The History Of The Turkish Khazars People

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• published: 07 Jun 2015
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The Khazars (Turkish: Hazarlar, Tatar: Xäzärlär, Hebrew: כוזרים (Kuzarim), Arabic: خزر‎ (khazar), Russian: Хазары, Persian: خزر‎, Greek: Χάζαροι, Latin: Gazari /Cosri /Gasani) were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who created what for its duration was the most powerful polity to emerge from the breakup of the western Turkish steppe empire, known as the Khazar Khanate or Khazaria. Astride a major artery 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 Kievan Rus'. 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 Sasanian Persian empire. The alliance was dropped around 900. 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 the 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, Khazar royalty and notable segments of the aristocracy converted to Judaism; the populace appears to have been multi-confessional—a mosaic of pagan, Tengrist, Jewish, Christian and Muslim worshippers—and polyethnic. 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, Kazakhs, Nogais, the Cossacks of the Don region, the Turkic-speaking Krymchaks and their Crimean neighbours the Karaites to the Moldavian Csángós, the Mountain Jews and others. A modern theory, that the core of Ashkenazi Jewry emerged from a hypothetical Khazarian Jewish diaspora, is now viewed with scepticism by most scholars, but occasionally supported by others. This Khazarian hypothesis is sometimes associated with antisemitism and anti-Zionism. 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 characters different from those 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. In Expositio in Matthaeum Evangelistam, Khazars are referred to as the Hunnic descendants of Gog and Magog and said to be circumcised and observing all the laws of Judaism. 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.