During the past
two centuries, one of the major controversies surrounding the kingdom of the
Khazars was about the ultimate religion(s) and geographic destination(s) of its
Jewish inhabitants. Moses Shulvass,
writing in The History of the Jewish People in 1982, indicated that the
fate of the Khazarian Jews “basically remains an enigma.” (Shulvass 2:118) Now, an
exciting new discovery has at long last demonstrated the integration of
specifically Jewish Khazars with other rabbinical Jews in an established Jewish
community in a land outside of Khazaria itself.
Timothy S. Miller
of Salisbury University (Salisbury, Maryland, U.S.A.) examined a set of miracle
tales copied by Constantine Akropolites (c.1250-c.1324) in the early 14th
century near the end of his version of the Life of Saint Zotikos (Vita
Sancti Zotici). He discovered
that two of these tales describe Khazars who lived in Pera, a suburb of
Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire, during the 11th century. The tales allude to these Khazars’
intermarriage with other Jews of Pera, thus providing the first solid evidence
of where Khazarian Jews settled after the destruction of the Khazar Empire in
the 960s. For some reason, Miller’s
discovery was virtually ignored by scholars, both Jewish and non-Jewish, over
the past decade and was not mentioned in any other publications about Khazars
and Byzantine Jews. One reason was
that scholars had mistakenly thought that Akropolites’ texts represented “merely
ornamented copies of earlier versions” and paid them no attention, but Miller
found that they actually contain important new information about Saint Zotikos
and his followers and that three of the miracle tales are not found anywhere
else. (Miller [1994] 339-340)
According to Miller’s analysis, Akropolites probably copied these tales
from an 11th century version of the Zotikos legend that is no longer
in existence. (Miller [1994] 345)
Saint Zotikos
lived during the early 4th century but was executed during the reign
of Constantius II (337-361). During
his life he performed many compassionate deeds for lepers, such as saving many
from the death penalty and providing them with food (including grains) and
shelter. He established a
leprosarium (leper asylum) in Pera on the Galata Hill, on the opposite side of
the Golden Horn from Constantinople, and it became a refuge where increasing
numbers of lepers arrived to seek to be cured. Akropolites’ Life of Saint
Zotikos claims that people immediately cured themselves of leprosy by
annointed their bodies with lamp oil in the Zotikos leprosarium or by accepting
Christianity, neither of which is an actual medical cure. But while the religiously-inspired
storyline is not totally believable, the basic geographic and demographic
circumstances are authentic.
Akropolites’ first
Khazar-themed miracle tale tells about a man of Khazar ancestry who was suddenly
struck with leprosy. Seeking a
cure, he visited the Zotikos leprosarium and recovered from his leprosy as soon
as he annointed himself with the magic lamp oil from above Zotikos’ tomb.
(Miller [1994] 365) The second tale
introduces this man’s sister, who is described as both a follower of Judaism and
the wife of a Jew. She, too, had
contracted leprosy. Her brother was
at this time a Christian. He urged
her to convert to Christianity, but “she held the views of the Hebrews and clung
to the pattern of the law, and rejected the law of grace and truth.” (Miller
[1994] 365) Despite her repeated
resistance to Christianity, her brother never ceased reading Christian holy
texts to her and trying to convince her of Christianity’s alleged truth. Finally, he became so desperate that he
kidnapped her and locked her in the holy enclosure of the brothers of
Christ. Over the coming days he
indoctrinated her with Christianity, and eventually she was baptized in holy
water, which allegedly restored her health “as though she was born again.”
(Miller [1994] 367)
Miller explained
that the Jewish quarter in Pera was near a church (the Church of Saint
Panteleemon) that is mentioned in the third of the three new miracle tales as
well as near the leprosarium where the Khazar man got cured. (Miller [1994]
376. See note I.) The Jews of Pera originally had lived
within Constantinople proper, but were moved to this undesirable section of Pera
during the 11th century by the Byzantine government. (Miller
[1991]) According to Miller’s
analysis: “Since most Khazars were Jewish, they had settled within the district
around Constantinople reserved for Byzantine Jews.” (Miller [1991]) That Judaism was indeed
the primary religion of the Khazars is confirmed by numerous independent
sources. (Brook [2003] 1823-1827)
There are only a
few other traces of the Khazar diaspora in medieval documentation. In The Book of Tradition,
composed in 1161, Rabbi Abraham ibn Daud stated that he and his acquaintances
met rabbinical Khazarian Jewish students who studied Judaism in Toledo, Spain
during the 12th century. (Ibn Daud 93. See note II.) It is noteworthy that these Khazars
still knew their identity almost two centuries after the Rus’ conquest of
Khazaria. Unfortunately, Ibn Daud
did not say where the Khazar students’ homes were located. It is also known that Khazars lived at
one time in the Kozare district of Kiev’s suburb of Podol, which existed by 945.
(Golb and Pritsak 57-58) However,
it is uncertain whether or not they were Jews, even though it is likely that
they were. The rabbinical Jewish
community of Kiev that in the early 10th century wrote the Kievan
Letter, a Hebrew document with a single Turkic word, may have had some
Khazars among their members. (Golb and Pritsak 26-27, 31-32) However, Avraham Torpusman and Moshe Gil
argued that the Kievan Letter was composed and signed not by Khazarian
Jews but by Judean Jews who had adopted local Slavic and Turkic names. We do not know the religion(s) of the
Kabar tribe(s) of Khazars who moved to Hungary at the end of the 9th
century.
As for other
Khazars residing in the Byzantine Empire, some Khazars had served the Byzantine
emperors Leo VI (ruled 886-912) and Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (ruled
913-959) as imperial bodyguards at the gates of the palace in Constantinople.
(Brook [2002] 513) These Khazars
swore their allegiance to the Byzantine state and attended Byzantine feasts and
ceremonies, many of which were Christian-themed. Due to the consistent anti-Judaism
attitudes of the emperors and repeated efforts to convert Byzantine Jews to
Christianity, it is unlikely that the Khazar guards were devout Jews. During the 930s and 940s, as recorded by
al-Masudi, Emperor Romanos I Lekapenos actively persecuted Jews and many of
those who refused to convert fled to Khazaria. (Dunlop 89) The second miracle tale about the Khazar
woman forced to convert to Christianity is an excellent illustration of the
notorious intolerance of medieval Byzantium. The tale’s author wrote that the woman’s
Jewish beliefs indicated that her soul “was infected by a disease more terrible
than leprosy.” (Miller [1994] 365)
A Patriarch of Constantinople, Nikolas I Mystikos, wrote a letter around
920 in which he called the Jewish Khazars “a deluded nation, so nearly ravished
from the bosom of piety by the evil demon.” (Brook [2002] 513) Despite the friction between Khazars and
Byzantines, the two sides still had trading relations in the 10th
century, and the Schechter Letter, a Hebrew letter written by an
anonymous Khazarian Jew, was evidently written in Constantinople and given to
Hasdai ibn Shaprut’s messengers there.
However, it is clear that the anonymous Jew’s permanent home was in
Khazaria, as he referred to Khazar King Joseph as his “master.” The 12th century traveller
Benjamin of Tudela only referred vaguely to traders from “Khazaria” who were not
part of the permanent Byzantine Jewish community.
Thanks to Miller’s
research and translation of Akropolites’ version of the Life of Saint
Zotikos, we now know one place where the Jewish Khazars lived after Khazaria
was extinguished: the Byzantine Empire.
It is significant that we learned that these Khazars lived with and
married other rabbinical Jews rather than Karaites. There were already Karaites in
Constantinople by the early 11th century but they lived in their own
separate quarter, separated by a wall from the larger rabbinical Jewish
community. It remains to be
demonstrated whether Jewish Khazars also moved to, and stayed in, such other
countries and regions as Kievan Rus, Hungary, Poland, Spain, or Daghestan. The suggestion that Khazars merged with
Ashkenazi Jews has been raised repeatedly, such as by Léon Alhadeff, but direct
proof is still lacking. (Alhadeff)
The hypothesis that Khazars merged with the Mountain Jews of the North
Caucasus was asserted by, among others, Heiko Haumann, but again cannot be
proved. (Haumann 6-7) Others’
claims that the Jewish Khazars all converted to Christianity or Islam at the end
of their history are equally speculative.
Despite the
current lack of direct evidence connecting Ashkenazi Jews with Khazars, the new
finding can be correlated with another known fact: that the 11th
century Byzantine Jews of Constantinople had family, cultural, and theological
ties with the Jews of Kiev. For
instance, some 11th-century Jews from Kievan Rus were participants in
an anti-Karaite assembly held in either Thessalonica or Constantinople, most
likely the former. (Pereswetoff-Morath 2:57) Additionally, there is a record of a
Slavic-speaking Jew of Kievan Rus who, evidently in the 11th century,
travelled to Thessalonica to meet with a relative who served as a rabbi.
(Pereswetoff-Morath 2:59-60)
Furthermore, the text of the Kievan Letter presents many
similarities with the style of rhyming used in the liturgical poems of the
Byzantine Jewish poet Eleazar ha-Qalir. (Golb and Pritsak 10-11) The Slavic-speaking Jews of Kiev of the
10th-11th centuries, in turn, were probably some of the
ancestors of the East Slavic-speaking Jews of eastern Europe of the
15th-17th centuries (who are documented in Beider Chapter
5) who subsequently mixed with Yiddish-speaking Jews to such an extent that they
eventually lost their distinctive names and customs. If we assume that both the medieval
Byzantine Jewish and medieval Kievan Jewish communities were part-Khazar, and
that distant descendants of these two communities later merged with Ashkenazim,
then we can posit an unbroken connection between the Khazars and the modern
Eastern European Jews for the first time.
Kevin
Alan Brook
Notes
-I.
Historia by Michael Attaleiates is a
source that indicates that the church was near the Jewish
quarter.
-II.
Khazar King Joseph also wrote that his predecessor King Bulan learned the
Talmud, implying that all other Khazarian Jews were also
rabbinical.
Sources
Cited
1. Alhadeff, Léon.
“Les
ethnies marginales du Judaïsme.”
Los Muestros No. 39 (June
2000).
2. Beider,
Alexander. A Dictionary of
Ashkenazic Given Names: Their Origins, Structure, Pronunciation and
Migrations. Bergenfield,
NJ: Avotaynu, 2001.
3.
Brook, Kevin A. “Khazar-Byzantine
Relations.” In: The Turks,
vol. 1, eds. Hasan Celal Güzel, C. Cem Oguz, and Osman Karatay, pp.
509-515. Ankara, Turkey: Yeni
Türkiye, 2002.
4.
Brook, Kevin A. “Khazars and
Judaism.” In: The Encyclopaedia
of Judaism, vol. 4, ed. Jacob Neusner, Alan J. Avery-Peck, and William
Scott-Green, pp. 1821-1832. Leiden,
Netherlands: Brill, 2003.
5. Dunlop, Douglas
M. The History of the Jewish
Khazars. New York, NY:
Schocken, 1967.
6. Golb, Norman,
and Pritsak, Omeljan. Khazarian
Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.
7. Haumann,
Heiko. A History of East
European Jews. Budapest,
Hungary: Central European University Press, 2002.
8. Ibn
Daud, Abraham. The Book of
Tradition, ed. Gerson D. Cohen. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication
Society of America, 1967.
9. Miller, Timothy
S. "The Miracle Tales of Saint
Zotikos, Khazars, and the Jews of Pera."
In: Seventeenth Annual Byzantine Studies Conference, 8-10 November
1991: Abstracts, pp. 17-18.
Brookline, MA: Hellenic College, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of
Theology, 1991.
10. Miller,
Timothy S. "The Legend of Saint
Zotikos According to Constantine Akropolites." Analecta Bollandiana 112 (1994):
339-376.
11.Pereswetoff-Morath,
Alexander. A Grin Without a
Cat. Volume 2: Jews and
Christians in Medieval Russia – Assessing the Sources. Lund,
Sweden: Lund University, 2002.
12. Shulvass,
Moses A. The History of the
Jewish People. Volume 2: The
Early Middle Ages. Chicago, IL:
Regnery Gateway, 1982.
About the
Author: Kevin Alan Brook
is the author of The Jews of Khazaria (Jason Aronson Publishers, 1999)
and contributed to The Encyclopaedia of Judaism Vol. 4 (Brill, 2003) and
The Turks Vol. 1 (Yeni Türkiye, 2002). His article "The Origins of East
European Jews" appeared in volume 30 of the journal Russian History/Histoire
Russe. Since 1995, Brook has
maintained the website of the American Center of Khazar Studies
(Khazaria.com). His report on the
medieval Jewish community in Eghegis, Armenia appeared in the December 2001
issue (No. 45) of Los Muestros.