Judaism in 740 by this people, geographically and strategically caught between the advancement of Islamic conquerors and the ambitions of Christian powers around Byzantium, a few years before Koestler. While the reasons that led the writer to engage in such research remain obscure today, particularly in light of the sometimes fierce criticisms his conclusions inevitably faced, one must acknowledge that the author hardly spared any effort in systematically exploiting the sources available to him: his knowledge of Hebrew, German, French, English, and Hungarian gave him access to texts not yet deciphered, such as Arabic manuscripts like Togan’s discovered in Iran in 1923, writings of Al Masudi, the great Arab historian of the 10th century, Russian chronicles of the 12th century, as well as a correspondence around 954-961 between Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, Jewish Minister of the Caliph of Cordoba, and a scribe of the Khazar king. Even carried away by his enthusiasm, Arthur Koestler does not compromise the standards of the historian when he carefully weighs, while taking the reader as a witness, the nature and content of the evidence he presents during his research. In this respect, some of the author’s phrases and assessments, indicative of his critical distance, simultaneously betray his fear of being perceived as both judge and party.
All the arguments are thus reviewed: the geographical position of the Khazar people between the Caspian and Black Seas, the dialect akin to that of the Bulgarians, the analysis of the politico-religious environment leading Kagan, the Khazar king, to demand the mandatory conversion of his people to Judaism — a modified Judaism which, initially, “allowed the people to retain their paganism and worship their idols,” the writer notes. Perhaps this branch of Judaism closely relates, ponders the author of the famous “Darkness at Noon”, to that of the “Karaites, a fundamentalist sect that emerged in Persia in the 8th century, before spreading to all Jewish communities”.
But the historian also knows how to play the journalist to draw all the consequences of his work when he addresses the repercussions of the “decline of Khazaria”: the dispersion from the 9th-10th century of this community to the four corners of Central and Eastern Europe but also as far as the vicinity of Baku. In the scope of his investigations, Arthur Koestler even finds traces among the first Seljukids, some of whose descendants bore Jewish first names, and among Jewish Khazars, initiators of a 12th-century messianic movement, “a rudimentary attempt at a Jewish crusade,” the author specifies, who proposed to conquer Palestine by force. From this “investigation,” he concludes, two facts emerge: “the disappearance of the Khazar nation in its historical habitat and the appearance in neighboring northeastern regions… of the greatest concentration of Jews since the beginning of the diaspora”. Supporting his argument which aims to revise “the history of German Jews of the Ashkenazi community”, the writer analyzes the Yiddish language, in which he claims to find “no linguistic component from German areas close to France”.
This context thus better illuminates the unequivocal condemnation expressed at the publication of “The Thirteenth Tribe” by the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who argued that “Koestler is a Jewish author who, by denying his Jewishness, is no longer a Jew.” Nevertheless, this work is worth reading: beyond the historical interest of addressing with multiple and solid references an often-unknown period and region, the author’s pedagogy makes this journey particularly enlightening and accessible for contemporary readers. As explained by a former president of the CRIF, when asked about this book: “There are so many hypotheses ranging from the east to the west, not forgetting Africa!”
Arthur Koestler, “The Thirteenth Tribe”, Coll. “Texto”, Editions Tallandier, 2008.
