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It has been suggested that this article be split into a new article titled Khazar Khaganate. (discuss) (October 2013)

Kingdom of Khazaria
618?–1048?
Khazar Khaganate, 650–850
Status	Khazar Qağanate
Capital	Balanjar (650-720 ca.) Semender(720s-750) Atil (750-ca.967-969)
Common languages	Turkic Khazar
Religion	Tengriism, Shamanism, Christianity, Slavic Paganism, Judaism, and Islam
Khagan
• 618–628	Tong Yabghu
• 9th century	Obadiah
• 9th century	Zachariah
• 9th century	Bulan
• 9th century	Benjamin
• 9th century	Aaron
• 9th century	Khan Tuvan
• 10th century	Joseph
• 10th century	Manasseh
• 10th century	David
• 11th century	Georgios
Historical era	Middle Ages
• Established	618?
• Disestablished	1048?
Population
• 7th century	1,400,000
Currency	Yarmaq

History of the Turkic peoples pre–14th century
Turkic peoples Onogurs Oghuz Turks Saragurs Utigurs Bulgars Sabir Kutrigurs Karluks Kimek Kipchaks Cherniye Klobuki Uyghurs Tatars Kumyks Yakuts Dolgans Krymchaks Crimean Karaites
Turkic Languages Turkish Azerbaijani Uzbek Kazakh Uyghur Turkmen Tatar Kyrgyz Bashkir Chuvash Qasgqai Karakalpak Sakha Kumyk Karachay-Balkar Tuvan Gagauz Karaim Krymchak
Turkic Mythology Belief system: Tengrism and Shamanism Chief gods and goddesses: Kayra and Ülgen Epics and heroes: Ergenekon and Asena Major concepts: Sheka and Grey wolf
Pre-14th century Yenisei Kyrgyz People 202 BCE–13th CE Yenisei Kyrgyz Khaganate Dingling 71 BC–?? AD Tiele (Gaoche) Göktürks First Turkic Khaganate 552–581 Western Turkic Khaganate 581–657 (Tokhara Yabghus, Turk Shahis) Eastern Turkic Khaganate 581–650 Second Turkic Khaganate 682–744 Sabiri People Khazar Khaganate 618–1048 Xueyantuo 628–646 Kangar Union 659–750 Turk Shahi 665-850 Türgesh Khaganate 699–766 Kimek–Kipchak Confederation 743–1035 Uyghur Khaganate 744–840 Oghuz Yabgu State 750–1055 Karluk Yabgu State 756–940 Kara-Khanid Khanate 840–1212 Western Kara-Khanid Eastern Kara-Khanid Ganzhou Uyghur Kingdom 848–1036 Qocho 856–1335 Pecheneg Khanates 860–1091 Ghaznavid Empire 963–1186 Seljuk Empire 1037–1194 Sultanate of Rum Cuman–Kipchak Confederation 1067–1239 Khwarazmian Empire 1077–1231 Kerait Khanate 11th century–13th century Atabegs of Azerbaijan 1136–1225 Delhi Sultanate 1206–1526 Mamluk dynasty Khalji dynasty Tughlaq dynasty Qarlughid Kingdom 1224–1266 Golden Horde 1242–1502 Mamluk Sultanate (Cairo) 1250–1517 Bahri dynasty Ottoman State 1299–1922
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The Khazars (Template:Lang-gr, Template:Lang-he-n (Kuzarim), Template:Lang-tr, Template:Lang-tt, Template:Lang-ar (khazar), Russian: Хазары, Template:Lang-fa,Template:Lang-la) were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who created the most powerful Western steppe empire, Khazaria, between the late 7th and 10th centuries. Astride one of the major arteries of commerce between northern Europe and southwestern Asia, Khazaria became one of the foremost trading emporia of the medieval world, commanding the western marches of the Silk Road and played a key commercial role as a crossroad between China, the Middle East, and European Russia. For some three centuries (c. 650–965) the Khazars dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus

Khazaria long served as a buffer state between the Byzantine empire and both the nomads of the northern steppes and the Umayyad empire, after serving as Byzantium's proxy against the Sassanid Persian empire. The alliance was dropped around 900 CE., as Byzantium began to encourage the Alans to attack Khazaria and weaken its hold on Crimea and the Caucasus, while seeking to obtain an entente with the rising Rus' power to Khazaria's north, which it aspired to convert to Christianity. Between 965 and 969, the Kievan Rus ruler Sviatoslav I of Kiev conquered the capital Atil and destroyed the Khazar state.

Beginning in the 8th century, the Khazar royalty and notable segments of the aristocracy converted to Judaism; the populace appears to have been multi-confessional—a mosaic of pagan, Muslim, Jewish and Christian worshippers—and polyethnic. A modern theory, that the core of Ashkenazi Jewry emerged from a hypothetical Khazarian Jewish diaspora, is generally treated with scepticism. This Khazarian hypothesis is sometimes associated with antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Khazars were known as the eastern Turks by Byzantines.

Etymology

Gyula Németh, following Zoltán Gombocz, derived Xazar from a hypothetical *Qasar reflecting a Turkic root qaz- (“to ramble, to roam”) being an hypothetical velar variant of Common Turkic kez-. With the publication of the fragmentary Tes and Terkhin inscriptions of the Uyğur empire (744-840) where the form 'Qasar' is attested, though uncertainty remains whether this represents a personal or tribal name, gradually other hypotheses emerged. Louis Bazin derived it from Turkic qas- ("tyrannize, oppress, terrorize") on the basis of its phonetic similarity to the Uyğur tribal name, Qasar. András Róna-Tas connects it with Kesar, the Pahlavi transcription of the Roman title Caesar.

D.M.Dunlop tried to link the Chinese term for "Khazars" to one of the tribal names of the Uyğur Toquz Oğuz, namely the Gésà. The objections are that Uyğur Gesa/Qasar was not a tribal name but rather the surname of the chief of the Sikari tribe of the Toquz Oğuz, and that in Middle Chinese the ethnonym "Khazars", always prefaced with the word Tūjué signifying ‘Türk’ (Tūjué Kěsà bù:突厥可薩部; Tūjué Hésà:突厥曷薩), is transcribed with different characters than that used to render the Qa- in the Uyğur word 'Qasar'. After their conversion it is reported that they adopted the Hebrew script, and it is likely that, though speaking a Türkic language, the Khazar chancellery under Judaism probably corresponded in Hebrew.

Tribal origins and early history

The tribes constituting the Khazar union were, according to the most widely approved view, basically Turkic groups, such as the Oğuric peoples, including Šarağurs, Oğurs, Onoğurs, and Bulğars, who formed part of the Tiĕlè (鐵勒) confederation. These tribes, many driven out of their homelands by the Sabirs, who in turn fled the Asian Avars, began to flow into the Volga-Caspian-Pontic zone from as early as the 4th century CE and are recorded by Priscus to reside in the Western Eurasian steppelands as early as 463. They appear to stem from Mongolia and South Siberia in the aftermath of the fall of the Hunnic/Xiōngnú nomadic polities. A variegated tribal federation led by these Tűrks, probably comprising a complex assortment of Iranian, proto-Mongolic, Uralic, and Palaeo-Siberian clans, vanquished the Rouran Khaganate of the hegemonic central Asian Avars in 552 and swept westwards, taking in their train other steppe nomads and peoples from the Sogdian kingdom.

The ruling family of this confederation may have hailed from the Āshǐnà (阿史那) clan of the West Türkic tribes, though Constantine Zuckerman regards Āshǐnà and their pivotal role in the formation of the Khazars with scepticism. Golden notes that Chinese and Arabic reports are almost identical, making the connection a strong one, and conjectures that their leader may have been Yǐpíshèkuì (Chinese:乙毗射匱), who lost power or was killed around 651. Moving west, the confederation reached the land of the Akat(z)ir, who had been important allies of Byzantium in fighting off Attila's army.

Rise of the Khazar state

An embryonic state of Khazaria began to form sometime after 630, when it emerged from the breakdown of the larger Göktürk qağanate. Göktürk armies had penetrated the Volga by 549, ejecting the Avars, who were then forced to flee to the sanctuary of the Hungarian plain. The Āshǐnà clan whose tribal name was ‘Türk’ (the strong one) appear on the scene by 552, when they overthrew the Rourans and established the Göktürk qağanate. By 568, these Göktürks were probing for an alliance with Byzantium to attack Persia. An internecine war broke out between the senior eastern Göktürks and the junior West Turkic Qağanate some decades later, when on the death of Taspar Qağan, a succession dispute led to a dynastic crisis between Taspar’s chosen heir, the Apa Qağan, and the ruler appointed by the tribal high council, Āshǐnà Shètú (阿史那摄图), the Ishbara Qağan. By the first decades of the 7th century, the Āshǐnà yabgu Tong managed to stabilize the Western division, but on his death, after providing crucial military assistance to Byzantium in routing the Sassanid army in the Persian heartland, the Western Turkic Qağanate dissolved under pressure from the encroaching Tang dynasty armies and split into two competing federations, each consisting of five tribes, collectively known as the “Ten Arrows” (On Oq). Both briefly challenged Tang hegemony in eastern Turkestan. To the West, two new nomadic states arose in the meantime, the Bulğar conferation, under Qubrat, the Duōlù clan leader, and the Nǔshībì subconfederation, also consisting of five tribes. The Duōlù challenged the Avars in the Kuban River-Sea of Azov area while the Khazar Qağanate consolidated further westwards, led apparently by an Āshǐnà dynasty. With a resounding victory over the tribes in 657, engineered by General Sū Dìngfāng (蘇定方), Chinese overlordship was imposed to their East after a final mop-up operation in 659, but the two confederations of Bulğars and Khazars fought for supremacy on the western steppeland, and with the ascendency of the latter, the former either succumbed to Khazar rule or, as under Asperukh, Qubrat’s son, shifted even further west across the Danube to lay the foundations of the Bulğar state in the Balkans (c. 679).

The Qağanate of the Khazars thus took shape out of the ruins of this nomadic empire as it broke up under pressure from the Tang dynasty armies to the east sometime between 630-650. After their conquest of the lower Volga region to the East and an area westwards between the Danube and the Dniepr, and their subjugation of the Onoğur -Bulğar union, sometime around 670, a properly constituted Khazar Qağanate emerges, becoming the westernmost successor state of the formidable Göktürk Qağanate after its disintegration. According to Omeljan Pritsak, the language of the Onoğur-Bulğar federation was to become the lingua franca of Khazaria as it developed into what Lev Gumilev called a 'steppe Atlantis' (stepnaja Atlantida/ Степная Атлантида). The high status soon to be accorded this empire to the north is attested by Ibn al-Balḫî’s Fârsnâma (c. 1100), which relates that the Sassanid Shah, Ḫusraw 1, Anûsîrvân, placed three thrones by his own, one for the King of China, a second for the King of Byzantium, and a third for the king of the Khazars. Though anachronistic in retrodating the Khazars to this period, the legend, in placing the Khazar qağan on a throne with equal status to kings of the other two superpowers, bears witness to the reputation won by the Khazars from early times.

The Khazar state: culture and institutions

Royal Diarchy and sacral Qağanate

Khazaria developed two notable institutions: Dual kingship, a typical Turkic nomadic structure, consisting of a shad/bäk and a qağan, and a sacral Qağanate. The emergence of this system may be deeply entwined with the conversion to Judaism. In Arabic sources, the lesser king was called îšâ and the greater king Xazar xâqân, the former managing both state and civilian affairs and the administration of the military, while the greater king‘s role was titular, not commanding obedience. He was recruited from the Khazar house of notables (ahl bait ma‘rûfīn) in a throttliing ritual where the candidate is almost strangled until he declares the number of years he wishes to reign, on the expiration of which he was killed. The deputy ruler would enter the presence of the reclusive greater king only with great ceremony, approaching him barefoot to prostrate himself in the dust and then light a piece of wood as a purifying fire, while waiting humbly and calmly to be summoned. Particularly elaborate rituals accompanied a royal burial, with a palatial structure ('Paradise') constructed and then hidden under rerouted river water to avoid disturbance by evil spirits and later generations. Such a royal burial ground (qoruq) is typical of inner Asian peoples. Both the îšâ and the xâqân converted to Judaism sometime in the 8th century, while the rest, according to the Persian traveller Ahmad ibn Rustah, probably followed the old Tūrkic religion.

The ruling elite

The ruling strata, like that of the later Činggisids within the Golden Horde, was a relatively small group that differed ethnically and linguistically from its subject peoples. This is thought to have been the Alano-As and Oğuric Turkic tribes, who were numerically superior within Khazaria. The Khazar Qağans, while taking wives and concubines from the subject populations, were protected by a Khwârazmian guard corps or comitatus called the Ursiyya. But unlike many other local polities, they hired soldiers (mercenaries) (the junûd murtazîqa in al-Mas’ûdî). At the peak of their empire, the Khazars ran a centralised fiscal administration, with a standing army of some 7-12,000 men, which could, at need, be multipied two or three times that number by inducting reserves from their nobles' retinues. Other figures for the permanent standing army indicate that it numbered as many as one hundred thousand. They controlled and exacted tribute from 25-30 different nations and tribes inhabiting the vast territories between the Caucasus, the Aral Sea, the Ural Mountains, and the Ukrainian steppes. Khazar armies were led by the Qağan Bek and commanded by subordinate officers known as tarkhans. When the bek sent out a body of troops, they would not retreat under any circumstances. If they were defeated, every one who returned was killed.

Settlements were governed by administrative officials known as tuduns. In some cases, such as the Byzantine settlements in southern Crimea, a tudun would be appointed for a town nominally within another polity's sphere of influence. Other officials in the Khazar government included dignitaries referred to by ibn Fadlan as Jawyshyghr and Kündür, but their responsibilities are unknown.

The people

It has been estimated that from 25 to 28 distinct ethnic groups made up the population of the Khazar Qağanate, aside from the ethnic elite. The ruling elite seems to have been constituted out of nine tribes/clans, themselves ethnically heterogeneous, spread over perhaps nine provinces or principalities, each of which would have been allocated to a clan. In terms of caste or class, some evidence suggests that there was a distinction, whether racial or social is unclear, between "White Khazars" (ak-Khazars) and "Black Khazars" (qara-Khazars). The 10th-century Muslim geographer al-Iṣṭakhrī claimed that the White Khazars were strikingly handsome with reddish hair, white skin, and blue eyes, while the Black Khazars were swarthy, verging on deep black, as if they were "some kind of Indian". Many Turkic nations had a similar (political, not racial) division between a "white" ruling warrior caste and a "black" class of commoners; the consensus among mainstream scholars is that Istakhri was confused by the names given to the two groups. However, Khazars are generally described by early Arab sources as having a white complexion, blue eyes, and reddish hair. The name of the presumed founding Āshǐnà clan itself may reflect an etymology suggestive of a darkish colour. The distinction appears to have survived the collapse of the Khazarian empire. Later Russian chronicles, commenting on the role of the Khazars in the magyarization of Hungary, refer to them as "White Oghurs" and Magyars as "Black Ogurs".

Economy

The import and export of foreign wares, and the revenues derived from taxing their transit, was a key hallmark of the Khazar economy, though it is said also to have produced isinglass. Distinctively among the nomadic steppe polities, the Khazar Qağanate developed a self-sufficient domestic economy, a combination of traditional pastoralism - allowing sheep and cattle to be exported - extensive agriculture, abundant use of the Volga's rich fishing stocks, together with craft manusfacture, with a diversification in lucrative returns from taxing international trade given its pivotal control of major trade routes. The Khazars constituted one of the two great furnishers of slaves to the Muslim market (the other being the Iranian Sâmânid amîrs), supplying it with captured Slavs and tribesmen from the Eurasian northlands. It was profits from the latter which enabled it to maintain a standard army of Khwarezm Muslim troops. The capital Atil reflected the division: Kharazān on the western bank where the king and his Khazar elite, with a retinue of some 4,000 attendants, dwelt, and Itil proper to the East, inhabited by Jews, Christians, Muslims and slaves and by craftsmen and foreign merchants. The ruling elite wintered in the city and spent from spring to late autumns in their fields. A large irrigated greenbelt, drawing on channels from the Volga river, lay outside the capital, where meadows and vineyards extended for some 20 farsakhs(ca.60 miles?). While customs duties were imposed on traders, and tribute and tithes were exacted from 25-30 tribes, with a levy of one sable skin, squirrel pelt, sword, dirham per hearth or ploughsare, or hides, wax, honey and livestock, depending on the zone. Trade disputes were handled by a commercial tribunal in Atil consisting of 7 judges, two for each of the monotheistic inhabitants (Jews, Muslims, Christians) and one for the pagans.

Linguistics

Determining the origins and nature of the Khazars is closely bound with theories of their languages, but it is a matter of intricate difficulty since no indigenous records in the Khazar language survive, and the state itself was polyglot and polyethnic. Whereas the royal or ruling elite probably spoke an eastern variety of Shaz Turkic, the subject tribes appear to have spoken varieties of Lir Turkic, such as Oğuric, a language variously identified with Bulğaric, Chuvash, and Hungarian (the latter based upon the assertion of the Persian historian al-Iṣṭakhrī that the Khazar language was different from any other known tongue). One method for tracing their origins consists in analysis of the possible etymologies behind the ethnonym Khazar itself.

Religion

Tengriism

Direct sources for Khazar religion are not many, but in all likelihood they originally practiced a traditional Turkic form of cultic practices known as Tengriism, which focused on the sky god Tengri. Something of its nature may be deduced from what we know of the rites and beliefs of contiguous tribes, such as the North Caucasian Huns. Horse sacrifices were made to this supreme deity. Rites involved offerings to fire, water, and the moon, to remarkable creatures, and to "gods of the road" (cf.Old Türk yol tengri, perhaps a god of fortune). Sun amulets were widespread as cultic ornaments. A tree cult was also maintained. Whatever was struck by lightning, man or object, was considered a sacrifice to the high god of heaven. The afterlife, to judge from excavations of aristocratic tumuli, was much a continuation of life on earth, warriors being interred with their weapons, horses, and sometimes with human sacrifices: the funeral of one tudrun in 711-12 saw 300 soldiers killed to accompany him to the otherworld. Ancestor worship was observed. The key religious figure appears to have been a shamanizing qam, and it was these (qozmím) that were, according to the Khazar Hebrew conversion stories, driven out.

Many sources suggest, and a notable number of scholars have argued, that the charismatic Āshǐnà clan played a germinal role in the early Khazar state, though Zuckerman dismisses the widespread notion of their pivotal role as a 'phantom'. The Āshǐnà were closely associated with the Tengri cult, whose practices involved rites performed to assure a tribe of heaven’s protective providence. The qağan was deemed to rule by virtue of qut, "the heavenly mandate/good fortune to rule."

Judaism

The conversion of Khazars to Judaism is reported by external sources and in the Khazar Correspondence, Hebrew documents whose authenticity was long doubted and challenged, but now widely accepted among specialists as either authentic or as reflecting internal Khazar traditions.

Conversion of steppe or peripheral tribes to a universal religion is fairly well attested phenomenon, and the Khazar conversion to Judaism, though unusual, was not unique. On Khazaria's southern flank, both Islam and Byzantine Christianity were proselytising great powers. Byzantine success in the north was sporadic, though Armenian and Albanian missions from Derbend built churches extensively in maritime Daghestan, then a Khazar district, Buddhism also had exercised an attraction on leaders of both the Eastern (552-742) and Western Qağanates (552-659), the latter being the progenitor of the Khazar state. In 682, according to the Armenian chronicle of Movsês Dasxuranc'i, the king of Caucasian Albania, Varaz Trdat, dispatched a bishop Israyêl to convert Caucasian "Huns" who were subject to the Khazars, and managed to bring Alp Ilut'uêr, a son-in-law of the Khazar qağan, and his army, to abandon their shamanizing cults and join the Christian fold. The Arab Georgian martyr St Abo who converted to Christianity within the Khazar kingdom around 779-80, describes local Khazars as irreligious. Some reports register a Christian majority at Samandar, or Muslim majorities in various areas of Khazaria. Also Jews from both the Islamic world and Byzantium are known to have migrated to Khazaria during periods of persecution under Heraclius, Justinian II, Leo III, and Romanus Lakapēnos. The pattern is one of an elite conversion preceding large-scale adoption of the new religion by the general population, which often resisted the imposition. One important condition for mass conversion was a settled urban state, where churches, synagogues or mosques provided a focus for religion, as opposed to the free nomadic lifestyle of life on the open steppes. A tradition of the Iranian Judeo-Tats claims that their ancestors were responsible for the Khazar conversion.

Both the date of the conversion, and the extent of its influence beyond the elite, often minimized in scholarship, are a matter of dispute, but at some point between 740 CE and 920 CE, the Khazar royalty and nobility appear to have converted to Judaism, in part, it is argued, perhaps to deflect competing pressures from Arabs and Byzantines to accept either Islam or Orthodoxy. Christian of Stavelot in his Expositio in Matthaeum Evangelistam (ca.860-870s) refers to them as descendants of Gog and Magog, who were circumcised and observed all the laws of Judaism. New numismatic evidence of coins dated 837/8 bearing the inscriptions arḍ al-ḫazar (Land of the Khazars), or Mûsâ rasûl Allâh (Moses the messenger of God, in imitation of the Islamic coin phrase: Muḥammad rasûl Allâh) suggest to many the conversion took place in that decade. Olsson argues that the 837/8 evidence marks only the beginning of a long and difficult official Judaization that concluded some decades later.

By the 10th century, the letter of King Joseph asserts that, after the royal conversion, "Israel returned (yashuvu yisra'el) with the people of Qazaria (to Judaism) in complete repentance (bi-teshuvah shelemah). Persian historian Ibn al-Faqîh wrote that 'all the Khazars are Jews, but they have been Judaized recently'. Ibn Fadlân, based on his Caliphal mission (921-922) to the Volga Bulğars, also reported that 'the core element of the state, the Khazars, were Judaized', something underwritten by the Qaraite scholar Ya'kub Qirqisânî around 937. The conversion appears to have occurred against a background of frictions arising from both an intensification of Byzantine missionary activity in from the Crimea to the Caucasus, and Arab attempts to wrest control over the latter in the 8th century CE, and a revolt, put down, by the Khavars around the mid-9th century is often invoked as in part influenced by their refusal to accept Judaism. Modern scholars generally see the conversion as a slow process through three stages, which accords with Richard Eaton's model of syncretic inclusion, gradual identification and, finally, displacement of the older tradition.

Some time between 954 and 961, Ḥasdai ibn Shaprūṭ wrote a letter of inquiry addressed to the ruler of Khazaria, and received a reply from Joseph of Khazaria. The exchanges of this Khazar Correspondence, together with the Schechter Letter discovered in the Cairo Geniza and the famous platonizing dialogue by Judah Halevi, Sefer ha-Kuzari ('The Khazar'), which plausibly drew on such sources, provide us with the only direct evidence of the indigenous traditions concerning the conversion. King Bulan is said to have driven out the sorcerers, and to have received angelic visitations exhorting him to find the true religion, upon which, accompanied by his vizier, he travelled to desert mountains of Warsān on a seashore, where he came across a cave in which Jews used to celebrate the Sabbath. Here he was circumcised. Bulan is then said to have convened a royal debate between exponents of the three Abrahamic religions. He decided to convert when he was convinced of Judaism's superiority. Many scholars situate this c. 740CE, a date supported by Halevi's own account. The details are both Judaic and Türkic: a Türkic ethnogonic myth speaks of an ancestral cave in which the Āshǐnà were conceived from the mating of their human ancestor and a wolf ancestress. These accounts suggest that there was a rationalizing syncretism of native pagan traditions with Jewish law, by melding through the motif of the cave, a site of ancestral ritual and repository of forgotten sacred texts, Türkic myths of origin and Jewish notions of redemption of Israel's fallen people. It is generally agreed they adopted Rabbinical rather than Qaraite Judaism.

Ibn Fadlan reports that the settlement of disputes in Khazaria was adjudicated by judges hailing each from his community, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Pagan. Some evidence suggests that the Khazar king saw himself as a defender of Jews even beyond the kingdom's frontiers, retaliating against Muslim or Christian interests in Khazaria in the wake of Islamic and Byzantine persecutions of Jews abroad. Ibn Fadlan recounts specifically an incident in which the king of Khazaria destroyed the minaret of a mosque in Atil as revenge for the destruction of a synagogue in Dâr al-Bâbûnaj, and allegedly said he would have done worse were it not for a fear that the Muslims might retaliate in turn against Jews. Ḥasdai ibn Shaprūṭ sought information on Khazaria in the hope he might discover 'a place on this earth where harassed Israel can rule itself' and wrote that, were it to prove true that Khazaria had such a king, he would not hesitate to forsake his high office and his family in order to emigrate there.

Abraham Harkavy noted in 1877 that an Arabic commentary on Isaiah 48:14, variously ascribed to Saadia Gaon or to the Karaite scholar Benjamin Nahâwandî, interpreted "The Lord hath loved him" as a reference "to the Khazars, who will go and destroy Babel" (i.e., Babylonia), a name used to designate the country of the Arabs. This has been taken as an indication of hopes by Persian Jews that the Khazars might overthrow the caliphate.

In 965, as the Qağanate was struggling against the victorious campaign of the Rus' prince Sviatislav, the Islamic historian Ibn al-Athîr mentions that Khazaria, attacked by the Oğuz, sought help from Khwarezm, but their appeal was rejected because they were regarded as 'infidals' (al-kuffâr:pagans). Save for the king, the Khazarians are said to have converted to Islam in order to secure an alliance, and the Turks were, with Khwarezm's military assistance repelled. It was this that, according to Ibn al-Athîr, led the Jewish king of Khazar to convert to Islam.

Khazars and Byzantium

Byzantine diplomatic policy towards the steppe peoples generally consisted of encouraging them to fight among themselves. The Pechenegs provided great assistance to the Byzantines in the 9th century in exchange for regular payments. Byzantium also sought alliances with the Göktürks against common enemies: in the early 7th century, one such alliance was brokered with the Western Tűrks against the Persian Sassanids in the Byzantine–Sassanid War of 602–628. During the period leading up to and after the siege of Constantinople in 626, Heraclius sought help via emissaries, and eventually personally, from a Göktürk chieftain of the Western Tűrkic Qağanate, Tong Yabghu Qağan, in Tiflis, plying him with gifts and the promise of marriage to his daughter, Epiphania. Tong Yabghu responded by sending a large force to ravage the Persian empire, marking the start of the Third Perso-Turkic War. A joint Byzantine-Tűrk operation breached the Caspian gates and sacked Derbent in 627. Together they then besieged Tiflis, where the Byzantines used traction trebuchets (ἑλέπόλεις) to breach the walls, one of their first known uses by the Byzantines. After the campaign, Tong Yabghu is reported, perhaps with some exaggeration, to have left some 40,000 troops behind with Heraclius. Though occasionally identified with Khazars, the Göktürk identification is more probable since the Khazars only emerged from that group after the fragmentation of the former sometime after 630. Sassanid Persia never recovered from the devastating defeat wrought by this invasion.

Once the Khazars emerged as a power, the Byzantines also began to form alliances, dynastic and military, with them. In 695, the last Heraclian emperor, Justinian II, nicknamed the slit-nosed (ὁ ῥινότμητος) after he was mutilated and deposed, was exiled to Cherson in the Crimea, where a Khazar governor (tudun) presided. He escaped into Khazar territory in 704 or 705 and was given asylum by qağan Busir Glavan (Ἰβουζήρος Γλιαβάνος), who gave him his sister in marriage, perhaps in response to an offer by Justinian who may have thought a dynastic marriage would seal by kinship a powerful tribal support for his attempts to regain the throne. The Khazarian spouse thereupon changed her name to Theodora. Busir was offered a bribe by the Byzantine usurper, Tiberius III, to kill Justinian. Warned by Theodora, Justinian escaped, murdering two Khazar officials in the process. He fled to Bulgaria, whose Khan Tervel helped him regain the throne. Upon his reinstallment, and despite Busir's treachery during his exile, he sent for Theodora; Busir complied, and she was crowned as Augusta, suggesting that both prized the alliance.

Decades later, Leo III (ruled 717-741) made a similar alliance to coordinate strategy against a common enemy, the Muslim Arabs. He sent an embassy to the Khazar qağan Bihar and married his son, the future Constantine V (ruled 741-775), to Bihar's daughter, a princess referred to as Tzitzak, in 732. On converting to Christianity, she took the name Irene. Constantine and Irene had a son, the future Leo IV (775-780), who thereafter bore the sobriquet, “the Khazar”. Leo died in mysterious circumstances after his Athenian wife bore him a son, Constantine VI, who on his majority co-ruled with his mother, the dowager. He proved unpopular, and his death ended the dynastic link of the Khazars to the Byzantine throne. By the 8th century, Khazars dominated the Crimea (650-c.950), and even extended their influence into the Byzantine peninsula of Cherson until it was wrested back in the 10th century. Khazar and Farghânian (Φάργανοι) mercenaries constituted part of the imperial Byzantine Hetaireia bodyguard after its formation in 840, a position that could openly be purchased by a payment of 7 pounds of gold.

Arab–Khazar wars

During the 7th and 8th centuries, the Khazars fought a series of wars against the Umayyad Caliphate and its Abbasid successor. The First Arab-Khazar War began during the first phase of Muslim expansion. By 640, Muslim forces had reached Armenia; in 642 they launched their first raid across the Caucasus under Abd ar-Rahman ibn Rabiah. In 652 Arab forces advanced on the Khazar capital, Balanjar, but were defeated, suffering heavy losses; according to Arab historians such as al-Tabari, both sides in the battle used catapaults against the opposing troops. A number of Russian sources give the name of a Khazar khagan from this period as Irbis and describe him as a scion of the Göktürk royal house, the Ashina. Whether Irbis ever existed is open to debate, as is whether he can be identified with one of the many Göktürk rulers of the same name.

Due to the outbreak of the First Muslim Civil War and other priorities, the Arabs refrained from repeating an attack on the Khazars until the early 8th century. The Khazars launched a few raids into Transcaucasian principalities under Muslim dominion, including a large-scale raid in 683–685 during the Second Muslim Civil War that rendered much booty and many prisoners. There is evidence from the account of al-Tabari that the Khazars formed a united front with the remnants of the Göktürks in Transoxiana.

The Second Arab-Khazar War began with a series of raids across the Caucasus in the early 8th century. The Umayyads tightened their grip on Armenia in 705 after suppressing a large-scale rebellion. In 713 or 714, Umayyad general Maslamah conquered Derbent and drove deeper into Khazar territory. The Khazars launched raids in response into Albania and Iranian Azerbaijan but were driven back by the Arabs under Hasan ibn al-Nu'man. The conflict escalated in 722 with an invasion by 30,000 Khazars into Armenia inflicting a crushing defeat. Caliph Yazid II responded, sending 25,000 Arab troops north, swiftly driving the Khazars back across the Caucasus, recovering Derbent, and advancing on Balanjar. The Arabs broke through the Khazar defense and stormed the city; most of its inhabitants were killed or enslaved, but a few managed to flee north. Despite their success, the Arabs had not yet defeated the Khazar army, and they retreated south of the Caucasus.

In 724, Arab general al-Jarrah ibn Abdallah al-Hakami inflicted a crushing defeat on the Khazars in a long battle between the rivers Cyrus and Araxes, then moved on to capture Tiflis, bringing Caucasian Iberia under Muslim suzerainty. The Khazars struck back in 726, led by a prince named Barjik, launching a major invasion of Albania and Azerbaijan; by 729, the Arabs had lost control of northeastern Transcaucasia and were thrust again into the defensive. In 730, Barjik invaded Iranian Azerbaijan and defeated Arab forces at Ardabil, killing the general al-Djarrah al-Hakami and briefly occupying the town. Barjik was defeated and killed the next year at Mosul, where he directed Khazar forces from a throne mounted with al-Djarrah's severed head. Arab armies led first by the prince Maslamah ibn Abd al-Malik and then by Marwan ibn Muhammad (later Caliph Marwan II) poured across the Caucasus and in 737 defeated a Khazar army led by Hazer Tarkhan, briefly occupying Atil itself. The Qağan was forced to accept terms involving conversion to Islam, and to subject himself to the Caliphate, but the accommodation was short-lived as a combination of internal instability among the Umayyads and Byantine support undid the agreement within three years, and the Khazars re-asserted their independence. The adoption of Judaism by the Khazars, which in this theory would have taken place around 740, may have been part of this re-assertion of independence.

Whatever the impact of Marwan's campaigns, warfare between the Khazars and the Arabs ceased for more than two decades after 737. Arab raids continued until 741, but their control in the region was limited as maintaining a large garrison at Derbent further depleted the already overstretched army. A third Muslim civil war soon broke out, leading to the Abbasid Revolution and the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in 750.

In 758, the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur attempted to strengthen diplomatic ties with the Khazars, ordering Yazid ibn Usayd al-Sulami, one of his nobles and the military governor of Armenia, to take a royal Khazar bride. Yazid married a daughter of Khazar Khagan Baghatur, but she died inexplicably, possibly in childbirth. Her attendants returned home, convinced that some Arab faction had poisoned her, and her father was enraged. Khazar general Ras Tarkhan invaded south of the Caucasus in 762–764, devastating Albania, Armenia, and Iberia, and capturing Tiflis. Thereafter relations became increasingly cordial between the Khazars and the Abbasids, whose foreign policies were generally less expansionist than the Umayyads, broken only by a series of raids in 799 over another failed marriage alliance.

The rise of the Rus' and the collapse of the Khazarian state

By the 9th century, groups of Varangian Rus’, developing a powerful warrior-merchant system, began probing south down the waterways controlled by the Khazars and their protectorate, the Volga Bulgarians, partially in pursuit of the Arab silver which flowed north for hoarding through the Khazarian-Volga Bulgarian trading zones, partially to trade in furs and ironwork. Northern mercantile fleets passing Atil were tithed, as they were at Byzantine Cherson. Their presence may have prompted the formation of a Rus’ state by convincing the Slavs, Merja and the Chud' to unite to protect common interests against Khazarian exactions of tribute. It is often argued that a Rus' Khaganate modelled on the Khazarian state had formed to the east, and that the Varangian chieftain of the coalition appropriated the title of qağan (khagan) as early as the 830s: the title survived to denote the princes of Kievan Rus', whose capital, Kiev, is often associated with a Khazarian foundation. The construction of the Sarkel fortress, with technical assistance from Khazaria's Byzantine ally at the time, together with the minting of an autonomous Khazar coinage around the 830s may have been a defensive measure against emerging threats from Varangians to the north and from the Magyars on the eastern steppe. By 860, the Rus' had penetrated as far as Kiev and, via the Dnieper, Constantinople.

Alliances often shifted. Byzantium, threatened by Varangian Rus raiders, would assist Khazaria, and Khazaria at times allowed the northerners to pass through their territory in exchange for a portion of the booty. From the beginning of the 10th century, the Khazars found themselves fighting on multiple fronts as nomadic incursions were exacerbated by uprisings by former clients and invasions from former allies. The pax Khazarica was caught in a pincer movement between steppe Pechenegs and the strengthing of an emergent Rus' power to the north, both undermining Khazaria'ìs tributary empire. According to the Schechter Text, the Khazar ruler King Benjamin, ca.880-890 fought a battle against the allied forces of five lands whose moves were perhaps encouraged by Byzantium Though Benjamin was victorious, his son Aaron II faced another invasion, this time led by the Alans, whose leader had converted to Christianity and entered into an alliance with Byzantium, which, under Leo VI the Wise, encouraged them against the Khazars.

By the 880s, Khazar control of the Middle Dnieper from Kiev, where they collected tribute from Eastern Slavic tribes, began to wane as Oleg of Novgorod wrested control of the city from the Varangian warlords Askold and Dir, and embarked on what was to prove to be the foundation of a Rus' empire. The Khazars had initially allowed the Rus' to use the trade route along the Volga River, and raid southwards. According to al-Masudi, the qağan is said to have given his assent on the condition that the Rus' give him half of the booty. In 913, however, two years after Byzantium concluded a peace treaty with the Rus' (911), A Varangian foray, with Khazar connivance, through Arab lands led to a request to the Khazar throne by the Khwârazmian Islamic guard for permission to retaliate against the large Rus' contingent on its return. The purpose was to revenge the violence the Rus' razzia had inflicted on their fellow Muslim believers. The Rus' force was thoroughly routed and massacred. The Khazar rulers closed the passage down the Volga to the Rus', sparking a war. In the early 960s, Khazar ruler Joseph wrote to Hasdai ibn Shaprut about the deterioration of Khazar relations with the Rus': 'I protect the mouth of the river (Itil-Volga) and prevent the Rus arriving in their ships from setting off by sea against the Ishmaelites and (equally) all (their) enemies from setting off by land to Bab. '

The Rus' warlords launched several wars against the Khazar Qağanate, and raided down to the Caspian sea. The Schechter Letter relates the story of a campaign against Khazaria by HLGW (recently identified as Oleg of Chernigov) around 941 in which Oleg was defeated by the Khazar general Pesakh. The Khazar alliance with the Byzantine empire began to collapse in the early 10th century. Byzantine and Khazar forces may have clashed in the Crimea, and by the 940s emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus was speculating in De Administrando Imperio about ways in which the Khazars could be isolated and attacked. The Byzantines during the same period began to attempt alliances with the Pechenegs and the Rus', with varying degrees of success. Sviatoslav I finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s, in a circular sweep that overwhelmed the Khazar fortresses like Sarkel and Tamatarkha, reached as far as the Caucasian Kassogians and then back to Kiev. Sarkel fell in 965, with the capital city of Atil following, c. 968 or 969.

In the Russian chronicle the vanquishing of the Khazar traditions is associated with Vladimir's conversion in 986. According to the Primary Chronicle, in 986 Khazar Jews were present at Vladimir's disputation to decide on the prospective religion of the Kievian Rus'. Whether these were Jews who had settled in Kiev or emissaries from some Jewish Khazar remnant state is unclear. Conversion to one of the faiths of the people of Scripture was a precondition to any peace treaty with the Arabs, whose Bulgar envoys had arrived in Kiev after 985.

A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city that its vineyards and garden had been razed, that not a grape or raisin remained in the land, and not even alms for the poor were available. An attempt to rebuilt may have been undertaken, since Ibn Hawqal and al-Muqaddasi refer to it after that date, but by Al-Biruni's time (1048) it was in ruins

Aftermath: Impact, decline and dispersion

Though Poliak argued that the Khazar kingdom did not wholly succumb to Sviatislav's campaign, but lingered on until 1224, when the Mongols invaded Rus', by most accounts, the Rus'-Oghuz campaigns left Khazaria devastated, with perhaps many Khazarian Jews in flight, and leaving behind at best a minor rump state. It left little trace, except for some placenames, and much of its population was undoubtedly absorbed in successor hordes.Al-Muqaddasi, writing ca.985, mentions Khazar beyond the Caspian sea as a district of 'woe and squalor', with honey, many sheep and Jews. Kedrenos mentions a joint Rus'-Byzantine attack on Khazaria in 1016, which defeated its ruler Georgius Tzul. The name suggests Christian affiliations. The account concludes by saying, that after Tzul's defeat, the Khazar ruler of "upper Media", Senaccherib, had to sue for peace and submission. In 1024 Mstislav of Chernigov (one of Vladimir's sons) marched against his brother Yaroslav with an army that included "Khazars and Kassogians" in a repulsed attempt to restore a kind of 'Khazarian'-type dominion over Kiev.Ibn al-Athir's mention of a 'raid of Faḍlūn the Kurd against the Khazars' in 1030 CE, in which 10,000 of his men were vanquished by the latter, has been taken (by ) as a reference such a Khazar remnant, but Barthold identified this Faḍlūn as Faḍl ibn Muḥammad and the 'Khazars' as either Georgians or Abkhazians. A Kievian prince named Oleg, grandson of Jaroslav was reportedly kidnapped by "Khazars" in 1079 and shipped off to Constantinople, although most scholars believe that this is a reference to the Kipchaks or other steppe peoples then dominant in the Pontic region. Upon his conquest of Tmutarakan in the 1080s Oleg Sviatoslavich, son of a prince of Chernigov, gave himself the title "Archon of Khazaria". 1083 Oleg is said to have revenged himself on the Khazars after his brother Roman was killed by their allies, the Polovtsi. After one more conflict with these Polovtsi in 1106, the Khazars fade from history.

By the end of the 12th century, Petachiah of Ratisbon reported traveling through what he called "Khazaria", and had little to remark on other than describing its minim (sectaries) living amidst desolation in perpetual mourning. The reference seems to be to Karaites. The Franciscan missionary William of Rubruck likewise found in the lower Volga area where Ital once lay only impoverished pastures. Giovanni di Plano Carpini, the papal legate to the court of the Mongol Khan Guyuk at that time, mentioned an otherwise unattested Jewish tribe, the Brutakhi, perhaps in the Volga region. Though connections are made to the Khazars, the link is based merely on a common attribution of Judaism.

The 10th century Zoroastrian Dênkart registered the collapse of Khazar power in attributing its eclipse to the enfeebling effects of 'false' religion. The decline was contemporary to that suffered by the Transoxiana Sāmānid empire to the east, both events paving the way for the rise of the Great Seljuq Empire, whose founding traditions mention Khazar connections. Whatever successor entity survived, it could not longer function as a bulwark against the pressure east and south of nomad expansions. By 1043, Kimeks and Qipchaqs, thrusting westwards, pressured the Oğuz, who in turn pushed the Pechenegs west towards Byzantium's Balkan provinces.

Khazaria nonetheless left its mark on the rising states and some of their traditions and institutions. Much earlier, Tzitzak, the Khazar wife of Leo III introduced into the Byzantine court the distinctive kaftan or riding habit of the nomadic Khazars, the tzitzakion (τζιτζάκιον), and this was adopted as a solemn element of imperial dress. The orderly hierarchical system of succession by ‘scales’ (lestvichnaia sistema:лествичная система) to the Grand Principate of Kiev was arguably modeled on Khazar institutions, via the example of the Rus' Khaganate.

The proto-Hungarian Pontic tribe, while perhaps threatening Khazaria as early as 839 (Sarkel), developed its institutional models, such as the dual rule of a ceremonial kende-kündü and a gyula administering practical and military administration, under Khazar tutelage. A dissident group of Khazars, the Qabars, joined the Hungarians in their flight from the Pechenegs as they moved into Pannonia. Elements within the Hungarian population can be viewed as perpetuating Khazar traditions as a successor state. Byzantine sources refer to Hungary as Western Tourkia in contrast to Khazaria, Eastern Tourkia. The gyula line produced the kings of medieval Hungary through descent from Árpád, while the Qabars retained their traditions longer, and were known as “black Hungarians” (fekete magyarság). Some archeological evidence from Čelarevo suggests the Qabars practiced Judaism since warrior graves with Jewish symbols were found there, including menorahs, shofars, etrogs, lulavs, candlesnuffers, ash collectors, inscriptions in Hebrew, and a six-pointed star identical to the Star of David.

The Khazar state was the only Jewish state to rise between the Fall of the Second Temple (67-70 CE) and the establishment of Israel (1948), and its example stimulated messianic aspirations for a return to Israel as early as Judah Halevi. In the time of the Egyptian vizier Al-Afdal Shahanshah (d.1121), one Solomon ben Duji, often identified as a Khazarian Jew, attempted to stir up a messianic crusade for the liberation of, and return of all Jews to, Palestine. He wrote to many Jewish communities to enlist support. He eventually moved to Kurdistan where his son Menachem some decades later assumed the title of Messiah and, raising an army for this purpose, took the fortress of Amadiya north of Mosul. His project was opposed by the rabbinical authorities and he was poisoned in his sleep. One theory maintains that the Star of David, until then a decorative motif or magical emblem, began to assume its national value in late Jewish tradition from its earlier symbolic use in Menachem's crusade.

The word Khazar, as an ethnonym, was last used in the 13th century by a people in the North Caucasus believed to practice Judaism. The nature of a hypothetical Khazar diaspora, Jewish or otherwise, is disputed. Avraham ibn Daud mentions encountering rabbinical students descended from Khazars as far away as Toledo, Spain in the 1160s. Khazar communities persisted here and there. Many Khazar mercenaries served in the armies of the Islamic Caliphates and other states. Documents from medieval Constantinople attest to a Khazar community mingled with the Jews of the suburb of Pera. and Khazar merchants were active in both Constantinople and Alexandria in the 12th. century.

Khazar origins for, or suggestions Khazars were absorbed by many peoples, have been made regarding the Slavic Judaising Subbotniks, the Bukharan Jews, the Muslim Kumyks the Cossacks of the Don region, the Turkic-speaking Krymchak Jews and the and their Crimean neighbours the Karaites to the Moldavian Csángós, the Mountain Jews and others. Turkic-speaking Karaites (in the Crimean Tatar language, Qaraylar) from Crimea to Poland and Lithuania have claimed Khazar origins. Specialists in Khazar history question the connection, Scholarship is likewise sceptical of claims that the Tatar-speaking Krymchak Jews of the Crimea descend from Khazars.

A popular, if in academic terms minoritarian, thesis holds that the Khazar Jewish population went into a northern diaspora and had a significant impact on the rise of Ashkenazi Jews. Connected to this thesis is the theory, expounded by Paul Wexler, that the grammar of Yiddish contains a Khazar substrate.

Ashkenazi-Khazar theories

Several scholars have suggested that the Khazars did not disappear after the dissolution of their Empire, but migrated West to eventually form part of the core of the later Ashkenazi Jewish population of Europe. This hypothesis is greeted with scepticism or caution by most scholars.

Abraham Eliyahu Harkavi suggested as early as 1869 that there might be a link between the Khazars and European Jews but the theory that Khazar converts formed a major proportion of Ashkenazi was first proposed to a Western public in a lecture by Ernest Renan in 1883. Occasional suggestions emerged that there was a small Khazar component in East European Jews in works by Joseph Jacobs (1886), Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, a critic of anti-Semitism, (1893) Maksymilian Ernest Gumplowicz, and by the Russian-Jewish anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg. In 1909 Hugo von Kutschera developed the notion into a book-length study, arguing Khazars formed the foundational core of the modern Ashkenazi. Maurice Fishberg introduced the notion to an American audience in 1911. The idea was also taken up by the Polish-Jewish economic historian and General Zionist Yitzhak Schipper in 1918 and by scholarly anthropologists, such as Roland B. Dixon (1923), and by writers like H. G. Wells (1921) who used it to argue that "The main part of Jewry never was in Judea", a thesis that was to have a political echo in later opinion. In 1932, Samuel Krauss ventured the theory that the biblical Ashkenaz referred to northern Asia Minor, and identified it with the Khazars, a position immediately disputed by Jacob Mann. Ten years later, in 1942, Abraham N. Poliak, later professor for the history of the Middle Ages at Tel Aviv University, published a Hebrew monograph in which he concluded that the East European Jews came from Khazaria. D.M. Dunlop, writing in 1954, thought very little evidence backed what he regarded as a mere assumption, and argued that the Ashkenazi-Khazar descent theory went far beyond what our imperfect records permit. Léon Poliakov, while assuming the Jews of Western Europe resulted from a "panmixia" in the Ist millennium, asserted in 1955 that it was widely assumed that Europe's Eastern Jews descended from a mixture of Khazarian and German Jews. Poliak's work found some support in Salo Wittmayer Baron and Ben-Zion Dinur, but was dismissed by Bernard Weinryb as a fiction (1962).

The Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976. which was both positively reviewed and dismissed as a fantasy, and a somewhat dangerous one. Israel’s ambassador to Britain branded it ‘an anti-Semitic action financed by the Palestinians,’ while Bernard Lewis claimed that the idea was not supported by any evidence whatsoever, and had been abandoned by all serious scholars. Raphael Patai, however, registered some support for the idea that Khazar remnants had played a role in the growth of Eastern European Jewish communities, and several amateur researchers, such as Boris Altschüler (1994) and Kevin Alan Brook, kept the thesis in the public eye. The theory has been occasionally manipulated to deny Jewish nationhood. Recently, a variety of approaches, from linguistics (Paul Wexler) to historiography (Shlomo Sand) and population genetics (Eran Elhaik) has revived support for and interest in the theory. In broad academic perspective, both the idea that the Khazars converted en masse to Judaism, and the suggestion they emigrated to form the core population of Ashkenazi Jewry, remain highly polemical issues.

Use in anti-Semitic polemics

Maurice Fishberg and Roland B Dixon’s works were later exploited in racist and religious polemical literature in both Britain, in British Israelism, and the United States. Particularly after the publication of Burton J. Hendrick ‘s The Jews in America (1923) it began to enjoy a vogue among advocates of immigration restriction in the 1920s; racial theorists like Lothrop Stoddard; anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorists like the Ku Klux Klan’s Hiram Wesley Evans; anti-communist polemicists like John O. Beaty and Wilmot Robertson, whose views influenced David Duke. According to Yehoshafat Harkabi (1968) and others, it played a role in Arab anti-Zionist polemics, and took on an anti-semitic edge. Bernard Lewis, noting in 1987 that Arab scholars had dropped it, remarked that it only occasionally emerged in Arab political discourse. It has also played some role in Soviet anti-semitic chauvinism and Slavic Eurasian historiography, particularly in the works of scholars like Lev Gumilev. Although the Khazar hypothesis never played any major role in anti-semitism, and though the existence of a Jewish kingdom north of the Caucasus had formerly long been denied by Christian religious commentators, it came to be exploited by the White supremicist Christian movement and even by terrorist esoteric cults like Aum Shinrikyō.

Genetic studies

The hypothesis of Khazarian ancestry in Ashkenazi has also been a subject of discussion in the new field of population genetics, wherein claims have been made concerning evidence both for and against it. The general conclusion is that, if traces of descent from Khazars exist in the Ashkenazi gene pool, the contribution would be quite minor, or insignificant. Eran Elhaik argued in 2012 for a significant Khazar component, using Caucasian populations, Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, as proxies. In October 2013, a study found "A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages" - weakening the claim for Khazarian ancestry in Ashkenazi Jews

According to Nadia Abu El-Haj, the issues of origins are generally complicated by the difficulties of writing history via genome studies and the biases of emotional investments in different narratives, depending on whether the emphasis lies on direct descent or on conversion within Jewish history. The lack of Khazar DNA samples that might allow verification also present difficulties.

In literature

The Kuzari is one of most famous works of the medieval Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet Rabbi Yehuda Halevi (c. 1075–1141). Divided into five essays ("ma'amarim" (namely, Articles)), it takes the form of a fictional dialogue between the pagan king of the Khazars and a Jew who was invited to instruct him in the tenets of the Jewish religion. The intent of the work - though based on Ḥasdai ibn Shaprūṭ's correspondence with the Khazar king -was not historical, but rather to defend Judaism as a revealed religion, written in the context, firstly of Karaite challenges to the Spanish rabbinical intelligentsia, and then against temptations to adapt Aristotelianism and Islamic philosophy to the Jewish faith. Originally written in Arabic, it was translated into Hebrew by Judah ibn Tibbon). Benjamin Disraeli's early novel Alroy (1833) draws on Menachem ben Solomon's story. The question of mass religious conversion and the indeterminability of the truth of stories about identity and conversion are central themes of Milorad Pavić's bestselling mystery story Dictionary of the Khazars. H.N. Turteltaub's Justinian, Marek Halter's Book of Abraham and Wind of the Khazars, and Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road allude to or feature elements of Khazar history or create fictional Khazar characters.

Cities associated with the Khazars

Atil, Khazaran, Samandar; in the Caucasus, Balanjar, Kazarki, Sambalut, and Samiran; in Crimea and the Taman region, Kerch, Theodosia, (modern Güzliev), Samkarsh (also called Tmutarakan, Tamatarkha), and Sudak. In the Don valley Sarkel. A number of Khazar settlements have been discovered in the Mayaki-Saltovo region. Some scholars suppose that the Khazar settlement of Sambat on the Dnieper refers to the later Kiev.

See also

Notes

1. Golden 2007b, p. 136
2. Wexler 1996, p. 50
3. Herlihy 1972, pp. 136–148 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFHerlihy1972 (help);Russell1972, pp. 25–71.This figure has been calculated on the basis of the data in both Herlihy and Russell's work.
4. Luttwak 2009, p. 152.'Khazars (Hebrew:Kuzarim).'
5. Golden 2001a, p. 33.'Somewhat later, however, in a letter to the Byzantine Emperor Basil I, dated to 871, Louis the German, clearly taking exception to what had apparently become Byzantine usage, declares that 'we have not found that the leader of the Avars, or Khazars (Gasanorum),'
6. Petrukhin 2007, p. 255
7. Noonan 1999, p. 493.
8. Golden 2011, p. 65.
9. .Noonan 1999, p. 498
10. Noonan 1999, pp. 499, 502–3.
11. Golden 2007a, p. 28
12. In his Chronographia, Theophanes wrote: "During his stay there , he invited the eastern Turks, who are called Chazars, to become his allies." (cited in Theophanes, The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor, translated by Cyril Mango and Roger Scott, 1997, p. 446).
13. Golden 2007a, p. 15
14. Golden 2007a, p. 16 and n.38 citing L. Bazin, 'Pour une nouvelle hypothèse sur l'origine des Khazar,' in Materialia Turcica, 7/8 (1981-1982): 51-71.
15. Golden 2007a, p. 16.Compare Tibetan dru-gu Gesar (the Turk Gesar).
16. Dunlop 1954, pp. 34–40
17. Golden 2007a, p. 16
18. Golden 2007a, p. 17.Kěsà (可薩) would have been pronounced something like ka’sat in both Early Middle Chinese/EMC and Late Middle Chinese/LMC while Hésà (曷薩) would yield γat-sat in (EMC) and xɦat sat (LMC) respectively, where final ‘t’ often transcribes –r- in foreign words. Thus, while these Chinese forms could transcribe a foreign word of the type *Kasar/*Kazar, *Gatsar,*Gazr,*Gasar, there is a problem phonetically with assimilating these to the Uyğur word Qasar/ Gesa (EMC/LMC Kat-sat= Kar sar=*Kasar).
19. Shirota 2005, pp. 235, 248.
20. Brook 2009, p. 5
21. Golden 2007b, p. 148: Ibn al-Nadīm commenting on script systems in 987-8 recorded that the Khazars wrote in Hebrew.
22. Erdal 2007, pp. 98–99:'The chancellery of the Jewish state of the Khazars is therefore also likely to have used Hebrew writing even if the official language was a Turkic one.
23. Golden 2001b, p. 78.'The word tribe is as troublesome as the term clan. It is commonly held to denote a group, like the clan, claiming descent from a common (in some ulture zones eponymous) ancestor, possessing a common territory, economy, language, culture, religion, and sense of identity. In reality, tribes were often highly fluid sociopolitical structures, arising as "ad hoc responses to ephemeral situations of competitition," as Morton H. Fried has noted.'
24. Golden 2007a, p. 14
25. Szádeczky-Kardoss 1994, p. 206
26. Golden 2007a, pp. 40–41;Brook 2009, p. 4 note that Dieter Ludwig, in his doctoral thesis Struktur und Gesellschaft des Chazaren-Reiches im Licht der schriftlichen Quellen, (Münster,1982) suggested that the Khazars were Turkic members of the Hephthalite Empire, where the lingua franca was a variety of Iranian.
27. Golden 2006, p. 86
28. Golden 2007a, p. 53,
29. Zuckerman 2007, p. 404.Cf.'The reader should be warned that the A-shih-na link of the Khazar dynasty, an old phantom of . . Khazarology, will . .lose its last claim to reality'.
30. ^ Golden 2006, p. 89.
31. Golden 2006, pp. 89–90. In this view, the name Khazar would derive from a hypothetical *Aq Qasar.
32. ^ Kaegi 2003, p. 143 n.115, citing also Golden 1992, pp. 127–136, 234–237.
33. Whittow 1996, p. 221. The word Türk, Whittow adds, had no strict ethnic meaning at the time: 'Throughout the early middle ages on the Eurasian steppes, the term ‘Turk’ may or may not imply membership of the ethnic group of Turkic peoples, but it does always mean at least some awareness and acceptance of the traditions and ideology of the Gök Türk empire, and a share, however distant, in the political and cultural inheritance of that state.'
34. Kaegi 2003, pp. 154–186.
35. Whittow 1996, p. 222.
36. Golden 2010, pp. 54–55 The Duōlù (咄陆) were the left wing of the On Oq, the Nǔshībì (弩失畢: *Nu Šad(a)pit), and together they were registered in Chinese sources as the 'ten names' (shí míng:十名).
37. Golden 2001b, pp. 94–5.
38. Somogyi 2008, p. 128.
39. Zuckerman 2007, p. 417
40. Golden 2006, p. 90.
41. Golden 2007a, pp. 11–13.
42. Golden 2007a, pp. 7–8
43. Golden 2001b, p. 73
44. Golden 2007b, pp. 155–156. Several scholars connect it to Judaization, with Artamonov linking its introduction to Obadiyah's reforms and the imposition of full Rabbinical Judaism and Pritsak to the same period (799-833), arguing that the Beg, a major domo from the Iranian *Barč/Warâ</Bolčan clan, identified with Obadiyah, compelled the Qağanal clan to convert, an event which putatively caused the Qabar revolt. Golden comments: "There is nothing but conjecture to connect it with the reforms of Obadiyah, the further evolution of Khazar Judaism or the Qabars ... The fact is we do not know when, precisely, the Khazar system of dual kingship emerged. It could not have come ex nihilo. It was not present in the early stages of Khazar history. Given the Old Türk traditions of the Khazar state ... and the overall institutional conservation of steppe society, one must exercise great caution here. Clear evidence for it is relatively late (the latter part of the ninth century perhaps and more probably the tenth/century- although it was probably present by the first third of the ninth century. Iranian influences via the Ors guard of the Qağans may have also been a factor"
45. Noonan 1999, p. 500
46. Olsson 2013, p. 2 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFOlsson2013 (help).
47. Dunlop 1954, pp. 97, 112. The nobles would kill him if his reign lasted even one day beyond the specified number of years. Ibn Fadlan gave a precise figure for the maximum number of years allotted to a king's reign. If a Qağan had ruled for at least forty years, Fadlan wrote, his courtiers and subjects felt that his ability to reason had become impaired on account of his old age. They would then kill the Qağan.
48. ^ Noonan 2001, p. 77.
49. Golden 2006.
50. Petrukhin 2007, pp. 256–257 notes that Ibn Fadlun's description of a Rus' prince (malik) and his lieutenant (khalifa) mirrored the Khazarian diarchy, but the report is flawed, there being no sacral kingship among the Rus'.
51. Golden 2007b, pp. 133–4.
52. de Weese 1994, p. 181 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFde_Weese1994 (help).
53. Golden, 2006 & pp.79-81 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFGolden2006pp.79-81 (help).
54. Golden 2007b, pp. 130–131: "the rest of the Khazars profess a religion similar to that of the Turks."
55. Golden 2006, p. 88
56. Golden 2007b, p. 138.This regiment was exempt from campaigning against fellow Muslims, evidence that non-Judaic beliefs was no obstacle to access to the highest levels of government.They had abandoned their homeland after the onset of Islam, and sought service with the Khazars, according to al-Masudi.
57. Olsson 2013, p. 13 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFOlsson2013 (help) writes that there is no evidence for this Islamic guard for the 9th century, but that its existence is attested for 913.
58. Golden 2006, pp. 79–80, 88.
59. Olsson 2013, p. 1 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFOlsson2013 (help).
60. Noonan 2007, p. 211,217 gives the lower figure for the Muslim contingents, but adds that the army could draw on other mercenaries stationed in the capital, Rūs, Ṣaqāliba and pagans. Olsson's 10,000 refers to the spring-summar horsemen in the nomadic king's retinue.
61. Koestler 1977, p. 18
62. Dunlop 1954, p. 113
63. Dunlop 1954, p. 96
64. Brook 2009, pp. 3–4
65. Patai & Patai 1989, p. 70.
66. Brook 2009, p. 3
67. Golden 2006, pp. 86 n.39, 89The ethnonym in the Tang Chinese annals, Āshǐnà (阿史那), often accorded a key role in the Khazar leadership, may reflect an Eastern Iranian or Tokharian word (Khotanese Saka âşşeina-āššsena ‘blue’): Middle Persian axšaêna (‘dark-coloured’): Tokharian A âśna (‘blue’, ‘dark’).
68. Luttwak 2009, p. 152.
69. Oppenheim 1994, p. 312.
70. Barthold 1993, p. 936.
71. Golden 2011, p. 64.
72. Noonan 2007, pp. 208–209, 216–219. A third division may have contained the dwellings of the tsarina. The dimensions of the western part were 3x3, as opposed to the eastern part's 8 x 8 farsakhs.
73. ^ Noonan 2007, p. 214.
74. Noonan 2007, pp. 211–214. Outside Muslim traders were under the jurisdiction of a special royal official (ghulām).
75. Erdal 2007, p. 75, n.2.'there must have been many different ethnic groups within the Khazar realm. . . These groups spoke different languages, some of them no doubt belonging to the Indo-European or different Caucasian language families.'. The high chancery official of the Abbasid Caliphate under Al-Wathiq, Sallām the interpreter (Sallam al-tardjuman), famous for his reputed mastery of thirty languages, might have been both Jewish and a Khazar.Wasserstein 2007, p. 376, and n.2 referring to.Dunlop 1954, pp. 190–193.
76. Golden 2006, p. 91.'Oğuric Turkic, spoken by many of the subject tribes,doubtless, was one of the linguae francae of the state. Alano-As was also widely spoken. Eastern Common Turkic, the language of the royal house and its core tribes, in all likelihood remained the language of the ruling elite in the same way that Mongol continued to be used by the rulers of the Golden Horde, alongside of the Qipčaq Turkic speech spoken by the bulk of the Turkic tribesmen that constituted the military force of this part of the Činggisid empire. Similarity, Oğuric, like Qipčaq Turkic in the Jočid realm, functioned as one of the languages of government.'
77. Golden 2007a, pp. 13–14, 14 n.28. al-Iṣṭakhrī ‘s account however then contradicts itself by likening the language to Bulğaric.
78. Golden 2007, pp. 131–133 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFGolden2007 (help)
79. Whittow 1996, p. 220
80. Golden 2007b, p. 133. Whittow 1996, p. 220 notes that this native institution, given the constant, lengthy, military and acculturating pressures on the tribes from China to the East, was influenced also by the sinocentric doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven (Tiānmìng:(天命), which signaled legitimacy of rule.
81. Kohen 2007, p. 112.The letters were first published by Johannes Buxtorf around 1660. Controversy arose over their authenticity: it was even argued that the letters represented: 'no more than Jewish self-consolation and fantasmagory over the lost dreams of statehood' (Kohen ibid).
82. Dunlop 1954, p. 130:'If anyone thinks that the Khazar correspondence was first composed in 1577 and published in Qol Mebasser, the onus of proof is certainly on him. He must show that a number of ancient manuscripts, which appear to contain references to the correspondence, have all been interpolated since the end of the sixteenth century. This will prove a very difficult or rather an impossible task.'
83. Golden 2007b, pp. 145–6:'The issue of the authenticity of the Correspondence has a long and mottled history which need not detain us here. Dunlop and most recently Golb have demonstrated that Hasdai's letter, Joseph's response (dating perhaps from the 950s) and the "Cambridge Document" are, indeed, authentic.'
84. deWeese 2010, pp. 171, 305 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFdeWeese2010 (help):'(a court debate on conversion)appears in accounts of Khazar Judaism in two Hebrew accounts, as well as in one eleventh-century Arabic account. These widespread and evidently independent attestations would seem to support the historicity of some kind of court debate, but, more important, clearly suggest the currency of tales recounting the conversion and originating among the Khazar Jewish community itself' . .'the "authenticity" of the Khazar correspondence is hardly relevant'.(p.171): 'The wider issue of the "authenticity" of the "Khazar correspondence", and of the significance of this tale's parallels with the equally controversial Cambridge document /Schechter text, has been discussed extensively in the literature on Khazar Judaism; much of the debate loses significance if, as Pritsak has recently suggested, the accounts are approached as "epic" narratives rather than evaluated from the standpoint of their "historicity".
85. Szpiech 2012, p. 102.
86. Golden 2007b, pp. 128–9 compares Ulfilas's conversions of the Goths to Arianism;Al-Masudi records a conversion of the Alans to Christianity during the Abbasid period;the Volga Bulğars adopted Islam after their leader converted in the 10th century; the Uyğur Qağan accepted Manichaeism in 762
87. Golden 2007b, p. 123, taking exception to J. B. Bury's claim (1912) that it was 'unique in history'.(Koestler 1977, p. 52);Golden 2007b, p. 153 cites from Jewish history the conversion of Idumeans under John Hyrcanus; of the Itureans under Aristobulus I; of the kingdom of Adiabene under Queen Helena; the Ḥimyârî kings in Yemen, and Berber assimilations to North African Jewry.
88. Gil 2011, pp. 429–441 is a lone voice in arguing the conversion never took place. Gil believes the conversion of Khazars is a myth, and argues that Arab sources do not mention Khazars as Jews, and contemporary Jewish responsa show no trace of Khazarian Jews. He concludes that the conversion 'never happened'.
89. Golden 2007b, pp. 124, 135.
90. ^ Golden 2007b, p. 125.
91. de Weese 1994, pp. 292–293 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFde_Weese1994 (help).
92. Golden 2007b, p. 124:Alp Ilut'uêr is a Turkish subordinate title.
93. Golden 2007b, pp. 135–6:Shapira 2007b, pp. 347–348 thinks the evidence from such Georgian sources renders suspect a conversion prior to this date.
94. Golden 2007b, pp. 135–136, reporting on al-Muqaddasi.
95. de Weese 1994, p. 73 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFde_Weese1994 (help) during Islamic invasions, some groups of Khazars who suffered defeat, including a qağan, were converted to Islam.
96. Golden 2007b, pp. 141–145, 161
97. Noonan 2001, pp. 77–78.
98. Golden 2007b, p. 126:'The Șûfî wandering out into the steppe was far more effective in bringing Islam to the Turkic nomads than the learned 'ulamâ of the cities.'
99. Wexler 1987, p. 61.
100. Cahen 1997, pp. 137–139 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFCahen1997 (help) argues the conversion was restricted to the elite.Wexler 2002, p. 514:'the Khazars (most of whom did not convert to Judaism, but remained animists, or adopted Islam and Christianity), . .'.
101. Golden 2007b, p. 127:'In much of the literature on conversions of Inner Asian peoples, attempts are made, "to minimize the impact" . . This has certainly been true of some of the scholarship regarding the Khazars.'
102. Olsson 2013, p. 2 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFOlsson2013 (help):'scholars who have contributed to the subject of the Khazars' conversion, have based their arguments on a limited corpus of textual, and more recently, numismatic evidence . .Taken together these sources offer a cacophony of distortions, contradictions, vested interests, and anomalies in some areas, and nothing but silence in others.'
103. Noonan 1999, p. 502:'Judaism was apparently chosen because it was a religion of the book without being the faith of a neighbouring state which had designs on Khazar lands.'
104. Salo 1957, p. 198 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSalo1957 (help):'Their conversion to Judaism was the equivalent of a declaration of neutrality between the two rival powers.'
105. Golden 2007b, p. 139:'’We are not aware of any nation under the sky that would not have Christians among them. For even in Gog and Magog, the Hunnic people who call themselves Gazari, those whom Alexander confined, there was a tribe more brave than the others. This tribe had already been circumcised and they profess all dogmata of Judaism (omnem Judaismum observat).’
106. Olsson 2013, p. 3 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFOlsson2013 (help). The idea of a forced general conversion imposed on the Qağanal dynasty in the 830s was advanced by Omeljian Pritsak, and is now supported by Roman Kovalev and Peter Golden.
107. Olsson 2013, p. 13 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFOlsson2013 (help). He identifies this with the onset of Magyar invasions of the Pontic steppe in the 830s, the construction of Sarkel, and the Schechter letter's reference to Bulan, converted to his Jewish wife's faith, wresting power, in a period of famine, elements which undermined the qağan, and allowed the creation of the royal diarchy.Olsson 2013, pp. 13, 19–23 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFOlsson2013 (help).
108. Szpiech 2012, pp. 92–117, 104.
109. Golden 2007b, pp. 143, 159:wa al-ḥazarwa malikuhum kulluhum yahûd('The Khazars and their king are all Jews')
110. Golden 2007b, p. 143, citing his comment on Genesis 9:27:'some other commentators are of the opinion that this verse alludes to the Khazars who accepted Judaism', with Golden's comment:'Certainly, by this time, the association of Khazaria and Judaism in the Jewish world was an established fact'.
111. Golden 2007b, pp. 137–138,
112. Spinei 2009, p. 50 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSpinei2009 (help).
113. Shapira 2007b, p. 349, and n.178 and Zuckerman 1995, p. 250 disagree, consider there was only one stage and place it later. Shapira takes stage 1 as a Jewish-Khazar reinterpretation of the Tengri-cult in terms of a monotheism similar to Judaism's; Zuckerman thinks Judaisation took place, just once, after 861.
114. Golden 2007b, pp. 127–128, 151–153.Dunlop 1954, p. 170 Dunlop thought the Ist stage occurred with the king's conversion c. 740; the second with the installation of Rabbinial Judaism c. 800.
115. DeWeese 1994, pp. 300–308.
116. ^ Melamed 2003, pp. 24–26 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFMelamed2003 (help).
117. Schweid 2007, p. 279 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSchweid2007 (help). Arabic original: Kitâb al-ḥuyya wa’l-dalîl fi naṣr al-din al-dhalîl (Book of the Argument and Demonstration in Aid of the Despised Faith).
118. Korobkin 1998 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKorobkin1998 (help)
119. Brook 2009, pp. 30, 41, n.75 mentions also a letter in Hebrew, the Mejelis document, dated (985–986), which refers to "our lord David, the Khazar prince" who lived in Taman. As Brook noted, both D. M. Dunlop and Dan Shapira dismiss it as a forgery.
120. Shapira 2009, p. 1102. The name is commonly etymologized as meaning 'elk' in Türkic. Shapira identifies him with the Sabriel of the Schechter letter, and suggests, since Sabriel is unattested as a Jewish name, though the root is 'hope, believe, find out, understand' that it is a calque on the Oğuz Türkic bulan(one who finds out) or bilen (one who knows)
121. Szpiech 2012, pp. 93–117, 102, citing the letter of Letter of King Joseph:et ha-qosmim ve-et'ovdei 'avodah zarah('expelled the wizards and idolators').
122. DeWeese 1994, p. 302. This detail is in Halevi's Sefer Ha-Kusari. Golden has identified Warsān as Transcaucasian Varaˇc‘an (Olsson 2013, p. 18 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFOlsson2013 (help)) Ḥasdai ibn Shaprūṭ's letter also mentions a legend that the Chaldaeans, under persecution, hid the Scriptures in a cave, and taught their sons to pray there, which they did until their descendants forgot the custom. Much later, a tradition has it, a man of Israel entered the cave and, retrieving the books, taught the descendants how to learn the Law.(De Weese 1994, pp. 304–5 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFDe_Weese1994 (help)).
123. Korobkin 1998, p. 352, n.8 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKorobkin1998 (help).
124. Dunlop 1954, p. 170.
125. De Weese 1994, p. 303 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFDe_Weese1994 (help);Golb & Pritsak 1882, p. 111 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFGolbPritsak1882 (help):The Schechter document has officers during the religious debate speak of a cave in a certain plain (TYZWL) where books are to be retrieved. They turn out to be the books of the Torah.
126. Golden 2007b, p. 157.
127. DeWeese 1994, pp. 276, 300–304. The original ancestral cavern of the Türks, according to Chinese sources, was called Ötüken and the tribal leaders would travel there annually to conduct sacrificial rites.
128. Dunlop 1954, pp. 117–118.
129. DeWeese 1994, pp. 304–305.
130. ^ Róna-Tas 1999, p. 232.
131. Maroney 2010, p. 72
132. Golden 2007a, p. 34.
133. Kohen 2007, pp. 107–108, refers to Khazar killings of Christians or the uncircumcized in retaliation for persecutions of Jews in Byzantium, and Khazar reprisals against Muslims for persecutions of Jews in Caucasian Albania, perhaps under Emir Nasr.
134. Golden 2007b, p. 161.
135. Koestler 1977, p. 63;Leviant 2008, pp. 159–162, 162:'If indeed I could learn that this was the case, then, despising all my glory, abadndoning my high estate, leaving my family, I would go over mountains and hills, through seas and lands, till I should arrive at the place where my Lord the King resides, that I might see not only his glory and magnificence, and that of his servants and ministers, but also the tranquillity of the Israelites. On beholding this my eyes would brighten, my reins would exult, my lips would pour forth praises to God, who has not withdrawn his favour from his afflicted ones.'
136. Abraham Harkavy,Ha-Maggid (1877) p.357.Secondary source required.
137. Harkavy, in Kohut Memorial Volume, p. 244.
138. ^ Petrukhin 2007, p. 263.
139. Luttwak 2009, p. 52
140. Many sources identify the Göktürks in this alliance as Khazars, for example, Beckwith writes recently:'The alliance sealed by Heraclius with the Khazars in 627 was of seminal importance to the Byantine Empire through the Early Middle Ages, and helped assure its long-term survival.'Beckwith 2011, pp. =120, 122. Early sources such as the almost contemporary Armenian history,Patmutʿiwn Ałuanicʿ Ašxarhi attributed to Movsēs Dasxurancʿ, and the Chronicle attributed to Theophanes identify these Turks as Khazars (Theophanes has: 'Turks, who are called Khazars'). Both Zuckerman and Golden reject the identification Zuckerman 2007, pp. 403–404.
141. Kaegi 2003, pp. 143–145.
142. Róna-Tas 1999, p. 230.
143. Kaegi 2003, p. 145.
144. Zuckerman 2007, p. 417. Scholars dismiss Chinese annals which, reporting the events from Turkic sources, attribute the destruction of Persia and its leader Shah Khusrau II personally to Tong Yabghu. Zuckerman argues instead that the account is correct in its essentials.
145. Bauer 2010, p. 341.
146. Ostrogorsky 1969, pp. 124–126 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFOstrogorsky1969 (help).
147. Cameron 1984, p. 212 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFCameron1984 (help). By 711, however, Busir was supporting, possibly instigating, a revolt in Cherson among Byzantine troops led by another exile, rebel general Bardanes, who seized the throne as Emperor Philippikos and killed Justinian.
148. Luttwak 2009, pp. 137–8
149. Piltz 2004, p. 42.
150. Noonan 2007, p. 220.
151. Beckworth 2009, p. 392,n.22 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBeckworth2009 (help).
152. McBride & Heath 2004, p. 14 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFMcBrideHeath2004 (help).
153. Mako 2010, p. 45
154. ^ Brook 2009, pp. 126–7
155. Brook 2009, pp. 127
156. Wasserstein 2007, pp. 375–376
157. Moss 2002, p. 16. Over 520 separate hoards of such silver have been uncovered in Sweden and Gotland.
158. Abulafia 1987, pp. 419, 480–483.The Volga Bulgarian state was converted to Islam in the 10th century, and wrested liberty from its Khazarian suzerains when Svyatislav razed Atil.
159. Shepard 2006, p. 19.
160. Petrukhin 2007, p. 245
161. Noonan 2001, p. 81.
162. Whittow 1996, pp. 243–252 argues however that:The title of qaghan, with its claims to lordship over the steppe world, is likely to be no more than ideological booty from the 965 victory.'
163. Korobkin 1998, p. xxvii harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKorobkin1998 (help) citing Golb & Pritsak 1982, p. 15 notes that Khazars have often been connected with Kiev's foundations. Pritsak and Golb state that children in Kiev were being given a mixture of Hebrew and Slavic names by c. 930. Toch 2012, p. 166 on the other hand is sceptical, and argues'a significant Jewish presence in early medieval Kiev or indeed in Russia at large remains much in doubt'.
164. Golden 2007b, p. 156.The yarmaq based on the Arab dirhem was perhaps issued in reaction to fall-off in Muslim minting in 820s, and to a felt need in the turbulent upheavals of the 830s to assert a new religious profile, with the Jewish legends stamped on them.
165. Petrukhin 2007, p. 247, and n.1: Scholars are divided as to whether the fortification of Sarkel represents a defensive bulwark against a growing Magyar or Varangian threat.
166. Petrukhin 2007, p. 257.
167. ^ Kohen 2007, p. 107.
168. Noonan 1999, pp. 502–3.
169. Kohen 2007, p. 106.MQDWN or the Macedon dynasty of Byzantium;SY,perhaps a central Volga statelet, Burtas, Asya; PYYNYL denoting the Danube-Don Pechnegs;BM, perhaps indicating the Volga Bulgars, and TWRQY or Oghuz Turks. The provisory identifications are those of Pritsak.
170. Noonan 1999, p. 508.
171. Olsson 2013, p. 13 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFOlsson2013 (help): Al-Masudi says the king secretly tipped off the Rus' of the attack, but was unable to oppose the request of his guards.
172. Kohen 2007, p. 107
173. Petrukhin 2007, p. 257. The letter continues:'I wage war with them. If I left them (in peace) for a single hour they would crush the whole land of the Ishmaelites up to Baghdad.'
174. From Klavdiy Lebedev (1852–1916), Svyatoslav's meeting with Emperor John, as described by Leo the Deacon.
175. Petrukhin 2007, p. 259.
176. ^ Petrukhin 2007, p. 262.
177. Petrukhin 2007, pp. 262–263.
178. Dunlop 1954, p. 242.
179. Dunlop 1954, p. 248.Dunlop thought the later city of Saqsin lay on or near Atil
180. Gow, p. 31, n.28 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFGow (help).
181. Sand 2009, p. 229 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSand2009 (help)
182. Golden 2007b, pp. 148.
183. Brook 2009, p. 156. The Caspian Sea is still known to Arabs, and many peoples of the region, as the 'Khazar Sea' (Arabic Bahr ul-Khazar)
184. Noonan 1999, p. 503.
185. Golden 2007b, pp. 147–8.
186. Kohen 2007, p. 109.
187. Shapira 2007a, p. 305.
188. Dunlop 1954, p. 253.
189. Kohen 2007, p. 109
190. Sand 2009, p. 227 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSand2009 (help).
191. Dubnov 1980, p. 792.
192. Golden 2007a, p. 45, and n.157
193. Golden 2007b, p. 130:'thus it is clear that the false doctrine of Yišô in Rome (Hrôm) and that of Môsê among the Khazars and that of Mânî in Turkistan took away their might and the valor that they once possessed and made them feeble and decadent among their rivals'.
194. Golden 2007b, p. 159.
195. Peacock 2010, pp. 27–35, 27–28, 35 for details.Some sources claim that the father of Seljuk, the eponymous progenitor of the Seljuk Turks, namely Toqaq Temür Yalığ, began his career as an Oghuz soldier in Khazar service in the early and mid-10th century, and rose to high rank before he fell out with the Khazar rulers and departed for Khwarazm. Seljuk's sons, significantly, all bear names from the Jewish scriptures: Mîkâ’il, Isrâ’îl, Mûsâ, Yûnus. Peacock argues that early traditions attesting a Seljuk origin within the Khazar empire when it was powerful, were later rewritten, after Khazaria fell from power in the 11th century, to blank out the connection.
196. Peacock 2010, p. 35.
197. Erdal 2007, p. 80, n.22:Wexler 1987, p. 72 Tzitzak is often treated as her original proper name, with a Turkic etymology čiček ('flower') Erdal, however, citing the Byzantine work on court ceremony De Ceremoniis, authored by Constantine Porphyrogennetos, argues that the word referred only to the dress Irene wore at court, perhaps denoting its colourfulness, and compares it to the Hebrew ciciot, the knotted fringes of a ceremonial shawl tallit.
198. Golden 2001a, pp. 28–29, 37.
199. Golden 1994b, pp. 247–248.
200. Róna-Tas 1999, p. 56
201. Golden 2007a, pp. 33.
202. Golden 2007b, p. 150.
203. Brook 2009, p. 167.
204. Brook 2009, p. 113, 122-3 n.148. 'Engravings that resemble the six-pointed Star of David were found on circular Khazar relics and bronze mirrors from Sarkel and Khazarian grave fields in Upper Saltov. However, rather than having been made by Jews, these appear to be shamanistic sun discs.'
205. Oppenheim 1994, p. 310.
206. Schweid 2007, p. 286 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSchweid2007 (help).
207. Brook 2009, pp. 191–192, n.72 says this thesis was developed by Jacob Mann, based on a reading of the word "Khazaria" in the Cairo Geniza fragment. Bernard Lewis, he adds, challenged the assumption by noting that the original text reads Hakkâri and refers to the Kurds of the Hakkâri mountains in south-east Turkey.
208. Baron 1957, pp. 202–204, p.204.
209. Wexler 2002, p. 514.
210. Golden 2007b, p. 149.
211. Brook 2009, pp. 177–178
212. Noonan 2007, p. 229.
213. Kizilov 2009, p. 335
214. Patai & Patai 2987, p. 73 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFPataiPatai2987 (help).
215. Wexler 1987, p. 70.
216. Golden 2007a, p. 9
217. Róna-Tas 1999, p. 232:Rabbinic Judaism rather than Qaraism was the form adopted. Small Karaim communities may have existed, but the linguistic and historical evidence suggests that the Turkic-speaking Karaim Jews in Poland and Lithuania, one branch also existed in Crimea, descend from the Khazars. ‘At most, it is conceivable that the smaller Karaite community which lived in Kharazia gained the Kipchak type Turkic language, that they speak today, through an exchange of language.’ Khazars probably converted to Rabbinic Judaism, whereas in Karaism only the Torah is accepted, the Talmud being ignored.
218. Brook 2009, pp. 227–228.
219. Wexler 2002, pp. 513–541.
220. Wexler 2002, p. 536.‘Most scholars are sceptical about the hypothesis’. Wexler, who proposes a variation on the idea, argues that a combination of three reasons accounts for scholarly aversion to the concept: a desire not to get mixed up in controversy, ideological insecurities, and the incompetence of much earlier work in favour of that hypothesis.
221. Golden 2007a, p. 56:'Methodologically, Wexler has opened up some new areas, taking elements of folk culture into account. I think that his conclusions have gone well beyond the evidene. Nonetheless, these are themes that should be pursued further.'
222. Rossman 2002, p. 98: Abraham Harkavy, O yazykye evreyev, zhivshikh v drevneye vremya na Rusi i o slavianskikh slovakh, vstrechaiuschikhsia u evreiskikh pisatelei, St. Petersburg.
223. Barkun 1997, p. 137: Ernest Renan, "Judaism as a Race and as Religion." Delivered on the January 27, 1883.
224. Rossman 2002, p. 98.
225. Singerman 2004, pp. 3–4 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSingerman2004 (help), Israël chez les nations (1893)
226. Polonsky, Basista & Link-Lenczowski 1993, p. 120. In the book Początki religii żydowskiej w Polsce, Warsaw: E. Wende i S-ka, 1903.
227. Goldstein 2006, p. 1318. Goldstein writes: ‘The theory that Eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars was originally proposed by . .Samuel Weissenberg in an attempt to show that Jews were deeply rooted on Russian soil and that the cradle of Jewish civilization was the Caucasus’. Weissenberg’s book Die Südrussischen Juden, was published in 1895.
228. Koestler 1976, pp. 134, 150 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKoestler1976 (help). Die Chasaren; historische Studie, A. Holzhauen,Vienna 1909.2nd ed., 1910.
229. Koestler 1976, pp. 134, 150 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKoestler1976 (help).
230. Goldstein 2006, p. 131. Maurice Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.
231. Litman 1984, pp. 85–110, 109. Schipper’s first monograph on this was published in the Almanach Žydowski (Vienna) in 1918, While in the Warsaw ghetto before falling victim to the Holocaust at Majdanek, Schipper (1884-1943) was working on the Khazar hypothesis.
232. Brook 2010, p. 210 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBrook2010 (help).
233. Wells 2004, p. 2 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFWells2004 (help):"There were Arab tribes who were Jews in the time of Muhammad, and a Turkic people who were mainly Jews in South Russia in the ninth century. Judaism is indeed the reconstructed political ideal of many shattered peoples-mainly semitic. As a result of these coalescences and assimilations, almost everywhere in the towns throughout the Roman Empire, and far beyond it in the east, Jewish communities traded and flourished, and were kept in touch through the Bible, and through a religious and educational organization. The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea."
234. Singerman 2004, p. 4 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSingerman2004 (help).
235. Morris 2003, p. 22 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFMorris2003 (help): Pasha Glubb held that Russian Jews ‘have considerably less Middle Eastern blood, consisting largely of pagan Slav proselytes or of Khazar Turks.’ For Glubb, they were not 'descendants of the Judeans . .The Arabs of Palestine are probably more closely related to the Judeans (genetically) than are modern Russian or German Jews'. . 'Of course, an anti-Zionist (as well as an anti-Semitic) point is being made here: The Palestinians have a greater political right to Palestine than the Jews do, as they, not the modern-day Jews, are the true descendants of the land's Jewish inhabitants/owners'.
236. Roland Burrage Dixon The Racial History of Man, 1923; H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (1921)
237. Malkiel 2008, p. 263,n.1.
238. Golden 2007a, p. 29. 'Poliak sought the origins of Eastern European Jewry in Khazaria'. First written as an article, then as a monograph (1942), it was twice revised in 1944, and 1951 as Kazariyah: Toldot mamlaxa yehudit (Khazaria:The History of a Jewish Kingdom in Europe) Mosad Bialik, Tel Aviv, 1951.
239. Sand 2010, p. 234.
240. Dunlop 1954, pp. 261, 263.
241. Poliakov 2005, p. 285 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFPoliakov2005 (help):'As for the Jews of Eastern Europe (Poles, Russians, etc.,) it has always been assumed that they descended from an amalgamation of Jews of Khazar stock from southern Russia and German Jews (the latter having imposed their superior culture).'
242. Sand 2009, pp. 241–2 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSand2009 (help). Sand cites Salo Wittmayer Baron,Baron 1957, pp. 196–206, p.206:'before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish center of Eastern Europe'; and Ben-Zion Dinur, Yisrael ba-gola 5 vols., 3rd ed.(1961-1966)Tel-Aviv: Jerusalem:Dvir;Bialik Institute, 1961. (OCLC:492532282) vol.1 p.2,5:'The Russian conquests did not destroy the Khazar kingdom entirely, but they broke it up and diminished it And this kingdom, which had absorbed Jewish immigration and refugees from many exiles, must itself have become a diaspora mother, the mother of one of the greatest of the diasporas (Em-galuyot, em akhat hagaluyot hagdolot)-of Israel in Russia, Lithuania and Poland.'
243. Golden 2007a, p. 55:’Salo Baron, who incorrectly viewed them as Finno-Ugrians, believed that the Khazars “sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centers of eastern Europe’
244. Golden 2007a, p. 55:’dismissed. . .rather airily’.
245. ^ Sand 2009, p. 240. harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSand2009 (help)
246. Lewis 1987, p. 48:'Some limit this denial to European Jews and make use of the theory that the Jews of Europe are not of Israelite descent at all but are the offspring of a tribe of Central Asian Turks converted to Judaism, called the Khazars. This theory, first put forward by an Austrian anthropologist in the early years of this century, is supported by no evidence whatsoever. It has long since been abandoned by all serious scholars in the field, including those in Arab countries, where Khazar theory is little used except in occasional political polemics.' Assertions of this kind has been challenged by Paul WexlerWexler 2002, pp. 538 who also notes that the arguments on this issue are riven by contrasting ideological investments:'Most writers who have supported the Ashkenazi-Khazar hypothesis have not argued their claims in a convincing manner . . The opponents of the Khazar-Ashkenazi nexus are no less guilty of empty polemics and unconvincing arguments.'(p.537)).
247. Patai & Patai 1989, p. 71: 'it is assumed by all historians that those Jewish Khazars who survived the last fateful decades sought and found refuge in the bosom of Jewish communities in the Christian countries to the west, and especially in Russia and Poland, on the one hand, and in the Muslim countries to the east and the south, on the other. Some historians and anthropologists go so far as to consider the modern Jews of East Europe, and more particularly of Poland, the descendants of the medieval Khazars.’
248. Golden 2007a, p. 9
249. Brook 2009
250. Toch 2012, p. 155,n.4.
251. Wexler 2007, pp. 387–398.
252. Sand 2009, pp. 190–249 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSand2009 (help).
253. ^ Elhaik 2012, pp. 61–74.
254. Golden 2007, pp. 9–10 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFGolden2007 (help).
255. Goldstein 2006, p. 131.
256. Singerman 2004, pp. 4–5 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSingerman2004 (help).
257. Goodrick-Clarke 2002, p. 237 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFGoodrick-Clarke2002 (help).
258. .Boller 1992, pp. 2, 6–7. Barkun 1997, pp. 141–2. Beaty was an anti-Semitic, McCarthyite professor of Old English at SMU, author of ‘The Iron Curtain over America, (Dallas 1952). According to him, ‘the Khazar Jews . .were responsible for all of America’s – and the world’s ills, beginning with World War 1. The book ‘had little impact’ until the former Wall Street broker and oil tycoon J. Russell Maguire promoted it.
259. Barkun 1997, pp. 140–141. His ’Dispossessed Majority(1972)
260. Wexler 2002, p. 514 has a more detailed bibliography.
261. Harkabi 1987, p. 424:"Arab anti-Semitism might have been expected to be free from the idea of racial odium, since Jews and Arabs are both regarded by race theory as Semites, but the odium is directed, not against the Semitic race, but against the Jews as a historical group. The main idea is that the Jews, racially, are a mongrel community, most of them being not Semites, but of Khazar and European origin." This essay was translated from Harkabi Hebrew text 'Arab Antisemitism' in Shmuel Ettinger, Continuity and Discontinuity in Antisemitism, (Hebrew) 1968 (p.50).
262. Shnirelman 2007, pp. 353–372:'in the very late 1980s Russian nationalists were fixated on the "Khazar episode." For them the Khazar issue seemed to be a cruial one. They treated it a the first historically documented case of the imposition of a foreign yoke on the Slavs, .. In this context the term "Khazars" became popular as a euphemism for the so-called "Jewish occupation regime." (p.354)
263. Rossman 2007, pp. 121–188.
264. Barkun 1997, pp. 136–7:'The Khazar theory never figured as a major component of anti-Semitism. Indeed, it receives only scant attention in Léon Poliakov’s monumental history of the subject.’
265. Barkun 2012, p. 165:'Although the Khazar theory gets surprisingly little attention in scholarly histories of anti-Semitism, it has been an influential theme among American anti-Semites since the immigration restrictionists of the 1920s,'.
266. Gow 1995, pp. 30–31, n.28.
267. Barkun 1997, pp. 142–144.
268. Goodman & Miyazawi 2000, pp. 263–264 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFGoodmanMiyazawi2000 (help).
269. Ostrer 2012, pp. 24–7, 93–95, 124–125.
270. Nebel, Filon & Brinkmann 2001, pp. 1095–1112.
271. Behar, Skorecky & Hammer 2003, pp. 769–779 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBeharSkoreckyHammer2003 (help).
272. Nebel, Filon & Faerman 2005, pp. 388–391.
273. Atzmon & Ostrer 2010, pp. 850–859 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFAtzmonOstrer2010 (help)
274. Costa, Pereira & Richards 2013, pp. 1–10.
275. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/ncomms3543.html
276. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131008112539.htm
277. El-Haj 2012, pp. 1–2, 28–9, 120–123, 133 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFEl-Haj2012 (help):'if the genome does not prove Sand wrong, neither can it prove him right. It is the wrong kind of evidence and the wrong style of reasoning for the task at hand.'(p.28):'They (researchers) will never be able to prove descent from Khazars: there are no "verification" samples.'(p.133).
278. Lobel 2000, pp. 2–4.
279. Baron 1957, p. 204.
280. Wachtel 1998, pp. 210–215.
281. Cokal 2007.
282. Róna-Tas 1999, p. 152:'Kiev in Khazar is Sambat, the same as the Hungarian word szombat,'Saturday', which is likely to have been derived from the Khazar Jews living in Kiev.'

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• Golden, Peter B. (2007a). "Khazar Studies: Achievements and Perspectives". In Golden, Peter B.; Ben-Shammai,, Haggai; Róna-Tas, András (eds.). The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Vol. 17. BRILL. pp. 7–57. ISBN 978-9-004-16042-2. Retrieved February 13, 2013. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Golden, Peter B. (2007b). "The Conversion of the Khazars to Judaism". In Golden, Peter B.; Ben-Shammai,, Haggai; Róna-Tas, András (eds.). The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Vol. 17. BRILL. pp. 123–161. ISBN 978-9-004-16042-2. Retrieved February 13, 2013. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Golden, Peter Benjamin (2010). Turks and Khazars: Origins, Institutions, and Interactions in Pre-Mongol Eurasia. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Vol. 952. Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-1-409-40003-5. Retrieved 10 February 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Golden, Peter Benjamin (2011). Central Asia in World History. New Oxford World History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-199-79317-4. Retrieved 16 October 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Goldstein, Eric L. (2006) . The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Princeton University Press. Retrieved 26 July 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Goodman, David G.; Miyazawa, Masanori (2000) . Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype. Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0-739-10167-4. Retrieved 26 July 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2003) . Black Sun: Aryan cults, esoteric nazism, and the politics of identity. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-814-73155-0. Retrieved 26 July 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Gow, Andrew Colin (1995). The " Red Jews": Antisemitism in the Apocalyptic Age 1200-1600. BRILL. ISBN 978-9-004-10255-2. Retrieved 26 July 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Halevy, Yehuda (1998). Korobkin, N. Daniel (ed.). The Kuzari. In defense of the Despised Faith. Jason Aronson. ISBN 978-0-765-79970-8. Retrieved 26 July 2013.
• Harkabi, Yehoshafat (1987) . "Contemporary Arab Anti-Semitism: its Causes and Roots". In Fein, Helen (ed.). The Persisting Question: Sociological Perspectives and Social Contexts of Modern Antisemitism. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 412–427. ISBN 978-3-110-10170-6,. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

• Herlihy, David (1984). "Demography". In Strayer, Joseph R. (ed.). Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Vol. 4. Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 136–148. ISBN 978-0684170244. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Kizilov, Mikhail (2009). The Karaites of Galicia: An Ethnoreligious Minority Among the Ashkenazim, the Turks, and the Slavs, 1772-1945. BRILL. ISBN 978-9-004-16602-8. Retrieved 26 July 2013.

• Koestler, Arthur (1977) . The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage. London: Pan Books. ISBN 978-0-091-25550-3. Retrieved 10 February 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Lewis, Bernard (1987) . Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-30420-6. Retrieved 10 February 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lewis, Bernard (2013). The Jews of Islam. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-03021-6. Retrieved 26 July 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

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• Logan, F. Donald (1992) . The Vikings in History (2 ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08396-6. Retrieved 10 February 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Mango, Cyril, ed. (2002). The Oxford History of Byzantium. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-198-14098-6. Retrieved 10 February 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Maroney, Eric (2010). The Other Zions: The Lost Histories of Jewish Nations. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-442-20045-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Melammed, Avraham (2003). Goodman, Lenn Evan (ed.). The Philosopher-King in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Thought. SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-791-48770-9. Retrieved 29 July 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Meserve, Margaret (2009). Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought. Harvard Historical Series. Vol. 158. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02656-8.
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• Nebel, Almut; Filon, Dvora; Brinkmann, B (2001). "The Y chromosome pool of Jews as part of the genetic landscape of the Middle East". American Journal of Human Genetics. 69: 1095–1112. PMC 1274378. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Nebel, Almut; Filon, Dvora; Faerman, Marina (March 2005). "Y chromosome evidence for a founder effect in Ashkenazi Jews". European Journal of Human Genetics. 13 (3): 388–391. doi:10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201319. PMID 15523495. Retrieved 11 November 2012. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Noonan, Thomas S. (1999). "European Russia c500-c1050". In Reuter, Timothy; McKitterick, Rosamond (eds.). The New Cambridge Medieval History: Volume 3, C.900-c.1024. Vol. 3. Cambridge University Press. pp. 485–534. ISBN 978-0-521-36447-8. Retrieved 4 August 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Noonan, Thomas S. (2001). "The Khazar Qaghanate and its impact on the early Rus' state: the Translatio Imperii from Itil to Kiev". In Khazanov, Anatoly M.; Wink, André (eds.). Nomads in the Sedentary World. Curzon-IIAS Asian studies series. Routledge. pp. 76–102. ISBN 978-0-700-71369-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Noonan, Thomas S. (2007). "The Economy of the Khazar Khaganate". In Golden, Peter B.; Ben-Shammai,, Haggai; Róna-Tas, András (eds.). The World of the Khazars:New Perspectives. Handbuch der Orientalistik: Handbook of Uralic studies. Vol. 17. BRILL. pp. 207–244. ISBN 978-9-004-16042-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Oppenheim, Samuel A (1994). "Jews". In Olson, James Stuart; Pappas, Lee Brigance; Pappas, Charles (eds.). An Ethnohistorical Dictionary of the Russian and Soviet Empires. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 305–328. ISBN 978-0-313-27497-8. Retrieved 28 February 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

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• Petrukhin, Vladimiir (2007). "Khazaria and Rus': An Examination of their Historical Relations". In Golden, Peter B.; Ben-Shammai,, Haggai; Róna-Tas, András (eds.). The World of the Khazars:New Perspectives. Handbuch der Orientalistik: Handbook of Uralic studies. Vol. 17. BRILL. pp. 245–268. ISBN 978-9-004-16042-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

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• Shapira, Dan D. Y. (2009). "Jews in Khazaria". In Ehrlich, Mark Avrum (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture,. Handbuch der Orientalistik: Handbook of Uralic studies. Vol. 1. ABC-CLIO. pp. 1097–1104. ISBN 978-1-851-09873-6. Retrieved 13 November 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Shepard, Jonathan (2006). "Closer Encounters with the Byzantine World:The Rus at the Straits of Kerch". In Reyerson, Kathryn Von; Stavrou, Theofanis George; Tracy, James Donald (eds.). Pre-modern Russia and its world:Essays in Honour of Thomas S. Noonan. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. pp. 15–77. ISBN 978-3-447-05425-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Shirota, Shun (城田俊) (2005). Woods,, John E.; Pfeiffer, Judith; Tucker, Ernest (eds.). "The Chinese Chroniclers of the Khazars: Notes on Khazaria in Tang Period Texts". Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi. 14. Peter de Ridder Press: 231–261. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Shnirelman, Victor A (2007). "The Story of a Euphemism:The Khazars in Russian Nationalist Literature". In Golden, Peter B.; Ben-Shammai,, Haggai; Róna-Tas, András (eds.). The World of the Khazars:New Perspectives. Handbuch der Orientalistik: Handbook of Uralic studies. Vol. 17. BRILL. pp. 353–372. ISBN 978-9-004-16042-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Shulvass, Moses A. (1985). The History of the Jewish People. Vol. 2. Regnery Gateway. ISBN 978-0-895-26657-6. Retrieved 26 July 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Somogyi, Péter (2008). "New remarks on the flow of Byzantine coins in Avaria and Walachia during the second half of the seventh century". In Curta, Florin; Kovalev, Roman (eds.). The "Other" Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and Cumans. East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450. Vol. 2. BRILL. pp. 83–149. ISBN 978-9-004-16389-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Szádeczky-Kardoss, Samuel (1994) . "The Avars". In Sinor, Denis (ed.). The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 206–228. ISBN 978-0-521-24304-9. Retrieved February 13, 2013. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Szpiech, Ryan (2012). Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-812-20761-3. Retrieved 15 September 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Toch, Michael (2012). The Economic History of European Jews: Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages. Études sur le Judaïsme Médiéval. Vol. 56. Leiden: BRILL. ISBN 978-9-004-23534-2. Retrieved 10 February 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Toynbee, Arnold (1962) . A Study of History. Vol. 1–12. Oxford University Press. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Wasserstein, David (2007). "The Khazars and the World of Islam". In Golden, Peter B.; Ben-Shammai,, Haggai; Róna-Tas, András (eds.). The World of the Khazars:New Perspectives. Handbuch der Orientalistik: Handbook of Uralic studies. Vol. 17. BRILL. pp. 373–386. ISBN 978-9-004-16042-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
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• Wexler, Paul. (1987). Explorations in Judeo-Slavic Linguistics. Contributions to the sociology of Jewish languages. Vol. 2. Brill Archive. ISBN 978-9-004-07656-3. Retrieved 10 February 2013.
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• Zuckerman, Constantine (2007). "The Khazars and Byzantium –The First Encounter". In Golden, Peter B.; Ben-Shammai,, Haggai; Róna-Tas, András (eds.). The World of the Khazars:New Perspectives. Handbuch der Orientalistik: Handbook of Uralic studies. Vol. 17. BRILL. pp. 399–431. ISBN 978-9-004-16042-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

External links

• Lecture on the Jews of Khazaria by Dr. Henry Ambramson
• The Kievan Letter scan in the Cambridge University Library collection.
• Khazaria.com
• Resources - Medieval Jewish History - The Khazars The Jewish History Resource Center, Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Khazar Historic Maps
• The Kitab al-Khazari of Judah Hallevi, full English translation at sacred-texts.com
• Ancient lost capital of the Khazar kingdom found

v t e Turkic topics
Languages	Afshar Altai Northern Southern Äynu Azerbaijani Bashkir Bulgar Chagatai Chulym Chuvash Crimean Tatar Cuman Dolgan Fuyü Gïrgïs Gagauz Ili Turki Karachay-Balkar Karaim Karakalpak Karamanli Turkish Kazakh Khakas Khalaj Khazar Khorasani Turkic Kipchak Krymchak Kumyk Kipchak languages Kyrgyz Nogai Old Turkic Ottoman Turkish Pecheneg Qashqai Sakha/Yakut Salar Shor Siberian Tatar Tatar Tofa Turkish Turkmen Tuvan Urum Uyghur Uzbek Western Yugur Alphabets Old Turkic Common Turkic Cyrillic Old Uyghur Persian
Peoples	Afshars Altaians Chelkans, Kumandins, Telengits, Teleuts, Tubalars Azerbaijanis in Iran, Armenia, Georgia Balkars Bashkirs Chulyms Chuvash Crimean Karaites Crimean Tatars Dolgans Gagauz Karachays Karakalpaks Kazakhs in China Khakas Khalaj Khorasani Turks Krymchaks Kyrgyz in China Kumyks Naimans Nogais Qarai Turks Qashqai Salar Shors Siberian Tatars Baraba Tatars Tatars Astrakhan, Chinese, Lipka, Kryashens, Mishar, Nağaybäk, Volga Tofalar Turkmens Afghan, Iranian Turkish in Abkhazia, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Crete, Cyprus, Dodecanese, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Kosovo, Lebanon, Libya, North Macedonia, Meskhetia (Ahiska), Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Syria, Tunisia, Western Thrace, Yemen Tuvans Uyghurs Uzbeks in Afghanistan Yakuts (Sakha) Yugurs Extinct Turkic groups Bulaqs Bulgars Cumans Dughlats Göktürks Karluks Khazars Kimek Kipchaks K'o-sa Oghuz Turks Shatuo Türgesh Uzes
Politics	Grey Wolves Kemalism Burkhanism Jadid Pan-Turkism Turkesism Turanism (Hungarian)
Origins	Turkestan Mongolia History Timeline of the Göktürks Timeline 500–1300 Migration Turkification Nomadic empire Turco-Mongol Tian Shan / Altai Mountains Otuken Oğuz
Locations	Sovereign states Azerbaijan Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Northern Cyprus Turkey Turkmenistan Uzbekistan Autonomous areas Altai Republic Bashkortostan Chuvashia Crimea Gagauzia Kabardino-Balkaria Karachay-Cherkessia Karakalpakstan Khakassia Nakhchivan Sakha Tatarstan Tuva Xinjiang
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Traditional sports	Kyz kuu Jereed Kokpar Jigit Chovgan
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These are traditional areas of settlement; the Turkic group has been living in the listed country/region for centuries and should not be confused with modern diasporas. State with limited international recognition.

v t e Khazaria
Byzantium Bulgaria Abbasids Arab–Khazar wars Kipchaks Meshchera Pax Khazarica Radhanites Rus' Volga trade route Dnieper trade route
Khazar rulers	Irbis Busir Bihar Parsbit Zachariah Bulan Obadiah Hezekiah Manasseh I Hanukkah Isaac Zebulun Manasseh II Nisi Aaron I Menahem Benjamin Aaron II Joseph David George
Other figures	Alp Iluetuer Alp Tarkhan Balgitzin Barjik Bulchan Hazer Tarkhan HLGW John of Gothia Leo IV Papatzys Pesakh Ras Tarkhan Serach Sfengus Sviatoslav Theodora Tzitzak Yitzhak ha-Sangari
Places	Atil Azaq Balanjar Bar Chersonesus Dagestan Güsliyev Golden Hills Kaffa Kavkaz Kazarki Kerch Kerem Khazaran Khumar Levedia Saltovo-Mayaki Samandar Sambalut Sambat Samiran Samosdelka Saqsin Sarkel Semikarakorsk Fortress Sudak Taman Tamatarkha
Tributaries	Abkhazians Alans Arsiyah Baranjars Barsils Bashkirs Black Klobuks Burtas Crimean Goths Cumans East Slavs Huns Juhuri Kabars Kipchaks Kumyks Kassogs Laz people Lezgins Magyars Mordvins Oghuz Onogurs Pechenegs Sabirs Sarir Uralics Volga Bulgaria
Scholars	Mikhail Artamonov Vasily Bartold D.M. Dunlop Norman Golb Peter B. Golden Lev Gumilev Alexander Harkavy Thomas S. Noonan Svetlana Pletnyova Omeljan Pritsak
Legacy	Khazar Correspondence Khazar language Khazar ancestry claims Ashkenazi Cossacks Crimean Karaites Subbotniks Jewish Cossacks Khazars in fiction Kuzari Kievan Letter Mandgelis Document Red Jews Schechter Letter
Category

v t e Crimea articles
Political status Sevastopol Republic of Crimea (Russia) Autonomous Republic of Crimea
History	Greek Crimea Crimea in the Roman era Cherson (theme) Bosporan Kingdom) Akatziri Khazars Crimean Goths Kipchaks Empire of Trebizond Genoese Crimea Genoese–Mongol Wars Crimean campaigns of 1687 and 1689 Crimean Khanate 1783 annexation by Russia Crimean War Soviet period Crimea in World War II 1944 Crimean Tatar deportation Renaming of Crimean toponyms 1954 transfer to Ukraine Crimean Tatar repatriation Autonomous Republic of Crimea President of Crimea (historical) 2003 Tuzla Island conflict 2014 status referendum 2014 annexation by Russia Supreme Council of Crimea (until 2014) (Chairman) Prime Minister of Crimea (until 2014) Council of Ministers (until 2014) Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People
Geography	Arabat Spit Arabat Bay Azov Sea Black Sea Caves Marble Vyalova Crimean Mountains Kerch Strait Perekop Isthmus Pontic–Caspian steppe Southern Coast Syvash Subdivisions Cities Raions Urban-type settlements
Politics	Republic of Crimea/Autonomous Republic of Crimea Constitution Head State Council 2014 parliamentary election Sevastopol Legislative Assembly Governor 2017 election Black Sea Fleet Crimean Federal District
Economy	Tourism Crimean Bridge Crimean Trolleybus
Society	Sports Crimean Premier League Demographics Peoples Russians Ukrainians Crimean Tatars Armenians Karaites Pontic Greeks Krymchaks Crimea Germans Languages Crimean Tatar Krymchak Russian Ukrainian Religion Christianity Roman Catholicism Ukrainian Catholicism Judaism Islam
Category

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• Articles to be split from October 2013
• Historical Turkic states
• Turkic dynasties
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• Turkic peoples
• Turkic tribes
• Khazars
• Former countries in Europe
• Khaganates
• Jewish history
• Groups who converted to Judaism