The Myth of the Khazar Conversion- Shaul Stampfer

when I was a graduate student I promised myself I'm not going to give a lecture saying I I I I and I'm going to break that promise so you know don't take everything I say so seriously and I apologize for treating so much the first person but it just happened with this to to because this topic is not really something I should have dealt with now basically I'm a uh I have to be careful since they're taping things I've dealt with uh topics like education and family structure and demography in Eastern Europe but I got an invitation once to give uh to come to a conference in memory of somebody who I really admire John clear I think he was actually once here as well he was a wonderful person so they said that we have this conference we're inviting you to participate we have to give a lecture on within a framework of topics that fits the conference now I didn't know anything about those topics but you know getting an invitation I really wanted to participate so I decided to write something on the background of East European Jews where did all those millions of Jews in Eastern Europe come from so I started working on the topic and I came up with an answer which satisfied myself but one of the ideas that people have raised for the background of all of the Jews of eern Europe since there were so many of them is that some or many or most or all were descended from the kazars who had converted to Judaism some time in the Middle Ages now you you might be asking yourself what is this business of kazars and I will try to fill in the kazars were a tribe very powerful tribe at the in the eth 9th centuries they lived what is now Southern Ukraine dagistan maybe over a little bit into usbekistan near between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea if you don't know exactly where it is don't worry because nobody knew exactly where it was in the ancient world it was far away from every civilization but it was a very powerful state for a while and if you think a little bit about the map you have the Middle East today is basically Muslim with some Christian populations and a little island of Jewish populations Islam spread from what is now Saudi Arabia towards the west and also began to spread North it was the kazars who apparently stopped the spread of of Islam and then the early Slavs the who are now the Russians and ukrainians converted not to Islam but to Christianity so this nation had an important impact on the course of world events one can only imagine if the Slavs had become Muslims and not Christians how world history would have played out so it was a powerful Nation it was possibly a large nation and the story was that they converted to Judaism and some many people have said that the Jews of Eastern Europe are descended from this population now this has implications uh it's been bounced around Arthur Kesler wrote a book about this the 13th tribe schloman wrote another book of invention of the Jewish people claiming that basically most of the Jews today or at least the ashkanazi East European Jews are descendant of Kazar and therefore have no relationship to a population in Palestine Orel or whatever term you want to have now Mike I teach mainly at the University I have experienc that you know after you talk for a while things get to little tiring and not everybody can stay so focused I certainly can so before anybody drops out I want to say that this claim is pardon my is nonsense uh why can I be so and usually not so emphatic about things but here we can be pretty certain and I'll give you two pieces of evidence and then we'll go to what I think is really interesting there's been a lot of genetic study of ashkanazi Jews why because ashkanazi Jews have some really neat genetic diseases so makes it very interesting for people who are studying genetics and the spread of diseases to trace familial relationships and to see where on the genome you have these diseases and there's some interesting correlations between various populations now one of the things that the geneticists have found is that the ashkanazi genes show relationships to all kinds of populations but absolutely no connection to anything resembling the genes that we find in the Turkish tribes or the Turkish populations of Central Asia which would have been the case if the kazars had been the uh ancestors of East European Jews the genetic similarity between ashkanazi Jews is strongest to North African Jews and has strong to other populations including Palestinians but has nothing to no similarity on a genetic level with what we have in Central Asia then you can also take a totally different approach which also is evidence it's not as emphatic as gentic and it's because it's hard to argue with genes but take a look at the Yiddish language you have Yiddish today spoken it's been spoken for hundreds of years you have a common word in Yiddish which is called the bless when you the blessing after a meal in Yiddish is called benching like in a bench we sit down that's to say the blessing after the food what does the word come from the Latin Benedictus a blessing you have the word like there's a Sabbath food which is often eaten among ashkanazi Jews it's cooked on a pot all all the for 24s flows or whatever it is I'm not sure how long it's a long time and with potatoes and beans this is called CH and it comes from the French sh or hot it stays hot over the Sabbath in yish we have many words of Latin and Italian French origin which reflects the migration of Jews there are almost no words in Yiddish of turkic or one of the exceptions in Yiddish is a very useful word in modern Hebrew balagan for something which is total disorder this does come apparently from the Turkish but it comes by way of Polish not and there's no need to try and find some medieval Kazar SS now if thousands and thousands of kazars had migrated to Eastern Europe you would have have to have some kind of a clue or Remnant in the Yiddish language either Foods or names of trees or plants there's nothing in Yiddish that reflects the origin so if the genetic evidence is clearcut if the linguistic evidence is clearcut then we can certainly put aside the question that the Jews of Eastern Europe were descended from the Kazar there's only one good reason to claim this and that is if you have a political agenda so that you can't argue with you can say political agenda can be good even if the evidence is not good I mean history in my opinion is not a justification for politics you have to separate the two in any case the Jews of Eastern Europe are not descended from a turkic tribe however the question is did this tribe convert or this nation convert to Judaism or not so I didn't know very much about it and the truth is I didn't really care very much as long as I knew that they didn't have any impact on the demography of Eastern Europe because I'm interested more in demography then a few years ago this per a person named Moshe Gil uh published an article in Hebrew and which he said this whole thing is nonsense the stories about the conversion of the kazars to Judaism are just imaginary they never converted I read the article it was interesting it another thing to put in a footnote but the article was I I think it's no secret it was really poorly written it was frag fragmentary he made a claim the footnotes didn't fit the argument uh there were a lot of important issues that he ignored I couldn't understand how the editors of the journal even let this article slip in so you know people at Hebrew University can be pretty snobby and I tried to avoid it but it crept in and it really was bad then I asked around who is this guy guil and people who you don't know who he is he's got 9 3 or 94 years old a specialist in medieval Islam and Jews in Islamic world and when I opened by big mouth and said you know this article is really bad people looked at me and said Stanford he got a big mouth if you can write an original article when you're 92 years old you can be happy even if it isn't wellred I mean who's going to argue with Gil and tell him to rewrite his article so I realized that I have to accept I should accept at my place and then I waited for the academic response you know for the big experts to say something about the article nobody says anything people talk and there was one international conference after another about the Judaism of the kazars and nobody invited Gil nor nobody discussed Gil it was just like forgotten partially because the article I think was not well written so I thought maybe this is something that needs a little bit more attention because somebody should just check and see were the kazars converts to Judaism or not even though again this doesn't affect the question of the demography but just an interesting question so I decided nobody else is going to do it I'm going to do it and this is actually I didn't realize how complicated it was going to be if I realized it I probably would not have done it because it's not easy to do the sources are in many many languages and it requires that fair familiarity which I don't have with I didn't have these I know a little bit more now with medieval history but it was kind of funny there was one requirement which uh I found in retrospect it was useful which uh I was I actually had it my ability now going around one of the reasons I went into demography is because I found at the University that I have somehow people look at me they think that I'm much more Pious than I am the combination of a beard which is because my wife likes beards and the yamaka which is because that's what God wants the combination of the two makes me look very very pious people were always asking me to give a lecture about rabbis and I said I don't want to deal with rabbis I'm not the way I look so demography was a way of escaping it now in the course of my studies at the University I had the opportunity to study Bible critically in University manner with a very good a number of very good teachers among them mo Moshe Greenberg if anybody has St studied Bible and and I also had a opportunity to study talmud and oddly enough I did this for fun here it came in to use because sometimes when you deal with a text you have to analyze the words and the philology and the people who deal with Kazar on the whole are really really brilliant it's really frightening to work in the area because you feel like a and you really are you know they say well in Hungarian it's like this but if you look in alic turkic languages it comes out a little bit differently they're brilliant brilliant people but they're so good at looking at the words that they're less used to looking at the story itself and seeing does it hang together or does it not and here experience in studying Bible when you realize that some of the stories are very interesting literary Creations but not necessarily precise depictions of what happened and if you take a look at talmud and you see the arguments of the rabbis then you realize that this is a literary formulation the fact that the text says the rabbis said this or that doesn't mean that they said it this is what the edit of the text is setting up this experience was kind of useful for me so I came into this I told you I was going to use the word I more than I should I came into this with a little bit of experience with text and a little more experience with the critical reading and understanding of stories so the next step in dealing with the question did the kazars convert to Judaism or not is to look at these stories themselves and to or look at the sources and to see what are the sources that we have at our disposal so I wrote a big article about this I think it's actually going get published so if you want all the footnotes and the details and the page 26 on the top you can it'll it'll be out I hope one day if you're really really eager I can probably send you answers to questions but in general if you look at the text what is the best possible text now when we're looking in history for historical text what we would like to have is something from written at the time first person hopefully objective these are the kinds of sources we like second hand third hand is very often what we get but it's not as good as first s now with regard to the kazars we have a firstand source we have a correspondence between who was a Jewish courtier man of the court in medieval Spain and the king of the kazars who lived in kazaras somewhere between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea it's pretty far away we have a letter ofai even sha which she writes from Spain and says I've heard that the Kazar is converted to Judaism please tell me about yourself he was thrilled by the idea that here a warlike Nation had accepted Judaism his own religion and he got it there's an answer written by Joseph king of the kazars in which he describes the history of his fames Kings of khazaria H and describes how Generations previously his great great great great great grandfather had had a dream that um uh his behavior is pleasing to God but the way he worships God is not correct and went on and on ultimately he decided to have a competition with representatives of Judaism Christianity and Islam to each one would present the merits of their religion and he would be able to find out which is the best religion and this is what Kai loved guess who was the winner Judaism was the one so for this is the punchline of the story and since then for Generations they kazars have been Jews and they've uh welcome Scholars and they built study halls and Grand synagogues and on and on and written in beautiful Hebrew now here is where a third Factor came in which once again I'm using the first person I noticed but here it's very helpful being a experienced teacher of first year students at University when I get a paper from a student which has the word whereas or cacophony the next thing I do is I start checking in on the internet because I want to know where he got it from there is no first year student who's going to use the word whereas or caka or any of those other multi cabic words and the question is is it going to take me five minutes or a half an hour to find out where he's cop there's one person I never found but I know they copied my best was my best was two minutes I said gosh this sounds like something my teacher Jacob Catz would have written so i p without Jacob cats I had to say the student had good taste to copy from a really great scholar but uh got to give credit so when I see something that's written in beautiful Hebrew from a tribal leader Somewhere Out near the Caspian Sea it begins something is a bit wrong now of course you can explain this you can say that he's a king he doesn't have time to sit down and write he's got a Ghost Rider even people who are more important than the king of the kazars have ghost writers to write their uh speeches so let's take so he might have had a ghost riter who was a brilliant hebraist and knew how to write a Hebrew full of biblical Illusions and references to verses Etc then begin to look at the story all right does it really make sense that you're going to have a argument between a Jew and a Christian a Muslim and a Jew and the argument is going to crush the opponents with the claim you're both based on Judaism it's that's not the way arguments work there are answers a good Christian debator a good Muslim debator can easily provide answers and responses as to why their relig religion why while in one way or another based on or preceded by Judaism is a superior form you don't win an argument like that on points moreover if you check the dates according to the letter you go back to the great great great great great grandfather and you look on a time scale it turns out that this guy's great great great grandfather who converted to Judaism it was active before there was a Kazar Nation because it goes back too far what the uh he goes back it goes back to the seventh century take three he says he we don't have a precise State for the letter but it was written let's say around the year 900 and he says that his great great great grandfather was 340 years previously the letter between the Spanish uh the Kazar was no no no the Kazar the Kazar writing about his great-grandfather dates his great-grandfather 340 years earlier we don't we don't have a date for either letter but the approximate date for the letter that came from Spain there's no written date so you so the proximity has to be if it was real if it was real had came from even that had to be in his lifetime which is in the 10th late 9th early 10th Century so whether was I think the whole thing was forged but if it was real It Was Written either when he was young or a little bit older now if we take a look at the contents of the letter then we also notice the fact it's written in such brilliant Hebrew which it really is then you begin to say gee what else do we have written in khazaria and there's nothing no scholar from khazaria no other biblical commentaries or Tuda commentaries or poetry we have no text from kazara other than this text which appears to be Kazar and the King of the kazars in this letter likes the description of his land you know I'm the king of this land he is a a little the description is a little odd because he writes about the land and he describes the Agriculture and the Orchards and the fruit trees and the Brooks which is all very nice which is Maybe to some parts of that area this is not the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian is not quite Paradise but there are places where there are trees however what were Medieval turkic Nations mainly in that period in terms of economic activities they had flocks they were Horsemen of the steps they went back and forth across the steps of their horses they had sheep they had goats they had all kinds of animals like this not a word in this description it would be a perfect description of what country Orchards he doesn't mention olives but he could have pal Palestine maybe Spain certainly but it does not fit the Kazar a step culture it doesn't there's no reference to the Dynamics of migration because these Nations all of these nations the kazars and the alans the pigs I'm just throwing in words to make an impression on you don't take me seriously but there really were Nations like this they were all Nomads like the hanss and the Mongols that's why they were so powerful because they could sweep in on their horses and sweep out so there's no reference to that not only that he does mention the cities near khazaria and when he talks about the area of the Crimea which is on the Black Sea or the areas to the South the description fits pretty much what we know however when the description comes to the east which is to and the where the Caravan Roots would go towards China or to Iran which was very important because this in the medieval period this was was a time of trade rots which went from east to west when he talks about that then his geographical descriptions are very very vague and quite inaccurate and here you begin to wonder if this is a king of the kazars he should really know where the trade was coming from the East and you read the letter doesn't fit so when you have a of problems like this then you begin to really have to wonder is this a text that was written in khazaria by a king who didn't know where his trade Roots were who didn't know what his economy was who didn't know exactly how many years his grandfather had lived who boasted about the study halls and the scholars even though somehow nothing came out of these Scholars you begin to wonder is this really a text that was written in that time and place could God forbid this be forgery do we know of any texts written in Spain which were attributed to authors who clearly were not written by those authors do we yes we do okay this is not a fair test but Jewish studies experts we have the Zohar the Zohar presents itself as being written by Palestinian Rabbi Shimon barai and it was written it was compiled it was put together you can nobody knows exactly how it came into being but it was certainly not written in the time of the Romans in the land of Israel this is a Spanish creation Now if you you write it in Spain you say this is a WR book written by Joe who wants to read a book by written by Jo if you say it was written by the famous Rabbi in Roman Palestine oh this is a serious book so the zor got into the literature as a pseudepigraphic text that doesn't mean it's not worth studying it's extremely worth studying it's very valuable it's an expression of religious thought it's just not a very useful source about life in the first century in Palestine you have to take it as it is so we have in the Middle Ages all kinds of Works which are attributed and they're not written out of maliciousness or to trick historians but they're written in order to feel a need to come to answer certain problems that people have and if we're dealing with the Jews in the Middle Ages who have their fair share of problems they have no Monopoly of pro of problems I think that from my opinion I have a simple measurement you're probably better off as a Jew in the Middle Ages than being the average non-jew most the average non-jews were peasants and they were really kicked around but the Jews thought they had Fair number of problems and they did and a story like this about an exotic place in which and in a fair competition where Judaism is the winner for Jews this was a really good story that encouraged and strengthened them and met a need so if we put this text aside then we have to look at what are the other sources just because you have one inaccurate text that doesn't mean the other ones are also inacurate there's no guilt by association if we look at the other ones however they problem atic each one in its own way there is another Hebrew text which describes the story in a totally different way it says that basically there was a the Jewish fam families in Armenia that fled to khazaria and they intermarried and then there was a Jewish there was a military commander by of Jewish descent whose wife pushed him into becoming observant of the Sabbath and of K the laws of kosher food and he became very observant and when this happened the king of madon and the king of Arabia became Furious How could a Kazar Commander revert to Judaism and they sent delegations and there was an argument between the two the representatives of the Christians and of the Muslims and of the Jews and when it got to the culmination one of the Jews said well there's a cave let's go see what's in the cave and they went into this cave and they found there sounds a little bit like Kuman and they went and they found manuscripts and the assimilated Jews were able to take these manuscripts of the Holy books and to read them if we could find out how this would happen this would solve the problems of Hebrew schools around the world and they were able to read these manuscripts and understand the truth of Judaism and then the others simply surrendered and uh from that point on the kazars were Jewish it's a great story but it's difficult to find anything within the story that you can really take seriously as a as a reality there also problems with the language and uh there's a lot of Arabic in them but that's that's that's not to the point the main thing is the story itself is so fantastic that you really find it difficult to build on it and there is a uh statement that almost every e even within a fantastic story there is a kernel of truth but not every oyster has a pearl some oysters do some don't and not every fantastic story has a historical curve so if we want to look at sources then we have to go at sources which are more problematic but perhaps more reliable and there are a fair number of Muslim geographers and historians who write about the uh jewishness of the kazars now um there's a whole list that uh since I took this very seriously I took each one one by one and analyzed them but I'm not going to do it now what I will say is though that for the Muslim writers this area of Black Sea Caspian Sea was really far off from civilization for them and they are explicit about it it was basically close to the lands of go and Magog these uh wild nations from they mentioned in the Bible and more importantly they're mentioned in the Quran what nations that are retied up to the struggle which will come at the end of the world and there was a very widespread belief in the Middle Ages that Alexander the Great built a great wall to keep Gog and Magog away from the Civilized world and if they would ever breach the wall they would destroy Humanity now it could be that this is a spin-off of stories about the Great Wall of China that could be but any case they was a wall to keep go and Magog out and the kazars are regarded as a nation which is close to go Magog in other words for them for most of these writers these uh this was a world beyond the Civilized World in which people could do strange things there were animals which had the heads of men and the bodies of a horse there were all kinds of strange people there were Magic rivers and you also could have a population of which of all things would convert to Judaism which is also reasonably barbaric uh step if one takes now here you can listen to me but don't believe me check read sometime if you take all of these descriptions one by one each of the sources that we have in the Muslim geographers are almost each contradict each other in terms of the dates in terms terms of the Dynamics they do mention the story that the kazars converted but there's no systematic picture and there's what's most important there's no explanation of why and how this could take place now these texts were all written in either in current present day Iraq or in present day Persia uh the other words they were written far from the scene where it took place and the people who wrote relied in second and third hand information so we have a we don't we have interesting sources contradictory and not the most reliable and now in the very the limited amount of time I have left I'll discuss negative sources because basically I'm a negative person so I like the negative sources first off we have a great deal of literary sources from the Middle Ages among the from the Jews we have the cyoa we have literature of the Babylonian GA lots and lots of texts none of them ever mention a story of conversion of the Kazar to Judaism and you think about it for somebody like my manes who was dealing with with the struggle between Judaism and Islam this would have been such a beautiful thing to site here in a Fair competition is Judaism one in a discussion there's no reference not a word not only that there were populations that were even more interested in the kazars than the Jews and that is the byzantines because the byzantines were neighbors they had a kind of a common border the kazars were sometimes enemies sometimes allies the byzantines had information on the kazars they had interest in the kazars you go through the Byzantine sources I didn't but I read everybody who did and I checked all the indexes there's not a word about Kazar conversions in the Byzantine literature now to think that a strongly Christian kingdom which was deeply interested in Jews mainly because they didn't like Jews would not mention the fact the Kazar the Jewish is odd they have very nasty things to say about K kazars they're cheats they're Liars their violence they're violent but they don't call them Jews as well we have and this is even better letters of Christian missionaries who were sent to khazaria but they don't say that they were sent to convert the Jews not only that there's a kind of a left-handed compliment they say that they went to khazaria and they were welcomed by the king and he allowed them to present their ideas now why a left-handed ciment what kind of Jewish king would allow missionaries into his country if you had a Jewish King why would he be tolerant there's absolutely no precedent for it and either he would kill them or he would throw them out why let them into a country so we have an absence of references where there should be references Behavior which doesn't make sense if the kazars were Jewish we have we have evidence of conversion to Christianity in regions that were under Kazar rule again why a Jewish Kingdom would allow this I mean can you imagine I'm not going to say any names but you can think of a few rabbis can you imagine them sitting quietly when this happened we have no literary Productions from the kazars and now again relying on other people who know much more than I do in the Georgian literature in the Armenian literature and the Persian literature there's no reference to the Kazar so all in all if you look at the story you say all right what real evidence do we have for the Kazar the best we can find is problematic evidence in in the works of geographers and historians however we have not an argument from Silence but what I call an argument from silences many different National literatures in each of one by every reason of logic should have somehow responded and they don't and if you have silence here and silence there and silence there and a tradition of exotic tales about exotic places and one last thing if you take a look at the archaeological evidence all of the archaeological work that has been done has not found any evidence for conversion to Judaism or even of large scale jwm there are there were Jews in Kazar so the fact that you find a Jewish gravestone proves that they were Jews which we know but not significant numbers burial customs of Kazar rulers this we have some burials don't fit Jewish burial Traditions so that there's no material evidence there's not even gra a lot of graffiti from the time no Jewish looking graffiti the best they came up with is they found a graffiti of a mugin duy to starve David the only problem was that that wasn't the Jewish symbol in the 8th Century it's a medieval symbol somebody somebody like the diagram je Star of David but there's no really Jewish symbols maybe that's where it came from what maybe that's where it came from uh no maybe but I I don't think so so when you look at it if the simplest explanation and usually simple as good is that this is a great story it's a myth but it's not something that happened or something that's history and the issue is that most of the people have dealt with this you you look at it's kind of funny I I feel odd this position they're all believers well this professor said that and that scholar said that and it's written in a book with German letters it's Gothic it's got to be true everybody is quoting everybody and nobody says forget the quotes let's just look at the facts and see is it or isn't it and I think one of the most important historians that I know of is Christian Anderson you know the story about the close of the emperor sometimes you know a little kid just looks and says yeah he doesn't have any clothes on and here you have to keep belief out of Academia you have to say are there facts and in this case I don't think there I don't think there are any facts so this is kind ofical uh but I think that this here that Gil was absolutely correct I just wish he would have written it himself then I could have spent the last two years doing something else y

Channel: StroumJewishStudies

Views: 55,941

Keywords: Jewish studies, University of Washington, Stroum Jewish Studies Program, Seattle, Lunchtime Learning, Shaul Stampfer, Hebrew University, Khazar conversion, Jewish history, lecture

Id: PYbycYgjnSU

Length: 42min 47sec (2567 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 08 2013