“under the Tatar rule, were accessible for many Moslem merchants from Khoresm or Khiva, who were long since experienced in trade and the tricks of profit-seeking.”

the word “Moslem” is not in the French version. It does not appear to be in the Russian either, though I am struggling to get every word in the Russian. When I succeed, I will make a final correction. Until then, I have added a footnote.

At your link, he concludes that “the main ethnic element of … most modern Jewish populations of the world is Israelite,” but supports this with “the Israelite haplotypes fall into Y-DNA haplogroups J and E.” However, earlier he stated that “the Y-DNA haplogroups J and E … are typical of the Middle East” but not limited to Israel. So the logic seems to be:

All jews are (haplogroups J and E)
All (haplogroups J and E) are middle eastern

the latter including “Kurdish, Armenian, Palestinian Arab, Lebanese, Syrian, and Anatolian Turkish peoples”

From this we could conclude the family heritage with middle eastern peoples, not Israel simply.

And if Turks are lumped in with that group, as he does, there is no contradiction to my assertion. Indeed, coming full circle in that way shows the absurdity of the “rebuttal.”

The “middle east” is taken to include Armenians, Arabs, and Turks, and this itself shows the difficulty of these studies using samples after the mixing has occurred. Unless they can get enough DNA from the ancients, there is a great deal of assumption that must be mixed in, it seems to me. This is similar to the claim a while ago that some Negroes were descended from Thomas Jefferson. You can go up the chain, with 1/2 admixing at every step, then you have to go back down the chain, with 1/2 mixing at every step. And the DNA at each of the “1/2 admixing” steps, if it were avaialable at all, is also the result of such a series of 1/2 admixtures. I’m skeptical.

Later, your author identifies Khazars as Europeans, which is absurd.

Harkavy’s thesis that the caspian jews were from the ten lost tribes or the remnant of the not-lost two tribes seems either implausible or self-defeating to me. (1) Why would those people have lost their collective memory of who they were? If it is claimed that they did remember, then why did they not write it down (genealogies, etc.)? (2) On the other hand, if they were descended from exiled Israel, but lost all continuity with the same, in what sense should they be regarded as jews? That is racism in the only form that the term makes any sense, but which still celebrates an absurdity: namely, thinking that mere blood, without any inherited culture, character, or accomplishment, grants one solidarity.

It is also interesting to see how in relatively recent history (yes I know, I must be weird to think of 1000 AD as “recent”) we can observe the formation of brand-new ethnic groups from a combination of migration and marriage, the turkish Cuman tribe for example becoming the partially european yet distinct tribe of Crimean Tatars.

In this regard, it is also fascinating to see that the majority of modern-day jews are essentially a branch of the Turks.