Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (15 page)

T H E  J E W I S H
E M P I R E

“D
ishonoured and humiliated in our dispersion, we have to listen in silence to those who say: ‘Every nation has its own land and you [the Jews] alone possess not even a shadow of a country on this earth.’ I feel the urge to know the truth, whether there is really a place on this earth where harassed Israel [the Jewish people] can rule itself, where it is subject to nobody.”

Thus wrote the Jewish chief minister of Moorish Spain (the Umayyad caliphate, based in Cordoba) to the king of a faraway empire that, according to reports reaching Spain, was a Jewish state.

“If I were to know that this is indeed the case, I would not hesitate to forsake all honors, to resign my high office, to abandon my family, and to travel over mountains and plains, over land and water, until I arrived at the place where my Lord, the [Jewish] King rules.”¹

For hundreds of years after the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple in
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. 70, there had been no Jewish state, and the Jews had been scattered all over the known world. So when, in c. 955, the Jewish chief minister of Muslim Spain, Hasdai ibn Shaprut,² learned about the existence of a Jewish kingdom 1,500 miles east of Spain and 700 miles north of Jerusalem, in and to the east of what is now the Ukraine, he could hardly credit what he heard.³

What he did not know at the time, however, was that this Jewish empire had already been in existence for more than two hundred years. (So poor was information transmission and international political knowledge in medieval times that the Ukraine might as well have been on the dark side of the moon as far as Hasdai was concerned.) It had already played a vital role in world history and would ultimately do so again. But how had a Jewish empire come into existence on the Eurasian steppes, and what impact did it have on the international stage?

Following the climatic problems of the 530s, the Turks had overthrown Avar rule in Mongolia and had established their own great empire.
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However, within just over a hundred years, one key element of that Turkic empire—a group probably related to its ruling clan—broke away to form a state of its own. This group, the Khazars, rapidly set about constructing an empire that stretched from central Asia to the borders of Poland. As the Khazar state grew stronger, it became a northern buffer between the Christian late Roman Empire and the Muslim empire of the Arab caliphate.
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Confronted with the two superpowers, the Khazars realized that neutrality became a political necessity. The pagan Khazars could well see that most of the “civilized” world followed one or the other of the politically powerful monotheistic creeds, Christianity or Islam. The Khazars felt it was desirable to place themselves on the same monotheistic theological (and therefore political) level as the two superpowers, but sensibly, they did not wish to take sides.

In practice, neutrality meant opting for a “common-denominator” religious affiliation, one that could not be seen as leaning in either a Christian or a Muslim direction. Judaism fitted the bill exactly. Despite some Christian antagonism toward Judaism, both the Christian church of the Roman Empire and the Muslim caliphate regarded it as a legitimate faith. Christians found less to disagree with in Judaism than in Islam—and, likewise, Islam found Judaism less offensive than the “man-god” ideas inherent in Christianity. Of the three faiths’ holy scriptures, it was the Old Testament—the bedrock of Judaism—that was accepted as the word of God by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. For these reasons Judaism appealed politically to the Khazars, and they adopted it as their faith.

Surviving records suggest that, at least for the appearance of fairness, representatives of the three faiths were invited to the Khazar royal court to present their arguments.
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There seems to have already been a strong Jewish influence there, for the Christian and Muslim representatives had to be sent for from abroad, whereas the Jewish representative was on the spot. It is possible that the Jewish presence in Khazaria even predated the Khazar state and consisted of Crimean Jews and refugees from Constantinople’s anti-Semitic pogroms of the 630s.

According to the eleventh-century Arab historian Al-Bakri, a high Khazar official advised the king that “those in possession of sacred scriptures fall into three groups.” He suggested that the king should “summon them and ask them to state their case,” and then “follow the one who is in possession of the truth.”
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In another version (written by the tenth-century Khazar king Joseph), both the Romans and the caliphate sent envoys—this time uninvited—with “precious gifts and money and learned men to convert [the king] to their beliefs.”
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“But,” wrote Joseph, “the King was wise and sent for a Jew with much knowledge and acumen and put all three [the two envoys and the Jew] together to discuss their doctrines.” After a lengthy debate, the Khazar monarch, a king called Bulan, adjourned the conference for three days. He then asked the Christian which of the other two faiths he preferred. The Christian envoy, probably a bishop, chose Judaism. The king then put the same question to the Muslim and received the same response.

It seems likely that the Khazar ruler—with political neutrality in mind—had already decided to opt for Judaism before the conference started, but had thought it expedient to give the others the opportunity to put their bids in, so to speak. Indeed, from a neutral second-preferences perspective, the Khazar king had seen to it that his choice of faith was, in a sense, actually seen to be in line with his superpower neighbors’ wishes.

The conversion seems to have taken place sometime in the second quarter of the eighth century. But the Judaism the Khazar king followed appears to have been of a very basic variety. For possible internal reasons and probable external geopolitical ones, the newly converted king, Bulan, and his Jewish advisors seem to have kept exclusively or at least predominantly to the Old Testament and not to have paid much attention to Rabbinic law or the Talmud—the huge body of Jewish legal and cultural literature compiled in the fifth century. Within Judaism in the eighth century there was in some places—especially geographically peripheral areas—fierce doctrinal reluctance to accept Talmudic (originally predominantly Mesopotamian) interpretations of Jewish law and practice. In Mesopotamia itself, this actually developed into a major schism in which anti-Talmudic conservatives broke away to form a sect still known today as the Karaites.
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In Khazaria, the argument for embracing Judaism had been the commonality of the Old Testament’s acceptability to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—and so geopolitically it would no doubt have been seen as “additionalist” to put any emphasis on the Talmud. After all, the Koran and the New Testament had not been embraced, precisely because they had not passed the commonality test. The dictates of political neutrality and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the Talmud seemed to have given early Khazar Judaism a fairly conservative complexion.

It is likely that at that stage relatively few inhabitants of the empire converted, probably just the king and his immediate clan. However, the new religious situation must have led to at least some Jewish emigration by more pro-Talmudic elements and a steady flow of official and unofficial conversions to Judaism within the Khazar community as well as within other ethnic groups (also mainly Turkic) within the empire.

The anti-additionalist arguments of the 730s served their purpose but soon were no longer politically vital. Thus, by around 800, the Khazar king Obadiah, “a brave and venerated man,” was able to “reform the Rule and fortify the Law according to tradition and usage.” The reforming king then “built synagogues and schools, assembled a multitude of Israel’s sages, gave them lavish gifts of gold and silver, and made them interpret the 24 [sacred] books, the Mishna and the Talmud and the order in which the Liturgies are to be said.”
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This seems to suggest that Talmudic knowledge did not exist in Khazaria at this time and that Talmudic experts had to be invited in from abroad, almost certainly to settle, as their theological interpretation of the Scriptures and the Talmud would have been a long-term and ongoing activity.

Obadiah’s reform of Khazarian Judaism almost certainly stemmed, at least in part, from the king’s own religious commitment and enthusiasm—and it is likely that at this stage conversion to the Jewish faith became more prevalent. Widespread conversions certainly must have started at some point, given the number of ethnically non-Jewish groups attested to in medieval times as adhering to Judaism or to Jewish customs in the Khazar region.

First of all, there were the Khazars themselves, the empire’s ruling elite. Ethnically and linguistically Turkic, they probably numbered up to 750,000—at a guess perhaps 25 percent of the empire’s total population of between 1.5 million and 3 million.
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Some of the Oghuz Turks—specifically those who worked for the Khazars in the ninth and tenth centuries—almost certainly became Judaized or even fully Jewish. It is known, for instance, that Seljuk, the founder of the dynasty that bears his name,
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called one of his sons Israel, while his grandson was called Daud (David), both specifically Jewish names; and it is possible that their house of worship, referred to by an Arab chronicler,
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was a synagogue.
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Some elements of another Turkic people, the Cumans, who swept west in the mid–eleventh century, also appear to have become either partially or fully Judaized. For instance, a Cuman prince by the name of Kobiak named his sons Isaac and Daniel.
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Certainly some Turkic nomads on the south Russian (now Ukrainian) steppes were fully or partially Jewish. The twelfth-century Jewish explorer Pethahiah of Regensburg recorded that he had met nomads on the steppes—perhaps Cumans or Oghuz—who followed an unconventional form of Judaism, observed the Sabbath in total darkness (no artificial light being permitted), and prohibited even the cutting of bread on that day.

Then there was the Khazar influence on the Hungarians. The Magyar tribes originally lived in the Khazar sphere of influence on the steppe. In around
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. 800 one of the Khazar tribes, the Kabars, fled from the Khazar heartland after a disagreement with the Khazar king. This tribe, as part of the Khazar nation, was almost certainly Jewish, and it became the leading group among the early Magyars.

Then, fifty or so years later, the Khazar monarch, as overlord of the Magyars, gave them the right to choose their own king. By 900, other tribes, the Pecheneg Turks, had forced the Magyars to migrate west to what is now Hungary.
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But the old Magyar-Khazar link continued, and in c. 950 groups of Khazars (presumably Jews) were invited into Hungary by the Hungarians. In the fourteenth century many Hungarian Jews were still being officially categorized as Khazars.
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Cuman pressure in the early twelfth century on the Khazars themselves almost certainly led to a major new Jewish settlement being set up in what had once been Khazar land and was now the Viking principality of Kiev. This new town, established by c. 1117 and known as Bela Vezha (the same name as the Khazar empire’s greatest fortress, just north of the Caspian Sea), was located near Chernigov, 90 miles north of Kiev. There must already have been a substantial and long-established Jewish community in the Kiev area, because tenth-century letters that refer to it still survive. Indeed, Kiev itself was probably founded by Jewish Khazars in or prior to the ninth century—well before it was taken over by the Vikings in 882.
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It was not only some Cuman and Oghuz tribes that seem to have become at least partially Judaized by their Khazar overlords or neighbors. Some north-Iranian-speaking Tat tribes of the Caucasus Mountains are still Jewish today, although academic opinion is divided as to whether their Jewish identity was derived from the Khazars, derived from the Iranian Jews, or influenced culturally or ethnically by both. A Russian chronicle of 1346 actually describes the eastern Caucasus as the “Land of the Jews.”