Although his name has been almost totally forgotten for more than two generations, during the early 1950s Prof. John Beaty was a figure of some prominence, at least within conservative circles.

A West Virginian born in 1890, Beaty earned his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Virginia, then completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Columbia University in 1921. Beginning in 1919 he spent his entire academic career teaching English at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, becoming a full professor in 1922 and finally retiring in 1957. For much of that time, he served as department chairman, and was a successful novelist and scholar, being the author or co-author of a dozen books, eventually used at over 700 American colleges and universities. During that long career, he enjoyed a number of academic honors and distinctions, even serving as president of the Conference of College Teachers of English, and prior to 1951 seems to have never attracted any significant controversy.

But Beaty was a patriotic individual who held a commission in the military reserves and as America moved towards involvement in World War II, his status was activated in 1941 and he joined our Military Intelligence as a captain, serving until 1947 when he left the army with the rank of full colonel and resumed his academic teaching career. During those war years, his government role had been an important one, serving as Chief of the Historical Section while also being responsible for summarizing all available American intelligence and producing the daily briefing report distributed to the White House and all of our other top political and military leaders. Later in the war, he was also required to interview and debrief thousands of our returning military servicemen, including very senior ones, summarizing their information and experiences for government files. Given such crucial activities, there were probably few Americans more familiar with nearly all aspects of our wartime information than Beaty when he returned to civilian life in 1947.

Beaty had always had a strong interest in broader political events. During the mid-1920s, he had been awarded an Alfred Kahn traveling fellowship to Europe, and subsequently drew upon the knowledge he had acquired to publish articles analyzing the continent’s geostrategic situation and the possible risks of a future war. As a strong conservative with traditional cultural values, he had published Image of Life in 1940, a book strongly critical of what he regarded as the ideological distortions often promoted by our mainstream media and publishing industry. And then in the postwar years, he became outraged over the total contrast between the true facts of the conflict that he had discovered from his central role in Military Intelligence and the extremely distorted and dishonest portrayal of those events provided by most of the mainstream media to our severely misinformed citizenry.

Many world developments greatly alarmed him. Stalin’s Soviet Union had seized half of Europe, while his subservient Communist parties held enormous influence in much of the rest, including France, Italy, and Greece. Beaty regarded the 1949 Communist victory in China as a gigantic strategic defeat for the West, and the sudden outbreak of the Korean War the following year had now drawn American forces into direct military conflict, with our inexperienced and under-equipped troops suffering serious early defeats at the hands of a large Chinese army.

During these years Beaty had been working on a book aimed at describing the root causes of our recent disasters and providing a candid account of the world war against Germany that we had recently fought. He believed that unless the American people learned these facts and mobilized themselves politically, they might both lose their traditional freedoms and be driven into a ruinous third world war against the powerful Communist bloc. So in December 1951 he published The Iron Curtain Over America.

Although Beaty had an illustrious academic career and stellar wartime credentials, he was a strong conservative Christian and a committed anti-Communist, and his fairly short but heavily documented book crossed every sort of impermissible red line in American publishing, especially with its focus upon what he regarded as the enormously pernicious role of organized Jewish groups in American politics. He was scathing towards the policies of Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but equally hostile towards many of their leading opponents such as Gov. Thomas Dewey, the Republican Presidential candidate in both 1944 and 1948. Given such sentiments, it was hardly surprising that his book was only released by a small Dallas publisher, with the author himself having to cover the costs of the initial print-run.

After reading Beaty’s very interesting text, I drew heavily upon the exhaustive archival research of Prof. Joseph Bendersky, a mainstream historian, and in articles published in 2018 and 2019, I described the surprising popular success of Beaty’s book:

Some years ago, I came across a totally obscure 1951 book entitled The Iron Curtain Over America by John Beaty, a well-regarded university professor. Beaty had spent his wartime years in Military Intelligence, being tasked with preparing the daily briefing reports distributed to all top American officials summarizing available intelligence information acquired during the previous 24 hours, which was obviously a position of considerable responsibility.

As a zealous anti-Communist, he regarded much of America’s Jewish population as deeply implicated in subversive activity, therefore constituting a serious threat to traditional American freedoms. In particular, the growing Jewish stranglehold over publishing and the media was making it increasingly difficult for discordant views to reach the American people, with this regime of censorship constituting the “Iron Curtain” described in his title. He blamed Jewish interests for the totally unnecessary war with Hitler’s Germany, which had long sought good relations with America, but instead had suffered total destruction for its strong opposition to Europe’s Jewish-backed Communist menace.

Beaty also sharply denounced American support for the new state of Israel, which was potentially costing us the goodwill of so many millions of Muslims and Arabs…

Then as now, a book taking such controversial positions stood little chance of finding a mainstream New York publisher, but it was soon released by a small Dallas firm, and then became enormously successful, going through some seventeen printings over the next few years. According to Scott McConnell, founding editor of The American Conservative, Beaty’s book became the second most popular conservative text of the 1950s, ranking only behind Russell Kirk’s iconic classic, The Conservative Mind.

Moreover, although Jewish groups including the ADL harshly condemned the book, especially in their private lobbying, those efforts provoked a backlash, and numerous top American generals, both serving and retired, wholeheartedly endorsed Beaty’s work, denouncing the ADL efforts at censorship and urging all Americans to read the volume…

Much of this very interesting story is told by Joseph Bendersky, an expert in Holocaust Studies, who devoted ten years of archival research to his 2000 book The “Jewish Threat.” His work chronicles the very extensive anti-Semitism found within the U.S. Army and Military Intelligence throughout the first half of the twentieth century, with Jews being widely regarded as posing a serious security risk.

Let us take a step back and place Bendersky’s findings in their proper context. We must recognize that during much of the era covered by his research, U.S. Military Intelligence constituted nearly the entirety of America’s national security apparatus—being the equivalent of a combined CIA, NSA, and FBI—and was responsible for both international and domestic security, although the latter portfolio had gradually been assumed by J. Edgar Hoover’s own expanding organization by the end of the 1920s.

Bendersky’s years of diligent research demonstrate that for decades these experienced professionals—and many of their top commanding generals—were firmly convinced that major elements of the organized Jewish community were ruthlessly plotting to seize power in America, destroy all our traditional Constitutional liberties, and ultimately gain mastery over the entire world.

I have never believed in the existence of UFOs as alien spacecraft, always dismissing such notions as ridiculous nonsense. But suppose declassified government documents revealed that for decades nearly all of our top Air Force officers had been absolutely convinced of the reality of UFOs. Could I continue my insouciant refusal to even consider such possibilities? At the very least, those revelations would force me to sharply reassess the likely credibility of other individuals who had made similar claims during that same period.

Bendersky devotes several pages to a discussion of Beaty’s book, which he claims “ranks among the most vicious anti-Semitic diatribes of the postwar era.” He also describes the story of its tremendous national success, which followed an unusual trajectory.

Books by unknown authors that are released by tiny publishers rarely sell many copies, but the work came to the attention of George E. Stratemeyer, a retired general who had been one of Douglas MacArthur’s commanders, and he wrote Beaty a letter of endorsement. Beaty began including that letter in his promotional materials, drawing the ire of the ADL, whose national chairman contacted Stratemeyer, demanding that he repudiate the book, which was described as a “primer for lunatic fringe groups” all across America. Instead, Stratemeyer delivered a blistering reply to the ADL, denouncing it for making “veiled threats” against “free expression and thoughts” and trying to establish Soviet-style repression in the United States. He declared that every “loyal citizen” should read The Iron Curtain Over America, whose pages finally revealed the truth about our national predicament, and he began actively promoting the book around the country while attacking the Jewish attempt to silence him. Numerous other top American generals and admirals soon joined Stratemeyer in publicly endorsing the work, as did a couple of influential members of the U.S. Senate, leading to its enormous national sales.

Having now discovered that Beaty’s views were so totally consistent with those of nearly all our Military Intelligence professionals, I decided to reread his short book, and found myself deeply impressed. His erudition and level-headedness were exactly what one would expect from an accomplished academic with a Columbia Ph.D. who had risen to the rank of colonel during his five years of service in Military Intelligence and on the General Staff. Although strongly anti-Communist, by all indications Beaty was very much a moderate conservative, quite judicious in his claims and proposals. Bendersky’s hysterical denunciation reflects rather badly upon the issuer of that fatwa.

Over the last few weeks fierce debates had broken out on a couple of my recent articles mentioning Beaty and his 1951 book, prompting me to reread it for the first time since 2019, and I found it just as impressive as I had on that previous occasion.

Reasonable allowances must obviously be made for the contents of a boldly iconoclastic political work published more than seventy years ago, released at the very beginning of our long Cold War. A substantial part of Beaty’s text focused upon the great threat that our country faced from global Communism led by Stalin’s Soviet Union, and both Communism and the USSR disintegrated more than three decades ago. Present-day readers would probably find his coverage of our government’s failure to prevent the 1949 Communist victory in China and our severe military blunders in the ongoing Korean War far more too lengthy and detailed, and his conspiratorial suspicions regarding those failures may or may not have been warranted.

But leaving aside those minor blemishes, I think the narrative he provides of the true circumstances behind America’s involvement in both the Second World War and its immediate aftermath is greatly superior to the heavily slanted and expurgated accounts we find in our standard history books. And Beaty’s wartime responsibility for collating and summarizing all incoming intelligence information and then producing a daily digest for distribution to the White House and our other top officials surely provided him a far more accurate picture of the reality than that of the typical third-hand scribe.

Meanwhile, Beaty also covered some other topics nervously avoided by nearly all the other authors of his day that have clear contemporary relevance. He devoted more than a dozen pages to describing our government’s strong support for the Zionist conquest of Palestine, an outrageous war of aggression that led to the expulsion of some 880,000 Arab civilians from their ancient homeland. Beaty noted the rank hypocrisy of the Truman Administration’s direct efforts to facilitate such military aggression in the Middle East even as it was deploying our armed forces to deter or repel similar aggression in Europe or in Korea. He argued that decision had severely damaged our standing among the world’s enormous population of Arabs and Muslims, while also demonstrating the tremendous influence that organized Jewish groups held over the foreign policy of the Democratic Party.

I would also argue that some elements of Beaty’s narrative actually demonstrate his considerable caution and level-headedness. He must surely have been aware that James Forrestal, our first Secretary of Defense and one of the top figures in the Truman Administration, had bitterly opposed our Israel policy, soon leading to his ouster and his highly-suspicious death, which was officially ruled a suicide. I think that if Beaty had discussed Forrestal’s involvement, he might have felt compelled to also mention his strange demise, and he probably believed that including such an explosive story based upon such thin evidence might have fatally tainted the rest of his heavily-documented book, leading him to exclude it. Probably for similar reasons, Beaty also made no mention of the very suspicious death several years earlier of Gen. George Patton, one of our top European commanders. However, over the years and the decades that followed, a great deal of evidence has come out suggesting that both of those important American figures and many others as well had probably met with foul play, generally at the hands of Zionist or Communist agents, as I discussed in a 2018 article:

Given Beaty’s very strong academic and national security credentials, the exceptionally controversial views he espoused, and his enormous publishing success, it’s hardly surprising that Jewish and leftist groups launched major efforts to destroy his reputation and that of his book. The initial attacks by the ADL had severely backfired, provoking strong endorsements of Beaty’s arguments by many of our top generals, but their efforts to demonize Beaty continued, probably now aimed less at dissuading committed conservatives from buying his book than at preventing his ideas from entering the respectable political mainstream. And as I investigated the various published attacks against Beaty, I was surprised to discover that they usually focused upon a rather strange side-issue.

A central theme of Beaty’s book was the long history of subversive activity by organized Jewish groups, whether in Czarist Russia, the Middle East, or America itself. Although most of his account seems solidly documented and reasonably plausible, one major element struck me as highly unlikely. From his earliest mention in the second chapter, he had claimed that few European Jews had any ancestral connection to the Israelites of the Bible, but were instead the descendants of the Khazars, a fierce warrrior tribe of mixed Turkic and Mongolian origins who had once created a powerful kingdom in Southern Russia and the Caucuses, then converted to Judaism more than a thousand years ago. Not only did Beaty use “Khazar” as a synonym for “Jew,” but to a considerable extent he actually featured it more prominently, with two of his chapters including that term in their title.

Although I had been vaguely aware of the Khazar Hypothesis of Jewish origins, I regarded it as merely a rather marginal academic theory, finally laid to rest in the last couple of decades by modern DNA analysis. But Beaty had been writing more than seventy years ago, and he cited seemingly credible scholarly support for his claims, notably including the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia and the magisterial six volume History of the Jews, published in the nineteenth century by Heinrich Graetz. Beaty’s book had appeared several years before Watson and Crick had even discovered DNA, so I regarded his theory as a harmless eccentricity, hardly damaging his credibility on the major issues that fell within the purview of his personal expertise.

I also suspected that his claims regarding the Khazars might partly have had a personal psychological motive. After all, Jews and their nefarious activities were the primary target of Beaty’s analysis, and as a deeply religious Christian he might have been a bit uncomfortable providing such unrelenting criticism of the direct descendants of the holy patriarchs of the Bible. To be sure, he never issued any blanket condemnation of Jewry and instead regularly emphasized his great admiration for “patriotic Jews,” but even so he probably felt better if the figures he was denouncing in page after page were merely Turkic converts to Judaism rather than the direct heirs of the Israelites themselves. In reading his earlier 1940 book Image of Life, I’d similarly noticed quite a few cases in which he’d sharply criticized Jews for the damage they were doing to American culture and their constant attacks against our country’s Anglo-Saxon majority, but the word “Jew” had never once appeared in the text, with Beaty always instead using such euphemistic expressions as “non-Christians” or “unassimilable minorities.”

For whatever reason, Beaty assumed that most Ashkenazi Jews had Khazar roots, and this mere side-issue strangely became the overwhelming focus of the attacks against him. Probably few ordinary Americans of the 1950s had ever heard of the Khazars, so it was relatively easy for his legion of organized opponents to stigmatize his book as bizarre and delusional, filled with the conspiratorial claim that Jews weren’t really Jews. This enabled them to successfully have it dismissed as merely a work of the lunatic fringe.

Thus, in 1953 a liberal Methodist pastor named Ralph Lord Roy published Apostles of Discord, a harsh attack upon a wide assortment of right-wing Christian authors and activists whom he condemned as racists and antisemites, with Roy devoting eight pages to Beaty, including a heavy focus upon his Khazar claims. Later that same year, an editor at the Southwest Review, located on Beaty’s own SMU campus, used the Roy book as the basis for an attack along similar lines. The following year, Time Magazine published a short attack on Beaty and his book. In 1956, The Bridge: A Yearbook of Judaeo-Christian Studies published a very long review of Beaty’s work, once again ridiculing and lacerating Beaty for his delusional Khazar beliefs. Only the more prominent writings and pamphlets of the 1950s have ever been digitized and placed on the Internet, so I suspect that a great deal of similar material from that era has long since disappeared and been forgotten.

Roy reported the numerous right-wing writers and activists who had praised Beaty’s book, emphasizing that these included ultra-right-wing Christians such as Gerald L.K. Smith and Gerald Winrod, widely considered America’s leading antisemitic preachers, and indeed I suspect that such individuals were strongly attracted to the notion that their present-day Jewish enemies had no connection to the holy Jews of the Old Testament. A 1970 book devoted ten pages to attacking Beaty on similar grounds, suggesting that he had been a leading source of the Khazar beliefs that had become so popular in conspiratorial far right circles, and this seems quite plausible given the huge sales he had enjoyed. Beaty’s rather hostile Wikipedia page focuses heavily on his Khazar claims.

Indeed, when I recently cited some of Beaty’s material in my own articles, hostile critics focused intensely upon Beaty’s Khazar views in order to completely discredit him:

Beaty’s book can be briefly summarized in a few words as “Khazars! Khazars! Khazars!” He doesn’t really have much of a traceable argument beyond that.

Instead, he spends a lot of energy blasting off about Khazars, without giving any indication that he has ever tried to study the subject. It’s just an ideological bullhorn which he blows around.

The problem is that Beaty provides nothing of substance apart from rantings about Khazars.

Over the years I’ve been surprised to discover that many conspiratorial anti-Jewish activists on the Internet still remain strong adherents to the Khazar origins of Ashkenazi Jews, with the term “Khazar” being very widely bandied about in such circles. So although few of them have probably ever heard of Beaty, it’s quite possible that belief may constitute his largest lasting contribution to the public debate. Since his book is conveniently available on this website, those so interested may read it and judge for themselves.

The overwhelming majority of Beaty’s material had seemed very solidly argued, so his eccentric Khazar claims were naturally seen as his greatest vulnerability, the issue that his bitter critics had focused upon for more than seventy years in order to discredit the rest of his analysis. Therefore, I decided to take some time to explore the Khazar Hypothesis and the broader question of Jewish origins, partly to evaluate Beaty’s credibility.

When Beaty had published his 1951 book, the story of the Khazars had probably been unknown to nearly all Americans, but a generation later another book by a very different writer suddenly brought it to widespread public attention, at least in intellectual circles.

Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian Jew, an early Zionist and former Communist who later turned strongly against Stalin and soon became a prominent Cold War writer. He was best known for Darkness at Noon, a loosely fictionalized account of the Stalinist purge trials of the 1930s that had deeply impressed me when I’d read the novel in high school. Then in 1976 he published The Thirteenth Tribe, a widely-discussed book promoting the Khazar Hypothesis for the origins of European Jewry, and I recently reread it for the first time since the 1990s.

I wasn’t terribly impressed. Aside from the story of the conversion of their rulers to Judaism, apparently very little solid evidence exists concerning the large Khazar Empire, merely scattered references in the histories and correspondence of their Byzantine, Russian, and Islamic neighbors and rivals, so although Koestler’s short book only ran a couple of hundred pages, it actually felt heavily padded, substantially summarizing the much better documented histories of the other regional powers in order to fill out its pages.

Koestler was a literary intellectual rather than a trained historian or anthropologist, and the efforts he made on behalf of his controversial theory sometimes seemed rather strained to me. All analysts agree that the Eastern European Jews are either the descendants of Jewish migrants from the Rhineland area of Germany or else Turkic Khazar converts. But these Jews call themselves “Askenazim”—meaning “German”—and they speak Yiddish, a German dialect, which contains almost no Turkic words. Although this evidence does not conclusively establish the Rhineland case, it obviously does tend to support it. Koestler rather weakly tries to explain away those simple facts by arguing that the Khazar Jews were so impressed by the high culture of the Gentile German settlers whom they encountered that they adopted the language of the latter, which is possible but not very plausible.

Furthermore, we only begin to encounter references to the substantial presence of Eastern European Jews hundreds of years after the collapse of the Khazar Empire, so any connection between the two populations seems rather tenuous.

I also wondered whether Koestler’s advocacy might have been partly based upon a personal motive. Prior to the conquest of their present-day lands, the Magyar tribesmen who founded Hungary had spent centuries as vassals of the Khazars, and when they finally broke free during the ninth century and migrated into Central Europe, a small segment of their former Khazar overlords came with them. So if Koestler had successfully established his theory, he would have been able to trace his own Jewish ancestry to the former rulers of the Hungarian Gentiles of his own country, providing a pleasant psychological boost to the self-esteem of someone raised in the ethnic patchwork quilt of mitteleuropa.

The main argument in favor of the Khazar Hypothesis had been the question of numbers. The Khazar Empire was relatively large and populous, and advocates tend to argue that most of the inhabitants eventually followed their rulers in converting to Judaism, thereby becoming a far more plausible source of the eventual millions of Central and Eastern European Jews than the immigrant Jews from the Rhineland, who probably numbered only a few thousand. But this ignores the reality that populations that find a successful economic niche can grow very rapidly over time.

For example, top Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann had ten siblings in his Russian family, and similarly high fertility rates had helped Russia’s Jewish population grow from roughly a half-million around 1800 to a figure ten times larger a century later. So if we know that Russian Jews had increased ten-fold during the course of a single century, it’s perfectly possible that a few thousand German Jews might have multiplied a hundred-fold during the course of six or seven hundred years. In a different historical example, today’s many millions of French Canadians and Louisiana Cajuns are all the descendants of just a couple of thousand French settlers who arrived in the New World three or four hundred years ago, while many tens of millions of Americans trace most of their ancestry to a few thousand British settlers who had arrived on the continent around the same time.

Moreover, the very distinct economic activities of the Ashkenazi Jews is another factor strangely ignored both by Koestler and his critics. The Rhineland Jews overwhelmingly filled a minority business niche, being money-lenders and traders among their Gentile host population, and together with estate-management and alcohol sales, this was the same sort of occupational profile filled by the much later and larger Ashkenazi populations of Central Europe and the Ukraine. In sharp contrast, the Khazars were fierce Central Asian tribal warriors, and their sudden transformation into a middleman minority earning their livelihood from business and finance seems much less likely.

Koestler’s book provoked considerable discussion when it was published almost two generations ago, but many of the reviewers were skeptical or even dismissive, so I’m not sure whether it had much long-term impact on the debate. Indeed, some of Koestler’s sharp critics even suggested that he had written it merely in hopes that such a controversial work would revive his public profile which had largely faded away since his early writings of the 1940s had originally established his name.

Far more recent and more influential in mainstream circles has been the widely-praised international bestseller The Invention of the Jewish People by Prof. Shlomo Sand, a dissenting anti-Zionist Israeli historian, whose English translation had been released in 2009, a year after the original Hebrew edition. Sand’s basic thesis was considerably more measured than that of Koestler, primarily arguing that the majority of present-day Jews both in Europe and elsewhere were probably the descendents of later converts rather than the ancient Israelites of the Bible, with the Khazars merely being one of many such strands. I’d casually read the book about a dozen years ago, and despite the favorable recommendations had been rather unimpressed, but I now decided to reread it.

Perhaps because I was now much more focused upon the topic of Jewish origins, my reaction to Sand’s work was far more positive than it had been the first time through.

For example, whereas Koestler had stretched the very thin historical evidence of the Khazars across an entire book, presenting his material in a rather tendentious and credulous manner, a professional historian such as Sand was far more judicious, treating it with considerable caution across 40 pages of text, much of which carefully summarized the conflicting views of many of the leading Jewish historians over the last two centuries.

As Sand explained, mainstream Jewish scholars who held a belief in the Khazar origins of European Jewry had always been a decided minority, but a minority that was both substantial and highly-regarded. During the 1950s, Prof. John Beaty had been roasted and vilified in our own country for his endorsement of the Khazar Hypothesis, which was portrayed as a lunatic-fringe belief probably motivated by his hatred of Jews; but during that very same period, Israel’s own Minister of Education was a prominent Jewish scholar holding very similar beliefs.

While Sand does seem to accept that a considerable fraction of Eastern European Jews probably have substantial Khazar roots, he hardly regards the case as solidly proven, nor is it central to his overall analysis, which instead focused upon a wide variety of different conversions to Judaism over the last two thousand years and more.

Some of the conversions emphasized by Sand seem absolutely undeniable though previously unknown to a non-specialist such as myself. For example, around 125 BC, King Yohanan Hyrcanus of the Maccabean dynasty conquered the small neighboring Semitic state of Edom and forcibly converted its inhabitants to Judaism. This history was often embarrassing and under-emphasized by many modern Jewish historians, especially since some of the most important later Judean leaders such as King Herod the Great, various leading rabbis, and even the most extreme Zealots involved in the Great Revolt against Rome were primarily of Edomite convert descent.

Numerous other apparent large-scale conversions to Judaism also took place, but on a voluntary basis. Sand gives the background to the later Jewish kingdom of Yemen that survived for more than a century, as well as the very large and flourishing Jewish communities of Alexandria and North Africa in the era of the late Roman Republic, while Cicero had famously remarked in 59 AD upon the substantial number of Jews living at Rome itself. Judaism was a proselytizing religion during this period, and that fact was almost certainly responsible for the rapid appearance of these large Jewish populations across the shores of the Mediterranean rather than any massive emigration of Jewish peasants from Palestine or any implausibly rapid natural population increase in small immigrant Jewish communities.

Indeed, despite the considerable loss of Jewish life during the revolts against Roman rule, over the next century Jewish numbers reached their high-water mark in the ancient world, perhaps 7-8% of the entire population of the Roman Empire, amounting to many millions. Sand plausibly argues that the rapid expansion of Judaism through conversion had probably begun with Alexander’s conquests and the creation of the large Hellenistic kingdoms that replaced the Persian Empire, and this process had then accelerated with the rise of Rome. All of this supports Sand’s central thesis that by the time of the late Roman Empire only a rather small fraction of its large Jewish population could actually trace their roots back to the Israelites of the Bible.

Many of the other facts that Sands recounts seem to have become solidly established in mainstream modern scholarship but had remained unknown to an ignorant layman such as myself.

For example, in the half-century since Israel’s conquests of the 1967 war, waves of determined Israeli archaeologists and historians have made every effort to uncover evidence of the wealthy and powerful Jewish state of King David and King Solomon, but have found almost nothing at all. This suggests that the story of their mighty kingdom was either entirely fictional or so wildly exaggerated that it amounted to the same thing, with those famous Biblical figures actually reigning over a tiny, impoverished scrap of territory, so unimportant and obscure that it was totally ignored in the chronicles of the major states of the Middle East and also by Herodotus when he compiled his very hefty regional history a few centuries later.

Consider also the belief that the Jews were expelled from their homeland following the failure of their repeated revolts against the Romans in the first and second centuries AD. This story of the Jewish Exile is probably almost universally assumed by Jews and Gentiles alike, constituting a central ideological pillar for the “restoration” of a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel in 1948 and the ingathering of Jews from across the world that soon followed. However, it has absolutely no factual basis and is accepted by few if any reputable scholars. Although the victorious Romans certainly might have exiled a thin stratum of the vanquished Jewish elites as punishment, they had no policy of deporting entire populations, so the ordinary Judeans who survived their defeat surely remained exactly where they were, merely suffering a loss of political independence.

As Sand persuasively argued, over the centuries many of those Jews eventually converted to Christianity then later to Islam following the Muslim conquest, and they are the ancestors of today’s Palestinians, leavened by an admixture from all the various conquering groups of the last two thousand years, including Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks. Thus, the direct descendants of the Judeans lived continuously in their homeland prior to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The tremendous historical irony that the current Palestinians—now suffering horrifying massacres in Gaza—are almost certainly the closest lineal descendants of the Biblical Israelites was highlighted by Sand and had been similarly emphasized by Beaty in his 1951 book.

Although this view might seem shocking to the vast majority of both Gentiles and Jews, certainly including most present-day Israelis, Sand and Beaty were hardly alone in reaching that conclusion. David Ben-Gurion was Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, while Yitzhak Ben-Zvi became the country’s second president after the death of Chaim Weizmann, and in 1918 as young Zionist leaders, they had co-authored Eretz Israel in the Past and the Present, the most important Zionist book of that era, very successfully released in both Hebrew and Yiddish. In that work, they summarized the strong historical evidence that the local Palestinians were obviously just long-converted Jews, expressing the hope that they would therefore be absorbed into the growing Zionist movement and become an integral part of their planned State of Israel; Ben-Zvi published a later 1929 booklet making the same points. It was only after the Palestinians became increasingly hostile to Zionist colonization and they began violently clashing with those European settlers that that Judean ancestry of the Palestinians was tossed down the memory-hole and forgotten.

Thus, despite a long series of military conquests and foreign overlords, the Israelites of the Old Testament had remained in place for well over two thousand years, annually plowing their fields until they were brutally uprooted and expelled from their ancient homeland by Zionist militants in 1948, a story I had told in a lengthy article last month.

The different elements of Sand’s reconstruction fit together quite snugly. Palestine had never been a very populous land and its inhabitants had overwhelmingly consisted of peasant farmers. Once we recognize that they had remained in place following the failure of their repeated revolts against Roman rule, the large Jewish populations we later find spread across the shores of the Mediterranean basin only become explicable as a result of large-scale religious conversions. Such a development was hardly surprising given the decline of traditional paganism and the rise of various new cults during those same centuries of the later Roman Empire. Thus, it seems undeniable that the overwhelming majority of the Jews of that era had little if any Judean ancestry.

Sand seems a highly-reputable scholar and his international best-seller was very respectfully treated or even glowingly praised by a long list of mainstream outlets and reviewers, including Israeli ones. But his academic specialty was French history rather than the classical world, and many of his claims about the size and status of the Jews in the Roman Empire seemed so surprising to me that I decided to evaluate them by reading The Jews in the Roman World, published in 1973 by Michael Grant, an eminent British ancient historian.

Although Grant’s emphasis was quite different, his account seemed generally consistent with that of Sand. Population figures from the classical era have considerable uncertainty, but Grant seemed to accept the very large Jewish population spread across Rome’s empire, which he reckoned might have reached a figure as high as eight million, perhaps representing as much as 20% of the total in the eastern, Greek-speaking provinces. The widespread evidence of Jewish conversions was also heavily documented, although unlike Sand, Grant believed that the Emperor Nero’s second wife was merely sympathetic to Judaism rather than an outright Jewish convert.

Some of the reviews I read also seemed to substantiate Sand’s important findings. A long article about his book ran on the front-page of one of the sections of the New York Times, and the journalist seemed to have contacted various mainstream experts, who confirmed many of the author’s surprising claims: the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine was merely a myth, modern Jews were very substantially the descendants of later converts, and today’s Palestinians were indeed probably the direct descendants of the ancient Judeans. I was also pleased to discover that the Times writer had focused upon many of the same surprising points I had taken from rereading the text. A comprehensive Wikipedia page provides an even-handed summary of Sand’s book, including the praise he attracted from so many leading Jewish public intellectuals.

Although Sand naturally drew much bitter criticism especially from Zionists, I noticed that many of the sharpest attacks against his work focused upon his support for the Khazar Hypothesis, although it only constituted a small part of his book and he was cautious in his claims. This closely mirrored the strategy employed against Beaty more than a half-century earlier.

For centuries, nearly everything we have known about the ancient world has been based upon literary and epigraphic evidence, but over the last generation DNA analysis and population genetics have begun providing additional, potentially far more scientifically objective sources of information. And the nature and origins of world Jewry has been an important target of that newly-enhanced research.

Sand is a historian, strongly committed to his anti-racist beliefs and an individual with deep Communist roots. When I originally read his book a decade ago, I was surprised that he seemed to almost completely ignore some of the revelations of Jewish origins produced by genetic studies that had recently been in the news and I was therefore quite dismissive of his work when I briefly mentioned it in a 2016 article:

For example, Shlomo Sand’s international best-seller The Invention of the Jewish People was very widely praised in left-liberal and anti-Zionist circles, and attracted considerable attention in the mainstream media. But although I found many parts of the history extremely interesting, the central claim appeared to be incorrect. As far as I’m aware, there seems overwhelming genetic evidence that Europe’s Ashkenazi Jews do indeed trace much of their ancestry back to the Holy Land, apparently being the descendants of a few hundred (presumably Jewish) Middle Easterners, mostly male, who settled in Southern Europe some time after the Fall of Rome and took local Northern Italian wives, afterward remaining largely endogamous for the next thousand-plus years of their growing presence in Central and Eastern Europe. However, being a historian rather than a genetic researcher, Prof. Sand was apparently unaware of this hard evidence, and focused upon much weaker literary and cultural indicators, perhaps also being somewhat influenced by his own ideological predilections.

Given the fascination of the Jewish public with their ancestral origins and the fact that so many journalists and genetic researchers are themselves Jewish, it’s hardly surprising that the implications of Jewish DNA analysis has been so widely covered in the media. But when one such Jewish geneticist revealed in 2010 that widely-separated populations of Jews seemed much more closely related to each other than they were to any of the local host populations among whom they had dwelled for many centuries, Sand outrageously told Science Magazine that “Hitler would certainly have been very pleased,” deeply offending that scientist. Heated ideological reactions such as these were among the reasons I’d dismissed Sand’s book when I’d read it a year or two later.

But after now rereading Sand, I have somewhat tempered my strongly negative appraisal. The author did devote a few pages to discussing the genetic evidence, providing various examples to argue that it had often been skewed by the ideological predispositions of the researchers, while the media tended to promote those studies that supported the Zionist framework and ignore those that challenged it. So although the author agreed that genetic analysis had “a brilliant future,” he believed that it was still “a relatively young science” whose current findings should be treated with considerable caution. Although I still found Sand’s arguments unconvincing, his position wasn’t quite as anti-scientific as I had remembered it to be.

Ironically enough, as one of the hostile reviewers of his book had noted, many aspects of today’s widely-accepted genetic picture seem to strongly buttress Sand’s own overall conclusions. The vast majority of the world’s Jews are the European Ashkenazis, and most DNA analysis has concluded that they are overwhelmingly the descendants of a tiny founding population from more than a thousand years ago, whose males were apparently Jewish Middle Easterners but with a large majority of the females being Northern Italian or German Gentiles. This conclusion thus actually supports Sand’s claim that modern-day Jews had very heavy convert ancestry although their family tree is different than the one he suggested. Meanwhile, those same studies have revealed at most a tiny sliver of Turkic ancestry, seeming to rule out the Khazar Hypothesis that Sand had discussed at considerable length.

For decades, journalist Jon Entine has been heavily focused upon these sorts of issues, with his Genetic Literary Project website being devoted to that topic. Several years ago I read his 2007 book Abraham’s Children, which discussed the particular genetics of the Jewish population, and although DNA researchers have obviously made huge strides during the subsequent sixteen years, I decided to reread it.

Although the main focus of Entine’s book was the genetic evidence of Jewish origins, he also devoted part of one chapter to strongly challenging the Khazar Hypothesis on general historical grounds, and I found his arguments quite persuasive. Although he certainly acknowledges that Khazar converts may have contributed to the ancestry of Askhenazi Jews—he even finds some scattere