Khazars become Kosher

I promised to write this in response to a response about the new Turkish game show, called something like "You Bet Your Eternal Soul." But I got distracted by Mr Sobrino's adventures in his ancestral homeland. It was the equivalent of "hiking the Appalachian Trail" as we say here in the Carolinas. But, now I am back on task with something important to do, so I'll do this first.

So - the Khazars. They were a Turkic tribe who put together an empire out in the steppes north of the Black Sea in the 8th and 9th Centuries. For awhile everybody was afraid of them, but they had a serious problem. While they seem to have been happy with that old time religion (shamanism, apparently), they were stuck into between powerful Christian and Muslim powers who wanted to convert them. They figured they were going to have to go one way or the other.

And, after all, they reasoned, going monotheistic was all the rage, so why not give it a try. So the Khazar khan called together all the nobles of his court to listen to a debate by a Priest, a Rabbi, and an Iman (sounds like the set-up of a bad joke, doesn't it?). They asked each only one question: what books do you regard as sacred?

The Rabbi said: the Testament of the Jews, of course.

The Priest said: the Testament of the Jews and the New Testament of the Christians, of course.

The Imam said: the Testament of the Jews, the New Testament of the Christians, and the Holy Koran, of course.

The Khazars thought about it and responded "Well, you all agree on only one thing: the Testament of the Jews is sacred. So we will convert to the faith of the Jews."

And that is why a fierce Turkic tribe became Jewish. There is even a theory that most of the Jews in Eastern Europe are not actually Semitic, but Turkic.

I once planned to write and illustrate a children's book about this for a little red-haired Jewish girl I knew in Manhattan. It was going to end with the line: "... and some of Khazars had red hair, but I am the only one who knows this. And now so do you," with a picture of a little Khazar girl pulling off her head cloth to reveal masses of red hair. It went nowhere.

For those who don't understand Turkish

Here is a different version of the song Eartha Kitt sings in Turkish. This one is sung in Ladino, a type of medieval Castillian suffering from a train wreck with Turkish and Hebrew (and a few other languages).

klezmorim forever!

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Eartha Kitt

We lost a great singer and an interesting person a few weeks ago.

But I didn't know that she could sing in Turkish!

with thanks to B.B. of Hitti

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Bulgaria and the Turks

Not so many years ago much of Europe was in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, rulers of a great Muslim empire. It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that the final push to drive them out of Europe got under way. World War I would finish them off.

During all those centuries they were in Europe, however, many Turks moved into the area and many more locals became Muslims. Some of these latter continued to speak their native languages, like the Bosnian Muslims, others adopted Turkish. Many of those Turkish speaking Muslims stayed, at least until recently.

Take the 900,000 of them who lived in Bulgaria. Tony Judt in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1949 tells what happened to them at the hands of the Bulgarian government:

Things were brought to a head by the exodus to Turkey, during the summer of 1989, of an estimated 300,000 ethnic Turks -- another public relations calamity for the regime, and an economic one too, as the country began to run short of manual labors.

Of course, the effect on a wealthy country like America would be .... probably much worse.

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