• V EXODUS 1 The evidence quoted in the previous pages indicates that – contrary to the traditional view held by nineteenth-century historians – the Khazars, after the defeat by the Russians in 965, lost their empire but retained their independence within narrower frontiers, and their Judaic faith, well into the thirteenth century.
• Its population was largely absorbed by the Golden Horde which had established the centre of its empire in Khazar territory.
• 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.1 Here, then, we have the cradle of the numerically strongest and culturally dominant part of modern Jewry.
• The `offshoots` to which Baron refers were indeed branching out long before the destruction of the Khazar state by the Mongols – as the ancient Hebrew nation had started branching into the Diaspora long before the destruction of Jerusalem.
• We remember that long before the destruction of their state, several Khazar tribes, known as the Kabars, joined the Magyars and migrated to Hungary.
• Two centuries later John Cinnamus, the Byzantine chronicler, mentions troops observing the Jewish law, fighting with the Hungarian army in Dalmatia, AD 1154.2 There may have been small numbers of `real Jews` living in Hungary from Roman days, but there can be little doubt that the majority of this important portion of modern Jewry originated in the migratory waves of Kabar-Khazars who play such a dominant part in early Hungarian history.
• Not only was the country, as Constantine tells us, bilingual at its beginning, but it also had a form of double kingship, a variation of the Khazar system: the king sharing power with his general in command, who bore the title of Jula or Gyula (still a popular Hungarian first name).
• The system lasted to the end of the tenth century, when St Stephen embraced the Roman Catholic faith and defeated a rebellious Gyula – who, as one might expect, was a Khazar, `vain in the faith and refusing to become a Christian`.3 This episode put an end to the double kingship, but not to the influence of the Khazar–Jewish community in Hungary.
• A reflection of that influence can be found in the `Golden Bull` – the Hungarian equivalent of Magna Carta – issued AD 1222 by King Endre (Andrew) II, in which Jews were forbidden to act as mintmasters, tax collectors, and controllers of the royal salt monopoly – indicating that before the edict numerous Jews must have held these important posts.
• King Endre`s custodian of the Revenues of the Royal Chamber was the Chamberlain Count Teka, a Jew of Khazar origin, a rich landowner, and apparently a financial and diplomatic genius.
• Comparing similar episodes from the Palestinian Diaspora in the west and the Khazar Diaspora in the east of Europe, makes the analogy between them appear perhaps less tenuous.
• It is also worth mentioning that when King Endre was compelled by his rebellious nobles to issue, reluctantly, the Golden Bull, he kept Teka in office against the Bull`s express provisions.
• The Royal Chamberlain held his post happily for another eleven years, until papal pressure on the King made it advisable for Teka to resign and betake himself to Austria, where he was received with open arms.
• Teka duly returned, and perished during the Mongol invasion.*4 3 The Khazar origin of the numerically and socially dominant element in the Jewish population of Hungary during the Middle Ages is thus relatively well documented.
• The Khazars were not the only nation which sent offshoots into Hungary.
• We are told that when the allied tribes decided to elect a king to rule them all, they chose a Jew, named Abraham Prokovnik.13 He may have been a rich and educated Khazar merchant, from whose experience the Slav backwoodsmen hoped to benefit – or just a legendary figure; but, if so, the legend indicates that Jews of his type were held in high esteem.
• At any rate, so the story goes on, Abraham, with unwonted modesty, resigned the crown in favour of a native peasant named Piast, who thus became the founder of the historic Piast dynasty which ruled Poland from circa 962 to 1370.
• Whether Abraham Prochownik existed or not, there are plenty of indications that the Jewish immigrants from Khazaria were welcomed as a valuable asset to the country`s economy and government administration.
• The Poles under the Piast dynasty, and their Baltic neighbours, the Lithuanians,* had rapidly expanded their frontiers, and were in dire need of immigrants to colonize their territories, and to create an urban civilization.
• They encouraged, first, the immigration of German peasants, burghers and craftsmen, and later of migrants from the territories occupied by the Golden Horde,* including Armenians, southern Slavs and Khazars.
• They included large numbers of prisoners of war, such as Crimean Tartars, who were put to cultivate the estates of Lithuanian and Polish landlords in the conquered southern provinces (at the close of the fourteenth century the Lithuanian principality stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea).
• But in the fifteenth century the Ottoman Turks, conquerors of Byzantium, advanced northward, and the landlords transferred the people from their estates in the border areas further inland.14 Among the populations thus forcibly transferred was a strong contingent of Karaites – the fundamentalist Jewish sect which rejected rabbinical learning.
• According to a tradition which has survived among Karaites into modern times, their ancestors were brought to Poland by the great Lithuanian warrior-prince Vytautas (Vitold) at the end of the fourteenth century as prisoners of war from Sulkhat in the Crimea.15 In favour of this tradition speaks the fact that Vitold in 1388 granted a charter of rights to the Jews of Troki, and the French traveller, de Lanoi, found there `a great number of Jews` speaking a different language from the Germans and natives.16 That language was – and still is – a Turkish dialect, in fact the nearest among living languages to the lingua cumanica, which was spoken in the former Khazar territories at the time of the Golden Horde.
• Accordingly, Zajaczkowski, the eminent contemporary Turcologist, considers the Karaites from the linguistic point of view as the purest present-day representatives of the ancient Khazars.18 About the reasons why this sect preserved its language for about half a millennium, while the main body of Khazar Jews shed it in favour of the Yiddish lingua franca, more will have to be said later.
• 5 The Polish kingdom adopted from its very beginnings under the Piast dynasty a resolutely Western orientation, together with Roman Catholicism.
• Hence the policy of attracting immigrants – Germans from the west, Armenians and Khazar Jews from the east – and giving them every possible encouragement for their enterprise, including Royal Charters detailing their duties and special privileges.
• In the Charter issued by Boleslav the Pious in 1264, and confirmed by Casimir the Great in 1334, Jews were granted the right to maintain their own synagogues, schools and courts; to hold landed property, and engage in any trade or occupation they chose.
• A striking illustration for their privileged condition is given in a papal breve, issued in the second half of the thirteenth century, probably by Pope Clement IV, and addressed to an unnamed Polish prince.