The Wind of the Khazars by Cecilia Rothschild

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The Wind of the Khazars

By Cecilia Rothschild

The Wind of the Khazars

by Marek Halter

Translated by Michael Bernard

The Toby Press, New Milton, CT

October , 2003  The group of warrior tribes called the Khazars, who between 700-1000 C.E controlled the region from north of the Caucasus south to Kiev, and from the Black Sea to the Caspian, have long fascinated historians. Particularly compelling are the legends surrounding their conversion to Judaism. "The Wind of the Khazars," just released in an English translation, is French author Marek Halter's sweeping exploration of the enigmatic Kingdom of the Khazars.

Born in Warsaw in 1936, Halter and his family fled the Warsaw Ghetto during the war, settling in a part of Russia that would become the setting for "The Wind of the Khazars." At the war's end, the family moved to Paris, and Halter went on to a distinguished career as an artist, novelist and human rights activist. His "Book of Abraham," also historical fiction, has been translated into numerous languages. And "Le Fou et les Rois," or "The Jester and the Kings," a book that discusses his own work as an activist for peace in the Middle East, won the "Prix Aujourd'hui," the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

In "Wind of the Khazars," Halter uses a dual-plot structure that boldly juxtaposes past and present to heighten the work's tension beyond that of the usual historical novel. The timeless beauty of the Caucasus, where "the folds of the mountains, moving between sun and shadow, looked like drapes of ancient velvet" is the backdrop for the complex plots that the author skillfully weaves together. Although at times challenging to follow, Halter's fast-moving style carries the reader along many diverse adventures toward an inspiring conclusion. The book is rich in period detail and descriptive passages, reflecting the extensive research the author did on the history of the Khazars.

The central character is Marc Sofer (the word sofer means "scribe" in Hebrew), a successful present-day, Paris-based novelist of Polish-Jewish descent who broods over his reasons for writing: he seems to have so little ability to influence real world events.

A foil for Halter himself, Sofer sets out on a lecture tour that will lead him to a fascination with the Khazars. He meets a beautiful but elusive red-headed woman with a Russian accent, who challenges him with the question of whether he still believes enough in dreams to write about them. On the same trip, a Russian Jew from the Caucasus presents Sofer with a rare Khazari coin inscribed with a menorah
and Hebrew letters and tells him about an immense cave deep in the Caucasus mountains, which contains glittering streets and an ornate synagogue.

Sofer's curiosity leads him to Oxford and Cambridge, where he examines rare manuscripts on the Khazars, including correspondence between a rabbi of Cordoba, Spain, and a king of the Khazars. Trying to imagine the lives of this remote people, Sofer accepts the red-headed woman's challenge. He will travel to the land of the Khazars to fully explore their existence. When he lands at the Baku airport in Azerbaijan, Sofer simultaneously finds himself in a place of forgotten peoples, shadowy Russian Mafia, volatile disputes over oil rights, and explosive ethnic politics.

"Passing through the mirror of time," Sofer senses the presence of the characters he has studied and of events long past. The Khazar ruler, Khagan Bulan, had been converted to Judaism in 740 C.E. by persecuted Jews who fled to his kingdom. The combination of absolute rule with devout belief, exemplified by his reign, was carried on by Bulan's successors. Despite his conversion to Judaism, Bulan and future Khazar kings practiced a policy of religious tolerance. The Khazar Rabbi Hanania, summed up the Khazar credo this way: "A warrior fights with his body alone. He who studies the Torah fights with the minds and hearts of a whole people behind him." As the kingdom expanded and consolidated its control of important trade routes, its borders were threatened by incursions from neighboring powers: the pagan Rus to the north, the Persian and Baghdadi empires to the south, their sometime allies, the Byzantine Greeks, and the Asian hordes that united under Genghis Khan to the east.

Sofer feels a special bond with young Isaac Ben Eliezer of Cordoba who in 954 C.E. was sent to the distant Khazar court by Rabbi Hazdai Ibn Shaprut, chief rabbi of Sephardi Jews. Ben Eliezer was instructed to learn all he could about the armor-clad "steppe warriors," who were considered unique among Jewish communities
at the time, because they possessed power to rule other tribes and collect tribute. Traveling for long months through dangerous European cities, Ben Eliezer carries a letter asking the current Khazari ruler to explain the astonishing news of this Jewish kingdom, and to ask whether the Khazars will bring the messiah.

The reply dashes the Sephardic rabbi's hopes: Given the precarious position of the Khazars in this area of increasingly intense tribal rivalries, their ruler can no longer assure Jews that they can take refuge in his kingdom, and he doubts that the messiah will appear in the guise of a Khazari ruler.

While residing at the Khazari court, Ben Eliezer meets and falls in love with Attex, a beautiful red-headed princess, who has been promised in marriage to a Byzantine Greek ruler. Defying her father's wishes Attex flees to her mountain hideout. In the ornate hidden caves, she and Ben Eliezer spend one night of bliss in a "marriage before God." She urges him to leave her and return to Cordoba with the letter. When enemy warriors overrun her hidden sanctuary, Attex is killed, but Ben Eliezer cannot identify her remains among the carnage, giving rise to the legend that she had escaped with the wind howling through the mountains.

When Ben Eliezer finally returns to Spain with the letter for the rabbi, "a rumor from Asia was already spreading through the markets of Sepharad like dirty smoke," that Itil, the capital of the Khazari kingdom had been overrun by Russian invaders. By 1016 C.E. the final waves of Rus and Asian conquerors drove the Khazars into the mountains and west into Eastern Europe where they mixed with the local populations. All that remained was the legend that the Khazari rulers had created secret sanctuaries for the preservation of Jewish worship in the mountain caverns that dotted their kingdom.

Immersed in visions of this history, Sofer explores the ethnic diversity of the region, from the Azerbaijan cities of Baku to Quba, to Sadoue, Georgia, today crisscrossed by oil pipelines. The redhead who challenged him mysteriously reappears and tells him that her name is Sonja. She explains that she belongs to the "New Khazars," a group that lives in the caves, trying to catalog and preserve the few remaining treasures of the ancient kingdom's past glory and to save the site that might soon be exploited by international oil companies.

Sofer is enthralled by the cavernous city she shows him, complete with richly decorated synagogue, ark, mikvah and library. Sonja confides that as a young Russian-Jewish history teacher in her native Georgia, she was not allowed to teach about the profound cultural influence the Khazars had on Russia. Even fellow Jews, she says, knew little about the Khazars until recently. She begs Sofer to use his fame as a writer to expose this injustice that threatens to obliterate the scarce remaining traces of the Khazars.

Like Ben Eliezer and Attex, Sofer and Sonja spend one rapturous night of lovemaking together in the magnificent caverns before she disappears during a sudden invasion. The vivid depiction of men in black rappelling from helicopters with bullets flying is action writing at its best. The men are there the behest of a consortium of oil barons who wish to delay discovery of the "miraculous pocket" of oil deep in the mountains until a more profitable moment in the future. They bomb the caves which shelter the remaining Khazari treasures and kidnap Sofer, making him promise not to write about the Khazars and his modern-day captors.

The Khazars have intrigued writers for centuries. Among those taken by their tale are Judah Halevi, who wrote the medieval masterpiece "Il Kuzari," to Arthur Koestler, author of "The Thirteenth Tribe." Disputes over historical identity and ancestral claims give current relevance to Halter's work. New bits of physical, linguistic and ethnographic information about the Khazars have given rise to fierce controversies. Even anti-Semitic internet Web sites have joined the debate to allege that Ashkenazi Jews are solely descendant from the Khazars and therefore not entitled to claim Israel as their historic homeland. Many scholars, including D.M. Dunlop, who is cited by Halter in the book, say that the Khazars need a great deal further study.

Through the character of Sofer, Halter ponders the impact Khazar history has had on his own life. As a Polish Jew, Sofer muses that he might be descended from these daring steppe horsemen. In the end, the power they had harnessed, the "winds" of their expansion, became the "Wind of the Khazars...chasing the Khazars themselves...toward Europe, effacing all traces of the Jewish Kingdom...carrying off forever the vestiges of ancient times." Just as Ben Eliezer lost Attex, Sofer has lost Sonja, but his fingers tingle defiantly with the prospect of writing about the forbidden subject. This haunting and unforgettable tale of beauty and devotion in a harsh landscape is a compelling story of the power that once was the Khazars.


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