Khazars, including Peter Golden and Moses Shulvass. Golden himself described the book as "controversial", stating it contained "sweeping claims of Khazar legacy and influence". Koestler's reason for writing it 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 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". Reception In The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand, historian of cinema, French intellectual history, and nationalism at Tel Aviv University, writes "while 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 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 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 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