The World of the Khazars. New Perspectives

470 Pages·6.485 MB·English

by  Golden P.B., Ben-Shammai H., Róna-Tas A. (editors)

H dO
The W orld of the Khazars
New Perspectives
Selected Papers from the Jerusalem 1999
International Khazar Colloquium
Edited by
Peter В. Golden,
Haggai Ben-Shammai
& Andras Rona-Tas
Brill
The World of the Khazars
Handbook of Oriental Studies
Handbuch der Orientalistik
Section Eight
Central Asia
Edited by
Denis Sinor
Nicola Di Cosmo
VOLUME 17
The World of the Khazars
New Perspectives
Selected Papers from the Jerusalem 1999
International Khazar Colloquium
hosted by the Ben Zvi Institute
Edited by
Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai and
Andras Rona-Tas
✓ S
' 1 6 8 Ъ ‘
BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2007
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ISSN: 0169-8524
ISBN: 978 90 04 16042 2
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PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
CONTENTS
Abbreviations ..................................................................................... vii
Introduction ....................................................................................... 1
Opening Remarks ............................................................................. 3
Haggai Ben-Shammai
Khazar Studies: Achievements and Perspectives .......................... 7
Peter B. Golden
The Alans: Neighbours of the Khazars in the Caucasus .............. 59
Irina A. Arzhantseva
The Khazar Language ....................................................................... 75
Marcel Erdal
New Findings Relating to Hebrew Epigraphic Sources from
the Crimea, with an Appendix on the Readings in King
Joseph’s Letter ................................................................................ 109
Artem Fedorchuk
The Conversion of the Khazars to Judaism .................................... 123
Peter B. Golden
Byzantine Sources for Khazar History ........................................... 163
James Howard-Johnston
Al-Khazar wa-’l-Saqaliba: Contacts and Conflicts? ...................... 195
Tatiana Kalinina
The Economy of the Khazar Khaganate ......................................... 207
Thomas S. Noonan
Khazaria and Rus’: An Examination of their Historical
Relations ............................................................................................. 245
Vladimir Petrukhin
vi CONTENTS
The Khazars and the Magyars ......................................................... 269
Andras Rona-Tas
The Khazar Motif in the Kuzari of Judah Halevi .......................... 279
Eliezer Schweid
Iranian Sources on the Khazars ....................................................... 291
Dan Shapira
Armenian and Georgian Sources on the Khazars:
A Re-Evaluation ................................................................................ 307
Dan Shapira
The Story of a Euphemism: The Khazars in Russian Nationalist
Literature ............................................................................................ 353
Victor Shnirelman
The Khazars and the World of Islam ............................................... 373
David Wasserstein
Yiddish Evidence for the Khazar Component in the Ashkenazic
Ethnogenesis ...................................................................................... 387
Paul Wexler
The Khazars and Byzantium—The First Encounter ..................... 399
Constantine Zuckerman
Select Bibliography ............................................................................ 433
Index 447
ABBREVIATIONS
AEMAe Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi (Wiesbaden)
AO Archivum Ottomanicum (Wiesbaden)
AOH Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae
(Budapest)
BGA Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum (Leiden)
BMGS Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (Oxford)
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
(London)
BZ Byzantinische Zeitschrift (Munchen)
CFHB Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae (Berlin)
CSHB Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (Bonn)
GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies (Cambridge, Mass.)
HMK See Gy. Nemeth, A honfoglalo magyarsag kialakulasa
MAIET Materialy po Arkheologii, Istorii i Ёtnografii Tavrii (Simferopol,
Crimea, Ukraine)
PSRL Polnoe sobranie russkix letopisej (Moskva-St. Petersburg/
Petrograd/Leningrad)
PVL Povest’ vremennyx let, ed. D.S. Lixacev and M.B. Sverdlov
REB Revue des Ёtudes Byzantines (Paris)
TM Travaux et Memoires (Centre de Recherche d’histoire et
civilisation byzantines, Paris)

INTRODUCTION
The Khazar Empire (ca. 650-ca. 965-969), one of the largest states of
medieval Eurasia, extended from the Middle Volga lands in the north
to the Northern Caucasus and Crimea in the south and from the Ukrai­
nians steppe lands in the west to the western borders of present day
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the east. Its determinant component
was Turkic in origin and it must be understood within the context of
medieval Eurasian, Turkic, nomad-based states. It played a key role in
the history of the peoples of Rus’, medieval Hungary and the Cauca­
sus and had an impact on the whole of Eastern-Northeastern Europe,
the Balkans and the Islamic Middle East. Khazaria became one of the
great trans-Eurasian trading terminals connecting the northern forest
zones with Byzantium and the Islamic Caliphate. We find information
on the Khazars written in Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Middle and Neo-Per­
sian, Greek, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, medieval Slavic and Chinese.
A number of undeciphered runiform-scripts were used on the territory
of Khazaria, but a corpus of texts in what can be identified as the Khazar
language has yet to be established. Courted by both Byzantium and the
Islamic Caliphate, the Khazars, in the ninth century, converted to Juda­
ism. After it was overrun by the Rus’ and their Turko-nomadic allies,
this once powerful Eurasian empire rapidly faded. The name “Gazaria”
survived for some time as the designation of the Crimea, one of the
regions long associated with them. The seemingly sudden disappear­
ance of Khazaria with its connections across Eurasia and the Middle
East has given it a romantic glow. The Judaization of its ruling core
already in the Middle Ages produced a narrative that served as a frame­
work to a philosophical work by Judah ha-Levi. In modern writings it
has produced a range of political sentiments, running the gamut from
anti-Semitic-tinged nationalism to attempts to derive Eastern European
Jewry from the Khazars. As a consequence, in addition to the growing
body of scholarly studies on the Khazars, there has been no shortage
of speculative or politically motivated works and even several novels
including Milorad Pavic’s much-heralded fantasy, The Dictionary of the
Khazars. Nonetheless, numerous fundamental questions regarding the
Khazars, their language, history and culture, remain unanswered or in