You didn’t know this about Khazars

A nomadic Turkic-speaking tribal confederation and an offshoot of the Turk kaghanate, the Khazars established one of the earliest and most successful states in medieval eastern Europe.

The name ‘Khazar’ seems to be tied to a Turkic verb form meaning “wandering”.

The next one hundred years of Khazar history brought security to the Russian steppe and the surrounding regions, permitting cross-continental trade to flourish via Khazaria and providing it with the necessary stability for the formation of a unique material culture, known to archaeologists as Saltovo.

They were known to retaliate against Muslim or Christian interests in Khazaria for persecution of Jews abroad.

Khazar history is divided into two periods: the Crimean North Caucasus c.

Religious tolerance and Khazaria’s international commercial interests brought Christians, Muslims, Jews, pagans, and others to trade and live within the kaghanate.

Following their conversion to Judaism, the Khazars themselves traced their origins to Kozar, a son of Togarmah.

After a major defeat in 737, the Khazars relocated their political focus to the north and established their capital of Atil/Itil in the Volga delta around 800.

Likewise, the Khazar rulers viewed themselves as the protectors of international Jewry, and corresponded with foreign Jewish leaders.

While many questions remain concerning this conversion and its pervasiveness, it is clear that by accepting Judaism, the ruling class made Khazaria a religious neutral zone for its warring Christian and Islamic neighbors.

They were important allies of the Byzantine Empire against the Sassanid Empire and later the Caliphate, the Pechenegs, and the Rus’.

The first significant appearance of the Khazars in history is their aid to the campaign of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius against the Sassanid Persians.

The first war was fought in the early 650 and ended with the defeat of an Arab force led by Abd ar-Rahman ibn Rabiah outside the Khazar town of Balanjar, after a battle in which both sides used siege engines on the others’ troops.

Some scholars, such as D.M. Dunlop, considered the Khazars to be connected with a Uyghur or Tiele confederation tribe called He’san in Chinese sources from the 7th-century.

Jews fled from Byzantium to Khazaria as a consequence of persecution under Heraclius, Justinian II, Leo III, and Romanos I.

Some historians have looked for possible connections between the Khazars and the lost tribes of Israel, but modern scholars generally consider them to be Turks who migrated from the East.

There is evidence from the account of al-Tabari that the Khazars formed a united front with the remnants of the Gok Turks in Transoxiana.

This reference indicates that some Khazars maintained ethnic, if not political, autonomy at least two centuries after the sack of Atil.

Dmitri Vasil’ev of Astrakhan State University recently hypothesized that the Khazars moved in to the Pontic steppe region only in the late 500s, and originally lived in Transoxiana.

Politically focused on the northern Black Sea region, during the first phase the Khazars were locked in endless wars against the Arabs over the control of the Caucasus.

In the 7th century CE they founded an independent Khaganate in the Northern Caucasus along the Caspian Sea, where over time Judaism became the state religion.

A.D. and subsequently settled in the lower Volga region.

By the 1960s the Khazar theory had become a “firm article of faith” amongst Christian Identity groups.