Himyar, Berber and Khazar: The Origin Of The Yahweh Chosen Rats
An excerpt from "The Invention Of The Jewish People" by SHLOMO SAND
TheTaoOfAnarchy: Look at what they have been doing to the Palestinians in the land of Palestine right now. That’s exactly what their Yahweh demands them to do. That’s why I call them the Yahweh chosen rats! They are not human but truly rats in human clothes!
ARABIA FELIX THE PROSELYTIZED KINGDOM OF HIMYAR
This legendary region in the southern end of the peninsula intrigued the Romans, who called it "Happy Arabia." Under Augustus they dispatched a garrison there, to which Herod contributed a company from Judea. But the mission failed, and most of the soldiers were lost in the blazing desert.
Himyar was the name of a large local tribe, which in the second century BCE began to subdue its neighbours and to consolidate into a tribal kingdom. Its capital was the city Zafar, and it came to be known also as "the kingdom of Saba, Dhu-Raydan, Hadhramaut and Yamnat," and of the Arabs of Taud and Tihamat.
By such a resounding name it became known far and wide. Rome did form some ties with it, and much later so did the Sassanid kings of Persia. Around the Himyarite ruler, known in the Arabian traditions as tubba, corresponding to "king" or "emperor," and in Himyarite inscriptions as malik, were consolidated the kingdom's administration, the nobility and the tribal leadership.
Himyar's confirmed rival was the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum across the Red Sea, which periodically sent forces across the strait to blockade its wealthy neighbor.
A possible visit by the Himyarites to the Holy Land was suggested by some tombs in Beit She'arim near Haifa, uncovered in 1936. A Greek inscription engraved over one of the niches describes the interred as "people of Himyar."
We know they were Jews, because one of them was named "Menah[em], Elder of the Congregation," and two characteristic Jewish emblems, a candelabra and a ram's horn, were carved beside the inscription. No one knows how these Himyarite tombs, dated probably to the third century CE, came to be in Beit She'arim.2
The Arian Christian historian Philostorgius wrote that in the middle of the fourth century, Constantius II, emperor of the eastern Roman Empire, sent a mission to the Himyarites to convert them to Christianity. The mission was resisted by the local Jews, but in the end the Himyarite king accepted Christianity, says Philostorgius, and even built two churches in his kingdom. The story has not been verified. However, it was at about that time that the Ethiopian kingdom became Christian, and it is possible that there was a struggle between the contending religions in Himyar at that time. Possibly one of the kings converted to Christianity, but if so, the victory was short-lived.
There is much archaeological and epigraphic evidence, some of it newly discovered, that indicates with near certainty that toward the end of the fourth century CE the Himyar kingdom abandoned paganism and adopted monotheism, but it was not Christianity that it chose. In 378 CE, Malik Karib Yuhamin built structures on which were discovered such inscriptions as "By the might of their Lord, Lord of Heavens." There are also inscriptions reading "Lord of the Heavens and the Earth" and "Rahmanan" (the Merciful). The latter is a characteristic Jewish term; it appears in the Talmud in its Aramaic form, Rahmana, and was only later, in the early seventh century, adopted by the Muslims as one of the names of Allah. Christians in the Arab world also used the term, but they invariably added "the Son and the Holy Spirit."
If researchers disagreed about the character of this pioneering monotheism, the issue was more or less resolved when another inscription was discovered in the city of Beit al-Ashwal, dedicated to the son of Malik Karib Yuhamin. It says, in Hebrew, "written by Yehudah, the well-remembered, amen shalom, amen," and, in Himyari, "by the power and grace of his lord, who created his soul, lord of life and death, lord of heaven and earth, who created all things, and with the financial help of his people Israel and the empowerment of his lord."3 Whether or not this inscription was ordered by the royal house itself, it praises the king on the terms of the Jewish religion, and its author clearly assumes that this religion is shared by the ruler.
Himyar was ruled from the last quarter of the fourth century CE to the first quarter of the sixth—that is, between 120 and 150 years, almost as long as the duration of the Hasmonean kingdom—by a strong, monotheistic Jewish monarchy.
Muslim tradition associates the Judaization of the Himyarite kingdom to Abu Karib Assad, Malik Karib Yuharnin's second son, who apparently ruled between 390 and 420 CE. Legend has it that this king went to war in the north of the peninsula but, instead of fighting, returned with two Jewish sages and began to convert all his subjects to Judaism.'4 At first the subjects rejected the new religion, but were eventually persuaded and entered the covenant of Abraham.
There is also evidence from 440 CE that confirms the Jewish faith of Surahbi'il Yaffur, Assad's son. The great dam of Ma'rib, repaired and rebuilt by this king, bears an inscription with his name and titles, and the help given him by the "lord of heaven and earth." Another epigraph dating from the same time includes the expression "Rahmanan," the divine tide that recurs in inscriptions of successive kings.
The story of the execution of Azqir, a Christian missionary from the city of Najran in northern Himyar, indicates that "Rahman Judaism" had become the hegemonic religion. There are many Arabic legends about the killing of this preacher, described in Christian hagiography as a martyr at Jewish hands.
This occurred in the reign of the Himyarite king Surahbi'il Yakkaf. After Azqir built a chapel with a cross on top, he was arrested by agents of the kingdom and the chapel was destroyed. The king tried to persuade him to abandon his belief in the redeemer, but Azqir refused and was sentenced to death. At the advice of a rabbi close to the king, it was decided to carry out the sentence in Najran, as an example to others. Christianity had made some headway in the city, and it was felt necessary to deter the local populace. Before he was put to death, the martyr Azqir performed some miracles that impressed the public and were recorded in the tradition of the church.
The kingdom went into decline after Surahbi'il Yakkaf s death, and his two sons were unable to fight off the Ethiopians, who penetrated Himyar and for a time succeeded in reinforcing their remaining Christian supporters. The struggle between Himyar and the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum was not only a religious one, but also a conflict of political and commercial interests. Aksum was influenced by the Byzantine Empire, which sought to control the Red Sea strait in order to secure its trade with India. Himyar opposed Byzantium and firmly resisted the Christian domination of the region.6 The prolonged devotion to Judaism among large elements in the kingdom might have been due to strong conflicts of interest.
The nobility and the merchants supported the Jewish monarchy, because it safe guarded their economic independence. But Judaism was not confined to the nobility—there is much evidence that it struck root in various tribes, and even crossed the strait and penetrated the rival realm of Ethiopia.7
After several years of Christian hegemony, Judaism returned to power in the figure of Dhu Nuwas, the last Jewish Himyarite ruler. There is abundant material about this malik, mainly because of his intense struggle against Christianity and his bitter war against Ethiopia. Procopius's book On the Wars; the testimony of the itinerant merchant Cosmas, known as Christian Topography; a hymn composed by the Abbot John Psaltes; the fragmented Book of the Himyarites; a letter of the Syrian bishop of Beit-Arsham;8 and many other Christian documents all offer evidence about the power of the Jewish king as well as his cruelty and persecution of the followers of Jesus. A good many Arabic sources confirm these stories, if with less anti-Jewish intensity.
Dhu Nuwas's official name was Yusuf As'ar Yath'ar, and later Arabic traditions also call him by the epithet "Masruk," probably meaning "long-haired."
He was famous for his flowing locks, and legends describe his heroic last battle and how, riding his great white horse, he sank in the Red Sea. There is no doubt about his Judaism, but it is not certain that he was of royal birth, nor exactly when he ascended the throne. It was probably not much later than 518 CE, as until that year the Himyarite capital was ruled by a viceroy, a protégé of the Ethiopians, against whom Dhu Nuwas led a widespread revolt in the mountains. He succeeded in capturing Zafar and consolidating his power over the whole kingdom. The nobility supported him, and those who had not converted to Judaism did so after his victory. One testimony states that Jewish sages came from Tiberias to fortify the Mosaic faith when Dhu Nuwas was established on the throne.10
With Judaism again in power, the city of Najran, with its Christian majority, rebelled again. The Himyarite king besieged it for a long time and finally captured it. Numerous Christians perished in the battle, which served Ela Asbeha, the king of Aksum, as a pretext to launch war against Jewish Himyar. With the support and logistical assistance of the Byzantine Empire, which provided the ships, Christian armies crossed the Red Sea, and in 525 Dhu Nuwas was defeated after a long, grim battle. The city of Zafar was destroyed, fifty members of the ruling family were taken captive, and this was the end of the Judaizing kingdom in the southern Arabian Peninsula. An attempted rebellion, led by Sayf ibn Dhu Yazan, a descendant of Dhu Nuwas, was crushed.
The Ethiopian-backed regime that succeeded the Jewish kingdom was of course Christian, but in the 570s the region was conquered by the Persians. This halted Himyar's complete Christianization, but the country did not become Zoroastrian (this religion won few followers outside Persia). We know that the Judaized community of Himyar persisted under the Ethiopian and the Persian powers, because when the forces of Muhammad arrived in 629, the prophet warned them in a letter not to force the local Christians and Jews to convert to Islam. The type of tax imposed on the Jews reveals that many of them subsisted on agriculture, but we have no way of estimating how many remained faithful to their religion, or how many converted to the victorious religion. In all probability, a good many of the Jews had earlier become Christian, and others converted to Islam afterward. But, as noted earlier, a good many continued to believe in the old rahman god, and by maintaining theological ties to the centers in Babylonia, the Himyarite Jewish community survived until the twentieth century.
The existence of a Judaizing kingdom in the southern Arabian Peninsula was already known in the nineteenth century. Heinrich Graetz devoted several pages to it in his famous work, based on stories drawn from Arab historians as well as Christian sources. He wrote accounts of Abu Karib Assad and Dhu Nuwas laced with colorful anecdotes.11 Simon Dubnow, too, wrote about this kingdom, not at such length as Graetz but with more accurate dates.12 Salo Baron followed their example with several pages about "the ancestors of the Jewry of the Yemen," and sought in various ways to justify their harsh treatment of the Christians.13
Later Zionist historiography paid less attention to the Himyarite kingdom. Dinur's monumental compilation Israel in Exile opens with the "Jewish people going into exile" in the seventh century CE, and so the earlier Jewish kingdom in southern Arabia disappears. Some Israeli scholars questioned the Jewish ness of the Himyarites, which was probably not entirely rabbinical; others simply passed over this troublesome historical chapter.14 School textbooks issued after the 1950s made no mention of the proselytized southern kingdom that lay buried under the desert sand.
Only historians who specialized in the history of the Jews of the Arab countries sometimes referred to the many Himyarite proselytes. Notable among them was Israel Ben-Ze'ev, who first published his book Jews in Arabia in the late 1920s in Egypt, edited it and translated it into Hebrew in 1931, and expanded it considerably in 1957. The other scholar who discussed the Jewish kingdom in depth was Haim Ze'ev Hirschberg, whose book Israel in Arabia appeared in 1946. These two works provide a broad canvas depicting the history of the Jews in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, and despite their nationalist tone, their scholarship is of high quality. In recent years archaeology has uncovered additional epigraphic material, and Ze'ev Rubin, a prominent historian at Tel Aviv University, is one of the few who keep up the research about the lost time of the Himyarites.
At the end of his fascinating description of the Judaized kingdom, Hirschberg, perhaps the best-known historian of the Jews in the Arab world, asked the following questions: "How many Jews lived in the Yemen? What was their racial origin—were they of the seed of Abraham, or Judaized Yemenites?" Needless to say, he could not answer these questions but, unable to stop himself, continued:
Nevertheless, the Jews who had come from the Land of Israel, perhaps also from Babylonia, were the living soul of the Jewish community in the Yemen.
They were not too few, their importance was considerable, and they decided every issue; when the persecutions began, they remained faithful to their people and their faith. In fact, many of the proselytized Himyarites could not withstand the suffering and converted to Islam. The Christians vanished altogether from the Yemen, but the Jews remained as a distinct element, apart from the Arabs. They cleave to their faith to this day, despite the contempt and humiliation surrounding them ... Other proselytes, such as the Khazars, assimilated and integrated among the nations, because the Jewish element among them was scanty, but the Jews of the Yemen remained a living tribe of the Jewish nation.15
Compared with the meticulous description of Himyar's history, and the strict use of original sources at every stage of the work, this concluding paragraph seems out of place, even somewhat absurd. Yet it deserves to be quoted, because it demonstrates the nature and thinking of Zionist historiography on the subject of proselytizing. Hirschberg had not the slightest evidence concerning the number, if any, of "born Jews" in the different classes of Himyarite society, nor about the origins of those who clung to the Jewish faith. But the ethnocentric imperative was stronger than his historical training, and demanded that he conclude his work with the "call of the blood." Otherwise, the readers of this respected scholar's work might fall into the error of thinking that the Jews of the Yemen were descendants of Dhu Nuwas and his hardened nobles, and not of the peaceable Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the purported patriarchs of all the Jews in the world.
Hirschberg's ethnobiological passion was by no means exceptional. Virtually everyone who wrote about the Jewish community of Yemen applied to it a politically correct genealogy reaching back to the ancient Judahites. Some scholars even argued that, following the destruction of the First Temple, many Judahites were exiled not to Babylonia but to southern Arabia. Others suggested that the first Yemenite Jews were of the dynasty of the Queen of Sheba. King Solomon's sexy guest must have returned to her country accompanied by "Jewish courtiers," who with great dedication obeyed the command to multiply and be fruitful. This queen must have produced numerous offspring, because the Ethiopians also believed that their kings were her descendants.
Thus the chapter about the Judaizing Himyarites was abandoned by the historiographical roadside in Israel's educational system, and secondary-school graduates know nothing about it. It is the sad fate of this mighty Jewish kingdom, which dominated its region, that its descendants are not proud of it and that many others fear to mention its very existence.16
PHOENICIANS AND BERBERS: THE MYSTERIOUS QUEEN KAHINA
The Himyarites are not the only ones who have vanished from the historical memory of Israel; the origin of their fellow Jews in North Africa has been similarly suppressed. If, according to national mythology, the Jews of Yemen are the descendants of King Solomon's courtiers, or at least of the Babylonian exiles, the Jews of the Maghreb are likewise supposed to be descendants of the First Temple exiles, or of the Jews of European Spain, a supposedly higher lineage. The latter are also described as having been "exiled" to the western end of the Mediterranean from the desolate kingdom of Judah after the fall.
The present chapter, above, referred to the spread of Judaism to North Africa, and the great uprising against Rome between 115 and 117 CE. A Jewish Hellenistic king named Lucas (some historians called him Andreas) arose in the course of this large-scale messianic, anti-pagan revolt, and temporarily seized the province of Cyrenaica, in the east of today's Libya. His ferociously swift conquests took him as far as Alexandria in Egypt. Evidence shows that this fiery religious revolt was especially vicious, like future monotheistic conflicts, and that it was put down with an iron hand by the Roman armies.17 The propagation of Judaism slowed down in this province but was not entirely extinguished. There remained Jews and proselytes in Cyrenaica, and, following the upheavals, the Judaizing process advanced slowly westward.
The suspicious Rabbi Hosea, who lived in the Holy Land in the third century CE, was concerned about the proselytizing in North Africa, and the Jerusalem Talmud quotes him as asking, "The proselytes coming from Libya, should they have to wait three generations?" (Tractate Kilayim). The leading amora known as Rav declared: "From Tyre to Carthage people know the Israelites and their father in heaven, and westward from Tyre and eastward from Carthage people do not know the Israelites and their father in heaven" (Tractate Menahot).
The successful spread of Judaism in the Maghreb was probably due to the presence of a Phoenician population in the region. Although Carthage was destroyed back in the second century BCE, not all its inhabitants perished. The city was rebuilt, and was soon an important commercial port once more.
Where, then, did all the Punics—the African Phoenicians—who populated the coastline go? Several historians, notably the French Marcel Simon, have suggested that a large number of them became Jews, accounting for the distinctive strength of Judaism throughout North Africa.18
It is not beyond reason to assume that the close resemblance of the language of the Old Testament to ancient Phoenician, as well as the fact that some of the Punics were circumcised, helped promote mass conversion to Judaism. The process may also have been stimulated by the arrival of captives from Judea after the fall of the kingdom. The old populace, originating from Tyre and Sidon, had been hostile to Rome for a very long time, and probably welcomed the exiled rebels and adopted their particular faith. Marcel Simon suggests that the philo-Jewish policy of most of the Severan emperors, a dynasty originating in North Africa, might also have contributed to the popularity of Judaization.
North Africa was one of the outstanding successes in the history of proselytization in the Mediterranean region. Although in the third and fourth centuries CE, as noted in the previous chapter, the rate of conversion to Judaism slowed down in Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece and Italy—the heart of the ancient Western civilization—along the coast of the Maghreb the communities of believers in Yahweh did quite well. Archaeological and epigraphic evidence depicts thriving Jewish religious life. Archaeological excavations near ancient Carthage uncovered a number of tombs from the third century CE inscribed in Latin characters, or even Hebrew or Phoenician, with images of candelabra engraved alongside. Also found all over the region have been a large number of tombstones of proselytes with Greek or Latin names, and their religion is always stated beside their non-Hebrew names. A synagogue from the same period, bearing inscriptions and designs of candles, candelabras and ram's horns, was discovered in Hammam-Lif (ancient Naro), near today's Tunis. On the floor is written, "Your maidservant Julia the young woman repaired with her fortune this mosaic for the sake of the holy synagogue of Naro." It is not surprising that the inscription goes on to name the head of the synagogue as Rusticus and his son as Asterius. In North Africa, as elsewhere, many of the Judaizers remained in a state of semiconversion, or as they would later be known, "heaven worshippers" (Coelicolae). The New Testament mentions God-fearers, Jews and proselytes coming to Jerusalem from the "parts of Libya about Cyre'ne" (Acts 2:10). Many syncretist sects flourished in various cities, and it was this heterogeneous throng that gave rise to Christianity, which grew powerful in this region as in other Mediterranean lands. Two of the leading thinkers of early Christianity, Tertullian and, later, Augustine, were born in Africa.
The former was especially concerned about the strength of Judaism in his native city of Carthage. His extensive knowledge of the Old Testament and Jewish tradition indicates the strength of the local Jewish religious culture. His sharp attacks against the proselytes also testify to the popular appeal of this movement.
He sought to explain the success of Judaism, in contrast to that of the persecuted Christianity, by noting that it was a legal religion in Roman law, hence easier to adopt.
He showed respect for the Jews, especially the Jewish women for their modesty, but fiercely attacked the Judaizers, arguing that they adopted the Jewish religion out of convenience, because on the holy Sabbath they could avoid all work.19
Evidence of Christianity's struggle against the strong Jewish presence is found in the writings of Augustine and in those of the Christian poet Commodianus. Augustine criticizes the "heaven worshippers," probably an intermediate Jewish-Christian sect, whom the church regarded as heretics or even unbelievers. In his work Instructions, Commodianus (whose exact dates are not known) attacked the numerous proselytes and mocked their switching and changing of religions and the blatant inconsistency of their worship.
The advance of the church was temporarily halted by the Vandal conquest. These Germanic tribes from Europe dominated North Africa between 430 and 533 CE, where they established an Arian Christian kingdom. There is next to no information about the situation of North Africa's Jews during the Vandal century, but it is known that relations between the Arians and the Jewish believers were much better than between the latter and the consolidating Orthodox Church. The return of the Byzantine Empire to the region restored the primacy of the church, and the suppression of heretics and unbelievers intensified. It is quite likely that, following this conquest, some of the coastal Jews—those former Punics—fled inland, and others moved further west. Here began the amazing story of a new wave of Judaization.
As Ibn Khaldun, the great fourteenth-century Arab historian, wrote:
[Possibly] some of the Berbers practiced Judaism, which they had received from their powerful Israelite neighbors in Syria. Among the Jewish Berbers were the Djeraoua, who inliabited Aurès, the tribe of Kahina, who was killed by the Arabs in their first conquests. Other Jewish tribes were the Nefouca, of the African Berbers, the Fendelaoua, the Medioun, Behloula, Giatha and the Berbers of the extreme Maghreb, the Fazaz. Idris the First of the Beni el-Hassan, son of El-Hassan who reached the Maghreb, wiped out all traces of the religions that persisted in his territory and crushed the independence of the tribes.20
Ibn Khaldun apparently assumed that at least some of the Berbers, North Africa's longtime inhabitants, were descendants of the ancient Phoenicians or some other Canaanite population that originated in the vicinity of Syria and converted to Judaism (elsewhere he even speaks of the Himyarite origin of some of the Berbers).21 The Judaized tribes he lists were large and powerful, and spread across North Africa. Other than the Djeraoua (Jerawa), who inhabited the highlands of Aurès, the Nefouça lived near today's Tripoli, the Mediouna tribes lived in today's western Algeria, and the Fendelaoua, Behloula and Fazaz lived in the territory of Fès, in today's Morocco. Despite the mass conversion to Islam that followed the Arab conquest, these tribal areas roughly correspond to the sites where Jewish communities persisted until modern times.
Many cultural practices—not only the amulets—common among the Berbers are also found in the religious rites of the Jews of North Africa. Some of these Jews always spoke the Berber language in addition to Arabic. Were the Judaized Berbers, as well as their proselytized Punic predecessors and a handful of emigré Judeans, the ancestors of the Jews of North Africa? More over, to what extent did this great wave of Berber Judaization augment the number of Jews in Spain during and after its conquest by the Arabs?
Ibn Khaldun returns elsewhere to the resistance to the Muslim conquest, led by the queen of the Aurès mountains, Dihya al-Kahina. This leader of the Judaized Berbers was believed to be a necromancer, hence her title kahina (priestess), probably of Punic or Arabic origin. She was a strong ruler, and in 689, when the Muslims launched their renewed effort to conquer North Africa, she united several powerful tribes and succeeded in defeating the mighty forces of Hassan ibn al-Nu'man). Five years later, after the queen had implemented a scorched-earth policy and destroyed towns and villages along the coast, Arab reinforcements arrived and overwhelmed the forces of the bold Berber ruler, and she herself was killed in battle. Her sons converted to Islam and joined the conquerors, and this was the end of her long reign, which remains shrouded in myths and mystery.
Ibn Khaldun was not the only Arab historian to describe the fascinating deeds of Dihya al-Kahina. Earlier Arab writers, from the ninth century CE, described in detail her fight against the Muslim conquerors. The Baghdad-based writer al-Waqidi emphasized her cruel treatment of her own subjects; Khalifa ibn Khayyat al-Usfuri dated her defeat to 693 CE; the Persian historian Ahmad al-Baladhuri recounted the story in brief; and Ibn Abd al-Hakam, who lived in Egypt, expounded the story of the queen's son who also fought against the invaders.22 Muslim historians who followed Ibn Khaldun continued to write about the Judaized queen, and her story was picked up by modern scholars.
Many legends formed around the acts and personality of the female Berber Jewish leader. During the colonial period, French writers revived the old myths in order to highlight the historical fact that the Arabs were invaders whom the local populace had fiercely resisted. Later, in the postcolonial period, Kahina became an Arab—sometimes a Berber—heroine, a forerunner of the French national heroine Joan of Arc. Since Arabic literature referred to her as a mysterious Jewess, some Zionist historians were intrigued, and a few took up the story as though Dihya was a late incarnation of the biblical prophetess Deborah.
Nahum Slouschz, a diligent Zionist historian of North Africa's Jews who completed his doctoral thesis in Paris, was the first to install Kahina in the modern Jewish memory.23 As early as 1909 he published two essays about the Jewish Berbers, and an article entitled "The Kahina's Race."24 He argued that North Africa was settled by large numbers of Jews who came from Jerusalem, and was ruled by them for a long time before the arrival of the Muslims. To his mind, Kahina the warrior queen could not have been a mere proselytized Berber—she had to have been a Jew "by race."
In 1933 Slouschz expanded his publications and reissued them as a book in Hebrew. Dihya al-Kahina ("Judith the Priestess") contains fascinating historical material tinged with romanticism and seasoned with folklore and picturesque tales that Slouschz had borrowed from Arabic and French historiography.25 He argues that Kahina's noble tribe, the powerful Djeraoua tribe of the Aurès—whom he calls the Gera—was "a nation of the race of Israel."26 These "Geras" had come to the region from Libya and had previously lived in Egypt. The priests, who led the tribe, had come to the land of the Nile in the reign of Judah's king Josiah, in the exile of the Pharaoh Necho. Dihya was an affectionate Jewish nickname for a woman named Judith, and she was certainly of a priestly family.
Jewish tradition does not permit women to be priests, but as the Canaanite influence was still strong among them, the Geras dubbed her a kahina.
Slouschz could tell that Kahina was good-looking and strong; she was said to be "handsome as a horse and powerful as a wrestler"27 French scholars compared her to Joan of Arc, but Slouschz, drawing on Arab sources, stated that Kahina "indulged in carnal love with all the passion of her fiery youth," and was married three times. The problem was that these husbands were not Jews of her tribe, and it is known that one of them was a Berber and the other a Greek—namely, a Byzantine. Would a kosher Jewess have married uncircumcised gentiles?
Slouschz explained that the Judaism of the Berber tribes was not of the severe, rabbinical form known to us; hence their customs were of a different sort:
[Kahina] remained faithful to her ancestral faith in its ancient, "pre-Ezra" form, which was common among the faraway Jews in Africa, a Judaism that did not yet distinguish between peoples and continued to marry its neighbors, and would never keep up with the special isolation of the "Pharisees" that was predominant in the Roman and Arab cities.28
In this way Slouschz could remain an "ethnocentric Zionist"—asserting that the legendary amazon and her priests were of the right race, while admitting that the other Berber tribes were generally proselytes. He was convinced that syncretism and a flexible religious policy had helped propagate Judaism and make it a popular religion before the arrival of Islam. Nevertheless, despite the unorthodox ways of the Jewish Berbers and their religious oddities, they and their descendants definitely belong to the "Jewish people." He asserted that he had gone to Africa to seek his "national brothers" and was convinced that "Israel was one nation in the world."29
Hirschberg, a far more cautious and reliable historian than Slouschz, was the second scholar to deal with the Judaized Berbers and their queen Kahina.
The foreword to his book History of the Jews in North Africa includes the following passage:
“the obscurity of the history of most of the communities of the interior in the first half of the second millennium CE [provides] a certain background for the thesis that the great majority of Maghreb Jews are of Berber stock.
This thesis was enunciated in various travel books and adopted in modern historical writings, without anybody giving it a thorough scrutiny ... The position with regard to sources is different here than in the case of the Himyar Judaizer in South Arabia or the Khazars on the banks of the Volga. We know that the great majority of the former adopted Islam in the days of Mohammed and that only Jews of Jewish stock were left in South Arabia, and it is also well known that the Khazar Judaizers have completely disappeared. Now is it to be supposed that precisely the Berbers in North Africa remained loyal to Judaism, especially as the evidence of their Judaization is extremely flimsy?30
Having demolished the possibility of a historical connection between the Jews of Yemen and the Himyarite kingdom, and declared its absence to be an established fact, Hirschberg felt obliged to clarify the origins of the Jews of North Africa. A thorough, pedantic scholar, he did not want to overlook uncomfortable historical passages that most of his colleagues dismissed out of hand.
Certain older Arab historians had described the Berber tribes' conversion to Judaism, and their having neither approved nor disapproved made their descriptions more trustworthy. And since, as he knew, Jews never sought to convert others, it must have been the presence of Jewish communities in the Berber lands that led some of the inhabitants to adopt Judaism.
Hirschberg's readers were soon reassured—further along, he asserted that these proselytes were a tiny minority in the Jewish population. Moreover, he noted, there is hardly any Jewish testimony on the subject of proselytes; the Berber language left little trace in written Judeo-Arabic culture; and the Old Testament was never translated into Berber. The fact that the Jews adopted Arabic very quickly after the Muslim conquest, whereas the Berbers put up stronger resistance to the linguistic acculturation, proves that the former were not of Berber origin. As for the story about the Judaized queen, it was not very meaningful, since she did not act in the spirit of Judaism and ultimately contributed nothing to it. In fact, her name was Kahya, and the Arab writers misread it as Kahina.31
Hirschberg knew, of course, that the Berbers' culture was largely an oral tradition, and consequently no traces of it are to be found in the Arabic literature and language of North Africa. He knew that there were many names, family appellations, superstitions and customs common to Jewish believers and Muslim Berbers. (For example, the custom of splashing passers-by with water at Pentecost was both Jewish and Berber; the relatively free status of the Jewish women also resembled Berber custom rather than Arabic; and so on.) In many Jewish communities the family name Cohen ("priest") did not appear at all, while in others almost all members of the congregation were called Cohen but had not a single Levy—which could have indicate collective conversions. Moreover, some Islamized Berber tribes had retained certain Jewish customs, such as not lighting fires on Sabbath eve and avoiding leavened bread during the spring festival. Yet this last fact only served to reinforce Hirschberg's conviction: "Ancient Christianity disappeared completely from North Africa, while Judaism persisted through the ages. Indeed, not only the Christian Berbers became Muslim—so did the proselytized Berbers. Only the Jews of the seed of Abraham remained."32
So firm was Hirschberg's conviction that he forgot his ethno-religious belief that the Arabs, too, had descended from the great patriarch. But this typical slip is marginal. His constant effort to prove that the Jews were a nation-race that had been torn from its ancient homeland and gone into a wandering exile was far more significant, and, as we have seen thus far, it met the imperative of mainstream Zionist historiography. His inability to rise above the purifying essentialist ideology that guided all his research damaged his work, and it was this fault that constituted the "scientific source" in support of the common positions in the standard history textbooks of the Israeli educational system.
André Chouraqui, a French Israeli scholar and public figure who was born in Algeria, was less concerned about his pure descent; his book Between East and West: A History of the Jews of North Africa shows a significant historiographic shift: "But, while the last Christian communities of the Berbers survived only to the twelfth century Judaism in North Africa retained the loyalty of its proselytes down to our own day. In the middle of the twentieth century, an estimated one half of the Jews of North Africa are descendants of Berber converts."33
Chouraqui had no more data for estimating the proportion of Berber descendants in the Maghreb's Jewish community than had Hirschberg—they could equally well have spoken of 9 percent as of 99 percent. His book was first published in French in the 1950s, and it clearly sought to align itself with French scholars of the Maghreb. At that time it was difficult to rebut the wide spread view of ancient Judaism as a strongly proselytizing religion, and the book's later Hebrew readers were offered a version far less ethnocentric and more reasonable on the origins of the Jews of North Africa. The book high lights Jewish efforts to proselytize the Punics and does not hesitate to link this growing influence throughout the region with the mass Judaization of the Berbers. Chouraqui also wrote about the Jewish queen Kahina, arguing that although she also treated her Jewish subjects harshly, "the final battles of the Jewish people before modern times were not those against Rome in the Land of Israel in the first century CE, but rather in the seventh century against the Arabs in Africa."34
As we shall see further on, Chouraqui's national passion misled him a little: these were not the last battles of the Jewish people against the Arabs before the twentieth century. The Khazars, just before their mass conversion to Judaism, outdid Kahina and her Berber Jewish troops in halting the advance of Islam, and succeeded even after the battles in North Africa. But before we proceed to these eastern "faraway Jews" (the Volga and Don rivers being east of the Maghreb), it is necessary to mention the significant support for the view of the Maghreb Jews as descendants of Judaized Berbers and Judaized Arabs who accompanied the armies of Islam. It comes from the field of philology.
Professor Paul Wexler of Tel Aviv University was primarily interested in Spanish Jewry, but since the history of this community became involved at an early stage with that of North Africa, he was able to shed new light on the issue. His book The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews argues, "the Sephardic Jews are primarily descendants of Arabs, Berbers and Europeans who converted to Judaism in the period between the rise of the first Jewish communities in western Asia, North Africa and southern Europe, and the 12th century."35 There may, of course, have been some descendants of Judeans in these communities, but they must have been a tiny minority. How did Wexler reach such a heretical conclusion, counter to the hegemonic discourse in the academic world in which he worked?
The sad lack of historical testimony about the early formation of Jewish groups in the Iberian Peninsula, Wexler argued, forces us to rely on the evolution of their languages and their ethnographic data. As a "philological archaeologist," Wexler skillfully traced linguistic vestiges found in the texts and the languages that are still in use today, and concluded that the origins of the Sephardic Jews were extremely heterogeneous, and hardly Judean. Most came to Europe from North Africa with the Muslim conquest in the early eighth century CE, and traces of Judeo-Arabic from the Maghreb, as well as Berber customs, can be found in the Judeo-Iberian language and culture. And if the Arab language was the decisive factor from a linguistic viewpoint, in cultural-religious and demographic terms the Berber presence was the most significant.36
Furthermore—and this may be Wexler's most important discovery—Hebrew and Aramaic made their appearance in Jewish texts only in the tenth century CE, and were not a product of an earlier autochthonous linguistic development. This means that exiles or emigrés from Judea had not settled in Spain in the first century CE or introduced their original language. During the first millennium CE, Jewish believers in Europe knew no Hebrew or Aramaic.
Only after the religious canonization of classical Arabic in the Muslim world, and of medieval Latin in Christendom, did Judaism adopt and propagate its own religious language as a high cultural code.37
Wexler's theory might explain the great conundrum in the history text books in Israel. The authorized scholars have failed to provide a reasonable explanation for the existence of such a large Jewish community in Spain—a lively and creative community that was considerably bigger, numerically, than the groups of Jewish believers that had appeared in Italy, southern Gaul or the Germanic lands.
Judaism probably began to germinate in the Iberian Peninsula in the early centuries CE, mainly among proselytized Roman soldiers, slaves and merchants—much as it did in other imperial colonies in the northwestern Mediterranean. In the New Testament, Paul writes, "whensoever I take my journey into Spain, I will come to you" (Rom. 15:24); he probably intended to preach to the first Jewish Christian congregations that were beginning to be organized there. The decisions adopted by the council of bishops at Elvira bear evidence to the monotheistic syncretism that was still going strong in the south of Western Europe during the fourth century CE.38 Later, the heavy-handed treatment of the Visigoth rulers toward Jewish believers and new proselytes, chiefly in the seventh century CE, drove many of them to flee to North Africa.
Their historical revenge was not long in coming.
The Muslim conquest of Iberia, which began in 711 CE, was carried out mainly by Berber regiments that may well have included many proselytes, who enlarged the demographic: size of the older Jewish communities. Contemporary Christian sources condemned the treasonable behavior of the Jews in various cities, who welcomed the invading forces and were even drafted by them as auxiliary troops. Indeed, as many Christians fled, the Jews, their rivals, were appointed acting governors of many cities.
In his compilation Israel in Exile, Ben-Zion Dinur had included many quotes from Arab sources that corroborate the Christian ones, such as the following:
The third regiment, which had been sent against Elvira, besieged Granada, the capital of that state, and entrusted the blockade to a local force made up of Muslims and Jews, and that is what they did wherever Jews were found ...
Having captured Carmona, Musa attacked Sevilla ... After a siege lasting many months, Musa captured the city, and the Christians fled to Baya. Leaving the Jews as the standing army in Sevilla, Musa advanced to Mérida. Moreover, when Tariq saw that Toledo was empty, he brought in the Jews and left some of his men with them, while he himself proceeded to Wadi al-Hajara [Guadalajara].39
Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander and first Muslim governor of the Iberian Peninsula (Gibraltar bears his name), was a Berber from the Judaized tribe of Nefouça. He reached Spain with seven thousand troops, which soon grew to twenty-five thousand, as many local men joined them. "Among them were many Jews," says Dinur. Drawing his information from Spanish scholars, the Zionist historian reluctantly admits that some of them "argue that all the Berbers who took part in the Arab conquests in Spain were Judaizers."'40
It would be a wild exaggeration to argue that the conquest of Spain was a coordinated operation of Muslim and Jewish Berbers. But as we have seen, the fruitful cooperation between the two religions began in Iberia at the start of the invasion, so it is reasonable to assume that the Jews' favored status made for a meaningful expansion of their communities. However, the ability of established Jews to proselytize pagans and Christians was practicable only in the early stages of the Muslim presence, when Christian hegemony retreated and the massive conversion to Islam had not yet begun.41 This option would begin to shrink in the ninth century, though it never quite ended.
The wave of Islamization did not stop the immigration of Jewish believers from all over southern Europe and even more from the coast of North Africa.
In his important book on the Sephardic Jewry, Yitzhak Baer noted admiringly that Arabic Spain had become "a refuge for Jews."42 The Jewish community thrived demographically, thanks to local proselytizing and to the waves of conquest and immigration. It also flourished culturally, thanks to the admirable symbiosis between it and the tolerant Arabism of the kingdom of Al-Andalus and the principalities that succeeded it. Jewish life in the Muslim regions proved the possibility of a multireligious society in a medieval world of hardening monotheism, which increasingly expressed itself in the abasement, and often the persecution, of the "infidel." At that same time, a kingdom at the other end of Europe was notable for its freedom from religious fanaticism.
JEWISH KAGANS? A STRANGE EMPIRE RISES IN THE EAST
In the middle of the tenth century, the Sephardic golden age, Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, a physician and important statesman in the court of the caliph of Cordoba, Abd ar-Rahman III, wrote a letter to the king of the Khazars, Joseph ben Aaron. Rumors about a great Jewish empire bordering on eastern Europe had reached the Jewish elites at the Continent's western end, and aroused intense curiosity: Was there, at long last, a Jewish kingdom that was not subordinate to Muslim or Christian powers The letter opens with a poem of praise for the king—with an acrostic composed by Menahem ben Saruq, Hasdai's secretary and the leading Hebrew poet in the Iberian Peninsula43—followed by the writer's introduction of himself (inter alia, of course, as a descendant of the exiles from Jerusalem) and a description of the kingdom in which he lives. Then he comes to the point:
Merchants have told me that there is a kingdom of Jews called Alkhazar, and I did not believe it, because I thought they said this to please and approach me. I was puzzled about it, until emissaries arrived from Constantinople with a gift from their king to our king, and I asked them about it. They assured me that this was the truth, that the kingdom is called Alkhazar, and between al-Constantinople and their country there was a journey of fifteen days by sea, but on land there are many nations between us. And the name of its king is Joseph ... And I, when I heard this, was filled with force and my hands grew strong and my hope intensified, and I bowed and made obeisance to the Lord of heaven. I searched for a faithful emissary to send to your land to find out the truth and to greet my lord the king and his servants our brothers, but it was difficult to do, for the distance is very great.
Hasdai goes on to describe in detail all the difficulties entailed in dispatching the letter, and finally asks direct questions: Of what tribe is the king? What is the system of the monarchy? Is it passed from father to son, as was done by the ancestors in the Torah? How big is the kingdom? Who are its enemies, and over whom does it rule? Does war take precedence over the Sabbath? What is the country's climate? And so forth. Hasdai's curiosity was limitless, for which he apologized courteously.
It is not known how long it took before the Khazar king's reply arrived, but in the extant letter King Joseph answered Hasdai's questions as best he could.
He described his origin and the boundaries of his kingdom:
You have asked of what nation and family and tribe we are. Know you that we are of the sons of Japhet and of his son Togarmah ... It is said that in his time my ancestors were but a few, and the Lord granted them strength and boldness, and they fought with many great nations mightier than they were, and with God's help drove them out and inherited their country ... Many generations passed until a king rose whose name was Bulan, a wise and God fearing man, who put all his trust in the Lord, and removed all the sorcerers and idolaters from the country and lived under the Lord's wing ... This king summoned all his ministers and servants and told them all these things. They were content, and accepted the king's judgment and entered under the wing of the Shekhinah ... Then rose a king of his offspring, named Obadiah, a righteous and honest man, who reformed the kingdom and set the Law in the proper order, and built synagogues and seminaries and brought in many of the sages of Israel ...45
Writing in an epic and ornate style, the king describes the conversion to Judaism and lists the reasons that moved his ancestors to prefer the Jewish religion to the other two monotheistic faiths. In a tone suffused with fervent belief in the Torah and the commandments, he goes on to describe the location of his kingdom, its size, its population and the power of his enemies and rivals (the Russians and the Ishmaelites).
Various literary embellishments of and additions to the old texts led some scholars to conclude that these letters, especially the king's reply, were not written in the tenth century CE, and might be forgeries or emendations by Muslim authors. There are two versions of Joseph's letter, a long one and a short one, but certain terms in the short version do not belong in the Arabic lexicon, and its original author was not part of the Muslim cultural world. Moreover, the distinctive linguistic use of the biblical Hebrew "reversing connection" (vav hahipukh) indicates that Hasdai's letter and the king's reply were not written by one hand. The letter of the Khazar king was probably copied and embellished many times, but its core information seems fairly trustworthy, as it accords with contemporary Arab testimonies, and so cannot be dismissed as merely a literary creation.46
In any event, there is evidence from the late eleventh century that despite the difficulties of international communications, copies of both letters, in several versions, were found throughout the Jewish intellectual world. For example, Rabbi Yehudah al-Barzeloni, who questioned the accuracy of these copies, commented, "We have seen some versions of the letter written by Joseph the king, son of Aaron the Khazar Priest, to Rabbi Hasdai son of Yitzhak, and did not know if it was true or not." Finally, though, this sharp scholar, who detested fables, became convinced, and he admitted as much: "That Khazars proselytized and had proselyte kings, I have heard that all this is written in the books of Ishmaelites who were living then and wrote about it in their books." He therefore copied the letter of King Joseph and quoted a part of it in his own work.47
It is almost certain that the twelfth-century Rabbi Yehudah Halevi was familiar with this correspondence. He ascribed the conversion to Judaism by the Khazar monarch to a three-sided monotheistic brainstorming session. Its depiction in the opening of his work The Kuzari is adapted from King Joseph's letter, with some changes in style and detail.48 It should be noted that Rabad (Rabbi Abraham ben David), who was several decades younger than Yehudah Halevi and was one of the fathers of Kabbalah in Provence, wrote of Eastern Europe: "There were Khazar peoples who proselytized, and their king Joseph sent a letter to the president, Rabbi Hasdai son of Yitzhak, ben Shaprut, to tell him that he followed the rabbinate and so did all his people." He goes on to say that when in Tolitula [Toledo], he met Jewish students who told him that they were Khazars and faithful to rabbinical Judaism.49
Whereas the histories of the Judaized Himyarites and Berbers were all but erased from the general consciousness, it was more difficult to leave blank pages in the case of the Khazars. In the first place, the secular modern public knew about the Kuzari, the theological treatise completed in 1140 CE by Yehudah Halevi, a highly respected figure in Jewish tradition and a canonical one in Zionist culture because of his particular association with the Holy Land.
Second, there was a mass of historical evidence about the Khazar kingdom from Arabic, Persian, Byzantine, Russian, Armenian, Hebrew and even Chinese sources. They all agreed that it was very powerful, and many of the sources also referred to its unexpected conversion to Judaism.
Furthermore, the historical standing of this kingdom and the events that followed its breakup had been echoed in the earliest Jewish historiography in Eastern Europe, which battled with this issue for decades. Even Zionist reconstructors of the past hesitated for a long time to tackle the subject, and few of them attempted to research it with appropriate thoroughness. But the widespread interest in the Khazar kingdom eventually began to shrink, and it all but evaporated with the rise of the memory establishment in Israel, after some ten years of its existence.
Although the medieval kingdom of the Khazars existed in distant obscurity, and no gifted theologians had praised and immortalized it as the biblical authors had done in their time and place, it is, however, attested by external sources far more varied and abundant than exist about the kingdom of David and Solomon. Jewish Khazaria was, of course, immeasurably bigger than any historical kingdom in the land of Judah. It was also more powerful than Himyar or the desert realm of Dihya al-Kahina.
The story of the Khazars is fascinating. It begins in the fourth century CE, when some nomadic tribes accompanied the Huns as they surged westward. It continues with the rise of a great empire in the steppes along the Volga River and the northern Caucasus, and ends with the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, which wiped out all traces of this extraordinary kingdom.
The Khazars were a coalition of strong Turkic or Hunnic-Bulgar clans who, as they began to settle down, mingled with the Scythians who had inhabited these mountains and steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, which was known for a long time as the Khazar Sea.50 At its peak, the kingdom encompassed an assortment of tribes and linguistic groups, Alans and Bulgars, Magyars and Slavs. The Khazars collected taxes from them all and ruled over a vast landmass, stretching from Kiev in the northwest to the Crimean Peninsula in the south, and from the upper Volga to present-day Georgia.
From the sixth century on, Persian testimonies followed by Muslim ones shed light on the early stages of the Khazar saga. They invaded the Sassanid kingdom and harassed its border inhabitants. They got as far as the area around Mosul in today's Iraq. In the early seventh century, during the reign of the Persian king Khosrau II, a marriage with the Khazar king's daughter sealed an alliance that enabled the Persians to build fortifications in the passes of the Caucasus Mountains. Remains of these fortifications against Khazar invasions can still be seen. Armenian and Byzantine sources reveal that in the following years the Khazar kingdom formed an alliance with the Eastern Roman Empire in its struggle against the Persians, and became a significant factor in the regional balance of power. The seventh-century Armenian bishop Sebeos wrote in his History of Heraclius: "They [Armenian nobles] went to serve the Great Kagan, king of the northern lands. At the command of their king, the Kagan ... they marched through the Jor pass to come to the aid of the king of Greece."51
The Kagan—this being the title of the ruler of Khazaria—maintained extensive relations with the Byzantine Empire. The future emperor Justinian II, who had been exiled to the Crimea, escaped at the end of the seventh century to the Khazar kingdom, where he married a Khazar princess. She was rebap tized as Theodora and would later be a powerful empress. Nor was this the only marital tie between the realms. In the tenth century, the ruler and author Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus wrote: "That Emperor Leo [III] ... allied himself by marriage with the Kagan of Khazaria, accepting his daughter as wife [for his son Constantine V], shaming the Byzantine Empire and himself, because he thereby abandoned the precepts of the forefathers and treated them with disdain."52
This nontraditional, interdynastic match took place in 732 CE, and the son born of it became the emperor who was known as Leo the Khazar. This was also the zenith of the diplomatic relations between the two mighty kingdoms. The Khazars succeeded in the course of many battles to halt the Muslims' north ward sweep, and temporarily saved the Byzantine Empire from a menacing encirclement that would have precipitated its collapse.
The many battles between the Muslims and the Khazars were described by numerous Arab chroniclers, who had no qualms about copying each other's work. Ibn al-Athir wrote that "they fought very fiercely, and both sides held out. Then the Khazars and the Turks overcame the Muslims ... After al-Jarrah fell on the battlefield, the Khazars coveted [the country] and penetrated far into it, reaching Mosul."53 This was in 730 CE, but the response was not long in coming. After a tremendous logistical effort and more battles, the Arab armies managed to repel the determined enemy. The commander, who would later be the Caliph Marwan II, even led strong forces into Khazaria itself, and his condition for withdrawal was the conversion of the Kagan to Islam. The Khazar sovereign accepted, and the Arab armies retreated to the Caucasus Mountains, which was agreed as the final boundary between Khazaria and the Muslim world. As we shall see, the temporary conversion of the pagan Khazar kingdom was not very meaningful, though many of its subjects accepted the faith of Muhammad.
Most sources depict the Khazar kingdom as having a highly original dual government: a supreme holy leader as well as an active secular leader. Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a diplomat and author who was sent by the caliph al-Muqtadir in 921 CE to the Bulgar country by the Volga, crossed Khazaria, and described it in his rare travel notes. On the Khazars and their political system, he wrote:
As for the king of the Khazars, known as Khakan [Kagan], he is seen only once in four months, and at a respectful distance. He is called the Great Khakan, and his deputy is called Khakan Bey. It is [the latter] who commands the armies, administers the kingdom and looks after it. He sallies and raids, and the kings of the vicinity surrender to him. He goes every day to see the Great Khakan, in a deferential manner, showing himself humble and modest.54
More information is found in the work of the geographer and chronicler Al-Istakhri, writing in about 932. His description is livelier and more picturesque:
As for their regime and government, their master is called Khakan Khazar, who is more exalted than the king of the Khazars, though it is the king who empowers him. When they want to empower a Khakan they throttle him with a silk cord, and when he has almost suffocated they ask him, For how long do you wish to reign? And he replies, So many years. If he dies before that time [it is well], otherwise he is put to death at that time. Only the sons of well-known families may fill the post of Khakan, and he has no real power, but is worshipped and adored when people appear before him.
Yet no one enters his presence except a small number, such as the king and those of his rank ... And no one is appointed Khakan except those who cleave to Judaism.55
Other Arabic sources corroborate the existence of a dual power system in Khazaria. This was an efficient regime—it maintained a mystique around the Great Kagan, and utilized the most gifted and competent prince as the Bey, who functioned as a military viceroy. The halo of sanctity that hung over the Kagan did not stop him from maintaining a harem of twenty-five women and sixty concubines, though this was not necessarily in devout emulation of the biblical King Solomon.
The seat of the rulers was the capital Itil, beside the Volga estuary on the Caspian Sea. Unfortunately, it appears that changes in the course of the great river's tributaries and the rise in sea level inundated the city, whose precise location remains unknown. If the kingdom maintained a documentary archive, it was lost, and scholars have had to rely mainly on external sources. Itil was largely a city of tents and wooden houses, and only the rulers' residences were built of bricks. Ibn Fadlan's description provides some details:
Al-Khazar is the name of a region (and climate), and its capital is called Itil. Itil is the name of the river that runs into al-Khazar from the [land of] Russians and Bulgars. Itil is a city and al-Khazar is the name of the kingdom, not the city. Itil is in two parts ... The king resides in the western part, a parasang in length, surrounded by a wall, but it is built irregularly. Their houses are made of felt, except a few that are built of mud. And there are markets and public baths.56
The inhabitants were no longer nomadic herders like their forefathers, but the populace still migrated every spring to the rural areas to cultivate the soil and spent the harsh winter in the capital city, where the climate was more temperate because of its proximity to the sea. Al-Istakhri reported:
In summer they go to the fields twenty leagues away, to sow and to gather. As some are close to the river and others to the prairie, they carry it [the produce] on carts and on the river. Their main nourishment is rice and fish. The honey and barley they send out of their country comes to them from the region of the Russians and Bulgars.57
Al-Istakhri also described another city: "The Khazars have a city named Samandar ... It has many gardens, and it is said to contain some four thousand vineyards, as far as the Serir boundary. Most of its produce is grapes."58 It is known that this was the Khazar capital before the rulers moved to Itil, and that fishing was an important source of livelihood for the population.
So we know that the Khazars were typical rice-growers and regular consumers of fish and wine, though the bulk of the kingdom's income came from tolls. Khazaria straddled the Silk Road, and also dominated the Volga and the Don rivers, which were major transportation routes. A further source of income was the heavy tax imposed on the numerous tribes governed by the kingdom. The Khazars were known for their flourishing trade, especially in furs and slaves, and their growing wealth enabled them to maintain a strong and well-trained military force that dominated all of southern Russia and today's eastern Ukraine.
Thus far, the descriptions of the Arab chroniclers coincide and even accord with the testimony of King Joseph's letter. The question of the Khazar language, however, is obscure. No doubt the great mixture of tribes and populations spoke various languages and dialects, but what was the language of the Khazar power elite? Al-Istakhri, following al-Bakri, wrote: "The language of the Khazars differs from that of the Turks and the Persian language, and does not resemble the language of any other nation."59 Nevertheless, most researchers assume that the spoken Khazar language consisted of Hunnic-Bulgarian dialects with others from the Turkic family.
There is no doubt, however, that the Khazars' sacred tongue and written communication was Hebrew. The few extant Khazar documents indicate as much, and the Arab writer al-Nadim, who lived in Baghdad in the tenth century, confirms it: "As for the Turks and the Khazars ... they have no script of their own, and the Khazars write in Hebrew."60 Inscriptions have been found in Crimea that are in a non-Semitic language written in Hebrew characters; two of these characters (shin and tzadik), eventually entered the Cyrillic alphabet, presumably in the course of the Khazars' early rule over the Russians.
Why did the Khazar kingdom not adopt the Greek or Arabic language for religious usage and high-level communication? Why did the Khazars become Jews, when all their neighbors converted en masse either to Christianity or to Islam?
And another question: When did the amazing collective proselytizing begin?
KHAZARS AND JUDAISM: A LONG LOVE AFFAIR?
One of the few surviving testimonies left by the Khazars themselves is the important document known to scholars as the Cambridge Document. Its originality is less disputed than that of King Joseph's letter. This Hebrew manuscript, written by a Jewish Khazar from the court of King Joseph, was found in the famous Cairo genizah, published in 1912, and has since been kept at the Cambridge University library.61 Little is known about the writer or the addressee, but it appears to have been written in the tenth century CE and may have been another reply to Hasdai's request. The text is fragmented, and many words are missing, but it is still a rich source of information. After a few missing lines, the letter reads as follows:
Armenia and our ancestors fled from them ... [for they could not] bear the yoke of the worshippers of idols. And [the princes of Khazaria] received them [for the men of] Khazaria were first without the Torah. And [they too] remained without Torah and Scriptures and made marriage with the inhabitants of the land [and mingled with them.] And they learned their deeds, and went out with them [to the war continually.] And they became [one] people. Only upon the covenant of circumcision they relied. And [some of them] observed the Sabbath. And there was no king in the land of Khazaria. Only him who won victories in the battle they would appoint over him them as general of the army. Now (it happened) at one time when the Jews went forth into the battle with them as was their wont that on that day a Jew proved mighty with his sword and put to flight the enemies who came against Khazaria. Then the people of Khazaria appointed him over them as general of the army in accordance with their ancient custom.62
The document also describes a tripartite brainstorming encounter between a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew—similar in essentials to the description in King Joseph's letter, and concluded, of course, with the appropriate decision in favor of Judaism.
It seems that this literary-historical model was very popular in that period, because early Russian chronicles describe the conversion of Vladimir I of Kiev to Christianity in almost the same manner, though naturally with a different outcome. A contemporary Arab writer also described the Judaization of the king of Khazaria following an intense theological debate, except that in his text the Jewish scholar hired an assassin to poison the Muslim scholar before the decisive confrontation, and in that way "the Jew turned the king to his religion and converted him."63
The rest of the so-called Cambridge Document, like its opening, suggests an interesting hypothesis concerning the Judaization of the Khazars:
Israel, together with the men of Khazaria, returned in perfect repentance. But also the Jews began to come from Baghdad, from Khorasan and from the land of Greece and strengthened the hands of the men of the land, and encouraged themselves in the covenant of the Father of the Multitude [Abraham]. And the men of the land appointed over them one of the wise men as judge. And they call his name in the tongue of Khazaria, Khagan. Therefore, the judges who arose after him are called by the name Kagan even unto this day. As to the great prince of Khazaria, they turned his name into Sabriel and thus made him king over them.64
It may be that this Sabriel was the postconversion name of King Bulan, mentioned in Joseph's letter, and this story may well be unreliable, and the dramatic descriptions of the Judaization merely fables and sermons. However, stories about migration as the catalyst in the process of proselytization seem much more relevant to understanding Khazar history. The arrival of Jewish believers from Armenia, from today's Iraq, from Khorasan (which covered parts of modern-day Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan) and from Byzantium may well have triggered the conversion of that strange kingdom to Judaism. Proselytizing Jews were driven from the arena of rival monotheisms, Christianity or Islam, to the lands of paganism.
As in other regions that witnessed mass Judaization, so in Khazaria, it began with immigrants who convinced the pagans that their faith was preferable.
The great mass proselytizing campaign that began in the second century BCE, with the rise of the Hasmonean kingdom, reached its climax in Khazaria in the eighth century CE.
The Khazar-Hebrew testimony about Jewish immigration finds support in Arabic literature. The Arab chronicler al-Mas'udi wrote:
As for the Jews, they are the king and his court and the Khazars his people. The Judaization of the king of the Khazars took place in the Caliphate of Harun al-Rashid. Many Jews who had heard of it joined him from all the Muslim cities and from Byzantium. The reason being that the Byzantine king in our time, the year 332 [944 CE], Armanus [Romanus] forcibly Christianized the Jews in his kingdom ... Upon which, many Jews fled from Byzantium to the land of the Khazars.65
The Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid lived from 763 to 809 CE. The putative Byzantine emperor Romanus reigned in the first half of the tenth century. This passage suggests that the relation between the Khazar kingdom and Judaism developed in stages, the first of which was in the eighth century CE. We have seen that in that century the Khazar armies invaded Armenia, and even reached the city of Mosul in today's Kurdistan. In these regions there were still Jewish communities—people remaining from the ancient kingdom of Adia bene—who had spread deep into Armenia. Perhaps it was in this encounter that the Khazars were first exposed to the religion of Yahweh, and that some Jewish believers accompanied the army when it returned to Khazaria. It is also known that proselytized Jews bearing Greek names lived on the northern shores of the Black Sea, especially in the Crimea.66 Later some of them fled from the vicious persecutions of the Byzantine emperors.
Yehudah Halevi noted in The Kuzari that the Khazars converted in 740 CE, but the date may not be correct. A Christian document written circa 864 CE in distant western France stated that "all the 'Gazari' obey the precepts of Judaism."67 At some stage between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries, the Khazars adopted Jewish monotheism as their particular faith and rite. It is also reasonable to assume that this was not a miraculous single act, but a long process. Even King Joseph's questionable letter describes the conver sion as occurring in stages: King Bulan was persuaded by the logic of the Law of Moses and became a Jew, but only King Obadiah, his grandson or great-grandson, "reformed the kingdom and set the law in the proper order," built synagogues and seminaries, and adopted the Mishnah and Talmud. It is also said that he invited Jewish sages from far away to bolster the true faith among his subjects.
If in the nineteenth century scholars were doubtful about the conversion of the Khazar kingdom, today it is not in dispute. The spreading monotheism reached the Caucasus and the steppes of the Volga and the Don—today's southern Russia—and convinced rulers and tribal elites to believe in the many advantages of a single deity. The question remains, Why did Khazaria opt for Judaism rather than the other monotheistic religions: with their less onerous requirements? If we set aside the magical sermon included in King Joseph's letter, the Cambridge Document, and Yehudah Halevi's book, we are left with the same explanation that accounted for Himyar's conversion. The desire to remain independent in the face of mighty, grasping empires—in this case, the Orthodox Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Muslim Caliphate—impelled the rulers of Khazaria to adopt Judaism as a defensive ideological weapon. Had the Khazars adopted Islam, for example, they would have become the subjects of the caliph. Had they remained pagan, they would have been marked for annihilation by the Muslims, who did not tolerate idolatry. Christianity, of course, would have subordinated them to the Eastern Empire for a long time. The slow and gradual transition from the ancient shamanism of the region to Jewish monotheism probably also contributed to the consolidation and centralization of the Khazar realm.
One of the leading collectors of material about the Khazars was a Karaite Russian named Abram Firkovich. This tireless researcher was also very devout; anxious to create the impression that Khazaria had converted not to rabbinical Judaism but to Karaism, he added and deleted material in various documents, sacred books and tomb inscriptions. Thus, despite his valuable work of preser vation, he damaged many sources and created general distrust. Eventually his falsifications were discovered by other scholars (chiefly the important historian Abraham Eliyahu Harkavy), and closer investigation revealed that the Khazars' Judaism was not at all Karaite. It is quite possible that Karaism, no less than Talmud Judaism, spread through the expanses of Khazaria, especially to the Crimea, but the Jewish practice in the kingdom was, to a greater or lesser extent, rabbinical. The historical consolidation of Karaism came too late to have been the first catalyst that prompted the Judaization of the Khazars, and there is no reason to assume that it went on to capture all of them. Moreover, at the time of the Khazar conversion, copies of the Talmud were still a rarity, which enabled many proselytes to take up ancient rites, even priestly sacrifices.
Remains of a body found in a burial cave in Phangoria in the Crimea were found clothed in leather garments in the style worn by servers in the Jerusalem Temple, as prescribed in detail in the Old Testament.
But one of the wonders of the eastern Jewish kingdom, for which it is still praised, was its religious pluralism, inherited from its early polytheistic shamanism, which was still popular in the region. As al-Mas'udi wrote: "The laws of the Khazar capital decree seven judges: two for the Muslims, two who judge in accordance with the Torah, for the Khazars, two who rule in accord ance with the Gospels, for the Christians among them, and one for the Saqaliba (Bulgars) and Russians and other idolaters "
It is almost certain that the Khazar power sheltered Jews, Muslims, Christians and pagans, and that synagogues, mosques and churches existed side by side in its cities. Ibn Hawqal, writing in 976-7CE, confirmed this in his description of Samandar: "There are Muslims living there, who have mosques in the place, and the Christians have churches and the Jews synagogues."69 Yaqutal-Hamawi, drawing on ibn Fadlan, wrote:
The Muslims have in this city [Itil] a big mosque where they pray, and which they visit on Fridays. It had a tall minaret for summoning to prayer and several criers. When the king of the Khazars heard in the year 310 [922 CE] that Muslims had destroyed a synagogue in Dal al-Babunaj, he ordered the minaret to be torn down, and this was done. And he put the criers to death.
He said, If I did not fear that they would destroy all the synagogues in the Muslim lands, I would have destroyed this mosque.70
Jewish solidarity sometimes overcame the principle of religious tolerance, but did not do away with it—although when Jews were persecuted in the Byzantine Empire during the reign of the Emperor Romanus, King Joseph retaliated by persecuting Christian Khazars. Nevertheless, the Kagans implemented a policy similar to that of the Muslim kingdom of Al-Andalus, a mild monotheistic model, very different from the contemporary Christian civilization or from the "totalitarian" ethos of the Hasmonean kingdom. Muslims and Christians served in the Kagan's armies, and were even exempt from fighting when their fellow believers were on the other side.
The Cambridge Document supports the statement found in the letter of King Joseph, that the Kagans bore Hebrew names. King Joseph's letter mentions Hezekiah, Manasseh, Yitzhak, Zebulun, Menahem, Binyamin and Aharon. The manuscript mentions kings named Binyamin and Aharon, which reinforces the correctness of the king's letter, albeit partially.
The author of the manuscript also writes, "Now they say in our land that our ancestors came from the tribe of Simeon, but we are not able to prove the truth of the matter."71 Proselytes have always striven to find some direct genealogical link to the patriarchs of biblical mythology, and this tendency affected many of the Khazars, who wanted to believe that they were descended from the Israelite tribes. The religious consciousness grew more decisive in the next generation, and in time it overcame the former tribal identities associated with idolatry, The pagan cults became abominable in the eyes of the proud new monotheists, and even more so for their offspring and their imagined identity. The kingdom therefore saw itself as more Jewish than Khazar, and so it was documented in the contemporary Russian epics: it was not the land of the Khazars, but the land of the Jews—Zemlya Zhidovskaya—that awed its Slav neighbors.
The desire for a sacred genealogy also gave rise to novel cultural markers.
The list of kings in King Joseph's letter includes one named Hanukkah, and the Cambridge Document mentions an army commander named Pessah. This original practice of naming people after religious festivals was unknown in biblical times or in the Hasmonean kingdom, nor has it been found in the kingdom of Himyar and its descendants, or among the Jews of distant North Africa. In later times, these names migrated westward to Russia, Poland and even Germany.
Nevertheless, the question remains unanswered: Did Jews constitute the majority of the monotheistic believers in the whole of Khazaria? The sources are contradictory. Some of the Arab writers assert that the Jewish Khazars were an elite minority that held the power. For example, Al-Istakhri states that "the smallest community are the Jews, while most of the inhabitants are Muslims and Christians, but the king and his courtiers are Jews."72 Others stated that all the Khazars were Jews. Yaqut, following ibn Fadlan, the most reliable source of the period, states: "The Khazars and their king are all Jews."73 Al-Mas'udi likewise asserted: "As for Jews—they are the king and his courtiers and his subjects the Khazars."74 It is quite possible that the bulk of the great Khazar tribe became Jews, while other tribes were only partly proselytized and that many became Muslims or Christians or remained pagan.
How big was the community of proselytized Khazars? The research has not come up with any figures. A major difficulty in history is that we never know much about the spiritual beliefs of the commonality. Most traditional Jewish historiography, as well as a major part of Soviet nationalist scholar ship, emphasized that only the monarchy and the higher nobility became Jews, while the Khazar masses were pagan or adopted Islam. It must not be forgotten that in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries CE, not all European peasants had become Christian, and that the faith was quite tenuous in the lower echelons of the medieval social hierarchy. On the other hand, it is known that at the time of the early monotheistic religions, slaves were almost always forced to adopt their masters' faith. The wealthy Khazars, who owned many slaves, were no different (as the letter of King Joseph clearly states). Inscriptions engraved on many tombstones in the former Khazaria indicate widespread Judaism, though often with obvious syncretic deviations.75
The Khazar kingdom remained Jewish for too long—estimates range from two hundred to four hundred years—not to warrant the assumption that the practice and the faith trickled down to broader strata. Although it was probably not the pure and detailed Halakhic Judaism, at least some of the commandments and rituals must have reached extensive congregations; otherwise, the Jewish religion would not have attracted so much attention, as well as a good deal of emulation, throughout the region. It is known that proselytization also took place among the Alans, speakers of Iranian dialects who lived under the Khazar aegis in the mountains of the northern Caucasus.
The Cambridge Document contains the statement that in one of the Khazars' many wars against their neighbors, "only the king of the Alani was in support of [Khazaria.] For some of them observed the Torah of the Jews."76
It was the same with the great Kabar tribe, which pulled away from Khazaria and joined the Magyars on their westward migration. Before their migration to Central Europe, the Magyars, who are among the forebears of today's Hungarian people, were subordinated to the Khazar kingdom. The Kabars, who had been part of the Khazar population, rebelled against the Kagan for some reason, joined the Magyars, and left Khazaria with them. It is known that among them were a good many proselytes, and their presence in the formation of the Hungarian kingdom and the rise of the Jewish community in it may not be void of significance.77
In addition to the letter of King Joseph and the long Cambridge Document, there is another Khazar document that was found in the Cairo genizah and brought to the same British university. Published only in 1962, it testifies to the spread of Judaism in the Slav regions of Khazaria.78 A letter in Hebrew sent from Kiev about 930 CE asks for assistance for a local Jew named Yaakovben Hanukkah, who has lost all his property. The signatories on the letter are typical Hebrew names as well as Khazar-Turkic ones, and together they claim to represent the "congregation of Kiyov." The letter also bears an endorsement in Turkish characters, saying, "I read it." This document almost certainly indicates the early presence of Khazar proselytes in the city that would soon become the Russian kingdom's first capital. It is even possible that the fore bears of these Jews founded it, as the name Kiev derives from a Turkic dialect.
There must have been a reason that a wide opening in the ancient city wall was known as the Jews' Gate, and that it led to a quarter known as Jewish and another called Khazar.79
Another early source attesting to the collective conversion of the Khazars is a Karaite one. In about 973 CE, one Yaakov Qirqisani, a scholarly traveler who was quite familiar with the regions around Khazaria, wrote a commentary in Aramaic on the verse "God shall enlarge Japheth" (Gen. 9:27): "This is what the words mean: he will dwell in the tents of Shem, which grant him a favor and advantage. And some commentators think that this refers to the Khazars, who became Jews."80
This Karaite testimony is not the only one confirming that the Judaization was not merely an "oriental" fantasy of Arab scholars. In addition to Hasdai ibn Shaprut's request and the statements of Rabad, the great Rabbi Saadia Gaon, who lived in Baghdad for several years in the tenth century, also wrote about the Khazars. We saw in the previous chapter that he lamented the Islamization of Jews in the Holy Land. Did he rejoice in the Judaization of a whole kingdom, by way of replacement? He may well have been dubious about these new Jews who showed up far north of Babylon, these believers in the law of Moses who were also tough warriors, riders of horses, periodic executioners of their own kings, and very active slave traders. The worry that these wild Jews did not accept the full burden of the Torah and all the precepts of the Talmud may well have dismayed the Karaites' severest ideological opponent. In his writings, he referred to the Judaization of the Khazars in a matter-of-fact way, mentioned the Kagan once, and also described a Jew named Yitzhak bar Abraham who journeyed to the Khazars' land and settled there.81
Later, sometime in the early twelfth century, Rabbi Petahiah of Regens burg (Ratisbon) set out to journey from his city in Germany to Baghdad. On the way, he passed through Kiev, the Crimean Peninsula, and other regions that had been parts of Khazaria, which had already declined and diminished.
His impressions of the journey, actually written by his disciple, were as follows:
In the land of Kedar and the land of Khazaria it is customary that the women mourn and bewail their deceased parents all day and all night... There are no Jews in Kedar, there are heretics, and R. Petahiah asked them, Why do you not believe in the words of the Sage[s]? They replied, Because our parents did not teach them. On the Sabbath eve they cut all the bread to be eaten on the Sabba[th], and eat in the dark, and spend all day sitting in one place, and do not pray but sing the Psalms. When Rabbi Petahiah taught them ou[r] prayer and the blessing of food, they liked it, and said, We have not heard of the Talmud.82
This description strengthens the supposition that Karaism was widespread in the region or, alternatively, that there was an undefined Jewish syncretism in the steppes. Later, however, when Petahiah reached Baghdad, he told a different story:
The seven kings of Meshech were visited by an angel who told them in a dream to abandon their religions and laws and follow the law of Moses ben Amram, or their country would be destroyed. They tarried, until the angel began to devastate their land, and all the kings of Meshech and their people converted to Judaism, and asked the head of a seminary to send them Torah students, and poor students went there to teach them and their sons the Torah and the Babylonian Talmud. Students went from Egypt to teach them. He saw the emissaries and those who went to the tomb of Ezekiel, heard about the miracles and that the worshippers' petitions were answered.8
Were these the last gasps of a dwindling Jewish kingdom? The desperate clinging to a faith that remained after the former royal glory? We know too little about the situation of Khazaria in the twelfth century CE to venture an opinion.
When did the great Khazar empire collapse? In the past it was assumed by many that it happened in the second half of the tenth century. The principality of Kiev, out of which grew the first Russian kingdom, was for many years a vassal of the rulers of Khazaria. The principality grew stronger in the tenth century, struck an alliance with the Eastern Roman Empire and attacked its powerful Khazar neighbors. In 965 (or 969), Sviatoslav I, the ruling prince of Kiev, attacked the Khazar city of Sarkel, which controlled the Don River, and captured it. Sarkel was a fortified city, originally built by Byzantine engineers, of important strategic value to the Jewish empire, and its loss marked the beginning of the empire's decline. Contrary to prevalent opinion, however, this was not the end of Khazaria.
Reports about the fate of the capital Itil in this war are contradictory. Some Arab sources state that it fell; others state that it survived the Russian victory.
Since it consisted largely of huts and tents, it may well have been rebuilt. What is certain, though, is that in the second half of the tenth century Khazaria lost its hegemonic position in the region. Prince Vladimir I of Kiev, Sviatoslav's young son, expanded the boundaries of his principality as far as the Crimea, and, in a significant step for the future of Russia, converted to Christianity. His alliance with the Eastern Roman Empire undermined its long connection with Khazaria, and in 1016 CE a joint Byzantine-Russian force attacked and defeated the Jewish kingdom.84
Thereafter, the Russian church was headed by the patriarch of Contantinople, but this holy alliance did not last long. In 1071 the Seljuks, rising tribes of Turkic origin, defeated the empire's considerable forces, and eventually the Kievan Russian kingdom, too, fell apart. Little is known about the situation of Khazaria in the late eleventh century CE. There are some mentions of Khazar warriors fighting in the armies of other powers, but there is almost no information about the kingdom itself. Seljuk assaults on the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, beginning at about the same time, ended its flourishing intellectual renaissance, and most Arab chronicles fell silent for a long time.
Empires have risen and fallen throughout history, but the monotheistic religions, as noted in the first chapter, were far more durable and stable. From the decline of the tribal societies until modern times, religious identity meant far more to people than did their superficial relationship to empires, kingdoms or principalities. In the course of its triumphant history, Christianity outlived many political regimes, and so did Islam. Why, then, not Judaism? It survived the fall of the Hasmonean kingdom, the collapse of Adiabene and Himyar and Dihya al-Kahina's heroic defeat. It also survived the last Jewish empire, which stretched from the Caspian to the Black Sea.
The decline of Khazaria's political power did not cause the collapse of Judaism in its main cities, or in extensions of it that reached deep into the Slav territories. The continued Jewish presence in them is documented. The fact that Jews held on to their faith in the mountains, in the steppes, in the river valleys and in the Crimean Peninsula is attested not only by Petahiah.
Christian testimonies, too, reveal that followers of the law of Moses existed in various places.85
But if the internecine wars in the sprawling prairies between the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains did not annihilate populations and religions, the torrential Mongolian invasion—led by Genghis Khan and his sons in the early thirteenth century—swept up everything in its path and wrecked the political, cultural and even economic morphologies of all of Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Some new kingdoms arose under the aegis of the "Golden Horde," apparently including a small Khazar kingdom, but the Mongols did not understand the needs of land cultivation in the vast territories they captured, and did not sufficiently care for the farming needs of the subjugated populations.
During the conquest, the irrigation systems that branched from the wide rivers—systems that had sustained the cultivation of rice and vineyards—were demolished, causing the flight of masses of people and depopulating the prairies for hundreds of years. Among the emigrants were many Jewish Khazars who, together with their neighbors, advanced into the western Ukraine and hence to Polish and Lithuanian territories. Only the Khazars in the mountains of the Caucasus managed, to some extent, to hold on to their land, where agriculture was based mainly on precipitation. After the first half of the thirteenth century, there are no more mentions of Khazaria: the kingdom sank into historical oblivion.
MODERN RESEARCH EXPLORES THE KHAZAR PAST
Isaak Jost took an interest in the Khazars and wrote about them; later, so did Heinrich Graetz. The wisps of Khazar history available in the nineteenth century were the letters of Hasdai and Joseph. Despite the differences between these two notable historians, they shared the German condescension toward the culture of Eastern Europe, especially its Jews. Furthermore, in seeking to reconstruct the history of the Jews, they looked in particular for its spiritual expressions. The scanty Khazar output could make no impression on these hyper-Germanic intellectuals. Jost placed no credence at all in Joseph's letter, and Graetz, who indulged in descriptions, wrote that before their conversion to Judaism, the Khazars "professed a coarse religion, which was combined with sensuality and lewdness."87 This was characteristic rhetoric—a system atic erasure of the past proselytes who had swelled the ranks of the "chosen people."
Graetz, with his basic positivist approach, gave credence to the Hebrew correspondence between Hasdai and the king, just as he believed all the biblical stories. It seems he was momentarily captivated by the image of the mighty kingdom of the Jewish Khazars, and was also convinced that Judaism had spread through much of its population. Yet in the final analysis, he viewed the Khazars' Judaization as a passing phenomenon, without significance, which had no effect on the history of the Jews.88
But if the historians of Ashkenaz did not attribute much importance to the Khazars, Eastern European scholars looked at it differently. In Russia, Ukraine and Poland there was lively interest in the lost Jewish kingdom, especially among the Jewish Russian scholars. In 1834, V. V. Grigoriev, an early scholar at the Saint Petersburg School of Eastern Studies, published a study about the Khazars, in which he stated: "An unusual phenomenon in the Middle Ages was the Khazar people. In the midst of wild nomadic tribes, it had all the qualities of a civilized nation: orderly administration, flourishing commerce and a standing army ... Khazaria was a bright meteor that shone in Europe's dark sky."89 In the early nineteenth century, the idea that the Russian nation emerged in the light of a Jewish kingdom did not seem strange; interest in Khazaria spread following this pioneering study, and other historians began to research the subject from a sympathetic viewpoint that tended to glorify the Khazar past. At this time, Russian nationalism was in its infancy, and it was possible to show generosity to the exotic ancient Slavic peoples in the East.
Echoes of these works reached the Jewish communities as well. In 1838, Joseph Perl published his satiric book Bohen Zaddik, containing forty-one "letters" from imaginary rabbis concerning various aspects of Jewish life, including some mentions of the Khazars.90 Letter 25 discussed past doubts about the Judaization of the eastern kingdom, contrary to the current scientific confirmation of the statements in Hasdai's letter (though not in Joseph's letter).
Another supposed rabbi wrote in response that he was happy to learn about the historical existence of the Khazars.91 Interest in Khazaria did not end there, and it grew stronger in the second half of the century. For example, in 1867 two books appeared that dealt directly and indirectly with Khazar history. One was a short work by Joseph Yehudah Lerner, entitled The Khazars; the other, Abraham A. Harkavy's The Jews and the Language of the Slavs.92 Lerner trusted the Hebrew correspondence and relied on it rather uncritically. He already knew some of the Arab chronicles, and he used them to complete the historical reconstruction. But what is most interesting about his essay is his refusal to date the fall of the Khazar kingdom to 965 (or 969) CE. He argued that a Jewish kingdom persisted in the Crimean peninsula, ruled by a king named David, and that only in 1016, following the Byzantine conquest, did the independent Jewish monarchy fall apart and the large Jewish population turn to Karaism.93
Lerner concludes with a defense of the findings of Abram Firkovich, who, as we have seen, was accused by other scholars of forging and distorting Jewish tombstone inscriptions—all of which suggests that Lerner himself came from a Karaite background.
One of the most trenchant critics of Firkovich and of the Karaite hypothesis was Abraham Harkavy, an early Jewish Russian historian. In 1877 Harkavy was appointed head of the department of Jewish literature and Oriental manuscripts in the Imperial Public Library in Saint Petersburg, a post he retained for the rest of his life. He was a cautious and pedantic researcher, and his works—The Jews and the Language of the Slavs and other works about the Khazars,notably Stories by Jewish Writers on the Khazars and the Khazar Kingdom—are regarded as reliable studies. He had no doubt that there were many Jews in Khazaria, and that they practiced rabbinical Judaism. It was he who in 1874 discovered in Firkovich's collection the longer version of King Joseph's letter, and his profound knowledge of Eastern tradition and literature made him a leading scholar on the subject of the Khazars. The Orientalist Daniel Abramovich Chwolson, a baptized Jew, was a colleague of his, with whom Harkavy argued intensely.94
By the time Dubnow consolidated his status in Jewish historiography, there was already a fair amount of material on Khazaria. The Cambridge Document was published in 1912, and in the first half of the twentieth century the Hasdai-Joseph correspondence began to be treated as a trustworthy source, even though it had been extensively redacted. In his comprehensive oeuvre World History of the Jewish People, Dubnow devoted more space to the Khazar kingdom than did his predecessors Jost and Graetz.95 He outlined the development of the kingdom, described in vivid terms its voluntary Judaization on the basis of King Joseph's letter, and trusted the bulk of the Arab chronicles.
Like Graetz, he was impressed by Khazaria's great power, but he did not fail to stress that only the higher strata converted, while the middle and lower classes remained pagan, Muslim, or Christian. He added a special appendix including a long bibliographic analysis, and stated that "the story of the Khazars is one of the most problematic issues in the history of the Jews."96 But he did not explain why that was so. There seems to be some awkwardness in his writing on the subject, though the reason for it is unclear. Perhaps it was the fact that those tricky Khazars were not exactly the "ethno-biological descendants of Israel," and their history was alien to the Jewish metanarrative.
The Soviet government in its early days encouraged the study of Khazaria, and young historians enthusiastically began to research Russia's pre-imperial past. Between the early 1920s and the mid-1930s, this resulted in a wave of historiographical production whose findings were unhesitatingly idealized.
The Soviet scholars' sympathy was due to the fact that the Khazar empire was not ruled by the Orthodox Church, and was tolerant of and open to all religions. The fact that it was a Jewish kingdom did not disturb the researchers, especially since many of them, for all their conspicuous Marxism, came from a Jewish background. Why not inject a little Jewish pride into the spirit of proletarian internationalism? But the most prominent of these scholars were not of Jewish origin.
In 1932, Pavel Kokovtsov published all the "Hebrew Khazar documents" in a systematic critical work, and although he expressed reservations about the authenticity of some of them, the publication itself encouraged further research as well as archaeological excavations in the region of the lower Don River. The archaeological mission was led by young Mikhail Artamonov, who published his summaries in Studies on Khazaria's Ancient History.97 This work conformed to the Russian and Soviet tradition of being sympathetic to the Khazar narrative, and it lauded the ancient rulers who nurtured the embryonic Kievan Russia.
The great Soviet interest in Khazaria and its prominent place in the historiography of southeastern Europe influenced the work of Jewish scholars outside the USSR. For example, between the two world wars the important Polish-Jewish historian Yitzhak Schipper devoted several chapters in his books to Khazar history Baron, too, in his comprehensive oeuvre, was determined to examine the Khazar phenomenon at length. Where Dubnow included Khazar history as a legitimate chapter in the history of the "Jewish people," Baron, writing in the late 1930s, treated it, surprisingly, as a major issue, as we shall see.
Despite Baron's essentially ethnocentric outlook, he did not hesitate to tackle the Khazar conundrum and install it in the history of the Jews. To integrate the Khazars into that sequence, he assumed that there had been a massive migration of Jews into the Khazarian territories, making its population mixed Khazar-Jewish, as he put it.98 Other than that, Baron's Khazar narrative is solid, and based on most of the sources available to him at the time. In later editions, published in the late 1950s, he included new analyses and expanded on the subject with many updated clarifications.
Dinur did the same in his valuable collection of sources, Israel in Exile. As well as impressive quotes from the Hasdai-Joseph exchange, the Cambridge Document, and Arab and Byzantine chronicles, the 1961 edition included numerous scholarly comments and abundant new information. It devoted more than fifty pages to Khazar history, and Dinur adopted a straightforward position about it: "The 'Khazar kingdom,' 'the country of Jews' and 'the cities of Jews' within it were historical facts of great significance. They were transformed by the developments of Jewish history, and their impact was felt in the life of the Jewish people, despite their distance from its high road."99
For such a statement to be made, it was necessary to assume that there had been in Khazaria an early Jewish population, "a Jewish tribal community," and that it was because of its presence that the kingdom converted to Judaism. Jewish migration to Khazaria was not merely a trickle of refugees and immigrants who made it to the strange country and proselytized with great skill—there had to have been "a continuing Jewish immigration to the country, and the Jews were a significant stratum of the population, bolstering its Jewish element."100 Now that we are certain that many of the Khazars were "Jews by descent," we can take pride in their territorial and military might, and relish the memory of an ancient Jewish sovereignty, a kind of medieval Hasmonean kingdom, but much bigger.
Baron's and Dinur's updated Khazar history drew very largely on Abraham Polak's impressive research. Polak's book was published in Hebrew in 1944, with two further editions, the last one in 1951. Khazaria: The History of a Jewish Kingdom in Europe was the first comprehensive work on the subject, and although it won a prize from the city of Tel Aviv, it was received in some circles with reservations and mixed reactions. All the reviews praised its broad scope, energy and scholarly thoroughness. Polak, who was born in Kiev, knew Russian, Turkish, classical Arabic, ancient Persian, Latin and probably Greek, and his knowledge of the historical material was impressive. But some reviewers criticized his "vertiginous" treatment of history, a term used in the title of one of the most abrasive critiques of the book.101 The author, it said, had overloaded the narrative with myriad details and had extracted more than was necessary from the sources. There is some truth to this argument: in cutting his path through the Khazar world, Polak followed the same positivist working principles that guided the local historians in reconstructing the history of the "First Temple period" and the "Second Temple period." But he did so with great skill, and his statements were hard to refute.
Polak's great sin, according to some of the reviews, lay in the assumption that concluded his work. This Israeli scholar asserted categorically that the great bulk of Eastern European Jewry originated in the territories of the Khazar empire. "I cannot imagine what greater joy and honor he grants us with this Turkish-Mongolian genealogy than our Jewish origin," complained the critic made dizzy by the book.102
But in spite of this and other criticisms, Baron and Dinur drew extensively on Polak's book and regarded it as the definitive work on the history of the Khazars. Provided, of course, a Jewish ethnobiological seed was planted in the beginning of the history. Polak's publishers included on the back cover a prominent statement designed to reassure suspicious readers: "This empire [Khazaria] was Jewish not only by religion, but because it had a large Israelite population, and proselytized Khazars were only a minority in it." If the proselytes were but a small part of that vast Jewish kingdom, then the Khazar thesis conformed with the Zionist metanarrative and became more legitimate. The author himself, for all his supposed irresponsibility, was partly aware of the problem and sought to sugarcoat his bitter pill with a comforting ethnocentric palliative:
There had been Jewish settlements in the country before the Khazars' conversion, even before the Khazar conquest. There had been a process of Judaization in the kingdom among other, non-Khazar people. There was Jewish immigration from other countries, mainly from Muslim Central Asia, eastern Iran and Byzantium. Thus a large Jewish community grew there, of which the proselyte Khazars were only a part, and whose cultural character was shaped mainly by the old population of the northern Caucasus and Crimea.103
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, such phrasing could still more or less meet the demands of Zionist historiography, and as we have seen, Dinur gave this "bold" move his stamp of approval. Moreover, Polak was a devout Zionist who gave generously of his intellectual and linguistic capabilities to Israeli military intelligence. At the end of the 1950s he was appointed chairman of Tel Aviv University's Department of Middle Eastern and African History, and in this setting managed to publish several works about the Arab world. But such an independent-minded scholar was not cut out for compromises, and as his historical approach grew increasingly out of step with the dominant reconstruction of Jewish historical memory, he continued to defend his pioneering work.
From 1951 to the present moment, not a single historical work about the Khazars has appeared in Hebrew. Nor was Polak's Khazaria ever reissued. It served till the end of the 1950s as a legitimate point of departure for Israeli researchers, but it lost this status over the years. Except for one modest MA thesis on this subject, and one (published) routine seminar paper, there has been nothing.104 The Israeli academic world has been mute on this topic, and no significant research has taken place. Slowly and consistently, any mention of the Khazars in the public: arena in Israel came to be tagged as eccentric, freakish and even menacing. In 1997, the prominent Israeli television commentator Ehud Ya'ari, who had for years been intrigued by the unique power of the Khazars, produced a short TV serial on the subject, cautious but full of fascinating information.105
What caused this silent lapse in the Jewish Israeli memory? Aside from the traditional ethnocentric conception that in some form dominates every aspect of Jewish nationalism, there are two possible hypotheses. One is that the wave of decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s drove the Israeli memory-merchants to avoid the very shadow of the Khazar past. There was anxiety about the legitimacy of the Zionist project, should it become widely known that the settling Jewish masses were not the direct descendants of the "Children of Israel"—such delegitimization might lead to a broad challenge against the State of Israel's right to exist. Another possibility, not necessary in conflict with the former, is that the occupation of large, densely populated Palestinian territories intensified the ethnic element in Israeli identity politics. The proximity of masses of Palestinians began to seem a threat to the imaginary "national" Israel, and called for stronger bonds of identity and definition. The effect was to put the kibosh on any remembrance of Khazaria. In the second half of the twentieth century, the connection with the orphaned Khazars was steadily weakened, as the "Jewish people" gathered again in its original "home land" after two thousand years of wandering in the world.
The age of silence in Israel echoed in many ways the silencing in the USSR, though in the land of Russian socialism it took place in the previous generation.
Between Artamonov's book in 1937 and the 1960s, hardly anything was published about the Khazars, and those few publications were mostly devoted to their repudiation and denigration. The existence of those strange Jews in the East became, not surprisingly, an aberration from the historical logic of Marxism-Leninism and the character of "Mother Russia" that was reborn under Stalin. The proletarian internationalism of the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s was replaced, even before the Second World War, by assertive Russian nationalism. After 1945, with the rise of the Cold War and the accelerated Russification of the non-Russian territories, this became an even harsher and more exclusive ethnocentrism.
All the Russian and, later, the Soviet historians who had written about Khazaria were denounced as bourgeois who had failed to comprehend the common Slav traits and so played down the importance of ancient Kievan Russia. In 1951 even the daily paper Pravda joined the call to excoriate the Khazar parasites and their old erring and misleading interpreters. P. Ivanov, an "establishment historian" (probably Stalin himself), published an important article exposing the poor research on the Khazars, and asserted that "our forefathers had to take up arms to protect our homeland against invasions from the steppes. Ancient Russia was the shield of the Slav tribes. It defeated Khazaria and liberated from its domination ... old Slav lands, and lifted the yoke of Khazaria from the backs of other tribes and nations."106 The article made a point of attacking Artamonov, who had inappropriately shown sympathy for Khazar culture and had ascribed to it a positive historical role in the birth of Russia. The scientific council of the history institute at the USSR Academy of Sciences met after the Pravda article and concluded that the paper had been perfectly correct in its reasoning. Now all the stops were pulled out, and the Khazars became damned and tainted beings, who had by ill fortune stumbled into Russian history. Only in the 1960s, with the partial thaw of the Stalinist frost, did the study of the Khazars carefully begin anew—but from now on, it bore clear nationalist, and at times anti-Semitic, features.107
But whereas in Israel and the Soviet Union—the two states to which the Khazar past was most relevant—Khazaria research was treated for many years as taboo, fresh materials were emerging in the West. In 1954 a thorough and comprehensive study of Jewish Khazaria, by a British scholar named Douglas Dunlop, was published by Princeton University Press. Dunlop showed a thorough familiarity with the Arabic literature on the subject, and great caution on the fate of the Khazars after the fall of their empire.108 In 1970 Peter Golden submitted a vast doctoral dissertation, entitled "The Q'azars: Their History and Language as Reflected in the Islamic, Byzantine, Caucasian, Hebrew and Old Russian Sources." Parts of this scholarly work were published in 1980.
In 1976 Arthur Koestler dropped a literary bombshell entitled The Thirteenth Tribe, which was translated into many languages and provoked a variety of reactions. In 1982 the book by Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century, laid the critical foundations for the subject. The popular work by Kevin A. Brook, The Jews of Khazaria, appeared in 1999. This non-academic writer also started an extensive Website dedicated to the subject of Khazaria."110 Other works appeared in Spanish, French and German, and in recent years many of the books mentioned have been translated into Russian, Turkish and Persian.111 None of them appeared in Hebrew, except Koestler's Thirteenth Tribe, which was issued in Jerusalem by a private publisher, who did not risk distributing it to the bookshops.112
Other than these, over the years there have been dozens of essays, articles and chapters in history books devoted to the history of the Khazars and its connection to Jewish history. There was even a scientific conference in Jerusalem in 1999, attended mainly by outside scholars. The event attracted little interest in local academic circles.113 Although the ideological pressure of the late 1980s and 1990s has eased somewhat, Israeli historians have not taken up the subject of Khazaria, nor have they directed their students to these blocked historical paths.
But while the Khazars scared off the Israeli historians, not one of whom has published a single paper on the subject, Koesder's Thirteenth Tribe annoyed them and provoked angry responses. Hebrew readers had no access to the book itself for many years, learning about it only through the venomous denunciations.
THE ENIGMA: THE ORIGIN OF EASTERN EUROPE'S JEWS
Arthur Koestler was a Zionist pioneer in his youth, even a close supporter of the Zionist right-wing leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, but grew disillusioned with the settlement project and the Jewish national movement. (Later he was a Communist, but grew to detest Stalin and became bitterly anti-Soviet.) Nevertheless, he continued to support the existence of the State of Israel, and was concerned about the Jewish refugees who flocked to it. Throughout his life, he opposed all forms of racism in general, and anti-Semitism in particular, and fought against them with his considerable literary talent. Most of his books were translated into Hebrew and were quite successful. One of the impulses that prompted him to write The Thirteenth Tribe was his determination to defeat, while he still could, Hitler's heritage in the world. He wrote:
[T]he large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European— and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar—origin. If so, this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case, then the term "anti-Semitism" would become void of meaning, 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.114
Koestler was not certain, in the 1970s, whether the non-Ashkenazi Jews were descendants of the Judeans, and if the Khazar conversion was an exception in Jewish history. Nor did he understand that his battle against anti-Semitic racism might deal a mortal blow to Zionism's principal imaginary. Or rather, he did and did not understand, and naively assumed that if he declared an unambiguous political position at the end of the book, he would be exonerated:
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 ... Whatever the Israeli citizens' racial origins, and whatever illusions they entertain about them, their State exists de jure and defacto, and cannot be undone, except by genocide.115
But it was no use. In the 1970s Israel was caught up in the momentum of territorial expansion, and without the Old Testament in its hand and the "exile of the Jewish people" in its memory, it would have had no justification for annexing Arab Jerusalem and establishing settlements in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and even the Sinai Peninsula. The writer who was able, in his classic novel Darkness at Noon, to crack the Communist enigma, did not comprehend that the Zionist enigma was entirely caught up in the mythology of an eternal "ethnic" time. Nor did he foresee that the post-1967 Zionists would resemble the Stalinists in their ferocious response—both saw him as an irredeemable traitor.
When the book appeared, Israel's ambassador to Britain described it as "an antisemitic action financed by the Palestinians.116 The organ of the World Zionist Organization, In the Diasporas of the Exile, suggested that "perhaps this cosmopolitan has begun, after all, to wonder about his own roots," but that most probably Koestler feared he was a forgotten writer, and "sensed that a Jewish theme, presented from a paradoxical and unusual perspective, and done skillfully, would restore public interest in him."117 The Zionist publication expressed a deep concern that "thanks to its exotic elements and Koestler's prestige, the book would appeal to Jewish readers without either historical understanding or a critical faculty, who might accept its thesis and implications literally."118
Professor Zvi Ankori, of the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University (among other institutions), compared Koestler to Jacob Fallmerayer, the German scholar who already in the nineteenth century had suggested that the modern Greeks were not descendants of the ancient Hellenes, as they imagined, but of a hotchpotch of Slavs, Bulgars, Albanians and others who had poured into the Peloponnese and gradually mixed with its original population.
We might speculate, Ankori wrote, about Koestler's psychological reasons for borrowing from Abraham Polak's old thesis, which had been dismissed in the past and could harm Israel in the present.119 Later Professor Shlomo Simonson, Ankori's respected colleague at Tel Aviv University, also wondered if the reasons for Koestler's writing about the Jewish Khazars might have to do with his conflicted identity as an Eastern European immigrant within British culture. "It is not surprising at all," added this senior Israeli historian, "that a recently published work on the history of Jewish self-hate devoted a substantial section to Koestler."120 Simonson, like Ankori, noted that the source of this discredited story about the origin of Eastern European Jews was the work of their Tel Aviv colleague Professor Polak.
But neither Polak, a professional historian, nor Koestler, who did not claim to be one, invented the thesis that a large part of Eastern European Jewry originated in the territories of the Khazar empire. It should be stressed that this hypothesis—reviled since the 1970s as scandalous, disgraceful and anti-Semitic—had previously been accepted in various scholarly circles, both Zionist and non-Zionist, although it never became the consensus, because of the fears it aroused among the ethnocentric.
Already in 1867, for example, the great Jewish scholar Abraham Harkavy had written in the introduction to his book The Jews and the Languages of the Slavs that "the first Jews who came to the southern regions from Russia did not originate in Germany, as many writers tend to believe, but from the Greek cities on the shores of the Black Sea and from Asia, via the mountains of the Caucasus."121 Harkavy stated that later waves of immigration brought Jews also from Germany, and since they were more numerous, the Yiddish language eventually became dominant among the Jews of Eastern Europe, but in the seventeenth century they still spoke Slavic. Dubnow, too, before he became a well-known and responsible historian, wondered in an early letter, "Whence did the first Jews who came to Poland and Russia originate—in the Western countries, or the lands of the Khazars and Crimea?"122 He assumed that the answer would be found only as archaeology progressed, furnishing the historical narrative with further evidence.
Yitzhak Schipper, a senior socioeconomic historian and a prominent Zionist in Poland, believed for a long time that the "Khazar thesis" accounted well for the massive demographic presence of Jews in Eastern Europe. In this, he was following a series of Polish scholars, Jewish and non-Jewish, who had written about the first settlements of Jewish believers in Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine. Schipper also assumed that there had been "authentic" Jews in Judaizing Khazaria who contributed to the development of crafts and commerce in the powerful empire that stretched from the Volga to the Dnieper River. But he was also convinced that the influence of Judaism on the Khazars and the eastern Slavs gave rise to the large Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.1
We have seen that Salo Baron followed Polak and devoted a good many pages to the Khazar issue. Despite the built-in ethnicism of his work, he made an unusual digression from linear history when he stopped at the Khazar way station. Unable to overlook the views of most Polish historians between the world wars, let alone the comprehensive work of the Israeli historian Polak, Baron wrote:
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 centers of Eastern Europe . . . During the half millennium (740-1250) of its existence, however, and its aftermath in the Eastern European communities, this noteworthy experiment in Jewish statecraft doubtless exerted a greater influence on Jewish history than we are as yet able to envisage.
From Khazaria Jews began drifting into the open steppes of Eastern Europe, during both the period of their country's affluence and that of its decline . . . After Sviatoslav's victories and the ensuing decline of the Khazar empire, on the other hand, refugees from the devastated districts, including Jews, sought shelter in the very lands of their conquerors. Here they met other Jewish groups and individuals migrating from the west and south. Together with these arrivals from Germany and the Balkans, they began laying the foundations for a Jewish community which, especially in sixteenth-century Poland, outstripped all the other contemporary areas of Jewish settlement in population density as well as in economic and cultural power.124
Baron was not a "self-hating Jew" and certainly not hostile to the Zionist enterprise, and neither was his Jerusalem colleague Ben-Zion Dinur. Nevertheless, the latter—Israel's minister of education in the 1950s—did not hesitate to join Baron and Polak and express an unambiguous position regarding the origins of the Eastern European Jews: "The Russian conquests did not destroy the Khazar kingdom entirely, but they broke it up and diminished it. And this kingdom, which had absorbed Jewish immigrants and refugees from many exiles, must itself have become a diaspora mother, the mother of one of the greatest of the diasporas—of Israel in Russia, Lithuania and Poland."125
Readers today might be astonished to hear that Israel's high priest of memory in the 1950s did not hesitate to describe Khazaria as the "diaspora mother" of Eastern European Jewry. It goes without saying that here, too, his rhetoric was suffused with characteristic ethnobiological thinking.
Dinur, like Baron, needed the historical connection with the "born Jews" who were in Khazaria before it was Judaized. Nevertheless, the fact is that until the 1960s the assumption that the majority of the Yiddish people did not originate in Germany but in the Caucasus, the Volga steppes, the Black Sea and the Slav countries was an acceptable assumption, caused no shock, and was not considered anti-Semitic, as it was after the early 1970s.
The statement by the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce that "any history is first of all a product of the time of its writing" has long been a common place, but it still fits perfectly the Zionist historiography of the Jewish past.
The conquest of the "City of David" in 1967 had to be achieved by the direct descendants of the House of David—not, perish the thought, by the offspring of tough horsemen from the Volga-Don steppes, the deserts of southern Arabia, or the coast of North Africa. In other words, the "whole, undivided Land of Israel" needed more than ever a "whole, undivided People of Israel."
Traditional Zionist historiography had always maintained that the Jews of Eastern Europe had come from Germany (before that, they had spent "some time" in Rome, to which they had been driven from "the Land of Israel"). The essentialist view of the exiled, wandering people, combined with the prestige of a "civilized" country such as Germany, overshadowed the lowly status of Europe's backward regions and created a winning product (just as the Jews from the Arab countries tend to describe themselves as Sephardic, so the Jews of Eastern Europe prefer to see themselves as Ashkenazi). Although there is no historical evidence showing that Jews migrated from western Germany to the Continent's east, the fact that Jews in Poland, Lithuania and Russia spoke Yiddish supposedly proved that the Eastern European Jews were originally German Jews—Ashkenazi Jews. As the vocabulary of the language spoken by these Jews was 80 percent Germanic, how did it happen that Khazars and all sorts of Slavs, who had previously spoken Turkic or Slavonic dialects, ended up speaking Yiddish?
Isaac Baer Levinsohn (also known as Rival), described as the father of Jewish enlightenment in Russia, stated in his book Testimony in Israel, published in 1828: "Our elders told us that some generations earlier the Jews in these parts spoke only this Russian language, and this Ashkenazi Jewish language we speak now had not yet spread among all the Jews living in these regions."126 Harkavy, too, was convinced that before the seventeenth century most Eastern European Jews spoke Slavic dialects.
Polak, who gave much thought to this issue, proposed several hypotheses, some more persuasive than others. A less than convincing suggestion was that a large part of the Judaized Khazar population, especially those who lived in the Crimea, were still speaking an ancient Gothic language that had been common in the peninsula till the sixteenth century, and resembled Yiddish much more than the German that was current at that time in the German lands. A more plausible suggestion was that the Germanic colonization that spread eastward in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, bringing with it large German-speaking commercial and artisanal populations, led to the spreading of their language among those who acted as mediators between these economic powerhouses and the local nobility and peasantry, which continued to speak their Slavic dialects.127 Some four million Germans had migrated from eastern Germany into Poland, where they created Eastern Europe's first bourgeoisie, and also brought the Roman Catholic clergy with them. The Jews, who came mainly from the east and the south—not only from the Khazar lands, but also from the Slavic regions under its influence—took on certain functions in the division of labor that formed with the first signs of modernization. Becoming tax collectors and prosperous minters of coins (silver coins bearing Polish words in Hebrew characters have been found), as well as humble carters, woodworkers and furriers, the Jews filled intermediate positions in production and mingled with the cultures and languages of the diffèrent classes (they might also have brought some of these skills from the Khazar empire). Koestler described this historical scene in vivid terms:
One can visualize a shtetl craftsman, a cobbler perhaps, or a timber merchant, speaking broken German to his clients, broken Polish to the serfs on the estate next door; and at home mixing the most expressive bits of both with Hebrew into a kind of intimate private language. How this hotchpotch became communalized and standardized to the extent to which it did, is any linguist's guess.128
Later a limited immigration of Jewish elites from Germany—rabbis and Talmudic scholars, young and old—completed the process, further establishing the new language of the masses and apparently also modifying and consolidating their rituals. These religious elites, seemingly invited in from the west, enjoyed a prestige that many wanted to emulate and share, hence the expansion and consolidation of the German vocabulary. Yet such a pivotal word as "to pray"—a key concept in the ritual imaginary—was retained in its Turkish dialect form: davenen. Like many other words in Yiddish, it did not come from a German dialect.129
Although the immigrants from the west contributed significantly to it, Yiddish did not resemble the German Jewish dialect that developed in the ghettoes of western Germany. There the Jewish population was concentrated in the Rhine region, and its dialect incorporated many words and expressions from the local French and German dialects, of which there is not a trace in eastern Yiddish. Already in 1924 the philologist Mathias Mieses had argued that Yiddish could never have come from western Germany, although in that period the concentrations of Jews were in fact to be found there, not in the eastern part of the territory of German dialect speakers.130
More recentiy, the Tel Aviv linguist Paul Wexler published some thorough studies supporting the assumption that the spread of Yiddish was not due to migration of Jews from the west. Its basis is Slavic, and its vocabulary is predominantly southeastern German. In its origins, Yiddish resembles the Sorb language, which evolved in the boundary regions between speakers of Slavic and Germanic dialects; like Yiddish, it almost disappeared in the twentieth century.131
Demographically, too, the thesis that the Jews of Eastern Europe originated in western Germany is challenged by an inconvenient fact. The number of Jewish believers in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries in the territory between Mainz and Worms, Cologne and Strasbourg, was very small. There are no precise data, but estimates range from a few hundred to a few thousand, never more. It is possible that some wandered eastward during the Crusades—though there is no evidence to suggest this, and moreover it is known that the fugitives from the pogroms did not go far and usually returned to their homes—but in any case, such a trickle could not have given rise to the huge Jewish communities of Poland, Lithuania and Russia. If these communities originated in western Germany, as Israel's establishment historians argue today, why did they multiply so dramatically in the east while remaining demographically stable in the west, long before the use of birth control? Surely the quantities of food and sanitary conditions in Eastern Europe were hardly superior to "depleted, hungry and unhygienic" Western Europe? In the final analysis, life in the poverty-stricken small towns in the east was no more conducive to propagation than life in the cities of Britain, France and Germany—yet it was in the east that the demographic "big bang" took place, with the result that speakers of Yiddish dialects constituted, on the eve of the twentieth century, 80 percent of all the Jews in the world.
Khazaria collapsed some time before the first indications of the presence of Jews in Eastern Europe, and it is difficult not to connect the two. Although Jewish believers in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Hungary erased their Khazar or Slavic past from memory, and remembered instead, like the descendants of Himyar's and North Africa's Judaizers, how they "came out of Egypt's house of bondage," various vestiges of their true historical past did remain. In their migration westward, they left a few markers by the side of the road.
Back in the 1920s, Yitzhak Schipper discovered in the regions of the Ukraine, Transylvania, Istria, Poland and Lithuania a number of place names that contain some form of the terms "Khazar" or "Kagan."132 There are also given and family names that hark back to the Khazar or Slavic east, rather than the Germanic west. Names for animals such as the hawk (balaban), deer, wolf and bear were not known in the kingdoms of Judea or Himyar, or among the Jews of Spain and North Africa, and they reached Western Europe quite late.
Aside from these rather minor indications, there are some sociological and anthropological elements uniquely associated with eastern Jewry that cannot be found anywhere in the west.
The essential way of life of the typical Yiddish townlet, which must also have preserved the dialect, has never been found in the Rhine area or its vicinity. From the second century BCE, when Judaism began to spread in the world, it flourished in small faith communities mostly on the margins of cities and towns, and only rarely in villages. In Western and Southern Europe, Jews never created separate settlements. But the Jewish townlet, not always small (and not always exclusively Jewish), permitted its inhabitants to differ from its neighbors not only in religious practices and norms but also in more secular ways, such as language or the architectural style of prayer houses.
At the center of the Jewish townlet stood the synagogue, with a double dome reminiscent of the Eastern pagoda. Jewish dress in Eastern Europe did not resemble that of the Jews of France or Germany. The yarmulke—also derived from a Turkic word—and the fur hat worn over it were more reminiscent of the people of the Caucasus and the horsemen of the steppes than of Talmudic scholars from Mainz or merchants from Worms. These garments, like the long silk caftan worn chiefly on the Sabbath, differed from the clothing worn by the Belorussian or Ukrainian peasants. But any mention of these features and others—from food to humor, from clothing to chants, all connected to the specific cultural morphology of their daily life and their history—scarcely interested the scholars who were occupied in inventing the eternal history of the "people of Israel." They could not come to terms with the troublesome fact that there had never been a Jewish people's culture, but only a popular Yiddish culture that resembled the cultures of their neighbors much more than it did those of the Jewish communities of Western Europe or North Africa.133
Today the descendants of the Jews of "Yiddishland" live mainly in the United States and Israel. The remains of millions of others are buried beneath the slaughterhouses constructed by Hitler in the twentieth century When we consider the tremendous effort that the memory agents in Israel have invested in commemorating their dying moments, compared with the scanty effort made to discover the rich (or wretched, depending on one's viewpoint) life lived in Yiddishland before the vicious massacre, we can draw only sad conclusions about the political and ideological role of modern historiography.
Like the absence of costly archaeological exploration in southern Russia and the Ukraine to uncover the remains of Khazaria, the absence of sociological, linguistic and ethnographic studies about the long-standing ways of life in the townlets of Poland and Lithuania—work of innovative historical research, not mere folklore134 —is no accident. No one wants to go looking under stones when venomous scorpions might be lurking beneath them, waiting to attack the self-image of the existing ethnos and its territorial ambitions. The writing of national history is not seriously meant to uncover past civilizations; its principal aim thus far has been the construction of a meta-identity and the political consolidation of the present.
History deals with books, not with things, a "patriotic" scholar might argue, having spent his or her entire life interpreting religious, governmental and ideological texts produced in the past by a paper-thin elite. This is true where the traditional study of the past is concerned. But the advent of anthropological history began, slowly but surely, to corrode the simplistic Zionist metahistories.
Sometimes it seems that most of the scholars who have specialized in the history of the People of Israel have yet to hear about this strange new form of historiography. A deeper exploration of the ways of life and communication in past Jewish communities might further expose a wicked little fact: that the further we move from religious norms and the more we focus our research on diverse daily practices, the more we discover that there never was a secular ethnographic common denominator between the Jewish believers in Asia, Africa and Europe. World Jewry had always been a major religious culture.
Though consisting of various elements, it was not a strange, wandering nation. There is a good deal of irony in the fact that people who adopted the religion of Moses had been living between the Volga and the Don rivers before the arrival there of Russians and Ukrainians, just as Judaizers had been living in Gaul before it was invaded by Frankish tribes. So, too, in North Africa, where Punics converted to Judaism before the arrival of the Arabs, and in the Iberian Peninsula, where a Judaic culture flourished and struck root before the Christian Reconquista. In contrast to the image of the past that Christian Judeophobes began to promote, and that modern anti-Semites echoed, there had never been in all history a cursed nation-race that was driven out of the Holy Land for killing the divine Messiah, and that settled uninvited among other "nations."
The offspring of the Judaizers around the Mediterranean, in Adiabene before and after the Common Era, the descendants of the Himyars, the Berbers and the Khazars, were linked by the Jewish monotheism that bridged the diverse linguistic-cultural groups that arose in far-flung lands and followed different historical paths. Many abandoned Judaism; others clung to it stubbornly and succeeded in carrying it to the threshold of the secular age.
Is Himyar, Berber and Khazar time lost beyond recovery? Is there no chance that a new historiography would invite those ancient Jews, who have been forgotten by their descendants, to reappear in the legitimate sphere of public memory?
The construction of a new body of knowledge always bears a direct connection with the national ideology in which it operates. Historical insights that diverge from the narrative laid down at the inception of the nation can be accepted only when consternation about their implications is abated. This can happen when the current collective identity begins to be taken for granted and ceases to be something that anxiously and nostalgically clings to a mythical past, when identity becomes the basis for living and not its purpose—that is when historiographic change can take place.
For now, it is difficult to predict whether the Israeli politics of identity will permit, in the early twenty-first century, the emergence of fresh paradigms for the investigation of the origins and history of Jewish faith communities.
PS:
If you are interested, please find time to read another book “The Rise and Fall of A Palestinian Dynasty..” by another Jewish professor Ilan Pappe: