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Review of Michał Németh, Unknown Lutsk Karaim letters in Hebrew script (19th–20th centuries). A critical edition, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego [= Studia Turcologica Cracoviensia 12], 2011, 416 pages
Get PDFJan Grzegorzewski’s Karaite materials in the archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków
Get PDFThe article focuses on the survey of Jan Grzegorzewski’s Karaite-related materials kept in the archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków. The article also analyzes the biography and contribution to the field of Karaite studies of Jan Grzegorzewski (1846/9-1922), one of the earliest students of the Karaim language in Europe. Quite an eccentric person, Grzegorzewski was at the same time traveller, litterateur, Slavicist, and Orientalist. Although some academicians (e.g. T. Kowalski) have expressed their scepticism about Grzegorzewski’s scholarly activity, there is no doubt that his Karaitica articles remain highly significant contribution to the field of the history of the Karaim language and folklore. Jan Grzegorzewski’s archival collection contains varied materials such as ethnographic and linguistic data, fairy-tales, proverbs, poetry, letters, drafts of articles, statistics, and official documents. Some interesting documents from Grzegorzewski’s collection are published as appendices at the end of the article
The Karaim translation of the Book of Nehemia copied in the 17 th century’s Crimea and printed in 1840/1841 at Gözleve, on the copyist of the manuscript, and some related issues
Get PDFIn this article, the author describes the nature of the 1840/1841 Turkic Karaim translation of the Bible, published at Gözleve / Jevpatorija, and especially, the translation of Nehemia, the last book in this publication. The author tries to identify the translator / copyist of Nehemia, who was working on the MS in 1672 in Mangup,having been based himself on the colophon, and surmised that the rest of the Bible translation may come from a MS copied by the same copyist. The author further speculates why the publisher of the Gözleve edition chose this particular MS. In order to define the Turkic language of the translation, the author goes in details about the earlier Jewish – both Rabbanite and Karaite – population of Çufut-Qal‘eh in the Crimea; his conclusion is that the earlier population was mostly immigrants from the North (the Duchy of Lithuania) and their language could not be originally any sort of Crimean Turkic. In the article, the author publishes and republishes different Judeo-Turkic Karaite Biblical translations and tombstone inscriptions
The rise of Karaim cultural nationalism as part of the European movement
Get PDFIn the nationalistic-revivalist atmosphere which prevailed in Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th century and the first four decades of the 20th century, it would indeed be a real miracle if the Karaims, with all their ethnic characteristics, had remained untouched by nationalist movements. In the framework of the essential definitions of nation, nationalism and ethnicity, their religion, languages, calendar, endogamic family ties, social organization, leadership and etiological myths represent the most characteristic markers of an ethnic group or ethnic minority. This conclusion is supported by a great number of ethnic symbols which distinguish the Karaims from Jews and other neighbouring peoples. For their part, the decisions of the Austrian and Russian authorities in favour of the Karaims after 1774 constituted the basis for their status as a juridically independent ingroup. The recurrent negative definitions of the Karaims as a Jewish sect etc. can be considered neither appropriate nor up-to-date
The relation between Hebrew and Turkic in Crimean Karaim literature on the basis of a translation of the Hebrew drama Melukhat Sha’ul
Get PDFThis paper discusses three topics related to a Crimean Karaim translation of the Hebrew drama entitled Melukhat Sha’ul. The translation was made in the first half of the nineteenth century, approximately in the 1840s, by a Karaim scholar named Abraham ben Yashar Lutski. The first part of this article is devoted to the characteristics of relations between the Karaims and the Rabbanites at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the context of their literary activity. It is followed by a short description of the plot of the drama and its connections and deviations from the biblical events presented in The First Book of Samuel. The third part of the article analyzes the influence of Hebrew on the language of the Crimean Karaim translation of Melukhat Sha’ul. Moreover, attention is drawn to the manner in which Hebrew vocabulary related to magic was translated into Turkic. For the purpose of this paper magical terms, which are present in the Hebrew drama, are compared with their counterparts in the Turkic translation
