Anti-Zionist Demography

The Invention of the Jewish People
by Shlomo Sand, trans Yael Lotan
Verso, 2009, 332 pp., $34.95

Everyone has heard of Attila and his Huns, who fought their way on pony back from the northern borders of China to the lands today called France, where they were defeated in 453 CE. Theirs was only the first of a series of migrations from cCntral Asia that repeatedly reshaped the Christian and Islamic world over the next thousand years, and the conquests of their successors, though less famous, were more enduring. Akatzirs and Avars; Bulgars, Khazars, and Kök Türks; Ogurs, Onogurs (with their allies the Hungarians), Quturgurs, and Uturgurs; Polovtsy, Pechenegs, Qumans, and Sabirs; and of course, the Mongols: these and many other of the diverse peoples whom scholars today assign to the semi-geographic, semi-ethnic, and semi-linguistic category of Altaic or Turkic, all left Central Asia for destinations that eventually encompassed vast expanses of Europe, Asia, Asia Minor, and even Africa (the Mamluks of Egypt).

The Khazars rank among the more obscure of these peoples. They left no records in their own language and few in other languages. We do not know when they first entered the world of Late Antiquity or when they disappeared. From Greek, Armenian, Muslim, and Jewish writers, we learn everything we know about the polity, called the “qaganate,” that they established. It seems to have stretched, at its height, from Kiev in the North East to Crimea in the South West. It lasted more than three hundred years, gradually falling to the Rus after 965 CE. We do not know the exact location of its capital, Atil, somewhere near the lower Volga—a tent city, apart from a few ceremonial buildings, because the Khazars clung to their steppe ways. They gathered in cloth yurts during the winter, dispersing for war and pastoral activities in summer. This textile architecture disintegrated after their disappearance, foiling archaeological attempts to discover material traces of the qaganate’s glory.

If the Khazars are scarce in ancient sources, they are wildly overrepresented in modern ones. Unlike their contemporary rivals the Alans, Bulgars, or Pechenegs, the Khazars have been the subject of two modern bestsellers—first Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), and now the book under review. On the World Wide Web they are far more populous than they ever were in their own time—ninth-century Muslim geographers estimated their fighting force at around ten thousand—peopling half a million sites like the “Illuminati Conspiracy Archive” and “christusrex.org.” (The latter has put Koestler’s book online, with a preface suggesting that his suicide in 1983 was in fact a murder by the Mossad.) Why should this obscure Turkic tribe be so interesting today?

The answer lies in the intersection of late antique and postmodern geopolitics. The Khazars, like other steppe nomads, entered a world div...