Pesakh (general)

Pesach or Pesakh ( ) was a Khazar Jewish general mentioned in the ''Schechter Letter''.

Pesach was military commander of the region around the Kerch Strait who defeated the armies of the Rus' prince (), most likely Oleg the Wise, around the year 941 in the Taman Peninsula.

Linguistic discussion

Dunlop argued that the term should be read as "the Beg" or "Ebe-shad".

Critical assessment of the letter

The letter associates Pesach with the term () with the phrase or ", who is Pesach the ". This has given rise to two interpretations:

# That represents the Khazar military title ''baliqchi'', which is only attested to by the Greek accounts of Theophanes the Confessor - thus affording the reading "Pesach, he (who is the) ''baliqchi''"
# That represents a personal name, perhaps the Turkic ''Boluščï'', indicating that "Pesach" was merely the general's nickname, or at the very least was not his name at birth - thus affording the reading "''Boluščï'', he is (who is called) Pesach".

Assuming does represent the title of ''baliqchi'', it might indicate that Pesach commanded ships or a port, instead of soldiers on the ground, as ''baliqchi'' is thought to roughly translate to "Fisherman" (or, in alternate translation "Fish-Lord") in the Khazar language; leading scholars to hypothesize that the office was actually a ''naval'' rank within the Khazar military.

The term ("the ") is similarly obscure. Dunlop reads , ''haMeyuqqar'', meaning "the Honored", while Schechter proposed "the Reverer," or emending to "the Uniter". David Kahane proposed the alternate reading "the Guardian". Golb and Pritsak write that "the word is clearly spelled , not ... recognition that there is no yod in the word at all makes unnecessary further speculation about the meaning of the reading ; but the term in itself also makes no sense as it stands. That it is a Hebrew word, however, would seem to be indicated by the initial consonant he signifying the definite article. is not a known Hebrew root, but may be cogently emended based on the fact that the previous line of the text states that “the Commander (, ''haPaqid''), the chief of the armed troops" . . . the evidently corrupt , , is with facility emended back to , .”Golb, Norman and Omeljan Pritsak. ''Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century.'' Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982, p. 116-117.

References

Sources

*Kevin Alan Brook. ''The Jews of Khazaria.'' 3rd ed. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2018.
*Dunlop, Douglas M. ''The History of the Jewish Khazars,'' Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954.
*Golb, Norman and Omeljan Pritsak. ''Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century.'' Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982.
*Zuckerman, Constantine. "On the Date of the Khazar’s Conversion to Judaism and the Chronology of the Kings of the Rus Oleg and Igor." ''Revue des Etudes Byzantines'' 53 (1995): 237–270.

{{Khazaria

Khazar generals
10th-century Jews