Jewish Origins: The Khazar Empire, written by Freydis
As
is often the case fact is more fascinating (and fantastic) than
fiction, so it is with Jewish history.
Certainly one of the most significant and truly astounding
stories has to do with who the Jews really are and where they
come from. And in this regard it's widely accepted as fact that
Jews all originated in the Levant, as their holy book states and
as contemporary Zionism expounds as justification for occupation
of the modern state of Israel and surrounding territories.
This may be true for the Sephardim (meaning Jews from
Spain) that make up less than 20% of the total today, and
probably arrived in southwestern Europe from the Levant during
the Roman Empire. But a growing body of historical and archeological
evidence shows this is not the case for the vast majority of
Jews alive today, the 80%+ called Ashkenazim. So, although
Christians and most Jews alike believe that the Eastern
Mediterranean region is the homeland of their genetic ancestors,
this egregious error confuses religious documents with a true
scientifically-derived origin.
That
scientifically-verified origin indicates that, as incredible as it may initially seem, the majority of the Jews
in the world today actually originated from a group of
Turkic people from Asia living
between the Caspian and Black Seas in an Empire known as
Khazaria,
from about the year 700-1200.
Khazaria was a formidable and populous power that dominated
regional trade routes and accumulated great wealth. Their
conversion to Judaism marked one of the most momentous events of
the past two millennia. Hundreds of years later the decline and
fall of Khazaria pushed Jews into new settlements in Eastern
Europe, creating the basis of today's Jewish population that
lives primarily in the United States and Israel.
The Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins
to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever
perpetrated. [1, pg.17]
Khazaria Rediscovered
 Although
a mystery for many years the pieces of the Khazaria puzzle are
now beginning to fit into place as new archeological evidence
emerges to substantiate the scattered written accounts of
travelers and proselytizers. Since the Khazar people were
semi-nomadic
and
mostly illiterate they didn’t leave much behind for us to study,
but outsiders from civilized parts of the world, like Byzantium
and Arab lands, did travel to Khazaria and did leave records of
their experiences. So, from historical documents we know that
the capital of Khazaria is Itil but, unfortunately for modern
historians and archeologists, only a few of the most important
buildings were actually built of stone and brick, the remainder
were tents or similar temporary structures. Nonetheless
difficult doesn’t mean impossible and in 2008 a Russian
archeologist, Dmitry Vasilyev from Astrakhan State University,
discovered burnt-brick ruins near the city of Astrakhan at the
mouth of the Volga River and the Caspian Sea in Russia. The
archeological remnants match historical descriptions of the lost
capital of Khazaria. [2]
Conversion to Judaism
Originally Khazaria was just
another brutal, warlike clan-empire ruled by the Kagan
priest/kings and characterized by a variety of intensely pagan
belief practices. Yet
by about the year 1000 the Khazars were using the Hebrew
alphabet in official documents.
Under the
leadership of kings Bulan and Obadiah, the standard rabbinical
form of the Jewish religion spread among the Khazars. King
Bulan adopted Judaism in approximately the year 838, after
supposedly holding a debate between representatives of the
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths. The Khazar nobility and
many of the common people also became Jews. King Obadiah later
established synagogues and Jewish schools in Khazaria.
[4]
The Khazar conversion to Judaism
is not something that would have happened without great
consideration. Why did they do it? In
order to understand the reasons Khazaria converted to Judaism it’s
important to recognize that, first of all, Khazaria was a major
transit region.
The silk route and other critical
trade paths went directly through Khazaria. The main source of
revenue for the empire came from commerce and particularly from
Khazar control of the east to west trade routes that linked the
Far East with Byzantium as well as the north to south
corridors connecting the Arab empire with northern Slavic lands.
So,
much of their fortune was made as merchants and from taxes on
products moving from one point to another.
Further income was squeezed
from neighboring subordinate tribes through intimidation and
extortion. [3, p.17] This maintained the
fiscal strength of the empire throughout the 8th ,9th, and 10th
centuries, and made the people well versed in certain traits and
tactics that were to come in handy in the future.
By the nature of the geography Khazaria also served as a very
important buffer between conflicting regions, of particular
benefit to Byzantium, by blocking the advances of the Muslims
from the southeast, the Rus barbarians from the north, and the
rough nomadic tribes from the east. As a merchant empire and
a transit point a certain element of neutrality was important
for relations with neighboring powers.
The other major impetus was the necessity of unifying an empire
composed of cutthroat rabble practicing various, and no doubt
contradictory, pagan beliefs.
At the same time, their intimate contacts with Byzantium and
the Caliphate had taught the Khazars that their primitive
shamanism was not only barbaric and outdated compared to the
great monotheistic creeds, but also unable to confer on the
leaders the spiritual and legal authority which the rulers of
the two theocratic world powers, the Caliph and the Emperor,
enjoyed. Yet the conversion to either creed would have meant
submission, the end of independence, and thus would have
defeated its purpose. What could have been more logical than
to embrace a third creed, which was uncommitted towards either
of the two, yet represented the venerable foundation of both?
[1, p. 59]
After conversion Jews from the
surrounding regions travelled to Khazaria to escape persecution
and enjoy camaraderie.
Disintegration and Dispersal
A critical historical event that had a major impact upon the
Khazar Empire was another conversion to monotheism, that of the
raiding Rus tribes to Christianity.
In the year 988 Prince
Vladimir studied all of the major monotheistic religions and
picked Orthodox Christianity because he was impressed with
Byzantium’s wealth and didn’t want to have to give up eating
pork (and alcohol) as the other two monotheistic religions
required. Prince Vladimir was nothing if not pragmatic.
After the Rus adopted Christianity they aligned with Byzantium
and decisively defeated the
now mostly sedentary and less warlike Khazars
at their fortress of Sarkel in the year 965, and then their
capital Itil shortly afterwards. Yet that wasn’t the ultimate
ruin of Khazaria. It was actually the nomadic assaults from the
Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan in the
13th century that fractured and scattered the
Khazar Jews to the west. Finally the Black Death plague of
1347-1348 mopped up the scattered elements already reduced to replaying
their barbaric past.
Its population was largely absorbed by the Golden Horde which
had established the centre of its empire in Khazar territory.
But before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many
offshoots into the subdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately
to build up the great Jewish centres of eastern Europe.
[1, p. 141]
The Khazar Jews fled their homeland
for safer and more stable regions of Eastern Europe such as
Poland, Hungary, and the Ukraine.
If we can guess at how many
people lived in Khazaria we can get an idea of the size of Eastern
Europe's early Jewish population:
We remember that the Arab sources
speak of Khazar armies numbering three hundred thousand men
involved in the Muslim—Khazar wars; and even if allowance is
made for quite wild exaggerations, this would indicate a total
Khazar population of at least half a million souls. Ibn Fadlan
gave the number of tents of the Volga Bulgars as 50,000,
which would mean a population of 300,000-400,000,
i.e., roughly the same order of magnitude as the
Khazars. On the other hand, the number of Jews in the
Polish—Lithuanian kingdom in the seventeenth century is also
estimated by modern historians
at 500,000 (5 per cent of the total population).
These figures do not fit in too badly with the known facts
about a protracted Khazar migration via the Ukraine to
Poland-Lithuania, starting with the destruction of Sarkel and
the rise of the Piast dynasty toward the end of the first
millennium, accelerating during the Mongol conquest, and being
more or less completed in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries —
by which time the steppe had been emptied and the Khazars had
apparently been wiped off the face of the earth.
[1, p. 150-151]
So,
Khazaria Jews formed the Eastern European Jewish population.
According to the article 'Statistics' in the Jewish
Encyclopaedia, in the sixteenth century the total Jewish
population of the world amounted to about one million. This
seems to indicate, as Poliak, Kutschera and others
have pointed out, that during the Middle Ages the majority of
those who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars. A substantial
part of this majority went to Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and the
Balkans, where they founded that Eastern Jewish community which
in its turn became the dominant majority of world Jewry.
[1, p. 151]
A strong identity wrapped in a code
of religious separatism largely kept the people intact despite
enduring dispersion within other nations and empires. They took
over niches they learned from late Khazaria times, mostly
financial and merchant careers, but also the crude and unregulated medical
professions allowed by the Christian governments.
As the surrounding Christian
populations grew the Jewish enclaves did not increase
proportionally and gradually the Jews from Khazaria became
geographically compressed from living in towns and villages
(shtetl), into legally circumscribed regions of cities
(ghettos).
As
cities grew the more organized Christian authorities established
laws that restricted Jewish activities and forced them to live
in proscribed parts of the city.
To the Christian Europeans the
ghetto Jews were a scary looking people with very odd customs
and beliefs, as written in the Bible they are a
“a peculiar people” (Deuteronomy
14:2 King James version). And since they couldn’t intermix it
was very much a black and white issue for both sides, them and
us; this deeply ingrained mentality even remains today. The
stereotypical Jewish jobs such as doctors, dentists, and
moneylenders arose because those occupations were outside the
mainstream as defined by the Christian (Catholic) Church. Jewish
authorities liked the ghetto, it neatly meshed with their
religious views and it was easy to claim persecution and rally
their flock around a unique identity under real, or perceived,
siege. The ghetto restricted cultural development while keeping
their beliefs separate from the influences of the outside. And
Christian authorities liked the ghetto because they could
minimize Jewish competition and contain the different faith.
 An
interesting side note concerns the six-pointed ‘Star of David’
symbol -- it probably originated from Khazaria rather than the
Middle East.
According to one theory, the six-pointed 'shield of David'
which adorns the modern Israeli flag, started to become a
national symbol with David al-Roy's crusade. 'Ever since,'
writes Baron, 'it has been suggested, the six-cornered "shield
of David", theretofore mainly a decorative motif or a magical
emblem, began its career toward becoming the chief
national-religious symbol of Judaism. Long used
interchangeably with the pentagram or the "Seal of Solomon",
it was attributed to David in mystic and ethical German
writings from the thirteenth century on, and appeared on the
Jewish flag in Prague in 1527.’
[1, p. 137]
From
Eastern Europe to Israel
This
was the steady state of affairs until the 18th century when
Napoleon swept through Europe on his way to Russia and broke
open the stagnant and inbred ghettos with new laws that usurped
religion in favor of economy. Then in the last part of the 19th
century Theodor Herzl dreamed up the nationalist theocracy of
Zionism and sold it to Jewish and Christian leaders who found it attractive for their own reasons. Zionism offered the
Jews their own state and a chunk of real estate in Palestine, which was chosen because it matched the religious
texts and the land was politically feasible to acquire. European
Jews gradually moved into what is now the state of Israel as another conqueror
arrived on the scene who was less charitable towards the Jews
than Napoleon, Adolph Hitler, accelerating the flow of Jews into
British controlled Palestine.
Conclusion
Except for brief historical exceptions Judaism is not a
proselytizing religion, a critical difference between the other
two major historical monotheistic religions of Christianity and
Islam. Judaism is rather a matrilineal tribal faith considered
to be a long and unbroken chain of a single people that have
wandered out, around, and now back to the Eastern Mediterranean
with the advent of Zionism and the modern state of Israel. But the
classic storyline of Jewish origins has never been able to
explain how hundreds of thousands of Jews, supposedly from the
Levant, remarkably all appeared in villages across Eastern
Europe beginning about the 13th and 14th
centuries, with virtually nowhere else of any comparable
population. However, the rise and fall of Khazaria does explain
the situation perfectly well.
Historical facts and archeological evidence demolish the
established origins and assumed racial and ethnic character of
the Jews. The vast majority of Jews alive today are not
descendants of the Middle East and therefore the pejorative term
anti-Semitism is effectively meaningless because most Jews are
not a Semitic (Middle Eastern) people. Not that the term
'anti-Semitism' made much sense to begin with since it was
always selectively employed to refer to Jewish but not Arab
Semites! Christian Zionists
as
well
have a perplexing dilemma on their hands since today's Jews are
not 'God's chosen people' of the Bible but rather a Turkic
people from Asia
having no
substantial connection to the characters and tribes described in
the holy books.
References
1. The Thirteenth Tribe,
by Arthur Koestler, Random House publishing, (first American
edition), 1976.
2.
Russian archaeologist finds lost capital of Khazar empire,
AP via MSNBC, September 21, 2008.
3.
A History of Russia,
sixth edition, by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky,
Oxford University Press, 2000.
4.
An Introduction to the History of Khazaria, by Kevin
Alan Brook, Khazaria.com, September 2004.
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