THE KHAZAR EMPIRE AND ITS HERITAGE
This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism. Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry. . .The Khazars' sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain.
In the second part of this book, "The Heritage," Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry. He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more convincing for the restraint with which it is advanced. Yet should this theory be confirmed, the term "anti-Semitism" would become void of meaning, since, as Mr. Koestler writes, it is based "on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated."
Rise and Fall of the Khazars
"In Khazaria, sheep, honey, and Jews exist
in large quantities." Muqaddasi, Descriptio Imperii
Moslemici (tenth century).
ABOUT the time when Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the West, the eastern confines of Europe between the Caucasus and the Volga were ruled by a Jewish state, known as the Khazar Empire. At the peak of its power, from the seventh to the tenth centuries AD, it played a significant part in shaping the destinies of mediaeval, and consequently of modern, Europe. The Byzantine Emperor and historian, Constantine Porphyrogenitus (913-959), must have been well aware of this when he recorded in his treatise on court protocol .1 that letters addressed to the Pope in Rome, and similarly those to the Emperor of the West, had a gold seal worth two solidi attached to them, whereas messages to the King of the Khazars displayed a seal worth three solidi. This was not flattery, but Realpolitik. "In the period with which we are concerned," wrote Bury, "it is probable that the Khan of the Khazars was of little less importance in view of the imperial foreign policy than Charles the Great and his successors." .2 The country of the Khazars, a people of Turkish stock, occupied a strategic key position at the vital gateway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, where the great eastern powers of the period confronted each other. It acted as a buffer protecting Byzantium against invasions by the lusty barbarian tribesmen of the northern steppes - Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, etc. - and, later, the Vikings and the Russians. But equally, or even more important both from the point of view of Byzantine diplomacy and of European history, is the fact that the Khazar armies effectively blocked the Arab avalanche in its most devastating early stages, and thus prevented the Muslim conquest of Eastern Europe. Professor Dunlop of Columbia University, a leading authority on the history of the Khazars, has given a concise summary of this decisive yet virtually unknown episode:
- The Khazar country ... lay across the natural line of advance of the Arabs. Within a few years of the death of Muhammad (AD 632) the armies of the Caliphate, sweeping northward through the wreckage of two empires and carrying all before them, reached the great mountain barrier of the Caucasus. This barrier once passed, the road lay open to the lands of eastern Europe. As it was, on the line of the Caucasus the Arabs met the forces of an organized military power which effectively prevented them from extending their conquests in this direction. The wars of the Arabs and the Khazars, which lasted more than a hundred years, though little known, have thus considerable historical importance. The Franks of Charles Martel on the field of Tours turned the tide of Arab invasion. At about the same time the threat to Europe in the east was hardly less acute. ... The victorious Muslims were met and held by the forces of the Khazar kingdom. ... It can ... scarcely be doubted that but for the existence of the Khazars in the region north of the Caucasus, Byzantium, the bulwark of European civilization in the east, would have found itself outflanked by the Arabs, and the history of Christendom and Islam might well have been very different from what we know.3
- Our investigations cannot go into problems pertaining to the history of ideas, but we must call the reader's attention to the matter of the Khazar kingdom's state religion. It was the Jewish faith which became the official religion of the ruling strata of society. Needless to say, the acceptance of the Jewish faith as the state religion of an ethnically non-Jewish people could be the subject of interesting speculations. We shall, however, confine ourselves to the remark that this official conversion - in defiance of Christian proselytizing by Byzantium, the Muslim influence from the East, and in spite of the political pressure of these two powers - to a religion which had no support from any political power, but was persecuted by nearly all - has come as a surprise to all historians concerned with the Khazars, and cannot be considered as accidental, but must be regarded as a sign of the independent policy pursued by that kingdom.
- The Turkish-speaking Karaites [a fundamentalist Jewish sect] of the Crimea, Poland, and elsewhere have affirmed a connection with the Khazars, which is perhaps confirmed by evidence from folklore and anthropology as well as language. There seems to be a considerable amount of evidence attesting to the continued presence in Europe of descendants of the Khazars.
- a new approach, both to the problem of the relations between the Khazar Jewry and other Jewish communities, and to the question of how far we can go in regarding this [Khazar] Jewry as the nucleus of the large Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. ... The descendants of this settlement - those who stayed where they were, those who emigrated to the United States and to other countries, and those who went to Israel - constitute now the large majority of world Jewry.
2
"Attila was, after all, merely the king of a
kingdom of tents. His state passed away - whereas the despised
city of Constantinople remained a power. The tents vanished, the
towns remained. The Hun state was a whirlwind. ...".Thus Cassel,6 a
nineteenth-century orientalist, implying that the Khazars shared,
for similar reasons, a similar fate. Yet the Hun presence on the
European scene lasted a mere eighty years,*[From circa 372, when
the Huns first started to move westward from the steppes north of
the Caspian, to the death of Attila in 453.] whereas the kingdom
of the Khazars held its own for the best part of four centuries.
They too lived chiefly in tents, but they also had large urban
settlements, and were in the process of transformation from a
tribe of nomadic warriors into a nation of farmers,
cattle-breeders, fishermen, vine-growers, traders and skilled
craftsmen. Soviet archaeologists have unearthed evidence for a
relatively advanced civilization which was altogether different
from the "Hun whirlwind". They found the traces of
villages extending over several miles,7 with houses connected by
galleries to huge cattlesheds, sheep-pens and stables (these
measured 3-31/2 x 10-14 metres and were supported by columns.8
Some remaining ox-ploughs showed remarkable craftsmanship; so did
the preserved artefacts - buckles, clasps, ornamental saddle
plates..Of particular
interest were the foundations, sunk into the ground, of houses
built in a circular shape.9 According to the Soviet
archaeologists, these were found all over the territories
inhabited by the Khazars, and were of an earlier date than their
"normal", rectangular buildings. Obviously the
round-houses symbolize the transition from portable, dome- shaped
tents to permanent dwellings, from the nomadic to a settled, or
rather semi-settled, existence. For the contemporary Arab sources
tell us that the Khazars only stayed in their towns - including
even their capital, Itil - during the winter; come spring, they
packed their tents, left their houses and sallied forth with
their sheep or cattle into the steppes, or camped in their
cornfields or vineyards..The
excavations also showed that the kingdom was, during its later
period, surrounded by an elaborate chain of fortifications,
dating from the eighth and ninth centuries, which protected its
northern frontiers facing the open steppes. These fortresses
formed a rough semi-circular arc from the Crimea (which the
Khazars ruled for a time) across the lower reaches of the Donetz
and the Don to the Volga; while towards the south they were
protected by the Caucasus, to the west by the Black Sea, and to
the east by the "Khazar Sea", the Caspian.* ["To
this day, the Muslims, recalling the Arab terror of the Khazar
raids, still call the Caspian, a sea as shifting as the nomads,
and washing to their steppe-land parts, Bahr-ul-Khazar -
"the Khazar Sea"." (W. E. 0. Allen, A History
of the Georgian People, London 1952).] However, the northern
chain of fortifications marked merely an inner ring, protecting
the stable core of the Khazar country; the actual boundaries of
their rule over the tribes of the north fluctuated according to
the fortunes of war. At the peak of their power they controlled
or exacted tribute from some thirty different nations and tribes
inhabiting the vast territories between the Caucasus, the Aral
Sea, the Ural Mountains, the town of Kiev and the Ukrainian
steppes. The people under Khazar suzerainty included the Bulgars,
Burtas, Ghuzz, Magyars (Hungarians), the Gothic and Greek
colonies of the Crimea, and the Slavonic tribes in the
north-western woodlands. Beyond these extended dominions, Khazar
armies also raided Georgia and Armenia and penetrated into the
Arab Caliphate as far as Mosul. In the words of the Soviet
archaeologist M. I. Artamonov:10
- Until the ninth century, the Khazars had no rivals to their supremacy in the regions north of the Black Sea and the adjoining steppe and forest regions of the Dnieper. The Khazars were the supreme masters of the southern half of Eastern Europe for a century and a hall, and presented a mighty bulwark, blocking the Ural-Caspian gateway from Asia into Europe. During this whole period, they held back the onslaught of the nomadic tribes from the East.
3
But who were these remarkable people - remarkable as much by
their power and achievements as by their conversion to a religion
of outcasts? The descriptions that have come down to us originate
in hostile sources, and cannot be taken at face value. "As
to the Khazars," an Arab chronicler 11 writes, "they
are to the north of the inhabited earth towards the 7th clime,
having over their heads the constellation of the Plough. Their
land is cold and wet. Accordingly their complexions are white, their eyes blue, their hair flowing and predominantly reddish, their bodies large and their natures cold. Their general aspect is wild." .After a century of warfare, the Arab writer obviously had no great sympathy for the Khazars. Nor had the Georgian or Armenian scribes, whose countries, of a much older culture, had been repeatedly devastated by Khazar horsemen. A Georgian chronicle, echoing an ancient tradition, identifies them with the hosts of Gog and Magog - "wild men with hideous faces and the manners of wild beasts, eaters of blood".12 An Armenian writer refers to "the horrible multitude of Khazars with insolent, broad, lashless faces and long falling hair, like women".13 Lastly, the Arab geographer Istakhri, one of the main Arab sources, has this to say:14 "The Khazars do not resemble the Turks. They are black-haired, and are of two kinds, one called the Kara-Khazars, [Black Khazars] who are swarthy verging on deep black as if they were a kind of Indian, and a white kind [Ak-Khazars], who are strikingly handsome.".This is more flattering, but only adds to the confusion. For it was customary among Turkish peoples to refer to the ruling classes or clans as "white", to the lower strata as "black". Thus there is no reason to believe that the "White Bulgars" were whiter than the "Black Bulgars", or that the "White Huns" (the Ephtalites) who invaded India and Persia in the fifth and sixth centuries were of fairer skin than the other Hun tribes which invaded Europe. Istakhri's black-skinned Khazars - as much else in his and his colleagues' writings - were based on hearsay and legend; and we are none the wiser regarding the Khazars' physical appearance, or their ethnic Origins..The last question can only be answered in a vague and general way. But it is equally frustrating to inquire into the origins of the Huns, Alans, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Bashkirs, Burtas, Sabirs, Uigurs, Saragurs, Onogurs, Utigurs, Kutrigurs, Tarniaks, Kotragars, Khabars, Zabenders, Pechenegs, Ghuzz, Kumans, Kipchaks, and dozens of other tribes or people who at one time or another in the lifetime of the Khazar kingdom passed through the turnstiles of those migratory playgrounds. Even the Huns, of whom we know much more, are of uncertain origin; their name is apparently derived from the Chinese Hiung-nu, which designates warlike nomads in general, while other nations applied the name Hun in a similarly indiscriminate way to nomadic hordes of all kinds, including the "White Huns" mentioned above, the Sabirs, Magyars and Khazars.*[It is amusing to note that while the British in World War I used the term "Hun" in the same pejorative sense, in my native Hungary schoolchildren were taught to look up to "our glorious Hun forefathers" with patriotic pride An exclusive rowing club in Budapest was called "Hunnia", and Attila is still a popular first name.] .In the first century AD, the Chinese drove these disagreeable Hun neighbours westward, and thus started one of those periodic avalanches which swept for many centuries from Asia towards the West. From the fifth century onward, many of these westward-bound tribes were called by the generic name of "Turks". The term is also supposed to be of Chinese origin (apparently derived from the name of a hill) and was subsequently used to refer to all tribes who spoke languages with certain common characteristics - the "Turkic" language group. Thus the term Turk, in the sense in which it was used by mediaeval writers - and often also by modern ethnologists - refers primarily to language and not to race. In this sense the Huns and Khazars were "Turkic" people.*[But not the Magyars, whose language belongs to the Finno-Ugrian language group.] The Khazar language was supposedly a Chuvash dialect of Turkish, which still survives in the Autonomous Chuvash Soviet Republic, between the Volga and the Sura. The Chuvash people are actually believed to be descendants of the Bulgars, who spoke a dialect similar to the Khazars. But all these connections are rather tenuous, based on the more or less speculative deductions of oriental philologists. All we can say with safety is that the Khazars were a "Turkic" tribe, who erupted from the Asian steppes, probably in the fifth century of our era..The origin of the name Khazar, and the modern derivations to which it gave rise, has also been the subject of much ingenious speculation. Most likely the word is derived from the Turkish root gaz, "to wander", and simply means "nomad". Of greater interest to the non-specialist are some alleged modern derivations from it: among them the Russian Cossack and the Hungarian Huszar - both signifying martial horsemen;*[Huszar is probably derived via the Serbo-Croat from Greek references to Khazars.] and also the German Ketzer - heretic, i.e., Jew. If these derivations are correct, they would show that the Khazars had a considerable impact on the imagination of a variety of peoples in the Middle Ages.
4
Some Persian and Arab chronicles provide an attractive
combination of legend and gossip column. They may start with the
Creation and end with stop-press titbits. Thus Yakubi, a
ninth-century Arab historian, traces the origin of the Khazars
back to Japheth, third son of Noah. The Japheth motive recurs
frequently in the literature, while other legends connect them
with Abraham or Alexander the Great. .One of the earliest factual
references to the Khazars occurs in a Syriac chronicle by
"Zacharia Rhetor",*[It was actually written by an
anonymous compiler and named after an earlier Greek historian
whose work is summarized in the compilation.] dating from the
middle of the sixth century. It mentions the Khazars in a list of
people who inhabit the region of the Caucasus. Other sources
indicate that they were already much in evidence a century
earlier, and intimately connected with the Huns. In AD 448, the
Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II sent an embassy to Attila which
included a famed rhetorician by name of Priscus. He kept a minute
account not only of the diplomatic negotiations, but also of the
court intrigues and goings-on in Attila's sumptuous banqueting
hall - he was in fact the perfect gossip columnist, and is still
one of the main sources of information about Hun customs and
habits. But Priscus also has anecdotes to tell about a people
subject to the Huns whom he calls Akatzirs - that is, very
likely, the Ak-Khazars, or "White" Khazars (as distinct
from the "Black" Kara-Khazars).**[The
"Akatzirs" are also mentioned as a nation of warriors
by Jordanes, the great Goth historian, a century later, and the
so- called "Geographer of Ravenna" expressly identifies
them with the Khazars. This is accepted by most modern
authorities. (A notable exception was Marquart, but see Dunlop's
refutation of his views, op. cit., pp. 7f.) Cassel, for instance,
points out that Priscus's pronunciation and spelling follows the
Armenian and Georgian: Khazir.] The Byzantine Emperor, Priscus
tells us, tried to win this warrior race over to his side, but
the greedy Khazar chieftain, named Karidach, considered the bribe
offered to him inadequate, and sided with the Huns. Attila
defeated Karidach's rival chieftains, installed him as the sole
ruler of the Akatzirs, and invited him to visit his court.
Karidach thanked him profusely for the invitation, and went on to
say that "it would be too hard on a mortal man to look into
the face of a god. For, as one cannot stare into the sun's disc,
even less could one look into the face of the greatest god
without suffering injury." Attila must have been pleased,
for he confirmed Karidach in his rule..Priscus's chronicle confirms
that the Khazars appeared on the European scene about the middle
of the fifth century as a people under Hunnish sovereignty, and
may be regarded, together with the Magyars and other tribes, as a
later offspring of Attila's horde.
5
The collapse of the Hun Empire after Attila's death left a
power-vacuum in Eastern Europe, through which once more, wave
after wave of nomadic hordes swept from east to west, prominent
among them the Uigurs and Avars. The Khazars during most of this
period seemed to be happily occupied with raiding the rich
trans-Caucasian regions of Georgia and Armenia, and collecting
precious plunder. During the second half of the sixth century
they became the dominant force among the tribes north of the
Caucasus. A number of these tribes - the Sabirs, Saragurs,
Samandars, Balanjars, etc. - are from this date onward no longer
mentioned by name in the sources: they had been subdued or
absorbed by the Khazars. The toughest resistance, apparently, was
offered by the powerful Bulgars. But they too were crushingly
defeated (circa 641), and as a result the nation split
into two: some of them migrated westward to the Danube, into the
region of modern Bulgaria, others north-eastward to the middle
Volga, the latter remaining under Khazar suzerainty. We shall
frequently encounter both Danube Bulgars and Volga Bulgars in the
course of this narrative. .But
before becoming a sovereign state, the Khazars still had to serve
their apprenticeship under another short-lived power, the
so-called West Turkish Empire, or Turkut kingdom. It was a
confederation of tribes, held together by a ruler: the Kagan or
Khagan*[Or Kaqan or Khaqan or Chagan, etc. Orientalists have
strong Idiosyncrasies about spelling (see Appendix I). I shall
stick to Kagan as the least offensive to Western eyes. The h in
Khazar, however, is general usage.] - a title which the Khazar
rulers too were subsequently to adopt. This first Turkish state -
if one may call it that - lasted for a century (circa 550-650)
and then fell apart, leaving hardly any trace. However, it was
only after the establishment of this kingdom that the name
"Turk" was used to apply to a specific nation, as
distinct from other Turkic-speaking peoples like the Khazars and
Bulgars.*[This, however, did not prevent the name
"Turk" still being applied indiscriminately to any
nomadic tribe of the steppes as a euphemism for Barbarian, or a
synonym for "Hun". It led to much confusion in the
interpretation of ancient sources.] .The Khazars had been under
Hun tutelage, then under Turkish tutelage. After the eclipse of
the Turks in the middle of the seventh century it was their turn
to rule the "Kingdom of the North", as the Persians and
Byzantines came to call it. According to one tradition,15 the
great Persian King Khusraw (Chosroes) Anushirwan (the Blessed)
had three golden guest-thrones in his palace, reserved for the
Emperors of Byzantium, China and of the Khazars. No state visits
from these potentates materialized, and the golden thrones - if
they existed - must have served a purely symbolic purpose. But
whether fact or legend, the story fits in well with Emperor
Constantine's official account of the triple gold seal assigned
by the Imperial Chancery to the ruler of the Khazars.
6
Thus during the first few decades of the seventh century, just
before the Muslim hurricane was unleashed from Arabia, the Middle
East was dominated by a triangle of powers: Byzantium, Persia,
and the West Turkish Empire. The first two of these had been
waging intermittent war against each other for a century, and
both seemed on the verge of collapse; in the sequel, Byzantium
recovered, but the Persian kingdom was soon to meet its doom, and
the Khazars were actually in on the kill. .They were still nominally
under the suzerainty of the West Turkish kingdom, within which
they represented the strongest effective force, and to which they
were soon to succeed; accordingly, in 627, the Roman Emperor
Heraclius concluded a military alliance with the Khazars - the
first of several to follow - in preparing his decisive campaign
against Persia. There are several versions of the role played by
the Khazars in that campaign which seems to have been somewhat
inglorious - but the principal facts are well established. The
Khazars provided Heraclius with 40000 horsemen under a chieftain
named Ziebel, who participated in the advance into Persia, but
then - presumably fed up with the cautious strategy of the Greeks
- turned back to lay siege on Tiflis; this was unsuccessful, but
the next year they again joined forces with Heraclius, took the
Georgian capital, and returned with rich plunder. Gibbon has
given a colourful description (based on Theophanes) of the first
meeting between the Roman Emperor and the Khazar chieftain.16 - ...To the hostile league of Chosroes with the Avars, the Roman emperor opposed the useful and honourable alliance of the Turks.*[By "Turks", as the sequel shows, he means the Khazars.] At his liberal invitation, the horde of Chozars transported their tents from the plains of the Volga to the mountains of Georgia; Heraclius received them in the neighbourhood of Tiflis, and the khan with his nobles dismounted from their horses, if we may credit the Greeks, and fell prostrate on the ground, to adore the purple of the Caesar. Such voluntary homage and important aid were entitled to the warmest acknowledgements; and the emperor, taking off his own diadem, placed it on the head of the Turkish prince, whom he saluted with a tender embrace and the appellation of son. After a sumptuous banquet, he presented Ziebel with the plate and ornaments, the gold, the gems, and the silk, which had been used at the Imperial table, and, with his own hand, distributed rich jewels and earrings to his new allies. In a secret interview, he produced a portrait of his daughter Eudocia, condescended to flatter the barbarian with the promise of a fair and august bride, and obtained an immediate succour of forty thousand horse...
7
The Persian state never recovered from the crushing defeat
inflicted on it by Emperor Heraclius in 627. There was a
revolution; the King was slain by his own son who, in his turn,
died a few months later; a child was elevated to the throne, and
after ten years of anarchy and chaos the first Arab armies to
erupt on the scene delivered the coup de grace to the
Sassanide Empire. At about the same time, the West Turkish
confederation dissolved into its tribal components. A new
triangle of powers replaced the previous one: the Islamic
Caliphate - Christian Byzantium and the newly emerged Khazar
Kingdom of the North. It fell to the latter to bear the brunt of
the Arab attack in its initial stages, and to protect the plains
of Eastern Europe from the invaders. .In the first twenty years of
the Hegira - Mohammed's flight to Medina in 622, with which the
Arab calendar starts - the Muslims had conquered Persia, Syria,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, and surrounded the Byzantine heartland (the
present-day Turkey) in a deadly semi-circle, which extended from
the Mediterranean to the Caucasus and the southern shores of the
Caspian. The Caucasus was a formidable natural obstacle, but no
more forbidding than the Pyrenees; and it could be negotiated by
the pass of Dariel*[Now called the Kasbek pass.] or bypassed
through the defile of Darband, along the Caspian shore. .This fortified defile, called
by the Arabs Bab al Abwab, the Gate of Gates, was a kind
of historic turnstile through which the Khazars and other
marauding tribes had from time immemorial attacked the countries
of the south and retreated again. Now it was the turn of the
Arabs. Between 642 and 652 they repeatedly broke through the
Darband Gate and advanced deep into Khazaria, attempting to
capture Balanjar, the nearest town, and thus secure a foothold on
the European side of the Caucasus. They were beaten back on every
occasion in this first phase of the Arab-Khazar war; the last
time in 652, in a great battle in which both sides used artillery
(catapults and ballistae). Four thousand Arabs were killed,
including their commander, Abdal-Rahman ibn-Rabiah; the rest fled
in disorder across the mountains..For
the next thirty or forty years the Arabs did not attempt any
further incursions into the Khazar stronghold. Their main attacks
were now aimed at Byzantium. On several occasions*[AD 669, 673-8,
717-18.] they laid siege to Constantinople by land and by sea;
had they been able to outflank the capital across the Caucasus
and round the Black Sea, the fate of the Roman Empire would
probably have been sealed. The Khazars, in the meantime, having
subjugated the Bulgars and Magyars, completed their western
expansion into the Ukraine and the Crimea. But these were no
longer haphazard raids to amass booty and prisoners; they were
wars of conquest, incorporating the conquered people into an
empire with a stable administration, ruled by the mighty Kagan,
who appointed his provincial governors to administer and levy
taxes in the conquered territories. At the beginning of the
eighth century their state was sufficiently consolidated for the
Khazars to take the offensive against the Arabs..From a distance of more than a
thousand years, the period of intermittent warfare that followed
(the so-called 'second Arab war", 722-37) looks like a
series of tedious episodes on a local scale, following the same,
repetitive pattern: the Khazar cavalry in their heavy armour
breaking through the pass of Dariel or the Gate of Darband into
the Caliph's domains to the south; followed by Arab
counter-thrusts through the same pass or the defile, towards the
Volga and back again. Looking thus through the wrong end of the
telescope, one is reminded of the old jingle about the noble Duke
of York who had ten thousand men; "he marched them up to the
top of the hill. And he marched them down again." In fact,
the Arab sources (though they often exaggerate) speak of armies
of 100000, even of 300000, men engaged on either side - probably
outnumbering the armies which decided the fate of the Western
world at the battle of Tours about the same time..The death-defying fanaticism
which characterized these wars is illustrated by episodes such as
the suicide by fire of a whole Khazar town as an alternative to
surrender; the poisoning of the water supply of Bab al Abwab by
an Arab general; or by the traditional exhortation which would
halt the rout of a defeated Arab army and make it fight to the
last man: "To the Garden, Muslims, not the Fire" - the
joys of Paradise being assured to every Muslim soldier killed in
the Holy War. .At one
stage during these fifteen years of fighting the Khazars overran
Georgia and Armenia, inflicted a total defeat on the Arab army in
the battle of Ardabil (AD 730) and advanced as far as Mosul and
Dyarbakir, more than half-way to Damascus, capital of the
Caliphate. But a freshly raised Muslim army stemmed the tide, and
the Khazars retreated homewards across the mountains. The next
year Maslamah ibn-Abd-al-Malik, most famed Arab general of his
time, who had formerly commanded the siege of Constantinople,
took Balanjar and even got as far as Samandar, another large
Khazar town further north. But once more the invaders were unable
to establish a permanent garrison, and once more they were forced
to retreat across the Caucasus. The sigh of relief experienced in
the Roman Empire assumed a tangible form through another dynastic
alliance, when the heir to the throne was married to a Khazar
princess, whose son was to rule Byzantium as Leo the Khazar. .The last Arab campaign was led
by the future Caliph Marwan II, and ended in a Pyrrhic victory.
Marwan made an offer of alliance to the Khazar Kagan, then
attacked by surprise through both passes. The Khazar army, unable
to recover from the initial shock, retreated as far as the Volga.
The Kagan was forced to ask for terms; Marwan, in accordance with
the routine followed in other conquered countries, requested the
Kagan's conversion to the True Faith. The Kagan complied, but his
conversion to Islam must have been an act of lip-service, for no
more is heard of the episode in the Arab or Byzantine sources -
in contrast to the lasting effects of the establishment of
Judaism as the state religion which took place a few years
later.*[The probable date for the conversion is around AD 740 -
see below.] Content with the results achieved, Marwan bid
farewell to Khazaria and marched his army back to Transcaucasia -
without leaving any garrison, governor or administrative
apparatus behind. On the contrary, a short time later he
requested terms for another alliance with the Khazars against the
rebellious tribes of the south. .It
had been a narrow escape. The reasons which prompted Marwan's
apparent magnanimity are a matter of conjecture - as so much else
in this bizarre chapter of history. Perhaps the Arabs realized
that, unlike the relatively civilized Persians, Armenians or
Georgians, these ferocious Barbarians of the North could not be
ruled by a Muslim puppet prince and a small garrison. Yet Marwan
needed every man of his army to quell major rebellions in Syria
and other parts of the Omayad Caliphate, which was in the process
of breaking up. Marwan himself was the chief commander in the
civil wars that followed, and became in 744 the last of the
Omayad Caliphs (only to be assassinated six years later when the
Caliphate passed to the Abbasid dynasty). Given this background,
Marwan was simply not in a position to exhaust his resources by
further wars with the Khazars. He had to content himself with
teaching them a lesson which would deter them from further
incursions across the Caucasus. .Thus
the gigantic Muslim pincer movement across the Pyrenees in the
west and across the Caucasus into Eastern Europe was halted at
both ends about the same time. As Charles Martel's Franks saved
Gaul and Western Europe, so the Khazars saved the eastern
approaches to the Volga, the Danube, and the East Roman Empire
itself. On this point at least, the Soviet archaeologist and
historian, Artamonov, and the American historian, Dunlop, are in
full agreement. I have already quoted the latter to the effect
that but for the Khazars, "Byzantium, the bulwark of
European civilization to the East, would have found itself
outflanked by the Arabs", and that history might have taken
a different course..Artamonov
is of the same opinion:18 - Khazaria was the first feudal state in Eastern Europe, which ranked with the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Caliphate.... It was only due to the powerful Khazar attacks, diverting the tide of the Arab armies to the Caucasus, that Byzantium withstood them....
8
During the long lull between the first and second Arab wars,
the Khazars became involved in one of the more lurid episodes of
Byzantine history, characteristic of the times, and of the role
the Khazars played in it. .In
AD 685 Justinian II, Rhinotmetus, became East Roman Emperor at
the age of sixteen. Gibbon, in his inimitable way, has drawn the
youth's portrait:20 - His passions were strong; his understanding was feeble; and he was intoxicated with a foolish pride.... His favourite ministers were two beings the least susceptible of human sympathy, a eunuch and a monk; the former corrected the emperor's mother with a scourge, the latter suspended the insolvent tributaries, with their heads downwards, over a slow and smoky fire.
- The amputation of his nose, perhaps of his tongue, was imperfectly performed; the happy flexibility of the Greek language could impose the name of Rhinotmetus ("Cut-off Nose"); and the mutilated tyrant was banished to Chersonae in Crim-Tartary, a lonely settlement where corn, wine and oil were imported as foreign luxuries.*[The treatment meted out to Justinian was actually regarded as an act of leniency: the general tendency of the period was to humanize the criminal law by substituting mutilation for capital punishment - amputation of the hand (for thefts) or nose (fornication, etc.) being the most frequent form. Byzantine rulers were also given to the practice of blinding dangerous rivals, while magnanimously sparing their lives.] .During his exile in Cherson, Justinian kept plotting to regain his throne. After three years he saw his chances improving when, back in Byzantium, Leontius was de-throned and also had his nose cut off. Justinian escaped from Cherson into the Khazar-ruled town of Doros in the Crimea and had a meeting with the Kagan of the Khazars, King Busir or Bazir. The Kagan must have welcomed the opportunity of putting his fingers into the rich pie of Byzantine dynastic policies, for he formed an alliance with Justinian and gave him his sister in marriage. This sister, who was baptized by the name of Theodora, and later duly crowned, seems to have been the only decent person in this series of sordid intrigues, and to bear genuine love for her noseless husband (who was still only in his early thirties). The couple and their band of followers were now moved to the town of Phanagoria (the present Taman) on the eastern shore of the strait of Kerch, which had a Khazar governor. Here they made preparations for the invasion of Byzantium with the aid of the Khazar armies which King Busir had apparently promised. But the envoys of the new Emperor, Tiberias III, persuaded Busir to change his mind, by offering him a rich reward in gold if he delivered Justinian, dead or alive, to the Byzantines. King Busir accordingly gave orders to two of his henchmen, named Papatzes and Balgitres, to assassinate his brother-in-law. But faithful Theodora got wind of the plot and warned her husband. Justinian invited Papatzes and Balgitres separately to his quarters, and strangled each in turn with a cord. Then he took ship, sailed across the Black Sea into the Danube estuary, and made a new alliance with a powerful Bulgar tribe. Their king, Terbolis, proved for the time being more reliable than the Khazar Kagan, for in 704 he provided Justinian with 15000 horsemen to attack Constantinople. The Byzantines had, after ten years, either forgotten the darker sides of Justinian's former rule, or else found their present ruler even more intolerable, for they promptly rose against Tiberias and reinstated Justinian on the throne. The Bulgar King was rewarded with "a heap of gold coin which he measured with his Scythian whip" and went home (only to get involved in a new war against Byzantium a few years later)..Justinian's second reign (704-711) proved even worse than the first; "he considered the axe, the cord and the rack as the only instruments of royalty".22 He became mentally unbalanced, obsessed with hatred against the inhabitants of Cherson, where he had spent most of the bitter years of his exile, and sent an expedition against the town. Some of Cherson's leading citizens were burnt alive, others drowned, and many prisoners taken, but this was not enough to assuage Justinian's lust for revenge, for he sent a second expedition with orders to raze the city to the ground. However, this time his troops were halted by a mighty Khazar army; whereupon Justinian's representative in the Crimea, a certain Bardanes, changed sides and joined the Khazars. The demoralized Byzantine expeditionary force abjured its allegiance to Justinian and elected Bardanes as Emperor, under the name of Philippicus. But since Philippicus was in Khazar hands, the insurgents had to pay a heavy ransom to the Kagan to get their new Emperor back. When the expeditionary force returned to Constantinople, Justinian and his son were assassinated and Philippicus, greeted as a liberator, was installed on the throne only to be deposed and blinded a couple of years later. .The point of this gory tale is to show the influence which the Khazars at this stage exercised over the destinies of the East Roman Empire - in addition to their role as defenders of the Caucasian bulwark against the Muslims. Bardanes-Philippicus was an emperor of the Khazars' making, and the end of Justinian's reign of terror was brought about by his brother-in-law, the Kagan. To quote Dunlop: "It does not seem an exaggeration to say that at this juncture the Khaquan was able practically to give a new ruler to the Greek empire."23
9
From the chronological point of view, the next event to be
discussed should be the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism,
around AD 740. But to see that remarkable event in its proper
perspective, one should have at least some sketchy idea of the
habits, customs and everyday life among the Khazars prior to the
conversion..Alas, we have
no lively eyewitness reports, such as Priscus's description of
Attila's court. What we do have are mainly second-hand accounts
and compilations by Byzantine and Arab chroniclers, which are
rather schematic and fragmentary - with two exceptions. One is a
letter, purportedly from a Khazar king, to be discussed in
Chapter 2; the other is a travelogue by an observant Arab
traveller, Ibn Fadlan, who - like Priscus - was a member of a
diplomatic mission from a civilized court to the Barbarians of
the North..The court was
that of the Caliph al Muktadir, and the diplomatic mission
travelled from Baghdad through Persia and Bukhara to the land of
the Volga Bulgars. The official pretext for this grandiose
expedition was a letter of invitation from the Bulgar king, who
asked the Caliph (a) for religious instructors to convert his
people to Islam, and (b) to build him a fortress which would
enable him to defy his overlord, the King of the Khazars. The
invitation - which was no doubt prearranged by earlier diplomatic
contacts - also provided an opportunity to create goodwill among
the various Turkish tribes inhabiting territories through which
the mission had to pass, by preaching the message of the Koran
and distributing huge amounts of gold bakhshish. .The opening paragraphs of our
traveller's account read:*[The following quotations are based on
Zeki Validi Togan's German translation of the Arabic text and the
English translation of extracts by Blake and Frye, both slightly
paraphrased in the interest of readability.] - This is the book of Ahmad ibn-Fadlan ibn-al-Abbas, ibn-Rasid, ibn-Hammad, an official in the service of [General] Muhammed ibn-Sulayman, the ambassador of [Caliph] al Muktadir to the King of the Bulgars, in which he relates what he saw in the land of the Turks, the Khazars, the Rus, the Bulgars, the Bashkirs and others, their varied kinds of religion, the histories of their kings, and their conduct in many walks of life. .The letter of the King of the Bulgars reached the Commander of the Faithful, al Muktadir; he asked him therein to send him someone to give him religious instruction and acquaint him with the laws of Islam, to build him a mosque and a pulpit so that he may carry out his mission of converting the people all over his country; he also entreated the Caliph to build him a fortress to defend himself against hostile kings.*[i.e., as later passages show, the King of the Khazars.] Everything that the King asked for was granted by the Caliph. I was chosen to read the Caliph's message to the King, to hand over the gifts the Caliph sent him, and to supervise the work of the teachers and interpreters of the Law....[There follow some details about the financing of the mission and names of participants.] And so we started on Thursday the 11th Safar of the year 309 [June 21, AD 921] from the City of Peace [Baghdad, capital of the Caliphate].
- The river was frozen for three months, we looked at the landscape and thought that the gates of the cold Hell had been opened for us. Verily I saw that the market place and the streets were totally empty because of the cold.... Once, when I came out of the bath and got home, I saw that my beard had frozen into a lump of ice, and I had to thaw it in front of the fire. I stayed for some days in a house which was inside of another house [compound?] and in which there stood a Turkish felt tent, and I lay inside the tent wrapped in clothes and furs, but nevertheless my cheeks often froze to the cushion....
- So each of us put on a Kurtak, [camisole] over that a woollen Kaftan, over that a buslin, [fur-lined coat] over that a burka [fur coat]; and a fur cap, under which only the eyes could be seen; a simple pair of underpants, and a lined pair, and over them the trousers; house shoes of kaymuht [shagreen leather] and over these also another pair of boots; and when one of us mounted a camel, he was unable to move because of his clothes.
- They are, in respect of their language and constitution, the most repulsive of men. Their language is like the chatter of starlings. At a day's journey there is a village called Ardkwa whose inhabitants are called Kardals; their language sounds entirely like the croaking of frogs.
- The next morning one of the Turks met us. He was ugly in build, dirty in appearance, contemptible in manners, base in nature; and we were moving through a heavy rain. Then he said: "Halt." Then the whole caravan of 3000 animals and 5000 men halted. Then he said: "Not a single one of you is allowed to go on." We halted then, obeying his orders.*[Obviously the leaders of the great caravan had to avoid at all costs a conflict with the Ghuzz tribesmen.] Then we said to him: "We are friends of the Kudarkin [Viceroy]". He began to laugh and said: "Who is the Kudarkin? I shit on his beard." Then he said: "Bread." I gave him a few loaves of bread. He took them and said: "Continue your journey; I have taken pity on you."
- They are nomads and have houses of felt. They stay for a while in one place and then move on. One can see their tents dispersed here and there all over the place according to nomadic custom. Although they lead a hard life, they behave like donkeys that have lost their way. They have no religion which would link them to God, nor are they guided by reason; they do not worship anything. Instead, they call their headmen lords; when one of them consults his chieftain, he asks: "O lord, what shall I do in this or that matter?" The course of action they adopt is decided by taking counsel among themselves; but when they have decided on a measure and are ready to carry it through, even the humblest and lowliest among them can come and disrupt that decision.
- Their women wear no veils in the presence of their men or strangers. Nor do the women cover any parts of their bodies in the presence of people. One day we stayed at the place of a Ghuzz and were sitting around; his wife was also present. As we conversed, the woman uncovered her private parts and scratched them, and we all saw it. Thereupon we covered our faces and said: "May God forgive me." The husband laughed and said to the interpreter: "Tell them we uncover it in your presence so that you may see and restrain yourselves; but it cannot be attained. This is better than when it is covered up and yet attainable." Adultery is alien to them; yet when they discover that someone is an adulterer they split him in two halves. This they do by bringing together the branches of two trees, tie him to the branches and then let both trees go, so that the man tied to them is torn in two.
- When they observe a man who excels through quickwittedness and knowledge, they say: "for this one it is more befitting to serve our Lord." They seize him, put a rope round his neck and hang him on a tree where he is left until he rots away.
- Ibn Fadlan describes not the simple murder of too-clever people, but one of their pagan customs: human sacrifice, by which the most excellent among men were offered as sacrifice to God. This ceremony was probably not carried out by common Bulgars, but by their Tabibs, or medicine men, i.e. their shamans, whose equivalents among the Bulgars and the Rus also wielded power of life and death over the people, in the name of their cult. According to Ibn Rusta, the medicine men of the Rus could put a rope round the neck of anybody and hang him on a tree to invoke the mercy of God. When this was done, they said: "This is an offering to God."
10
It took the Caliph's mission nearly a year (from June 21, 921,
to May 12, 922) to reach its destination, the land of the Volga
Bulgars. The direct route from Baghdad to the Volga leads across
the Caucasus and Khazaria - to avoid the latter, they had to make
the enormous detour round the eastern shore of the "Khazar
Sea", the Caspian. Even so, they were constantly reminded of
the proximity of the Khazars and its potential dangers. .A characteristic episode took
place during their sojourn with the Ghuzz army chief (the one
with the disreputable underwear). They were at first well
received, and given a banquet. But later the Ghuzz leaders had
second thoughts because of their relations with the Khazars. The
chief assembled the leaders to decide what to do: - The most distinguished and influential among them was the Tarkhan; he was lame and blind and had a maimed hand. The Chief said to them: "These are the messengers of the King of the Arabs, and I do not feel authorized to let them proceed without consulting you." Then the Tarkhan spoke: "This is a matter the like of which we have never seen or heard before; never has an ambassador of the Sultan travelled through our country since we and our ancestors have been here. Without doubt the Sultan is deceiving us; these people he is really sending to the Khazars, to stir them up against us. The best will be to cut each of these messengers into two and to confiscate all their belongings." Another one said: "No, we should take their belongings and let them run back naked whence they came." Another said: "No, the Khazar king holds hostages from us, let us send these people to ransom them."
- The Bulgar King's son was held as a hostage by the King of the Khazars. It was reported to the King of the Khazars that the Bulgar King had a beautiful daughter. He sent a messenger to sue for her. The Bulgar King used pretexts to refuse his consent. The Khazar sent another messenger and took her by force, although he was a Jew and she a Muslim; but she died at his court. The Khazar sent another messenger and asked for the Bulgar King's other daughter. But in the very hour when the messenger reached him, the Bulgar King hurriedly married her to the Prince of the Askil, who was his subject, for fear that the Khazar would take her too by force, as he had done with her sister. This alone was the reason which made the Bulgar King enter into correspondence with the Caliph and ask him to have a fortress built because he feared the King of the Khazars.
11
What Ibn Fadlan has to tell us about the Khazars is based - as
already mentioned - on intelligence collected in the course of
his journey, but mainly at the Bulgar court. Unlike the rest of
his narrative, derived from vivid personal observations, the
pages on the Khazars contain second-hand, potted information, and
fall rather flat. Moreover, the sources of his information are
biased, in view of the Bulgar King's understandable dislike of
his Khazar overlord - while the Caliphate's resentment of a
kingdom embracing a rival religion need hardly be stressed. .The narrative switches
abruptly from a description of the Rus court to the Khazar court:
- Concerning the King of the Khazars, whose title is Kagan, he appears in public only once every four months. They call him the Great Kagan. His deputy is called Kagan Bek; he is the one who commands and supplies the armies, manages the affairs of state, appears in public and leads in war. The neighbouring kings obey his orders. He enters every day into the presence of the Great Kagan, with deference and modesty, barefooted, carrying a stick of wood in his hand. He makes obeisance, lights the stick, and when it has burned down, he sits down on the throne on the King's right. Next to him in rank is a man called the K-nd-r Kagan, and next to that one, the Jawshyghr Kagan. .It is the custom of the Great Kagan not to have social intercourse with people, and not to talk with them, and to admit nobody to his presence except those we have mentioned. The power to bind or release, to mete out punishment, and to govern the country belongs to his deputy, the Kagan Bek..It is a further custom of the Great Kagan that when he dies a great building is built for him, containing twenty chambers, and in each chamber a grave is dug for him. Stones are broken until they become like powder, which is spread over the floor and covered with pitch. Beneath the building flows a river, and this river is large and rapid. They divert the river water over the grave and they say that this is done so that no devil, no man, no worm and no creeping creatures can get at him. After he has been buried, those who buried him are decapitated, so that nobody may know in which of the chambers is his grave. The grave is called "Paradise" and they have a saying: "He has entered Paradise". All the chambers are spread with silk brocade interwoven with threads of gold. .It is the custom of the King of the Khazars to have twenty-five wives; each of the wives is the daughter of a king who owes him allegiance. He takes them by consent or by force. He has sixty girls for concubines, each of them of exquisite beauty.
- The King has a great city on the river Itil [Volga] on both banks. On one bank live the Muslims, on the other bank the King and his court. The Muslims are governed by one of the King's officials who is himself a Muslim. The law-suits of the Muslims living in the Khazar capital and of visiting merchants from abroad are looked after by that official. Nobody else meddles in their affairs or sits in judgment over them.
- The Khazars and their King are all Jews.*[This sounds like an exaggeration in view of the existence of a Muslim community in the capital. Zeki Validi accordingly suppressed the word "all". We must assume that "the Khazars" here refers to the ruling nation or tribe, within the ethnic mosaic of Khazaria, and that the Muslims enjoyed legal and religious autonomy, but were not considered as "real Khazars".] The Bulgars and all their neighbours are subject to him. They treat him with worshipful obedience. Some are of the opinion that Gog and Magog are the Khazars.
12
I have quoted Ibn Fadlan's odyssey at some length, not so much
because of the scant information he provides about the Khazars
themselves, but because of the light it throws on the world which
surrounded them, the stark barbarity of the people amidst whom
they lived, reflecting their own past, prior to the conversion.
For, by the time of Ibn Fadlan's visit to the Bulgars, Khazaria
was a surprisingly modern country compared to its neighbours. .The contrast is evidenced by
the reports of other Arab historians,*[The following pages are
based on the works of lstakhri, al- Masudi, Ibn Rusta and Ibn
Hawkal (see Appendix II).] and is present on every level, from
housing to the administration of justice. The Bulgars still live
exclusively in tents, including the King, although the royal tent
is "very large, holding a thousand people or more".26
On the other hand, the Khazar Kagan inhabits a castle built of
burnt brick, his ladies are said to inhabit "palaces with
roofs of teak",27 and the Muslims have several mosques,
among them "one whose minaret rises above the royal
castle".28 .In the
fertile regions, their farms and cultivat ed areas stretched out
continuously over sixty or seventy miles. They also had extensive
vineyards. Thus Ibn Hawkal: "In Kozr [Khazaria] there is a
certain city called Asmid [Samandar] which has so many orchards
and gardens that from Darband to Serir the whole country is
covered with gardens and plantations belonging to this city. It
is said that there are about forty thousand of them. Many of
these produce grapes."29 .The
region north of the Caucasus was extremely fertile. In AD 968 Ibn
Hawkal met a man who had visited it after a Russian raid:
"He said there is not a pittance left for the poor in any
vineyard or garden, not a leaf on the bough.... [But] owing to
the excellence of their land and the abundance of its produce it
will not take three years until it becomes again what it
was." Caucasian wine is still a delight, consumed in vast
quantities in the Soviet Union. lHowever, the royal treasuries'
main source of income was foreign trade. The sheer volume of the
trading caravans plying their way between Central Asia and the
Volga-Ural region is indicated by Ibn Fadlan: we remember that
the caravan his mission joined at Gurganj consisted of "5000
men and 3000 pack animals". Making due allowance for
exaggeration, it must still have been a mighty caravan, and we do
not know how many of these were at any time on the move. Nor what
goods they transported - although textiles, dried fruit, honey,
wax and spices seem to have played an important part. A second
major trade route led across the Caucasus to Armenia, Georgia,
Persia and Byzantium. A third consisted of the increasing traffic
of Rus merchant fleets down the Volga to the eastern shores of
the Khazar Sea, carrying mainly precious furs much in demand
among the Muslim aristocracy, and slaves from the north, sold at
the slave market of Itil. On all these transit goods, including
the slaves, the Khazar ruler levied a tax of ten per cent. Adding
to this the tribute paid by Bulgars, Magyars, Burtas and so on,
one realizes that Khazaria was a prosperous country - but also
that its prosperity depended to a large extent on its military
power, and the prestige it conveyed on its tax collectors and
customs officials. .Apart
from the fertile regions of the south, with their vineyards and
orchards, the country was poor in natural resources. One Arab
historian (Istakhri) says that the only native product they
exported was isinglass. This again is certainly an exaggeration,
yet the fact remains that their main commercial activity seems to
have consisted in re-exporting goods brought in from abroad.
Among these goods, honey and candle-wax particularly caught the
Arab chroniclers' imagination. Thus Muqaddasi: "In Khazaria,
sheep, honey and Jews exist in large quantities."30 It is
true that one source - the Darband Namah - mentions gold
or silver mines in Khazar territory, but their location has not
been ascertained. On the other hand, several of the sources
mention Khazar merchandise seen in Baghdad, and the presence of
Khazar merchants in Constantinople, Alexandria and as far afield
as Samara and Fergana. .Thus
Khazaria was by no means isolated from the civilized world;
compared to its tribal neighbours in the north it was a
cosmopolitan country, open to all sorts of cultural and religious
influences, yet jealously defending its independence against the
two ecclesiastical world powers. We shall see that this attitude
prepared the ground for the coup de theatre - or coup
d'tat - which established Judaism as the state religion. .The arts and crafts seem to
have flourished, including haute couture. When the
future Emperor Constantine V married the Khazar Kagan's daughter
(see above, section 1), she brought with her dowry a splendid
dress which so impressed the Byzantine court that it was adopted
as a male ceremonial robe; they called it tzitzakion,
derived from the Khazar-Turkish pet- name of the Princess, which
was Chichak or "flower" (until she was baptized
Eirene). "Here," Toynbee comments, "we have an
illuminating fragment of cultural history."31 When another
Khazar princess married the Muslim governor of Armenia, her
cavalcade contained, apart from attendants and slaves, ten tents
mounted on wheels, "made of the finest silk, with gold-and
silver-plated doors, the floors covered with sable furs. Twenty
others carried the gold and silver vessels and other treasures
which were her dowry".32 The Kagan himself travelled in a
mobile tent even more luxuriously equipped, carrying on its top a
pomegranate of gold.
13
Khazar art, like that of the Bulgars and Magyars, was mainly
imitative, modelled on Persian-Sassanide patterns. The Soviet
archaeologist Bader33 emphasized the role of the Khazars in the
spreading of Persian-style silver-ware towards the north. Some of
these finds may have been re-exported by the Khazars, true to
their role as middlemen; others were imitations made in Khazar
workshops - the ruins of which have been traced near the ancient
Khazar fortress of Sarkel.*[Unfortunately, Sarkel, the most
important Khazar archaeological site has been flooded by the
reservoir of a newly built hydro-electric station.] The jewellery
unearthed within the confines of the fortress was of local
manufacture.34 The Swedish archaeologist T. J. Arne mentions
ornamental plates, clasps and buckles found as far as Sweden, of
Sassanide and Byzantine inspiration, manufactured in Khazaria or
territories under their influence.35 .Thus the Khazars were the
principal intermediaries in the spreading of Persian and
Byzantine art among the semi-barbaric tribes of Eastern Europe.
After his exhaustive survey of the archaeological and documentary
evidence (mostly from Soviet sources), Bartha concludes: - The sack of Tiflis by the Khazars, presumably in the spring of AD 629, is relevant to our subject.... [During the period of occupation] the Kagan sent out inspectors to supervise the manufacture of gold, silver, iron and copper products. Similarly the bazaars, trade in general, even the fisheries, were under their control.... [Thus] in the course of their incessant Caucasian campaigns during the seventh century, the Khazars made contact with a culture which had grown out of the Persian Sassanide tradition. Accordingly, the products of this culture spread to the people of the steppes not only by trade, but by means of plunder and even by taxation.... All the tracks that we have assiduously followed in the hope of discovering the origins of Magyar art in the tenth century have led us back to Khazar territory.36
14
Whether the warrior on the golden jar is of Magyar or Khazar
origin, he helps us to visualise the appearance of a cavalryman
of that period, perhaps belonging to an elite regiment. Masudi
says that in the Khazar army 'seven thousand of them*[Istakhri
has 12000.] ride with the King, archers with breast plates,
helmets, and coats of mail. Some are lancers, equipped and armed
like the Muslims.... None of the kings in this part of the world
has a regular standing army except the King of the Khazars."
And Ibn Hawkal: "This king has twelve thousand soldiers in
his service, of whom when one dies, another person is immediately
chosen in his place." .Here
we have another important clue to the Khazar dominance: a
permanent professional army, with a Praetorian Guard which, in
peacetime, effectively controlled the ethnic patchwork, and in
times of war served as a hard core for the armed horde, which, as
we have seen, may have swollen at times to a hundred thousand or
more.*[According to Masudi, the "Royal Army" consisted
of Muslims who "immigrated from the neighbourhood of
Kwarizm. Long ago, after the appearance of Islam, there was war
and pestilence in their territory, and they repaired to the
Khazar king.... When the king of the Khazars is at war with the
Muslims, they have a separate place in his army and do not fight
the people of their own faith" [Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p.
206] That the army "consisted" of Muslims is of course
an exaggeration, contradicted by Masudi himself a few lines
later, where he speaks of the Muslim contingent having a
"separate place" in the Khazar army. Also, lbn Hawkal
says that "the king has in his train 4000 Muslims and this
king has 2000 soldiers in his service". The Kwarizmians
probably formed a kind of Swiss Guard within the army, and their
compatriots" talk of "hostages" (see above,
section 10) may refer to them. Vice versa, the Byzantine Emperor
Constantine Porphyrogenitus had a corps d'élite of
Khazar guardsmen stationed at the gates of his palace. This was a
privilege dearly bought: "These guards were so well
remunerated that they had to purchase their posts for
considerable sums, on which their salaries represented an annuity
varying from about 2.25 to 4 per cent." (Constantine, De
Ceremoniis, pp. 692-3). For example, "a Khazar who
received 7.4s. had paid for enrolment 302.8s." (Bury, p.
228n).]
15
The capital of this motley empire was at first probably the
fortress of Balanjar in the northern foothills of the Caucasus;
after the Arab raids in the eighth century it was transferred to
Samandar, on the western shore of the Caspian; and lastly to Itil
in the estuary of the Volga. .We
have several descriptions of Itil, which are fairly consistent
with each other. It was a twin city, built on both sides of the
river. The eastern half was called Khazaran, the western half
Itil;*[The town was in different periods also mentioned under
different names, e.g., al-Bayada, "The White City".]
the two were connected by a pontoon bridge. The western half was
surrounded by a fortified wall, built of brick; it contained the
palaces and courts of the Kagan and the Bek, the habitations of
their attendants*[Masudi places these buildings on an island,
close to the west bank, or a peninsula.] and of the
"pure-bred Khazars". The wall had four gates, one of
them facing the river. Across the river, on the east bank, lived
"the Muslims and idol worshippers";38 this part also
housed the mosques, markets, baths and other public amenities.
Several Arab writers were impressed by the number of mosques in
the Muslim quarter and the height of the principal minaret. They
also kept stressing the autonomy enjoyed by the Muslim courts and
clergy. Here is what al-Masudi, known as "the Herodotus
among the Arabs", has to say on this subject in his
oft-quoted work Meadows of Gold Mines and Precious Stones: - The custom in the Khazar capital is to have seven judges. Of these two are for the Muslims, two are for the Khazars, judging according to the Torah (Mosaic law), two for the Christians, judging according to the Gospel and one for the Saqualibah, Rus and other pagans, judging according to pagan law.... In his [the Khazar King's] city are many Muslims, merchants and craftsmen, who have come to his country because of his justice and the security which he offers. They have a principal mosque and a minaret which rises above the royal castle, and other mosques there besides, with schools where the children learn the Koran.
- When they wish to enthrone this Kagan, they put a silken cord round his neck and tighten it until he begins to choke. Then they ask him: "How long doest thou intend to rule?" If he does not die before that year, he is killed when he reaches it.
When the new Chief has been elected, his officers and attendants ... make him mount his horse. They tighten a ribbon of silk round his neck, without quite strangling him; then they loosen the ribbon and ask him with great insistence: "For how many years canst thou be our Khan?" The king, in his troubled mind, being unable to name a figure, his subjects decide, on the strength of the words that have escaped him, whether his rule will be long or brief.40
We do not know whether the Khazar rite of slaying the King (if it ever existed) fell into abeyance when they adopted Judaism, in which case the Arab writers were confusing past with present practices as they did all the time, compiling earlier travellers' reports, and attributing them to contemporaries. However that may be, the point to be retained, and which seems beyond dispute, is the divine role attributed to the Kagan, regardless whether or not it implied his ultimate sacrifice. We have heard before that he was venerated, but virtually kept in seclusion, cut off from the people, until he was buried with enormous ceremony. The affairs of state, including leadership of the army, were managed by the Bek (sometimes also called the Kagan Bek), who wielded all effective power. On this point Arab sources and modern historians are in agreement, and the latter usually describe the Khazar system of government as a "double kingship", the Kagan representing divine, the Bek secular, power. .The Khazar double kingship has been compared - quite mistakenly, it Seems - with the Spartan dyarchy and with the superficially similar dual leadership among various Turkish tribes. However, the two kings of Sparta, descendants of two leading families, wielded equal power; and as for the dual leadership among nomadic tribes,*[Alföldi has suggested that the two leaders were the commanders of the two wings of the horde (quoted by Dunlop, p. 159, n. 123).] there is no evidence of a basic division of functions as among the Khazars. A more valid comparison is the system of government in Japan, from the Middle Ages to 1867, where secular power was concentrated in the hands of the shogun, while the Mikado was worshipped from afar as a divine figurehead. .Cassel41 has suggested an attractive analogy between the Khazar system of government and the game of chess. The double kingship is represented on the chess-board by the King (the Kagan) and the Queen (the Bek). The King is kept in seclusion, protected by his attendants, has little power and can only move one short step at a time. The Queen, by contrast, is the most powerful presence on the board, which she dominates. Yet the Queen may be lost and the game still continued, whereas the fall of the King is the ultimate disaster which instantly brings the contest to an end. .The double kingship thus seems to indicate a categorical distinction between the sacred and the profane in the mentality of the Khazars. The divine attributes of the Kagan are much in evidence in the following passage from Ibn Hawkal: *[Ibn Hawkal, another much-travelled Arab geographer and historian, wrote his Oriental Geography around AD 977. The passage here quoted is virtually a copy of what Istakhri wrote forty years earlier, but contains less obscurities, so I have followed Ouseley's translation (1800) of Ibn Hawkal.]
- The Khacan must be always of the Imperial race [Istakhri: "...of a family of notables"]. No one is allowed to approach him but on business of importance: then they prostrate themselves before him, and rub their faces on the ground, until he gives orders for their approaching him, and speaking. When a Khacan ... dies, whoever passes near his tomb must go on foot, and pay his respects at the grave; and when he is departing, must not mount on horseback, as long as the tomb is within view. So absolute is the authority of this sovereign, and so implicitly are his commands obeyed, that if it seemed expedient to him that one of his nobles should die, and if he said to him, "Go and kill yourself," the man would immediately go to his house, and kill himself accordingly. The succession to the Khacanship being thus established in the same family [Istakhri: "in a family of notables who possess neither power nor riches"]; when the turn of the inheritance arrives to any individual of it, he is confirmed in the dignity, though he possesses not a single dirhem [coin]. And I have heard from persons worthy of belief, that a certain young man used to sit in a little shop at the public market-place, selling petty articles [Istakhri: 'selling bread"]; and that the people used to say, "When the present Khacan shall have departed, this man will succeed to the throne" [Istakhri: "There is no man worthier of the Khaganate than he"]. But the young man was a Mussulman, and they give the Khacanship only to Jews. The Khacan has a throne and pavilion of gold: these are not allowed to any other person. The palace of the Khacan is loftier than the other edifices.42
Const. Porphyr. Khaqan Bek Ibn Rusta Khazar Khaqan Aysha Masudi Khaqan Malik Istakhri Malik Khazar Khaqan Khazarl. Ibn Hawkal Khaqan Khazar Malik Khazar or Bek Gardezi Khazar Khaqan Abshad
"THE religion of the Hebrews," writes Bury, "had exercised a profound influence on the creed of Islam, and it had been a basis for Christianity; it had won scattered proselytes; but the conversion of the Khazars to the undiluted religion of Jehova is unique in history."1 .What was the motivation of this unique event? It is not easy to get under the skin of a Khazar prince - covered, as it was, by a coat of mail. But if we reason in terms of power-politics, which obeys essentially the same rules throughout the ages, a fairly plausible analogy offers itself. .At the beginning of the eighth century the world was polarized between the two super-powers representing Christianity and Islam. Their ideological doctrines were welded to power-politics pursued by the classical methods of propaganda, subversion and military conquest. The Khazar Empire represented a Third Force, which had proved equal to either of them, both as an adversary and an ally. But it could only maintain its independence by accepting neither Christianity nor Islam - for either choice would have automatically subordinated it to the authority of the Roman Emperor or the Caliph of Baghdad. .There had been no lack of efforts by either court to convert the Khazars to Christianity or Islam, but all they resulted in was the exchange of diplomatic courtesies, dynastic inter-marriages and shifting military alliances based on mutual self-interest. Relying on its military strength, the Khazar kingdom, with its hinterland of vassal tribes, was determined to preserve its position as the Third Force, leader of the uncommitted nations of the steppes. .At the same time, their intimate contacts with Byzantium and the Caliphate had taught the Khazars that their primitive shamanism was not only barbaric and outdated compared to the great monotheistic creeds, but also unable to confer on the leaders the spiritual and legal authority which the rulers of the two theocratic world powers, the Caliph and the Emperor, enjoyed. Yet the conversion to either creed would have meant submission, the end of independence, and thus would have defeated its purpose. What could have been more logical than to embrace a third creed, which was uncommitted towards either of the two, yet represented the venerable foundation of both? .The apparent logic of the decision is of course due to the deceptive clarity of hindsight. In reality, the conversion to Judaism required an act of genius. Yet both the Arab and Hebrew sources on the history of the conversion, however varied in detail, point to a line of reasoning as indicated above. To quote Bury once more:
- There can be no question that the ruler was actuated by political motives in adopting Judaism. To embrace Mohammadanism would have made him the spiritual dependent of the Caliphs, who attempted to press their faith on the Khazars, and in Christianity lay the danger of his becoming an ecclesiastical vassal of the Roman Empire. Judaism was a reputable religion with sacred books which both Christian and Mohammadan respected; it elevated him above the heathen barbarians, and secured him against the interference of Caliph or Emperor. But he did not adopt, along with circumcision, the intolerance of the Jewish cult. He allowed the mass of his people to abide in their heathendom and worship their idols.2
- In this city [Khazaran-Itil] are Muslims, Christians, Jews and pagans. The Jews are the king, his attendants and the Khazars of his kind.*[i.e., presumably the ruling tribe of "White Khazars", see above, Chapter I, 3.] The king of the Khazars had already become a Jew in the Caliphate of Harun al-Rashid*[i.e., between AD 786 and 809; but it is generally assumed that Masudi used a convenient historical landmark and that the conversion took place around AD 740.] and he was joined by Jews from all lands of Islam and from the country of the Greeks [Byzantium]. Indeed the king of the Greeks at the present time, the Year of the Hegira 332 [AD 943-4] has converted the Jews in his kingdom to Christianity by coercion.... Thus many Jews took flight from the country of the Greeks to Khazaria....3a
- How did they force them? Anyone refusing to accept their erroneous belief was placed in an olive mill under a wooden press, and squeezed in the way olives are squeezed in the mill.
2 The circumstances of the conversion are obscured by legend, but the principal Arab and Hebrew accounts of it have some basic features in common. .Al-Masudi's account of the Jewish rule in Khazaria, quoted earlier on, ends with a reference to a previous work of his, in which he gave a description of those circumstances. That previous work of Masudi's is lost; but there exist two accounts which are based on tile lost book. The first, by Dimaski (written in 1327), reiterates that at the time of Harun al Rashid, the Byzantine Emperor forced the Jews to emigrate; these emigrants came to the Khazar country where they found "an intelligent but uneducated race to whom they offered their religion. The natives found it better than their own and accepted it."11 .The second, much more detailed account is in al-Bakri's Book of Kingdoms and Roads (eleventh century):
- The reason for the conversion to Judaism of the King of the Khazars, who had previously been a pagan, is as follows. He had adopted Christianity.*[No other source, as far as I know, mentions this. It may be a substitution more palatable to Muslim readers for the Kagan's short-lived adoption of Islam prior to Judaism.] Then he recognized its falsehood and discussed this matter, which greatly worried him, with one of his high officials. The latter said to him: O king, those in possession of sacred scriptures fall into three groups. Summon them and ask them to state their case, then follow the one who is in possession of the truth. .So he sent to the Christians for a bishop. Now there was with the King a Jew, skilled in argument, who engaged him in disputation. He asked the Bishop: "What do you say of Moses, the son of Amran, and the Torah which was revealed to him?" The Bishop replied: "Moses is a prophet and the Torah speaks the truth." Then the Jew said to the King: "He has already admitted the truth of my creed. Ask him now what he believes in." .So the King asked him and he replied: "I say that Jesus the Messiah is the son of Mary, he is the Word, and he has revealed the mysteries in the name of God." Then said the Jew to the King of the Khazars: "He preaches a doctrine which I know not, while he accepts my propositions." But the Bishop was not strong in producing evidence. Then the King asked for a Muslim, and they sent him a scholarly, clever man who was good at arguments. But the Jew hired someone who poisoned him on the journey, and he died. And the Jew succeeded in winning the King for his faith, so that he embraced Judaism.12
3
We now turn from the principal Arab source on the conversion -
Masudi and his compilers - to the principal Jewish source. This
is the so-called "Khazar Correspondence": an exchange
of letters, in Hebrew, between Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, the Jewish
chief minister of the Caliph of Cordoba, and Joseph, King of the
Khazars or, rather, between their respective scribes. The
authenticity of the correspondence has been the subject of
controversy but is now generally accepted with due allowance made
for the vagaries of later copyists.*[A summary of the controversy
will be found in Appendix III.] .The
exchange of letters apparently took place after 954 and before
961, that is roughly at the time when Masudi wrote. To appreciate
its significance a word must be said about the personality of
Hasdai Ibn Shaprut - perhaps the most brilliant figure in the
"Golden Age" (900-1200) of the Jews in Spain. .In 929, Abd-al-Rahman III, a
member of the Omayad dynasty, succeeded in unifying the Moorish
possessions in the southern and central parts of the Iberian
peninsula under his rule, and founded the Western Caliphate. His
capital, Cordoba, became the glory of Arab Spain, and a focal
centre of European culture with a library of 400000 catalogued
volumes. Hasdai, born 910 in Cordoba into a distinguished Jewish
family, first attracted the Caliph's attention as a medical
practitioner with some remarkable cures to his credit.
Abd-al-Rahman appointed him his court physician, and trusted his
judgment so completely that Hasdai was called upon, first, to put
the state finances in order, then to act as Foreign Minister and
diplomatic trouble-shooter in the new Caliphate's complex
dealings with Byzantium, the German Emperor Otto, with Castile,
Navarra, Arragon and other Christian kingdoms in the north of
Spain. Hasdai was a true uomo universale centuries before the
Renaissance who, in between affairs of state, still found the
time to translate medical books into Arabic, to correspond with
the learned rabbis of Baghdad and to act as a Maecenas for Hebrew
grammarians and poets. .He
obviously was an enlightened, yet a devoted Jew, who used his
diplomatic contacts to gather information about the Jewish
communities dispersed in various parts of the world, and to
intervene on their behalf whenever possible. He was particularly
concerned about the persecution of Jews in the Byzantine Empire
under Romanus (see above, section I). Fortunately, he wielded
considerable influence at the Byzantine court, which was vitally
interested in procuring the benevolent neutrality of Cordoba
during the Byzantine campaigns against the Muslims of the East.
Hasdai, who was conducting the negotiations, used this
opportunity to intercede on behalf of Byzantine Jewry, apparently
with success.14 .According
to his own account, Hasdai first heard of the existence of an
independent Jewish kingdom from some merchant traders from
Khurasan in Persia; but he doubted the truth of their story.
Later he questioned the members of a Byzantine diplomatic mission
to Cordoba, and they confirmed the merchants' account,
contributing a considerable amount of factual detail about the
Khazar kingdom, including the name - Joseph - of its present
King. Thereupon Hasdai decided to send couriers with a letter to
King Joseph. .The letter
(which will be discussed in more detail later on) contains a list
of questions about the Khazar state, its people, method of
government, armed forces, and so on - including an inquiry to
which of the twelve tribes Joseph belonged. This seems to
indicate that Hasdai thought the Jewish Khazars to hail from
Palestine - as the Spanish Jews did - and perhaps even to
represent one of the Lost Tribes. Joseph, not being of Jewish
descent, belonged, of course, to none of the tribes; in his Reply
to Hasdai, he provides, as we shall see, a genealogy of a
different kind, but his main concern is to give Hasdai a detailed
- if legendary - account of the conversion - which took place two
centuries earlier - and the circumstances that led to it. .Joseph's narrative starts with
a eulogy of his ancestor, King Bulan, a great conqueror and a
wise man who "drove out the sorcerers and idolators from his
land". Subsequently an angel appeared to King Bulan in his
dreams, exhorting him to worship the only true God, and promising
that in exchange He would "bless and multiply Bulan's
offspring, and deliver his enemies into his hands, and make his
kingdom last to the end of the world". This, of course, is
inspired by the story of the Covenant in Genesis; and it implies
that the Khazars too claimed the status of a Chosen Race, who
made their own Covenant with the Lord, even though they were not
descended from Abraham's seed. But at this point Joseph's story
takes an unexpected turn. King Bulan is quite willing to serve
the Almighty, but he raises a difficulty: - Thou knowest, my Lord, the secret thoughts of my heart and thou hast searched my kidneys to confirm that my trust is in thee; but the people over which I rule have a pagan mind and I do not know whether they will believe me. If I have found favour and mercy in thine eyes, then I beseech thee to appear also to their Great Prince, to make him support me. .The Eternal One granted Bulan's request, he appeared to this Prince in a dream, and when he arose in the morning he came to the King and made it known to him....
- After these feats of arms [the invasion of Armenia], King Bulan's fame spread to all countries. The King of Edom [Byzantium] and the King of the Ishmaelim [the Muslims] heard the news and sent to him envoys with precious gifts and money and learned men to convert him to their beliefs; but the king was wise and sent for a Jew with much knowledge and acumen and put all three together to discuss their doctrines.
4
So much for the conversion. What else do we learn from the
celebrated "Khazar Correspondence"? .To take Hasdai's letter first:
it starts with a Hebrew poem, in the then fashionable manner of
the piyut, a rhapsodic verse form which contains hidden
allusions or riddles, and frequently acrostics. The poem exalts
the military victories of the addressee, King Joseph; at the same
time, the initial letters of the lines form an acrostic which
spells out the full name of Hasdai bar Isaac bar Ezra bar
Shaprut, followed by the name of Menahem ben Sharuk. Now this
Menahem was a celebrated Hebrew poet, lexicographer and
grammarian, a secretary and protoge of Hasdai's. He was obviously
given the task of drafting the epistle to King Joseph in his most
ornate style, and he took the opportunity to immortalize himself
by inserting his own name into the acrostic after that of his
patron. Several other works of Menahem ben-Sharuk are preserved,
and there can be no doubt that Hasdai's letter is his
handiwork.*[See Appendix III.] .After
the poem, the compliments and diplomatic flourishes, the letter
gives a glowing account of the prosperity of Moorish Spain, and
the happy condition of the Jews under its Caliph Abd al Rahman,
"the like of which has never been known.... And thus the
derelict sheep were taken into care, the arms of their
persecutors were paralysed, and the yoke was discarded. The
country we live in is called in Hebrew Sepharad, but the
Ishmaelites who inhabit it call it al-Andalus." .Hasdai then proceeds to
explain how he first heard about the existence of the Jewish
kingdom from the merchants of Khurasan, then in more detail from
the Byzantine envoys, and he reports what these envoys told him: - I questioned them [the Byzantines] about it and they replied that it was true, and that the name of the kingdom is al-Khazar. Between Constantinople and this country there is a journey of fifteen days by sea,*[This probably refers to the so-Called "Khazarian route": from Constantinople across the Black Sea and up the Don, then across the Don-Volga portage and down the Volga to Itil. (An alternative, shorter route was from Constantinople to the east coast of the Black Sea.)] but they said, by land there are many other people between us and them. The name of the ruling king is Joseph. Ships come to us from their land, bringing fish, furs and all sorts of merchandise. They are in alliance with us, and honoured by us. We exchange embassies and gifts. They are powerful and have a fortress for their outposts and troops which go out on forays from time to time.*[The fortress is evidently Sarkel on the Don. "They are honoured by us" fits in with the passage in Constantine Born-in-the-Purple about the special gold seal used in letters to the Kagan. Constantine was the Byzantine Emperor at the time of the Embassy to Spain.]
- I feel the urge to know the truth, whether there is really a place on this earth where harassed Israel can rule itself, where it is subject to nobody. If I were to know that this is indeed the case, I would not hesitate to forsake all honours, to resign my high office, to abandon my family, and to travel over mountains and plains, over land and water, until I arrived at the place where my Lord, the [Jewish] King rules.... And I also have one more request: to be informed whether you have any knowledge of [the possible date] of the Final Miracle [the coming of the Messiah] which, wandering from country to country, we are awaiting. Dishonoured and humiliated in our dispersion, we have to listen in silence to those who say: "every nation has its own land and you alone possess not even a shadow of a country on this earth".
5
King Joseph's reply is less accomplished and moving than
Hasdai's letter. No wonder - as Cassel remarks: 'scholarship and
culture reigned not among the Jews of the Volga, but on the
rivers of Spain". The highlight of the Reply is the story of
the conversion, already quoted. No doubt Joseph too employed a
scribe for penning it, probably a scholarly refugee from
Byzantium. Nevertheless, the Reply sounds like a voice out of the
Old Testament compared to the polished cadences of the
tenth-century modern statesman. .It
starts with a fanfare of greetings, then reiterates the main
contents of Hasdai's letter, proudly emphasizing that the Khazar
kingdom gives the lie to those who say that "the Sceptre of
Judah has forever fallen from the Jews' hands" and
"that there is no place on earth for a kingdom of their
own". This is followed by a rather cryptic remark to the
effect that "already our fathers have exchanged friendly
letters which are preserved in our archives and are known to our
elders".*[This may refer to a ninth-century Jewish
traveller, Eldad ha- Dani, whose fantastic tales, much read in
the Middle Ages, include mentions of Khazaria which, he says, is
inhabited by three of the lost tribes of Israel, and collects
tributes from twenty-eight neighbouring kingdoms. Eldad visited
Spain around 880 and may or may not have visited the Khazar
country. Hasdai briefly mentions him in his letter to Joseph - as
if to ask what to make of him.] .Joseph
then proceeds to provide a genealogy of his people. Though a
fierce Jewish nationalist, proud of wielding the 'sceptre of
Judah", he cannot, and does not, claim for them Semitic
descent; he traces their ancestry not to Shem, but to Noah's
third son, Japheth; or more precisely to Japheth's grandson,
Togarma, the ancestor of all Turkish tribes. "We have found
in the family registers of our fathers," Joseph asserts
boldly, "that Togarma had ten sons, and the names of their
offspring are as follows: Uigur, Dursu, Avars, Huns, Basilii,
Tarniakh, Khazars, Zagora, Bulgars, Sabir. We are the sons of
Khazar, the seventh..." .The
identity of some of these tribes, with names spelt in the Hebrew
script is rather dubious, but that hardly matters; the
characteristic feature in this genealogical exercise is the
amalgamation of Genesis with Turkish tribal tradition.*[It also
throws a sidelight on the frequent description of the Khazars as
the people of Magog. Magog, according to Genesis X, 2-3 was the
much maligned uncle of Togarma.] .After
the genealogy, Joseph mentions briefly some military conquests by
his ancestors which carried them as far as the Danube; then
follows at great length the story of Bulan's conversion.
"From this day onwards," Joseph continues, "the
Lord gave him strength and aided him; he had himself and his
followers circumcized and sent for Jewish sages who taught him
the Law and explained the Commandments." There follow more
boasts about military victories, conquered nations, etc., and
then a significant passage: - After these events, one of his [Bulan's] grandsons became King; his name was Obadiab, he was a brave and venerated man who reformed the Rule, fortified the Law according to tradition and usage, built synagogues and schools, assembled a multitude of Israel's sages, gave them lavish gifts of gold and silver, and made them interpret the twenty-four [sacred] books, the Mishna [Precepts] and the Talmud, and the order in which the liturgies are to be said.
6
After mentioning Obadiah's religious reforms, Joseph gives a
list of his successors: - Hiskia his son, and his son Manasseh, and Chanukah the brother of Obadiah, and Isaac his son, Manasseh his son, Nissi his son, Menahem his son, Benjamin his son, Aaron his son, and I am Joseph, son of Aaron the Blessed, and we were all sons of Kings, and no stranger was allowed to occupy the throne of our fathers.
- We have our eyes on the sages of Jerusalem and Babylon, and although we live far away from Zion, we have nevertheless heard that the calculations are erroneous owing to the great profusion of sins, and we know nothing, only the Eternal knows how to keep the count. We have nothing to hold on only the prophecies of Daniel, and may the Eternal speed up our Deliverance....
- Thou hast mentioned in thy letter a desire to see my face. I too wish and long to behold thy gracious face and the splendour of thy magnificence, wisdom and greatness; I wish that thy words will come true, that I should know the happiness to hold thee in my embrace and to see thy dear, friendly and agreeable face; thou wouldst be to me as a father, and I to thee as a son; all my people would kiss thy lips; we would come and go according to thy wishes and thy wise counsel.
- With the help of the Almighty I guard the mouth of the river [the Volga] and do not permit the Rus who come in their ships to invade the land of the Arabs.... I fight heavy wars with them [the Rus] for if I allowed it they would devastate the lands of Ishmael even to Baghdad.
7
Among other Hebrew sources, there is the "Cambridge
Document" (so called after its present location in the
Cambridge University Library). It was discovered at the end of
the last century, together with other priceless documents in the
"Cairo Geniza", the store-room of an ancient synagogue,
by the Cambridge scholar, Solomon Schechter. The document is in a
bad state; it is a letter (or copy of a letter) consisting of
about a hundred lines in Hebrew; the beginning and the end are
missing, so that it is impossible to know who wrote it and to
whom it was addressed. King Joseph is mentioned in it as a
contemporary and referred to as "my Lord", Khazaria is
called "our land"; so the most plausible inference is
that the letter was written by a Khazar Jew of King Joseph's
court in Joseph's lifetime, i.e., that it is roughly
contemporaneous with the "Khazar Correspondence". Some
authorities have further suggested that it was addressed to
Hasdai ibn Shaprut, and handed in Constantinople to Hasdai's
unsuccessful envoy, Isaac bar Nathan, who brought it back to
Cordoba (whence it found its way to Cairo when the Jews were
expelled from Spain). At any rate, internal evidence indicates
that the document originated not later than in the eleventh
century, and more likely in Joseph's lifetime, in the tenth. .It contains another legendary
account of the conversion, but its main significance is
political. The writer speaks of an attack on Khazaria by the
Alans, acting under Byzantine instigation, under Joseph's father,
Aaron the Blessed. No other Greek or Arab source seems to mention
this campaign. But there is a significant passage in Constantine
Porphyrogenitus's De Adminisdrando Imperio, written in
947-50, which lends some credibility to the unknown
letter-writer's statements: Concerning Khazaria, how war is to be made upon them and by whom. As the Ghuzz are able to make war on the Khazars, being near them, so likewise the ruler of Alania, because the Nine Climates of Khazaria [the fertile region north of the Caucasus] are close to Alania, and the Alan can, if he wishes, raid them and cause great damage and distress to the Khazars from that quarter.
Now, according to Joseph's Letter, the ruler of the Alans paid tribute to him, and whether in fact he did or not, his feelings toward the Kagan were probably much the same as the Bulgar King's. The passage in Constantine, revealing his efforts to incite the Alans to war against the Khazars, ironically reminds one of Ibn Fadlan's mission with a parallel purpose. Evidently, the days of the Byzantine-Khazar rapprochement were long past in Joseph's time. But I am anticipating later developments, to be discussed in Chapter III.
8
About a century after the Khazar Correspondence and the
presumed date of the Cambridge Document, Jehuda Halevi wrote his
once celebrated book, Kuzari, the Khazars. Halevi (1085-1141) is
generally considered the greatest Hebrew poet of Spain; the book,
however, was written in Arabic and translated later into Hebrew;
its sub-title is "The Book of Proof and Argument in Defence
of the Despised Faith". .Halevi
was a Zionist who died on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; the Kuzari,
written a year before his death, is a philosophical tract
propounding the view that the Jewish nation is the sole mediator
between God and the rest of mankind. At the end of history, all
other nations will be converted to Judaism; and the conversion of
the Khazars appears as a symbol or token of that ultimate event. .In spite of its title, the
tract has little to say about the Khazar country itself, which
serves mainly as a backdrop for yet another legendary account of
the conversion - the King, the angel, the Jewish scholar, etc. -
and for the philosophical and theological dialogues between the
King and the protagonists of the three religions. .However, there are a few
factual references, which indicate that Halevi had either read
the correspondence between Hasdai and Joseph or had other sources
of information about the Khazar country. Thus we are informed
that after the appearance of the angel the King of the Khazars
"revealed the secret of his dream to the General of his
army", and "the General" also looms large later on
- another obvious reference to the dual rule of Kagan and Bek.
Halevi also mentions the "histories" and "books of
the Khazars" - which reminds one of Joseph speaking of
"our archives", where documents of state are kept.
Lastly, Halevi twice, in different places of the book, gives the
date of the conversion as having taken place "400 years
ago" and "in the year 4500" (according to the
Jewish calendar). This points to AD 740, which is the most likely
date. All in all, it is a poor harvest as far as factual
statements are concerned, from a book that enjoyed immense
popularity among the Jews of the Middle Ages. But the mediaeval
mind was less attracted by fact than by fable, and the Jews were
more interested in the date of the coming of the Messiah than in
geographical data. The Arab geographers and chroniclers had a
similarly cavalier attitude to distances, dates and the frontiers
between fact and fancy. .This
also applies to the famed German-Jewish traveller, Rabbi Petachia
of Ratisbon, who visited Eastern Europe and western Asia between
1170 and 1185. His travelogue, Sibub Ha'olam,
"Journey around the World", was apparently written by a
pupil, based on his notes or on dictation. It relates how shocked
the good Rabbi was by the primitive observances of the Khazar
Jews north of the Crimea, which he attributed to their adherence
to the Karaite heresy: - And the Rabbi Petachia asked them: "Why do you not believe in the words of the sages [i.e., the Talmudists]?" They replied: "Because our fathers did not teach them to us." On the eve of the Sabbath they cut all the bread which they eat on the Sabbath. They eat it in the dark, and sit the whole day on one spot. Their prayers consist only of the psalms.17*[Spending the Sabbath in the dark was a well-known Karaite custom.]
9
At about the same time when Druthmar wrote down what he knew
from hearsay about the Jewish Khazars, a famed Christian
missionary, sent by the Byzantine Emperor, attempted to convert
them to Christianity. He was no less a figure than St Cyril,
"Apostle of the Slavs", alleged designer of the
Cyrillic alphabet. He and his elder brother, St Methodius, were
entrusted with this and other proselytizing missions by the
Emperor Michael III, on the advice of the Patriarch Photius
(himself apparently of Khazar descent, for it is reported that
the Emperor once called him in anger "Khazar face")..Cyril's proselytizing efforts
seem to have been successful among the Slavonic people in Eastern
Europe, but not among the Khazars. He travelled to their country
via Cherson in the Crimea; in Cherson he is said to have spent
six months learning Hebrew in preparation for his mission; he
then took the "Khazarian Way" - the Don-Volga portage -
to Itil, and from there travelled along the Caspian to meet the
Kagan (it is not said where). The usual theological disputations
followed, but they had little impact on the Khazar Jews Even the
adulatory Vita Constantine (Cyril's original name) says
only that Cyril made a good impression on the Kagan, that a few
people were baptized and two hundred Christian prisoners were
released by the Kagan as a gesture of goodwill. It was the least
he could do for the Emperor's envoy who had gone to so much
trouble. .There is a
curious sidelight thrown on the story by students of Slavonic
philology. Cyril is credited by tradition not only with having
devised the Cyrillic but also the Glagolytic alphabet. The
latter, according to Baron, was "used in Croatia to the
seventeenth century. Its indebtedness to the Hebrew alphabet in
at least eleven characters, representing in part the Slavonic
sounds, has long been recognized". (The eleven characters
are A, B, V, G, E, K, P, R, S, Sch, T.) This seems to confirm
what has been said earlier on about the influence of the Hebrew
alphabet in spreading literacy among the neighbours of the
Khazars. "IT was", wrote D. Sinor,1 "in the second half of the eighth century that the Khazar empire reached the acme of its glory" that is, between the conversion of Bulan and the religious reform under Obadiah. This is not meant to imply that the Khazars owed their good fortune to their Jewish religion. It is rather the other way round: they could afford to be Jews because they were economically and militarily strong. .A living symbol of their power was the Emperor Leo the Khazar, who ruled Byzantium in 775-80 - so named after his mother, the Khazar Princess "Flower" - the one who created a new fashion at the court. We remember that her marriage took place shortly after the great Khazar victory over the Muslims in the battle of Ardabil, which is mentioned in the letter of Joseph and other sources. The two events, Dunlop remarks, "are hardly unrelated".2.However, amidst the cloak-and-dagger intrigues of the period, dynastic marriages and betrothals could be dangerous. They repeatedly gave cause - or at least provided a pretext - for starting a war. The pattern was apparently set by Attila, the erstwhile overlord of the Khazars. In 450 Attila is said to have received a message, accompanied by an engagement ring, from Honoria, sister to the West Roman Emperor Valentinian III. This romantic and ambitious lady begged the Hun chieftain to rescue her from a fate worse than death - a forced marriage to an old Senator - and sent him her ring. Attila promptly claimed her as his bride, together with half the Empire as her dowry; and when Valentinian refused, Attila invaded Gaul..Several variations on this quasi-archetypal theme crop up throughout Khazar history. We remember the fury of the Bulgar King about the abduction of his daughter, and how he gave this incident as the main reason for his demand that the Caliph should build him a fortress against the Khazars. If we are to believe the Arab sources, similar incidents (though with a different twist) led to the last flare-up of the Khazar-Muslim wars at the end of the eighth century, after a protracted period of peace. .According to al-Tabari, in AD 798,*[The date, however, is uncertain.] the Caliph ordered the Governor of Armenia to make the Khazar frontier even more secure by marrying a daughter of the Kagan. This governor was a member of the powerful family of the Barmecides (which, incidentally, reminds one of the prince of that eponymous family in the Arabian Nights who invited the beggar to a feast consisting of rich dish-covers with nothing beneath). The Barmecide agreed, and the Khazar Princess with her suite and dowry was duly dispatched to him in a luxurious cavalcade (see I, 10). But she died in childbed; the newborn died too; and her courtiers, on their return to Khazaria, insinuated to the Kagan that she had been poisoned. The Kagan promptly invaded Armenia and took (according to two Arab sources)3 50000 prisoners. The Caliph was forced to release thousands of criminals from his gaols and arm them to stem the Khazar advance. .The Arab sources relate at least one more eighth-century incident of a misfired dynastic marriage followed by a Khazar invasion; and for good measure the Georgian Chronicle has a particularly gruesome one to add to the list (in which the royal Princess, instead of being poisoned, kills herself to escape the Kagan's bed). The details and exact dates are, as usual, doubtful,4 and so is the real motivation behind these campaigns. But the recurrent mention in the chronicles of bartered brides and poisoned queens leaves little doubt that this theme had a powerful impact on people's imagination, and possibly also on political events.
2
No more is heard about Khazar-Arab fighting after the end of
the eighth century. As we enter the ninth, the Khazars seemed to
enjoy several decades of peace at least, there is little mention
of them in the chronicles, and no news is good news in history.
The southern frontiers of their country had been pacified;
relations with the Caliphate had settled down to a tacit
non-aggression pact; relations with Byzantium continued to be
definitely friendly. .Yet
in the middle of this comparatively idyllic period there is an
ominous episode which foreshadowed new dangers. In 833, or
thereabouts, the Khazar Kagan and Bek sent an embassy to the East
Roman Emperor Theophilus, asking for skilled architects and
craftsmen to build them a fortress on the lower reaches of the
Don. The Emperor responded with alacrity. He sent a fleet across
the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov up the mouth of the Don to the
strategic spot where the fortress was to be built. Thus came
Sarkel into being, the famous fortress and priceless
archaeological site, virtually the only one that yielded clues to
Khazar history - until it was submerged in the Tsimlyansk
reservoir, adjoining the Volga-Don canal. Constantine
Porphyrogenitus, who related the episode in some detail, says
that since no stones were available in the region, Sarkel was
built of bricks, burnt in specially constructed kilns. He does
not mention the curious fact (discovered by Soviet archaeologists
while the site was still accessible) that the builders also used
marble columns of Byzantine origin, dating from the sixth
century, and probably salvaged from some Byzantine ruin; a nice
example of Imperial thrift.5 .The
potential enemy against whom this impressive fortress was built
by joint Roman-Khazar effort, were those formidable and menacing
newcomers on the world scene, whom the West called Vikings or
Norsemen, and the East called Rhous or Rhos or Rus. .Two centuries earlier, the
conquering Arabs had advanced on the civilized world in a
gigantic pincer movement, its left prong reaching across the
Pyrenees, its right prong across the Caucasus. Now, during the
Viking Age, history seemed to create a kind of mirror image of
that earlier phase. The initial explosion which had triggered off
the Muslim wars of conquest took place in the southernmost region
of the known world, the Arabian desert. The Viking raids and
conquests originated in its northernmost region, Scandinavia. The
Arabs advanced northward by land, the Norsemen southward by sea
and waterways. The Arabs were, at least in theory, conducting a
Holy War, the Vikings waged unholy wars of piracy and plunder;
but the results, as far as the victims were concerned, were much
the same. In neither case have historians been able to provide
convincing explanations of the economical, ecological or
ideological reasons which transformed these apparently quiescent
regions of Arabia and Scandinavia quasi overnight into volcanoes
of exuberant vitality and reckless enterprise. Both eruptions
spent their force within a couple of centuries but left a
permanent mark on the world. Both evolved in this time-span from
savagery and destructiveness to splendid cultural achievement..About the time when Sarkel was
built by joint Byzantine-Khazar efforts in anticipation of attack
by the eastern Vikings, their western branch had already
penetrated all the major waterways of Europe and conquered half
of Ireland. Within the next few decades they colonized Iceland,
conquered Normandy, repeatedly sacked Paris, raided Germany, the
Rhne delta, the gulf of Genoa, circumnavigated the Iberian
peninsula and attacked Constantinople through the Mediterranean
and the Dardanelles - simultaneously with a Rus attack down the
Dnieper and across the Black Sea. As Toynbee wrote:6 "In the
ninth century, which was the century in which the Rhos impinged
on the Khazars and on the East Romans, the Scandinavians were
raiding and conquering and colonizing in an immense arc that
eventually extended south-westward ... to North America and
southeastward to ... the Caspian Sea.".No wonder that a special
prayer was inserted in the litanies of the West: A furore
Normannorum libera nos Domine. No wonder that Constantinople
needed its Khazar allies as a protective shield against the
carved dragons on the bows of the Viking ships, as it had needed
them a couple of centuries earlier against the green banners of
the Prophet. And, as on that earlier occasion, the Khazars were
again to bear the brunt of the attack, and eventually to see
their capital laid in ruins. .Not
only Byzantium had reason to be grateful to the Khazars for
blocking the advance of the Viking fleets down the great
waterways from the north. We have now gained a better
understanding of the cryptic passage in Joseph's letter to
Hasdai, written a century later: "With the help of the
Almighty I guard the mouth of the river and do not permit the Rus
who come in their ships to invade the land of the Arabs.... I
fight heavy wars [with the Rus]."
3
The particular brand of Vikings which the Byzantines called
"Rhos" were called "Varangians" by the Arab
chroniclers. The most probable derivation of "Rhos",
according to Toynbee, is "from the Swedish word 'rodher',
meaning rowers".7 As for "Varangian", it was used
by the Arabs and also in the Russian Primary Chronicle to
designate Norsemen or Scandinavians; the Baltic was actually
called by them "the Varangian Sea".8 Although this
branch of Vikings originated from eastern Sweden, as distinct
from the Norwegians and Danes who raided Western Europe, their
advance followed the same pattern. It was seasonal; it was based
on strategically placed islands which served as strongholds,
armouries and supply bases for attacks on the mainland; and its
nature evolved, where conditions were favourable, from predatory
raids and forced commerce to more or less permanent settlements
and ultimately, amalgamation with the conquered native
populations. Thus the Viking penetration of Ireland started with
the seizure of the island of Rechru (Lambay) in Dublin Bay;
England was invaded from the isle of Thanet; penetration of the
Continent started with the conquest of the islands of Walcheren
(off Holland) and Noirmoutier (in the estuary of the Loire)..At the eastern extreme of
Europe the Northmen were following the same blueprint for
conquest. After crossing the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland they
sailed up the river Volkhov into Lake Ilmen (south of Leningrad),
where they found a convenient island - the Holmgard of the
Icelandic Sagas. On this they built a settlement which eventually
grew into the city of Novgorod.*[Not to be confused with Nizhny
Novgorod (now re-named Gorky).] From here they forayed on
southward on the great waterways: on the Volga into the Caspian,
and on the Dnieper into the Black Sea. .The former route led through
the countries of the militant Bulgars and Khazars; the latter
across the territories of various Slavonic tribes who inhabited
the north-western outskirts of the Khazar Empire and paid tribute
to the Kagan: the Polyane in the region of Kiev; the Viatichi,
south of Moscow; the Radimishchy east of the Dnieper; the
Severyane on the river Derna, etc.*[Constantine Porphyrogenitus
and the Russian Chronicle are in fair agreement concering the
names and locations of these tribes and their subjection to the
Khazars.] These Slavs seemed to have developed advanced methods
of agriculture, and were apparently of a more timid disposition
than their "Turkish" neighbours on the Volga, for, as
Bury put it, they became the "natural prey" of the
Scandinavian raiders. These eventually came to prefer the
Dnieper, in spite of its dangerous cataracts, to the Volga and
the Don. It was the Dnieper which became the "Great
Waterway" - the "Austrvegr" of the Nordic Sagas -
from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and thus to Constantinople.
They even gave Scandinavian names to the seven major cataracts,
duplicating their Slavonic names; Constantine conscientiously
enumerates both versions (e.g., Baru-fors in Norse, Volnyi in
Slavonic, for "the billowy waterfall")..These Varangian-Rus seem to
have been a unique blend unique even among their brother Vikings
- combining the traits of pirates, robbers and meretricious
merchants, who traded on their own terms, imposed by sword and
battle-axe. They bartered furs, swords and amber in exchange for
gold, but their principal merchandise were slaves. A contemporary
Arab chronicler wrote: - In this island [Novgorod] there are men to the number of 100000, and these men constantly go out to raid the Slavs in boats, and they seize the Slavs and take them prisoner and they go to the Khazars and Bulgars and sell them there. [We remember the slave market in Itil, mentioned by Masudi]. They have no cultivated lands, nor seed, and [live by] plunder from the Slavs. When a child is born to them, they place a drawn sword in front of him and his father says: "I have neither gold nor silver, nor wealth which I can bequeath to thee, this is thine inheritance, with it secure prosperity for thyself."9
- Viking-Varangian activity, ranging from Iceland to the borders of Turkestan, from Constantinople to the Arctic circle, was of incredible vitality and daring, and it is sad that so much effort was wasted in plundering. The Northern heroes did not deign to trade until they failed to vanquish; they preferred bloodstained, glorious gold to a steady mercantile profit.10
- They are the filthiest creatures of the Lord. In the morning a servant girl brings a basin full of water to the master of the household; he rinses his face and hair in it, spits and blows his nose into the basin, which the girl then hands on to the next person, who does likewise, until all who are in the house have used that basin to blow their noses, spit and wash their face and hair in it.12
- Not one of them goes to satisfy a natural need alone, but he is accompanied by three of his companions who guard him between them, and each one of them has his sword because of the lack of security and treachery among them, for if a man has even a little wealth, his own brother and his friend who is with him covet it and seek to kill and despoil him.15
- These people are vigorous and courageous and when they descend on open ground, none can escape from them without being destroyed and their women taken possession of, and themselves taken into slavery.16
4
Such were the prospects which now faced the Khazars..Sarkel was built just in time;
it enabled them to control the movements of the Rus flotillas
along the lower reaches of the Don and the Don-Volga portage (the
"Khazarian Way"). By and large it seems that during the
first century of their presence on the scene*[Very roughly, 830
1.-930.] the plundering raids of the Rus were mainly directed
against Byzantium (where, obviously, richer plunder was to be
had), whereas their relations with the Khazars were essentially
on a trading basis, though not without friction and intermittent
clashes. At any rate, the Khazars were able to control the Rus
trade routes and to levy their 10 per cent tax on all cargoes
passing through their country to Byzantium and to the Muslim
lands. .They also exerted
some cultural influence on the Northmen, who, for all their
violent ways, had a naive willingness to learn from the people
with whom they came into contact. The extent of this influence is
indicated by the adoption of the title "Kagan" by the
early Rus rulers of Novgorod. This is confirmed by both Byzantine
and Arab sources; for instance, Ibn Rusta, after describing the
island on which Novgorod was built, states "They have a king
who is called Kagan Rus." Moreover, Ibn Fadlan reports that
the Kagan Rus has a general who leads the army and represents him
to the people. Zeki Validi has pointed out that such delegation
of the army command was unknown among the Germanic people of the
North, where the king must be the foremost warrior; Validi
concludes that the Rus obviously imitated the Khazar system of
twin rule. This is not unlikely in view of the fact that the
Khazars were the most prosperous and culturally advanced people
with whom the Rus in the early stages of their conquests made
territorial contact. And that contact must have been fairly
intense, since there was a colony of Rus merchants in Itil - and
also a community of Khazar Jews in Kiev. .It is sad to report in this
context that more than a thousand years after the events under
discussion, the Soviet regime has done its best to expunge the
memory of the Khazars' historic role and cultural achievements.
On January 12, 1952, The Times carried the following
news item:
EARLY
RUSSIAN CULTURE BELITTLED
SOVIET HISTORIAN REBUKED
Another Soviet historian has been criticized by Pravda
for belittling the early culture and development of the Russian
people. He is Professor Artamonov, who, at a recent session of
the Department of History and Philosophy at the USSR Academy of
Sciences, repeated a theory which he had put forward in a book in
1937 that the ancient city of Kiev owed a great deal to the
Khazar peoples. He pictures them in the role of an advanced
people who fell victim to the aggressive aspirations of the
Russians. ."All
these things," says Pravda, "have nothing in
common with historical facts. The Khazar kingdom which
represented the primitive amalgamation of different tribes,
played no positive role whatever in creating the statehood of the
eastern Slavs. Ancient sources testify that state formations
arose among the eastern Slavs long before any record of the
Khazars. The Khazar kingdom, far from promoting the development
of the ancient Russian State, retarded the progress of the
eastern Slav tribes. The materials obtained by our archaeologists
indicate the high level of culture in ancient Russia. Only by
flouting the historical truth and neglecting the facts can one
speak of the superiority of the Khazar culture. The idealization
of the Khazar kingdom reflects a manifest survival of the
defective views of the bourgeois historians who belittled the
indigenous development of the Russian people. The erroneousness
of this concept is evident. Such a conception cannot be accepted
by Soviet historiography." .Artamonov,
whom I have frequently quoted, published (besides numerous
articles in learned journals) his first book, which dealt with
the early history of the Khazars, in 1937. His magnum opus, History
of the Khazars, was apparently in preparation when Pravda
struck. As a result, the book was published only ten years later
- 1962 - carrying a recantation in its final section which
amounted to a denial of all that went before - and, indeed, of
the author's life-work. The relevant passages in it read: SOVIET HISTORIAN REBUKED
- The Khazar kingdom disintegrated and fell into pieces, from which the majority merged with other related peoples, and the minority, settling in Itil, lost its nationality and turned into a parasitic class with a Jewish coloration. .The Russians never shunned the cultural achievements of the East.... But from the Itil Khazars the Russians took nothing. Thus also by the way, the militant Khazar Judaism was treated by other peoples connected with it: the Magyars, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Alans and Polovtsians.... The need to struggle with the exploiters from Itil stimulated the unification of the Ghuzz and the Slavs around the golden throne of Kiev, and this unity in its turn created the possibility and prospect for a violent growth not only of the Russian state system, but also of ancient Russian culture. This culture had always been original and never depended on Khazar influence. Those insignificant eastern elements in Rus culture which were passed down by the Khazars and which one usually bears in mind when dealing with the problems of culture ties between the Rus and the Khazars, did not penetrate into the heart of Russian culture, but remained on the surface and were of short duration and small significance. They offer no ground at all for pointing out a "Khazar" period in the history of Russian culture.
5
Intensive trading and cultural interchanges did not prevent
the Rus from gradually eating their way into the Khazar Empire by
appropriating their Slavonic subjects and vassals. According to
the Primary Russian Chronicle, by 859 - that is, some twenty-five
years after Sarkel was built - the tribute from the Slavonic
peoples was "divided between the Khazars and the Varangians
from beyond the Baltic Sea". The Varangians levied tribute
on "Chuds", "Krivichians", etc. - i.e., the
more northerly Slavonic people - while the Khazars continued to
levy tribute on the Viatichi, the Seviane, and, most important of
all, the Polyane in the central region of Kiev. But not for long.
Three years later if we can trust the dating (in the Russian
Chronicle), the key town of Kiev on the Dnieper, previously under
Khazar suzerainty, passed into Rus hands. .This was to prove a decisive
event in Russian history, though it apparently happened without
an armed struggle. According to the Chronicle, Novgorod was at
the time ruled by the (semilegendary) Prince Rurik (Hröekr), who
held under his sway all the Viking settlements, the northern
Slavonic, and some Finnish people. Two of Rurik's men, Oskold and
Dir, on travelling down the Dnieper, saw a fortified place on a
mountain, the sight of which they liked; and were told that this
was the town of Kiev, and that it "paid tribute to the
Khazars". The two settled in the town with their families,
"gathered many Northmen to them, and ruled over the
neighbouring Slavs, even as Rurik ruled at Novgorod. Some twenty
years later Rurik's son Oleg [Helgi] came down and put Oskold and
Dir to death, and annexed Kiev to his sway." .Kiev soon outshone Novgorod in
importance: it became the capital of the Varangians and "the
mother of Russian towns"; while the principality which took
its name became the cradle of the first Russian state. .Joseph's letter, written about
a century after the Rus occupation of Kiev, no longer mentions it
in his list of Khazar possessions. But influential Khazar-Jewish
communities survived both in the town and province of Kiev, and
after the final destruction of their country they were reinforced
by large numbers of Khazar emigrants. The Russian Chronicle keeps
referring to heroes coming from Zemlya Zhidovskaya,
"the country of the Jews"; and the "Gate of the
Khazars" in Kiev kept the memory of its erstwhile rulers
alive till modern times.
6
We have now progressed into the second half of the ninth
century and, before continuing with the tale of the Russian
expansion, must turn our attention to some vital developments
among the people of the steppes, particularly the Magyars. These
events ran parallel with the rise of Rus power and had a direct
impact on the Khazars - and on the map of Europe. .The Magyars had been the
Khazars' allies, and apparently willing vassals, since the dawn
of the Khazar Empire. "The problem of their origin and early
wanderings have long perplexed scholars", Macartney wrote;17
elsewhere he calls it "one of the darkest of historical
riddles".18 About their origin all we know with certainty is
that the Magyars were related to the Finns, and that their
language belongs to the so-called Finno-Ugrian language family,
together with that of the Vogul and Ostyak people living in the
forest regions of the northern Urals. Thus they were originally
unrelated to the Slavonic and Turkish nations of the steppes in
whose midst they came to live - an ethnic curiosity, which they
still are to this day. Modern Hungary, unlike other small
nations, has no linguistic ties with its neighbours; the Magyars
have remained an ethnic enclave in Europe, with the distant Finns
as their only cousins. .At
an unknown date during the early centuries of the Christian era
this nomadic tribe was driven out of its erstwhile habitat in the
Urals and migrated southward through the steppes, eventually
settling in the region between the Don and the Kuban rivers. They
thus became neighbours of the Khazars, even before the latter's
rise to prominence. For a while they were part of a federation of
semi-nomadic people, the Onogurs ("The Ten Arrows" or
ten tribes); it is believed that the name "Hungarian"
is a Slavonic version of that word;19 while "Magyar" is
the name by which they have called themselves from time
immemorial..From about
the middle of the seventh to the end of the ninth centuries they
were, as already said, subjects of the Khazar Empire. It is a
remarkable fact that during this whole period, while other tribes
were engaged in a murderous game of musical chairs, we have no
record of a single armed conflict between Khazars and Magyars,
whereas each of the two was involved at one time or another in
wars with their immediate or distant neighbours: Volga Bulgars,
Danube Bulgars, Ghuzz, Pechenegs, and so on - in addition to the
Arabs and the Rus. Paraphrasing the Russian Chronicle and Arab
sources, Toynbee writes that throughout this period the Magyars
"took tribute", on the Khazars' behalf, from the Slav
and Finn peoples in the Black Earth Zone to the north of the
Magyars' own domain of the Steppe, and in the forest zone to the
north of that. The evidence for the use of the name Magyar by
this date is its survival in a number of place-names in this
region of northerly Russia. These place-names presumably mark the
sites of former Magyar garrisons and outposts."20 Thus the
Magyars dominated their Slavonic neighbours, and Toynbee
concludes that in levying tribute, "the Khazars were using
the Magyars as their agents, though no doubt the Magyars made
this agency profitable for themselves as well".21 .The arrival of the Rus
radically changed this profitable state of affairs. At about the
time when Sarkel was built, there was a conspicuous movement of
the Magyars across the Don to its west bank. From about 830
onward, the bulk of the nation was re-settled in the region
between the Don and the Dnieper, later to be named Lebedia. The
reason for this move has been much debated among historians;
Toynbee's explanation is both the most recent and the most
plausible: - We may ... infer that the Magyars were in occupation of the Steppe to the west of the Don by permission of their Khazar suzerains.... Since the Steppe-country had previously belonged to the Khazars, and since the Magyars were the Khazars' subordinate allies, we may conclude that the Magyars had not established themselves in this Khazar territory against the Khazars' will.... Indeed we may conclude that the Khazars had not merely permitted the Magyars to establish themselves to the west of the Don, but had actually planted them there to serve the Khazars' own purposes. The re- location of subject peoples for strategic reasons was a device that had been practised by previous nomad empire builders.... In this new location, the Magyars could help the Khazars to check the south-eastward and southward advance of tile Rhos. The planting of the Magyars to the west of the Don will have been all of a piece with the building of the fortress Sarkel on tile Don's eastern bank.22
7
This arrangement worked well enough for nearly half a century.
During this period the relation between Magyars and Khazars
became even closer, culminating in two events which left lasting
marks on the Hungarian nation. First, the Khazars gave them a
king, who founded the first Magyar dynasty; and, second, several
Khazar tribes joined the Magyars and profoundly transformed their
ethnic character. .The
first episode is described by Constantine in De Administrando
(circa 950), and is confirmed by the fact that the names he
mentions appear independently in the first Hungarian Chronicle
(eleventh century). Constantine tells us that before the Khazars
intervened in the internal affairs of the Magyar tribes, these
had no paramount king, only tribal chieftains; the most prominent
of these was called Lebedias (after whom Lebedia was later
named): - And the Magyars consisted of seven hordes, but at that time they had no ruler, either native or foreign, but there were certain chieftains among them, of which the principal chieftain was the aforementioned Lebedias.... And the Kagan, the ruler of Khazaria, on account of their [the Magyars'] valour and military assistance, gave their first chieftain, the man called Lebedias, a noble Khazar lady as wife, that he might beget children of her; but Lebedias, by some chance, had no family by that Khazar woman.
- After a little time had passed, the Kagan, the ruler of Khazaria, told the Magyars ... to send to him their first chieftain. So Lebedias, coming before the Kagan of Khazaria, asked him for the reason why he had sent for him. And the Kagan said to him: We have sent for you for this reason: that, since you are well-born and wise and brave and the first of the Magyars, we may promote you to be the ruler of your race, and that you may be subject to our Laws and Orders.
8
The second episode seems to have had an even more profound
influence on the Hungarian national character. At some
unspecified date, Constantine tells us,23 there was a rebellion (apostasia)
of part of the Khazar nation against their rulers. The insurgents
consisted of three tribes, "which were called Kavars [or
Kabars], and which were of the Khazars' own race. The Government
prevailed; some of the rebels were slaughtered and some fled the
country and settled with the Magyars, and they made friends with
one another. They also taught the tongue of the Khazars to the
Magyars, and up to this day they speak the same dialect, but they
also speak the other language of the Magyars. And because they
proved themselves more efficient in wars and the most manly of
the eight tribes [i.e., the seven original Magyar tribes plus the
Kabars], and leaders in war, they were elected to be the first
horde, and there is one leader among them, that is in the
[originally] three hordes of the Kavars, who exists to this
day." .To dot his
i's, Constantine starts his next chapter with a list "of the
hordes of Kavars and Magyars. First is that which broke off from
the Khazars, this above-mentioned horde of the Kavars.",
etc.24 The horde or tribe which actually calls itself
"Magyar" comes only third. .It looks as if the Magyars had
received - metaphorically and perhaps literally - a blood
transfusion from the Khazars. It affected them in several ways.
First of all we learn, to our surprise, that at least till the
middle of the tenth century both the Magyar and Khazar languages
were spoken in Hungary. Several modern authorities have commented
on this singular fact. Thus Bury wrote: "The result of this
double tongue is the mixed character of the modern Hungarian
language, which has supplied specious argument for the two
opposite opinions as to the ethnical affinities of the
Magyars."25 Toynbee26 remarks that though the Hungarians
have ceased to be bilingual long ago, they were so at the
beginnings of their state, as testified by some two hundred
loan-words from the old Chuvash dialect of Turkish which the
Khazars spoke (see above, Chapter I, 3). .The Magyars, like the Rus,
also adopted a modified form of the Khazar double-kingship. Thus
Gardezi: "... Their leader rides out with 20000 horsemen;
they call him Kanda [Hungarian: Kende] and this is the title of
their greater king, but the title of the person who effectively
rules them is Jula. And the Magyars do whatever their Jula
commands." There is reason to believe that the first Julas
of Hungary were Kabars.27 .There
is also some evidence to indicate that among the dissident Kabar
tribes, who de facto took over the leadership of the Magyar
tribes, there were Jews, or adherents of "a judaizing
religion".28 It seems quite possible - as Artamonov and
Bartha have suggested29 - that the Kabar "apostasia"
was somehow connected with, or a reaction against, the religious
reforms initiated by King Obadiah. Rabbinical law, strict dietary
rules, Talmudic casuistry might have gone very much against the
grain of these steppe-warriors in shining armour. If they
professed "a judaizing religion", it must have been
closer to the faith of the ancient desert-Hebrews than to
rabbinical orthodoxy. They may even have been followers of the
fundamentalist sect of Karaites, and hence considered heretics.
But this is pure speculation.
9
The close cooperation between Khazars and Magyars came to an
end when the latter, AD 896, said farewell to the Eurasian
steppes, crossed the Carpathian mountain range, and conquered the
territory which was to become their lasting habitat. The
circumstances of this migration are again controversial, but one
can at least grasp its broad outlines..During the closing decades of
the ninth century yet another uncouth player joined the nomad
game of musical chairs: the pechenegs.*[Or "Paccinaks",
or in Hungarian, "Bescnyk".] What little we know about
this Turkish tribe is summed up in Constantine's description of
them as an insatiably greedy lot of Barbarians who for good money
can be bought to fight other Barbarians and the Rus. They lived
between the Volga and the Ural rivers under Khazar suzerainty;
according to Ibn Rusta,30 the Khazars "raided them every
year" to collect the tribute due to them. .Toward the end of the ninth
century a catastrophe (of a nature by no means unusual) befell
the Pechenegs: they were evicted from their country by their
eastern neighbours. These neighbours were none other than the
Ghuzz (or Oguz) whom Ibn Fadlan so much disliked - one of the
inexhaustible number of Turkish tribes which from time to time
cut loose from their Central-Asiatic moorings and drifted west.
The displaced Pechenegs tried to settle in Khazaria, but the
Khazars beat them off.*[This seems to be the plausible
interpretation of Constantine's statement that "the Ghuzz
and the Khazars made war on the Pecheisegs". [Cf. Bury, p.
424.]] The Pechenegs continued their westward trek, crossed the
Don and invaded the territory of the Magyars. The Magyars in turn
were forced to fall back further west into the region between the
Dnieper and the Sereth rivers. They called this region Etel-Kz,
"the land between the rivers". They seem to have
settled there in 889; but in 896 the Pechenegs struck again,
allied to the Danube Bulgars, whereupon the Magyars withdrew into
present-day Hungary. .This,
in rough outline, is the story of the Magyars' exit from the
eastern steppes, and the end of the Magyar-Khazar connection. The
details are contested; some historians31 maintain, with a certain
passion, that the Magyars suffered only one defeat, not two, at
the hands of the Pechenegs, and that Etel-Kz was just
another name for Lebedia, but we can leave these quibbles to the
specialists. More intriguing is the apparent contradiction
between the image of the Magyars as mighty warriors, and their
inglorious retreat from successive habitats. Thus we learn from
the Chronicle of Hinkmar of Rheims32 that in 862 they raided the
Fast Frankish Empire - the first of the savage incursions which
were to terrorize Europe during the next century. We also hear of
a fearful encounter which St Cyril, the Apostle of the Slavs, had
with a Magyar horde in 860, on his way to Khazaria. He was saying
his prayers when they rushed at him luporum more ululantes
- "howling in the manner of wolves". His sanctity,
however, protected him from harm.33 Another chronicle34 mentions
that the Magyars, and the Kabars, came into conflict with the
Franks in 881; and Constantine tells us that, some ten years
later, the Magyars "made war upon Simeon (ruler of the
Danube Bulgars) and trounced him soundly, and came as far as
Preslav, and shut him up in the fortress called Mundraga, and
returned home."35 .How
is one to reconcile all these valiant deeds with the series of
retreats from the Don into Hungary, which took place in the same
period? It seems that the answer is indicated in the passage in
Constantine immediately following the one just quoted: - "... But after Symeon the Bulgar again made peace with the Emperor of the Greeks, and got security, he sent to the Patzinaks, and made an agreement with them to make war on and annihilate the Magyars. And when the Magyars went away on a campaign, the Patzinaks with Symeon came against the Magyars, and completely annihilated their families, and chased away miserably the Magyars left to guard their land. But the Magyars returning, and finding their country thus desolate and ruined, moved into the country occupied by them today [i.e. Hungary].
- The bulk of the Magyar nation, the true Finno-Ugrians, comparatively (although not very) pacific and sedentary agriculturalists, made their homes in the undulating country ... west of the Danube. The plain of the Alfld was occupied by the nomadic race of Kabars, true Turks, herdsmen, horsemen and fighters, the driving force and the army of the nation. This was the race which in Constantine's day still occupied pride of place as the "first of the hordes of the Magyars". It was, I believe, chiefly this race of Kabars which raided the Slavs and Russians from the steppe; led the campaign against the Bulgars in 895; in large part and for more than half a century afterwards, was the terror of half Europe.37
10
We can now resume the story of the Rus ascent to power where
we left it - the bloodless annexation of Kiev by Rurik's men
around AD 862. This is also the approximate date when the Magyars
were pushed westward by the Pechenegs, thus depriving the Khazars
of protection on their western flank. It may explain why the Rus
could gain control of Kiev so easily. .But the weakening of Khazar
military power exposed the Byzantines, too, to attack by the Rus.
Close to the date when the Rus settled in Kiev, their ships,
sailing down the Dnieper, crossed the Black Sea and attacked
Constantinople. Bury has described the event with much gusto: - In the month of June, AD 860, the Emperor [Michael III], with all his forces, was marching against the Saracens. He had probably gone far when he received the amazing tidings, which recalled him with all speed to Constantinople. A Russian host had sailed across the Euxine [Black Sea] in two hundred boats, entered the Bosphorus, plundered the monasteries and suburbs on its banks, and overrun the Island of the Princes. The inhabitants of the city were utterly demoralized by the sudden horror of the danger and their own impotence. The troops (Tagmata) which were usually stationed in the neighbourhood of the city were far away with the Emperor ... and the fleet was absent. Having wrought wreck and ruin in the suburbs, the barbarians prepared to attack the city. At this crisis ... the learned Patriarch, Photius, rose to the occasion; he undertook the task of restoring the moral courage of his fellow-citizens.... He expressed the general feeling when he dwelt on the incongruity that the Imperial city, "queen of almost all the world", should be mocked by a band of slaves [sic] a mean and barbarous crowd. But the populace was perhaps more impressed and consoled when he resorted to the ecclesiastical magic which had been used efficaciously at previous sieges. The precious garment of the Virgin Mother was borne in procession round the walls of the city; and it was believed that it was dipped in the waters of the sea for the purpose of raising a storm of wind. No storm arose, but soon afterwards the Russians began to retreat, and perhaps there were not many among the joyful citizens who did not impute their relief to the direct intervention of the queen of heaven.40
- Vasiliev and Paszkievicz and Vernadsky are inclined to believe that the two naval expeditions that thus converged on the Sea of Marmara were not only simultaneous but were concerted, and they even make a guess at the identity of the master mind that, in their view, worked out this strategic plan on the grand scale. They suggest that Rurik of Novgorod was the same person as Rorik of Jutland.42
11
For the next two hundred years Byzantine-Russian relations
alternated between armed conflict and treaties of friendship.
Wars were waged in 860 (siege of Constantinople), 907, 941, 944,
969- 71; and treaties concluded in 838-9, 861,911,945, 957, 971.
About the contents of these more or less secret agreements we
know little, but even what we know shows the bewildering
complexity of the game. A few years after the siege of
Constantinople the Patriarch Photius (still the same) reports
that the Rus sent ambassadors to Constantinople and - according
to the Byzantine formula for pressurized proselytizing -
"besought the Emperor for Christian baptism". As Bury
comments: "We cannot say which, or how many, of the Russian
settlements were represented by this embassy, but the object must
have been to offer amends for the recent raid, perhaps to procure
the deliverance of prisoners. It is certain that some of the
Russians agreed to adopt Christianity ... but the seed did not
fall on very fertile ground. For upwards of a hundred years we
hear no more of the Christianity of the Russians. The treaty,
however, which was concluded between AD 860 and 866, led probably
to other consequences."43 .Among
these consequences was the recruiting of Scandinavian sailors
into the Byzantine fleet - by 902 there were seven hundred of
them. Another development was the famous "Varangian
Guard", an lite corps of Rus and other nordic mercenaries,
including even Englishmen. In the treaties of 945 and 971 the
Russian rulers of the Principality of Kiev undertook to supply
the Byzantine Emperor with troops on request.44 In Constantine
potphyrogenitus' day, i.e., the middle of the tenth century, Rus
fleets on the Bosphorus were a customary sight; they no longer
caine to lay siege on Constantinople but to sell their wares.
Trade was meticulously well regulated (except when armed clashes
intervened): according to the Russian Chronicle, it was agreed in
the treaties of 907 and 911 that the Rus visitors should enter
Constantinople through one city gate only, and not more thin
fifty at a time, escorted by officials; that they were to receive
during their stay in the city as much grain as they required and
also up to Six months' supply of other provisions, in monthly
deliveries, including bread, wine, meat, fish, fruit and bathing
facilities (if required). To make sure that all transactions
should be nice and proper, black-market dealings in currency were
punished by amputation of one hand. Nor were proselytizing
efforts neglected, as the ultimate means to achieve peaceful
coexistence with the increasingly powerful Russians..But it was hard going.
According to the Russian Chronicle, when Oleg, Regent of Kiev,
concluded the treaty of 911 with the Byzantines, "the
Emperors Leo and Alexander [joint rulers], after agreeing upon
the tribute and mutually binding themselves by oath, kissed the
cross and invited Oleg and his men to swear an oath likewise.
According to the religion of the Rus, the latter swore by their
weapons and by their god Perun, as well as by Volos, the god of
cattle, and thus confirmed the treaty."45 .Nearly half a century and
several battles and treaties later, victory for the Holy Church
seemed in sight: in 957 Princess Olga of Kiev (widow of Prince
Igor) was baptized on the occasion of her state visit to
Constantinople (unless she had already been baptized once before
her departure - which again is controversial). .The various banquets and
festivities in Olga's honour are described in detail in De
Caerimonus, though we are not told how the lady reacted to
the Disneyland of mechanical toys displayed in the Imperial
throne-room - for instance, to the stuffed lions which emitted a
fearful mechanical roar. (Another distinguished guest, Bishop
Liutprand, recorded that he was able to keep his sang-froid only
because he was forewarned of the surprises in store for
visitors.) The occasion must have been a major headache for the
master of ceremonies (which was Constantine himself), because not
only was Olga a female sovereign, but her retinue, too, was
female; the male diplomats and advisers, eighty-two of them,
"marched self-effacingly in the rear of the Russian
delegation".46*[Nine kinsmen of Olga's, twenty diplomats,
forty-three commercial advisers, one priest, two interpreters,
six servants of the diplomats and Olga's special interpreter.] .Just before the banquet there
was a small incident, symbolic of the delicate nature of
Russian-Byzantine relations. When the ladies of the Byzantine
court entered, they fell on their faces before the Imperial
family, as protocol required. Olga remained standing "but it
was noticed, with satisfaction, that she slightly if perceptibly
inclined her head. She was put in her place by being seated, as
the Muslim state guests had been, at a separate table."47 .The Russian Chronicle has a
different, richly embroidered version of this state visit. When
the delicate subject of baptism was brought up, Olga told
Constantine "that if he desired to baptize her, he should
perform this function himself; otherwise she was unwilling to
accept baptism". The Emperor concurred, and asked the
Patriarch to instruct her in the faith. - The Patriarch instructed her in prayer and fasting, in almsgiving and in the maintenance of chastity. She bowed her head, and like a sponge absorbing water, she eagerly drank in his teachings.... .After her baptism, the Emperor summoned Olga and made known to her that he wished her to become his wife. But she replied, "How can you marry me, after yourself baptizing me and calling me your daughter? For among Christians that is unlawful, as you yourself must know." Then the Emperor said, "Olga, you have outwitted me."48
12
Yet in spite of the great to-do about Olga's baptism and her
state visit to Constantine, this was not the last word in the
stormy dialogue between the Greek Church and the Russians. For
Olga's son, Svyatoslav, reverted to paganism, refused to listen
to his mother's entreaties, "collected a numerous and
valiant army and, stepping light like a leopard, undertook many
campaigns"51 among them a war against the Khazars and
another against the Byzantines. It was only in 988, in the reign
of his son, St Vladimir, that the ruling dynasty of the Russians
definitely adopted the faith of the Greek Orthodox Church - about
the same time as Hungarians, Poles, and Scandinavians, including
the distant Icelanders, became converted to the Latin Church of
Rome. The broad outlines of the lasting religious divisions of
the world were beginning to take shape; and in this process the
Jewish Khazars were becoming an anachronism. The growing
rapprochement between Constantinople and Kiev, in spite of its
ups and downs, made the importance of Itil gradually dwindle; and
the presence of the Khazars athwart Rus-Byzantine trade-routes,
levying their 10 per cent tax on the increasing flow of goods,
became an irritant both to the Byzantine treasury and the Russian
warrior merchants. .Symptomatic
of the changing Byzantine attitude to their former allies was the
surrender of Cherson to the Russians. For several centuries
Byzantines and Khazars had been bickering and occasionally
skirmishing, for possession of that important Crimean port; but
when Vladimir occupied Cherson in 987, the Byzantines did not
even protest; for, as Bury put it, "the sacrifice was not
too dear a price for perpetual peace and friendship with the
Russian state, then becoming a great power".52 .The sacrifice of Cherson may
have been justified; but the sacrifice of the Khazar alliance
turned out to be, in the long run, a short-sighted policy.IN discussing Russian-Byzantine relations in the ninth and tenth centuries, I have been able to quote at length from two detailed sources; Constantine's De Administrando and the Primary Russian Chronicle. But on the Russian-Khazar confrontation during the same period - to which we now turn - we have no comparable source material; the archives of Itil, if they ever existed, have gone with the wind, and for the history of the last hundred years of the Khazar Empire we must again fall back on the disjointed, casual hints found in various Arab chronicles and geographies..The period in question extends from circa 862 - the Russian occupation of Kiev - to circa 965 - the destruction of Itil by Svyatoslav. After the loss of Kiev and the retreat of the Magyars into Hungary, the former western dependencies of the Khazar Empire (except for parts of the Crimea) were no longer under the Kagan's control; and the Prince of Kiev could without hindrance address the Slavonic tribes in the Dnieper basin with the cry, "Pay nothing to the Khazars!"1 .The Khazars may have been willing to acquiesce in the loss of their hegemony in the west, but at the same time there was also a growing encroachment by the Rus on the east, down the Volga and into the regions around the Caspian. These Muslim lands bordering on the southern half of the "Khazar Sea" - Azerbaijan, Jilan, Shirwan, Tabaristan, Jurjan - were tempting targets for the Viking fleets, both as objects of plunder and as trading posts for commerce with the Muslim Caliphate. But the approaches to the Caspian, past Itil through the Volga delta, were controlled by the Khazars - as the approaches to the Black Sea had been while they were still holding Kiev. And "control" meant that the Rus had to solicit permission for each flotilla to pass, and pay the 10 per cent customs due - a double insult to pride and pocket. .For some time there was a precarious modus vivendi. The Rus flotillas paid their due, sailed into the Khazar Sea and traded with the people around it. But trade, as we saw, frequently became a synonym for plunder. Some time between 864 and 8842 a Rus expedition attacked the port of Abaskun in Tabaristan. They were defeated, but in 910 they returned, plundered the city and countryside and carried off a number of Muslim prisoners to be sold as slaves. To the Khazars this must have been a grave embarrassment, because of their friendly relations with the Caliphate, and also because of the crack regiment of Muslim mercenaries in their standing army. Three years later - AD 913 - matters came to a head in an armed confrontation which ended in a bloodbath. .This major incident - already mentioned briefly (Chapter III, 3) has been described in detail by Masudi, while the Russian Chronicle passes it over in silence. Masudi tells us that "some time after the year of the Hegira 300 [AD 912-913] a Rus fleet of 500 ships, each manned by 100 persons" was approaching Khazar territory:
- When the ships of the Rus came to the Khazars posted at the mouth of the strait ... they sent a letter to the Khazar king, requesting to be allowed to pass through his country and descend his river, and so enter the sea of the Khazars ... on condition that they should give him half of what they might take in booty from the peoples of the sea-coast. He granted them permission and they ... descended the river to the city of Itil and passing through, came out on the estuary of the river, where it joins the Khazar Sea. From the estuary to the city of Itil the river is very large and its waters abundant. The ships of the Rus spread throughout the sea. Their raiding parties were directed against Jilan, Jurjan, Tabaristan, Abaskun on the coast of Jurjan, the naphtha country [Baku] and the region of Azerbaijan.... The Rus shed blood, destroyed the women and children, took booty and raided and burned in all directions....2a
- But the Rus turned on them and thousands of the Muslims were killed or drowned. The Rus continued many months in this sea.... When they had collected enough booty and were tired of what they were about, they started for the mouth of the Khazar river, informing the king of the Khazars, and conveying to him rich booty, according to the conditions which he had fixed with them.... The Arsiyah [the Muslim mercenaries in the Khazar army] and other Muslims who lived in Khazaria learned of the situation of the Rus, and said to the king of the Khazars: leave us to deal with these people. They have raided the lands of the Muslims, our brothers, and have shed blood and enslaved women and children. And he could not gainsay them. So he sent for the Rus, informing them of the determination of the Muslims to fight them..The Muslims [of Khazaria] assembled and went forth to find the Rus, proceeding downstream [on land, from Itil to the Volga estuary]. When the two armies came within sight of each other, the Rus disembarked and drew up in order of battle against the Muslims, with whom were a number of Christians living in Itil, so that they were about 15000 men, with horses and equipment. The fighting continued for three days. God helped the Muslims against them. The Rus were put to the sword. Some were killed and others were drowned. of those slain by the Muslims on the banks of the Khazar river there were counted about 30000....2b
- The Muslims in this city [Itil] have a cathedral mosque where they pray and attend on Fridays. It has a high minaret and several muezzins [criers who call for prayer from the minaret]. When the king of the Khazars was informed in a.H. 310 [AD 922] that the Muslims had destroyed the synagogue which was in Dar al-Babunaj [unidentified place in Muslim territory], he gave orders to destroy the minaret, and he killed the muezzins. And he said: "If I had not feared that not a synagogue would be left standing in the lands of Islam, but would be destroyed, I would have destroyed the mosque too."
2
Masudi's account of the 912-13 Rus incursion into the Caspian
ends with the words: "There has been no repetition on the
part of the Rus of what we have described since that year."
As coincidences go, Masudi wrote this in the same year - 943 - in
which the Rus repeated their incursion into the Caspian with an
even greater fleet; but Masudi could not have known this. For
thirty years, after the disaster of 913, they had lain off that
part of the world; now they felt evidently strong enough to try
again; and it is perhaps significant that their attempt
coincided, within a year or two, with their expedition against
the Byzantines, under the swashbuckling Igor, which perished
under the Greek fire. .In
the course of this new invasion, the Rus gained a foothold in the
Caspian region in the city of Bardha, and were able to hold it
for a whole year. In the end pestilence broke out among the Rus,
and the Azerbaijanis were able to put the survivors to flight.
This time the Arab sources do not mention any Khazar share in the
plunder - nor in the fighting. But Joseph does in his letter to
Hasdai, written some years later: "I guard the mouth of the
river and do not permit the Rus who come in their ships to invade
the land of the Arabs ... I fight heavy wars with them."*[In
the so cal1ed "long version" of the same letter (see
Appendix III), there is another sentence which may or may not
have been added by a copyist: "If I allowed them for one
hour, they would destroy all the country of the Arabs as far as
Baghdad..." Since the Rus sat on the Caspian not for an
hour, but for a year, the boast sounds rather hollow - though a
little less so if we take it to refer not to the past but to the
future.] .Whether or not
on this particular occasion the Khazar army participated in the
fighting, the fact remains that a few years later they decided to
deny the Russians access to the "Khazar Sea" and that
from 943 onward we hear no more of Rus incursions into the
Caspian. .This momentous
decision, in all likelihood motivated by internal pressures of
the Muslim community in their midst, involved the Khazars in
"heavy wars" with the Rus. Of these, however, we have
no records beyond the statement in Joseph's letter. They may have
been more in the nature of skirmishes except for the one major
campaign of AD 965, mentioned in the Old Russian Chronicle, which
led to the breaking up of the Khazar Empire.
3
The leader of the campaign was Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev, son
of Igor and Olga. We have already heard that he was
"stepping light as a leopard" and that he
"undertook many campaigns" - in fact he spent most of
his reign campaigning. In spite of the constant entreaties of his
mother, he refused to be baptized, "because it would make
him the laughing stock of his subjects". The Russian
Chronicle also tells us that "on his expeditions he carried
neither waggons nor cooking utensils, and boiled no meat, but cut
off small strips of horseflesh, game or beef, and ate it after
roasting it on the coals. Nor did he have a tent, but he spread
out a horse-blanket under him, and set his saddle under his head;
and all his retinue did likewise."4 When he attacked the
enemy, he scorned doing it by stealth, but instead sent
messengers ahead announcing: "I am coming upon you." .To the campaign against the
Khazars, the Chronicler devotes only a few lines, in the laconic
tone which he usually adopts in reporting on armed conflicts: - Svyatoslav went to the Oka and the Volga, and on coming in contact with the Vyatichians [a Slavonic tribe inhabiting the region south of modern Moscow], he inquired of them to whom they paid tribute. They made answer that they paid a silver piece per ploughshare to the Khazars. When they [the Khazars] heard of his approach, they went out to meet him with their Prince, the Kagan, and the armies came to blows. When the battle thus took place, Svyatoslav defeated the Khazars and took their city of Biela Viezha.4a
4
After the death of Svyatoslav, civil war broke out between his
sons, out of which the youngest, Vladimir, emerged victorious. He
too started life as a pagan, like his father, and he too, like
his grandmother Olga, ended up as a repentant sinner, accepted
baptism and was eventually canonized. Yet in his youth St
Vladimir seemed to have followed St Augustine's motto: Lord give
me chastity, but not yet. The Russian Chronicle is rather severe
about this: - Now Vladimir was overcome by lust for women. He had three hundred concubines at Vyshgorod, three hundred at Belgorod, and two hundred at Berestovo. He was insatiable in vice. He even seduced married women and violated young girls, for he was a libertine like Solomon. For it is said that Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. He was wise, yet in the end he came to ruin. But Vladimir, though at first deluded, eventually found salvation. Great is the Lord, and great his power and of his wisdom there is no end.
7
Olga's baptism, around 957 did not cut much ice, even with her
own son. Vladimir's baptism, AD 989, was a momentous event which
had a lasting influence on the history of the world..It was preceded by a series of
diplomatic manoeuvrings and theological discussions with
representatives of the four major religions - which provide a
kind of mirror image to the debates before the Khazar conversion
to Judaism. Indeed, the Old Russian Chronicle's account of these
theological disputes constantly remind one of the Hebrew and Arab
accounts of King Bulan's erstwhile Brains Trust - only the
outcome is different. .This
time there were four instead of three contestants - as the schism
between the Greek and the Latin churches was already an
accomplished fact in the tenth century (though it became official
only in the eleventh). .The
Russian Chronicle's account of Vladimir's conversion first
mentions a victory he achieved against the Volga Bulgars,
followed by a treaty of friendship. "The Bulgars declared:
'May peace prevail between us till stone floats and straw
sinks.'" Vladimir returned to Kiev, and the Bulgars sent a
Muslim religious mission to convert him. They described to him
the joys of Paradise where each man will be given seventy fair
women. Vladimir listened to them "with approval", but
when it came to abstinence from pork and wine, he drew the line. ."'Drinking,' said he,
'is the joy of the Russes. We cannot exist without that
pleasure.'"8.Next
came a German delegation of Roman Catholics, adherents of the
Latin rite. They fared no better when they brought up, as one of
the main requirements of their faith, fasting according to one's
strength. "... Then Vladimir answered: 'Depart hence; our
fathers accepted no such principle.'"9 .The third mission consisted of
Khazar Jews. They came off worst. Vladimir asked them why they no
longer ruled Jerusalem. "They made answer: 'God was angry at
our forefathers, and scattered us among the Gentiles on account
of our sins.' The Prince then demanded: 'How can you hope to
teach others while you yourselves are cast out and scattered
abroad by the hand of God? Do you expect us to accept that fate
also?'" .The fourth
and last missionary is a scholar sent by the Greeks of Byzantium.
He starts with a blast against the Muslims, who are
"accursed above all men, like Sodom and Gomorrah, upon which
the Lord let fall burning stones, and which he buried and
submerged.... For they moisten their excrement, and pour the
water into their mouths, and annoint their beards with it,
remembering Mahomet.... Vladimir, upon hearing these statements,
spat upon the earth, saying: 'This is a vile thing.'"10 .The Byzantine scholar then
accuses the Jews of having crucified God, and the Roman Catholics
- in much milder terms - of having "modified the
Rites". After these preliminaries, he launches into a long
exposition of the Old and New Testaments, starting with the
creation of the world. At the end of it, however, Vladimir
appears only half convinced, for when pressed to be baptized he
replies, "I shall wait yet a little longer." He then
sends his own envoys, "ten good and wise men", to
various countries to observe their religious practices. In due
time this commission of inquiry reports to him that the Byzantine
Service is "fairer than the ceremonies of other nations, and
we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth". .But Vladimir still hesitates,
and the Chronicle continues with a non-sequitur: ."After a year had passed,
in 988, Vladimir proceeded with an armed force against Cherson, a
Greek city...."11 (We remember that control of this
important Crimean port had been for a long time contested between
Byzantines and Khazars.) The valiant Chersonese refused to
surrender. Vladimir's troops constructed earthworks directed at
the city walls, but the Chersonese "dug a tunnel under the
city wall, stole the heaped-up earth and carried it into the
city, where they piled it up". Then a traitor shot an arrow
into the Rus camp with a message: "There are springs behind
you to the east, from which water flows in pipes. Dig down and
cut them off" When Vladimir received this information, he
raised his eyes to heaven and vowed that if this hope was
realized, he would be baptized.12 .He succeeded in cutting off
the city's water supply, and Cherson surrendered. Thereupon
Vladimir, apparently forgetting his vow, "sent messages to
the Emperors Basil and Constantine [joint rulers at the time],
saying: 'Behold, I have captured your glorious city. I have also
heard that you have an unwedded sister. Unless you give her to me
to wife, I shall deal with your own city as I have with
Cherson.'" .The
Emperors replied: "If you are baptized you shall have her to
wife, inherit the Kingdom of God, and be our companion in the
faith.".And so it
came to pass. Vladimir at long last accepted baptism, and married
the Byzantine Princess Anna. A few years later Greek Christianity
became the official religion not only of the rulers but of the
Russian people, and from 1037 onward the Russian Church was
governed by the Patriarch of Constantinople.
5
It was a momentous triumph of Byzantine diplomacy. Vernadsky
calls it "one of those abrupt turns which make the study of
history so fascinating ... and it is interesting to speculate on
the possible course of history had the Russian princes ...
adopted either of these faiths [Judaism or Islam] instead of
Christianity.... The acceptance of one or another of these faiths
must necessarily have determined the future cultural and
political development of Russia. The acceptance of Islam would
have drawn Russia into the circle of Arabian culture - that is,
an Asiatic-Egyptian culture. The acceptance of Roman Christianity
from the Germans would have made Russia a country of Latin or
European culture. The acceptance of either Judaism or Orthodox
Christianity insured to Russia cultural independence of both
Europe and Asia."13 .But
the Russians needed allies more than they needed independence,
and the East Roman Empire, however corrupt, was still a more
desirable ally in terms of power, culture and trade, than the
crumbling empire of the Khazars. Nor should one underestimate the
role played by Byzantine statesmanship in bringing about the
decision for which it had worked for more than a century. The
Russian Chronicle's naive account of Vladimir's game of
procrastination gives us no insight into the diplomatic
manoeuvrings and hard bargaining that must have gone on before he
accepted baptism - and thereby, in fact, Byzantine tutelage for
himself and his people. Cherson was obviously part of the price,
and so was the dynastic marriage to Princess Anna. But the most
important part of the deal was the end of the Byzantine-Khazar
alliance against the Rus, and its replacement by a
Byzantine-Russian alliance against the Khazars. A few years
later, in 1016, a combined Byzantine-Russian army invaded
Khazaria, defeated its ruler, and "subdued the country"
(see below, IV, 8). .Yet
the cooling off towards the Khazars had already started, as we
have seen, in Constantine Porphyrogenitus's day, fifty years
before Vladimir's conversion. We remember Constantine's musings
on "how war is to be made on Khazaria and by whom". The
passage quoted earlier on (II, 7) continues: - If the ruler of Alania does not keep the peace with the Khazars but considers the friendship of the Emperor of the Romans to be of greater value to him, then, if the Khazars do not choose to maintain friendship and peace with the Emperor, the Alan can do them great harm. He can ambush their roads and attack them when they are off their guard on their route to Sarkel and to "the nine regions" and to Cherson ... Black Bulgaria [the Volga Bulgars] is also in a position to make war on the Khazars.14
- If this passage in Constantine Porphyrogenitus's manual for the conduct of the East Roman Imperial Government's foreign relations had ever fallen into the hands of the Khazar Khaqan and his ministers, they would have been indignant. They would have pointed out that nowadays Khazaria was one of the most pacific states in the world, and that, if she had been more warlike in her earlier days, her arms had never been directed against the East Roman Empire. The two powers had, in fact, never been at war with each other, while, on the other hand, Khazaria had frequently been at war with the East Roman Empire's enemies, and this to the Empire's signal advantage. Indeed, the Empire may have owed it to the Khazars that she had survived the successive onslaughts of the Sasanid Persian Emperor Khusraw II Parviz and the Muslim Arabs.... And thereafter the pressure on the Empire of the Arabs' onslaught had been relieved by the vigour of the Khazars' offensive- defensive resistance to the Arabs' advance towards the Caucasus. The friendship between Khazaria and the Empire had been symbolized and sealed in two marriage-alliances between their respective Imperial families. What, then, had been in Constantine's mind when he had been thinking out ways of tormenting Khazaria by inducing her neighbours to fall upon her?15
6
Nevertheless, it turned out to be a short-sighted policy. To
quote Bury once more: - The first principle of Imperial policy in this quarter of the world was the maintenance of peace with the Khazars. This was the immediate consequence of the geographical position of the Khazar Empire, lying as it did between the Dnieper and the Caucasus. From the seventh century, when Heraclius had sought the help of the Khazars against Persia, to the tenth, in which the power of Itil declined, this was the constant policy of the Emperors. It was to the advantage of the Empire that the Chagan should exercise an effective control over his barbarian neighbours.16
7
During the two centuries of Kuman rule, followed by the Mongol
invasion, the eastern steppes were once more plunged into the
Dark Ages, and the later history of the Khazars is shrouded in
even deeper obscurity than their origin. .The references to the Khazar
state in its final period of decline are found mainly in Muslim
sources; but they are, as we shall see, so ambiguous that almost
every name, date and geographical indication is open to several
interpretations. Historians, famished for facts, have nothing
left but a few bleached bones to gnaw at like starving
bloodhounds, in the forlorn hope of finding some hidden morsel to
sustain them. .In the
light of what has been said before, it appears that the decisive
event precipitating the decline of Khazar power was not
Svyatoslav's victory, but Vladimir's conversion. How important
was in fact that victory, which nineteenth-century
historians*[Following a tradition set by Fraehn in 1822, in the Memnoirs
of the Russian Academy.] habitually equated with the end of
the Khazar state? We remember that the Russian Chronicle mentions
only the destruction of Sarkel, the fortress, but not the
destruction of Itil, the capital. That Itil was indeed sacked and
devastated we know from several Arab sources, which are too
insistent to be ignored; but when and by whom it was sacked is by
no means clear. Ibn Hawkal, the principal source, says it was
done by the Rus who "utterly destroyed Khazaran, Samandar
and Itil" - apparently believing that Khazaran and Itil were
different towns, whereas we know that they were one twin-town;
and his dating of the event differs from the Russian Chronicle's
dating of the fall of Sarkel which Ibn Hawkal does not mention at
all, just as the Chronicle does not mention the destruction of
Itil. Accordingly, Marquart suggested that Itil was sacked not by
Svyatoslav's Rus, who only got as far as Sarkel, but by some
fresh wave of Vikings. To complicate matters a little more, the
second Arab source, ibn Miskawayh, says that it was a body of
"Turks" which descended on Khazaria in the critical
year 965. By "Turks" he may have meant the Rus, as
Barthold maintained. But it could also have been a marauding
horde of Pechenegs, for instance. It seems that we shall never
know who destroyed Itil, however long we chew the bones..And how seriously was it
destroyed? The principal source, Ibn Hawkal, first speaks of the
"utter destruction" of Itil, but then he also says,
writing a few years later, that "Khazaran is still the
centre on which the Rus trade converges". Thus the phrase
"utter destruction" may have been an exaggeration. This
is the more likely because he also speaks of the "utter
destruction" of the town of Bulghar, capital of the Volga
Bulgars. Yet the damage which the Rus caused in Bulghar could not
have been too important, as we have coins that were minted there
in the year 976-7 - only about ten years after Svyatoslav's raid;
and in the thirteenth century Buighar was still an important
city. As Dunlop put it: - The ultimate source of all statements that the Russians destroyed Khazaria in the tenth century is no doubt IbnHawkal ... Ibn Hawkal, however, speaks as positively of the destruction of Bulghar on the middle Volga. It is quite certain that at the time of the Mongol attacks in the thirteenth century Bulghar was a flourishing cornmunity. Was the ruin of Khazaria also temporary?17
8
The first non-Arab mention of Khazaria after the fatal year
965 seems to occur in a travel report by Ibrahim Ibn Jakub, the
Spanish-Jewish ambassador to Otto the Great, who, writing
probably in 973, describes the Khazars as still flourishing in
his time.21 Next in chronological order is the account in the
Russian Chronicle of Jews from Khazaria arriving in Kiev AD 986,
in their misfired attempt to convert Vladimir to their faith. .As we enter the eleventh
century, we read first of the already mentioned joint
Byzantine-Rus campaign of 1016 against Khazaria, in which the
country was once more defeated. The event is reported by a fairly
reliable source, the twelfth-century Byzantine chronicler
Cedrenus.22 A considerable force was apparently needed, for
Cedrenus speaks of a Byzantine fleet, supported by an army of
Russians. The Khazars evidently had the qualities of a
Jack-in-the-Box, derived from their Turkish origin, or Mosaic
faith, or both. Cedrenus also says that the name of the defeated
Khazar leader was Georgius Tzul. Georgius is a Christian name; we
know from an earlier report that there were Christians as well as
Muslims in the Kagan's army. .The
next mention of the Khazars is a laconic entry in the Russian
Chronicle for the year 1023, according to which "[Prince]
Mtislav marched against his brother [Prince] Yaroslav with a
force of Khazars and Kasogians".*[The Kasogians or Kashaks
were a Caucasian tribe under Khazar rule and may or may not have
been the ancestors of the Cossacks.] Now Mtislav was the ruler of
the shortlived principality of Tmutorakan, centred on the Khazar
town of Tamatarkha (now Taman) on the eastern side of the
straights of Kerch. This, as already said, was the only Khazar
territory that the Rus occupied after their victory of 965. The
Khazars in Mtislav's army were thus probably levied from the
local population by the Russian prince. lSeven years later (AD
1030) a Khazar army is reported to have defeated a Kurdish
invading force, killed 10000 of its men and captured their
equipment. This would be added evidence that the Khazars were
still very much alive and kicking, if one could take the report
at face value. But it comes from a single twelfthcentury Arab
source, ibn-al-Athir, not considered very reliable. .Plodding on in our chronology,
anxious to pick up what morsels of evidence are left, we come
across a curious tale about an obscure Christian saint,
Eustratius. Around AD 1100, he was apparently a prisoner in
Cherson, in the Crimea, and was ill-treated by his "Jewish
master", who forced ritual Passover food on him.23 One need
not put much trust in the authenticity of the story (St
Eustratius is said to have survived fifteen days on the cross);
the point is that it takes a strong Jewish influence in the town
for granted - in Cherson of all places, a town nominally under
Christian rule, which the Byzantines tried to deny to the
Khazars, which was conquered by Vladimir but reverted later
(circa 990) to Byzantium. .They
were still equally powerful in Tinutorakan. For the year 1079 the
Russian Chronicle has an obscure entry: "The Khazars [of
Tmutorakan] took Oleg prisoner and shipped him overseas to
Tsargrad [Constantinople]." That is all. Obviously the
Byzantines were engaged in one of their cloak-and- dagger
intrigues, favouring one Russian prince against his competitors.
But we again find that the Khazars must have wielded considerable
power in this Russian town, if they were able to capture and
dispatch a Russian prince. Four years later Oleg, having come to
terms with the Byzantines, was allowed to return to Tmutorakan
where "he slaughtered the Khazars who had counseled the
death of his brother and had plotted against himself".
Oleg's brother Roman had actually been killed by the
Kipchak-Kumans in the same year as the Khazars captured Oleg. Did
they also engineer his brother's murder by the Kumans? Or were
they victims of the Byzantines' Macchiavellian game of playing
off Khazars and Rus against each other? At any rate, we are
approaching the end of the eleventh century, and they are still
very much on the scene..A
few years later, sub anno 1106, the Russian Chronicle
has another laconic entry, according to which the Polovtsi, i.e.,
the Kumans, raided the vicinity of Zaretsk (west of Kiev), and
the Russian prince sent a force out to pursue them, under the
command of the three generals Yan, Putyata and "Ivan, the
Khazar". This is the last mention of the Khazars in the Old
Russian Chronicle, which stops ten years later, in 1116..But in the second half of the
twelfth century, two Persian poets, Khakani (circa
1106-90) and the better-known Nizami (circa 1141-1203)
mention in their epics a joint Khazar-Rus invasion of Shirwan
during their lifetime. Although they indulged in the writing of
poetry, they deserve to be taken seriously as they spent most of
their lives as civil servants in the Caucasus, and had an
intimate knowledge of Caucasian tribes. Khakani speaks of
"Dervent Khazars" - Darband being the defile or
"turnstile" between the Caucasus and the Black Sea,
through which the Khazars used to raid Georgia in the good o1d
days of the seventh century, before they developed a more sedate
style of life. Did they revert, towards the end, to the unsettled
nomad-warrior habits of their youth? .After - or possibly before -
these Persian testimonies, we have the tantalizingly short and
grumpy remarks of that famed Jewish traveller, Rabbi Petachia of
Regensburg, quoted earlier on (II, 8). We remember that he was so
huffed by the lack of Talmudic learning among the Khazar Jews of
the Crimean region that when he crossed Khazaria proper, he only
heard "the wailing of women and the barking of dogs".
Was this merely a hyperbole to express his displeasure, or was he
crossing a region devastated by a recent Kuman raid? The date is
between 1170 and 1185; the twelfth century was drawing to its
close, and the Kumans were now the omnipresent rulers of the
steppes. .As we enter the
thirteenth century, the darkness thickens, and even our meagre
sources dry up. But there is at least one reference which comes
from an excellent witness. It is the last mention of the Khazars
as a nation, and is dated between 1245-7. By that time the
Mongols had already swept the Kumans out of Eurasia and
established the greatest nomad empire the world had as yet seen,
extending from Hungary to China..In
1245, Pope Innocent IVsent a mission to Batu Khan, grandson of
Jinghiz Khan, ruler of the western part of the Mongol Empire, to
explore the possibilities of an understanding with this new world
power - and also no doubt to obtain information about its
military strength. Head of this mission was the sixty-year-old
Franciscan friar, Joannes de Plano Carpini. He was a contemporary
and disciple of St Francis of Assisi, but also an experienced
traveller and Church diplomat who had held high offices in the
hierarchy. The mission set out on Easter day 1245 from Cologne,
traversed Germany, crossed the Dnieper and the Don, and arrived
one year later at the capital of Batu Khan and his Golden Horde
in the Volga estuary: the town of Sarai Batu, alias Saksin, alias
Itil. .After his return
to the west, Carpini wrote his celebrated Historica Mongolorum.
It contains, amidst a wealth of historical, ethnographical and
military data, also a list of the people living in the regions
visited by him. In this list, enumerating the people of the
northern Caucasus, he mentions, along with the Alans and
Circassians, the "Khazars observing theJewish
religion". It is, as already said, the last known mention of
them before the curtain falls. .But
it took a long time until their memory was effaced. Genovese and
Venetian merchants kept referring to the Crimea as
"Gazaria" and that name occurs in Italian documents as
late as the sixteenth century. This was, however, by that time
merely a geographical designation, commemorating a vanished
nation.
9
Yet even after their political power was broken, they left
marks of Khazar-Jewish influence in unexpected places, and on a
variety of people. .Among
them were the Seljuk, who may be regarded as the true founders of
Muslim Turkey. Towards the end of the tenth century, this other
offshoot of the Ghuzz had moved southwards into the vicinity of
Bokhara, from where they were later to erupt into Byzantine Asia
Minor and colonize it. They do not enter directly into our story,
but they do so through a back-door, as it were, for the great
Seljuk dynasty seems to have been intimately linked with the
Khazars. This Khazar connection is reported by Bar Hebracus
(1226-86), one of the greatest among Syriac writers and scholars;
as the name indicates, he was of Jewish origin, but converted to
Christianity, and ordained a bishop at the age of twenty. .Bar Hebraeus relates that
Seljuk's father, Tukak, was a commander in the army of the Khazar
Kagan, and that after his death, Seljuk himself, founder of the
dynasty, was brought up at the Kagan's court. But he was an
impetuous youth and took liberties with the Kagan, to which the
Katoun - the queen - objected; as a result Seljuk had to leave,
or was banned from the court.24 Another contemporary source, ibn-al-Adim's History of Aleppo, also speaks of Seljuk's father as "one of the notables of the Khazar Turks";25 while a third, Ibn Hassul,26 reports that Seljuk "struck the King of the Khazars with his sword and beat him with a mace which he had in his hand...." We also remember the strong ambivalent attitude of the Ghuzz towards the Khazars, in Ibn Fadlan's travellogue. .Thus there seems to have been an intimate relationship between the Khazars and the founders of the Seljuk dynasty, followed by a break. This was probably due to the Seljuks' conversion to Islam (while the other Ghuzz tribes, such as the Kumans, remained pagans). Nevertheless, the Khazar-Judaic influence prevailed for some time even after the break. Among the four sons of Seljuk, one was given the exclusively Jewish name of Israel; and one grandson was called Daud (David). Dunlop, usually a very cautious author, remarks:
- In view of what has already been said, the suggestion is that these names are due to the religious influence among the leading families of the Ghuzz of the dominant Khazars. The "house of worship" among the Ghuzz mentioned by Qazwini might well have been a synagogue.27
10
Where the historians' resources give out, legend and folklore
provide useful hints. .The
Primary Russian Chronicle was compiled by monks; it is saturated
with religious thought and long biblical excursions. But parallel
with the ecclesiastical writings on which it is based, the Kiev
period also produced a secular literature - the so-called bylina,
heroic epics or folk-songs, mostly concerned with the deeds of
great warriors and semi-legendary princes. The "Lay of
Igor's Host", already mentioned, about that leader's defeat
by the Kumans, is the best known among them. The bylina
were transmitted by oral tradition and - according to Vernadsky
"were still chanted by peasants in remote villages of
northern Russia in the beginning of the twentieth
century".28 .In
striking contrast to the Russian Chronicle, these epics do not
mention by name the Khazars or their country; instead they speak
of the "country of the Jews" (Zemlya Jidovskaya),
and of its inhabitants as "Jewish heroes" (Jidovin
bogatir) who ruled the steppes and fought the armies of the
Russian princes. One such hero, the epics tell us, was a giant
Jew, who came "from the Zemlya Jidovskaya to the
steppes of Tsetsar under Mount Sorochin, and only the bravery of
Vladimir's general, Ilya Murometz, saved Vladimir's army from the
Jews".29 There are several versions of this tale, and the
search for the whereabouts of Tsetsar and Mount Sorochin provided
historians with another lively game. But, as Poliak has pointed
out, "the point to retain is that in the eyes of the Russian
people the neighbouring Khazaria in its final period was simply
'the Jewish state', and its army was an army of Jews".30
This popular Russian view differs considerably from the tendency
among Arab chroniclers to emphasize the importance of the Muslim
mercenaries in the Khazar forces, and the number of mosques in
Itil (forgetting to count the synagogues). .The legends which circulated
among Western Jews in the Middle Ages provide a curious parallel
to the Russian bylina. .To
quote Poliak again: "The popular Jewish legend does not
remember a 'Khazar' kingdom but a kingdom of the 'Red
Jews'." And Baron comments: - The Jews of other lands were flattered by the existence of an independent Jewish state. Popular imagination found here a particularly fertile field. Just as the biblically minded Slavonic epics speak of "Jews" rather than Khazars, so did western Jews long after spin romantic tales around those "red Jews", so styled perhaps because of the slight Mongolian pigmentation of many Khazars.31
11
Another bit of semi-legendary, semi-historical folklore
connected with the Khazars survived into modern times, and so
fascinated Benjamin Disraeli that he used it as material for a
historical romance: The Wondrous Tale of Alroy. .In the twelfth century there
arose in Khazaria a Messianic movement, a rudimentary attempt at
a Jewish crusade, aimed at the conquest of Palestine by force of
arms. The initiator of the movement was a Khazar Jew, one Solomon
ben Duji (or Ruhi or Roy), aided by his son Menahem and a
Palestinian scribe. "They wrote letters to all the Jews,
near and far, in all the lands around them.... They said that the
time had come in which God would gather Israel, His people from
all lands to Jerusalem, the holy city, and that Solomon Ben Duji
was Elijah, and his son the Messiah."*[The main sources for
this movement are a report by the Jewish traveller Benjamin of
Tudela (see above, II, 8); a hostile account by the Arab writer
Yahya al-Maghribi, and two Hebrew manuscripts found in the Cairo
Geniza (see above, II, 7). They add up to a confusing mosaic; I
have followed Baron's careful interpretation (Vol. III, p.204;
Vol. IV, pp.202-4, and notes).] .These
appeals were apparently addressed to the Jewish communities in
the Middle East, and seemed to have had little effect, for the
next episode takes place only about twenty years later, when
young Menahem assumed the name David al-Roy, and the title of
Messiah. Though the movement originated in Khazaria, its centre
soon shifted to Kurdistan. Here David assembled a substantial
armed force - possibly of local Jews, reinforced by Khazars - and
succeeded in taking possession of the strategic fortress of
Amadie, north-east of Mosul. From here he may have hoped to lead
his army to Edessa, and fight his way through Syria into the Holy
Land. .The whole
enterprise may have been a little less quixotic than it seems
now, in view of the constant feuds between the various Muslim
armies, and the gradual disintegration of the Crusader
strongholds. Besides, some local Muslim commanders might have
welcomed the prospect of a Jewish crusade against the Christian
Crusaders. .Among the
Jews of the Middle East, David certainly aroused fervent
Messianic hopes. One of his messengers came to Baghdad and -
probably with excessive zeal - instructed its Jewish citizens to
assemble on a certain night on their flat roofs, whence they
would be flown on clouds to the Messiah's camp. A goodly number
of Jews spent that night on their roofs awaiting the miraculous
flight. .But the
rabbinical hierarchy in Baghdad, fearing reprisals by the
authorities, took a hostile attitude to the pseudo-Messiah and
threatened him with a ban. Not surprisingly, David al-Roy was
assassinated - apparently in his sleep, allegedly by his own
father-in-law, whom some interested party had bribed to do the
deed. .His memory was
venerated, and when Benjamin of Tudela travelled through Persia
twenty years after the event, "they still spoke lovingly of
their leader". But the cult did not stop there. According to
one theory, the six-pointed "shield of David" which
adorns the modern Israeli flag, started to become a national
symbol with David al-Roy's crusade. "Ever since,"
writes Baron, "it has been suggested, the six-cornered
'shield of David', theretofore mainly a decorative motif or a
magical emblem, began its career toward becoming the chief
national-religious symbol of Judaism. Long used interchangeably
with the pentagram or the 'seal of Solomon', it was attributed to
David in mystic and ethical German writings from the thirteenth
century on, and appeared on the Jewish flag in Prague in
1527."32 .Baron
appends a qualifying note to this passage, pointing out that the
connection between al-Roy and the six-pointed star "still
awaits further elucidation and proof". However that may be,
we can certainly agree with Baron's dictum which concludes his
chapter on Khazaria: - During the half millenium of its existence and its aftermath in the East European communities, this noteworthy experiment in Jewish statecraft doubtless exerted a greater influence on Jewish history than we are as yet able to envisage.
PART TWO
The Heritage
V
EXODUS
1
THE evidence quoted in the previous pages indicates that -
contrary to the traditional view held by nineteenth-century
historians - the Khazars, after the defeat by the Russians in
965, lost their empire but retained their independence within
narrower frontiers, and their Judaic faith, well into the
thirteenth century. They even seem to have reverted to some
extent to their erstwhile predatory habits. Baron comments: - In general, the reduced Khazar kingdom persevered. It waged a more or less effective defence against all foes until the middle of the thirteenth century, when it fell victim to the great Mongol invasion set in motion by Jenghiz Khan. Even then it resisted stubbornly until the surrender of all its neighbours. Its population was largely absorbed by the Golden Horde which had established the centre of its empire in Khazar territory. But before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centres of eastern Europe.1
2
This development is well illustrated by what one might call
the Khazar Diaspora in Hungary. .We
remember that long before the destruction of their state, several
Khazar tribes, known as the Kabars, joined the Magyars and
migrated to Hungary. Moreover, in the tenth century, the
Hungarian Duke Taksony invited a second wave of Khazar emigrants
to settle in his domains (see above, III, 9). Two centuries later
John Cinnamus, the Byzantine chronicler, mentions troops
observing the Jewish law, fighting with the Hungarian army in
Dalmatia, AD 1154.2 There may have been small numbers of
"real Jews" living in Hungary from Roman days, but
there can be little doubt that the majority of this important
portion of modern Jewry originated in the migratory waves of
Kabar-Khazars who play such a dominant part in early Hungarian
history. Not only was the country, as Constantine tells us,
bilingual at its beginning, but it also had a form of double
kingship, a variation of the Khazar system: the king sharing
power with his general in command, who bore the title of Jula or
Gyula (still a popular Hungarian first name). The system lasted
to the end of the tenth century, when St Stephen embraced the
Roman Catholic faith and defeated a rebellious Gyula - who, as
one might expect, was a Khazar, "vain in the faith and
refusing to become a Christian".3 .This episode put an end to the
double kingship, but not to the influence of the Khazar-Jewish
community in Hungary. A reflection of that influence can be found
in the "Golden Bull" - the Hungarian equivalent of
Magna Carta - issued AD 1222 by King Endre (Andrew) II, in which
Jews were forbidden to act as mintmasters, tax collectors, and
controllers of the royal salt monopoly - indicating that before
the edict numerous Jews must have held these important posts. But
they occupied even more exalted positions. King Endre's custodian
of the Revenues of the Royal Chamber was the Chamberlain Count
Teka, a Jew of Khazar origin, a rich landowner, and apparently a
financial and diplomatic genius. His signature appears on various
peace treaties and financial agreements, among them one
guaranteeing the payment of 2000 marks by the Austrian ruler
Leopold II to the King of Hungary. One is irresistibly reminded
of a similar role played by the Spanish Jew Hasdai ibn Shaprut at
the court of the Caliph of Cordoba. Comparing similar episodes
from the Palestinian Diaspora in the west and the Khazar Diaspora
in the east of Europe, makes the analogy between them appear
perhaps less tenuous..It
is also worth mentioning that when King Endre was compelled by
his rebellious nobles to issue, reluctantly, the Golden Bull, he
kept Teka in office against the Bull's express provisions. The
Royal Chamberlain held his post happily for another eleven years,
until papal pressure on the King made it advisable for Teka to
resign and betake himself to Austria, where he was received with
open arms. However, King Endre's son Bela IV, obtained papal
permission to call him back. Teka duly returned, and perished
during the Mongol invasion.*[I am indebted to Mrs St G. Saunders
for calling my attention to the Teka episode, which seems to have
been overlooked in the literature on the Khazars.]4
3
The Khazar origin of the numerically and socially dominant
element in the Jewish population of Hungary during the Middle
Ages is thus relatively well documented. It might seem that
Hungary constitutes a special case, in view of the early
Magyar-Khazar connection; but in fact the Khazar influx into
Hungary was merely a part of the general mass-migration from the
Eurasian steppes toward the West, i.e., towards Central and
Eastern Europe. The Khazars were not the only nation which sent
offshoots into Hungary. Thus large numbers of the self-same
Pechenegs who had chased the Magyars from the Don across the
Carpathians, were forced to ask for permission to settle in
Hungarian territory when they in turn were chased by the Kumans;
and the Kumans shared the same fate when, a century later, they
fled from the Mongols, and some 40000 of them "with their
slaves" were granted asylum by the Hungarian King Bela.5 .At relatively quiescent times
this general westward movement of the Eurasian populations was no
more than a drift; at other times it became a stampede; but the
consequences of the Mongol invasion must rank on this metaphoric
scale as an earthquake followed by a landslide. The warriors of
Chief Tejumin, called "Jinghiz Khan", Lord of the
Earth, massacred the population of whole cities as a warning to
others not to resist; used prisoners as living screens in front
of their advancing lines; destroyed the irrigation network of the
Volga delta which had provided the Khazar lands with rice and
other staple foods; and transformed the fertile steppes into the
"wild fields" - dikoyeh pole - as the Russians
were later to call them: an unlimited space without farmers or
shepherds, through which only mercenary horsemen pass in the
service of this or that rival ruler - or people escaping from
such rule".6 .The
Black Death of 1347-8 accelerated the progressive depopulation of
the former Khazar heartland between Caucasus, Don and Volga,
where the steppe-culture had reached its highest level - and the
relapse into barbarism was, by contrast, more drastic than in
adjoining regions. As Baron wrote: "The destruction or
departure of industrious Jewish farmers, artisans and merchants
left behind a void which in those regions has only recently begun
to be filled."7.Not
only Khazaria was destroyed, but also the Volga Bulgar country,
together with the last Caucasian strongholds of the Alans and
Kumans, and the southern Russian principalities, including Kiev.
During the period of disintegration of the Golden Horde, from the
fourteenth century onward, the anarchy became, if possible, even
worse. "In most of the European steppes emigration was the
only way left open for populations who wanted to secure their
lives and livelihood".8 The migration toward safer pastures
was a protracted, intermittent process which went on for several
centuries. The Khazar exodus was part of the general picture. .It had been preceded, as
already mentioned, by the founding of Khazar colonies and
settlements in various places in the Ukraine and southern Russia.
There was a flourishing Jewish community in Kiev long before and
after the Rus took the town from the Khazars. Similar colonies
existed in Perislavel and Chernigov. A Rabbi Mosheh of Kiev
studied in France around 1160, and a Rabbi Abraham of Chernigov
studied in 1181 in the Talmud School of London. The "Lay of
Igor's Host" mentions a famous contemporary Russian poet
called Kogan - possibly a combination of Cohen (priest) and
Kagan.9 Some time after Sarkel, which the Russians called Biela
Veza, was destroyed the Khazars built a town of the same
name near Chernigov.10 .There
is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland,
which derive from "Khazar" or "Zhid" (Jew):
Zydowo, Kozarzewek, Kozara, Kozarzow, Zhydowska Vola, Zydaticze,
and so on. They may have once been villages, or just temporary
encampments of Khazar-Jewish communities on their long trek to
the west.11 Similar place-names can also be found in the
Carpathian and Tatra mountains, and in the eastern provinces of
Austria. Even the ancient Jewish cemeteries of Cracow and
Sandomierz, both called "Kaviory", are assumed to be of
Khazar-Kabar origin. .While
the main route of the Khazar exodus led to the west, some groups
of people were left behind, mainly in the Crimea and the
Caucasus, where they formed Jewish enclaves surviving into modern
times. In the ancient Khazar stronghold of Tamatarkha (Taman),
facing the Crimea across the straits of Kerch, we hear of a
dynasty of Jewish princes who ruled in the fifteenth century
under the tutelage of the Genovese Republic, and later of the
Crimean Tartars. The last of them, Prince Zakharia, conducted
negotiations with the Prince of Muscovi, who invited Zakharia to
come to Russia and let himself be baptized in exchange for
receiving the privileges of a Russian nobleman. Zakharia refused,
but Poliak has suggested that in other cases "the
introduction of Khazar-Jewish elements into exalted positions in
the Muscovite state may have been one of the factors which led to
the appearance of the 'Jewish heresy' (Zhidovst- buyushtchik)
among Russian priests and noblemen in the sixteenth century, and
of the sect of Sabbath-observers (Subbotniki) which is
still widespread among Cossacks and peasants".12 .Another vestige of the Khazar
nation are the "Mountain Jews" in the north- eastern
Caucasus, who apparently stayed behind in their original habitat
when the others left. They are supposed to number around eight
thousand and live in the vicinity of other tribal remnants of the
olden days: Kipchaks and Oghuz. They call themselves Dagh
Chufuty (Highland Jews) in the Tat language which they have
adopted from another Caucasian tribe; but little else is known
about them.*[The above data appear in A. H. Kniper's article
"Caucasus, People of" in the 1973 printing of the Enc.
Brit., based on recent Soviet sources. A book by George
Sava, Valley of the Forgotten People (London, 1946)
contains a description of a purported visit to the mountain Jews,
rich in melodrama but sadly devoid of factual information.] .Other Khazar enclaves have
survived in the Crimea, and no doubt elsewhere too in localities
which once belonged to their empire. But these are now no more
than historic curios compared to the mainstream of the Khazar
migration into the Polish-Lithuanian regions - and the formidable
problems it poses to historians and anthropologists.
4
The regions in eastern Central Europe, in which the Jewish
emigrants from Khazaria found a new home and apparent safety, had
only begun to assume political importance toward the end of the
first millennium. .Around
962, several Slavonic tribes formed an alliance under the
leadership of the strongest among them, the Polans, which became
the nucleus of the Polish state. Thus the Polish rise to eminence
started about the same time as the Khazar decline (Sarkel was
destroyed in 965). It is significant that Jews play an important
role in one of the earliest Polish legends relating to the
foundation of the Polish kingdom. We are told that when the
allied tribes decided to elect a king to rule them all, they
chose a Jew, named Abraham Prokownik.13 He may have been a rich
and educated Khazar merchant, from whose experience the Slav
backwoodsmen hoped to benefit - or just a legendary figure; but,
if so, the legend indicates that Jews of his type were held in
high esteem. At any rate, so the story goes on, Abraham, with
unwonted modesty, resigned the crown in favour of a native
peasant named Piast, who thus became the founder of the historic
Piast dynasty which ruled Poland from circa 962 to 1370.
.Whether Abraham
Prochownik existed or not, there are plenty of indications that
the Jewish immigrants from Khazaria were welcomed as a valuable
asset to the country's economy and government administration. The
Poles under the Piast dynasty, and their Baltic neighbours, the
Lithuanians,* [The two nations became united in a series of
treaties, starting in 1386, into the Kingdom of Poland. For the
sake of brevity, I shall use the term "Polish Jews" to
refer to both countries - regardless of the fact that at the end
of the eighteenth century Poland was partitioned between Russia,
Prussia and Austria, and its inhabitants became officially
citizens of these three countries. Actually the so-called Pale of
Settlement within Imperial Russia, to which Jews were confined
from 1792 onward, coincided with the areas annexed from Poland
plus parts of the Ukraine. Only certain privileged categories of
Jews were permitted to live outside the Pale; these, at the time
of the 1897 census, numbered only 200000, as compared to nearly
five million inside the Pale - i.e., within former Polish
territory.] had rapidly expanded their frontiers, and were in
dire need of immigrants to colonize their territories, and to
create an urban civilization. They encouraged, first, the
immigration of German peasants, burghers and craftsmen, and later
of migrants from the territories occupied by the Golden
Horde,*[Poland and Hungary were also briefly invaded by the
Mongols in 1241-42, but they were not occupied - which made all
the difference to their future history.] including Armenians,
southern Slavs and Khazars. .Not
all these migrations were voluntary. They included large numbers
of prisoners of war, such as Crimean Tartars, who were put to
cultivate the estates of Lithuanian and Polish landlords in the
conquered southern provinces (at the close of the fourteenth
century the Lithuanian principality stretched from the Baltic to
the Black Sea). But in the fifteenth century the Ottoman Turks,
conquerors of Byzantium, advanced northward, and the landlords
transferred the people from their estates in the border areas
further inland.14 .Among
the populations thus forcibly transferred was a strong contingent
of Karaites - the fundamentalist Jewish sect which rejected
rabbinical learning. According to a tradition which has survived
among Karaites into modern times, their ancestors were brought to
Poland by the great Lithuanian warrior- prince Vytautas (Vitold)
at the end of the fourteenth century as prisoners of war from
Sulkhat in the Crimea.15 In favour of this tradition speaks the
fact that Vitold in 1388 granted a charter of rights to the Jews
of Troki, and the French traveller, de Lanoi, found there "a
great number of Jews" speaking a different language from the
Germans and natives.16 That language was - and still is - a
Turkish dialect, in fact the nearest among living languages to
the lingua cumanica, which was spoken in the former
Khazar territories at the time of the Golden Horde. According to
Zajaczkowski,17 this language is still used in speech and prayer
in the surviving Karaite communities in Troki, Vilna, Ponyeviez,
Lutzk and Halitch. The Karaites also claim that before the Great
Plague of 1710 they had some thirty-two or thirty-seven
communities in Poland and Lithuania. .They call their ancient
dialect "the language of Kedar" - just as Rabbi
Petachia in the twelfth century called their habitat north of the
Black Sea "the land of Kedar"; and what he has to say
about them - sitting in the dark through the Sabbath, ignorance
of rabbinical learning - fits their sectarian attitude. .Accordingly, Zajaczkowski, the
eminent contemporary Turcologist, considers the Karaites from the
linguistic point of view as the purest present-day
representatives of the ancient Khazars.18 About the reasons why
this sect preserved its language for about half a millennium,
while the main body of Khazar Jews shed it in favour of the
Yiddish lingua franca, more will have to be said later.
5
The Polish kingdom adopted from its very beginnings under the
Piast dynasty a resolutely Western orientation, together with
Roman Catholicism. But compared with its western neighbours it
was culturally and economically an underdeveloped country. Hence
the policy of attracting immigrants - Germans from the west,
Armenians and Khazar Jews from the east - and giving them every
possible encouragement for their enterprise, including Royal
Charters detailing their duties and special privileges. .In the Charter issued by
Boleslav the Pious in 1264, and confirmed by Casimir the Great in
1334, Jews were granted the right to maintain their own
synagogues, schools and courts; to hold landed property, and
engage in any trade or occupation they chose. Under the rule of
King Stephen Bthory (1575-86) Jews were granted a Parliament of
their own which met twice a year and had the power to levy taxes
on their co-religionists. After the destruction of their country,
Khazar Jewry had entered on a new chapter in its history. .A striking illustration for
their privileged condition is given in a papal breve, issued in
the second half of the thirteenth century, probably by Pope
Clement IV, and addressed to an unnamed Polish prince. In this
document the Pope lets it be known that the Roman authorities are
well aware of the existence of a considerable number of
synagogues in several Polish cities - indeed no less than five
synagogues in one city alone.*[Probably Wroclaw or Cracow.] He
deplores the fact that these synagogues are reported to be taller
than the churches, more stately and ornamental, and roofed with
colourfully painted leaden plates, making the adjacent Catholic
churches look poor in comparison. (One is reminded of Masudi's
gleeful remark that the minaret of the main mosque was the
tallest building in Itil.) The complaints in the breve are
further authenticated by a decision of the Papal legate, Cardinal
Guido, dated 1267, stipulating that Jews should not be allowed
more than one synagogue to a town..We gather from these
documents, which are roughly contemporaneous with the Mongol
conquest of Khazaria, that already at that time there must have
been considerable numbers of Khazars present in Poland if they
had in several towns more than one synagogue; and that they must
have been fairly prosperous to build them so "stately and
ornamental". This leads us to the question of the
approximate size and composition of the Khazar immigration into
Poland. .Regarding the
numbers involved, we have no reliable information to guide us. We
remember that the Arab sources speak of Khazar armies numbering
three hundred thousand men involved in the Muslim-Khazar wars
(Chapter I, 7); and even if allowance is made for quite wild
exaggerations, this would indicate a total Khazar population of
at least half a million souls. Ibn Fadlan gave the number of
tents of the Volga Bulgars as 50000, which would mean a
population of 300000-400000, i.e., roughly the same order of
magnitude as the Khazars'. On the other hand, the number of Jews
in the Polish-Lithuanian kingdorn in the seventeenth century is
also estimated by modern historians at 500000 (5 per cent of the
total population).19 These figures do not fit in too badly with
the known facts about a protracted Khazar migration via the
Ukraine to Poland-Lithuania, starting with the destruction of
Sarkel and the rise of the Piast dynasty toward the end of the
first millennium, accelerating during the Mongol conquest, and
being more or less completed in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries
- by which time the steppe had been emptied and the Khazars had
apparently been wiped off the face of the earth.*[The last of the
ancient Khazar villages on the Dnieper were destroyed in the
Cossack revolt under Chmelnicky in the seventeenth century, and
the survivors gave a further powerful boost to the number of Jews
in the already existing settlement areas of Poland-Lithuania.]
Altogether this population transfer was spread out over five or
six centuries of trickle and flow. If we take into account the
considerable influx of Jewish refugees from Byzantium and the
Muslim world into Khazaria, and a small population increase among
the Khazars themselves, it appears plausible that the tentative
figures for the Khazar population at its peak in the eighth
century should be comparable to that of the Jews in Poland in the
seventeenth century, at least by order of magnitude - give or
take a few hundred thousand as a token of our ignorance. There is
irony hidden in these numbers. According to the article
"statistics" in the Jewish Encyclopaedia, in
the sixteenth century the total Jewish population of the world
amounted to about one million. This seems to indicate, as Poliak,
Kutschera20 and others have pointed out, that during the Middle
Ages the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were
Khazars. A substantial part of this majority went to Poland,
Lithuania, Hungary and the Balkans, where they founded that
Eastern Jewish community which in its turn became the dominant
majority of world Jewry. Even if the original core of that
community was diluted and augmented by immigrants from other
regions (see below), its predominantly Khazar-Turkish derivation
appears to be supported by strong evidence, and should at least
be regarded as a theory worth serious discussion. .Additional reasons for
attributing the leading role in the growth and development of the
Jewish community in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe mainly
to the Khazar element, and not to immigrants from the West, will
be discussed in the chapters that follow. But it may be
appropriate at this point to quote the Polish historian, Adam
Vetulani (my italics): - Polish scholars agree that these oldest settlements were founded by Jewish emigres from the Khazar state and Russia, while the Jews from Southern and Western Europe began to arrive and settle only later ... and that a certain proportion at least of the Jewish population (in earlier times, the main bulk) originated from the east, from the Khazar country, and later from Kievian Russia.21
6
So much for size. But what do we know of the social structure
and composition of the Khazar immigrant community? .The first impression one gains
is a striking similarity between certain privileged positions
held by Khazar Jews in Hungary and in Poland in those early days.
Both the Hungarian and Polish sources refer to Jews employed as
mintmasters, administrators of the royal revenue, controllers of
the salt monopoly, taxcollectors and "money-lenders" -
i.e., bankers. This parallel suggests a common origin of those
two immigrant communities; and as we can trace the origins of the
bulk of Hungarian Jewry to the Magyar-Khazar nexus, the
conclusion seems self-evident. .The
early records reflect the part played by immigrant Jews in the
two countries' budding economic life. That it was an important
part is not surprising, since foreign trade and the levying of
customs duties had been the Khazars' principal source of income
in the past. They had the experience which their new hosts were
lacking, and it was only logical that they were called in to
advise and participate in the management of the finances of court
and nobility. The coins minted in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries with Polish inscriptions in Hebrew lettering (see
Chapter II, 1) are somewhat bizarre relics of these activities.
The exact purpose they served is still something of a mystery.
Some bear the name of a king (e.g., Leszek, Mieszko), others are
inscribed "From the House of Abraham ben Joseph the
Prince" (possibly the minter-banker himself), or show just a
word of benediction: "Luck" or "Blessing".
Significantly, contemporary Hungarian sources also speak of the
practice of minting coins from silver provided by Jewish
owners.22 .However - in
constrast to Western Europe - finance and commerce were far from
being the only fields of Jewish activity. Some rich emigrants
became landowners in Poland as Count Teka was in Hungary; Jewish
land-holdings comprising a whole village of Jewish farmers are
recorded, for instance, in the vicinity of Breslau before 1203;23
and in the early days there must have been Khazar peasants in
considerable numbers, as the ancient Khazar place- names seem to
indicate. .A tantalizing
glimpse of how some of these villages may have come into being is
provided by the Karaite records mentioned before; they relate how
Prince Vitold settled a group of Karaite prisoners-of-war in
"Krasna", providing them with houses, orchards and land
to a distance of one and a half miles. ("Krasna" has
been tentatively identified with the Jewish small town Krasnoia
in Podolia.)24 .But
farming did not hold out a future for the Jewish community. There
were several reasons for this. The rise of feudalism in the
fourteenth century gradually transformed the peasants of Poland
into serfs, forbidden to leave their villages, deprived of
freedom of movement. At the same time, under the joint pressure
of the ecclesiastic hierarchy and the feudal landlords, the
Polish Parliament in 1496 forbade the acquisition of agricultural
land by Jews. But the process of alienation from the soil must
have started long before that. Apart from the specific causes
just mentioned - religious discrimination, combined with the
degradation of the free peasants into serfs - the transformation
of the predominantly agricultural nation of Khazars into a
predominantly urban community reflected a common phenomenon in
the history of migrations. Faced with different climatic
conditions and farming methods on the one hand, and on the other
with unexpected opportunities for an easier living offered by
urban civilization, immigrant populations are apt to change their
occupational structure within a few generations. The offspring of
Abruzzi peasants in the New World became waiters and
restaurateurs, the grandsons of Polish farmers may become
engineers or psychoanalysts.*[The opposite process of colonists
settling on virgin soil applies to migrants from more highly
developed to under-developed regions.] .However, the transformation of
Khazar Jewry into Polish Jewry did not entail any brutal break
with the past, or loss of identity. It was a gradual, organic
process of change, which - as Poliak has convincingly shown -
preserved some vital traditions of Khazar communal life in their
new country. This was mainly achieved through the emergence of a
social structure, or way of life, found nowhere else in the world
Diaspora: the Jewish small town, in Hebrew ayarah, in
Yiddish shtetl, in Polish miastecko. All three
designations are diminutives, which, however, do not necessarily
refer to smallness in size (some were quite big small-towns) but
to the limited rights of municipal selfgovernment they enjoyed. .The shtetl should not
be confused with the ghetto. The latter consisted of a street or
quarter in which Jews were compelled to live within the confines
of a Gentile town. It was, from the second half of the sixteenth
century onward, the universal habitat of Jews everywhere in the
Christian, and most of the Muslim, world. The ghetto was
surrounded by walls, with gates that were locked at night. It
gave rise to claustrophobia and mental inbreeding, but also to a
sense of relative security in times of trouble. As it could not
expand in size, the houses were tall and narrow-chested, and
permanent overcrowding created deplorable sanitary conditions. It
took great spiritual strength for people living in such
circumstances to keep their self-respect. Not all of them did. .The shtetl, on the
other hand, was a quite different proposition - a type of
settlement which, as already said, existed only in
Poland-Lithuania and nowhere else in the world. It was a
self-contained country town with an exclusively or predominantly
Jewish population. The shtetl's origins probably date
back to the thirteenth century, and may represent the missing
link, as it were, between the market towns of Khazaria and the
Jewish settlements in Poland. .The
economic and social function of these semi-rural, semiurban
agglomerations seems to have been similar in both countries. In
Khazaria, as later in Poland, they provided a network of trading
posts or market towns which mediated between the needs of the big
towns and the countryside. They had regular fairs at which sheep
and cattle, alongside the goods manufactured in the towns and the
products of the rural cottage industries were sold or bartered;
at the same time they were the centres where artisans plied their
crafts, from wheelwrights to blacksmiths, silversmiths, tailors,
Kosher butchers, millers, bakers and candlestick-makers. There
were also letter-writers for the illiterate, synagogues for the
faithful, inns for travellers, and a heder - Hebrew for
"room", which served as a school. There were itinerant
story-tellers and folk bards (some of their names, such as Velvel
Zbarzher, have been preserved)25 travelling from shtetl
to shtetl in Poland - and no doubt earlier on in
Khazaria, if one is to judge by the survival of story-tellers
among Oriental people to our day. .Some particular trades became
virtually a Jewish monopoly in Poland. One was dealing in timber
- which reminds one that timber was the chief building material
and an important export in Khazaria; another was transport.
"The dense net of shtetls," writes Poliak,26
"made it possible to distribute manufactured goods over the
whole country by means of the superbly built Jewish type of horse
cart. The preponderance of this kind of transport, especially in
the east of the country, was so marked amounting to a virtual
monopoly - that the Hebrew word for carter, ba'al agalah*[Literally
"master of the cart".] was incorporated into the
Russian language as balagula. Only the development of
the railway in the second half of the nineteenth century led to a
decline in this trade." .Now
this specialization in coach-building and cartering could
certainly not have developed in the closed ghettoes of Western
Jewry; it unmistakably points to a Khazar origin. The people of
the ghettoes were sedentary; while the Khazars, like other
semi-nomadic people, used horse- or ox-drawn carts to transport
their tents, goods and chattel - including royal tents the size
of a circus, fit to accommodate several hundred people. They
certainly had the know-how to negotiate the roughest tracks in
their new country. .Other
specifically Jewish occupations were inn-keeping, the running of
flour mills and trading in furs - none of them found in the
ghettoes of Western Europe. .Such,
in broad outlines, was the structure of the Jewish shtetl
in Poland. Some of its features could be found in old market
towns in any country; others show a more specific affinity with
what we know - little though it is - about the townships of
Khazaria, which were probably the prototypes of the Polish shtetl. .To these specific
features should be added the "pagoda-style" of the
oldest surviving wooden shtetl synagogues dating from
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which is totally different
from both the native style of architecture and from the building
style adopted by Western Jews and replicated later on in the
ghettoes of Poland. The interior decoration of the oldest shtetl
synagogues is also quite different from the style of the Western
ghetto; the walls of the shtetl synagogue were covered
with Moorish arabesques, and with animal figures characteristic
of the Persian influence found in Magyar-Khazar artefacts (I, 13)
and in the decorative style brought to Poland by Armenian
immigrants.27 .The
traditional garb of Polish Jewry is also of unmistakably Eastern
origin. The typical long silk kaftan may have been an imitation
of the coat worn by the Polish nobility, which itself was copied
from the outfit of the Mongols in the Golden Horde - fashions
travel across political divisions; but we know that kaftans were
worn long before that by the nomads of the steppes. The skull-cap
(yarmolka) is worn to this day by orthodox Jews - and by
the Uzbeks and other Turkish people in the Soviet Union. On top
of the skull-cap men wore the streimel, an elaborate
round hat rimmed with fox-fur, which the Khazars copied from the
Khasaks - or vice versa. As already mentioned, the trade in fox
and sable furs, which had been flourishing in Khazaria, became
another virtual Jewish monopoly in Poland. As for the women, they
wore, until the middle of the nineteenth century, a tall white
turban, which was an exact copy of the Jauluk worn by Khasak and
Turkmen women.28 (Nowadays orthodox Jewesses have to wear instead
of a turban a wig made of their own hair, which is shaved off
when they get married.) .One
might also mention in this context - though somewhat dubiously -
the Polish Jews' odd passion for gefillte (stuffed) fisch,
a national dish which the Polish Gentiles adopted. "Without
fish", the saying went, "there is no Sabbath." Was
it derived from distant memories of life on the Caspian, where
fish was the staple diet? .Life
in the shtetl is celebrated with much romantic nostalgia
in Jewish literature and folklore. Thus we read in a modern
survey of its customs29 about the joyous way its inhabitants
celebrated the Sabbath: - Wherever one is, he will try to reach home in time to greet the Sabbath with his own family. The pedlar travelling from village to village, the itinerant tailor, shoemaker, cobbler, the merchant off on a trip, all will plan, push, hurry, trying to reach home before sunset on Friday evening. .As they press homeward the shammes calls through the streets of the shtetl, "Jews to the bathhouse!" A functionary of the synagogue, the shammes is a combination of sexton and beadle. He speaks with an authority more than his own, for when he calls "Jews to the bathhouse" he is summoning them to a commandment.
VI
WHERE
FROM?
1
Two basic facts emerge from our survey: the disappearance of
the Khazar nation from its historic habitat, and the simultaneous
appearance in adjacent regions to the north-west of the greatest
concentration of Jews since the beginnings of the Diaspora. Since
the two are obviously connected, historians agree that
immigration from Khazaria must have contributed to the growth of
Polish Jewry - a conclusion supported by the evidence cited in
the previous chapters. But they feel less certain about the extent
of this contribution - the size of the Khazar immigration
compared with the influx of Western Jews, and their respective
share in the genetic make-up of the modern Jewish community. .In other words, the fact that
Khazars emigrated in substantial numbers into Poland is
established beyond dispute; the question is whether they provided
the bulk of the new settlement, or only its hard core, as it
were. To find an answer to this question, we must get some idea
of the size of the immigration of "real Jews" from the
West.
2
Towards the end of the first millennium, the most important
settlements of Western European Jews were in France and the
Rhineland.*[Not counting the Jews of Spain, who formed a category
apart and did not participate in the migratory movements with
which we are concerned.] Some of these communities had probably
been founded in Roman days, for, between the destruction of
Jerusalem and the decline of the Roman Empire, Jews had settled
in many of the greater cities under its rule, and were later on
reinforced by immigrants from Italy and North Africa. Thus we
have records from the ninth century onwards of Jewish communities
in places all over France, from Normandy down to Provence and the
Mediterranean. .One group
even crossed the Channel to England in the wake of the Norman
invasion, apparently invited by William the Conqueror,1 because
he needed their capital and enterprise. Their history has been
summed up by Baron: - They were subsequently converted into a class of "royal usurers" whose main function was to provide credits for both political and economic ventures. After accumulating great wealth through the high rate of interest, these moneylenders were forced to disgorge it in one form or another for the benefit of the royal treasury. The prolonged well-being of many Jewish families, the splendour of their residence and attire, and their influence on public affairs blinded even experienced observers to the deep dangers lurking from the growing resentment of debtors of all classes, and the exclusive dependence of Jews on the protection of their royal masters.... Rumblings of discontent, culminating in violent outbreaks in 1189-90, presaged the final tragedy: the expulsion of 1290. The meteoric rise, and even more rapid decline of English Jewry in the brief span of two and a quarter centuries (1066-1290) brought into sharp relief the fundamental factors shaping the destinies of all western Jewries in the crucial first half of the second millennium.2
3
If we turn to the history of German Jewry, the first fact to
note is that "remarkably, we do not possess a comprehensive
scholarly history of German Jewry.... The Germanica Judaica
is merely a good reference work to historic sources shedding
light on individual communities up to 1238."5 It is a dim
light, but at least it illuminates the territorial distribution
of the Western-Jewish communities in Germany during the critical
period when Khazar-Jewish immigration into Poland was approaching
its peak. lOne of the earliest records of such a community in
Germany mentions a certain Kalonymous, who, in 906, emigrated
with his kinsfolk from Lucca in Italy to Mavence. About the same
time we hear of Jews in Spires and Worms, and somewhat later in
other places - Trves, Metz, Strasbourg, Cologne - all of them
situated in a narrow strip in Alsace and along the Rhine valley.
The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela (see above, II, 8)
visited the region in the middle of the twelfth century and
wrote: "In these cities there are many Israelites, wise men
and rich."6 But how many are "many"? In fact very
few, as will be seen. .Earlier
on, there lived in Mayence a certain Rabbi Gershom ben Yehuda (circa
960-1030) whose great learning earned him the title "Light
of the Diaspora" and the position of spiritual head of the
French and Rhenish-German community. At some date around 1020
Gershom convened a Rabbinical Council in Worms, which issued
various edicts, including one that put a legal stop to polygamy
(which had anyway been in abeyance for a long time). To these
edicts a codicil was added, which provided that in case of
urgency any regulation could be revoked "by an assembly of a
hundred delegates from the countries Burgundy, Normandy, France,
and the towns of Mayence, Spires and Worms". In other
rabbinical documents too, dating from the same period, only these
three towns are named, and we can only conclude that the other
Jewish communities in the Rhineland were at the beginning of the
eleventh century still too insignificant to be mentioned.7 By the
end of the same century, the Jewish communities of Germany
narrowly escaped complete extermination in the outbursts of
mob-hysteria accompanying the First Crusade, AD 1096. F. Barker
has conveyed the crusader's mentality with a dramatic force
rarely encountered in the columns of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica:8 - He might butcher all, till he waded ankle-deep in blood, and then at nightfall kneel, sobbing for very joy, at the altar of the Sepulchre - for was he not red from the winepress of the Lord?
- Imitating on a grand scale Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac, fathers slaughtered their children and husbands their wives. These acts of unspeakable horror and heroism were performed in the ritualistic form of slaughter with sacrificial knives sharpened in accordance with Jewish law. At times the leading sages of the community, supervising the mass immolation, were the last to part with life at their own hands.... In the mass hysteria, sanctified by the glow of religious martyrdom and compensated by the confident expectation of heavenly rewards, nothing seemed to matter but to end life before one fell into the hands of the implacable foes and had to face the inescapable alternative of death at the enemy's hand or conversion to Christianity.
4
The thirteenth century was a period of partial recovery. We
hear for the first time of Jews in regions adjacent to the
Rhineland: the Palatinate (AD 1225); Freiburg (1230), Ulm (1243),
Heidelberg (1255), etc.18 But it was to be only a short respite,
for the fourteenth century brought new disasters to Franco-German
Jewry. .The first
catastrophe was the expulsion of all Jews from the royal domains
of Philip le Bel. France had been suffering from an economic
crisis, to the usual accompaniments of debased currency and
social unrest. Philip tried to remedy it by the habitual method
of soaking the Jews. He exacted from them payments of 100000 livres
in 1292, 215000 livres in 1295, 1299, 1302 and 1305,
then decided on a radical remedy for his ailing finances. On June
21, 1306, he signed a secret order to arrest all Jews in his
kingdom on a given day, confiscate their property and expel them
from the country. The arrests were carried out on July 22, and
the expulsion a few weeks later. The refugees emigrated into
regions of France outside the King's domain: Provence, Burgundy,
Aquitaine, and a few other frudal fiefs. But, according to
Mieses, "there are no historical records whatsoever to
indicate that German Jewry increased its numbers through the
sufferings of the Jewish community in France in the decisive
period of its destruction".19 And no historian has ever
suggested that French Jews trekked across Germany into Poland,
either on that occasion or at any other time. lUnder Philip's
successors there were some partial recalls of Jews (in 1315 and
1350), but they could not undo the damage, nor prevent renewed
outbursts of mob persecution. By the end of the fourteenth
century, France, like England, was virtually Judenrein.
5
The second catastrophe of that disastrous century was the
Black Death, which, between 1348 and 1350, killed off a third of
Europe's population, and in some regions even two-thirds. It came
from east Asia via Turkestan, and the way it was let loose on
Europe, and what it did there, is symbolic of the lunacy of man.
A Tartar leader named Janibeg in 1347 was besieging the town of
Kaffa (now Feodosia) in the Crimea, then a Genoese trading port.
The plague was rampant in Janibeg's army, so he catapulted the
corpses of infected victims into the town, whose population
became infected in its turn. Genoese ships carried the rats and
their deadly fleas westward into the Mediterranean ports, from
where they spread inland..The
bacilli of Pasteurella pestis were not supposed to make
a distinction between the various denominations, yet Jews were
nevertheless singled out for special treatment. After being
accused earlier on of the ritual slaughter of Christian children,
they were now accused of poisoning the wells to spread the Black
Death. The legend travelled faster even than the rats, and the
consequence was the burning of Jews en masse all over
Europe. Once more suicide by mutual self-immolation became a
common expedient, to avoid being burned alive. .The decimated population of
Western Europe did not reach again its pre-plague level until the
sixteenth century. As for its Jews, who had been exposed to the
twofold attack of rats and men. only a fraction survived. As
Kutschera wrote: - The populace avenged on them the cruel blows of destiny and set upon those whom the plague had spared with fire and sword. When the epidemics receded, Germany, according to contemporary historians, was left virtually without Jews. We are led to conclude that in Germany itself the Jews could not prosper, and were never able to establish large and populous communities. How, then, in these circumstances, should they have been able to lay the foundations in Poland of a mass population so dense that at present [AD 1909] it outnumbers the Jews of Germany at the rate of ten to one? It is indeed difficult to understand how the idea ever gained ground that the eastern Jews represent immigrants from the West, and especially from Germany.20
Yet, next to the first crusade, the Black Death is most frequently invoked by historians as the deus ex machina which created Eastern Jewry. And, just as in the case of the crusades, there is not a shred of evidence for this imaginary exodus. On the contrary, the indications are that the Jews' only hope of survival on this, as on that earlier occasions, was to stick together and seek shelter in some fortified place or less hostile surroundings in the vicinity. There is only one case of an emigration in the Black Death period mentioned by Mieses: Jews from Spires took refuge from persecution in Heidelberg - about ten miles away. .After the virtual extermination of the old Jewish communities in France and Germany in the wake of the Black Death, Western Europe remained Judenrein for a couple of centuries, with only a few enclaves vegetating on - except in Spain. It was an entirely different stock of Jews who founded the modern communities of England, France and Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - the Sephardim (Spanish Jews), forced to flee from Spain where they had been resident for more than a millennium. Their history - and the history of modern European Jewry - lies outside the scope of this book. .We may safely conclude that the traditional idea of a mass-exodus of Western Jewry from the Rhineland to Poland all across Germany - a hostile, Jewless glacis - is historically untenable. It is incompatible with the small size of the Rhenish Communities, their reluctance to branch out from the Rhine valley towards the east, their stereotyped behaviour in adversity, and the absence of references to migratory movements in contemporary chronicles. Further evidence for this view is provided by linguistics, to be discussed in Chapter VII.
ON the evidence quoted in previous chapters, one can easily understand why Polish historians - who are, after all, closest to the sources - are in agreement that "in earlier times, the main bulk of the Jewish population originated from the Khazar country".1 One might even be tempted to overstate the case by claiming - as Kutschera does - that Eastern Jewry was a hundred per cent of Khazar origin. Such a claim might be tenable if the ill-fated Franco-Rhenish community were the only rival in the search for paternity. But in the later Middle Ages things become more complicated by the rise and fall of Jewish settlements all over the territories of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and the Balkans. Thus not only Vienna and Prague had a considerable Jewish population, but there are no less than five places called Judendorf, "Jew-village", in the Carinthian Alps, and more Judenburgs and Judenstadts in the mountains of Styria. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Jews were expelled from both provinces, and went to Italy, Poland and Hungary; but where did they originally come from? Certainly not from the West. As Mieses put it in his survey of these scattered communities:
- During the high Middle Ages we thus find in the east a chain of settlements stretching from Bavaria to Persia, the Causcasus, Asia Minor and Byzantium. [But] westward from Bavaria there is a gap through the whole length of Germany.... Just how this immigration of Jews into the Alpine regions came about we do not know, but without doubt the three great reservoirs of Jews from late antiquity played their part: Italy, Byzantium and Persia.2
2
There is another, very curious legend relating to the history
of Austrian Jewry. It was launched by Christian chroniclers in
the Middle Ages, but was repeated in all seriousness by
historians as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century. In
pre-Christian days, so the legend goes, the Austrian provinces
were ruled by a succession of Jewish princes. The Austrian
Chronicle, compiled by a Viennese scribe in the reign of Albert
III(1350-95) contains a list of no less than twenty-two such
Jewish princes, who are said to have succeeded each other. The
list gives not only their alleged names, some of which have a
distinctly Ural-Altaian ring, but also the length of their rule
and the place where they are buried; thus: "Sennan, ruled 45
years, buried at the Stubentor in Vienna; Zippan, 43 years,
buried in Tulln"; and so on, including names like Lapton,
Ma'alon, Raptan, Rabon, Effra, Sameck, etc. After these Jews came
five pagan princes, followed by Christian rulers. The legend is
repeated, with some variations, in the Latin histories of Austria
by Henricus Gundelfingus, 1474, and by several others, the last
one being Anselmus Schram's Flores Chronicorum Austriae, 1702
(who still seems to have believed in its authenticity).4 .How could this fantastic tale
have originated? Let us listen to Mieses again: "The very
fact that such a legend could develop and stubbornly maintain
itself through several centuries, indicates that deep in the
national consciousness of ancient Austria dim memories persisted
of a Jewish presence in the lands on the upper Danube in bygone
days. Who knows whether the tidal waves emanating from the Khazar
dominions in Eastern Europe once swept into the foothills of the
Alps - which would explain the Turanian flavour of the names of
those princes. The confabulations of mediaeval chroniclers could
evoke a popular echo only if they were supported by collective
recollections, however vague."5 .As already mentioned, Mieses
is rather inclined to underestimate the Khazar contribution to
Jewish history, but even so he hit on the only plausible
hypothesis which could explain the origin of the persistent
legend. One may even venture to be a little more specific. For
more than half a century - up to AD 955 - Austria, as far west as
the river Enns, was under Hungarian domination. The Magyars had
arrived in their new country in 896, together with the
Kabar-Khazar tribes who were influential in the nation. The
Hungarians at the time were not yet converted to Christianity
(that happened only a century later, AD 1000) and the only
monotheistic religion familiar to them was Khazar Judaism. There
may have been one or more tribal chieftains among them who
practised a Judaism of sorts - we remember the Byzantine
chronicler, John Cinnamus, mentioning Jewish troops fighting in
the Hungarian army.*[See above, V, 2.] Thus there may have been
some substance to the legend - particularly if we remember that
the Hungarians were still in their savage raiding period, the
scourge of Europe. To be under their dominion was certainly a
traumatic experience which the Austrians were unlikely to forget.
It all fits rather nicely.
3
Further evidence against the supposedly Franco-Rhenish origin
of Eastern Jewry is provided by the structure of Yiddish, the
popular language of the Jewish masses, spoken by millions before
the holocaust, and still surviving among traditionalist
minorities in the Soviet Union and the United States. .Yiddish is a curious amalgam
of Hebrew, mediaeval German, Slavonic and other elements, written
in Hebrew characters. Now that it is dying out, it has become a
subject of much academic research in the United States and
Israel, but until well into the twentieth century it was
considered by Western linguists as merely an odd jargon, hardly
worth serious study. As H. Smith remarked: "Little attention
has been paid to Yiddish by scholars. Apart from a few articles
in periodicals, the first really scientific study of the language
was Mieses's Historical Grammar published in 1924. It is
significant that the latest edition of the standard historical
grammar of German, which treats German from the point of view of
its dialects, dismisses Yiddish in twelve lines."6 .At first glance the
prevalence of German loanwords in Yiddish seems to contradict our
main thesis on the origins of Eastern Jewry; we shall see
presently that the opposite is true, but the argument involves
several steps. The first is to inquire what particular kind of
regional German dialect went into the Yiddish vocabulary. Nobody
before Mieses seems to have paid serious attention to this
question; it is to his lasting merit to have done so, and to have
come up with a conclusive answer. Based on the study of the
vocabulary, phonetics and syntax of Yiddish as compared with the
main German dialects in the Middle Ages, he concludes: - No linguistic components derived from the parts of Germany bordering on France are found in the Yiddish language. Not a single word from the entire list of specifically Moselle-Franconian origin compiled by J. A. Ballas (Beitrge zur Kunntnis der Trierischen Volkssprache, 1903, 28ff.) has found its way into the Yiddish vocabulary. Even the more central regions of Western Germany, around Frankfurt, have not contributed to the Yiddish language....7 Insofar as the origins of Yiddish are concerned, Western Germany can be written off....8 Could it be that the generally accepted view, according to which the German Jews once upon a time immigrated from France across the Rhine, is misconceived? The history of the German Jews, of Ashkenazi*[For "Ashkenazi" see below, VIII, I] Jewry, must be revised. The errors of history are often rectified by linguistic research. The conventional view of the erstwhile immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from France belongs to the category of historic errors which are awaiting correction.9
- The German colonists were at first regarded by the people with suspicion and distrust; yet they succeeded in gaining an increasingly firm foothold, and even in introducing the German educational system. The Poles learnt to appreciate the advantages of the higher culture introduced by the Germans and to imitate their foreign ways. The Polish aristocracy, too, grew fond of German customs and found beauty and pleasure in whatever came from Germany.13
- Those German Jews who reached the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania had an enormous influence on their brethren from the east. The reason why the [Khazar] Jews were so strongly attracted to them was that they admired their religious learning and their efficiency in doing business with the predominantly German cities.... The language spoken at the Heder, the school for religious teaching, and at the house of the Ghevir [notable, rich man] would influence the language of the whole community.14
4
Poliak has proposed an additional hypothesis concerning the
early origins of Yiddish, which deserves to be mentioned, though
it is rather problematical. He thinks that the "shape of
early Yiddish emerged in the Gothic regions of the Khazar Crimea.
In those regions the conditions of life were bound to bring about
a combination of Germanic and Hebrew elements hundreds of years
before the foundation of the settlements in the Kingdoms of
Poland and Lithuania."16 .Poliak
quotes as indirect evidence a certain Joseph Barbaro of Venice,
who lived in Tana (an Italian merchant colony on the Don estuary)
from 1436 to 1452, and who wrote that his German servant could
converse with a Goth from the Crimea just as a Florentine could
understand the language of an Italian from Genoa. As a matter of
fact, the Gothic language survived in the Crimea (and apparently
nowhere else) at least to the middle of the sixteenth century. At
that time the Habsburg ambassador in Constantinople, Ghiselin de
Busbeck, met people from the Crimea, and made a list of words
from the Gothic that they spoke. (This Busbeck must have been a
remarkable man, for it was he who first introduced the lilac and
tulip from the Levant to Europe.) Poliak considers this
vocabulary to be close to the Middle High German elements found
in Yiddish. He thinks the Crimean Goths kept contact with other
Germanic tribes and that their language was influenced by them.
Whatever one may think of it, it is a hypothesis worth the
linguist's attention.
5
"In a sense," wrote Cecil Roth, "the Jewish
dark ages may be said to begin with the Renaissance."17 .Earlier on, there had been
massacres and other forms of persecution during the crusades, the
Black Death, and under other pretexts; but these had been lawless
outbreaks of massviolence, actively opposed or passively
tolerated by the authorities. From the beginnings of the
Counter-Reformation, however, the Jews were legally degraded to
not-quite-human status, in many respects comparable to the
Untouchables in the Hindu caste system. ."The few communities
suffered to remain in Western Europe - i.e., in Italy, Germany,
and the papal possessions in southern France - were subjected at
last to all the restrictions which earlier ages had usually
allowed to remain an ideal"18 - i.e., which had existed on
ecclesiastical and other decrees, but had remained on paper (as,
for instance, in Hungary, see above, V, 2). Now, however, these
"ideal" ordinances were ruthlessly enforced:
residential segregation, sexual apartheid, exclusion from all
respected positions and occupations; wearing of distinctive
clothes: yellow badge and conical headgear. In 1555 Pope Paul IV
in his bull cum nimis absurdum insisted on the strict
and consistent enforcement of earlier edicts, confining Jews to
closed ghettoes. A year later the Jews of Rome were forcibly
transferred. All Catholic countries, where Jews still enjoyed
relative freedom of movement, had to follow the example. .In Poland, the honeymoon
period inaugurated by Casimir the Great had lasted longer than
elsewhere, but by the end of the sixteenth century it had run its
course. The Jewish communities, now confined to shtetl
and ghetto, became overcrowded, and the refugees from the Cossack
massacres in the Ukrainian villages under Chmelnicky (see above,
V, 5) led to a rapid deterioration of the housing situation and
economic conditions. The result was a new wave of massive
emigration into Hungary, Bohemia, `Rumania and Germany, where the
Jews who had all but vanished with the Black Death were still
thinly spread. .Thus the
great trek to the West was resumed. It was to continue through
nearly three centuries until the Second World War, and became the
principal source of the existing Jewish communities in Europe,
the United States and Israel. When its rate of flow slackened,
the pogroms of the nineteenth century provided a new impetus.
"The second Western movement," writes Roth (dating the
first from the destruction of Jerusalem), "which continued
into the twentieth century, may be said to begin with the deadly
Chmelnicky massacres of 1648-49 in Poland."19
6
The evidence quoted in previous chapters adds up to a strong
case in favour of those modern historians - whether Austrian,
Israeli or Polish who, independently from each other, have argued
that the bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of
Caucasian origin. The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not
flow from the Mediterranean across France and Germany to the east
and then back again. The stream moved in a consistently westerly
direction, from the Caucasus through the Ukraine into Poland and
thence into Central Europe. When that unprecedented
mass-settlement in Poland came into beng, there were simply not
enough Jews around in the west to account for it; while in the
east a whole nation was on the move to new frontiers. .It would of course be foolish
to deny that Jews of different origin also contributed to the
existing Jewish world-community. The numerical ratio of the
Khazar to the Semitic and other contributions is impossible to
establish. But the cumulative evidence makes one inclined to
agree with the concensus of Polish historians that "in
earlier times the main bulk originated from the Khazar
country"; and that, accordingly, the Khazar contribution to
the genetic make-up of the Jews must be substantial, and in all
likelihood dominant.THE Jews of our times fall into two main divisions: Sephardim and Ashkenazim. .The Sephardim are descendants of the Jews who since antiquity had lived in Spain (in Hebrew Sepharad) until they were expelled at the end of the fifteenth century and settled in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. They spoke a Spanish-Hebrew dialect, Ladino (see VII, 3), and preserved their own traditions and religious rites. In the 1960s, the number of Sephardim was estimated at 500000. .The Ashkenazim, at the same period, numbered about eleven million. Thus, in common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew. But the term is misleading, for the Hebrew word Ashkenaz was, in mediaeval rabbinical literature, applied to Germany - thus contributing to the legend that modern Jewry originated on the Rhine. There is, however, no other term to refer to the non-Sephardic majority of contemporary Jewry. .For the sake of piquantry it be mentioned that the Ashkenaz of the Bible refers to a people living somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Ararat and Armenia. The name occurs in Genesis 10, 3 and I Chronciles 1, 6, as one of the sons of Gomer, who was a son of Japheth. Ashkenaz is also a brother of Togarmah (and a nephew of Magog) whom the Khazars, according to King Joseph, claimed as their ancestor (see above II, 5) But worse was to come. For Ashkenaz is also named in Jeremiah 51, 27, where the prophet calls his people and their allies to rise and destroy Babylon: "Call thee upon the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz." This passage was interpreted by the famous Saadiah Gaon, spiritual leader of Oriental Jewry in the tenth century, as a prophecy relating to his own times: Babylon symbolized the Caliphate of Baghdad, and the Ashkenaz who were to attack it were either the Khazars themselves or some allied tribe. Accordingly, says Poliak,1 some learned Khazar Jews, who heard of the Gaon's ingenious arguments, called themselves Ashkenazim when they emigrated to Poland. It does not prove anything, but it adds to the confusion.
2
Summing up a very old and bitter controversy in a laconic
paragraph, Raphael Patai wrote:2 - The findings of physical anthropology show that, contrary to popular view, there is no Jewish race. Anthropometric measurements of Jewish groups in many parts of the world indicate that they differ greatly from one another with respect to all the important physical characteristics - stature, weight, skin colour, cephalic index, facial index, blood groups, etc.
- Thus despite the view usually held, the Jewish people is racially heterogeneous; its constant migrations and its relations - voluntary or otherwise - with the widest variety of nations and peoples have brought about such a degree of crossbreeding that the so-called people of Israel can produce examples of traits typical of every people. For proof it will suffice to compare the rubicund, sturdy, heavily-built Rotterdam Jew with his co- religionist, say, in Salonika with gleaming eyes in a sickly face and skinny, high-strung physique. Hence, so far as our knowledge goes, we can assert that Jews as a whole display as great a degree of morphological disparity among themselves as could be found between members of two or more different races.3
- With regard to blood type, Jewish groups show considerable differences among themselves and marked similarities to the Gentile environment. The Hirszfeld "biochemical index"
- (A+AB)
(B+AB) - can be used most conveniently to express this. A few typical examples are: German Jews 2.74, German Gentiles 2.63; Rumanian Jews 1.54, Rumanian Gentiles 1.55; Polish Jews 1.94, Polish Gentiles 1.55; Moroccan Jews 1.63, Moroccan Gentiles 1.63; Iraqi Jews 1.22, Iraqi Gentiles 1.37; Turkistan Jews 0.97, Turkistan Gentiles 0.99.12
Ga-Ja
and:
Ga-Gb~ Ja-Jb
That is to say that, broadly speaking, the difference in
respect of anthropological criteria between Gentiles (Ga) and
Jews (Ja) in a given country (a) is smaller than the difference
between Jews in different countries (a and b); and the difference
between Gentiles in countries a and b is similar to the
difference between Jews in a and b. .It seems appropriate to wind
up this section with another quotation from Harry Shapiro's
contribution to the UNESCO series - "The Jewish People: A
Biological History":13 and:
Ga-Gb~ Ja-Jb
- The wide range of variation between Jewish populations in their physical characteristics and the diversity of the gene frequencies of their blood groups render any unified racial classification for them a contradiction in terms. For although modern racial theory admits some degree of polymorphism or variation within a racial group, it does not permit distinctly different groups, measured by its own criteria of race, to be identified as one. To do so would make the biological purposes of racial classification futile and the whole procedure arbitrary and meaningless. Unfortunately, this subject is rarely wholly divorced from non-biological considerations, and despite the evidence efforts continue to be made to somehow segregate the Jews as a distinct racial entity.
3
How did this twin-phenomenon - diversity in somatic features
and conformity to the host-nation - come about? The geneticists'
obvious answer is: through miscegenation combined with selective
pressures. ."This",
writes Fishberg, "is indeed the crucial point in the
anthropology of the Jews: are they of pure race, modified more or
less by environmental influences, or are they a religious sect
composed of racial elements acquired by proselytism and
intermarriage during their migration in various parts of the
world?" And he leaves his readers in no doubt about the
answer:14 - Beginning with Biblical evidence and traditions, it appears that even in the beginning of the formation of the tribe of Israel they were already composed of various racial elements.... We find in Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine at that time many races - the Amorites, who were blondes, dolichocephalic, and tall; the Hittites, a dark-complexioned race, probably of Mongoloid type; the Cushites, a negroid race; and many others. With all these the ancient Hebrews intermarried, as can be seen in many passages in the Bible.
- There is every reason to believe that in Spain and Portugal today there is a strong tincture of the blood of these Jewish converts in Iberian veins, especially in the upper and middle classes. Yet the most acute psychoanalyst would find it difficult, if samples of living upper-and middle-class Spanish and Portuguese were presented to him, to detect who had Jewish ancestors.19
- Such violent infusion of Gentile blood into the veins of the flock of Israel has been especially frequent in Slavonic countries. One of the favourite methods of the Cossacks to wring out money from the Jews was to take a large number of prisoners, knowing well that the Jews would ransom them. That the women thus ransomed were violated by these semi-savage tribes goes without saying. In fact, the "Council of the Four Lands", at its session in the winter of 1650, had to take cognizance of the poor women and children born to them from Cossack husbands during captivity, and thus restore order in the family and social life of the Jews. Similar outrages were ... again perpetrated on Jewish women in Russia during the massacres in 1903-5.22
4
And yet - to return to the paradox - many people, who are
neither racialists nor anti-Semites, are convinced that they are
able to recognize a Jew at a single glance. How is this possible
if Jews are such a hybrid lot as history and anthropology show
them to be? .Part of the answer, I think, was given by Ernest Renan
in 1883: "Il n'y a pas un type juif il y a des types
juifs."23 The type of Jew who can be recognized "at a
glance" is one particular type among many others. But only a
small fraction of fourteen million Jews belong to that particular
type, and those who appear to belong to it are by no means always
Jews. One of the most prominent features - literally and metaphorically -
which is said to characterize that particular type is the nose,
variously described as Semitic, aquiline, hooked, or resembling
the beak of an eagle (bec d'aigle). But, surprisingly, among 2836
Jews in New York City, Fishberg found that only 14 per cent -
i.e., one person in seven - had a hooked nose; while 57 per cent
were straight-nosed, 20 per cent were snub-nosed and 6.5 per cent
had "flat and broad noses".24.Other anthropologists came up
with smiilar results regarding Semitic noses in Poland and the
Ukraine.25 Moreover, among true Semites, such as pure-bred
Bedoums, this form of nose does not seem to occur at all.26
On the other hand, it is "very frequently met among the
various Caucasian tribes, and also in Asia Minor. Among the
indigenous races in this region, such as the Armenians,
Georgians, Ossets, Lesghians, Aissors, and also the Syrians,
aquiline noses are the rule. Among the people living in
Mediterranean countries of Europe, as the Greeks, Italians,
French, Spanish and Portuguese, the aquiline nose is also more
frequently encountered than among the Jews of Eastern Europe. The
North American Indians also very often have 'Jewish'
noses."27 .Thus the
nose alone is not a very safe guide to identification. Only a
minority - a particular type of Jew - seems to have a convex
nose, and lots of other ethnic groups also have it. Yet intuition
tells one that the anthropologists' statistics must be somehow
wrong. An ingenious way out of this conundrum was suggested by
Beddoc and Jacobs, who maintained that the "Jewish
nose" need not be really convex in profile, and may yet give
the impression of being "hooked", due to a peculiar
"tucking up of the wings", an infolding of the
nostrils.  |
To prove his point that it is this "nostrility" which provides the illusion of beakedness, Jacobs invites his readers "to write a figure 6 with a long tail (Fig 1); now remove the turn of the twist, as in Fig 2, and much of the Jewishness disappears; and it vanishes entirely when we draw the lower continuation horizontally, as in Fig 3". |
5
A further source of confusion is the extreme difficulty of
separating hereditary characteristics from those shaped by the
social background and other factors in the environment. We have
come across this problem when discussing bodily stature as an
alleged racial criterion; but the influence of social factors on
physiognomy, conduct, speech, gesture and costume works in
subtler and more complex ways in assembling the Jewish identikit.
Clothing (plus coiffure) is the most obvious of these factors.
Fit out anybody with long corkscrew sidelocks, skull-cap,
broad-rimmed black hat and long black kaftan, and you recognize
at a glance the orthodox Jewish type; whatever his nostrility, he
will look Jewish. There are other less drastic indicators among
the sartorial preferences of certain types of Jews of certain
social classes, combined with accents and mannerisms of speech,
gesture and social behaviour. .It
may be a welcome diversion to get away for a moment from the
Jews, and listen to a French writer describing how his
compatriots can tell an Englishman "at a glance".
Michel Leiris, apart from being an eminent writer, is Director of
Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
and Staff Member of the Muse de l'Homme: - It is ... absurd to talk about an English "race" or even to regard the English as being of the "Nordic" race. In point of fact, history teaches that, like all the people of Europe, the English people has become what it is through successive contributions of different peoples. England is a Celtic country, partially colonized by successive waves of Saxons, Danes and Normans from France, with some addition of Roman stock from the age of Julius Caesar onwards. Moreover, while an Englishman can be identified by his way of dressing, or even by his behaviour, it is impossible to tell that he is an Englishman merely from his physical appearance. Among the English, as among other Europeans, there are both fair people and dark, tall men and short, dolichocephalics and brachycephalics. It may be claimed that an Englishman can be readily identified from certain external characteristics which give him a "look" of his own: restraint in gesture (unlike the conventional gesticulating southerner), gait and facial expression, all expressing what is usually included under the rather vague term of "phlegm". However, anyone who made this claim would be likely to be found at fault in many instances, for by no means all the English have these characteristics, and even if they are the characteristics of the "typical Englishman", the fact would still remain that these outward characteristics are not "physique" in the true sense: bodily attitudes and motions and expressions of the face all come under the heading of behaviour; and being habits determined by the subject's social background, are cultural, not "natural". Moreover, though loosely describable as "traits", they typify not a whole nation, but a particular social group within it and thus cannot be included among the distinctive marks of race.29
6
In any discussion of the biological and social inheritance of
the Jews, the shadow of the ghetto must loom large. The Jews of
Europe and America, and even of North Africa, are children of the
ghetto, at no more than four or five generations removed.
Whatever their geographical origin, within the ghetto-walls they
lived everywhere in more or less the same milieu,
subjected for several centuries to the same formative, or
deformative, influences. .From
the geneticist's point of view, we can distinguish three such
major influences: inbreeding, genetic drift, selection. .Inbreeding may have
played, at a different period, as large a part in Jewish racial
history as its opposite, hybridization. From biblical times to
the era of enforced segregation, and again in modern times,
miscegenation was the dominant trend. In between, there stretched
three to five centuries (according to country) of isolation and
inbreeding - both in the strict sense of consanguinous marriages
and in the broader sense of endogamy within a small, segregated
group. Inbreeding carries the danger of bringing deleterious
recessive genes together and allowing them to take effect. The
high incidence of congenital idiocy among Jews has been known for
a long time,31 and was in all probability a result of protracted
inbreeding - and not, as some anthropologists asserted, a Semitic
racial peculiarity. Mental and physical malformations are
conspicuously frequent in remote Alpine villages, where most of
the tombstones in the churchyard show one of half a dozen family
names. There are no Cohens or Levys amongst them..But inbreeding may also
produce champion race-horses through favourable gene
combinations. Perhaps it contributed to the production of both
cretins and geniuses among the children of the ghetto. It reminds
one of Chaim Weizmann's dictum: "The Jews are like other
people, only more so." But genetics has little information
to offer in this field. .Another
process which may have profoundly affected the people in the
ghetto is "genetic drift" (also known as the
Sewall Wright effect). It refers to the loss of hereditary traits
in small, isolated populations, either because none of its
founding members happened to possess the corresponding genes, or
because only a few possessed them but failed to transmit them to
the next generation. Genetic drift can thus produce considerable
transformations in the hereditary characteristics of small
communities. .The selective
pressures active within the ghetto walls must have been of
an intensity rarely encountered in history. For one thing, since
the Jews were debarred from agriculture, they became completely
urbanized, concentrated in towns or shtetls, which
became increasingly overcrowded. As a result, to quote Shapiro,
"the devastating epidemics that swept mediaeval cities and
towns, would in the long run have been more selective on Jewish
populations than on any others, leaving them with progressively
greater immunity as time went on ... and their modern descendants
would, therefore, represent the survivors of a rigorous and
specific selective process."32 This, he thinks, may account
for the rarity of tuberculosis among Jews, and their relative
longevity (amply illustrated by statistics collected by
Fishberg). .The hostile
pressures surrounding the ghetto ranged from cold contempt to
sporadic acts of violence to organized pogroms. Several centuries
of living in such conditions must have favoured the survival of
the glibbest, the most pliant and mentally resilient; in a word,
the ghetto type. Whether such psychological traits are based on
hereditary dispositions on which the selective process operates,
or are transmitted by social inheritance through childhood
conditioning, is a question still hotly disputed among
anthropologists. We do not even know to what extent a high IQ is
attributable to heredity, and to what extent to milieu.
Take, for instance, the Jews' once proverbial abstemiousness
which some authorities on alcoholism regarded as a racial
trait.33 But one can just as well interpret it as another
inheritance from the ghetto, the unconscious residue of living
for centuries under precarious conditions which made it dangerous
to lower one's guard; the Jew with the yellow star on his back
had to remain cautious and sober, while watching with amused
contempt the antics of the "drunken goy". Revulsion
against alcohol and other forms of debauch was instilled from
parent to child in successive generations - until the memories of
the ghetto faded, and with progressive assimilation, particularly
in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the alcohol intake progressively
increased. Thus abstemiousness, like so many other Jewish
characteristics, turned out to be, after all, a matter of social
and not biological, inheritance. .Lastly,
there is yet another evolutionary process - sexual selection -
which may have contributed in producing the traits which we have
come to regard as typically Jewish. Ripley seems to have been the
first to suggest this (his italics): "The Jew is radically
mixed in the line of racial descent; he is, on the other
hand, the legitimate heir to all Judaism as a matter of choice....
It affected every detail of their life. Why should it not also
react upon their ideal of physical beauty? and why not influence
their sexual preferences, as well as determine their choice in
marriage? Its results thus became accentuated through
heredity."34 .Ripley
did not inquire into the ghetto's "ideal of physical
beauty". But Fishberg did, and came up with an appealing
suggestion: "To the strictly orthodox Jew in Eastern Europe,
a strong muscular person is an Esau. The ideal of a son of Jacob
was during the centuries before the middle of the nineteenth
century, 'a silken young man'."35 This was a delicate,
anaemic, willowy youth with a wistful expression, all brains and
no brawn. .But, he
continues, "in Western Europe and America there is at
present a strong tendency in the opposite direction. Many Jews
are proud of the fact that they do not look like Jews.
Considering this, it must be acknowledged that there is hardly a
glowing future for the so-called 'Jewish' cast of
countenance."36 .Least
of all, we may add, among young Israelis. 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 - is of Khazar-Turkish, rather than Semitic, origin. .In this 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. .From the anthropologist's point of view, two groups of facts militate against this belief: the wide diversity of Jews with regard to physical characteristics, and their similarity to the Gentile population amidst whom they live. Both are reflected in the statistics about bodily height, cranial index, blood-groups, hair and eye colour, etc. Whichever of these anthropological criteria is taken as an indicator, it shows a greater similarity between Jews and their Gentile host-nation than between Jews living in different countries. To sum up this situaton, I have suggested the formulae: Ga-Ja~ Ja-Jb..The obvious biological explanation for both phenomena is miscegenation, which took different forms in different historical situations: intermarriage, large-scale proselytizing, rape as a constant (legalized or tolerated) accompaniment of war and pogrom. .The belief that, notwithstanding the statistical data, there exists a recognizable Jewish type is based largely, but not entirely on various misconceptions. It ignores the fact that features regarded as typically Jewish by comparison with nordic people cease to appear so in a Mediterranean environment; it is unaware of the impact of the social environment on physique and countenance; and it confuses biological with social inheritance. .Nevertheless, there exist certain hereditary traits which characterize a certain type of contemporary Jew. In the light of modern population-genetics, these can to a large degree be attributed to processes which operated for several centuries in the segregated conditions of the ghetto: inbreeding, genetic drift, selective pressure. The last-mentioned operated in several ways: natural selection (e.g., through epidemics), sexual selection and, more doubtfully, the selection of character-features favouring survival within the ghetto walls. lIn addition to these, social heredity, through childhood conditioning, acted as a powerful formative and deformative factor. .Each of these processes contributed to the emergence of the ghetto type. In the post-ghetto period it became progressively diluted. As for the genetic composition and physical appearance of the pre-ghetto stock, we know next to nothing. In the view presented in this book, this "original stock" was predominantly Turkish mixed to an unknown extent with ancient Palestinian and other elements. Nor is it possible to tell which of the so-called typical features, such as the "Jewish nose", is a product of sexual selection in the ghetto, or the manifestation of a particularly "persistent" tribal gene. Since "nostrility" is frequent among Caucasian peoples, and infrequent among the Semitic Bedouins, we have one more pointer to the dominant role played by the "thirteenth tribe" in the biological history of the Jews.
Appendices
APPENDIX I
A NOTE ON SPELLING
THE spelling in this book is consistently inconsistent. It is
consistent in so far as, where I have quoted other authors, I
have preserved their own spelling of proper names (what else can
you do?); this led to the apparent inconsistency that the same
person, town or tribe is often spelt differently in different
passages. Hence Kazar, Khazar, Chazar, Chozar, Chozr, etc.; but
also Ibn Fadlan and ibn-Fadlan; Al Masudi and al-Masudi. As for
my own text, I have adopted that particular spelling which seemed
to me the least bewildering to English-speaking readers who do
not happen to be professional orientalists. .T. E. Lawrence was a brilliant
orientalist, but he was as ruthless in his spelling as he was in
raiding Turkish garrisons. His brother, A. W. Lawrence, explained
in his preface to Seven Pillars of Wisdom: APPENDIX I
A NOTE ON SPELLING
- The spelling of Arabic names varies greatly in all editions, and I have made no alterations. It should be explained that only three vowels are recognized in Arabic, and that some of the consonants have no equivalents in English. The general practice of orientalists in recent years has been to adopt one of the various sets of conventional signs for the letters and vowel marks of the Arabic alphabet, transliterating Mohamed as Muhammad, muezzin as mu'edhdhin, and Koran as Qur'an or Kur'an. This method is useful to those who know what it means but this book follows the old fashion of writing the best phonetic approximations according to ordinary English spelling.
- Of the difficulties arising from an irregular combination of letters, the confusion of one word with another, and the total omission, in some lines, of the diacritical points, I should not complain, because habit and persevering attention have enabled me to surmount them in passages of general description, or sentences of common construction; but in the names of persons or of places never before seen or heard of, and which the context could not assist in deciphering, when the diacritical points were omitted, conjecture alone could supply them, or collation with a more perfect manuscript.... .Notwithstanding what I have just said, and although the most learned writers on Hebrew, Arabick, and Persian Literature, have made observations on the same subject, it may perhaps, be necessary to demonstrate, by a particular example, the extraordinary influence of those diacritical points [frequently omitted by copyists]. .One example will suffice - Let us suppose the three letters forming the name Tibbet to be divested of their diacritical points. The first character may be rendered, by the application of one point above, an N; of two points a T, of three points a TH or S; if one point is placed under, it becomes a B - if two points, a Y and if three points, a P. In like manner the second character may be affected, and the third character may be, according to the addition of points, rendered a B, P, T, and TH, or S.*[The original of this quote is enlivened by letters in Persian script, which I have omitted in kindness to the publishers.]
OUR knowledge of Khazar history is mainly derived from Arab, Byzantine, Russian and Hebrew sources, with corroborative evidence of Persian, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian and Turkish origin. I shall comment only on some of the major sources.
1. Arabic
- The early Arabic historians differ from all others in the unique form of their compositions. Each event is related in the words of eye-witnesses or contemporaries, transmitted to the final narrator through a chain of intermediate reporters, each of whom passed on the original report to his successor. Often the same account is given in two or more slightly divergent forms, which have come down through different chains of reporters. Often, too, one event or one important detail is told in several ways on the basis of several contemporary statements transmitted to the final narrator through distinct lines of tradition.... The principle still is that what has been well said once need not be told again in other words. The writer, therefore, keeps as close as he can to the letter of his sources, so that quite a late writer often reproduces the very words of the first narrator....
2. Byzantine
Among Byzantine sources, by far the most valuable is
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus's De Adnimistrando Imperio,
written about 950. It is important not only because of the
information it contains about the Khazars themselves (and
particularly about their relationship with the Magyars), but
because of the data it provides on the Rus and the people of the
northern steppes. Constantine (904-59) the scholar-emperor was a
fascinating character - no wonder Arnold Toynbee confessed to
have "lost his heart" to him2 - a love-affair with the
past that started in his undergraduate days. The eventual result
was Toynbee's monumental Constantine Porphyrogenitus and his
World, published in 1973, when the author was eighty-four.
As the title indicates, the emphasis is as much on Constantine's
personality and work as on the conditions of the world in which
he - and the Khazars - lived. .Yet
Toynbee's admiration for Constantine did not make him overlook
the Emperor's limitations as a scholar: "The information
assembled in the De Administrando Imperio has been
gathered at different dates from different sources, and the
product is not a book in which the materials have been digested
and co-ordinated by an author; it is a collection of files which
have been edited only perfunctorily."3 And later on: "De
Administrando Imperio and De Caeromoniis, in the state in
which Constantine bequeathed them to posterity, will strike most
readers as being in lamentable confusion."4 (Constantine
himself was touchingly convinced that De Caeromoniis was
a "technical masterpiece" besides being "a
monument of exact scholarship and a labour of love"5.)
Similar criticisms had been voiced earlier by Bury,6 and by
Macartney, trying to sort out Constantine's contradictory
statements about the Magyar migrations:."...We shall do well to
remember the composition of the De Administrando Imperio - a
series of notes from the most various sources, often duplicating
one another, often contradicting one another, and tacked together
with the roughest of editing."7 .But we must beware of
bathwaterism - throwing the baby away with the water, as
scholarly critics are sometimes apt to do. Constantine was
privileged as no other historian to explore the Imperial archives
and to receive first-hand reports from his officials and envoys
returning from missions abroad. When handled with caution, and in
conjunction with other sources, De Administrando throws
much valuable light on that dark period.
3. Russian
Apart from orally transmitted folklore, legends and songs
(such as the "Lay of Igor's Host"), the earliest
written source in Russian is the Povezt Vremennikh Let,
literally "Tale of Bygone Years", variously referred to
by different authors as The Russian Primary Chronicle, The
Old Russian Chronicle, The Russian Chronicle, Pseudo-Nestor,
or The Book of Annals. It is a compilation, made in the
first half of the twelfth century, of the edited versions of
earlier chronicles dating back to the beginning of the eleventh,
but incorporating even earlier traditions and records. It may
therefore, as Vernadsky8 says, "contain fragments of
authentic information even with regard to the period from the
seventh to the tenth century" - a period vital to Khazar
history. The principal compiler and editor of the work was
probably the learned monk Nestor (b. 1056) in the Monastery of
the Crypt in Kiev, though this is a matter of controversy among
experts (hence "Pesudo-Nestor"). Questions of
authorship apart, the Povezt is an invaluable (though
not infallible) guide for the period that it covers.
Unfortunately, it stops with the year 1112, just at the beginning
of the Khazars' mysterious vanishing act. .The mediaeval Hebrew sources
on Khazaria will be discussed in Appendix III. It would be presumptuous to comment on the modern historians of repute quoted in these pages, such as Toynbee or Bury, Vernadsky, Baron, Macartney, etc. - who have written on some aspect of Khazar history. The following remarks are confmed to those authors whose writings are of central importance to the problem, but who are known only to a specially interested part of the public. .Foremost among these are the late Professor Paul F. Kahle, and his former pupil, Douglas Morton Dunlop, at the time of writing Professor of Middle Eastern History at Columbia University. .Paul Eric Kahle (1875-1965) was one of Europe's leading orientalists and masoretic scholars. He was born in East Prussia, was ordained a Lutheran Minister, and spent six years as a Pastor in Cairo. He subsequently taught at various German universities and in 1923 became Director of the famous Oriental Seminar in the University of Bonn, an international centre of study which attracted orientalists from all over the world. "There can be no doubt", Kahle wrote,9 "that the international character of the Seminar, its staff, its students and its visitors, was the best protection against Nazi influence and enabled us to go on with our work undisturbed during nearly six years of Nazi regime in Germany.... I was for years the only Professor in Germany who had a Jew, a Polish Rabbi, as assistant." .No wonder that, in spite of his impeccable Aryan descent, Kahle was finally forced to emigrate in 1938. He settled in Oxford, where he received two additional doctorates (in philosophy and theology). In 1963 he returned to his beloved Bonn, where he died in 1965. The British Museum catalogue has twenty-seven titles to his credit, among them The Cairo Geniza and Studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls. .Among Kahle's students before the war in Bonn was the young orientalist D. M. Dunlop. .Kahle was deeply interested in Khazar history. When the Belgian historian Professor Henri Grgoire published an article in 1937 questioning the authenticity of the "Khazar Correspondence",10 Kahle took him to task: "I indicated to Grgoire a number of points in which he could not be right, and I had the chance of discussing all the problems with him when he visited me in Bonn in December 1937. We decided to make a great joint publication - but political developments made the plan impracticable. So I proposed to a former Bonn pupil of mine, D. M. Dunlop, that he should take over the work instead. He was a scholar able to deal both with Hebrew and Arabic sources, knew many other languages and had the critical training for so difficult a task."11 The result of this scholarly transaction was Dunlop's The History of the Jewish Khazars, published in 1954 by the Princeton University Press. Apart from being an invaluable sourcebook on Khazar history, it provides new evidence for the authenticity of the Correspondence (see Appendix III), which Kahle fully endorsed.12 Incidentally, Professor Dunlop, born in 1909, is the son of a Scottish divine, and his hobbies are listed in Who's Who as "hill-walking and Scottish history". Thus the two principal apologists of Khazar Judaism in our times were good Protestants with an ecclesiastic, Nordic background. .Another pupil of Kahle's with a totally different background, was Ahmed Zeki Validi Togan, the discoverer of the Meshhed manuscript of Ibn Fadlan's journey around Khazaria. To do justice to this picturesque character, I can do no better than to quote from Kahle's memoirs:13
- Several very prominent Orientals belonged to the staff of the [Bonn] Seminar. Among them I may mention Dr Zeki Validi, a special protégé of Sir Aurel Stein, a Bashkir who had made his studies at Kazan University, and already before the first War had been engaged in research work at the Petersburg Academy. During the War and after he had been active as leader of the Bashkir-Armee [allied to the Bolshevists], which had been largely created by him. He had been a member of the Russian Duma, and had belonged for some time to the Committee of Six, among whom there were Lenin, Stalin and Trotzki. Later he came into conflict with the Bolshevists and escaped to Persia. As an expert on Turkish - Bashkirian being a Turkish language - he became in 1924 adviser to Mustafa Kemal's Ministry of Education in Ankara, and later Professor of Turkish in Stambul University. After seven years, when asked, with the other Professors in Stambul, to teach that all civilisation in the world comes from the Turks, he resigned, went to Vienna and studied Mediaeval History under Professor Dopsch. After two years he got his doctor degree with an excellent thesis on Ibn Fadlan's journey to the Northern Bulgars, Turks and Khazars, the Arabic text of which he had discovered in a MS. in Meshhed. I later published his book in the "Abhandlungen fr die Kunde des Morgenlandes". From Vienna I engaged him as Lecturer and later Honorar Professor for Bonn. He was a real scholar, a man of wide knowledge, always ready to learn, and collaboration with him was very fruitful. In 1938 he went back to Turkey and again became Professor of Turkish in Stambul University.
THE exchange of letters between the Spanish statesman Hasdai ibn Shaprut and King Joseph of Khazaria has for a long time fascinated historians. It is true that, as Dunlop wrote, "the importance of the Khazar Correspondence can be exaggerated. By this time it is possible to reconstruct Khazar history in some detail without recourse to the letters of Hasdai and Joseph."1 Nevertheless, the reader may be interested in a brief outline of what is known of the history of these documents. .Hasdai's Letter was apparently written between 954 and 961, for the embassy from Eastern Europe that he mentions (Chapter III,3-4) is believed to have visited Cordoba in 954, and Caliph Abd-al-Rahman, whom he mentions as his sovereign, ruled till 961. That the Letter was actually penned by Hasdai's secretary, Menahem ben-Sharuk - whose name appears in the acrostic after Hasdai's - has been established by Landau,2 through comparison with Menahem's other surviving work. Thus the authenticity of Hasdai's Letter is no longer in dispute, while the evidence concerning Joseph's Reply is necessarily more indirect and complex. .The earliest known mentions of the Correspondence date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Around the year 1100 Rabbi Jehudah ben Barzillai of Barcelona wrote in Hebrew his "Book of the Festivals" - Sefer ha-Ittim - which contains a long reference, including direct quotations, to Joseph's Reply to Hasdai. The passage in question in Barzillai's work starts as follows:
- We have seen among some other manuscripts the copy of a letter which King Joseph, son of Aaron, the Khazar priest wrote to R. Hasdai bar Isaac.*[Hasdai's name in Hebrew was bar Isaac bar Shaprut. The R (for Rabbi) is a courtesy title.] We do not know if the letter is genuine or not, and ifit is a fact that the Khazars, who are Turks, became proselytes. It is not definite whether all that is written in the letter is fact and truth or not. There may be falsehoods written in it, or people may have added to it, or there may be error on the part of the scribe.... The reason why we need to write in this our book things which seem to be exaggerated is that we have found in the letter of this king Joseph to R. Hasdai that R. Hasdai had asked him of what family he was, the condition of the king, how his fathers had been gathered under the wings of the Presence [i.e., become converted to Judaism] and how great were his kingdom and dominion. He replied to him on every head, writing all the particulars in the letter.3
- Hasdai ibn-Ishaq*[Arab version of Hasdai's name.] thinks that this great long mountain [the Caucasus] is connected with the mountains of Armenia and traverses the country of the Greeks, extending to Khazaran and the mountains of Armenia. He was well informed about these parts because he visited them and met their principal kings and leading men.4
- You will find congregations of Israel spread abroad from the town of Sala at the extremity of the Maghrib, as far as Tahart at its commencement, the extremity of Africa [Ifriqiyah, Tunis], in all Africa, Egypt, the country of the Sabaeans, Arabia, Babylonia, Elam, Persia, Dedan, the country of the Girgashites which is called Jurjan, Tabaristan, as far as Daylam and the river Itil where live the Khazar peoples who became proselytes. Their king Joseph sent a letter to R. Hasdai, the Prince bar Isaac ben-Shaprut and informed him that he and all his people followed the Rabbanite faith. We have seen in Toledo some of their descendants, pupils of the wise, and they told us that the remnant of them followed the Rabbanite faith.5
2
The first printed version of the Khazar Correspondence is
contained in a Hebrew pamphlet, Kol Mebasser,
"Voice of the Messenger of Good News".*[Two copies of
the pamphlet belonging to two different editions are preserved in
the Bodleian Library.] It was published in Constantinople in or
around 1577 by Isaac Abraham Akrish. In his preface Akrish
relates that during his travels in Egypt fifteen years earlier he
had heard rumours of an independent Jewish kingdom (these rumours
probably referred to the Falashas of Abyssinia); and that
subsequently he obtained "a letter which was sent to the
king of the Khazars, and the king's reply". He then decided
to publish this correspondence in order to raise the spirits of
his fellow Jews. Whether or not he thought that Khazaria still
existed is not clear. At any rate the preface is followed by the
text of the two letters, without further comment. .But the Correspondence did not
remain buried in Akrish's obscure little pamphlet. Some sixty
years after its publication, a copy of it was sent by a friend to
Johannes Buxtorf the Younger, a Calvinist scholar of great
erudition. Buxtorf was an expert Hebraist, who published a great
amount of studies in biblical exegesis and rabbinical literature.
When he read Akrish's pamphlet, he was at first as sceptical
regarding the authenticity of the Correspondence as Rabbi
Barzillai had been five hundred years before him. But in 1660
Buxtorf finally printed the text of both letters in Hebrew and in
a Latin translation as an addendum to Jehudah Halevi's book on
the Khazars. It was perhaps an obvious, but not a happy idea, for
the inclusion, within the same covers, of Halevi's legendary tale
hardly predisposed historians to take the Correspondence
seriously. It was only in the nineteenth century that their
attitude changed, when more became known, from independent
sources, about the Khazars.
3
The only manuscript version which contains both
Hasdai's Letter and Joseph's Reply, is in the library of Christ
Church in Oxford. According to Dunlop and the Russian expert,
Kokovtsov,6 the manuscript "presents a remarkably close
similarity to the printed text" and "served directly or
indirectly as a source of the printed text".7 It probably
dates from the sixteenth century and is believed to have been in
the possession of the Dean of Christ Church, John Fell (whom
Thomas Brown immortalized with his "I do not love thee, Dr
Fell..."). .Another
manuscript containing Joseph's Reply but not Hasdai's Letter is
preserved in the Leningrad Public Library. It is considerably
longer than the printed text of Akrish and the Christ Church
manuscript; accordingly it is generally known as the Long
Version, as distinct from the Akrish-Christ Church "Short
Version", which appears to be an abbreviation of it. The
Long Version is also considerably older; it probably dates from
the thirteenth century, the Short Version from the sixteenth. The
Soviet historian Ribakov8 has plausibly suggested that the Long
Version - or an even older text - had been edited and compressed
by mediaeval Spanish copyists to produce the Short Version of
Joseph's Reply. lAt this point we encounter a red herring across
the ancient track. The Long Version is part of the so-called
"Firkowich Collection" of Hebrew manuscripts and
epitaphs in the Leningrad Public Library. It probably came from
the Cairo Geniza, where a major part of the manuscripts in the
Collection originated. Abraham Firkowich was a colourful
nineteenth-century scholar who would deserve an Appendix all to
himself. He was a great authority in his field, but he was also a
Karaite zealot who wished to prove to the Tsarist government that
the Karaites were different from orthodox Jews and should not be
discriminated against by Christians. With this laudable purpose
in mind, he doctored some of his authentic old manuscripts and
epitaphs, by interpolating or adding a few words to give them a
Karaite slant. Thus the Long Version, having passed through the
hands of Firkowich, was greeted with a certain mistrust when it
was found, after his death, in a bundle of other manuscripts in
his collection by the Russian historian Harkavy. Harkavy had no
illusions about Firkowich's reliability, for he himself had
previously denounced some of Firkowich's spurious
interpolations.9 Yet Harkavy had no doubts regarding the
antiquity of the manuscript; he published it in the original
Hebrew in 1879 and also in Russian and German translation,10
accepting it as an early version of Joseph's letter, from which
the Short Version was derived. Harkavy's colleague (and rival)
Chwolson concurred that the whole document was written by the
same hand and that it contained no additions of any kind.11
Lastly, in 1932, the Russian Academy published Paul Kokovtsov's
authoritative book, The Hebrew-Khazar Correspondence in the
Tenth Century12 including facsimiles of the Long Version of
the Reply in the Leningrad Library, the Short Version in Christ
Church and in Akrish's pamphlet. After a critical analysis of the
three texts, he came to the conclusion that both the Long and the
Short Versions are based on the same original text, which is in
general, though not always, more faithfully preserved in the Long
Version.
4
Kokovtsov's critical survey, and particularly his publication
of the manuscript facsimiles, virtually settled the controversy -
which, anyway, affected only the Long Version, but not Hasdai's
letter and the Short Version of the Reply. .Yet a voice of dissent was
raised from an unexpected quarter. In 1941 Poliak advanced the
theory that the Khazar Correspondence was, not exactly a forgery,
but a fictional work written in the tenth century with the
purpose of spreading information about, or making propaganda for,
the Jewish kingdom.13 (It could not have been written later than
the eleventh century, for, as we have seen, Rabbi Barzillai read
the Correspondence about 1100, and Ibn Daud quoted from it in
1161). But this theory, plausible at first glance, was
effectively demolished by Landau and Dunlop. Landau was able to
prove that Hasdai's Letter was indeed written by his secretary
Menahem ben-Sharuk. And Dunlop pointed out that in the Letter
Hasdai asks a number of questions about Khazaria which Joseph
fails to answer - which is certainly not the way to write an
information pamphlet: - There is no answer forthcoming on the part of Joseph to enquiries as to his method of procession to his place of worship, and as to whether war abrogates the Sabbath.... There is a marked absence of correspondence between questions of the Letter and answers given in the Reply. This should probably be regarded as an indication that the documents are what they purport to be and not a literary invention.14
Why the Letter of Hasdai at all, which, though considerably longer than the Reply of Joseph, has very little indeed about the Khazars, if the purpose of writing it and the Reply was, as Poliak supposes, simply to give a popular account of Khazaria? If the Letter is an introduction to the information about the Khazars in the Reply, it is certainly a very curious one - full of facts about Spain and the Umayyads which have nothing to do with Khazaria.15
Dunlop then clinches the argument by a linguistic test which proves conclusively that the Letter and the Reply were written by different people. The proof concerns one of the marked characteristics of Hebrew grammar, the use of the so-called "waw- conversive", to define tense. I shall not attempt to explain this intricate grammatical quirk,*[The interested reader may consult Weingreen, J., A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew, 2nd ed, (Oxford, 1959)] and shall instead simply quote Dunlop's tabulation of the different methods used in the Letter and in the Long Version to designate past action:16
Waw Conversive Simple Waw
with Imperfect with Perfet
Hasdai's Letter 48 14
Reply (Long Version) 1 95
In the Short Version of the Reply, the first method (Hasdai's)
is used thirty-seven times, the second fifty times. But the Short
Version uses the first method mostly in passages where the
wording differs from the Long Version. Dunlop suggests that this
is due to later Spanish editors paraphrasing the Long Version. He
also points out that Hasdai's Letter, written in Moorish Spain,
contains many Arabisms (for instance, al-Khazar for the Khazars),
whereas the Reply has none. Lastly, concerning the general tenor
of the Correspondence, he says: - ... Nothing decisive appears to have been alleged anainst the factual contents of the Reply of Joseph in its more original form, the Long Version. The stylistic difference supports its authenticity. It is what might be expected in documents emanating from widely separated parts of the Jewish world, where also the level of culture was by no means the same. It is perhaps allowable here to record the impression, for what it is worth, that in general the language of the Reply is less artificial, more naive, than that of the Letter.17
APPENDIX IV
SOME IMPLICATIONS - ISRAEL AND THE DIASPORA
SOME IMPLICATIONS - ISRAEL AND THE DIASPORA
WHILE this book deals with past history, it unavoidably carries certain implications for the present and future. .In the first place, I am aware of the danger that it may be maliciously misinterpreted as a denial of the State of Israel's right to exist. But that right is not based on the hypothetical origins of the Jewish people, nor on the mythological covenant of Abraham with God; it is based on international law - i.e., on the United Nations' decision in 1947 to partition Palestine, once a Turkish province, then a British Mandated Territory, into an Arab and a Jewish State. Whatever the Israeli citizens' racial origins, and whatever illusions they entertain about them, their State exists de jure and de facto, and cannot be undone, except by genocide. Without entering into controversial issues, one may add, as a matter of historical fact, that the partition of Palestine was the result of a century of peaceful Jewish immigration and pioneering effort, which provide the ethical justification for the State's legal existence. Whether the chromosomes of its people contain genes of Khazar or Semitic, Roman or Spanish origin, is irrelevant, and cannot affect Israel's right to exist - nor the moral obligation of any civilized person, Gentile or Jew, to defend that right. Even the geographical origin of the native Israeli's parents or grandparents tends to be forgotten in the bubbling racial melting pot. The problem of the Khazar infusion a thousand years ago, however fascinating, is irrelevant to modern Israel. .The Jews who inhabit it, regardless of their chequered origins, possess the essential requirements of a nation: a country of their own, a common language, government and army. The Jews of the Diaspora have none of these requirements of nationhood. What sets them apart as a special category from the Gentiles amidst whom they live is their declared religion, whether they practise it or not. Here lies the basic difference between Israelis and Jews of the Diaspora. The former have acquired a national identity; the latter are labelled as Jews only by their religion - not by their nationality, not by their race. .This, however, creates a tragic paradox, because the Jewish religion - unlike Christianity, Buddhism or Islam - implies membership of a historical nation, a chosen race. All Jewish festivals commemorate events in national history: the exodus from Egypt, the Maccabean revolt, the death of the oppressor Haman, the destruction of the Temple. The Old Testament is first and foremost the narrative of a nation's history; it gave monotheism to the world, yet its credo is tribal rather than universal. Every prayer and ritual observance proclaims membership of an ancient race, which automatically separates the Jew from the racial and historic past of the people in whose midst he lives. The Jewish faith, as shown by 2000 years of tragic history, is nationally and socially self-segregating. It sets the Jew apart and invites his being set apart. It automatically creates physical and cultural ghettoes. It transformed the Jews of the Diaspora into a pseudo-nation without any of the attributes and privileges of nationhood, held together loosely by a system of traditional beliefs based on racial and historical premisses which turn out to be illusory. .Orthodox Jewry is a vanishing minority. Its stronghold was Eastern Europe where the Nazi fury reached its peak and wiped them almost completely off the face of the earth. Its scattered survivors in the Western world no longer carry much influence, while the bulk of the orthodox communities of North Africa, the Yemen, Syria and Iraq emigrated to Israel. Thus orthodox Judaism in the Diaspora is dying out, and it is the vast majority of enlightened or agnostic Jews who perpetuate the paradox by loyally clinging to their pseudo-national status in the belief that it is their duty to preserve the Jewish tradition. .It is, however, not easy to define what the term "Jewish tradition" signifies in the eyes of this enlightened majority, who reject the Chosen-Race doctrine of orthodoxy. That doctrine apart, the universal messages of the Old Testament - the enthronement of the one and invisible God, the Ten Commandments, the ethos of the Hebrew prophets, the Proverbs and Psalms - have entered into the mainstream of the Judeo-Helenic-Christian tradition and become the common property of Jew and Gentile alike. .After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews ceased to have a language and secular culture of their own. Hebrew as a vernacular yielded to Aramaic before the beginning of the Christian era; the Jewish scholars and poets in Spain wrote in Arabic, others later in German, Polish, Russian, English and French. Certain Jewish communities developed dialects of their own, such as Yiddish and Ladino, but none of these produced works comparable to the impressive Jewish contribution to German, Austro-Hungarian or American literature. .The main, specifically Jewish literary activity of the Diaspora was theological. Yet Talmud, Kabbala, and the bulky tomes of biblical exegesis are practically unknown to the contemporary Jewish public, although they are, to repeat it once more, the only relics of a specifically Jewish tradition - if that term is to have a concrete meaning - during the last two millennia. In other words, whatever came out of the Diaspora is either not specifically Jewish, or not part of a living tradition. The philosophical, scientific and artistic achievements of individual Jews consist in contributions to the culture of their host nations; they do not represent a common cultural inheritance or autonomous body of traditions. .To sum up, the Jews of our day have no cultural tradition in common, merely certain habits and behaviour-patterns, derived by social inheritance from the traumatic experience of the ghetto, and from a religion which the majority does not practise or believe in, but which nevertheless confers on them a pseudo-national status. Obviously - as I have argued elsewhere1 - the long-term solution of the paradox can only be emigration to Israel or gradual assimilation to their host nations. Before the holocaust, this process was in full swing; and in 1975 Time Magazine reported2 that American Jews "tend to marry outside their faith at a high rate; almost one-third of all marriages are mixed". .Nevertheless the lingering influence of Judaism's racial and historical message, though based on illusion, acts as a powerful emotional break by appealing to tribal loyalty. It is in this context that the part played by the thirteenth tribe in ancestral history becomes relevant to the Jews of the Diaspora. Yet, as already said, it is irrelevant to modern Israel, which has acquired a genuine national identity. It is perhaps symbolic that Abraham Poliak, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University and no doubt an Israeli patriot, made a major contribution to our knowledge of Jewry's Khazar ancestry, undermining the legend of the Chosen Race. It may also be significant that the native Israeli "Sabra" represents, physically and mentally, the complete opposite of the "typical Jew", bred in the ghetto.
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