I apologize in advance BUT this is long and you should read it to the end. ;-)
As we Hasbaranik's - those of us who disseminate positive information abroad about the State of Israel and its actions- know it is our voluntary work of love of Israel that is in the forefront of the battle for world opinion.
From experience - and WHAT inspires me is that I have been privately messaged, by many young Millenials and older persons who are reading my factual and researched replies to the utter fabrications and mendacious lies of "Detractors of Israel" trolls.
So this morning with cup of coffee in hand I opened my computer, to "briefly" review the websites that purport to present the "news". As usual I saw the "atypical" distortions of history and facts on Facebook by several let us "politely" call them enthusiasts for the Tragedy Tourists of Nachbaland (the Arabs of the Mandated Areas). I noticed. yet again, that the detractors of Israel were focusing on Shlomo Sand and his accusation that today's Jews are not real Jews and ergo are not "indigenous" to the land - strengthening the accusation that Zionists -read Jews- are "occupiers".
It never fails to amaze me that a "person"; who is NOT a professor of Middle Eastern History nor is he a genealogist, is used as a source for hate filled propaganda. Sand is a total fool and has already been debunked many times by real professors of Middle Eastern History and genealogists.
Sand’s book has been criticized by many REAL professors of Middle Eastern History and actual geneticists for presenting "dubious theories" regarding Jewish identity as historical facts. Specifically his fraudulent “invention” that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars, who purportedly converted in the early Middle Ages. Actual Genetic research by dozens of real geneticists has proven beyond all doubt that Sand's allegations are "a myth with no factual basis."
If his material were submitted to me a REAL Historian as a student paper I would reject it outright as plagiarism of the contents of anti-Jewish websites.
I draw your attention to notice those who hail Sand’s book as "groundbreaking scholarship"; Neo-Nazis, member's of the Hebrew Israelites of BLM, jihadists, Aryan racist, anti-Semites and hate filled individuals of all stripes.
The fact that serious historians have dismissed Sand's books as; pseudo-academic poppycock, as fraud, and as little more than a comic books recycling of Neo-Nazi myths about Jews being Khazars, has NOT been absorbed by the Rectal Brain Community.
Sand’s conclusions from the imaginary “evidence” about the Khazar roots of Israelis, resemble those of his jihadi groupies, namely those that rant and rave and froth at the mouth that: "Israel has no right to exist and that Jews are not Jews at all!
Here is my reply to the "Detractors of Israel" and Rectal Brain enthusiasts for Nachbaland:
There’s a new chapter in the ever-heated, ongoing, and somewhat esoteric debate over whether Ashkenazi Jews descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who lived in the Caucasus region between the 7th and 10th centuries.
A long-held theory from Yehuda Ha-Levi regarding the "Kuzari"-a text written in the form of a dialogue between a rabbi and a pagan, posits that members of the kingdom converted to Judaism at the behest of their ruler, a notion that fascinated Arthur Koestler who wrote the controversial 1976 book; "The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage". The objective of Koestler was to support a theory which would make the term 'anti-Semitism' become void of meaning.In a new article in the highly respected journal of Jewish Social Studies, Hebrew University researcher Shaul Stampfer argues there is no evidence from Medieval Jewish, Islamic or Christian texts that such a conversion took place.
“The silence of so many sources about the Khazars’ Judaism is very suspicious,” Stampfer once explained in an article by Haaretz;
“The Byzantines, the geonim [Jewish religious leaders of the sixth to eleventh centuries], the sages of Egypt—none of them have a word about the Jewish Khazars.”
Assuming it’s a myth, it’s one that offered Jews; “a source of encouragement in difficult times” Stampfer wrote in his study.
“The history of the Khazars is an important topic in its own right and deserves to be studied seriously and carefully, without the unnecessary distraction of looking for hints of a conversion that never took place. The same is true for Jewish history. Research must be subordinated to facts and not to personal agendas.”
Stampfer’s findings serve as a retort to the controversial work of Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand whose 2009 book, The Invention of the Jewish People, argued for the link between Ashkenazi Jews and the Khazars of the Steppe and saw in that truism an upending of the Jews’ historical claims on the land of Israel.
Recent tests of DNA has genetically proven that many "Ashkenazic" Jews are descendants from those who were enslaved prisoners sent to Northern Italy to work the stone quarries and as field hands on estates of wealthy Romans. The remainder of Jews from Judea, the Galilee and Shomron continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction and horrific suppression of the Bar Kochba uprising in 135CE. Some converted to Christianity, while the most who survived the Islamic conquest in 634 CE were forced to embrace Islam.
The new findings contradict previous assertions that Ashkenazi mitochondrial lineages originated in the Near East, or from mass conversions to Judaism in the Khazar kingdom. “We found that most of the maternal lineages don’t trace to the north Caucasus, which would be a proxy for the Khazarians, or to the Near East, but most of them emanate from Europe,” said coauthor Martin Richards, an archaeo geneticist at the University of Huddersfield in the U.K.
Richards and colleagues’ story “seems reasonable,” said Harry Ostrer, a human geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City who was not involved in the study. “It certainly fits with what we understand about Jewish history.”
Ostrer's genetic research among the Hassidic community has shown that the majority of Ashkenazi Jews today have ancestry in central or Eastern Europe. Previous work has demonstrated that just four mitochondrial types, passed down from four mothers, account for 40 percent of variation in Ashkenazi Jews’ mitochondrial DNA, and some researchers have published evidence of Near Eastern origins for these Ashkenazi mitochondrial types.
Most Zionist thinkers were aware of the assimilation of ancient Jews into the local Arab population specifically tribes in the area of Hebron. Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, were aware of this fact that the peasants of the Mandates areas were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea.
What is NOT mentioned in ALL of Sand diatribe of lies is that half or more of the Jewish population either pre-existed, or as in the time of previous periods of drought or war, migrated to other areas throughout North Africa (cree Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt), Yemen and Asia Minor -primarily the areas of Iraq and Iran.
Many Jews during the time of King Solomon either sailed to foreign lands and intermarried with locals as in the case of Ethiopian Jewry and the Beni Yisrael of India. Or were descendants of warriors who were mercenaries during the time of Alexander The Great -the Beni Menashe or the members of the 5th Century BCE Jewish Garrison sent to guard Elephantine Island in the Nile river valley.