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The Raid of Fadlun the Kurd Against the Khazars

Ibn al-Athir (1160-1234) refers to "the raid of Fadlun the Kurd against the Khazars" as taking place in 421 AH (1030 CE):

"According to Ibn al-Athir, after an attack on the "Khazars", Fadlun was returning to his own country, when the "Khazars" fell upon him unexpectedly and killed more than 10,000 of his own troops. Those "Khazars" recovered the booty which Fadlun had taken from them and captured the equipmnent of the Muslims. Polak notes that this seems to indicate that these "Khazars" were still non-Muslims; however Barthold, (who identified this Fadlun as Fadl ibn Muhammad of the Saddadid dynasty, who ruled Gandjah), argued that here Georgians or Abkhazians were probably meant, and this opinion was ... " (Shapira 2007:305-6)

"the tribal territory of the Kurds in the Middle Ages andespecially during the five first centuries of Islam, extended from Dvîn (south of thelake Sevan) to Mosul, and from Hamadân to the Djezireh" (James 2007)

References 
James, B., 2007, The tribal territory of the Kurds through Arabic medieval historiography Boris James, url: http://www.academia.edu/181102/The_tribal_territory_of_the_Kurds_through_Arabic_medieval_historiography

Shapira, D.Y.A., 2007, Iranian sources on the Khazars, in The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives, Part 8, Volume 17, edited by Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai, András Róna-Tas, published by Brill: Leiden, Nederlands.

Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from Khazars, Hebrew University historian says

New study finds no evidence that Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants of Khazars, or that subjects in the medieval kingdom converted to Judaism en masse.

The claim that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars who converted in the Middle Ages is a myth, according to new research by a Hebrew University historian. The Khazar thesis gained global prominence when Prof. Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University published “The Invention of the Jewish People” in 2008. In that book, which became a best seller and was translated into several languages, Sand argued that the “Jewish people” is an invention, forged out of myths and fictitious “history” to justify Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel. Now, another Israeli historian has challenged one of the foundations of Sand’s argument: his claim that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the people of the Khazar kingdom, who in the eighth century converted en masse on the instruction of their king. In an article published this month in the journal “Jewish Social Studies,” Prof. Shaul Stampfer concluded that there is no evidence to support this assertion. “Such a conversion, even though it’s a wonderful story, never happened,” Stampfer said. Stampfer, an expert in Jewish history, analyzed material from various fields, but found no reliable source for the claim that the Khazars – a multiethnic kingdom that included Iranians, Turks, Slavs and Circassians – converted to Judaism. “There never was a conversion by the Khazar king or the Khazar elite,” he said. “The conversion of the Khazars is a myth with no factual basis.” As a historian, he said he was surprised to discover how hard it is “to prove that something didn’t happen. Until now, most of my research has been aimed at discovering or clarifying what did happen in the past ... It’s a much more difficult challenge to prove that something didn’t happen than to prove it did.” That’s because the proof is based primarily on the absence of evidence rather than its presence – like the fact that an event as unprecedented as an entire kingdom’s conversion to Judaism merited no mention in contemporaneous sources. “The silence of so many sources about the Khazars’ Judaism is very suspicious,” Stampfer said. “The Byzantines, the geonim [Jewish religious leaders of the sixth to eleventh centuries], the sages of Egypt – none of them have a word about the Jewish Khazars.” The research ended up taking him four years. “I thought I’d finish in two months, but I discovered that there was a huge amount of work. I had to check sources that aren’t in my field, and I consulted and got help from many people.” Stampfer said his research had no political motives, though he recognizes that the topic is politically fraught. “It’s a really interesting historical question, but it has political implications,” he said. “As a historian, I’m naturally worried by the misuse of history. I think history should be removed from political discussions, but anyone who nevertheless wants to use history must at least present the correct facts. In this case, the facts are that the Khazars didn’t convert, the Jews aren’t descendants of the Khazars and the contemporary political problems between Israelis and Palestinians must be dealt with on the basis of current reality, not on the basis of a fictitious past.” Sand had tied the Khazar issue directly to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, telling Haaretz in 2008 that many Jews fear that wide acceptance of his thesis would undermine their “historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea [ancient Israel] would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us ... There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist.” Stampfer believes the persistence of the Khazar conversion myth attests to researchers’ reluctance to abandon familiar paradigms. “Those who believed this story – and they are many – usually didn’t do so for malicious reasons,” he says. “I tell my students that the only thing I want them to remember from my classes is the need to investigate and ask – to investigate whether the arguments they hear are credible, reasonable and well-founded.”

Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism?

Shaul Stampfer's academic research says 'No':

Author: Shaul Stampfer
Jewish Social Studies Vol. 19, No. 3 (Spring/Summer 2013), pp. 1-72 Published by: Indiana University Press Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jewisocistud.19.3.1

Abstract: "The view that some or all of the Khazars, a central Asian people, converted to Judaism at some point during the ninth or tenth century is widely accepted. A careful examination of the sources, however, shows that some of them are pseudepigraphic, and the rest are of questionable reliability. Many of the most reliable contemporary texts that mention Khazars say nothing about their conversion, nor is there any archaeological evidence for it. This leads to the conclusion that such a conversion never took place."

The Black Lands

 

Fig. Typical nomadic scatter with artefacts from the Khazar period in the Black Lands
of Kalmykia (Shingiray, 2013: 192)

"The main corpus of material left behind by the nomadic people of the Northwestern Caspian consists of burial sites dispersed across the desert-steppe lowlands north of the Eastern Caucasus, such as the territory of modern Kalmykia, northern Dagestan, northeastern Chechnya, and Astrakhan Province - namely, a type of arid landscape that is often designated as the Black Lands in historical sources (see Gadlo 1979:65-660. The nomads inahabiting that territory moved around with portable felt tents; there was no need to sustain any permanent settlements or structures, nor any possibility of doing so. Therefore, the main evidence of these peoples' way of life comes from their ritual sites, mainly burials, and from small artefact scatters left behind from their ephemeral dwellings." (Shiniray 2013:189).

The case of the imperial nomadic Khazars - compared to other denizens of the Turk-Khazar polity in the wider Northwestern Caspian region - presents a valuable opportunity to study different types of material that were manifested by groups with diverse systems of values, worldviwes, ethic paradigms, and politics of representation. This kind of comparative study may be particularly revealing because the wide Khazar community and its polity underwent some dramatic transformations int he course of the second half of the first millennium AD that challenged its different groups and their values in a contrasting way. Before I turn to this investigation, I would like to contextualise the present state of knowledge about Khazar archaeology in general and that of the Khazar nomads in the Northwestern Caspian region in particular (Shingiray 2013:190).

Although this territory, namely the historical Black Lands - is consensually recognised as the land of the ethnic Khazars on the basis of primary textual sources,  the material culture of the Khazar period in this territory does not form any cohesive SMC complex that could be associated with the imperial and hypthetically settled nomads (hence the "hypothetical" nature of this eighth variant). Rather the material culture in this arid landscape is represented by modest and mixed nomadic contexts and assemblages, by largely redeposited, "disturbed", and ephemeral seasonal sites.

KHAZAR ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE "INVISIBLE COMMUNITY"

---

"In the course of the twentieth century, archaeologists accumulated large quantities of material culture from the southern region of Russia, which was thought to have been under the domination of the Turk-Khazar polities. As a result, the idea of the Khazar state and "ethnic" culture, which supposedly existed as a continuous culture-historical entity with its own archaeological material cutlure (called the "Saltovo-Mayatskaya Culture" or the SMC, for short), was born as a stable historical object (see Artamonov 1962; Flerov 1983; Pletneva 1967, 1999:22-24). Naturally, all interpretations of various political, cultural, and historical dynamics of the Khazar groups were carried out within the frameworks of twentieth century paradigms, such as formal, empirical, culture-hisotrical, ethnogenetic, and unilinear-evolutionary models, and inevitably underwent drastic simplifications. Moreover, the ethnohistorical interpretations were forged strictly within boundaries outlined by the poltical science of Soviet/Russian archaeology whereby all politically incorrect aspects had to be undermined or eliminated (see more on this in Shnirelman 2002, 2006b, and this volume; also ee Kohl, this volume) (Shingiray 2013:190).

"These sites, with their minimalist materiality did not live up to Pletneva's expectations and did not impress her followers, who by and large did not interpret or publish the results of their surveys and excavations in the 'land of the Khazars'. There were none of the burials full of riches, and no urban sites or caravanserais that Pletneva had predicted would be found in her hypothetical variant of the imperial Khazars (Pletneva 1996: 144-50, 1999: 191-205)."