Arthur Koestler; The Thirteenth TribePART ONE
Rise and Fall of the Khazars | II
CONVERSION | III
DECLINE | IV
FALL | PART TWO
The Heritage | VI
WHERE FROM? | VII
CROSS-CURRENTS | VIII
RACE AND MYTH | Appendices | APPENDIX IV
SOME IMPLICATIONS - ISRAEL AND THE
DIASPORA | SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY |
REFERENCES
THE KHAZAR EMPIRE AND ITS HERITAGE
Appendices
APPENDIX I
A NOTE ON SPELLING
THE spelling in this book is
consistently inconsistent. It is consistent in so far as, where I have quoted
other authors, I have preserved their own spelling of proper names (what else
can you do?); this led to the apparent inconsistency that the same person,
town or tribe is often spelt differently in different passages. Hence Kazar,
Khazar, Chazar, Chozar, Chozr, etc.; but also Ibn Fadlan and ibn-Fadlan; Al
Masudi and al-Masudi. As for my own text, I have adopted that particular
spelling which seemed to me the least bewildering to English-speaking readers
who do not happen to be professional orientalists.
lT.
E. Lawrence was a brilliant orientalist, but he was as ruthless in his
spelling as he was in raiding Turkish garrisons. His brother, A. W. Lawrence,
explained in his preface to Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
The spelling of Arabic names varies
greatly in all editions, and I have made no alterations. It should be
explained that only three vowels are recognized in Arabic, and that some of
the consonants have no equivalents in English. The general practice of
orientalists in recent years has been to adopt one of the various sets of
conventional signs for the letters and vowel marks of the Arabic alphabet,
transliterating Mohamed as Muhammad, muezzin as mu’edhdhin, and Koran as
Qur’an or Kur’an. This method is useful to those who know what it means but
this book follows the old fashion of writing the best phonetic approximations
according to ordinary English spelling.
He then prints a list of publisher’s
queries re spelling, and T. F. Lawrence’s answers; for instance:
lQuery:
“Slip [galley sheet] 20. Nuri, Emir of the Ruwalla, belongs to the ‘chief
family of the Rualla’. On Slip 23 ‘Rualla horse’, and Slip 38, ‘killed one
Rueli’. In all later slips ‘Rualla’.”
lAnswer:
“should have also used Ruwala and Ruala.”
lQuery:
“Slip 47. Jedha, the she-camel, was Jedhah on Slip 40.”
lAnswer:
“she was a splendid beast.”
lQuery:
“Slip 78. Sherif Abd el Mayin of Slip 68 becomes el Main, el Mayein, el
Muein, el Mayin, and el Muyein.”
lAnswer:
“Good egg. I call this really ingenious.”
lIf
such are the difficulties of transcribing modern Arabic, confusion becomes
worse confounded when orientalists turn to mediaeval texts, which pose
additional problems owing to mutilations by careless copyists. The first
English translation of “Ebn Haukal” (or ibn-Hawkal) was published AD 1800 by
Sir William Ouseley, Knt. LL.D.
In his preface, Sir William, an eminent orientalist, uttered this touching cri de cœur:
Of the difficulties arising from an
irregular combination of letters, the confusion of one word with another, and
the total omission, in some lines, of the diacritical points, I should not
complain, because habit and persevering attention have enabled me to surmount
them in passages of general description, or sentences of common construction;
but in the names of persons or of places never before seen or heard of, and
which the context could not assist in deciphering, when the diacritical
points were omitted, conjecture alone could supply them, or collation with a
more perfect manuscript.…
lNotwithstanding
what I have just said, and although the most learned writers on Hebrew,
Arabick, and Persian Literature, have made observations on the same subject,
it may perhaps, be necessary to demonstrate, by a particular example, the
extraordinary influence of those diacritical points [frequently omitted by
copyists]. lOne
example will suffice — Let us suppose the three letters forming the name
Tibbet to be divested of their diacritical points. The first character may be
rendered, by the application of one point above, an N; of two points a T, of
three points a TH or S; if one point is placed under, it becomes a B — if two
points, a Y and if three points, a P. In like manner the second character may
be affected, and the third character may be, according to the addition of
points, rendered a B, P, T, and TH, or S.
APPENDIX II
A NOTE ON SOURCES
(A) ANCIENT SOURCES
OUR knowledge of Khazar history is
mainly derived from Arab, Byzantine, Russian and Hebrew sources, with
corroborative evidence of Persian, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian and Turkish
origin. I shall comment only on some of the major sources.
1.
Arabic
The early Arabic historians differ from
all others in the unique form of their compositions. Each event is related in
the words of eye-witnesses or contemporaries, transmitted to the final
narrator through a chain of intermediate reporters, each of whom passed on
the original report to his successor. Often the same account is given in two
or more slightly divergent forms, which have come down through different
chains of reporters. Often, too, one event or one important detail is told in
several ways on the basis of several contemporary statements transmitted to
the final narrator through distinct lines of tradition.… The principle still
is that what has been well said once need not be told again in other words.
The writer, therefore, keeps as close as he can to the letter of his sources,
so that quite a late writer often reproduces the very words of the first
narrator.…
Thus the two classic authorities in
the field, H. A. R. Gibb and M.J. de Goeje, in their joint article on Arab
historiography in earlier editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.[254]
It explains the excruciating difficulties in tracing an original source which
as often as not is lost — through the successive versions of later
historians, compilers and plagiarists. It makes it frequently impossible to
put a date on an episode or a description of the state of affairs in a given
country; and the uncertainty of dating may range over a whole century in
passages where the author gives an account in the present tense without a
clear indication that he is quoting some source in the distant past. Add to
this the difficulties of identifying persons, tribes and places, owing to the
confusion over spelling, plus the vagaries of copyists, and the result is a
jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing, others of extraneous origin
thrown in, and only the bare outlines of the picture discernible.
lThe
principal Arabic accounts of Khazaria, most frequently quoted in these pages,
are by Ibn Fadlan, al-Istakhri, Ibn Hawkal and al-Masudi. But only a few of
them can be called “primary” sources, such as Ibn Fadlan who speaks from
first-hand experience. Ibn Hawkal’s account, for instance, written circa
977, is based almost entirely on Istakhri’s, written around 932; which in
turn is supposed to be based on a lost work by the geographer el-Balkhi, who
wrote around 921.
lAbout
the lives of these scholars, and the quality of their scholarship we know
very little. Ibn Fadlan, the diplomat and astute observer, is the one who
stands out most vividly. Nevertheless, as we move along the chain through the
tenth century, we can observe successive stages in the evolution of the young
science of historiography. El-Balkhi, the first in the chain, marks the
beginning of the classical school of Arab Geography, in which the main
emphasis is on maps, while the descriptive text is of secondary importance.
Istakhri shows a marked improvement with a shift of emphasis from maps to
text. (About his life nothing is known; and what survives of his writings is
apparently only a synopsis of a larger work.) With Ibn Hawkal (about whom we
only know that he was a travelling merchant and missionary) a decisive
advance is reached: the text is no longer a commentary on the maps (as in
Balkhi, and still partly in Istakhri), but becomes a narrative in its own
right. lLastly
with Yakut (1179-1229) we reach, two centuries later, the age of the
compilers and encyclopaedists. About him we know at least that he was born in
Greece, and sold as a boy on the slave market in Baghdad to a merchant who
treated him kindly and used him as a kind of commercial traveller. After his
manumission he became an itinerant bookseller and eventually settled in
Mossul, where he wrote his great encyclopaedia of geography and history. This
important work includes both Istakhri’s and Ibn Fadlan’s account of the
Khazars. But, alas, Yakut mistakenly attributes Istakhri’s narrative also to
Ibn Fadlan. As the two narratives differ on important points, their
attribution to the same author produced various absurdities, with the result
that Ibn Fadlan became somewhat discredited in the eyes of modern historians.
lBut
events took a different turn with the discovery of the full text of Ibn
Fadlan’s report on an ancient manuscript in Meshhed, Persia. The discovery,
which created a sensation among orientalists, was made in 1923 by Dr Zeki
Validi Togan (about whom more below). It not only confirmed the authenticity
of the sections of Ibn Fadlan’s report on the Khazars quoted by Yakut, but
also contained passages omitted by Yakut which were thus previously unknown.
Moreover, after the confusion created by Yakut, Ibn Fadlan and Istakhri/Ibn
Hawkal were now recognized as independent sources which mutually corroborated
each other. lThe
same corroborative value attaches to the reports of Ibn Rusta, al-Bekri or
Gardezi, which I had little occasion to quote precisely because their
contents are essentially similar to the main sources.
lAnother,
apparently independent source was al-Masudi (died circa 956), known as
“the Arab Herodotus”. He was a restless traveller, of insatiable curiosity,
but modern Arab historians seem to take a rather jaundiced view of him. Thus
the Encyclopaedia of Islam says that his travels were motivated “by a strong
desire for knowledge. But this was superficial and not deep. He never went
into original sources but contented himself with superficial enquiries and
accepted tales and legends without criticism.”
lBut
this could just as well be said of other mediaeval historiographers,
Christian or Arab.
2.
Byzantine
Among Byzantine sources, by far the
most valuable is Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus’s De Adnimistrando
Imperio, written about 950. It is important not only because of the
information it contains about the Khazars themselves (and particularly about
their relationship with the Magyars), but because of the data it provides on
the Rus and the people of the northern steppes.
Constantine (904-59) the scholar-emperor was a fascinating character — no
wonder Arnold Toynbee confessed to have “lost his heart” to him[255]
— a love-affair with the past that started in his undergraduate days. The
eventual result was Toynbee’s monumental Constantine Porphyrogenitus and
his World, published in 1973, when the author was eighty-four. As the
title indicates, the emphasis is as much on Constantine’s personality and
work as on the conditions of the world in which he — and the Khazars — lived.
lYet
Toynbee’s admiration for Constantine did not make him overlook the Emperor’s
limitations as a scholar: “The information assembled in the De
Administrando Imperio has been gathered at different dates from different
sources, and the product is not a book in which the materials have been
digested and co-ordinated by an author; it is a collection of files which
have been edited only perfunctorily.”[256]
And later on: “De Administrando Imperio and De Caeromoniis, in
the state in which Constantine bequeathed them to posterity, will strike most
readers as being in lamentable confusion.”[257]
(Constantine himself was touchingly convinced that De Caeromoniis was
a “technical masterpiece” besides being “a monument of exact scholarship and
a labour of love”[258].)
Similar criticisms had been voiced earlier by Bury,[259]
and by Macartney, trying to sort out Constantine’s contradictory statements
about the Magyar migrations:
l“…We
shall do well to remember the composition of the De Administrando Imperio
— a series of notes from the most various sources, often duplicating one
another, often contradicting one another, and tacked together with the
roughest of editing.”[260]
lBut
we must beware of bathwaterism — throwing the baby away with the water, as
scholarly critics are sometimes apt to do. Constantine was privileged as no
other historian to explore the Imperial archives and to receive first-hand
reports from his officials and envoys returning from missions abroad. When
handled with caution, and in conjunction with other sources, De
Administrando throws much valuable light on that dark period.
3.
Russian
Apart from orally transmitted
folklore, legends and songs (such as the “Lay of Igor’s Host”), the earliest
written source in Russian is the Povezt Vremennikh Let, literally
“Tale of Bygone Years”, variously referred to by different authors as The
Russian Primary Chronicle, The Old Russian Chronicle, The
Russian Chronicle, Pseudo-Nestor, or The Book of Annals. It
is a compilation, made in the first half of the twelfth century, of the
edited versions of earlier chronicles dating back to the beginning of the
eleventh, but incorporating even earlier traditions and records. It may
therefore, as Vernadsky[261]
says, “contain fragments of authentic information even with regard to the
period from the seventh to the tenth century” — a period vital to Khazar
history. The principal compiler and editor of the work was probably the
learned monk Nestor (b. 1056) in the Monastery of the Crypt in Kiev, though
this is a matter of controversy among experts (hence “Pesudo-Nestor”).
Questions of authorship apart, the Povezt is an invaluable (though not
infallible) guide for the period that it covers. Unfortunately, it stops with
the year 1112, just at the beginning of the Khazars’ mysterious vanishing
act. lThe
mediaeval Hebrew sources on Khazaria will be discussed in Appendix III.
(B) MODERN LITERATURE
It would be presumptuous to comment
on the modern historians of repute quoted in these pages, such as Toynbee or
Bury, Vernadsky, Baron, Macartney, etc. — who have written on some aspect of
Khazar history. The following remarks are confmed to those authors whose
writings are of central importance to the problem, but who are known only to
a specially interested part of the public.
lForemost
among these are the late Professor Paul F. Kahle, and his former pupil,
Douglas Morton Dunlop, at the time of writing Professor of Middle Eastern
History at Columbia University.
lPaul
Eric Kahle (1875-1965) was one of Europe’s leading orientalists and masoretic
scholars. He was born in East Prussia, was ordained a Lutheran Minister, and
spent six years as a Pastor in Cairo. He subsequently taught at various
German universities and in 1923 became Director of the famous Oriental
Seminar in the University of Bonn, an international centre of study which
attracted orientalists from all over the world. “There can be no doubt”,
Kahle wrote,[262]
“that the international character of the Seminar, its staff, its students and
its visitors, was the best protection against Nazi influence and enabled us
to go on with our work undisturbed during nearly six years of Nazi regime in
Germany.… I was for years the only Professor in Germany who had a Jew, a
Polish Rabbi, as assistant.”
lNo
wonder that, in spite of his impeccable Aryan descent, Kahle was finally
forced to emigrate in 1938. He settled in Oxford, where he received two
additional doctorates (in philosophy and theology). In 1963 he returned to
his beloved Bonn, where he died in 1965. The British Museum catalogue has
twenty-seven titles to his credit, among them The Cairo Geniza and Studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
lAmong
Kahle’s students before the war in Bonn was the young orientalist D. M.
Dunlop. lKahle
was deeply interested in Khazar history. When the Belgian historian Professor
Henri Grégoire published an article in 1937 questioning the authenticity of
the “Khazar Correspondence”,[263]
Kahle took him to task: “I indicated to Grégoire a number of points in which
he could not be right, and I had the chance of discussing all the problems
with him when he visited me in Bonn in December 1937. We decided to make a
great joint publication — but political developments made the plan
impracticable. So I proposed to a former Bonn pupil of mine, D. M. Dunlop,
that he should take over the work instead. He was a scholar able to deal both
with Hebrew and Arabic sources, knew many other languages and had the
critical training for so difficult a task.”[264]
The result of this scholarly transaction was Dunlop’s The History of the
Jewish Khazars, published in 1954 by the Princeton University Press.
Apart from being an invaluable sourcebook on Khazar history, it provides new
evidence for the authenticity of the Correspondence (see Appendix III), which
Kahle fully endorsed.[265]
Incidentally, Professor Dunlop, born in 1909, is the son of a Scottish
divine, and his hobbies are listed in Who’s Who as “hill-walking and Scottish
history”. Thus the two principal apologists of Khazar Judaism in our times
were good Protestants with an ecclesiastic, Nordic background.
lAnother
pupil of Kahle’s with a totally different background, was Ahmed Zeki Validi
Togan, the discoverer of the Meshhed manuscript of Ibn Fadlan’s journey
around Khazaria. To do justice to this picturesque character, I can do no
better than to quote from Kahle’s memoirs:[266]
Several very prominent Orientals
belonged to the staff of the [Bonn] Seminar. Among them I may mention Dr Zeki
Validi, a special protégé of Sir Aurel Stein, a Bashkir who had made his
studies at Kazan University, and already before the first War had been
engaged in research work at the Petersburg Academy. During the War and after
he had been active as leader of the Bashkir-Armee [allied to the
Bolshevists], which had been largely created by him. He had been a member of
the Russian Duma, and had belonged for some time to the Committee of Six,
among whom there were Lenin, Stalin and Trotzki. Later he came into conflict
with the Bolshevists and escaped to Persia. As an expert on Turkish —
Bashkirian being a Turkish language — he became in 1924 adviser to Mustafa
Kemal’s Ministry of Education in Ankara, and later Professor of Turkish in
Stambul University. After seven years, when asked, with the other Professors
in Stambul, to teach that all civilisation in the world comes from the Turks,
he resigned, went to Vienna and studied Mediaeval History under Professor
Dopsch. After two years he got his doctor degree with an excellent thesis on
Ibn Fadlan’s journey to the Northern Bulgars, Turks and Khazars, the Arabic
text of which he had discovered in a MS. in Meshhed. I later published his
book in the “Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes”. From Vienna I
engaged him as Lecturer and later Honorar Professor for Bonn. He was a
real scholar, a man of wide knowledge, always ready to learn, and
collaboration with him was very fruitful. In 1938 he went back to Turkey and
again became Professor of Turkish in Stambul University.
Yet another impressive figure in a
different way, was Hugo Freiherr von Kutschera (1847-1910), one of the early
propounders of the theory of the Khazar origin of Eastern Jewry. The son of a
high-ranking Austrian civil servant, he was destined to a diplomatic career,
and studied at the Oriental Academy in Vienna, where he became an expert
linguist, mastering Turkish, Arabic, Persian and other Eastern languages.
After serving as an attaché at the Austro-Hungarian Embassy in
Constantinople, he became in 1882 Director of Administration in Sarajevo of
the provinces of Bosnia-Hercegovina, recently occupied by Austro-Hungary. His
familiarity with oriental ways of life made him a popular figure among the
Muslims of Bosnia and contributed to the (relative) pacification of the
province. He was rewarded with the title of Freiherr (Baron) and various
other honours. lAfter
his retirement, in 1909, he devoted his days to his lifelong hobby, the
connection between European Jewry and the Khazars. Already as a young man he
had been struck by the contrast between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews in Turkey
and in the Balkans; his study of the ancient sources on the history of the
Khazars led to a growing conviction that they provided at least a partial
answer to the problem. He was an amateur historian (though a
quasi-professional linguist), but his erudition was remarkable; there is
hardly an Arabic source, known before 1910, missing from his book.
Unfortunately he died before he had time to provide the bibliography and
references to it; Die Chasaren — Historische Studie was published
posthumously in 1910. Although it soon went into a second edition, it is
rarely mentioned by historians.
lAbraham
N. Poliak was born in 1910 in Kiev; he came with his family to Palestine in
1923. He occupied the Chair of Mediaeval Jewish History at Tel Aviv
University and is the author of numerous books in Hebrew, among them a History of the Arabs;
Feudalism in Egypt 1250-1900; Geopolitics
of Israel and the Middle East, etc. His essay on “The Khazar Conversion
to Judaism” appeared in 1941 in the Hebrew periodical Zion and led to
lively controversies; his book Khazaria even more so. It was published
in 1944 in Tel Aviv (in Hebrew) and was received with — perhaps
understandable — hostility, as an attempt to undermine the sacred tradition
concerning the descent of modern Jewry from the Biblical Tribe. His theory is
not mentioned in the Encyclopaedia Judaica 1971-2 printing.
lMathias
Mieses, however, whose views on the origin of Eastern Jewry and the Yiddish
language I have quoted, is held in high academic esteem. Born 1885 in
Galicia, he studied linguistics and became a pioneer of Yiddish philology
(though he wrote mostly in German, Polish and Hebrew). He was an outstanding
figure at the First Conference on the Yiddish Language, Czernovitz, 1908, and
his two books: Die Entstehungsursache der jüdischen Dialekte (1924)
and Die Jiddische Sprache (1924) are considered as classics in their
field. lMieses
spent his last years in Cracow, was deported in 1944 with destination
Auschwitz, and died on the journey.
APPENDIX III
THE “KHAZAR CORRESPONDENCE”
1
THE exchange of letters between the
Spanish statesman Hasdai ibn Shaprut and King Joseph of Khazaria has for a
long time fascinated historians. It is true that, as Dunlop wrote, “the
importance of the Khazar Correspondence can be exaggerated. By this time it
is possible to reconstruct Khazar history in some detail without recourse to
the letters of Hasdai and Joseph.”[267]
Nevertheless, the reader may be interested in a brief outline of what is
known of the history of these documents.
lHasdai’s
Letter was apparently written between 954 and 961, for the embassy from
Eastern Europe that he mentions (Chapter III,3-4) is believed to have visited
Cordoba in 954, and Caliph Abd-al-Rahman, whom he mentions as his sovereign,
ruled till 961. That the Letter was actually penned by Hasdai’s secretary,
Menahem ben-Sharuk — whose name appears in the acrostic after Hasdai’s — has
been established by Landau,[268]
through comparison with Menahem’s other surviving work. Thus the authenticity
of Hasdai’s Letter is no longer in dispute, while the evidence concerning
Joseph’s Reply is necessarily more indirect and complex.
lThe
earliest known mentions of the Correspondence date from the eleventh and
twelfth centuries. Around the year 1100 Rabbi Jehudah ben Barzillai of
Barcelona wrote in Hebrew his “Book of the Festivals” — Sefer ha-Ittim
— which contains a long reference, including direct quotations, to Joseph’s
Reply to Hasdai. The passage in question in Barzillai’s work starts as
follows:
We have seen among some other
manuscripts the copy of a letter which King Joseph, son of Aaron, the Khazar
priest wrote to R. Hasdai bar Isaac.
We do not know if the letter is genuine or not, and ifit is a fact that the
Khazars, who are Turks, became proselytes. It is not definite whether all
that is written in the letter is fact and truth or not. There may be
falsehoods written in it, or people may have added to it, or there may be
error on the part of the scribe.… The reason why we need to write in this our
book things which seem to be exaggerated is that we have found in the letter
of this king Joseph to R. Hasdai that R. Hasdai had asked him of what family
he was, the condition of the king, how his fathers had been gathered under
the wings of the Presence [i.e., become converted to Judaism] and how great
were his kingdom and dominion. He replied to him on every head, writing all
the particulars in the letter.[269]
Barzillai goes on to quote or
paraphrase further passages from Joseph’s Reply, thus leaving no doubt that
the Reply was already in existence as early as AD 1100. A particularly
convincing touch is added by the Rabbi’s scholarly scepticism. Living in
provincial Barcelona, he evidently knew little or nothing about the Khazars.
lAbout
the time when Rabbi Barzillai wrote, the Arab chronicler, Ibn Hawkal, also
heard some rumours about Hasdai’s involvement with the Khazars. There
survives an enigmatic note, which Ibn Hawkal jotted down on a manuscript map,
dated AH 479 — AD 1086. It says:
Hasdai ibn-Ishaq
thinks that this great long mountain [the Caucasus] is connected with the
mountains of Armenia and traverses the country of the Greeks, extending to
Khazaran and the mountains of Armenia. He was well informed about these parts
because he visited them and met their principal kings and leading men.[270]
It seems most unlikely that Hasdai
actually visited Khazaria; but we remember that he offered to do so in his
Letter, and that Joseph enthusiastically welcomed the prospect in the Reply;
perhaps the industrious Hawkal heard some gossip about the Correspondence and
extrapolated from there, a practice not unfamiliar among the chroniclers of
the time. lSome
fifty years later (AD 1140) Jehudah Halevi wrote his philosophical tract “The
Khazars” (Kuzri). As already said, it contains little factual
information, but his account of the Khazar conversion to Judaism agrees in
broad outlines with that given by Joseph in the Reply. Halevi does not
explicitly refer to the Correspondence, but his book is mainly concerned with
theology, disregarding any historical or factual references. He had probably
read a transcript of the Correspondence as the less erudite Barzillai had
before him, but the evidence is inconclusive.
lIt
is entirely conclusive, however, in the case of Abraham ben Daud (cf. above,
II, 8) whose popular Sefer ha-Kabbalah, written in 1161, contains the
following passage:
You will find congregations of Israel
spread abroad from the town of Sala at the extremity of the Maghrib, as far
as Tahart at its commencement, the extremity of Africa [Ifriqiyah, Tunis], in
all Africa, Egypt, the country of the Sabaeans, Arabia, Babylonia, Elam,
Persia, Dedan, the country of the Girgashites which is called Jurjan,
Tabaristan, as far as Daylam and the river Itil where live the Khazar peoples
who became proselytes. Their king Joseph sent a letter to R. Hasdai, the
Prince bar Isaac ben-Shaprut and informed him that he and all his people
followed the Rabbanite faith. We have seen in Toledo some of their
descendants, pupils of the wise, and they told us that the remnant of them
followed the Rabbanite faith.[271]
2
The first printed version of the
Khazar Correspondence is contained in a Hebrew pamphlet, Kol Mebasser,
“Voice of the Messenger of Good News”.
It was published in Constantinople in or around 1577 by Isaac Abraham Akrish.
In his preface Akrish relates that during his travels in Egypt fifteen years
earlier he had heard rumours of an independent Jewish kingdom (these rumours
probably referred to the Falashas of Abyssinia); and that subsequently he
obtained “a letter which was sent to the king of the Khazars, and the king’s
reply”. He then decided to publish this correspondence in order to raise the
spirits of his fellow Jews. Whether or not he thought that Khazaria still
existed is not clear. At any rate the preface is followed by the text of the
two letters, without further comment.
lBut
the Correspondence did not remain buried in Akrish’s obscure little pamphlet.
Some sixty years after its publication, a copy of it was sent by a friend to
Johannes Buxtorf the Younger, a Calvinist scholar of great erudition. Buxtorf
was an expert Hebraist, who published a great amount of studies in biblical
exegesis and rabbinical literature. When he read Akrish’s pamphlet, he was at
first as sceptical regarding the authenticity of the Correspondence as Rabbi
Barzillai had been five hundred years before him. But in 1660 Buxtorf finally
printed the text of both letters in Hebrew and in a Latin translation as an
addendum to Jehudah Halevi’s book on the Khazars. It was perhaps an obvious,
but not a happy idea, for the inclusion, within the same covers, of Halevi’s
legendary tale hardly predisposed historians to take the Correspondence
seriously. It was only in the nineteenth century that their attitude changed,
when more became known, from independent sources, about the Khazars.
3
The only manuscript version which
contains both Hasdai’s Letter and Joseph’s Reply, is in the library of
Christ Church in Oxford. According to Dunlop and the Russian expert,
Kokovtsov,[272]
the manuscript “presents a remarkably close similarity to the printed text”
and “served directly or indirectly as a source of the printed text”.[273]
It probably dates from the sixteenth century and is believed to have been in
the possession of the Dean of Christ Church, John Fell (whom Thomas Brown
immortalized with his “I do not love thee, Dr Fell…”).
lAnother
manuscript containing Joseph’s Reply but not Hasdai’s Letter is preserved in
the Leningrad Public Library. It is considerably longer than the printed text
of Akrish and the Christ Church manuscript; accordingly it is generally known
as the Long Version, as distinct from the Akrish-Christ Church “Short
Version”, which appears to be an abbreviation of it. The Long Version is also
considerably older; it probably dates from the thirteenth century, the Short
Version from the sixteenth. The Soviet historian Ribakov[274]
has plausibly suggested that the Long Version — or an even older text — had
been edited and compressed by mediaeval Spanish copyists to produce the Short
Version of Joseph’s Reply.
lAt
this point we encounter a red herring across the ancient track. The Long
Version is part of the so-called “Firkowich Collection” of Hebrew manuscripts
and epitaphs in the Leningrad Public Library. It probably came from the Cairo
Geniza, where a major part of the manuscripts in the Collection originated.
Abraham Firkowich was a colourful nineteenth-century scholar who would
deserve an Appendix all to himself. He was a great authority in his field,
but he was also a Karaite zealot who wished to prove to the Tsarist
government that the Karaites were different from orthodox Jews and should not
be discriminated against by Christians. With this laudable purpose in mind,
he doctored some of his authentic old manuscripts and epitaphs, by
interpolating or adding a few words to give them a Karaite slant. Thus the
Long Version, having passed through the hands of Firkowich, was greeted with
a certain mistrust when it was found, after his death, in a bundle of other
manuscripts in his collection by the Russian historian Harkavy. Harkavy had
no illusions about Firkowich’s reliability, for he himself had previously
denounced some of Firkowich’s spurious interpolations.[275]
Yet Harkavy had no doubts regarding the antiquity of the manuscript; he
published it in the original Hebrew in 1879 and also in Russian and German
translation,[276]
accepting it as an early version of Joseph’s letter, from which the Short
Version was derived. Harkavy’s colleague (and rival) Chwolson concurred that
the whole document was written by the same hand and that it contained no
additions of any kind.[277]
Lastly, in 1932, the Russian Academy published Paul Kokovtsov’s authoritative
book, The Hebrew-Khazar Correspondence in the Tenth Century[278]
including facsimiles of the Long Version of the Reply in the Leningrad
Library, the Short Version in Christ Church and in Akrish’s pamphlet. After a
critical analysis of the three texts, he came to the conclusion that both the
Long and the Short Versions are based on the same original text, which is in
general, though not always, more faithfully preserved in the Long Version.
4
Kokovtsov’s critical survey, and
particularly his publication of the manuscript facsimiles, virtually settled
the controversy — which, anyway, affected only the Long Version, but not
Hasdai’s letter and the Short Version of the Reply.
lYet
a voice of dissent was raised from an unexpected quarter. In 1941 Poliak
advanced the theory that the Khazar Correspondence was, not exactly a
forgery, but a fictional work written in the tenth century with the purpose
of spreading information about, or making propaganda for, the Jewish kingdom.[279]
(It could not have been written later than the eleventh century, for, as we
have seen, Rabbi Barzillai read the Correspondence about 1100, and Ibn Daud
quoted from it in 1161). But this theory, plausible at first glance, was
effectively demolished by Landau and Dunlop. Landau was able to prove that
Hasdai’s Letter was indeed written by his secretary Menahem ben-Sharuk. And
Dunlop pointed out that in the Letter Hasdai asks a number of questions about
Khazaria which Joseph fails to answer — which is certainly not the way to
write an information pamphlet:
There is no answer forthcoming on the
part of Joseph to enquiries as to his method of procession to his place of
worship, and as to whether war abrogates the Sabbath.… There is a marked
absence of correspondence between questions of the Letter and answers given
in the Reply. This should probably be regarded as an indication that the
documents are what they purport to be and not a literary invention.[280]
Dunlop goes on to ask a pertinent
question:
Why the Letter of Hasdai at all,
which, though considerably longer than the Reply of Joseph, has very little
indeed about the Khazars, if the purpose of writing it and the Reply was, as
Poliak supposes, simply to give a popular account of Khazaria? If the Letter
is an introduction to the information about the Khazars in the Reply, it is
certainly a very curious one — full of facts about Spain and the Umayyads
which have nothing to do with Khazaria.[281]
Dunlop then clinches the argument by
a linguistic test which proves conclusively that the Letter and the Reply
were written by different people. The proof concerns one of the marked
characteristics of Hebrew grammar, the use of the so-called “waw-conversive”,
to define tense. I shall not attempt to explain this intricate grammatical
quirk,
and shall instead simply quote Dunlop’s tabulation of the different methods
used in the Letter and in the Long Version to designate past action:[282]
|
|
Waw Conversive
with Imperfect |
Simple Waw
with Perfet |
|
Hasdai’s Letter |
48 |
14 |
|
Reply (Long Version) |
1 |
95 |
In the Short Version of the Reply,
the first method (Hasdai’s) is used thirty-seven times, the second fifty
times. But the Short Version uses the first method mostly in passages where
the wording differs from the Long Version. Dunlop suggests that this is due
to later Spanish editors paraphrasing the Long Version. He also points out
that Hasdai’s Letter, written in Moorish Spain, contains many Arabisms (for
instance, al-Khazar for the Khazars), whereas the Reply has none. Lastly,
concerning the general tenor of the Correspondence, he says:
…Nothing decisive appears to have been
alleged against the factual contents of the Reply of Joseph in its more
original form, the Long Version. The stylistic difference supports its
authenticity. It is what might be expected in documents emanating from widely
separated parts of the Jewish world, where also the level of culture was by
no means the same. It is perhaps allowable here to record the impression, for
what it is worth, that in general the language of the Reply is less
artificial, more naive, than that of the Letter.[283]
To sum up, it is difficult to
understand why past historians were so reluctant to believe that the Khazar
Kagan was capable of dictating a letter, though it was known that he
corresponded with the Byzantine Emperor (we remember the seals of three
solidi); or that pious Jews in Spain and Egypt should have diligently copied
and preserved a message from the only Jewish king since biblical times.
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