COUNTY SOVEREIGNTY No. 7
1997 February 1

Again, just this one essay. The implication for my County
Sovereignty theme is that a major force keeping centralization
going, namely the warfare state, will greatly shrink. Let me add
here that I have come to think that devolution will not go to the
point where there is no governmental authority spanning a
country's free migration area. The United States is by far the
largest such area, for free migration is either prohibited or not
practiced on any significant scale in any more populous country.

WHY THE KHAZARS WILL ABANDON ISRAEL

Until modern times, Jews have been remarkable among the
worlds' great peoples by their ability to survive. But now,
demographic factors are doing them in. The outmarriage rate is
about half among Jews in the United States, and Jewish
demographers have predicted that the U.S. will contain as few
as 10,000 Jews in the year 2100. The children of these interfaith
marriages are not likely to view themselves as Jewish: after all,
neither would have married outside their faith if they had taken
the faith seriously. Some children do choose to be Jewish. If the
mother is a Jew, the children are automatically Jews by the
standards of Orthodox Judaism, but in order for this to have any
effect in the larger world, the child has to come to identify
himself as Jewish. (In Reform Judaism, either parent can be
Jewish.)

Jewish leaders are well aware of their demographic threat and
regularly urge lapsed Jews to return to their faith and argue over
(say) whether this is best served by reach-out methods to Jews
who have married outside their faith. But these efforts are
manifestly failing, for the simple reason that Jews are among the
world's most intelligent people and most of them cannot take the
religion very seriously. Only about one-sixth of Jews attend
Sabbath services in any given week, a figure that would still be
lower if Jews so lapsed that they are not even interviewed by
surveyors were taken into consideration. By contrast, about half
of Protestants and Roman Catholics show up at church on any
given Sunday.

Faith is not working to prevent a demographic erosion, and
memories of the Holocaust are receding in spite of considerable
efforts to keep the memory alive. Nationalistic pride about Israel
is not working very well, at least not in the diaspora, that is, all
places outside Israel.

The only thing that is left to stop the Jewish demographic
decline is for the Jews to identify themselves as a race and to
take pride in their many achievements. We are already seeing
this happen. Here is a typical UseNet exchange:

> From: dav-bra@ix.netcom.com(DAVID BRANTZ)
> Newsgroups: soc.culture.israel,
  soc.culture.jewish,talk.politics.mideast
> Subject: ZIONIST HISTORICAL CLAIMS ARE PROVEN
> Organization: Netcom
> Message-ID: <500jgc$af1@sjx-ixn3.ix.netcom.com>
> NNTP-Posting-Host: irv-ca13-09.ix.netcom.com
> X-NETCOM-Date: Tue Aug 27  9:55:40 PM PDT 1996
> 
> [big snip]
> 
> In your ravings you place the jews [Jews] among the Khazars
and amongt [among or amongst] the ignorant  and despized
[despised] by the Arabs of Berbers, but the laws of science has
[have] proven you a liar.

[Note the typical UseNet bad grammar, careless spelling, and
name calling. --Frank]

> About 1955, two biologists, Leo Sachs and Mucosa Bat
Miriam working in the Weisman Institute and Israel Institute for
Biological studies entered into a study to determine what degree
of mixing the jews [Jews] engaged in with the native populations
among whom they had migrated, either going voluntarily or
being forced to by invaders.  According to the strict observence
[observance] of the jewish [Jewish] religion, jews [Jews] should
only marry other jews, [Jews.]  i[I]t is known that there has
been some intermarriage in various parts of the world[,] and the
question arises [as to] what effect this and the possibility of
conversion has had on the gene pool of the jewish and [Jews.]
i[I]ndeed there is evidence for such a gene pool after the over
three thousand years of the history of the jews [Jews,] between
the crossing of the Jordan into [and] their entrance into Canaan
and [the] subsequent conquest of their promised land.
-----temporary end of "anon"

The standard line on whether the Jews constitute a race was
strongly negative only a couple of decades ago. It was routinely
claimed that Jews more resembled the people among whom they
lived than to their co-religionists in other countries. Now the
claim is just the opposite! The reason why may be just a simple
recognition of reality. This explanation would generally be a
satisfactory one and a high tribute to the recognizers, since an
Objectivist attitude to reality is not very common. But the study
cited below dates way back to 1955. I suspect, therefore, that
interests may be involved rather than just a 42-year delayed
recognition of the facts.

"anon" again:
> To determine this rate of mixture or lack of mixture with the
natives from the other lands, it was necessary to obtain a
reliable method to determine what mixture existed. The process
could not include any factors that could change due to
environmental factors, such as blood type proportions[,] which
is [are] highly dependent on environmental effects.  The method
decided was one which was vestigal [vestigial] and showed no
known change due to the environment.  It was the fingerprint
pattern distribution of the hands.  It has long been shown that
this pattern is a result of genetic distribution and requires an
appreciable number of subjects for its original bases not to be
distorted.  For the study, each population group would contain
500 males taken at random not to include [but then removing]
members of the same family so as to make it more random in a
population.  [This is bad statistics, by the way.--Frank] For each
population there was [were] 5,000 fingers. Men only [Only
men] were studied so as to avoid any difference[s] due to sex. 
Thus for the study, there was a total of 40,000 fingers for the
eight jewish [Jewish] groups.  Owing to the size of the
indidvidual [individual] groups, it was assumed that none of the
populations examined would be subject to the genetic drift that
may occur in small isolated groups.
> 
> There would be a shock [where? by whom?] if you  were to
accept the logic of science, but knowing from your ravings, it is
obvious that you will reject the laws of genetics if it conflicts
[they conflict] with the myth that you embrace and propound. 
---"anon" suspended for my comments again:

Note for now that Mr. Brantz is dealing here with the Khazar
hypothesis and that he will not be telling us *which* non-Jewish
groups were studied. Did they include, as a special population,
those now living what used to be the Khazar kingdom?

---back to "anon":
>  I will discuss it [the study] so that reasonable people can
learn.  This is [It was] based upon the distribution of whorls,
loops and arches which determines the fingerprint indexes [a
fingerprint index].  It seems to be [is] different in different
nations.  For the European continent, the non-jews fingerprint
index [the fingerprint index for non-Jews] ranges from 11.9 to
12.5.  In the  Southern Mediteranean [Mediterranean] area, the
index for the non-jews [for non-Jewish populations] ranges from
14.1 to 14.6.  The range of the Jews range [The index for
Jewish populations ranges] from 13.4 to 13.9.  The amazing fact
is that the fingerprint index of the Jews [in majuscule!] from
Poland and Yemen was exactly 13.79. Both of these people
were highly religious and very strongly abided by the jewish
[Jewish] concept that only jews [Jewish] will marry jews Jews].
Furthermore the jews [Jews] from Yemen migrated before the
fall of the f[F]irst t[T]emple, that is before the Babylonian
c[C]aptivity.  They still retained the same biological affinity
though separated by four thousand miles and over twenty-five
hundred years.  These Yemenite Jew [Jews, plural][,] who were
completely isolated for twenty-five hundred years[,] completely
destroys your dream of a Khazar conversion. Though you
cannot admit it, the Ashkenazi jews [Jews] are returning to their
ancient home.  They are the descendents [descendants] of the
Hebrews who were driven from there nearly two thousand years
ago.  They will rebuild a land which the arabs [Arabs] had laid
waste by their selfishness [hardly the Objectivist notion of
selfishness!] and stupidity.   This is the way of those who glory
in the fact of the rebirth of that which has always been, the
Jewish Nation [confused sentence].
---end of "anon"

Back to Frank:
Using a single factor is an extremely slender reed upon which to
assert that all, or most of, the world's Jews belong to a single
race. But a man named Ethan T. Vishniac, of the Astronomy
Department of the University of Texas, posted a list on the
UseNet last year of three books and twelve journal articles, a
majority of which come after 1990, which Mr. Vishniac, at
least, says supports the idea that the Jews are a single race. I
have seen only one book among this assemblage, which is the
only one described by Mr. Vishniac as having mentioned any
comparison with the peoples now living in the area the Khazars
controlled. This is A.E. Mourant (the grand old man of blood
typing), et alia, _The Genetics of the Jews_ (Oxford UP, 1978).
I singled in on the book's implications for the Khazar hypothesis
and found out that there was simply not enough made by way of
distinction between the various populations in the region of the
world from the Khazar homeland and Palestine for anything to
be concluded one way or the other. The book only dealt with
the issue in passing, I should point out. 

[I noted Mourant's statement that blood types were more
"objective" than going by bones and especially going by visible
features. But sight is the best developed sense in man, and
mating is done more on the basis of visible features than
anything else. Today, mitochondrial DNA is used instead of
blood types but doing this sort of gene counting is quite
evidently extremely liable to being done fallaciously, if the
letters flying back and forth in _Science_ are any guide. John
Brockman, in _The Third Culture_, interviewed several
biologists (and physicists and others: a fine book) who argued
about the views of others on the merits of molecular biology.
E.O. Wilson (among those Brockman interviewed), in his
autobiography, _Naturalist_, spoke of the bias among scientists
that easily quantified things are ipso facto more objective (and
who have pushed the old-fashioned naturalists out of the biology
department at many universities) and said that the gene counters
can explain everything but the origin of species!]

What is this Khazar hypothesis? This is the notion that most of
the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe are descendants, not of
the ancient Hebrews from Palestine but rather descendants of a
people known as the Khazars, who were located in the Caucasus
Mountains and once had a large empire. This group of
converted Jews does indeed have a historical existence and were
of far more importance to world history than their obscurity
would seem to warrant. They were located along the famous
Silk Road from Europe through Central Asia to China and
could, and did, tax the caravans moving through. But more
importantly, they served as a buffer between the Moslems and
the Greek-speaking Byzantine Christians. This was as early as
the 7th century A.D. In time, the Khazars wanted a more
respectable religion than their current shamanistic one and its
King Bulan adopted Judaism in 841, thus keeping Khazaria from
becoming a client state of either the Moslems or the Byzantines.
The effect of this was to prevent the spread of Islam northward.
Their independence was to last about a century, though, until
the Russians got the Byzantine faith, whereupon Khazaria was
trapped in the middle. The Rus Prince Sviatoslav roared through
and busted up the inhabitants, making for a diaspora of a
different group of Jews. Many fled north and became ancestors
of Ashkenazi Jews. None of this is disputed by historians
(assuming I got the dates right!!). What is controversial is the
further statement that *most* of the Khazars converted along
with King Bulan and not just the upper crust and the even
further statement that *most* Ashkenazi Jews are descendant of
these converts to Judaism. The best-known defense of the
Khazar hypothesis is Arthur Koestler, himself Jewish, who
wrote _The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its
Heritage_ (NY: Random House, 1976).

Well, who could possibly care, except a handful of scholars
interested in archeology and language in perhaps the globe's
most forgotten region? For one, the Arabs used it to argue
against the admission of Israel to the United Nations, claiming
that the Jews who had recently arrived from Europe had no
historical claims to live there. (I stumbled across this piece of
information quite by accident, in a small box in the Manchester
_Guardian Weekly_ about events of thirty years ago, which
would have made my accident be in 1975. I don't recall having
never heard of these Arab arguments since, though I must admit
that I haven't gone looking for them. Still, in that week in 1945,
it was among the major news items.)

What really enrages Mr. Brantz is that certain American
antisemites, of a variety called Christian Identity, have picked it
up as a reason to question the legitimacy of Israel. (I discussed
this briefly in _County Sovereignty_ No. 4 (1996 July 1, but it
warrants greater attention now). What happened was this: one of
the first consequences of Darwin's _Origin_ was not to accept
conclusions based upon evidence, in good Objectivist fashion,
but to dive further back into Christianity and take the Bible
seriously, combing over the Books of Daniel, Isaiah, and
Revelation in particular for prophecies to things to come and
also to get refascinated with the business of the Ten Lost Tribes
of Israel. The British Israelites are so-called because they
identified the British themselves as one of the Lost Tribes.
Ironically, they had nominated the "Black Sea Khazars" as
another of the ten lost tribes but *not* as currently living Jews.
According to a book I am relying upon heavily here, Michael
Barkun _Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the
Christian Identity_ (Chapel Hill: U of NC P, 1994), the first to
identify Ashkenazic Jews as Khazars was the great French
historian Ernest Renan in a lecture in 1883. It was only in the
United States that the implications of the Khazar hypothesis
against the legitimacy of Israel really got going.

Whatever the truth of the Khazar hypothesis, not everyone can
just go move back to their supposed homelands. Otherwise we
would have to hand our country back to the Indians, and those
claiming to be descendants of Picts would reclaim Scotland. The
mystery is why Ashkenazic Jews would *want* to live in "the
only spot in the Middle East that has no oil," as Golda Meir put
it. Being competent to make the desert bloom, they would only
stir up the hostility and ENVY of hundreds of millions of
Moslems. Palestine is hardly a place where Ashkenazic Jews
would be safe! Besides, the claim that YHWH foretold their
return can hardly have been taken seriously by Jews who are too
smart to actually believe in such godly, or ungodly,
hocus-pocus. Also unreasonable, though less so, is the argument
that a *imperial* power, Great Britain, gave them a "mandate."
The only explanation that I can come up with is that a great
many Ashkenazic Jews did not abandon religion in favor of
secular rationalism in one fell swoop but stopped at a way
station called socialism. Israel was to be a socialist paradise:
that was its real attraction to Ashkenazic Jews.

Alas, socialism has collapsed as a living ideology, and so there
is no real reason for Ashkenazi Jews to be in Israel at all. The
pioneer political geographer, Hugo Hassinger, wrote after the
World War I that unless Austria-Hungary, had been able to
discover and establish a raison d'etre, a justification for
existence, even without the calamity of the war, it could not
long have continued to exist. The same is true of both
Yugoslavia and Israel.

Besides, Israel is becoming too costly, since keeping it safe
from envious Moslems requires a vast military machine in the
United States. This country can no longer afford to maintain
both a welfare state and a warfare state. Britain realized this
after World War II and gave up her Empire and retained the
welfare state. It is dubious whether the United States can do the
opposite, namely give up the welfare state and keep the warfare
state: the taxpayers are going to demand what they, erroneously,
perceive as freebies if they are going to pay for a warfare state.
Besides, Americans are an awfully contentious bunch and Jews
in this country have had to use their not inconsiderable power to
confine criticism of American foreign policy with regard to
Israel to publications with circulations numbering in the
thousands. It's a potentially explosive situation, one which Jews
themselves seem to fully appreciate; indeeed, any group that has
survived as long as they have will have some awfully sensitive
detectors out for potential dangers.

I predict that American Jews will find a way out of this
conundrum by declaring that they, mostly Ashkenazic, are a
race, yes, but a race different from the Sephardic Jews. I intend
no conspiracy thinking whatsoever; indeed probably most Jews
will resist it. Nevertheless, the process of finding racial
separateness is already underway. To wit:

1. Any casual reader of newspapers will know that Tay-Sachs
disease is peculiar to Ashkenazic Jews. There are several others,
and the Tuesday science section of the _New York Times_ a
few months ago had a fascinating discussion of some of these
other diseases peculiar to Ashkenazic Jews. There was one in
particular that was fatal to Ashkenazic Jewish women but only
after their reproductive years. It turns out that those who do
catch the disease are exceptionally robust and fertile! Evolution
does not care about you after your contribution to the gene pool
is over, and scientists are trying to find out more about the
particulars of this disease. (Biologists may not think that the fact
of diseases confined to Ashkenazi Jews warrants their separate
racial categorization, but this will be seen just as a splitter vs.
lumper matter.)

2. A few weeks before that, the science section of the _NYT_
had a long piece on reexamination by linguists of the origins of
Yiddish. The fact that most of the vocabulary of Yiddish is
either Hebrew or German bespeaks against the Khazar
hypothesis. But scholars are now locating a possible Turkish
substratum behind Yiddish words, which amounts to,
effectively, a revival of the Khazar thesis, since the Khazars
spoke a language of the Orhur branch of the Turkish family of
languages.

3. There are now two Internet sites, the second just a month or
two old, devoted to the Khazars, which I urge viewing:

http://acad.bryant.edu/~kbrook, which was put up by a man
with the improbable Khazar name of Kevin Alan Brook, and

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6784, which was put up by
phil@rtpro.pp.se [se is Sweden]. This is the product of a group
called The Kaz-Khan Khazar Organisation, whatever that is. It
seems that "Phil" is just someone who helps others out with
Web pages, as I have run into several personal Web sites at
geocities.com. (Kaz-Khan or Khagan means King of the
Khazars. Interestingly, Kagan or Kogan or Kogon is a common
Jewish name.)

I have no idea how much is pure speculation by these two gents
and how much is generally-accepted historical fact. What I
*predict* is that:

1. More and more interest will be taken in the Khazars and that
more and more Oghur Turkic words will be found that went into
Yiddish (what you find is very much a function of where and
how hard you look);

2. More and more diseases peculiar to Ashkenazic Jews will be
discovered;

3. An interest in the religion of the Khazars will boom and we
will start seeing a revival of Khazar paganism (Brook's Web site
says something about this, the chief god being Tengri);

4. The one standard deviation inferiority of the Sephardic Jews
of Israel compared to the Ashkenazic Jews in intelligence will
be given much more publicity (the only reference I have seen is
in a book by Thomas Sowell; it's not in _The Bell Curve_);

5. Somehow the superior intelligence of Sephardic Jews outside
Israel will be accounted for (selective migration, a general
decline of intelligence in the Middle East that included the Jews
there, some Khazar genes creeping into diaspora Sephardics);

6. A consequent division of Jews into superior Jews
(Ashkenazic, but later openly Khazar) and inferior Jews
(Sephardics in the Middle East);

7. A de-identification of Khazars with religion (except for the
Tengri pagans!);

8. A de-identification with Israel on the part of the Khazars;

9. A new identification by the Khazars as a race, but not so
much as a race that traces its origins to a Turkish tribe so much
as *what it became in history*, thus making races surprisingly
easy to materialize (fitting in with the idea that races are
"superficial," which they may very be from the standpoint of
what I call the gene counters (molecular biologists) though of
the greatest importance in human affairs);

10. The Khazars will think of themselves a *biologically* the
"Wandering Race," meaning that their outstanding characteristic
is never to settle, and which characteristic entails the features
that define their greatness and uniqueness;

11. The other wandering race, the Gypsies, will be written off
as of inferior intelligence;

12. The Khazars will not only de-identify with Israel and with
the Jewish religion: they will not want to lose their uniqueness
by having a homeland but continue to serve mankind as a "light
to the Gentiles" (even if the particular expression is Biblical!);

13. Studies will start appearing that show that Judaism
underwent a transformation under Khazar auspices so great that
it became a religion entirely *different* from that under the
ancient Hebrews, despite the continuity of texts. A good pattern
to follow is James C. Russell, _The Germanization of Early
Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious
Transformation_ (Oxford UP, 1994), except that the word will
become "raciohistorical" or "socio-raciohistorical" or maybe
some nicer word than "race". Indeed the word race may be
avoided altogether, since "racism" is the finest example of what
Ayn Rand called an "anti-concept" ever. Furthermore, the socio-
racio development of the Khazars into Eternal Wanderers will
be shown to have transformed Judaism still further;

14. Judaism will be seen as having held back the Khazars and to
be ripe for junking, much like what certain white racists (*not*
the Identity Christians!) say about Christianity;

15. Khazars will discover that the whole movement of racial
equality harms their survival and was probably a mistake from
the beginning;

16. Further neo-con trial balloons, like _The Bell Curve_ will
be launched. I say _The Bell Curve_ is a neo-con operation,
because Jews in the United States have an effective *veto
power* over what gets published in any great quantity. (A veto
power is not a *positive* power to make things happen, and I
do not hold that is a conspiracy among Jews, much less a
Council of the Elders of Zion. The trouble with conspiracies is
the same as that of organizing any large bureaucracy, and the
laws of bureaucratic incompetence do not stop at Khazar
boundaries. The Khazars are indeed special, but not *that*
special.). _The Bell Curve_ would have achieved neither the
publicity nor the notoriety had enough Jews (acting
independently) been against it. There are books that give better
arguments for racial differences in intelligence that have *not*
been given such attention. This neo-con trial balloon did not go
over, in very large part because of the sharp reaction by over-
socialized Jews! No conspiracy theory can account for this
reaction, nor for _The Bell Curve_ being a neo-con job in the
first place; 

17. Since these steps will take time and Khazars who have
bought into Judaism, Zionism, socialism, and racial
egalitarianism will have to die out, the Peace Process in the
Middle East will have to go on by other means, specifically by
capitalism. Arabs are investing in businesses in Israel and Jews
are investing in businesses in Arab countries. Business leaders in
both countries will use their growing power to cool down
religious conflict and will adopt Objectivism as an ideology that
damns envy as the worst possible character trait;

18. Objectivism, to become the next world religion among the
global elite, as I explained at great length last year, will become
modified to allow for a kind of racism that is *not* what its
founder, Ayn Rand, called the "lowest form of collectivism,"
but rather a legitimate source of pride that will serve as a more
specific goal of aspiration, namely to do one's race honor, than
the less specific virtues that Objectivists currently recognize;

19. The Khazars will move out of Israel, except for those
harmless ones who really do want to wail in front of walls; the
Sephardics will not make the desert bloom enough to stir up the
envy of the Arabs; envy by will denounced by the global elite of
Objectivists and accepted by the rest of the world to an extent
sufficient to keep it down to manageable proportions;
businessmen in all the Middle East countries will tell the
politicians and religious zealots to cool it; it will be okay to be
both an Objectivist and a Khazar; and

20. This process is going to be very rough on individual Jews.
What's the Yiddish saying, "It is difficult to be a Jew"? The
reason is that those who *remain* Jewish have been
exceptionally indoctrinated (socialized is a nicer way of putting
it). But, Jews have survived because, in the long run, they are
flexible. But Jews must be inflexible in the short run: they must
stick together. It is when objective survival needs mandate rapid
change that overly-socialized Jews are in for some very rough
inner conflicts in their own individual psyches.

The launching of the trial balloon called _The Bell Curve_, the
reexamination of the roots of Yiddish, and all the other
developments that are beginning to emerge are not products of
conspiracy but of "spontaneous order." This means we will
understand the process of my predicted transformation of Jewry
into racial Khazarism no better than we understand how
capitalism emerged. I intend no idealization of this biosocial
co-evolutionary process. As Kevin Macdonald states in his
magnificent, _A People that Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a
Group Evolutionary Strategy_ (Praeger, 1994, an extremely
respectable publisher), it was rewarding in rewarding Talmudic
scholars with prestige (which enabled them to have large
families) that resulted in their superior intelligence. (It seems
also to have made for scholarship that can be excessively ornate,
though I must report that those in the post-Federalist period in
the United States who wanted to scrap our continuing reliance
on the common law of England as the basis of our legal system
noted that its complexities were vastly in excess of those in the
Talmud, as a visit to any law library will quickly confirm.) The
superior intelligence, plus the genetic selection of Jews as those
who *remain* Jewish and hence are the ones most interested in
Jewish survival, is what has made Judaism survive. I do not
idealize this process, since the history of the Jews has been an
extremely rough one. All I have done is to make the very bold
claim that Judaism will survive its most fearsome crisis to date,
indifference, *not* the Nazi Holocaust, which (maybe a Gentile
should not be saying this) exerted a profound eugenic effect on
the survivors (Quick: name the top ten Jews were exterminated.
Now name a hundred far better-known ones who escaped.). And
from this very bold claim, I have made some conjectures as to
how the Jews will once again remake themselves and survive.