Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

230 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
MODERN RESEARCH EXPLORES THE KHAZAR PAST
Isaak Jost took an interest in the Khazars and wrote about them; later, so
did Heinrich Graetz. The wisps of Khazar history available in the nineteenth
century were the letters of Hasdai and Joseph. Despite the differences between
these two notable historians, they shared the German condescension toward
the culture of Eastern Europe, especially its Jews. Furthermore, in seeking to
reconstruct the history of the Jews, they looked in particular for its spiritual
expressions. The scanty Khazar output could make no impression on these
hyper-Germanic intellectuals. Jost placed no credence at all in Joseph's letter,
and Graetz, who indulged in descriptions, wrote that before their conversion
to Judaism, the Khazars "professed a coarse religion, which was combined
with sensuality and lewdness." 87 This was characteristic rhetoric—a systematic
erasure of the past proselytes who had swelled the ranks of the "chosen
people."
Graetz, with his basic positivist approach, gave credence to the Hebrew
correspondence between Hasdai and the king, just as he believed all the
biblical stories. It seems he was momentarily captivated by the image of the
mighty kingdom of the Jewish Khazars, and was also convinced that Judaism
had spread through much of its population. Yet in the final analysis, he viewed
the Khazars' Judaization as a passing phenomenon, without significance,
which had no effect on the history of the Jews. 88
But if the historians of Ashkenaz did not attribute much importance to the
Khazars, Eastern European scholars looked at it differently. In Russia, Ukraine
and Poland there was lively interest in the lost Jewish kingdom, especially
among the Jewish Russian scholars. In 1834, V. V. Grigoriev, an early scholar
at the Saint Petersburg School of Eastern Studies, published a study about the
Khazars, in which he stated: "An unusual phenomenon in the Middle Ages
was the Khazar people. In the midst of wild nomadic tribes, it had all the
qualities of a civilized nation: orderly administration, flourishing commerce
and a standing army ... Khazaria was a bright meteor that shone in Europe's
dark sky." 89 In the early nineteenth century, the idea that the Russian nation
emerged in the light of a Jewish kingdom did not seem strange; interest in
Khazaria spread following this pioneering study, and other historians began to
research the subject from a sympathetic viewpoint that tended to glorify the
87 Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 3, 139.
88 Ibid., 138-41.
89 Quoted in Yehoshua Lior's master's thesis, The Khazars in the Light of the Soviet
Historiography, Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 1973 (in Hebrew), 122.