The Thirteenth Tribe
Arthur Koestler

This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism. Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry.

To the general reader the Khazars, who flourished from the seventh to the eleventh century, may seem infinitely remote today. Yet they have a close and unexpected bearing on our world which emerges as Mr. Koestler recounts the fascinating history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe at about the time that Charlemagne was Emperor in the West. The Khazar's sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain.

Thereafter the Khazars found themselves in a precarious position between the two major world powers: the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium and the triumphant followers of Mohammed. As Mr. Koestler points out, the Khazars were the Third World of their day, and they chose a surprising method of resisting both the Western pressure to become Christian and the Eastern to adopt Islam. Rejecting both, they converted to Judaism.

In the second part of this book, "The Heritage," Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry. He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more convincing for the restraint with which it is advanced. Yet should this theory be confirmed, the term "anti-Semitism" would become void of meaning, since, as Mr. Koestler writes, it is based "on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated."

Table of Contents

Map: The Khazar Empire

Part One: Rise and Fall of the Khazars
I - Rise
II - Conversion
III - Decline
IV - Fall

Part Two: The Heritage
V - Exodus
VI - Where From?
VII - Cross-currents
VIII - Race and Myth

Appendices
I - A Note of Spelling
II - A Note of Sources
III - The 'Khazar Correspondence'
IV - Some Implications – Israel and the Diaspora

References
Selected Bibliography
Index

256 pages, 8.5 x 5.5, Paperback

Price - $15.00