University
of Nebraska Press
Shofar
- Books Received
Shofar
- Advertising &
Mailing List Info
Shofar
- Book Reviews |
The Jews of Khazaria, by Kevin Alan Brook. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 317 pp. $44.00.
The Khazar khagan was the Prester John of the Jewish diaspora towards the end of the first millennium, above all for the Jewish intelligentsia of Umayyad Spain, one of whom managed to make contact with him. The Khazars were reckoned (quite rightly) to be a great steppe power, capable of combatting the Muslim caliphate on equal terms. Well-read rabbis remembered them in later centuries. Then, in 1976, the arcane interest of a small scholarly coterie was suddenly drawn to the attention of a wider public by Arthur Koestler, with the publication of his The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage. Kevin Alan Brook, thirty years on, strives, with considerable success, to satisfy the appetite for information about the Khazars which Koestler generated. The Jews of Khazaria is, in essence, a compendium of information gathered from every available source, with the help of an army of scholars with Khazar interests and of translators from German, Swedish, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Hebrew.
The information is extracted from primary sources—Arabic, Armenian, Byzantine, Latin, Slavonic and Hebrew—and from a large array of intermediary scholarly works. Between them the chapters hoover up all the information which lies scattered in the public domain. They are arranged as follows: (1) origins, (2) urban settlements, (3) institutional development, (4) material and immaterial culture, (5) economy, (6) conversion to Judaism (the most important and most useful of the chapters), (7) foreign relations (principally with Arabs, Byzantines, and Hungarians), (8) Russian destruction of the khaganate, (9) evidence of Khazar survivals in eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus (north and south) and elsewhere, and (10) the Khazar contribution to Ashkenazi Jewry (judged to be small but significant in the last and longest chapter).
The general line can be characterised as positive. Brook is a vicarious Khazar patriot. He follows the general thrust of the specialist literature, which still bears a strong imprint from the Soviet era. So, for him, the Khazar khaganate was economically advanced and well developed institutionally, its territory dotted with towns and villages. The Khazars proper are portrayed as ruling over a multi-ethnic empire, comprising Caucasian Alans, Hungarians, Pechenegs, Volga Bulgars, Crimea Goths, and a number of Slav tribes. Their conversion to Judaism is placed in a context of long-established neighboring Jewish communities (notably in the Crimean and the Taman peninsula). The critical stage, namely the conversion of the beg, in effect the chief operating officer who reported to the khagan, is dated to the 830s. Although there are conflicting testimonies about the degree of Jewish penetration, Brook comes down firmly on the side of the maximalists. For him a majority of the Khazars were Jews by the middle of the tenth century, when the Russians attacked and the Khazars’ world collapsed.
In no sense can The Jews of Khazaria be classified as a work of haute vulgarisation. For it is information which Brook seeks to gather and to convey, and he is not concerned with the manner in which he does so. Evidence is presented as it might be in court, item by item, rather than being articulated in argumentative flows. Clarity is the aim, not elegance of expression. It is in effect a printed version of a website. But there are problems in trying to produce an authoritative and comprehensive website in print. First it is fixed. It can no longer be updated as new information becomes available, save by a new edition after a considerable delay. It was singularly unfortunate, then, that Brook published the second edition of his book during the long hiatus between the holding of a first international colloquium of Khazar Studies in Jerusalem in 1999, and the publication of some of the papers (P.B. Golden, H. Ben-Shammai & A. Róna-Tas, ed., The World of the Khazars [Leiden-Boston, 2007]). It was an extraordinarily exciting meeting, at which, for the first time, there was a concerted effort by specialists to exchange ideas, debate issues, and formulate new theories, or, at any rate, ask new questions.
The second problem, of which Brook is well aware, is that scholars are by nature contrary. They like to disagree with one another. There is a premium on originality, on coming up with new theses, on criticizing or modifying those of others. The general sound generated is cacophanous, making it virtually impossible for a listener, even one as assiduous as Brook, to produce a recording with a melodic line. He has to register all the clashing notes, even those generated by scholars who take quirkiness to an extreme.
Third, there is an ever-present danger that a website will isolate a field of inquiry from its neighbours. In this case, both the spread of Judaism into the central Asian steppes and Khazar state construction are put in contexts, but the contexts are dealt with too sketchily and are too narrowly defined.
The rise of the Khazars in the steppes north of the Caucasus is correctly placed in the aftermath of the implosion of the first trans-Eurasian empire, that of the Turks, around the year 630, the Khazars ultimately gaining the upper hand over the Bulgars in a struggle for regional pre-eminence in the steppes north of the Caspian, Caucasus and Black Sea (by the 660s). Note is also taken of the roughly contemporary transformation of the southern sedentary world by Islam in the 630s and 640s (but with the Arab conquest of Persia dated a decade too early). But nothing is said of nomadic statecraft and governmental institutions, which were developed in the inner Asian frontiers of China in the course of centuries of confrontation and interaction between the nomadic and sedentary worlds. Without background information about the structures of the Xiung-nu (Hun) and Turkish empires, the student of matters Khazar is hard put to make sense of all the data preserved, mainly in Arab, Byzantine, and Hebrew sources, about Khazar offices, taxation, military affairs and client-management. It also becomes hard to understand how the Khazar khaganate survived so long as a major player in west Eurasian affairs.
As one of the historians who contributes to the scholarly cacophany, I could expound my own theory that the Scandinavian adventurers (the first Russians or Rus) who colonized vast tracts of eastern Europe from the late eighth century were operating within the northern Khazar sphere of influence and were subjected to light Khazar control. It is a theory which can explain the existence of a khagan of the Rus (he was, of course, the Khazar khagan) and also the multiplication of small political centres among the Rus (division and dispersal serving the interest of the higher imperial power). Perhaps Kevin Alan Brook will pick it up in the third edition of The Jews of Khazaria. For the moment, though, he should be complimented on the trouble which he has taken to assemble so much information, out of so many disparate sources. He has provided a useful reference work for all those intrigued by the most striking single case of successful Jewish proselytism, as well as for those interested in the affairs of one of the four great powers of western Eurasia in the early middle ages.
James Howard-Johnston
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
|
