Khazars in the Hungarian Jewish Imagination

• In Event: Jewish History and Jewish Historical Imagination

Abstract

In the 1880s, the Hungarian rabbi and historian Samuel Kohn claimed that Hungarian Jewry was descended from Jewish Khazars who joined forces with the seven Hungarian tribes that conquered the Carpathian Basin in the 890s. This myth of origin, which placed Jews at the foundational moment in Hungarian history, was widely popularized by Hungarian Jewish publicists and scholars, and -- from the 1880s until the 1930s -- it became a key motif in the larger debates about the place of Jews in Hungarian society. This paper will explore the contours of the Khazar myth, exploring its implications for Hungarian Jewish politics and Hungarian Jewish identities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

author

• Michael Laurence Miller, Central European University