Re: authentic & fake #Jews: the tragic #Gaza war has predictably led to bad #history going viral:. European Jews are descendants of medieval #Turkic converts--#Khazars-- & thus have no #historical & #genetic connection to the land of #Israel
It's a myth, promoted by a combination of the cynical or stupid, sadly embraced by the naive & uninformed
Sadly relevant, as I was long scheduled to give a virtual talk about this at Indiana University next week.
@histodons
#Mazeldon #antisemitism 1/n
Resuming 🧵 #antisemitism & #FakeNews re: #Gaza #Hamas - #Israel war
1of the most disturbing things re: the conversation is the denial of history, e.g. assertion that Jews mostly descended from medieval #Khazar converts (conversion was real but limited)
I've always been fascinated by the history of both the pagan #Khazars & conversion
Who knows that the Caspian Sea was called the Khazar Sea, or that the victory of the Khazars was as important as the Battle of Tours?
#Mazeldon @histodons 2/n
As I've noted earlier (https://historians.social/@CitizenWald/110574070037911438), the #Khazar hypothesis began as a legitimate attempt to explain eastern European history.
However, right-wing extremists & racists, from the Christian Identity movement to McCarthyites, appropriated it in the early C20 & grafted it onto existing conspiratorial #antisemitism
Here, one of my "favorite" examples, which shows you just how loopy this shit was. The book earned praise from major political & military figures
#Mazeldon @histodons 3/n
@CitizenWald @histodons you seem to be trying to address cheap identitarian racism with a scientific argument. Allow me to challenge that such approach is meaningful. There's a gap between how readers perceive the two arguments, and it doesn't play in your favour in the case of those representatives of the majority in Western countries who are looking for reinforcement of their views.
For an interpretation that is somewhat defining for the issue, consider the notion of epistemic vigilance:
"This debate between reductionism and anti-reductionism revolves around two distinct issues, one normative and the other descriptive. The normative issue has to
do with the conditions in which a belief acquired through testimony qualifies as knowledge. The descriptive issue has to do with the cognitive and social practices
involved in the production and acceptance of testimony. The two issues are explicitly linked in a ‘third way’ approach which assumes that our actual practices, which involve some degree of vigilance, are likely to be reasonable, and therefore at least indicative of what the norm should be (e.g. Adler, 2003, Fricker, 2006)."
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1331363/1/Wilson_Epistemic%20Vigilance%20revised%20final.pdf
