WHO WERE THE HISTORICAL KHAZARS? continued

" As it was, on the line of the Caucasus the Arabs met the forces of an organized military power which effectively prevented them from extending their conquests in this direction……..The victorious Muslims were met and held by the forces of the Khazar Kingdom……..It can scarcely be doubted that but for the existence of the Khazars in the region north of the Caucasus, Byzantium, the bulwark of European civilization in the east, would have found itself outflanked by the Arabs, and the history of Christendom and Islam might well have been very different from what we know". [Dunlop, History, pp.1X-X]

After a great Khazar victory over the Arabs, the future Byzantine Emperor, Constantine V, married the Khazar princess Chichek, (later Irene), in AD740, and their son, Emperor Leo 1V, was known as Leo the Khazar.

Although the exact date is in dispute, about AD740, an event occurred which was to have lasting and unforeseen effects on East and West European history, and on Jewish religious and philosophical thought, particularly on the concept of "The Chosen People".

Alongside military prowess, Khazaria lay at a strategic point on the great trade routes from east to west, including the Silk Road. The river Itil was the major crossing point for the great caravans. It brought merchants, their goods, their news, their vast knowledge, to Khazaria and the west. With them came scholars, including Christians, Muslims and Jews from the great schools of Babylon. Goods were bought, sold, exchanged, including the much-prized Khazar stallions. At night, in the caravansarais and inns, ideas were exchanged, thoughts compared. Great religious debates were held in which the Kagan-King, the high ceremonial Shaman Bulan took part, listening and deliberating. Finally, Bulan and his court, and probably the military elite, converted to Judaism, Bulan receiving the Hebrew name of Sabriel. Contemporaries of Bulan were no doubt as astonished as modern scholars, when they found irrefutable evidence of the event in Hebrew, Byzantine, Arabic and Russian sources and, much later, in letters to the Sephardi community in Spain.

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