"Real? Inscription By Kabars (Khavars, Khalyzians, Khazars)" Topic

Guys,

I was searching for a completely different type of rock carving* when I came across this:

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"His mansion is famous.
Jüedi Kür Karaite (or Jüedi Kür the Kerei)."

Is that inscription legit? Does it really say that? Can anyone point me to something more on this? Now I'm intrigued.

Thanks,

Dan
* Believe me, I was looking for something completely different:
TMP link

The origins and translation of the inscription are uncertain.

Says the wiki.

It *could* be a legit inscription and a true translation.

Be very careful about discussions of alleged Khazar remains in Magyar historiography. The issue is highly charged with enough nationalist tensions to distort facts. Take Arthur Koestler's novel The Thirteenth Tribe, for example.

Although I am no expert, I have this dumb question: If this inscription was made by or for a Khazar Karaite (Jew), why isn't it written in some form of Hebrew characters, even if the language of the inscription is Turkic?

"If this inscription was made by or for a Khazar Karaite (Jew), why isn't it written in some form of Hebrew characters, even if the language of the inscription is Turkic?"

That alone would not discount it, I think.

Perhaps he was a recent proselyte, or he never had the opportunity to learn Hebrew proficiently? Or maybe he could write in Hebrew characters, but the message was for a non-Hebrew?

Dan
PS. "Arthur Koestler"? I'll check it out. Thanks

I said it could be legitimate, but I raised a valid question.

Here are some things you should know about Koestler and his book.

In the 19th century, Hungarian nationalism became extreme (cf. Hungarian Revolution of 1848) and national minorities in Hungary faced heavy pressure to Magyarize in language, religion and culture. To resist this pressure, Hungarian Jews emphasized the possibility that they descended from Khazar Jews who had settled in Hungary along with the Magyars, and so were both authentically Hungarian and Jewish, different from 'foreign', Polish Jews.

There is limited evidence for Khazar Jewish settlement in eastern Europe. Really, there is very limited evidence about the Khazars over-all. Hungarian Jews were and are not much different in language, culture and religion from Polish Jews, and there is strong evidence linking Polish Jews to the late-Roman Rhineland. The evidence in either direction was hotly debated by representatives of the two Jewish communities, with the prize for the Hungarian Jews being hoped-for acceptance vs. persecution by Hungarian nationalist extremists.

Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian Jewish communist who defected to the west and supported himself by writing novels. In the 1970s he had a world hit with his purported historical work The Thirteenth Tribe.

In TTT, Koestler takes all the stories he heard as a child about Khazars and gives them a twist, arguing that not just Hungarian Jews, but in fact all Polish Jews (Ashkenazim) are principally descended from Khazar refugees.

TTT caught the popular imagination and was very popular in its time. Close examination shows that Koestler had very little evidence to support his arguments: The Khazar Correspondence itself, a few cites from Byzantine and Arab writings, and his other principal source turns out to be 'legend'. At least some of the 'legends' he cites are known to have been deliberately fabricated in the 19th century for political purposes, as the wiki you link to on Karaites indicates.

You should know that political opponents of Zionism have seized on Koestler's book as proving that Askenazim are not of Judean descent, but instead descend mainly from Khazar converts. My own opinion is that, while some Khazar elements were likely absorbed by the Ashkenazim, most evidence points to the late-Roman Rhineland as the region from which most Jews moved to Poland.

This is fascinating stuff!

"My own opinion is that, while some Khazar elements were likely absorbed by the Ashkenazim, most evidence points to the late-Roman Rhineland as the region from which most Jews moved to Poland."

I thought that, as "safe" lines for bulk commerce in the north dwindled along with imperial control, most of the communities would have gradually moved to the south, back toward the Mediterranean where there was still some level of continuity in institutions other than the Church. And that they may have moved back north around the time of Charlemagne? I'm just guessing here.

Dan

Very interesting, Zippyfusenet! Never new the background to the Jewish Khazar concept that I read about in the WRG army lists.

The legendary origin of the Rhineland community is from a coffle of slave women awarded as booty to a cohort of Batavian Auxilia who had served in the Jewish War. The women were kept as barrack room slaves and allowed to raise their children as Jews. Later, teachers came from other lands to educate this degraded remnant of Zion.

It's a legend, but genetic studies have not falsified it. Per the mitochondrial DNA, most Ashkenazim descend from a handfull of women, in the single digits.

This makes all us Ashkenazim bastards and socially inferior to the Sefardim and Mizrachim, who have slavery on their pedigrees no more recently than Egypt.

The Rhine continued to be a major route of trade even after the fall of empire. There was a lively slave trade along the post-Roman Christian/pagan frontier, as early Crusaders raided the heathen German and Slavic tribes. Slaves were a form of livestock, booty that could transport itself. Slave-raiding also had an element of kidnapping for ransom. It was useful to have culturally neutral agents, like Jews, who could operate on both sides of the hostile frontier to arrange ransoms for the better connected captives.

Rhineland Jewish society prospered until the First (Palestinian) Crusade, when Crusader mobs attacked and massacred many communities. At about this time the Kingdom of Poland was Christianizing, and early Polish rulers invited Rhineland Jews to immigrate in order to develop their country. The Poles offered Jews a Charter of Rights that enabled the Ashkenazim to live as a medieval estate. The Charter attracted mass emigration, and endured as long as the ancien regieme in Poland.

BigRedBat, TTT should be readily available, and it's not a bad review of what is known about the Khazars. In particular it covers the Khazar Correspondence pretty well. Just take some of Koestler's wider claims with a shaker of salt.

Would they have been speaking Hebrew? Virtually every Jew in Palestine spoke Aramaic at this time, with many conversant in Greek, and others in Latin.

Hebrew seemed reserved for reading the Torah. It was learned by the young men so as to be able to read in Synagogue, but the every day language was Aramaic.

It seems to me that if Jews moved into Hungary, that the first ones, and for several generations, would be speaking Aramaic, while learning and adopting to the new language of the Khazar.

That's my understanding, anyway. I am open to other evidence on the matter.

V/R

Thanks Zippy, I shall buy a copy!

Aramaic (or Greek) may have been spoken as the day to day language in the Middle East but the communities of the diaspora used a variety of languages based on wherever they initially settled. This created Ladino, Yiddish etc. Further migration could mean that the language was then used in an area where it was unrelated to the local language.

Hebrew was used as a lingua franca between Jewish communities and scholars in different areas since it was learnt for reading the Torah.

We have an Arab traveller's comment that the Khazars used Jewish script. However, this may not have been universal. There is an (outside) chance, if he was unfamiliar with Hebrew, that he mistook the Turkic script for Jewish since it was different to Arabic, Latin and Greek scripts with which he would certainly be familiar.

There is also the possibility that the inscription was made for a non-Jewish audience. It would be a bit redundant to say he was a Karaite if everyone else putting up inscriptions was the same. This particular inscription was found in Transylvania and various theories have been put forward such as it being a Khavar, a group of Khazars who joined the Magyars.

What you fellows are missing is the central role of the Hebrew alphabet (not the Hebrew language) in Diaspora Jewish culture.

At a time when eastern Europe was a pre-literate society, Jews had a big advantage conducting business because nearly every Jewish boy and many of the girls learned primary literacy and numeracy in the Hebrew alphabet. They were taught in a system of village primary schools present throughout the Diaspora, known in Yiddish as Chedarim, "chambers" or "rooms".

The purpose of the Cheder was theoretically to begin a child's study of Hebrew scriptures, but few advanced that far. Most children attended school for just a few years, long enough to learn to read the Hebrew alphabet phonetically. Most Jews learned no more than a smattering of prayer-book Hebrew – but nearly all men could write their native languages, Yiddish, Laddino, Turkic, Tat…phonetically in Hebrew characters.

So. A Christian nobleman or peasant might be a shrewd trader, but he could only do business face-to-face, at a fair or when a travelling business agent (usually a Jew) came to buy his crop or his livestock. Any contract he made could only be oral, carried in the memories of the hand-sworn witnesses. When the witnesses died, so did his contract.

A Jew, on the other hand, could keep a simple set of books, could write up a contract. Years after the witness' death, the contract could be read and signatures verified. A Jew could write a letter to friends or relatives in a far city, and get back important news, "It looks like there will be a war in Bavaria this year. The Prussian and Austrian agents are in town, buying up all the cattle and horses, spending good silver. Send me every beast that can walk, right away, and I'll get us a good price."

The advantage was so great that Jews formed practically the entire business class in eastern Europe and some other pre-literate regions for centuries, until the Enlightenment brought wide-spread primary education to these societies. And then the Ashkenazim became redundant.

Use of the Hebrew alphabet was one of the biggest advantages that the Khazars gained by converting to Judaism. If this inscription had been made in Hebrew letters, I would agree that it was made by a Jew, or by someone who was taught by a Jew. There are a lot of reasons it could have been written in Turkish characters…but you have to explain it to me. It doesn't seem natural.

Wow,interesting stuff!

Zip: "The legendary origin of the Rhineland community is from a coffle of slave women awarded as booty to a cohort of Batavian Auxilia who had served in the Jewish War. The women were kept as barrack room slaves and allowed to raise their children as Jews. Later, teachers came from other lands to educate this degraded remnant of Zion."

QUESTIONS:

1) Was the Roman hereditary profession/trade law (I really can't remember what it was called) already in effect around that time?

2). If so, would it have applied to the illegitimate offspring of the Batavian soldiers?

Thanks,

Dan

Hi Zippy.

Look again at the last paragraph I wrote as an idea for why a Jew may have been commemorated in a non-Hebrew inscription. With the Khavars being a minority group in the Magyar invasion there is more reason why the inscription may have been in this fashion.

CC, Jerusalem fell in 70 and the war was completely over by 74. The Roman laws binding a son to his father's profession were not made until the 3rd century and later, when the Empire was losing population to plague and war.

Swampster, what you suggest is certainly possible.

What an interesting thread.

Zippy you say

"The legendary origin of the Rhineland community is from a coffle of slave women awarded as booty to a cohort of Batavian Auxilia who had served in the Jewish War. The women were kept as barrack room slaves and allowed to raise their children as Jews."

And then "There is limited evidence for Khazar Jewish settlement in eastern Europe. Really, there is very limited evidence about the Khazars over-all. Hungarian Jews were and are not much different in language, culture and religion from Polish Jews, and there is strong evidence linking Polish Jews to the late-Roman Rhineland.

What is the strong evidence "linking Polish Jews to the late-Roman Rhineland"?

More than anything, the Yiddish language links Polish Jews to the Rhineland. It's derived from a medieval Rhenish dialect of German.

The Khazars are reported to have spoken a Turkic language. There is no evidence they ever changed it. King Joseph had a court scribe who could read and write Hebrew, but there is no reason to think the king was fluent in that language, or Aramaic, or any but his own.

If Khazars moved in any numbers into greater Poland, I'd expect them either to keep their own language, or adopted the Polish language that their new neighbors spoke. I would not expect them to take up a completely foreign language spoken only hundreds of miles to the west by people they had never met.

If for some reason the Khazars changed their language to a dialect of German, why not pick an eastern German dialect that they might at least have heard once in a while?

In The Thirteenth Tribe Koestler tries to rationalize a Turkic-to-German language change for his Khazar immigrants to Poland. In my opinion he fails at this. It just doesn't make sense.

I think the Yiddish language was brought to Poland by medieval Jewish immigrants from the Rhineland, who came in such numbers that they never assimilated to the Polish language, but preserved their own German dialect as a living language for hundreds of years.

Another argument, not as strong, is that some link the Khazars to later, very small, groups of Karaite Jews in eastern Europe. Polish Jews were overwhelmingly Rabbanate Jews, with only very small numbers of Karaites known.

But this is a weaker argument, because we know so little about the Khazars. There is considerable doubt whether they converted to Judaism in large numbers, or whether the conversion was limited only to the royal court and clan, with most of the tribe remaining pagan or adopting other religions. For instance, it was reported that the Khazar capital city, Itil, contained 12 mosques but only 1 synagogue. We don't really know how Jewish the Khazars actually were, let alone what particular kind of Jews.

I think the Yiddish language is the clincher.

My own family name, Horowitz, is a common name among Polish Jews in several forms (Herovitz, Gurevich, others). It comes from the name of a town in Bohemia, Horovice. I am told that Horovice is the market town for a range of hills called the Horoff.

The history (at this point it's no longer legend, there are records) is that in the early 12th century a Rabbi who was also a wealthy merchant travelled with his family and goods from Moorish Spain to Bohemia and bought the town of Horovice. Apparently he was treated much like any other landlord, in spite of being a Jew. There's a coat-of-arms that seems to be authentic. He used the town as base of operations for trading into the Polish lands that were opening up, and farther to the east. His family took the name of the town for their own.

Of course most of us of the name are probably descended from servants and shirt-tail relatives, not from the great man himself. Perhaps some of us just took the name because it was respectable. The earliest ancestors I'm sure of in my direct line were a pair of orphaned brothers with no money and no prospects, far from Horovice.

But my point is that all the movement in this story is from west to east, into Poland. No Khazars.

A 2012 genetic study apparently found a substantial Caucasian (as in, from the Caucasus, not in the = White sense) ancestry:

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This is presented as evidence for the Khazar hypothesis, which strikes me as a little bit weird, or at least in need of explanation; AFAIK, the Khazar heartland was well to the north.

Thanks for the link Andreas. I read the abstract, read the article, googled Dr. Elhaik's name and read up on the controversy that his article raised…Dr. Elhaik comes off as more professional than many of his critics, some of whom are quite shrill.

Still, the critics make some points about the author's lack of qualifications to write this paper: Dr. Elhaik is not a population geneticist, he specializes in medical research, he is not a historian. For these reasons Johns Hopkins would not fund his research. A Saudi source funded him. That about sums up the ad-hominem attacks on Dr. Elhaik.

I agree with you that the Khazars were Turks, that their heartland lay north and west of the Caucasus in the Don valley, although King Joseph claimed to hold the Iron Gates of the Caucasus as part of his empire. Therefore, modern Caucasian populations may not be good genetic proxies for Dark Ages Khazars.

Dr. Elhaik presumes that modern Caucasians descend principally from Khazar survivors, but this is certainly false. The Caucasian mountains have been a refuge for peoples for thousands of years, and Khazar fugitives would have added Turkic elements to the pre-existing mosaic.

Most importantly, Dr. Elhaik seems unaware that most modern near-eastern people have a Caucasian component to their genotypes, dating from very ancient times, possibly acquired from very early populations whose survivors are found today in the Caucasus. So the 'Caucasian' element that Dr. Elhaik has identified in Ashkenazi genotypes might have come to Poland from either direction; might have arrived directly from the steppes to the east, or might have come from the opposite direction, from the Levant by means of a Jewish population who moved to western Europe.

Got to go to work. Post more later.

Hmm. Instead of thinking in absolute terms …

As an aside, after the Huns defeated the Goths in Russia/Ukraine in 376 AD, could a remnant of "German"- speakers have remained in Scythia?

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Or, perhaps like those Goths we know of from history, could there have been subsequent bands of "German"-speakers that could have migrated from "Scandza" into the Russian/Ukraine area after the Gothic Empire fell to the Huns? If it happened before, could it have happened again later (but long before the Rus)?

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Just curious. Not implying any connection to the Karaites, Khazars or anything.

Dan

There were Gothic speaking remnants in the Crimea over a thousand years after the Hunnic invasion.
If you are thinking this may have been a source for Yiddish then it seems the wrong form of German. Rhineland seems to be the origin.

IIRC, a lot of settlers who moved east in mid- Middle ages were from the Rhineland. I think the 'Saxons' in Hungary were more likely to be from much further west but the Hungarians lumped them in with the people they already knew.

Back again.

I'm not a professional historian, but have read enough on this topic to have opinions about some of Dr. Elhaik's sources and historiography.

One of Elhaik's historical sources is Koestler The Thirteenth Tribe. I have given my evaluation of Koestler above – his book is at best pop history.

Another cited source is Shlomo Sand The Invention of the Jewish People. Sand is very up front with his own agenda. Sand is an Israeli and a Zionist who wants to resolve Arab/Israeli hostilities by absorbing Palestinian Arabs into a new Israeli nationality – a one-state solution. Sand's purpose in writing his book is to show that such a project, the construction of a Jewish people from disparate foreign elements including many converts, was done once and so could be done again in our time.

I admire Sand's idealism but I doubt his history. Like Koestler, he is inclined to take as fact claims that are far from established. In particular, Sand behaves as if he had accurate census numbers for Roman provinces when he is really working with estimates. 'Since the population of Judea was so small while these foreign Jewish communities were so big, the overseas Jewish populations must be overwhelmingly the result of conversion.' Well, no. There was certainly conversion on a large scale, but I don't accept the numbers given. There's an agenda at work here.

Dr. Elhaik uses dates and numbers for the 'Rhineland Hypothesis' (of Ashkenazi origins) that make this hypothesis seem less likely. I disagree with the dates and numbers he uses:

"The "Rhineland hypothesis" envisions modern European Jews to be the descendents of the Judeans—an assortment of Israelite–Canaanite tribes of Semitic origin…It proposes two mass migratory waves: the first occurred over the 200 years following the Muslim conquest of Palestine (638 CE) and consisted of devoted Judeans who left Muslim Palestine for Europe (Dinur 1961). Whether these migrants joined the existing Judaized Greco–Roman communities is unclear, as is the extent of their contribution to the Southern European gene pool. The second wave occurred at the beginning of the 15th century by a group of 50,000 German Jews who migrated eastward and ushered an apparent hyper-baby-boom era for half a millennium…"

My own opinion is that large numbers of Judeans were dispersed to all Roman provinces in the first century, long before the Muslim conquest, as captives following the Jewish Wars. While Judea was never depopulated, large scale enslavements were a feature of Roman warfare, and the numbers transported must certainly have been in the tens of thousands, possibly in the hundreds of thousands. There was more than one Jewish War: three major rebellions in Judea over three generations, culminating in the Bar Kochba Rebellion, and major wars in other lands that had large Jewish populations: Alexandria, Cyrenaica, Cyprus. No doubt hundreds of thousands of slaves were taken, in the aggregate.

These very slaves are claimed to be the founders of the Rhineland Jewish community. I expect that the Jewish slave diaspora in the first century had much influence on the spread and development of the Christian religion.

On Elhaik's second point, my own family history shows Rhineland Jews and others from the west moving into Poland hundreds of years before the 15th century.

I think there was time for a Judean Jewish population to reach Poland from the west and grow.

On the other hand, Elhaik uncritically accpts maximalist claims about Khazaria:

"Jewish presence in the Caucasus and later Khazaria was recorded as early as the late centuries BCE and reinforced due to the increase in trade along the Silk Road (fig. 1), the decline of Judah (1st–7th centuries), and the uprise of Christianity and Islam (Polak 1951). Greco–Roman and Mesopotamian Jews gravitating toward Khazaria were also common in the early centuries and their migrations were intensified following the Khazars' conversion to Judaism (Polak 1951; Brook 2006; Sand 2009). The eastward male-driven migrations (fig. 7) from Europe to Khazaria solidified the exotic Southern European ancestry in the Khazarian gene pool (fig. 5), and increased the genetic heterogeneity of the Judeo–Khazars. The religious conversion of the Khazars encompassed most of the empire's citizens and subordinate tribes and lasted for the next 400 years (Polak 1951; Baron 1993) until the invasion of the Mongols (Polak 1951; Dinur 1961; Brook 2006). At the final collapse of their empire (13th century), many of the Judeo–Khazars fled to Eastern Europe and later migrated to Central Europe and admixed with the neighboring populations."

"After the decline of their empire, the Judeo–Khazars refugees sought shelter in the emerging Polish kingdom and other Eastern European communities where their expertise in economics, finances, and politics was valued. Prior to their exodus, the Judeo–Khazar population was estimated to be half a million in size, the same as the number of Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian kingdom four centuries later (Polak 1951; Koestler 1976)."

There is simply no evidence in the archaeological record for *mass* Jewish migrations into Khazaria, or *mass* conversions taking place there. If there was a Judeo-Khazar population of half a million, where are their ritual baths in the archaeological record? Ritual baths, mikvehs in Yiddish, are a clear marker of Jewish settlement. By Jewish law, one of the first things a community must do is build a ritual bath, a pool filled by 'living water' big enough to totally immerse the body. Without a mikveh, an observant Jew can't ritually purify himself, or even have sex with his wife. You bet they built a mikveh right away. Mikvehs are found in the archaeology everywhere that Jews have lived.

Where have mikvehs been found in Khazaria?

I think Dr. Elhaik has made an interesting discovery, of a 'Caucasian' component in the Ashkenazi genotype, but it doesn't prove what he thinks it proves. It doesn't prove the primacy of the Khazar hypothesis.

Oh, here's Dr. Elhaik's explanation for Yiddish:

"Yiddish, the language of Central and Eastern European Jews, began as a Slavic language that was relexified to High German at an early date (Wexler 1993)."

Fail. I speak Yiddish, haltingly, and studied HochDeutsch in high school. Yiddish is *not* a Slavic language. Yiddish grammar is German. Yiddish vocabulary is 90% German, with the rest being about half Slavic and half Hebrew.

@zippyfusenet: I'd just like to thank you for your input here: most interesting. :)

very erudite discussion here!