Should Israelis have to prove their ancestry with a DNA test? Tucker Carlson seems to think so.

In his interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — widely covered for the geopolitical fireworks over Iran, Gaza, and Israeli borders — Carlson took a sharp detour into something older than any current policy dispute: whether Ashkenazi Jews, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have a “true connection” to Israel at all.

As TOI reported, Carlson pressed Huckabee extensively on that question. At one point he asked: “Why don’t we do genetic testing on everybody in the land and find out who Abram’s descendants are?” Then came the pointed insinuation about Netanyahu: “Bibi’s family, we know they lived in Eastern Europe. There’s no evidence they ever lived here.”

Huckabee pushed back, noting an obvious complication: converts. Later, he went further, denouncing Carlson’s line of questioning as an echo of the Khazar conspiracy theory — the claim that Ashkenazi Jews descend not from ancient Jews of the Land of Israel but from a medieval Turkic kingdom whose monarchy allegedly converted to Judaism.

Carlson never used the word “Khazar.” He didn’t need to. 

The move is familiar. It’s the pedigree audit: shift the argument from policy to bloodline; treat hesitation as proof. The theory changes — racial science, colonial rhetoric, medieval conspiracy — but the function stays constant. Whatever instrument is available gets aimed at the same target: Jewish belonging, wherever Jews happen to reside.

That is what Carlson was doing. And it deserves not just rebuttal but exposure.

The Khazar story has had an unusually persistent afterlife. Arthur Koestler’s 1976 book, The Thirteenth Tribe, suggested that Khazar converts seeded the origins of Ashkenazi Jewry, allegedly by traveling hundreds of miles to German-speaking towns in the Rhineland, after the fall of their own kingdom in the late Middle Ages. Koestler’s thesis never won over mainstream scholarship. But, in certain dark corners, it became a durable talking point — and a remarkably flexible one.

On parts of the left, it has been used to portray Ashkenazi Jews as interlopers, disconnected from the ancient Levant and therefore colonial outsiders. On the far right, it depicts Jews as impostors altogether, a people without authentic roots anywhere. Different motives, identical conclusion: Jewish belonging is suspect.

But modern scholarship cuts decidedly the other way.

In 2001, I wrote about Jewish population-genetics research by Dr. Harry Ostrer and Neil Risch, then of NYU and Stanford. Their work found that Ashkenazi Jews were genetically closer to other Jewish populations — and in several analyses, closer to certain Middle Eastern groups — than to non-Jewish Europeans or Turks. Ashkenazi ancestry reflects both Near Eastern roots and later European admixture. 

That is not a scandal. It is exactly what a long diaspora history would predict.

The most prominent recent attempt to revive the Khazar account came in 2013, when geneticist Eran Elhaik argued that Ashkenazi Jews descended largely from Khazars. The paper generated headlines — and then sustained a barrage of methodological criticism. Subsequent studies rejected its geographic conclusions and reaffirmed substantial Levantine ancestry among Ashkenazi populations.

Hebrew University historian Shaul Stampfer dismantled Elhaik’s argument. Exposing myriad historical errors in Elhaik’s foundational assumptions and synthesizing the critiques of multiple population geneticists challenging Elhaik’s methodology, Stampfer showed that the Khazar origin claim collapsed on both the historical record and the genetics. Indeed, Stampfer reasonably doubts whether the rulers of Khazaria ever converted to Judaism at all. 

But even scholars who accept a conversion narrative typically describe it as an elite phenomenon. They reject any suggestion of a deep, widespread Judaization in Khazaria, let alone a mass migration of Jewish Khazarians from the Caspian Steppe to Central Europe. 

In short, neither the math nor the genetics bear out Carlson’s assumption that Ashkenazim are counterfeit Jews whose connection to the Land of Israel is a modern invention. 

Of course, Carlson’s insinuation relies less on technical genetics than on a visual cue: many Ashkenazi Jews have lighter skin than many people in today’s Middle East. They can often pass as white. The implication is that they look like Europeans because they are Europeans.

But whiteness is a social category, not a genetic passport — and a particularly unstable one in Jewish history. The assumption that Middle Eastern ancestry must produce dark pigmentation misreads the region entirely. Populations around the eastern Mediterranean — Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Druze — have always included individuals with pale skin, light eyes, and light hair. Geography, migration, and ordinary genetic variation produce a wide range of appearances.

Ashkenazi Jews also experienced severe demographic bottlenecks in medieval Europe. When a small founding population contributes disproportionately to later generations, certain traits become amplified — including visible ones. This is the same population history that explains elevated rates of certain genetic diseases in Ashkenazi communities. It also helps explain why some outward traits became overrepresented.

“Why do some Jews look European?” has multiple ordinary scientific answers. None of them support Carlson’s implied conclusion.

It is also worth noting what Carlson’s visual logic erases: a large share of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi and Sephardi, with roots in Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran — many of them refugees from persecution in Muslim-majority countries within living memory. Israel is not a monochrome “white” project. It is a gathering of diasporas. Any analysis that treats it as otherwise is not engaging with the reality. It is projecting a cartoon.

Even if Carlson were right on the narrow ancestry point — and he isn’t — the moral logic would still be rotten.

A demand for blood certification is not a neutral inquiry. It is a political instrument: it turns identity into a courtroom exhibit, treats belonging as something granted by an examiner, and frames Jewish peoplehood as guilty until proven innocent. History has seen this before. The Holocaust should have settled one point permanently: racialists never considered Jews white. Jews were marked as alien no matter how pale their skin.

The lesson is not that the science doesn’t matter. It is that bad-faith actors will use whatever science — or pseudoscience — is available to achieve a predetermined conclusion. Racial biology served that function in the early twentieth century. The Khazar theory serves it now. 

Tomorrow it will be something else. The instrument changes, but the target doesn’t.

That is why the answer cannot be silence or fatigue. It must be clarity. The evidence matters. The history matters. The genetics matters — not because belonging requires laboratory certification, but because falsehoods, left unchallenged, harden into consensus.

The science tells a complicated story. Jewish history tells a resilient one. Neither requires a blood test to endure.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)