{"id":4877,"date":"2008-09-28T05:14:10","date_gmt":"2008-09-28T02:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=4877"},"modified":"2023-04-30T12:50:02","modified_gmt":"2023-04-30T09:50:02","slug":"scholar-claims-to-find-medieval-jewish-capital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2008\/09\/28\/scholar-claims-to-find-medieval-jewish-capital\/","title":{"rendered":"Scholar claims to find medieval Jewish capital ; Yahudi Turklerin Hazar Devletinin Baskenti: Itil, the Khazar capital"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The KHAZARS\/ Scholar claims to find medieval Jewish capital<\/h2>\n

September 22nd, 2008\u00a0\u00b7\u00a01 Comment\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n
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By MANSUR MIROVALEV, Associated Press Writer\u00a0<\/span>Sat Sep 20, 2:13 PM ET<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
MOSCOW – A Russian archaeologist says he has found the lost capital of theKhazars<\/span>, a powerful nation that adopted Judaism as its official religion more than 1,000 years ago, only to disappear leaving little trace of its culture.<\/div>\n
Dmitry Vasilyev, a professor at\u00a0Astrakhan State University<\/span>, said his nine-year excavation near the\u00a0Caspian Sea<\/span>\u00a0has finally unearthed the foundations of a triangular fortress of flamed brick, along with modest yurt-shaped dwellings, and he believes these are part of what was once Itil, the Khazar capital.<\/div>\n
By law Khazars could use flamed bricks only in the capital, Vasilyev said. The general location of the city on the Silk Road was confirmed in medieval chronicles by Arab, Jewish and European authors.<\/div>\n
\u201cThe discovery of the capital of Eastern Europe\u2019s first feudal state is of great significance,\u201d he told The Associated Press. \u201cWe should view it as part of Russian history.\u201d<\/div>\n
Kevin Brook, the American author of \u201cThe Jews of Khazaria,\u201d e-mailed Wednesday that he has followed the Itil dig over the years, and even though it has yielded no Jewish artifacts, \u201cNow I\u2019m as confident as the archaeological team is that they\u2019ve truly found the long-lost city,<\/div>\n
The Khazars were a Turkic tribe that roamed the steppes from Northern China to the Black Sea. Between the 7th and 10th centuries they conquered huge swaths of what is now southern Russia and\u00a0Ukraine<\/span>, the\u00a0Caucasus Mountains<\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0Central Asia<\/span>\u00a0as far as the\u00a0Aral Sea<\/span>.<\/div>\n
Itil, about 800 miles south of\u00a0Moscow<\/span>, had a population of up to 60,000 and occupied 0.8 square miles of marshy plains southwest of the\u00a0Russian Caspian Sea port<\/span>\u00a0of\u00a0Astrakhan<\/span>, Vasilyev said.<\/div>\n
It lay at a major junction of the Silk Road, the\u00a0trade route<\/span>\u00a0between Europe and China, which \u201chelped Khazars amass giant profits,\u201d he said.<\/div>\n
The Khazar empire was once a regional superpower, and Vasilyev said his team has found \u201cluxurious collections\u201d of well-preserved ceramics that help identify cultural ties of the Khazar state with Europe, the Byzantine Empire and even Northern Africa. They also found armor, wooden kitchenware, glass lamps and cups, jewelry and vessels for transporting precious balms dating back to the eighth and ninth centuries, he said.<\/div>\n
But a scholar in\u00a0Israel<\/span>, while calling the excavations interesting, said the challenge was to find Khazar inscriptions.<\/div>\n
\u201cIf they found a few buildings, or remains of buildings, that\u2019s interesting but does not make a big difference,\u201d said Dr. Simon Kraiz, an expert on Eastern European Jewry at\u00a0Haifa<\/span>\u00a0University. \u201cIf they found Khazar writings, that would be very important.\u201d<\/div>\n
Vasilyev says no Jewish artifacts have been found at the site, and in general, most of what is known about the Khazars comes from chroniclers from other, sometimes competing cultures and empires.<\/div>\n
\u201cWe know a lot about them, and yet we know almost nothing: Jews wrote about them, and so did Russians, Georgians, and Armenians, to name a few,\u201d said Kraiz. \u201cBut from the Khazars themselves we have nearly nothing.\u201d<\/div>\n
The Khazars\u2019 ruling dynasty and nobility converted to Judaism sometime in the 8th or 9th centuries. Vasilyev said the limited number of Jewish religious artifacts such as mezuzas and Stars of David found at other Khazar sites prove that ordinary Khazars preferred traditional beliefs such as shamanism, or newly introduced religions including Islam.<\/div>\n
Yevgeny Satanovsky, director of the\u00a0Middle Eastern Institute<\/span>\u00a0in\u00a0Moscow<\/span>, said he believes the Khazar elite chose Judaism out of political expediency \u2014 to remain independent of neighboring Muslim and Christian states. \u201cThey embraced Judaism because they wanted to remain neutral, like\u00a0Switzerland<\/span>\u00a0these days,\u201d he said.<\/div>\n
In particular, he said, the Khazars opposed the Arab advance into the\u00a0Caucasus Mountains<\/span>\u00a0and were instrumental in containing a Muslim push toward eastern Europe. He compared their role in eastern Europe to that of the French knights who defeated Arab forces at the\u00a0Battle of Tours<\/span>\u00a0in France in 732.<\/div>\n
The Khazars succeeded in holding off the Arabs, but a young, expanding Russian state vanquished the Khazar empire in the late\u00a010th century<\/span>. Medieval Russian epic poems mention Russian warriors fighting the \u201cJewish Giant.\u201d<\/div>\n
\u201cIn many ways,\u00a0Russia<\/span>\u00a0is a successor of the Khazar state,\u201d Vasilyev said.<\/div>\n

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He said his dig revealed traces of a large fire that was probably caused by the Russian conquest. He said Itil was rebuilt following the fall of the Khazar empire, when ethnic Khazars were slowly assimilated by Turkic-speaking tribes,\u00a0Tatars<\/span>and\u00a0Mongols<\/span>, who inhabited the city until it was flooded by the rising\u00a0Caspian Sea<\/span>around the\u00a014th century<\/span>.<\/div>\n

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The study of the Khazar empire was discouraged in the\u00a0Soviet Union<\/span>. The dictator\u00a0Josef Stalin<\/span>, in particular, detested the idea that a Jewish empire had come before Russia\u2019s own. He ordered references to Khazar history removed from textbooks because they \u201cdisproved his theory of Russian statehood,\u201d Satanovsky said.<\/div>\n

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Only now are Russian scholars free to explore Khazar culture. The Itil excavations have been sponsored by the Russian-Jewish Congress, a nonprofit organization that supports cultural projects in Russia.<\/div>\n

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\u201cKhazar studies are just beginning,\u201d Satanovsky said.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0 The KHAZARS\/ Scholar claims to find medieval Jewish capital September 22nd, 2008\u00a0\u00b7\u00a01 Comment\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 By MANSUR MIROVALEV, Associated Press Writer\u00a0Sat Sep 20, 2:13 PM ET MOSCOW – A Russian archaeologist says he has found the lost capital of theKhazars, a powerful nation that adopted Judaism as its official religion more than 1,000 years ago, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":179182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[783],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ukraine-eastern-europe-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}