Dr Samrez Salik

@SamrezSalik1

PhD in Strategic Security Management of CPEC, Blogger, Author, Social Activist, Strategist, Teacher

Islamabad

Joined September 2013

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The Jewish Empire That Ruled Ukraine — and Was Destroyed in the Same War Zone That Burns Today There was once a Jewish empire in the middle of what is now Ukraine. It controlled the Crimea, the Donbas, the Black Sea steppe, the Don and Volga river basins, and the northern Caucasus. It was one of the wealthiest and most powerful states in the medieval world. It protected Europe from Arab conquest. It sat at the crossroads of the Silk Road. Its capital was described by a 10th-century Persian geographer as "very pleasant and prosperous, with great riches." It was called the Khazar Khaganate. It lasted over 300 years. It was destroyed in a military campaign launched from Kiev. And the fortresses where it made its final stand sit directly on the territory where Russian and Ukrainian forces are fighting today. You almost certainly were never taught this in school. That alone should prompt you to read further. Who Were the Khazars? The Khazars were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who emerged from the collapse of the Western Göktürk Khaganate in the mid-7th century AD. As the great Turkic empire fractured under pressure from Tang Dynasty China, the Khazar tribes moved westward onto the Pontic steppe — the vast grassland stretching north of the Black and Caspian Seas — and carved out a territory of their own. What followed was one of the more unlikely success stories in medieval history. The Khazars were not builders of great monuments or authors of surviving literature. What they built instead was a trading empire of extraordinary sophistication, positioned at the intersection of every major commercial route connecting the known world. The east-west Silk Road passed through their territory. The north-south route connecting Scandinavian traders to the Islamic Caliphate — the famous Varangian route — ran directly through their heartland along the Volga and Don rivers. The Khazars taxed all of it at a flat rate of 10 percent, imposed minimal restrictions on who could trade or worship, and grew spectacularly wealthy as a result. Arab merchants, Byzantine diplomats, Viking traders, and Chinese caravans all moved through Khazar territory. A 10th-century visitor described their capital, Atil, on the northwestern shore of the Caspian Sea, as a city of mosques, churches, synagogues, and pagan temples operating side by side — an almost unimaginable pluralism for the early medieval world. For roughly 300 years, from approximately 650 to 965 AD, the Khazar Khaganate was the dominant power in what is now southern Russia and eastern Ukraine. It was, in the assessment of most historians who have examined it, one of the most successful and tolerant commercial states of the early medieval era. The Jewish Kingdom What makes the Khazars genuinely unique in world history — and what most people have never heard — is what happened to their religion. The Khazars were initially Tengri shamanists, the traditional steppe faith of the Turkic nomads. As their empire grew and they came into sustained contact with both the Christian Byzantine Empire to their south and west and the Islamic Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates to their south and east, pressure mounted on the Khazar ruling class to adopt one of the two dominant Abrahamic faiths — conversion was, in the medieval world, often a precondition of diplomatic recognition and alliance. The Khazar khagan — likely sometime in the 8th or early 9th century — chose neither. Instead, the ruling class converted to Judaism. The reasoning was almost certainly geopolitical as much as spiritual. Judaism was the parent religion of both Christianity and Islam, commanded respect from both, and was affiliated with neither warring empire. A Khazar state practicing Judaism could trade with Constantinople and Baghdad, maintain diplomatic relations with both, and avoid being absorbed into either sphere of influence. It was, in its way, a masterstroke of medieval realpolitik. The conversion was real, documented, and consequential. The Khazar king corresponded in Hebrew with the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world. Coins were minted bearing Jewish inscriptions. The state religion of the Khaganate was Judaism — making it, for several centuries, the only Jewish state in the world outside the Land of Israel itself, and the only one ruling a major territorial empire. The common people of Khazaria continued practicing a mixture of faiths — Islam, Christianity, shamanism, and Judaism coexisted within the empire's borders. But the royal court, the military leadership, and the ruling administration were Jewish. This was acknowledged by contemporaries and is recorded in Byzantine, Arab, and later Hebrew sources. The Territory: Modern Ukraine, Almost Exactly At its height, the Khazar Khaganate controlled: The entire eastern half of modern Ukraine, including the steppe territories that are now the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions — the precise zones of the current war. The Crimean Peninsula, which the Khazars administered through a subordinate ruler. The Don and Donets river basins — the Donbas, in modern terminology. The Volga-Don portage, the critical land crossing between the two great river systems, around which much of their commercial power was built. The northern Caucasus, including parts of what are now Dagestan, Chechnya, and the Russian republics of the North Caucasus. The northern Black Sea coast from the Dnieper River east to the Caspian. Their western boundary roughly followed the Dnieper River — the same river that has served repeatedly as a military boundary in the current Ukraine conflict. Their fortress of Sarkel sat on the lower Don River in what is now the Rostov region of Russia, just across the modern Ukrainian border — the same general area where Russian forces have maintained positions throughout the war that began in 2022. The geographic overlap between the maximum extent of the Khazar Khaganate and the territory contested in the current Russia-Ukraine war is not approximate. It is nearly exact. The Destruction: Launched From Kiev The fall of Khazaria is one of the more dramatic events in medieval history, and it is almost entirely absent from popular historical consciousness in the West. By the mid-10th century, the Khazar empire was weakening. It faced pressure from the Pechenegs — another nomadic Turkic group — on its western flank, and from the rising power of the Kievan Rus to the north. The Rus, centered on Kiev, had originally been Khazar tributaries. By the 9th century they had grown powerful enough to contest that subordination, and by the 960s they were ready to end it entirely. In 964–965 AD, Sviatoslav I — Grand Prince of Kiev, one of the most formidable military commanders of the medieval Slavic world — launched a campaign to destroy Khazaria permanently. He swept down through the Volga-Don steppe, rallying Slavic tribes who had previously paid tribute to the Khazars. His army moved with unusual speed for the era. In 965, Sarkel fell. The great limestone-and-brick fortress on the left bank of the lower Don River — built in 833 AD with Byzantine engineering assistance, garrisoned by Oghuz and Pecheneg mercenaries — was taken and sacked. Sviatoslav renamed it Belaya Vyezha, "the White Tower," a Slavic translation of the Turkic "Sarkel," and established a Rus settlement in its place. Two to four years later, Atil itself — the Khazar capital on the Caspian shore — fell. A contemporary witness described the destruction in terms that recall the Roman annihilation of Carthage: "The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch." The city was so completely obliterated that its location was unknown to modern archaeologists until 2008, when excavations near Astrakhan, Russia finally confirmed where it had stood. The Khazar Khaganate ceased to exist. The ruling class scattered — some absorbed into surrounding Turkic populations, some migrating westward into Eastern Europe. The empire that had dominated the Black Sea steppe for three centuries vanished from history within a decade of Sviatoslav's campaign. Sviatoslav launched that campaign from Kiev. He destroyed the Khazar empire in the Donbas, along the Don River, and across the Volga-Caspian steppe. He then turned west and campaigned in the Balkans before being killed by the Pechenegs on his return journey. The Kievan Rus absorbed the former Khazar territories and within a generation converted to Orthodox Christianity under Vladimir the Great. The Same Ground, a Thousand Years Later Sarkel — the fortress where the Khazar empire made one of its final stands in 965 AD — sat on the lower Don River near the modern Russian city of Volgodonsk, in the Rostov region. The Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, the epicenter of the war that began in 2014 and escalated into full-scale invasion in 2022, are directly adjacent. The Dnieper River, which served as the approximate western boundary of the Khazar empire, has been a recurring front line in the current conflict. Crimea, which the Khazars controlled for centuries, was annexed by Russia in 2014 — the opening move of the current confrontation. The Zaporizhzhia region — named for the famous Zaporozhian Cossacks who would later dominate the same steppe — was Khazar territory. Kherson, contested bitterly in 2022 and 2023, sits on the Black Sea coast the Khazars patrolled. The Don River basin, where Sarkel stood and where Russian military logistics have run throughout the current war, was the Khazar heartland. This is not mysticism. It is geography. The Pontic steppe — that vast, flat, river-crossed grassland between the Dnieper and the Volga — has been the contested zone of every major power struggle in Eastern Europe for over a thousand years, from the Khazar-Rus wars of the 960s through the Mongol invasion of the 13th century, the Ottoman-Russian wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, Napoleon's eastern campaign, the German eastern front of both World Wars, and now the Russia-Ukraine war of the 21st century. The land itself draws conflict. It always has. What is different now is that most people consuming news about the war in eastern Ukraine have no idea they are watching armies fight over territory that was, a thousand years ago, the homeland of a Jewish empire that ruled the medieval steppe, built one of the most tolerant commercial civilizations of the Dark Ages, was destroyed in a lightning campaign launched from the city that gives the conflict its name, and then vanished so completely that historians argued for centuries about where its capital even stood. What the History Books Left Out — and Why That Matters The Khazars are not entirely absent from academic history. Specialists know them well. But they are almost completely absent from the popular historical consciousness of the West — from school curricula, from mainstream documentary coverage, from the cultural framework most people use to understand Eastern Europe and its conflicts. That absence is worth noticing. The Khazar Khaganate was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most significant states of the early medieval period. It held the line against Arab expansion into Eastern Europe at a time when the Caliphate was at the peak of its military power — had the Arabs broken through the Caucasus and into the Pontic steppe in the 7th and 8th centuries, the entire subsequent history of Eastern Europe would have been different. It was the primary commercial intermediary between the Islamic world and the Scandinavian and Slavic north for over two centuries. It was the only Jewish state with significant territorial power in the post-Biblical world until the 20th century. And it was destroyed in the precise geography where one of the most consequential wars of our time is being fought. The habit of asking why certain historical facts are absent from the mainstream narrative — and then going to find them yourself — is not conspiracy thinking. It is basic intellectual hygiene. The Khazars are a perfect example of what that habit uncovers: documented, sourced, uncontested history that simply never made it into the story most people are told about the world. The ground being fought over today has been fought over before. A thousand years ago, the empire that lost that fight was Jewish, ruled from the same steppe, and was destroyed by a prince riding out of Kiev. Whether that means anything for the present is a question worth sitting with.

Deeteem1's tweet photo. The Jewish Empire That Ruled Ukraine — and Was Destroyed in the Same War Zone That Burns Today

There was once a Jewish empire in the middle of what is now Ukraine. It controlled the Crimea, the Donbas, the Black Sea steppe, the Don and Volga river basins, and the northern Caucasus. It was one of the wealthiest and most powerful states in the medieval world. It protected Europe from Arab conquest. It sat at the crossroads of the Silk Road. Its capital was described by a 10th-century Persian geographer as "very pleasant and prosperous, with great riches."

It was called the Khazar Khaganate. It lasted over 300 years. It was destroyed in a military campaign launched from Kiev. And the fortresses where it made its final stand sit directly on the territory where Russian and Ukrainian forces are fighting today.

You almost certainly were never taught this in school. That alone should prompt you to read further.

Who Were the Khazars?

The Khazars were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who emerged from the collapse of the Western Göktürk Khaganate in the mid-7th century AD. As the great Turkic empire fractured under pressure from Tang Dynasty China, the Khazar tribes moved westward onto the Pontic steppe — the vast grassland stretching north of the Black and Caspian Seas — and carved out a territory of their own.

What followed was one of the more unlikely success stories in medieval history. The Khazars were not builders of great monuments or authors of surviving literature. What they built instead was a trading empire of extraordinary sophistication, positioned at the intersection of every major commercial route connecting the known world.

The east-west Silk Road passed through their territory. The north-south route connecting Scandinavian traders to the Islamic Caliphate — the famous Varangian route — ran directly through their heartland along the Volga and Don rivers. The Khazars taxed all of it at a flat rate of 10 percent, imposed minimal restrictions on who could trade or worship, and grew spectacularly wealthy as a result. Arab merchants, Byzantine diplomats, Viking traders, and Chinese caravans all moved through Khazar territory. A 10th-century visitor described their capital, Atil, on the northwestern shore of the Caspian Sea, as a city of mosques, churches, synagogues, and pagan temples operating side by side — an almost unimaginable pluralism for the early medieval world.

For roughly 300 years, from approximately 650 to 965 AD, the Khazar Khaganate was the dominant power in what is now southern Russia and eastern Ukraine. It was, in the assessment of most historians who have examined it, one of the most successful and tolerant commercial states of the early medieval era.

The Jewish Kingdom
What makes the Khazars genuinely unique in world history — and what most people have never heard — is what happened to their religion.

The Khazars were initially Tengri shamanists, the traditional steppe faith of the Turkic nomads. As their empire grew and they came into sustained contact with both the Christian Byzantine Empire to their south and west and the Islamic Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates to their south and east, pressure mounted on the Khazar ruling class to adopt one of the two dominant Abrahamic faiths — conversion was, in the medieval world, often a precondition of diplomatic recognition and alliance.

The Khazar khagan — likely sometime in the 8th or early 9th century — chose neither. Instead, the ruling class converted to Judaism.

The reasoning was almost certainly geopolitical as much as spiritual. Judaism was the parent religion of both Christianity and Islam, commanded respect from both, and was affiliated with neither warring empire. A Khazar state practicing Judaism could trade with Constantinople and Baghdad, maintain diplomatic relations with both, and avoid being absorbed into either sphere of influence. It was, in its way, a masterstroke of medieval realpolitik.

The conversion was real, documented, and consequential. The Khazar king corresponded in Hebrew with the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world. Coins were minted bearing Jewish inscriptions. The state religion of the Khaganate was Judaism — making it, for several centuries, the only Jewish state in the world outside the Land of Israel itself, and the only one ruling a major territorial empire.

The common people of Khazaria continued practicing a mixture of faiths — Islam, Christianity, shamanism, and Judaism coexisted within the empire's borders. But the royal court, the military leadership, and the ruling administration were Jewish. This was acknowledged by contemporaries and is recorded in Byzantine, Arab, and later Hebrew sources.

The Territory: Modern Ukraine, Almost Exactly

At its height, the Khazar Khaganate controlled:

The entire eastern half of modern Ukraine, including the steppe territories that are now the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions — the precise zones of the current war. The Crimean Peninsula, which the Khazars administered through a subordinate ruler. The Don and Donets river basins — the Donbas, in modern terminology. The Volga-Don portage, the critical land crossing between the two great river systems, around which much of their commercial power was built. The northern Caucasus, including parts of what are now Dagestan, Chechnya, and the Russian republics of the North Caucasus. The northern Black Sea coast from the Dnieper River east to the Caspian.

Their western boundary roughly followed the Dnieper River — the same river that has served repeatedly as a military boundary in the current Ukraine conflict. Their fortress of Sarkel sat on the lower Don River in what is now the Rostov region of Russia, just across the modern Ukrainian border — the same general area where Russian forces have maintained positions throughout the war that began in 2022.

The geographic overlap between the maximum extent of the Khazar Khaganate and the territory contested in the current Russia-Ukraine war is not approximate. It is nearly exact.

The Destruction: Launched From Kiev
The fall of Khazaria is one of the more dramatic events in medieval history, and it is almost entirely absent from popular historical consciousness in the West.

By the mid-10th century, the Khazar empire was weakening. It faced pressure from the Pechenegs — another nomadic Turkic group — on its western flank, and from the rising power of the Kievan Rus to the north. The Rus, centered on Kiev, had originally been Khazar tributaries. By the 9th century they had grown powerful enough to contest that subordination, and by the 960s they were ready to end it entirely.

In 964–965 AD, Sviatoslav I — Grand Prince of Kiev, one of the most formidable military commanders of the medieval Slavic world — launched a campaign to destroy Khazaria permanently. He swept down through the Volga-Don steppe, rallying Slavic tribes who had previously paid tribute to the Khazars. His army moved with unusual speed for the era.

In 965, Sarkel fell. The great limestone-and-brick fortress on the left bank of the lower Don River — built in 833 AD with Byzantine engineering assistance, garrisoned by Oghuz and Pecheneg mercenaries — was taken and sacked. Sviatoslav renamed it Belaya Vyezha, "the White Tower," a Slavic translation of the Turkic "Sarkel," and established a Rus settlement in its place.

Two to four years later, Atil itself — the Khazar capital on the Caspian shore — fell. A contemporary witness described the destruction in terms that recall the Roman annihilation of Carthage: "The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch." The city was so completely obliterated that its location was unknown to modern archaeologists until 2008, when excavations near Astrakhan, Russia finally confirmed where it had stood.

The Khazar Khaganate ceased to exist. The ruling class scattered — some absorbed into surrounding Turkic populations, some migrating westward into Eastern Europe. The empire that had dominated the Black Sea steppe for three centuries vanished from history within a decade of Sviatoslav's campaign.

Sviatoslav launched that campaign from Kiev. He destroyed the Khazar empire in the Donbas, along the Don River, and across the Volga-Caspian steppe. He then turned west and campaigned in the Balkans before being killed by the Pechenegs on his return journey. The Kievan Rus absorbed the former Khazar territories and within a generation converted to Orthodox Christianity under Vladimir the Great.

The Same Ground, a Thousand Years Later
Sarkel — the fortress where the Khazar empire made one of its final stands in 965 AD — sat on the lower Don River near the modern Russian city of Volgodonsk, in the Rostov region. The Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, the epicenter of the war that began in 2014 and escalated into full-scale invasion in 2022, are directly adjacent. The Dnieper River, which served as the approximate western boundary of the Khazar empire, has been a recurring front line in the current conflict. Crimea, which the Khazars controlled for centuries, was annexed by Russia in 2014 — the opening move of the current confrontation.

The Zaporizhzhia region — named for the famous Zaporozhian Cossacks who would later dominate the same steppe — was Khazar territory. Kherson, contested bitterly in 2022 and 2023, sits on the Black Sea coast the Khazars patrolled. The Don River basin, where Sarkel stood and where Russian military logistics have run throughout the current war, was the Khazar heartland.

This is not mysticism. It is geography. The Pontic steppe — that vast, flat, river-crossed grassland between the Dnieper and the Volga — has been the contested zone of every major power struggle in Eastern Europe for over a thousand years, from the Khazar-Rus wars of the 960s through the Mongol invasion of the 13th century, the Ottoman-Russian wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, Napoleon's eastern campaign, the German eastern front of both World Wars, and now the Russia-Ukraine war of the 21st century. The land itself draws conflict. It always has.

What is different now is that most people consuming news about the war in eastern Ukraine have no idea they are watching armies fight over territory that was, a thousand years ago, the homeland of a Jewish empire that ruled the medieval steppe, built one of the most tolerant commercial civilizations of the Dark Ages, was destroyed in a lightning campaign launched from the city that gives the conflict its name, and then vanished so completely that historians argued for centuries about where its capital even stood.

What the History Books Left Out — and Why That Matters
The Khazars are not entirely absent from academic history. Specialists know them well. But they are almost completely absent from the popular historical consciousness of the West — from school curricula, from mainstream documentary coverage, from the cultural framework most people use to understand Eastern Europe and its conflicts.

That absence is worth noticing. The Khazar Khaganate was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most significant states of the early medieval period. It held the line against Arab expansion into Eastern Europe at a time when the Caliphate was at the peak of its military power — had the Arabs broken through the Caucasus and into the Pontic steppe in the 7th and 8th centuries, the entire subsequent history of Eastern Europe would have been different. It was the primary commercial intermediary between the Islamic world and the Scandinavian and Slavic north for over two centuries. It was the only Jewish state with significant territorial power in the post-Biblical world until the 20th century. And it was destroyed in the precise geography where one of the most consequential wars of our time is being fought.

The habit of asking why certain historical facts are absent from the mainstream narrative — and then going to find them yourself — is not conspiracy thinking. It is basic intellectual hygiene. The Khazars are a perfect example of what that habit uncovers: documented, sourced, uncontested history that simply never made it into the story most people are told about the world.

The ground being fought over today has been fought over before. A thousand years ago, the empire that lost that fight was Jewish, ruled from the same steppe, and was destroyed by a prince riding out of Kiev.

Whether that means anything for the present is a question worth sitting with.

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Dr Samrez Salik

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