by
arthur koestler
PART TWO
The Heritage
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. They even seem to have reverted to some
extent to their erstwhile predatory habits. Baron comments:
- In general, the reduced Khazar kingdom persevered. It waged a more
or less effective defence against all foes until the middle of the thirteenth
century, when it fell victim to the great Mongol invasion set in motion
by Jenghiz Khan. Even then it resisted stubbornly until the surrender
of all its neighbours. 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. Ethnically, the
Semitic tribes on the waters of the Jordan and the Turko-Khazar tribes
on the Volga were of course "miles apart", but they had at least
two important formative factors in common. Each lived at a focal junction
where the great trade routes connecting east and west, north and south
intersect; a circumstance which predisposed them to become nations of
traders, of enterprising travellers, or "rootless cosmopolitans"
- as hostile propaganda has unaffectionately labelled them. But at the
same time their exclusive religion fostered a tendency to keep to themselves
and stick together, to establish their own communities with their own
places of worship, schools, residential quarters and ghettoes (originally
self- imposed) in whatever town or country they settled. This rare combination
of wanderlust and ghetto-mentality, reinforced by Messianic hopes
and chosen-race pride, both ancient Israelites and mediaeval Khazars shared
- even though the latter traced their descent not to Shem but to Japheth.
2
This development is well illustrated by what one might call the Khazar
Diaspora in Hungary. .We remember
that long before the destruction of their state, several Khazar tribes,
known as the Kabars, joined the Magyars and migrated to Hungary. Moreover,
in the tenth century, the Hungarian Duke Taksony invited a second wave
of Khazar emigrants to settle in his domains (see above, III, 9). 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. But they occupied
even more exalted positions. 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. His
signature appears on various peace treaties and financial agreements,
among them one guaranteeing the payment of 2000 marks by the Austrian
ruler Leopold II to the King of Hungary. One is irresistibly reminded
of a similar role played by the Spanish Jew Hasdai ibn Shaprut at the
court of the Caliph of Cordoba. 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. However, King Endre's son Bela IV, obtained
papal permission to call him back. Teka duly returned, and perished during
the Mongol invasion.*[I am indebted to Mrs St G. Saunders for calling
my attention to the Teka episode, which seems to have been overlooked
in the literature on the Khazars.]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. It might seem that Hungary constitutes a special case,
in view of the early Magyar-Khazar connection; but in fact the Khazar
influx into Hungary was merely a part of the general mass-migration from
the Eurasian steppes toward the West, i.e., towards Central and Eastern
Europe. The Khazars were not the only nation which sent offshoots into
Hungary. Thus large numbers of the self-same Pechenegs who had chased
the Magyars from the Don across the Carpathians, were forced to ask for
permission to settle in Hungarian territory when they in turn were chased
by the Kumans; and the Kumans shared the same fate when, a century later,
they fled from the Mongols, and some 40000 of them "with their slaves"
were granted asylum by the Hungarian King Bela.5 .At relatively quiescent times this general
westward movement of the Eurasian populations was no more than a drift;
at other times it became a stampede; but the consequences of the Mongol
invasion must rank on this metaphoric scale as an earthquake followed
by a landslide. The warriors of Chief Tejumin, called "Jinghiz Khan",
Lord of the Earth, massacred the population of whole cities as a warning
to others not to resist; used prisoners as living screens in front of
their advancing lines; destroyed the irrigation network of the Volga delta
which had provided the Khazar lands with rice and other staple foods;
and transformed the fertile steppes into the "wild fields" -
dikoyeh pole - as the Russians were later to call them: an unlimited
space without farmers or shepherds, through which only mercenary horsemen
pass in the service of this or that rival ruler - or people escaping from
such rule".6 .The Black Death
of 1347-8 accelerated the progressive depopulation of the former Khazar
heartland between Caucasus, Don and Volga, where the steppe-culture had
reached its highest level - and the relapse into barbarism was, by contrast,
more drastic than in adjoining regions. As Baron wrote: "The destruction
or departure of industrious Jewish farmers, artisans and merchants left
behind a void which in those regions has only recently begun to be filled."7.Not
only Khazaria was destroyed, but also the Volga Bulgar country, together
with the last Caucasian strongholds of the Alans and Kumans, and the southern
Russian principalities, including Kiev. During the period of disintegration
of the Golden Horde, from the fourteenth century onward, the anarchy became,
if possible, even worse. "In most of the European steppes emigration
was the only way left open for populations who wanted to secure their
lives and livelihood".8 The migration toward safer pastures was a
protracted, intermittent process which went on for several centuries.
The Khazar exodus was part of the general picture. .It had been preceded, as already mentioned,
by the founding of Khazar colonies and settlements in various places in
the Ukraine and southern Russia. There was a flourishing Jewish community
in Kiev long before and after the Rus took the town from the Khazars.
Similar colonies existed in Perislavel and Chernigov. A Rabbi Mosheh of
Kiev studied in France around 1160, and a Rabbi Abraham of Chernigov studied
in 1181 in the Talmud School of London. The "Lay of Igor's Host"
mentions a famous contemporary Russian poet called Kogan - possibly a
combination of Cohen (priest) and Kagan.9 Some time after Sarkel, which
the Russians called Biela Veza, was destroyed the Khazars built
a town of the same name near Chernigov.10 .There
is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which
derive from "Khazar" or "Zhid" (Jew): Zydowo, Kozarzewek,
Kozara, Kozarzow, Zhydowska Vola, Zydaticze, and so on. They may have
once been villages, or just temporary encampments of Khazar-Jewish communities
on their long trek to the west.11 Similar place-names can also be found
in the Carpathian and Tatra mountains, and in the eastern provinces of
Austria. Even the ancient Jewish cemeteries of Cracow and Sandomierz,
both called "Kaviory", are assumed to be of Khazar-Kabar origin.
.While the main route of the Khazar
exodus led to the west, some groups of people were left behind, mainly
in the Crimea and the Caucasus, where they formed Jewish enclaves surviving
into modern times. In the ancient Khazar stronghold of Tamatarkha (Taman),
facing the Crimea across the straits of Kerch, we hear of a dynasty of
Jewish princes who ruled in the fifteenth century under the tutelage of
the Genovese Republic, and later of the Crimean Tartars. The last of them,
Prince Zakharia, conducted negotiations with the Prince of Muscovi, who
invited Zakharia to come to Russia and let himself be baptized in exchange
for receiving the privileges of a Russian nobleman. Zakharia refused,
but Poliak has suggested that in other cases "the introduction of
Khazar-Jewish elements into exalted positions in the Muscovite state may
have been one of the factors which led to the appearance of the 'Jewish
heresy' (Zhidovst- buyushtchik) among Russian priests and noblemen
in the sixteenth century, and of the sect of Sabbath-observers (Subbotniki)
which is still widespread among Cossacks and peasants".12 .Another vestige of the Khazar nation are the
"Mountain Jews" in the north- eastern Caucasus, who apparently
stayed behind in their original habitat when the others left. They are
supposed to number around eight thousand and live in the vicinity of other
tribal remnants of the olden days: Kipchaks and Oghuz. They call themselves
Dagh Chufuty (Highland Jews) in the Tat language which they have
adopted from another Caucasian tribe; but little else is known about them.*[The
above data appear in A. H. Kniper's article "Caucasus, People of"
in the 1973 printing of the Enc. Brit., based on recent Soviet
sources. A book by George Sava, Valley of the Forgotten People
(London, 1946) contains a description of a purported visit to the mountain
Jews, rich in melodrama but sadly devoid of factual information.] .Other Khazar enclaves have survived in the
Crimea, and no doubt elsewhere too in localities which once belonged to
their empire. But these are now no more than historic curios compared
to the mainstream of the Khazar migration into the Polish-Lithuanian regions
- and the formidable problems it poses to historians and anthropologists.
4
The regions in eastern Central Europe, in which the Jewish emigrants
from Khazaria found a new home and apparent safety, had only begun to
assume political importance toward the end of the first millennium. .Around
962, several Slavonic tribes formed an alliance under the leadership of
the strongest among them, the Polans, which became the nucleus of the
Polish state. Thus the Polish rise to eminence started about the same
time as the Khazar decline (Sarkel was destroyed in 965). It is significant
that Jews play an important role in one of the earliest Polish legends
relating to the foundation of the Polish kingdom. We are told that when
the allied tribes decided to elect a king to rule them all, they chose
a Jew, named Abraham Prokownik.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,* [The
two nations became united in a series of treaties, starting in 1386, into
the Kingdom of Poland. For the sake of brevity, I shall use the term "Polish
Jews" to refer to both countries - regardless of the fact that at
the end of the eighteenth century Poland was partitioned between Russia,
Prussia and Austria, and its inhabitants became officially citizens of
these three countries. Actually the so-called Pale of Settlement within
Imperial Russia, to which Jews were confined from 1792 onward, coincided
with the areas annexed from Poland plus parts of the Ukraine. Only certain
privileged categories of Jews were permitted to live outside the Pale;
these, at the time of the 1897 census, numbered only 200000, as compared
to nearly five million inside the Pale - i.e., within former Polish territory.]
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,*[Poland
and Hungary were also briefly invaded by the Mongols in 1241-42, but they
were not occupied - which made all the difference to their future history.]
including Armenians, southern Slavs and Khazars. .Not
all these migrations were voluntary. 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. According to Zajaczkowski,17
this language is still used in speech and prayer in the surviving Karaite
communities in Troki, Vilna, Ponyeviez, Lutzk and Halitch. The Karaites
also claim that before the Great Plague of 1710 they had some thirty-two
or thirty-seven communities in Poland and Lithuania. .They call their ancient dialect "the language
of Kedar" - just as Rabbi Petachia in the twelfth century called
their habitat north of the Black Sea "the land of Kedar"; and
what he has to say about them - sitting in the dark through the Sabbath,
ignorance of rabbinical learning - fits their sectarian attitude. .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. But
compared with its western neighbours it was culturally and economically
an underdeveloped country. 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. Under
the rule of King Stephen Bthory (1575-86) Jews were granted a Parliament
of their own which met twice a year and had the power to levy taxes on
their co-religionists. After the destruction of their country, Khazar
Jewry had entered on a new chapter in its history. .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. In this document the Pope lets it be known that the Roman
authorities are well aware of the existence of a considerable number of
synagogues in several Polish cities - indeed no less than five synagogues
in one city alone.*[Probably Wroclaw or Cracow.] He deplores the fact
that these synagogues are reported to be taller than the churches, more
stately and ornamental, and roofed with colourfully painted leaden plates,
making the adjacent Catholic churches look poor in comparison. (One is
reminded of Masudi's gleeful remark that the minaret of the main mosque
was the tallest building in Itil.) The complaints in the breve are further
authenticated by a decision of the Papal legate, Cardinal Guido, dated
1267, stipulating that Jews should not be allowed more than one synagogue
to a town..We gather from these documents, which are roughly
contemporaneous with the Mongol conquest of Khazaria, that already at
that time there must have been considerable numbers of Khazars present
in Poland if they had in several towns more than one synagogue; and that
they must have been fairly prosperous to build them so "stately and
ornamental". This leads us to the question of the approximate size
and composition of the Khazar immigration into Poland. .Regarding
the numbers involved, we have no reliable information to guide us. We
remember that the Arab sources speak of Khazar armies numbering three
hundred thousand men involved in the Muslim-Khazar wars (Chapter I, 7);
and even if allowance is made for quite wild exaggerations, this would
indicate a total Khazar population of at least half a million souls. Ibn
Fadlan gave the number of tents of the Volga Bulgars as 50000, which would
mean a population of 300000-400000, i.e., roughly the same order of magnitude
as the Khazars'. On the other hand, the number of Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian
kingdorn in the seventeenth century is also estimated by modern historians
at 500000 (5 per cent of the total population).19 These figures do not
fit in too badly with the known facts about a protracted Khazar migration
via the Ukraine to Poland-Lithuania, starting with the destruction of
Sarkel and the rise of the Piast dynasty toward the end of the first millennium,
accelerating during the Mongol conquest, and being more or less completed
in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries - by which time the steppe had been
emptied and the Khazars had apparently been wiped off the face of the
earth.*[The last of the ancient Khazar villages on the Dnieper were destroyed
in the Cossack revolt under Chmelnicky in the seventeenth century, and
the survivors gave a further powerful boost to the number of Jews in the
already existing settlement areas of Poland-Lithuania.] Altogether this
population transfer was spread out over five or six centuries of trickle
and flow. If we take into account the considerable influx of Jewish refugees
from Byzantium and the Muslim world into Khazaria, and a small population
increase among the Khazars themselves, it appears plausible that the tentative
figures for the Khazar population at its peak in the eighth century should
be comparable to that of the Jews in Poland in the seventeenth century,
at least by order of magnitude - give or take a few hundred thousand as
a token of our ignorance. There is irony hidden in these numbers. According
to the article "statistics" in the Jewish Encyclopaedia,
in the sixteenth century the total Jewish population of the world amounted
to about one million. This seems to indicate, as Poliak, Kutschera20 and
others have pointed out, that during the Middle Ages the majority of those
who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars. A substantial part of this
majority went to Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and the Balkans, where they
founded that Eastern Jewish community which in its turn became the dominant
majority of world Jewry. Even if the original core of that community was
diluted and augmented by immigrants from other regions (see below), its
predominantly Khazar-Turkish derivation appears to be supported by strong
evidence, and should at least be regarded as a theory worth serious discussion.
.Additional reasons for attributing the leading
role in the growth and development of the Jewish community in Poland and
the rest of Eastern Europe mainly to the Khazar element, and not to immigrants
from the West, will be discussed in the chapters that follow. But it may
be appropriate at this point to quote the Polish historian, Adam Vetulani
(my italics):
- Polish scholars agree that these oldest settlements were founded by
Jewish emigres from the Khazar state and Russia, while the Jews from
Southern and Western Europe began to arrive and settle only later ...
and that a certain proportion at least of the Jewish population
(in earlier times, the main bulk) originated from the east, from
the Khazar country, and later from Kievian Russia.21
6
So much for size. But what do we know of the social structure and composition
of the Khazar immigrant community? .The first impression one gains is a striking
similarity between certain privileged positions held by Khazar Jews in
Hungary and in Poland in those early days. Both the Hungarian and Polish
sources refer to Jews employed as mintmasters, administrators of the royal
revenue, controllers of the salt monopoly, taxcollectors and "money-lenders"
- i.e., bankers. This parallel suggests a common origin of those two immigrant
communities; and as we can trace the origins of the bulk of Hungarian
Jewry to the Magyar-Khazar nexus, the conclusion seems self-evident. .The
early records reflect the part played by immigrant Jews in the two countries'
budding economic life. That it was an important part is not surprising,
since foreign trade and the levying of customs duties had been the Khazars'
principal source of income in the past. They had the experience which
their new hosts were lacking, and it was only logical that they were called
in to advise and participate in the management of the finances of court
and nobility. The coins minted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
with Polish inscriptions in Hebrew lettering (see Chapter II, 1) are somewhat
bizarre relics of these activities. The exact purpose they served is still
something of a mystery. Some bear the name of a king (e.g., Leszek, Mieszko),
others are inscribed "From the House of Abraham ben Joseph the Prince"
(possibly the minter-banker himself), or show just a word of benediction:
"Luck" or "Blessing". Significantly, contemporary
Hungarian sources also speak of the practice of minting coins from silver
provided by Jewish owners.22 .However
- in constrast to Western Europe - finance and commerce were far from
being the only fields of Jewish activity. Some rich emigrants became landowners
in Poland as Count Teka was in Hungary; Jewish land-holdings comprising
a whole village of Jewish farmers are recorded, for instance, in the vicinity
of Breslau before 1203;23 and in the early days there must have been Khazar
peasants in considerable numbers, as the ancient Khazar place- names seem
to indicate. .A tantalizing glimpse
of how some of these villages may have come into being is provided by
the Karaite records mentioned before; they relate how Prince Vitold settled
a group of Karaite prisoners-of-war in "Krasna", providing them
with houses, orchards and land to a distance of one and a half miles.
("Krasna" has been tentatively identified with the Jewish small
town Krasnoia in Podolia.)24 .But
farming did not hold out a future for the Jewish community. There were
several reasons for this. The rise of feudalism in the fourteenth century
gradually transformed the peasants of Poland into serfs, forbidden to
leave their villages, deprived of freedom of movement. At the same time,
under the joint pressure of the ecclesiastic hierarchy and the feudal
landlords, the Polish Parliament in 1496 forbade the acquisition of agricultural
land by Jews. But the process of alienation from the soil must have started
long before that. Apart from the specific causes just mentioned - religious
discrimination, combined with the degradation of the free peasants into
serfs - the transformation of the predominantly agricultural nation of
Khazars into a predominantly urban community reflected a common phenomenon
in the history of migrations. Faced with different climatic conditions
and farming methods on the one hand, and on the other with unexpected
opportunities for an easier living offered by urban civilization, immigrant
populations are apt to change their occupational structure within a few
generations. The offspring of Abruzzi peasants in the New World became
waiters and restaurateurs, the grandsons of Polish farmers may become
engineers or psychoanalysts.*[The opposite process of colonists settling
on virgin soil applies to migrants from more highly developed to under-developed
regions.] .However, the transformation of Khazar Jewry
into Polish Jewry did not entail any brutal break with the past, or loss
of identity. It was a gradual, organic process of change, which - as Poliak
has convincingly shown - preserved some vital traditions of Khazar communal
life in their new country. This was mainly achieved through the emergence
of a social structure, or way of life, found nowhere else in the world
Diaspora: the Jewish small town, in Hebrew ayarah, in Yiddish
shtetl, in Polish miastecko. All three designations
are diminutives, which, however, do not necessarily refer to smallness
in size (some were quite big small-towns) but to the limited rights of
municipal selfgovernment they enjoyed. .The shtetl should not be confused
with the ghetto. The latter consisted of a street or quarter in which
Jews were compelled to live within the confines of a Gentile town. It
was, from the second half of the sixteenth century onward, the universal
habitat of Jews everywhere in the Christian, and most of the Muslim, world.
The ghetto was surrounded by walls, with gates that were locked at night.
It gave rise to claustrophobia and mental inbreeding, but also to a sense
of relative security in times of trouble. As it could not expand in size,
the houses were tall and narrow-chested, and permanent overcrowding created
deplorable sanitary conditions. It took great spiritual strength for people
living in such circumstances to keep their self-respect. Not all of them
did. .The shtetl, on the other hand, was
a quite different proposition - a type of settlement which, as already
said, existed only in Poland-Lithuania and nowhere else in the world.
It was a self-contained country town with an exclusively or predominantly
Jewish population. The shtetl's origins probably date back to
the thirteenth century, and may represent the missing link, as it were,
between the market towns of Khazaria and the Jewish settlements in Poland.
.The economic and social function
of these semi-rural, semiurban agglomerations seems to have been similar
in both countries. In Khazaria, as later in Poland, they provided a network
of trading posts or market towns which mediated between the needs of the
big towns and the countryside. They had regular fairs at which sheep and
cattle, alongside the goods manufactured in the towns and the products
of the rural cottage industries were sold or bartered; at the same time
they were the centres where artisans plied their crafts, from wheelwrights
to blacksmiths, silversmiths, tailors, Kosher butchers, millers, bakers
and candlestick-makers. There were also letter-writers for the illiterate,
synagogues for the faithful, inns for travellers, and a heder
- Hebrew for "room", which served as a school. There were itinerant
story-tellers and folk bards (some of their names, such as Velvel Zbarzher,
have been preserved)25 travelling from shtetl to shtetl
in Poland - and no doubt earlier on in Khazaria, if one is to judge by
the survival of story-tellers among Oriental people to our day. .Some particular trades became virtually a Jewish
monopoly in Poland. One was dealing in timber - which reminds one that
timber was the chief building material and an important export in Khazaria;
another was transport. "The dense net of shtetls,"
writes Poliak,26 "made it possible to distribute manufactured goods
over the whole country by means of the superbly built Jewish type of horse
cart. The preponderance of this kind of transport, especially in the east
of the country, was so marked amounting to a virtual monopoly - that the
Hebrew word for carter, ba'al agalah*[Literally "master
of the cart".] was incorporated into the Russian language as balagula.
Only the development of the railway in the second half of the nineteenth
century led to a decline in this trade." .Now
this specialization in coach-building and cartering could certainly not
have developed in the closed ghettoes of Western Jewry; it unmistakably
points to a Khazar origin. The people of the ghettoes were sedentary;
while the Khazars, like other semi-nomadic people, used horse- or ox-drawn
carts to transport their tents, goods and chattel - including royal tents
the size of a circus, fit to accommodate several hundred people. They
certainly had the know-how to negotiate the roughest tracks in their new
country. .Other specifically Jewish
occupations were inn-keeping, the running of flour mills and trading in
furs - none of them found in the ghettoes of Western Europe. .Such,
in broad outlines, was the structure of the Jewish shtetl in
Poland. Some of its features could be found in old market towns in any
country; others show a more specific affinity with what we know - little
though it is - about the townships of Khazaria, which were probably the
prototypes of the Polish shtetl. .To
these specific features should be added the "pagoda-style" of
the oldest surviving wooden shtetl synagogues dating from the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which is totally different from both
the native style of architecture and from the building style adopted by
Western Jews and replicated later on in the ghettoes of Poland. The interior
decoration of the oldest shtetl synagogues is also quite different
from the style of the Western ghetto; the walls of the shtetl
synagogue were covered with Moorish arabesques, and with animal figures
characteristic of the Persian influence found in Magyar-Khazar artefacts
(I, 13) and in the decorative style brought to Poland by Armenian immigrants.27
.The traditional garb of Polish
Jewry is also of unmistakably Eastern origin. The typical long silk kaftan
may have been an imitation of the coat worn by the Polish nobility, which
itself was copied from the outfit of the Mongols in the Golden Horde -
fashions travel across political divisions; but we know that kaftans were
worn long before that by the nomads of the steppes. The skull-cap (yarmolka)
is worn to this day by orthodox Jews - and by the Uzbeks and other Turkish
people in the Soviet Union. On top of the skull-cap men wore the streimel,
an elaborate round hat rimmed with fox-fur, which the Khazars copied from
the Khasaks - or vice versa. As already mentioned, the trade in fox and
sable furs, which had been flourishing in Khazaria, became another virtual
Jewish monopoly in Poland. As for the women, they wore, until the middle
of the nineteenth century, a tall white turban, which was an exact copy
of the Jauluk worn by Khasak and Turkmen women.28 (Nowadays orthodox Jewesses
have to wear instead of a turban a wig made of their own hair, which is
shaved off when they get married.) .One
might also mention in this context - though somewhat dubiously - the Polish
Jews' odd passion for gefillte (stuffed) fisch, a national
dish which the Polish Gentiles adopted. "Without fish", the
saying went, "there is no Sabbath." Was it derived from distant
memories of life on the Caspian, where fish was the staple diet? .Life
in the shtetl is celebrated with much romantic nostalgia in Jewish
literature and folklore. Thus we read in a modern survey of its customs29
about the joyous way its inhabitants celebrated the Sabbath:
- Wherever one is, he will try to reach home in time to greet the Sabbath
with his own family. The pedlar travelling from village to village,
the itinerant tailor, shoemaker, cobbler, the merchant off on a trip,
all will plan, push, hurry, trying to reach home before sunset on Friday
evening. .As they press homeward
the shammes calls through the streets of the shtetl,
"Jews to the bathhouse!" A functionary of the synagogue, the
shammes is a combination of sexton and beadle. He speaks with
an authority more than his own, for when he calls "Jews to the
bathhouse" he is summoning them to a commandment.
The most vivid evocation of life in the shtetl is the surrealistic
amalgam of fact and fantasy in the paintings and lithographs of Marc Chagall,
where biblical symbols appear side by side with the bearded carter wielding
his whip and wistful rabbis in kaftan and yarmolka. .It was a weird community, reflecting its weird
origins. Some of the earliest small-towns were probably founded by prisoners
of war - such as the Karaites of Troki - whom Polish and Lithuanian nobles
were anxious to settle on their empty lands. But the majority of these
settlements were products of the general migration away from the "wild
fields" which were turning into deserts. "After the Mongol conquest",
wrote Poliak, "when the Slav villages wandered westward, the Khazar
shtetls went with them."30 The pioneers of the new settlements
were probably rich Khazar traders who constantly travelled across Poland
on the much frequented trade routes into Hungary. "The Magyar and
Kabar migration into Hungary blazed the trail for the growing Khazar settlements
in Poland: it turned Poland into a transit area between the two countries
with Jewish communities."31 Thus the travelling merchants were familiar
with conditions in the prospective areas of resettlement, and had occasion
to make contact with the landowners in search of tenants. "The landlord
would enter into an agreement with such rich and respected Jews"
(we are reminded of Abraham Prokownik) "as would settle on his estate
and bring in other settlers. They would, as a rule, choose people from
the place where they had lived."32 These colonists would be an assorted
lot of farmers, artisans and craftsmen, forming a more or less self-supporting
community. Thus the Khazar shtetl would be transplanted and become
a Polish shtetl. Farming would gradually drop out, but by that
time the adaptation to changed conditions would have been completed. .The nucleus of modern Jewry thus followed the
old recipe: strike out for new horizons but stick together.
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