Crimean Karaites

TheCrimean Karaitesor simplyKaraites(CrimeanKaraim: Кърымкъарайлар,Qrımqaraylar, singular къарай,qaray;Trakaidialect:karajlar, singularkaraj;Hebrew:קראי מזרח אירופה;Crimean Tatar:Qaraylar;Yiddish:קרימישע קאַראַיִמער,romanized:krimishe karaimer), also known more broadly asEastern European Karaites, are a traditionallyTurkic-speakingJudaicethnoreligious groupnative toCrimea.Nowadays, most Karaim in Eastern Europe speak the dominant local language of their respective regions.
The Karaite religion, known in Eastern Europe as Karaism, split from mainstreamRabbinical Judaismin the 19th and 20th centuries. They have lived alongsideKrymchaks.Most Karaites in the region do not consider themselves to be Jews, associating the ethnonym with Rabbinical Jews alone, but rather consider themselves to be descendants of theKhazars,non-Rabbinical Judeans, or otherTurkic peoples.
Research into the origins of the Karaites indicates they are of ethnic Jewish origin and are genetically closely related to otherJewish diasporagroups.Some researchers believe they originated inConstantinopleand later settled in the ByzantinePrincipality of Theodoro.
A closely related group, the Slavic Karaites, were formally accepted into the Karaite ethnoreligious community of Crimea after the deposition of TsarNicholas IIin 1917. They are descendants of ethnic RussianSubbotniks.However, most Slavs claiming to be Karaites in Eastern Europe are not members of the Karaite ethnoreligious community, and are not accepted as legitimate Karaites.
Turkic-speakingKaraite Jews(in theCrimean Tatar language,Qaraylar) have lived inCrimeafor centuries. Mostmodern scientists regard them as descendants of Karaite Jews who settled in Crimea and adopted aKypchak language. Othersview them as descendants ofKhazarorCuman,Kipchakconverts to Karaite Judaism. Today, many Crimean Karaites reject ethnic Semitic origins theories and identify as descendants of the Khazars.Some specialists in Khazar history question the Khazar theory of Karaim origins,noting the following:
In 19th century Crimea, Karaites began to distinguish themselves from other Jewish groups, sending envoys to the czars to plead for exemptions from harsh anti-Jewish legislation. These entreaties were successful, in large part due to the tsars' wariness of theTalmud, and in 1863 Karaites were granted the same rights as their Christian and Tatar neighbors. Exempted from thePale of Settlement, later they were considered non-Jews by Nazis. This left the community untouched bythe Holocaust, unlike other Turkic-speaking Jews, like theKrymchakJews that were almost wiped out.
Miller says that Crimean Karaites did not start claiming a distinct identity apart from the Jewish people before the 19th century, and that such leaders asAvraham FirkovichandSima Babovichencouraged this position to avoid the strongantisemitismof the period.
From the time of theGolden Hordeonward, Karaites were present in many towns and villages throughout Crimea and around theBlack Sea. During the period of theCrimean Khanate, they had major communities in the towns ofÇufut Qale,Sudak,Kefe, andBakhchysarai.
According to Karaite tradition,Grand DukeVytautasof theGrand Duchy of Lithuaniarelocated one branch of the Crimean Karaites to Lithuania ordering to build them a town, called todayTrakai. There they continued to speak their own language. This legend originally referring to 1218 as the date of relocation contradicts the fact that the Lithuanian dialect of theKaraim languagediffers significantly from the Crimean one.The Lithuanian Karaites settled primarily inVilniusandTrakai, as well as inBiržai,Pasvalys,NaujamiestisandUpytė– smaller settlements throughoutLithuania proper.
The Lithuanian Karaites also settled in lands of modernBelarusandUkraine, which were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Karaite communities emerged inHalychand Kukeziv (nearLviv) inGalicia, as well as inLutskandDerazhneinVolhynia.Jews (Rabbinites and Karaites) in Lithuanian territory were granted a measure of autonomy under Michel Ezofovich Senior'smanagement. TheTrakaiKaraim refused to comply, citing differences in faith. Later all Jews, including Karaites,were placed under the authority of theRabbinite"Council of Four Lands" (Vaad)and "Council of the Land of Lithuania" taxation (1580–1646). TheYiddish-speaking Rabbinites considered the Turkic-speaking Karaites to beapostates, and kept them in a subordinate and depressed position. The Karaites resented this treatment. In 1646, the Karaites obtained the expulsion of the Rabbinites from Trakai. Despite such tensions, in 1680, Rabbinite community leaders defended the Karaites of Shaty nearTrakaiagainst an accusation ofblood libel. Representatives of both groups signed an agreement in 1714 to respect the mutual privileges and resolve disputes without involving the Gentile administration.
According to Crimean Karaite tradition, which developed in the 20th centuryinterwarPolandtheir forefathers were mainly farmers and members of the community who served in the military forces of theGrand Duchy of Lithuaniaand thePolish–Lithuanian Commonwealth,as well as in the Crimean Khanate. But according to the historical documents of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the chief occupation of the Crimean Karaites wasmoney lending.They were granted special privileges, including exemption from the military service.In the Crimean Khanate, the Karaites were repressed like other Jews, with prohibitions on behavior extended to riding horses.
Some famous Karaim scholars in Lithuania includedIsaac b. Abraham of Troki(1543–1598),Joseph ben Mordecai Malinovski,Zera ben Nathan of Trakai,Salomon ben Aharon of Trakai,Ezra ben Nissan(died in 1666) andJosiah ben Judah(died after 1658). Some of the Karaim became quite wealthy.
During the times of thePolish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Karaim suffered severely during theKhmelnytsky Uprisingof 1648 and the wars between Russia and the Commonwealthin the years 1654–1667. The many towns plundered and burnt includedDerazhneand Trakai, where only 30 families were left in 1680. The destruction of the Karaite community inDerazhnein 1649 is described in a poem (both in Hebrew and Karaim) by a leader of the congregation,HazzanJoseph ben Yeshuah HaMashbir.Catholic missionaries worked to convert the local Karaim to Christianity, but were largely unsuccessful.
19th century leaders of the Karaim, such asSima BabovichandAvraham Firkovich, were driving forces behind a concerted effort to alter the status of the Karaite community in eyes of theRussianlegal system. Firkovich in particular was adamant in his attempts to connect the Karaim with theKhazars, and has been accused of forging documents and inscriptions to back up his claims.
Ultimately, the Tsarist government officially recognized the Karaim as being innocent of thedeath of Jesus. So they were exempt from many of the harsh restrictions placed on other Jews. They were, in essence, placed on equal legal footing withCrimean Tatars. The relatedKrymchakcommunity, which was of similar ethnolinguistic background but which practiced rabbinical Judaism, continued to suffer under Tsarist anti-Jewish laws.
Solomon Krym(1864–1936), a Crimean Karaite agronomist, was elected in 1906 to the FirstDuma(1906–1907) as aKadet(National Democratic Party). On November 16, 1918 he became the Prime Minister of a short-lived Crimean Russian liberal, anti-separatist and anti-Soviet government also supported by the German army.
Since the incorporation of Crimea into theRussian Empirethe main center of the Qarays is the city ofYevpatoria. Their status under Russian imperial rule bore beneficial fruits for the Karaites decades later.
In 1934, the heads of the Karaite community in Berlin asked theNaziauthorities to exempt Karaites from the anti-Semitic regulations based on their legal status as Russians in Russia. TheReich Agency for the Investigation of Familiesdetermined that, from the standpoint of German law, the Karaites were not to be considered Jews. The letter from the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung(de)officially ruled:
This ruling set the tone for how the Nazis dealt with the Karaite community in Eastern Europe. At the same time, the Nazis had serious reservations about the Karaites.SSObergruppenfuhrerGottlob Bergerwrote on November 24, 1944:
Despite having exempt status, groups of Karaites were massacred in the early phases of the war. German soldiers who came across Karaites in the Soviet Union during the invasion ofOperation Barbarossa, unaware of their legal status under German law, attacked them; 200 were killed atBabi Yaralone. German allies such asVichy Francebegan to require the Karaites to register as Jews, but eventually granted them non-Jewish status after getting orders byBerlin.
When interrogated,Ashkenazirabbisin Crimea told the Germans that Karaites were not Jews, in an effort to spare the Karaite community the fate of theirRabbaniteneighbors.Many Karaites risked their lives to hide Jews, and in some cases claimed that Jews were members of their community. The Nazis impressed many Karaites intolabor battalions.
According to some sources, Nazi racial theory asserted that the Karaites of Crimea were actuallyCrimean Gothswho'd adopted the Crimean Tatar language and their own distinct form of Judaism.
InVilniusandTrakai, the Nazis forced KaraiteHakhamSeraya Shapshalto produce a list of the members of the community. Though he did his best, not every Karaite was saved by Shapshal's list.
After the Soviet recapture of Crimea from Nazi forces in 1944, the Soviet authorities counted 6,357 remaining Karaites. Karaites were not subject tomass deportation, unlike theCrimean Tatars, Greeks, Armenians and others the Soviet authorities alleged had collaborated during the Nazi German occupation. Some individual Karaites were deported.
Assimilation and emigration greatly reduced the ranks of the Karaite community. A few thousand Karaites remain inLithuania,Belarus,Ukraine,PolandandRussia. Nowadays, the largest communities exist inIsraeland theUnited States; however, these communities are almost entirely Egyptian in origin and ethnically and liturgically distinct from Crimean Karaites. There is also a community of fewer than 100 Karaites inTurkey.
In the 1990s, about 500 Crimean Karaites, mainly from Ukraine, emigrated to Israel under theLaw of Return.The Israeli Chief Rabbinate has ruled that Karaites are Jews under Jewish law.
Traditionally, Crimean Karaites had three major subdivisions, each of which maintained their own dialect of the Karaim dialect: the Crimean Karaites, the Galician Karaites, and the Lithuanian Karaites. Today, the distribution is different. The largest number is probably now in Israel; some other Crimean Karaites have left to America or elsewhere. These Karaites are mostly joining non-Crimean-Karaite communities.
According to Karaite tradition, all the Eastern European Karaite communities were derived from those in theCrimea,but some modern historians doubt the Crimean origin of Lithuanian Karaites.Nevertheless, this name, "Crimean Karaites" is used for the Turkic-speaking Karaites community supposed to have originated in Crimea, distinguishing it from the historicallyAramaic,Hebrew, andArabic-speaking Karaites of theMiddle East.
In 2009, 231 people in Kazakhstan identified as Karaites. This was an unusual jump from the 28 Karaites recorded in 1999.
Karaite communities still exist in Lithuania, but have experienced a steep decline in numbers in recent decades. Historically, they lived mostly inPanevėžysandTrakai, but now most live in Vilnius, where they have a kenesa. There is also a kenesa in Trakai; the Panevėžys community has declined to only a handful of people and does not maintain a house of worship.
Within living memory, the community was many times larger than it is today. The 1979 census in the USSR showed 3,300 Karaim.Lithuanian Karaim Culture Communitywas founded in 1988. According to the Lithuanian Karaim website the Statistics Department of Lithuania carried out an ethno-statistic research entitled "Karaim in Lithuania" in 1997. It was decided to question all adult Karaim and mixed families, where one of the members is a Karaim. During the survey, for the beginning of 1997, there were 257 people of Karaim ethnicity, 32 of whom were children under 16. A similar survey was done in 2021, in honour of the 625th anniversary of Karaite settlement in Lithuania. This coincided with the 2021 national census.
In 2011, 423 individuals identified as Karaims in the Lithuanian census. By 2021, this had dropped to 192, a decline of around 55 percent in a single decade.
In 2011, 346 people in Poland identified as Karaites.
Outside Russian-occupied Crimea (seeUkraine, below), there are 205 self-identifying Karaites as of 2021, nearly all of whom speak Russian as a first language. There are no significant concentrations; the largest community numbers over 60 people in Moscow.
Crimea was traditionally the centre of the Crimean Karaite population. In the Ukrainian census of 2010, just under 60 percent of Ukraine's Karaite population, 715 individuals, lived in Crimea, representing around 30 percent of the global population at the time. However, between the Russian invasion of 2014 and the Russian census of 2021, the population dropped to 295, a fall of almost 60 percent. The war of 2022 may have caused further disruption. This means that the Crimean population is no longer the largest, and is almost certainly smaller than the populations of mainland Ukraine, Poland, and Israel.
Outside Crimea, Karaites historically settled inGalicia, particularly inHalychandLutsk. However, there is only one Karaite left in Halych today, and the kenesa was shut down in 1959 and eventually demolished. The Galician community had its own dialect of Karaim. The largest contemporary Karaite community is in Kyiv; smaller ones exist in other cities, including Kharkiv, which has a functioning kenesa, although the community numbers only about two dozen.In the 2010 census, 481 Ukrainians identified as Karaites outside of Crimea. In 2021, the Ukrainian government unveiled a bill planned to grant Crimean Karaites and other minority groups official 'Indigenous' status.
Until the 20th century,Karaite Judaismwas the only religion of the Karaim,During theRussian Civil Wara significant number of Karaim emigrated toYugoslavia,Czechoslovakia,PolandandHungaryand thenFranceandGermany.Most of them converted toChristianity. The Karaim's modern national movement philanthropist M.S. Sarach was one of them.
The Crimean Karaites'emancipationin theRussian Empirecausedcultural assimilationfollowed bysecularization. This process continued in the USSR when most of thekenesaswere closed.
In 1928secularKaraimphilologistSeraya Shapshalwas elected asHachamof Polish and Lithuanian Karaim. Being a strong adopter of Russian orientalist V. Grigorjev's theory about theKhazarianorigin of the Crimean Karaites, Shapshal developed the Karaim's religion and "historical dejudaization" doctrine.
In the mid 1930s, he began to create a theory describing theAltai-Turkicorigin of the Karaim and the pagan roots of Karaite religious teaching (worship of sacred oaks, polytheism, led by the godTengri, the Sacrifice). Shapshal's doctrine is still a topic of critical research and public debate.
He made a number of other changes aimed at the Karaim'sTurkificationand at erasing theKaraite Jewishelements of their culture and language.He issued an order canceling the teaching ofHebrewin Karaite schools and replaced the names of the Jewish holidays and months with Turkic equivalents (see the table below).
According to Shapshal, Crimean Karaites were pagans who adopted the law ofMoses, but continued to adhere to their ancientTurkicbeliefs. In addition, he claimed that the Karaites had reveredJesusandMohammedas prophets for centuries. In the Post-Soviet period, Shapshal's theory was further developed in modern Karaylar publications(e.g. "Crimean Karaite legends") and was officially adopted by the Crimean Karaim Association "Krymkaraylar" (Ассоциация крымских караимов “Крымкарайлар”) as the only correct view of the Karaim's past in 2000.
The ideology of de-Judaization, pan-Turkism and the revival ofTengrismis imbued with the works of the contemporary leaders of the Karaites in Crimea. At the same time, some part of the people retained Jewish customs, several Karaite congregations have registered.
Leon Kull and Kevin Alan Brook led the first scientific study of Crimean Karaites usinggenetic testingof bothY chromosomalandmitochondrialDNA and their results showed that the Crimean Karaites are indeed partially of Middle Eastern origin and closely related to other Jewish communities (Ashkenazi,SephardiandMizrahi Jewsand Egyptian Karaite Jews), while finding that the Crimean Karaites possess a lower affinity to non-Jewish Turkic-speaking peoples of the region.
Haplogroups G2a-P15, J1-M267, J2-M172 together make up more than half of the Karaites' gene pool. Next come haplogroups R1a-M198, C3, E1b, T and L.
Karaimbelongs toKypchaksub-branch of theTurkicfamily and is closely related toCrimean Tatar,Armeno-Kipchaketc. Among the many different influences exerted on Karaim, those of Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian were the first to change the outlook of the Karaim lexicon. Later, due to considerable Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian influence, many Slavic and Baltic words entered the language of Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Russian Karaim.Hebrewremained in use for liturgical purposes. Following theOttomanoccupation of Crimea,Turkishwas used for business and government purposes among Karaim living on the Crimean peninsula. Three different dialects developed: the Trakai dialect, used inTrakaiandVilnius(Lithuania), the Lutsk or Halych dialect spoken inLutsk(untilWorld War II), andHalych, and the Crimean dialect. The last forms the Eastern group, while Trakai and Halych Karaim belong to the Western group. Currently only small minority of Karaim can speak the Karaim language (72 Crimean dialect speakers,118Trakaidialect speakers, and about 20Halychdialect speakers).
The most famous Crimean Karaite food isKybyn(Russian:Кибинаpl.Кибины,Karaim:kybynpl.kybynlar,Lithuanian:Kibinai). Kybynlar are half moon shaped pies of leavened dough with a stuffing of chopped beef or mutton, baked indutch ovenor baking sheet. Other meals common for Crimean Karaites andTatarsareChiburekki,Pelmeni,Shishlik(These are most often made from mutton).
Ceremony dishes, cooked for religious holidays and weddings are: