The Thirteenth Tribe - Assessment

Assessment

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 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 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 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 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".

Koestler biographers have also been critical of 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 the book as evidence that Koestler's brain "was starting to fail him".