Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

232 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
Khazaria, and that they practiced rabbinical Judaism. It was he who in 1874
discovered in Firkovich's collection the longer version of King Joseph's letter,
and his profound knowledge of Eastern tradition and literature made him a
leading scholar on the subject of the Khazars. The Orientalist Daniel Abramovich
Chwolson, a baptized Jew, was a colleague of his, with whom Harkavy
argued intensely. 94
By the time Dubnow consolidated his status in Jewish historiography,
there was already a fair amount of material on Khazaria. The Cambridge Document
was published in 1912, and in the first half of the twentieth century the
Hasdai-Joseph correspondence began to be treated as a trustworthy source,
even though it had been extensively redacted. In his comprehensive oeuvre
World History of the Jewish People, Dubnow devoted more space to the Khazar
kingdom than did his predecessors Jost and Graetz. 95 He outlined the development
of the kingdom, described in vivid terms its voluntary Judaization on
the basis of King Joseph's letter, and trusted the bulk of the Arab chronicles.
Like Graetz, he was impressed by Khazaria's great power, but he did not fail to
stress that only the higher strata converted, while the middle and lower classes
remained pagan, Muslim, or Christian. He added a special appendix including
a long bibliographic analysis, and stated that "the story of the Khazars is one of
the most problematic issues in the history of the Jews." 96 But he did not explain
why that was so. There seems to be some awkwardness in his writing on the
subject, though the reason for it is unclear. Perhaps it was the fact that those
tricky Khazars were not exactly the "ethno-biological descendants of Israel,"
and their history was alien to the Jewish metanarrative.
The Soviet government in its early days encouraged the study of Khazaria,
and young historians enthusiastically began to research Russia's pre-imperial
past. Between the early 1920s and the mid-1930s, this resulted in a wave of
historiographical production whose findings were unhesitatingly idealized.
The Soviet scholars' sympathy was due to the fact that the Khazar empire was
not ruled by the Orthodox Church, and was tolerant of and open to all religions.
The fact that it was a Jewish kingdom did not disturb the researchers,
especially since many of them, for all their conspicuous Marxism, came from
a Jewish background. Why not inject a little Jewish pride into the spirit of
proletarian internationalism? But the most prominent of these scholars were
not of Jewish origin.
94 The pre-First World War research should include Hugo Von Kutschera, Die
Chasaren: Historische Studie, Vienna: A. Holzhausen, 1910.
95 Dubnow, History of the World-People, vol. 4, 140-7.
96 Ibid., 272.