Ebook: Coup d'etat, Coronation and Conversion. Some Reflections on the Adoption of Judaism by the Khazar Khaganate

Article // Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Volume
23. Issue
04. October 2013, Cambridge. - pp. 495-526«The Turks will take control of Kufa in southern Iraq and the Khazars the province of al-Jazira in northern Iraq» runs a popular hadlth o f the early ‘Abbasid Caliphate. The patently false attribution to the Prophet notwithstanding, this hadlth suggests that the Khazars, a militarised semi-nomadic Turkic people securely established in their Khaganate north of the Caucasus Mountains, loomed menacing and large in the imagination - and fears - of their settled neighbours.