PRELIMINARY NOTES TO THE SECOND,
RECONSTRUCTED, AND REVISED EDITION
The author assures the reader that he will not have to die if he reads this book, as did the user of the 1691 edition, then The Khazar Dictionary still had its first scribe. Some explanation regarding that edition is in order here, but for the sake of brevity the lexicographer proposes to strike a deal with his readers. He will sit down to write these notes before supper, and the reader will take them to read after supper. Thereby, hunger will force the author to be brief, and gratification will allow the reader to peruse the introduction at leisure.
I. A History of The Khazar Dictionary
The event discussed in this lexicon occurred sometime in the 8th or 9th century A.D. (or there were several similar events), and this subject is commonly referred to by the scholars as "the Khazar polemic." The Khazars were an autonomous and powerful tribe, a warlike and nomadic people who appeared from the East at an unknown date, driven by a scorching silence, and who, from the 7th to 10th century, settled in the land between the two seas, the Caspian and the Black. (A review of the literature on the Khazars was published in New York ((The Khazars, A Bibliography, 1939)); a Russian, M. I. Artamonov, wrote a monograph on the history of the Khazars in two editions ((Leningrad, 1936 and 1962)) and, in 1954, in Princeton, D.M. Dunlop published a history of the Jewish Khazars.)
It is known the winds that brought them were masculine winds, which never bring rain--winds with a yoke of grass, which they trail through the sky like a beard. One late Slavic mythological source mentions the Kozije Sea, which could be taken to mean that there was a sea called the "Khazar Sea", since the Slavs called the Khazars "Kozars". It is also known the Khazars established a powerful empire between the two seas, preaching a to-us-unknown faith. When their husbands were killed in battle, a Khazar woman would be given a pillow to hold all the tears they would weep for the warriors.
The Khazars entered the annals of history when they went to war against the Arabs and concluded an alliance with the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in 627 A.D., but their origins remain unknown and all traces of them have vanished, leaving nothing to show by what name or people one should look for them today. They left in their wake a graveyard by the Danube, though it is not really sure if in is Khazar, and a pile of keys surmounted by silver of gold triangular coins, which Dabmannus believed had been minted by the Khazars. The Khazars, and the Khazar state, vanished from the stage of history as a result of the event that is the main concern of this book--their conversion from their original faith, unknown to us today, to one (again, it is not known which) of three known religions of the past and present--Judaism, Islam, or Christianity.
The collapse of the Khazar Empire followed soon after their conversion. A Russian military commander of the 10th century, Price Svyatoslav, gobbled up the Khazar Empire like an apple, without even dismounting from his horse. In 943 A.D. the Russians went without sleep for eight nights to smash the Khazar capital at the mouth of the Volga into the Caspian Sea, and between 965 and 970 A.D. they destroyed the Khazar state. Eyewitnesses noted that the shadows of the houses in the capital held their outlines for years, although the buildings themselves had been destroyed long before. They held fast in the wind and the waters of the Volga. According to a 12th century Russian chronicle, Oleg was already called archon of the Khazar state by the year 1083, but by that time (the 12th century), another people--the Kuman--were already to be found on the territory of what had been the Khazar state.
There are very few material remnants of Khazar culture. No public or private inscriptions have been discovered, no trace of the Khazar books mentioned by Halevi, or trace of their language, though Cyril notes they prayed in the Khazar language. The sole public building excavated in Suwar, on erstwhile Khazar territory, is probably not Khazar, but Bulgar. Nor was anything noteworthy found in the excavations at Sarkel, not even traces of the fortress we know the Byzantines built there for the Khazars' use. After the fall of their state, the Khazars are barely mentioned. In the 10th century, a Hungarian chieftain invited them to settle his territory. In the year 1117 a group of Khazars went to Kiev to see Prince Vladimir Monomakh. In Pressburg, in 1309, Catholics were forbidden to enter into matrimony with Khazars, and in 1346 the decision was confirmed by the Pope. That is about all there is.
The Khazars' act of conversion, which was to seal their fate, occurred the following way. According to ancient chronicles, the Khazar ruler, the kaghan, had a dream and sought three philosophers to interpret it for him. This was a matter of importance to the Khazar state, because the kaghan had decided to convert, together with his people, to the faith of the sage who would give the most satisfactory dream interpretation. Some sources assert the, when the kaghan made his decision that day, the hair on his head dies, and although he felt it happen, something nevertheless drove him on. And so it was that a Moslem, and Jewish, and a Christian divine--a dervish, a rabbi, and a monk--were to be found at the kaghan's summer residence. Each received a knife made of salt as a gift from the kaghan, and they began their debate.
The sage's viewpoints, their contest based on the tenets of their three different faiths, the characters involved in, and the outcome of the "Khazar polemic" aroused keen interest and strong conflicting opinions about the event and its consequences, the victors and the vanquished, and through the centuries they became the subject of repeated debate in Hebrew, Christian, and Moslem circles; all this continues to the preset, although the Khazars have long since ceased to exist. Sometime in the 17th century there was a suprising renewal of interest in Khazars affairs, and the immense body of studies concerning the Khazars systamatized and published in Borussia (Prussia) in 1691.
Among the items examined were samples of triangular coins, names inscribed on old rings, images painted on a pitcher of salt, diplomatic correspondence, portraits of writers in which all the book titles etched in the background were transcribed, reports from spies, testaments, voices of Black Sea parrots thought to speak the extinct Khazar language, painted scenes of music-making (from which musical annotations drawn on score books were deciphered), and even a tattooed human skin, not to mention Byzantine, Hebrew, and Arab archival material. In short, everything that the imagination of 17th-centurty man could tame and turn to his advantage was drawn on. And all of this was collected between the covers of one dictionary.
An explanation for the awakened interest in the 17th century, one thousand years after the event, was left by a chronicler in the following obscure sentences, which read: "Each of us promenades his thought, like a monkey on a leash. When you read, you have two such monkeys: your own and one belonging to someone else. Or, even worse, a monkey and an hyena. Now consider what you will feed them. For a hyena does not eat the same thing as a monkey..."
In any case, in the year of 1691 the printer of the Polish dictionary, Joannes Daubmannus (or a successor under his name), published a listing of sources on the Khazar question in the one format that made it possible to include the sundry material that had been amassed and lost through the centuries by those who, with quills in their earrings, use their mouths as ink bottles. The work was published in the form of a dictionary about the Khazars and entitles Lexicon Corsi. According to one (Christian) version, the book was dedicated to publisher by a monk named Theocitist Nikolsky, who had found various material about the Khazars on an Austrian-Turkish battlefield and had memorized it. Daubmannus' edition was divided into three dictionaries: a separate glossary of Moslem sources on the Khazar question, and alphabetized list of materials drawn from Hebrew writings and tales, and a third dictionary complied on the basis of the Christian accounts of the Khazar question. This Daubmannus edition--a dictionary of dictionaries on the Khazar Empire--had an unusual fate.
Among the five hundred copies of the first dictionary, Daubmannus printed one with poisoned dye. This poisoned copy, with its gilded lock, had a companion copy with a silver lock. In 1692 the Inquisition destroyed all copies of the Daubmannus edition, and the only ones to remain in circulation were the poisoned copy of the book, which escaped the censor's notice, and the auxiliary copy, with its silver lock, which accompanied it. Insubordinates and infidels who ventured to read the proscribed book risked the threat of death. Whoever opened the book soon became numb, stuck on his own heart as on a pin. Indeed the reader would die on the ninth page at the words Verbum caro factum est ("The Word became flesh"). If read simultaneously with the poisoned copy, the auxiliary copy enabled one to know exactly when death would strike. Found in the auxiliary copy was the note: "When you awake and suffer no pain, know that you are no longer among the living."
From the legal case concerning the 18th century Dorfmer family and its inheritance, we see that the "gold" (poisoned) copy of the dictionary was passed down from one generation to the next in this Prussian family: the eldest son received one half of the book, and the other children each received one quarter, or less if there were more of them. The rest of the Dorfmer inheritance--orchards, meadows, fields, houses, water, livestock--was divided up with each section of the book, and for a long time the book was not associated with the deaths that occurred. Once, when pestilence struck down the livestock and there was a drought, someone told the members of the family that every book, like every girl. could turn into the witch Mora, that her spirit could go out into the world and infect and torment those around her. Therefore, into the book's lock should be places a small wooden cross, like those put into a girl's mouth when she turned into this witch, so as not to release its spirit to plague the world and the household. They did this with The Khazar Dictionary--a cross was places on its lock as over a mouth--but matters only got worse, and members of the household began to choke in their sleep and die. The family went to the priest and told them what was happening, and the priest removed the cross from the book; that very same day, the plague ended. He told them: "Be careful, in the future, not to place the cross on the lock like that, when the spirit is residing outside of the book. It fears the cross and, not daring to go back into the book, it wreaks havoc all around." And so the little gilded lock was bolted and The Khazar Dictionary remained on the shelf for decades, unused. From that shelf could be heard a strange rustling sound that emanated from the Daubmannus dictionary, and some diary notes kept at the time in Lvov say that built into Daubmannus' lexicon was a sandglass, made by Nehama, a man familiar with the Zohar and able to speak and write at once at the same time.
This Nehama claimed that in his own hand he recognized the consonant of "heh" of his Hebrew language, in the letter "vav" his own male soul. The hourglass he had built into the binding of the book was invisible, but, as you read you could hear the trickle of the sand in the utter silence. When it stopped, you had to turn the book over and continue reading it the other way around, back to front, and therein the secret meaning of the book was reveled. Other records relate, however, that the rabbis did not approve of the attention their compatriot Nehama paid to The Khazar Dictionary, and the book was subject to periodic attack by learned men from the Jewish community. The rabbis had no quarrel with the orthodoxy of the Hebrew sources for the dictionary, but they could not agree with the other sources.
Finally, it must be said that the Lexicon Corsi did not fare well in Spain either, where, in the Moslem (Moorish) community, and eight-hundred-year ban was placed on reading the "silver copy"; since that period has yet to expire, the ban still applies. This act can be explained by the fact that families that came from the Khazar Empire were still to be found in Spain at the time. It is written that these "last Khazars" had an unusual custom. When they came into conflict with someone, they would try at all costs to imprecate and curse him while he slept, yet were careful not to awaken him with their invectives and curses. Evidently they believed that such imprecations had a stronger effect, and the curses worked faster when the enemy was asleep.
II. Composition of the Dictionary
It is impossible to tell what the 1691 Daubmannus edition of The Khazar Dictionary looked like, since the only remaining exemplars, the poisoned and the silver (companion) copies, were both destroyed, each in its own part of the world. According to once source, the gilded copy was destroyed in an utterly ignominious way. Its last owner was an old man from the Dorfmer family, famous for his ability to judge a good sword, like a bell, by its sound. He never read books and used to say , "Light lays its eggs on my eyes like a fly lays larvae in a wound. We know what that can spawn..." Greasy foods were bad for the old man, and everyday, when no-one in the house was looking, he would lower a page of The Khazar Dictionary into his bowl of soup to skim off the fat at then throw away the telltale leaf. And so it happened that, before anyone in the house even noticed, he had used up the Lexicon Corsi. The same source says that the book was embellished with drawings, which the old man did not want to use because they spoiled the taste of his soup. These illustrated pages of the dictionary were the only ones to be preserved, and they could still perhaps be located today, provided one could ever identify, amid the trails of a path, that first trail, from which all others followed. A professor of Oriental studies and medieval archeology, Dr. Isailo Suk, is believed to have owned a copy or transcript of The Khazar Dictionary, but after his death nothing was found among his possessions. Hence, only fragments of the Daubmannus edition have reached us, just as sleep leaves a dusting of sand in the eye.
On the basis of these fragments, cited in writings that disagree with the authors of The Khazar Dictionary, it has been firmly established (as mentioned above) that the Daubmannus edition was a sort of Khazar encyclopedia, a collection of biographies or hagiographies of individuals who in any way crossed the firmament of the Khazar Empire, like sparrows flying through a room. Lives of the saints and of other individuals who participated in the Khazar polemic, in recording and studying through the centuries, provided the foundation of the book, and everything else was divided into three sections.
The composition of the Daubmannus dictionary, consisting of Hebrew, Moslem, and Christian sources on the Khazars' conversion, also serves as the basis for this second edition, a decision was made, in spite of the lack of source material for the dictionary and the insurmountable difficulties this posed, after the lexicographer had read the following lines from the Khazar lexicon: "A dream is a garden of devils, and all dreams in this world were dreamed long ago. Now they are simply interchanged with equally used and worn reality, just as coins are exchanged for promissory notes and vice versa, from hand to hand..." In such a world, in such a phase of that world, this was a responsibility one could indeed accept.
Here it is important to bear in mind the following. The publisher of this second edition of The Khazar Dictionary is perfectly aware that Daubmannus' 17th century material is not reliable, that it is largely based on legends, that it is something like a feast eaten in a dream, and that it is caught in a web of various ancient misconceptions. Nevertheless, this material is offered here for the reader to inspect, since this dictionary does not concern itself with the Khazars as we see them today, but is, rather, an attempt to reconstruct the lost Daubmannus edition. Contemporary findings about the Khazars are used only as an unavoidable supplements to the fragments of the unpreserved original.
It is also necessary to mention that , for understandable reasons, it was impossible to preserve the order and alphabetical arrangements of the Daubmannus dictionary, in which the three alphabets and three languages were used--Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic--and in which dates were given according to the three calendars of the above mentioned groups. Here all dates are calculated according to a single calendar, and a translation of Daubmannus' sources and his entries in three languages is given in a single language. In the 17th-century original all the words were arranged differently and in changing from one language to another, the same name would appear in different places in each of the three dictionaries (Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek), because letters do not follow the same sequence in every alphabet, just as book pages are not always turned in the same direction, and, in the theater, leading actors do not always make their entries from the same side of the stage. Indeed the same principle would apply to each new translation into another language, because the material for this dictionary on the Khazars would inevitable have to be grouped differently in each new language and alphabet, so that the entries would always appear somewhere else and the names in an ever-changing hierarchy. Hence, important entries in the Daubmannus edition, such as St. Cyril, Judah Halevi, Yusuf Masudi, and others do not appear in the same place here as in the first edition of The Khazar Dictionary. This is certainly the main shortcoming of the current edition in relation to the Daubmannus edition, since only someone who can read through the sections of one book in their proper order can create the world anew. This approach was adopted, however, because it is impossible to reproduce Daubmannus' alphabetical order.
All these shortcomings need not be considered as a major drawback: the reader capable of deciphering the hidden meaning of a book from the order of its entries has long since vanished from the earth, for today's reading audience believes the matter of imagination lies exclusively within the realm of the writer and does not concern them in the least, especially with regard to a dictionary. This type of reader does not even need a sandglass in the book to remind him when to change his manner of reading: he never changes his manner of reading in any case.
III. How to Use the Dictionary
For all its problems, this book has preserved some of the virtues of the original Daubmannus edition. Like that one, it can be read in an infinite manner of ways. It is an open book, and when it is shut, it can be added to: just as it has its own former and preset lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, and containers. It has a register, concordances, and entries, like a holy book or a crossword puzzle, and all the names or subjects in hypertext are linked to the same entry in another book or the appendix. Thus, the reader can use the book as he sees fit. As with any other lexicon, some will look up a word or a name that interests them at any given moment, whereas others may look at the book as a text meant to be read in its entirety, from beginning to end, in one sittings, so as to gain a complete picture of the Khazar question and the people, issues, and events connected to it. The books pages can be turned from left to right, or from right to left, as were those of the Prussian edition (Hebrew and Arab sources). The three books of this dictionary--Red, Yellow, and Green--can be read in any order the reader desires; he may start with the book that falls open as he picks up the dictionary. That is probably why in the 17th-century edition the books were printed in three separate volumes. The same has not been done here for technical reasons.
The Khazar Dictionary can also be read diagonally, to get a cross section of all three registers--the Islamic, the Christian, and the Hebrew. The best way to do this is to work in threes, either by choosing entries which are to be found in all three dictionaries, such as the words "Ateh", "Kaghan", "Khazar Polemic", or "Khazars" or by choosing three different persons connected by the same role in the Khazar question. This gives the reader an integral picture of the entries in the three different books of the dictionary which tell of the participants in the Khazar polemic (Sangari, Cyril , Ibn Kora), of its chroniclers (Al-Barki, Methodius, Halevi ), or of students of the Khazar Question in the 12th century (Cohen, Masudi, Brankovich), and in the 20th century (Suk , Muawia, Schultz). Of course, among those triads one should not forget the three who come from the three hells, the Moslem, the Hebrew, and the Christian (Ephrosinis Lukrarevich, Sevast, Akshany). They have covered the longest journey to reach this book.
But the reader should not be discouraged by such detailed instructions. He can, with a clear conscience, skip all these introductory remarks and read the way he eats: he can use his right eye as a fork, his left as a knife, and toss the bones over his shoulder. That will do. He may, of course, wander off and get lost among the words of this book, as did Masudi, one of the writers of this dictionary, who wandered into other people's dreams, never to find his way back. In that event, the reader has no other choice than to begin in the middle of any given page and forge his own path. Then he may move through the book like a forest, from one marker to the next, orienting himself by observing the stars, the moon, and the cross. Another time he will read it like the buzzard that flies only on Thursdays, and here he again, he can rearrange it in an infinite number of ways, like a Rubik cube. No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary. Hence, each reader will put together the book for himself, as in a game of dominoes or cards, and, as with a mirror, he will get out of this dictionary as much as he puts into it, for, as is written on one of the pages of this lexicon, you cannot get more out of the truth than you put into it. After all. this book need never be read in its entirety; one can take half or only part and stop there, as one often does with dictionaries. The more one seeks, the more one gets, and the lucky will ultimately have in his possession all the links connecting the names in this dictionary. The rest will be for others.
IV. Preserved Fragments from the Introduction to the Destroyed 1691 Edition of the Dictionary
(translated from the Latin)
1. The author advises the reader to not tackle this book unless he absolutely has to. An when he does touch it, let it be on days when he feels that his mind and sense of caution probe deeper than usual, and let him read it the way he catches "leap-fever", and illness that skips over every other day and strikes only on feminine days of the week.
2. Imagine two men holding a captured puma on a rope. If they want to approach each other, the puma will attack because the rope will slacken; only if they both pull simultaneously on the rope is the puma equidistant from the two of them. That is why it is so hard for him who reads and him who writes to reach each other: between them lies a mutual thought captured on ropes that they pull in opposite directions. If we were now to ask that puma--in other words, that thought--how it perceived these two men, it might answer that the ends of the rope those to be eaten are holding someone they cannot eat.
3. Take care my friend, not to be too obsequious and not to curry favor overtly with those who hold their authority in a ring and their power in the sweep of a sword. They are always surrounded by people who pay court not willingly or out of conviction, but because they have to. And they have to because they have a bee showing on their cap or lard hidden in their armpit, they were caught doing wrong and are now atoning for it; their freedom is on a leash and they are ready to do anything. Those high up, who rule over everybody, know and use this well. Take care, therefore, that they do not perceive you as one of that lot, innocent though you may be. This is exactly what will happen if you ever praise them in excess or overly pander to them in that crowd of sycophants: they will associate you in their minds with lawbreakers and criminals and will think you are another one with a mote in your eye and that you do nothing of your own free will or out of conviction., because you must in order to atone for your sins. Such people are rightly despised and kicked around like dogs or forced to commit the same sorts of acts they committed before.
4. As for you, the writer, never forget the following: the reader is like a circus horse which has to be taught that it will be rewarded with a lump of sugar every time it acquits itself well. If that sugar is withheld, it will not perform. As for essayist and critics, they are like cuckolded husbands: always the last to find out.