A Turkic-speaking Judaic people who argued they were not Jews
The Karaim of Crimea follow a form of Judaism that accepts only the Hebrew Bible and rejects the Talmud, yet most say they descend from the Khazars or other Turkic peoples rather than from Jews. Genetic research points the other way. That dispute over identity saved and shaped the community across two centuries.
Crimean Karaites traditionally spoke a Kipchak Turkic language and lived for centuries in Crimean towns such as Çufut Qale and Bakhchysarai, and later Yevpatoria. Their faith differs from rabbinic Judaism in treating the Tanakh as the sole scripture, a rift with roots in the 12th century. Research on their origins finds Jewish ancestry and close genetic kinship with other diaspora Jews; some scholars place their beginnings in Constantinople.
The Khazar story has problems. The Khazars vanished in the 11th century, whereas Crimean Karaites are first recorded in the 13th. Khazar Judaism was probably rabbinic, and the Khazar tongue likely belonged to a different Turkic branch from Karaim. According to the historian Miller, the community only began asserting a separate identity in the 19th century, when leaders such as Avraham Firkovich and Sima Babovich lobbied the tsars. Firkovich has been accused of forging inscriptions to tie his people to the Khazars.
The lobbying worked. In 1863 the Karaites received the same rights as their Christian and Tatar neighbours and escaped the Pale of Settlement, while the related Krymchaks, who practised rabbinic Judaism, stayed under the anti-Jewish laws. A tradition holds that Grand Duke Vytautas moved one branch to Lithuania, where Trakai became a centre, though the Lithuanian dialect's distance from the Crimean one undercuts the legendary date of 1218.
In 1934 a German genealogy agency ruled that Karaites were not a Jewish religious community under Nazi law, and most were spared the Holocaust that nearly destroyed the Krymchaks. The exemption was not complete: soldiers unaware of it killed 200 at Babi Yar, and many Karaites were forced into labour battalions. Some Karaites also sheltered Jews, sometimes by claiming them as members. Soviet officials counted 6,357 Karaites in 1944, and assimilation and emigration have since shrunk the community to a few thousand across Eastern Europe.
Source: Crimean Karaites
