In his theological masterwork the Kuzari, the great medieval philosopher and poet Rabbi Judah Halevi imagines a dialogue between a rabbi and the ruler of an exotic pagan emperor about religion, which concludes with the latter’s decision to convert to Judaism. Halevi’s framing device was based on what he thought to be a true story of the king of the Khazaria, an empire located in what is now the southern part of European Russia—perhaps spilling over into Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia—whose ruling class converted to Judaism around the 8th century CE. From time to time—most recently in 2013—spurious theories have popped up that the Khazars are the real ancestors of the majority of Ashkenazi Jews. The eminent scholar Shaul Stampfer, meanwhile, has concluded that not only are these claims unfounded, but that the Khazar conversion is itself a myth.
Dan Shapira puts together what we do know about this people, and what evidence there is of their Judaism:
Al-Masudi [ca. 896–956, a historian and geographer], one of the best Arabic sources, said that the Khazars converted to Judaism in the times of Caliph Harun al-Rashid (766-809) and promised to tell the circumstances; the promise was never fulfilled and we have no such description. Al-Dimashqi [1256–1327, also an Arab geographer], said that the Jews, persecuted in Byzantium in the times of Harun al-Rashid, fled to Khazaria. He adds that these Jews found there a skillful but unsophisticated bunch of folks to whom they proposed their own religion; allegedly, the Khazars found this religion better than the one they had and accepted it.
In the 830s, coins were minted in Khazaria bearing the Arabic text “There is no God but Allah, and Musa (Moses) is His messenger.” These coins can be seen as evidence that the Khazars—or some of them—had converted to Judaism. [After all, allah is but the Arabic word for God, but Muslims believe Mohammad to be his chief messenger.] However . . . all we know is that the coins were minted by Jews for their purposes.
The first modern historian of Russia, Nikolai Karamzin [1766-1826] argued that the Russian state has been born from Khazaria and the Khazar “yoke” was good for the eastern Slavs; he needed the good Khazar yoke in order to oppose it to the bad Mongol yoke—because of which, Karamzin argued, Russia needed autocracy. Joseph Stalin . . . wrote in a Pravda article in 1952 that Khazaria was a parasitical cancerous growth of Judeo-plutocracy on the body of the peoples of the USSR.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/history-detective-shapira-khazars