Every number of years the theory is advanced that the Jews of
Europe are actually descendants of the Khazar kingdom, a mostly
Turkic people whose king and nobility converted to Judaism in
the early eighth century, allowing them to become a buffer state
between Islam and Christendom. When the Khazar kingdom collapsed
in the 13th century, according to the believers in the Khazar
theory, its population fled into Eastern Europe and served as
the core of European Jewry. Most Jewish historians argued for
centuries that after the destruction of the Temple and the Bar
Kokhba Revolt, many Jews who had been exiled moved up the
Italian peninsula north of the Alps into the trading cities
along the Rhine River in Germany. From there, European Jewry
began to populate the countries of Eastern Europe in the
centuries that followed. In his monumental work, "Arab Attitudes
to Israel," written in the early 1970s, Professor Yehoshafat
Harkabi described the Khazar theory as one of the arguments
marshaled in the Arab world to asse