Books
The birth of the Jews?
Philip Mason
The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage Arthur Koestler (Hutchinson £4.75)
The Khazars between the sixth and tenth centuries AD established an empire north Of the Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian. At its greatest extent, it stretched many hundreds of miles north to the lower slopes of the Urals and west almost to the Carpathians. The area was a meeting-place for waves of migration and conquest. The Khazars traded, fought wars or made alliances—with the Persian Empire and the Arabs, with Turks, Huns and Mongols, with the Eastern Empire at Constantinople and with the Russians. Before the establishment of their empire, they had been subject to the Huns and the Turks; they met and checked the great wave of Islamic conquest in the seventh century and by holding the line of the Caucasus prevented the Arabs from passing round the Black Sea and outflanking Constantinople. Thus, it is argued, they played in the East a Part comparable to that of Charles Martel in the West and saved the Roman empire in the East for seven hundred years.
They were great traders, the Khazars, and at the height of their power so formidable that the Emperors of the East formally allotted them higher diplomatic status than the Pope or Charlemagne, despatches to Whom were assigned two gold seals while those to the Khazars had three. But their empire was eventually broken up by the Norsemen (sometimes called the Varanglans or Rus) who travelled south along the Russian river systems, subduing the Slavonic tribes and forging the Russian nation. The date of the decisive battle was 965 AD; but it is Arthur Koestler's argument that after losing their empire the Khazars remained a people for another three centuries, until a destructive wave of Mongols from central Asia—the Golden Horde under a grandson of Jenghiz Khan—made a desert of the country round the mouths of the Volga s and the Don, destroying the irrigation systems and driving into exile those of the inhabitants they did not kill. But why, you may ask, does Mr Koestler concern himself with this remote people? Ills interest, as you guess, is not merely historical or anthropological. Some time around 740 AD the rulers of the Khazars adopted Judaism as the state religion ; owing to their position between the two great seas, as the meeting place of East and West, South and North, there were Jews, Christians and Muslims at their trading centres and the Khazars began to feel some embarrassment about acknowledging a
religion of the steppes with many gods and no scriptures. Legend says that their King or Khakhan summoned theologians from the three Peoples of the Book and commanded them to argue their case before him. But he was already under strong Jewish influence and, since both Christian and Muslim admitted that there was truth in the Hebrew scriptures, he chose the Jewish faith. Perhaps diplomatic reasons weighed more heavily than theological; he had to preserve a balance between the Khalif at Baghdad and the Emperor at Constantinople. However that may be, the Khazars became Jews—the only case of the conversion of a whole people to a creed so much more accustomed to persecution than to bearing rule.
Mr Koestler's argument continues that when the Mongols destroyed their heartland the Khazars dispersed to other parts of what became Russia, to Hungary and above all to Poland. He produces strong evidence for believing that nearly all the Eastern Jews—the Ashkenazim—are originally of Khazar origin. The Ashkenazim form the great majority—perhaps twelve or thirteen to one—of those professing Judaism, particularly of those in the United States and Israel. The Sephardic or Western Jews (who in Britain form the aristocracy of Jewry because they came from Spain to escape the Inquisition two centuries earlier than the mass of the Ashkenazim) may perhaps, Mr Koestler suggests, be 'true Jews', that is Jews not only by religion but also by descent from the children of Abraham who invaded Canaan. But thirteen Jews out of fourteen are descended from the Khazars, or from tribes subdued by the Khazars, and are of Turkish or 'Caucasian' origin. They are sons ofJapheth and not of Shem.
In support of this historical argument, Mr Koestler summarises in a few pages the evidence of physical anthropology. Whether your criterion is skin colour, stature, shape of the skull, hair formation or blood groups, Jews usually resemble the Gentiles of a country where they have lived three generations or so far more closely than they resemble Jews from another Gentile country where these characteristics are markedly different. In short, Jews from India look more like Indians than like Jews from Poland. (This fairly simple proposition Mr Koestler puts into a mathematical equation which to me is much more difficult to understand and gives a misleading air of exactitude to what is really a matter of averages. But it does of course look nice and scientific.) Even the Jews of the Old Testament were a fairly mixed lot; there would have been no need to preach so many sermons against Canaanitish women if mixture had not occurred.
Mr Koestler argues at the beginning of his book that if he can prove that most Jews are ancestrally derived from the Volga rather than the Jordan 'the term "antisemitism" would become void of meaning, based on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims'. I wish I could share this belief. Anti-semitism is a fact, a phenomenon of mass psychology which has had terrible consequences and which still exists. It is not a rational system of thought which can be demolished at a blow by reason. No one who reads this book—full of fascinating information about the Uzbegs, the Seljuks, the Magyars, the Pechenegs and the Ghuzz—is likely to deny the proposition that Jews are not a race, in the sense of a population distinguished by physical characteristics inherited from a common ancestor. They are distinguished from other people by the culture and religion they inherited, above all by the consciousness of being Jews. But to explain this to the anti-semite will not lessen his animosity.
To be an object of hatred it is enough to be different and to be a threat. The difference need not be racial; no one supposes that the Catholic is racially different from the Orangeman. The threat may lie in the fact that you are markedly more successful and hard-working, or that you are dirty and poor, feckless and inconsequent. There is a task for the statesman—to reduce the threat; there is a task for the educator—to persuade a new generation that it is silly as well as cruel to think like the Orangeman or the Jewbaiter; there will remain a few cases who are a task for the psychiatrist when the statesman and the educator have done their work. This book is part of the educating process. Anti-semitism is already a sign of ignorance and probably of some deep personal inadequacy; this book will help to drive home the lesson. But it will not, I fear, make the term void of meaning.
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