The Khazar Conversion
Beyond the great rivers of the Russian steppe, between the Caspian and the Black Sea, in a land of grass and horsemen and trading posts, there once ruled a people called the Khazars. They were Turkic by tongue and…
Biblical Narrative
Beyond the great rivers of the Russian steppe, between the Caspian and the Black Sea, in a land of grass and horsemen and trading posts, there once ruled a people called the Khazars. They were Turkic by tongue and shamanist by tradition, and they had built upon the lower Volga a kingdom that the caliphs and the emperors of Byzantium feared and courted alike. In the eighth century, so the chronicles tell, their king — the bek they called Bulan — turned his face away from the old gods and embraced the faith of the Jews.
It happened, the medieval Hebrew letter known as the Schechter Letter relates, that two missionaries came before him: a priest of the Christians and an imam of the Muslims, each pleading the truth of his religion. Bulan asked them in turn whose faith they preferred next to their own. The Christian admitted that the religion of Israel was the older and more honorable. The Muslim conceded the same. Then said the king: I have heard you both, and from your own mouths I learn that the Israelites are the children of the older covenant. I will follow them.
His successors deepened the conversion. Obadiah, said to be a great-grandson of Bulan, brought rabbis from Baghdad to teach Talmud and built synagogues across the land. The royal house and the warrior aristocracy adopted the laws of Moses; the common people remained mixed in their devotions, as steppe peoples often were. For two hundred years a Jewish kingdom — improbable as a unicorn — guarded the trade routes between the Norse and the Khwarezmians, between the lands of bear-furs and the lands of silver coin.
In the tenth century, far away in Cordoba, the Jewish vizier of the Spanish caliph Hasdai ibn Shaprut heard rumors of a Jewish kingdom in the east and could scarcely believe his ears. He wrote a letter, a long, careful, scholarly letter, and sent it by relays of merchants. Years later a reply came back, signed by Joseph, king of the Khazars: yes, we are who you have been told. We trace our descent from Togarmah; our laws are the laws of Sinai; our city is on the Volga and is called Atil. Then the kingdom fell, swept away by the Rus prince Sviatoslav in 969, and the Jews of the Khazars vanished into the steppes — into legend, into the pages of medieval Hebrew poetry, into the long imagination of a Judaism that was not, after all, alone.
From the day my fathers entered under the wings of the Shekhinah, He has subdued our enemies before us, has overthrown their kingdoms, and has cast them down before us.King Joseph to Hasdai ibn Shaprut (Khazar Correspondence, c. 955)
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Khazar Khaganate (c. 650 — 969 CE) was a Turkic steppe empire centered on the lower Volga, with capitals at Balanjar, Samandar, and finally Atil (Itil) near the river's delta. At its height it controlled the strategic corridor between the Caspian and Black seas, taxing trade between the Abbasid caliphate, Byzantium, and the Slavic and Norse north. Its conversion to Judaism — partial, gradual, and concentrated in the royal house and military aristocracy — is one of the most striking and contested episodes in medieval religious history.
The principal sources are: the Khazar Correspondence between Hasdai ibn Shaprut of Cordoba and King Joseph of Khazaria (c. 955 CE; preserved in two recensions, the long and the short, the latter possibly an authentic Joseph response and the former a redaction); the Schechter Letter discovered in the Cairo Geniza (Cambridge T-S Misc. 35.38), which gives the conversion narrative; and Arabic geographical sources including al-Mas'udi (Muruj al-Dhahab, 943) and Ibn Fadlan (922). Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak's Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (Cornell 1982) is the foundational source-critical study of the Hebrew evidence.
Kevin Alan Brook's The Jews of Khazaria (3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield 2018) is the standard modern synthesis. Brook argues for a partial royal-and-elite conversion in the late eighth or early ninth century, deepening over the ninth and tenth, with most subjects retaining traditional or syncretistic religion. Peter B. Golden's Khazar Studies (Akadémiai Kiadó 1980) and his contributions to the Cambridge History of Inner Asia situate the Khazars within the broader Turkic and steppe context. Archaeological evidence — Magyar-style fortresses, Khazar-period cemeteries with seven-branched menorah motifs at Chelarevo (Serbia), and tombstones with Hebrew inscriptions in the northern Caucasus — corroborates a Jewish elite presence.
The genetic question — whether modern Ashkenazi Jews descend in significant part from Khazars — has been thoroughly tested and largely refuted. Multiple genome-wide studies (Behar et al. 2010, 2013; Costa et al. 2013; Xue et al. 2017) show that Ashkenazi Jews share strongest genetic affinity with Levantine and Southern European populations, not with North Caucasian or Volga-region populations. Arthur Koestler's popularizing The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), which argued for Khazar Ashkenazi origins, has been superseded by the genetic evidence. The Khazars converted; their kingdom fell; and their ultimate genetic absorption into the regional Turkic, Slavic, and (in small part) Caucasian Jewish populations leaves no major imprint on modern Ashkenazi DNA.
The Khazar conversion is real, but its scale was modest and its genetic legacy slight; it is one of the most significant medieval episodes of mass religious choice — and one of the most mythologized.Adapted from Kevin Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria