The Thirteenth Tribe

Abstract The history of the Khazars, whose medieval kingdom ceased to exist in the second half of the tenth century, has often been used with purely pragmatic political and ideological intentions by a diverse range of actors across different chronological periods—from the Zaporozhian Cossacks and Karaite nationalists to Nazi scholars and leaders of a pan-Turkic nationalist revival. Unfortunately, many of the purely academic publications related to the field of Khazar history were equally heavily distorted by the political agenda of the time or the personal ambitions and preferences of their authors. This chapter is an attempt to trace the most important examples of the use and misuse of Khazar history in European national ideologies and politically motivated scholarship; especially significant in this context are ideological debates and theories concerning the supposed Khazar origins of the East European Karaites.