JTA — During Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, both men made considerable waves with their takes on history and theology.

Huckabee sparked a diplomatic row by citing the Bible to argue that Israel had a divine right to claim all of the Middle East — even though he didn’t back doing so politically.

But Carlson’s own interpretation of Israeli sovereignty was also notable, as the far-right pundit insisted that Israelis should undergo genetic testing to determine if they have a rightful claim to the land.

“Why don’t we do genetic testing on everybody in the land and find out who Abram’s descendants are?” Carlson asked Huckabee at one point, using the name Abraham used before he made a covenant with God to become the first Jew. “It’s really simple. We’ve cracked the human genome. We can do that. Why don’t we do that?”

At another point, Carlson singled out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu specifically as an illegitimate Israeli.

“What you’re saying is that certain people have a title to a highly contested region. They own it, in some deep sense,” he told Huckabee. “So I think it’s fair to ask, who are they, and how do we know? So the current prime minister’s ancestors weren’t from here within recorded history. He has no deed. Bibi Netanyahu, on one side, his family’s from Poland, they’re from Eastern Europe. So how do we know he has a connection to the people who God promised the land to?”

The line of questioning made little sense to many Jewish listeners, who understand Judaism as a blend of religion, ethnicity and community in which converts have always been accepted. For Jewish listeners, too, the idea of tracing bloodlines is often associated with the Nazis, who chose their victims based on how many Jewish ancestors they had.

But both Carlson’s critics, and his supporters across the ideological spectrum who have agreed with his views on Israel, understood what he was getting at. They identified his line of questioning as a variation on the “Khazar theory”: the belief that Ashkenazi Jews, like Netanyahu, are genetically descended from a Turkic minority that converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages rather than from the 12 tribes of Israel.

“The people currently occupying Israel are Khazarian Turks,” far-right pundit Candace Owens, a promoter of many antisemitic conspiracy theories, wrote on X.

“He has ZERO ancestral connection to the land. He’s Polish,” the far-left influencer Shaun King wrote on X about Netanyahu in praise of Carlson’s interview. “His real last name is Mileikowsky.”

The theories as to why the Khazars, who were a real people, would have converted en masse to Judaism have varied according to the teller; one tale holds that a Khazar royal held a debate among representatives of Judaism, Islam and Christianity to name the best religion, and Judaism won out. But no matter how it happened, the theory goes, Jews who trace their genetics to Eastern Europe........

© The Times of Israel