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On Firkowicz, Forgeries and Forging Jewish Identities

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On Firkowicz, Forgeries and Forging Jewish Identities chapter 9 On Firkowicz, Forgeries and Forging Jewish Identities Dan D.Y. Shapira This paper is a—necessarily short—report on the great project of the publica- tion of forged tombstone inscriptions in a Crimean Jewish-Karaite cemetery, by which (together with other spurious evidence) Avraham Firkowicz (1787– 1874) attempted to establish a myth of the origin of the Karaite Jews. In order to appreciate his efforts it is necessary to briefly sketch the various trends of ideas among Jews and Gentiles on the ancient history of Hebrews as current in the early nineteenth century in Russia and elsewhere. Avraham, son of Shemuel Firkowicz, was to a large degree a medieval char- acter. Born in 1787 in Łuck (Lutsk, Lutzk; Volhynia) in a tiny Turkic-speaking community of Jewish religious dissidents, the Karaites, as a subject of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the epoch of the early Jewish Enlightenment, he lived through the emergence of the Jewish Reform Movement, the heyday of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums, and the emergence of both the specific Russian-Jewish civilization and Yiddish literature. He died in 1874 after an active life up to his last day, only a few years before the Pogroms of 1881–82 which prompted the massive Jewish emigration to America, the emergence of the first Palestinophile (or proto-Zionist) organizations and the important book Autoemancipation by Leon Pinsker, the son of a friend and colleague of his, Śimhah Pinsker. When young Firkowicz began to read his Hebrew Pentateuch, he found himself under Russian rule, following the third partition of Poland in 1795. The Karaites of the nearest community of Halich / Halicz,1 closely connected to those of Łuck, found themselves on the other side of the border, in Austria. So the Russian imperial might, not always benevolent and sometimes capable of arbitrary destruction, was to be for Firkowicz a never forgotten potential threat. As many other local Karaites, Firkowicz spent much of his youth in the countryside, trading with the Gentiles. The Łuck Karaites were a tightly-knit 1 See Mikhail Kizilov, The Karaites of Galicia: an ethno-religious minority among the Ashkenazim, the Turks, and the Slavs, 1772–1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2008). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�768�9_0�0 On Firkowicz, Forgeries and Forging Jewish Identities 157 minority of men of learning with significant ancestors in scholarship, strug- gling for survival. During the Four-Year Sejm (1788–1792) of the Rzeczpospolita, the local Karaites led the way to the split with their Rabbanite Jewish brethren.2 The majority of the Jews of Łuck were Rabbanites (thus knowledge of some Yiddish was widespread among the Karaites); the rest of the city’s inhabitants were Orthodox or Uniate Russians (Ukrainians) and Catholic Poles. Firkowicz began to study by correspondence with prominent Karaites in Halich and the Crimea. He asked for guidance from Rabbanites as well, mostly the maskilim, the men of Haskalah, the belated Jewish equivalent of the Enlightenment.3 The reforms of Jewish life in Austria imposed by Joseph ii brought about a crisis of identity: one of the early maskilim there, Naphtali-Herz (Hartwig) Wessely (1725–1805), argued in his Diḇre Šalom we’Emeth (1784), for the neces- sity of these reforms from the standpoint of the Talmud. He also stressed the importance of learning both modern languages and Classical Hebrew and emphasized the importance of manual work. In fact, a Jewish agricultural colony was set up in Austrian Galicia in 1782–1785. The Haskalah movement aimed at the return to the classical models of the Bible instead of those of the “Rabbinical” literature.4 The goal was the religious and social emancipa- tion of the Jews, stressing what is common to Jews and Christians, that is, the Bible, and not the Talmud. As such, this movement as a whole considered the Karaites as natural allies and to some degree as models.5 They were seen by the early maskilim as the keepers of the purest Hebrew language,6 and Karaism was regarded—for example by Christians in Protestant countries— as a scripturalist antithesis to the Talmudistic distortions. The maskilim chose 2 Ibid., 33. 3 On Krochmal’s and other maskilim’s keen and sympathetic interest in Karaism, cf. Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context. The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 349. 4 See S. Schreiner, “Aufklärung als Re-Hebraisierung; Anmerkungen zu Isaak Ber Lewinsohns Haskala-Programm,” Studia Judaica 5,1 (2002), 69–83. 5 Cf. Sh. Feiner, “ ‘Sefarad’ dans les représentations historiques de la ‘Haskala’—entre moder- nisme et conservatisme,” Mémoires juives d’Espagne et du Portugal (1996), 239–51; idem., “The Jewish Search for a Usable Past,” American Historical Review 106 (2001), 941–2; on the maskilim’s enchantment with the Medieval Judeo-Spanish civilization see Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context. The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 71–92. 6 The Karaite literary corpus, at least in Europe, was entirely Hebrew and based (almost) exclu- sively on the Biblical Hebrew..
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