Editor's Introduction: The Khazar Khanate: Debates and Mysteries

Abstract

Who does not love a treasure trove hunt? Who were the Khazars? Why do creative historians, linguists, and archeologists continue to theorize about them and their relations with surrounding Slavic peoples? These and other provocative questions are raised in this second issue featuring the famed Khazars, a people of probable Turkic backgroundwith some Jewish religious identity among the elite. The more one delves into these questions, analyzing a considerable and expanding literature on the Khazar Khanate, the clearer it becomes that more than a century of research into historical documents, linguistic evidence, and the archeological record has failed to fill in all the gaps. This makes Khazar studies fertile ground for further research and sometimes for the pitfalls of using history to purvey memory and identity politics burdened with the emotional biases of excessive nationalism. Our previous issue established that the Khazar Khanate, dated from the late eighth–tenth centuries, was multiethnic, multiconfessional, and relatively far flung. It also revealed its core region of the Volga–Don territories to be rife with violent competitions for power in the Khazar time frame. In this issue we dig deeper into the implications of these struggles for hegemony, and into why the Khazar legacy continues to be debated. While at first glance the specific questions the featured authors are asking may seem academic and without current political resonance, patterns of advocacy are revealed as readers continue through the issue. Did the Khazars have “dual power?” Established historian Igor G. Semenov of Dagestan, whose article on ethnopolitics in Khazaria began Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia, vol. 57, no. 4, 2018, pp. 269–273. © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1061-1959 (print)/1558-092X (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611959.2018.1547610