G
Chris Doss wrote:
>
> 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
>
> ---
>
> 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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--
Gary Williams
"Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." - John Stuart Mill
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