KHAZARS

--A warrior people who settled in the Caucasus between the 7th and 10th centuries, had a powerful state, ships sailing two seas, the Caspian and the Black, as many winds as there are fish, three capitals (summer, winter, and wartime), and years as towering as the pine trees. They preached a faith unknown today, worshipped salt, carved their temples into underground salt rocks or saline hills. According to Halevi, they adopted Judaism in the year 740, and the last Khazar kaghan, Joseph, even made contact with the Spanish Jews, because he sailed on the seventh day, when the earth curses man and its malediction drives ships away from the shore. Those ties were broken in the year 970, when the Russians captured the Khazar capital and destroyed the Khazar state. Some Khazars subsequently merged with the East European Jews, others with the Arabs, Turks, and Greeks, so that today we know only about a small oasis of Khazar people who, without either a religion or a language of their own, continued to live in autonomous districts in Eastern and Central Europe until the outbreak of World War II (1939), and then entirely disappeared. The Jewish version of their name is Kuzari (plural Kuzarim). It is generally held that only the Khazar nobility adopted Judaism; however, between the 7th and 10th centuries, in the Pannonian plains, there was a center for Judaization that is sometimes attributed to the Khazars (Chelarevo). Around the year 800, in Westphalia, Druthmar of Aquitane mentions "gentes Hunorum que et gazari vocantur," stressing that they were circumcised, were of the faith of Moses, and were strong. In the 12th century, Cinnamus said that the Khazars lived by the law of Moses, albeit not always orthodoxly. The Jewish kaghans were mentioned as early as the 10th century by Arab sources (Ibn Rustah, Al-Istakri, Ibn Hawqul).

A text known as the "Khazar Correspondence" provides interesting information about the Khazars. This text is preserved in at least two version, one of which is more detailed than the other; it has yet to be fully elucidated by scholars. Kept at Oxford and written in the Hebrew language, it is a correspondence of Joseph the king of the Khazars and Hasdai Ibn Shaprut of Moorish Spain, who wrote to the Khazar king in the middle of the 10th century, asking him to reply to following questions:

1. Is there a Jewish state anywhere in the world?

2. How did the Jews come to Khazaria?

3. How did the Khazar's conversion to the Jewish faith take place?

4. Where does the king of the Khazars live?

5. What tribe does he belong to?

6. What is his role in wars?

7. Does he suspend war on the Sabbath?

8. Does the Khazar king possess any information whatsoever about the possible end of the world?

The reply explains the Khazar polemic, which preceded the Khazars' conversion to Judaism.

There is another source in connection with this polemic, but it has not been preserved. In his entry on the Khazars, Daubmannus cites the manuscript On Khazar Affairs (probably a Latin version). The closing words of the text show that its oldest sections relate to a report that probably served to brief the Hebrew representative, Rabbi Isaac Sangari, prior to his departure on his Khazar mission, where he participated in the celebrated polemic. The preserved parts of the text read:

ON THE NAME KHAZARS

The Khazar state is called the "kaghan's empire" or the "kaghsnate", and gone from its name is that of the original Khazar Empire, which preceded the kaghanate and built it with the sword. Khazars are grudgingly called by this name in their own state. They always avoid the Khazar name and use some other. In regions near the Crimea, where there is also a Greek population, the Khazars are known as the "non-Greek population" or as "Greek who have not joined Christianity"; in the South, where there are also Jews, Khazars are called the "Non-Jewish group"; in the East, which has a partially Arab population, the Khazars are called the "non-Islamized people". Khazars who have adopted one of the foreign faiths (Jewish, Greek, or Arab) are no longer called Khazars, but are counted as Jews, Greeks, or Arabs. The accidental few who happen to convert to the Khazar faith are addressed in Khazar circles by their pre-conversion names; in other words, they are still considered Greeks, Jews, or Arabs, even though they are now of the Khazar faith. For instance, instead of saying that some man was a Khazar, a Greek recently put it like this: "In the kaghate, Khazar-speaking people who have not converted to the Greek faith are called future Jews. "One can find in the Khazar state learned Jews, Greeks or Arabs who know a great deal about the Khazars' past, books, and monuments, who speak of them at length and with praise; some of them even write Khazar history; but the Khazars themselves are not permitted to speak about their own past or write books about it.

THE KHAZAR LANGUAGE is musical, and the poems I heard recited in it sounded lovely, but I do not remember them; it is said they were composed by a Khazar princess. The language has seven genders; along with the masculine, feminine, and neuter, there are also genders for eunuchs, for sexless women (those whom the Arab shaitan blighted and robbed, for those who change sex, be they males who switch to female or the other way around, and for lepers, who along with their disease must adopt a new form of speech to reveal their malady as soon as the engage in conversation. Girls have a different accent from boys, and men from women: boys learn Arabic, Hebrew, or Greek depending on whether they live in a Greek-populated region, in an area where there are Jews mixed with Khazars, or the territory of the Saracens and Persians. Consequently, the Jewish "kamesh", "holem", and "shurek", the big, medium, and small "u" and middle "a", come through when boys speak the Khazar language. Girls, on the other hand, do not learn Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic, and their accent is different and purer. As is known, when a people vanishes, the first to disappear are the upper classes, and with them literature; all that remains are books of law, which the people know by heart. The same can be said of the Khazars. In their capital, sermons in the Khazar language are expensive, whereas Hebrew, Arabic, or Greek they are cheap or free of charge. Curiously, once they are outside their state, the Khazars are reluctant to reveal their Khazar origin, preferring to avoid one-another and conceal the fact that they speak and understand the Khazar language, hiding it from their own compatriots even more than from foreigners. In the language, which is the official language, are more highly regarded in the civil and administrative services. Consequently, even people who are fluent in the Khazar language will often deliberately speak it incorrectly, with a foreign accent, from which they derive a manifest advantage. Even with translators--for instance, from Khazar into Hebrew, or Greek into Khazar--the people selected are those who make mistakes in the Khazar language or pretend to do so.

JUDICARY

Under Khazar law, the sentence for the same crime is in the Jewish-populated part of the state one or two years labor as a galley slave, in the Arabic inhabited part of the empire it is half a year, in the Greek inhabited region no punishment, and in the central part of the state, which is alone called the "Khazar district" (although the Khazars are everywhere the largest group), beheading.

SALT AND SLEEP

The letters of the Khazar alphabet take their names from salted foods, and the numbers from types of salt; the Khazars recognize seven kinds of salt. Only the salty regard of God does not cause aging; otherwise the Khazars believe that aging comes from looking at one's own body or another's, because looks plow and tear through bodies with the most varied and lethal tools, creating their passions, hates, plans, and cravings. The Khazars pray by weeping, for tears are a part of God, by virtue of having a bit of salt at the bottom, just as shells hold pearls. Sometimes women take a handkerchief and fold it until it can be folded no more; that is a prayer.

The Khazar also follow the cult of sleep. They believe that anyone who has lost salt cannot fall asleep, which is why such attention is paid to sleep. But that is not all; there is something I could not fully grasp, like a road you cannot hear from the noise of the cart. They believe that people who inhabit every man's past lie as though enslaved and cursed in his memory; they can take no other step that the one they once took, can meet no one but the people they once met, cannot even grow old. The only freedom allowed ancestors, allowed entire bygone nations of fathers and mothers retained in memories, is occasional respite in dreams. There, in our dreams, these figures from our memories acquire some measure of freedom; they move around a little, meet a new face, change partners in their hates and loves, and assume a small illusion of life. Hence, sleep occupies a prominent place in the Khazar faith, because in dreams the past, forever captured within itself, gains freedom and new promise.

MIGRATION

The old Khazar tribes are believed to have resettled once every ten generations and with every migration to have become more a nation of traders and less a nation of warriors. Suddenly, instead of being quick with their sword and lance, they could work out the price of a ship, a house, or a meadow in jingling ducats or spilling silver. Many explanations have been given for this, but the one I find most convincing says that they became infertile during this cycle and had to move in order to maintain the species and renew fertility. As soon as their family was revived, they would return to their homeland and again pick up their speaks.

RELIGIOUS CUSTOMS

The Khazar kaghan does not allow religion to interfere with state or military affairs. He says, "If a saber had two tips, it would be called a pick-ax." This attitude is the same whether the faith in question is the Khazar, the Jewish, the Greek, or the Arab. But where the shoe fits some it pinches others. Whereas our own, the Greek, and the Arab faiths dropped roots in other states as well and enjoy strong foreign protection from our fellow tribesmen and other nations, the Khazar faith is without such foreign protection, so, when pressure is brought to bear, it suffers the most; in other words, the first three flourish at its expense. A case in point is the kaghan's attempt to reduce monastic land holdings in the country and cut down the number of temples by ten for each religion. Since there were fewer Khazar temples than Jewish, Arab, or Greek temples to start with, the Khazar church was the most severely affected. This can be seen at every step. Khazar cemeteries, for instance, are dying out. In areas of inhabited by Greeks (like the Crimea), by Jews (as in Tamatarkha), or by Arabs and Persians (along the Persian border), Khazar cemeteries are increasingly being placed under lock and key, Khazar burial rites are denied, and the roads teem with dying Khazars heading for the area around Itil, the capital, where Khazar cemeteries still function. Their souls tremble in their throats as they take to the road. "The past is not deep enough behind us," lament the Khazar priest, who, of course, see what is happening. "Our people have to await maturity, so that the past can sufficiently increase its stocks and create a broad enough basis to build the future successfully."

It is interesting that in the Khazar Empire there are Greeks and Armenians who are of the same Christian faith but are constantly at one another's throats. However, the result is always the same and bespeaks their wisdom: after every conflict, the Greeks and Armenians demand separate temples. Since the Khazar state approves these expansions, the two sides come out of every conflict reinforced and with double the number of their temples, which, of course, works to the determent of the Khazars and their faith.

THE KHAZAR DICTIONARY embraces the books of the dream hunters, a very powerful Khazar religious sect. The dictionary is a kind of Holy Scripture, a Bible to them. Complete with biographies of various persons of the male and female sex, The Khazar Dictionary is a mosaic portrait of a single character who we call Adam Cadmon. Here are two fragments from the dictionary:

"The truth is transparent and goes unnoticed, whereas lies are opaque and let in neither light or gaze. There is a third version, where the two mix, and this is the most customary. With one eye we see through the truth, and that gaze is lost forever in infinity; with the other eye we do not see even and inch through the lies, and that gaze can penetrate no further, but remains on earth and ours; and so we push through life sideways. Hence, the truth cannot be understood on its own, like a lie, but only by comparing it with lies, by comparing the white space with the letters of our Book, because the white spaces in The Khazar Dictionary mark the translucent places of the divine truth and name (Adam Cadmon), and the black letters between the white spaces are where our eyes cannot penetrate beyond the surface.

"Letters can also be compared with items of clothing. In winter you put on wools or furs, a scarf, a hat with its winter lining turned out, and you button yourself up; in summer you are in cotton, you discard your heavy wear; in between summer and winter you add or take away from your clothing. So it is with reading. In the various seasons of your years, the content of your books will differ, because you will combine the clothing in various ways. For the time being, The Khazar Dictionary is still just a heap of random letters, names, and pseudonyms (Adam Cadmon's). But with time you will dress and acquire more . . . . Dreams are the Friday to what in reality is called Saturday. They lead to It and are one with that day, and so it should be with each day (Thursday to Sunday, Monday to Wednesday, and so on). He who can read them together will have them and will have a part of the body (of Adam Cadmon) inside him . . . ."

In the hope that my words will be of assistance to Rabbi Isaac, this is as much as I can say, I who am called Yabel on Friday, Tubalkin on Sunday, and Yubal only on the Sabbath. Having made this effort, I shall now rest, for remembering is permanent circumcision . . .