[Steve]

The word Semitic comes from the race of peoples in ancient Sumer from whom the biblical Jews claimed to have emerged. Sem or Shem, one of the sons of Noah in the Bible stories, is said to be of this line and the origin appears to have been the legend of ‘Shemjaza’, the ‘heavenly son and guardian angel of God’. According to several Jewish writers, including Arthur Koestler in his book, The Thirteenth Tribe, very few Jews today can trace their genetic ancestry back to the Semite line of this period and/ or the Semitic line in Palestine and Israel at the time of Y’shua (Jesus). Instead, they are the genetic descendants of a people of Turkish-Mongolian-Nordic ancestry called the Khazars who converted to the Jewish religion in 740AD.

The Khazars lived in lower Russia between the Black and Caspian Seas. They were between the Christian and Islamic worlds and their leader chose to accept the Jewish faith to avoid being swamped by the empires of the perceived alternatives. Most Jews today, Koestler says, originate from these people, not the Semitic line. In fact, to call someone ‘anti-Semitic’ is, more accurately, to call them ‘anti-Arab’, because more members of the old Semite race are Arab than are Jewish! After the breakup of the Khazar empire by the thirteenth century, the people who adopted the Jewish faith either stayed on in Russia or, in the case of the majority, moved on into what became the Balkans, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany.