The Khazar Polemic

In light of the recent post on debates between Jesuits and Buddhists at the court of the Mongols, and a recent question from Lisa as to whether I could recommend any book capable of sustaining the moods of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, I think the following is appropriate.
I owe the reference to my brother, who continues to keep me alive to the possibilities in literature.

…And so it was that a Moslem, a Jewish, and a Christian divine—a dervish, a rabbi, and a monk---were to be found at the khagan’s summer residence. Each received a knife made of salt as a gift from the kaghan, and they began their debate. The sages’ viewpoints, their contest based on the tenets of their three different faiths, the characters involved in, and the outcome of the “Khazar polemic” aroused keen interest and strongly conflicting opinions about the event and its consequences, the victors and the vanquished, and through the centuries they became the subject of repeated debate in Hebrew, Christian and Moslem circles; all this continues to the present, although the Khazars have long since ceased to exist. (p4, Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic).


I recommend the Dictionary of the Khazars to all; especially the female version, available as such, at all good booksellers.


In the spirit of the novel, I thought including here the entries found under “khazar polemic” is appropriate.



KHAZAR POLEMIC (Jewish Sources)
Hebrew sources cite this as the key event in the Khazar's conversion to Judaism. Since accounts of the event are scarce and contradictory, the exact date of the polemic is unknown, and the time of Judaization is confused with the moment when the three dream interpreters visited the Khazar Capital. The earliest preserved account, dating from the 10th century, is the correspondence between the Khazar Kaghan Joseph (who already practiced Judaism) and Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, the minister of the caliph in Cordoba. Hasdai was a Jew and had asked the kaghan to describe the circumstances under which the Khazars had adopted the Jewish faith. According to this correspondence, it all took place under the reign of Kaghan Bulan, and the invitation of an angel, right after the capture of Ardabil (around 731). It was then, if this source is to be believed, that a debate on religions was conducted the the court of the Khazar kaghan. Since the Jewish envoy bested the Greek and Arab representatives, the Khazars adopted Judaism under Kaghan Bulan's successor, Obadiah. The second source is a fragment of a Jewish letter found in 1912 in Cambridge, England. It comes from a manuscript belonging to a the Cairo Synagogue (ed. Schechter). The letter was written in approximately 950 by a Jew of Khazar origin to Minister Shaprut, as a supplement to Kaghan Bulan's letter to the same personage at the court of Cordoba. This source contends that the Judaization of the Khazars took place before the polemic and that happened as follows:
A non-practicing Jew returned from war a hero and became the Khazar kaghan. His wife and her father expected that he would now accept the faith of his forefathers, but he himself said nothing. The turning point (according to Daubmannus) came one evening when the kaghan's wife said to him:
Beneath the heavenly equator in the valleys where the sweet and saline dew meet, there grows a huge poisonous fungus, and the tasty little edible mushrooms on its cap transform its contaminated blood into sweetness. The deer like to invigorate their masculine strength by nibbling these mushrooms. But if they are careless and bite down too deep, the ingest some of the big poisonous fungus along with the little mushrooms, and then they die.
Every evening, when I kiss my beloved, I think: It is only natural that one day I will bite down to deep . . . .
Upon hearing these words, the kaghan began practicing Judaism. All this transpired before the polemic, which, according to this source, took place during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Leo III (717-740). After the polemic, Judaism became fully established among the Khazars and neighboring peoples during the reign of Kaghan Sabriel, who is one and the same person with Kaghan Obadiah, because (according to Daubmannus) he was called Sabriel during the even years and Obadiah during the odd years of his rule.
The most exhaustive Hebrew source on the Khazar polemic is also the most important, although it is of a later date. This is the book Al Khazari by Judah Halevi, the famous poet and chronicler of the Khazar polemic. He says that the polemic and the Khazar's conversion to the Jewish faith took place four centuries before the writing of his book, which would take place in the year 740. Finally, there is Bacher, who found that the impact of the Khazars Judaization is reflected in midrash literature. The legends that told about the event especially flourished in the Crimea, the Taman peninsula, and Tamatarkha, known as a Jewish city in the Khazar Empire.
Briefly, the event that was these sources' object of interest took place in the following way. In the summer capital of the kaghan, on the Black Sea, where they whitewashed the pears on their branches in the autumn and picked them fresh in the winter, three theologians were brought together: a Jewish rabbi, a Christian monk, and an Arab mullah. The kaghan informed them of his decision to convert, along with all his people, to the religion of the one theologian who gave the most satisfactory interpretation of the dream. An angel had appeared in the Khazar kaghan's dream and had said to him: "God is pleased by your intentions, but not by your deeds." The debate centered on these words and the Hebrew sources cited by Daubmannus describe the further course of events.
The Hebrew representative, Rabbi Isaac Sangari, said nothing at first, letting the other two, the Greek and the Arab, speak first. When it seemed that the kaghan was about to be swayed by the arguments of the Islamic representative, a Khazar princess by the name of Ateh joined in the discussion, admonishing the Arab in these words:
You are too wise when you speak to me. I watch the clouds drift and disappear behind the mountains and recognize them in fleeting thoughts. Tears sometimes trickle from them, but thin the brief hours when the clouds part I see a patch of clear sky with your face at the bottom, because it is only there to prevent me from seeing you as you are.
In reply, the mullah told the kaghan that he was not suggesting any kind of trickery to the Khazars, but, rather, he was suggesting a holy book, the Koran, because the Khazars did not have a the Holy Book: we have all learned to walk because we are made out of two lame legs, but you are still limping.
Princes Ateh the asked the Arab:
Every book has a father and a mother. There is the father, who dies impregnating the mother and who gives the child a name. and the there is the (book's) mother, who gives birth to the child, nurses it, and releases it into the world. Who is the mother of your Divine Book?
While the Arab was unable to answer this question, merely repeating that he was not suggesting trickery, he was suggesting the Holy Book, which is the messenger of love between God and man, Princess Ateh wound up the discussion with these words:
The Persian shah and the Greek emperor decided to exchange lavish gifts as a sign of piece. One gift-bearing legislation set out from Constantinople and the other from Isfhan. They met in Baghdad, where they learned that Nadir, the Persian shah, had been deposed, and that the Greek emperor had died. The two legislations were thus compelled to stay in Baghdad for a while, not knowing what to do with the treasures they were bearing, and fearing for their lives at every step. Seeing that bit by bit they were beginning to spend the treasure, they consulted on what to do. One of them said:
Whatever we do will be wrong. So let us each take one ducat and throw away the rest. . . ."
Which is what they did.
And what are we to do with our love, the love we send one another through our messengers? Will that too not remain in the hands of our messengers how take a ducat each and throw away the rest?
Having heard her words, the kaghan decided that the princess was right, and he rejected the Arab, saying, as quoted by Halevi:
"Why do Christians and Moslems, who have divided the inhabited part of the world between them, war against one another, each serving his own god of pure intent, by fasting and praying like monks and recluses? And they accomplish everything by killing, believing that this is the most devout way to bring them closer to God. They wage war, believing that heaven and eternal bliss will be their reward. Yet not both convictions can be accepted."
The kaghan reached the following conclusion:
"Your caliph has fleets of green-sailed ships and soldiers who chew on both sides. If we cross over to his religion, how many Khazars will be left? It is better for us, since convert we must, to join the Jews expelled by the Greeks, to join the poor and wandering who came here from Khorezm during the time of the Kitibia. The only army is what they can fit into a temple or onto a scroll."
The kaghan then turned to the Hebrew representative and asked him what he had to say about his religion. Rabbi Isaac Sangari replied that the Khazars did not have to convert to a new religion at all: they could keep their old one. His words caused general surprise, so the rabbi explained:
"You are not Khazars. You are Jews and should return to your rightful place: to the living God of your ancestors."
Only then did the rabbi begin to expound on his teachings to the kaghan. The days dripped like rain, and he talked and talked. First he told the kaghan about the seven things created before the creation of the world: the Torah, justice, Israel, the Throne of Glory, Jerusalem, and the Messiah, the son of David. Then he enumerated the most exalted things: the spirit of living God, air from the spirit, water from the wind, and fire from the water. And then he listed the three mothers: in the universe--air, water, and fire; in the soul--the chest, stomach, and head; in the year--moisture, frost, and heat. And the seven: 'beth', 'gimel', 'daleth', 'kaf', 'peh', 'resh', and 'tav', which are :in the universe--Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, and the moon: in the soul--wisdom, wealth, power, life, mercy, progeny, and peace; and in the year--Sabbath, Thursday, Tuesday, Sunday, Friday, Wednesday, and Monday. . . .
And the kaghan began to understand the language spoken to Adam by God in heaven, and he said: "The wine I am pressing now will be drunk by others after me."
The kaghan's lengthy talks with Rabbi Isaac con be found in Judah Halevi's book on the Khazars, where the kaghan's conversion is described in the following way:
"Afterward, says the history of the Khazars, the Khazar kaghan departed with his vizier for the barren mountains by the sea. One night the came upon a cave where some Jews were celebrating Passover. They told them who they were, adopted their faith, were circumcised in the cave, and then returned home, eager to learn Jewish law. But they kept their conversion secret until the occasion presented itself for them to disclose the entire affair slowly to a handful of intimate friends. When the number of these friends increased, they made it public and persuaded the rest of the Khazars to adopt the Jewish faith. They sent for teachers and books from other countries and began studying the Torah . . . ."
In fact, the Khazars' conversion to Judaism evolved in two phases. The first came immediately after the Khazar victory over the Arabs at Ardabil, south of the Caucasus, in the year 730, when they used the plundered booty to build a temple modeled after the biblical one. In approximately 740, Judaism was adopted in certain extra forms. Kaghan Bulan invited rabbis from other countries to cultivate the Jewish faith among the Khazars. This early Judaism of the Khazars appears to have included the Khorezm people, who, when the Hursat Uprising was crushed, had fled in the sixties or eighties of the 8th century to the Khazar court, led by the rabbi.
The reform of this original Judaism was undertaken around the year 800, by Kaghan Obadiah, who began building synagogues and schools, where the Khazars learned about the Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, and Jewish liturgy: in other words, rabbinical Judaism was introduced.
In a way, the Arabs played a decisive role in the entire process. Leading figures in Khazar state adopted Judaism a time when Islamic influence had declined because of the power struggle between two dynasties in the Arab caliphate--the Omayyad and the Abbasid. Consequently, Masudi's claim that the king of the Khazars became a Jew during the reign of Caliph Harun Al-Rashid (786-809) checks out with the time of reform of Judaism undertaken by the Khazar Kaghan Obadiah.




KHAZAR POLEMIC (Islamic Sources)

Dimasci writes that during the polemic, which was to decide what confession the Khazar were to adopt, there was great unrest in the land. During the debate at the sumptuous court of the Khazar kaghan, the Khazar state started to walk. It was completely in motion. Nobody could meet anybody twice in the same place. A witness saw a crowd of people carrying huge rocks and asking: Where should we put them? They were the frontier stones of the Khazar Empire, the boundary markers. For Princess Ateh had ordered that boundary markers be carried, that they not touch the ground until it was decided what would happen to the Khazar faith. Exactly when this happened has not been established, but Al-Bakri notes that the Khazars adopted Islam before other religions, and that this was in the year 737 after Isa. Whether the conversion to Islam coincided with the polemic is a different question. It obviously. Thus, the year of the polemic remains unknown, but its essence is perfectly clear. Under strong pressure to adopt one of three religions--Islam, Christianity, or Judaism--the kaghan summoned the his court three learned men--a Jew who had been expelled from the caliphate, a Greek theologist from the university in Constantinople, and one of the Arab interpreters of the Koran. The Latter, named Farabi Ibn Kora , was the last to join the polemic, because he had trouble getting to the kaghan's court. Therefore, the first to speak were the Christian and Hebrew representatives, and the Greek began winning the kaghan over to his side. A man with soupy eyes and freckled hair, he sat at the royal table and said:

"In a barrel the most important thing is the hole; in a jug, what is not the jug; in the soul, what is not man; in the head, what is not the head, which is to say the word . . . . Now, listen, you who do not feed on silence.

"Unlike the Saracens or Jews, in giving you the cross we Greeks will not take your word as security. You are not required to take up our Greek language with the cross; on the contrary, you may keep your Khazar language. But know that this will not be the case if you adopt Judaism or the law of Mohammed. If you adopt either of those religions, you will also have to adopt their language."

Upon hearing these words, the kaghan was prepared to accept the tenets of the Greek, but then Princess Ateh spoke up and said:

A man who sells birds to me that living in a town on the Caspian shores are two renowned artists--a father and a son. The father is a painter, the man told me, and you will recognize his work by seeing the bluest of all blues you have even seen. His son is a poet, and you will recognize his poems by feeling that you have heard them before, not from someone else, but from a plant or animal. . . .

I put on my traveling rings and set out for the Caspian shores. When I reached the town, I made inquires and found the two men. I recognized them immediately from the bird vendor's description: the father painted glorious pictures, and the son wrote marvelous poems in a lovely, entirely unknown (to me) language. I liked them both but they also liked me and asked: "Which of the two of us will you choose?"

"I have chosen the son," I told them, "because he doesn't need a translator."

But the Greek would not let himself be pulled by the earring, and remarked that we humans are whole because we are made of two who are lame, and that women can see because they are composed of two who are one-eyed. As an illustration he told the following story:

When I was a young man, I fell in love with a girl. She didn't notice me, but I didn't give up, and one evening I spoke of my love so passionately to Sofia (that was her name) that she embraced me and I felt her tears on my cheek. I immediately knew from their taste that she was blind, but that didn't bother me. We were still embracing when suddenly horse hoofs could be heard thudding through the nearby woods.

"Is that a white horse whose hoofs can be heard through our kisses?" she asked me.

"We don't and won't know," I replied, "until it comes out of the forest."

"You haven't understood a thing," she said, and at that moment a white horse emerged from the woods.

"Yes, I have, I've understood everything," I responded and asked her the color of my eyes.

"Green," she said.

"Look, my eyes are blue. . . ."

The kaghan was impressed by the Greek representative's story, and he was on the verge of adopting the Christian God when, sensing what was happening, Princess Ateh decided to leave. Before going, she turned to the kaghan and said:

This morning my master asked me whether I felt in my heart as he did in his. I had long nails with silver thimbles that whistled and I was smoking nargileh, blowing green smoke rings.

In answer to my master's question, I replied, "No!"--and my pipe dropped from my mouth.

My master departed, disheartened, because he didn't know that as I watched him go I was thinking: It would have been the same had I said yes!

The kaghan flinched at these words and realized that, although the Greek was wearing the voice of an angel instead of shoes, the truth was on the other side. Finally he turned to the caliph's man, Farabi Ibn Kora, and asked him for his interpretation of the dream he had dreamed on one of the previous nights. An angel had come to him in his dream with the message that God was pleased by his intentions, but not by his deeds. Then Farabi Ibn Kora asked the kaghan:

"In your dream, was it an angel of recognition or an angel of revelation? Did it appear in the form of an apple tree or something else?"

When the kaghan answered it had been neither, Ibn Kora remarked:

"Of course it was neither, because it was a third angel. That third angel is Adam Ruhani, and you and your priests are trying to lift yourselves up to him. Those are your intentions, and they are good. But you are trying to achieve this by conceiving Adam as a book being written by your dreams and your dream hunters <../red/hunter.htm> . Those are your intentions and they are wrong, for you perform them by creating your own book in the absence of the Holy Book. Since the Holy Book is given to us, accept it from us, share it with us, and discard your own. . . ."

Upon hearing these words, the kaghan embraced Farabi Ibn Kora, and that put an end to it all. He adopted Islam, doffed his shoes, prayed to Allah, and ordered the name bestowed on him by Khazar tradition, before his birth, to be burned.




KHAZAR POLEMIC

--The event that Christian sources attribute to the year 861 A.D., according to The Life of Constantine of Thessalonica, St. Cyril, written in the ninth century and preserved in what is refereed to as the manuscript of the Moscow Spiritual Academy and in the 1469 version of Vladislav the Grammarian. In that year of 861 A.D., Khazar envoys came before the Byzantine emperor and said: "We have always recognized only one God, who rules over us all, and we bow to Him facing east, and uphold our other pagan customs as well. The Jews are trying to persuade us to adopt their faith and rites, and the Saracens are offering peace and many gifts to draw us to their own faith, saying, 'Our faith is better than all other peoples' '; therefore, nurturing an old friendship and love, we now turn to you, for you, the Greeks, are a great people vested with imperial power by God; in seeking your advice, we ask you to send us one of your learned men, for if he emerges victorious from the debate with the Jews and the Saracens, we shall adopt your faith."

When the Greek emperor asked Cyril if he would go to the Khazars, the latter replied that he would embark on such a journey on foot and in his bare feet. Daubmannus believes that what Cyril meant was that he needed as much time to prepare for his journey as it would take him to walk from Constantinople to the Crimea, for at the time Cyril was still illiterate in his dreams and did not know how to unlock them from the inside; in other words, he did not know how to wake up when he wanted. Nevertheless, he accepted the mission, and in Kherson, where he stopped along the way, he learned Hebrew and translated the Hebrew grammar into Greek in preparation for the polemic at the court of the Khazar kaghan. He and his brother, Methodius, passed Lake Meot and the Caspian gates of the Caucasus Mountains, where they met the kaghan's envoy. The envoy asked Constantine the Philosopher why he always held a book before him when speaking, while the Khazars extracted all wisdom from their chests, as if they had swallowed it first. Constantine replied that he felt naked without a book, and who would believe that a naked man has many robes? To meet Constantine and Methodius, the Khazar deputy had traveled from the capital, Itil, to Sarkel on the Don, and to Kherson. He then lead the Byzantine envoys to Samandar, on the Caspian Sea, the kaghan's summer residence, where the polemic was to be held. At court, where the Jewish and Saracen representatives had already arrived, the question arose as to what rank Constantine should have at the dinner table. He responded: "I had a great and very famous grandfather who was close to the emperor, but, because he refused the honors bestowed upon him, he was exiled, and he arrived in a strange land where he became poor and I was born. I, seeking my grandfather's one-time honor, have not succeeded in achieving it; you see, I am only the grandson of Adam."

"You worship the Trinity," said the kaghan in his dinner toast, "and we worship but one God, as it is written in the books. Why is that?"

The Philosopher replied:

"Books preach the Word and the Spirit. If someone pays you honor but does not respect your word and spirit, while another respects al three, which of the two pays greater honor?"

The Jewish representative asked:

"Tell us, then, how a can woman place in her womb God, whom she cannot see, let alone give birth to?"

The Philosopher pointed to the kaghan and his first counselor, saying; "If someone were to say that the first counselor cannot receive the kaghan, but that the lowliest servant can both receive him and render him honor, tell me than, what should we call him: mad or sensible?'

Now the Saracens joined the polemic, and Constantine the Philosopher was asked about a custom he had first encountered in Samarra, at the Saracen caliph's. The Saracens used to place a picture of the devil on the outside of Christian houses; on each Christian door was a figure of some demon. And the Saracens, who had long been trying to poison Constantine, asked him:

"Do you, Philosopher, comprehend the significance of this?"

And he said:

"I se the demonic figures, and I think that Christians live inside, but since demons cannot coexist with them they run outside. And if there are no demon figures outside, it means they are inside with the household . . . ."

Another badly damaged Christian source on the Khazar polemic has reached us in the form of a legend concerning the Kievites' conversion to Christianity in the 10th century. From the legend, in which Constantine the Philosopher was among the participants in the Kiev polemic about the three religions (even though he lived one hundred years earlier), one can recognize a document that was originally about the Khazar polemic. If we abstract the additions and revisions of the 10th and later centuries, this source's report on the Khazar polemic would look roughly as follows.

A Khazar kaghan whose fortunes had flourished in the wars against the Pechenegs and the Greeks, from whom he had captured Kherson (Kerch on the Crimea), decided to adopt a leisurely life after all his military successes. He wanted to have as many women as the soldiers he had lost in the war. "He had many women," says a version of this legend published in Venice in 1772 in the Serbian language, "And, wanting to have women of all faiths, he not only worshiped various idols, but, out of affection for his women and mistresses, also wanted to profess different faiths." This prompted various foreigners (Greeks, Arabs, Jews) to rush to the kaghan with their envoys, in the hope of converting him immediately to their own faith. Constantine the philosopher, sent by the Greek emperors, was more successful that the Jews or Saracens in the polemic at the court of the Khazar kaghan, says this source. But, unable to reach a final decision, the kaghan kept hesitating, until finally on e of his kin, recognizable as Princess Ateh, who is familiar to us from a third source, stepped in. Her people convinced the kaghan to send them out among the Jews, Greeks, and Saracens to investigate their doctrines first hand. When this woman's mission returned, it recommenced Christianity as the most suitable faith, and the envoys revealed to the kaghan that his relative, whom they served, had adopted Christianity long before. The third source of Christian references to the Khazar polemic--Daubmannus--believed that the kaghan was frightened by the news. Consequently, fortune fell to the Jewish representative after the kaghan discovered that Christians, like Jews, observe the Old Testament. When Constantine confirmed that this was true, the kaghan turned to the Jew, who had fled to the Khazars from Greece and strongly advocated Judaism. "Of us three dream hunters," the Romaniot told the kaghan, "the only one you Khazars have no reason to fear is me, a rabbi; for neither a caliph, with the green sails of his fleet, nor a Greek emperor, with a cross over his armies, stands behind the Jews. Behind Constantine of Thessalonica come spears and cavalry, but behind me, a Jewish rabbi, trail prayer shawls. . . . "

So spoke the rabbi, and the kaghan now favored him and his arguments, when Princess Ateh intervened in the polemic and once again altered the outcome of the conversation. The decisive words in the Khazar polemic, spoken by Ateh to the Jewish participant were:

You say: Let him who wants wealth turn to the North, and let him who wants window to the South! But why do you speak such sweet words to me here in the North and not to Wisdom, who awaits you in the land of your fathers? Why did you not go there, where light lays its eggs, where centuries rub against centuries, to drink the sour rain of the Dead Sea, to kiss the sand that runs in oblique streams like a stretched rope of gold in place of water from Jerusalem's wells? Instead you tell me that I dream of an inky night and that only in your reality is there moonlight. Why do you say this to me?

Yet another week has grown poor and thin. It has spent its most solemn day, which you say begins in Palestine, the day it had so jealously guarded, but whose time has come. It gives it up reluctantly, piece by piece. Take your piece; take your Sabbath and then go. Go to Wisdom and say everything you wanted to say to me. You will be happier. But beware: to conquer a fortress, one must first conquer one's own soul.

But I tell you all this in vain, for you carry your eyes in your mouth and do not see until you speak. My conclusion is this: either your saying is wrong or it is not you expected in the South but someone else. How else am I to understand why you are here in the North and with me?

Princess Ateh's words startled the Khazar kaghan and he told the rabbi he had heard that the Jews themselves admitted that their God had abandoned and scattered them all over the world. "Do you with to draw us to your faith so that you may have comrades in your misery, and so that we Khazars may be punished by God as you are and scattered throughout the world?"

The kaghan then turned away from the Jew and again found the most acceptable arguments to be those of Constantine the Philosopher. He and his chief aides converted to Christianity and sent the Greek emperor a letter, cited in Cyril's hagiography that read:

"Your Serene Majesty, you sent us a man who has explained to us the glory of the Christian faith in both word and deed, and we are convinced that it is the true faith and are commanding people to baptize themselves voluntarily. . . ."

According to another source, the kaghan, having accepted Constantine's reasons, quite unexpectedly decided to go to war against the Greeks instead of adopting their faith. He said, "You do not beg for faith, you obtain it by the sword!" He attacked them from Kherson and when he had victoriously completed his campaign, he asked the Greek emperor for a Greek princess to take as his wife. The emperor set only one condition--that the Khazar kaghan convert to Christianity. To the great surprise of Constantinople, the kaghan accepted the term, and that is how the Khazars were converted.