Volume 23, Number 17 · October 28, 1976
You Don't Have to Be Khazarian…
By Leon Wieseltier
The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage
by Arthur Koestler
Random House, 255 pp., $8.95
'I have been visiting Lord Derby,' the aristocrat-prone Lewis Namier once told Isaiah Berlin. 'He said to me: 'Namier, you are a Jew. Why do you write our English history, why do you not write Jewish history?' I replied, 'Derby! There is no Jewish history, only a Jewish martyrology, and that is not amusing enough for me.'' Namier was a Jew cruelly at odds with his own East European origins; there is a certain and not untypical pathos to his scorn for his ancestors' trials. But like all such generalizations, his is not without its exceptions. The dark annals of Jewish history are punctuated by occasional periods of respite, by flushes of Jewish autonomy in a climate of unwavering hostility. The most extended, intriguing, and unclear of these occurred in medieval Russia, among the marauding shamanistic hosts that swept across the Eurasian frontiers in the period between Attila and Genghis Khan. In AD 740 one of these nomadic tribes, the Khazars, took the unlikely step of converting to Judaism. And for at least two centuries following there flourished along the lower Volga a Jewish kingdom—Zemlya Zhidovskaya, says the Russian Chronicle—ruled by a Jewish king according to a version of rabbinic law.
Review, 4483 words
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