- The Jews of our times fall into two main divisions: Sephardim
and Ashkenazim.
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- The Sephardim are descendants of the Jews who since antiquity
had lived in Spain (in Hebrew Sepharad) until they were expelled at the
end of the fifteenth century and settled in the countries bordering the
Mediterranean, the Balkans, and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. They
spoke a Spanish-Hebrew dialect, Ladino, and preserved their own traditions
and religious rites. In the 1960s, the number of Sephardim was estimated
at 500,000.
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- The Ashkenazim, at the same period, numbered about eleven
million. Thus, in common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi
Jew." ( page 181).
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- In Mr. Koestler's own words, "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."
-
- The history of the Ashkenazi Jews was widely known and
appreciated in the former Soviet Union. Ashkenazi militants traced the
area where the Turkic Khazars originated before their migration to Southern
Russia to Birobidjan, an Eastern Siberian area as big as Switzerland bordered
by the Amur river, by China and Mongolia. Around 1928 they started building
settlements with the Soviet government's help and in 1934 the Autonomous
Republic (Okrug) of Birobidjan Yevrei came into being with official languages
of Yiddish and Russian. It is still there as an Autonomous Republic to
this day, offering the only historically legitimate settlement area for
Ashkenazi Jews willing to exercise their "right to return"
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- --Mr. Arthur Koestler
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