Who does not love a treasure trove hunt? Who were the Khazars? Why do creative historians, linguists, and archeologists continue to theorize about them and their relations with surrounding Slavic peoples? These and other provocative questions are raised in this second issue featuring the famed Khazars, a people of probable Turkic background with some Jewish religious identity among the elite. The more one delves into these questions, analyzing a considerable and expanding literature on the Khazar Khanate, the clearer it becomes that more than a century of research into historical documents, linguistic evidence, and the archeological record has failed to fill in all the gaps. This makes Khazar studies fertile ground for further research and sometimes for the pitfalls of using history to purvey memory and identity politics burdened with the emotional biases of excessive nationalism.Footnote1
Our previous issue established that the Khazar Khanate, dated from the late eighth–tenth centuries, was multiethnic, multiconfessional, and relatively far flung. It also revealed its core region of the Volga–Don territories to be rife with violent competitions for power in the Khazar time frame. In this issue we dig deeper into the implications of these struggles for hegemony, and into why the Khazar legacy continues to be debated. While at first glance the specific questions the featured authors are asking may seem academic and without current political resonance, patterns of advocacy are revealed as readers continue through the issue.
Did the Khazars have “dual power?” Established historian Igor G. Semenov of Dagestan, whose article on ethnopolitics in Khazaria began our previous issue, continues here by asking this question and exploring the leadership title “Khazar-Elteber.” He concludes that the famous Turkic “dual power” system of separating military and political-administrative leadership may have been adapted by the Khazars of the Volga-Don territories. A large and eclectic ethnopolitical confederation may have grown out of an earlier Western Turkic Khanate, and after 651 C.E. been headed by members of an originally Central Asian Ashina dynasty. Although Semenov marshals historical document and linguistic sources, he must inevitably deal with fragmentary evidence. His thesis linking the Khazars to the Ashina dynasty is controversial because it downplays the Jewish connections or identity of the Khazars and focuses on “a political consolidation around the throne of the khan, whose main [but not only] bulwark was the Khazars.”
Did Slavic tribes pay tribute to the Khazars? Sergei P. Shchavelev of Kursk uses treasure hoards found in Khazar territory and its fringes to speculate on why such hoards, consisting of bundled coins (silver and gold, sometimes Arabic), jewelry, and other goods, would have been hidden and how they would have been used. He cites narratives from the Rus’ chronicles to document that tribute in furs and “white” (bright) coins were paid by Slavic villagers to the Khazar Khanate. He discusses why supposed payments of “swords” may have been misunderstood, and how complex and changing relationships between Turkic and Slavic peoples may have included symbiosis as well as warfare. Shchavelev’s work is controversial in part because it has been difficult for some anti-Semitic Russian and Ukrainian historians to accept that tribute was paid by their ancestors to Khazars associated with Judaism.
Did the “Judeo-Khazars” found Kiev, today’s capital of Ukraine and ancient center of Kievan Rus’? Peter P. Tolochko, a former director of Kiev’s elite Academy of Sciences Archeological Institute, emphatically rejects this “myth” in an article whose tone our editor Leslie English called “snarky.” Indeed, his article reads as a tossed-off-in-anger diatribe, all the more remarkable given his status in the field. While the tone of his article is a model of how to undermine one’s own case, aspects of his arguments need to be considered seriously. Ironically, the main object of his scorn is the late historian Omeljan Pritsak, head of Harvard’s Ukrainian Institute, and one of my former mentors.Footnote2 Tolochko questions that Kiev could have been named for a Khazar vezir [political leader] called Kuy [Kuya], as suggested by Pritsak on the basis of linguistic deciphering. Tolochko also doubts the existence of a “Hebrew Letter” from the tenth century found in Kiev, although many scholars have accepted it. However, he has a point that Kiev was founded earlier than the tenth century, according to archeological finds that date it as a population center to at least the ninth century. A major debate is whether Kiev was fortified around the same time (830s) as Sarkel on the Lower Don. Sarkel was a Khazar fort-town captured by Prince Sviatoslav of Kievan Rus’ in the 960s. Tolochko insists that “If anything, Kiev would have been a frontier fortress of the Slavs.” He resurrects the debate about tribute paying to the Khazars. Significantly, he acknowledges that a small number of Khazar successors, perhaps remnants of the khanate, may have lived in the oldest of Kiev’s districts, called Old Kiev Hill.Footnote3
Who were the Khazars, and where did they come from before arriving in the Volga–Don region? This question returns us to the perennially awkward problem of correlating archeological finds with the ethnic backgrounds of specific peoples. Damir Z. Khairetdinov, the distinguished head of the Moscow Islamic University, tackles Khazar and Tatar “ethnogenesis” with focus on the Mishars [also called Nizhgars] of the Oka River in today’s Nizhnii Novgorod region. Using historical documents, folk narratives, and linguistics, he makes the case that some Mishars were related to the Burtas. In addition to Islamic practices, the Burtas were associated with Ancient Iranian cults and possibly Judaism. Mishar and Burtas ancestors “may have adopted Judaism as a consequence of close contacts with Khazars.” Fascinatingly, Khairetdinov mentions a fortress-settlement precursor to Nizhnii Novgorod, possibly founded by a military leader called both Abram and Ibrahim, and that “Abram’s town” may have been the “last point on the Volga trade route found within Khazaria’s sphere of influence.” His analysis can be compared to note 18 of our author Sergei Shchavelev, who points out that North Caucasus excavations in the Caspian–Coastal Dagestan region have identified “materials specifically related to a Khazar ethnos,” but that nonetheless their diffuse khanate would have been multiethnic. Schchavelev’s and Khairetdinov’s theories are plausible but controversial because it is tricky to identify ethnic groups for the time frame discussed, as well as to correlate ethnicity and religion. Their data and perspectives problematize older theories of Arthur Koestler and others that claim some Khazars were ancestors of Ashkenazy Jews, a “the thirteenth tribe.”Footnote4
Does new data about Caucasus and Central Asian trade routes further our understanding of the Khazar Khanate and its roots? It is likely that the Khazar Empire at its peak, whether through trade, cultural persuasion, military exploits, or everyday hegemony involving tribute, extended its influence quite far, some have claimed through the entire region between the Caspian and the Black Seas.Footnote5
Our finale article reanalyzing the Khazar Khanate is by Irina G. Ravich and Valerii S. Flërov, Academy of Sciences archeologists based in Moscow. Using a fairly narrow topic focused on two exciting finds of high-tin forged “oriental” bronzes, they point out that everything elegant and unusual in a given archeological site need not have come to its final home via trade. Gifts, tribute, and trinkets, including chess pieces no longer used for chess, may have passed through many hands over time and space. The presence of bronzes associated with Central Asia found in Khazaria fortified settlements and burials guarantees neither accurate dating of a Khazar site nor kinship of the Khazars with Central Asians. But they do provide insights into the ebb and flow of prestige objects over considerable distances.
In sum, the sharpest debates about the Khazars center on their Jewishness, because their association with the Jewish religion has made them a target of those who would conflate ethnicity with religion and succumb to retrospective anti-Semitism. Other controversies follow, over whether an originally steppe nomadic Turkic people could have been capable of sustained tribute-taking from or even enslaving of Slavic peoples. For Russian or Ukrainian nationalists, it is painful to consider Kiev, the ancient revered capital of Eastern Orthodox Rus’, as having a Khazar component among its founders. We still do not know the degree of Judaism within the Khazar Khanate, exactly whence the Khazars came, and whether their lost capital “Itil [Atil, Saksin]” can be found in the earliest layers of the Samosdelka site in the Volga delta.Footnote6 As we learn more through further archeological exploration, uncovering treasures as diverse as tribute coins, bronzes, menorahs or their images, other Jewish symbols, and everyday objects, we can only hope that the “archeology of power and politics” does not blind us to as yet undiscovered new correlations and perspectives.Footnote7
Notes
1. See our previous issue and my introduction for context: Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, ed., “The Khazar Khanate Revisited,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, vol 57, no. 3. The two issues on Khazar history are meant to be read as a set.For sensitivity to nationalist abuses of history, see especially Victor A. Shnirelman, Khazarskii Mif: Ideologiia politicheskogo radikalizma v Rossii i ee istoki (Moscow, Jerusalem: Mosti Kul’tury, 2012); V.A. Shnirelman “The Story of a Euphemism: The Khazars in Russian Nationalist Literature,” Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 8, Uralic and Central Asian Studies, 2007, vol.17, pp. 353–72. For important perspective and references, see Kevin Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018, 3rd edition); and K.A. Brook’s frequently updated bibliography on the Khazars: http://www.khazaria.com/khazar-biblio/sec3.html. See also the work of distinguished scholar of Khazaria Peter Benjamin Golden, especially P.B. Golden, Turks and Khazars: Origins, Institutions, and Interactions in Pre-Mongol Eurasia (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010); Peter Benjamin Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai, and Andras Róna-Tas, eds. The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2007, Handbook of Oriental Studies 17).
2. See Omeljan Pritsak, “The Khazar Kingdom’s Conversion to Judaism,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 1978, 2; and Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). Another author who triggered Tolochko’s ire is Michael (Menashe) Goldelman. See M. Gol’del’mann, “Khazary,” Kratkaia Evreiskaia entsiklopediia 1999; and Michael Goldelman, “On the Location of the Khazarian City of Al-Bayda,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi, 1998–99, vol. 10.
3. For perspective on Prince Sviatoslav, his times and politicized memory, see Viktor Shnirel’man, “Kniaz’ Sviatoslave i politika pamiati,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 2017, no. 2 (112), pp. 35–50 (http://www.nlobooks.ru/node/8676).
4. On Arthur Koestler’s famous “thirteenth tribe” theory, written to dispel the idea that all Jews are Israelites and thus to diffuse anti-Semitism, see Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (London: Hutchinson [Penguin Random House], 1976 or later editions). For a balanced critique, see Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (London: Random House, 2009). Shchavelev’s optimism that Dagestan coastal evidence proves the presence of a “Khazar ethnos” derives especially from the work of M.G. Magomedov, Khazary na Kavkaze (Makhachkala: Dagestanskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1994). For further sources and perspective, see www.turklib.ru - Turkistan Library; and the scholarship of Boris Zhivkov, Khazaria in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, trans. Daria Manova (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015). Chapter five of Zhivkov’s work is “The Internal Ethnic Communities in Khazaria,” pp. 221–67.
5. Compare Boris Zhivkov, Khazaria in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, trans. Daria Manova (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015).
6. I am grateful to Kevin Alan Brook for contacting me (emails October 27, 2018) after our first issue on the Khazars appeared (“The Khazar Khanate Revisited,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, vol 57, no. 3) and for explaining that the third edition of his book The Jews of Khazaria (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018, 3rd edition) updates, among many points, the evidence for the earliest layer of Samosdelka being associated with the Khazar period. He also notes that a pot found at Mariupol on the Northern Azov Sea within the Khazar time frame has an image of a menorah. On this find in relation to other religions of Khazaria, see Valerij S. Flërov, “Iudaizm, khristianstvo, islam v khazarskom kaganate po arkheologicheskim dannym (kratkiy obzor),” Prinosi kŭm bŭlgarskata arheologiia, 2018, vol. 8, pp. 139–45.
7. I borrow the felicitous phrase in quotes from C. Hartley, G. Yazicioğlu, and A. Smith, eds., The Archaeology of Power and Politics in Eurasia: Regimes and Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).