The Associated Press
Scholar claims to find medieval Jewish capital
By MANSUR MIROVALEV ` 13 hours ago
MOSCOW (AP) – A Russian archaeologist says he has found the lost
capital of the Khazars, a powerful nation that adopted Judaism as its
official religion more than 1,000 years ago, only to disappear leaving
little trace of its culture.
Dmitry Vasilyev, a professor at Astrakhan State University, said his
nine-year excavation near the Caspian Sea has finally unearthed the
foundations of a triangular fortress of flamed brick, along with
modest yurt-shaped dwellings, and he believes these are part of what
was once Itil, the Khazar capital.
By law Khazars could use flamed bricks only in the capital, Vasilyev
said. The general location of the city on the Silk Road was confirmed
in medieval chronicles by Arab, Jewish and European authors.
"The discovery of the capital of Eastern Europe’s first feudal state
is of great significance," he told The Associated Press. "We should
view it as part of Russian history."
Kevin Brook, the American author of "The Jews of Khazaria," e-mailed
Wednesday that he has followed the Itil dig over the years, and even
though it has yielded no Jewish artifacts, "Now I’m as confident as
the archaeological team is that they’ve truly found the long-lost
city,
The Khazars were a Turkic tribe that roamed the steppes from Northern
China to the Black Sea. Between the 7th and 10th centuries they
conquered huge swaths of what is now southern Russia and Ukraine, the
Caucasus Mountains and Central Asia as far as the Aral Sea.
Itil, about 800 miles south of Moscow, had a population of up to
60,000 and occupied 0.8 square miles of marshy plains southwest of the
Russian Caspian Sea port of Astrakhan, Vasilyev said.
It lay at a major junction of the Silk Road, the trade route between
Europe and China, which "helped Khazars amass giant profits," he said.
The Khazar empire was once a regional superpower, and Vasilyev said
his team has found "luxurious collections" of well-preserved ceramics
that help identify cultural ties of the Khazar state with Europe, the
Byzantine Empire and even Northern Africa. They also found armor,
wooden kitchenware, glass lamps and cups, jewelry and vessels for
transporting precious balms dating back to the eighth and ninth
centuries, he said.
But a scholar in Israel, while calling the excavations interesting,
said the challenge was to find Khazar inscriptions.
"If they found a few buildings, or remains of buildings, that’s
interesting but does not make a big difference," said Dr. Simon Kraiz,
an expert on Eastern European Jewry at Haifa University. "If they
found Khazar writings, that would be very important."
Vasilyev says no Jewish artifacts have been found at the site, and in
general, most of what is known about the Khazars comes from
chroniclers from other, sometimes competing cultures and empires.
"We know a lot about them, and yet we know almost nothing: Jews wrote
about them, and so did Russians, Georgians, and Armenians, to name a
few," said Kraiz. "But from the Khazars themselves we have nearly
nothing."
The Khazars’ ruling dynasty and nobility converted to Judaism sometime
in the 8th or 9th centuries. Vasilyev said the limited number of
Jewish religious artifacts such as mezuzas and Stars of David found at
other Khazar sites prove that ordinary Khazars preferred traditional
beliefs such as shamanism, or newly introduced religions including
Islam.
Yevgeny Satanovsky, director of the Middle Eastern Institute in
Moscow, said he believes the Khazar elite chose Judaism out of
political expediency ‘ to remain independent of neighboring Muslim and
Christian states. "They embraced Judaism because they wanted to remain
neutral, like Switzerland these days," he said.
In particular, he said, the Khazars opposed the Arab advance into the
Caucasus Mountains and were instrumental in containing a Muslim push
toward eastern Europe. He compared their role in eastern Europe to
that of the French knights who defeated Arab forces at the Battle of
Tours in France in 732.
The Khazars succeeded in holding off the Arabs, but a young, expanding
Russian state vanquished the Khazar empire in the late 10th
century. Medieval Russian epic poems mention Russian warriors fighting
the "Jewish Giant."
"In many ways, Russia is a successor of the Khazar state," Vasilyev
said.
He said his dig revealed traces of a large fire that was probably
caused by the Russian conquest. He said Itil was rebuilt following the
fall of the Khazar empire, when ethnic Khazars were slowly assimilated
by Turkic-speaking tribes, Tatars and Mongols, who inhabited the city
until it was flooded by the rising Caspian Sea around the 14th
century.
The study of the Khazar empire was discouraged in the Soviet
Union. The dictator Josef Stalin, in particular, detested the idea
that a Jewish empire had come before Russia’s own. He ordered
references to Khazar history removed from textbooks because they
"disproved his theory of Russian statehood," Satanovsky said.
Only now are Russian scholars free to explore Khazar culture. The Itil
excavations have been sponsored by the Russian-Jewish Congress, a
nonprofit organization that supports cultural projects in Russia.
"Khazar studies are just beginning," Satanovsky said.
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