Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (16 page)

Lastly, there are the ancient Jewish communities of Crimea (the Krimchaks), which are probably partially Khazar-derived or -influenced; although the original Jewish presence in Crimea had certainly started in pre-Khazar times. After the demise of Khazar power elsewhere, some sort of Jewish political survival probably continued in Crimea, for some Crimean Khazars tried to seize control of part of the Crimean peninsula as late as 1079, and the area was actually known as Gazaria (Khazaria) and the Jewish population as Gazari (Khazars) up till the fifteenth century. What’s more, several Khazar Crimean fortress towns survived as Jewish centers into later medieval and early modern times.
¹⁹

O
f long-term significance was the Khazar empire and the Judaization of substantial numbers of Turkic and other peoples? The effects were twofold.

First, the Khazar empire—and the fact that it was monotheistic—prevented the westward spread of Islam. If it had not been for the military might of the empire, Islam would likely have rolled west into pagan eastern Europe and possibly even into pagan Scandinavia in the eighth and ninth centuries
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²⁰
The Vikings, who later ended up as Christians, could well have become Islamicized instead if the Khazar block on Islamic expansion had not existed. Theoretically Poland, Hungary, Romania, eastern Austria, the Czech and Slovak lands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Viking eastern England could all have become Muslim. If the Khazar empire had not prevented Islamic expansion, it is even possible that the Normans (originally Vikings from Denmark) might have already been Muslims for two hundred years by the time they conquered England in 1066. What’s more, if the Arabs had occupied what is now the Ukraine and Russia, a Viking people known as the Rus would never have been able to push south and east from the Baltic to establish Russia.

But blocking the Islamic advance was not the only long-term historical role played by Khazaria. The Jewish empire’s other legacy was the creation of a large pool of Jews of ethnically non-Jewish origin who subsequently became a major part—perhaps even the numerically dominant part—of northeast European Jewry and subsequently of world Jewry.

World Jewry was, and still is, divided into a number of distinctly different traditions, chief among which are the Sephardim (Spanish Jews) and the Ashkenazim (northern European Jews). By far the largest number of Ashkenazim originate from eastern Europe—especially Lithuania, Poland, and Russia—and almost certainly have a large Khazar or Khazar-influenced (i.e., ethnically Turkic, Slav, and Magyar) genetic component.

Potential physical evidence for this has recently been discovered by geneticists. DNA tests on Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews have revealed the possibility that at least one key section of the latter community may have genetic evidence of a potentially large-scale or even mass conversion which must have taken place sometime after around
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. 700—the time when the ancestors of the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities started to become geographically differentiated. Historically it is known that such mass conversions have never occurred in western Europe and that in eastern Europe (including Russia and the Ukraine) no such conversions have occurred since at least
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. 1200. This suggests that any such conversion must have taken place sometime between 700 and 1200 in eastern Europe—and the only known mass conversion within that time frame and in that geographical area was that of the Khazars in the eighth century. Significantly, the section of the Ashkenazi community whose DNA may suggest a partially convert origin is that section which up till now had traditionally been said to be wholly descended from the Assistant Priests of ancient Israel. This group, according to tradition, comprises the majority of the descendants of the ancient Israelite tribe of Levi—people who today still bear the name Levi or Levy. Significantly, it does not include a Levite subgroup—the Priests themselves—who often have the name Cohen. The Levi name, identity, and, even today, the Assistant-Priest status and role are only passed down in the male line, as is a specific piece of genetic material, the Y-chromosome—the DNA strand that actually determines maleness.

Genetic codes on the Y-chromosome are therefore inherited from a man’s distant male-line ancestors. By analyzing Y chromosomes from a sample of both Levite and non-Levite populations in both Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities, geneticists have discovered that an astounding 30 percent of Ashkenazi non-Cohenic Levites have a particular combination of DNA material on part of their Y-chromosome that is not shared to any extent by either non-Levite Ashkenazi Jews or the Sephardic community as a whole.
²²

This genetic marker does not even show up among the Cohens (descendants of the ancient Israelite Chief Priests)—but only among the descendants of Assistant Priests, and then only within Ashkenazi (northern European) Jewry.

What seems to have happened is not only a potentially large-scale conversion of non-Jewish people, almost certainly Khazars, to Judaism, but also the adoption of Levite (Assistant Priest) status by a substantial number of the Khazar converts. This interpretation is implicitly supported by textual evidence that has survived from Khazar times. A tenth-century letter of recommendation from the Jewish community of Kiev to Jewish communities outside Khazaria was signed by Jews with traditional Turkic names whose almost certainly Turkic Khazar ancestors had adopted Levitical second names—in both cases the name Cohen (a Levite subgroup)—indicating that they saw themselves as descendants or close associates of the ancient tribe of Levi.

If some top Khazars were adopting Cohenic Levitical status (i.e., Chief Priest status), then it is more than likely that others—a larger number—were adopting ordinary Levitical status (i.e., Assistant Priest status). Adoption of Cohenic or ordinary Levitical status by converts was and is expressly forbidden by rabbinical law, so the Khazars had to develop a mythic national history that gave them the right to Levitical status. They claimed that they were the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel and were not converts at all but merely returnees to Judaism. Furthermore, the tribe they claimed ancestry from was that of Simeon, the brother of the founder of the tribe of Levi; in the Bible (Genesis 49) it is made clear that the descendants of Simeon and Levi were to have a common destiny. Probably it was the old pre-Jewish Khazar priests—the
qams
—who at the conversion had become Levites en masse while the rest of the ethnic Khazar population (and probably some other Khazar-influenced peoples) had become ordinary non-Levitical Jews.

In the tenth and eleventh centuries, as the Khazar state disintegrated, and into the thirteenth century, as the Cuman and Mongol hordes pushed large numbers of refugees westward, Khazar and Khazar-influenced groups professing Judaism—including the probably highly committed Levites—migrated into eastern Europe, where they mixed with other Jewish groups moving east from Germany and north from Italy. As a result, many different peoples with different languages had to adopt a lingua franca, and that language became Yiddish—a composite language with a medieval German base but also including Slavic, Romance, Hebrew, Aramaic, possibly Turkic, and other lexical and syntactical components.

In time, the Ashkenazim became the dominant tradition in world Jewry, but the numerical strength that allowed them to achieve that status almost certainly derived, at least in part, from the Jewish empire of Khazaria, a state that vanished from the world stage a thousand years ago and has been forgotten even by most of the world’s history books.

Thus did the climatic and consequent political events in sixth-century Mongolia lead, via Turkic expansion and the subsequent formation of the Khazar empire, to both the non-Islamic nature of Europe and the size, ethnic makeup, and predominant cultural orientation of world Jewry.

Courtesy of the climatic chaos of the mid–sixth century, Avars, Slavs, Arabs, Turks, and Khazars changed Europe’s history forever.

WESTERN
EUROPE

D I S A S T E R  I N
B R I T A I N

T
he climatic problems of the sixth century—both directly and through the medium of the plague—were also inducing fundamental change, bringing ancient western Europe to an end and ushering in its protomodern successors. Many of the modern states of western Europe owe their genesis to the climatic and epidemiological turmoil of this period. It was, for example, arguably the single most pivotal era in British history, for it witnessed a decisive change in the balance of power between the island’s two major ethnic groups.

Prior to the fifth century, Britain had been a predominantly Celtic (native British) land. Then, in the 440s, substantial numbers of Germanic peoples had crossed the North Sea and settled in parts of what is now eastern and southern England. Over subsequent decades, hundreds of tiny Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were established. Some then amalgamated to become slightly larger units—Sussex, Surrey, Kent, Essex, early Wessex, East Anglia, and early Mercia. By the early sixth century (perhaps by 510 or 520) Anglo-Saxon expansion had virtually ceased in the face of Celtic resistance. This was the period normally associated with the quasi-legendary figure of King Arthur, a successful pan-British war leader. The Germanic east and the Celtic west then began to develop independently and separately.

The historical evidence shows that on the whole the British disliked the Anglo-Saxons so vehemently that normally they did not wish to mix or even trade with them, and the archaeological evidence confirms that there was indeed virtually no trade (and therefore probably little personal contact) between the Celtic west and the Germanic east.¹ In physical terms, vast forests separated the two peoples along most of what had become by the early sixth century a relatively stable frontier. And yet, by the early years of the following century, the Germanic Anglo-Saxons had taken over vast tracts of Celtic land, were engaged in further aggressive expansion, and had become the dominant geopolitical force. All this came about as a result, both direct and indirect, of the same worldwide climatic chaos that caused famines in China, snow in Mesopotamia, the first emergence of plague in East Africa, and the darkening of the sun, as reported in Constantinople.

Tree-ring evidence from Britain shows that tree growth slowed down significantly in 535–536 and did not fully recover until 555. The concentration of major climatic problems in the period 535–555 was seven times greater than in any other equivalent period during the rest of the 170-year span between 480 and 650.² Irish annals say that in Ireland there was a famine (“a failure of bread”) in 538, almost certainly due to climatic problems. The Meteorological Office survey of British weather—
A Meteorological Chronology up
to
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. 1450—
reveals that there were “floods in the Tweed with heavy casualties” in 536; that in 545 there was an “intensely cold winter”; that in 548, 250 people were killed in a “storm in London” in which “many homes were thrown down”; that in 550 “large hail stones like pullet’s eggs fell in Scotland”; that in 552 there was “violent rain in Scotland for five months”; that in 554 “the winter was so severe with frost and snow that the birds and wild animals became so tame as to allow themselves to be taken by hand”; and that in 555 there were “severe thunderstorms all over Britain.”