4. Khazars Book, historical section

It's unclear why a large Jewish community, devoid of sincere friends, hated by its neighbors, unsupported by its subjects, dominated international commerce for a 150 years leading 1/2 the world Jews?

This is a strange part of the collection. Gumilev takes most of this chapter to describe the anti-system movements that are disguised as alternate religions in the Middle Ages. The Cathars of Provence, the Paterens of Lombardy, the Bogumilians of Bulgaria, the Peacchians of Asia Minor, the Carmites of Arabia, the Ismailites of Berberia and Iran, while having many ethnographic and dogmatic differences, they had one thing in common: aversion to reality. They were out to destroy what is here, not to create anything. The fact that truth and falsehood are not opposed in these systems, but are equated with each other. Reality of the times was sometimes so terrible that people were ready to throw themselves into any illusion.

Or when the passionate young man was fed to his heart's content, but forbidden to do anything, he sought the use of his hidden powers, and found them in the preaching of denial, without paying attention to the fact that the goal set before him was a fantasy.

Anti-system preaching was destructive throughout the middle Ages both in Europe and Asia Minor. I think that you will find the equating of truth and falsehood even our leaders of today.

Then toward the very end he then says: In Khazaria, the anti-system lasted for 150 years, but its death was hardly accidental. No one lives alone, and no anti-system can stop the development of natural ethnic groups associated with the landscapes of their country.

THIS SECTION ALSO HAS THE RESOURCES, from the footnotes of the other 3 sections. You could open it on a separate tab, when reading the other sections.

The worshipers of the captive light

We already said; The Khazar tragedy is described, but not explained. Without sincere companions and allies, leading the disparate Jewish communities is not feasible. So the Jewish Khazaria did have such allies.

"The enemies of our enemies are our friends," says the old proverb. Even if they do not like us and get nothing from us, they, fighting with their own, and thus our enemies, help us. In the ninth and eleventh centuries, irreconcilable with Christianity, Islam and Hinayan Buddhism were the supporters of the teachings of the prophet and philosopher Mani, who was executed in Iran in 276. By the ninth century the Manichaean community as such had disappeared, but it gave rise to a multitude of teachings and interpretations that gave rise to several strong movements sharply opposed to Christianity and to Islam. Wherever Manichean preachers appeared, they found sincere supporters, and everywhere blood flowed on a scale that shocked even those accustomed to much of the early Middle Ages. And, as a matter of fact, why should one sacrifice oneself and kill others because of his poetic views of the world? But they did!

Manichean preachers in southern France and even in Italy so electrified the masses that at times even the pope was afraid to leave his fortified castle, lest he be insulted in the city streets by the excited crowd, among whom were also knights, especially since the feudal lords, affected by the propaganda, refused to subdue them.

In the second half of the eleventh century the Manichean doctrine spread to Lombardy, where the vices of the higher clergy caused legitimate indignation among the laity. In 1,062 Ariald, a priest in Milan, spoke out against the marriage of priests, but met resistance from Archbishop Guido, and was killed. The struggle continued, with the archbishop and his successor supported by Emperor Henry IV, the secret Satanist, and the reformers by Popes Alexander II and Gregory VII. Apparently both the popes and the emperor were not interested in the essence of the problem, but simply sought [334-335] supporters. The people of Milan paid the price for the rivalry of the leaders, which was burned during a street battle in 1,075. In the twelfth century the Manicheans, called in Italy the Patarenes, spread through all the cities as far as Rome, with the peasants being the least inclined to heresy and the nobles and priests, i.e. the most passionate part of the population, being the most active heretics.

In Languedoc, which was under the shadowy patronage of the kings of Germany, the center of Manicheanism was the city of Albi, because of which the French Manicheans became known as Albigensians, along with their Greek name, Cathars, which means "pure". Their community was divided into "perfect," "faithful," and laity. The "perfect" lived in celibacy and fasting, teaching the "faithful" and guiding the dying who, on their deathbed, accepted initiation into the "perfect" to escape the bonds of the material world. The laity, sympathetic to the Cathars, translated the books of the Old Testament into vernacular languages as heroic tales, thus gradually changing the ideals of chivalry and thus the stereotype of their readers. The rest was completed by the antipathy of the Provençal people to the French as an alien and aggressive ethnic group. By 1,176 most of the nobility and clergy of Languedoc had become Cathars, while a smaller portion and the peasants preferred to be silent and not to protest.

Religious beliefs and disagreements are not in themselves occasions for strife and wars of annihilation, but they are often indicators of profound causes that give rise to tremendous historical phenomena. The common notion that the fervent religiosity of the Middle Ages gave rise to Catholic fanaticism, which ignited the fires of the first Inquisition, is quite wrong. By the end of the 11th century, the spiritual and secular society of Europe was in complete moral decline. Many priests were illiterate, prelates were appointed through kinship, theological thought was crushed by literal interpretations of the Bible that matched the level of ignorant theologians, and spiritual life was constrained by the statutes of the Cluniac monks who insistently substituted freethinking for virtue. In that epoch all vigorous natures were made either mystics or debauchees [in detail see: 47, p. 170-173]. And there were many more energetic and passionate people at that time than it was required for everyday life. That is why they tried to send them to Palestine, to free the Holy Sepulchre from Muslims, with the hope that they would not return. [335-336]

But not everyone went to the East. Many sought clues to existence without leaving their hometowns, because Eastern wisdom itself flowed to the West. It answered the most painful theological question: God, who created the world, is good; where did evil and Satan come from?

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The Catholic legend of the rebellion of the proud angel did not satisfy inquiring minds. God is omniscient and omnipotent! He must, then, have foreseen this rebellion ...and crushed it. Since he did not do so, he is responsible for all the consequences, and is therefore he is the source of evil.

For the vast majority of people who were part of the Christian ethnic groups of the Middle Ages, complex theological problems were incomprehensible and unnecessary. But the need for an organic, consistent worldview was present for almost all Christians, even those who had little faith in the tenets of religion and certainly did not think about them.

The nature and system of the worldview had a practical sense of separating good from evil and explaining what was evil. For the medieval layman this problem was solved simply by contrasting God with the devil, i.e., by means of elementary dualism. But this was opposed by scholarly theologians, monists, who argued that God is omnipresent. But if so, then God is present in the devil and thus morally responsible for all of Satan's shenanigans.

The intellectuals objected that if God is the source of evil and sin, even though the devil, then there was no point in honoring him. And they cited texts from the New Testament where Christ refused to compromise with the devil who tempted him.

To this the proponents of monism objected with the theory that Satan was created as a pure angel, but became indignant and began to do evil out of self-will and pride. But this conception is incompatible with the principle of God's omniscience, who had to foresee the nuances of his creation's behavior, and omnipotence, for, having the ability to stop Satan's outrages, but he does not do so. Therefore, theologians put forward a new concept: the devil is needed and performs his assigned task, and this, in fact, meant a compromise of God and Satan, which for people indifferent to the faith was convenient, but for sincere believers was unacceptable. The search for a new solution, and thus for heresy, arose then.

In 847 the learned monk Gottschalk, developing the concept of Blessed Augustine, issued the doctrine of predestination [336-337] of some people to salvation in paradise and of others to condemnation in hell, regardless of their actions, but by the foreknowledge of God by virtue of his omniscience. This view was quite logical, but absurd, for then there was no need to do anything for one's salvation and, on the contrary, one could commit any crime, referring to the fact that they too were foreseen by God at the creation of the world. Gottschalk's sermon was sharply resented. In 849 a polemic arose about it, in which John Scotus Erigena took part, declaring that there is no evil in the world at all, that evil is the absence of being, hence the problem of Good and Evil was eliminated from theology altogether, and thus not only theoretical, but also practical morality was abolished.

The view of Erigena was condemned at the Local Council of Valens in 855. [2, с. 62-65]. The Council spoke in favor of Gottschalk's teachings and scornfully rejected the "Scottish mush", i.e. the teachings of Erigena, which were qualified as a theses of the devil and not of the true faith [ibid.] But after all, in both versions evil, both metaphysical (Satan) and practical (crimes), was rehabilitated. Gottschalk regarded divine foreknowledge as the source of evil, while Erigen proposed that apparent evil should be taken as good, since "God does not do evil.

So, theoretically, the problem of Good and Evil was deadlocked, and practically the Roman Church returned to Pelagius' teaching on salvation by doing good works. This decision was by no means a conscious departure from the views of St. Augustine, but rather an instinctive one, perceived intuitively and yielding practical results of natural morality. But if Pelagianism satisfied the demands of the masses, it did not remove the question of the nature and origin of evil and Satan mentioned repeatedly in the New Testament. Uncertainty troubled the inquiring minds of young people of all nations and classes.

It was not that they were looking to philosophy and theology for enrichment or social reorganization; no, they were looking for a consistent worldview that would unite their life experiences with the tradition and knowledge of the day.

Indeed, for ninth-century men, gifted with a fervent imagination and accustomed to a concrete worldview, was it appropriate to describe God as an "incomprehensibility" that does not know what it is. In relation to the objects of the world - God is designated as nothingness - or as a monad, having in [337- 338] himself neither distinction nor opposition; in relation to being ideal - as the cause of all things taking form; in relation to his incomprehensibility - as "divine darkness.

And how could the monks of the monastery of Malmesbury, where Erigena was abbot, pray to a "darkness" that could not even hear them? They could not help but see blasphemy in the teachings of their abbot and in 890, according to a very unreliable but very revealing version, they killed him with their own inkwell. But even after this, the painful questions were not removed. Disappointed in the possibilities of scholasticism, which in the tenth century was experiencing another decline, medieval theologians sought solutions outside schools and received answers from those coming from the East (from the Balkan Peninsula)

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Manicheans, or, as they were called, Cathars (the pure ones)1. Evil is eternal. It is matter enlivened by spirit, but enveloped by itself. The evil of the world is the torment of the spirit in the tenets of matter; consequently, all material things are the source of evil. And if so, then evil is all things, including temples and icons, crosses and bodies of people. And all this is subject to destruction. The easiest way out for the Manicheans would be suicide, but they introduced into their doctrine the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. This means that death plunges the suicidal person into a new birth, with all the trouble that comes with it. Therefore, for the salvation of the soul another thing was suggested: the exhaustion of the flesh either by ascesis or by violent debauchery, after which the weakened matter should release the soul from its clutches. Only this goal was deemed worthy by the Manicheans, and as far as earthly affairs were concerned, morality was naturally abolished. For if matter is evil, [338-339] then any extermination of it is good, be it murder, falsehood, treachery... all is irrelevant. With respect to the objects of the material world, everything was permitted.

In the doctrine of predestination, i.e., responsibility for one's sins, most relevant at the time, the Cathars combined the Augustinianism of Gottschalk and the cosmology of Erigena. They denied free will in human beings and divided people into those created by the good and evil gods.  The former can do evil only against their will, and hence sin is not imputed to them, but can only delay their "return home. In so doing, they postulated the pre-existence of souls and metampsychosis. By this "return" they are connected to the cosmology of Erigena, the only difference being that the latter denied the evil beginning; but he called God "divine darkness", so that it is not clear whom did he worship: God or Satan? From the point of view of his disciple-monks, the second solution was more logical, because the "divine darkness" (uncreated and created) did not take back into itself its emanation, i.e. ideas (created and creating), and invisible things that fill the world (created and not creating), but the undead souls of the dead (not created and not creating), i.e. simply "undead", vampires which people fear and which have pseudo-existence with evil activity (for people).

Translating this dilemma into the language of modern concepts, we can say that in the emerged system of notions the role of devil was played by vacuum, which is known to be very active when it collides with matter, although without it, it is deprived of existence. But since the lively imagination of the people of that time demanded that both the good and the evil be personified, the Cathars combined the evil god with Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, who was fickle, cruel and deceitful, who created the material world in order to mock people.

But here the medieval Christian immediately asked the question: what about Christ, who was also human? Two answers were prepared: one explicit for the converted, the other secret for the initiated. It was explicitly explained that "Christ had a heavenly, ethereal body when he entered into Mary. He came out of her as alien to matter as he had been before.... He had no need of anything earthly, and if he apparently ate and drank, he did it for people, so as not to be suspected by Satan, who was looking for a chance to destroy the "Deliverer." But for the "faithful" (as members of the congregation were called) another explanation was offered: "Christ is a demon creation: he came into the [339-340] world to deceive the people and to hinder their salvation. The real one did not come, but lived in a special world, in the heavenly Jerusalem." [47, с. 194-195].

Enough details. There can be no doubt that Manichaeism in Provence and Lombardy is not heresy, but simply anti-Christianity, and that it is further away from Christianity than Islam and even theistic Buddhism. However, if we turn from theology to cultural history, the conclusion is different. God and the devil were preserved in the Manichaean conception, but swapped places. That is why the new confession was such a tremendous success in the twelfth century. The concept itself was exotic, but the details were familiar, and the replacement of the plus by the minus was easy for the perception of the God-seekers. Consequently, any protest, any rejection of reality, very unattractive indeed, could find expression in the change of the sign. Besides, the Manichaean doctrine split up into many directions, worldviews, outlooks and degrees of concentration, aided in varying degrees by the passionariness of the converts, which allowed them not to fear the fire, and the justification of lies, with which they not only sometimes saved themselves, but dealt their opponents irresistible devastating blows.

For the sake of the success of the propaganda of their doctrine, the Cathars frequently changed their clothes, penetrating towns and villages, sometimes as pilgrims, sometimes as merchants, but most often as artisan weavers, because it was easy for a weaver to get to work and make the right connections while remaining unnoticed themselves.

1 Western Manicheanism had been in competition with Christianity since the late third century and was subject to similar persecution under Diocletian. Christian emperors continued these persecutions. Theodosius defined the death penalty for belonging to Manichaeism. Honorius classified the confession of Manichaeism as a state crime. The Vandal king Gunnerich exterminated the Manichaeans in North Africa; only those who managed to escape to Italy escaped. In the sixth century Ravenna became the center of Manicheanism, for the inhabitants of Lombardy, the Arians, forced to fight against Rome, gave them shelter. In the 10th century Manichaeism spread to Languedoc and merged with similar teachings in Bulgaria. In 1,022 ten Cathars were burned in Orleans, among them the confessor of King Robert I, Etienne, the scholastic Lysis and the chaplain Heribert. Unlike many patriarchal and plebeian anti-church movements, the Cathars were socially diverse, which contributed to the success of their teachings.

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 From this we can see that here is not a class anti-feudal movement of the masses, but a disguise of members of an organization united by the authority of a Manichean "pope" who lived, as they said, in Bulgaria.

But why were Manichean scholars not able to supplant Christianity, especially when popes were at war with emperors and scholastics were wasting their energies in fruitless disputes with each other? Perhaps because Manichaeism was opposed by an unconscious worldview, which we will try to articulate here.  God created the Earth, but the devil is the prince of this world; on Earth the devil is stronger than God, but that is why a noble knight and a monk must stand up for the weak and fight the strong enemy to the last drop of blood. After all, God is not in strength, but in truth, and his creation - the Earth is beautiful, but Evil comes from outside, from the gates of Hell, and the easiest and most dignified thing to do is to drive it back.

This conception was uncontroversial, easy to grasp, and consistent, if not with the mores of the time, with [340-341] its ideals. And since the ideal is a distant forecast perceived intuitively, it was justified, although the tragedy accompanying its realization befell Europe and Asia only in the XIII century, i.e. beyond the chronological limits of our subject. Let us therefore turn for the time being to Byzantium, which suffered from similar teachings no less than France.

Heirs of the secret knowledge.

As we said briefly, Byzantine super-ethnos was hatched from the egg of the Christian community, the social frame of which was the church organization. But there was a second germ in this egg, the so-called Gnosticism. Gnostics became dreamers, God-seekers, almost fantasists, who, like the ancient philosophers, sought to invent a coherent and consistent conception of the universe, including good and evil in it.

Gnosticism was not a knowledge of the world, but a poetry of notions, in which the aversion to reality occupied the main place. Among the many Gnostic schools and movements, a common one was the doctrine of the Demiurge, that is, the craftsman who created the world in order to amuse by the torment of men. This Demiurge they regarded as the Jewish Old Testament Yahweh, whom they contrasted with the true God, who created souls but not matter. At the same time, they all recognized Christ, but considered his human form to be ghostly, i.e., non-material. The most widespread was the teaching of the Ophites, i.e., worshippers of the serpent, who had taught wisdom to Adam and Eve.

According to this logico-ethical system, the Divine Light and its Wisdom is the basis of the world, and the evil and talentless demon Yaldavaoth, whom the Jews call Yahweh, created Adam and Eve. But he wanted them to remain ignorant, not understanding the difference between Good and Evil. It was only with the help of the magnanimous Serpent, the messenger of divine Wisdom, that people threw off the yoke of ignorance of the essence of the divine beginning. Yaldavaof takes revenge for their deliverance and fights the serpent, the symbol of knowledge and freedom. He sends a flood (this symbol refers to base emotions), but Wisdom, having "showered the light" on Noah and his kind, saves them. Yaldavaoth then manages to subdue a group of people by making a treaty with Abraham and giving his descendants the law through Moses. He calls himself the One God, but he lies; he is really just a minor fire demon through whom some of the Hebrew prophets spoke. Others [341-342] spoke on behalf of other demons, not so evil. Christ Yaldavaoth wanted to destroy, but was only able to arrange the execution of the man Jesus, who then rose again and was united with the divine Christ.  More elegant and highly sophisticated systems came out in the second century by the Antiochian Sathornilus, the Alexandrian Basilides, and his compatriot who had moved to Rome, Valentinus.

Most of the Gnostics did not seek to spread their doctrine, for they considered it too complicated for the perception of ignorant people. So their concepts went out with them. But in the middle of the second century, the Christian thinker Marcion, based on the Apostle Paul's speech in Athens about the "Unknown God," developed the Gnostic concept to the point where it became accessible to the broad masses of Christians. And this doctrine has not disappeared. Through hundreds of transmissions, it survived in Marcion's homeland of Asia Minor, and in the 9th century, transformed but still recognizable, it became the confession of the Paulites (in the name of the Apostle Paul), who fought against Byzantine Orthodoxy, even entering into a political alliance with the Muslims.

If we talk about the religious doctrine of the Pavlikians, their distinction from the Manicheans, their similarity to the ancient Gnostics, and their extremely negative attitude toward Mazdaism and Judaism are striking.  But the theological subtleties which agitated the minds of the theologians were alien and incomprehensible to the masses whose task was war against Byzantium. To oppose themselves to Orthodoxy, it was enough to recognize that matter is not a creation of God, but an eternally evil beginning. This thesis is akin to the Manicheans and Cathars, but the origin of the doctrine from the lost treatise of Marcion left an indelible mark on their ideology.

Marcion's treatise on the inconsistency of the Old and New Testaments has not survived because it was neither accepted nor refuted in the second century. It was cautiously glossed over, and then consigned to oblivion. This method of scientific polemics has worked without fail in all centuries. But the opponents of Marcion could not foresee that by the end of the nineteenth century it would be possible to restore the content of his concept by applying a technique unknown to them - a broad comparison of fragments with the general direction of thought, original enough to distinguish it from the others. This work [342-343] was done by Döllinger and he obtained a result, if not identical with Marcion's text, then close enough to it. The distinction between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the Gospel was formulated by the Cathars, the Paulicians, and the Christian Gnostics taü "The first forbids men to eat of the tree of life, but the second promises to give the overcomer a taste of the hidden manna" (Apoc. 2:17). The first exhorts to the mingling of the sexes and to multiplication to the boundaries of the oikumene, while the second forbids even one sinful gaze upon a woman. The first promises land as a reward, the second promises heaven. The first prescribes circumcision and the killing of the defeated, while the second forbids both. The first curses the earth, the second blesses it. The first repents of having created man, while the second does not change his sympathies. The first prescribes vengeance, the second prescribes forgiveness for the penitent. The first demands animal sacrifices, the second abhors them. The first promises the Jews dominion over the whole world, while the second forbids dominion over others. The first allows the Jews usury (i.e., capitalism), while the second forbids the appropriation of money not earned (war booty at the time was seen as payment for valor at risk). In the Old Testament, the cloud is dark and the tornado of fire; in the New Testament, it is unapproachable light. The Old Testament forbids touching the ark of the covenant or even approaching it, i.e. the principles of religion are a mystery to the mass of believers, in the New Testament it is a call to all. In the Old Testament it is the curse of him who hangs on the tree, i.e., to be executed; in the New Testament it is the death of Christ on the cross and the resurrection; in the Old Testament the unbearable yoke of law, but in the New, the good and easy burden of Christ [65, s. 146-147, quoted from: 2, p.37].

The Pauline Christians, like the Manichaeans, cannot be considered Christians, even though they did not reject the Gospel. They rejected icons and rituals, denied the sacraments of baptism and communion, and all vigorously fought against the Church and its authorities, parishioners and subjects, making it their business to sell captive young men and women to the Arabs.

At the same time, there were many racially-minded priests and monks, as well as professional military men who led their cohesive, disciplined bands among the Peacocks (Pavlikians). Even their spiritual leaders could not restrain these sectarians from atrocities. Life took its toll, even if the slogan of the struggle was the denial of life. And one should not blame Marcion, for these murders1, who in theology was a philologist, who showed [343-344] a fundamental difference between the Old and New Testaments. The ideological basis of the anti-system of the Byzantine super-ethnos could have been based on another concept, as we shall now show.

Pavlikianism was defeated by military force in 872, after which the captured Pavlikians were not executed, but placed on the border with Bulgaria for frontier service. Thus, the mixed Manichaean-Markionite doctrine penetrated the Balkan Slavs and gave rise to Bohumilism, a variant of dualism quite different from the Manichaean prototype which strengthened in the same years in Macedonia (the community in Drogovichi).

Instead of the eternal opposition of Light and Darkness, the Bogumilians taught that the head of the angels created by God, Satanil, rose out of pride and was cast into the waters, for there was no land yet, Satanil created land and people, but could not animate them, for which he turned to God, promising to become obedient. God blew a soul into men, and then Satanil blew him off and made Cain. God responded by burping Jesus, a disembodied spirit, to lead all the angels, also disembodied. Jesus went into one ear of Mary, came out through the other, and gained the image of a human being while remaining a ghostly figure. The angels twisted Sataniel, took away the suffix "il" - "the one" - in which his power, of course mystical, lurked, and drove him into Hell. Now he is not Satanil, but Satan. And Jesus returned to the womb of the Father, having left the material world created by Sataniel. The conclusion of the concept was unexpected, but simple: "Beat the Byzantines!"

We may now pause to make the first generalization preceding the conclusion. The Cathars, the Patarenes, the Bohemians, the Peacchians, the Mazdakites, the strict Manicheans and their varieties, despite their dogmatic differences and different genesis of their philosophies, had one thing in common - anti-materialism, -

They expressed in hatred of the material world, or, as we would say in our time, the environment. Representatives of their polar opposite ideology (Marionism) viewed the environment, with its inherent spontaneous processes, as a creation of God, i.e., as good. They were spontaneous materialists [344-345] regardless of the presence of the principle of monotheism in their worldview.    Thus, by adopting a neutral frame of reference, we can introduce into the study a division into two classes of worldviews (by no means philosophical or theological doctrines): the life-affirming, i.e. The Marionist worldview was not a distinctive one, but a worldview of the ancient Marionism, which was a worldview that was sympathetic to the biosphere of the planet, and the life-negative one, which set as its goal and ideal the annihilation of the material world. The correlation between these worldviews is by no means a mirror one, which is why the name "anti-systems" can only conventionally be assigned to social formations of the negative type.

1 Marcion's view of the cosmos was clarified by his disciple Apelles (d. c. 180). The one beginning, the unborn God, created the two chief angels. One, "famous and glorious," created the world; the other, "fiery," is hostile to God and the world. Consequently, the world, as the creation of the good angel, is benign, but subject to the blows of the evil "fiery one," identified with Yahweh of the Old Testament [2, p. 117]. The distinction between ancient Markeonism and the doctrines that sprang from it is obvious.

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What is decisive here is asymmetry, since negative formations exist only at the expense of positive ethnic systems, which they corrode from within, like cancerous tumors corrode the organism that houses them.

It may be doubted whether the phenomenon described was universal in the Middle Ages, rather than characteristic only of Christian culture. In this case we could dispense with the search for a natural explanation of the phenomenon. Therefore, let us continue the description and consider how things were in the Middle East, a world of different cultural traditions and different ethnic relations, i.e., the Arab Caliphate under the Abbasid dynasty.

Anti-Peace Advocates

Muslim law, the Sharia, allowed Christians and Jews, for an additional tax, the harj, to practice their religions in peace. Idolaters were subject to conversion to Islam, which was also tolerable. But the "zindiks," representatives of nihilistic doctrines, faced a painful death. A whole inquisition was instituted against them, the head of which bore the title of "executioner of the zindiks. Naturally, under such conditions, free thought was buried in the underground and emerged from it transformed beyond recognition in the second half of the ninth century. His name was Abdullah ibn Maimun, a native of Midia, an eye doctor by profession, who died in 874-875.

The dogma and principles of the new doctrine can only be described, but not formulated, as its basic principle [345-346] was falsehood. The adherents of the new doctrine even called themselves differently in different places, Ismaili, Karmati, Batinites, Equalidites, Burkanites, Jannibites, Saidites, Muhammire, Mubanze, and Talimi... Their goal was the same - to destroy Islam at all costs. It would be possible to doubt this characterization coming from the mouth of the enemy, if the actual course of historical events did not confirm it.

The visible side of the doctrine was simple: the ugliness of this world will be corrected by the Mahdi, i.e., the savior of mankind and the restorer of justice. This sermon almost always resonated with the masses of the people, especially in hard times. A The ninth century was very violent. Rebellions and the fall of emirs, tribal uprisings on the outskirts and the slave zinjas in the heart of the country, the outrages of mercenary troops and the arbitrariness of the administration, defeats in the wars with Byzantium and the growing fanaticism of the mullahs... all this fell on the shoulders of the peasants and the urban poor, including the educated but destitute Persians and Syrians. There was plenty of fuel: one had to be able to bring a torch to it.

Free propaganda of any ideas was not feasible in the Caliphate. Therefore, the emissaries of the doctrine - dai (heralds) pretended to be pious Shiites. They interpreted texts of the Koran, causing doubts in interlocutors and hinting that they knew something, but the true law is forgotten, that is why all calamities arise, and if it is restored, then... But then he, as if regaining consciousness, silenced himself, which, of course, aroused curiosity. The interlocutor, extremely interested, asks to continue, but the preacher, again referring to the Koran, takes from him an oath of silence, and then, as a test of the proselyte's good will, a sum of money for the common cause, according to the means of the converted. Then comes the teaching of the new convert about the "true Imams," the descendants of Ali, and the seven prophets equal to Mohammed. Having learned this, the proselyte ceases to be a Muslim, for the assertion that the last and highest prophet is the Mahdi contradicts a fundamental tenet of Islam. Then come the four degrees of knowledge for the masses and five more for the elect. The Koran, the rituals, the philosophy of Islam, are all accepted, but in an allegorical sense that allows them to be interpreted as desired. Finally, it is explained to the initiate that even the coming of the Mahdi is only an allegory of knowledge and the spreading of truth. All the prophets of all religions were men of error and their laws are not obligatory for the initiate. There is no God in heaven, but only a second world, where everything is back [346-347] to our world. Only the Imam, as the receptacle of the spirit, the true lord of the Ismailis, is holy. He must be obeyed and paid in gold, which can be easily obtained from the infidels by robbery and trade of captured neighbors who have not joined the secret community. All Muslims are enemies against whom lies, treachery, murder and violence are permitted. And one who has entered the "path," even in the first degree, there is no return except to death.

The community that professed and preached this terrible doctrine, which was undoubtedly mystical and at the same time anti-religious, very quickly gained a firm foothold in various areas of the disintegrating Caliphate. The greatest success was that of the Karmati community of Bahrain, which devastated Mecca in 929.

1 Zindik from the Persian word "zend" - meaning, which was the equivalent of the Greek "gnosis" - knowledge. Consequently, the Zindiks were Gnostics, but in the Arab era the name acquired a new connotation, "sorcerers" [45, с. 136].

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The Karmatians killed pilgrims and stole the black stone from Kaaba, which was returned only in 961. By devastating raids, the Karmatians devastated Syria and Iraq, and even managed to conquer Multan in India, where they barbarously massacred the population and destroyed the wonderful work of art, the temple of Aditya.

No less important was the conversion to Ishmaelism of some of the Berbers of Atlas. These warlike tribes used the preaching of pseudo-Islam to deal with the Arab conquerors. The leader of the rebels, Ubeidullah, was crowned caliph in 907, establishing the Fatimid dynasty, the descendants of Ali and Fatma, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad.

He succeeded because he officially declared himself a Shiite, using the secret right of disinformation1 conferred by a high degree of initiation. In 969 his descendants conquered Egypt and invaded Syria, but the brutality of the Berbers caused outrage among the local population, and the Caliph Fatimid's attempt to subdue the Carman republic of Bahrain provoked resistance from the free-loving Arabs. The brutal war that arose between the Arabs and the Berbers weakened both sides so much that the pressure of the Carmats and Ismailis on the Sunnis weakened. But the Fatimids held out in Egypt until 1,171, relying no longer on the Berbers, who had fallen away from [347-348] the Caliph, but on mercenary troops of Negroes and Turks. The Negroes supported the Ismailis, the Turks were Sunnis, like most of the population of Egypt. The slaughter of these troops so weakened the government that a Sunni coup was carried out in 1,171 which abolished the Fatimid dynasty. Power in Egypt and then in Syria passed into the hands of the famous Salah ad-Din ibn Ayoub, who founded the Ayoubid dynasty, which split up into many smaller holdings.

The Ismailis also tried to establish themselves in Iran and Central Asia, but encountered the opposition of the Turks, first Mahmud Ghaznavi and then the Seljuk sultans. Despite their defeats, the Ismailis held out in Iran and Syria at the end of the twelfth century. The ambitious Hasan Sabbah, an official in the office of the Seljuk Sultan Melik Shah, who was expelled for his intrigues, became an Ismaili imam. In 1,090 he managed to seize the mountain stronghold of Alamut in Deilem and many more castles in different places in Iran and Syria, and in 1,126 the Syrian Ishmaelites acquired a fortress of Banias and ten others in the mountains of Lebanon and Antilwan.

However, the fortresses were not the mainstay of these fanatics. Most of the subjects of the "elder of the mountain" lived in towns and villages, posing as Muslims or Christians. But at night, obeying the orders of their dais, they committed secret murders or gathered in bands that attacked even fortified castles. Muslims did not regard them as co-religionists, and a 12th century poet tells that during an attack on his castle his mother led her daughter to a balcony over an abyss in order to push the girl into the abyss, so that she would not fall into the hands of the Ismailis [58, p. 201]. Attempts to destroy this order were unsuccessful, for every vizier or emir inconvenient to the Ismailis was lined with the irresistible dagger of an obvious assassin who sacrificed his life at the command of his elder. Wouldn't that be enough?

The Cathars of Provence, the Paterens of Lombardy, the Bogumilians of Bulgaria, the Peacchians of Asia Minor, the Carmites of Arabia, the Ismailites of Berberia and Iran, while having many ethnographic and dogmatic differences, had one thing in common: aversion to reality. Just as the shadows of different people are unlike one another not in their inner filling, which shadows do not have, but only in their contours, so these confessions differed. Their resemblance was stronger than their differences, even though denial was the basis of it. Denial was their strength, but it was also their weakness: denial helped them to win, but it did not [348-349] enable them to really win. This peculiarity was so striking to all scholars that they were tempted to see it as a manifestation of the class struggle, which certainly took place in the heyday of feudalism. However, this fascinating simplification, when it comes to the facts, encounters insurmountable difficulties.

The class struggle against the dominant feudal lords did not cease for a moment, but it proceeded along two unrelated lines. The serfs resented the arbitrariness of the barons, but their program was clear: "When Adam plowed the land and Eve spun, who was a gentleman then?" The question is reasonable, but it has nothing to do with the doctrine that everything material is a manifestation of world evil and, as such, must be destroyed. On the contrary, the class nature of the peasantry pushed them, having achieved their freedom and rights, to cultivate the land, build houses, raise children, and accumulate fortunes, rather than abandon it all for illusions, even if quite logical. The second line is the struggle of urban communities (communes) in alliance with royalty against the dukes and earls. Again, the nascent bourgeoisie sought wealth, luxury, power, not to asceticism and poverty.

1 "The basis of their faith outwardly consists in confession of the Shi'a dogma and love to the lord of the faithful Ali, but inwardly they are infidels" [Kitab al-bayan. Quoted from: 4b. Footnote 339, p. 336]. A similar conclusion was reached by I. P. Petrushevskii, who considered the doctrines Galiya and Ismailia as independent religions, only superficially covered by Shiite forms [48, p. 242].

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In the West the cities supported then the pope, then the emperor, in the East - the Sunni caliph, in Byzantium they were a stronghold of Orthodoxy, for the welfare of the townspeople depended on strengthening order in the world, and not on the annihilation of the world, for the sake of otherworldly ideals, alien and inarticulate.

And it is unlikely that the preaching of Salvationist poverty can be considered a social program. After all, Christian monks and Muslim marabouts and Sufis were advocating the poverty of the clergy. The bishops' opulence, nepotism and simony were stigmatized from the pulpits by popes and councils, but they did not attract suspicion of heresy. Occasionally, too restless denouncers were killed from around the corner, or executed on fictitious charges, but in those cruel times it was easy to end up on the scaffold without this, especially when the man who was passionate about an idea did not notice that he was in the way of the crown prince. Executions were carried out without ideological censure. And indeed: how could a mystical doctrine reflect class interests? After all, for this it must be made generally accessible, but then the guiding principle - secret initiation and blind obedience - would be lost.

So, what was the behavior of the heretics themselves? The last thing they wanted was peace. Of course, they murdered the feudal lords, but equally [349-350] ruthlessly they massacred the peasants and townspeople, taking away their possessions and selling their wives and children into slavery. The social composition of the Manichean and Ishmaelite communities was extremely variegated. They included racial priests, poor artisans and rich merchants, peasants and vagabonds who were adventurers, and finally professional warriors, i.e., feudal lords, without whom a long and successful war was impossible in those days. The army had to have people who knew how to form warriors into a fighting order, fortify the castle, and organize a siege. Only feudal lords could do that in the 10^th and 12th centuries.

When Ismailis managed to win and conquer a country, for example, Egypt, they did not change the social order at all. The Ismaili chiefs simply took the place of the Sunni emirs and also collected taxes from fellahs and duties from merchants. And when they became feudal lords, they began to carry out religious persecution no worse than the Sunnis. In 1,210. The "elders of the mountain" in Alamut burned "heretical" (in their opinion) books. The Fatimid Caliph Hakim ordered Christians to wear crosses on their clothes and Jews to wear bells; Muslims were allowed to trade in the bazaar only at night, and dogs found in the streets were ordered to be killed.

And even the Carmats of Bahrain, who established a republic seemingly free of feudal institutions, combined the social equality of the members of their community with state slavery. As E. A. Belyaev has noted, "The tense struggle waged by the Karmats against the Caliphate and Sunni Islam also took the form of a sectarian movement from the very beginning. Therefore, the Karmati, being intolerant fanatics, directed their weapons not only against the Sunni Caliphate and its rulers, but also against all those who did not accept their teachings and were not part of their organization ... Attacks on peaceful urban and rural inhabitants by Karmati armed units were accompanied by murder, looting and violence ... The Karmatians captured survivors, enslaved them, and sold them in their busy markets along with other booty [4, p. 60]. The theoretical basis of this policy was the "inner" (batik) doctrine. The divine substance - "supreme light", produced emanation - "sparkling light", and it in turn produced matter - "dark light", inert, unreal, doomed to death. This matter is nothingness, but sparks of "sparkling [350-351] light" are thrown into it. These are the souls of the prophets, the imams, the initiates, and they alone, when they die, move from body to body. All other men who do not belong to the chosen are ghosts of non-existence, with whom one may do as one pleases, for their existence is unreal. Naturally, the stereotype of behavior formed on this ideological basis alienated from the Karmati a wide stratum of peasants, townspeople and even Bedouins, who were always ready to plunder under any banner, but considered it unnecessary to kill women and children.

What kind of "class struggle" is that?

But maybe this is all the slander of the enemies of "free thought" against the freethinkers, who condemned the rulers for their arbitrariness and the clergy for their ignorance. Suppose so, but why then did these "slanderers" not object to criticism of their orders? The negative side of heretical doctrines was not challenged, and the positive side was spoken of by the French and Persians, Greeks and Chinese of the 11th and 13th centuries with unanimous abhorrence, and clearly without collusion. But let us hear the other side - the famous Nasir-i-Khosrow, who hid from the Sunni Turkmens in Yomgan (the territory of Afghanistan) and died there around 1,088.

The thinker believed that "if to kill snakes is obligatory for us according to the consent of people, then to kill infidels is obligatory for us according to the order of the Almighty God, the infidel is more serpent than the serpent...". [quoted from: 6, p. 262]. The supreme goal of his faith is human comprehension of the innermost knowledge and achievement of "angel-like". The means of achievement is the establishment of Fatimid power, which he thinks of as follows:

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"Having learned that the descendants of Fatima had occupied Mecca”,

We shall feel heat in our bodies and joy in our hearts. The armies of God dressed in white1 will arrive;

God's vengeance on the horde of blacks2 I hope is near.

Let the sun of the prophet's kin3 swing his saber, That the ruthless descendants of Abbas should die out, That the land should become white and red like hullah4

And the true faith shall reach Baghdad in praise. [351-352]

The prophet's abode is his golden words.

And only the heir has rights to the kingdom5.

And, if in the west the sun riseth,6 Fear not from the darkness of the dungeons to raise his head up7.

The verse is unambiguous. It is a call for religious war without any social agenda. Consequently, the Ishmaelite movement was not a class movement, nor were the movements of the Cathars, the Bohemians and the Peacchus. The latter differed from Ismailism only in the fact that they did not achieve the political successes after which their degeneration into feudal states would have been inevitable. And if only socio-political motives had mattered, why would the Fatimid caliph of Egypt Hakim (996-1,021), being in a Sunni country and supported by a Sunni, Turkic army, have claimed that he was in constant communion with Satan, and prayed, addressing the planet Saturn? [188] There was no benefit to him from this; on the contrary, he lost his throne and went missing. It was hardly in his practical interest. Apparently, Hakim acted in accord with his conscience.

In light of these considerations, leading Soviet historians have refused to define Ismailism as social protest. Е. A. Belyaev pointed out that Ismailis did not lead the anti-feudal struggle of peasants, but used it for their own purposes [4, p. 70-72]. A. Y. Yakubovskiy and I. P. Petrushevskiy, noting the complexity of the problem, considered its solution premature [48, p. 295]. But maybe we are trying to find a solution not where it has been unsuccessfully sought?

As a matter of fact, if the Manicheans had achieved total victory they would have had to abandon the destruction of flesh and matter in order to maintain it, i.e. to transgress the very principle for the sake of which they sought victory. Having committed this treason against themselves, they would have had to establish a system of relations with their neighbors and with the landscapes among which they lived, i.e., to adopt the very feudal order that was natural at the level of technology and culture of the time. Consequently, they would have ceased to be themselves, and [351-352] would have become their own opposite. But this position in this case was ruled out by the irreversibility of evolution. Having taken the position of cursing life and taking as its canon the hatred of the world, one cannot exclude one's own body from it. Therefore, one's own demise was an inevitable consequence of the negation of matter. And whether it occurred in battle with Christians, or from asceticism, or from debauchery, the end was the same. It is a strange concept, but a consistent one.

There may be a false idea that Catholics were better, more honest, kinder, nobler than Cathars (Albigensians). It is just as wrong as the reverse. People remain themselves, no matter what ethical doctrines are preached to them. And why is the concept that absolution can be bought with money donated to a crusade better than a call to fight the material world? And if one doctrine is better than the other, for whom? So to pose the question of qualitative assessment is meaningless and just as anti-scientific as the question of which is better: acid or lye? They both burn the skin!

But if so, why is so much attention paid to this particular feud, when at the same time there were sharp social conflicts between the feudal class and the enslaved peasants; a rivalry of growing kingdoms for territory and trading cities for markets was developing? How did that semi-concealed war, which we have taken as our starting point, differ from them?

1 The color of the Fatimids.

2 The color of the Abbasids.

3 Mustansir, the caliph of Egypt, Fatimid (1,036-1,094).

4 The cloaks of the Bedouins are white with red stripes.

5 Mustansir's descent from Ali and Fatima, Muhammad's daughter, is implied. In fact, the ancestor of the Fatimids was Ubeidullah, the stepson of Abdullah ibn Maimun, a Jew convert to Ismailism.

6 This refers to the success of Mustansir's troops. See: 6, p. 263

7 A poetic translation by L. N. Gumilev.

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 A pernicious phantom.

Let us put the question this way: what do Ismailism, Carmatism, Marionite Pavlikianism, Manichaean Bohumilism, Albigensianism, and some Templar wrenching have in common? By genesis of beliefs, dogmatics, eschatology to exoticism, nothing. But there is one trait that is common to these systems: the denial of life, expressed in the fact that truth and falsehood are not opposed, but are equated with each other.   Out of this grows the program of man-killing, for since there is no real life, which is seen either as illusion (Tantrism), or as a mirage in a mirror image (Ismailism), or as the creation of Satan (Manichaeism), there is nobody to pity - for there is no object of pity, and no reason to pity - God is not recognized, so there is no one to hold an [353-354] account - and no pity, because it means prolonging the imagined, but painful suffering of a being who is in fact ghostly. And if so, in the absence of an object, the lie is equal to the truth, and one can use both for one's own purposes.

We must give the medieval men credit: they were consistent and therefore their speeches sounded very convincing. Reality was sometimes so terrible that people were ready to throw themselves into any illusion, especially one as logical, rigorous and elegant. After all, by entering the world of phantasmagoria and spells, they became masters of that world, or, more accurately, they were sincerely convinced of it. And the fact that they had to spit on the cross like the Templars, or smash a Kaaba meteorite into pieces like the Karmatians, for the sake of this feeling of freedom and power over others, did not bother them at all.

True, when they took this path, they did not gain personal freedom. On the contrary, they lost even that which they had to a very limited extent when they were in one or another positive system. There, law and custom guaranteed them some rights commensurate with their incumbent duties. Here they had no rights. Strict discipline subjected them to an invisible leader, an elder, a teacher. But it gave them the opportunity to do maximum harm to their neighbors. And it was so pleasant, so joyful, that it was possible to sacrifice life.

And it was not only distress and resentment that drove neophytes into negative systems. In the Middle Ages people often lived badly, but not everywhere and not always. Turbulent periods alternated with quiet ones, but the philistine mustiness of peaceful rural life acted dialectically and created consequences opposite to the prerequisites. When the passionate young man was fed to his heart's content, but forbidden to do anything, he sought the use of his hidden powers and found them in the preaching of denial, without paying attention to the fact that the goal set before him is a fantasy. Fairy tale and myth were born daily. Against them the strict conclusions of science and practical forecasts of reality were powerless: in the first millennium they fascinated people of all countries except Russia and Siberia, where anti-systems had not developed.

In contrast to the struggle for political domination within one large system, and even clashes between different systemic entities, here there was a war of extermination. The French Manicheans were too similar to the [354-355] French Catholics for them to coexist in the same arena, for both developed in opposite directions. As they collided, they caused the annihilation of the very matter which they regarded not as God's creation, but as the world's evil. And so they behaved everywhere: in Byzantium, Iran, Central Asia, and even in faith-tolerant China. Therefore, persecution of them was widespread, and their resistance, often very active, gave the early Middle Ages the coloring that shines through the visible history of the clash of states and the formation of ethnic groups. The presence of two incompatible psychological structures at that time was a global phenomenon. That is why so few monuments of art remain from this epoch.

The fact that the Manicheans disappeared from the face of the Earth by the end of the fourteenth century is not surprising, for they, in fact, aspired to it. Hating the material world and its joys, they had to hate life itself; consequently, they did not even have to affirm death, for death is only a moment of change of states, but anti-life and anti-world. This is where they moved, clearing the earth for the Renaissance. Their only misfortune was that they failed to take all humans with them, taking them through martyrdom, far from always voluntary. True, they tried, and it is not their fault that the life-affirming element of the human psyche resisted their onslaught, so that the history of nations has not ceased to flow.

From this we can see that Manichean communities could exist only in the presence of positive creative culture and at the expense of the values created by it. This anti-system is as if parasitized in the bodies of those ethnic groups where it penetrated, destroying them and dying with them.

In Khazaria, the anti-system lasted for 150 years, but its death was hardly accidental. No one lives alone, and no anti-system can stop the development of natural ethnic groups associated with the landscapes of their country. What any anti-system would pass up is life with the release of free energy capable of producing work.

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The Iranian branch of the Jews brought to the Khazars the principles of Mazdaqism, according to which all unreasonable, i.e., elemental nature, including the emotions of man himself, was declared evil.  The good was declared to be reason, though it is reason that is inherently delusional. The Byzantine branch brought skills of extraterritoriality, that is, the absence of direct contact with [355-356] natural landscapes. And both showed intolerance for their ethnic surroundings, with which they reckoned only insofar as it was practically necessary. And then both people and nature rose up against them.

The fate of the ruling class of Khazaria, which coincided with the dominant ethnic group, was shared by the natives of the country, except for those who had time to move to the Don or take refuge on the "ridge" - the mountain range of Dagestan, over the Terek. The Volga Khazars were in the worst situation, as the landscape that fed them sank under the waves of the Caspian Sea. If in the III century the level of the Caspian Sea was at an absolute mark of minus 36 m, then at the end of the XIII century it reached the absolute mark of minus 19 m, i.e. rose by 17 m. For the steep shores of the Caucasus and Iran this was of no great importance, but for the northern shelf, where Khazaria was situated, this transgression was a catastrophe. "The Netherlands" became "Atlantis. Flowering gardens, pastures, villages - everything was flooded with water, from which only the dry tops of the Baer knolls, where previously were the Khazar cemeteries, were sticking out.

Khazars had to leave the flooded country, and without a familiar, native landscape, the ethnos is dispersed. And so scattered Khazars in the great city of Sarai, the capital of the entire Western Eurasia. But they got rid of the dark light of anti-system.

However, not only the ethnic integrity of the Khazars was lost. Dark Light took away from them into the intergalactic abysses what seems to be inalienable - the memory, or, strictly speaking scientifically, the ethnic tradition. The descendants of the Khazars have forgotten that they were the Khazars, and the descendants of the Khazar Jews have forgotten about the country where their ancestors lived and acted.

The latter is understandable: for the Jews, the lower Volga was not their homeland, but a stadium for testing their strength; therefore, it did not make practical sense for them to remember the tragic failure. For these reasons, Khazaria became a country without historical sources: written, physical and ethnographic, that is recorded in the rites and beliefs. And since before the XX century, any history was based on the collection and criticism of sources, the history of Khazaria could not be written.

Our time was marked by a powerful shift in scientific methodology: a systematic approach in which the attention of the researcher moved from the elements of research on the relationships between them. This methodology made it possible to bring in data seemingly distant from the topic of study and thereby [356-357] fill the gaps in the history of Eastern Europe. Thanks to the systematic method it became possible to get rid of mythmaking, a disease of science that arises when there is insufficient information about the subject, when unstudied sections of the topic are filled with the fabrications of the historian. Khazar history was repeatedly plagued by this disease and continues to plague us.

Recently published a book, which called the Khazars "thirteenth tribe (tribe) of Israel”. [68]. The author presents the history of such an amazing phenomenon in such a way that comments are appropriate in the course of the content of the book. We give them in footnotes.

The author of the mentioned book believes that approximately from VII to XII century, from the Black Sea to the Urals and from the Caucasus to the convergence of the Don and the Volga River was spread semi-nomadic empire, which was inhabited by the Khazars - a nation of Turkic origin1.

For the author's note: ancient Jews, being a monolithic ethnos, were anthropologically diverse. The natives of Ur of the Chaldeans were of Sumerian type: short, stocky, with reddish hair and thin lips. The Negro admixture came from being in Egypt. The Semites, tall, slender, with a straight nose and narrow face, were an admixture of the ancient Arabs, the Chaldeans. Most of the 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 is irrelevant to ethnic diagnosis, for ethnos and race are concepts of different frames of reference [see 29]. Occupying a vital strategic passage between the Black and Caspian Seas, they played an important role in the bloody events of the Eastern Roman Empire2. They were a [357-358] buffer between the steppe robbers and Byzantium.3 They repelled the Arabs and thus prevented the conquest of Eastern Europe by Islam. They tried to hold back the invasion of the Vikings into southern Russia and to the Byzantine borders1.

1 The term "Turk" has three meanings. For VI-VIII centuries. - is a small ethnos (Türks), which led a huge association in the Great Steppe (el) and died in the middle of the 8th century. These Turks were Mongoloid. The Khazar khan dynasty descended from them, but the Khazars themselves were Caucasoids of the Dagestan type. For the IX-XII centuries the Turk was a 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 linguistic group.      Turkic languages are spoken by ethnic groups of different origin. Consequently, the author's definition can refer only to the ancient Turks, which, as we have shown, is incorrect.

2 Khazaria bordered the Caucasus with the Arab Caliphate from the 7th century, not with Byzantium.

3 The Avars, Bulgarians and Magyars fought with Byzantium on the Danube, where the Khazars never reached.

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Sometime around 740-42 the royal court and the ruling military class converted to Judaism.3 About the motives of this unusual event are not known4. It was probably an advantage in maneuvering between the rival Christian and Muslim "worlds "5 (i.e. cultural-political units or super-ethnoses).

By the 10th century a new enemy appeared: the Vikings, who soon became known as the Rus6. Khazar bastion Sarkel was destroyed in 965, but the central Khazaria remained intact7, but the state of the Khazars declined8.

Having counted 12 fundamental and non-disputable errors, rather deliberate errors, we can stop further narration of the content of the book. It is not the mysteries [358-359] of the historiography of the dark and ancient times that interested the author. The main thing is the connection of the history of the Khazars with the subsequent fate of Judaism.

LITERATURE

1. alekseyeva. P. In search of the ancestors. М., 1972.

2. Arsen'ev I. From Charlemagne to the Reformation. М, 1909.

3. Artamonov M.I. History of the Khazars. Л., 1962.

4. Belyaev E. A Muslim sectarianism. М., 1957.

5. Berlin N. Historical fate of the Jewish people on the territory of the Russian state. Pr, 1919.

6. Bertels A. E. Nasir-al-Khosrow and Ismailism. М., 1959.

7. Bidzhiev X. X., Gadlo A.V. Excavations of Khumarin settlement. - In book: Archaeology of North Caucasus. VI Krupnov readings in Krasnodar: Abstracts. М., 1976.

8. Braichevsky M.Y. The adventures of Pyci. Kiev, 1968.

9. Weber G. General History. 2nd ed., in 15 vols. М., 1893-1896.

10. Vernadsky G.V. Outline of Russian History. Prague, 1927.

11. Garkavi A. Я. Tales of Jewish writers on the Khazars and the Khazar Kingdom. SPb, 1874.

12. Grekov B.D. Kievan Rus. М., 1949.

13. V. Grigoryev. V. On the duality of the supreme power in the Khazars. - In the book: Russia and Asia, Spb,  1876.

14. Gumilev L.N. Some issues of the Hunnish history. - Bulletin of Ancient History", 1960, No 3.

15. Gumilev L.N. Khazaria and the Caspian Sea (Landscape and ethnos. I). - "Vestnik LSU", 1964, No 6, vol. 1, с. 83-95.

16. Gumilev L.N. Khazaria and Terek (Landscape and ethnos. II). - "Vestnik LSU", 1964, No 24, vol. 4, с. 78-88.

17. Gumilev L.N. Neighbors of the Khazars. - "Countries and Peoples of the East", 1965, issue IV.

18. Gumilev L.N. Khazar burials in the Volga delta. - "Messages of the State Hermitage", 1965,  Volga delta, 1965, XXVI.

19. Gumilev L.N. Khazar cultural monuments in the Volga delta. - Messages of the State Hermitage,1965, issue XXVI.

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    1 Vikings were moving to Russia along the Dnieper, which was beyond the control of Khazaria.

   2 The date is taken from the Apocrypha and is erroneous. A competent author of the 10th century Masudi said that it happened during the reign of Harun ar-Rashid, or rather, in the 9th century. [see: 3, pp. 262-282].

   3 Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. If indeed the military class of Khazaria simply changed religion, there would be no need to replace their soldiers with hired Muslims, expensive and not very reliable

   4 А. Among the used literature Köstler mentions the book by M.I. Artamonov, but it is clear from the text that he did not read it. However, he himself cites the testimony of the 11th century Karaite author. Yafet ibn-Ali, who calls the Khazars of the Jewish faith bastards (mamzer), thus showing the way in which this faith spread in Khazaria [see: p. 80]. In the presence of the natural course of mestiziation there is no need to look for motives of a political nature. Bastards do not arise on instructions from the government

    5 What advantages can the confession of a religion odious to both rivals give? And it is strange that the author puts tradition and a natural worldview in connection with the demands of political conjuncture. Why should one assume such an unprincipled nature in the Khazars?

    6 The Norman theory of the origin of Russia was outdated half a century ago.

    7 Central, or rather the Volga Khazaria was occupied first by Khorezm, and then by the Oguzes.

    8 Yes, if it continued to exist, the treaties and information about its policy would have been preserved. But there is nothing!

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34. History of Byzantium. In 3 vols. М., 1967.

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