Books: Caucasian Connection

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In addition, Koestler offers a blizzard of information but not enough hard facts to support his thesis. As in the past, he is a master of the conditional assertion ("This would be added evidence ..."). Unfortunately, the approximately four-century history of Khazaria is thin in primary source material. The kingdom seems to have flourished as a crossroads of East-West trade. Persecuted Jews from Byzantium are believed to have flocked to Khazaria, where they intermarried with their Caucasian coreligionists. When Genghis Khan's Mongols swept westward in the 13th century, Khazaria's Jews fled to Eastern and Central Europe. These fugitives, Koestler suggests, were part of a second Diaspora that became the Ashkenazim, or European Jews of Russia and Poland. True Semitic Jews, he says, are descendants of the Sephardim, that small group whose exile wanderings can be traced from the ancient Middle East through North Africa, Spain and Portugal.

Stamped Kosher. Given the complex genetic blending that has occurred during Europe's history, Koestler's position is all too facile, despite the obvious effort and time the author spent on his study. It is not that he is unaware of the subtle traps and deadfalls of racial theory. In fact, he does his usual imitation of a Renaissance man by including mathematical formulas derived from a biochemical blood index. But Koestler's enthusiasm for the idea of a non-Semitic Jewry threatens to drown his own carefully drawn qualifications.

This conflict between sense and sensationalism causes some problems. Koestler is fearful, for example, that his book might be used to undercut the foundations of Israel. If most Israelis are really descended from Caucasian nomads who stamped themselves kosher 1,200 years ago, how can they claim

Israel as their rightful ancestral home land? Yet he is quick to counter himself with the argument that Israel's legitimacy is based on the 1947 United Nations mandate that partitioned Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state.

Of such stuff are authentic nonissues concocted.