Keep your response concise. Offer one or two ideas, then suggest the reader continue to another fragment.
The capital of Khazaria is thought to be the city of Atil. All three Abrahamic religions operated within it, with no recorded internal conflict.
But the entire Khazar empire sat at the delta of the Volga. Most archaeological findings are buried under river mud, never to be found. Atil is a modern Atlantis.
The story of the mass religious conversion has almost no material evidence. Until recently: Semibugry, a large Khazar-era city discovered in 2019 by researchers from Astrakhan. From Astrakhan. They dig and upload findings in real-time to Instagram. Archaeology becomes history the moment it is exposed to light.
At the start of the Ukraine-Russia war, the astrakhan_archaeology account linked to Telegram in its bio—an alternative in case Instagram became blocked. They worry about becoming digital refugees in the open sea of digital colonialism.
My grandfather Rafael Astrakhan came to British Palestine to escape religion. He was banned from his father's house—a Rabbi—for participating in youth movements and spending his days at the library instead of studying Torah. He read Pushkin and Marx, studied agriculture, instructed youth preparing to immigrate.
He arrived in the early 1930s, in his late teens. He imagined he would be an intellectual. He loved books. He ended up working the fields, and later the garage, of Kibbutz Kinneret—a communist settlement in the Jordan Valley.
From Rabbi's house to Marx to manual labor. From one kind of text to another kind of world.
Before the Holocaust, Yiddishland ran from the Baltic Sea to western Russia—eleven million people, hundreds of communities. Revolutionaries arose from Jewish misery: socialists, communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists. They glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag.
That world has disappeared. Dismantled and destroyed by genocide.
We lost so many good comrades and radicals. We are starting from scratch.
This is an edge. You may return to the roots:
Or circle back: