chapter 9 Steppe Empires? The Khazars and the Volga Bulgars Common opinion used to have it that the defeat by Charles Martel of a Muslim army near Tours in 733 or 734 was a decisive moment in world history marking the halting of the northward spread of Islam. Similarly, historians used to praise the Khazars for rescuing (Eastern) Europe from complete Islamization. The Khazars were believed to have blunted the Arab advance through the Caucasus Mountains and to have fought them to a standstill. Before the 13th or 14th cen- tury, Islam did not therefore move beyond the Caucasus range.1 The conversion of the Khazars to Judaism has also attracted attention, a lot more than any other event in their more than 200-year long history. To be sure, that conver- sion was not unique in history, if one thinks, for example, of the Yemenite Jews of 6th-century Himyar. But in a world obsessed with inventing traditions, the Khazars are now viewed as ancestors of the East European Jewry, of those who perished in the Holocaust and of some of those who founded the state of Israel in 1948. The idea, first put forward by Ernest Renan in the late 19th century, was largely made popular in the 20th century by Arthur Koestler: “the large majori- ty of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern Europe—and thus perhaps main- ly of Khazar origin.” To Koestler, a journalist, the “story of the Khazar Empire … begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.”2 A historian, the Israeli president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (1952–1963) went even further. He called Khazaria “the most significant attempt at the establishment of an 1 Fouracre, Age, pp. 86–87; Shnirel’man, Myth, p. 4. Shapira, “The Khazar account,” p. 336 still believes that “it was not, or not only the Khazar stand against the Arabs in 737 that stopped Islam’s advance into Europe, but rather the victory at Poitiers/Tours in 732 by Charles (duly named Martellus, Maccabee, thereafter).” For a critique of this idea, see Makó, “The possible reasons,” especially p. 57. 2 Koestler, Thirteenth Tribe, p. 17. As Shnirel’man, Myth, p. 98 explains, before Koestler, the idea was used by American journalists to berate Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and put them in contrast to German and Spanish Jews. During and after the war, the idea was also advocated by the Israeli historian Abraham N. Poliak. In the late 19th century, Salomon Kohn advanced the idea that Hungarians and Jews were brothers, since they originated from the Khazaria (Konrád, “Zsidók magyar nemzete”). The idea that Ashkenazic Jews are descen- dants of Khazars is still popular (Brook, Jews of Khazaria; Wexler, “What Yiddish teaches” and “Yiddish evidence”). Others deny that Khazars have ever converted to Judaism, perhaps be- cause, in the meantime, the link between Ashkenazic Jews and Khazars has been interpreted in racial (and racist) terms: the Ashkenazi Jews are not truly Jews, but Turks (Gil, “Did the Khazars”). With no relation to that line of thinking, archaeologists point out the lack of any archaeological evidence of the Khazar conversion to Judaism (Flerov, “Iudaizm,” pp. 277–79). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395190_010 Steppe Empires? The Khazars and the Volga Bulgars 129 independent Jewish state in the diaspora.”3 The Khazars have been claimed as ancestors by Crimean Karaites and by Kazakhs.4 They have also been used as a literary motif by Judah Halevi in the 12th century and by Milorad Pavić, 800 years later.5 In the nationalist literature of late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, “Khazars” have also been employed as a less literary (and much more pernicious) metaphor in anti-Semitic tirades, a euphemism for “international Zionism.”6 It is then not surprising that modern historians struggle both with the cor- rect assessment of Khazar history and with the contemporary relevance of the Khazars. Many see Khazaria as one of the largest political entities of its day, stretching from Kiev in the west to the Aral Sea in the east, and from the Middle Don and Middle Volga in the north to the Crimea and the Caucasus Mountains in the south.7 A multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious state, Khazaria is treated as a “classical” case of a steppe or nomadic empire, although the evi- dence of the written and archaeological sources does not support such an in- terpretation.8 Striding the east-west transit routes and controlling trade along those routes, Khazaria is also regarded as a special kind of nomadic state, one with a well-developed urban culture, supposedly indicated by the great num- ber of city names mentioned in Arabic sources. However, the idea that Khazar cities existed at all has been recently criticized as little more than the result of an evolutionary mode of thinking linked to a misinterpretation of both written and archaeological sources.9 3 Ben-Zvi, The Exiled, p. 256. 4 Kizilov and Mikhailova, “The Khazar khaganate,” pp. 36–42; Golden, “The Khazars and the Kazakhs.” 5 The Spanish Jewish poet Judah Halevi (c. 1075–1141) is the author of the most important work of Jewish medieval philosophy: ha Levi, The Kuzari (Schweid, “Khazarskaia tema”). The Serbian novelist Milorad Pavić (1929–2009) is the author of the experimental novel Dictionary of the Khazars (Pavić, Dictionary). 6 Shnirel’man, “The story of a euphemism,” pp. 358–59 points out the conceptual link between this notion and Lev Gumilev’s idea that, as an “ethnic chimera,” the Khazars were simply a form of “aggressive Judaism” responsible for much harm done to Rus(sia) in the course of history. The “struggle” between Slavs and Khazars has been a significant topic of the Russian historiography since the 19th century (Vashchenko, “Khazarskaia problema”, pp. 55–121). 7 Novosel’cev, “Khazariia”; Kalinina et al., Khazariia; Zaremska, “Chazaria”; Zhivkov, Khazaria. 8 Naimushin, “Khazarskiia kaganat”; Kalinina, “Khazarskoe gosudarstvo”; Zhivkov, Khazaria, pp. 222–67. 9 The idea that Khazars had cities (such as Itil, Samandar, Sarkel, and Semikarakory) was first put forward by Pletneva, Ot kochevyi k gorodam, p. 44 and then defended and developed in Pletneva, “Goroda kochevnikov” and “Goroda v khazarskom kaganate.” Pletneva’s idea was adopted uncritically by Callmer, “Urbanisation” and Petrukhin, “Rus’ i Khazariia.” For a thor- ough critique of this idea as originating in Marxism, see Flerov, “‘Goroda’ Khazarii”; Svistun, .