The Ideology Of The Ninth And Tenth Centuries 89
to the removal of the king.325 In the Old Testament, “the direct connection
between the Anointed One and God allows for the mixing of the monarchic,
priestly and prophetic fields. The king, conceived by Jehovah, not only pos-
sesses a sacred quality; he also by roght takes on the priestly function as media-
tor between God and the people”.326 Therefore, according to Jewish beliefs, the
positions of both the priests and the king have a dual nature. “There was a
distinction between the charismatic kingship of unction and the hereditary
kingship of the national leader, between the priesthood reserved for the priests
and the royal priesthood”.327
If Jewish tradition cannot provide a clear answer to the issue of power divi-
sion in Khazaria, then maybe it is possible to comprehend its influence with
the help of the Khazar Correspondence. The information that is relevant in this
matter is related to the Judaization of Khazaria. The Khazar Correspondence
provides us with two different accounts. The first one can be regarded as the
official (state) one and is included in the letter of the Khazar ruler Joseph,
while the second one is by a Khazar Jew, perhaps not unlike the writer of the
Cambridge Document himself.
Joseph’s version is as follows: an angel appeared to a king (Bulan) who was
a wise man. He told him that God wanted to give him a law and rules. Bulan
in turn told the angel that the people he governed were unbelievers and asked
him to appear to a chief prince who was among them (i.e. the people). The
angel fulfilled his request and appeared in a dream to the chief prince. He in
turn shared his dream with Bulan and the king summoned all the princes (i.e.
there were others besides the chief prince!), his slaves and all the people. He
told them about the angel and his wish and they accepted the new faith.328
The ancestors of the Cambridge Document writer were Jews who fled from
Armenia to Khazaria. There they intermingled with the Khazars, fought along-
side them and gradually became one people. At that point the Khazars did
not have a king and whoever won a battle became commander-in-chief. Thus,
325 Eliade 1997, 408–409; Shivarov 1996, 36.
326 Dagron 2006, 300.
327 Dagron 2006, 78.
328 Kokovtsov 1932. The motif of dreams preceding the adoption of a new religion, followed
by a religious dispute, is widespread in the steppe world (see Golden 2007b, 130). The
dream is part of Christian and Muslim writings related to the change of religion. In these
narratives, the authors present the life of such a person (in our case, Bulan) as an exam-
ple for others. The dream itself marks “the transformation of the former self into a new
spiritual individual”. An interesting aspect in Christianity is the role of the woman in the
dream as a model for piety and power, restraint or wisdom/knowledge, while among the
Muslims this model is more often related to genealogy/ancestry (see Jones 2003).