Dr Henry Abramson - The Jews of Khazaria

okay great so here's the joke it's not all that money but percent so there's a three Jewish grandmother's sitting on a on a bench and they're just quietly enjoying the weather and one of them says Oh ie and then the second one says Oh leave a and then the third one says or Eve a is Mir and then the first one said ladies I thought we agreed we were not going to speak about the children okay thank you for laughing okay there's actually it's hard to tell there's laughter because I'm wearing one of these microphones but actually inside they're laughing they're really laughing okay so tonight's class is something we actually spoke about two years ago and it was before we started videotaping these classes so I wanted to reintroduce it I hope that you don't remember this class because that it'll be ruined otherwise and I have to apologize also because yesterday I had to do a very quick trip up to New York I went up in the morning and came back at night it was kind of a rigorous trip and I owe a vey iz Mir right and I did not have and I realized why I like Surfside so much you know it's like it's clean you know people don't paint on walls here you know there's its butt the butt area I did not have chance to make the movable Prezi that you enjoy normally so we're gonna do old tech we're just going to do a PowerPoint for today that I use from a long time ago one last word we we don't have a sponsor for this week so there's the lecture is sponsored by Young Israel Bell Harbor my daughter suggested that one of the first steps toward world domination is to sponsor one of these lectures and I'm speaking to the Internet audience as well please consider sponsoring a lecture because it's great for the great for the synagogue to have a little support as they are building their new magnificent edifice just down the street but today's topic is going to but being here as I like to say is is a sponsorship that's tremendously valuable to me I'm really glad that you come and enjoy the lectures okay so today's topic is a very unusual one because we try to focus on biographies I have chosen a name King bulan however it's quite possible that bulan did not exist where he existed under a different name and we know very very little about him as a person I'm using him as an excuse to speak about the nation that he represented that is the nation of the Hazare's which represents one of the most bizarre chapters in a long history of the Jewish people basically what we're going to be talking about is in the middle of the eighth century a large and powerful Empire with regional control throughout much of the northern Caspian region what which would be today Ukraine the Caucasus region and over to Kazakhstan simply decided to convert to Judaism all at once and they remained Jewish for several hundred years we have a lot of corroborating evidence that this actually happened for example the there was a huge shortage of of matzo balls throughout the rest of Europe as there were no okay I'm sorry it was a really long trip but no we have lots of corroborating evidence about these cause ours and then suddenly in the 13th century they basically disappear now what happened to them where did they go it's a it's a topic of considerable controversy and I'd like to kind of walk you through the sources and show you the what little we know about the kazars and then we'll have to leave at the end of the hour with a lot more questions than answers but nevertheless it is a fascinating and unusual chapter in our long and storied history so the the story of the kazars was made most famous some four hundred years after their initial conversion and it was made famous through a literary event the publication of a book called the safer kuzuri kuzuri of course means that the has aright the the person of Caesarea and it was written bruh bye-bye rabbi yehuda halevi by means of some kind of complicated discussion with a mysterious Yitzhak Sanger II basically what the safer a kuzuri purports to be is the extensive dialogue between the king of the kazars and representatives of all of the world's great monotheistic faiths after an extensive debate with a Jew a Christian and a Muslim it sounds a little bit like an off-color joke ultimately King bulan decides that he will in fact convert to Judaism and he takes his nation with him now the the book itself is not a history text it's not purporting in any modern sense of the term to give an accurate and you know objective account of what happened in Caesarea in the 8th century it is not as the historian for Lanka put it vsi gently give is involved the way it actually was not actually trying to say that really the author a famous poet and philosopher Robert La Vie was using this as a literary conceit to expound upon a religious triangular dialogue and he wanted essentially Judaism to have an excuse to compare itself with the other world faiths of Christianity and Islam it's not coincidental of course that he wrote this in Spain which is the world's great triangular culture for most of European history you know Spain has very strong populations of Christians Muslims and Jews and so this three-way debate was very hakuna for the time and he used this story of of King bulan as a device in order to allow the Muslims to have their say and then the Christians there say and the Jew of course would then do away with their arguments and demonstrate that Christianity was or Judaism was clearly superior to give you one example of a classic argument one that I find actually rather convincing when I think about these sort of things one of the arguments the Kazari if I remember correctly is that you know all of the other great monotheistic faiths rely on the testimony ultimately rely on the testimony of a single man in the case of the Christians it would be Jesus and especially Paul who never actually met Jesus in his lifetime but had a vision of him you know on the roads of Damascus as we discussed a few weeks ago or in the case of Islam it's Mohammed who has an encounter with the angel Gabriel Gabriel same angel is in the Jewish pantheon and ultimately you know the testimony of the veracity of the faith relies on one or a small group of people the kuzuri argues that this is one of the big differences with Judaism because you have the account of the authoritative wrote the Ten Commandments where you have six million adult male Jews and of course their wives their families on all they're at Mount Sinai receiving the Torah at once all claiming according to the Midrash account to have heard the first two Commandments directly from God and then afterwards you know through as a mediation and so the kuzuri are used you know it's one thing to have one person so to speak make up a story and have lots of people believe it but can you imagine six million people six hundred thousand six hundred thousand people approximately three million if you include children and people of all genders so to speak you know if you have three hundred thousand how many is it six hundred thousand three million about three million people hearing it and reporting it and if that isn't enough they're all Jews and you can imagine Jews all agreeing on one event like that recording it for posterity that's an interesting kind of argument I think for Judaism but that's really what the kuzuri is about the kuzuri is not about the history of the kazars he just uses it the story as an excuse to speak about the concert so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go back in time and try to actually understand what happened in Caesarea why did these Jews convert or why do these people convert to Judaism what kind of Judaism they practice and so on so here's a map that shows you exactly where the Hazara n' empire was in the at the time of a conversion about 740 here is Kiev way up here on the top the Black Sea the Caspian Sea the Mediterranean is over here if we extended this down Israel would be you'd have Israel be right about here I think so it's a big chunk of territory it includes what would be called the Caucasus region here countries like Georgia maybe a little bit of Azerbaijan all of the eastern side of the Ukraine meaning the eastern of the Dnieper River and well into what would be the dawn River region of Russia the Russian Empire and out here into Kazakhstan very very large territory in the 8th century and the in fact there is a very significant historian of the period the lato million pretty talk of Harvard who argued that Kiev itself was founded by kazars which is a great irony if you can imagine that this you know them Kiev is really the mother city of the entire Russian civilization Ukraine of course Belarus and the Russian Empire as well and I think that it was originally a Jewish trading outpost is quite amazing but of course in Kiev we have a lot of archaeological sites and long-standing traditions that a certain place is called the Khazar gate and this is the Jewish quarter and it goes back hundreds and hundreds of years long before we have Eastern European settlement moving into the region a very very old Jewish community over there so you can see it's not an insignificant little territory that became Jewish it was a really large territory at the time I think that will probably be some like something like the size of let's say France it's a very large area maybe France and Germany combined actually so we you know people have been fascinated with lost Jewish tribes as long as there have been lost Jewish tribes and that is basically from the 8th century before well I said 7th but I meant the 8th century before the Common Era when the ten northern tribes were dispersed throughout the ancient Near East and ever since then various cultures of all many cultures have purported to be the inheritors genetically culturally historically of those Ten Lost Tribes but none of them have really been you know demonstrated as accurate although there is some fascinating new material coming out with DNA analysis looking at various populations to try to determine how likely it is that they are in fact Jewish and especially in Africa there have been several populations have been dent identified as having a very high statistical relationship to contemporary Jews the Arab historians who were again this is not a secret to historians everyone's aware that there was this cause our Empire was Jewish they opine that the bazaars must have been the children of keturah in rabbinic teachings cateura was the name of Hegar abraham's second wife that after he sent her away with her son yesh Mayo and then she came back and her name was changed to cateura which means kind of like pleasant smelling incense and then she had a whole bunch of children with Avraham it is mentioned in the Bible that he married cateura and and then the children went east so it makes sense they could land in they could land in the Kazarian region but there's there's no way for us to really determine the truth of that other historians argue that it might be the children of japhet Greece mr. Rodriguez you have a hard question if it comes from Arab historians yes Victoria is a whole new person according to the Quran she's not oh really Hagar Sara that's really perceptive did you hear that yeah this is why this is a kind of gradually produced that Thoreau College south he's now a graduate student at FIU so I'll just mention this by the way I did get a request from a woman who does a really fast I just got it today on the internet she wrote this really enjoys the lectures I wish I could remember her name now that I'm speaking to her but she says could I please repeat the questions so that you can hear them when you watch them on the web so the the was so much a question as an observation that if these are Arab historians which they are the the Arabs believe that cateura is not the same person as as Hagar that is a totally separate person but still it makes sense that these people would be the children of Abraham albeit not through Haga fascinating and by the way this woman that wrote to me again I'm sorry I forgot her name she does she likes these lectures because she makes she has a dance company and they do Jewish historical dances based on famous Jewish women and so my lectures have been like really useful for her you know the one on the daughter of Rashi and things like that so that's kind of cool don't I will now do my okay okay so other documents we have about the kazars besides the the kuzuri we have an interesting piece of correspondence between hosta even sharp roots who was a very important Spanish Jewish politician and a one King Joseph in azaria who gives another version of the story in fact this is probably the the or text that you who de la vie worked with when he wrote the kuzuri he relied very much on the account that Casa de even shaprut had fulfilled cos da Vinci brute is a an excellent example of the kind of achievements that were that are associated very closely with the Golden Age of Spain where Jews were unlike any other time really in Jewish history but maybe a possible exception in contemporary America where you begin to see this bit by bit you have people who are like an incredible stature as religious Jews meaning they they contributed literature in Hebrew about the religious texts and so on and at the same time very powerful influential politicians in the secular realm cast iron chef Ruth Shmuel Eamon Agrella to a certain degree Yahoo Dalai Lama even Cabrillo there's a whole list of people who really achieved you know greatness in both worlds here in America today we have a little bit of that let's say with you know Orthodox Jewish popular politicians reaching great heights things like that but it still pales in comparison to Spain anyways Kosta even Shep Ruth was an extremely important diplomat he had tremendous linguistic skills and as a Jew he had international connections with Jewish populations the world round and he would conduct on the behalf of the the Spanish by Zia he would our political authorities at the time Chris main was well I'm nothing against that details I don't let's just get off the topic cos David Shepherd sent out correspondence to many Jewish communities doing research on what's out there and what kind of possibilities that were for trade and so on and he got possibly two responses from the juice of Caesarea and this is already like in the ninth and tenth century and the the response he gets is apparently an internal Kazarian story about how they became jewish and the the the version that's received there is that king bulan did in fact have this debate with the three representatives of the great monotheistic faiths and then he decided to become Jewish and his royal court followed him and then slowly bit by bit the country as a whole became Jewish yes miss Abramson that is a characteristically brilliant question ms Abramson because Polly the question now or repeat now for all dancers in New York the question was why did he only invite the Polyphemus to the debate I mean the polytheists were around a long time there's lots of idol-worshipping going on why are they not called to the party why only the monotheists let me see if that goes in terms of the lecture I was gonna give no I'll just tell you I'll answer the question now oh look at this messed up my powerpoint I got to go back here to this one well let's go to this one here right the answer is because it was clear that polytheism was rapidly going out of favor polytheism was clearly an ideology of the past the great monotheistic movements especially Christian and Islam were expanding a pace very dramatically I'll show you in a few minutes oh you know what I have to show you the map now because I can't answer that question without showing the map the the base the short answer is that the monotheistic faiths were expanding at such a dramatic rate that the polytheists were afraid that they would be simply swallowed up oh here we go okay why convert oh it won't go backwards that's the problem I'm using my iPad instead of my regular confute computer here here we go so have a look at this map here we looked at a version of this earlier if you consider where Azaria was right up over here in this region going up into Ukraine so Christianity starting out in Rome basically I mean from Israel over here to Rome has taken over all of Europe except for Spain and is pressing with great progress towards northern Baltic states like Lithuania Latvia and so on and pagans are just converting left and right because the Christian faith with life after death and a just God and prayer and things like that was ultimately far more appealing especially the idea of belonging to a global faith you know with a very consistent coherent ideology you compare that to polytheism with its multiple gods and and multiple narratives and really no real place for human beings in it it was very weak Islam at the same time is expanding incredibly dramatically we're talking about 740 right so this purple air it starts in 622 and this purple area really measures what it's like in the year 750 so Islam spreads you know like in a viral way as it were it becomes so popular as it it conquers regions and as people willingly give themselves up to become Muslims so here's Khazaria sandwiched between Christian Europe and Muslim Europe and they have to decide well are we going to become absorbed in a larger in reality absorbed within a larger Christian reality or shall we try to stake out our own kind of independent region by adopting Judaism that was their strategy according to most historians that's probably the most reasonable you know motivation for it and in fact it seemed to have worked we should recall that both the Christians and the Muslims had special reserve status for Jews that the the Jews under the Christianity were preserved under the doctrine of witness that was authored by st. Augustine the idea that the Jews should be allowed to practice their religion until the second coming of the Messiah and for the Muslims they had the doctrine of the dimi the protected people that Jews were allowed to practice their religion because they had once received you know an authentic communication from God and so the the kazars evidently thought that this is probably the best compromise we won't be absorbed in Christianity we won't be absorbed in Islam we'll be able to maintain our independence and they did maintain it for about five hundred years which is huge if you think that America is only about 300 years old as a country and Caesarea is 500 years old Jewish that's pretty impressive I think senator your question is a person excellent don't ask for the car okay so let's go back to where we were mmm now another fascinating area where we get sources on the kazars this will take just a little bit of background information is the amazing Cairo Genizah which is one of the the really most dramatic discoveries in modern times not just for Jewish history although it's especially good for Jewish history but also for Mediterranean history as a whole and just a little bit of a background information the halacha is Jewish law requires that anything that is holy may not be discarded it has to be treated in an appropriate manner when it is no longer usable specifically holy books may not simply be thrown in the trash they have to be buried in jewish cemetery they have to be treated with respect and given as it were a proper burial that's the only way you're allowed to get rid of them you can't simply throw them away so in most synagogues and observant Jewish homes there will be a place where you store all of the old books until there is time to bury them and then they're transferred to the funeral home and things like that and there they're buried this storage place is called the Ganesa from the word la the gun nose or league knows how would you say that Stephen big nose so which means to to store away to like keep as a treasure kind of thing and that's what people do they have these things called the Ganesa and then from time to time they empty on burying them so near Cairo there was a synagogue that had they had a custom in this particular region that not only would they treat holy books like that you know Torah scrolls or you know printed books at this time but they would treat anything written with Hebrew letters anything written in Hebrew was considered holy and therefore they saved it all and they would put all of these documents again they're not producing paper like we do today with printers and so on they you know a manuscript was still a significant thing that required a lot of energy to produce and to care for and so on but anything written in Hebrew including shopping lists marriage contracts business arrangements and of course a whole host of religious documents were simply stored away in the Attic of a synagogue near Faust dot and there was some kind of legend that circulated that there was like some kind of serpent up there that anyone who went up would be bitten and it would you know be their end but some English travelers you know British English travelers made their way there and insisted on having a look and this is actually the opening to the Ganesa it was kind of like an attic and they went up and they found literally hundreds of thousands of documents covering several centuries of Mediterranean history all written with Hebrew letters but of course dealing with things both religious and secular it was a find that astonished the scholarly world and within a short order by the turn of the the not the twentieth century it was all carted away and is stored in some of its and I believe in New York and Leningrad and I believe London has some pieces of the Ganesa but amazing things they're still going through these documents trying to figure out what they mean about 250,000 fragments and by comparison there are about a hundred thousand documents for all of Arabic history so in this one Ganesa you have more than two and a half times everything we know about Arabic history so it gives you a sense of what how the the historical world relies on the Ganesa to understand things the texts are difficult to use oh here we go yes there's some in Cambridge in New York and in st. Petersburg they're fragmentary they're often damaged that's why they were stored away because they could no longer be used and they are written in several languages even though all in the Hebrew characters you have of course Hebrew documents you have Aramaic documents and you even have Arabic documents you know people writing using Hebrew letters to express statements in Arabic which was not an uncommon thing many medieval documents written by Jews use the Hebrew alphabet even to write in English or in French they'll just use Hebrew as well as it work so that's that's very funny so the comet is right in Mexico while they wouldn't work in her school but in Mexico though you know if they need to write down the answers for a test they'll write them in Hebrew and then you can just look at it after where it's very good okay the contents as I mentioned you have religious texts you have manuscript copies of things by the son of the Rambam and the Rambam themself oh not mistaken is that correct mr. Rodriguez I'm not sure I think they even found some pieces of the mission of Torah in there writings from the Rambam yeah that's something from the ramen that Maimonides own handwritten documents astounding business papers legal documents lots of letters that were sent to Egypt because you know a letter could come from England let's say written in Hebrew it arrived at a home in in Cairo and they would send it away let's put it on their personal McGillis personal stories biographies autobiographies things like that and even some scrap paper with doodles on it if you can believe it and the scope of the coverage is the entire Mediterranean Basin we're talking about in the neighborhood of eight about the 500 years of this entire region recorded in this treasure trove so what does it have to say about the kazars because this it corresponds so this is one find from the Ganesa that's pretty interesting it's known as the so-called Kiev in letter because it seems to have the word Kiev written and unfortunately it the word Kiev is written at a spot where it's smudged and a little bit damaged so you can't tell for sure if they're really trying to say Kiev but it is a letter from a kazar going to the region of FOSS dot and it's a letter of introduction actually it is what we would call today a tilde or a Patek and we still use them in Jewish society today it's essentially a letter attesting to the bona fides of the holder of this letter saying that he is an upright individual who was fallen on hard times and he deserves the support of the Jewish communities that he visits in other words this was a letter that belonged to a mashaallah a charity collector and he was slapping around different parts of the Mediterranean Basin showing the letter to people saying listen I'm from Caesarea possibly from Kiev and could you help out a guy and he would ask for a dollar so show up at the shul at 7:30 in the morning and go to the another shul and there you know and who collect money so that indicates that it's probably authentic it's you know so well and it shows you how long do have been doing this it's a well-worn Jewish tradition to camp one of these documents of introduction and ask people for funding now one of the most fascinating things about the letter though which tells us more about Hazara ins firstly the idea that you know it was from Caesarea is fascinating but look at this fascinating thing at the bottom here at the very bottom it says in Turkic runes not in Hebrew but in Turkic this phrase which I'm not going to try to pronounce because I have no idea but it apparently translation is I have read it so what could that possibly mean here's this document written in Hebrew and at the very bottom there is a signature that says I have read it what do you think Stephen it's a receipt in Turkic so who's receiving it who's I forgot to mention by the way the names of the guys who are writing it they're like weird Turkic names like pagan names and then it says Huck Ohain you know like like I don't know shiatsu Slav hot coal hain you know things like that so that combined with this strange phrase I have read it what well when you look at it to adat today what do they say on the to dot besides they describe how this person is please yeah Sherlock Hamlin exactly that's precisely it there's a little it's a bit of letterhead it's at the bottom but it's like the rabbi so to speak or the head of the community or someone wrote yes I approve this message my name is Stas Islam and I approve this message and that's what it is it's an endorsement by a prominent kazar jewish official and yet he writes it in Turkish and not in Hebrew so how did this document get created what did this document mean how did it work okay this is like it was an undergraduate class everyone nobody make eye contact cuz that's the first thing you can do wrong right Joseph who do you think actually wrote this letter like who actually pen to paper the guy probably the the holder of the document probably does not know any Hebrew so who wrote it I scribe write or a rabbi some professional author who you would go to and you would speak in Turkey and you say listen I want to go to Foss stop I hear they have a lot of rich Jews there and I want to collect some money so I need you to write down my story so he goes to a scribe and the soul fair writes it down in proper literary Hebrew and then he adds this document then what does he do with it because he wants to authenticate it yeah he goes he takes it to the head of the Jewish community and he says would you please you know uh indicate that you approve of this message and that's what this is so this little phrase here is from the head of the Jewish community well it has its signature afterwards has his name afterwards but it says in his own writing I have read it in Turkey which what ultimately does that mean the fact that it's in Turkic now well yeah but they don't know Hebrew exactly it says that the head of the community is ignorant of even very basic Hebrew and so this is something that many historians have concluded about Khazaria that the conversion was very very shallow that they probably did not really engage in a deep meaningful conversion it probably was for political purposes only it may have been just like a quick dunk in a Caspian Sea for a mikvah and that's it and there's certainly significant elements of Judaism you have ascribed there who's writing these letters they do know how to collect money that's important but the the actual depth of the conversion is limited Ms Abramson good argument so the argument ms Abramson theorizes that it's catering to the readership the fact that it's in Turkic and so it doesn't say it's like the rabbi today were to write in English I approve this message that would be very true except that we're talking about Fustat it showed up in Egypt and they don't speak Turkic there they speak Arabic there so if he had written in Arabic then you have an argument but it this is probably the case and I have to say I cheated a little bit because I did some more reading and there are lots of indications from for example the travelers Potocki of Regensburg and Benjamin of Tudela that we spoke about a while ago that they come to Caesarea and they can't believe as they put it back then the shivoham' Isis how difficult the the extent of Jewish life is there that they have very few schools there very few mikvaot it's really hard to find good kosher Chinese food anywhere and they say obviously this is not a very advanced Jewish civilization at all there's even some question from some of the travelers that did they even practice circumcision and circumcision is one of the most basic rituals of Judaism it in fact you know it's usually one of the last rituals to go as Jews become more more assimilated they will still practice circumcision until the bitter end so to speak it's one of the last things to go excuse that a partial pun there I didn't mean that there and there's a lot of so is it quite possible that Khazaria was not really that deeply religious in fact most of the evidence the preponderance of the evidence indicates that that is the case the kazars also may have been fairly pluralistic in terms of judaism as we shall see later there have been some confusing finds - like for example this find of a coin in the the region of eto the capital of Khazaria Wow isn't that like that sells at all right you see the coin you see the symbol on it it's all over right there totally Jewish problem is the Star of David was not a traditional Jewish symbol for about another eight hundred years you know we didn't use the Star of David to represent you well you see the menorah you see like the hands of the coin but you don't see the Star of David so this is quite likely simply a pagan symbol of the time six pointed star it happens to look very Jewish it makes you know makes us feel warm and sort of like ethnically connected but it's probably not historically accurate yeah just be like its origins could this be its origins it's a brilliant Theory you could probably get at least one graduate paper out of it but I think it would be a stretch to say this the origins I mean a six-pointed star is not that complex and icon I'm sure many cultures have it yeah to look at another example the swastika that has such you know dire negative connotations to us in in the regions of India the swastika is considered a symbol of progress right like a walking wheel and they don't have any of the negative connotations there even some synagogues that have been discovered with swastikas in the tile inlay you know obviously built before the 20th century but it was considered not necessarily a negative thing okay now the one of the big questions is maybe the kazars were Karaites because ironically this one this all happened at the time when the Talmud was being written not so far away right this is happening in the Northern Caucasus region and the Talmud is being written I don't know how many miles but maybe 2,000 miles away in the Mesopotamian region it's not so far you know the Jews are corresponding between Spain and Babylon can't they correspond with Caesarea why do we not have more get onic correspondence with the kazars how come nobody seems to be really interested in the fact there's a whole Jewish Kingdom in the northern region why don't they write about it so one of the theories is that we perhaps they wrote about that they did not they ignored them because the Hazare's were attracted to Cara ISM rather than to rabbinic Judaism Cara ism is a movement that garnered strength just about this time under Anan Ben dahveed in particular we spoke about him a long time ago and this was a movement that sought to G legitimize the oral torah and to argue that the written Torah was the sole authentic source of Jewish religious information and the Karaites we spoke about them also a little bit last week with Sajha Gowen where the you know there was a lot of polemic between Karaites and so-called rabbinic or rabbinic Jews so could be that the kazars adopted a more sparse form of Judaism known as terrorism this was especially the the argument postulated by I ever ham firki wits here who is a somewhat of a controversial historian because although he was a specialist in Caesarea he also flirted with the Greek Orthodox Church and so that to certain degree that kind of deal ejido mises him for many historians but where it's fascinating story about him but I think we're gonna pass on it so there is a possibility that they may have been originally Karaites and then later became rabba Knights because you know there's an ongoing flux between these two movements the Karaites grow and sometimes shrinking other times and it could be that they were a carrot you know you had a very thin superficial conversion in the eighth century and by the time you get to the ninth century you know there's more information about what's going on and many some of the kazars eventually converted to rabbinic Judaism as it were we don't have a lot of details about this we do have some Christian texts that indicate that when they visited the region the Jews were practicing a whole host of or the Hazara in Jews were practicing a whole host of of habits that were associated with rabbi night so that's also parsley as well this is another archaeological find it's a belt buckle it has nothing especially Jewish about it but I kind of liked it so I stuck it in the lecture like that okay the the decline of the Khazar an empire you know I forgot to mention one other kind of interesting things maybe I'll mention it right now actually it makes sense here the whole story of the conversion of the Hazare's to Judaism finds itself in a very important document called in Russian the Provost Romania yet the chronicle of bry gone years which is the the main source for medieval Russian history it's a 13th century document that describes the history of the world with special emphasis on the conversion of King Volo the mayor of Kiev to Christianity in the year 988 and in the the poet's forum in the yet there's a discussion of how King volodymyr was a pagan and he was wondering about you know what should he do and so he invited four representatives of world religions to debate with each other in Kiev the four were Hazara and Jews which is of course our interest Moslems and then two different kinds of Christians the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox and they have you know this long I'm going to end this the story is almost identical to what we have of King Joseph and similar to what we see with with Yahoo da ladies account however as you can imagine the Eastern Orthodox Christians win the debate the the Roman Catholics don't have a chance in fact they get some of the worst treatment the Muslims are treated just horribly by the the church author of this document and the Hazara and Jews almost almost make it meaning King volodymyr after he hears what the Hazara and Jews have to say he basically says well that's it you know you guys are the best I really I think we should become Jewish and he says but listen before I become Jewish can you tell me a little bit about your homeland and the Kazari and Jews say unfortunately we have been exiled from our homeland for almost a thousand years now we've been punished for our many sins and that's why we don't have the Land of Israel and Volo Damir at that point de Muir's and he says oh wait a minute are you serious if you guys don't have a kingdom I should convert to your religion he says it like that too he says I should convert to your religion I thought that was funny okay anyways I also think it's funny that so that's how it can you imagine what Russia would be like if they had converted to Judaism and 988 it'll be a totally different story but that's how close they came he also came somewhat close to Islam but you know what eventually turned him off his Lama came very close what was it that made the Russians not choose Islam according to the PO best any famous drinking thank you mr. Rodriguez absolutely right that he says basically that's it this is it let's make Allah hi I'm I think I'm gonna become a Muslim and they say sorry you know we don't make lehayim in Islam because we don't drink alcohol and he says what that's not for us he says we Russians have to have our little cups by which he means like you know shot glasses and so that's how close he comes to Islam as well and then the the the the church author of the text adds a few other salient details again besides he says it's such an expiry throwaway phrase and besides the Muslims tend to rub their beards with excrement anyways you know which he just made that up on the spot I guess just to try and add a little color to it anyways you do have cause ours appearing in lots of documents like this one so there's like no surprise that there are all these Jews living in in Kiev it's just one of those weird things that Jews themselves tend to basically ignore them only travelers will report on this exotic Jewish community but otherwise it doesn't garner much attention the decline of the cotton Empire was probably mostly because of their ongoing warfare with the the Kiev and the roof's people which will be regarded by the Russians as their cultural progenitors but also by the Ukrainians and by the Belarusians so the have these ongoing Wars and ultimately especially when the Tatars come in from the east the Hazara empire is overrun and it disappears about the year 1240 and then it never reappeared now what happens to all these Jews what this by the way is a picture of has our burial mounds you know they have these they look kind of like you know just well mounds yeah that was like no so what happened to them these are now sure suppositions we don't actually know but what seems to be reasonable is they probably simply assimilated into the surrounding peoples they probably simply you know saw the end of their their political identity and the the coherence of Jewish ideology with the state and they simply stopped being Jewish and picked up being pagan like they were five hundred years earlier the this if this is true it's indicative of the relative weakness of the conversion that they did not really you know hold on to it very strong and fast and they simply disappeared as a result some theorists opine that they are the progenitors of various groups of Jews such as let's say the mountain Jews that trace their origins to this region and these things are possible but you know in the absence of more verifiable data it's impossible to say whether or not it is true there is a theory Arthur Kessler is associated with it and some people who have a very you know a biased agenda in particular that in fact the kazars are the progenitors of Ashkenazi Jewry meaning you know if you have it just a look at Jews today at least in terms of superficial racial characteristics you've got a wide range from you know dark-skinned Africans small number of Asian Jews oriental Jews and you know North Africans with the kind of Mediterranean complexion and then you've got all these light-skinned sometimes blue-eyed blonde-haired Ashkenazi Jews who clearly traced their origins to the Rhineland yes I lived in Hungary for a few years and the Hungarians claim that the castles are the origins of the ancient Jews that the Jews the original Jews in Hungary and castles that's interesting that's our observation is that in Hungary the argument was that the ancient Hungarian Jews were the Khazar ian's to begin with the Gaza well that's that's definitely I mean hunc everything about Hungary is exceptional you know the language is completely different and there's there's a theory actually that supports that because the Casa or the Jewish community and Hungary was rather unique in that they're the only population of although juries of Europe who feel it you know it's absolutely obligated to cover every piece of furniture with plastic as soon as you get it and so that could be they have caused our origins but so the but the there is this theory that the that the the kazars are the origins of the Ashkenazim it's doesn't have much weight to it the there's no linguistic evidence of the Khazar penetration in Ashkenazi culture although there are some words that the great Yiddish scholar Max von I argued were Turkic in origin like for example the word davon davon has no Hebrew root and has no Germanic roots so it doesn't come from Yiddish either he argued it came from a Turkic root it's not really related to Slavic either so there may be some little bits of Turkic in there but there's no evidence otherwise to indicate that the Jews of Eastern Europe not so much maybe Hungary but certainly Ukraine Poland and so on are from the kazars what is motivating a lot of people who propound this theory is that they hope that by display the origins of Ashkenazi Jewry which were the probably the most prominent Jewish population in Europe and in America about three-quarters of American Jews are of Ashkenazi origin they could somehow D legitimize the the biblical ancestry of the Jews in other words by saying you think you're descended from the forefathers in the Bible forget about it you're actually a hazhar you're actually descended from the conversions of the kazars to Judaism and that's in many cases that's really what's motivating this particular argument and not necessarily the scholarly data behind it if you happen to wander around like some of the white supremacist websites on the web which I don't recommend you do or at least you should definitely have a shower afterwards but the the the websites will frequently talk about you know today's Jews are not the real don't think they're like the descendants of Moses and all those guys in the Bible it's a completely different people that has overtaken their name in their heritage the true Jews today are of course the Christians and us guys and those Jews who claim to be Jews don't come from Jews at all that's the argument it's fairly specious but nevertheless it exists so the legacy of the kazars as I mentioned the trilateral debate it appears in several cultures yeah I put Chinese food up there but the the trilateral ate appears in several cultures so the story of the conversion of King bull on may actually have you know origins in reality and it clearly had an iconic sort of stickiness that was absorbed by many other cultures including the Russians however their demographic impact on later Jewish civilizations and certainly their cultural impact is highly attenuated we have really no significant evidence of the kazars ever passing through Jewish history except through you know these scattered little bits of data in the Cairo Genizah or travelers accounts we have no great cause our authors we have no great cause our traditions that we can identify and they simply appear like a you know bright flash on the horizon and then they simply disappeared shortly thereafter okay so that's that's about it for tonight I hope you enjoyed the lecture next week is going to be a really big one we're gonna talk about a colossal figure in Jewish history the great Moses Ben Maimon Maimonides the Rambam was a fascinating life story and a tremendous controversial contribution to Jewish culture so I look forward to speaking with you then thank you very much [Music]

Channel: KosherTube

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Keywords: Dr Henry Abramson - The Jews of Khazaria, Parsha, Israel, Torah, Jewish Prayer, Jewish Tradition, Jewish Holiday, Jewish Courses Online, Jewish Scipture, Jewish History, Jewish Video, Halakah, Jerusalem, Bible Teachings, Bnei Noach, How to be Jewish

Id: sVts8BSmyRk

Length: 51min 22sec (3082 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018