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.