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Review of Nesrin Güllüdağ, Kırımçak Türkçesi Grameri ‘A Grammar of Krymchak Turkic’, Ankara: Gece Kitaplığı. 2014, 496 pages. ISBN 9786054942619.
Get PDFThe Reuven Fahn Collection
No full textThe article, divided into five chapters, is devoted to the corpus of works by the Hebrew writer Reuven Fahn (1878–1939?) about the Karaites. The works consist of both research and literary writings. The article emphasizes the fact that Reuven Fahn was the only author who wrote stories about the lives of the Karaites in Hebrew. In the first chapter, parts of his life are depicted, emphasizing the period when he lived in the town of Halicz. The second describes briefly the variety of research and literary works he produced. The third deals with his approach as a religious Jew to research on the Karaites. The fourth studies his stories about various characters in the Karaite community and their customs. The stories demonstrate Reuven Fahn’s close familiarity with the Karaites, the compassion he felt toward them, as well as his criticism of them. The fifth is devoted to a description of seven Karaite legends that he personally heard from them and then put into writing in Hebrew. To finalize the picture, the history of the Karaites in WWII is briefly mentioned, as well as the immigration of part of the community to Israel in the 1950s. A list of selected works by Reuven Fahn concerning the Karaites is included in the article
Documents in the Firkovich Collection: Valuable Sources on the History of the Jewish Communities in Europe and the Middle East from the 12th to the 19th century
Get PDFThe paper presents a survey of the manuscript collections of Avraham Firkovich, and, in particular, of the handwritten documents it contains in Hebrew, Arabic, West-Russian and other languages. These historical documents belonged to the Karaite (mostly of Lithuania), Rabbanite and Samaritan communities, and reflect their life in Europe and the Middle East from the 12th to the 19thcentury. These historical sources were included in different library funds and described in several inventory hand-lists; some archival materials have been presented in printed catalogues, and many items have been published and translated into European languages. In the paper, a brief survey of the documents is given, as well as the history of their acquisition by Firkovich and the history of their cataloguing and research over the past 150 years
Review of Michał Németh, Zwięzła gramatyka języka zachodniokaraimskiego z ćwiczeniami ‘A concise grammar of western Karaim with exercises’, Poznań: Katedra Studiów Azjatyckich [= Prace Karaimoznawcze 1], 2011, 272 pages
Get PDFThe Karaite Jewish community in Israel (20th and 21st centuries)
Get PDFThe academic world has at its disposal a vast quantity of resources concerning the history and culture of the Karaite Jewish community. These resources include Biblical manuscripts, works on Biblical exegesis and Halakhah (Jewish law), grammatical texts, letters on community affairs, wedding contracts and other important texts that shed much light upon Karaite religious observance, history, and culture. The aim of this paper is to present to the reader in a concise manner the facts regarding the development of the Karaite Jewish community in Israel in the 20th and 21st century. In addition, it endeavors to describe the relationship between the KaraiteJewish community and other communities, in particular the Rabbinate Jewish community in Israel and the USA
Rabbanite magical texts in Karaite manuscripts
Get PDFIn spite of the recurrent polemic in Classical Karaite texts against Rabbanite dealings with magic, later Karaite manuscripts do contain some magical texts and recipes. In the present study, we examine one such manuscript (Jerusalem – The National Library of Israel Ms. Heb. 8°3652), a nineteenth-century Karaite compendium of magical and non-magical texts, copied in Troki in 1873 by Yehudah ben Shelamiel Zekharia Bezekowicz. Upon closer examination, many, and probably all, of the magical and divinatory texts and recipes found in this manuscript can be shown to be derived from the Jewish magical tradition, as transmitted in Rabbanite manuscripts. We therefore point to some of these parallels, and show that this late-Karaite manuscript incorporates textual units that go back to late antique Jewish magic, to medieval and Renaissance Jewish magic, and to more modern Jewish magic, and that its magic-related contents display no specific Karaite features. It is simply a collection of Rabbanite magical traditions copied by Karaite scribes for their own use
Pas Yeda’ and Massa’ ha-‘Am: The lost works of Avraham ben Yoshiyahu (Abraham Ezyiaszewicz)
Get PDFPas Yeda’ and Massa’ ha-‘Am are two famous works by Avraham ben Yoshiyahu, mentioned in numerous publications, which were lost. The present article is devoted to these two works. It makes an attempt to explain the mystery of the “lost” Pas Yeda’ and it introduces an edition of the preserved passages of Massa’ ha-‘Am which have until recently been unrecognized. It also briefly depicts the preserved manuscripts and works of Avraham ben Yoshiyahu
Some remarks on the history of the Karaites in Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 15th century
Get PDFThe articles deals with the medieval sources on the history of the Karaites who appeared in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the reign of duke Vitold (Vytautas). Many of them were already analyzed by researchers, whoever some questions still remained unanswered or presented not always in fully critical way. The research questions deal with the original privilege issued by Lithuanian monarchs to the Karaites, allegedly participation of the Karaites at the battle of Tannenberg or travel description left by Burgundian knight Gilbert de Lannoy. It seems that the first written document, shaping he legal position of the Karaites in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was issued by duke Casimir Jagellonides in 1441. The charter of grand duke Vitold, drawn in 1388, was certainly forged sometime in the 15th century. The Bavarian Latin chronicle informing that a Jewish (in fact, Karaite?) military unit supported Polish-Lithuanian army at the battle of Tannenberg in 1410, transmitted only political propaganda, and did not reflect a real fact. Famous Burgundian traveler, who visited Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the beginning of the15th century, met Karaites in Troki
Karaite chronography of the 16th–19th centuries from the Crimea and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Get PDFoai:ojs.pressto.amu.edu.pl:article/4030This article focuses on a genre of Karaite historical writing of the Crimea and Poland-Lithuania – the chronography of which has never been researched by scholars. The object of this study is to analyze the main characteristics of this chronography. This genre existed in the Crimea in the 16th-19th centuries and supposedly emerged due to the influence of both Tatar chronicles and Rabbanite historiography. The scanty number of Polish-Lithuanian chronicles from the 17th century on were supposedly affected by Polish chronicles and by Crimean Karaite chronicles. This genre includes a diversity of writings with different characteristics. In order to define them as historical writings I sorted them and divided them into sub-genres. This division, as well as the authors’ purpose in their writings, help us to define whether a certain text is associated with the historical writing and to come to some conclusions about the author’s views concerning history, his self-identification and his mentality in general
Karaim literature as a source of information on the spoken language. A case study of the early 20th-century Lutsk Karaim dialect
Get PDFThe present article presents an analysis of a Lutsk Karaim literary work, namely Sergiusz Rudkowski’s Dostłar, which was published in two parts in 1931 and 1939. The two characters of the drama use colloquial language and therefore the work appears to be until now the only source of knowledge on Lutsk Karaim in its spoken form. The linguistic peculiarities of the drama are compared with other non-literary sources that reflect everyday language used at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The present study has been carried out in order to determine whether the language of the drama was caricatured by the author, and thus exaggerated to some extent, or whether it reflects the factual command of Karaim during that period. In the final analysis, it is safe to say that the drama’s language should be treated as a reliable source of knowledge. It is important to note that it contains linguistic elements (swearwords, abusive words, Hebrew elements, &c.) that are absent from all other colloquial linguistic materials