La Belle Epoque 2


 * La Belle Epoque 2
 * by Jonathan I. Edelstein
 * 20 January 2002

Khazars, history of ... By the last quarter of the third century, the classical Khazar kingdom had entered its final decline. Weakened by a succession of disastrous wars with Kievan Russia and power struggles between the khagan and his council, the Khazars were easy prey for the expanding Turkish proto-state. In the summer of SE 282 [1054 CE], Itil fell to an advancing Turkish army, and the Khazar kingdom ceased to exist. With the exception of certain northwestern areas that were absorbed by the Kievans, the Khazars would spend the next four centuries under Turkish rule.

The conquest of the Khazar kingdom, however, did not spell the end of Khazar culture. The Turkish khagan appointed governors down to the municipal level, and Khazars were subject to taxation and conscription like other Turkish subjects, but no attempt was made to "Turkify" them. Although Nestorian themselves, the Turks were tolerant of other faiths, and did not impose their religion or even their language on conquered peoples.

In some ways, in fact, the Turkish conquest was ironically a liberation for the Khazars. The middle third century had seen an increase in the use of Ananism as a tool of governmental control, and Ananite teachers had found themselves caught in the intrigues between the khagan and his council of state. Suppression of dissenting views by the faction in power had become increasingly harsh; teachers who made the wrong enemies were often imprisoned, and some were even executed.

All this ended with the fall of the kingdom. With religion removed from royal control, Ananite teachers were free to write and preach without fear of civil retribution. In addition, although the Turkish governors continued to require villages to collect a school tax, the schools were no longer required to devote themselves to the glory of the state. The first years of the Turkish conquest saw a long-delayed flowering of philosophy among the highly literate Khazar population.

And this flowering was not limited to the Khazars themselves. The Turkish khagans, easily impressed by scholarship, invited Ananite teachers to their court and commissioned them to set up public schools in Samarkand. Although the Turks remained firmly Nestorian, the enlightened atmosphere of Samarkand attracted Ananite teachers to secular philosophy...

Jewish Theology ... By the middle of the third century, it was common. If somewhat oversimplistic, to divide Jewish philosophy into Eastern and Western schools. The distinction between the two was partly due to distance but was primarily the result of the Jewish people's reactions to very different environments.

In the Mediterranean world, conditions for Jews grew steadily worse as the Hundred Years War progressed; although they did not quite reach the nadir of the middle fourth century, anti-Jewish riots were common and legal restrictions became more severe. In addition, the combination of emigration, rioting and exclusion from the professions increased the Western Jews' material poverty. The Mediterranean Jewish community was unable to replace the lost academies of Sura and Pumbaditha, leaving both scholarship and legal interpretation in the hands of local rabbis. On occasion, scholars attempted to collect and harmonize these rulings, but these collections tended to be fragmentary and poorly distributed.

Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that the primary focus of Jewish theological interpretation in the Mediterranean was survival. It was during the third century, for instance, that rabbis began to rule that it was permissible for Jews to deny their faith to non-Jews. The concept of the "general dispensation" -- i.e., that it is permissible for a Jew to obey the civil law even if it conflicts with Jewish law, so long as he promises to make amends when he can practice safely -- also dates from this period. Whenever possible, Jewish law was interpreted so as to cause the least possible offense to Christians or Submissives; Jews were forbidden to distinguish themselves by clothing or manner (except where required by civil law), to accept even voluntary converts, or to conduct public worship in a way that might bring an adverse reaction. In some communities, Jews were even instructed to delay the celebration of Passover if it coincided with Easter.

Inevitably, many Mediterranean Jews ceased to be Jews, adopting the protective coloration of their Christian or Submissive neighbors and promising to return to observance on a day which would never come. In time, their children and grandchildren forgot that they had ever been Jews. The majority, however, continued to worship unobtrusively, obey the commandments as far as possible, and pray that someday this, too, would pass.

The condition of the Jews of India was completely different. Unlike their Mediterranean brethren, the Cochin Jews experienced no persecution or hatred; they were accepted by the dominant Hindus as one caste among many. Their focus was not day-to-day survival; instead, the scholars of the Cochin academies sought to reconcile Jewish law with secular philosophy and science.

The classical Greek philosophers, particularly Aristotle, clearly influenced the work of the Cochin theologians. The influence of the Sanskrit classics and Buddhism, however, was considerably greater. By most measures, the philosophy that most caught the imagination of the Cochin Jews was Mahayana Buddhism; works identifying the Maitreya with the Messiah, reconciling Judaism with the Eightfold Path, and examining correspondences between Mahayana and Jewish scripture, were commonplace during the later third century. This was made somewhat easier by the Mahayana conception of a universal soul or spiritual being, which Jewish scholars equated with God.

The influence of the Indian scholars quickly spread to the Jewish community of Babylonia. The Babylonian Jews, who lived in a relatively tolerant environment, had far more in common with the Jews of southern India than with those of the Mediterranean world, and looked to the east rather than the west for spiritual guidance. Thus did the teachings of the Buddha, albeit in an indirect and distorted fashion, make their way into Persia...