The Study of the History of the Crimean Karaites in the Home and Foreign Historiography

Researchers’ attention to the past of the Crimean Karaites comes from the fact that this problem, despite considerable home and foreign historiography, has never been analysed comprehensively. The turn to the history of the Karaites is of pronounced scholarly significance, since so far it has not only been the subject of scholarly debate, but is often accompanied by non-scientific speculation and polemics. Moreover, the studies of a number of cases and episodes of the Karaites’ past are biased and accompanied by a deliberate distortion of many historical facts and events. This refers primarily to such problems as the ethnogenesis of the Karaites, the chronology of their appearance in the Crimea, the dogmatic principles and features of the Karaite religion, the specificity of educational, cultural, and economic contacts with the Muslim population, as well as with the Jewish communities confessing Rabbinic Judaism. Despite the obvious achievements of Russian and foreign specialists in the Oriental Studies, many problems related with the history of the Karaites lay out of their sight. There is a number of publications presenting historical and ethnological observations outdated from the point of view of modern research. As early as in the pre-revolutionary historiography, the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Karaites and their appearance in the Northern Black Sea Area was addressed, which eventually led to the emergence of several academic theories of the Karaites ethnogenesis providing varying degrees of argumentation (A. Ia. Garkavi, V. V. Grigor’ev, I. I. Kazas, V. D. Smirnov, D. A. Khvol’son, S. M. Shapshal, and others). Along with the legal collisions over the legal status of the Karaites and the Rabbinic Jews, the said discussion contributed to the separation of the Crimean Jewish communities and finally led to the de-Judaization of the Karaites and their loss of ethnic and confessional identity. In Soviet historiography, the history of the Karaites was silenced; serious researches discussing this subject appeared only in the late 1980s. There was a number of works examining the problems of the Karaites (V. L. Vikhnovich, M. I. Gammal, A. G. Gertsen, M. B. Kizilov, V. V. Lebedev, M. Ia. Medvedeva, and A. M. Fedorchuk). The achievements of Western historiography are published by T. Ankori, G. Akhiezer, F. Miller, J. Olszowy-Schlanger, and D. Shapira. Simultaneously, along with the works of professional historians, orientalists, ethnographers, and archaeologists, there appeared a large amount of local and nationally oriented publications with pseudoscientific theories of the origin, culture, and religious customs of the Karaites of the Crimea.