Israel Eli Zanzer

Israel Eli Zanzer — known within the Russian and Mongolian community as Alexander Zanzer — was a Siberian-born Jewish businessman who, by the winter of 1920, had built one of the most respected commercial households in the Mongolian capital of Urga. He spoke fluent Mongolian and managed a significant share of the local gold-mining enterprises. He enjoyed the personal favor of the Bogd Khan himself.

Zanzer's life was, until 1921, the exact answer to the antisemitic myths the Bolsheviks and their opponents traded in interchangeably. He was not a revolutionary. He was a trader, a philanthropist, a father, and an intermediary. He had come south to escape the Tsarist Pale of Settlement and stayed because Mongolia — under the Bogd Khan's tolerant Buddhist court — had made room for him.

Urga on the eve of the siege

In 1920, Urga was a dusty crossroads of ancient Buddhist monasteries, traditional Mongolian yurts, foreign merchant quarters, and Chinese garrison barracks. The city held perhaps 50,000 people, a tiny Jewish community of merchants and their families among them. Zanzer's household was well known: a walled compound with a working office, a stable of local traders passing through, and — by the accounts of surviving letters — a table that was always set for one more guest.

When Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg arrived at the gates of the city with his Asiatic Cavalry Division and drove out the Chinese, Zanzer — like most of Urga's foreign residents — greeted the liberation cautiously. The Bogd Khan was restored. Trade might resume. For a few weeks, the city breathed.

The purge

Then the Baron began to unravel. Convinced that Jews were, by nature, agents of the Bolshevik revolution — an ideology invented by antisemites in Russia two decades earlier — Ungern declared open season on the community. His subordinate, the sadistic Captain Feodoroff, was given license to hunt through the city.

Zanzer, despite his standing, his Mongolian family, and his direct line to the Bogd Khan, became a prime target. What follows in the historical record is remarkable: a peaceful merchant, using the same networks of business relationships, tribal contacts, and quiet favors that he had spent a decade building, engineered an escape for himself and for eleven refugees. The refugees were placed under the personal protection of Prince Togtokho, a revered Mongolian national hero, who invoked the ancient nomadic law of hospitality when the Baron's riders came for them. A guest under a Mongolian roof, the Prince declared, would not be surrendered to foreign killers.

After the Baron

Zanzer's route out of Mongolia — through the miners he had employed, over mountains he had crossed as a trader, past patrols his wife's family helped him avoid — kept him alive long enough to see Ungern captured and shot in September 1921. He would live to see the Soviet occupation, the loss of the Bogd Khan's independent court, and the beginning of the long twentieth century that swallowed most of the world he had known.

His name appears too rarely in English-language histories of the period, most of which are still focused on Ungern's cavalry campaigns rather than on the civilian community that survived him. White Khan is, in part, an attempt to correct that.

In the series

Zanzer is introduced in Episode 4: The Golden Capital as the Baron's Division reaches the gates of Urga. He is a central figure of Episode 7 as the purges begin, and the emotional heart of Episode 8: The Law of Sanctuary — the sequence in which the refugees reach Prince Togtokho's estate and Zanzer, using his own quiet networks, disappears into the desert.