Re: Who was talking about Khazaria?

On Fri, 25 Oct 2002 09:06:22 -0500 Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>
writes:
>     I'd say that the theory presented here is about half-right.
> Traditionally,
> it was assumed that after the Byzantines and Slavs finished mopping
> up the
> Khazarian Empire, all the Khazars just crawled into a corner and
> died. However,
> there is a significant amount of evidence that even before the end
> of their
> empire, some Khazarians were migrating--there is some suggestions
> that a family
> or clan of Khazars joined with the Magyar tribes on their way west
> to what is
> today modern Hungary. Koestler's theory is that they basically went
> west after
> the fall of the empire, becoming the ancestors of most European
> Jews. A more
> recent book, "The Jews of Khazaria," posits a theory between the two
> extremes;
> namely, that the Khazarian Jews went west and bumped into the French
> and German
> Jews heading east, intermingled, and out of the mix came Ashkenazi
>     :Peter
-

Well, technically the Franco-German Jews were already "Ashkenazic"
(Ashkenaz = the Rhineland) before they migrated into Eastern Europe and
bumped into whatever remained of the Khazars.  Before that migration, if
i remember correctly, Eastern Europe was known as Kena`an according to
the Jewish habit of renaming DIasporan regions after Biblical places in
the Eastern Mediterranean.  Until the medieval period, Spain was known as
"Ispamya" before it was renamed "Sefarad".  Which is why it's still
"Ispamya" (or something similar) in Judajca.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "word-making is world-making."
     ~ avivah gottlieb zornberg

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