9
Appendices
APPENDIX I
A
NOTE ON SPELLING
THE spelling in this book is
consistently inconsistent. It is consistent in so far as, where
I have quoted other authors, I have preserved their own
spelling of proper names (what else can you do?); this led to
the apparent inconsistency that the same person, town or tribe
is often spelt differently in different passages. Hence Kazar,
Khazar, Chazar, Chozar, Chozr, etc.; but also Ibn Fadlan and
ibn-Fadlan; Al Masudi and al-Masudi. As for my own text, I have
adopted that particular spelling which seemed to me the least
bewildering to English-speaking readers who do not happen to be
professional orientalists. .T.
E. Lawrence was a brilliant orientalist, but he was as ruthless
in his spelling as he was in raiding Turkish garrisons. His
brother, A. W. Lawrence, explained in his preface to Seven
Pillars of Wisdom:
- The spelling of Arabic names
varies greatly in all editions, and I have made no
alterations. It should be explained that only three vowels
are recognized in Arabic, and that some of the consonants
have no equivalents in English. The general practice of
orientalists in recent years has been to adopt one of the
various sets of conventional signs for the letters and vowel
marks of the Arabic alphabet, transliterating Mohamed as
Muhammad, muezzin as mu'edhdhin, and Koran as Qur'an or
Kur'an. This method is useful to those who know what it
means but this book follows the old fashion of writing the
best phonetic approximations according to ordinary English
spelling.
He then prints a list of publisher's
queries re spelling, and T. F. Lawrence's answers; for
instance: .Query:
"Slip [galley sheet] 20. Nuri, Emir of the Ruwalla,
belongs to the 'chief family of the Rualla'. On Slip 23 'Rualla
horse', and Slip 38, 'killed one Rueli'. In all later slips
'Rualla'." .Answer:
"should have also used Ruwala and Ruala." .Query:
"Slip 47. Jedha, the she-camel, was Jedhah on Slip 40."
.Answer:
"she was a splendid beast."
.Query: "Slip 78. Sherif
Abd el Mayin of Slip 68 becomes el Main, el Mayein, el Muein,
el Mayin, and el Muyein." .Answer:
"Good egg. I call this really ingenious." .If
such are the difficulties of transcribing modern Arabic,
confusion becomes worse confounded when orientalists turn to
mediaeval texts, which pose additional problems owing to
mutilations by careless copyists. The first English translation
of "Ebn Haukal" (or ibn-Hawkal) was published AD 1800 by Sir
William Ouseley, Knt. LL.D.*[Ibn Hawkal wrote his book in
Arabic, but Ouseley translated it from a Persian
translation.] In his preface, Sir William, an eminent
orientalist, uttered this touching cri de
cour:
- Of the difficulties arising from
an irregular combination of letters, the confusion of one
word with another, and the total omission, in some lines, of
the diacritical points, I should not complain, because habit
and persevering attention have enabled me to surmount them
in passages of general description, or sentences of common
construction; but in the names of persons or of places never
before seen or heard of, and which the context could not
assist in deciphering, when the diacritical points were
omitted, conjecture alone could supply them, or collation
with a more perfect manuscript.... .Notwithstanding
what I have just said, and although the most learned writers
on Hebrew, Arabick, and Persian Literature, have made
observations on the same subject, it may perhaps, be
necessary to demonstrate, by a particular example, the
extraordinary influence of those diacritical points
[frequently omitted by copyists].
.One
example will suffice - Let us suppose the three letters
forming the name Tibbet to be divested of their diacritical
points. The first character may be rendered, by the
application of one point above, an N; of two points a T, of
three points a TH or S; if one point is placed under, it
becomes a B - if two points, a Y and if three points, a P.
In like manner the second character may be affected, and the
third character may be, according to the addition of points,
rendered a B, P, T, and TH, or S.*[The original of this
quote is enlivened by letters in Persian script, which I
have omitted in kindness to the publishers.]
APPENDIX II
A
NOTE ON SOURCES
(A) ANCIENT
SOURCES
OUR knowledge of Khazar history is
mainly derived from Arab, Byzantine, Russian and Hebrew
sources, with corroborative evidence of Persian, Syriac,
Armenian, Georgian and Turkish origin. I shall comment only on
some of the major sources.
1.
Arabic
- The early Arabic historians differ
from all others in the unique form of their compositions.
Each event is related in the words of eye-witnesses or
contemporaries, transmitted to the final narrator through a
chain of intermediate reporters, each of whom passed on the
original report to his successor. Often the same account is
given in two or more slightly divergent forms, which have
come down through different chains of reporters. Often, too,
one event or one important detail is told in several ways on
the basis of several contemporary statements transmitted to
the final narrator through distinct lines of tradition....
The principle still is that what has been well said once
need not be told again in other words. The writer,
therefore, keeps as close as he can to the letter of his
sources, so that quite a late writer often reproduces the
very words of the first narrator....
Thus the two classic authorities in
the field, H. A. R. Gibb and M.J. de Goeje, in their joint
article on Arab historiography in earlier editions of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.1 It explains the
excruciating difficulties in tracing an original source which
as often as not is lost - through the successive versions of
later historians, compilers and plagiarists. It makes it
frequently impossible to put a date on an episode or a
description of the state of affairs in a given country; and the
uncertainty of dating may range over a whole century in
passages where the author gives an account in the present tense
without a clear indication that he is quoting some source in
the distant past. Add to this the difficulties of identifying
persons, tribes and places, owing to the confusion over
spelling, plus the vagaries of copyists, and the result is a
jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing, others of
extraneous origin thrown in, and only the bare outlines of the
picture discernible. .The
principal Arabic accounts of Khazaria, most frequently quoted
in these pages, are by Ibn Fadlan, al-Istakhri, Ibn Hawkal and
al-Masudi. But only a few of them can be called "primary"
sources, such as Ibn Fadlan who speaks from first-hand
experience. Ibn Hawkal's account, for instance, written
circa 977, is based almost entirely on Istakhri's,
written around 932; which in turn is supposed to be based on a
lost work by the geographer el-Balkhi, who wrote around
921.
.About the lives of these
scholars, and the quality of their scholarship we know very
little. Ibn Fadlan, the diplomat and astute observer, is the
one who stands out most vividly. Nevertheless, as we move along
the chain through the tenth century, we can observe successive
stages in the evolution of the young science of historiography.
El-Balkhi, the first in the chain, marks the beginning of the
classical school of Arab Geography, in which the main emphasis
is on maps, while the descriptive text is of secondary
importance. Istakhri shows a marked improvement with a shift of
emphasis from maps to text. (About his life nothing is known;
and what survives of his writings is apparently only a synopsis
of a larger work.) With Ibn Hawkal (about whom we only know
that he was a travelling merchant and missionary) a decisive
advance is reached: the text is no longer a commentary on the
maps (as in Balkhi, and still partly in Istakhri), but becomes
a narrative in its own right. .Lastly
with Yakut (1179-1229) we reach, two centuries later, the age
of the compilers and encyclopaedists. About him we know at
least that he was born in Greece, and sold as a boy on the
slave market in Baghdad to a merchant who treated him kindly
and used him as a kind of commercial traveller. After his
manumission he became an itinerant bookseller and eventually
settled in Mossul, where he wrote his great encyclopaedia of
geography and history. This important work includes both
Istakhri's and Ibn Fadlan's account of the Khazars. But, alas,
Yakut mistakenly attributes Istakhri's narrative also to Ibn
Fadlan. As the two narratives differ on important points, their
attribution to the same author produced various absurdities,
with the result that Ibn Fadlan became somewhat discredited in
the eyes of modern historians. .But
events took a different turn with the discovery of the full
text of Ibn Fadlan's report on an ancient manuscript in
Meshhed, Persia. The discovery, which created a sensation among
orientalists, was made in 1923 by Dr Zeki Validi Togan (about
whom more below). It not only confirmed the authenticity of the
sections of Ibn Fadlan's report on the Khazars quoted by Yakut,
but also contained passages omitted by Yakut which were thus
previously unknown. Moreover, after the confusion created by
Yakut, Ibn Fadlan and Istakhri/Ibn Hawkal were now recognized
as independent sources which mutually corroborated each other.
.The
same corroborative value attaches to the reports of Ibn Rusta,
al-Bekri or Gardezi, which I had little occasion to quote
precisely because their contents are essentially similar to the
main sources. .Another,
apparently independent source was al-Masudi (died circa 956),
known as "the Arab Herodotus". He was a restless traveller, of
insatiable curiosity, but modern Arab historians seem to take a
rather jaundiced view of him. Thus the Encyclopaedia of Islam
says that his travels were motivated "by a strong desire for
knowledge. But this was superficial and not deep. He never went
into original sources but contented himself with superficial
enquiries and accepted tales and legends without criticism."
.But
this could just as well be said of other mediaeval
historiographers, Christian or Arab.
2.
Byzantine
Among Byzantine sources, by far the
most valuable is Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus's De
Adnimistrando Imperio, written about 950. It is important
not only because of the information it contains about the
Khazars themselves (and particularly about their relationship
with the Magyars), but because of the data it provides on the
Rus and the people of the northern steppes. Constantine
(904-59) the scholar-emperor was a fascinating character - no
wonder Arnold Toynbee confessed to have "lost his heart" to
him2 - a love-affair with the past that started in his
undergraduate days. The eventual result was Toynbee's
monumental Constantine Porphyrogenitus and his World,
published in 1973, when the author was eighty-four. As the
title indicates, the emphasis is as much on Constantine's
personality and work as on the conditions of the world in which
he - and the Khazars - lived. .Yet
Toynbee's admiration for Constantine did not make him overlook
the Emperor's limitations as a scholar: "The information
assembled in the De Administrando Imperio has been
gathered at different dates from different sources, and the
product is not a book in which the materials have been digested
and co-ordinated by an author; it is a collection of files
which have been edited only perfunctorily."3 And later on:
"De Administrando Imperio and De Caeromoniis, in the
state in which Constantine bequeathed them to posterity, will
strike most readers as being in lamentable confusion."4
(Constantine himself was touchingly convinced that De
Caeromoniis was a "technical masterpiece" besides being "a
monument of exact scholarship and a labour of love"5.) Similar
criticisms had been voiced earlier by Bury,6 and by Macartney,
trying to sort out Constantine's contradictory statements about
the Magyar migrations:."...We
shall do well to remember the composition of the De
Administrando Imperio - a series of notes from the most various
sources, often duplicating one another, often contradicting one
another, and tacked together with the roughest of editing."7
.But
we must beware of bathwaterism - throwing the baby away with
the water, as scholarly critics are sometimes apt to do.
Constantine was privileged as no other historian to explore the
Imperial archives and to receive first-hand reports from his
officials and envoys returning from missions abroad. When
handled with caution, and in conjunction with other sources,
De Administrando throws much valuable light on that
dark period.
3.
Russian
Apart from orally transmitted
folklore, legends and songs (such as the "Lay of Igor's Host"),
the earliest written source in Russian is the Povezt
Vremennikh Let, literally "Tale of Bygone Years",
variously referred to by different authors as The Russian
Primary Chronicle, The Old Russian Chronicle, The Russian
Chronicle, Pseudo-Nestor, or The Book of Annals.
It is a compilation, made in the first half of the twelfth
century, of the edited versions of earlier chronicles dating
back to the beginning of the eleventh, but incorporating even
earlier traditions and records. It may therefore, as Vernadsky8
says, "contain fragments of authentic information even with
regard to the period from the seventh to the tenth century" - a
period vital to Khazar history. The principal compiler and
editor of the work was probably the learned monk Nestor (b.
1056) in the Monastery of the Crypt in Kiev, though this is a
matter of controversy among experts (hence "Pesudo-Nestor").
Questions of authorship apart, the Povezt is an
invaluable (though not infallible) guide for the period that it
covers. Unfortunately, it stops with the year 1112, just at the
beginning of the Khazars' mysterious vanishing act.
.The
mediaeval Hebrew sources on Khazaria will be discussed in
Appendix III.
(B) MODERN
LITERATURE
It would be presumptuous to comment on
the modern historians of repute quoted in these pages, such as
Toynbee or Bury, Vernadsky, Baron, Macartney, etc. - who have
written on some aspect of Khazar history. The following remarks
are confmed to those authors whose writings are of central
importance to the problem, but who are known only to a
specially interested part of the public. .Foremost
among these are the late Professor Paul F. Kahle, and his
former pupil, Douglas Morton Dunlop, at the time of writing
Professor of Middle Eastern History at Columbia University.
.Paul
Eric Kahle (1875-1965) was one of Europe's leading orientalists
and masoretic scholars. He was born in East Prussia, was
ordained a Lutheran Minister, and spent six years as a Pastor
in Cairo. He subsequently taught at various German universities
and in 1923 became Director of the famous Oriental Seminar in
the University of Bonn, an international centre of study which
attracted orientalists from all over the world. "There can be
no doubt", Kahle wrote,9 "that the international character of
the Seminar, its staff, its students and its visitors, was the
best protection against Nazi influence and enabled us to go on
with our work undisturbed during nearly six years of Nazi
regime in Germany.... I was for years the only Professor in
Germany who had a Jew, a Polish Rabbi, as assistant."
.No
wonder that, in spite of his impeccable Aryan descent, Kahle
was finally forced to emigrate in 1938. He settled in Oxford,
where he received two additional doctorates (in philosophy and
theology). In 1963 he returned to his beloved Bonn, where he
died in 1965. The British Museum catalogue has twenty-seven
titles to his credit, among them The Cairo Geniza and
Studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls. .Among
Kahle's students before the war in Bonn was the young
orientalist D. M. Dunlop. .Kahle
was deeply interested in Khazar history. When the Belgian
historian Professor Henri Grgoire published an article in 1937
questioning the authenticity of the "Khazar Correspondence",10
Kahle took him to task: "I indicated to Grgoire a number of
points in which he could not be right, and I had the chance of
discussing all the problems with him when he visited me in Bonn
in December 1937. We decided to make a great joint publication
- but political developments made the plan impracticable. So I
proposed to a former Bonn pupil of mine, D. M. Dunlop, that he
should take over the work instead. He was a scholar able to
deal both with Hebrew and Arabic sources, knew many other
languages and had the critical training for so difficult a
task."11 The result of this scholarly transaction was Dunlop's
The History of the Jewish Khazars, published in 1954
by the Princeton University Press. Apart from being an
invaluable sourcebook on Khazar history, it provides new
evidence for the authenticity of the Correspondence (see
Appendix III), which Kahle fully endorsed.12 Incidentally,
Professor Dunlop, born in 1909, is the son of a Scottish
divine, and his hobbies are listed in Who's Who as
"hill-walking and Scottish history". Thus the two principal
apologists of Khazar Judaism in our times were good Protestants
with an ecclesiastic, Nordic background. .Another
pupil of Kahle's with a totally different background, was Ahmed
Zeki Validi Togan, the discoverer of the Meshhed manuscript of
Ibn Fadlan's journey around Khazaria. To do justice to this
picturesque character, I can do no better than to quote from
Kahle's memoirs:13
- Several very prominent Orientals
belonged to the staff of the [Bonn] Seminar. Among
them I may mention Dr Zeki Validi, a special
protÈgÈ of Sir Aurel Stein, a Bashkir who had
made his studies at Kazan University, and already before the
first War had been engaged in research work at the
Petersburg Academy. During the War and after he had been
active as leader of the Bashkir-Armee [allied
to the Bolshevists], which had been largely created by
him. He had been a member of the Russian Duma, and had
belonged for some time to the Committee of Six, among whom
there were Lenin, Stalin and Trotzki. Later he came into
conflict with the Bolshevists and escaped to Persia. As an
expert on Turkish - Bashkirian being a Turkish language - he
became in 1924 adviser to Mustafa Kemal's Ministry of
Education in Ankara, and later Professor of Turkish in
Stambul University. After seven years, when asked, with the
other Professors in Stambul, to teach that all civilisation
in the world comes from the Turks, he resigned, went to
Vienna and studied Mediaeval History under Professor Dopsch.
After two years he got his doctor degree with an excellent
thesis on Ibn Fadlan's journey to the Northern Bulgars,
Turks and Khazars, the Arabic text of which he had
discovered in a MS. in Meshhed. I later published his book
in the "Abhandlungen fr die Kunde des Morgenlandes". From
Vienna I engaged him as Lecturer and later Honorar
Professor for Bonn. He was a real scholar, a man of
wide knowledge, always ready to learn, and collaboration
with him was very fruitful. In 1938 he went back to Turkey
and again became Professor of Turkish in Stambul
University.
Yet another impressive figure in a
different way, was Hugo Freiherr von Kutschera (1847-1910), one
of the early propounders of the theory of the Khazar origin of
Eastern Jewry. The son of a high-ranking Austrian civil
servant, he was destined to a diplomatic career, and studied at
the Oriental Academy in Vienna, where he became an expert
linguist, mastering Turkish, Arabic, Persian and other Eastern
languages. After serving as an attach at the Austro-Hungarian
Embassy in Constantinople, he became in 1882 Director of
Administration in Sarajevo of the provinces of
Bosnia-Hercegovina, recently occupied by Austro-Hungary. His
familiarity with oriental ways of life made him a popular
figure among the Muslims of Bosnia and contributed to the
(relative) pacification of the province. He was rewarded with
the title of Freiherr (Baron) and various other honours.
.After
his retirement, in 1909, he devoted his days to his lifelong
hobby, the connection between European Jewry and the Khazars.
Already as a young man he had been struck by the contrast
between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews in Turkey and in the
Balkans; his study of the ancient sources on the history of the
Khazars led to a growing conviction that they provided at least
a partial answer to the problem. He was an amateur historian
(though a quasi-professional linguist), but his erudition was
remarkable; there is hardly an Arabic source, known before
1910, missing from his book. Unfortunately he died before he
had time to provide the bibliography and references to it;
Die Chasaren - Historische Studie was published
posthumously in 1910. Although it soon went into a second
edition, it is rarely mentioned by historians.
.Abraham
N. Poliak was born in 1910 in Kiev; he came with his family to
Palestine in 1923. He occupied the Chair of Mediaeval Jewish
History at Tel Aviv University and is the author of numerous
books in Hebrew, among them a History of the Arabs;
Feudalism in Egypt 1250-1900; Geopolitics of Israel and the
Middle East, etc. His essay on "The Khazar Conversion to
Judaism" appeared in 1941 in the Hebrew periodical Zion and led
to lively controversies; his book Khazaria even more
so. It was published in 1944 in Tel Aviv (in Hebrew) and was
received with - perhaps understandable - hostility, as an
attempt to undermine the sacred tradition concerning the
descent of modern Jewry from the Biblical Tribe. His theory is
not mentioned in the Encyclopaedia Judaica 1971-2
printing. .Mathias
Mieses, however, whose views on the origin of Eastern Jewry and
the Yiddish language I have quoted, is held in high academic
esteem. Born 1885 in Galicia, he studied linguistics and became
a pioneer of Yiddish philology (though he wrote mostly in
German, Polish and Hebrew). He was an outstanding figure at the
First Conference on the Yiddish Language, Czernovitz, 1908, and
his two books: Die Entstehungsursache der jdischen
Dialekte (1924) and Die Jiddische Sprache (1924)
are considered as classics in their field. .Mieses
spent his last years in Cracow, was deported in 1944 with
destination Auschwitz, and died on the journey.
****
APPENDIX III
THE
"KHAZAR CORRESPONDENCE"
1
THE exchange of letters between the
Spanish statesman Hasdai ibn Shaprut and King Joseph of
Khazaria has for a long time fascinated historians. It is true
that, as Dunlop wrote, "the importance of the Khazar
Correspondence can be exaggerated. By this time it is possible
to reconstruct Khazar history in some detail without recourse
to the letters of Hasdai and Joseph."1 Nevertheless, the reader
may be interested in a brief outline of what is known of the
history of these documents. .Hasdai's
Letter was apparently written between 954 and 961, for the
embassy from Eastern Europe that he mentions (Chapter III,3-4)
is believed to have visited Cordoba in 954, and Caliph
Abd-al-Rahman, whom he mentions as his sovereign, ruled till
961. That the Letter was actually penned by Hasdai's secretary,
Menahem ben-Sharuk - whose name appears in the acrostic after
Hasdai's - has been established by Landau,2 through comparison
with Menahem's other surviving work. Thus the authenticity of
Hasdai's Letter is no longer in dispute, while the evidence
concerning Joseph's Reply is necessarily more indirect and
complex. .The
earliest known mentions of the Correspondence date from the
eleventh and twelfth centuries. Around the year 1100 Rabbi
Jehudah ben Barzillai of Barcelona wrote in Hebrew his "Book of
the Festivals" - Sefer ha-Ittim - which contains a
long reference, including direct quotations, to Joseph's Reply
to Hasdai. The passage in question in Barzillai's work starts
as follows:
- We have seen among some other
manuscripts the copy of a letter which King Joseph, son of
Aaron, the Khazar priest wrote to R. Hasdai bar
Isaac.*[Hasdai's name in Hebrew was bar Isaac bar
Shaprut. The R (for Rabbi) is a courtesy title.] We do
not know if the letter is genuine or not, and ifit is a fact
that the Khazars, who are Turks, became proselytes. It is
not definite whether all that is written in the letter is
fact and truth or not. There may be falsehoods written in
it, or people may have added to it, or there may be error on
the part of the scribe.... The reason why we need to write
in this our book things which seem to be exaggerated is that
we have found in the letter of this king Joseph to R. Hasdai
that R. Hasdai had asked him of what family he was, the
condition of the king, how his fathers had been gathered
under the wings of the Presence [i.e., become converted
to Judaism] and how great were his kingdom and dominion.
He replied to him on every head, writing all the particulars
in the letter.3
Barzillai goes on to quote or
paraphrase further passages from Joseph's Reply, thus leaving
no doubt that the Reply was already in existence as early as AD
1100. A particularly convincing touch is added by the Rabbi's
scholarly scepticism. Living in provincial Barcelona, he
evidently knew little or nothing about the Khazars.
.About
the time when Rabbi Barzillai wrote, the Arab chronicler, Ibn
Hawkal, also heard some rumours about Hasdai's involvement with
the Khazars. There survives an enigmatic note, which Ibn Hawkal
jotted down on a manuscript map, dated AH 479 - AD 1086. It
says:
- Hasdai ibn-Ishaq*[Arab version
of Hasdai's name.] thinks that this great long mountain
[the Caucasus] is connected with the mountains of
Armenia and traverses the country of the Greeks, extending
to Khazaran and the mountains of Armenia. He was well
informed about these parts because he visited them and met
their principal kings and leading men.4
It seems most unlikely that Hasdai
actually visited Khazaria; but we remember that he offered to
do so in his Letter, and that Joseph enthusiastically welcomed
the prospect in the Reply; perhaps the industrious Hawkal heard
some gossip about the Correspondence and extrapolated from
there, a practice not unfamiliar among the chroniclers of the
time. .Some
fifty years later (AD 1140) Jehudah Halevi wrote his
philosophical tract "The Khazars" (Kuzri). As already
said, it contains little factual information, but his account
of the Khazar conversion to Judaism agrees in broad outlines
with that given by Joseph in the Reply. Halevi does not
explicitly refer to the Correspondence, but his book is mainly
concerned with theology, disregarding any historical or factual
references. He had probably read a transcript of the
Correspondence as the less erudite Barzillai had before him,
but the evidence is inconclusive. .It
is entirely conclusive, however, in the case of Abraham ben
Daud (cf. above, II, 8) whose popular Sefer
ha-Kabbalah, written in 1161, contains the following
passage:
- You will find congregations of
Israel spread abroad from the town of Sala at the extremity
of the Maghrib, as far as Tahart at its commencement, the
extremity of Africa [Ifriqiyah, Tunis], in all
Africa, Egypt, the country of the Sabaeans, Arabia,
Babylonia, Elam, Persia, Dedan, the country of the
Girgashites which is called Jurjan, Tabaristan, as far as
Daylam and the river Itil where live the Khazar peoples who
became proselytes. Their king Joseph sent a letter to R.
Hasdai, the Prince bar Isaac ben-Shaprut and informed him
that he and all his people followed the Rabbanite faith. We
have seen in Toledo some of their descendants, pupils of the
wise, and they told us that the remnant of them followed the
Rabbanite faith.5
2
The first printed version of the
Khazar Correspondence is contained in a Hebrew pamphlet,
Kol Mebasser, "Voice of the Messenger of Good
News".*[Two copies of the pamphlet belonging to two
different editions are preserved in the Bodleian Library.]
It was published in Constantinople in or around 1577 by Isaac
Abraham Akrish. In his preface Akrish relates that during his
travels in Egypt fifteen years earlier he had heard rumours of
an independent Jewish kingdom (these rumours probably referred
to the Falashas of Abyssinia); and that subsequently he
obtained "a letter which was sent to the king of the Khazars,
and the king's reply". He then decided to publish this
correspondence in order to raise the spirits of his fellow
Jews. Whether or not he thought that Khazaria still existed is
not clear. At any rate the preface is followed by the text of
the two letters, without further comment. .But
the Correspondence did not remain buried in Akrish's obscure
little pamphlet. Some sixty years after its publication, a copy
of it was sent by a friend to Johannes Buxtorf the Younger, a
Calvinist scholar of great erudition. Buxtorf was an expert
Hebraist, who published a great amount of studies in biblical
exegesis and rabbinical literature. When he read Akrish's
pamphlet, he was at first as sceptical regarding the
authenticity of the Correspondence as Rabbi Barzillai had been
five hundred years before him. But in 1660 Buxtorf finally
printed the text of both letters in Hebrew and in a Latin
translation as an addendum to Jehudah Halevi's book on the
Khazars. It was perhaps an obvious, but not a happy idea, for
the inclusion, within the same covers, of Halevi's legendary
tale hardly predisposed historians to take the Correspondence
seriously. It was only in the nineteenth century that their
attitude changed, when more became known, from independent
sources, about the Khazars.
3
The only manuscript version which
contains both Hasdai's Letter and Joseph's Reply, is
in the library of Christ Church in Oxford. According to Dunlop
and the Russian expert, Kokovtsov,6 the manuscript "presents a
remarkably close similarity to the printed text" and "served
directly or indirectly as a source of the printed text".7 It
probably dates from the sixteenth century and is believed to
have been in the possession of the Dean of Christ Church, John
Fell (whom Thomas Brown immortalized with his "I do not love
thee, Dr Fell..."). .Another
manuscript containing Joseph's Reply but not Hasdai's Letter is
preserved in the Leningrad Public Library. It is considerably
longer than the printed text of Akrish and the Christ Church
manuscript; accordingly it is generally known as the Long
Version, as distinct from the Akrish-Christ Church "Short
Version", which appears to be an abbreviation of it. The Long
Version is also considerably older; it probably dates from the
thirteenth century, the Short Version from the sixteenth. The
Soviet historian Ribakov8 has plausibly suggested that the Long
Version - or an even older text - had been edited and
compressed by mediaeval Spanish copyists to produce the Short
Version of Joseph's Reply. lAt this point we encounter a red
herring across the ancient track. The Long Version is part of
the so-called "Firkowich Collection" of Hebrew manuscripts and
epitaphs in the Leningrad Public Library. It probably came from
the Cairo Geniza, where a major part of the manuscripts in the
Collection originated. Abraham Firkowich was a colourful
nineteenth-century scholar who would deserve an Appendix all to
himself. He was a great authority in his field, but he was also
a Karaite zealot who wished to prove to the Tsarist government
that the Karaites were different from orthodox Jews and should
not be discriminated against by Christians. With this laudable
purpose in mind, he doctored some of his authentic old
manuscripts and epitaphs, by interpolating or adding a few
words to give them a Karaite slant. Thus the Long Version,
having passed through the hands of Firkowich, was greeted with
a certain mistrust when it was found, after his death, in a
bundle of other manuscripts in his collection by the Russian
historian Harkavy. Harkavy had no illusions about Firkowich's
reliability, for he himself had previously denounced some of
Firkowich's spurious interpolations.9 Yet Harkavy had no doubts
regarding the antiquity of the manuscript; he published it in
the original Hebrew in 1879 and also in Russian and German
translation,10 accepting it as an early version of Joseph's
letter, from which the Short Version was derived. Harkavy's
colleague (and rival) Chwolson concurred that the whole
document was written by the same hand and that it contained no
additions of any kind.11 Lastly, in 1932, the Russian Academy
published Paul Kokovtsov's authoritative book, The
Hebrew-Khazar Correspondence in the Tenth Century12
including facsimiles of the Long Version of the Reply in the
Leningrad Library, the Short Version in Christ Church and in
Akrish's pamphlet. After a critical analysis of the three
texts, he came to the conclusion that both the Long and the
Short Versions are based on the same original text, which is in
general, though not always, more faithfully preserved in the
Long Version.
4
Kokovtsov's critical survey, and
particularly his publication of the manuscript facsimiles,
virtually settled the controversy - which, anyway, affected
only the Long Version, but not Hasdai's letter and the Short
Version of the Reply.
.Yet a voice of dissent was raised
from an unexpected quarter. In 1941 Poliak advanced the theory
that the Khazar Correspondence was, not exactly a forgery, but
a fictional work written in the tenth century with the purpose
of spreading information about, or making propaganda for, the
Jewish kingdom.13 (It could not have been written later than
the eleventh century, for, as we have seen, Rabbi Barzillai
read the Correspondence about 1100, and Ibn Daud quoted from it
in 1161). But this theory, plausible at first glance, was
effectively demolished by Landau and Dunlop. Landau was able to
prove that Hasdai's Letter was indeed written by his secretary
Menahem ben-Sharuk. And Dunlop pointed out that in the Letter
Hasdai asks a number of questions about Khazaria which Joseph
fails to answer - which is certainly not the way to write an
information pamphlet:
- There is no answer forthcoming on
the part of Joseph to enquiries as to his method of
procession to his place of worship, and as to whether war
abrogates the Sabbath.... There is a marked absence of
correspondence between questions of the Letter and answers
given in the Reply. This should probably be regarded as an
indication that the documents are what they purport to be
and not a literary invention.14
Dunlop goes on to ask a pertinent
question:
Why the Letter of Hasdai at all,
which, though considerably longer than the Reply of Joseph, has
very little indeed about the Khazars, if the purpose of writing
it and the Reply was, as Poliak supposes, simply to give a
popular account of Khazaria? If the Letter is an introduction
to the information about the Khazars in the Reply, it is
certainly a very curious one - full of facts about Spain and
the Umayyads which have nothing to do with
Khazaria.15
Dunlop then clinches the argument by a
linguistic test which proves conclusively that the Letter and
the Reply were written by different people. The proof concerns
one of the marked characteristics of Hebrew grammar, the use of
the so-called "waw- conversive", to define tense. I shall not
attempt to explain this intricate grammatical quirk,*[The
interested reader may consult Weingreen, J., A Practical
Grammar for Classical Hebrew, 2nd ed, (Oxford, 1959)] and
shall instead simply quote Dunlop's tabulation of the different
methods used in the Letter and in the Long Version to designate
past action:16
Waw Conversive Simple Waw
with Imperfect with Perfet
Hasdai's Letter 48 14
Reply (Long Version) 1 95
In the Short Version of the Reply, the
first method (Hasdai's) is used thirty-seven times, the second
fifty times. But the Short Version uses the first method mostly
in passages where the wording differs from the Long Version.
Dunlop suggests that this is due to later Spanish editors
paraphrasing the Long Version. He also points out that Hasdai's
Letter, written in Moorish Spain, contains many Arabisms (for
instance, al-Khazar for the Khazars), whereas the Reply has
none. Lastly, concerning the general tenor of the
Correspondence, he says:
- ... Nothing decisive appears to
have been alleged anainst the factual contents of the Reply
of Joseph in its more original form, the Long Version. The
stylistic difference supports its authenticity. It is what
might be expected in documents emanating from widely
separated parts of the Jewish world, where also the level of
culture was by no means the same. It is perhaps allowable
here to record the impression, for what it is worth, that in
general the language of the Reply is less artificial, more
naive, than that of the Letter.17
To sum up, it is difficult to
understand why past historians were so reluctant to believe
that the Khazar Kagan was capable of dictating a letter, though
it was known that he corresponded with the Byzantine Emperor
(we remember the seals of three solidi); or that pious Jews in
Spain and Egypt should have diligently copied and preserved a
message from the only Jewish king since biblical
times.
****
APPENDIX IV
SOME
IMPLICATIONS - ISRAEL AND THE DIASPORA
WHILE this book deals with past
history, it unavoidably carries certain implications for the
present and future. .In
the first place, I am aware of the danger that it may be
maliciously misinterpreted as a denial of the State of Israel's
right to exist. But that right is not based on the hypothetical
origins of the Jewish people, nor on the mythological covenant
of Abraham with God; it is based on international law - i.e.,
on the United Nations' decision in 1947 to partition Palestine,
once a Turkish province, then a British Mandated Territory,
into an Arab and a Jewish State. Whatever the Israeli citizens'
racial origins, and whatever illusions they entertain about
them, their State exists de jure and de
facto, and cannot be undone, except by genocide. Without
entering into controversial issues, one may add, as a matter of
historical fact, that the partition of Palestine was the result
of a century of peaceful Jewish immigration and pioneering
effort, which provide the ethical justification for the State's
legal existence. Whether the chromosomes of its people contain
genes of Khazar or Semitic, Roman or Spanish origin, is
irrelevant, and cannot affect Israel's right to exist - nor the
moral obligation of any civilized person, Gentile or Jew, to
defend that right. Even the geographical origin of the native
Israeli's parents or grandparents tends to be forgotten in the
bubbling racial melting pot. The problem of the Khazar infusion
a thousand years ago, however fascinating, is irrelevant to
modern Israel. .The
Jews who inhabit it, regardless of their chequered origins,
possess the essential requirements of a nation: a country of
their own, a common language, government and army. The Jews of
the Diaspora have none of these requirements of nationhood.
What sets them apart as a special category from the Gentiles
amidst whom they live is their declared religion, whether they
practise it or not. Here lies the basic difference between
Israelis and Jews of the Diaspora. The former have acquired a
national identity; the latter are labelled as Jews only by
their religion - not by their nationality, not by their
race.
.This, however, creates a tragic
paradox, because the Jewish religion - unlike Christianity,
Buddhism or Islam - implies membership of a historical nation,
a chosen race. All Jewish festivals commemorate events in
national history: the exodus from Egypt, the Maccabean revolt,
the death of the oppressor Haman, the destruction of the
Temple. The Old Testament is first and foremost the narrative
of a nation's history; it gave monotheism to the world, yet its
credo is tribal rather than universal. Every prayer and ritual
observance proclaims membership of an ancient race, which
automatically separates the Jew from the racial and historic
past of the people in whose midst he lives. The Jewish faith,
as shown by 2000 years of tragic history, is nationally and
socially self-segregating. It sets the Jew apart and invites
his being set apart. It automatically creates physical and
cultural ghettoes. It transformed the Jews of the Diaspora into
a pseudo-nation without any of the attributes and
privileges of nationhood, held together loosely by a system of
traditional beliefs based on racial and historical premisses
which turn out to be illusory. .Orthodox
Jewry is a vanishing minority. Its stronghold was Eastern
Europe where the Nazi fury reached its peak and wiped them
almost completely off the face of the earth. Its scattered
survivors in the Western world no longer carry much influence,
while the bulk of the orthodox communities of North Africa, the
Yemen, Syria and Iraq emigrated to Israel. Thus orthodox
Judaism in the Diaspora is dying out, and it is the vast
majority of enlightened or agnostic Jews who perpetuate the
paradox by loyally clinging to their pseudo-national status in
the belief that it is their duty to preserve the Jewish
tradition. .It
is, however, not easy to define what the term "Jewish
tradition" signifies in the eyes of this enlightened majority,
who reject the Chosen-Race doctrine of orthodoxy. That doctrine
apart, the universal messages of the Old Testament - the
enthronement of the one and invisible God, the Ten
Commandments, the ethos of the Hebrew prophets, the Proverbs
and Psalms - have entered into the mainstream of the
Judeo-Helenic-Christian tradition and become the common
property of Jew and Gentile alike. .After
the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews ceased to have a
language and secular culture of their own. Hebrew as a
vernacular yielded to Aramaic before the beginning of the
Christian era; the Jewish scholars and poets in Spain wrote in
Arabic, others later in German, Polish, Russian, English and
French. Certain Jewish communities developed dialects of their
own, such as Yiddish and Ladino, but none of these produced
works comparable to the impressive Jewish contribution to
German, Austro-Hungarian or American literature.
.The
main, specifically Jewish literary activity of the
Diaspora was theological. Yet Talmud, Kabbala, and the bulky
tomes of biblical exegesis are practically unknown to the
contemporary Jewish public, although they are, to repeat it
once more, the only relics of a specifically Jewish tradition -
if that term is to have a concrete meaning - during the last
two millennia. In other words, whatever came out of the
Diaspora is either not specifically Jewish, or not part of a
living tradition. The philosophical, scientific and artistic
achievements of individual Jews consist in contributions to the
culture of their host nations; they do not represent a common
cultural inheritance or autonomous body of traditions.
.To
sum up, the Jews of our day have no cultural tradition in
common, merely certain habits and behaviour-patterns, derived
by social inheritance from the traumatic experience of the
ghetto, and from a religion which the majority does not
practise or believe in, but which nevertheless confers on them
a pseudo-national status. Obviously - as I have argued
elsewhere1 - the long-term solution of the paradox can only be
emigration to Israel or gradual assimilation to their host
nations. Before the holocaust, this process was in full swing;
and in 1975 Time Magazine reported2 that American Jews
"tend to marry outside their faith at a high rate; almost
one-third of all marriages are mixed". .Nevertheless
the lingering influence of Judaism's racial and historical
message, though based on illusion, acts as a powerful emotional
break by appealing to tribal loyalty. It is in this context
that the part played by the thirteenth tribe in ancestral
history becomes relevant to the Jews of the Diaspora. Yet, as
already said, it is irrelevant to modern Israel, which has
acquired a genuine national identity. It is perhaps symbolic
that Abraham Poliak, a professor of history at Tel Aviv
University and no doubt an Israeli patriot, made a major
contribution to our knowledge of Jewry's Khazar ancestry,
undermining the legend of the Chosen Race. It may also be
significant that the native Israeli "Sabra" represents,
physically and mentally, the complete opposite of the "typical
Jew", bred in the ghetto.