by
arthur koestler
VII
CROSS-CURRENTS
1
ON the evidence quoted in previous chapters, one can easily understand
why Polish historians - who are, after all, closest to the sources - are
in agreement that "in earlier times, the main bulk of the Jewish
population originated from the Khazar country".1 One might even be
tempted to overstate the case by claiming - as Kutschera does - that Eastern
Jewry was a hundred per cent of Khazar origin. Such a claim might be tenable
if the ill-fated Franco-Rhenish community were the only rival in the search
for paternity. But in the later Middle Ages things become more complicated
by the rise and fall of Jewish settlements all over the territories of
the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and the Balkans. Thus not only Vienna
and Prague had a considerable Jewish population, but there are no less
than five places called Judendorf, "Jew-village", in the Carinthian
Alps, and more Judenburgs and Judenstadts in the mountains of Styria.
By the end of the fifteenth century, the Jews were expelled from both
provinces, and went to Italy, Poland and Hungary; but where did they originally
come from? Certainly not from the West. As Mieses put it in his survey
of these scattered communities:
- During the high Middle Ages we thus find in the east a chain of settlements
stretching from Bavaria to Persia, the Causcasus, Asia Minor and Byzantium.
[But] westward from Bavaria there is a gap through the whole length
of Germany.... Just how this immigration of Jews into the Alpine regions
came about we do not know, but without doubt the three great reservoirs
of Jews from late antiquity played their part: Italy, Byzantium and
Persia.2
The missing link in this enumeration is, once again, Khazaria, which,
as we have seen earlier on, served as a receptacle and transit-station
for Jews emigrating from Byzantium and the Caliphate. Mieses has acquired
great merit in refuting the legend of the Rhenish origin of Eastern Jewry,
but he, too, knew little of Khazar history, and was unaware of its demographic
importance. However, he may have been right in suggesting an Italian component
among the immigrants to Austria. Italy was not only quasi-saturated with
Jews since Roman times, but, like Khazaria, also received its share of
immigrants from Byzantium. So here we might have a trickle of "genuine"
Jews of Semitic origin into Eastern Europe; yet it could not have been
more than a trickle, for there is no trace in the records of any substantial
immigration of Italian Jews into Austria, whereas there is plenty of evidence
of a reverse migration of Jews into Italy after their expulsion from the
Alpine provinces at the end of the fifteenth century. Details like this
tend to blur the picture, and make one wish that the Jews had gone to
Poland on board the Mayflower, with all the records neatly kept.
.Yet the broad outlines of the migratory process
are nevertheless discernible. The Alpine settlements were in all likelihood
westerly offshoots of the general Khazar migration toward Poland, which
was spread over several centuries and followed several different routes
- through the Ukraine, the Slavonic regions north of Hungary, perhaps
also through the Balkans. A Rumanian legend tells of an invasion - the
date unknown - of armed Jews into that country.3
2
There is another, very curious legend relating to the history of Austrian
Jewry. It was launched by Christian chroniclers in the Middle Ages, but
was repeated in all seriousness by historians as late as the beginning
of the eighteenth century. In pre-Christian days, so the legend goes,
the Austrian provinces were ruled by a succession of Jewish princes. The
Austrian Chronicle, compiled by a Viennese scribe in the reign of Albert
III(1350-95) contains a list of no less than twenty-two such Jewish princes,
who are said to have succeeded each other. The list gives not only their
alleged names, some of which have a distinctly Ural-Altaian ring, but
also the length of their rule and the place where they are buried; thus:
"Sennan, ruled 45 years, buried at the Stubentor in Vienna; Zippan,
43 years, buried in Tulln"; and so on, including names like Lapton,
Ma'alon, Raptan, Rabon, Effra, Sameck, etc. After these Jews came five
pagan princes, followed by Christian rulers. The legend is repeated, with
some variations, in the Latin histories of Austria by Henricus Gundelfingus,
1474, and by several others, the last one being Anselmus Schram's Flores
Chronicorum Austriae, 1702 (who still seems to have believed in its
authenticity).4 .How could this fantastic tale have originated?
Let us listen to Mieses again: "The very fact that such a legend
could develop and stubbornly maintain itself through several centuries,
indicates that deep in the national consciousness of ancient Austria dim
memories persisted of a Jewish presence in the lands on the upper Danube
in bygone days. Who knows whether the tidal waves emanating from the Khazar
dominions in Eastern Europe once swept into the foothills of the Alps
- which would explain the Turanian flavour of the names of those princes.
The confabulations of mediaeval chroniclers could evoke a popular echo
only if they were supported by collective recollections, however vague."5
.As already mentioned, Mieses is rather inclined
to underestimate the Khazar contribution to Jewish history, but even so
he hit on the only plausible hypothesis which could explain the origin
of the persistent legend. One may even venture to be a little more specific.
For more than half a century - up to AD 955 - Austria, as far west as
the river Enns, was under Hungarian domination. The Magyars had arrived
in their new country in 896, together with the Kabar-Khazar tribes who
were influential in the nation. The Hungarians at the time were not yet
converted to Christianity (that happened only a century later, AD 1000)
and the only monotheistic religion familiar to them was Khazar Judaism.
There may have been one or more tribal chieftains among them who practised
a Judaism of sorts - we remember the Byzantine chronicler, John Cinnamus,
mentioning Jewish troops fighting in the Hungarian army.*[See above, V,
2.] Thus there may have been some substance to the legend - particularly
if we remember that the Hungarians were still in their savage raiding
period, the scourge of Europe. To be under their dominion was certainly
a traumatic experience which the Austrians were unlikely to forget. It
all fits rather nicely.
3
Further evidence against the supposedly Franco-Rhenish origin of Eastern
Jewry is provided by the structure of Yiddish, the popular language of
the Jewish masses, spoken by millions before the holocaust, and still
surviving among traditionalist minorities in the Soviet Union and the
United States. .Yiddish is a curious amalgam of Hebrew, mediaeval
German, Slavonic and other elements, written in Hebrew characters. Now
that it is dying out, it has become a subject of much academic research
in the United States and Israel, but until well into the twentieth century
it was considered by Western linguists as merely an odd jargon, hardly
worth serious study. As H. Smith remarked: "Little attention has
been paid to Yiddish by scholars. Apart from a few articles in periodicals,
the first really scientific study of the language was Mieses's Historical
Grammar published in 1924. It is significant that the latest edition
of the standard historical grammar of German, which treats German from
the point of view of its dialects, dismisses Yiddish in twelve lines."6 .At first glance the prevalence of German loanwords
in Yiddish seems to contradict our main thesis on the origins of Eastern
Jewry; we shall see presently that the opposite is true, but the argument
involves several steps. The first is to inquire what particular kind of
regional German dialect went into the Yiddish vocabulary. Nobody before
Mieses seems to have paid serious attention to this question; it is to
his lasting merit to have done so, and to have come up with a conclusive
answer. Based on the study of the vocabulary, phonetics and syntax of
Yiddish as compared with the main German dialects in the Middle Ages,
he concludes:
- No linguistic components derived from the parts of Germany bordering
on France are found in the Yiddish language. Not a single word from
the entire list of specifically Moselle-Franconian origin compiled by
J. A. Ballas (Beitrge zur Kunntnis der Trierischen Volkssprache,
1903, 28ff.) has found its way into the Yiddish vocabulary. Even the
more central regions of Western Germany, around Frankfurt, have not
contributed to the Yiddish language....7 Insofar as the origins of Yiddish
are concerned, Western Germany can be written off....8 Could it be that
the generally accepted view, according to which the German Jews once
upon a time immigrated from France across the Rhine, is misconceived?
The history of the German Jews, of Ashkenazi*[For "Ashkenazi"
see below, VIII, I] Jewry, must be revised. The errors of history are
often rectified by linguistic research. The conventional view of the
erstwhile immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from France belongs to the category
of historic errors which are awaiting correction.9
He then quotes, among other examples of historic fallacies, the case
of the Gypsies, who were regarded as an offshoot from Egypt, "until
linguistics showed that they come from India".10 .Having
disposed of the alleged Western origin of the Germanic element in Yiddish,
Mieses went on to show that the dominant influence in it are the so-called
"East-Middle German" dialects which were spoken in the Alpine
regions of Austria and Bavaria roughly up to the fifteenth century. In
other words, the German component which went into the hybrid Jewish language
originated in the eastern regions of Germany, adjacent to the Slavonic
belt of Eastern Europe. .Thus
the evidence from linguistics supports the historical record in refuting
the misconception of the Franco-Rhenish origins of Eastern Jewry. But
this negative evidence does not answer the question how an East-Middle
German dialect combined with Hebrew and Slavonic elements became the common
language of that Eastern Jewry, the majority of which we assume to have
been of Khazar origin. .In attempting
to answer this question, several factors have to be taken into consideration.
First, the evolution of Yiddish was a long and complex process, which
presumably started in the fifteenth century or even earlier; yet it remained
for a long time a spoken language, a kind of lingua franca, and
appears in print only in the nineteenth century. Before that, it had no
established grammar, and "it was left to the individual to introduce
foreign words as he desires. There is no established form of pronunciation
or spelling.... The chaos in spelling may be illustrated by the rules
laid down by the Jüdische Volks- Bibliothek: (1) Write as you
speak, (2) write so that both Polish and Lithuanian Jews may understand
you, and (3) spell differently words of the same sound which have a different
signification."11 .Thus Yiddish
grew, through the centuries, by a kind of untrammelled proliferation,
avidly absorbing from its social environments such words, phrases, idiomatic
expressions as best served its purpose as a lingua franca. But
the culturally and socially dominant element in the environment of mediaeval
Poland were the Germans. They alone, among the immigrant populations,
were economically and intellectually more influential than the Jews. We
have seen that from the early days of the Piast dynasty, and particularly
under Casimir the Great, everything was done to attract immigrants to
colonize the land and build "modern" cities. Casimir was said
to have "found a country of wood and left a country of stone".
But these new cities of stone, such as Krakau (Cracow) or Lemberg (Lwow)
were built and ruled by German immigrants, living under the so-called
Magdeburg law, i.e., enjoying a high degree of municipal self-government.
Altogether not less than four million Germans are said to have immigrated
into Poland,12 providing it with an urban middleclass that it had not
possessed before. As Poliak has put it, comparing the German to the Khazar
immigration into Poland: "the rulers of the country imported these
masses of much-needed enterprising foreigners, and facilitated their settling
down according to the way of life they had been used to in their countries
of origin: the German town and the Jewish shtetl". (However,
this tidy separation became blurred when later Jewish arrivals from the
West also settled in the towns and formed urban ghettoes.)
.Not only the educated bourgeoisie, but the clergy too,
was predominantly German - a natural consequence of Poland opting for
Roman Catholicism and turning toward Western civilization, just as the
Russian clergy after Vladimir's conversion to Greek orthodoxy was predominantly
Byzantine. Secular culture followed along the same lines, in the footsteps
of the older Western neighbour. The first Polish university was founded
in 1364 in Cracow, then a predominantly German city.*[One of its students
in the next century was Nicolaus Copernicus or Mikolaj Koppernigk whom
both Polish and German patriots later claimed as their national.] As Kutschera,
the Austrian, has put it, rather smugly:
- The German colonists were at first regarded by the people with suspicion
and distrust; yet they succeeded in gaining an increasingly firm foothold,
and even in introducing the German educational system. The Poles learnt
to appreciate the advantages of the higher culture introduced by the
Germans and to imitate their foreign ways. The Polish aristocracy, too,
grew fond of German customs and found beauty and pleasure in whatever
came from Germany.13
Not exactly modest, but essentially true. One remembers the high esteem
for German Kultur among nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals.
.It is easy to see why Khazar
immigrants pouring into mediaeval Poland had to learn German if they wanted
to get on. Those who had close dealings with the native populace no doubt
also had to learn some pidgin Polish (or Lithuanian, or Ukrainian or Slovene);
German, however, was a prime necessity in any contact with the towns.
But there was also the synagogue and the study of the Hebrew thorah. One
can visualize a shtetl craftsman, a cobbler perhaps, or a timber
merchant, speaking broken German to his clients, broken Polish to the
serfs on the estate next door; and at home mixing the most expressive
bits of both with Hebrew into a kind of intimate private language. How
this hotchpotch became communalized and standardized to the extent to
which it did, is any linguist's guess; but at least one can discern some
further factors which facilitated the process. .Among the later immigrants to Poland there
were also, as we have seen, a certain number of "real" Jews
from the Alpine countries, Bohemia and eastern Germany. Even if their
number was relatively small, these German-speaking Jews were superior
in culture and learning to the Khazars, just as the German Gentiles were
culturally superior to the Poles. And just as the Catholic clergy was
German, so the Jewish rabbis from the West were a powerful factor in the
Germanization of the Khazars, whose Judaism was fervent but primitive.
To quote Poliak again:
- Those German Jews who reached the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania had
an enormous influence on their brethren from the east. The reason why
the [Khazar] Jews were so strongly attracted to them was that they admired
their religious learning and their efficiency in doing business with
the predominantly German cities.... The language spoken at the Heder,
the school for religious teaching, and at the house of the Ghevir
[notable, rich man] would influence the language of the whole community.14
A rabbinical tract from seventeenth-century Poland contains the pious
wish: "May God will that the country be filled with wisdom and that
all Jews speak German."15.Characteristically, the only sector among the
Khazarian Jews in Poland which resisted both the spiritual and worldly
temptations offered by the German language were the Karaites, who rejected
both rabbinical learning and material enrichment. Thus they never took
to Yiddish. According to the first all-Russian census in 1897, there were
12894 Karaite Jews living in the Tsarist Empire (which, of course, included
Poland). Of these 9666 gave Turkish as their mother tongue (i.e., presumably
their original Khazar dialect), 2632 spoke Russian, and only 383 spoke
Yiddish. .The Karaite sect, however,
represents the exception rather than the rule. In general, immigrant populations
settling in a new country tend to shed their original language within
two or three generations and adopt the language of their new country.*[This
does not, of course, apply to conquerors and colonizers, who impose their
own language on the natives.] The American grandchildren of immigrants
from Eastern Europe never learn to speak Polish or Ukrainian, and find
the jabber-wocky of their grandparents rather comic. It is difficult to
see how historians could ignore the evidence for the Khazar migration
into Poland on the grounds that more than half a millennium later they
speak a different language. .Incidentally,
the descendants of the biblical Tribes are the classic example of linguistic
adaptability. First they spoke Hebrew; in the Babylonian exile, Chaldean;
at the time of Jesus, Aramaic; in Alexandria, Greek; in Spain, Arabic,
but later Ladino - a Spanish-Hebrew mixture, written in Hebrew characters,
the Sephardi equivalent of Yiddish; and so it goes on. They preserved
their religious identity, but changed languages at their convenience.
The Khazars were not descended from the Tribes, but, as we have seen,
they shared a certain cosmopolitanism and other social characteristics
with their co-religionists.
4
Poliak has proposed an additional hypothesis concerning the early origins
of Yiddish, which deserves to be mentioned, though it is rather problematical.
He thinks that the "shape of early Yiddish emerged in the Gothic
regions of the Khazar Crimea. In those regions the conditions of life
were bound to bring about a combination of Germanic and Hebrew elements
hundreds of years before the foundation of the settlements in the Kingdoms
of Poland and Lithuania."16 .Poliak
quotes as indirect evidence a certain Joseph Barbaro of Venice, who lived
in Tana (an Italian merchant colony on the Don estuary) from 1436 to 1452,
and who wrote that his German servant could converse with a Goth from
the Crimea just as a Florentine could understand the language of an Italian
from Genoa. As a matter of fact, the Gothic language survived in the Crimea
(and apparently nowhere else) at least to the middle of the sixteenth
century. At that time the Habsburg ambassador in Constantinople, Ghiselin
de Busbeck, met people from the Crimea, and made a list of words from
the Gothic that they spoke. (This Busbeck must have been a remarkable
man, for it was he who first introduced the lilac and tulip from the Levant
to Europe.) Poliak considers this vocabulary to be close to the Middle
High German elements found in Yiddish. He thinks the Crimean Goths kept
contact with other Germanic tribes and that their language was influenced
by them. Whatever one may think of it, it is a hypothesis worth the linguist's
attention.
5
"In a sense," wrote Cecil Roth, "the Jewish dark ages
may be said to begin with the Renaissance."17 .Earlier on, there had been massacres and other
forms of persecution during the crusades, the Black Death, and under other
pretexts; but these had been lawless outbreaks of massviolence, actively
opposed or passively tolerated by the authorities. From the beginnings
of the Counter-Reformation, however, the Jews were legally degraded to
not-quite-human status, in many respects comparable to the Untouchables
in the Hindu caste system. ."The few communities suffered to remain
in Western Europe - i.e., in Italy, Germany, and the papal possessions
in southern France - were subjected at last to all the restrictions which
earlier ages had usually allowed to remain an ideal"18 - i.e., which
had existed on ecclesiastical and other decrees, but had remained on paper
(as, for instance, in Hungary, see above, V, 2). Now, however, these "ideal"
ordinances were ruthlessly enforced: residential segregation, sexual apartheid,
exclusion from all respected positions and occupations; wearing of distinctive
clothes: yellow badge and conical headgear. In 1555 Pope Paul IV in his
bull cum nimis absurdum insisted on the strict and consistent
enforcement of earlier edicts, confining Jews to closed ghettoes. A year
later the Jews of Rome were forcibly transferred. All Catholic countries,
where Jews still enjoyed relative freedom of movement, had to follow the
example. .In Poland, the honeymoon period inaugurated
by Casimir the Great had lasted longer than elsewhere, but by the end
of the sixteenth century it had run its course. The Jewish communities,
now confined to shtetl and ghetto, became overcrowded, and the
refugees from the Cossack massacres in the Ukrainian villages under Chmelnicky
(see above, V, 5) led to a rapid deterioration of the housing situation
and economic conditions. The result was a new wave of massive emigration
into Hungary, Bohemia, `Rumania and Germany, where the Jews who had all
but vanished with the Black Death were still thinly spread. .Thus
the great trek to the West was resumed. It was to continue through nearly
three centuries until the Second World War, and became the principal source
of the existing Jewish communities in Europe, the United States and Israel.
When its rate of flow slackened, the pogroms of the nineteenth century
provided a new impetus. "The second Western movement," writes
Roth (dating the first from the destruction of Jerusalem), "which
continued into the twentieth century, may be said to begin with the deadly
Chmelnicky massacres of 1648-49 in Poland."19
6
The evidence quoted in previous chapters adds up to a strong case in
favour of those modern historians - whether Austrian, Israeli or Polish
who, independently from each other, have argued that the bulk of modern
Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin. The mainstream of
Jewish migrations did not flow from the Mediterranean across France and
Germany to the east and then back again. The stream moved in a consistently
westerly direction, from the Caucasus through the Ukraine into Poland
and thence into Central Europe. When that unprecedented mass-settlement
in Poland came into beng, there were simply not enough Jews around in
the west to account for it; while in the east a whole nation was on the
move to new frontiers. .It would of course be foolish to deny that
Jews of different origin also contributed to the existing Jewish world-community.
The numerical ratio of the Khazar to the Semitic and other contributions
is impossible to establish. But the cumulative evidence makes one inclined
to agree with the concensus of Polish historians that "in earlier
times the main bulk originated from the Khazar country"; and that,
accordingly, the Khazar contribution to the genetic make-up of the Jews
must be substantial, and in all likelihood dominant.
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