This seems to be strong support for the old theory (popularized by Koestler in "The Thirteenth Tribe") that the East European jewry, whose language came to be known as Yiddish, originally was largely composed of Khazarian Jewish refugees from the Mongol invasions.
Shane Mage
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FWIW this is what Solzhenitsyn writes on pp. 13-15 of 200 Let Vmeste (200 Years Together), Russian edition, quick translation by me. I have transliterated some place names and names of peoples and they may not be correct. I have left out all the footnotes.
The first Russian-Jewish intersection may be considered the wars of Kievan Rus with the Khazars – but this is not completely correct, for the Khazars had only leadership from Jewish tribes, and were themselves Turks who had converted to Judaism.
If we believe the account of the respected mid-20th-century Jewish author Yu.D. Brutskus, some Jews resettled from Persia into the Lower Volga through Derbensk, where after 724 AD Itil arose – the capital of the Khazar Kaganat. The tribal leaders of the turko-khazars (still pagans at the time), neither wished to become Muslim, in order not to submit to the Baghdad Caliphate, nor Christian, in order to avoid the tutelage of the Byzantine Empire. Therefore around 732 the tribe accepted the Jewish religion.
There was also a Jewish colony in the Bosporsk Kingdom (Crimea, the Tamansk peninsula), to which Emperor Adrian had settled Jewish captives in 137 after the suppression of Bar-Kakhba. As a result, the Jewish population in Crimea preserved itself under the Goths and under the Huns, and especially Kafa (Kerch) remained Jewish. In 933 Prince Igor took Kerch for a time, and Svyatislav Igorevich conquered the Don Valley from the Khazars. In 969 the Rus already ruled all the Volga region from Itil, and Russian ships appeared by Semender (the Derbensk coast). The remainders of the Khazars are the Kumyks in the Caucasus, and in Crimea they, together with the Polovians, became the Crimean Tatars. (The Karaites and Jewish Krimchaks, on the other hand, did not convert to Mohammedism.)
On the other hand, a series of researchers believe (without strict proof) that a certain number of Jews resettled in eastern and northwestern directions, passing through Russian territory. For instance, the Westernizer and semitologist Avrakham Garkavi writes that the Jewish community in what was to become Russia “was formed by Jews who had resettled from the banks of the Black Sea and the Caucasus, where their ancestors had lived after the Assyrian and Babylonian captivity.” Yu.D. Brutskus has a similar view. (There exists an opinion that they were the descendents of the “lost” tenth tribe of Israel.) Such migration may have ended as late as after the fall of Tmutarakan (1097) from the Polovians. In the opinion of Garkavi, the spoken language of these Jews was Slavic, and only in the 17th century, when Ukrainian Jews fled from the pogroms of Chmelnitsky into Poland, did their language become Yiddish, which Jews in Poland spoke.
Jews came to Kiev through different routes and settled there. Already during the reign of Igor the southern part of the city was called “the Kozars.” In 933 Igor added Jewish captives from Kerch. Then Jewish tribes arrived in 965 from Crimea, in 969 “kozars” from Itil and Semender, in 989 from Korsun (Khersones), and in 1017 from Tmutarakan. Western Jews also appeared in Kiev in connection with the West-East caravan merchant trade, and, possibly, from the end of the ninth century, persecution in Europe during the First Crusade.
These and later researchers confirm the Khazar “Jewish element” in Kiev in the 11th century. Even earlier: at the border of the 9th and 10th centuries the presence of a “Khazar administration and Khazar garrison” is remarked in Kiev. And as early as “the first half of the 9th century the Jewish and Khazar element in Kiev
played a significant role.” The Kiev of the 9th-10th centuries was multinational and ethnically tolerant.
In this way, and the end of the 10th century, when Vladimir was choosing a new faith for the Rus, there was no lack of Jews in Kiev, including scholars who suggested Judaism. But the choice went otherwise than it had in Khazaria 250 years earlier. Karamazin relates it thus: “Having listened to the Jews, [Vladimir] asked: ‘where is your fatherland?’ ‘In Jerusalem,’ answered the missionaries, ‘but God in His anger has scattered us through alien lands.’ ‘And you, having been punished by God, dare to instruct others?’ Vladimir said. ‘We do not wish to lose our fatherland like you have.’” After the conversion of Rus to Christianity, Brutskus adds, some of the Kozar Jews of Kiev converted as well, and even -- perhaps one of them? – one of the first Christian bishops and spiritual writers in Rus, Luka Zhidyata.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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