On Sun, 26 Sep 2004, John Bizwas wrote:
> However, I was more interested in what happened to the Khazar Jews and
> their possible place in a theory about multiple ethnicities amongst E.
> European Jews--including how to account for Russian and Caucasus Jews.
Leaving aside all the obviously illegitimate reasons, I can think of one main reason why people think it's not worth talking about -- it's just too long a time. It's like speculating whether people descend from the Franks or the Angles. After 1000 years, all sensible people know everything's mongrelized and all that matters is collective memory -- what people think they are and where they think they came from. Fact plays a very subordinate role in that process. It's like Renan said -- A nation is a people united by a mistaken view of their past and a hatred of their neighbors. I realize that you, by contrast, want to unearth a cosmopolitan ethnic history. But that's kind of a contradiction in terms. Cosmopolitans take the fact of mixture as obvious and the composition as irrelevant. This doesn't mean you can't continue to make it your personal scholarly hobby horse. But I think you should probably stop being surprised that many of the people you meet on this journey will be weirdo nationalists (i.e., the people who make heated objections which seem to you, rightly, to be based in irrationalism), and many of the people you mention it to will initially take you for one (e.g., Chip). It's a peril of the trade. The majority of people who hunt for such facts and fine distinctions have always been crazy nationalists. It's you who are going against type.
As for the actual, factual intellectual question, the sources you cite seem to mainly come down to Brooks' book _The Jews of Khazaria_, and afaict, his claims are extremely mild. He admits that the mass of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia were from Europe. He simply speculates that perhaps a tiny amount might possibly have descended from migrants from Khazaria. When you put it like that, sure, it's possible. But it's the kind of thing that even if it were true, it wouldn't change anything. It'd be like finding out that some Cumans became Jews. It'd be a fascinating footnote, but still a footnote. It wouldn't have any effect on Jewish self-image. You can tell by one glance down a Tel Aviv street that there's been tons of intermarriage. It's as obvious as the nose on our faces. This would simply be one new wall of exhibits to the vast museum that is Jewish history.
As for groups like the Bukharin Jews (in Uzbekistan) or Mountain Jews (a completely distinct Caucasian group) ultimately going back the Khazars, that could be. People have thought it many times. They could also have been the result of migrations from the middle east. Or they could have been the result of migrations or commercial influxes from elsewhere much more recently, whose recentness has been obscured by myth-making accounts. Or they could have been people who read the Christian bible and decided to reinvent Judaism ex nihilo and call themselves Jews, as several contemporary African and African-American groups have done. After 200 years in a mainly pre-literate culture, their nonsense could have become venerable. After all, isn't that how religions got invented in the first place?
Any of these stories would be interesting, and one of them has to be true; they had to have come from somewhere. Unlike you, I don't think we'll ever know, any more than we'll know where the Jews of Ethiopia came from. I personally tend to think the Khazars disaggregated and were assimilated by later migrations as completely as the Huns and the Vandals and all other such groups (esp. as the Caucasus was an unusually heavily trafficked piece of ground that way). But happy hunting!
BTW, you probably already know this, but a humorous and literary approach to the Khazar controversy -- and to the general experience of getting sucked into a mad world of heated cross-referential, cross-linguistic and deep-in-the-past controversy -- is the novel by the Yugoslav poet Milorad Pavic, _Dictionary of the Khazars_. Maybe someone will put it on the net someday. Because if there was ever a novel pre-designed to be set in hypertext, that's the one.
Michael