The Khazarian kingdom reached its peak of power and world influence in the latter half of the eighth century. The death knell of their empire was eventually seen in the dragon-headed ships of the Vikings who were to cross and navigate all the major waterways in their onslaughts. Even the legendary ferocity of the Khazars was outdistanced by these Norsemen who "did not deign to trade until they failed to vanquish; they preferred bloodstained, glorious gold to a steady mercantile profit." 43 They were also called Rus, from which descended, among others, the Russians.
Because historical Scandinavian literature did not begin until after the time of the Vikings, little of actual fact is known of them, with much of it apocryphal and contradictory and almost none of it laudatory. Of their military powers, however, virtually all accounts are in harmony. In his book, The Magyars in the Ninth Century, C. A. Macartney quotes the Arab historian, Ibn Rusta:
"These people are vigorous and courageous and when they descend on open ground, none can escape from them without being destroyed and their women taken possession of, and themselves taken into slavery." 44
There was even coined a specific term for the Viking ferocity: berserksgangr, from which is derived the English word berserk.
"Such were the prospects," says Koestler, "which...faced the Khazars."
Even in light of their viciousness and military prowess, these Norse Vikings focused their pillaging assaults on the Byzantine Roman Empire, preferring to trade with the Khazars rather than to tangle with them. Though eventually outmatched in ferocity, the Khazars were still able, for a while, to exact their ten percent taxes even from the Vikings on all of their "cargo" (more correctly spelled plunder) that passed through their land.
An interesting story emerges from this period of the Khazar Empire that gives a clear vignette of the emerging cultural schematic that was eventually to be scattered throughout the world.
In 912 the Rus Vikings, with an armada of 500 ships, each manned by 100 warriors, were set on invading and plundering the Muslim lands south of the Khazars, with whom the Khazars had a loose alliance of protection due to the thousands of loyal Muslims in the Kagan's army. The Rus commander sent a letter to the Kagan asking permission to pass through his territory, to which the Khazar king acceded on condition of receiving half of the spoils upon their return.
On the Viking's return from their bloody mission, and paying the tribute required by the Khazars, the Muslims loyal to the Khazarian monarch, who lived in the eastern part of his kingdom, requested of the Kagan that they be permitted to fight the Vikings in retaliation for what they had done to their brethren to the south. The king granted them permission to do so, which resulted in the complete eradication of the Rus force -- except for five thousand who escaped and were subsequently killed by the Butas and Bulgars to the north.
Here pictured is a classical perspective of what was to become the Khazar/Jewish heritage in nearly all their dealings -- business, social or cultural: a king who becomes a willing though passive confederate of marauding Rus/Vikings, claims half of the loot they have taken in their bloody assault, licenses a retributive attack against them by Muslims under his own command, but then informs the Vikings of the imminent reprisal he himself has authorised. 45
The weakening of the Khazar military influence had a very wide and unexpected influence in that it greatly hastened the extinction of the Byzantine Empire. They no longer had a powerful force on their eastern borders to prevent the Vikings, Mongols and others from invading an already weakened dominion. This, and internal factions within Khazaria, was the prolog to the scattering of the Khazar/Jewish seed throughout Russia and eastern Europe -- and eventually, as shall be shown, to the reshaping of world history.
The swan song of the Khazar kingdom was not a precipitous decline in a climactic or decisive series of battles, but rather a gradual, evolutionary succumbing to superior forces over a protracted period of time.
"In general, the reduced Khazar kingdom persevered," says S. W. Baron. "It waged a more or less effective defense against all foes until the middle of the thirteenth century, when it fell victim to the great Mongol invasion set in motion by Jenghiz Khan. Even then it resisted stubbornly until the surrender of all its neighbours....But before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centres of eastern Europe." 46
"Here, then," remarks Arthur Koestler, "we have the cradle of the numerically strongest and culturally dominant part of modern Jewry."
The ancient Hebrew nation had started branching into the Diaspora long before the destruction of Jerusalem. Ethnically, the Semitic tribes on the waters of the Jordan and the Turko-Khazar tribes on the Volga were of course 'miles apart', but they had at least two important formative factors in common. Each lived at a focal junction where the great trade routes connecting east and west, north and south intersect; a circumstance which predisposed them to become nations of traders, of enterprising travellers, or 'rootless cosmopolitans' -- as hostile propaganda has unaffectionately labelled them. But at the same time their exclusive religion fostered a tendency to keep to themselves and stick together, to establish their own communities with their own places of worship, schools, residential quarters and ghettoes (originally self-imposed) in whatever town or country they settled. This rare combination of wanderlust and ghetto-mentality, reinforced by Messianic hopes and chosen-race pride, both ancient Israelites and mediaeval Khazars shared -- ~even though the latter traced their descent not to Shem [S[h]emites] but to Japheth~." [underscore supplied]
This more recent "Diaspora" resulted in a strong, oftentimes politically overwhelming, Khazar/Jewish influence in especially Hungary and Poland, but also in the whole of Eastern Europe. Jews were found in positions of power and political influence in virtually every major category of life, business and society. There may have already been a small population of what Koestler calls "real Jews" living in that region, "but there can be little doubt that the majority of modern Jewry originated in the migratory waves of ... Khazars who play such a dominant part in early Hungarian history".
The Khazar influx into the Hungary/Poland region was only a small part of an overall "mass-migration" from their homeland to Eastern and Central Europe. They were employed as "mintmasters, administrators of the royal revenue, controllers of the salt monopoly [at that time salt was a valuable commodity often used in place of money. From this comes the saying "worth his salt".] , taxcollectors and 'money-lenders' -- i.e., bankers."47
Western European Jews historically displayed such a talent and acumen at trading and as userers (money lenders) that in virtually any society and culture in which they found themselves, they became the possessors of and controlling influence over large portions of that nation's wealth. "In the 'dark ages' the commerce of Western Europe," wrote Cecil Roth in the 1973 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, "was largely in Jewish hands, not excluding the slave trade, and...Jew and Merchant are used as almost interchangeable terms."
"The floating wealth of the country," Roth continued, "was soaked up by the Jews, who were periodically made to disgorge into the exchequer [national or royal treasury]" 48 It was evident that the ruling class periodically became intimidated by the mass of their nation's wealth accumulating to the hands of so small a minority -- and a very clannish minority at that. This would logically give any ruling authority cause for concern -- when a particular group virtually controls the nation's economics while at the same time appearing to have a tenuous allegiance to the country in which they reside. Such a course of events evidently led to the creation of a stereotyping blueprint for Jews and Jewish communities that has been expressed -- and reacted to -- in various cultures for centuries.
"The nucleus of modern Jewry," remarks Koestler, "thus followed the old recipe: strike out for new horizons but stick together." 49 This, as previously mentioned, was the course of Western European Jews, but the similarity between them and the Khazarian Jews is striking, especially in their unequalled aptitude at things economical and political.
This mass of historical data "has lead several historians to conjecture that a substantial part, and perhaps the majority of eastern Jews -- and hence of world Jewry -- might be of Khazar, and not of Semitic Origin."
The far-reaching implications of this hypothesis may explain the great caution exercised by historians in approaching this subject -- if they do not avoid it altogether. Thus in the 1973 edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica the article "Khazars" is signed by Dunlop, but there is a separate section dealing with "Khazar Jews after the Fall of the Kingdom", signed by the editors, ~and written with the obvious intent to avoid upsetting believers in the dogma of the Chosen Race~. [underscore supplied] 50
Abraham N. Poliak, Tel Aviv University's post-war Professor of Mediaeval Jewish History, wondered at "how far we can go in regarding this [Khazar] Jewry as the nucleus of the large Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. The descendants of this settlement," Poliak declares, "those who stayed where they were, those who emigrated to the United States and to other countries, and those who went to Israel -- constitute now the large majority of world Jewry. [emphasis supplied] 51 Some historians, such as Austrian Hugo Kutschera, assert that Eastern European Jewry was not part, but entirely of Khazarian origin. 52
Still further proof that the Jews of Eastern Europe had no origins in the West is Yiddish, the language commonly used by the Eastern Jews. Yiddish was, until the latter part of the twentieth century, a dying language. It is an amalgamation of several tongues, primarily Hebrew, and written with Hebrew characters, but which includes much of mediaeval German and components of other languages like Slavonic. The German elements incorporated into Yiddish have been clearly shown to have originated in the east of Germany where it joined the Slavonic regions of Eastern Europe. Yiddish is a sort of linguistic "sponge" in that it readily absorbs and incorporates whatever words or idiomatic expressions best suit its purpose. It would therefore naturally have become a cultural marker for whatever region in which it was spoken, absorbing the telltale indicators of dialect like a tattoo. 53
Another respected Austrian historian, Matisyohu Meises, questions, "Could it be that the generally accepted view, according to which the German Jews once upon a time immigrated from France across the Rhine, is misconceived?" Meises, who knew virtually nothing about the Khazars, was perplexed at the fact that no Yiddish linguistic roots whatever could be traced to Western Europe. He also noted that, inexplicably, there was a large geographical gap clearly delineating the Yiddish spoken by the Eastern Khazar transplants from any spoken in Western Europe. 54
"The evidence," Mr. Koestler nicely summates, "...adds up to a strong case in favour of those modern historians -- whether Austrian, Israeli or Polish -- who, independently from each other, have argued that the bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin. The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not flow from the Mediterranean across France and Germany to the east and then back again. The stream moved in a consistently westerly direction, from the Caucasus through the Ukraine into Poland and thence into Central Europe. When that unprecedented mass-settlement in Poland came into being, there were simply not enough Jews around in the west to account for it; while in the east a whole nation was on the move to new frontiers." 55
With the overwhelming evidence that the modern Jewish population is of Khazar origin, Koestler remarks that this would clearly indicate that "their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." This conclusion would then logically render the epithet "anti-Semitism" "void of meaning," Koestler says.
The latter conclusion is a position Palestinian Arabs might well dispute with Mr. Koestler due to the fact that this revelation ironically places the modern Jew, currently occupying Palestine, in the unenviable position of, themselves, being anti-Semitic -- an historical mockery of somewhat amazing proportions. 56
But what, one may ask, became of the greater part of the population of "real Jews"?
Towards the close of the ninth century the Jewish settlements of Germany, who were nearly all of Semitic origin, had been virtually wiped out by the "mob-hysteria" that resulted from the First Crusade in 1096. The Encyclopedia Britannica on the Crusades vividly sets forth the mindset of the crusaders:
"He might butcher all, till he waded ankle-deep in blood, and then at nightfall kneel, sobbing for very joy, at the altar of the Sepulchre -- for was he not red from the winepress of the Lord?" 57
The Jews who found themselves in that "winepress" significantly assisted in their own demise. Like those of Massada who committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the armies of Rome, a great many of the Jews of the Rhineland and surrounding countries, when presented with the choice of baptism into "Christianity" or death at the hands of their captors, chose neither, opting for the Massada solution.
Imitating on a grand scale Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac, fathers slaughtered their children and husbands their wives. These acts of unspeakable horror and heroism were performed in the ritualistic form of slaughter with sacrificial knives sharpened in accordance with Jewish law. At times the leading sages of the community, supervising the mass immolation, were the last to part with life at their own hands. In the mass hysteria, sanctified by the glow of religious martyrdom and compensated by the confident expectation of heavenly rewards, nothing seemed to matter but to end life before one fell into the hands of the implacable foes and had to face the inescapable alternative of death at the enemy's hand or conversion to Christianity. 58
Of the German cities of Worms and Spires, being somewhat representative of the whole of Western European communities that were devastated by the Crusades, Salo Baron writes, "the total Jewish population of either community had hardly exceeded the figures...given for the dead alone". 59
The most common historical concept, before the modern revelation of the existence of Khazaria, was that the 1096 Crusade literally "swept like a broom" virtually the entire German Jewish population into Poland. This was an invention of apparent necessity because those historians could account by no other means for the inexplicably large population of Eastern European Jews. They concluded this in the face of the total absence of any historical account of a mass migration of Jews to eastern Germany and certainly not Poland.
By the close of the 1300s much of Western Europe was, for all practical purposes, completely empty of any perceivable Jewish population. What the Crusades failed to accomplish in the eradication of Western European Jewry the "Black Death" -- the Bubonic Plagues of the bacilli Pasteurella pestis -- virtually completed. Those Jews of that era suffered doubly; from the plague itself and from the proliferation of superstitious rumours that they were responsible for the disease by poisoning wells, just as they were blamed earlier for "the ritual slaughter of Christian children." This resulted in the burning alive of Jews in great numbers over the whole of Europe. 60 Later some of the Sephardic Jews of Spain immigrated northward, accounting for some of the smaller Jewish populations of Western Europe.
"Because of the long and varied history of the Jews," says the 2001 edition of World Book Encyclopedia, "it is difficult to define a Jew. There is no such thing as a Jewish race. Jewish identity is a mixture of religious, historical, and ethnic factors." Thus, those who might have truly claimed to be of the genealogy of Abraham and of true Semitic origin became extinct as a discernible race, being replaced by the white Khazars of the Transcaucasus, none of whose ancestors, as Benjamin Freedman phrases it, have ever placed a foot in the land of Palestine. This causes a serious problem with modern Christianity's infatuation with the Jews and their "return to their Homeland," begging the question: How can one return to a place where they have never been?
