Researchers into the Khasar issue were for a long time inhibited by the assumption that the form Khazar was original. The discovery and publication of Terh and Tez Uighur inscriptions revealed that the original Turkic name of the Khazars was Khasar. This made other evidence which had hitherto been difficult or impossible to interpret accessible, and more could be put in correct chronological order. The Khasar ethnic name ultimately stems from the title Caesar, which reached the Middle Persian sources, among others. In 739, a ruler of the Turkic dynasty in Gandhara abdicated in favour of his son. The Chinese sources which record this and the coins issued by the new king both give the king's name as From Kesar. The From is the Iranian form of Rome, and the Kesar is the title Caesar. This name passed over to the Tibetans, who knew it in the form Phrom Ge-sar. This "Roman" Ge-sar also appeared in the Tibetan sources as "Turk", i.e. Dru-gu Ge-sar, and after a while became the hero of a Tibetan epic, which now has a long and widespread heritage in Tibet and its surroundings. This Tibetan epic was borrowed by the Mongols and survived among them as the Geser Epic. The Kesar title also passed over to the Turkic-speaking population. As a result of the stressed second syllable in Turkic, Kesar became Khasar, and the title survived as both an ethnic and a personal name. The most prominent of the personages who bore the name was Chingis Khan's brother. There are not many examples of ethnic group's names deriving from a title, but among them are the name Kerel for the Magyars and the Turkic Yabghu, which derives from the title Yabghu. This type of ethnic name evolved from the expressions "Khasar's people" and "Yabghu's people".
Another barrier to research into Khazar origins has also been lifted. There was a view that if the Khazar people were self-designated, the language implied by the mid-word -z- could not be Chuvash type. Quite apart from the fact that ethnic names say nothing about the peoples themselves, it is now known that the -z- in the name of the Khazars is secondary.
Chinese sources also list a tribe by the name of Khasar among the Central Asian Uighur tribes. There is some debate as to how they are related. This Uighur tribe only appears in the Chinese sources in the period following the middle of the 8th century, and so it cannot be ruled out that a group of European Khazars migrated east - perhaps at the time of Marvan's attack in 737 - and joined forces with the Uighurs who took over power from the Turks after 750. If this was the case, then the Uighurs could not have been the ancestors of the Khazars, as some thought. It also conflicts with the view that links the Khazars with Akatirs. The original form of the ethnic name that appears in Priskos is akatir, but after the Latin phonemic change ti > chi, copyists wrote it as akatziroi. The more reliable manuscripts give it as akatir. This only later became akatsir in Jordanes and Cassiodorus. The popularity of the form akatsir is due to the Turkic etymology produced for it (agachi eri, 'people of the wood").
The most important evidence, hitherto ignored precisely because of its reading, is an appendix already quoted: the Syrian geographical description written for the ecclesiastical history of Zakarius the Rhetor also lists the Khasar people among the peoples living north of the Caucasus. As we have seen, this dates from 555.
Michael the Syrian wrote the history of three peoples in his chronicle. The ancestors of the three peoples are three brothers, called Hazarig, Bulgharios, and Pugur. The form of the third name is a produce of text corruption, but can be read correctly as Wugur, one form of the ethnic name Oghur. Bulgharios and his people migrated to the Danube, and the other two peoples went to the land of the Alani, which they called Bersilia. Michael the Syrian wrote his chronicle before 1199, but adapted old Byzantine and Middle Persian sources. What is important for us is that it refers to events around 670, in which the Khazars and the Ughurs appear together in the foundation of an empire.
The religion of the Khazars in the 7th century was Tengrism. This was described quite thoroughly by the bishop of the Caucasian Albanians, Isreal, who visited the "North Caucasian Huns" in 681. The description has survived in the text of Moses of Dashuranci. The Khazars soon converted to the Jewish faith, however. The political reasons for this were clear: choosing a third religion between the Islam of the Arabs and the Christianity of Byzantium enabled them to avoid becoming dependent on either. Many details of the conversion and the nature of the Khazars' Judaism were until recently disputed, however.
The Khazars' conversion proceeded in several stages. The earliest source (Masudi) claims that the first conversion took place during the time of Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809). According to the Khazars' Jewish tradition, the first converted king was Bulan, but the faith only started to spread after his third successor, Obadiya, had "revived the empire and strengthened the true faith" around 800. Bulan ruled around 730, and it is highly improbable that any kind of official conversion took place at this time, or if it did, then only for a very short period. In his work written in 864 in Westphalia, Druthmar of Aquitain noted that "all of the Gazars follow Judaism." This is, in fact, one of the most disputed issues.
Source: Hungarians and Europe in the early Middle Ages by András Róna-Tas
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Your getting to complicated with your etymology.Like other researches in this field you choose exotic etymologies to explain words that are simply found in the local dialect. Khazar probably meant goat "Koza" in Russian.
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