CROSS-CURRENTS
1
ON the evidence quoted in previous
chapters, one can easily understand why Polish historians - who
are, after all, closest to the sources - are in agreement that
"in earlier times, the main bulk of the Jewish population
originated from the Khazar country".1 One might even be tempted
to overstate the case by claiming - as Kutschera does - that
Eastern Jewry was a hundred per cent of Khazar origin. Such a
claim might be tenable if the ill-fated Franco-Rhenish
community were the only rival in the search for paternity. But
in the later Middle Ages things become more complicated by the
rise and fall of Jewish settlements all over the territories of
the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and the Balkans. Thus not
only Vienna and Prague had a considerable Jewish population,
but there are no less than five places called Judendorf,
"Jew-village", in the Carinthian Alps, and more Judenburgs and
Judenstadts in the mountains of Styria. By the end of the
fifteenth century, the Jews were expelled from both provinces,
and went to Italy, Poland and Hungary; but where did they
originally come from? Certainly not from the West. As Mieses
put it in his survey of these scattered communities:
- During the high Middle Ages we
thus find in the east a chain of settlements stretching from
Bavaria to Persia, the Causcasus, Asia Minor and Byzantium.
[But] westward from Bavaria there is a gap through
the whole length of Germany.... Just how this immigration of
Jews into the Alpine regions came about we do not know, but
without doubt the three great reservoirs of Jews from late
antiquity played their part: Italy, Byzantium and
Persia.2
The missing link in this enumeration
is, once again, Khazaria, which, as we have seen earlier on,
served as a receptacle and transit-station for Jews emigrating
from Byzantium and the Caliphate. Mieses has acquired great
merit in refuting the legend of the Rhenish origin of Eastern
Jewry, but he, too, knew little of Khazar history, and was
unaware of its demographic importance. However, he may have
been right in suggesting an Italian component among the
immigrants to Austria. Italy was not only quasi-saturated with
Jews since Roman times, but, like Khazaria, also received its
share of immigrants from Byzantium. So here we might have a
trickle of "genuine" Jews of Semitic origin into Eastern
Europe; yet it could not have been more than a trickle, for
there is no trace in the records of any substantial immigration
of Italian Jews into Austria, whereas there is plenty of
evidence of a reverse migration of Jews into Italy after their
expulsion from the Alpine provinces at the end of the fifteenth
century. Details like this tend to blur the picture, and make
one wish that the Jews had gone to Poland on board the
Mayflower, with all the records neatly kept.
.Yet
the broad outlines of the migratory process are nevertheless
discernible. The Alpine settlements were in all likelihood
westerly offshoots of the general Khazar migration toward
Poland, which was spread over several centuries and followed
several different routes - through the Ukraine, the Slavonic
regions north of Hungary, perhaps also through the Balkans. A
Rumanian legend tells of an invasion - the date unknown - of
armed Jews into that country.3
2
There is another, very curious legend
relating to the history of Austrian Jewry. It was launched by
Christian chroniclers in the Middle Ages, but was repeated in
all seriousness by historians as late as the beginning of the
eighteenth century. In pre-Christian days, so the legend goes,
the Austrian provinces were ruled by a succession of Jewish
princes. The Austrian Chronicle, compiled by a Viennese scribe
in the reign of Albert III(1350-95) contains a list of no less
than twenty-two such Jewish princes, who are said to have
succeeded each other. The list gives not only their alleged
names, some of which have a distinctly Ural-Altaian ring, but
also the length of their rule and the place where they are
buried; thus: "Sennan, ruled 45 years, buried at the Stubentor
in Vienna; Zippan, 43 years, buried in Tulln"; and so on,
including names like Lapton, Ma'alon, Raptan, Rabon, Effra,
Sameck, etc. After these Jews came five pagan princes, followed
by Christian rulers. The legend is repeated, with some
variations, in the Latin histories of Austria by Henricus
Gundelfingus, 1474, and by several others, the last one being
Anselmus Schram's Flores Chronicorum Austriae, 1702
(who still seems to have believed in its authenticity).4
.How
could this fantastic tale have originated? Let us listen to
Mieses again: "The very fact that such a legend could develop
and stubbornly maintain itself through several centuries,
indicates that deep in the national consciousness of ancient
Austria dim memories persisted of a Jewish presence in the
lands on the upper Danube in bygone days. Who knows whether the
tidal waves emanating from the Khazar dominions in Eastern
Europe once swept into the foothills of the Alps - which would
explain the Turanian flavour of the names of those princes. The
confabulations of mediaeval chroniclers could evoke a popular
echo only if they were supported by collective recollections,
however vague."5 .As
already mentioned, Mieses is rather inclined to underestimate
the Khazar contribution to Jewish history, but even so he hit
on the only plausible hypothesis which could explain the origin
of the persistent legend. One may even venture to be a little
more specific. For more than half a century - up to AD 955 -
Austria, as far west as the river Enns, was under Hungarian
domination. The Magyars had arrived in their new country in
896, together with the Kabar-Khazar tribes who were influential
in the nation. The Hungarians at the time were not yet
converted to Christianity (that happened only a century later,
AD 1000) and the only monotheistic religion familiar to them
was Khazar Judaism. There may have been one or more tribal
chieftains among them who practised a Judaism of sorts - we
remember the Byzantine chronicler, John Cinnamus, mentioning
Jewish troops fighting in the Hungarian army.*[See above,
V, 2.] Thus there may have been some substance to the
legend - particularly if we remember that the Hungarians were
still in their savage raiding period, the scourge of Europe. To
be under their dominion was certainly a traumatic experience
which the Austrians were unlikely to forget. It all fits rather
nicely.
3
Further evidence against the
supposedly Franco-Rhenish origin of Eastern Jewry is provided
by the structure of Yiddish, the popular language of the Jewish
masses, spoken by millions before the holocaust, and still
surviving among traditionalist minorities in the Soviet Union
and the United States. .Yiddish
is a curious amalgam of Hebrew, mediaeval German, Slavonic and
other elements, written in Hebrew characters. Now that it is
dying out, it has become a subject of much academic research in
the United States and Israel, but until well into the twentieth
century it was considered by Western linguists as merely an odd
jargon, hardly worth serious study. As H. Smith remarked:
"Little attention has been paid to Yiddish by scholars. Apart
from a few articles in periodicals, the first really scientific
study of the language was Mieses's Historical Grammar
published in 1924. It is significant that the latest edition of
the standard historical grammar of German, which treats German
from the point of view of its dialects, dismisses Yiddish in
twelve lines."6
.At first glance the prevalence of
German loanwords in Yiddish seems to contradict our main thesis
on the origins of Eastern Jewry; we shall see presently that
the opposite is true, but the argument involves several steps.
The first is to inquire what particular kind of regional German
dialect went into the Yiddish vocabulary. Nobody before Mieses
seems to have paid serious attention to this question; it is to
his lasting merit to have done so, and to have come up with a
conclusive answer. Based on the study of the vocabulary,
phonetics and syntax of Yiddish as compared with the main
German dialects in the Middle Ages, he concludes:
- No linguistic components derived
from the parts of Germany bordering on France are found in
the Yiddish language. Not a single word from the entire list
of specifically Moselle-Franconian origin compiled by J. A.
Ballas (Beitrge zur Kunntnis der Trierischen
Volkssprache, 1903, 28ff.) has found its way into the
Yiddish vocabulary. Even the more central regions of Western
Germany, around Frankfurt, have not contributed to the
Yiddish language....7 Insofar as the origins of Yiddish are
concerned, Western Germany can be written off....8 Could it
be that the generally accepted view, according to which the
German Jews once upon a time immigrated from France across
the Rhine, is misconceived? The history of the German Jews,
of Ashkenazi*[For "Ashkenazi" see below, VIII, I]
Jewry, must be revised. The errors of history are often
rectified by linguistic research. The conventional view of
the erstwhile immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from France
belongs to the category of historic errors which are
awaiting correction.9
He then quotes, among other examples
of historic fallacies, the case of the Gypsies, who were
regarded as an offshoot from Egypt, "until linguistics showed
that they come from India".10 .Having
disposed of the alleged Western origin of the Germanic element
in Yiddish, Mieses went on to show that the dominant influence
in it are the so-called "East-Middle German" dialects which
were spoken in the Alpine regions of Austria and Bavaria
roughly up to the fifteenth century. In other words, the German
component which went into the hybrid Jewish language originated
in the eastern regions of Germany, adjacent to the Slavonic
belt of Eastern Europe. .Thus
the evidence from linguistics supports the historical record in
refuting the misconception of the Franco-Rhenish origins of
Eastern Jewry. But this negative evidence does not answer the
question how an East-Middle German dialect combined with Hebrew
and Slavonic elements became the common language of that
Eastern Jewry, the majority of which we assume to have been of
Khazar origin.
.In attempting to answer this
question, several factors have to be taken into consideration.
First, the evolution of Yiddish was a long and complex process,
which presumably started in the fifteenth century or even
earlier; yet it remained for a long time a spoken language, a
kind of lingua franca, and appears in print only in
the nineteenth century. Before that, it had no established
grammar, and "it was left to the individual to introduce
foreign words as he desires. There is no established form of
pronunciation or spelling.... The chaos in spelling may be
illustrated by the rules laid down by the J¸dische
Volks- Bibliothek: (1) Write as you speak, (2) write so
that both Polish and Lithuanian Jews may understand you, and
(3) spell differently words of the same sound which have a
different signification."11 .Thus
Yiddish grew, through the centuries, by a kind of untrammelled
proliferation, avidly absorbing from its social environments
such words, phrases, idiomatic expressions as best served its
purpose as a lingua franca. But the culturally and
socially dominant element in the environment of mediaeval
Poland were the Germans. They alone, among the immigrant
populations, were economically and intellectually more
influential than the Jews. We have seen that from the early
days of the Piast dynasty, and particularly under Casimir the
Great, everything was done to attract immigrants to colonize
the land and build "modern" cities. Casimir was said to have
"found a country of wood and left a country of stone". But
these new cities of stone, such as Krakau (Cracow) or Lemberg
(Lwow) were built and ruled by German immigrants, living under
the so-called Magdeburg law, i.e., enjoying a high degree of
municipal self-government. Altogether not less than four
million Germans are said to have immigrated into Poland,12
providing it with an urban middleclass that it had not
possessed before. As Poliak has put it, comparing the German to
the Khazar immigration into Poland: "the rulers of the country
imported these masses of much-needed enterprising foreigners,
and facilitated their settling down according to the way of
life they had been used to in their countries of origin: the
German town and the Jewish shtetl". (However, this
tidy separation became blurred when later Jewish arrivals from
the West also settled in the towns and formed urban
ghettoes.)
.Not only the educated
bourgeoisie, but the clergy too, was predominantly
German - a natural consequence of Poland opting for Roman
Catholicism and turning toward Western civilization, just as
the Russian clergy after Vladimir's conversion to Greek
orthodoxy was predominantly Byzantine. Secular culture followed
along the same lines, in the footsteps of the older Western
neighbour. The first Polish university was founded in 1364 in
Cracow, then a predominantly German city.*[One of its
students in the next century was Nicolaus Copernicus or Mikolaj
Koppernigk whom both Polish and German patriots later claimed
as their national.] As Kutschera, the Austrian, has put it,
rather smugly:
- The German colonists were at first
regarded by the people with suspicion and distrust; yet they
succeeded in gaining an increasingly firm foothold, and even
in introducing the German educational system. The Poles
learnt to appreciate the advantages of the higher culture
introduced by the Germans and to imitate their foreign ways.
The Polish aristocracy, too, grew fond of German customs and
found beauty and pleasure in whatever came from
Germany.13
Not exactly modest, but essentially
true. One remembers the high esteem for German Kultur
among nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals.
.It
is easy to see why Khazar immigrants pouring into mediaeval
Poland had to learn German if they wanted to get on. Those who
had close dealings with the native populace no doubt also had
to learn some pidgin Polish (or Lithuanian, or Ukrainian or
Slovene); German, however, was a prime necessity in any contact
with the towns. But there was also the synagogue and the study
of the Hebrew thorah. 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; but at least
one can discern some further factors which facilitated the
process. .Among
the later immigrants to Poland there were also, as we have
seen, a certain number of "real" Jews from the Alpine
countries, Bohemia and eastern Germany. Even if their number
was relatively small, these German-speaking Jews were superior
in culture and learning to the Khazars, just as the German
Gentiles were culturally superior to the Poles. And just as the
Catholic clergy was German, so the Jewish rabbis from the West
were a powerful factor in the Germanization of the Khazars,
whose Judaism was fervent but primitive. To quote Poliak
again:
- Those German Jews who reached the
kingdom of Poland-Lithuania had an enormous influence on
their brethren from the east. The reason why the
[Khazar] Jews were so strongly attracted to them was
that they admired their religious learning and their
efficiency in doing business with the predominantly German
cities.... The language spoken at the Heder, the
school for religious teaching, and at the house of the
Ghevir [notable, rich man] would influence
the language of the whole community.14
A rabbinical tract from
seventeenth-century Poland contains the pious wish: "May God
will that the country be filled with wisdom and that all Jews
speak German."15.Characteristically,
the only sector among the Khazarian Jews in Poland which
resisted both the spiritual and worldly temptations offered by
the German language were the Karaites, who rejected both
rabbinical learning and material enrichment. Thus they never
took to Yiddish. According to the first all-Russian census in
1897, there were 12894 Karaite Jews living in the Tsarist
Empire (which, of course, included Poland). Of these 9666 gave
Turkish as their mother tongue (i.e., presumably their original
Khazar dialect), 2632 spoke Russian, and only 383 spoke
Yiddish. .The
Karaite sect, however, represents the exception rather than the
rule. In general, immigrant populations settling in a new
country tend to shed their original language within two or
three generations and adopt the language of their new
country.*[This does not, of course, apply to conquerors and
colonizers, who impose their own language on the natives.]
The American grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe
never learn to speak Polish or Ukrainian, and find the
jabber-wocky of their grandparents rather comic. It is
difficult to see how historians could ignore the evidence for
the Khazar migration into Poland on the grounds that more than
half a millennium later they speak a different
language.
.Incidentally, the descendants of
the biblical Tribes are the classic example of linguistic
adaptability. First they spoke Hebrew; in the Babylonian exile,
Chaldean; at the time of Jesus, Aramaic; in Alexandria, Greek;
in Spain, Arabic, but later Ladino - a Spanish-Hebrew mixture,
written in Hebrew characters, the Sephardi equivalent of
Yiddish; and so it goes on. They preserved their religious
identity, but changed languages at their convenience. The
Khazars were not descended from the Tribes, but, as we have
seen, they shared a certain cosmopolitanism and other social
characteristics with their co-religionists.
4
Poliak has proposed an additional
hypothesis concerning the early origins of Yiddish, which
deserves to be mentioned, though it is rather problematical. He
thinks that the "shape of early Yiddish emerged in the Gothic
regions of the Khazar Crimea. In those regions the conditions
of life were bound to bring about a combination of Germanic and
Hebrew elements hundreds of years before the foundation of the
settlements in the Kingdoms of Poland and Lithuania."16
.Poliak
quotes as indirect evidence a certain Joseph Barbaro of Venice,
who lived in Tana (an Italian merchant colony on the Don
estuary) from 1436 to 1452, and who wrote that his German
servant could converse with a Goth from the Crimea just as a
Florentine could understand the language of an Italian from
Genoa. As a matter of fact, the Gothic language survived in the
Crimea (and apparently nowhere else) at least to the middle of
the sixteenth century. At that time the Habsburg ambassador in
Constantinople, Ghiselin de Busbeck, met people from the
Crimea, and made a list of words from the Gothic that they
spoke. (This Busbeck must have been a remarkable man, for it
was he who first introduced the lilac and tulip from the Levant
to Europe.) Poliak considers this vocabulary to be close to the
Middle High German elements found in Yiddish. He thinks the
Crimean Goths kept contact with other Germanic tribes and that
their language was influenced by them. Whatever one may think
of it, it is a hypothesis worth the linguist's
attention.
5
"In a sense," wrote Cecil Roth, "the
Jewish dark ages may be said to begin with the
Renaissance."17
.Earlier on, there had been
massacres and other forms of persecution during the crusades,
the Black Death, and under other pretexts; but these had been
lawless outbreaks of massviolence, actively opposed or
passively tolerated by the authorities. From the beginnings of
the Counter-Reformation, however, the Jews were legally
degraded to not-quite-human status, in many respects comparable
to the Untouchables in the Hindu caste system.
."The
few communities suffered to remain in Western Europe - i.e., in
Italy, Germany, and the papal possessions in southern France -
were subjected at last to all the restrictions which earlier
ages had usually allowed to remain an ideal"18 - i.e., which
had existed on ecclesiastical and other decrees, but had
remained on paper (as, for instance, in Hungary, see above, V,
2). Now, however, these "ideal" ordinances were ruthlessly
enforced: residential segregation, sexual apartheid, exclusion
from all respected positions and occupations; wearing of
distinctive clothes: yellow badge and conical headgear. In 1555
Pope Paul IV in his bull cum nimis absurdum insisted
on the strict and consistent enforcement of earlier edicts,
confining Jews to closed ghettoes. A year later the Jews of
Rome were forcibly transferred. All Catholic countries, where
Jews still enjoyed relative freedom of movement, had to follow
the example. .In
Poland, the honeymoon period inaugurated by Casimir the Great
had lasted longer than elsewhere, but by the end of the
sixteenth century it had run its course. The Jewish
communities, now confined to shtetl and ghetto, became
overcrowded, and the refugees from the Cossack massacres in the
Ukrainian villages under Chmelnicky (see above, V, 5) led to a
rapid deterioration of the housing situation and economic
conditions. The result was a new wave of massive emigration
into Hungary, Bohemia, `Rumania and Germany, where the Jews who
had all but vanished with the Black Death were still thinly
spread. .Thus
the great trek to the West was resumed. It was to continue
through nearly three centuries until the Second World War, and
became the principal source of the existing Jewish communities
in Europe, the United States and Israel. When its rate of flow
slackened, the pogroms of the nineteenth century provided a new
impetus. "The second Western movement," writes Roth (dating the
first from the destruction of Jerusalem), "which continued into
the twentieth century, may be said to begin with the deadly
Chmelnicky massacres of 1648-49 in Poland."19
6
The evidence quoted in previous
chapters adds up to a strong case in favour of those modern
historians - whether Austrian, Israeli or Polish who,
independently from each other, have argued that the bulk of
modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin.
The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not flow from the
Mediterranean across France and Germany to the east and then
back again. The stream moved in a consistently westerly
direction, from the Caucasus through the Ukraine into Poland
and thence into Central Europe. When that unprecedented
mass-settlement in Poland came into beng, there were simply not
enough Jews around in the west to account for it; while in the
east a whole nation was on the move to new
frontiers.
.It would of course be foolish to
deny that Jews of different origin also contributed to the
existing Jewish world-community. The numerical ratio of the
Khazar to the Semitic and other contributions is impossible to
establish. But the cumulative evidence makes one inclined to
agree with the concensus of Polish historians that "in earlier
times the main bulk originated from the Khazar country"; and
that, accordingly, the Khazar contribution to the genetic
make-up of the Jews must be substantial, and in all likelihood
dominant.