historians.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Historians.social is open to all who are interested in history.

Server stats:

297
active users

Perils of internet & social media research:

I'm always on the lookout for stories about , regarding either the empire (in what was today's Ukraine & southern Russia) or contemporary

But because the late Bob Lee unwisely chose to hook up with Khazar Elyassnia, the murder case has been flooding my timeline

Fortunately (for my research, at least) the haters & nutjobs are still out there, if one is but patient & knows where to look

Here goes 1/n

The idea that Eastern European (Ashkenazim) were descended from remnants of the Turkic Khaganate, which adopted Judaism in the course of the 8th and 9th centuries, arose in the later 19th century as a plausible hypothesis to account for (1) the demographic surge of Ashkenazic Jewry, which, by the end of the early modern era, outstripped the once more numerous Sephardic (Mediterranean and Middle Eastern) Jewish population, and (2) the physical differences between them 2/n

By the mid-C20, the idea that Eastern European were the descendants of converts had become the province of cranks & (usually both). Although the states tried to invoke this canard in the 1947 Partition debate, they made relatively little global use of it afterward. It is thus very disturbing that this canard is again popular--among the racist lunatic right, but also in some Arab and pseudo-left discourse on and 3/n

@CitizenWald
I have to admit that I was taken in by this when I first encountered it in the 1990s—I was just starting to learn early medieval history and I’d never heard of the Khazars before in any context, so I had no idea of the ickiness associated with the ‘theory’... and I didn’t know enough about far-right discourses back then to spot the red flags...

Jim Wald

@tkinias Understandable. As I said, it began as a legitimate theory (and it would be fascinating if true--just as I would be thrilled if we had hard proof of alien visitation) , and people such as Sand and Elhaik are operating as scholars (vs. a figure such as, say, Graham Hancock), although their findings have not met with widespread acceptance. The problem, as always, was with those who latch onto their ideas for other reasons.