By Alex Gordon
Kösztler wrote, “I have endeavored to show that anthropological evidence in conjunction with history refutes the popular belief in a Jewish race that descended from a biblical tribe.” According to Kösztler’s assertion, the Jews are “not the children of Abraham, but the descendants of the pagans of Eastern Europe, and also – Eurasians, centered mainly in the ancient kingdom of Khazaria – where Ukraine and Western Russia are now.”
Kösztler concludes that the antisemitism of the Nazis had nothing to do with the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. Centuries-old claims against the Jews are not justified, for they are not Semites and are not responsible for the murder of Christ. The hypothesis of the non-Semitic origin of the Jews has been taken up by Jew-haters and those who deny the historical right of the Jews to the Land of Israel.
Kösztler read a philosophical treatise by the medieval poet, physician, rabbi and philosopher Yehuda Halevi, HaKuzari (Khazar). In this work, the medieval thinker, reeling from the legend of the Khazars’ adoption of Judaism, talks about the advantages of the Jewish religion over other beliefs. Using the legend, he wanted to unite the disparate Jewry. At the same time, however, the medieval thinker helped to perpetuate the view that the Khazars were Jews.
The modern Israeli historian Shaul Stampfer denies the adoption of Judaism by the Khazars. He believes that the main document in favor of the Khazar origin of the Jews is the so-called Jewish-Khazar correspondence – a corpus including three works of epistolary genre. Stampfer, who has studied the entire array of sources, tends to believe that the Jewish-Khazar correspondence is the only source indicating that there were Jews among the Khazars. Nevertheless, due to the fact that the available letters have not survived to the present day in their entirety, when studying them, one cannot conclude about the widespread Judaism of the Khazars.
“All this indicates that neither the Khazar king nor the Khazar elite simply did not accept Judaism. All my life I have been researching what happened in the past. To prove that something in the past did not happen, turned out to be an order of magnitude more difficult,” Stampfer writes.
The Khazars chose Judaism because they saw themselves as an independent factor in Eurasia and did not want to enter the orbit of influence of either Byzantium (Christians) or the Caliphate (Muslims). Judaism was accepted only by the top, and the masses were divided: some remained pagans, some converted to Christianity, and some accepted Islam. The elite of Khazars accepted Judaism not to pay tribute to Christians of Constantinople and Muslims of Baghdad. There is no missionary in Judaism, which sharply limits the mobilization potential of this religion. Therefore, in the Khazar Khaganate, in which only a part of the elite accepted Judaism, there could not be an intensive violent spread of religion, similar to what took place in Christianity and Islam. Therefore, the Jews were so few among the Khazars that they could not by themselves be a source of intensive spread of the Jewish religion.
An additional argument against the Khazar origin of Jews was the absence in the Yiddish language, spoken by European Jews, of the roots of the Turkic language of the Khazars. The main thesis of The Thirteenth Tribe about the Khazar origin of the Jews is refuted not only by historical arguments and evidence of the erroneous anthropological approach of their author, but also by genetic testing.
Arthur Kösztler was born in Budapest in 1905 into the German-speaking family of a prosperous industrialist and inventor. When he was 14 years old, his family moved to Vienna. Kösztler studied science and psychology at the Imperial Royal Polytechnic Institute, where he became president of the Zionist Student Brotherhood. A month before the end of his classes at the university (1925), he burned his transcript, did not go to the final exams, and repatriated to the Land of Israel, which was under the British Mandate. From 1926 to 1929 he lived on Kibbutz Heftziba in the Jezreel Valley and later in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Kösztler met Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who took notice of the young activist and took him on a trip to Czechoslovakia. Together with like-minded people, Kösztler established the Austrian branch of the League of Activists in Vienna, the basis for Jabotinsky’s New Zionist Organization. The local Zionist newspaper published Kösztler’s first article on the need for a Jewish army in Palestine. Jabotinsky appointed him secretary of the Berlin branch of the New Zionist Organization. In 1927 Kösztler became a correspondent for the German liberal publishing house Ulstein in Palestine. He spent two years writing articles for various Ulstein publications on topics ranging from politics to local history essays.
In 1928, Jabotinsky purchased the oldest daily Hebrew newspaper in the world, the Doar ha-yom (Daily Mail), and invited Koestler to join him. Kösztler began writing the paper’s international politics column and edited the last page he invented, which was given over to entertainment. On this page, he created a crossword puzzle in Hebrew, although he had a poor command of the language and used translators.
However, life in Palestine weighed on Kösztler. He became disillusioned with Zionist ideals and became fascinated with socialism. He writes about it in Autobiography: “During these eight years after leaving Palestine [until 1937. – A. G.] I believed that the small and tedious Jewish question would finally be solved together with the Negro question, the Armenian question and all other questions in the global context of the socialist revolution. So, I left the old Promised Land for the new Promised Land and experienced an even more bitter disappointment.”
In 1930 Kösztler moved to Berlin, and in 1931 he took part in an expedition to the North Pole. In the same year he joined the German Communist Party. He traveled extensively in the Soviet Union (1932-1933). In 1938, in protest against Stalin’s show trials, he left the German Communist Party. Another motive for his return to Europe was internationalism, Eurocentrism: “I no longer believed that this artificial revival of the obsolete language of the Bible would bring about a cultural revival, a return of the age of the prophets. And I also knew that my roots were in Europe, that I belonged to Europe, and that if Europe disappeared, survival would become meaningless, and I would rather disappear with it than find refuge in a country that meant no more than refuge. This decision was indeed tested when France fell, and when instead of moving to Palestine or neutral America, I fled to England, which led lightning fast to solitary confinement in a London prison. However, even the prison cell in Pentonville [a prison in London. – A. G.] meant Europe, my home.”
George Orwell describes Kösztler’s reaction to the repression in the USSR as follows: “Everything Kösztler prints is centered around the Moscow trials. His main theme is the rebirth of the revolution, when the corrupting effects of the conquest of power begin to show, and the peculiar nature of the Stalinist dictatorship prompted Kösztler to make an evolution backward, to views close to conservatism, imbued with pessimistic sentiments. I don’t know how many books he wrote. Coming from Hungary, he began to write in German, and five of his works have appeared in England-The Spanish Testament, Darkness at Noon, The World of the Hungry and the Slaves, Arrival and Departure. The material in all of them is the same, and the atmosphere of nightmare invariably prevails from the first pages. In three of the five books I named, the action takes place entirely or almost entirely in prison.”
As a correspondent for the British newspaper News Chronicle Kösztler went to Spain in 1936, fought in the ranks of the International Brigade, was captured, was sentenced to death and was released in the exchange of prisoners. The hundred days he spent in a Frankist prison he described in his book The Spanish Testament. Kösztler was an active opponent of the death penalty.
In 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Kösztler was interned in a French camp for German citizens, where he spent. several months. He was released after the British government intervened. He volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, and after the defeat of France in 1940, he fled to England via Morocco and Portugal and fought Nazism in the British Army (1941-1942). In 1945 he became a British citizen and briefly returned to France. In 1948 he settled in London and lectured at American universities.
Kösztler gained worldwide recognition with his novel Darkness at Noon (1940) about a sincere communist, a Jew, who “in the name of saving the idea” confesses at the “show trial” in the USSR in the crimes attributed to him. The novel reflects Koestler’s impressions of sitting in prison awaiting execution.
Kösztler was one of the first to realize the weaknesses of democracy in opposing dictatorship and its ability to unwittingly bring totalitarian regimes to power. In Autobiography he writes: “Solemnly, like a prayer, we repeated the word ‘democracy,’ and in a few years the largest nation in Europe, with the help of a purely democratic procedure, empowered its destroyers. We deified the Will of the Masses, while their will was bent on murder and suicide. We considered capitalism a relic and would gladly replace it with the newest form of slavery. We preached broadmindedness and tolerance and were tolerant of the evils that were destroying our civilization. Our social progress turned into slave labor camps, our liberalism turned us into accomplices of tyrants and oppressors, our peacefulness encouraged aggression and war.”
Kösztler’s novel Thieves in the Night (1946) is written from the perspective of a sober and ironic half-Jewish half-Englishman who, confronted with racism in England, was made a participant in the events of 1937-1939 in the Land of Israel. Koestler not without skepticism recreates the period of Jewish settlement of the country, the difficulties of building a new society, describes the struggle of the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine with Arab terror and the British mandate authorities, the secret repatriation, the characters and fates of the people who prepared the revival of the Jewish state.
Kösztler was married three times, the third time to Dorothy Cynthia Jeffries. In 1983, suffering from Parkinson’s disease and leukemia, Kösztler committed suicide with his wife Cynthia by taking a high dose of sleeping pills. He was an ardent supporter of euthanasia.
The news of the Holocaust shocked the writer. In 1944 Kösztler wrote bitterly: “We have experienced the funeral of the entire Jewish population of Europe. Three million people have died so far. This is the greatest mass murder in recorded history; it is daily, hourly and as regular as the ticking of a clock. As I write these lines, I am looking at the pictures of those killed, and this explains my emotion and bitterness.”
He realized that Palestine had passed into the category of a refuge for the Jewish people. In Autobiography he describes his experiences, “From 1942, when the mass extermination of European Jews began, until the formation of the Jewish state in 1948, Palestine again became my main concern. I spent at that time a total of a year and a half in that country, wrote two books (Thieves in the Night and Promise and Fulfillment), several pamphlets, countless articles, made several speeches and sat on commissions, all the while advocating partition, since it was the only way to put an end to this horror and save what could still be saved. […] During my visits to Palestine, the poisoned atmosphere of the country, the bombings, the hangings, the savagery and hatred that filled everything were the real fuel for my intense neurosis, and at times alcohol was the only cure.”
In Palestine, Kösztler felt like an outsider. In Autobiography he recalled: “My Zionist friends of earlier days belonged to a completely different category. In a world full of upheaval, they were stubbornly devoted to their little strip of the Promised Land. They turned the desert into an oasis moistened by their sweat, in which their agony and passion pulsed. In the streets of Haifa and Tel Aviv, in the settlements of Sharon and the Galilee, they did their work with calm, slow movements, but inwardly they were all fanatics and maniacs.”
Kösztler’s attacks on Hebrew expose his complexes about Jewishness. Hebrew is the language of prayer. It was being revitalized in the Land of Israel before Kösztler’s eyes. This revival connected the Jewish religion with the Jewish nation. Kösztler, unable to master Hebrew and unwilling to build a Jewish state where it once existed, chose to detach himself from his biblical homeland. He failed to master the language of his ancestors and chose to change ancestors. He did not like eastern, dusty, hot, non-European Israel with its unlikeable language, and he decided to move his Jewish roots from the Land of Israel away from the Levant and closer to Europe.
In Autobiography Kösztler told about his stay in the Land of Israel and his “encounter” with the Hebrew language: “I came to Palestine as a young enthusiast, given to romantic impulses, but instead of utopia I found a reality, a very, it must be said, complex reality – both attractive and repulsive; but gradually the repulsion became stronger, and the reason for this was the Hebrew language – an obsolete, fossilized dialect, long since ceased to develop, abandoned by the Jews themselves long before our era – at the time of Christ they spoke Aramaic – and now forcibly revived. The archaic structure and ancient vocabulary were completely unsuitable for expressing modern thought, for conveying the nuances of feelings and meanings important to the twentieth-century man. By using Hebrew as an official language, the small Jewish community of Palestine cut itself off not only from Western civilization but also from its own cultural past.”
Kösztler refused to accept that “the small Jewish community of Palestine” was bringing itself closer to “its own cultural past” by revitalizing and enriching Hebrew. The Jews of the Land of Israel were not only drying up the swamps and turning the desert into an oasis, they were filling the present and the future with their language, which had previously been only the property of religion, but was now to become the property of the nation as well. Kösztler could not master Hebrew and refused repatriation, which did not give him the high position as a national writer and thinker, which was impossible to achieve without a knowledge of Hebrew.
Kösztler capitulated gracefully, “I realized that switching to Hebrew meant spiritual suicide for me. I brought my loyalty to Zionism to the point that I took Palestinian citizenship and issued a Palestinian passport. At that time, few Zionists ventured such a step, even Dr. Weizmann surrendered his British passport only after his election as president of Israel. I could give up my European citizenship, but not my European culture. I was a romantic idiot in love with the irrational, but here instinct protected me. I knew that in a Jewish-speaking environment I would always remain an outsider, and in doing so, I would gradually lose touch with European culture. I had left Europe at the age of twenty, now I was twenty-three, and I had had enough of the Orient – both Arab romance and Jewish mysticism. My mind and spirit craved Europe, longed for Europe, longed to go home.”
Kösztler’s escape into Zionism ended in failure due to his realization of the impossibility of solving the difficult task of learning a difficult new language and participating in the construction of a new society in which he could not take a leading position. Kösztler left the Land of Israel. He must have subconsciously decided that Jews could not come from an area where he had not succeeded.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.