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Moshe BEKKER
Research Fellow at the Human Rights Institute, National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan (Baku, Azerbaijan).
JEWS IN KHAZARIA
Abstract
The author relies on novel approaches to chronicles and historical documents to disprove what medieval and certain contemporary authors write about the Khazarian origin of the East European Jews. He explains why the Jews of the Sassanid and Byzantine empires migrated to the Caucasus and further on to Atil, the capital of Khazaria, and how they became military leaders and made the title of Bek (supreme commander of the army of khaganate) hereditary. He disproves the
allegations of those who insist that the khagan (believed to be a reincarnation of the god Tengri on Earth) and the top crust of the country's nobles embraced Judaism (if this had happened it would have been a gross violation of the central Judaic dogmas). The author cites the results of the latest genetic studies of the Jews which prove beyond a doubt that the Sephardic, Ashkenaz, and Mizrahi Jews descended from common Mid-Eastern ancestors.
Introduction
Professor of History at Tel Aviv University Shlomo Sand has revived the already denounced as absolutely ungrounded theory that the East European Jews descended from the Khazars, one of the Turkic peoples.1 I should say that Prof. Sand is not the first to bring this theory into circulation. In the mid-20th century, prominent linguist Naftali Anisimov voiced a similar idea with regard to the Mountain Jews: "Today we can say, without taking the risk of being wrong, that the Tat Jews did not descend from the Israeli (Jews) and that they were originally followers of Zarathustra (fire worshippers) and not of the 'religion of the Israelis'." He supported the above with the following facts:
"1. The Tats, called 'Mountain Jews,' have nothing to do with the Jews whom the Assyrian kings brought to Iran and Media as slaves.
2. It was the Jews who in the 7th-8th centuries, or even earlier, escaped from Rome who brought the faith of Moses to the Khazars.
3. The Khazars and, probably, Jews who escaped from Rome to the Caucasus brought the faith of Moses to some of the Tats, who along with other Tats, were fire worshippers (it is implied that since they brought the faith they also intermarried with the Tats.—M.B.).
4. The Tat Jews, Muslims, and Christians were a single people divided by religion—the faiths of Moses, Christ, and Muhammad."2
1 See: S. Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, Verso Books, 2009, 332 pp.
2 Quoted from: Ya. Agarunov, Bolshaya sudba malenkogo naroda, Moscow, 1995, p. 23.
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What academic arguments these are! A linguist should have known that the language is not always an indication of nationality, which is especially true of the Jews, who over the course of time had to change their language many times. Recently, until the 1940s, most of the Jews of Eastern Europe used Yiddish (which was very close to German); today it is rarely used, if ever. In Israel, the Jews revived Hebrew; in the United States, they use English; in Russia, Russian, and in Iran, Farsi (a language very close to the language of the Tats). It was language, not their ethnic origin, that all the Tats had in common. I shall demonstrate below that it was the Jews of Sassanian Iran who fled to Khazaria and Jewish runaways from Byzantium who later joined them.
Arthur Koestler made an attempt to fight anti-Semitism by insisting on the Khazarian roots of the Jews. In his highly original work, The Thirteenth Tribe. The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, he began the history of European Jews from the Khazarian Khaganate and concluded: "Should this turn out to be the case, then the term 'anti-Semitism' would become void of meaning."3 Some Soviet ideologists like the idea as a handy instrument for de-legitimizing the State of Israel. A detailed account can be found in Put k miru na Blizhnem Vostoke (The Road to Peace in the Middle East) by E. Dmitriev and V. Ladeykin.4 The authors have fallen into the trap of the misinterpreted correspondence between bek (pech) (hereditary supreme commander of the khaganate army) Joseph ben Aaron and Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a top-ranking official of Caliph of Cordoba Abdrakhman III. Yehuda ben Halevi, an outstanding medieval poet and thinker of Spain, author of the much acclaimed Sefer ha-Kuzari, was the first to fall into the trap. He amazed the world, in poetic form, with the fact that there was a "Jewish state," the Khazarian Khaganate, on the Volga.
Routes of Migration
Let us examine the facts. Joseph ben Aaron "wrote that the Khazars descended from Yaphet, that is, they were not Semites,"5 and told the story of how Jews arrived in Khazaria.
At that time, the state of the Khazars was headed by khakan (khagan or khan, the title of the Mongolian and Turkic rulers) from the Turkic dynasty of Ashina (Tribe of Wolf) whom the Khazars invited to defend their country, a common practice at that time. The Slavs of Ancient Rus invited Norman Prince Rurik and his host to protect their country against the nomads. The Khazars were quite satisfied with their Turkic khan: "He roamed together with his staff along the lower reaches of the Volga, between Volgograd and Astrakhan of our time. In the spring, they all moved to the Terek to spend the summer in the area around the Terek, the Kuban, and the Don. When the cold weather returned, they went back to the Volga. The Khazars did nothing to maintain their khan. He never demanded taxes and lived on what his nomadic camp produced. The khan and the top military who arrived with him were quite satisfied with the gifts of their subjects; they introduced no taxes and never engaged in trade." Still, "the Turkic beks and tarkhans were an alien element for the rest of the country."6 The same applies to the Jewish merchants who arrived in Atil; the Turks who belonged to the ruling class were not liked, while the Jews "lived separately and had practically no contacts with the locals."7 Dozens of other nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes found themselves under the ruling dynasty: the Kama Bulgars, Burtases, Suvars, Mordovians-Erzya, Cheremices, Vyatiches, Severyans, and Polyane Slavs. "The Alans, Kasogs, Circassians, Pechenegs, and Magyars also paid tribute to the
3 A. Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe. The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, Random House, New York, 1976, p. 17, available at [http://www.fantompowa.info/13th%20Tribe.pdf].
4 See: E. Dmitriev, V. Ladeykin, Put k miru na Blizhnem Vostoke, Moscow, 1974.
5 P. Kokovtsov, Evreysko-khazarskaya perepiska v X v., Leningrad, 1932, p. 3.
6 L. Gumilev, Drevnyaya Rus i Velikaya step, Moscow, 1989, p. 67.
7 Ibidem.
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Khazarian khakan."8 As often happens, they all were known under the blanket term "Khazars." For the same reason, the Jews, who for historical reasons lived in Khazaria, were known as Khazars. Elias Bickerman wrote the following in his Institutions de Seleucides: "Those who lived under the king belonged to his state."9 The Torah gives a detailed account of how Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite (Genesis 23:7-19), which does not mean that this Biblical character was a Hittite. He probably lived under a king of the Hittites and paid tribute to him, hence his name. This is as true as the fact that a Jew whose family name is Polyak or Polyakov is not a Pole; neither is a Jew with the name of Deutsch a German.
We all know "how the British colonized India and the French Indochina. They came to these colonies to earn money, do business, etc. After working and serving in India, Indochina, or Africa, they all went back home without becoming Indians, Vietnamese, or Africans."10 With no metropolitan country of their own, the Jews had nowhere to go back to; they had to settle in Atil, the capital of the khaganate, and lived there separately from everyone else. As pagans, the Khazars had numerous gods, but their shamans were not particularly adverse to the religion of the Jews. In fact, there were Persian and Byzantine communities in the khaganate with good experience of dealing with Orientals.
Driven away from Babylon by Persian King Cyr the Great, who captured it in 539 B.C., Jews came to Iran when the Achaemenid Empire was still alive. According to the Book of Esther, they spread to 127 regions and enjoyed extensive rights. Over time, however, the Zoroastrian magi, the adepts of the dominating religion in the Sassanid Empire who feared the mounting impact of Christianity and who were unable to distinguish between Judaism and Christianity, incited Shahanshah Yazdegerd II (438-457) against Christians and Jews not guilty of proselytism. Jews fled the country in great numbers.
Repressions continued and even intensified under Shahanshah Firuz (459-484), so the Jewish exodus continued. Jewish refugees settled in large numbers in the mountains of Daghestan; other groups reached the Volga delta and Atil, the capital of Khazaria. Lev Gumilev offered the following details: "The Jews were involved in the movement of the Mazdakids, which made them even less welcome in Iran of the Sassanids. This happened in 529."11 In his article published in Vestnik drevney istorii, Yu. Solodukho went into even greater detail: "Throughout the centuries the Jewish population of Iran enjoyed a great deal of independence: the Jews were ruled by the exilarch (a hereditary post) who ruled all the other provinces; he was responsible for law and order in the villages and towns where Jews lived, in the markets, etc. As the supreme judge for all the Iranian Jews, he had the right of 'stick and whip' and could pass death sentences even though under the Sassanids he had no such right, at least formally. This official represented the Jewish population and presented its interests to the king and the top crust. He also collected taxes for the state treasury."12 Young and very energetic, Mar-Zutra won the post in fierce clashes over it.
At that time, Sassanian Iran was torn apart by disagreements between the old nobility and the young class of landowners and their ideologist Magus Mazdak. He not merely represented the new class, but also preached equality for all, which gave Shah Kavad a chance to undermine the position of the big landowners. The troubles which swept the country weakened the central government; Mar-Zutra did not waver: "In 522 he organized a riot and, with a unit of 400, set up a small state of his own with the capital in Mehoza, which survived until 529."13 The riot was quenched, Mar-Zutra captured and executed, and his post lost all its previous significance. The Jews involved in the riot had to flee the country.
This means that there were several Jewish exoduses; not welcome in Christian Byzantium, the Jews had to leave the empire. According to Gumilev, "after coming to the Caucasus the Jews forgot
8 L. Gumilev, Otkrytie Khazarii, Moscow, 1966, p. 6.
9 E. Bickerman, Gosudarstvo Selevkidov, Moscow, 1985, p. 6.
10 L. Gumilev, Ot Rusi kRossii, Ekopross, Moscow, 1992, p. 33.
11 Ibid., p. 34.
12 Vestnik drevney istorii, No. 3-4, 1940, p. 134.
13 Ibidem.
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their old way of writing" and many of the Judaic traditions. "They still observed Shabbat and some other rites."14
In Khazaria, a country situated on the main trade routes between the North and the South and the West and the East, the Jews gained the opportunity to be involved in transit trade: "Khazaria was an active trade partner of Persia, Kwarazm, and the Byzantine Empire in the south and with Rus, Great Bulgaria, and Great Perm in the north."15 It should be said that since the Khazarian Khaganate was a country of nomads (cattle breeders), land-tillers, orchard growers, and fishermen, there was a niche for Jewish merchants and artisans. After amassing considerable wealth, the Jews developed political ambitions and a natural desire to convert their money into political clout. Concentrated mainly in the capital where, according to medieval travelers and geographers, "there were no brick buildings, the palace of the khan being the only exception,"16 while all other people lived in felt tents (yurtas) or wooden houses, the relatively small number of Jews became the most powerful and influential group.
This happened because the Ashina dynasty had degenerated into "fainéants" ("do-nothing kings") very much like the Merovingians (the descendants of Clovis) who were replaced by the Caro-lingians (the dynasty started by Charles Martel, the majordomo of the last king of the previous dynasty). His son, Pepin the Short, became king of the Franks. The Carolingians, too, did not escape the fate of the "do-nothing kings": Hugh Capet, Duke of France, was elected as a king and started the Cape-tian dynasty (from which the Valois, Bourbons, and Orleans branched off). Here is another example from the other side of the globe. Since 1192, Japan was ruled by shoguns (military leaders) from the clans of Miyamoto, Fujiwara, and others, the emperors being merely figureheads. The Meiji Revolution of 1868 put an end to this practice.
What should the Jews have done in a similar situation in a country of pagans where they remained the only close-knitted group? They revived their religious and national unity to make the "weak khakan with no real power" a nominal ruler. "The state was ruled by the 'pech' or, rather, malik. He and his advisors were all noble Jews, the real masters of a multiethnic state and members of the most profitable trade enterprises... 'Diarchy' in Khazaria was a huge swindle: once every twelve months the lawful khan was presented to the people" during a pagan festival dedicated to the god Tengri. "The rest of the time the head of the Judaic community was wringing the Khazars and neighboring peoples dry to gather enough money to hire mercenaries to keep the same people in check"17 and to protect the country's borders. This is what Lev Gumilev wrote, probably with good reason. "No one, however, tried to convert the local population to Judaism. The Judaic sages devotedly retained Jehovah's covenant for the chosen people, who have now accumulated all the boons created by their dominant position."18
The same author wrote: "There is another delusion; some think that the Khazars were converted to Judaism. This was impossible in the Middle Ages because Judaism is a gene-theistic rather than a proselytic cult; the few people converted were seen as the 'plague of Israel'."19 This means that the "citizens of free Khazaria" hardly hastened to synagogues to be converted to Judaism: they had enough gods to pray to, including the main god Tengri reincarnated in the khakan. "Foreigners who relied on superficial impressions to write about Khazaria" and who probably met only the Jewish rulers relied on the principle that rulers determine the faith. "They thought that all those they had met were Judaic Khazars, but neither the Jews nor the Khazars had any doubts about this."20 If the Jews in Khazaria were Orthodox Judaists, they were unlikely to chase pagans across their camps and pastures to perform circumcision, find out whether they knew enough Hebrew to read the Torah, or whether they obeyed the halakha and kashruth.
14 L. Gumilev, Ot Rusi k Rossii, p. 34.
15 L. Gumilev, Otkrytie Khazarii, p. 3.
16 Ibidem.
17 L. Gumilev, Drevnyaya Rus i Velikaya step, p. 74.
18 Ibidem.
19 L. Gumilev, Skazanie o khazarskoy dani, available at [www.Litru.ru].
20 L. Gumilev, Drevnyaya Rus i Velikaya step, p. 67.
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It should be said that the hereditary power of the pechs (appointed by the khakans) did not last long. Everything ended in the usual way: to avoid persecutions Jews thronged in great numbers from other countries in search of cozy niches and protection until the patience of the Khazarian nobles snapped: they could not and did not want to tolerate the power of people of an alien race and alien faith any longer. In the capital, the large Jewish community became strong enough to interfere in the tribal affairs of the beks and tarkhans in an effort to replace them with their own people. This is quite natural: at all times the center seeks control over the provinces to build up a strong vertical of power, while the provinces resist for all they are worth. Indeed, if the Khazarian nobles had embraced Judaism, they would have never gone against the co-religionists; this would have been unthinkable. The very fact of a conflict between the ruling alien minority and the Christian, Muslim, and pagan majority shows that Judaism remained limited to the Jews.
There are numerous medieval eyewitness accounts of the Khazarian religious patchwork. Ibn-ul-Aziz, a merchant and traveler, wrote that "the king (but not the khakan.—M.B.) was a Judaist, while his subjects were mostly followers of Muhammad and Christ; pagans were in the minority, but there were even fewer Jews." The same author said that "in 868 (that is, 100 years after the coup accomplished by members of the Jewish community), the Kozars adopted the law of Muhammad."21
Jews in Power
There is no agreement on how the Jews captured power in Khazaria. Joseph ben Aaron wrote in his letter to Hasdai ibn Shaprut that Judaism "descended" on the khaganate from the sky. We cannot accept as true the legend that an angel, which appeared to the khakan as he slept, convinced him to embrace a monotheist religion. This is a more or less common subject exploited by chroniclers of many countries to prove that the faith adopted by the ruler was the true one. Normally, the storytellers described how representatives of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) presented their faiths to the ruler. It seems that in Khazaria this legend was needed to add legitimacy to the military coup perpetrated by the Jews. Academician Dmitry Likhachev "has established that many of the chronicled stories never reflected the truth but were merely borrowed from earlier chronicles or were inventions pure and simple."22 The examples are numerous: Virgil wrote Aeneid to justify the rule of Emperor Augustus by proving that he had descended from Venus. The Khazarian story resurfaced, practically word for word, in many Russian chronicles which described how Prince Vladimir adopted Byzantine Christianity in 988.
As the story goes, representatives of the three Abrahamic religions arrived to present their evidence of the true nature of their faiths. In Ancient Russia, Orthodoxy was planted with sword, axe, and fire in which hundreds of magi and thousands of pagans perished. Khazaria escaped this fate: for a long time all religions lived peacefully side by side. In fact, the Jewish community could not use force to impose one faith on the country: its mercenaries were all Muslims.
Other authors offered other stories of how the Jewish community came to power. Pavel Koko-vtsov, a prominent scholar, wrote: "A certain Jew initiated a return to Judaism; his bravery in battle was duly rewarded: the Khazars elected him their king (pech.—M.B.). Under the influence of his religious wife, he decided to go back to the faith of their ancestors."23 It seems that, having risen so high, the undaunted warrior took this for a sign of God and "changed his Turkish name to Sabriel." This document shows that the khakan did not embrace Judaism, but that the Jews returned to the faith of ancestors. In fact, this was not the first time that the Jews had moved away from Judaism (this
H. Karamzin, Istoriya gosudarstva Rossiyskogo, Vol. I, Kniga, Moscow, 1988, p. 323.
L. Gumilev, Skazanie o khazarskoy dani.
P. Kokovtsov, op. cit.
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happened during the Hellenic Age, at the dawn of Christianity when the situation was highly critical, and during Soviet power). Gradually, the Jewish rulers were identified with the Khazars.
According to Lev Gumilev, "Bulan merely revived the Judaic traditions which the Jews had nearly forgotten and assumed the name Sabriel; in the 9th century it was wise Obadiah who instituted the coup which transferred power to the Jews. Old documents described him as 'a wise and God-fearing man, trusting in his Creator with all his heart'." The new ruler "drove the Turks (but not the khakan.—M.B.), who made up the bulk of the army, out of the country. Obadiah relied on mercenaries—Pechenegs and Guzes (who were Turks.—M.B.)."24 This means that the Jews probably led an uprising of the lower classes against the top crust (something similar happened during the 1917 revolution in Russia).
The same author further wrote: "The Jewish government of Khazaria used mercenaries from Gur-gan, who were paid for the victories they won. After serving their contracted term, many of them came back rich people. Sometimes defeats were punished with death."25 These warriors "won the battles over the Guzes on the River Yaik, over the Bulgars on the Kama, against the Burtases on the River Sakmar, and over the Savirs on the Donets. The Gurgans, however, refused to fight against the Daylemits, their co-religionists. In her article "Etapy stanovlenia iudaizma v Khazarskom kaganate" (The Stages of the Development of Judaism in the Khazarian Khaganate), Z. Lvova quotes the Bulgarian chronicle of Gazi-Baraj Tarihi (1229-1246), to which she refers as the Cambridge Document, which says, "They, the Jews, always fought alongside them and became one people with them."26 The author further wrote: "The only thing which set the Jews apart from the Khazars was their devotion to the Commandment of circumcision and the Shabbat. 'There was no king (pech.—M.B.) in the land of Khazaria; rather 'they would appoint whoever achieved victory in war over themselves as chief officer of the army.' And this went on until the day the Jews, very much as usual, went to war with them and one of them demonstrated an extraordinary force with his sword and put the enemies who attacked the Khazars to flight. According to their custom, the people of Khazaria appointed him their military leader."27
This is a telling fact. First, this Jew "was not a convert, but a Jew by birth." His personal bravery and self-sacrifice were the best confirmation of the loyalty of the Jewish community to the people of Khazaria. As pagans, the Khazars were indifferent to the faith of their hero. The same was registered among other pagan peoples. The Mongolian rulers from the Ilkhanid dynasty (the state of the Hulag-ids) frequently invited their Jewish subjects to rule the country. The names of several of them have reached us: Saad-ad Davla, who was responsible for the state's domestic and foreign policy; Muhaz-zam-ad Davla, head of the administration of Tabriz, and Labid Ben Ari-r Rabi, chief administrator of Azerbaijan. Second, Joseph ben Aaron wrote that the Khazarian khakan adopted Judaism to legitimize power which the Jewish community had usurped through a military coup.
The Cambridge Document also mentioned that the "hero of Khazaria" the people elected as their military leader was "remotely descended from the early Jewish settlers, and his wife Serakh convinced him to adopt Judaism."28 "Under his rule, Jews from Baghdad, Horasan, and the Greek lands (the Byzantine Empire.—M.B) flocked to Khazaria." They supported their co-religionists who came earlier to Khazaria to "strengthen their faith." This is "indirectly confirmed by what the chronicles say about the marriage between Aybat and a Jewess from Bukhara. Judging by what Gazi-Baraj wrote, in Tengrian society a marriage between a noble Khazar, let alone khakan, and a foreign woman of a different faith was impossible."29
How should we treat information about the Khazarian top crust adopting Judaism? We should be brave enough to reject it as false. The same source informs us that "after appropriating the post of
24 L. Gumilev, Ot Rusi k Rossii, p. 35.
25 L. Gumilev, Drevnyaya Rus i Velikaya step, p. 70.
26 Z. Lvova, Etapy stanovleniya iudaizma v Khazarskom kaganate, available at [sir35.ru].
27 Ibidem.
28 Ibidem.
29 Ibidem.
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bek, the Jews finally made this post hereditary. The Jewish top crust had no respect for the provincial pagan nobles who, while remaining nominally the subjects of a Turkic khakan who was close to them religiously and ethnically, fell under the power of ethnically and religiously alien people."30 Conflict was inevitable: one spark was enough to start a major fire. A fire did break out when Ben Amin proved unable to stop the Mojars (probably the Magyars, that is, Hungarians) who were advancing on Atil. "The White Khazars (the elite.—M.B.) closed ranks around the khakan. Ben Amin was deposed and strangled while the loyal clerics were buried alive. Later the Black Khazars put a Tengrian Urus on the throne." According to the chronicles, later "the Muslims prevailed."31 This could be expected because the mercenaries in military service were Gurgans who professed Islam.
The Jews of Khazaria were concentrated in Atil, the seat of the khakan, which is easily explained by the fact that it was a center of transit trade and the main storage place, Khazeran, which shared the island with the capital of Khazaria. The Khazars did not mint their own coins, which meant that commodity-money relations in their state were undeveloped. It should be said that at that time cities were fairly small and sparsely populated. For example, Jerusalem of King David's time covered an area of 1.5 hectares populated by about 2 thousand people. Four hundred years later, shortly before the First Temple was destroyed, there were up to 20 thousand living in the city. First, by that time the Jews had been a settled people for about 600 years and had acquired a developed urban infrastructure and a state with a vertical of power. Second, they were monotheists with a hereditary autocrat to rule them. At the time Jews arrived in their lands, the Khazars had been mostly nomads with their towns looking more like small nomadic camps than anything else protected by a rampart and a paling (rarely by a stone wall). As was already mentioned, the capital could boast only one brick building, the residence of the khakan; merchants, travelers, historians, and geographers never ventured too far: they preferred towns, the hubs of political and economic life, their markets, and the elite with a certain amount of purchasing power and knowledge. This explains why all of them described the capital where the khakan lived rather than the nomadic camps of his subjects.
This is where history was made: he who ruled Atil ruled the country, while the nomadic nobles remained more or less free of central power. It was Genghis Khan alone who managed to rely on iron discipline and his unquestioned authority to blend the Tatar and Mongolian tribes into an empire. At all times tribal chiefs were (and remain) more or less autonomous: today this is true of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and some of the African countries.
Medieval historian, geographer, and traveler Al-Istakhri wrote in his The Book of Roads and Kingdoms that in Khazaria "the Jews were in the minority, while the Muslims and Christians formed the majority."32 This fact alone disproved what Shlomo Sand wrote about mass giur (conversion to Judaism) of the Khazarians, allegedly the ancestors of the East European Jews. The names the Jews of Khazaria chose for their children were very much in tune with the times (the same can be said about Hellenism and the Soviet period, while in America, Jews have mostly American names, in France, French, in the Netherlands, Dutch, in Germany, German, etc.).
Modern Science on Jewish Genes
Not infrequently medieval Georgia had to beat off Khazarian inroads. "A Georgian chronicle, echoing an ancient tradition, identifies them with the hosts of Gog and Magog—'wild men with hideous faces and the manners of wild beasts, eaters of blood'. A well-known medieval historian Movses Kaghankatvatsi [the reputed author of a historiographical work on Caucasian Albania] refers to 'the
30 Ibidem.
31 Ibidem.
N. Karamzin, op. cit., p. 323.
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horrible multitude of Khazars with insolent, broad, lashless faces and long falling hair, like women.' Lastly, Arab geographer Istakhri, one of the main Arab sources, has this to say: 'The Khazars do not resemble the Turks. They are black-haired and are of two kinds, one called the Kara-Khazars [Black Khazars], who are swarthy verging on deep black as if they were a kind of Indian, and the white kind [Ak-Khazars], who are strikingly handsome."33 We can surmise that the tribes described under the blanket ethnonym of "Khazars" consisted of several ethnic groups such as Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Bashkirs, Burtases, Sabirs, Uyghurs, Utughurs, Kutrigurs, Kabars, etc., who probably belonged to different races.
When it comes to genetics the blunders of Shlomo Sand become even clearer. There are no Bashkirian, Hunnic, or Uyghur types (or of any other tribe) among the Jews. I have in mind the Israelis born from two Semitic parents and whose Semitic roots go back ten generations. The latest finding proved that all Jews, irrespective of the country they live in, descended from the Jews of the Middle East. According to latest scientific data, fifty generations (at least 1,000 years) are needed for a population to become half mixed with another population to produce a new line. The Khazarian Khaganate lived under Jewish rule for slightly over 150 years, that is, not long enough to produce a new line. In fact, the Jews comprised no more that 10 percent of the Atil population.
The island on which the capital stood surrounded with orchards, melon fields, and fisheries was fairly large, yet its population could not have been over 5 to 6 thousand. This means that 500-600 Jews could hardly change the ethnogenesis of the European Jewry even if they mingled with the locals. It should be said that the Jews are descendants of the orthodox minority, which for centuries practically never married outside their communities. Science confirms this. In her article "Stvolovye kletki ne mogut skryt svoyu natsionalnost" (The Stem Cells Cannot Conceal Their Nationality), A. Timosh-enko wrote: "There is a genetic passport of sorts created by nature itself which proves that members of different nations demonstrate different resistance to disease and which is responsible for different appearances and biochemical specifics. This is how genome works. For example, the very white skin typical of people of Northern Europe or the ability to digest lactose are the result of genetic selection which has been going on for hundreds of generations."34
In his book Know Your Genes, American academic Aubrey Milunsky writes about diseases typical of certain nations: "The chances that a child of yours will suffer or carry a hereditary disease" to a great, if not determining, degree depends on your ethnic origin. A high frequency of some diseases (Tay-Sachs disease and familial dysautonomia) is found among Jews. "Blacks in the United States carrying the sickle cell gene brought it with them from Africa. Now some 1 in 10 black Americans are carriers of this disorder, and a child with sickle cell anemia occurs in about 1 in 400 black births. Cystic fibrosis is the most common genetic killer of white children. About 1 in every 2,500 is born with it, and 1 in every 25 whites is a carrier, Cystic fibrosis in blacks or Orientals is positively rare. When it does occur, it is almost invariably related to white admixture somewhere in family history."35
The American Journal of Human Genetics (3 June, 2010 issue) carried an article "Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry;" the project excluded the Ethiopians known as falasha since they have nothing in common with the Jews as a nation. They can be accepted as a marginal sect which preaches a mixture of early Christianity and pre-Talmud Judaism. Ethnically, they belong to the Chad-Kushic group of the Negroid race.
To dot all the "i"s, let me say that Dr. Gil Atzmon, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, Prof. Edward Burns, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY; Prof. Harry Ostrer, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY, and Eitan Friedman, Tel-Aviv University, carried out a full-scale survey of the three larg-
33
34 A. Timoshenko, "Stvolovye kletki ne mogut skryt svoyu natsionalnost," available at [www.newsland.ru].
1 A. Koestler, op. cit., p. 20. A. Timoshenko, "Stvolovye
A. Milunsky, Know Your Genes, Houghtom Mifflin, 1977, p. 71.
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est Jewish populations: the Ashkenazi (the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe), Sephardic (the Jews of Italy, Greece, and Turkey), and Mizrahi (the Jews of Iran, Iraq, and Syria). The genetic material was obtained from 237 persons living in New York, Seattle, Athens, Rome, and Israel, each of whom was a descendant of one of the groups.
To better understand the relatedness of current Jewish groups, Dr. Ostrer and his colleagues performed a genome wide analysis of 418 representatives of non-Jewish groups. The researchers identified distinct Jewish population clusters each exhibiting a shared Middle Eastern ancestry which set them apart from the non-Jewish population (these distinctions date back to hoary antiquity). Genetic analysis demonstrated that the two major groups, Middle Eastern Jews and European Jews, were timed to have diverged from each other approximately 2,500 years ago. Dr. Ostrer noted, "The study supports the idea of a Jewish people linked by a shared genetic history."36
Blue eyes and blond hair among the Ashkenazi are the result of a recessive gene which frequently betrays itself in isolated populations such as the Nuristanis of Afghanistan (160 thousand of them live high up in the mountains) and people living in mountain auls in Daghestan. The above-mentioned authors have given dates for when the main Jewish populations began to form as independent communities.
The Iranian and Iraqi Jews formed independent communities in Babylon and the Persian Empire in the 6th and 4th centuries B.C., respectively. The Jewish populations in the Balkans, Italy, North Africa, and Syria appeared in Antiquity; later they mixed with Sephardic Jews who, after being evicted from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century, came to the Balkans. The Ashkenazi Jews were genetically incredibly homogenous, which means that they all descended from an extremely small group. The scholars concluded that, although divided into several population groups, the Jews of the world have common origins.37 The Mountain Jews belong to the Jewish population of the world; "having studied the Jews who moved to the Caucasus from Hither Asia," anthropologist L. Oshanin concluded that "all of them exhibited obvious specifics of the Hither Asian type."38 Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending have demonstrated that "the Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group," which they explained by "disease clusters, groups of biochemically related mutations ... that have physiological effects that could increase intelligence ... and are not common in adjacent populations."39
This reliably disproves the Khazarian theory of the origin of the Ashkenazi Jews as another unfounded hypothesis.
Conclusion
History is a living science which changes as time goes on and produces more and more knowledge. New facts compel us to reassess what looked to be unassailable truths. Today we know that historical chronicles and legends require a critical approach because, even in the distant past, ideology warped historical truths, negative information was suppressed, and facts and figures were distorted.
Most rulers shared a very understandable human failing: they wanted to look great in the eyes of the posterity and bought the services of chroniclers and court poets. Each of them hoped to go down
36 N. Lebedev, "Genetiki dokazali edinstvo evreev," available at [www.jewish.ru] (see also: [http:// www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100603123707.htm]).
37 See: N. Lebedev, op. cit.
38 Quoted from: R. Kasimova, Antrologicheskie issledovania sovremennogo naseleniya Azerbaidzhanskoy SSR, Baku, 1975, p. 45.
39 G. Cochran, J. Hardy, H. Harpending, "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence," Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA, available at [http://harpending.humanevo.utah.edu/Documents/ ashkiq.webpub.pdf].
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in history as a wise and fair "father of all the tribes and peoples" who had the prosperity of his subjects close at heart.
This is what happened to our recent past, which is being successfully revised; the same should be done with the history of the distant past—much in it should be assessed in line with current knowledge and technology. We should always bear in mind that the migration processes that occurred in antiquity and the Middle Ages differed little from what we see today. At that time, they were accompanied both by conquests of territories and peoples, as well as by the peaceful settlement of nomad cattle breeders, merchants, and artisans in new places. In fact, assimilation at that time and today was very similar: either the newcomers completely assimilated or they remained isolated and rejected. Aliens were feared and avoided; sometimes they were elevated to high posts to serve the new country. Contrary to religious bans, biological assimilation went on, albeit on a small scale.
This has nothing to do with Judaism, which was never inclined to proselytism (with the exception of one case when under Maccabees Judaism was imposed on a small tribe of Edomites closely related to the Jews). The Jews avoided proselytism at all times and regardless of where they lived. This means that the small Judaic community of Khazaria could hardly have imposed its religion on the subjects of the Khazarian khakan.
