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Ibn Fadlan reports that the settlement of disputes in Khazaria was adjudicated by judges hailing each from his community, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Pagan.[145] Some evidence suggests that the Khazar king saw himself as a defender of Jews even beyond the kingdom's frontiers, retaliating against Muslim or Christian interests in Khazaria in the wake of Islamic and Byzantine persecutions of Jews abroad.[146][147] Ibn Fadlan recounts specifically an incident in which the king of Khazaria destroyed the minaret of a mosque in Atil as revenge for the destruction of a synagogue in Dâr al-Bâbûnaj, and allegedly said he would have done worse were it not for a fear that the Muslims might retaliate in turn against Jews.[144][148] Ḥasdai ibn Shaprūṭ sought information on Khazaria in the hope he might discover 'a place on this earth where harassed Israel can rule itself' and wrote that, were it to prove true that Khazaria had such a king, he would not hesitate to forsake his high office and his family in order to emigrate there.[149]
Abraham Harkavy [150] noted in 1877 that an Arabic commentary on Isaiah 48:14, variously ascribed to Saadia Gaon or to the Karaite scholar Benjamin Nahâwandî, interpreted "The Lord hath loved him" as a reference "to the Khazars, who will go and destroy Babel" (i.e., Babylonia), a name used to designate the country of the Arabs. This has been taken as an indication of hopes by Persian Jews that the Khazars might overthrow the caliphate.[151]
In 965, as the Qağanate was struggling against the victorious campaign of the Rus' prince Sviatislav, the Islamic historian Ibn al-Athîr mentions that Khazaria, attacked by the Oğuz, sought help from Khwarezm, but their appeal was rejected because they were regarded as 'infidels' (al-kuffâr:pagans). Save for the king, the Khazarians are said to have converted to Islam in order to secure an alliance, and the Turks were, with Khwarezm's military assistance repelled. It was this that, according to Ibn al-Athîr, led the Jewish king of Khazar to convert to Islam.[152]
Byzantine diplomatic policy towards the steppe peoples generally consisted of encouraging them to fight among themselves. The Pechenegs provided great assistance to the Byzantines in the 9th century in exchange for regular payments.[153] Byzantium also sought alliances with the Göktürks against common enemies: in the early 7th century, one such alliance was brokered with the Western Tűrks against the Persian Sassanids in the Byzantine–Sassanid War of 602–628. The Byzantines called Khazaria Tourkía, and by the 9th. century refers to the Khazars as 'Turks'.[154] During the period leading up to and after the siege of Constantinople in 626, Heraclius sought help via emissaries, and eventually personally, from a Göktürk chieftain[155] of the Western Tűrkic Qağanate, Tong Yabghu Qağan, in Tiflis, plying him with gifts and the promise of marriage to his daughter, Epiphania.[156] Tong Yabghu responded by sending a large force to ravage the Persian empire, marking the start of the Third Perso-Turkic War.[157] A joint Byzantine-Tűrk operation breached the Caspian gates and sacked Derbent in 627. Together they then besieged Tiflis, where the Byzantines used traction trebuchets (ἑλέπόλεις) to breach the walls, one of their first known uses by the Byzantines. After the campaign, Tong Yabghu is reported, perhaps with some exaggeration, to have left some 40,000 troops behind with Heraclius.[158] Though occasionally identified with Khazars, the Göktürk identification is more probable since the Khazars only emerged from that group after the fragmentation of the former sometime after 630.[38] Sassanid Persia never recovered from the devastating defeat wrought by this invasion.[159]
Once the Khazars emerged as a power, the Byzantines also began to form alliances, dynastic and military, with them. In 695, the last Heraclian emperor, Justinian II, nicknamed the slit-nosed (ὁ ῥινότμητος) after he was mutilated and deposed, was exiled to Cherson in the Crimea, where a Khazar governor (tudun) presided. He escaped into Khazar territory in 704 or 705 and was given asylum by qağan Busir Glavan (Ἰβουζήρος Γλιαβάνος), who gave him his sister in marriage, perhaps in response to an offer by Justinian who may have thought a dynastic marriage would seal by kinship a powerful tribal support for his attempts to regain the throne.[160] The Khazarian spouse thereupon changed her name to Theodora.[161] Busir was offered a bribe by the Byzantine usurper, Tiberius III, to kill Justinian. Warned by Theodora, Justinian escaped, murdering two Khazar officials in the process. He fled to Bulgaria, whose Khan Tervel helped him regain the throne. Upon his reinstallment, and despite Busir's treachery during his exile, he sent for Theodora; Busir complied, and she was crowned as Augusta, suggesting that both prized the alliance.[162]
Decades later, Leo III (ruled 717-741) made a similar alliance to coordinate strategy against a common enemy, the Muslim Arabs. He sent an embassy to the Khazar qağan Bihar and married his son, the future Constantine V (ruled 741-775), to Bihar's daughter, a princess referred to as Tzitzak, in 732. On converting to Christianity, she took the name Irene. Constantine and Irene had a son, the future Leo IV (775-780), who thereafter bore the sobriquet, "the Khazar".[163][164] Leo died in mysterious circumstances after his Athenian wife bore him a son, Constantine VI, who on his majority co-ruled with his mother, the dowager. He proved unpopular, and his death ended the dynastic link of the Khazars to the Byzantine throne. By the 8th century, Khazars dominated the Crimea (650-c.950), and even extended their influence into the Byzantine peninsula of Cherson until it was wrested back in the 10th century.[1] Khazar and Farghânian (Φάργανοι) mercenaries constituted part of the imperial Byzantine Hetaireia bodyguard after its formation in 840, a position that could openly be purchased by a payment of 7 pounds of gold.[165][166]
During the 7th and 8th centuries, the Khazars fought a series of wars against the Umayyad Caliphate and its Abbasid successor. The First Arab-Khazar War began during the first phase of Muslim expansion. By 640, Muslim forces had reached Armenia; in 642 they launched their first raid across the Caucasus under Abd ar-Rahman ibn Rabiah. In 652 Arab forces advanced on the Khazar capital, Balanjar, but were defeated, suffering heavy losses; according to Arab historians such as al-Tabari, both sides in the battle used catapults against the opposing troops. A number of Russian sources give the name of a Khazar khagan from this period as Irbis and describe him as a scion of the Göktürk royal house, the Ashina. Whether Irbis ever existed is open to debate, as is whether he can be identified with one of the many Göktürk rulers of the same name.
Due to the outbreak of the First Muslim Civil War and other priorities, the Arabs refrained from repeating an attack on the Khazars until the early 8th century.[1] The Khazars launched a few raids into Transcaucasian principalities under Muslim dominion, including a large-scale raid in 683–685 during the Second Muslim Civil War that rendered much booty and many prisoners.[167] There is evidence from the account of al-Tabari that the Khazars formed a united front with the remnants of the Göktürks in Transoxiana.
The Second Arab-Khazar War began with a series of raids across the Caucasus in the early 8th century. The Umayyads tightened their grip on Armenia in 705 after suppressing a large-scale rebellion. In 713 or 714, Umayyad general Maslamah conquered Derbent and drove deeper into Khazar territory. The Khazars launched raids in response into Albania and Iranian Azerbaijan but were driven back by the Arabs under Hasan ibn al-Nu'man.[168] The conflict escalated in 722 with an invasion by 30,000 Khazars into Armenia inflicting a crushing defeat. Caliph Yazid II responded, sending 25,000 Arab troops north, swiftly driving the Khazars back across the Caucasus, recovering Derbent, and advancing on Balanjar. The Arabs broke through the Khazar defense and stormed the city; most of its inhabitants were killed or enslaved, but a few managed to flee north.[167] Despite their success, the Arabs had not yet defeated the Khazar army, and they retreated south of the Caucasus.
In 724, Arab general al-Jarrah ibn Abdallah al-Hakami inflicted a crushing defeat on the Khazars in a long battle between the rivers Cyrus and Araxes, then moved on to capture Tiflis, bringing Caucasian Iberia under Muslim suzerainty. The Khazars struck back in 726, led by a prince named Barjik, launching a major invasion of Albania and Azerbaijan; by 729, the Arabs had lost control of northeastern Transcaucasia and were thrust again into the defensive. In 730, Barjik invaded Iranian Azerbaijan and defeated Arab forces at Ardabil, killing the general al-Djarrah al-Hakami and briefly occupying the town. Barjik was defeated and killed the next year at Mosul, where he directed Khazar forces from a throne mounted with al-Djarrah's severed head. Arab armies led first by the prince Maslamah ibn Abd al-Malik and then by Marwan ibn Muhammad (later Caliph Marwan II) poured across the Caucasus and in 737 defeated a Khazar army led by Hazer Tarkhan, briefly occupying Atil itself. The Qağan was forced to accept terms involving conversion to Islam, and to subject himself to the Caliphate, but the accommodation was short-lived as a combination of internal instability among the Umayyads and Byzantine support undid the agreement within three years, and the Khazars re-asserted their independence.[169] The adoption of Judaism by the Khazars, which in this theory would have taken place around 740, may have been part of this re-assertion of independence.
Whatever the impact of Marwan's campaigns, warfare between the Khazars and the Arabs ceased for more than two decades after 737. Arab raids continued until 741, but their control in the region was limited as maintaining a large garrison at Derbent further depleted the already overstretched army. A third Muslim civil war soon broke out, leading to the Abbasid Revolution and the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in 750.
In 758, the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur attempted to strengthen diplomatic ties with the Khazars, ordering Yazid ibn Usayd al-Sulami, one of his nobles and the military governor of Armenia, to take a royal Khazar bride. Yazid married a daughter of Khazar Khagan Baghatur, but she died inexplicably, possibly in childbirth. Her attendants returned home, convinced that some Arab faction had poisoned her, and her father was enraged. Khazar general Ras Tarkhan invaded south of the Caucasus in 762–764, devastating Albania, Armenia, and Iberia, and capturing Tiflis. Thereafter relations became increasingly cordial between the Khazars and the Abbasids, whose foreign policies were generally less expansionist than the Umayyads, broken only by a series of raids in 799 over another failed marriage alliance.
By the 9th century, groups of Varangian Rus', developing a powerful warrior-merchant system, began probing south down the waterways controlled by the Khazars and their protectorate, the Volga Bulgarians, partially in pursuit of the Arab silver which flowed north for hoarding through the Khazarian-Volga Bulgarian trading zones,[170] partially to trade in furs and ironwork.[171] Northern mercantile fleets passing Atil were tithed, as they were at Byzantine Cherson.[172] Their presence may have prompted the formation of a Rus' state by convincing the Slavs, Merja and the Chud' to unite to protect common interests against Khazarian exactions of tribute. It is often argued that a Rus' Khaganate modelled on the Khazarian state had formed to the east, and that the Varangian chieftain of the coalition appropriated the title of qağan (khagan) as early as the 830s: the title survived to denote the princes of Kievan Rus', whose capital, Kiev, is often associated with a Khazarian foundation.[173][174][175][176] The construction of the Sarkel fortress, with technical assistance from Khazaria's Byzantine ally at the time, together with the minting of an autonomous Khazar coinage around the 830s may have been a defensive measure against emerging threats from Varangians to the north and from the Magyars on the eastern steppe.[177][178] By 860, the Rus' had penetrated as far as Kiev and, via the Dnieper, Constantinople.[179]
Alliances often shifted. Byzantium, threatened by Varangian Rus raiders, would assist Khazaria, and Khazaria at times allowed the northerners to pass through their territory in exchange for a portion of the booty.[180] From the beginning of the 10th century, the Khazars found themselves fighting on multiple fronts as nomadic incursions were exacerbated by uprisings by former clients and invasions from former allies. The pax Khazarica was caught in a pincer movement between steppe Pechenegs and the strengthing of an emergent Rus' power to the north, both undermining Khazaria'ìs tributary empire.[181] According to the Schechter Text, the Khazar ruler King Benjamin, ca.880-890 fought a battle against the allied forces of five lands whose moves were perhaps encouraged by Byzantium[182] Though Benjamin was victorious, his son Aaron II faced another invasion, this time led by the Alans, whose leader had converted to Christianity and entered into an alliance with Byzantium, which, under Leo VI the Wise, encouraged them against the Khazars.
By the 880s, Khazar control of the Middle Dnieper from Kiev, where they collected tribute from Eastern Slavic tribes, began to wane as Oleg of Novgorod wrested control of the city from the Varangian warlords Askold and Dir, and embarked on what was to prove to be the foundation of a Rus' empire.[183] The Khazars had initially allowed the Rus' to use the trade route along the Volga River, and raid southwards. According to al-Masudi, the qağan is said to have given his assent on the condition that the Rus' give him half of the booty.[180] In 913, however, two years after Byzantium concluded a peace treaty with the Rus' (911), A Varangian foray, with Khazar connivance, through Arab lands led to a request to the Khazar throne by the Khwârazmian Islamic guard for permission to retaliate against the large Rus' contingent on its return. The purpose was to revenge the violence the Rus' razzia had inflicted on their fellow Muslim believers.[184] The Rus' force was thoroughly routed and massacred.[180] The Khazar rulers closed the passage down the Volga to the Rus', sparking a war. In the early 960s, Khazar ruler Joseph wrote to Hasdai ibn Shaprut about the deterioration of Khazar relations with the Rus': 'I protect the mouth of the river (Itil-Volga) and prevent the Rus arriving in their ships from setting off by sea against the Ishmaelites and (equally) all (their) enemies from setting off by land to Bab. '[185]
The Rus' warlords launched several wars against the Khazar Qağanate, and raided down to the Caspian sea. The Schechter Letter relates the story of a campaign against Khazaria by HLGW (recently identified as Oleg of Chernigov) around 941 in which Oleg was defeated by the Khazar general Pesakh.[187] The Khazar alliance with the Byzantine empire began to collapse in the early 10th century. Byzantine and Khazar forces may have clashed in the Crimea, and by the 940s emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus was speculating in De Administrando Imperio about ways in which the Khazars could be isolated and attacked. The Byzantines during the same period began to attempt alliances with the Pechenegs and the Rus', with varying degrees of success. Sviatoslav I finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s, in a circular sweep that overwhelmed the Khazar fortresses like Sarkel and Tamatarkha, reached as far as the Caucasian Kassogians/Circassians and then back to Kiev.[188] Sarkel fell in 965, with the capital city of Atil following, c. 968 or 969.
In the Russian chronicle the vanquishing of the Khazar traditions is associated with Vladimir's conversion in 986.[189] According to the Primary Chronicle, in 986 Khazar Jews were present at Vladimir's disputation to decide on the prospective religion of the Kievian Rus'. Whether these were Jews who had settled in Kiev or emissaries from some Jewish Khazar remnant state is unclear. Conversion to one of the faiths of the people of Scripture was a precondition to any peace treaty with the Arabs, whose Bulgar envoys had arrived in Kiev after 985.[152]
A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city that its vineyards and garden had been razed, that not a grape or raisin remained in the land, and not even alms for the poor were available.[190] An attempt to rebuilt may have been undertaken, since Ibn Hawqal and al-Muqaddasi refer to it after that date, but by Al-Biruni's time (1048) it was in ruins[191]
Though Poliak argued that the Khazar kingdom did not wholly succumb to Sviatislav's campaign, but lingered on until 1224, when the Abkhazians.[199][200] A Kievian prince named Oleg, grandson of Jaroslav was reportedly kidnapped by "Khazars" in 1079 and shipped off to Constantinople, although most scholars believe that this is a reference to the Cumans-Kipchaks or other steppe peoples then dominant in the Pontic region. Upon his conquest of Tmutarakan in the 1080s Oleg Sviatoslavich, son of a prince of Chernigov, gave himself the title "Archon of Khazaria".[188] 1083 Oleg is said to have revenged himself on the Khazars after his brother Roman was killed by their allies, the Polovtsi/Cumans. After one more conflict with these Polovtsi in 1106, the Khazars fade from history.[198]
By the end of the 12th century, Petachiah of Ratisbon reported traveling through what he called "Khazaria", and had little to remark on other than describing its minim (sectaries) living amidst desolation in perpetual mourning.[1] The reference seems to be to Karaites.[201] The Franciscan missionary William of Rubruck likewise found in the lower Volga area where Ital once lay only impoverished pastures.[81] Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, the papal legate to the court of the Mongol Khan Guyuk at that time, mentioned an otherwise unattested Jewish tribe, the Brutakhi, perhaps in the Volga region. Though connections are made to the Khazars, the link is based merely on a common attribution of Judaism.[202]
The 10th century Zoroastrian Dênkart registered the collapse of Khazar power in attributing its eclipse to the enfeebling effects of 'false' religion.[203] The decline was contemporary to that suffered by the Transoxiana Sāmānid empire to the east, both events paving the way for the rise of the Great Seljuq Empire, whose founding traditions mention Khazar connections.[204][205] Whatever successor entity survived, it could not longer function as a bulwark against the pressure east and south of nomad expansions. By 1043, Kimeks and Qipchaqs, thrusting westwards, pressured the Oğuz, who in turn pushed the Pechenegs west towards Byzantium's Balkan provinces.[206]
Khazaria nonetheless left its mark on the rising states and some of their traditions and institutions. Much earlier, Tzitzak, the Khazar wife of Leo III introduced into the Byzantine court the distinctive kaftan or riding habit of the nomadic Khazars, the tzitzakion (τζιτζάκιον), and this was adopted as a solemn element of imperial dress.[207] The orderly hierarchical system of succession by 'scales' (lestvichnaia sistema:лествичная система) to the Grand Principate of Kiev was arguably modeled on Khazar institutions, via the example of the Rus' Khaganate.[208]
The proto-Hungarian Pontic tribe, while perhaps threatening Khazaria as early as 839 (Sarkel), developed its institutional models, such as the dual rule of a ceremonial kende-kündü and a gyula administering practical and military administration, under Khazar tutelage. A dissident group of Khazars, the Qabars, joined the Hungarians in their flight from the Pechenegs as they moved into Pannonia. Elements within the Hungarian population can be viewed as perpetuating Khazar traditions as a successor state. Byzantine sources refer to Hungary as Western Tourkia in contrast to Khazaria, Eastern Tourkia. The gyula line produced the kings of medieval Hungary through descent from Árpád, while the Qabars retained their traditions longer, and were known as "black Hungarians" (fekete magyarság). Some archeological evidence from Čelarevo suggests the Qabars practiced Judaism[209][210][211] since warrior graves with Jewish symbols were found there, including menorahs, shofars, etrogs, lulavs, candlesnuffers, ash collectors, inscriptions in Hebrew, and a six-pointed star identical to the Star of David.[212][213]
The Khazar state was the only Jewish state to rise between the Fall of the Second Temple (67-70 CE) and the establishment of Israel (1948),[215] and its example stimulated messianic aspirations for a return to Israel as early as Judah Halevi.[216] In the time of the Egyptian vizier Al-Afdal Shahanshah (d.1121), one Solomon ben Duji, often identified as a Khazarian Jew,[217] attempted to stir up a messianic crusade for the liberation of, and return of all Jews to, Palestine. He wrote to many Jewish communities to enlist support. He eventually moved to Kurdistan where his son Menachem some decades later assumed the title of Messiah and, raising an army for this purpose, took the fortress of Amadiya north of Mosul. His project was opposed by the rabbinical authorities and he was poisoned in his sleep. One theory maintains that the Star of David, until then a decorative motif or magical emblem, began to assume its national value in late Jewish tradition from its earlier symbolic use in Menachem's crusade.[218]
The word Khazar, as an ethnonym, was last used in the 13th century by a people in the North Caucasus believed to practice Judaism.[219] The nature of a hypothetical Khazar diaspora, Jewish or otherwise, is disputed. Avraham ibn Daud mentions encountering rabbinical students descended from Khazars as far away as Toledo, Spain in the 1160s.[220] Khazar communities persisted here and there. Many Khazar mercenaries served in the armies of the Islamic Caliphates and other states. Documents from medieval Constantinople attest to a Khazar community mingled with the Jews of the suburb of Pera.[221] and Khazar merchants were active in both Constantinople and Alexandria in the 12th. century.[222]
Khazar origins for, or suggestions Khazars were absorbed by many peoples, have been made regarding the Slavic Judaising Subbotniks, the Bukharan Jews, the Muslim Kumyks, Kazakhs, Nogais, the Cossacks of the Don region, the Turkic-speaking Krymchak Jews and the and their Crimean neighbours the Karaites to the Moldavian Csángós, the Mountain Jews and others.[223][224][225] Turkic-speaking Karaites (in the Crimean Tatar language, Qaraylar) from Crimea to Poland and Lithuania have claimed Khazar origins. Specialists in Khazar history question the connection,[226][227] Scholarship is likewise sceptical of claims that the Tatar-speaking Krymchak Jews of the Crimea descend from Khazars.[228]
One thesis, held that the Khazar Jewish population went into a northern diaspora and had a significant impact on the rise of Ashkenazi Jews. Connected to this thesis is the theory, expounded by Paul Wexler, that the grammar of Yiddish contains a Khazar substrate.[229]
Several scholars have suggested that the Khazars did not disappear after the dissolution of their Empire, but migrated West to eventually form part of the core of the later Ashkenazi Jewish population of Europe. This hypothesis is greeted with scepticism or caution by most scholars.[230][231][232]
In 1846 the Russian orientalist Vasilii Vasil'evich Grigor'ev (1816–1881) theorized that the Crimean Karaites were of Khazar stock, an allegation quickly taken up outsiders though unfamiliar to the Karaites themselves at the time.[233]Abraham Eliyahu Harkavi then suggested as early as 1869 that there might be a link between the Khazars and European Jews[234] but the theory that Khazar converts formed a major proportion of Ashkenazi was first proposed to a Western public in a lecture by Ernest Renan in 1883.[235][236] Occasional suggestions emerged that there was a small Khazar component in East European Jews in works by Joseph Jacobs (1886), Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, a critic of anti-Semitism, (1893)[237] Maksymilian Ernest Gumplowicz,[238] and by the Russian-Jewish anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg.[239] In 1909 Hugo von Kutschera developed the notion into a book-length study,[240] arguing Khazars formed the foundational core of the modern Ashkenazi.[241] Maurice Fishberg introduced the notion to American audiences in 1911.[242] The idea was also taken up by the Polish-Jewish economic historian and General Zionist Yitzhak Schipper in 1918[243][244] and by scholarly anthropologists, such as Roland B. Dixon (1923), and by writers like H. G. Wells (1921) who used it to argue that "The main part of Jewry never was in Judea",[245][246] a thesis that was to have a political echo in later opinion.[247][248] In 1932, Samuel Krauss ventured the theory that the biblical Ashkenaz referred to northern Asia Minor, and identified it with the Khazars, a position immediately disputed by Jacob Mann.[249] Ten years later, in 1942, Abraham N. Poliak, later professor for the history of the Middle Ages at Tel Aviv University, published a Hebrew monograph in which he concluded that the East European Jews came from Khazaria.[250][251] D.M. Dunlop, writing in 1954, thought very little evidence backed what he regarded as a mere assumption, and argued that the Ashkenazi-Khazar descent theory went far beyond what our imperfect records permit.[252] Léon Poliakov, while assuming the Jews of Western Europe resulted from a "panmixia" in the Ist millennium, asserted in 1955 that it was widely assumed that Europe's Eastern Jews descended from a mixture of Khazarian and German Jews.[253] Poliak's work found some support in Salo Wittmayer Baron and Ben-Zion Dinur,[254][255] but was dismissed by Bernard Weinryb as a fiction (1962).[256]
The Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976.[257] which was both positively reviewed and dismissed as a fantasy, and a somewhat dangerous one. Israel's ambassador to Britain branded it 'an anti-Semitic action financed by the Palestinians,' while Bernard Lewis claimed that the idea was not supported by any evidence whatsoever, and had been abandoned by all serious scholars.[257][258] Raphael Patai, however, registered some support for the idea that Khazar remnants had played a role in the growth of Eastern European Jewish communities,[259] and several amateur researchers, such as Boris Altschüler (1994)[226] and Kevin Alan Brook,[260] kept the thesis in the public eye. The theory has been occasionally manipulated to deny Jewish nationhood.[257][261] Recently, a variety of approaches, from linguistics (Paul Wexler)[262] to historiography (Shlomo Sand)[263] and population genetics (Eran Elhaik, a geneticist from the University of Sheffield)[264] has revived support for and interest in the theory. In broad academic perspective, both the idea that the Khazars converted en masse to Judaism, and the suggestion they emigrated to form the core population of Ashkenazi Jewry, remain highly polemical issues.[265]
Maurice Fishberg and Roland B Dixon's works were later exploited in racist and religious polemical literature in both Britain, in British Israelism, and the United States.[266] Particularly after the publication of Burton J. Hendrick's The Jews in America (1923)[267] it began to enjoy a vogue among advocates of immigration restriction in the 1920s; racial theorists[268] like Lothrop Stoddard; anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorists like the Ku Klux Klan's Hiram Wesley Evans; anti-communist polemicists like John O. Beaty[269] and Wilmot Robertson, whose views influenced David Duke.[270] According to Yehoshafat Harkabi (1968) and others,[271] it played a role in Arab anti-Zionist polemics, and took on an anti-semitic edge. Bernard Lewis, noting in 1987 that Arab scholars had dropped it, remarked that it only occasionally emerged in Arab political discourse.[272] It has also played some role in Soviet anti-Semitic chauvinism[273] and Slavic Eurasian historiography, particularly in the works of scholars like Lev Gumilev.[274] Although the Khazar hypothesis never played any major role in anti-semitism,[275][276] and though the existence of a Jewish kingdom north of the Caucasus had formerly long been denied by Christian religious commentators,[277] it came to be exploited by the White supremacist Christian movement [278] and even by terrorist esoteric cults like Aum Shinrikyō.[279] According to Jewish Law ( Shulchan Aruch, by Yosef Caro, a Sephardic Jew), The Khazarians converting does not delegitimize them as Jews, because conversion s allowed. Therefore, descendants of Khazar are fully Jewish.
The hypothesis of Khazarian ancestry in Ashkenazi has also been a subject of discussion in the new field of population genetics, wherein claims have been made concerning evidence both for and against it. The general conclusion is that, if traces of descent from Khazars exist in the Ashkenazi gene pool, the contribution would be quite minor,[280][281][282][283][284] or insignificant.[285]
Eran Elhaik argued in 2012 for a significant Khazar component in the paternal line based on the study of Y-DNA of Ashkenazi Jews, using Caucasian populations, Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijani Jews as proxies.[264]
According to Nadia Abu El-Haj, the issues of origins are generally complicated by the difficulties of writing history via genome studies and the biases of emotional investments in different narratives, depending on whether the emphasis lies on direct descent or on conversion within Jewish history. The lack of Khazar DNA samples that might allow verification also present difficulties.[286]
The Kuzari is an influential work written by the medieval Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet Rabbi Yehuda Halevi (c. 1075–1141). Divided into five essays (ma'amarim), it takes the form of a fictional dialogue between the pagan king of the Khazars and a Jew who was invited to instruct him in the tenets of the Jewish religion. The intent of the work, although based on Ḥasdai ibn Shaprūṭ's correspondence with the Khazar king, was not historical, but rather to defend Judaism as a revealed religion, written in the context, firstly of Karaite challenges to the Spanish rabbinical intelligentsia, and then against temptations to adapt Aristotelianism and Islamic philosophy to the Jewish faith.[287] Originally written in Arabic, it was translated into Hebrew by Judah ibn Tibbon).[130] Benjamin Disraeli's early novel Alroy (1833) draws on Menachem ben Solomon's story.[288] The question of mass religious conversion and the indeterminability of the truth of stories about identity and conversion are central themes of Milorad Pavić's bestselling mystery story Dictionary of the Khazars.[289] H.N. Turteltaub's Justinian, Marek Halter's Book of Abraham and Wind of the Khazars, and Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road allude to or feature elements of Khazar history or create fictional Khazar characters.[290]
Atil, Khazaran, Samandar; in the Caucasus, Balanjar, Kazarki, Sambalut, and Samiran; in Crimea and the Taman region, Kerch, Theodosia, Yevpatoria (Güzliev), Samkarsh (also called Tmutarakan, Tamatarkha), and Sudak. In the Don valley Sarkel. A number of Khazar settlements have been discovered in the Mayaki-Saltovo region. Some scholars suppose that the Khazar settlement of Sambat on the Dnieper refers to the later Kiev.[291]
Sevastopol, Black Sea, Russia, Ukraine, Simferopol
Oghuz languages, Turkey, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Turkic languages
Azerbaijan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Göktürks
Torah, Kabbalah, Israel, Hebrew language, Mishnah
Russian Empire, Russia, World War II, World War I, Golden Horde
First Bulgarian Empire, Kubrat, Ukraine, Khazars, Eurasian Avars
Russia, Kievan Rus', Ukraine, Russian Empire, Khazars
Kiev, Belarus, Ukraine, Russian Empire, Russia