Khazars

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Often when scholars examine history carefully, they end up showing that what we thought happened wasn’t really so. George Washington didn’t chop down his father’s cherry tree, and Paul Revere wasn’t considered a hero of the revolutionary war until 1863 when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his famous poem about him. Richard Shenkman in his fun book Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History, notes that Americans are proud of knowing their history, but much of which we know isn’t really true.

Often that is the case in Jewish history as well, but not always. Every now and then it works the other way. What we think is myth turns out to have more of a factual basis than we ever imagined.

In the 12th century, the Jewish Poet Yehudah HaLevi, wrote a philosophical book called the Kuzari. To give it more of a plot, he framed it as the story of the king of the Khazars who was looking to adopt a religion for his people. The king studies philosophy and also asks representatives from the Christian and Muslim communities to come and present before him. When he learns that both Christianity and Islam are based on Judaism, he decides to go straight to the source, and after bringing a Jewish scholar to defend the faith, he and his kingdom convert to Judaism. Yehudah HaLevi was drawing on a popular legend of the middle ages about a faraway Jewish Kingdom, a place where Jews, rather than being under the dominion of either Muslim or Christian authorities, were independent, and even had their own very successful army.

The land of the Khazars was a real place. Khazaria was located between Russia and Turkey on the Volga river. At its height this kingdom controlled much of what today is southern Russia, western Kazakhistan, eastern Ukraine, Azebijan and large portions of the Caucasus including Circassia, Degestan, Chechnya and parts of Georgia. And there was a Khazar tradition suggesting that around the year 740, the religiously unaffiliated King Bulan chose a religion.

Whether his choice was based on his perception of the philosophical merits of each faith tradition, as Yehudah Halevi described it, or whether it related to his precarious position, bordered on one side by a Muslim empire and on the other by Christian powers, we don’t know. Perhaps he was seeking a third way, a way of remaining unaligned as some countries did during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Whatever his reasons, the legend tells us that he chose Judaism.

Khazaria then enjoyed two centuries as an independent kingdom before being conquered by Russia in 969. Because communication across the globe was so limited at that time, other Jewish communities were only vaguely aware of the existence of this Jewish kingdom, and the degree of Orthodoxy of their Jewish practice is much disputed. Some posit that Judaism was brought to Khazaria by merchants, who we know in the medieval world travelled as far as India and China, and certainly were active in the Volga region.

Typically, serious historians didn’t think much of this whole episode. Robert M Seltzer, whose textbook Jewish People Jewish Thought The Jewish Experience in History is a classic used in many college classrooms writes that the story of the Khazars is the stuff of legend: “The Judaism of the Khazars has been much discussed, but the historical evidence is very limited.” At one point Arthur Koestler suggested that many of today’s Ashkenzi Jews are descendents of these Khazars and not of ancient Semitic people, but the DNA work on the kohanim, the Jewish priests, points to a common genetic origin of all world Jewry.

This week the Israeli papers had an interesting article on some archeological work done this past summer that may change the way we look at this history. Russian archeologists have discovered remnants of the Khazar kingdom in present day Southern Russia. The work this summer, supported by several universities and the Russian Jewish Congress, opens up the possibility of our finding out much more about this formally mythic history. This discovery gives further credence to other remnants we have of the Jewish Khazars. Saadia Gaon, a 10th century scholar mentions the Khazars in his writings and a letter written by Abraham Idn Daud, another medieval Jewish philosopher, talks about meeting rabbinical students from Khazaria on a trip to Toledo Spain in the mid 12th century. Classical Muslim sources also mention a homeland of the Jews in this area and refer to the city of Itil, the Arabic name for the Volga river, as a place of tolerance and diversity, with houses of worship for Jews, Christians, Muslims and pagans.

As we prepare to begin a new year, we see that opportunities for newness exist not only in the future, but also in our understanding of the past. When we go into the new year willing to reexam what we think we know, then we are open to all the possibilities it presents.