The conference took place around the middle of the month, a few days before the Great Bairam. There were a lot of people; the Wehrmacht had hastily replastered a large meeting hall in the former Communist Party headquarters, which had an immense oval table still scarred by the shrapnel that had come through the roof. There was a brief but animated discussion about a question of precedence: Köstring wanted each of the different delegations to be grouped together—the military administration, the Abwehr, the AOK, the Ostiministerium, and the SS—and that seemed logical, but Korsemann insisted that everyone be seated according to his rank; Köstring ended up giving in, which had Korsemann sitting on his right, Bierkamp a little lower, and me almost at the end of the table, across from Bräutigam, who was only a Hauptmann of the reserve, and next to the civilian expert from Minister Rosenberg’s institute. Köstring opened the meeting and then introduced Selim Shadov, the head of the Kabardo-Balkar National Council, who gave a long speech on the very ancient relations of hospitality, mutual aid, friendship, and sometimes even marriage between the Kabard, Balkar, and Tat peoples. He was a rather fat man, wearing a twill suit made of shiny cloth, his somewhat flabby face strengthened by a thick moustache, and he spoke a slow, emphatic Russian; Köstring translated his words himself. When Shadov had finished, Köstring got up and assured him, in Russian (this time a Dolmetscher translated for us), that the opinion of the National Council would be taken into account, and that he hoped that the question would be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. I looked at Bierkamp, sitting on the other side of the table, four seats away from Korsemann: he had placed his cap on the table next to his papers, and was listening to Köstring while tapping his fingers; Korsemann was scraping at a shrapnel gouge with his pen. After Köstring’s reply, they had Shadov leave, and the general sat down without commenting on the exchange. “I suggest we begin with the experts’ reports,” he said. “Doktor Bräutigam?” Bräutigam pointed to the man seated to my left, a civilian with yellowish skin, a drooping little moustache, and carefully combed greasy hair, sprinkled, as were his shoulders, with a cloud of dandruff, which he kept nervously brushing off. “Allow me to introduce Dr. Rehrl, a specialist in Eastern Judaism at the Institute for Jewish Questions in Frankfurt.” Rehrl slightly raised his buttocks from his chair in a little bow and began in a monotonous, nasal voice: “I believe we are dealing here with a remnant of a Turkic tribe, which adopted the Mosaic religion during the conversion of the Khazar nobility, and which later on sought refuge in the eastern Caucasus, around the tenth or eleventh centuries, during the destruction of the Khazar Empire. There, they mixed by marriage with an Iranian-speaking mountain tribe, the Tats, and a part of the group converted or reconverted to Islam while the others maintained a Judaism that became slowly corrupted.” He began to tick off the proofs: first of all, the words in Tat for food, people, and animals, that is, the fundamental substratum of language, were mainly of Turkish origin. Then he went over the little that was known of the history of the conversion of the Khazars. There were some interesting points there, but his summary tended to present things in a jumble, and was a little hard to follow. I was nonetheless impressed by his argument about proper names: one found, among the
Bergjuden, names of Jewish holidays such as Hanukkah or Pessach used as proper names, for example in the Russianized name Khanukayev, a usage that exists neither among the Ashkenazy Jews nor among the Sepharad, but which is attested among the Khazars: the proper name Hanukkah, for instance, appears twice in the Kiev Letter, a letter of recommendation written in Hebrew by the Khazar community of this city at the beginning of the tenth century; once on a gravestone in the Crimea; and once in the list of Khazar kings. For Rehrl, therefore, the Bergjuden, despite their language, were comparable from a racial perspective to the Nogai, the Kumyk, and the Balkar rather than to the Jews. After that, the head of the investigatory commission from the Wehrmacht, a rubicund officer named Weintrop, spoke: “My opinion can’t be as unequivocal as that of my respected colleague. In my opinion, the traces of a Caucasian Jewish influence on these famous Khazars—about which we know in fact quite little—are as numerous as are the proofs of an opposite influence. For example, in the document known as the Anonymous Cambridge Letter, which must also date from the tenth century, it is written that some Jews from Armenia intermarried with the inhabitants of this land—this refers to the Khazars—mingled with the Gentiles, learned their practices, and continually fought alongside them; and they became a single people. The author is speaking here of Middle Eastern Jews and of the Khazars: when he mentions Armenia, it’s not the modern Armenia that we know, but the ancient Greater Armenia, that is, almost all of Transcaucasia and a large part of Anatolia….” Weintrop went on in this vein; each element of proof that he put forward seemed to contradict the one before it. “If we come now to ethnological observation, we note few differences from their neighbors who converted to Islam, or who became Christian, like the Ossetes. Pagan influences remain very strong: the Bergjuden practice demonology, wear talismans to protect themselves from evil spirits, and so on. That resembles the so-called Sufi practices of the Muslim mountain people, such as the worship of graves or the ritual dances, which are also survivals of pagan rituals. The standard of living of the Bergjuden is identical to that of the other mountain peoples, whether in the city or in the auls that we visited: it’s impossible to maintain that the Bergjuden profited from Judeo-Bolshevism in order to advance their position. On the contrary, they seem in general almost poorer than the Kabards. At the Shabbat meal, the women and children sit apart from the men: this is contrary to Jewish tradition, but it’s the mountain tradition. On the other hand, during marriages like the one we were able to attend, with hundreds of Kabard and Balkar guests, the men and women of the Bergjuden dance together, which is strictly forbidden by Orthodox Judaism.”—“Your conclusions, then?” asked von Bittenfeld, Köstring’s adjutant. Weintrop scratched his white hair, cropped almost to the skulclass="underline" “As for the origin, it’s hard to say: the information is contradictory. But it seems obvious to us that they are completely assimilated and integrated and, if you like, vermischlingt, ‘mischlingized.’ The traces of Jewish blood that remain must be negligible.”—“However,” Bierkamp interrupted, “they cling obstinately to their Jewish religion, which they’ve preserved intact for centuries.”—“Oh, not intact, Herr Oberführer, not intact,” Weintrop said genially. “Quite corrupted, on the contrary. They have completely lost all Talmudic knowledge, if they ever had any. With their demonology, this makes them almost heretics, like the Karaïtes. What’s more, the Ashkenazy Jews scorn them and call them