The Khazar Empire: Origins, Rise and Legacy

In this episode, we discover one of the successor states of the Göktürk Empires, and arguably the most interesting of them all: the Empire of the Khazars (turkish: Hazarlar). This state was founded by remnants of the Western Göktürk Empire between 630 and 650 CE. The Ashina dynasty quickly took control over large parts of the Ponto-Caspian steppe, and their empire expanded well into Europe, the Caucasus and even Kazakhstan. However, apart from their military prowess and economic capacities, the most interesting aspect of the Khazars was their conversion to Judaism. Thus, the Khazar Khaganate became the only Jewish state of their time, and the last one until the creation of Israel in 1948.

Yet, it is not known how many of the Turkic people within the empire actually converted from Tengrism or Christianity to Judaism, and the hypothesis of the Turkic Khazars being the actual ancestors of the later Jews in Central and Eastern Europe has been very controversially debated for the past hundred years.

How should we deal with the Khazar legacy, then? We suggest that by analyzing not only the rise to power and their domination in the Ponto-Caspian steppe but also their origins and the socioeconomic changes taking place over the course of three centuries, we are going to be able to understand the legacy of these Turkic steppe warriors – both for Turkic and general Eurasian history. Because unlike some conspiracy theories or political ideologues might suggest, the Turkic Khazars were indeed of upmost geopolitical importance on the grand chess board of the early and high Middle Ages.

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