Re: Who was talking about Khazaria?

Quoting Pavel Iosad <pavel_iosad@...>:
    Quoting me:
> > Koestler's theory is that they basically went west after
> > the fall of the empire, becoming the ancestors of most European Jews.
> A more
> > recent book, "The Jews of Khazaria," posits a theory between the two
> extremes;
> > namely, that the Khazarian Jews went west and bumped into the French
> and German
> > Jews heading east, intermingled, and out of the mix came Ashkenazi
>
> Very very improbable. The Ashkenazi came anywhere near "Khazaria" only
> after the First Divide of Poland.
    According to this theory, the two groups met up in Poland and western
Ukraine. I can't remember off-hand, but there's evidence of new Jewish
communities being founded in the tenth and eleventh centuries in that area,
which would be consistant with the time frame. So the European Jews didn't have
to travel as far as Khazaria to meet the Khazarian Jews.
    :Peter

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