77-539: The Thirteenth Tribe is a 1976 book by Arthur Koestler advocating the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry , the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Judeans and Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars , a Turkic people who allegedly mass-converted to Judaism . Koestler hypothesized that the Khazars after their conversion in the 8th century migrated westwards into Eastern Europe in
154-724: A British visa. ( John le Carré used Bagot as a model for Connie Sachs in his spy novels featuring "George Smiley". Bagot was the first to warn that Kim Philby of MI6 was probably spying for the USSR.) Koestler describes the period 1939 to 1940 and his incarceration in Le Vernet in his memoir Scum of the Earth . Shortly before the German invasion of France, Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion in order to get out of
231-521: A boarding house in Vienna. When the war ended, the family returned to Budapest. As noted in Koestler's autobiography, he and his family were sympathetic to the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik Revolution of 1919. Though the small soap factory owned at the time by Koestler's father was nationalised, the elder Koestler was appointed its director by the revolutionary government and was well-paid. Even though
308-678: A fellow Communist activist. They separated amicably in 1937. In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War , he undertook a visit to General Francisco Franco 's headquarters in Seville on behalf of the Comintern , pretending to be a Franco sympathiser and using credentials from the London daily News Chronicle as cover. He collected evidence of the direct involvement of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany on Franco's side, which at that time
385-406: A foreign governess. His primary school education started at an experimental private kindergarten founded by Laura Striker ( née Polányi ). Her daughter Eva Striker later became Koestler's lover, and they remained friends all his life. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 deprived Koestler's father of foreign suppliers and his business collapsed. Facing destitution, the family moved temporarily to
462-580: A friend, Koestler obtained the position of Middle East correspondent for the prestigious Berlin-based Ullstein-Verlag group of newspapers. He returned to Jerusalem, where for the next two years he produced detailed political essays, as well as some lighter reportage, for his principal employer and for other newspapers. He was resident at this time at 29 Rehov Hanevi'im, in Jerusalem. He travelled extensively, interviewed heads of state, kings, presidents and prime ministers, and greatly enhanced his reputation as
539-518: A house built, and for the next twelve years used it as a place for summer vacations and for organising symposia. In May 1958 he had a hernia operation. In December he left for India and Japan, and was away until early 1959. Based on his travels, he wrote the book The Lotus and the Robot . In early 1960, on his way back from a conference in San Francisco, Koestler interrupted his journey at
616-559: A journalist. As noted in his autobiography, he came to realise that he would never really fit into Palestine's Zionist Jewish community, the Yishuv , and particularly that he would not be able to have a journalistic career in Hebrew . In June 1929, while on leave in Berlin, Koestler successfully lobbied at Ullstein for a transfer away from Palestine. In September he was sent to Paris to fill
693-455: A letter to his parents telling them that he was going to Mandate Palestine for a year to work as an assistant engineer in a factory, in order to gain experience to help him obtain a job in Austria. On 1 April 1926 he left Vienna for Palestine . For a few weeks Koestler lived in a kibbutz , but his application to join the collective ( Kvutzat Heftziba ) was rejected by its members. For
770-613: A niece of Lytton Strachey , was also a former communist; other associates included Rupert Crawshay-Williams , Michael Polanyi , Storm Jameson and, most significantly, Bertrand Russell , who lived close by. In 1948, when war broke out between the newly declared State of Israel and the neighbouring Arab states, Koestler was accredited by several newspapers, American, British and French, and travelled to Israel. Mamaine Paget went with him. They arrived in Israel on 4 June and stayed there until October. Later that year they decided to leave
847-713: A result of Adolf Hitler's rise to power in January 1933, Koestler was no longer able to visit Germany. Koestler left the Soviet Union in 1933, and in September of that year he returned to Paris and for the next two years was active in anti-Fascist movements. He wrote propaganda under the direction of Willi Münzenberg , the Comintern's chief propaganda director in the West. In 1935 Koestler married Dorothy Ascher (1905-1992),
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#1732780592518924-582: A scriptwriter for propaganda broadcasts and films. In his spare time he wrote Arrival and Departure , the third in his trilogy of novels that included Darkness at Noon . He also wrote several essays, which were subsequently collected and published in The Yogi and the Commissar . One of the essays, titled "On Disbelieving Atrocities" (originally published in The New York Times ), was about
1001-643: A supporter of Marxism-Leninism . On 31 December 1931, he applied for membership of the Communist Party of Germany . As noted in his biography, he was disappointed in the conduct of the Vossische Zeitung , "The Flagship of German Liberalism", which adapted to changing times by firing Jewish journalists, hiring writers with marked German Nationalist views, and dropping its longstanding campaign against capital punishment. Koestler concluded that Liberals and moderate Democrats could not stand up against
1078-670: A three-storey Georgian town house on Montpelier Square in London, and sold his houses in France and the United States. The first two volumes of his autobiography, Arrow in the Blue , which covers his life up to December 1931 when he joined the German Communist Party, and The Invisible Writing , which covers the years 1932 to 1940, were published in 1952 and 1954, respectively. A collection of essays, The Trail of
1155-631: A vacancy in the bureau of the Ullstein News Service. In 1931, he was called to Berlin and appointed science editor of the Vossische Zeitung and science adviser to the Ullstein newspaper empire. In July 1931, he was Ullstein's choice to represent the paper on board the Graf Zeppelin 's week-long polar flight, which carried a team of scientists and the polar aviator Lincoln Ellsworth to 82 degrees North and back. Koestler
1232-463: Is of Khazar-Turkish, rather than Semitic, origin. In the last chapter I have tried to show that the evidence from anthropology concurs with history in refuting the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe." Mattias Gardell writes that Koestler's thesis is "partly based on amateur anthropology", and its scientific arguments come from The Myth of a Jewish Race (1975) by Raphael Patai and his daughter Jennifer. It also relies on
1309-655: The New York Times described the book as "widely discredited." Koestler advances the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars , a Turkic people originating in and populating an empire north of and between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea . Koestler's hypothesis is that the Khazars – who converted to Judaism in the 8th century – migrated westwards into current Eastern Europe (primarily Ukraine , Poland, Belarus , Lithuania , Hungary and Germany) in
1386-652: The New York Drama Critics Award . Koestler donated all his royalties from the play to a fund he had set up to help struggling authors, the Fund for Intellectual Freedom (FIF). In June a bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate to grant Koestler permanent residence in the U.S. Koestler sent tickets for the play to his House sponsor Richard Nixon and his Senate sponsor Owen Brewster , a close confidant of Joseph McCarthy . The bill became law on 23 August 1951 as Private Law 221 Chapter 343 "AN ACT For
1463-527: The University of Michigan , Ann Arbor , where some experimental research was going on with hallucinogens . He tried psilocybin and had a "bad trip". Later, when he arrived at Harvard to see Timothy Leary , he experimented with more drugs, but was not enthusiastic about that experience either. In November 1960 he was elected to a Fellowship of The Royal Society of Literature . Tel Aviv University Too Many Requests If you report this error to
1540-432: The right-wing regime of Admiral Horthy . In 1920 the family returned to Vienna, where Henrik set up a successful new import business. In September 1922 Arthur enrolled in the University of Vienna to study engineering, and joined a Zionist duelling student fraternity, 'Unitas.' . When Henrik's latest business failed, Koestler stopped attending lectures and was expelled for non-payment of fees. In March 1926 he wrote
1617-500: The 12th and 13th centuries when the Khazar Empire was collapsing. At the end of the book's last chapter, Koestler summarizes its content and his intentions as follows: "In Part One of this book I have attempted to trace the history of the Khazar Empire based on the scant existing sources. In Part Two, Chapters V-VII, I have compiled the historical evidence which indicates that the bulk of Eastern Jewry — and hence of world Jewry —
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#17327805925181694-447: The 12th and 13th centuries when the Khazar Empire was collapsing. Koestler used previous works by Douglas Morton Dunlop , Raphael Patai and Abraham Polak as sources. His stated intent was to make antisemitism disappear by disproving its racial basis. Popular reviews of the book were mixed, academic critiques of its research were generally negative, and Koestler biographers David Cesarani and Michael Scammell panned it. In 2018,
1771-464: The 1960s he took LSD with Timothy Leary . In the 1970s he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie . Anne Applebaum , reviewing Michael Scammell : Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic Koestler was born in Budapest to Jewish parents Henrik and Adele Koestler ( née Jeiteles). Henrik's father, Lipót Koestler,
1848-653: The Ashkenazi version, has deep genetic roots." He refers to a 2010 study by geneticist Harry Ostrer which found that Ashkenazi Jews "clustered more closely with Middle Eastern and Sephardic Jews, a finding the researchers say is inconsistent with the Khazar hypothesis" and concludes "that all three Jewish groups—Middle Eastern, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi—share genomewide genetic markers that distinguish them from other worldwide populations". Geneticist Noah Rosenberg asserts that although recent DNA studies "do not appear to support"
1925-591: The British sculptor Daphne Hardy . They lived together in Paris, and she translated the manuscript of Darkness at Noon from German into English in early 1940. She smuggled it out of France when they left ahead of the German occupation and arranged for its publication after reaching London that year. After the outbreak of World War II , Koestler returned from the South of France to Paris. He attempted to turn himself in to
2002-491: The Communist Party and started work on a new novel, which was published in London under the title Darkness at Noon (1941). Also in 1938 he became editor of Die Zukunft (The Future), a German-language weekly published in Paris. Koestler's breaking with the Communist Party may have been influenced by the similar step taken by his fellow activist Willi Münzenberg . In 1939 Koestler met and formed an attachment to
2079-551: The Dinosaur and Other Essays , on the perils he saw facing western civilisation, was published in 1955. On 13 April 1955 Janine Graetz, with whom Koestler had an on-off relationship over a period of years, gave birth to his daughter Cristina. Despite repeated attempts by Janine to persuade Koestler to show some interest in her, Koestler had almost no contact with Cristina throughout his life. Early in 1956 he arranged for Cynthia Jeffries to have an abortion when she became pregnant; it
2156-706: The Khazar hypothesis, they do not "entirely eliminate it either." A 2013 study by Costa et al. included The Thirteenth Tribe in its list of references and attempted to test its Khazar hypothesis genetically. It concluded that "virtually none" of the Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups originated in the North Caucasus or Chuvashia, which it viewed as invalidating Koestler's hypothesis. Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler CBE ( UK : / ˈ k ɜː s t l ər / , US : / ˈ k ɛ s t -/ ; German: [ˈkœstlɐ] ; Hungarian : Kösztler Artúr ; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983)
2233-495: The Khazar theory since its introduction at the turn of the century." After it was first published, Fitzroy Maclean in The New York Times Book Review called The Thirteenth Tribe excellent, writing "Mr. Koestler's book is as readable as it is thought-provoking. Nothing could be more stimulating than the skill, elegance and erudition with which he marshals his facts and develops his theories." Reviewing
2310-634: The Khazars scared off the Israeli historians, not one of whom has published a single paper on the subject, Koestler's Thirteenth Tribe annoyed and provoked angry responses. Hebrew readers had no access to the book itself for many years, learning about it only through the venomous denunciations". Writing in The Wall Street Journal , Chronicle of Higher Education editor Evan Goldstein states "Sand suggests that those who attacked Koestler's book did so not because it lacked merit, but because
2387-568: The Loyalists, the wife of one of Franco's ace fighter pilots. Koestler was one of the few authors to have been sentenced to death, an experience he wrote about in Dialogue with Death . As he noted in his autobiography, his estranged wife Dorothy Ascher had greatly contributed to saving his life by intensive, months-long lobbying on his behalf in Britain. When he went to Britain after his release,
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2464-610: The Nationalist rebels were still trying to conceal. He had to escape after he was recognised and denounced as a Communist by a German former colleague. Back in France he wrote L'Espagne Ensanglantée , which was later incorporated into his book Spanish Testament . In 1937 he returned to Loyalist Spain as a war correspondent for the News Chronicle , and was in Málaga when it fell to Mussolini's troops, who were fighting on
2541-632: The Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Daphne Hardy, who had been doing war work in Oxford, joined Koestler in London in 1943, but they parted company a few months later. They remained good friends until Koestler's death. In December 1944 Koestler travelled to Palestine with accreditation from The Times . There he had a clandestine meeting with Menachem Begin , the head of the Irgun paramilitary organisation, who
2618-594: The Night . When he returned to England, Mamaine Paget, whom he had started to see before going out to Palestine, was waiting for him. In August 1945 the couple moved to the cottage of Bwlch Ocyn, an isolated farmhouse owned by Clough Williams-Ellis , in the Vale of Ffestiniog . Over the next three years, Koestler became a close friend of writer George Orwell . The region had its own intellectual circle, which would have been sympathetic to Koestler: Williams-Ellis' wife, Amabel ,
2695-599: The U.S. and the UK. In 1949 he also published the non-fiction Insight and Outlook . This too received lukewarm reviews. In July Koestler began work on Arrow in the Blue , the first volume of his autobiography. He hired a new part-time secretary, Cynthia Jefferies, who replaced Daphne Woodward . Cynthia and Koestler eventually married. In the autumn he started work on The Age of Longing , on which he continued to work until mid-1950. Koestler had reached agreement with his first wife, Dorothy, on an amicable divorce, and their marriage
2772-567: The UK for a while and move to France. News that his long-pending application for British nationality had been granted reached him in France in late December; early in 1949 he returned to London to swear the oath of allegiance to the British Crown . In January 1949 Koestler and Paget moved to a house he had bought in France. There he wrote a contribution to The God That Failed and finished work on Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949 . The latter book received poor reviews in both
2849-578: The United Nations mandate and not on Biblical covenants or genetic inheritance. In his view, "[t]he problem of the Khazar infusion a thousand years ago... is irrelevant to modern Israel." Koestler's book was praised by the neo-Nazi magazine The Thunderbolt as "the political bombshell of the century", and it was enthusiastically supported by followers of the Christian Identity movement. According to Jeffrey Kaplan, The Thirteenth Tribe
2926-417: The United States. Adele and her mother moved from Vienna to Budapest to stay with Adele's older married sister. Henrik and Adele met in 1898, and married in 1900. Arthur, their only child, was born on 5 September 1905. The Koestlers lived in spacious, well-furnished, rented apartments in various predominantly Jewish districts of Budapest. During Arthur's early years, they employed a cook/housekeeper, as well as
3003-582: The Universe", which also became the book's subtitle. Copernicus and Galileo were added to Kepler as the major subjects of the book. Later in 1956, as a consequence of the Hungarian Uprising , Koestler became busy organising anti-Soviet meetings and protests. In June 1957 Koestler gave a lecture at a symposium in Alpbach , Austria, and fell in love with the village. He bought land there, had
3080-479: The authorities as a foreign national several times and was finally arrested on 2 October 1939. The French government first detained Koestler at Stade Roland Garros until he was moved to Le Vernet Internment Camp among other "undesirable aliens", most of them refugees. He was released in early 1940 in response to strong British pressure. Milicent Bagot , an intelligence officer at MI5 , recommended his release from Camp Vernet, but said that he should not be granted
3157-653: The autobiography was published in 1953, after Koestler had become an outspoken anti-Communist, he wrote favourably of the Hungarian Communists and their leader Béla Kun . He fondly recalled the hopes for a better future he had felt as a teenager in revolutionary Budapest. Later the Koestlers witnessed the temporary occupation of Budapest by the Romanian Army and then the White Terror under
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3234-563: The autumn he went to the United States on a lecture tour, during which he lobbied for permanent resident status in the U.S. At the end of October, on impulse, he bought Island Farm , a small island with a house on it on the Delaware River near New Hope, Pennsylvania . He intended to live there at least for part of each year. In January 1951 a dramatised version of Darkness at Noon , by Sidney Kingsley , opened in New York. It won
3311-536: The book as "controversial", stating it contained "sweeping claims of Khazar legacy and influence". Koestler biographer Michael Scammell writes that Koestler told French biologist Pierre Debray-Ritzen he "was convinced that if he could prove that the bulk of Eastern European Jews (the ancestors of today's Ashkenazim) were descended from the Khazars, the racial basis for anti-Semitism would be removed and anti-Semitism itself could disappear". According to George Urban , Koestler's desire to connect Ashkenazi Jews with Khazars
3388-623: The book as evidence that Koestler's brain "was starting to fail him". A 2005 study by Nebel et al. , based on Y chromosome polymorphic markers, showed that Ashkenazi Jews are more closely related to other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than to the populations among whom they lived in Europe. However, 11.5% of male Ashkenazim were found to belong to Haplogroup R1a , the dominant Y chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europeans, suggesting possible gene flow. Referencing The Thirteenth Tribe ,
3465-488: The circle of the Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg , through whom he met the leading German Communists [and fellow-travellers] of the era, including Johannes Becher , Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht . Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin . He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but he did not die. Along
3542-489: The country. He deserted in North Africa and tried to return to England. He heard a false report that the ship on which Hardy was travelling had sunk, and that she and his manuscript were lost. He attempted suicide , but survived. Arriving in the UK without an entry permit, Koestler was imprisoned pending examination of his case. He was still in prison when Daphne Hardy's English translation of his book Darkness at Noon
3619-498: The couple tried to resume their marriage, but Koestler's gratitude to her proved an insufficient foundation for a daily life together. Koestler returned to France, where he agreed to write a sex encyclopaedia to earn money to live on. It was published to great success under the title The Encyclopœdia of Sexual Knowledge , under the pseudonyms of "Drs A. Costler, A. Willy, and Others". In July 1938 Koestler finished work on his novel The Gladiators . Later that year he resigned from
3696-505: The critics were cowards and ideologues. 'No one wants to go looking under stones when venomous scorpions might be lurking beneath them, waiting to attack the self-image of the existing ethnos and its territorial ambitions.'" In the Arab world the theory espoused in Koestler's book was adopted by persons who argued that if Ashkenazi Jews are primarily Khazar and not Semitic in origin, they would have no historical claim to Israel, nor would they be
3773-515: The emotional appeal of a polemic – only the earmarks of a poorly researched and hastily written book". Koestler's analysis was described as a mixture of flawed etymologies and misinterpreted primary sources by Chimen Abramsky in 1976 and Hyam Maccoby in 1977. Barkun describes the book as an "eccentric work", and writes that Koestler was "unequipped with the specialist background the subject might be thought to require", but that he "nevertheless made an amateur's serious attempt to investigate and support
3850-625: The next 43 years, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1949, Koestler began secretly working with a British Cold War anti-communist propaganda department known as the Information Research Department (IRD), which would republish and distribute many of his works, and also fund his activities. In 1968, he was awarded the Sonning Prize "for [his] outstanding contribution to European culture". In 1972, he
3927-548: The next twelve months he supported himself with menial jobs in Haifa , Tel Aviv , and Jerusalem . Frequently penniless and starving, he often depended on friends and acquaintances for survival. He occasionally wrote or edited broadsheets and other publications, mostly in German. In early 1927 he left Palestine briefly for Berlin , where he ran the Secretariat of Ze'ev Jabotinsky 's Revisionist Party. Later that year, through
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#17327805925184004-599: The official version of events by the Soviet government, he claimed that those starving were "enemies of the people who preferred begging to work." Koestler wrote a book on the Soviet Five-Year Plan , but it did not meet with the approval of the Soviet authorities and was never published in Russian. Only the German version, extensively censored, was published in an edition for German-speaking Soviet citizens. As
4081-650: The relief of Arthur Koestler". In 1951 the last of Koestler's political works, The Age of Longing , was published. In it he examined the political landscape of post-war Europe and the problems facing the continent. In August 1952 his marriage to Mamaine collapsed. They separated, but remained close until her sudden and unexpected death in June 1954. The book Living with Koestler: Mamaine Koestler's Letters 1945–51 , edited by Mamaine's twin sister Celia Goodman, gives insight into their lives together. Koestler decided to make his permanent home in Britain. In May 1953 he bought
4158-690: The rising Nazi tide and that the Communists were the only real counter-force. In the early 1930s, Koestler moved to the Soviet Union . In 1932 Koestler travelled in Turkmenistan and Central Asia, where he met and traveled with Langston Hughes . During his stay in the Soviet Union, he also lived for a time in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic , alongside physicist and writer Alexander Weissberg . At
4235-499: The side of the Nationalists. He took refuge in the house of retired zoologist Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell , and they were both arrested by Franco's chief propagandist, Luis Bolín , who had sworn that if he ever got his hands on Koestler, he would "shoot him like a dog". From February until June, Koestler was imprisoned in Seville under sentence of death. He was eventually exchanged for a "high value" Nationalist prisoner held by
4312-580: The study's authors note that "Some authors argue that after the fall of their kingdom in the second half of the 10th century CE, the Khazar converts were absorbed by the emerging Ashkenazi Jewish community in Eastern Europe." They conclude: "However, if the R-M17 chromosomes in Ashkenazi Jews do indeed represent the vestiges of the mysterious Khazars then, according to our data, this contribution
4389-401: The subject of the Biblical promise of Canaan to the Israelites , thus undermining the theological basis of both Jewish religious Zionists and Christian Zionists . The Saudi Arabian delegate to the United Nations argued that Koestler's theory "negated Israel's right to exist". Koestler did not see alleged Khazar ancestry as diminishing the claim of Jews to Israel, which he felt was based on
4466-448: The theory." Professor of Polish-Jewish history Gershon D. Hundert wrote in 2006 "There is no evidence to support the theory that the ancestors of Polish Jewry were Jews who came from the Crimean Jewish kingdom of Khazaria", describing Koestler as the "best-known advocate" of the theory. In 2009, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that the book was "a combination of discredited and forgotten [ideas]". Koestler biographers have also been critical of
4543-430: The time, the Ukrainian SSR was in the middle of a catastrophic man-made famine . Much later he would describe how in the train station of Kharkiv , "[Ukrainian peasant women] held up to the carriage windows horrible infants with enormous wobbling heads, sticklike limbs, and swollen, pointed bellies" as a result of the widespread malnutrition. Nevertheless, at this time he remained a convinced Soviet sympathiser, and echoing
4620-432: The way he had lunch with Thomas Mann , got drunk with Dylan Thomas , made friends with George Orwell , flirted with Mary McCarthy and lived in Cyril Connolly 's London flat. In 1940 Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicolson and Noël Coward . In the 1950s he helped to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom , together with Melvin Lasky and Sidney Hook . In
4697-426: The work in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 1991, journalist and author Grace Halsell described it as a "carefully researched book" that "refutes the idea of a Jewish 'race'." Despite some positive reviews in the press, James A. Beverley writes "When The Thirteenth Tribe was released, the academic critique of its research was prompt, public, and generally negative", and Evan Goldstein states that it
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#17327805925184774-480: The work of earlier historians, particularly Russian-Israeli historian Abraham Poliak 's Hebrew book Khazaria: Toledot mamlakhah yehudit (1951), and the History of the Jewish Khazars (1954) by Douglas Morton Dunlop , the author whom Koestler himself describes as a main source. Neil McInnes writes that Dunlop was, however, "much more tentative" in his conclusions, as were other historians of Khazars, including Peter Golden and Moses Shulvass. Golden himself described
4851-415: The work. In Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998), David Cesarani states it makes "selective use of facts for a grossly polemical end" and is "risible as scholarship". In Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (2009), Michael Scammell writes that Koestler's theory "was almost entirely hypothetical and based on the slenderest of circumstantial evidence", and takes
4928-427: Was "Identity's primary source for the Khazar theory"; they felt Koestler's book confirmed their own beliefs regarding Jews, and sold it "through their mail order services". Goldstein writes that "Koestler and the Khazar theory he advanced lives on in the fever swamps of the white nationalist movement". Michael Barkun writes that Koestler was apparently "either unaware of or oblivious to the use anti-Semites had made of
5005-413: Was "based on a tacit belief that the intellectual brilliance of and international influence of Hungarians and Jews, especially Hungarian Jews or Jewish-Hungarians, was due to some unexplained but clearly ancient affinity between the two peoples". In The Invention of the Jewish People , Shlomo Sand , historian of cinema, French intellectual history, and nationalism at Tel Aviv University , writes "while
5082-434: Was "savaged by critics". An August 1976 review in Time magazine described Koestler's theory as "all too facile, despite the obvious effort and time the author spent on his study", and stated that "Koestler offers a blizzard of information but not enough hard facts to support his thesis". A November 1976 review in National Review stated that the work had "neither the value of a well-executed honest piece of scholarship nor
5159-506: Was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army . In 1861 Lipót married Karolina Schon, the daughter of a prosperous timber merchant, and their son Henrik was born on 18 August 1869 in the town of Miskolc in northeastern Hungary. Henrik left school at age 16 and took a job as an errand boy with a firm of drapers. He taught himself English, German and French, and eventually became a partner in the firm. He later set up his own business importing textiles into Hungary. Arthur's mother, Adele Jeiteles,
5236-429: Was an Austro-Hungarian -born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest , and apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany , but he resigned in 1938 after becoming disillusioned with Stalinism . Having moved to Britain in 1940, he published his novel Darkness at Noon , an anti- totalitarian work that gained him international fame. Over
5313-486: Was born on 25 June 1871 into a prominent Jewish family in Prague . Among her ancestors was Jonas Mischel Loeb Jeitteles , a prominent 18th-century physician and essayist, whose son Juda Jeitteles became a well-known poet ( Beethoven set some of his poems to music). Adele's father, Jacob Jeiteles, moved the family to Vienna , where she grew up in relative prosperity until about 1890. Faced with financial difficulties, Jacob abandoned his wife and daughter and emigrated to
5390-454: Was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud . In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky , one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement . Travelling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist, he ran into Langston Hughes . While reporting on the Spanish Civil War , he met W. H. Auden at a "crazy party" in Valencia before winding up in one of Franco 's prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into
5467-411: Was dissolved on 15 December 1949. This cleared the way for his marriage to Mamaine Paget, which took place on 15 April 1950 at the British Consulate in Paris. In June Koestler delivered a major anti-Communist speech in Berlin under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom , an organisation funded (though he did not know this) by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States. In
5544-667: Was limited to either a single founder or a few closely related men, and does not exceed ~ 12% of the present-day Ashkenazim". Subsequent research showed that Ashkenazi varieties of R1a cannot have been Khazar in origin, with their Levite branch R1a-Y2619 within R1a-M582 being of Middle Eastern origin and their non-Levite haplogroup R1a-M12402 having close Slavic matches but a distance from Turkic matches. Writing in Science , Michael Balter states Koestler's thesis "clash[es] with several recent studies suggesting that Jewishness , including
5621-715: Was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1976, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and in 1979 with terminal leukaemia . On 1 March 1983, Koestler and his wife Cynthia died of suicide together at their London home by swallowing lethal quantities of barbiturate -based Tuinal capsules. [Koestler] began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire , at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother
5698-573: Was published in early 1941. Immediately after Koestler was released, he volunteered for Army service. While awaiting his call-up papers, between January and March 1941, he wrote his memoir Scum of the Earth , the first book he wrote in English. For the next twelve months he served in the Pioneer Corps . In March 1942 Koestler was assigned to the Ministry of Information , where he worked as
5775-402: Was the only journalist on board: his live wireless broadcasts, and subsequent articles and lecture tours throughout Europe, brought him further attention. Soon afterwards he was appointed foreign editor and assistant editor-in-chief of the mass-circulation Berliner Zeitung am Mittag . In 1931, Koestler, encouraged by Eva Striker , and impressed by the achievements of the Soviet Union, became
5852-457: Was then illegal. Koestler's main political activity during 1955 was his campaign for the abolition of capital punishment (which in the UK was by hanging). In July he started work on Reflections on Hanging . Although Koestler resumed work on a biography of Kepler in 1955, it was not published until 1959. In the interim it was entitled The Sleepwalkers . The emphasis of the book had changed and broadened to "A History of Man's Changing Vision of
5929-523: Was wanted by the British and had a 500-pound bounty on his head. Koestler tried to persuade him to abandon militant attacks and accept a two-state solution for Palestine, but failed. Many years later Koestler wrote in his memoirs: "When the meeting was over, I realised how naïve I had been to imagine that my arguments would have even the slightest influence." Staying in Palestine until August 1945, Koestler collected material for his next novel, Thieves in
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