Best Books on the Khazar Empire: The Jewish Kingdom of the Steppes

Somewhere in the second half of the eighth century CE, the ruling elite of the Khazar Empire converted to Judaism. This is one of the stranger facts of medieval history, and it has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention, speculation, and, in some cases, politically motivated distortion. The Khazars were a Turkic people who had built a powerful state in the Pontic steppe, the region north of the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian. At their peak, they controlled the main trade routes connecting the Byzantine Empire to the Islamic caliphates, extracted tribute from the Slavic peoples to their north, and twice stopped the Arab expansion into the Caucasus. They converted to Judaism, apparently, and the historical record on exactly how and why this happened is thin enough that it has generated arguments for over a thousand years. ## The Famous Argument Arthur Koestler's *The Thirteenth Tribe*, published in 1976, is the most widely read book about the Khazars and also the most controversial. Koestler, the Hungarian-British author of *Darkness at Noon*, argued that the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism, followed by their eventual dispersal after the collapse of their empire in the late tenth century, means that a significant proportion of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazar converts rather than from the ancient Israelites of the Middle East. Koestler presented this as a liberating argument: if Ashkenazi Jews are primarily of Khazar descent, then the anti-Semitic racial theories that had fueled the Holocaust were wrong on their own terms. His intention was benign. The thesis itself has not survived genetic scrutiny. Multiple large-scale genomic studies conducted since the 1990s have consistently found that Ashkenazi Jews share substantial genetic ancestry with Middle Eastern populations, not with Turkic or Central Asian ones. The Khazar origin theory for Ashkenazi Jews is now rejected by the overwhelming consensus of geneticists and historians. None of this makes *The Thirteenth Tribe* unreadable. As a history of the Khazar empire itself, drawing on the limited medieval sources available, it remains a lively introduction. Just read it knowing that its central demographic thesis has been refuted. ## The Scholarly Foundation Peter Golden is the foremost Western authority on the medieval Turkic peoples, and his work provides the scholarly foundation for any serious study of the Khazars. His *An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples*, published in 1992, covers the entire range of Turkic-speaking cultures from the earliest steppe nomads through the medieval period. The Khazars occupy a substantial section, and Golden's treatment is the most rigorous available in English. Golden draws on Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew, Armenian, and Syriac sources to reconstruct Khazar political history, social structure, and the dynamics of the conversion. His account is careful about what the sources actually say and honest about what they do not. The conversion of the Khazar leadership to Judaism is documented, but the extent to which the general population adopted Jewish practice, the specific circumstances of the conversion, and the theological content of Khazar Judaism all remain genuinely uncertain. Golden does not paper over these uncertainties, which makes his account more trustworthy than Koestler's more confident reconstructions. The book is academic in register and assumes some prior knowledge of steppe history. But it is the essential reference point. ## Nomads and Sedentary Civilizations Anatoly Khazanov's *Nomads and the Outside World* is not specifically about the Khazars, but it is essential background for understanding them. Khazanov, a Soviet-trained archaeologist who later taught at the University of Wisconsin, provides a comparative analysis of nomadic societies across Eurasia and their relationships with the sedentary civilizations they bordered, traded with, extracted tribute from, and occasionally conquered. His central argument is that nomadic empires were not simply barbarian societies waiting to be civilized but sophisticated political economies adapted to specific ecological conditions. The steppe environment made large-scale agriculture impossible and mobile pastoralism necessary, and this shaped everything: political organization, military tactics, trade relationships, and the specific forms of state-building that steppe societies developed. For the Khazars, this framework is clarifying. Their conversion to Judaism makes more sense when you understand the position of a steppe empire caught between two missionary powers: Byzantium pressing Christianity from the west and south, the Islamic caliphates pressing from the south and east. Adopting a minority religion with no associated great power was, among other things, a declaration of political independence. ## What Happened to Them The Khazar empire collapsed in the late tenth century under pressure from the expanding Rus state to the north and the Pechenegs from the east. The Rus prince Sviatoslav sacked the Khazar capital Sarkel in 965 CE. The remaining Khazar population dispersed, some assimilating into neighboring Turkic peoples, some into the Jewish communities of Crimea and the Caucasus. The historical trail goes cold quickly. They left a toponym, the Caspian Sea was called the Khazar Sea in medieval Arabic and Persian sources, and a great deal of unanswered questions. ## Further Reading Explore more history titles at [/category/history](/category/history).