The Monotheisation of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia: From the Eighth to the Thirteenth Century

313 Pages·2022·5.92 MB·English

by  Alex M. Feldman

The Monotheisation of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia
7736_Feldman.indd 1 30/08/22 2:45 PM
Edinburgh Byzantine Studies
Innovative approaches to the medieval Eastern Roman empire and its neighbours
Edinburgh Byzantine Studies promotes new, theory-driven approaches to
the empire commonly called Byzantium. The series looks at the literary,
historical, material and visual remains of this long-living political order and its
neighbours, often from a multi-disciplinary and/or cross-cultural vantage point.
Its innovative readings highlight the connectivity of Byzantine culture
as well as of Byzantine Studies.
Series Editors
Louise Blanke, The University of Edinburgh
Ivan Drpić, University of Pennsylvania
Niels Gaul, The University of Edinburgh
Alexander Riehle, Harvard University
Yannis Stouraitis, The University of Edinburgh
Alicia Walker, Bryn Mawr College
Books available in the series
Identities and Ideologies in the Medieval East Roman World
Yannis Stouraitis
The Monotheisation of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia: From the Eighth to the
Thirteenth Century
Alex M. Feldman
Imperial Visions of Late Byzantium: Manuel II Palaiologos and Rhetoric in Purple
Florin Leonte
Books forthcoming
Saints, Relics and Identity in Medieval and Modern Caucasia:
The Cult of Saints and the Body Politic
Nikoloz Aleksidze
Social Stratification in Late Byzantium
Christos Malatras
Visit the Edinburgh Byzantine Studies website at
edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-edinburgh-byzantine-studies.html
7736_Feldman.indd 2 30/08/22 2:45 PM
The Monotheisation of
Pontic-Caspian Eurasia
From the Eighth to the
Thirteenth Century
Alex M. Feldman
7736_Feldman.indd 3 30/08/22 2:45 PM
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values
to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Alex M. Feldman, 2022
Cover image: Abraham (1972). Hugh Meisobov. Acrylic on canvas.
Cover design: www.deanta.com and Deborah Mesibov
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 10.5/13 Warnock Pro by
IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and
printed and bound in Great Britain
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 7810 6 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 7812 0 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 7813 7 (epub)
The right of Alex M. Feldman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related
Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
7736_Feldman.indd 4 23/09/22 12:48 PM
Contents
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgements viii
Abbreviations xiii
Note on Transcription and Transliteration xv
A Proposition 1
1 The Monotheisation of Khazaria 18
The Earliest Textual Sources on Khazaria 19
The Advent of Khazarian Judaism 31
Monotheisation and Sedentarisation in Khazaria 59
Approximate Conclusions 78
2 A Commonwealth Inchoate: Byzantium and Pontic-Caspian
Eurasia in the Tenth Century 83
Khazaria’s Decline and Disappearance 84
Reinterpreting Northern Peoples in the DAI 90
3 Case Studies of Monotheisation in Eighth- to-Thirteenth-Century
Pontic-Caspian Eurasia 97
Volga Bulgaria 98
Magyars, Pečenegs and Cumans 107
Rus’: Byzantine Christianisation 135
4 Monotheisation in Metal 151
Empires of Faith and their Finances 151
Coinage and ‘Commonwealth’ (Eighth to Thirteenth Century):
the Ummah and the Oikoumene 157
7736_Feldman.indd 5 30/08/22 2:45 PM
vi the monotheisation of pontic-caspian eurasia
A Reassessment of Civilisation in Pontic-Caspian Eurasia 167
Monotheisation Revisited 168
Periodisation and Civilisation 176
Appendices 185
Appendix 1 Gog and Magog’s Association with Khazaria 187
Appendix 2 Steppe Nomadism and Gumilëv’s Eurasian Ideology 190
Appendix 3 The Khazar-Ashkenazi Descent Theory 193
Bibliography 206
Primary Sources 206
Secondary and Archaeological Literature 213
Index 276
7736_Feldman.indd 6 30/08/22 2:45 PM
Figures
I.1 A map of Eurasia with outlines of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia. 4
3.1 An image of the Khazar tamga, potentially one of the symbols
of the Āšǐnà dynasty, which appears on certain Khazar dirhams. 142
7736_Feldman.indd 7 30/08/22 2:45 PM
Acknowledgements
‘Ad fontes!’ The battlecry of the historian.1
For many years, I read the acknowledgements sections of history books
as a sort of mild listing of various persons involved with the author who
deserved thanks and praise: little more than a list of shout-outs. Yet
acknowledgements are much more than about gratitude and commenda-
tion; they are about the very intricate process by which a book – history
itself – is produced. In fact, the process of producing history depends on
the contingent forces of bottom-up markets, top-down regulation, office
politics and the puzzling cycles of history itself, and the product itself is
sometimes capable of altering the very history it seeks to retell. It’s easy to
say that ‘history is written by the winners’ – this cliché reveals little more
than window dressing for a process of individual and collective memory
which are as intertwined in the present as they are in the past. I suppose
the production of history is as much about the personal stories of the men
and women who produce it as it is about the stories they narrate. Hence,
the true weight of acknowledgements.
You may not choose your family, but you can choose whether or not to
internalise (or recognise) your family ethos within yourself – after all, you
are as much a product as you are a producer. My grandparents (Annette
and Abraham Feldman; Eudice and Hugh Mesibov) were staunch members
of the Greatest and the Silent Generations – they came of age amidst the
decadence of the 1920s (a decade which began with a worldwide pandemic
and ended in an economic crash – the reverse of the 2010s), the misery of
the 1930s and the crucible of the 1940s. They inherited a world of chaos;
1 Feldbrugge, History of Russian Law, 49.
7736_Feldman.indd 8 30/08/22 2:45 PM
acknowledgements ix
they left it superior, if imperfect. After painting in the WPA, building ships,
bridges and global governing structures, they became fashion designers,
pharmacists, opera singers and art and art history professors – the Western
middle classes. Their modernist sensibilities left them comfortable with the
prosaic mid-century Western dogmas (it all began with Greece and Rome,
then the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Columbus, Washington, etc.). Yet
this all began to change as my parents’ generation (Baby Boomers) came
of age, as challenging the modernist archetypes (hence, postmodernism)
became fashionable and some questioned whether Western civilisation
itself even exists (it does). My grandmother Eudice Mesibov even left her
career singing Bizet’s Carmen in Marshall-planned post-war European
opera halls to write a doctorate arguing that the second commandment
was not always taken seriously. It was a great work of art history – and
it also revealed something else. By the time I noticed it, the last bastions
of traditional Western civilisational dogma, a tiny, self-reproducing caste,
preserved the product at all costs.
The story of this story (the meta-story?) commenced in the autumn of
2010, when I began my first Greek class at Roger Williams University of
Rhode Island. Like many post-industrialised Western universities (specifi-
cally the liberal arts kind) in the 2010s, History, Classics, Philosophy and
all the social sciences (or humanities) were haemorrhaging students, and
therefore funding, since few parents allowed for such extravagance after
2008’s Big Short. Production and consumption had become the domain of
economists, not historians. I was fortunate to have parents who approved
such pedagogical indulgence, but everywhere were the signs of unavoid-
able unravelling: economics, finance, law and business departments were
ballooning with money and students were taking out exorbitant loans for
vocational degrees in the faint hope that they might come in handy. Still,
our consistently 15-minutes-late-for-every-class professor of Greek dis-
couraged us from pursuing Classics as a career – there wasn’t enough room
left in the bastion and most of us would need to scrape and scrounge pro-
ducing or selling something else in the corporate world as the waters rose.
Returning to him after living in Athens and witnessing the turmoil caused
by uncontrolled financial markets, I was told that nothing written in Greek
after the era of St Augustine of Hippo and St John Chrysostom was worth
reading – the Classical canon ended in the fifth century. It was his bastion
and he was the department head, so that was that. I suppose his words were
one of the earliest reasons for the book you’re holding.
If the villain plays a major role, luck is indispensable. This project was
conceived in the final stages of my MRes at the University of Birmingham
7736_Feldman.indd 9 30/08/22 2:45 PM