Answers to Quora Questions by Yair Davidiy
What Turkish people feel about the Khazar-Turkish theory I do not know. The definition of "Turkish" is more a linguistic matter rather than an ethnic one.
Ideas about where the Ashkenazi Jews came from are varied.
The Roman Tacitus offered a range of possibilities for Jewish origins.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/tacitus-on-the-jews-110-ce
Some say that the Jews were fugitives from the island of Crete, who settled on the nearest coast of Africa about the time when Saturn was driven from his throne by the power of Jupiter. Evidence of this is sought in the name. There is a famous mountain in Crete called Ida; the neighboring tribe, the Idaei, came to be called Judaei by a barbarous lengthening of the national name. Others assert that in the reign of Isis the overflowing population of Egypt, led by Hierosolymus and Judas, discharged itself into the neighboring countries. Many, again, say that they were a race of Ethiopian origin, who in the time of king Cepheus were driven by fear and hatred of their neighbors to seek a new dwelling-place. Others describe them as an Assyrian horde who, not having sufficient territory, took possession of part of Egypt, and founded cities of their own in what is called the Hebrew country, lying on the borders of Syria. Others, again, assign a very distinguished origin to the Jews, alleging that they were the Solymi, a nation celebrated in the poems of Homer, who called the city which they founded Hierosolyma after their own name. Most writers, however, agree in stating that once a disease, which horribly disfigured the body, broke out over Egypt; that king Bocchoris, seeking a remedy, consulted the oracle of Hammon, and was bidden to cleanse his realm, and to convey into some foreign land this race detested by the gods.
The Egyptian Manetho, as quoted by Josephus, claimed that the Jews were either descendants of the Shephered Kings (Hyksos) who had been driven out of Egypt or of local Egyptian lepers whom the other Egyptians had chased away.
The Europeans of the 1700s and later sometimes described the Jews as descended from Arab Semitic marauders who had come in from the desert.
After that it became fashionable to claim they came from the Khazars who were described as Turks or Mongols or a mixture of the two, or something else.
Nowadays it is asserted (based on mtDNA) that the Ashkenazi Jews came from Middle Eastern immigrants who took a liking to Italian women, or vice versa [i.e. Italian women took a liking to them?]
Personally I think this may be an improvement but to each his own.