Word: koestler
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...THIRTEENTH TRIBE by ARTHUR KOESTLER 255 pages. Random House...
...unblinking eye of Eastern mysticism, the dark side of Western technology, the enigmas of order and chance, the uncharted rills of the brain-no subject has been too forbidding for Arthur Koestler's exuberant curiosity. Now, at 70, he is the intellectual's Robert Ripley, presenting sideshows of believe-it-or-not facts and controversial speculations...
This time out, Koestler offers what he clearly intends to be an astounding fact-that the majority of the world's 14 million Jews are not Semites. Most European and American Jews, he advises, should not trace their origins to the tents of Jacob but rather to the yurts of 7th century Caucasian nomads known as Khazars. With their fair skin, reddish hair and blue eyes, the Khazars were not what is usually regarded as Semites. They spoke a kind of old Turkish, but their origins remain hidden...
...Khazars chose Judaism, an odd historical fact that Koestler and others are at pains to explain satisfactorily. According to one ancient Jewish legend, the Khazar king, Bulan, was in the market for a monotheism to replace his old tribal idolatry. He asked the emissary from Christian Byzantium which faith he would choose if the only option was between Judaism and Islam. The Christian chose Judaism because the Jews -though sinners-at least worshiped the same...
...brigade of intellectuals, including Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, had their lives and work shaped irrevocably by their experiences in Spain. "As a militiaman," George Orwell later wrote in Homage to Catalonia, "one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between political theories." Albert Camus observed afterwards: "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this...