In the Charter issued by Boleslav the Pious in 1264, and confirmed by Casimir the Great in 1334, Jews were granted the right to maintain their own synagogues, schools and courts; to hold landed property, and engage in any trade or occupation they chose. Under the rule of King Stephen Báthory (1575-86) Jews were granted a Parliament of their own which met twice a year and had the power to levy taxes on their co-religionists. After the destruction of their country, Khazar Jewry had entered on a new chapter in its history.
A striking illustration for their privileged condition is given in a papal breve, issued in the second half of the thirteenth century, probably by Pope Clement IV, and addressed to an unnamed Polish prince. In this document the Pope lets it be known that the Roman authorities are well aware of the existence of a considerable number of synagogues in several Polish cities — indeed no less than five synagogues in one city alone.[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] He deplores the fact that these synagogues are reported to be taller than the churches, more stately and ornamental, and roofed with colourfully painted leaden plates, making the adjacent Catholic churches look poor in comparison. (One is reminded of Masudi’s gleeful remark that the minaret of the main mosque was the tallest building in Itil.) The complaints in the breve are further authenticated by a decision of the Papal legate, Cardinal Guido, dated 1267, stipulating that Jews should not be allowed more than one synagogue to a town.
We gather from these documents, which are roughly contemporaneous with the Mongol conquest of Khazaria, that already at that time there must have been considerable numbers of Khazars present in Poland if they had in several towns more than one synagogue; and that they must have been fairly prosperous to build them so “stately and ornamental”. This leads us to the question of the approximate size and composition of the Khazar immigration into Poland.
Regarding the numbers involved, we have no reliable information to guide us. We remember that the Arab sources speak of Khazar armies numbering three hundred thousand men involved in the Muslim-Khazar wars (Chapter I, 7); 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 50000, which would mean a population of 300000-400000, i.e., roughly the same order of magnitude as the Khazars’. On the other hand, the number of Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian kingdorn in the seventeenth century is also estimated by modern historians at 500000 (5 per cent of the total population).[165] 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.[*******************] Altogether this population transfer was spread out over five or six centuries of trickle and flow. If we take into account the considerable influx of Jewish refugees from Byzantium and the Muslim world into Khazaria, and a small population increase among the Khazars themselves, it appears plausible that the tentative figures for the Khazar population at its peak in the eighth century should be comparable to that of the Jews in Poland in the seventeenth century, at least by order of magnitude — give or take a few hundred thousand as a token of our ignorance. There is irony hidden in these numbers. 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[166] 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. Even if the original core of that community was diluted and augmented by immigrants from other regions (see below), its predominantly Khazar-Turkish derivation appears to be supported by strong evidence, and should at least be regarded as a theory worth serious discussion.
Additional reasons for attributing the leading role in the growth and development of the Jewish community in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe mainly to the Khazar element, and not to immigrants from the West, will be discussed in the chapters that follow. But it may be appropriate at this point to quote the Polish historian, Adam Vetulani (my italics):
Polish scholars agree that these oldest settlements were founded by Jewish emigres from the Khazar state and Russia, while the Jews from Southern and Western Europe began to arrive and settle only later … and that a certain proportion at least of the Jewish population (in earlier times, the main bulk) originated from the east, from the Khazar country, and later from Kievian Russia.[167]
6
So much for size. But what do we know of the social structure and composition of the Khazar immigrant community?
The first impression one gains is a striking similarity between certain privileged positions held by Khazar Jews in Hungary and in Poland in those early days. Both the Hungarian and Polish sources refer to Jews employed as mintmasters, administrators of the royal revenue, controllers of the salt monopoly, taxcollectors and “money-lenders” — i.e., bankers. This parallel suggests a common origin of those two immigrant communities; and as we can trace the origins of the bulk of Hungarian Jewry to the Magyar-Khazar nexus, the conclusion seems self-evident.
The early records reflect the part played by immigrant Jews in the two countries’ budding economic life. That it was an important part is not surprising, since foreign trade and the levying of customs duties had been the Khazars’ principal source of income in the past. They had the experience which their new hosts were lacking, and it was only logical that they were called in to advise and participate in the management of the finances of court and nobility. The coins minted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with Polish inscriptions in Hebrew lettering (see Chapter II, 1) are somewhat bizarre relics of these activities. The exact purpose they served is still something of a mystery. Some bear the name of a king (e.g., Leszek, Mieszko), others are inscribed “From the House of Abraham ben Joseph the Prince” (possibly the minter-banker himself), or show just a word of benediction: “Luck” or “Blessing”. Significantly, contemporary Hungarian sources also speak of the practice of minting coins from silver provided by Jewish owners.[168]
However — in constrast to Western Europe — finance and commerce were far from being the only fields of Jewish activity. Some rich emigrants became landowners in Poland as Count Teka was in Hungary; Jewish land-holdings comprising a whole village of Jewish farmers are recorded, for instance, in the vicinity of Breslau before 1203;[169] and in the early days there must have been Khazar peasants in considerable numbers, as the ancient Khazar place-names seem to indicate.
A tantalizing glimpse of how some of these villages may have come into being is provided by the Karaite records mentioned before; they relate how Prince Vitold settled a group of Karaite prisoners-of-war in “Krasna”, providing them with houses, orchards and land to a distance of one and a half miles. (“Krasna” has been tentatively identified with the Jewish small town Krasnoia in Podolia.)[170]
But farming did not hold out a future for the Jewish community. There were several reasons for this. The rise of feudalism in the fourteenth century gradually transformed the peasants of Poland into serfs, forbidden to leave their villages, deprived of freedom of movement. At the same time, under the joint pressure of the ecclesiastic hierarchy and the feudal landlords, the Polish Parliament in 1496 forbade the acquisition of agricultural land by Jews. But the process of alienation from the soil must have started long before that. Apart from the specific causes just mentioned — religious discrimination, combined with the degradation of the free peasants into serfs — the transformation of the predominantly agricultural nation of Khazars into a predominantly urban community reflected a common phenomenon in the history of migrations. Faced with different climatic conditions and farming methods on the one hand, and on the other with unexpected opportunities for an easier living offered by urban civilization, immigrant populations are apt to change their occupational structure within a few generations. The offspring of Abruzzi peasants in the New World became waiters and restaurateurs, the grandsons of Polish farmers may become engineers or psychoanalysts.[†††††††††††††††††††]
However, the transformation of Khazar Jewry into Polish Jewry did not entail any brutal break with the past, or loss of identity. It was a gradual, organic process of change, which — as Poliak has convincingly shown — preserved some vital traditions of Khazar communal life in their new country. This was mainly achieved through the emergence of a social structure, or way of life, found nowhere else in the world Diaspora: the Jewish small town, in Hebrew ayarah, in Yiddish shtetl, in Polish miastecko. All three designations are diminutives, which, however, do not necessarily refer to smallness in size (some were quite big small-towns) but to the limited rights of municipal selfgovernment they enjoyed.
The shtetl should not be confused with the ghetto. The latter consisted of a street or quarter in which Jews were compelled to live within the confines of a Gentile town. It was, from the second half of the sixteenth century onward, the universal habitat of Jews everywhere in the Christian, and most of the Muslim, world. The ghetto was surrounded by walls, with gates that were locked at night. It gave rise to claustrophobia and mental inbreeding, but also to a sense of relative security in times of trouble. As it could not expand in size, the houses were tall and narrow-chested, and permanent overcrowding created deplorable sanitary conditions. It took great spiritual strength for people living in such circumstances to keep their self-respect. Not all of them did.
The shtetl, on the other hand, was a quite different proposition — a type of settlement which, as already said, existed only in Poland-Lithuania and nowhere else in the world. It was a self-contained country town with an exclusively or predominantly Jewish population. The shtetl’s origins probably date back to the thirteenth century, and may represent the missing link, as it were, between the market towns of Khazaria and the Jewish settlements in Poland.
The economic and social function of these semi-rural, semiurban agglomerations seems to have been similar in both countries. In Khazaria, as later in Poland, they provided a network of trading posts or market towns which mediated between the needs of the big towns and the countryside. They had regular fairs at which sheep and cattle, alongside the goods manufactured in the towns and the products of the rural cottage industries were sold or bartered; at the same time they were the centres where artisans plied their crafts, from wheelwrights to blacksmiths, silversmiths, tailors, Kosher butchers, millers, bakers and candlestick-makers. There were also letter-writers for the illiterate, synagogues for the faithful, inns for travellers, and a heder — Hebrew for “room”, which served as a school. There were itinerant story-tellers and folk bards (some of their names, such as Velvel Zbarzher, have been preserved)[171] travelling from shtetl to shtetl in Poland — and no doubt earlier on in Khazaria, if one is to judge by the survival of story-tellers among Oriental people to our day.
Some particular trades became virtually a Jewish monopoly in Poland. One was dealing in timber — which reminds one that timber was the chief building material and an important export in Khazaria; another was transport. “The dense net of shtetls,” writes Poliak,[172]“made it possible to distribute manufactured goods over the whole country by means of the superbly built Jewish type of horse cart. The preponderance of this kind of transport, especially in the east of the country, was so marked amounting to a virtual monopoly — that the Hebrew word for carter, ba‘al agalah[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] was incorporated into the Russian language as balagula. Only the development of the railway in the second half of the nineteenth century led to a decline in this trade.”
Now this specialization in coach-building and cartering could certainly not have developed in the closed ghettoes of Western Jewry; it unmistakably points to a Khazar origin. The people of the ghettoes were sedentary; while the Khazars, like other semi-nomadic people, used horse- or ox-drawn carts to transport their tents, goods and chattel — including royal tents the size of a circus, fit to accommodate several hundred people. They certainly had the know-how to negotiate the roughest tracks in their new country.
Other specifically Jewish occupations were inn-keeping, the running of flour mills and trading in furs — none of them found in the ghettoes of Western Europe.
Such, in broad outlines, was the structure of the Jewish shtetl in Poland. Some of its features could be found in old market towns in any country; others show a more specific affinity with what we know — little though it is — about the townships of Khazaria, which were probably the prototypes of the Polish shtetl.
To these specific features should be added the “pagoda-style” of the oldest surviving wooden shtetl synagogues dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which is totally different from both the native style of architecture and from the building style adopted by Western Jews and replicated later on in the ghettoes of Poland. The interior decoration of the oldest shtetl synagogues is also quite different from the style of the Western ghetto; the walls of the shtetl synagogue were covered with Moorish arabesques, and with animal figures characteristic of the Persian influence found in Magyar-Khazar artefacts (I, 13) and in the decorative style brought to Poland by Armenian immigrants.[173]
The traditional garb of Polish Jewry is also of unmistakably Eastern origin. The typical long silk kaftan may have been an imitation of the coat worn by the Polish nobility, which itself was copied from the outfit of the Mongols in the Golden Horde — fashions travel across political divisions; but we know that kaftans were worn long before that by the nomads of the steppes. The skull-cap (yarmolka) is worn to this day by orthodox Jews — and by the Uzbeks and other Turkish people in the Soviet Union. On top of the skull-cap men wore the streimel, an elaborate round hat rimmed with fox-fur, which the Khazars copied from the Khasaks — or vice versa. As already mentioned, the trade in fox and sable furs, which had been flourishing in Khazaria, became another virtual Jewish monopoly in Poland. As for the women, they wore, until the middle of the nineteenth century, a tall white turban, which was an exact copy of the Jauluk worn by Khasak and Turkmen women.[174] (Nowadays orthodox Jewesses have to wear instead of a turban a wig made of their own hair, which is shaved off when they get married.)
One might also mention in this context — though somewhat dubiously — the Polish Jews’ odd passion for gefillte (stuffed) fisch, a national dish which the Polish Gentiles adopted. “Without fish”, the saying went, “there is no Sabbath.” Was it derived from distant memories of life on the Caspian, where fish was the staple diet?
Life in the shtetl is celebrated with much romantic nostalgia in Jewish literature and folklore. Thus we read in a modern survey of its customs[175] about the joyous way its inhabitants celebrated the Sabbath:
Wherever one is, he will try to reach home in time to greet the Sabbath with his own family. The pedlar travelling from village to village, the itinerant tailor, shoemaker, cobbler, the merchant off on a trip, all will plan, push, hurry, trying to reach home before sunset on Friday evening.
As they press homeward the shammes calls through the streets of the shtetl, “Jews to the bathhouse!” A functionary of the synagogue, the shammes is a combination of sexton and beadle. He speaks with an authority more than his own, for when he calls “Jews to the bathhouse” he is summoning them to a commandment.
The most vivid evocation of life in the shtetl is the surrealistic amalgam of fact and fantasy in the paintings and lithographs of Marc Chagall, where biblical symbols appear side by side with the bearded carter wielding his whip and wistful rabbis in kaftan and yarmolka.
It was a weird community, reflecting its weird origins. Some of the earliest small-towns were probably founded by prisoners of war — such as the Karaites of Troki — whom Polish and Lithuanian nobles were anxious to settle on their empty lands. But the majority of these settlements were products of the general migration away from the “wild fields” which were turning into deserts. “After the Mongol conquest”, wrote Poliak, “when the Slav villages wandered westward, the Khazar shtetls went with them.”[176] The pioneers of the new settlements were probably rich Khazar traders who constantly travelled across Poland on the much frequented trade routes into Hungary. “The Magyar and Kabar migration into Hungary blazed the trail for the growing Khazar settlements in Poland: it turned Poland into a transit area between the two countries with Jewish communities.”[177] Thus the travelling merchants were familiar with conditions in the prospective areas of resettlement, and had occasion to make contact with the landowners in search of tenants. “The landlord would enter into an agreement with such rich and respected Jews” (we are reminded of Abraham Prokownik) “as would settle on his estate and bring in other settlers. They would, as a rule, choose people from the place where they had lived.”[178] These colonists would be an assorted lot of farmers, artisans and craftsmen, forming a more or less self-supporting community. Thus the Khazar shtetl would be transplanted and become a Polish shtetl. Farming would gradually drop out, but by that time the adaptation to changed conditions would have been completed.
The nucleus of modern Jewry thus followed the old recipe: strike out for new horizons but stick together.
VI
WHERE FROM?
1
Two basic facts emerge from our survey: the disappearance of the Khazar nation from its historic habitat, and the simultaneous appearance in adjacent regions to the north-west of the greatest concentration of Jews since the beginnings of the Diaspora. Since the two are obviously connected, historians agree that immigration from Khazaria must have contributed to the growth of Polish Jewry — a conclusion supported by the evidence cited in the previous chapters. But they feel less certain about the extent of this contribution — the size of the Khazar immigration compared with the influx of Western Jews, and their respective share in the genetic make-up of the modern Jewish community.
In other words, the fact that Khazars emigrated in substantial numbers into Poland is established beyond dispute; the question is whether they provided the bulk of the new settlement, or only its hard core, as it were. To find an answer to this question, we must get some idea of the size of the immigration of “real Jews” from the West.
2
Towards the end of the first millennium, the most important settlements of Western European Jews were in France and the Rhineland.[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] Some of these communities had probably been founded in Roman days, for, between the destruction of Jerusalem and the decline of the Roman Empire, Jews had settled in many of the greater cities under its rule, and were later on reinforced by immigrants from Italy and North Africa. Thus we have records from the ninth century onwards of Jewish communities in places all over France, from Normandy down to Provence and the Mediterranean.
One group even crossed the Channel to England in the wake of the Norman invasion, apparently invited by William the Conqueror,[179] because he needed their capital and enterprise. Their history has been summed up by Baron:
They were subsequently converted into a class of “royal usurers” whose main function was to provide credits for both political and economic ventures. After accumulating great wealth through the high rate of interest, these moneylenders were forced to disgorge it in one form or another for the benefit of the royal treasury. The prolonged well-being of many Jewish families, the splendour of their residence and attire, and their influence on public affairs blinded even experienced observers to the deep dangers lurking from the growing resentment of debtors of all classes, and the exclusive dependence of Jews on the protection of their royal masters.… Rumblings of discontent, culminating in violent outbreaks in 1189-90, presaged the final tragedy: the expulsion of 1290. The meteoric rise, and even more rapid decline of English Jewry in the brief span of two and a quarter centuries (1066-1290) brought into sharp relief the fundamental factors shaping the destinies of all western Jewries in the crucial first half of the second millennium.[180]
The English example is instructive, because it is exceptionally well documented compared to the early history of the Jewish communities on the Continent. The main lesson we derive from it is that the social-economic influence of theJews was quite out of proportion with their small numbers. There were, apparently, no more than 2500 Jews in England at any time before their expulsion in 1290.[********************] This tiny Jewish community in mediaeval England played a leading part in the country’s economic Establishment — much more so than its opposite number in Poland; yet in contrast to Poland it could not rely on a network of Jewish small-towns to provide it with a mass-basis of humble craftsmen, of lower-middle-class artisans and workmen, carters and innkeepers; it had no roots in the people. On this vital issue, Angevin England epitomized developments on the Western Continent. The Jews of France and Germany faced the same predicament: their occupational stratification was lopsided and top-heavy. This led everywhere to the same, tragic sequence of events. The dreary tale always starts with a honeymoon, and ends in divorce and bloodshed. In the beginning the Jews are pampered with special charters, privileges, favours. They are personae gratae like the court alchemists, because they alone have the secret of how to keep the wheels of the economy turning. “In the ‘dark ages’,” wrote Cecil Roth, “the commerce of Western Europe was largely in Jewish hands, not excluding the slave trade, and in the Carolingian cartularies Jew and Merchant are used as almost interchangeable terms.”[181] But with the growth of a native mercantile class, they became gradually excluded not only from most productive occupations, but also from the traditional forms of commerce, and virtually the only field left open to them was lending capital on interest. “…The floating wealth of the country was soaked up by the Jews, who were periodically made to disgorge into the exchequer…”[182] The archetype of Shylock was established long before Shakespeare’s time.
In the honeymoon days, Charlemagne had sent a historic embassy in 797 to Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad to negotiate a treaty of friendship; the embassy was composed of the Jew Isaac and two Christian nobles. The bitter end came when, in 1306, Philip le Bel expelled the Jews from the kingdom of France. Though later some were allowed to return, they suffered further persecution, and by the end of the century the French community of Jews was virtually extinct.[††††††††††††††††††††]
3
If we turn to the history of German Jewry, the first fact to note is that “remarkably, we do not possess a comprehensive scholarly history of German Jewry.… The Germanica Judaica is merely a good reference work to historic sources shedding light on individual communities up to 1238.”[183] It is a dim light, but at least it illuminates the territorial distribution of the Western-Jewish communities in Germany during the critical period when Khazar-Jewish immigration into Poland was approaching its peak.
One of the earliest records of such a community in Germany mentions a certain Kalonymous, who, in 906, emigrated with his kinsfolk from Lucca in Italy to Mavence. About the same time we hear of Jews in Spires and Worms, and somewhat later in other places — Trèves, Metz, Strasbourg, Cologne — all of them situated in a narrow strip in Alsace and along the Rhine valley. The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela (see above, II, 8) visited the region in the middle of the twelfth century and wrote: “In these cities there are many Israelites, wise men and rich.”[184] But how many are “many”? In fact very few, as will be seen.
Earlier on, there lived in Mayence a certain Rabbi Gershom ben Yehuda (circa 960-1030) whose great learning earned him the title “Light of the Diaspora” and the position of spiritual head of the French and Rhenish-German community. At some date around 1020 Gershom convened a Rabbinical Council in Worms, which issued various edicts, including one that put a legal stop to polygamy (which had anyway been in abeyance for a long time). To these edicts a codicil was added, which provided that in case of urgency any regulation could be revoked “by an assembly of a hundred delegates from the countries Burgundy, Normandy, France, and the towns of Mayence, Spires and Worms”. In other rabbinical documents too, dating from the same period, only these three towns are named, and we can only conclude that the other Jewish communities in the Rhineland were at the beginning of the eleventh century still too insignificant to be mentioned.[185] By the end of the same century, the Jewish communities of Germany narrowly escaped complete extermination in the outbursts of mob-hysteria accompanying the First Crusade, AD 1096. F. Barker has conveyed the crusader’s mentality with a dramatic force rarely encountered in the columns of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:[186]
He might butcher all, till he waded ankle-deep in blood, and then at nightfall kneel, sobbing for very joy, at the altar of the Sepulchre — for was he not red from the winepress of the Lord?
The Jews of the Rhineland were caught in that winepress, which nearly squeezed them to death. Moreover, they themselves became affected by a different type of mass hysteria: a morbid yearning for martyrdom. According to the Hebrew chronicler Solomon bar Simon, considered as generally reliable,[187] the Jews of Mayence, faced with the alternative between baptism or death at the hands of the mob, gave the example to other communities by deciding on collective suicide:[188]
Imitating on a grand scale Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac, fathers slaughtered their children and husbands their wives. These acts of unspeakable horror and heroism were performed in the ritualistic form of slaughter with sacrificial knives sharpened in accordance with Jewish law. At times the leading sages of the community, supervising the mass immolation, were the last to part with life at their own hands.… In the mass hysteria, sanctified by the glow of religious martyrdom and compensated by the confident expectation of heavenly rewards, nothing seemed to matter but to end life before one fell into the hands of the implacable foes and had to face the inescapable alternative of death at the enemy’s hand or conversion to Christianity.
Turning from gore to sober statistics, we get a rough idea of the size of the Jewish communities in Germany. The Hebrew sources agree on 800 victims (by slaughter or suicide) in Worms, and vary between 900 and 1300 for Mayence. Of course there must have been many who preferred baptism to death, and the sources do not indicate the number of survivors; nor can we be sure that they do not exaggerate the number of martyrs. At any rate, Baron concludes from his calculations that “the total Jewish population of either community had hardly exceeded the figures here given for the dead alone”.[189] So the survivors in Worms or in Mayence could only have numbered a few hundred in each case. Yet these two towns (with Spires as a third) were the only ones important enough to be included in Rabbi Gershom’s edict earlier on.
Thus we are made to realize that the Jewish community in the German Rhineland was numerically small, even before the First Crusade, and had shrunk to even smaller proportions after having gone through the winepress of the Lord. Yet cast of the Rhine, in central and northern Germany, there were as yet no Jewish communities at all, and none for a long time to come. The traditional conception of Jewish historians that the Crusade of 1096 swept like a broom a mass-migration of German Jews into Poland is simply a legend — or rather an ad hoc hypothesis invented because, as they knew little of Khazar history, they could see no other way to account for the emergence, out of nowhere, of this unprecedented concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe. Yet there is not a single mention in the contemporary sources of any migration, large or small, from the Rhineland further east into Germany, not to mention distant Poland.
Thus Simon Dubnov, one of the historians of the older school: “The first crusade which set the Christian masses in motion towards the Asiatic east, drove at the same time the Jewish masses towards the cast of Europe.”[190] However, a few lines further down he has to admit: “About the circumstances of this emigration movement which was so important to Jewish history we possess no close information.”[191] Yet we do possess abundant information of what these battered Jewish communities did during the first and subsequent crusades. Some died by their own hands; others tried to offer resistance and were lynched; while those who survived owed their good fortune to the fact that they were given shelter for the duration of the emergency in the fortified castle of the Bishop or Burgrave who, at least theoretically, was responsible for their legal protection. Frequently this measure was not enough to prevent a massacre; but the survivors, once the crusading hordes had passed, invariably returned to their ransacked homes and synagogues to make a fresh start.
We find this pattern repeatedly in chronicles: in Treves, in Metz, and many other places. By the time of the second and later crusades, it had become almost a routine: “At the beginning of the agitation for a new crusade many Jews of Mayence, Worms, Spires, Strasbourg, Würzburg and other cities, escaped to neighbouring castles, leaving their books and precious possessions in the custody of friendly burghers.”[192] One of the main sources is the Book of Remembrance by Ephraim bar Jacob, who himself, at the age of thirteen, had been among the refugees from Cologne in the castle of Wolkenburg.[193]Solomon bar Simon reports that during the second crusade the survivors of the Mayence Jews found protection in Spires, then returned to their native city and built a new synagogue.[194] This is the leitmotif of the Chronicles; to repeat it once more, there is not a word about Jewish communities emigrating toward eastern Germany, which, in the words of Mieses,[195] was still Judenrein — clean of Jews — and was to remain so for several centuries.
4
The thirteenth century was a period of partial recovery. We hear for the first time of Jews in regions adjacent to the Rhineland: the Palatinate (AD 1225); Freiburg (1230), Ulm (1243), Heidelberg (1255), etc.[196] But it was to be only a short respite, for the fourteenth century brought new disasters to Franco-German Jewry.
The first catastrophe was the expulsion of all Jews from the royal domains of Philip le Bel. France had been suffering from an economic crisis, to the usual accompaniments of debased currency and social unrest. Philip tried to remedy it by the habitual method of soaking the Jews. He exacted from them payments of 100000 livres in 1292, 215000 livresin 1295, 1299, 1302 and 1305, then decided on a radical remedy for his ailing finances. On June 21, 1306, he signed a secret order to arrest all Jews in his kingdom on a given day, confiscate their property and expel them from the country. The arrests were carried out on July 22, and the expulsion a few weeks later. The refugees emigrated into regions of France outside the King’s domain: Provence, Burgundy, Aquitaine, and a few other frudal fiefs. But, according to Mieses, “there are no historical records whatsoever to indicate that German Jewry increased its numbers through the sufferings of the Jewish community in France in the decisive period of its destruction”.[197] And no historian has ever suggested that French Jews trekked across Germany into Poland, either on that occasion or at any other time.
Under Philip’s successors there were some partial recalls of Jews (in 1315 and 1350), but they could not undo the damage, nor prevent renewed outbursts of mob persecution. By the end of the fourteenth century, France, like England, was virtually Judenrein.
5
The second catastrophe of that disastrous century was the Black Death, which, between 1348 and 1350, killed off a third of Europe’s population, and in some regions even two-thirds. It came from east Asia via Turkestan, and the way it was let loose on Europe, and what it did there, is symbolic of the lunacy of man. A Tartar leader named Janibeg in 1347 was besieging the town of Kaffa (now Feodosia) in the Crimea, then a Genoese trading port. The plague was rampant in Janibeg’s army, so he catapulted the corpses of infected victims into the town, whose population became infected in its turn. Genoese ships carried the rats and their deadly fleas westward into the Mediterranean ports, from where they spread inland.
The bacilli of Pasteurella pestis were not supposed to make a distinction between the various denominations, yet Jews were nevertheless singled out for special treatment. After being accused earlier on of the ritual slaughter of Christian children, they were now accused of poisoning the wells to spread the Black Death. The legend travelled faster even than the rats, and the consequence was the burning of Jews en masse all over Europe. Once more suicide by mutual self-immolation became a common expedient, to avoid being burned alive.
The decimated population of Western Europe did not reach again its pre-plague level until the sixteenth century. As for its Jews, who had been exposed to the twofold attack of rats and men. only a fraction survived. As Kutschera wrote:
The populace avenged on them the cruel blows of destiny and set upon those whom the plague had spared with fire and sword. When the epidemics receded, Germany, according to contemporary historians, was left virtually without Jews. We are led to conclude that in Germany itself the Jews could not prosper, and were never able to establish large and populous communities. How, then, in these circumstances, should they have been able to lay the foundations in Poland of a mass population so dense that at present [AD 1909] it outnumbers the Jews of Germany at the rate of ten to one? It is indeed difficult to understand how the idea ever gained ground that the eastern Jews represent immigrants from the West, and especially from Germany.[198]
Yet, next to the first crusade, the Black Death is most frequently invoked by historians as the deus ex machina which created Eastern Jewry. And, just as in the case of the crusades, there is not a shred of evidence for this imaginary exodus. On the contrary, the indications are that the Jews’ only hope of survival on this, as on that earlier occasions, was to stick together and seek shelter in some fortified place or less hostile surroundings in the vicinity. There is only one case of an emigration in the Black Death period mentioned by Mieses: Jews from Spires took refuge from persecution in Heidelberg — about ten miles away.
After the virtual extermination of the old Jewish communities in France and Germany in the wake of the Black Death, Western Europe remained Judenrein for a couple of centuries, with only a few enclaves vegetating on — except in Spain. It was an entirely different stock of Jews who founded the modern communities of England, France and Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — the Sephardim (Spanish Jews), forced to flee from Spain where they had been resident for more than a millennium. Their history — and the history of modern European Jewry — lies outside the scope of this book.
We may safely conclude that the traditional idea of a mass-exodus of Western Jewry from the Rhineland to Poland all across Germany — a hostile, Jewless glacis — is historically untenable. It is incompatible with the small size of the Rhenish Communities, their reluctance to branch out from the Rhine valley towards the east, their stereotyped behaviour in adversity, and the absence of references to migratory movements in contemporary chronicles. Further evidence for this view is provided by linguistics, to be discussed in Chapter VII.
VII
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”.[199]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.[200]
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.[201]
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).[202]
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.”[203]
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.[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] 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.”[204]
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 (Beiträge 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.…[205] Insofar as the origins of Yiddish are concerned, Western Germany can be written off.…[206] 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[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§]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.[207]
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”.[208]
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 Jüdische 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.”[209]
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,[210] 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.[*********************] 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.[211]
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.[212]
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.”[213]
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.[†††††††††††††††††††††] 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.”[214]
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.”[215]
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”[216] — 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.”[217]
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.
VIII
RACE AND MYTH
1
THE Jews of our times fall into two main divisions: Sephardim and Ashkenazim.
The Sephardim are descendants of the Jews who since antiquity had lived in Spain (in Hebrew Sepharad) until they were expelled at the end of the fifteenth century and settled in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. They spoke a Spanish-Hebrew dialect, Ladino (see VII, 3), and preserved their own traditions and religious rites. In the 1960s, the number of Sephardim was estimated at 500000.
The Ashkenazim, at the same period, numbered about eleven million. Thus, in common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew. But the term is misleading, for the Hebrew word Ashkenaz was, in mediaeval rabbinical literature, applied to Germany — thus contributing to the legend that modern Jewry originated on the Rhine. There is, however, no other term to refer to the non-Sephardic majority of contemporary Jewry.
For the sake of piquantry it should be mentioned that the Ashkenaz of the Bible refers to a people living somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Ararat and Armenia. The name occurs in Genesis 10, 3 and I Chronciles 1, 6, as one of the sons of Gomer, who was a son of Japheth. Ashkenaz is also a brother of Togarmah (and a nephew of Magog) whom the Khazars, according to King Joseph, claimed as their ancestor (see above II, 5) But worse was to come. For Ashkenaz is also named in Jeremiah 51, 27, where the prophet calls his people and their allies to rise and destroy Babylon: “Call thee upon the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz.” This passage was interpreted by the famous Saadiah Gaon, spiritual leader of Oriental Jewry in the tenth century, as a prophecy relating to his own times: Babylon symbolized the Caliphate of Baghdad, and the Ashkenaz who were to attack it were either the Khazars themselves or some allied tribe. Accordingly, says Poliak,[218]some learned Khazar Jews, who heard of the Gaon’s ingenious arguments, called themselves Ashkenazim when they emigrated to Poland. It does not prove anything, but it adds to the confusion.
2
Summing up a very old and bitter controversy in a laconic paragraph, Raphael Patai wrote:[219]
The findings of physical anthropology show that, contrary to popular view, there is no Jewish race. Anthropometric measurements of Jewish groups in many parts of the world indicate that they differ greatly from one another with respect to all the important physical characteristics — stature, weight, skin colour, cephalic index, facial index, blood groups, etc.
This indeed is the accepted view today among anthropologists and historians. Moreover, there is general agreement that comparisons of cranial indices, blood types, etc., show a greater similarity between Jews and their Gentile host-nation than between Jews living in different countries.
Yet, paradoxically, the popular belief that Jews, or at least certain types of Jews, can be instantly recognized as such, must not be dismissed out of hand — for the simple reason that it has a factual basis in every-day existence. The anthropologists’ evidence seems to be at loggerheads with common observation.
However, before attempting to tackle the apparent contradiction, it will be useful to look at a few samples of the data on which the anthropologists’ denial of a Jewish race is based. To start with, here is a quotation from the excellent series of booklets on “The Race Question in Modern Science” published by UNESCO. The author, Professor Juan Comas, draws the following conclusion from the statistical material (his italics):
Thus despite the view usually held, the Jewish people is racially heterogeneous; its constant migrations and its relations — voluntary or otherwise — with the widest variety of nations and peoples have brought about such a degree of crossbreeding that the so-called people of Israel can produce examples of traits typical of every people. For proof it will suffice to compare the rubicund, sturdy, heavily-built Rotterdam Jew with his co-religionist, say, in Salonika with gleaming eyes in a sickly face and skinny, high-strung physique. Hence, so far as our knowledge goes, we can assert that Jews as a whole display as great a degree of morphological disparity among themselves as could be found between members of two or more different races.[220]
Next, we must glance at some of the physical characteristics which anthropologists use as criteria, and on which Comas’s conclusions are based.
One of the simplest — and as it turned out, most naive — of these criteria was bodily stature. In The Races of Europe, a monumental work published in 1900, William Ripley wrote: “The European Jews are all undersized; not only this, they are more often absolutely stunted.”[221] He was up to a point right at the time, and he produced ample statistics to prove it. But he was shrewd enough to surmise that this deficiency in height might somehow be influenced by environmental factors.[222] Eleven years later, Maurice Fishberg published The Jews — A Study of Race and Environment, the first anthropological survey of its kind in English. It revealed the surprising fact that the children of East European Jewish immigrants to the USA grew to an average height of 167.9 cm. compared to the 164.2 cm. averaged by their parents — a gain of nearly an inch and a half in a single generation.[223] Since then it has become a commonplace that the descendants of immigrant populations — whether Jews, Italians or Japanese — are considerably taller than their parents, no doubt owing to their improved diet and other environmental factors.
Fishberg then collected statistics comparing the average height of Jews and Gentiles in Poland, Austria, Rumania, Hungary, and so on. The result again was a surprise. In general it was found that the stature of the Jews varied with the stature of the non Jewish population among which they lived. They were relatively tall where the indigenous population is tall, and vice versa. Moreover, within the same nation, and even within the same town (Warsaw) the bodily height of Jews and Gentiles was found to vary according to the degree of prosperity of the district.[224] All this does not mean that heredity has no influence on height; but it is overlayed and modified by environmental influences, and is unfit as a criterion of race.
We may now turn to cranial measurements — which were once the great fashion among anthropologists, but are now considered rather outdated. Here we meet again with the same type of conclusion derived from the data: “A comparison of the cephalic indices of Jewish and non-Jewish populations in various countries reveals a marked similarity between the Jewish and non-Jewish indices in many countries, while showing very wide variations when the cephalic indices of Jewish populations inhabiting different countries are compared. Thus one is driven to the conclusion that this feature, its plasticity not withstanding, points to a racial diversity of the Jews.”[225]
This diversity, it should be noted, is most pronounced between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. By and large, the Sephardim are dolichocephalic (long-headed), the Ashkenazim brachycephalic (broad-headed). Kutschera saw in this difference a further proof of the separate racial origin of Khazar-Ashkenazi and Semitic-Sephardi Jews. But we have just seen that the indices ofshort- or long-headedness are co-variant with the host-nations’ — which to some extent invalidates the argument.
The statistics relating to other physical features also speak against racial unity. Generally, Jews are dark-haired and darkeyed. But how general is “generally”, when, according to Comas, 49 per cent of Polish Jews were light-haired,[226] and 54 per cent of Jewish schoolchildren in Austria had blue eyes ?[227] It is true that Virchov[228] found “only” 32 per cent of blond Jewish schoolchildren in Germany, whereas the proportion of blond Gentiles was larger; but that merely shows that the co-variance is not absolute — as one would expect.
The hardest evidence to date comes from classification by blood groups. A great amount of work has recently been done in this field, but it will be sufficient to quote a single example with a particularly sensitive indicator. In Patai’s words:
With regard to blood type, Jewish groups show considerable differences among themselves and marked similarities to the Gentile environment. The Hirszfeld “biochemical index”
(A+AB)
(B+AB)
can be used most conveniently to express this. A few typical examples are: German Jews 2.74, German Gentiles 2.63; Rumanian Jews 1.54, Rumanian Gentiles 1.55; Polish Jews 1.94, Polish Gentiles 1.55; Moroccan Jews 1.63, Moroccan Gentiles 1.63; Iraqi Jews 1.22, Iraqi Gentiles 1.37; Turkistan Jews 0.97, Turkistan Gentiles 0.99.[229]
One might sum up this situation in two mathematical formulae:
Ga-Ja<Ja-Jb
and:
Ga-Gb @ Ja-Jb
That is to say that, broadly speaking, the difference in respect of anthropological criteria between Gentiles (Ga) and Jews (Ja) in a given country (a) is smaller than the difference between Jews in different countries (a and b); and the difference between Gentiles in countries a and b is similar to the difference between Jews in a and b.
It seems appropriate to wind up this section with another quotation from Harry Shapiro’s contribution to the UNESCO series — “The Jewish People: A Biological History”:[230]
The wide range of variation between Jewish populations in their physical characteristics and the diversity of the gene frequencies of their blood groups render any unified racial classification for them a contradiction in terms. For although modern racial theory admits some degree of polymorphism or variation within a racial group, it does not permit distinctly different groups, measured by its own criteria of race, to be identified as one. To do so would make the biological purposes of racial classification futile and the whole procedure arbitrary and meaningless. Unfortunately, this subject is rarely wholly divorced from non-biological considerations, and despite the evidence efforts continue to be made to somehow segregate the Jews as a distinct racial entity.
3
How did this twin-phenomenon — diversity in somatic features and conformity to the host-nation — come about? The geneticists’ obvious answer is: through miscegenation combined with selective pressures.
“This”, writes Fishberg, “is indeed the crucial point in the anthropology of the Jews: are they of pure race, modified more or less by environmental influences, or are they a religious sect composed of racial elements acquired by proselytism and intermarriage during their migration in various parts of the world?” And he leaves his readers in no doubt about the answer:[231]
Beginning with Biblical evidence and traditions, it appears that even in the beginning of the formation of the tribe of Israel they were already composed of various racial elements.… We find in Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine at that time many races — the Amorites, who were blondes, dolichocephalic, and tall; the Hittites, a dark-complexioned race, probably of Mongoloid type; the Cushites, a negroid race; and many others. With all these the ancient Hebrews intermarried, as can be seen in many passages in the Bible.
The prophets may thunder against “marrying daughters of a strange god”, yet the promiscuous Israelites were not deterred, and their leaders were foremost in giving a bad example. Even the first patriarch, Abraham, cohabited with Hagar, an Egyptian; Joseph married Asenath, who was not only Egyptian but the daughter of a priest; Moses married a Midianite, Zipporah; Samson, the Jewish hero, was a Philistine; King David’s mother was a Moabite, and he married a princess of Geshur; as for King Solomon (whose mother was a Hittite), “lie loved many strange women, including the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Animonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites.…”[232] And so the chronique scandaleuse goes on. The Bible also makes it clear that the royal example was imitated by many, high and low. Besides, the biblical prohibition of marrying Gentiles exempted female captives in times of war — and there was no shortage of them. The Babylonian exile did not improve racial purity; even members of priestly families married Gentile women. In short, at the beginning of the Diaspora, the Israelites were already a thoroughly hybridized race. So, of course, were most historic nations, and the point would not need stressing if it were not for the persistent myth of the Biblical Tribe having preserved its racial purity throughout the ages.
Another important source of interbreeding were the vast numbers of people of the most varied races converted to Judaism. Witness to the proselytizing zeal of the Jews of earlier times are the black-skinned Falasha of Abyssinia, the Chinese Jews of Kai-Feng who look like Chinese, the Yemenite Jews with their dark olive complexion, the Jewish Berber tribes of the Sahara who look like Tuaregs, and so on, down to our prime example, the Khazars.
Nearer home, Jewish proselytizing reached its peak in the Roman Empire between the fall of the Jewish state and the rise of Christianity. Many patrician families in Italy were converted, but also the royal family which ruled the province of Adiabene. Philo speaks of numerous converts in Greece; Flavius Josephus relates that a large proportion of the population of Antioch was Judaized; St Paul met with proselytes on his travels more or less everywhere from Athens to Asia Minor. “The fervour of proselytism”, the Jewish historian Th. Reinach wrote,[233] “was indeed one of the most distinctive traits of Judaism during the Greco-Roman epoch — a trait which it never possessed in the same degree either before or since.… It cannot be doubted that Judaism in this way made numerous converts during two or three centuries.… The enormous growth of the Jewish nation in Egypt, Cyprus, and Cyrene cannot be accounted for without supposing an abundant infusion of Gentile blood. Proselytism swayed alike the upper and the lower classes of society.”
The rise of Christianity slowed down the rate of miscegenation, and the ghetto put a temporary end to it; but before the ghetto-rules were strictly enforced in the sixteenth century, the process still went on. This is shown by the ever-repeated ecclesiastic interdictions of mixed marriages — e.g., by the Council of Toledo, 589; the Council of Rome, 743; the first and second Lateran Councils 1123 and 1139; or the edict of King Ladislav II of Hungary in 1092. That all these prohibitions were only partly effective is shown, for instance, by the report of the Hungarian Archbishop Robert von Grain to the Pope AD 1229, complaining that many Christian women are married to Jews, and that within a few years “many thousands of Christians” were lost in this way to the Church.[234]
The only effective bar were the ghetto walls. When these crumbled, intermarriages started again. Their rate accelerated to such an extent that in Germany, between 1921 and 1925, out of every 100 marriages involving Jews, 42 were mixed.[235]
As for the Sephardi, or “true” Jews, their sojourn in Spain for more than a millennium left its indelible mark both on themselves and on their hosts. As Arnold Toynbee wrote:
There is every reason to believe that in Spain and Portugal today there is a strong tincture of the blood of these Jewish converts in Iberian veins, especially in the upper and middle classes. Yet the most acute psychoanalyst would find it difficult, if samples of living upper- and middle-class Spanish and Portuguese were presented to him, to detect who had Jewish ancestors.[236]
The process worked both ways. After the massacres of 1391 and 1411 which swept the Peninsula, over 100000 Jews at a moderate estimate — accepted baptism. But a considerable proportion of them continued to practice Judaism in secret. These crypto-Jews, the Marranos, prospered, rose to high positions at court and in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and intermarried with the aristocracy. After the expulsion of all unrepentant Jews from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497) the Marranos were regarded with increasing suspicion; many were burned by the Inquisition, the majority emigrated in the sixteenth century to the countries around the Mediterranean, to Holland, England and France. Once in safety, they openly reverted to their faith and, together with the 1492-7 expellees, founded the new Sephardic communities in these countries.
Thus Toynbee’s remark about the hybrid ancestry of the upper strata of society in Spain also applies, mutatis mutandis, to the Sephardic communities of Western Europe. Spinoza’s parents were Portuguese Marranos, who emigrated to Amsterdam. The old Jewish families of England (who arrived here long before the nineteenth-twentieth century influx from the east), the Montefiores, Lousadas, Montagues, Avigdors, Sutros, Sassoons, etc., all came out of the Iberian mixing bowl, and can claim no purer racial origin than the Ashkenazis — or the Jews named Davis, Harris, Phillips or Hart.
One distressingly recurrent type of event was miscegenation by rape. That too has a long history starting in Palestine. We are told, for example, that a certain Juda ben Ezekial opposed his son marrying a woman who was not of “the seed of Abraham”, whereupon his friend Ulla remarked: “How do we know for certain that we ourselves are not descended from the heathens who violated the maidens of Zion at the siege of Jerusalem?”[237] Rape and loot (the amount of the latter often fixed in advance) was considered a natural right of a conquering army.
There is an ancient tradition, recorded by Graetz, which attributes the origin of the earliest Jewish settlements in Germany to an episode reminiscent of the rape of the Sabine women. According to this tradition, a German unit, the Vangioni who fought with the Roman legions in Palestine, “had chosen from the vast horde of Jewish prisoners the most beautiful women, had brought them back to their stations on the shores of the Rhine and the Main, and had compelled them to minister to the satisfaction of their desires. The children thus begotten of Jewish and German parents were brought up by their mothers in the Jewish faith, their fathers not troubling themselves about them. It is these children who are said to have been the founders of the first Jewish communities between Worms and Mayence.”[238]
In Eastern Europe rape was even more common. To quote Fishberg again:
Such violent infusion of Gentile blood into the veins of the flock of Israel has been especially frequent in Slavonic countries. One of the favourite methods of the Cossacks to wring out money from the Jews was to take a large number of prisoners, knowing well that the Jews would ransom them. That the women thus ransomed were violated by these semi-savage tribes goes without saying. In fact, the “Council of the Four Lands”, at its session in the winter of 1650, had to take cognizance of the poor women and children born to them from Cossack husbands during captivity, and thus restore order in the family and social life of the Jews. Similar outrages were … again perpetrated on Jewish women in Russia during the massacres in 1903-5.[239]
4
And yet — to return to the paradox — many people, who are neither racialists nor anti-Semites, are convinced that they are able to recognize a Jew at a single glance. How is this possible if Jews are such a hybrid lot as history and anthropology show them to be?
Part of the answer, I think, was given by Ernest Renan in 1883: “Il n’y a pas un type juif il y a des types juifs.”[240] The type of Jew who can be recognized “at a glance” is one particular type among many others. But only a small fraction of fourteen million Jews belong to that particular type, and those who appear to belong to it are by no means always Jews. One of the most prominent features — literally and metaphorically — which is said to characterize that particular type is the nose, variously described as Semitic, aquiline, hooked, or resembling the beak of an eagle (bec d’aigle). But, surprisingly, among 2836 Jews in New York City, Fishberg found that only 14 per cent — i.e., one person in seven — had a hooked nose; while 57 per cent were straight-nosed, 20 per cent were snub-nosed and 6.5 per cent had “flat and broad noses”.[241]
Other anthropologists came up with smiilar results regarding Semitic noses in Poland and the Ukraine.[242] Moreover, among true Semites, such as pure-bred Bedoums, this form of nose does not seem to occur at all.[243] On the other hand, it is “very frequently met among the various Caucasian tribes, and also in Asia Minor. Among the indigenous races in this region, such as the Armenians, Georgians, Ossets, Lesghians, Aissors, and also the Syrians, aquiline noses are the rule. Among the people living in Mediterranean countries of Europe, as the Greeks, Italians, French, Spanish and Portuguese, the aquiline nose is also more frequently encountered than among the Jews of Eastern Europe. The North American Indians also very often have ‘Jewish’ noses.”[244]
Thus the nose alone is not a very safe guide to identification. Only a minority — a particular type of Jew — seems to have a convex nose, and lots of other ethnic groups also have it. Yet intuition tells one that the anthropologists’ statistics must be somehow wrong. An ingenious way out of this conundrum was suggested by Beddoc and Jacobs, who maintained that the “Jewish nose” need not be really convex in profile, and may yet give the impression of being “hooked”, due to a peculiar “tucking up of the wings”, an infolding of the nostrils.
To prove his point that it is this “nostrility” which provides the illusion of beakedness, Jacobs invites his readers “to write a figure 6 with a long tail (Fig 1); now remove the turn of the twist, as in Fig 2, and much of the Jewishness disappears; and it vanishes entirely when we draw the lower continuation horizontally, as in Fig 3”. Ripley, quoting Jacobs, comments: “Behold the transformation! The Jew has turned Roman beyond a doubt. What have we proved then? That there is in reality such a phenomenon as a Jewish nose, even though it be differently constituted from our first assumption [the criterion of convexity].[245]
But is there? Figure 1 could still represent an Italian, or Greek, or Spanish or Armenian, or Red Indian nose, “nostrility” included. That it is a Jewish, and not a Red Indian, Armenian, etc., nose we deduce — at a glance — from the context of other features, including expression, comportment, dress. It is not a process of logical analysis, but rather in the nature of the psychologist’s Gestalt perception, the grasping of a configuration as a whole.
Similar considerations apply to each of the facial features considered to be typically Jewish — “sensuous lips”; dark, wavy or crinkly hair; melancholy, or cunning, or bulging or slit Mongol eyes, and so forth. Taken separately, they are common property of the most varied nations; put together, like an identikit, they combine into a prototype of — to say it once more — one particular type of Jew, of Eastern European origin, the type with which we are familiar. But our identi-kit would not fit the various other types of Jews, such as the Sephardim (including their very anglicized descendants in Britain); nor the Slavonic type of Central Europe, nor the blond Teutonic, the slit-eyed Mongoloid, or the crinkly-haired Negroid types of Jews.
Nor can we be sure to recognize with certainty even this limited prototype. The collection of portraits published by Fishberg, or Ripley, can be used for a “believe it or not” game, if you cover the caption indicating whether the portrayed person is Jew or Gentile. The same game can be played on a café terrace anywhere near the shores of the Mediterranean. It will, of course, remain inconclusive because you cannot walk up to the experimental subject and inquire after his or her religion; but if you play the game in company, the amount of disagreement between the observers’ verdicts will be a surprise. Suggestibility also plays a part. “Did you know that Harold is Jewish?” “No, but now that you mention it of course I can see it.,” “Did you know that (this or that) royal family has Jewish blood?” “No, but now that you mention it.…” Hutchinson’s Races of Mankind has a picture of three Geishas with the caption: Japanese with Jewish physiognomy. Once you have read the caption you feel: “But of course. How could I have missed it?” And when you have played this game for some time, you begin to see Jewish features — or Khazar features — everywhere.
5
A further source of confusion is the extreme difficulty of separating hereditary characteristics from those shaped by the social background and other factors in the environment. We have come across this problem when discussing bodily stature as an alleged racial criterion; but the influence of social factors on physiognomy, conduct, speech, gesture and costume works in subtler and more complex ways in assembling the Jewish identikit. Clothing (plus coiffure) is the most obvious of these factors. Fit out anybody with long corkscrew sidelocks, skull-cap, broad-rimmed black hat and long black kaftan, and you recognize at a glance the orthodox Jewish type; whatever his nostrility, he will look Jewish. There are other less drastic indicators among the sartorial preferences of certain types of Jews of certain social classes, combined with accents and mannerisms of speech, gesture and social behaviour.
It may be a welcome diversion to get away for a moment from the Jews, and listen to a French writer describing how his compatriots can tell an Englishman “at a glance”. Michel Leiris, apart from being an eminent writer, is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Staff Member of the Musée de l’Homme:
It is … absurd to talk about an English “race” or even to regard the English as being of the “Nordic” race. In point of fact, history teaches that, like all the people of Europe, the English people has become what it is through successive contributions of different peoples. England is a Celtic country, partially colonized by successive waves of Saxons, Danes and Normans from France, with some addition of Roman stock from the age of Julius Caesar onwards. Moreover, while an Englishman can be identified by his way of dressing, or even by his behaviour, it is impossible to tell that he is an Englishman merely from his physical appearance. Among the English, as among other Europeans, there are both fair people and dark, tall men and short, dolichocephalics and brachycephalics. It may be claimed that an Englishman can be readily identified from certain external characteristics which give him a “look” of his own: restraint in gesture (unlike the conventional gesticulating southerner), gait and facial expression, all expressing what is usually included under the rather vague term of “phlegm”. However, anyone who made this claim would be likely to be found at fault in many instances, for by no means all the English have these characteristics, and even if they are the characteristics of the “typical Englishman”, the fact would still remain that these outward characteristics are not “physique” in the true sense: bodily attitudes and motions and expressions of the face all come under the heading of behaviour; and being habits determined by the subject’s social background, are cultural, not “natural”. Moreover, though loosely describable as “traits”, they typify not a whole nation, but a particular social group within it and thus cannot be included among the distinctive marks of race.[246]
However, when Leiris says that facial expressions are not “physique” but “come under the heading of behaviour” he seems to overlook the fact that behaviour can modify the features of individuals and thus leave its stamp on their “physique”. One only has to think of certain typical traits in the physiognomies of ageing ham-actors, of priests living in celibacy, of career-soldiers, convicts serving long sentences, sailors, farmers, and so on. Their way of life affects not only their facial expression but also their physical features, thus giving the mistaken impression that these traits are of hereditary or “racial” origin.[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡]
If I may add a personal observation I frequently met on visits to the United States Central European friends of my youth who emigrated before World War Two and whom I had not seen for some thirty of forty years. Each time I was astonished to find that they not only dressed, spoke, ate and behaved like Americans, but had acquired an American physiognomy. I am unable to describe the change, except that it has something to do with a broadening of the jaw and a certain look in and around the eyes. (An anthropologist friend attributed the former to the increased use of the jaw musculature in American enunciation, and the look as a reflection of the rat-race and the resulting propensity for duodenal ulcers.) I was pleased to discover that this was not due to my imagination playing tricks — for Fishberg, writing in 1910, made a similar observation: “…. The cast of countenance changes very easily under a change of social environment. I have noted such a rapid change among immigrants to the United States.… The new physiognomy is best noted when some of these immigrants return to their native homes.… This fact offers excellent proof that the social elements in which a man moves exercise a profound influence on his physical features.”[247]
The proverbial melting-pot seems to be producing an American physiognomy — a more or less standardized phenotype emerging from a wide variety of genotypes. Even the pure-bred Chinese and Japanese of the States seem to be affected by the process to some extent. At any rate, one can often recognize an American face “at a glance”, regardless of dress and speech, and regardless of its owner’s Italian, Polish or German ancestry.
6
In any discussion of the biological and social inheritance of the Jews, the shadow of the ghetto must loom large. The Jews of Europe and America, and even of North Africa, are children of the ghetto, at no more than four or five generations removed. Whatever their geographical origin, within the ghetto-walls they lived everywhere in more or less the same milieu, subjected for several centuries to the same formative, or deformative, influences.
From the geneticist’s point of view, we can distinguish three such major influences: inbreeding, genetic drift, selection.
Inbreeding may have played, at a different period, as large a part in Jewish racial history as its opposite, hybridization. From biblical times to the era of enforced segregation, and again in modern times, miscegenation was the dominant trend. In between, there stretched three to five centuries (according to country) of isolation and inbreeding — both in the strict sense of consanguinous marriages and in the broader sense of endogamy within a small, segregated group. Inbreeding carries the danger of bringing deleterious recessive genes together and allowing them to take effect. The high incidence of congenital idiocy among Jews has been known for a long time,[248] and was in all probability a result of protracted inbreeding — and not, as some anthropologists asserted, a Semitic racial peculiarity. Mental and physical malformations are conspicuously frequent in remote Alpine villages, where most of the tombstones in the churchyard show one of half a dozen family names. There are no Cohens or Levys amongst them.
But inbreeding may also produce champion race-horses through favourable gene combinations. Perhaps it contributed to the production of both cretins and geniuses among the children of the ghetto. It reminds one of Chaim Weizmann’s dictum: “The Jews are like other people, only more so.” But genetics has little information to offer in this field.
Another process which may have profoundly affected the people in the ghetto is “genetic drift” (also known as the Sewall Wright effect). It refers to the loss of hereditary traits in small, isolated populations, either because none of its founding members happened to possess the corresponding genes, or because only a few possessed them but failed to transmit them to the next generation. Genetic drift can thus produce considerable transformations in the hereditary characteristics of small communities.
The selective pressures active within the ghetto walls must have been of an intensity rarely encountered in history. For one thing, since the Jews were debarred from agriculture, they became completely urbanized, concentrated in towns or shtetls, which became increasingly overcrowded. As a result, to quote Shapiro, “the devastating epidemics that swept mediaeval cities and towns, would in the long run have been more selective on Jewish populations than on any others, leaving them with progressively greater immunity as time went on … and their modern descendants would, therefore, represent the survivors of a rigorous and specific selective process.”[249] This, he thinks, may account for the rarity of tuberculosis among Jews, and their relative longevity (amply illustrated by statistics collected by Fishberg).
The hostile pressures surrounding the ghetto ranged from cold contempt to sporadic acts of violence to organized pogroms. Several centuries of living in such conditions must have favoured the survival of the glibbest, the most pliant and mentally resilient; in a word, the ghetto type. Whether such psychological traits are based on hereditary dispositions on which the selective process operates, or are transmitted by social inheritance through childhood conditioning, is a question still hotly disputed among anthropologists. We do not even know to what extent a high IQ is attributable to heredity, and to what extent to milieu. Take, for instance, the Jews’ once proverbial abstemiousness which some authorities on alcoholism regarded as a racial trait.[250] But one can just as well interpret it as another inheritance from the ghetto, the unconscious residue of living for centuries under precarious conditions which made it dangerous to lower one’s guard; the Jew with the yellow star on his back had to remain cautious and sober, while watching with amused contempt the antics of the “drunken goy”. Revulsion against alcohol and other forms of debauch was instilled from parent to child in successive generations — until the memories of the ghetto faded, and with progressive assimilation, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the alcohol intake progressively increased. Thus abstemiousness, like so many other Jewish characteristics, turned out to be, after all, a matter of social and not biological, inheritance.
Lastly, there is yet another evolutionary process — sexual selection — which may have contributed in producing the traits which we have come to regard as typically Jewish. Ripley seems to have been the first to suggest this (his italics): “The Jew is radically mixed in the line of racial descent; he is, on the other hand, the legitimate heir to all Judaism as a matter of choice.… It affected every detail of their life. Why should it not also react upon their ideal of physical beauty? and why not influence their sexual preferences, as well as determine their choice in marriage? Its results thus became accentuated through heredity.”[251]
Ripley did not inquire into the ghetto’s “ideal of physical beauty”. But Fishberg did, and came up with an appealing suggestion: “To the strictly orthodox Jew in Eastern Europe, a strong muscular person is an Esau. The ideal of a son of Jacob was during the centuries before the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘a silken young man’.”[252] This was a delicate, anaemic, willowy youth with a wistful expression, all brains and no brawn.
But, he continues, “in Western Europe and America there is at present a strong tendency in the opposite direction. Many Jews are proud of the fact that they do not look like Jews. Considering this, it must be acknowledged that there is hardly a glowing future for the so-called ‘Jewish’ cast of countenance.”[253]
Least of all, we may add, among young Israelis.
Summary
In Part One of this book I have attempted to trace the history of the Khazar Empire based on the scant existing sources.
In Part Two, Chapters V-VII, I have compiled the historical evidence which indicates that the bulk of Eastern Jewry — and hence of world Jewry — is of Khazar-Turkish, rather than Semitic, origin.
In this last chapter I have tried to show that the evidence from anthropology concurs with history in refuting the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe.
From the anthropologist’s point of view, two groups of facts militate against this belief: the wide diversity of Jews with regard to physical characteristics, and their similarity to the Gentile population amidst whom they live. Both are reflected in the statistics about bodily height, cranial index, blood-groups, hair and eye colour, etc. Whichever of these anthropological criteria is taken as an indicator, it shows a greater similarity between Jews and their Gentile host-nation than between Jews living in different countries. To sum up this situaton, I have suggested the formulae: Ga-Ja<Ja-Jb; and Ga-Gb @ Ja-Jb.
The obvious biological explanation for both phenomena is miscegenation, which took different forms in different historical situations: intermarriage, large-scale proselytizing, rape as a constant (legalized or tolerated) accompaniment of war and pogrom.
The belief that, notwithstanding the statistical data, there exists a recognizable Jewish type is based largely, but not entirely on various misconceptions. It ignores the fact that features regarded as typically Jewish by comparison with nordic people cease to appear so in a Mediterranean environment; it is unaware of the impact of the social environment on physique and countenance; and it confuses biological with social inheritance.
Nevertheless, there exist certain hereditary traits which characterize a certain type of contemporary Jew. In the light of modern population-genetics, these can to a large degree be attributed to processes which operated for several centuries in the segregated conditions of the ghetto: inbreeding, genetic drift, selective pressure. The last-mentioned operated in several ways: natural selection (e.g., through epidemics), sexual selection and, more doubtfully, the selection of character-features favouring survival within the ghetto walls.
In addition to these, social heredity, through childhood conditioning, acted as a powerful formative and deformative factor.
Each of these processes contributed to the emergence of the ghetto type. In the post-ghetto period it became progressively diluted. As for the genetic composition and physical appearance of the pre-ghetto stock, we know next to nothing. In the view presented in this book, this “original stock” was predominantly Turkish mixed to an unknown extent with ancient Palestinian and other elements. Nor is it possible to tell which of the so-called typical features, such as the “Jewish nose”, is a product of sexual selection in the ghetto, or the manifestation of a particularly “persistent” tribal gene. Since “nostrility” is frequent among Caucasian peoples, and infrequent among the Semitic Bedouins, we have one more pointer to the dominant role played by the “thirteenth tribe” in the biological history of the Jews.
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.[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] In his preface, Sir William, an eminent orientalist, uttered this touching cri de cœur:
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.[**********************]
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.[254] 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 him[255] — 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.”[256] 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.”[257] (Constantine himself was touchingly convinced that De Caeromoniis was a “technical masterpiece” besides being “a monument of exact scholarship and a labour of love”[258].) Similar criticisms had been voiced earlier by Bury,[259] 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.”[260]
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 Vernadsky[261] 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,[262] “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 Grégoire published an article in 1937 questioning the authenticity of the “Khazar Correspondence”,[263] Kahle took him to task: “I indicated to Grégoire 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.”[264] 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.[265] 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:[266]
Several very prominent Orientals belonged to the staff of the [Bonn] Seminar. Among them I may mention Dr Zeki Validi, a special protégé 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 für 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 attaché 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 jüdischen 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.”[267] 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,[268]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.[††††††††††††††††††††††] 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.[269]
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[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] 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.[270]
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.[271]
2
The first printed version of the Khazar Correspondence is contained in a Hebrew pamphlet, Kol Mebasser, “Voice of the Messenger of Good News”.[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] 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,[272] the manuscript “presents a remarkably close similarity to the printed text” and “served directly or indirectly as a source of the printed text”.[273] 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 Ribakov[274] 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.
At 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.[275] 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,[276] 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.[277] Lastly, in 1932, the Russian Academy published Paul Kokovtsov’s authoritative book, The Hebrew-Khazar Correspondence in the Tenth Century[278] 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.[279] (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.[280]
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.[281]
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,[***********************] 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:[282]
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 against 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.[283]
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 elsewhere[284] — 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 reported[285] 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.
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REFERENCES
Cahpter 1
[*] From circa 372, when the Huns first started to move westward from the steppes north of the Caspian, to the death of Attila in 453.
[†] “To this day, the Muslims, recalling the Arab terror of the Khazar raids, still call the Caspian, a sea as shifting as the nomads, and washing to their steppe-land parts, Bahr-ul-Khazar — “the Khazar Sea”.” (W. E. 0. Allen, A History of the Georgian People, London 1952).
[‡] It is amusing to note that while the British in World War I used the term “Hun” in the same pejorative sense, in my native Hungary schoolchildren were taught to look up to “our glorious Hun forefathers” with patriotic pride An exclusive rowing club in Budapest was called “Hunnia”, and Attila is still a popular first name.
[§] But not the Magyars, whose language belongs to the Finno-Ugrian language group.
[**] Huszar is probably derived via the Serbo-Croat from Greek references to Khazars.
[††] It was actually written by an anonymous compiler and named after an earlier Greek historian whose work is summarized in the compilation.
[‡‡] The “Akatzirs” are also mentioned as a nation of warriors by Jordanes, the great Goth historian, a century later, and the so-called “Geographer of Ravenna” expressly identifies them with the Khazars. This is accepted by most modern authorities. (A notable exception was Marquart, but see Dunlop’s refutation of his views, op. cit., pp. 7f.) Cassel, for instance, points out that Priscus’s pronunciation and spelling follows the Armenian and Georgian: Khazir.
[§§] Or Kaqan or Khaqan or Chagan, etc. Orientalists have strong Idiosyncrasies about spelling (see Appendix I). I shall stick to Kagan as the least offensive to Western eyes. The h in Khazar, however, is general usage.
[***] This, however, did not prevent the name “Turk” still being applied indiscriminately to any nomadic tribe of the steppes as a euphemism for Barbarian, or a synonym for “Hun”. It led to much confusion in the interpretation of ancient sources.
[†††] By “Turks”, as the sequel shows, he means the Khazars.
[‡‡‡] Now called the Kasbek pass.
[§§§] AD 669, 673-8, 717-18.
[****] The probable date for the conversion is around AD 740 — see below.
[††††] The treatment meted out to Justinian was actually regarded as an act of leniency: the general tendency of the period was to humanize the criminal law by substituting mutilation for capital punishment — amputation of the hand (for thefts) or nose (fornication, etc.) being the most frequent form. Byzantine rulers were also given to the practice of blinding dangerous rivals, while magnanimously sparing their lives.
[‡‡‡‡] The following quotations are based on Zeki Validi Togan’s German translation of the Arabic text and the English translation of extracts by Blake and Frye, both slightly paraphrased in the interest of readability.
[§§§§] i.e., as later passages show, the King of the Khazars.
[*****] Obviously the leaders of the great caravan had to avoid at all costs a conflict with the Ghuzz tribesmen.
[†††††] Rus: the Viking founders of the early Russian settlements — see below, Chapter III.
[‡‡‡‡‡] In support of his argument, the author adduces Turkish and Arabic quotations in the original, without translation — a nasty habit common among modern experts in the field.
[§§§§§] Apparently it did arrive at some time, as there is no further mention of the matter.
[******] This sounds like an exaggeration in view of the existence of a Muslim community in the capital. Zeki Validi accordingly suppressed the word “all”. We must assume that “the Khazars” here refers to the ruling nation or tribe, within the ethnic mosaic of Khazaria, and that the Muslims enjoyed legal and religious autonomy, but were not considered as “real Khazars”.
[††††††] The following pages are based on the works of lstakhri, al-Masudi, Ibn Rusta and Ibn Hawkal (see Appendix II).
[‡‡‡‡‡‡] Unfortunately, Sarkel, the most important Khazar archaeological site has been flooded by the reservoir of a newly built hydro-electric station.
[§§§§§§] It now belongs to Rumania and is called Sinnicolaul Mare.
[*******] The interested reader will find an excellent collection of photographs in Gyula László’s The Art of the Migration Period (although his historical comments have to be treated with caution).
[†††††††] Istakhri has 12000.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] According to Masudi, the “Royal Army” consisted of Muslims who “immigrated from the neighbourhood of Kwarizm. Long ago, after the appearance of Islam, there was war and pestilence in their territory, and they repaired to the Khazar king.… When the king of the Khazars is at war with the Muslims, they have a separate place in his army and do not fight the people of their own faith” [Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 206] That the army “consisted” of Muslims is of course an exaggeration, contradicted by Masudi himself a few lines later, where he speaks of the Muslim contingent having a “separate place” in the Khazar army. Also, lbn Hawkal says that “the king has in his train 4000 Muslims and this king has 2000 soldiers in his service”. The Kwarizmians probably formed a kind of Swiss Guard within the army, and their compatriots” talk of “hostages” (see above, section 10) may refer to them. Vice versa, the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus had a corps d”élite of Khazar guardsmen stationed at the gates of his palace. This was a privilege dearly bought: “These guards were so well remunerated that they had to purchase their posts for considerable sums, on which their salaries represented an annuity varying from about 2.25 to 4 per cent.” (Constantine, De Ceremoniis, pp. 692-3). For example, “a Khazar who received £7.4s. had paid for enrolment £302.8s.” (Bury, p. 228n).
[§§§§§§§] The town was in different periods also mentioned under different names, e.g., al-Bayada, “The White City”.
[********] Masudi places these buildings on an island, close to the west bank, or a peninsula.
[††††††††] Supposedly between AD 943 and 947.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Jewish Encyclopaedia, published 1901-6. In the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1971, the article on the Khazars by Dunlop is of exemplary objectivity.
[§§§§§§§§] Frazer wrote a special treatise on these lines on “The Killing of the Khazar Kings” (Folklore, XXVIII, 1917).
[*********] Alföldi has suggested that the two leaders were the commanders of the two wings of the horde (quoted by Dunlop, p. 159, n. 123).
[†††††††††] Ibn Hawkal, another much-travelled Arab geographer and historian, wrote his Oriental Geography around AD 977. The passage here quoted is virtually a copy of what Istakhri wrote forty years earlier, but contains less obscurities, so I have followed Ouseley’s translation (1800) of Ibn Hawkal.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Before the conversion the Kagan was still reported to play an active role — as, for instance, in his dealings with Justinian. To complicate matters further, the Arab sources sometimes refer to the “Kagan” when they clearly mean the “Bek” (as “kagan” was the generic term for “ruler” among many tribes), and they also use different names for the Bek, as the following list shows (after Minorsky, Hudud al Alam, p. 451):
Const. Porphyr. Khaqan Bek
Ibn Rusta Khazar Khaqan Aysha
Masudi Khaqan Malik
Istakhri Malik Khazar Khaqan Khazar
Ibn Hawkal Khaqan Khazar Malik Khazar or Bek
Gardezi Khazar Khaqan Abshad
The order of the rulers appears to have been switched.
[§§§§§§§§§] i.e., presumably the ruling tribe of “White Khazars”, see above, Chapter I, 3.
[**********] i.e., between AD 786 and 809; but it is generally assumed that Masudi used a convenient historical landmark and that the conversion took place around AD 740.
[††††††††††] This was an age when converting unbelievers by force or persuasion was a foremost concern. That the Jews, too, indulged in it is shown by the fact that, since the rule of Justinian, Byzantine law threatened severe punishments for the attempt to convert Christians to Judaism, while for Jews “molesting” converts to Christianity the penalty was death by fire (Sharf, p.25).
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] These inscriptions are a category apart from the forgeries of Firkovitch, notorious among historians (see Appendix III). — Poliak (4/3) quoting Chwolson, D.A. (1865).
[§§§§§§§§§§] See below, Chapter IV, II.
[***********] No other source, as far as I know, mentions this. It may be a substitution more palatable to Muslim readers for the Kagan’s short-lived adoption of Islam prior to Judaism.
[†††††††††††] A summary of the controversy will be found in Appendix III.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡][‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] See Appendix III.
[§§§§§§§§§§§] This probably refers to the so-Called “Khazarian route”: from Constantinople across the Black Sea and up the Don, then across the Don-Volga portage and down the Volga to Itil. (An alternative, shorter route was from Constantinople to the east coast of the Black Sea.)
[************] The fortress is evidently Sarkel on the Don. “They are honoured by us” fits in with the passage in Constantine Born-in-the-Purple about the special gold seal used in letters to the Kagan. Constantine was the Byzantine Emperor at the time of the Embassy to Spain.
[††††††††††††] This may refer to a ninth-century Jewish traveller, Eldad ha-Dani, whose fantastic tales, much read in the Middle Ages, include mentions of Khazaria which, he says, is inhabited by three of the lost tribes of Israel, and collects tributes from twenty-eight neighbouring kingdoms. Eldad visited Spain around 880 and may or may not have visited the Khazar country. Hasdai briefly mentions him in his letter to Joseph — as if to ask what to make of him.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] It also throws a sidelight on the frequent description of the Khazars as the people of Magog. Magog, according to Genesis X, 2-3 was the much maligned uncle of Togarma.
[§§§§§§§§§§§§] This division of Itil into three parts is also mentioned, as we have seen, in some of the Arab sources.
[*************] Spending the Sabbath in the dark was a well-known Karaite custom.
[†††††††††††††] “And this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.”
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] The date, however, is uncertain.
[§§§§§§§§§§§§§] Not to be confused with Nizhny Novgorod (now re-named Gorky).
[**************] Constantine Porphyrogenitus and the Russian Chronicle are in fair agreement concering the names and locations of these tribes and their subjection to the Khazars.
[††††††††††††††] See below, Chapter IV, 1.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Very roughly, 830-930.
[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] Or “Paccinaks”, or in Hungarian, “Bescnyök”.
[***************] This seems to be the plausible interpretation of Constantine’s statement that “the Ghuzz and the Khazars made war on the Pecheisegs”. [Cf. Bury, p. 424.]
[†††††††††††††††] Nine kinsmen of Olga’s, twenty diplomats, forty-three commercial advisers, one priest, two interpreters, six servants of the diplomats and Olga’s special interpreter.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Toynbee does not hesitate to call this famous secret weapon of the Greeks “napalm”. It was a chemical of unknown composition, perhaps a distilled petroleum fraction, which ignited spontaneously on contact with water, and could not be put out by water.
[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] In the so cal1ed “long version” of the same letter (see Appendix III), there is another sentence which may or may not have been added by a copyist: “If I allowed them for one hour, they would destroy all the country of the Arabs as far as Baghdad…” Since the Rus sat on the Caspian not for an hour, but for a year, the boast sounds rather hollow — though a little less so if we take it to refer not to the past but to the future.
[****************] The most outstanding Russian epic poem of the period, “The Lay of Igor’s Host”, describes one of the disastrous campaigns of the Russians against the Ghuzz.
[††††††††††††††††] One substantial branch of the Kumans, fleeing from the Mongols, was granted asylum in Hungary in 1241, and merged with the native population. “Kun” is still a frequent surname in Hungary.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Following a tradition set by Fraehn in 1822, in the Memnoirs of the Russian Academy.
[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] Yet one modern authority, Barthold, called him “one of the greatest geographers of all time”.[Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 245].
[*****************] “The probability is that Saksin was identical with, or at least at no great distance from Khazaran-ltil, and the name may be the older Sarisshin revived” (Dunlop, P.248, quoting Minorski).
[†††††††††††††††††] The Kasogians or Kashaks were a Caucasian tribe under Khazar rule and may or may not have been the ancestors of the Cossacks.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] The main sources for this movement are a report by the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela (see above, II, 8); a hostile account by the Arab writer Yahya al-Maghribi, and two Hebrew manuscripts found in the Cairo Geniza (see above, II, 7). They add up to a confusing mosaic; I have followed Baron’s careful interpretation (Vol. III, p.204; Vol. IV, pp.202-4, and notes).
[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] I am indebted to Mrs St G. Saunders for calling my attention to the Teka episode, which seems to have been overlooked in the literature on the Khazars.
[******************] The above data appear in A. H. Kniper’s article “Caucasus, People of” in the 1973 printing of the Enc. Brit., based on recent Soviet sources. A book by George Sava, Valley of the Forgotten People (London, 1946) contains a description of a purported visit to the mountain Jews, rich in melodrama but sadly devoid of factual information.
[††††††††††††††††††] The two nations became united in a series of treaties, starting in 1386, into the Kingdom of Poland. For the sake of brevity, I shall use the term “Polish Jews” to refer to both countries — regardless of the fact that at the end of the eighteenth century Poland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and its inhabitants became officially citizens of these three countries. Actually the so-called Pale of Settlement within Imperial Russia, to which Jews were confined from 1792 onward, coincided with the areas annexed from Poland plus parts of the Ukraine. Only certain privileged categories of Jews were permitted to live outside the Pale; these, at the time of the 1897 census, numbered only 200000, as compared to nearly five million inside the Pale — i.e., within former Polish territory.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Poland and Hungary were also briefly invaded by the Mongols in 1241-42, but they were not occupied — which made all the difference to their future history.
[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] Probably Wroclaw or Cracow.
[*******************] The last of the ancient Khazar villages on the Dnieper were destroyed in the Cossack revolt under Chmelnicky in the seventeenth century, and the survivors gave a further powerful boost to the number of Jews in the already existing settlement areas of Poland-Lithuania.
[†††††††††††††††††††] The opposite process of colonists settling on virgin soil applies to migrants from more highly developed to under-developed regions.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Literally “master of the cart”.
[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] Not counting the Jews of Spain, who formed a category apart and did not participate in the migratory movements with which we are concerned.
[********************] According to the classic survey of Joseph Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin England, based on recorded Jewish family names and other documents. [Quoted by Baron, Vol. IV, p. 77.]
[††††††††††††††††††††] The modern community of Jews in France and England was founded by refugees from the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] See above, V, 2.
[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] For “Ashkenazi” see below, VIII, I.
[*********************] 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.
[†††††††††††††††††††††] This does not, of course, apply to conquerors and colonizers, who impose their own language on the natives.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Emenon wrote in his essay “English Traits”: “Every religious sect has its physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face, the Quakers a face, the nuns a face. An Englishman will point out a dissenter by his manners. Trades and professions carve their own lines on faces and forms.”
[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] Ibn Hawkal wrote his book in Arabic, but Ouseley translated it from a Persian translation.
[**********************] The original of this quote is enlivened by letters in Persian script, which I have omitted in kindness to the publishers.
[††††††††††††††††††††††] Hasdai’s name in Hebrew was bar Isaac bar Shaprut. The R (for Rabbi) is a courtesy title.
[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] Arab version of Hasdai’s name.
[§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§] Two copies of the pamphlet belonging to two different editions are preserved in the Bodleian Library.
[***********************] The interested reader may consult Weingreen, J., A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew, 2nd ed, (Oxford, 1959).
[1] Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Caeromoniis I, p. 690.
[2] Bury, J. B. (1912), p. 402.
[3] Dunlop, D. M. (1954), pp. ix-x.
[4] Bartha, A. (1968), p. 35.
[5] Poliak, A. N. (1951).
[6] Cassel, P. (1876).
[7] Bartha, p. 24.
[8] Bartha, p. 24 and notes.
[9] Bartha, p. 24, n. 147-9.
[10] Istoria Khazar, 1962.
[11] Ibn-Said al-Maghribi, quoted by Dunlop, p. II.
[12] Schultze (1905), p. 23.
[13] Marquart, p. 44, n. 4.
[14] Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 96.
[15] Ibn-al-Balkhi, Fars Namah.
[16] Gibbon, Vol. V, pp. 87-8.
[17] Moses of Kalankatuk, quoted by Dunlop, p. 29.
[18] Artamonov, M. I. (1962).
[19] Obolensky, D. (1971), p. 172.
[20] Gibbon, p. 79.
[21] Gibbon, p. 180.
[22] Gibbon, p. 182.
[23] Op. cit., p. 176.
[24] Zeki Validi, Exk. 36a.
[25] Ibid., p. 50.
[26] Ibid., p. 61.
[27] Istakhri.
[28] Al-Masudi.
[29] Ibn Hawkal; also Istakhri (who was only 4000 gardens).
[30] Muqaddasi, p. 355, quoted by Baron III, p. 197.
[31] Toynbee, A. (1973), p. 549.
[32] Zeki Validi, p. 120.
[33] Quoted by Bartha, p. 184.
[34] Bartha, p. 139.
[35] Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 231.
[36] Bartha, pp. 143-5.
[37] László, G. (1974), pp. 66f.
[38] Hudud el Alam, No. 50.
[39] Op. cit., p. 405.
[40] St Julien, Documents sur les Tou Kioue, quoted by Zeki Validi, p. 269.
[41] Cassel, op. cit., p. 52.
[42] Ibn Hawkal, pp. 189-90.
[43] Op. cit., p. 405.
Chapter 2
[44] Bury, op. cit., p. 401.
[45] Ibid., p. 406.
[46] Sharf, A. (1971), p. 61.
3a Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 89.
[47] Ibid., p. 84.
[48] Quoted by Sharf, p. 88.
[49] The Vision of Daniel, a chronicle disguised as an ancient prophecy. Quoted by Sharf, p. 201.
[50] Quoted by Poliak, 4/3; Dunlop, p. 119.
[51] Poliak, (4/3); quoting Chwolson, D. A. (1865).
[52] Poliak, 4/3; Baron III, p. 210 and n. 47.
[53] Poliak, loc. cit.
[54] Quoted by Marquart (1903), p. 6.
[55] Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 90.
[56] Bury, op. cit., p. 408.
[57] Sharf, p. 100n.
[58] Bury, p. 406n.
[59] Dunlop (1954), p. 227.
[60] Baron, S. W. (1957), Vol. III, p. 201f.
[61] Dunlop, p. 220.
[62] Baron, Vol. III, p. 203.
Chapter III
[63] In his article “Khazars” in the Enc. Brit. 1973 edition.
[64] Op. cit., p. 177.
[65] Bar Hebraeus and al-Manbiji, quoted by Dunlop, p. 181.
[66] Marquart (pp. 5, 416), Dunlop (p. 42n.) and Bury (p. 408) all give slightly different dates.
[67] Bartha, p.27f.
[68] Op. cit. p. 547.
[69] Op. cit. p. 446n.
[70] Toynbee, p. 446; Bury, p. 422n.
[71] Gardezi (circa 1050), paraphrasing an earlier report by Ibn Rusta (circa 905), quoted by Macartney, C. A. (1930), p. 213.
[72] The Penguin Atlas of Mediaeval History, 1961, p. 58.
[73] Toynbee, p. 446.
[74] Zeki Validi, p. 85f.
[75] Ibn Rusta, quoted by Macartney, p. 214.
[76] Loc. cit.
[77] Ibn Rusta, quoted by Macartney, p. 215.
[78] Bid., pp. 214-15.
[79] Op. cit., p. I.
[80] Ibid., p. V.
[81] Toynbee, p. 419; Macrtney, p. 176.
[82] Toynbee, p. 418.
[83] Ibid., p. 454.
[84] Loc. cit.
[85] De Administrando, ch. 39-40.
[86] Toynbee, p.426.
[87] Op. cit., p. 426.
[88] Op. cit., p. 427.
[89] Macartney, pp 127ff.
[90] Baron, Vol. III, pp. 211f., 332.
[91] Bartha, pp. 99, 113.
[92] Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 105.
[93] Macartney, Guillemain.
[94]Quoted by Macartney, p. 71.
[95] Loc. cit.
[96] The Annals of Admont, quoted by Macartney, p. 76.
[97] De Administrando, ch. 40.
[98] Macartney, p. 123.
[99] Ibid., p. 122.
[100]Ibid., p. 123.
[101] Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 262.
[102] Bury, p. 419f.
[103] Op. cit., p. 448.
[104] Ibid., p. 447.
[105] Op. cit., p. 422.
[106] Toynbee, p. 448.
[107] Russian Chronicle, p. 65.
[108] Toynbee, p. 504.
[109] Loc. cit.
[110] Russian Chronicle, p. 82.
[111] Ibid., p. 83.
[112]Ibid., p. 72.
[113] Ibid., p. 84.
[114] Bury, p. 418.
Chapter IV
[115] Russian Chronicle, p. 84.
[116] Dunlop (1954). P. 238.
2a Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 210.
2b Quoted by Dunlop (1954), pp. 211-12.
[117] Quoted by Zeki Validi.
[118] Russian Chronicle, p. 84.
4a Ibid., p. 84.
[119] Ibid., p. 90.
[120] Toynbee, op. cit., p. 451.
[121] Russian Chronicle, p. 94.
[122] Ibid., p. 97.
[123] Ibid., p. 97.
[124] Ibid., p. 98.
[125] Ibid., p. 111.
[126] Ibid., p. 112.
[127] Vernadsky, g. (1948), pp. 29, 33.
[128] De Administrando, chs. 10-12.
[129] Toynbee, p. 508.
[130] Bury, op. cit., p. 414.
[131] Op. cit., p. 250.
[132] Zeki Validi, p. 206.
[133] Ahmad Tusi (twelth century), quoted by Zeki Validi, p. 205.
[134] Dunlop (1954), p. 249.
[135] Baron, Vol. IV, p. 174.
[136] Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 251.
[137] Kievo Pechershii Paterik, quoted by Baron, Vol. IV, p. 192.
[138] Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 260.
[139] Quoted by Zeki Validi, p. 143.
[140] Ibid., p. XXVII.
[141] Dunlop (1954), p. 261.
[142] Vernadsky, p. 44.
[143] Poliak, ch. VII.
[144] Loc. cit.
[145] Baron, Vol. III, p. 204.
[146] Baron, loc. cit.
Chapter V
[147] Baron, Vol. III, p. 206.
[148] Ibid., p. 212.
[149] Anonimi Gesta Hungarorum, quoted by Macartney, p. 188f.
[150] The Universal Jewish Encyclopaedia, article “Teka”.
[151] Dunlop (1954), p. 262.
[152] Poliak, ch. IX.
[153] Baron, Vol. III, p. 206.
[154] Poliak, ch. IX.Click
[155] Poliak, ch. VII; Baron, Vol. III, p. 218 and note.
[156] Brutzkus, Jewish Enc. Article “Chasaren”.
[157] Schiper, quoted by Poliak.
[158] Poliak, ch. IX.
[159] Baron, Vol. III, p. 217 and note.
[160] Poliak, ch. IX.
[161] Ibid.
[162] Ibid.
[163] Quoted by Poliak, ch. IX.
[164] Zajaczkowski, quoted by Dunlop, p. 222.
[165] Veltulani, A. (1962)., p. 278.
[166] Poliak, op. cit.; Kutschera, H. (1910).
[167] Vetulani, p. 274.
[168] Vetulani, pp. 276-7; Baron, Vol. III, p. 218 and notes; Poliak, op. cit.
[169] Baron, Vol. III, p. 219.
[170] Poliak, ch. VII.
[171] Enc. Brit., 1973 printing, “Yiddish Litterature”.
[172] Op. cit., ch. III.
[173] Ibid.
[174] Ibid.
[175] Zborowski, M., and Herzog, E. (1952), p. 41.
[176] Poliak, ch. III.
[177] Ibid., ch. VII.
[178] Ibid., ch. III.
Chapter VI
[179] According to William of Malmensbury’s De gestis regum Anglorum, quoted by Baron, Vol. IV, p. 277.
[180] Baron, Vol. IV, pp. 75-76.
[181] Roth, C. (1973).
[182] Roth, loc. cit.
[183]Baron, Vol. IV, p. 271.
[184] Ibid., p. 73.
[185] Kutschera, p. 233.
[186]14th ed., VI, p. 772, article “Crusades”.
[187] Baron, Vol. IV, p. 97.
[188] Ibid., p. 104.
[189]Ibid., pp. 105, 292n.
[190]Dubnov, S. (1926), p. 427.
[191] Ibid., p. 428.
[192] Baron, Vol. IV, p. 129.
[193] Ibid., p. 119.
[194] Ibid., p. 116.
[195] Mieses, M. (1924), p. 275.
[196] Ibid., pp. 274-5.
[197] Ibid., p. 273.
[198] Kutschera, pp. 235-6, 241.
Chapter VII
[199] Vetulani, loc. cit.
[200] Mieses, pp. 291-2.
[201] Jewish Enc., Vol. X, p. 512.
[202] Fuhrmann (1737), quoted by Mieses, p. 279.
[203] Mieses, loc. cit.
[204] Smith, H. Proc. V, pp. 65f.
[205] Mieses, p. 211.
[206] Ibid., p. 269.
[207] Ibid., p. 272.
[208] Ibid., p. 272.
[209] Smith, op. cit., p. 66.
[210] Kutschera, p. 244.
[211] Kutschera, p. 243.
[212] Poliak, ch. IX.
[213] Quoted by Poliak, loc. cit.
[214] Poliak, loc. cit.
[215] Roth, loc. cit.
[216] Roth, loc. cit.
[217] Ibid.
Chapter VIII
[218] Poliak, op. cit., Appendix III.
[219] Enc. Brit. (1973), Vol. XII, p. 1054.
[220] Comas, J. (1958), pp. 31-2.
[221] Ripley, W. (1900), p. 377.
[222] Ibid., pp. 378ff.
[223] Fishberg, M. (1911), p. 37.
[224] Fishberg, ch. II.
[225] Patai, op. cit.
[226] Comas, p. 30.
[227] Fishberg, p. 63.
[228] Quoted by Fishberg, p. 63.
[229] Patai, op. cit., p. 1054.
[230] Shapiro, H. (1953), pp. 74-5.
[231] Fishberg, p. 181.
[232] I Kings, XI, 1.
[233] Quoted by Fishberg, pp. 186-7.
[234] Fishberg, p. 189, n. 2.
[235] Comas, p. 31.
[236] Toynbee, 1947, p. 138.
[237] Graetz, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 213.
[238] Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 40-1.
[239] Fishberg, p. 191.
[240] Renan (1883), p. 24.
[241] Fishberg, p. 79.
[242] Ripley, p. 394f.
[243] Fishberg, p. 83, quoting Luschan.
[244] Fishberg, p. 83.
[245] Ripley, p. 395.
[246] Leiris, M. (1958), pp. 11 and 12.
[247] Fishberg, p. 513.
[248] Fishberg, pp. 332ff.
[249] Shapiro H. (1953), p. 80.
[250] E.g., Kerr and Reid, quoted by Fushberg, pp. 274-5.
[251] Ripley, p. 398.
[252] Fishberg, p. 178.
[253] Loc. cit.
Appendix II
[254] Vol. II p. 195, in the 1955 printing.
[255] Toynbee (1973), p. 24.
[256] Ibid., p. 465.
[257] Ibid., p. 602.
[258] Loc. cit.
[259] Byzantinische Zeitschrift XIV, pp. 511-70.
[260] Macartney, op. cit., p. 98.
[261] Vernadsky (1943), p. 178.
[262] Kahle, P. E. (1945).
[263] Grégoire, H. (1937), pp. 225-66.
[264] Kahle (1959), p. 33.
[265] Ibid.
[266] Kahle (1945), p. 28.
Appendix III
[267] Dunlop (1954), p. 125.
[268] Landau (1942).
[269] Following Kokovtsov’s test, quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 132.
[270] Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p. 154.
[271] Quoted by Dunlop, p. 127.
[272] Kokovtsov, P. (1932).
[273] Dunlop (1954), p. 230.
[274] Quoted in Enc. Judaica, article on “The Khazar Correspondence”.
[275] Harkavy, A. E. (1877).
[276] Harkavy (1875).
[277] Chwolson, D. A. (1882).
[278] Kokovtsov, op. cit.
[279] Poliak (1941).
[280] Dunlop (1954), p. 143.
[281] Ibid., pp. 137-8.
[282] Ibid., p. 152.
[283] Ibid., p. 153.
Appendix IV
[284] Koestler (1955).
[285] March 10, 1975.
http://www.iamthewitness.com/books/Arthur.Koestler/The.13th.Tribe.htm