On the Khazars & Others

By Frederick Dixon:

The idea that the Jews of eastern Europe are the descendants of the Khazars is one which has considerable traction among racial nationalists. It is difficult to see why this should be so, but perhaps it is to de-legitimise the claim of the Jews to an ancestral homeland in Palestine because, whatever else the Khazars may have been, they were never Palestinians. They were in fact a confederacy of steppe nomads of predominantly Turkic stock and language who came out of the furthest east to dominate southern Russia, the Ukraine and the Crimea between the 8th and 11th centuries AD.

They were a pagan people, but they did not remain so. They followed a path already established by earlier barbarian peoples coming into contact with Mediterranean civilization (which the Khazars found in the Greek cities on the northern shores of the Black Sea). They discovered – or rather their rulers discovered – a need for a civilized religion in place of their embarrassing old paganism, a religion which would bring them the fruits of Mediterranean culture and enable them to deal as equals with the emissaries of civilized powers. They considered Christianity, but to become Christian would imply, in the thinking of the time, subordination to the Emperor in Constantinople. They considered Islam, but kneeling before the Caliph in Baghdad did not appeal. So they became Jews because there was no great Jewish potentate, or rather the Khagan of the Khazars became the great Jewish potentate.

There is no certainty as to which variety of Judaism the Khazars adopted. There is some evidence that they adopted mainstream Talmudic Judaism, but equally they may have become Karaits – Karaitism rejects the Talmud and accepts as authentic only the Pentateuch, the five Mosaic books of the Old Testament. After the destruction of their power by the Varangian, Sviatoslav, the Khazars disappear from history, but they may not have disappeared altogether – Turkic speaking Karait Jews, remnants perhaps of the Khazar confederacy, still linger in parts of their old dominions. During the Second World War the Germans exempted the Karaits from the deportations on the grounds that they were Jews only by religion, not by race, although this did not always spare them from local actions.

Given their Turkic origin, it has always seemed unlikely that the Khazars could be the ancestors – except, perhaps, marginally – of the Ashkenazi Jews of eastern Europe. As “Ashkenazi” means “German” and the Ashkenazi language, Yiddish (or “Taytsch” i.e. “Deutsch”), is a variant of German, such an ancestry would be inexplicable. In reality, the history of the Ashkenazi is extraordinary enough even without the Khazars. DNA analysis has shown conclusively that the greater part of their ancestry derives from the near east and they are closer racially to other kinds of Jew than to the Christian populations among whom they lived for so long. Their medieval forebears lived in the great trading cities of the Rhine where they were Germanised but, unpopular as always, they were always insecure and by the 13th century they were ready to move on.

The opportunity to do so was provide by two pagan peoples, the Mongols and the Lithuanians. The Mongols, unified and invigorated by Genghis Khan, ravaged the Russian principalities in the 1230s. The prosperous trading cities on the great rivers of western Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine were destroyed and their populations, Slav and Scandinavian, annihilated. Into the vacuum which the Mongols created exploded the Lithuanians; this pagan people, who had lived undisturbed for millennia amid their forests and marshes, had been hammered into a unified military monarchy by the constant assaults of the Teutonic Knights, a German crusading order established both to the south of Lithuania in East Prussia, and to the north in Latvia. The Lithuanians quickly conquered a vast territory which include the whole of Belarus and most of the Ukraine.

These new lords were keen to re-establish the prosperity of the trading cities for their own benefit, but how? Their inhabitants were dead, the Lithuanians had no urban tradition whatsoever, the bewildered Christian peasantry who lived round about could not be quickly turned into merchants and townsmen. The obvious answer was to send for colonists, for a ready made, off-the-peg urban population, but the great colonisers of the middle ages were Germans and they were the bitter enemies of the Lithuanians. So it had to be a very special kind of German, a kind who could be trusted not to take the side of Christian peasants against their pagan lords. Thus began the transfer of the Jews of Germany into the east, and throughout the Lithuanian dominions the towns became and remained Jewish.

Lithuania in time united with Poland, and Poland was partitioned by her neighbours in the 18th century and ceased to have a separate political existence. The lion’s share of the spoils, including all of the former Lithuania, fell to Russia which thus inherited a vast population of Jews, a people of whom the Russians had little previous experience. Such little experience as they had satisfied the Russian authorities that the Jews should stay just where they were and so the “Jewish Pale” came into existence. The Pale comprised all those parts of the Russian Empire which had previously been Polish or Lithuanian and, except during occasional bouts of liberalisation, the Jews were not permitted to live elsewhere.

Conditions within the Pale were pregnant with future mischief – the Jews dominated the towns and were hated by the Christian peasantry for their often extortionate money lending and because they were employed as land agents, responsible for collecting rents and carrying out evictions. At the same time, they were despised by the country’s rulers, often the very same aristocrats who employed them as land agents! Intelligent, intellectual, devoid of patriotism because they had no country of their own, but with connections in every country and a strong messianic tradition, it is not surprising that the Jews devised utopian ideologies of equality and internationalism. Many wonders and terrors were to come out of the intellectual ferment of the Pale, and the greatest of the terrors was its own child, the Bolshevik revolution. The Tsars had failed to solve their Jewish problem, but the Jews solved their Tsarist problem.

It is an uncomfortable truth that in the new Soviet Union, in which atheist Jews were so prominent, the creativity of the Pale was stifled by the urge for conformity. Worse, the activities of the atheist Jews who dominated the Soviet secret police forces, gouging stores of grain out of starving Christian peasants in order to feed the towns, did little to ease the ancient hatred of the Christian Slavs for the town dwelling Jews. Thus it was that when German forces entered the Soviet Union on the 22nd June 1941 the native population rose in a paroxysm of fury and killed all the Jews they could lay their hands on. It is a great irony that the principal victims of these pogroms were conservative religious Jews; the atheist Bolshevik Jews, deeply involved in Government, Party, and NKVD, had their ears close enough to the ground to escape in time into the Soviet interior.

In those years 1941 to 1945 the Pale was utterly destroyed, nothing now remains except a few rags and tatters preserved more or less as museum pieces – maybe a Yiddish theatre in Vilnius or a synagogue in Zhitomir. But the Khazars? Well, those Turkic speaking Karaits still linger in the Crimea, in Lithuania and elsewhere, so maybe something of the Khazars persists. But the real moral of this story is that to be a minority is an uncomfortable and potentially perilous thing, and that the homogeneous nation state is the very best solution for Jews (and, if you must, for everyone else as well!).

By Frederick Dixon © 2013

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