Contested Histories: A Medieval Jewish E

In the tenth century, the Jewish physician Hasdai b. Shaprut wrote a letter in Hebrew from his home in Islamic Spain. He asked about the veracity of the stories he had heard from Khorasani merchants: could it be true that a Jewish empire existed far afield that could hold its own against the Roman Empire and Islamic Caliphate alike? The response to Hasdai’s query was discovered in the geniza of the synagogue in Old Cairo, answering in the affirmative. Some modern scholars read the correspondence as evidence of the Jewish empire; others dismiss the correspondence as the same vein of the Prester John narratives among European Christians or, worse, an anti-Semitic theory about Jewish control over trade routes. For both medieval and modern observers, the line between fact and fiction in the history of this empire has never been particularly clear.

In the modern world, the ethnonym “Khazar” has been coopted into anti-Semitic discourse. While this course will trace the changing meaning of the term, we will focus mainly on the medieval Khazars themselves. The Khazar Khaganate—an empire that stretched over eastern Europe and the north Caucasus from the eighth to the tenth centuries—caught the imagination of historians, litterateurs, missionaries, and philosophers over the centuries. The extant evidence about the Khaganate is vast, but usually contradictory, frequently sensationalist, and invariably contested. Given the sheer quantity of information preserved about the Khazars, narrating their history becomes an exercise in imaginative reflection. As a result, this course offers a deep dive into the extant sources, asking what practical challenges emerge from reading the contested history of the Khaganate across the wide array of Greek, Arabic, Persian, Georgian, Armenian, and Hebrew sources. After engaging with the sources available for Khazar history, the last few meetings of the class will open the conversation to potential models for embracing medieval imagination and grappling with modern accretions to Khazar histories.