1. Khazars Book, historical section

A ZIGZAG OF HISTORY, Between two oceans, 1 of 4

This is the Sixth Section in the total compilation book, here 46,000 words in 4 segments. This is Gumilev’s thorough examination of all the historical accounts about Khazaria. I’ll make mention that this period was very interrelated and complicated if you were to dig into every movement. Since this is an overview of the surrounds to Khazaria, it moves very fast. The descriptions are often dizzying at times. I hope that you can bare with it and take in the overview. Further readings will introduce these peoples again and again.

_____________

IN SECTION 4 THERE ALSO ARE THE RESOURCES, from the footnotes of the other 3 sections. You could open it on a separate tab, when reading these first sections.

_____________

The Eurasian continent is not monolithic. It is clearly divided into parts by natural barriers. The western peninsula of the Eurasian continent, washed by the Mediterranean and North Seas, is separated from the cold Eastern Europe by an invisible but strong boundary - the positive isotherm of January, above of which is sub-freezing.

The dry and hot areas of the Middle East and North Africa are also a landscape integrity, limited to the south by the Sahara, and to the east by the deserts of Central Asia. The mountainous region, stretching from the Adriatic Sea through Asia Minor to Transcaucasia, occupies a special, but quite independent position. At the juncture of these three large regions ethnic contacts constantly arose. These were in the 12th century Spain, Illyria, Great Armenia, extending to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, where there was Little Armenia, Sicilia.

Bounded by high mountains and hot deserts, India is rightly seen as a continent. However, the areas of Punjab and Sindh became contact zones between Hindus, Arabs, Afghans, and Turks as early as the 12th century. Natural barriers did not save India from foreign invasions.

Subtropical, abundantly humid China separated itself from the dry, cold Great Steppe by a wall, which in the twelfth century lay in ruins, but was considered the natural border between China and the Great Steppe.

Finally, the inner part of the continent, Eurasia in the narrow sense, stretched from the Chinese Wall to the Carpathians, including the steppe, forest-steppe and forest zones. Here the contact areas were the Hungarian steppe in the west and Western Manchuria in the east. In the south, the Tibetan Plateau and Semirechye can be included to this region, and the Central Asian Mesopotamia can be considered as a contact area. [251-252] (Contact of different ethnicities.)

The central part of the great Eurasian continent only at first sight seems a barren and wild country, not adapted to the development of an independent culture. Neighboring in the east with the ancient civilization of China, and in the west with the no less ancient culture of the Western European semi-continent, the Great Steppe is bounded by impassable taiga (pine forest) in the north and by mountain ranges in the south. This geographical unity, inhabited by diverse peoples with different economic skills, religions, social institutions and mores, was nevertheless felt by all neighbors as a kind of monolith, although neither ethnographers, nor historians, nor sociologists could determine the content of the dominant beginning.

And this is no accident. Back in the first half of the 20th century, the very existence of ethnographic wholes was questioned, since science had not yet found an aspect that allowed them to be perceived as realities. But it was also impossible not to notice them, and then such abstractions as West and East were formed, the meaninglessness of which was shown by Acad. N.I. Konrad [39], or "Forest" and "Steppe" [10], or "Yellowstone" [11]. [10], or the "yellow" and "white" races [53]. [252-253]

Indeed, dividing the material into two sections always simplifies problems, but by no means leads to a correct solution. In fact, the classifier unknowingly applies the primordial ethnic principle: "us" and "not us," only abstracting it as required by academic presentation. But we have to get away from this primitive aspect and proceed not from the binary reference system, but from the real existence of ethno-geographical regions, of which there are six in Eurasia, and from the change of super-ethnoses, of which there are even more. Therefore, we have changed the perspective and look at the Eurasian continent not from this or that angle, but from above. This allows us to establish the proportionality of the ethno-geographical regions.

The people who lived in these territories differed not only in languages, customs and institutions, but in their attitude to nature and history, to life and death, to good and evil. Let's see how. In the numerous primary sources, we will not find an answer to what interests us, for their authors wrote for other readers. However, along with the controversial and emotionally charged traditions, we have in sight a mass of deaf and dumb facts, the explanation of which is our responsibility. In part, this makes it difficult for the researcher to abandon the assessments of his predecessors. But is science a retelling of other people's knowledge? And in the natural sciences, where there are no verbal reports but only mute facts, are generalizations impossible? And does only deepening into the subject give cognition, while broadening the range leads to superficiality?

The systematic approach, while giving the possibility of broad generalizations, does not at all interfere with the accuracy of the study of details. For example, in the landscapes of ancient masters, minor figures only appear as spots of color. When enlarged by means of photography, they appear to the viewer as complete, drawn to detail. Everything about them is true, but they enter into the composition only as much as they are needed. This is the approach we are going to take.

p113 (page number from the Russian, to correspond to the Indexes published elsewhere)

Description of the Khazar country

Landscapes, like ethnicities, have their own history. The Volga Delta before the 3rd century was not like what it is today. Back then, the clear waters of the Volga flowed through the dry steppe among the high hills of the Baer, flowing into the Caspian Sea much [253-254] further south than later. The Volga was still shallow then, flowing not along the modern channel, but eastward, through the Akhtuba and Buzan channels, and probably flowed into the Ural trough, connected with the Caspian Sea by another narrow channel.

From this period remained monuments of the Sarmato-Alanian culture, i.e., the Turanians. The Khazars then still lived in the lower reaches of the Terek, (to the west of the Caspian).

In the II-III centuries, the Atlantic cyclones shifted their path to the north. The rains stopped irrigating the steppe zone, where a desert now prevailed for a time, and began to pour out in the Volga-Oka interfluves and in the latitude of the Kama catchment area. Winter wetting was especially significant: drifts of wet snow and, as a consequence, huge spring floods.

The Volga carried all these muddy waters, but its channel in the lower reaches was narrow for such flows. Then a delta of the modern type was formed, extending southward almost to the Buzachi Peninsula (north of Mangyshlak). The freshened shallows began to feed huge schools of fish. The banks of the channels were overgrown with dense forests, and the valleys between the hillocks turned into green meadows. Steppe grasses, remaining only at the tops of the hillocks (vertical zoning), retreated to the west and east (where the Bakhtemir and Kigach channels are now), and in the core of the emerged azonal landscape, lotus blossomed, frogs started to sing, herons and gulls began to nest. The country changed its face.

Then the ethnos that inhabited it changed, too. Steppe Sarmatians left the banks of streams, where the mosquitoes did not give rest to the cattle, and wet grasses were unusual and even harmful for them. But the Khazars spread along the then coastline, which is now 6 m below the level of the Caspian Sea. They found the richest fishing grounds, places to hunt waterfowl, and pastures for the horses on the slopes of the hills. Khazars brought with them cuttings of grapes and planted them in their new homeland, which they got without bloodshed, at the random mercy of nature. In very harsh winters, grapes died, but were replenished again and again with Dagestani varieties, because the connection between the Terek and Volga Khazaria was not interrupted.

Militant Alans and Huns, who dominated the Caspian steppes, were not a threat to the Khazars. Life in the delta is concentrated near the channels, and they are a labyrinth in which any outsider would get lost. The current in the channels is swift, there are dense thickets of reeds along the banks, [254-255] and it is not possible to get out on land everywhere. Any cavalry which tried to penetrate into Khazaria, could not quickly force the channel surrounded with thickets. Thus the cavalry was deprived of its main advantage, the maneuverability, while the locals, who knew how to navigate the maze of channels, could easily seize the initiative and give the enemy unexpected blows, being themselves elusive.

It was even more difficult in winter. The ice on fast rivers is thin and rarely, only in very cold winters, could it withstand a horse and a clipper. And to fall through the ice in winter, even in a shallow place, meant to freeze in the wind. If the squad stops and lights fires to dry off, then the pursued enemy has time to hide and hit the pursuer again.

Khazaria was a natural fortress, but, alas, surrounded by enemies. Strong at home, the Khazars did not venture out into the steppe, which would have been very useful to them. The more diverse the landscapes of the territory in which the economic system is created, the more prospects for economic development. The Volga delta is by no means monotonous, but it is not suitable for nomadic cattle-breeding, although the latter, as a form of extensive economy, is very beneficial for people because it is not labor intensive, and for nature because the number of cattle is limited by the amount of grass. Nomadic life is harmless for the nature.

Khazars did not live in the steppes and, therefore, were not nomads. But they also took from nature only a surplus that it could safely share: fish, grapes and the fruits of the gardens. In short, the ethnoses of the lower Volga were in a phase of homeostasis - equilibrium with nature and with each other at that time. Under this system of life, the ethnoses seldom actively communicated with each other, because there was nothing to fight about, and it was not profitable to take foreign girls as wives: accustomed to a different life, they would be bad housewives in the husband's house.

The larger the target, the easier it is to hit it. Therefore, let us conclude our story - the tragedy of the Khazar ethnos - in the framework of the history of neighboring countries. Of course, this history will be presented "summarized", because for our theme it has only auxiliary value. But it will be possible to trace the global international relations, which penetrated into the small Khazaria, and catch the rhythm of natural phenomena of the biosphere, the ever-changing mother of all life. Then the history of culture will play with all the colors. [255-256]

p114

Ethnos of "reflected light"

It may seem that by asserting the impossibility of the existence of an active ethnos without a passionate push, we have erred against our own thesis. For example, the Khazars became known to the Byzantine and Persian authors in the 4th century, and to the Armenian authors in the 3rd century1, but neither the meridional shock of the 2nd century (from Scandza to Palestine), nor the latitudinal shock of the 4th century (from Arabia to Northern China) should have affected them. How to explain the peculiarities of their ethnogenesis for a thousand years and the formation of numerous relics: Greben and Lower Don Cossacks, Astrakhan Tatars, and Karaites of the Crimea? In short, the Khazars behaved as a "full-fledged" ethnos that passed all phases of development, but at the expense of what?

The Rus chronicler correctly compares Khazars to Scythians [42], p.14], by which his source, George Amartol, meant an ancient, pre-Sarmatian population of the southern part of Eastern Europe [Ibid, p.II, p.223] - at a time when the steppe watershed areas were successively seized by Sarmatians (III c. B.C.), Huns (IV century A.D.), Bulgars (V century), Avars (VI century), Magyars and Pechenegs; Khazars lived quietly in dense coastal thickets, inaccessible to nomads, with whom they were always enemies.

Due to such favorable natural conditions, the Khazars - the descendants of the ancient Caucasoid population of Western Eurasia - lived as a persistent ethnic group until the end of the VI century, when the situation changed extremely sharply and unexpectedly.  The most important role in the Khazar ethnogenesis fell on the newborn ethnos of ancient Turks - Türkuts, as it is accepted to call them to avoid terminological confusion - mixing of this ethnos with other Türkic-speaking [256-257] tribes2. The Türkiyuts appeared this way: in 439 a small detachment of prince Ashin fled from Northwestern China from victorious and ruthless Tabgachs. The composition of this detachment was motley, but the predominant ethnos was the Syanbi, i.e. the ancient Mongols. Settling on the slopes of the Altai and Hangai, and mingling with the Aborigines, Turkuits made iron smelting and weapons production their narrow specialty. In 552 their first khan - Tumyn - defeated the Juan-Juan, who dominated the Steppe in the IV-V centuries. So, the Great Turkic Kaganat was created.

Tumyn's younger brother, Istemi Khan, was put at the head of an army which had a task to subdue the western steppes. Istemi reached the Don and the shores of the Black Sea. Some tribes fled from him, others obeyed the force of arms, while others thought it right to help the conqueror to share with him the fruits of victory. Among the latter were the Khazars and the Bulgarian tribe Uturgurs, who lived between the Kuban and the Don. When in the beginning of the VII century the Great Khaganate disintegrated, the Khazars and the Uturgurs were part of the Western Khaganate. Both sincerely helped their new rulers in wars against Byzantium and Iran. However, in the Western Türkut Kaganate two tribal unions formed two parties, fighting for power over the powerless khan. The Uturgurs sided with one, and Khazars, naturally, with the other party, and after its defeat accepted the escaped prince as their khan (650). [For details see: 3, p. 171; 23, p. 238.]

After 8 years the Western Türküt Kaganate was captured by the Tang empire troops, which benefited Khazars, who sided with the previously defeated prince, and to the detriment of Bulgars-Uturgurs, who lost support of the supreme khan (658). Because of this Khazars in about 670 defeated the Bulgarians, and they fled - some are on the Kama, some on the Danube, some in Hungary, and some even in Italy.

At the same time the Khazars had to repel the invasion of the Arabs, victorious from India to Aquitaine. But in the Caucasus, [257-258] unexpectedly for the conquerors of Iran and Spain, (the Arabs), the war went on with varying success, and the Khazar invasions into the Transcaucasus alternated with the Arab campaigns to Derbent (662-744), north of which the Arabs did not manage to gain a foothold. Where did a small relict ethnic group get such a tremendous passion, which allowed the Khazars, given the disparity of forces, to draw the war with the strongest and most aggressive state of the VIII century (Arabs)? The numerical advantage was on the side of the Arabs, because Khazar Khans Turkic dynasty was not supported by Alans, or Magyars, or Burtases, or Mordvians, or Slavs, and least of all Bulgarians. The special position was occupied by the highlanders of Dagestan, kingdoms Serir, Tuman, Ziri-Geran, Kaytag, Tabasaran, Lakz and Philam, who in 739 already submitted to the governor of Azerbaijan and Armenia Mervan [35, vol. I, p. 153], who based his power on the unassailable Derbent1. But the small Khazaria heroically defended its independence.

Why?

1 Moses Khorensky in his "History of Armenia" mentions that between 193 and 213. "The crowds of Khazars and Basils (Barsils), having united, passed through the gates of Jor (Derbent Passage)... crossed Kura and scattered on this side of it". [quoted from: 3, p.115]. M.I.Artamonov believes that a mention of the Khazars so early in time is an anachronism [Ibid, p.131], but does not give any reasons for doubts. Accepting the information of the source, we note that in the II century Khazars lived in the lower reaches of the Terek and Sulak. Later, they did not spread to the Volga through dry steppes, but along the shores of the Caspian Sea, which then was at minus 36 m, i.e., 8 m lower than in the 20th c. [see: 15, 16].   

2 The term "Turk" has three meanings. For VI-VIII centuries it is a small ethnos (Turks), which led a huge association in the Great Steppe (el) and died in the middle of VIII century. These Turks were Mongoloid. The Khazar dynasty descended from them, but the Khazars themselves were Europeans of the Dagestan type. For the IX-XII centuries. Turk is the common name for the warlike northern peoples, including the Magyars, Russians and Slavs. This cultural and historical meaning of the term has nothing to do with the origin. For modern orientalists "Turk" is a group of languages spoken by ethnic groups of different origins.

p115

Why? The whole 100 years (558-650) Turkic khans used the territory of Khazaria as a base for their military operations. In Khazaria Turk / Turkic warriors had a rest after crossing the dry steppes, and after returning from the or Transcaucasia they skipped the looted booty. And here for sure it was not without women, who, as it is known, are not indifferent to the winners. Children, who appeared after the military campaigns, sincerely considered themselves the Khazars. They did not know their fathers, they were brought up among the Khazars and in the landscape of the Volga Delta. They inherited only some anthropological and physiological features, including passionarity, from the Turkuts. And since such symbiosis lasted for more than a hundred years, it is natural that the passionarity brought by outsiders was enough to turn the relic peoples into an actively functioning ethnos.

But even more significant for the Khazar ethnogenesis was the next period, when Khazaria was ruled by Turkic Khans of the Ashina dynasty (650-810), the successors of the rulers of the Great Turkic Kaganate (552-745). The runaway tsarevitch and his companions, received by the Khazars hospitably, but did not merge with the mass of the people and did not oppose it. They continued to live a nomadic life, only spending the winter in houses in Itil; they led the fight against the Arabs and, being [258-259] masters of steppe maneuvering war, taught Khazars to beat back the onslaught of regular troops; remaining pagans, who revered the Blue Sky and the Black Earth, they were tolerant to complete indiscretion. This is what ruined them. But because of what and how?

The Khazars and the phases of ethnogenesis.

Introduction of the sign of passionarity from outside does not differ in its consequences from its emergence by mutation. The only difference is that during the genetic drift a trait spreads more rapidly, and therefore the process is more intense. Therefore, the incubation period of the Khazar ethnogenesis lasted for three generations, about 70 years, after which since 627 the name "Türkic-Khazars" becomes relevant, losing its meaning after 650, when Khazars are called mestizos of the Türkic-Khazar origin. Somehow Istahri and other eastern geographers divided Khazars into two classes: swarthy2 and black-haired, and "white, beautiful, perfect in appearance. [Ibid, p. 137]. They also attributed Khazars now to Turks, now to non-Turks, putting them now to Georgians, now to Armenians [Ibid, p.135]. The Khazar language, according to Istahri, resembles neither Türkic, nor Persian, nor any other known language, but is similar to the language of Bulgarians [Ibid, p.135]. This last has caused a set of perplexities, because the language of Bulgarian is considered Turkic. But was it so in V-VI centuries, when Turks first appeared in Volga region? Hardly!

The Türkic language spread as an international and widely used only in the 11th c. owing to the Cumans, and it displaced from the steppe Old Russian, which dominated in the 10th - 11th cc. (41, vol. I, p. 54). Before that the ethnoses spoke at home in their own languages, which did not come down to us, and in addition knew the Old Turkic language of the military leaders.

Thus, in the 7th century in the Lower Volga region optimal conditions for ethnogenesis were created: diverse landscapes in close combination, economic systems corresponding to them, coexistence of ethnic substrates belonging to a single (Eurasian) super-ethnos, and import of passionarity, which allowed to formalize ethnic diversity into a social system. This latter was elastic enough [259-260] for the ethnoses that entered it to become sub-ethnoses of the Khazar ethnos, which inherited the name from their ancestors.

That is why M.I. Artamonov doubted the reliability of the Armenian chronicles mentioning the Khazars in the 3rd century AD. [3, с. 116]. The ethnonym was the same, but the ethnicity was different, and that is often the case.

The phase of ethnic ascent took about 150 years, from the middle of VII till the end of VIII c. During this time the Khazars went from success to success and very successfully found contacts with their neighbors. However, the nature of these contacts was different, which led to the shift of the normal curve of ethnogenesis, so the Acme phase did not come.  Therefore, let us pay attention to the neighbors of the Khazars, but first recall that in the III-V centuries, the Khazar ethnos was in a phase of homeostasis. Its productive forces were stable, and society was in the primitive communal formation with well-established production relations.

But the neighbors of the Khazars were developing rapidly. Byzantium and Ancient Rus were growing painfully, but steadily; Sassanian Iran was losing its growth potential by simplifying the system, which led to the strengthening of state power to the detriment of the social groups.

The eastern peoples, the Huns, who came to Europe, lost the war with the natives: the Germans in the west and Bulgars in the east, after that they lost their political and ethnic significance.

1 Derbent was finally occupied by the Arabs in 685-686 and separated from the Caliphate in the 10th century along with Shirvan.

2 Zechariah refers to the "reds" [see: 31, vol. I, p.138].

p116

The fate of the Huns is a vivid example of the fact that any ethnic process can be disrupted by political collisions which cannot be predicted. The Huns could have won the battle with the Gepids at Nedao in 453, and defeated the Saragurs (Bulgars) in 453. Then a strong state would have been established in the Eastern Europe already in the 5th century. But since this did not happen, the numerous local ethnic groups regained their independence.

The second Asiatic ethnos, who reached Europe, the Avars (Obras), lost their positions in the Black Sea area in 630, because of the conflict with the Kuturgurians, who inhabited the steppes from the Don to the Carpathians. The Avars concentrated their efforts against the Greeks and the Franks and oppressed the Slavs, the Dulebs, who inhabited Volhynia. In the beginning of the IX century the Avars were defeated by the Franks, but still retained their independence and held territory east of the Danube until the arrival of the Hungarians, whom they met as kinsmen, and soon united with them into one ethnos. The Avar Kaganate, the last fragment of the ancient Turan, ceased to exist in the beginning of the 10th century. [260-261]

Khazar neighbors in the 7th-8th centuries.

The Hun tragedy left a mark on the ethnic map of Eastern Europe. The Saragurs Bulgars were squeezed by another Asian people, Sabirs or Savirs, some of them penetrated into Transcaucasia, and some settled in Pontic Scythia..., "up to Ripaean mountains, from which flows out Tanais" [3, p.651]. Savirs were natives of the Western Siberia and, apparently, belonged to the Ugrian or southern branch of the Samoyedic group. Their western tribes weakened, but retained their ancient ethnonym, the Norse. They did not border the Khazars and do not seem to have communicated with them as other neighboring ethnic groups did.

Not only a small group of Altai Mongoloid Turkuits1, but also the vassals that accompanied them in their campaigns became part of the Khazar ethnos during the 7th-8th centuries. Some of them assimilated, others retained their ethnicity. Thus, the authors of the 10th century Barsils ceased to distinguish from the Khazars, and Pechenegs, who until the 9th century came to Khazaria from the East as friends and allies, but did not mix with the Khazars [17,18,24]. Obviously, the nomadic life attracted them more than the sedentary life of the Khazars. But friendship did not interfere. Khazars, Barsils, Turkuts, Telesians, and Pechenegs were connected not by the commonality of life, morals, culture and language, but by a common historical destiny: the presence of common enemies and the unity of political objectives, the main of which was not to perish, but to survive. And to the beginning of IX century. Khazars coped with this task brilliantly, precisely because they were not alone.

Khazaria led the resistance forces, and thus expanded its sphere of influence to the Crimea and the Aral Sea, to the Kuban and the Oka, to the Desna and Sakmara. But in such ethnic heterogeneity for the state system often lurks a danger.

The Oguzes in the east, the Magyars in the north, the Alans and Bulgars (Blacks) in the west, were not always friends of the Khazars. But because these ethnic groups were part of the system of a single Eurasian super-ethnos, inter-tribal clashes did not turn into either extermination or wars of conquest. All these ethnoses lived a subsistence economy, which was always closely connected with the natural features of the host landscapes. The Oguzes were accustomed to [261-262] dry steppes and semi-deserts, where the snow cover is thin and does not impede year-round nomadism. But these steppes were not needed for the els (Huns) that inhabited the forest-steppe strip of western Eurasia, and for the Alans, who lived in the luxurious cereal steppes between the Kuban and the Don. There, a lot of snow falls in winter, hence hay for cattle; hence nomadic life is not possible; cattle breeding must be distant pastures.

But none of the above ethnoses needed floodplains inhabited by the Khazars, just as the Khazars had nothing to do in the steppes nor forests bordering them. Therefore they calmly watched as in the forest belt of western Eurasia spread a new ethnos, the Slavs: Vyatichi and Radimichi, and in the middle Dnieper region another group of Slavs gradually assimilated the Rossomons and Savirs, transforming them into Polans and Severians. Each of these ethnoses acquired its ecological niche, and therefore conflicts between them could be determined only by fluctuations in passionarity. [262-263]

Fortunately for all the above ethnoses, in this respect also in the eighth century were prosperous. The Alans, the descendants of the brutal Sarmatians, who in the 3rd century BC physically exterminated the Scythians, and gave the Parthians a leader with a retinue (250 BC), in a thousand years have turned into a cultural, hardworking and peaceful ethnos, devoid of tendencies toward aggression. This transformation was aided by the fact that the most active and indomitable part of the Alans left after 371 AD for Spain, to avoid being subjugated by the Huns. And as we know, passionarity is a hereditary trait. Hence, the descendants of passionate Alans should be sought in Castile, and not in the North Caucasus.

1 When in 627 the Turks and Khazars jointly with the Byzantines besieged Tbilisi, the Georgians put a gourd on the city wall and drew a face of Jabgu-Kagan on it: instead of eyebrows - thin dashes, bare chin, sparse hair on the mustache, nostrils - as wide as a elbow; and shouted: "Here is your king!"

p117

The Ugric, including Magyars, are an ancient ethnos, which received an additional injection of passionarity in the II-V centuries from the Huns1. The least passionate were Oguzes, who managed to keep their independence both from Huns and Turkuts.

The Byzantine ethnos had no ancestors. This, of course, does not mean that its constituent people are not descended from Pithecanthropes, but ethnos is not a stock of people, but a dynamic system, emerging in a historical time, in the presence of passionary push, as a necessary component at the starting point of ethnogenesis, a process which breaks the old culture.

In the Mediterranean in antiquity there was a single Hellenistic culture, which included in the process of development Lacium and the Phoenician cities. Ethnically it resembled Western European culture, because the basic Hellenistic core did not exhaust all the variants of the diverse Hellenistic culture. Of course, Rome, Carthage, Pella had their local peculiarities and represented independent ethnoses, but in a super-ethnic sense they were part of the broad circle of Hellenistic culture. This, however, is not new, but it is important for us as a starting point. Roman domination promoted ethnic revelation, and the equation of Greek with Latin resulted in almost the entire population of the Mediterranean merging into a single ethnos. But in the first century A.D. new people appeared in the Roman Empire, forming a new entity over the next two centuries. Already at the beginning of their appearance they opposed themselves to the "Gentiles", i.e. to all others, and really distinguished themselves from them, certainly [263-264] not by anatomical or physiological features, but by the character of behavior. They entertained themselves differently, treated each other differently, thought differently, and set for themselves goals in life that seemed meaningless to their contemporaries.

The Hellenistic world was alien to asceticism, the new people created Thebes-du; the Greeks and Syrians spent their evenings in theaters and admired the "dance of the wasp" (the ancient striptease), while these new gathered for conversation and quietly dispersed to their homes; the Hellenes and Romans had already for several centuries considered their gods as literary images, preserving the cult as a state tradition, and in everyday life confining themselves to numerous omens, while the new preachers and neophytes considered the reality of otherness with full conviction and prepared themselves for the afterlife. Loyal to the Roman government, they refused to acknowledge its divine nature and worship statues of emperors, even though it cost them their lives. These nuances of behavior did not break the structure of society, but the new people fell out of ethnic cohesion and aroused the burning hatred of the urban poor, who demanded their extermination. It is wrong to say that the reason for the animosity arose was a difference of opinion, for the uneducated pagans at this time had no firm convictions, while the new breed had a variety of convictions. But somehow with Mithras, Isis, Cybele, Helios, the Hellenes and Romans had no quarrel, making an exception only for Christ. Obviously, it is not the ideological or political attribute that should be put out of the brackets, but the ethological, i.e., behavioral one, which was really new and unusual for Hellenistic culture. However, it was also alien to the Jews, who, far from merging with the Romans and Greeks, were not persecuted for their faith.

Across the Boundaries of the Ages

In the first millennium of the new era there was another super-ethnos, without territory, without centralized power, without an army... But there was one. The Jews, scattered from Germany to Iran, lived without losing their internal unity, despite their external diversity. Among them were bearers of different cultural traditions, different ideals, different stereotypes of behavior. Oriental Jews were not like the Byzantine or German Jews, but we do not call them an ethnic group, but a super-ethnos.   And by the IX century it was time for them to say their word. And since this "word" was uttered in Khazaria and had a very significant [264-265] impact on the fate of the Khazars, we will have to trace how and why it could happen. And for this we will have to go deeper into antiquity and trace the fate of the eastern branch of the Jewish community and its connections with Iran.

The ethnic history of the Jews was winding and varied, but the transformations resulting from the passionate impulses changed them no less than all other ethnic groups. Even the appearance of culture and religious dogmas, phenomena much more stable than ethnic stereotypes, were changing, but the ethnonym was preserved, which misled ignorant people and even scientists.

1 It is customary to call Huns the Turkic-speaking ethnos of the Central Asia, and Huns - a mixture of a group of Huns, who in the II c. came to the coast of Volga and Urals, and local Ugric [14] (as the name Khazars inherited descendants of Khazars and Turkutes).

p118

The legendary information of the first books of the Bible1 vaguely recounts the unclear links of the ancestors of the Jews with Sumer - and then with Egypt, but this has nothing to do with our topic. The historically recorded Habiru tribes in the 14th century B.C. began a conquest, extremely violent, of the defenseless and peaceful Canaan, but encountered resistance from the Philistines, one of the "peoples of the sea," apparently the ancient Achaeans or Hittites. The war with the Canaanites and the Philistines lasted until the 10th century B.C. (the acmatic phase of ethnogenesis). Only King David (1,004-965) achieved decisive success and took Jerusalem, where his son Solomon built a temple. But after Solomon's death, his kingdom split in two (nadolom), and in 586 BC Jerusalem was taken by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, who took prisoners to Babylon. Thus began the famous dispersion (diaspora), the inertial phase of ethnogenesis.

In Babylon, the Jews took root, and when, in 539 BC, Cyrus allowed them to return to their homeland, few took advantage of this permission. The Babylonian colony of Jews proved to be richer and more populous than the Palestinian colony. [265-266]

From Babylon the Jews spread throughout Mesopotamia and Susiana, [57, p.63] where they came into close contact with the Persians. There is even a suggestion that the famous anti-devil inscription of Xerxes, who banned worshipping the tribal gods, the devas, was reflected in the Bible, in the book "Esther", containing a description of how the wise Mordoheus, thanks to the charm of his niece Esther, who captivated the king, managed to organize a pogrom of Macedonians2 and other rival Jews, fighting for influence on the Persian king of kings [Ibid, p. 80].

However, Mordecai's success proved to be ephemeral. The Persians grew cold toward the Jews, and they welcomed Alexander the Great gladly, taking advantage of the fact that neither the king nor his Hellenic friends had ever encountered the Jews. When, however, the Greeks and Jews found themselves within a single Seleucid state, a bloody war broke out between them, ending in the victory of the Jews, who established a kingdom in Palestine with the Hasmonean dynasty. Gradually, Palestinian and Diaspora Jews began to separate from each other, "forming, as it were, two nations." [57, с. 216]. And their fates were different.

The fate of the Palestinian Jews was sad. They were consistently at odds with the Persians, the Macedonians and the Romans. The latter so massacred the Jews in A.D. 70 and 132 that Palestine was depopulated and then populated by Arabs. But in the major cities of the Roman Empire, in the Greek colonies of Panticapaeum, Gorgippia and Tanais, in Armenia [5, p. 10] and in the oases of Arabia the Jewish population survived. However, these were the new Jews affected by the passionary impulse of the first century and, therefore, of the same age as the Byzantines and Slavs. They maintained active relations with their Iranian co-religionists, who enjoyed the patronage of the Parthian kings, the enemies of Rome. As a consequence, both communities were continuously exchanging ideas and people until the end of the fifth century3. [266-267]

And how they needed it! Persia was a poor country, but favored the Jews; the Eastern Roman Empire was rich, but the Greeks successfully competed with the Jews. In those centuries, the center of gravity of inter-ethnic conflicts was shifted to the realm of ideology. The Bible had already been translated into Greek and it was no longer a mystery. It was read diligently, but the reaction of the readers varied. Some stood up for the serpent, who had induced Eve to acquire the knowledge of good and evil, and they called the God who wanted to leave people in ignorance an evil demon (Ophites). Others declared matter, and consequently the whole visible world, to be non-existent, i.e. simply a hindrance to the perfection of the soul, whose reality they affirmed (Gnostics). A third denied the continuity of the New and Old Testaments, considering the ancient Jewish religion to be the worship of Satan (Marcion and his school).

The fourth, the Manicheans, saw the world as an area of struggle between Light and Darkness, but while Christians recognized the world and life as the creation of God, the Manicheans held the opposite view: the world is Darkness, which has captured bits of Light (the soul).

1 The Bible as a historical source has been criticized, establishing that even the Pentateuch is addressed to two different deities: Eloim - "the One" (plural from "Eloi") - and Yahweh - manifested in the fire tornadoes [51, p. 17 2]. So the ethnos was complex in the beginning. The Jews, having become a monolithic ethnos, represented anthropological diversity. The Chaldean descendants of Ur were of the Sumerian type: short, stocky, with reddish hair and thin lips. The Negro admixture came from being in Egypt. The Semites are tall, slender, with a straight nose and narrow face, the result of mixing with the ancient Chaldean Arabs. Most Jews, on the other hand, are of the Armenoid type that prevailed in Canaan, Syria, and Asia Minor, precisely the type that is now considered Jewish. This racial diversity points only to the complexity of the process of Jewish ethnogenesis, but has no bearing on ethnic diagnosis, for ethnos and race are concepts of different frames of reference.

2 Macedonia was part of the Persian power from 490-465 B.C., and during this brief period its natives served King Artaxerxes.

3 Against this background an updated Jewish doctrine was created. In the first century two versions of the Talmud were composed: the Jerusalem and Babylonian, and in the second and third centuries the Kabbalah, i.e. "the doctrine received by tradition," arose. According to the Kabbalah, God, "bored with loneliness," decided to create his equals. The world and people are his emanation; their purpose is to improve to the level of Deity, with the reincarnation of souls. God does not help them, for "help" is shameful bread, a handout. They themselves must attain perfection [see: 43, note 3, pp. 535-536].

p119

In the West, dualism did not hold. The pagan Plotinus and the Christian Origen created slender monistic concepts that captured the minds of third-century thinkers, while the Gnostic followers closed themselves off in their disdain for the common people, and their ideas stopped influencing the broad strata of Roman society and the ethnic groups that made it up. In Iran, Gnostic Manichaeism encountered a slender system of Zoroastrianism, where life was blessed and affirmed as a creation of Ormuzd, and death and destruction (the annihilation of matter) were considered the work of Ahriman. Mani paid with his life for the consistency of his teachings. There seemed to be no place in the world for life-negating Gnostic systems; but there was.

At the borders of the great super-ethnoses, Hellenism and Iran, Iran and Turan, Turan and India, where the small, though independent principalities of the Arabs, Caucasians, and Hephthalites were nestled, the followers of Gnostic ideas found shelter and security. And the Jews, who traded Palestine for Mesopotamia, were among them. Constrained by the rigid regulations of the official religion, they reacted sensitively to the development of the world's creative thought and passed off their considerations as ancient traditions - the Kabbalah, thus giving them a place next to the rigid system of the Talmud. In the Kabbalah there were both monistic systems, close to Neo-Platonism, and dualistic ones inherited from the Yeseis, and a craving for new ideas, now [267-268] and the case that arose in Iran and Byzantium. And as there were many passionate people in the Babylonian community, from III to VI century it bubbled with ideas and took active part in events which had significance for our theme.

The Persians of the fifth and twelfth centuries had a large number of people.

The Romans, even at the time of their greatest military might, could not conquer Dworech. The local population actively helped the Parthians and then the Persians. For their loyalty, the Shahs of Iran favored the Jews, allowing them to establish colonies in Ctesiphon and Ispahani (Isfahan). Similar favors were enjoyed by the Nestorians of Mesopotamia and the Monophysites of Armenia for their opposition to the orthodox Byzantine king.

Zoroastrianism, like Judaism, was a genotheistic religion, i.e. all Persians had to follow the teachings of the magi and worship fire, but no foreigners were to be admitted to the cult. Persian conversion to Christianity was punishable by death, which sometimes caused complications that did not arise with the Jews, who, like the Persians, did not allow foreigners into their midst. Since this consistent approach ruled out assimilation, a Judeo-Syro-Armenian-Persian chimera emerged in Western Iran and Mesopotamia, with the addition of Parthian nobles and Arabs of Bahrain, who worshipped the star gods and served the Shah of Iran in exchange for money. Inside this bizarre mosaic there was no peace. The nobles and magicians tried to limit the Shah's power without attempting the throne, for central authority was needed for protection against external enemies. The Shah tried to suppress the arbitrariness of the nobles, but without bloodshed, because the nobles made up the mounted army. The Jews were on the side of the crown and, with their characteristic zeal, exceeded the measure of zeal, which did them no good.   

In 491 Iran was plagued by drought, the resultant famine, and a plague of locusts. Shah Kawad opened the state granaries, but this did not prevent popular unrest. And then one of the nobles, Mazdak, proposed to the Shah his concept of saving the state. It was dualistic, but in it, unlike Manichaeism, the "kingdom of light" was endowed with the qualities of will and reason, and the "kingdom of darkness" with the quality of an irrational element. Hence it follows that injustice existing in the world is the consequence of irrationality, and it can be corrected by means of reason: introduction of equality, equation of benefits [268-269] (i.e., confiscation of property of the rich and its division among Mazdakites) and...

The system bribed with impeccable logic, and the Shah supported Mazdak. But how was it possible to distinguish the supporters of light from the defenders of darkness? Only by their personal statement! And then a lie was put into action. The Mazdakites, taking power in their hands, unleashed a mass terror, and the Shah became a puppet in their hands. In 496 Kawad fled from his ministers to the Ephtalites, returned with an army and took the throne, but the Mazdakites continued to occupy positions around the throne and massacre unwanted people, both outsiders and each other. It was not until 529 that King Khosroi gathered an army of men offended by the Mazdakites, drew the Saks to his side, and hanged Mazdak and buried his supporters alive in the ground. The bitterness of the parties was so great that the surviving Mazdakites had to flee to the Caucasus, for neither the Hephthalites in the east nor the Byzantines in the west would accept them.

Could the numerous Jews of Dworech and Isfahan have remained indifferent to the events taking place around them? Certainly, they took a lively part in them, but, as always, they were divided. To the orthodox Talmudists the Mazdakites were repulsive, to the freethinking Kabbalists they were amiable.

1 "Their inner - may God curse them! - is opposite to the outward, words are opposite to deeds." [4b, p. 188. Footnote 339].

p120

The struggle within the Jewish community of Iran was as intense and even bloody as that of the great power itself [54]. 54] The triumph of the Mazdakites threatened to destroy the Orthodox Jews, and they emigrated to Byzantium. There they were received sourly, but it was better than death.

When the massacre of the Mazdakites took place in Iran in 529, the Jews who had joined them had a bad time as well. The exarch of the Jewish community of Iran, Map Zutra, who collaborated with the Mazdakites, was hanged, as were all those who fell into the hands of Khosroi Anushirvan, who had assumed power while his father, Kawad, was still alive. The surviving Mazdakites fled to the Caucasus to lose themselves among the Christian population of Midia Antropatena (present-day Azerbaijan). They succeeded, as the Christians had an extremely negative attitude towards the Persian fire-worshippers, and sheltered the fugitives from Iran.

Jews associated with the Mazdakite movement also fled to the Caucasus, but away from the furious Persians. And they found themselves [269-270] in the wide plain between the Terek and the Sulak, and began to graze their cattle there, avoiding conflicts with their neighbors and not too strictly observing the traditional rites. They did, however, celebrate the Sabbath sacredly and perform the rite of circumcision1.

Let us return to the fate of the orthodox Jews, for it is they who will play the leading role in the subsequent era. The Orthodox Church of Byzantium at the time of the Great Councils (5th century) treated Judaism favorably. When the emigration of the Jews from Iran intensified and activated the Byzantine Jewish community, there began a period of not so much persecution, but state restrictions on the freedom of the Jewish cult. Justinian's edict of 546 forbade the Jews to celebrate the Passover and eat matzoh if the Jewish Passover occurred during Holy Week. In 553 the Jews were forbidden "to use... oral tradition". [5, с. 76]. In short, the Jews were turned into second-class citizens (inferiores, quasi, infames, turpes) [ibid], which led to the revival of Iranian-Filish sentiments in Byzantine Jewry. The occasion for repaying their humiliation presented itself in the early seventh century.

In 602 the soldiers killed the emperor Mauricius and enthroned the fierce tyrant Phocas. Shahinshah Khosroi Parviz started the war under the pretext of revenge for the deceased, who was his adoptive father. In fact, this war was aimed to expel the Greeks from Asia and Egypt, i.e. to restore the Achaemenid Empire. The Jews sided with the Persians. They caused turmoil in the rear of Greeks, and managed to obtain the patronage of the Greek government and to convert its anger against the Eastern Christians, Monophysites and Nestorians [49, p. 183-185; 40], which was on the Persian side, as the sympathies of the local population, after the punitive expeditions from Constantinople, went to their side. Thus, the Persians advanced as far as the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.     

The worst happened in 615 in Jerusalem, where after the surrender of the city the Persians took 62,000 to 67,000 prisoners [49, p.20]. Unable to ferry live goods across the Syrian desert without heavy losses, the Persian soldiers willingly sold off slaves and slave girls. "The Jews, because of their enmity, bought them at a cheap price and killed them." [ibid., p. 263]," writes in 1,234 Syrian [270-271] anonymous, i.e., someone with no personal interest and therefore no predilection. There he also reports that the Jews "were led away from Jerusalem," i.e., they simply returned to their ancestral homeland, Mesopotamia. Here, after the conclusion of peace in 629, they persuaded the Persian garrison to defend Edessa against the Greeks, which was to be returned to Byzantium under the terms of the peace treaty. Thus they have provided to themselves impunity, having sent to emperor Heraclius the parimeter who has begged to the tribesmen forgiveness, and the Persian soldiers were lost at hands of Byzantines [49, p. 2 70].

The Byzantine government either did not see, or did not want to see the real balance of power. Heraclius dreamed of reuniting monophysitism with Orthodoxy. To this end he proposed a compromise, the doctrine of Monothelitism, according to which the incarnate Word has two bodies - divine and human - and one will - divine. This doctrine was accepted neither by the Greeks, nor by the Syrians and Egyptians, nor by the Nestorians of Persia, nor by the Pope. This doctrine found its supporters only in the mountains of Lebanon, but even there they were very few, for the Lebanese, who were equally unfriendly to Greeks and Syrians, were a relic ethnos.

Against this background of general alienation, Heraclius retained his sympathy for the Jews and even helped them a great deal [57, p.276]. The Western Jews, who had penetrated the banks of the Rhine during the Roman era, suffered greatly from Germanic invasions in the fifth century, but on the banks of the Rhone and Garonne they lived quietly and richly. The Merovingians had no sympathy for the Jews, and in 629 King Dagobert decided to expel them from his domain. But Emperor Heraclius intervened, and the expulsion did not take place [Ibid, pp. 241-243].

It is not clear what guided Heraclius. May be, he noticed that bloody clashes between Jewish communities and supporters of the new prophet Muhammad had already started in Arabia, or maybe, there were motives unknown to us. In any case, the deal was at the expense of the Christian nations of the Middle East, with either the Greeks or Persians, and the Jews only benefited.

1 For a description of the life of this branch of the Jews see: 11, p. 17. Cambridge Anonymous considers them Jews of the tribe of Simon, who had forgotten the faith of their ancestors, [see: 38, p. 25].

p121

Such a blatant traitorous stance caused bitterness against the Jews of the Syrian and Arabian Semites, why it is hard to call it anti-Semitism. The result was an agreement reached in 637 between Bishop Sophronius and [271-272] Caliph Omar. The bishop surrendered Jerusalem to the Caliph "so that the Jews would not live in Jerusalem" [49, p. 285], after which Omar ordered a mosque to be built on the site of Solomon's temple.

The Arabs of the seventh century.

The Jews did not get along with the Muslims any more categorically than they did with the Christians. The first conflicts occurred as early as Medina, with the prophet himself. The Jews, defeated in street battles, left Arabia and settled in Palestine, near the Lake of Genesaret, because that country was then under Persian rule. Then some of them went to Iran with the retreating Persians, fearing retaliation by the Syrian Christians. By 650, however, both fell under the Arab yoke. The Persians took it rather easily, for they embraced Islam, but the Jews were disgusted by the apostasy. They found another way out - Shi'ism as a way of fragmenting the Muslim community.1

A certain Abdullah ibn-Sabah, a Jew who converted to Islam, put forward in 653 a doctrine, seemingly valid at first sight, that before the end of the world the prophet Muhammad would return to the world, and in the meantime, he should be replaced by those who had been his assistant in life, that is, Ali and his descendants. Here lurked the seed not only of the then controversy - Ali's claim to the throne, but also of the later Shiism [45, vol. I, p.332], which was inculcated in Persians better than in Arabs. Thus, was created the ideological basis of the civil wars that caused the relatively rapid disintegration of the Caliphate.

No, we will not recount here the history of the many rebellions and suppressions, murders and betrayals, mind games and madness of human passions; the victims of this war were Ali (slain in 661) and his son Hussein (fallen in battle in 680), abandoned by friends and associates. But those, "repenting", rebelled again and were defeated again in 690, which was followed by another execution.

This is when the Jews left the unhappy Persia. They lived in this country for 1200 years, enjoying the patronage of the laws and the sympathetic support of the crown princes. But when the laws of Iran were replaced by Sharia, and the Shahs by appointed Emirs (Commissioners), the Jews again turned in search of the "Promised Land". They themselves imagined this migration: "And it was in the summer of 4450 (i.e., in 690). And the Persians were smitten by them (Arabs), and they fell under their feet, and many Jews fled from the country of Paras as from a sword, and they moved from tribe to tribe, from state to state, and came to the country of Russia, and Ashkenazi and Sweden, and found there many Jews..." [5, 78-76]. [5, с. 78-79]2

This text shows a lot. The country of Rusin was already in VII century; in Germany (Ashkenaz) and Sweden, still pagan, there are Jewish colonies, but Khazaria is not on the list, although in 737 the Arab conqueror supposedly forced "the Persian fire-worshippers, Khazars, who worshiped the calf, and some who performed the law of Musa" to accept Islam3. In fact, it was only the wish of Mervan II, which remained without consequences. And in 690 the Khazars, led by the Turkites by birth, the princes of the royal family of Ashina, who became the khans of Khazaria, smashed Transcaucasia and occupied Derbent until 693. How could the Jews not see such a strong power? - Only by not seeing it!

So the way of the Jewish immigrants from Iran did not pass through the North Caucasian steppes, which at that time were soaked with Bulgarian and Alanian blood, but through Asia Minor and the Black Sea to the mouth of the Dnieper and Russia, and from there to the lands where were already colonies of the Western branch of the Jews, who remained in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.

But if so, who in Khazaria "performed the law of Musa"? Obviously, those Jews who fled to the Caucasus with the Mazlanites. They in 690 remembered very well the bloody clashes within the Jewish community of Iran, and with good reason feared their countrymen and refused to give them shelter. But their descendants in the 8th century did otherwise, as the Mazdakite tragedy was forgotten by the descendants of its participants.

The Khazars in the eighth century.

So, the Umayyads of Syria turned out to be enemies of both branches of the Jews: the Mazdakite and the orthodox. The first were allies of the Khazars, and the latter found refuge among the Christians. This arrangement of forces gives us the right to conclude that during the battle for Constantinople in 717-718, when Leo Isaurus burned the Arabian squadron with "Greek fire" and drove back the starving [273-274] land army from the walls of the capital, the Jews fought on the side of the Christians.

1 Shi'at Aliyyah is the party of Aliyyah, or "partisans."

2 The authorship of the text is attributed to the famous chronicler and physician Joseph b. Jehoshua HaKogen, who lived in the 16th century but had earlier manuscripts in his possession.

3 I. Berlin believes that it was this event that made the Jews leave Khazaria and move to the West [see: 5, p. 79]

p122

The forces of the Arabs were constrained on all fronts. In Spain in 718 the disobedient Christians formed the kingdom of Asturias. In Central Asia the Turks reached an agreement with China, made peace with Tibet, an ally of the Caliphate, and supported the revolt of the Sogdians, who had just been conquered, but not humbled.  Khazars forced the Arabian army to retreat and transferred military operations first to Azerbaijan, then to Armenia (721-722), they were helped by the surviving fire-worshippers-Persians and worshippers of Musa - Jews. The leader of the Jews, who had a Turkic name Bulan (Moose), distinguished himself in this campaign, so that he acted independently: he restored the Jewish rituals for his people1.

"Conversion of Khazars to Judaism" was not, and could not be, because in the Middle Ages proselytizing religions - Christianity and Islam - were sharply opposed to the ancient religions, where only members of the clan were allowed to perform the cult, even if the clan grew into an ethnic group. One had to be born a fire-worshipper or a Hindu, a member of a higher caste, but could not become one. If, however, it became necessary to accept a foreigner into one's milieu or to incorporate another tribe, false genealogies were invented to justify the violation of the principle. So, Shah Ezdgerd, having decided to increase the horse army, offered the Armenian Nahrars to become Zoroastrians, on the grounds that these noblemen were descended from Parthians, the Arshakids. When they refused to renounce Christianity, the matter stalled.

Judaism is the cult of a people "chosen by Yahweh," and thus the rare converts were considered "the leprosy of Israel.” The Jews [274-275] neighbored the Khazars peacefully, went camping together, but prayed separately, rightly believing that there was no need to make them look like themselves or, conversely, to hypocritically mimic them for good relations with their neighbors. Even forgetting most of the complex precepts of the Talmud, which was inevitable for a pastoral tribe with nowhere and no time for young men to learn even simple literacy, the descendants of the Mazdakite Jews did not melt into the environment of the surrounding tribes of Dagestan. They did not aspire to it, and they would not accept them in their environment. Bulan's merit was different: he removed the idolaters from his country and convinced other princes and the supreme prince of the Jews to restore the forgotten faith; he constructed a tent, an ark, a lampstand, an altar table and sacred vessels [3, p. 269], i.e. he restored the Jewish rites for his people. In the work of Jehuda b. Barzilai, a Jewish author of the XI century, translated this message as "The Khazars became proselytes and had proselyte kings (of Judaism)". [67].

However, S. Shishman points out that the word ger in the Bible means a foreigner incorporated by another people and given the rights of a member of the tribe that sheltered him [70, p. 327]. The meaning of "proselyte" came later. Judging from the general course of events, the ancient meaning in this case is preferable, for Budan adopted not rabbinism, but Karaism [69, pp. 68-76].

And let it not confuse the reader that the Jews who lived in Khazaria are called Khazars. It is common for ethnonyms to generalize when a sub-ethnos in a foreign country takes the name of an ethnos. Thus, a Breton in Russia will call himself a Frenchman, and a Karelian in France - a Russian. For foreigners, the Khazars are people who live in the Khazars and submit to the authority of the Khazar Kaganate. But for the inhabitants themselves, as well as for the historical fate of the country, the differences at the sub-ethnic level are noticeable. Sometimes they are not important, but in some circumstances, their role increases. This happened in Khazaria in the second half of the 8th century, when the Jewish rabbis from Byzantium began to arrive there.

With the Greeks in the eighth century.

In 723 Emperor Leo III Isaurus issued a decree forcibly baptizing all Jews within the Byzantine Empire2. This decree was issued after his victory over the Arabs [275- 276] and a year before the struggle against the veneration of icons began. Why did he need it?

There is no answer to this question in the sources, so we must search for the meaning of the decree on the basis of the general situation. The Christians of Asia Minor, as well as the Monophysites and Nestorians, were opponents of the veneration of icons and enemies of the Arabs. Did Leo the Isaurus not want to increase the number of his supporters by enlisting the Jews were that not included among the Christians, in order to give them the right to participate in the future reform? This is perhaps the most probable interpretation, since the subsequent persecution fell not on the Jews, who had remained in their faith, but on the Orthodox. Conversely, one of the caliph's officials, John Damascene-Mansur, wrote a denunciation of the iconoclasts under the patronage of Umayyad Hisham.

1 The basis for the dating given by M. I. Artamonov is contradictory. In the description of the raid of Khazars in Transcaucasia under Bulan's leadership the way to Dar Alam, (Daryal) "under which they see Daryal", and the town Ardvil, i.e. Ardabil are mentioned [3, p. 269]. M.I.Artamonov compared this raid with the Khazar invasion of Azerbaijan in 731, when Khazars, after some successes, were defeated by Arabs. This is inconsistent with the account of Bulan's success. Then the Arabs captured from the Khazars "a banner in the form of a copper image". [ibid, p. 215], which could not be with the Jews. Finally, the leader of Khazars was a son of Hagan, Barjil, and not a Jew, as well as his mother, Khansha Parsbit ("tiger face" - [see: 30р. Apparently, one should prefer an earlier date - 718, which does not contradict the known and established facts. Equally, Bulan's way is interpreted inaccurately. Dar alam - literally "gate of the world" (Pers. Arabic) is not Daryal, but Derbent - literally "locked door" (Pers.). In 718 this fortress was liberated by the Khazars from the Arabs.

2 This decree is mentioned by chronographers Theophanes (ed. Bonnae, I, 617) and Kedren (ed. Bonnae, I, 793); [see: 5, p. 76].

p123

This decree is thought to have caused the emigration of Jews from Byzantium to Khazaria, but it is not known whether it was enforced. Even if so, the emigration went to Khazaria, at that time an ally of Byzantium. And since the initiative to war with the Arabs was taken by Bulan, it is possible that Lev Isaur created the conditions for the transfer of the combat-ready ethnos to that part of the front, where it was needed. This is roughly what the Byzantine government did to the highlanders of Lebanon, the Mardaites. - They were withdrawn from Syria and placed in the garrisons of Asia Minor in order to make use of their experience in fighting the Muslims.

Bulan's reform was also significant in that it severed ties with the Mazdakite traditions. The ideological ties between the free-thinking members of the Jewish community and a group of free-thinking Persians proved elusive. As soon as life posed other problems, the chimera disintegrated. What for the Persian mazdakis had been an organic part of the established worldview, the Jews discarded as dried husks. Subsequently, the Mazdakites, or more precisely the Hurramites, tried to block with the Christian iconoclasts1, for the Khazar Jews did not help their former companions and sympathizers in the deadly struggle (815-837) against the Arabs and Persian Muslims.

But intra-ethnic ties were not affected by ideological differences. On the contrary, the emigration of Byzantine Jews to Khazaria was facilitated by the fact that the escapees were met by co-religionists and helped them to settle in. And as the rabbinic Jews [276-277] of the 7th-8th centuries were city dwellers, they settled in the cities: Itil, Semender, Samkerz, Belenjer, and were engaged in trade, to which the Khazars were not capable.

Different interethnic collisions give different results in ethnic history. The Türküts, united with the Khazars, led them to victories and gave them hegemony over neighboring ethnic groups. Bulan, who around 718 adopted the name "Sabriel", in 737 was defeated by the last great Umayyad, Mervan, who took from the Khazars a promise to accept the faith of Islam. The Khazars, of course, did not keep his promise, especially since already in 750. Mervan was defeated by the Abbasids and died. In Khazaria, everything remained the same, except that the capital was moved from the Terek, from Semender, away from the Arabs, onto the Volga, in Itil. Since ancient times, the Khazars lived in the lower reaches of the Volga, in its delta and floodplain.

They were not so much engaged in cattle breeding as in viticulture and fishing. Beautiful blue streams among green meadows and dense thickets fed a large population and the capital Itil, located on an island formed by the Volga and its eastern channel Akhtuba. With their luxurious economic base, the Khazars dominated the sparse population of dry steppes surrounding their oasis, which at that time stretched almost to the Buzachi peninsula. It was the "Caspian Netherlands", and the similarity was complemented by the fact that Itil became a staging post on two caravan routes: from Iran to Biarmiya, or the Great Perm, and from China to Provence.

In the IX-X centuries in Itil lived and played a major role for the Jews, but when did they get there? Obviously, we have to trace the history of Byzantium further back.

The following account of the breach between Byzantium and the Jewish Diaspora is unequivocal, and its date is remarkable, because against the background of world history, it is most significant: "The ruler of Constantinople during Harun ar-Rashid (786-809) expelled from his dominions all the Jews living there, who consequently went to the country of the Khazars, where they found reasonable people, but immersed in error (they were pagans. - L. G.), so the Jews offered them their religion, which the Khazars found better than their own, and accepted it. This text, firstly, confirms our hypothesis that the Iconoclast emperors did not persecute Jews, otherwise there would have been nobody to expel, and secondly, that this persecution coincided with the Seventh Ecumenical Council [277-278] (787) and the subsequent domination of the Greeks over the Asia Minor and the Jews adjoined to the latter. According to the logic of events, it was in the last years of the 8th century that it made sense for the Greeks to strive to get rid of the Jews, because their antipathy to the Arabs was replaced by sympathy after the caliph's throne passed from the Umayyads to the Abbasids, who were surrounded by Persian advisers and renewed the traditions of the Sassanid Iranian policy.

In history, the repetition of a political situation most often entails the restoration of the balance of power, although there are never literal coincidences. During the 250 years of independent existence, Khazaria had grown so much that from a tiny inheritance of West Turkut princes it became a strong power, winning the war against the Arab Caliphate. And here the fates of the Jewish and Khazar ethnic groups are intertwined.

1 Babek, the leader of the Hurramites, established an alliance with the emperor Theophilus around 830. [But the attempt to unite Mazdakism with iconoclastic orthodoxy, undertaken at the same time, was unsuccessful.

p124

end part 1 of 4

.