Detail from William Holman Hunt’s “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” (1860).

The Khazars, also known as “the thirteenth tribe,” were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who settled in the Caucasus in the sixth century. In the eighth century, they were caught between the Orthodox Byzantines and the Muslim world and in order to deflect these competing pressures, the Khazar royalty and nobility decided to convert to Judaism. This event is surrounded by mystery and there are many different theories on exactly what happened. Not a single line of the Khazar language has survived, nor is there any archaeological evidence to be found. One story is that the leader of the Khazars invited three religious scholars (one Jewish, one Christian, and one Muslim) to interpret a dream he had, and told them that he would convert to the faith of the most successful interpreter.

In Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavić takes this historical enigma and creates his own fictional account of the nation’s conversion – except that in his book, it is unknown which religion was victorious. The novel is presented as an actual dictionary (well, more like an encyclopedia), divided into three parts: the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sources – all of them claiming that the Khazars converted to their faith. The sources contradict and complement each other, creating a puzzle for the reader to put together.

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