4 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961) and His Role in Shaping of the Turkic Identity of the Polish-Lithuanian Karaite Community

Кто с верой, любовью и правдой Who with faith, love and truth Трон славный гахама займет? Shall keep the ḥakham’s throne? Кто вечной заботой и лаской Who with eternal care and kindness К добру свой народ поведет? Shall bring his people to prosperity?

Karaite poet M. Sinani, 19131053

Detailed narration of Szapszał’s biography would require from us writing a whole book about him and his life-adventures. His life was as full of them as the life of Count of Monte Cristo. Krymchak historian Lev Kaia, 19881054

4.1 Seraja Szapszał’s Biography Before the Arrival in (1873–1927)

The author of numerous publications and hero of a few belletristic novels whose life- story is enshrouded in the mist of most dramatic myths and legends, the last ḥakham of the East European Karaites, Seraja Szapszał1055 (1873–1961), spent a lengthy and

1053 M. Sinani, “Kto tron pochivshego zaimet?” Svetloi pamiati S.M. Panpulova,” KS 3-4 (1913): 2. 1054 “Подробное изложение биографии Шапшала потребовало бы написания нами целой книжки о нем и его жизненных приключениях. Его жизнь была ими не беднее, чем жизнь графа Монте-Кристо” (L.I. Kaia, Balovni sud’by. Ocherki po istorii karaimov v Rossii (, 1988), 37 (Archive of Vaad of , L.I. Kaia collection (uncatalogued)). 1055 In Russian: Серая/Серайя/Серайа/Сергей Маркович Шапшал or sometimes incorrectly Хан Шапшал (this is how he is called, for example, on his symbolical grave in the valley of Jehosaphath :Adib as-Soltan, i.e. “Sultan’s lawyer”) and Shapshal Khan; in Polish) ادیب السلطان :in ); in Persian Hadży Seraja Han Szapszał (the title of Hadży (“pilgrim” in the of the Karaites) was added after his pilgrimage to the Holy Land; Han (Khan) – during his stay in Persia); in Turkish: Thüreyyâ/Süreya Şapşaloğlu (it is important to notice here that in Muslim countries he normally altered his Hebrew name to the Turkic Süreyya which sounds almost identical with Biblical Serayyah); Serayah ben Mordecai Shapshal; in his/שריה בן מרדכי שפשל :in Lithuanian: Seraja Šapšalas; in Hebrew is a ((שְׂרָ יָה)ו) (early student papers he also used a penname Ibn-Karay. The name Serayah/Seraya(hu highly rare masculine Hebrew name, although it is referred to several times in the Bible (e.g. 2 Kings (It originates from the verb sarah and Yah (name of God .(שְׂרָ יָה כֹּהֵן הָרֹאׁש/Seraiah the chief priest – 25:18 and means “Yah persists”. Shapshal/şapşal is a Turkic word which means “lazy, sluggish, slovenly, untidy” (KRPS, 644; cf. other dictionaries of the Turkic languages).

© 2015 Mikhail Kizilov This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Seraja Szapszał’s Biography Before the Arrival in Poland (1873–1927) 217

eventful life.1056 In spite of the fact that much has been written on Szapszał’s biography, the topic is far from being exhaustively examined.1057 In my study I use the Polish spelling of his name (pronounced as Seraya Shapshal/Şapşal). Although originally a Crimean Tatar- and Russian-speaking Karaite, he lived in Poland and from 1928 to 1961; furthermore, it was the Polish variant of his name – Seraja Szapszał – that he normally used for his publications in the interwar period. Nevertheless, when referring to his relatives, who lived in the or Russia/Soviet Union, I apply the standard English transliteration – Shapshal. Historians possess little information about his childhood. Seraja Szapszał himself said in his official autobiographies on this subject only a few brief and not too informative sentences. The only reliable data about Szapszał’s early biography and about his genealogy was found by me among the Lev Kaia uncatalogued manuscript documents. One of these documents, ḥakham’s biography which had been prepared (evidently, on the basis of some unpublished documents) by Szapszał’s follower, Karaite Boris Yakovlevich Kokenai, was copied by Kaia on 22.04.1964. According to the document, the earliest-known member of the family, Szapszał’s grand-grand- grandfather, Alyapaq (Elijah?)1058 Moses Shapshal, lived in Çufut Kale in the 1720s. His son Mordecai Shapshal (b. Çufut Kale, 1742/3) was a learned person, shammash, of the larger -kenesa of Çufut Kale. His son, Moses ben Mordecai (b. Çufut Kale, 1772), together with Seraja’s father Mordecai ben Moses, moved from Çufut Kale to Bahçesaray in 1846. Szapszał’s father, Mordecai ben Moses Shapshal (b. Çufut Kale,

1056 Szapszał’s life can be roughly divided into the following periods: 1873-1884 – years spent in Crimea; 1884-1901 – in St. Petersburg; 1901-1908 – in Persia; 1915-1919/1920 – as the Taurida and ḥakham in Eupatoria (Crimea) and St. Petersburg; 1919-1928 – in Turkey; 1928-1939/1944 – as the ḥakham of the Polish Karaites in Wilno; 1944-1961 – as an assistant of the History Institute of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Soviet . 1057 I intend to dedicate a separate monograph to S. Szapszał’s biography. The following studies on this problem deserve to be mentioned: Yola Yanbaeva, “Iz materialov k biografii prof. S.M. Szapszała,” in Evrei v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1995), 27-29; Dan Shapira, “A Jewish Pan-Turkist: Seraia Szapszał (Şapşaloğlu) and his work ‘Qırım Qaray Türkleri (1928)’,” AOH 58 (2005): 349-380; Mikhail Kizilov, “New Materials on the Biography of S.M. Szapszał (1928-1939),” in Materialy Deviatoi Mezhdunarodnoi Konferentsii po Iudaike (Moscow, 2002), 255-273; D. Prokhorov and M. Kizilov, “Seraja Szapszał,” in Krym v litsakh i biografiiakh (spravochno-literaturnoe izdanie), ed. A.I. Dolia (Simferopol, 2008), 396- 400; Il’ia Zaitsev, Mikhail Kizilov, and Dmitrii Prokhorov, “Shapshal Seraya (Sergei) Markovich,” in Vostokovedy Rossii: XX – nachalo XXI v.: biobibliograficheskii slovar’ v 2 kn., ed. S.D. Miliband, vol. II: N–Ya (Moscow, 2008), 991; Mariusz Pawelec, “Listy do Wilna. Seraja Szapszał jako korespondent Ananiasza Zajączkowskiego,” AK, 19-36; Hannelore Müller, Religionswissenschaftliche Minoritätenforschung. Zur religionshistorischen Dynamik der Karäer im Osten Europas (Wiesbaden, 2010), 107-115. Articles by Karaite authors often provide important data which cannot be found in other published or archival sources (Khadzhi D.[avid] Tiriyaki, “K 140-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia gakhama S.M. Szapszała,” IKDU 7 (16) (2013): 2-4; Szymon Pilecki, “Rol’ prof. S.M. Szapszała v pravovom ukreplenii polozheniia karaimov v dovoennoi Polshe” (Russian; unpublished)). 1058 Alyapaq seems to stand for Eliya-apaq (i.e. Hebrew name and Turkic nickname). 218 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

1811 or 1812 – d. Bahçesaray, 1895), according to this biography, lived on the estate near the village of Oysun-köy (Oysuñki). He held conservative views and possessed a traditional “Biblical” countenance, with long beard and Semitic features.1059 He apparently did not know any Russian and for certain period of time had been working as the gabbai in the local Karaite community of Bahçesaray. In 1879 he was elected candidate to the ḥakham’s office. He was buried in 1895 in the valley of Jehosaphath near Çufut Kale.1060 Seraja ben Mordeсai Szapszał (b. 8.05.1873, village of Oysun-köy in Crimea1061) was the last – the twelfth – child in the family; his mother, Akbike Kazas, died when he was only a babe-in-arms in 1874. He attended a Karaite beit midrash in Simferopol from 1880 to 1884, where his instructor was Samuel ben Shemariah Pigit, an influential Karaite author and the ḥazzan in Ekaterinoslav (b. Çufut Kale, 1849 – d. Ekaterinoslav, 1911).1062 Szapszał was open and sincere concerning his early years only once – in a story, which he narrated as a type of a Karaite folktale to Abraham Szyszman. According to this story, young Szapszał demonstrated his independent and revolutionary way of thinking by asking his teacher (apparently, S. Pigit) an awkward question concerning the non-Jewish ethnic origin of the Karaites. In reward for this initiative he was physically punished, first at school, and later – by his father

1059 There is the portrait of Mordecai ben Moses Shapshal made by Boris/Barri/Barukh Egiz (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1260, fol. 7). It appears to be a copy of another portrait of photo no longer extant. A short note in ink on the reverse side of the picture calls him “Murat-Khayri Musaevich” (this is a Turkicized corruption of his Hebrew name) and mentions that he participated as a volunteer in the defence of during the Crimean war. For more information about the Karaite painter Egiz, see Bari Egizas: tapyba, piesiniai/Bari Egiz: zhivopis’, risunki/Bari Egiz: paintings, drawings (Vilnius, 2009); a biographical note on B. Egiz by Abraham Szyszman, 1945, Russian in MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1586, fols. 1-4r. 1060 His large tombstone with inscriptions in Russian and Hebrew, and a large magen david engraved on its side, was erected in the most prestigious part of the cemetery. The stone was near the so-called grave of “Isaac Sangari” (on this “grave,” which in fact was one of Firkovich’s numerous forgeries, see Dan Shapira, “Yitshaq Sangari, Sangarit, Bezalel Stern i Avraam Firkovich,” Materialy po Arkheologii, Istorii i Etnografii Tavridy 10 (2003): 535-555). One may speculate whether young Szapszał started thinking about the connections between the East European Karaites and after visiting his father’s tomb and having an inquistive look at “Sangari’s” grave located nearby. 1061 Oysun-köy (Oysuñki), today Rastushchee near the Pochtovaia train station in the vicinity of Simferopol; later Szapszał was apparently registered in the Bahçesaray Karaite community. This is why it is written in many Szapszał’s biographies that he was born in Bahçesaray. In 1915, there was still an isolated homestead (Russ. khutor) and two gardens that belonged to A.M. and Yu.M. Shapshal, who were apparently Seraja Szapszał’s brothers (Statisticheskii spravochnik Tavricheskoi gubernii, comp. F.N. Andrievskii, M.E. Benenson, pt. 2: Spisok naselennykh punktov Tavricheskoi gubernii, issue 6: Simferopolskii uezd (Simferopol, 1915), 100). 1062 Samuel ben Shemariyah Pigit, Iggeret Nidḥe Shemu

– at home.1063 Szapszał’s silence concerning his father, a traditional Karaite believer, and a story told to Szyszman testify to the fact that relations between “revolutionary” Szapszał and his traditionalist father were far from being friendly. In 1884, as Szapszał himself stated in one of his biographies, he was “sent to St. Petersburg in order to get a command of the state language” (i.e. Russian) where he studied in Okhtinskoe remeslennoe uchilishche (Russ. “Okhtinskoe vocational school”). Until then he apparently could speak fluently only Crimean Tatar. In 1886 (being already 13!1064) he entered the first class of Ya.G. Gurevich’s1065 private gymnasium in St. Petersburg. He graduated from the gymnasium in 1894, at the age of 21. His relatives, who lived in St. Petersburg and Moscow, were rich merchants, owners of tobacco factories and some other enterprises. One of them was mentioned in a comical verse of the famous Russian akmeist, Nikolai Gumilev.1066 In 1894 Szapszał entered the faculty of Oriental languages of St. Petersburg University. Archival documents preserved one of his early student papers written under the supervision of Professor N.I. Veselovskii (1848–1918) in 1898/9.1067 About two years after entering the university, Szapszał published a small, but very revolutionary booklet dedicated to the history of the Karaites in Çufut Kale. This was his earliest publication in which he openly expressed his views about Turko-Khazar

1063 This is according to a story “E pur si muove” recorded by Abraham Szyszman from S. Szapszał’s words in the 1930s (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1531). 1064 In that period the usual age for entering a gymnasium in the was 8-9 years. 1065 Yakov Grigor’evich Gurevich (1843–1906) was important Russian-Jewish historian and pedagogue. His gymnasium was a home to many important pedagogues and students of Russian and Jewish origin. 1066 Gumilev graduated from Gurevich’s gymnasium in 1900, i.e. 6 years after Szapszał’s graduation. See his comical verse “O deva Roza, ia v okovakh” which was dedicated to Rosa Vasil’evna, a Jewish speculator who had been selling to Gumilev various goods (including Shapshal’s produce) on credit: О дева Роза, я в оковах,/Я двадцать тысяч задолжал,/О сладость леденцов медовых,/Продуктов, что творит Шапшал. 1067 This paper is extremely helpful towards understanding the development of Szapszał’s scholarly views and his vision of Karaite history (e.g. he severely criticizes there Abraham Firkowicz’s activity and recognises that before his life-time the Karaites considered themselves to be Jews (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 891. Seraja Szapszał. “Nekotorye voprosy kasatel’no istorii krymskikh karaimov i Chufut- Kale. Zachetnaia rabota studenta IV kursa Seraii Shapshala (1898/1899)”). For a better understanding of Szapszał’s worldviews, see also ibid., no. 917. “Vypiski iz razlichnykh sochinenii, imeiushchikh kasatel’stvo k karaimam (1900s-1940s)” (a copybook containing Szapszał’s miscellaneous notes, quotations from sources and literature on the Jews and Karaites in various languages); ibid., no. 918. “Vypiski iz sochinenii razlichnykh avtorov. Materialy po istorii i literature karaimov” (started in , 1927); ibid., no. 822. Drafts for the monograph “Istoriia tiurkov-karaimov v Krymu, Litve i Polshe”, the 1930s-1942). 220 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

origins of the Karaites.1068 He stated in his letter to the famous Crimean historian, A.I. Markevich, that this booklet had been written at the request of the ḥakham Samuel Panpulov and was intended only for sale in Çufut Kale as a guidebook intended “to satisfy the curiosity of the tourists visiting this fortress.”1069 MS LMAB houses a few early drafts of the booklet, one of them signed by a penname “Ibn-Karay.”1070 Most of the information for this book, however, was borrowed by Szapszał from the two small historical treatises published in the nineteenth century by the Çufut Kale and Odessa ḥazzan Solomon Beim whose name Szapszał hardly mentioned in his booklet.1071 In 1901 Szapszał was invited to Persia as a teacher of Russian for the young prince Mohammed Ali of the Qajar dynasty (1872–1925). Mohammed Ali, who became shah in 1907, had to leave the country in 1909 and thus became the last Qajar ruler of Persia. In addition to his duties of prince’s instructor, Szapszał also lectured in Tebriz in Loqmaniye lyceum. This part of Szapszał’s biography, namely, his stay at the shah’s court, is often referred to in Karaite sources or in memoirs of those who were in contact with Szapszał – the “picturesque” details of which force one to doubt their credibility.1072 After the coronation of Mohammed Ali, Szapszał became one of the most important figures in the country, becoming the shah’s advisor and apparently an unofficial Adib) ادیب السلطان minister. During his stay in the country he was nicknamed in Persian as-Soltan, i.e. “Sultan’s scholar”) and Shapshal Khan – the title khan used in the sense of “nobleman”. (Claims by later Karaite authors that Szapszał would be viewed as a type of medieval Turkic khan, i.e. “the head of the state” or “prince”, certainly exaggerate the real situation.) From this moment on, Szapszał made the title of khan part of his name, often placing it before or after his real name. It was observed by Dan Shapira, however, that after Szapszał’s participation in the anti-Constitutional coup he earned from the Persians the nickname Šapšal-e xûn (“bloody Szapszał”). This was a pun on xân (pronounce: xūn), which, in colloquial Persian, sounds the same as the

1068 Seraja Szapszał, Karaimy i Chufut-Kale v Krymu (St. Petersburg, 1896). The copy of this leaflet, which is kept in NLR, contains Szapszał’s marginal notes which he inserted there after 1896; these notes are currently being prepared for publication by the author of this study. Szapszał’s brochure was republished many times in the 1990s; each time, however, without terms and sentences in Hebrew and characters used by Szapszał in the original edition. Prior to his departure to Persia in 1901 Szapszał published also the following articles: “Karaimy,” Zapiski krymskogo gornogo kluba 11 (1897): 23-30; idem, “Otkrytoe pis’mo g-nu A.Ya. Garkavi,” Salgir (05.07.1899); idem, “Oproverzhenie mneniia A. Garkavi i ego posledovatelei o prebyvanii v Chufut-Kale evreev,” Salgir 16 (20.01.1901): 2. 1069 See his letter to A.I. Markievich of 1897 in MS LMAB F. 143, no. 905, fol. 16. 1070 MS LMAB F. 143, no. 833a. 1071 Solomon Beim, Pamiat’ o Chufut-Kale (Odessa, 1862); idem, Chufut-Kale i karaimy (St. Petersburg, 1861). Solomon Avraamovich (Shelomo ben Avraham) Beim (b. Çufut Kale, 1818 – d. St. Petersburg, 1867), was from 1843 to 1861 ḥazzan in Bahçesaray and Çufut Kale, and later in Odessa. See more on him in Kizilov, Karaites through the Travelers’ Eyes, 7 9 - 8 7. 1072 E.g. M.M. Kazas, “Uchenyi, diplomat, dukhovnyi glava karaimov S.M. Szapszał,” Karaimy i Moskva (Moscow, 1997), 13. Seraja Szapszał’s Biography Before the Arrival in Poland (1873–1927) 221

word for “blood”, and on account of his being a political reactionary who urged his former student – shah Mohammed Ali – to crush the Constitutional Movement.1073 “The Daily Telegraph”, in 1909, called Szapszał “Adjutant-General Chapchal.” This, however, seems to be a considerable exaggeration since, to our knowledge, Szapszał had never been advanced as far as general’s or even any officer’s rank.1074 Active participation of Szapszał in the stormy political events in Persia of 1908 (though not yet fully documented) is recorded in many archival and published sources. According to some sources, at the time of the anti-Constitutionalist coup d’état, carried out by Mohammed Ali in 1907–1908, Szapszał de facto ruled the whole country and was the key figure in counterrevolutionary opposition. English Iranologist Edward Browne (1862–1926) dedicated much attention to Szapszał in his book on the revolutionary events in Persia in 1908. There, with reference to unpublished manuscript sources and testimonies of eyewitnesses, Browne gives a most negative portrayal of Szapszał and his activity, while calling him “shah’s tutor and evil genius,” “a notorious Russian Jew,” “notorious Jewish Russian agent,” etc. Moreover, one of Browne’s sources, M. Panoff, goes even further and accuses Szapszał of acquiring enormous illegal sums of money during his stay in Persia. Panoff alleges that Szapszał was an important Russian secret agent-provocateur who ordered many Iranian revolutionaries be executed and even spat “on the corpse mutilated by tortures.”1075 In addition to Browne’s sources, a number of documents in Persian, Russian, and other languages kept in MS LMAB confirm that Szapszał indeed was seriously involved in the inner political affairs of the country and actively participated in coup d’état.1076 A letter from the Archival directorate of the Ministry of Inner Affairs of the USSR of 2.10.1953 shows that Szapszał was in the service of the Tsarist Ministry of Inner Affairs in the period from 1901 (i.e. from his appointment to Persia) until

1073 Shapira, “Jewish Pan-Turkist,” 354. 1074 “Anarchy in Persia. Shah’s Evil Genius,” The Daily Telegraph 16,771 (26.01.1909): 13. Perhaps this is how British journalists translated Szapszał’s title of khan. 1075 Eward Granville Browne, A Brief Narrative of Recent Events in Persia Followed by a Translation of “The Four Pillars of the Persian Constitution” (London, 1909), 38-41, 58; idem, The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 (Cambridge, 1910), 105, 130, 170-171, 198-200, 202, 207, 214, 279, 324, 418-420. The author is grateful to Dr Dan Shapira for his pointing out at this valuable source. For more information on Szapszał’s stay in Persia, see K.N. Smirnov, Zapiski vospitatelia persidskogo shakha. 1907–1914 gody, ed. N.K. Ter-Oganov (Tel Aviv, 2002), 20-24, 43-44 and passim; O.V. Petrov-Dubinskii, “S.M. Shapshal (Edib-Us-Sultan) – uchitel’ naslednika persidskogo prestola,” Vostok/Oriens 5 (2007): 64-78. 1076 E.g. letters from Shahin Shah to Szapszał and secret ciphered telegrams about the state of affairs in the country (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 932; MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1608, fols. 1-2, 4-6); cf. handwritten notes on the events in Persia composed by anonymous author and based on the data received from Szapszał and the author’s own observations; these notes defend Szapszał (ibid., no. 833a, fols. 83-86), cf. ibid., nos. 929a-943a. 222 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

1917.1077 Browne states that upon his return from Persia Szapszał was immediately received by the Russian emperor Nicolai II; this seems to be another evidence of high importance of Szapszał’s mission in Persia.1078 Szapszał remained in contact with his tutee after the revolutionary events as well. It is known that in September 1909 Szapszał visited overthrown Mohammed Ali in his exile in Odessa.1079 In light of this evidence there is no doubt that Szapszał indeed fulfilled some special tasks of the Russian secret service at the court of the Persian shah. Moreover, there is no doubt that Szapszał played an important role in the suppression of the Constitutionalist uprising. Nevertheless, as Browne himself states in his work, the exact circumstances of the Szapszał’s participation in the events in Persia still await elucidation. Szapszał remained associated with many important figures involved in political changes in Persia many years after his departure.1080 In an interview given by Szapszał to The Daily Telegraph in St. Petersburg on 25.01.1909, he tried to justify his actions by saying that “he first exhorted the Shah, who was then Heir-Apparent and Governor-General of Tabris, to inaugurate certain reforms by creating the States General, as in before the Revolution, in order to familiarise the nation with representative institutions. General Chapchal acted thus in the capacity of a teacher, whose duty it was to instruct the Prince in the European sciences, including Constitutional law. When reaction began to flourish, and the Persian Government moved towards Absolutism, General Chapchal tendered his resignation, and declared his motives frankly by protest. The real evil genius of the Shah is Emir Djeng, an obscure untutored fanatic, who […] has risen to a position of absolute dictatorship by dint of canine fidelity to the Shah and his dynasty.”1081 Szapszał’s role in the coup d’état of 1908 and his anti-Constitutionalist actions had been later severely criticised by many Karaites and non-Karaites alike. In 1911, after the death of the Taurida and Odessa ḥakham Samuel Panpulov when Szapszał was mentioned as a candidate to the ḥakham’s office, there appeared several articles by Karaite authors severely criticising even the hint of the possibility of Szapszał’s being elected to the position of the ḥakham. One article stated that “blood was shed in rivers and seas in the misfortunate country [i.e. in Persia], and many, many of its

1077 The Archival directorate of the Ministry of Inner Affairs of the USSR of 2.10.1953 to S. Szapszał (MS LMAB, F. 143, no. 29, fol. 36). 1078 Browne, A Brief Narrative, 419. 1079 Memorandum of S.M. Shapshal on his trip to Odessa to Mohammed Ali Shah (20.09.1909) (GAARK F. 241, op. 1, no. 1135). 1080 E.g. telegramme sent to him by Mehdi Choa (Mehdi Quli Khan?) in 1924, French (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1529, fol. 21r); cf. numerous letters in Persian in ibid., fols. 27-32. 1081 “Anarchy in Persia,” 13. Seraja Szapszał’s Biography Before the Arrival in Poland (1873–1927) 223

streams are on the conscience of the “famous” [Szapszał].”1082 On the other hand, the fame and participation in the drastic political events gained him even more popularity among the pro-Szapszał oriented Karaites. In response to critical articles Szapszał started his own campaign against defamation and, according to his own words, won a few legal processes against his slanderers.1083 Ideological struggle against Szapszał was continued by some of his opponents even after 1915 when he was elected the ḥakham.1084 With the stormiest period in his life over, Szapszał continued his scholarly, political and state activity. In August 1911 Szapszał undertook a travel to the , apparently also with a secret task from the Russian government. The diary of this trip seems to be the only remaining part from Szapszał’s personal diaries (others were lost or destroyed).1085 The fact that he had been working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is corroborated, for example, by the fact that his correspondence from 1910 was addressed to St. Petersburg, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.1086 One should especially mention that among Szapszał’s students at this time was A.N. Samoilovich (1880–1938), an important Orientalist, who dedicated much time to the study of Crimean Tatar and Karaite literature.1087 In 1911, without even being officially informed about an election campaign, Szapszał was appointed the Troki ḥakham. Nevertheless, he refused to take this position. As “Karaimskaia Zhizn’” poisonously stated, while being involved in political games in Persia, he deemed

1082 “Protest protiv kandidatury S.M. Szapszała,” KZh 7 (1911): 117-118. Documents collected by L.I. Kaia contain references and quotations from the following publications by Karaite and non- Karaite authors severely criticizing Szapszał’s activity in Persia: Z.I. Zoil [E.M. Emeldesh?], Pravda o Shapshale persidskom, gakhame karaimskom (N.p., 1917), 32 pp.; M. Krizhskii’s article in newspaper Rus’; article “Prezritel’nyi Tersit” in Zhizn’ i sud 3 (1916); A. Tamarin, an article in newspaper Utro Rossii (4.02.1917). Unfortunately, for technical reasons I have been unable to find de visu any of these publications. It seems that not a single copy of Zoil’s pamphlet survived in Russian state libraries; the reference to the article “Prezritel’nyi Tersit” is incorrect since the indicated issue of Zhizn’ i sud does not contain it. 1083 One of his private diaries contains a draft of a paper (in pencil) entitled “Kleveta” (Russ. “calumny”) and dedicated to the processes against Szapszał’s slanderers and defamation of his name (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 917, fol. 66). See also “The case of a private accusation by the titular councilor S.M. Shapshal accusing V.I. Sinani and S.S. Raetskii (15.02.1912 – 27.10.1912);” GAARK F. 241, op. 1, no. 1230). For the apologetic Karaite version of Szapszał’s Persian activity, see Sima El’iashevich (Eliaszewicz), Yego preosviashchenstvo, karaimskii Gakham Seraia. Gazetnye materialy 1908-1909 godov, otnosiashchiesia k deiatel’nosti S.M. Shapshala v Persii (Theodosia, 1917). 1084 “Minutes and drafts of materials of several conferences of 1917 which represented the disguised struggle against the person of ḥakham S. Shapshal (3.04.1917 – 3.12.1917)” (GAARK F. 241, op. 2, no. 3). 1085 Fragments from this diary were published in Ilya Zaitsev and Mikhail Kizilov, “Puteshestvie Seraia Shapshala po Turtsii v 1911 godu,” Vostochnyi arkhiv 1 (27) (2013): 25-34. 1086 MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1608, fol. 31r. 1087 E.g. A. Samoilovich, “O materialakh Radlova po narodnoi slovesnosti krymskikh tatar i karaimov,” Zapiski Krymskogo Obshchestva iestestvoispytatelei i liubitelei prirody 6 (1916): 1-7, 118-124. 224 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

Troki ḥakhamate to be too financially and politically insignificant.1088 In 1912, he received a proposal from the Karaite public to become Taurida and Odessa ḥakham. This time his answer was also negative. Nevertheless, Szapszał agreed to become the Taurida and Odessa ḥakham three years later, in May 1915.1089 Although Szapszał now was the official head of the Karaite community, it is highly probable that Szapszał did not really follow the traditional Karaite rules concerning ritual cleanliness of the food. According to Cohen, in the 1930s the “religious head” of Wilno Karaites (i.e. Szapszał) was often seen during official receptions where he “was not at all particular about the food that he ate.”1090 Even after the ascension to the position of the ḥakham he continued his political and state activity. During the First World War he fulfilled linguistic tasks of military import: he worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, being engaged in the translations of military documents found on the Turkish ship “Hamidiye”.1091 In 1915-1917 Szapszał’s thesis on the Khazar origins of the East European Karaites was accepted as an official Karaite doctrine, although not all members of the community, and especially the elder generation and clergy, were eager to accept it. In order to disseminate his Khazar doctrine, Szapszał, as the religious head, had been delivering special lectures dedicated to the history and ethnic origins of the Karaites in Eupatoria, in Alexandrovskoe Karaimskoe Dukhovnoe uchilishche (Alexander Karaite Spiritual College).1092 Although the ḥakham’s residence was officially in Eupatoria, Szapszał often travelled outside it. He especially often travelled to St. Petersburg.1093 According to the memoirs of Anna Vyrubova in August 1916, Szapszał had been often received by the Russian empress and heir of the throne in Tsarskoe Selo. Szapszał amused the heir with Oriental tales and legends and used this opportunity to warn the Empress about the treacherous character of the British ambassador George Buchanan (1854–1924).1094 This again demonstrates Szapszał’s deep involvement in political and diplomatic affairs of the state. On 17.03.1917 he received the prestigious title of statskii sovetnik (Councillor of the state).1095

1088 See “Vybory Trokskogo gakhama,” KZh 3-4 (1911): 115-116; “Otkaz S.M. Szapszała,” KZh 3-4 (1911): 116-117. 1089 “On the election of the Taurida and Odessa Karaite ḥakham S.M. Shapshal (16.03.1915 – 22.02.1916)” (GAARK F. 241, op. 1, no. 1307). 1090 Cohen, Vilna, 467. 1091 “Avtobiografiia Prof. Sergeia Markovicha Szapszała” (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 25, fol. 4v); “Certificate and family list of the interpreter of the 6th grade of the political department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Markovich Shapshal (8.03.1917)” (GAARK F. 241, op. 2, fol. 33). 1092 For the texts of these lectures, see Seraja Szapszał. Zapiski o karaimakh [manuscript and type- written public lectures in various languages] (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 881). 1093 “Correspondence with S.M. Shapshal in Petrograd (27.02.1916 – 7.03.1916)” (GAARK F. 241, op. 1, no. 1328). 1094 Anna Vyrubova, Freilina ee velichestva (Moscow, 1990), 269. 1095 El’iashevich (Eliaszewicz), Yego preosviashchenstvo, 3-4. Seraja Szapszał’s Biography Before the Arrival in Poland (1873–1927) 225

After the February revolution of 1917 Szapszał organized in Eupatoria the Karaite National Assembly (Russ. Караимский Национальный Совет) becoming its first chairman. It is unclear how this organization shared its jurisdiction with TOKDP. In April, 1917, at the same time when Lenin had been spreading his “April theses,” Szapszał arrived to Petrograd in order to settle some matters in capital still enflamed by revolutionary fervor and to read a few public lectures dedicated to his new vision of the Karaite history.1096 Szapszał was also actively involved in social and charitable activity. In 1916 he had organized in Eupatoria the first Karaite national library, which he named Karay Bitikliği (Karaite library). It housed a number of most interesting Karaite-related books and precious manuscripts.1097 In 1917 he initiated publication of the periodical “Izvestiia TOKDP”, published in Russian, but also containing materials in the Karaim ethnolect of Crimean Tatar and Hebrew (both in Hebrew characters). In 1919, witnessing impoverishment of the local Karaites, he organized in Eupatoria a “poorhouse” (bogadel’nia) “Yardım” (Cr.Tat. “help, assistance”) in Eupatoria, named after his mother, Akbike Kazas (Shapshal).1098 Szapszał’s family life remains somewhat murky. In 1936, in an interview with the French journalist Abel Moreau, Szapszał stated that Karaite clergy were supposed to be married1099 and yet he himself was apparently still single during his election to the ḥakham’s office in 1915. According to Szapszał’s official curriculum vitae (composed after 1945) he was married to Vera Kefeli (née Egiz) in 1909. The Karaite author, O.V. Petrov-Dubinskii, retold a somewhat legendary story about this marriage. According to this story, Mohammed Ali’s wife needed an eye operation; for religious reasons, it was required that the operation could only be performed by

1096 An invitation to attend a public lecture by S.M. Szapszał on religion, ethnic origins, history and literature of the Karaites (Petrograd, 20.04.1917) (LMAB F. 143, no. 1519, fol. 14r). 1097 Organized by S. Szapszal in 1916, this library was liquidated by the Soviet regime in the 1920s; its important manuscript and print holdings were transferred, for the most part, to other central Soviet libraries and research institutions in Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, in the process of closing down the library many of its precious books and manuscripts were lost. An estimated number of several hundred Karaite manuscripts were transferred to the library of the Institute of Oriental manuscripts in St. Petersburg (on its history, see S. El’iashevich, “Karai – bitikligi,” Izvestiia TOKDP 2 (1918): 11-13; V.I. Kefeli, “Karai-Bitikligi i propazha natsional’nykh knig i svitkov karaimov,” KV 22 (1996)). A horrible picture of the destruction of the library and its holdings in the 1920s was described by the Karaite author, S. Szyszman (Simon Szyszman, Le Karaïsme: ses doctrines et son histoire (Lausanne, 1980), 166-167; it is not clear, though, on which sources Szyszman based his information and to what extent this information is true). Karay Bitikliği was resurrected by the Eupatoria Karaite community in the second half of the 1990s, largely through the efforts of Victor (David) Tiriiaki, the local ḥazzan. Today it houses printed and manuscript Karaitica. 1098 “About the Karaite poorhouse Yardım named after Akbike Shapshal, ḥakham’s mother (14.12.1919)” (GAARK F. 241, op. 2, no. 10); “Godovoi otchet po soderzhaniiu i oborudovaniiu Karaimskoi Bogadel’ni Yardım imeni Akbike Shapshal v g. Yevpatorii,” Izvestiia TOKDP 1 (1919): 28. 1099 Abel Moreau, “En Pologne. A Troki, chez le Hachan des Karaїmes,” Revue Bleue 6 (1936), 392 cf. Green, “The Karaite Community in Interwar Poland,” 107. 226 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

a woman. Unfortunately, at that moment there were virtually no women in the East with an ophthalmological educational background. This is why shah’s choice fell on the Karaitess, Vera Kefeli-Egiz, who was one of the first women to study medicine in Switzerland; her professors were the reknown Theodor Kocher and Hermann Sahli.1100 Dr. Kefeli-Egiz had been working at that time in Odessa and, before that, in Paris. She was invited to Teheran to perform the operation, which was a success. One of the coincidental results of this event was a romance between Szapszał and Vera Egiz – who were later married. According to some sources and studies, this happened in 1909 and according to others – in 1919.1101 Indeed, it is very likely that Szapszał and Vera Egiz could possibly have met in 1909 in Persia. Yet, it was hardly possible for them to be officially married in Russia in 1909. According to the memoirs of the Polish physician, Wincenty Tomaszewicz, at the age of nineteenth (i.e. ca. 1890) Vera Egiz was married to a Karaite (a certain Kefeli) who was much older than she. Nevertheless, when, five years later (ca. 1895), she had wanted to break up the marriage, her husband refused to divorce her. Thus – being the wife of another man – she could not possibly have married Szapszał in 1909. Furthermore, in the 1910s she was the civil wife of Solomon Krym, an influential Karaite financier who became the head of the Provisional Crimean government in 1919. It appears that she was officially married to Szapszał only in 1919 while the aforementioned Krym married a French pharmacist from Theodosia, Lucy Clarie.1102 In passing, it is also worthwhile mentioning that Szapszał apparently had a rather bad relationship with his siblings. Although Szapszał’s personal archive in Vilnius contains thousands of letters to the ḥakham from throughtout the East European Karaite communities, not a single letter from his brothers or sisters exists. This seems to be clear evidence to this hypothesis. The data about his life and activity after the October revolution of 1917 are not consistent. In his autobiographies composed for Soviet officials, Szapszał usually stated that in March 1919, being persecuted by the denikintsy (i.e. followers of the general A.I. Denikin), he was forced to leave Crimea and went first to the Caucasus and then to Constantinople. In the curriculum vitae compiled by Szapszał for the Soviet authorities in 1954 he mentioned that he did this because of his “open sympathy

1100 Hans Zbinden, Polen einst und jetzt. Reisen und Wanderungen (Frauenfeld/Stuttgart, 1969), 91. Vera Egiz was a daughter of Isaac and Toteke Egiz (b. 12.02.1871, Odessa – d. 1850, Vilnius); studied medicine in Bern (Switzerland) from 1891 to 1897. 1101 O.V. Petrov, “S.M. Shapshal (Edib-Us-Sultan) – uchitel’ valiakhda Mokhammeda-Ali, general- ad’’iutant Mokhammed-Ali-shakha,” in Sviatyni i problemy sokhraneniia etnokul’tury krymskikh karaimov. Materialy nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Simferopol: Dolya, 2008), 162-183; idem, S.M. Shapshal v Persii. Puteshestvie po ‘shapshalovskim’ mestam 100 let spustia,” KV 6 (87) (2008). 1102 This period of Vera Egiz’s life remains unclear (see Wincenty Tomaszewicz, Ze wspomnień lekarza (, 1965), 254-289; cf. Mikhail Kizilov, “Karaim Solomon Krym: zhizn’ i sud’ba,” Istoricheskoe nasledie Kryma 10 (2005): 86-96). Seraja Szapszał’s Biography Before the Arrival in Poland (1873–1927) 227

for the Soviet system”.1103 Nevertheless, Szapszał’s curriculum vitae of the 1920s (composed by officials, but based on Szapszał’s own data) informs the reader that “after the explosion of the revolution he [Szapszał] was arrested by the Bolsheviks and only under exceptional circumstances did he manage to escape from death”.1104 One Polish Karaite informant, originally from Eupatoria, narrated me an interesting story according to which Szapszał in fact managed to escape together with his friend on a Tatar cart (araba), while being disguised as an Oriental woman, her face, covered with a veil. When Soviet soldiers wanted to check the “woman’s” identity, Szapszał’s friend so skilfully played the role of a jealous Tatar husband that the soldiers did not dare to uncover the veil.1105 However, the Karaite Mikhail Sarach of Paris recorded a completely different version of Szapszał’s escape. According to this version, Szapszał was caught by the Bolsheviks in Eupatoria in 1918 and was delivered to a ship for his execution. Nevertheless, the commissar who took him to the ship where “the bourgeois” were to be executed, searched Szapszał’s pockets and found there photos of the Armenian Catholicos. Having learned that Szapszał was the Catholicos’ friend, the commissar let him free.1106 It is unclear whether or not any (or all) of these picturesque stories reflect true events. From archival sources, it is known that Szapszał had been in Constantinople not later than mid-August 1919.1107 On the other hand, according to D. Prokhorov, archival documents kept in GAARK testify that Szapszał was also in Crimea at the beginning of 1920.1108 If these documents contain correct data, this means that Szapszał travelled back and forth from Crimea to Constantinople, depending on the political situation in the peninsula. It is also known that he fled Crimea in haste, having left his valuables (golden objects and diamonds) in the care of the Eupatoria ḥazzan, Berakhah Eljaszewicz (Boris El’iashevich).1109 In 1921, Szapszał visited Palestine and and received the honorary title of Yerushalmi (Heb. “pilgrim to Jerusalem;” Yeru in abbreviated form) that was bestowed upon the Karaites who

1103 For the text of this curriculum vitae, see Yanbaeva, “Iz materialov k biografii,” 29. 1104 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fol. 13; AAN MWRiOP, no. 1464, fols. 99-100. 1105 This story was recorded by me in Warsaw in March 2000. According to V. Kropotov, the name of the person who secretly moved Szapszał from Eupatoria was Mark (Mordecai) Moiseevich Kumysh (Kumysh-Karaman) (Kropotov, Voiskovye traditsii, 94). 1106 M.S. Sarach, Anan’s Teaching, transl. from Russan A. Komen (Paris, 1997); idem, Anan ben David. Ego vera i uchenie VIII veka, shiroko primeniaemye v XX veke (Paris, 1996). 1107 See the letter of count Amiradzhibi to S. Szapszał (Russian, 14.08.1919) in MS LMAB F. 143, no. 171. 1108 Prokhorov, Kizilov, “Seraja Szapszał,” 396-400. 1109 Further destiny of these objects remains unknown (see Szapszał’s handwritten commentaries on B.S. Eljaszewicz’s letter to S. Szapszał, Moscow, Russian, 4.08.1945, MS LMAB F. 143, no. 239, fol. 6v). 228 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

visited ereṣ Yisra

The person of “Szapszał” vel Czapczal has the name of Szapsa,1114 and in the local territory, where he often takes on a Turkish name in order to facilitate contacts with local population, calling himself “Sureya Bey” – Szapsa comes from Crimea, is about 50, is married, his wife [Vera Egiz] is doctor of medicine (oculist), [they have] no children... In 1915 he was elected to be the head of Crimean Karaites. He possessed considerable property there, which was destroyed and sacked by the Bolsheviks in 1919; in the same year he was forced to escape from Russia and came to Constantinople. Having been left without any means [to survive], he found himself in a very difficult material situation, but due to his knowledge of the Turkish and Persian languages he managed to find a position in the “Turkish-Persian Bank”. This bank, which was founded by emigrant Georgians, is a financially weak institution; it is actually vegetating – this is why a position occupied by Szapsa is very scarcely paid... His moral qualities also seem to be very high; Szapsa has a reputation of very serious and honest man worthy of being trusted. He is not involved in politics, seems to be apolitical; nevertheless, he is an enemy of the Bolsheviks.1115

1110 He used this title in some documents of the 1920s, during his stay in Istanbul (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1016, fols. 2, 3r). Having moved to Poland, he began calling themselves Haci (Khadzhi/Hadży). In East European Karaite tradition this term was equivalent to that of Yerushalmi and was used to denote pilgrims to the Holy Land of Israel. Szapszał, however, used it because of its similarity to Arabic . used to denote pilgrims to Mecca in Muslim tradition ّالحجي 1111 This address was mentioned in a letter of Natan Yoorga to S. Szapszał (15.02.1924) in MS LMAB F. 143, no. 977; cf. ibid., no. 1608, fol. 19v. 1112 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fol. 138. 1113 Maria Emilia Zajączkowski-Łopatto, “Listy Ananiasza Zajączkowskiego do J.E. Hadży Seraji Chana Szapszała,” AK, 10. 1114 As one may notice, in the 1920s Polish authorities and journalists encountered many problems with transcribing ḥakham’s name. One may come across such variants as Czapczal, Szapsa, Szap-Szał, Ben Szapszał, Szaszłap et alia. 1115 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fols. 127-129. Łazarski based his opinion about Szapszał on his own observations and on information of T. Kowalski. Seraja Szapszał’s Biography Before the Arrival in Poland (1873–1927) 229

Because of the fact that his financial straights did not leave him much time for scholarly activity, Szapszał printed only two short publications in Istanbul.1116 One of them was a French and Russian translation of the novel “Mumun şekvası” by Ruşen Eşref.1117 According to D. Shapira, he also worked as a librarian in the manuscript department of Vehîdüddîn libraries cataloguing their holdings.1118 It is also important to state here that although Szapszał later introduced a number of Turkicization changes in Karaite every-day and religious traditions and thereby completely dejudaized the Karaite community, he certainly was not an anti- Semite. One cannot find any open anti-Semitic or judeophobic statements in any of his publications, letters, diaries or other archival materials. Furthermore, throughout his life he certainly maintained positive contacts with the Rabbanite Jews. To give an example, in 1937 Szapszał received an unusual letter: composed in Hebrew, it was sent to him from Jerusalem by a certain Rabbanite, Abram Bronzaft. Bronzaft called Szapszał mori ve-rabi (Heb. “my teacher and my master”) and expressed his gratitude to Szapszał for being his teacher not only in academia, but also in savoir vivre (Heb. ḥokhmat ḥayyim). Apparently, Bronzaft was one of Szapszał’s students from Wilno.1119 Let us, however, continue the analysis of Szapszał’s biography and turn to the Polish-Lithuanian period of his life.

1116 Seraja Szapszał, Kırım hanları ve kadiaskerleri tarafından Karaimlere verilen yarlıklar ve hücet-i şeriyeler (Istanbul, 1928; 20 pp.; non vidi). 1117 Ruşen Eşref, “Mumun şekvası,” İnci (Yeni) 15 (1 Nisan 1336/1.04.1920): 7 (Turkish in Arabic characters; see the copy of this periodical in MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1591; it contains Szapszał’s handwritten notes regarding the translation of Eşref’s novel). All the previous scholars who wrote that the novel was called “Mumun şikayeti” were wrong and apparently never saw this publication de visu. According to some unverified data, Szapszał’s translation appeared as “La plainte d’une bougie/Zhaloba svechi,” transl. into French and Russian by S. Szapszał, Indicateur du commerce des finances et la navigation (29.08.1920). While this publication was not located in the present author’s research, Szapszał’s archive has a draft version of the translation of this novel into Russian (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1591, fols. 1-4r; on fol. 4r one can also find a draft of an article about the modern Turkish literature written for the Russian Constantinople newspaper “Russkoe ekho”). For some reason, at the beginning of the translation, in his own hand, Szapszał indicated that the translation was done by F.V.Ya (Ф.В.Я.). 1118 Shapira, “Jewish pan-Turkist,” 355. 1119 A. Bronzaft to S. Szapszał, 27 Tevet, 5698 (31.12.1937), Jerusalem, Hebrew (LMAB F. 143, no. 204, fol. 1). 230 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

Illustration 6: Seraja Szapszał, the creator of the Turkic identity of the East European Karaites (source: periodical Myśl Karaimska 12, 1938).

4.2 Seraja Szapszał’s Life, Public and Academic Activity from 1927 to 1939

4.2.1 Election and Arrival in Poland

Because of the hostile attitude of Polish officials to all reminiscences of loyalty to Russian government and Russian legislative system whatsoever, the Polish- Lithuanian Karaite communities clearly understood the necessity of re-organizing the old administrative structure of their community life in the new Poland from the beginning of the 1920s. One of the most important tasks of this period was securing a new legal status for the Polish Karaite community and electing the new Troki ḥakham. The office of the Troki ḥakham was empty since the death of Romuald Kobecki in 1911.1120 For various reasons the Polish-Lithuanian Karaites of the 1920s could not

1120 See more about him in 2.4.3; some other Karaite sources inform that the Troki ḥakham’s office was unoccupied already in 1910 (Zacharjasz Nowachowicz, “Witaj, Pasterzu!” MK 1:4-5 (1928): 1; “J.E. H. Seraja Bej Szapszał,” MK 1:4-5 (1928): 6). Seraja Szapszał’s Life, Public and Academic Activity from 1927 to 1939 231

find anybody from their local surrounding influential enough to take this office. Even though after 1922 the duties of the Troki ḥakham were temporarily fulfilled by Szemaja Firkowicz, the Karaites understood that young Firkowicz did not possess sufficient authority to become the head of the community who could present the Karaite minority to the state officials and lobby its interests. This is why their choice fell on Seraja Szapszał, the former Taurida and Odessa ḥakham. Some documents mention that in the 1920s two local Karaite leaders (Pinachas Malecki and Szemaja Firkowicz) also nourished hopes of getting the position of the Troki ḥakham.1121 In 1927, however, Malecki stated that he had not aspired to this position even when he had been younger. He called Szapszał’s supporters “Panurg’s herd of cattle which is led into the abyss by beasts in the image of humans.” In his letter to Szapszał he strongly advised him not to occupy this post and suggested that he read the words of the Psalmist: “Man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish” (Psalm 49:20/48:21).1122 Another leader of the Wilno community, Owadjusz Pilecki, nevertheless, evaluated the possibility of Szapszał’s election to the position of the Troki ḥakham in a positive light.1123 In the eyes of the majority of Polish-Lithuanian Karaite leaders Szapszał apparently was the only figure who could have been promoted to the ḥakham’s office. Władysław Raczkiewicz (1885–1947)1124 mentioned “Czapczał” as “the unofficially-elected candidate”.1125 Official Polish circles explained the importance of Szapszał’s being elected ḥakham by political reasons: in their opinion Szapszał was very popular in “Asiatic countries, especially in Persia, with which Poland is now closely connected.” Moreover, it was supposed that in addition to his ḥakham’s activity, Szapszał would also promote development of Oriental Studies in the Wilno University. According to some financial estimates, if Szapszał were elected ḥakham, he would receive 12,000 złoty a year; if somebody else was to become the ḥakham, he would receive 6,000 złoty only. The sum of 12,000 zloty in interwar Poland was an impressive salary: the whole amount of money for the up-keep of the Karaite religious community (including ḥakham’s salary) was supposed to be 30,000 złoty, which means that Szapszał would receive more than one third of money intended for the Karaite community needs.1126 According to S. Saggese, in 1934 Szapszał’s annual salary was 60,000 złoty a year.1127 It is unclear, however, whether one can trust this information.

1121 See the letters of Owadjusz Pilecki (1920–1928) (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 541). 1122 F. Malecki to S. Szapszał (13.10.1927, Russian) (MS LMAB, F. 143, no. 459, fol. 1r). 1123 “Bołurmy Krymski Hacham Hachamba Trochta?/Budet li Krymskii Gakham – Gakhamom v Trokakh?” Sahyszymyz 1 (1927): 7. 1124 Wojewoda (governor) of Wilno region in the interwar period, the president of Poland in exile during World War II, friend and patron of the Karaites. 1125 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fols. 70-71, 83. 1126 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1464, fols. 101, 111, 115-117. 1127 S. Saggese, “I Caraimi di Polonia e Lituania,” Genus 23 (1967): 54. 232 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

On 17.08.1927, a special enquiry was dispatched to the Polish embassy in Turkey requesting the councillor of the embassy, Łazarski, to send to Poland information about Szapszał.1128 On 11.06.1927 the conference of the Karaite communities of Poland approved a new regulation concerning the ḥakham’s elections. It was decided that the elections of the new ḥakham would take place on 23.10.1927.1129 As has been planned, on 23.10.1927 representatives of four main Polish-Lithuanian Karaite communities nominated Szapszał as the only appropriate candidate and unanimously (four voices “pro” against none “contra”) elected him by secret ballot in the presence of official Polish authorities.1130 E. Kobecki was the representative of the Troki community, Dr. Z. Nowachowicz – of Halicz, I. Zajączkowski – of Wilno, and Z. Szpakowski – of Łuck. On the same day a congratulatory telegramme was dispatched by I. Zajączkowski to Szapszał in Constantinople. Szapszał immediately sent an affirmative answer; in contrast to previous elections, this time Szapszał did not hesitate for a minute to accept the position of the most important Karaite leader in Eastern Europe.1131 Szapszał’s election to the ḥakham’s office received a most warm welcome in the Polish press. Journalists praised the establishment of the independent Karaite union in Poland and did not conceal their pride at the fact that the head of all European Karaites would have his seat in Poland.1132 For various reasons the newly-elected ḥakham moved to Poland only about half a year after the election: he first had to arrange his financial and other matters in Turkey, obtain permission to enter Poland, and finally receive Polish citizenship.1133 A letter of 28.05.1928, signed by Sz. Firkowicz and A. Zajączkowski, asked the government to provide Szapszał with 3,000 złoty for his travel from Turkey to Poland and 2,000 złoty to furnish his apartment.1134 Szapszał arrived in Wilno on 9.05.1928.1135 The next day, in the presence of Polish officials and Karaite community leaders, Szapszał swore a solemn public oath of loyalty and fidelity to Poland.1136 Official inauguration of Szapszał into the ḥakham’s office took place some months later, on 11.09.1928. Such influential persons as Wł. Raczkiewicz,

1128 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fols. 127-129. 1129 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fols. 89-96. 1130 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fols. 131-135,139-140; see also N.S. “Zjazd w Trokach,” MK 2:1 (1929): 49. 1131 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fols. 136. 1132 See “Zjazd Karaitów,” Kurjer Poranny (25.10.1927); Cz.J. [Czesław Jankowski], “Wielki dzień w życiu Karaimów polskich,” KW (25.10.1927); idem, “Historyczny dzień w Trokach,” Słowo (25.10.1927); B.W. Święcicki, “Ogólnopolskie uroczystości Karaimów w Trokach,” Epoka 297 (29.10.1927); “J.E. Hacham karaimski Rzpltej Polskiej,” Słowo (20.11.1927); Tor-wicz, “Karaimi polscy,” KW (23.10.1927); “Wyznawcy mozaizmu,” KW (23.10.1927); cf. newspaper of the Egyptian Karaites published in Arabic: al-Ittihad al-Isra’ili 18 (27.12.1927) reprinted in El-Kodsi, Communities, plate 1, pp. 54-55. 1133 See Szapszał’s petition in AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fol. 137; while being in Turkey, he and his wife Vera Egiz held Persian citizenship (AAN MWRiOP, no. 1464, fol. 100). 1134 Ibid., fol. 118. 1135 B.s., “Przybycie Hachama Seraja Chana Szapszała,” Słowo (9.05.1928). 1136 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fol. 2. Seraja Szapszał’s Life, Public and Academic Activity from 1927 to 1939 233

Tadeusz Kowalski, and a number of representatives of other confessions were invited to attend this ceremony.1137 After Szapszał’s election Wł. Raczkiewicz emphasised in his speech the patriotic feelings of the Karaites, their fidelity to Poland and their diligence. He predicted that the ḥakham’s election would herald “the beginning of a new stage” in Karaite life. Indeed, Szapszał’s election did signify the beginning of a completely new era in the history of the East European Karaites, irrespective of whether one evaluates this new period positively or negatively.

4.2.2 Public Activity, Private Travels, Official Visits, and Meetings with Important Persons

In this subchapter I highlight the most important events in Szapszał’s biography from 1928 to 1939, largely in terms of their chronological order rather than in terms of their importance for the ḥakham’s life. Upon arrival in Poland Szapszał settled in Wilno at Stroma Street 5, Apartment 6.1138 As early as May of 1928 he had changed the name of his office – from Hebrew ḥakham to pseudo-Turkic ḥachan (for details, see below). Furthermore, he started adding to his name several additional titles which he had received, for various reasons, before 1928: khan/han as well as bey/bej (Both were received apparently in Persia and should be understood in the sense of “nobleman”), the honourific khadzhi/haci/hadży (Kar. “pilgrim to Jerusalem,” received in 1921; originally, he used its Hebrew equivalent – Yerushalmi), and, lastly, Jego Exellencja (Pol. “His Excellence”). As a result, his full name started looking as weighty as those of Muslim rulers of the East. For example, in one of the documents he called himself “Szapszał Hadży Seraja Han, son of Mark and Ak-Bike from the house of Kazas.”1139 The public activity of Szapszał as the religious and administrative head of the Karaite community included participation in public meetings, conferences and sessions. Szapszał often had to pronounce public speeches, carry out official visitations, contact state officials, compose official documents and fulfil many other pressing tasks required by his position. In this subchapter I survey most important events of Szapszał’s public life from 1928 to 1939. About a year after his arrival to Poland, in May 1929, Szapszał paid his first visit to the Karaite communities of and Volhynia. From 16 to 21 May 1929 he visited the Łuck community, and from 22 to 28 May, the community of Halicz.1140 While his visit to Łuck was reflected only in the official Karaite chronicle of events,1141 his stay in Halicz

1137 Apart from the Jews; as a journalist bitterly noticed: “Jews were not invited.” 1138 This was also the postal address of MK. 1139 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1464, fols. 30, 97. 1140 “Historyczne dni w Haliczu,” MK 2:2 (1929): 42-44. D., “Karaimi w Haliczu,” Kurjer Stanisławowski (16.06.1929). 1141 S. Sz-n [Szymon Szyszman], “Wizytacja Arcypasterska,” MK 2:2 (1929): 41-42. 234 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

was described by many other sources. A Karaite witness to Szapszał’s visit compared it to the arrival of Joseph ha-Mashbir in Halicz in the seventeenth century and to the visit of Abraham Firkowicz in 1871.1142 In addition to representatives of the local community, Szapszał was welcomed at the railway station in Halicz by the governor (wojewoda) of the Stanisławów district, Mr Winiarski. A group of local Karaites covered his path from the station with flowers. During his visit Szapszał was accompanied by the ḥazzanim of Łuck and Troki, Rafał Abkowicz and Szemaja Firkowicz. Moreover, during his stay in Halicz he met such important representatives of the Polish administration as the mayor of Halicz and the commander of the Stanisławów garrison.1143 Within the community, Szapszał was greeted with a few verses in Karaim, composed, most likely, by Zarach Zarachowicz. One of these verses clearly attests to the preservation of Judeo-Israelite identity by the local Karaites:

Tadzy basymyznyn The crown of our heads, Bijimiz biźnin Our master, Adonenu Our lord, Morenu Our teacher, Werabbenu And our Rabbi, Wa ateret roshenu. And the crown of our heads.1145 Karaj ułanłarny He greatly loved Kici tałmidłerni The Karaite children, Astry siwedi. The little pupils. Hammese ałarny He always Esinde tutady, Remembered them, Da bahady, And observed Ki Torany uchuhajłar That they would read the Torah Karaj dinin sakłahajłar. And keep Karaite faith. Da jiłdan jiłga And from year to year Bu sahyncły kinde He has been sending presents to his children, Kacan ułłu jarłyhas His little friends, Bołdu Jisraełde, On this memorable day Ijedi ułanłaryna, When great joy Kici dostłarynay Bernełer!1144 Was in Israel!1145

1142 “Historyczne dni w Haliczu,” MK 2:2 (1929): 42. 1143 Ibid., 42-44. 1144 The Yurchenko MSS. I have italicized Hebrew loanwords. The official report on Szapszał’s stay in Halicz also mentioned the fact that local Karaite youths sang “ethnic Karaite songs” to the ḥakham (“Historyczne dni,” 43). Another poem composed as a greeting for Szapszał was published in Kizilov, Karaites of Galicia, 396. 1145 The same honorary title is repeated twice, first in Karaim and then in Hebrew. Seraja Szapszał’s Life, Public and Academic Activity from 1927 to 1939 235

During his visit to Halicz, Szapszał met an outstanding historic personality, Isaac Ben Zvi (a.k.a. Isaac Shimshelevich and Yitshaq ben Zvi; 1884–1963; president of Israel from 1952 to 1963). Isaac Ben Zvi, then a Zionist leader and an ethnographer interested in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, visited Halicz and met there with Seraja Szapszał in order to become acquainted with the local Karaite community.1146 Szapszał did not miss this opportunity to disclose his Turkic doctrine to the scholar and “enlighten” him concerning the Khazar origins of the Karaites. It is evident from Ben Zvi’s memoirs that he, an ethnographer and historian deeply convinced of the Karaites’ belonging to the Jewish cultural milieu, was not particularly impressed by the information received from Szapszał.1147 Having spent about a week in Halicz, Szapszał left the community on 28 May 1929. One may assume that the Turkic ḥakhan (as he now called himself) Szapszał was not particularly happy to be addressed with such traditional Hebrew terms as “adonenu, morenu ve-rabbenu” (see the verse above). In 1930 Szapszał met with the Polish president Ignacy Mościcki during the latter’s visit to Troki (17.06.1930). The president listened to Szapszał’s public speech regarding the history of the Karaites in Poland; Mościcki also attended a special prayer to his and Poland’s health and flourishing and visited the Troki kenesa, where he tasted traditional Karaite sweets.1148 In the 1930s, thanks largely to Szapszał’s Turkicization activity and his renomée of an important Orientalist, the Polish Karaites were often visited by all sorts of important visitors from Turkey (for more information, see 4.3.1). In 1932 Szapszał welcomed in his Wilno flat the Swiss writer, Hans Zbinden (1893-1971). The latter was very much impressed by the fact that although “der russische Gelehrte Schapschal” lived in a modest flat in a multi-storey apartment house, he kept there a unique theological book, the other copy of which, according to Zbinden, was in the Pope’s library in Rome. He was also interested in connections of Szapszał’s family to Switzerland (Szapszał’s wife studied in Bern while Swiss writer, Lilli Haller, acquired a position as governess in a Karaite house in Yalta through Szapszał’s mediation).1149 Another important journalist, representative of the semi-official newspaper of the

1146 In 1951 he visited the colony of Crimean Karaite emigrants in Istanbul (Yiṣḥaq Ben Zvi, Niddeḥey Yisra

Holy See, Mario de Mandato, met with Szapszał in June 1932. He not only published an article about the Karaites in the newspaper, but also placed a large photo of the “hachan Seraiá bei Sciapsciál” in it.1150 In 1935 Szapszał’s dwelling in Wilno was visited by the writer and journalist Marian Hepke. The visitor found Szapszał’s dwelling highly exotic and Oriental, with carpets on the walls and an Ottoman sofa (a samovar represented the only exception from the Oriental atmosphere). Hepke drank Turkish coffee prepared by Szapszał and listened to his romantic Oriental tales and proverbs. He described “Hachan Szaraja Szapczał” as a “tall man of approximately 50, with hollow-cheeked head and very clever blue eyes.”1151 Strangely enough, Szapszał had not mentioned to him his theory of the Khazar origin of the Karaites, but rather emphasized military services rendered by them to the Polish kings:

They [the Karaites] have arrived here in the same way as the Tatars did. Together with the latter they were settled by the King Vitold on the Lithuanian border [in order to fight] against the Teutonic Order. The King has donated them land there. This was – emphasized the owner of the house in his typical mild manner of speaking – a special distinction. [At that time] the land and earth were something sacred. The earth is our mother and when we share it with somebody this person becomes our brother. And our forefathers – continued Hachan his explanations – had always known how to thank the Polish King for this reward. In earlier times, in the case of war, the Karaites raised two cavalry regiments.1152

Thus, in this speech Szapszał emphasized the similarity between the Karaites and the Tatars and the Karaites’ military valour. As has been mentioned above, there is no evidence that the Karaites ever took part in military actions in medieval or early modern times. Szapszał did not limit his activity only to Polish-Lithuanian Karaite matters, but often travelled to Romania, Bulgaria, France, Lithuania, , Turkey, and Egypt, with the aim of visiting his Karaite brethren abroad. One document reveals Szapszał’s ambitions to unite all the European Karaite communities under his aegis.1153 In the summer of 1935 Szapszał undertook trips to Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey where he, inter alia, visited the local Karaite communities.1154 On 26.04.1936 Szapszał was awarded a Commander’s Cross with the star of “Revival of Poland” for his “service in

1150 Mario De Mandato, “I Caraimi di Polonia. L’ultimo residua di una razza che si spegne,” L’osservatore Romano 19 (21.777) (24.06.1932): 3. 1151 Szapszał, a man of strong constitution and, as it seems, excellent health, indeed looked much younger his real age: at that moment he was already 62! 1152 Hepke, Wilno, 70-71. 1153 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fol. 29. 1154 “Działalność T-wa M.H. i L.H. [sic for M.H. i L.K.],” MK 11 (1936): 113. Seraja Szapszał’s Life, Public and Academic Activity from 1927 to 1939 237

the field of organisation of the Karaite confession in Poland.”1155 In August of 1937, he visited the Karaite communities of Paris and Berlin where he apparently learned about the imminent danger of Nazism for the Rabbanites and the Karaites. At the end of 1937/beginning of 1938, Szapszał suffered from a serious disease.1156 Despite his illness, sometime in 1938, he undertook a research trip to Syria and visited Istanbul, Beirut and Damascus.1157 In October of 1938 Zarach Firkowicz, a Karaite of Troki, was elected ḥazzan of the Poniewież community. As a result, Szapszał started thinking about appointing ḥazzanim to all the existing Karaite communities of Europe (France, Romania, Serbia, Germany, and Bulgaria1158) so that all of them would be subjected to the jurisdiction of the Polish ḥakham (or ḥachan, according to Szapszał’s terminology).1159 This project of unification of all the European Karaites under his aegis was not realized because of the beginning of the war. The last pre-war issue of “Myśl Karaimska” (no. 12, 1938) was officially entitled Księga pamiątkowa ku czci J.E. Hachana H. Seraji Szapszała w X-tą rocznicę jego ingresu (Pol. “The commemorative book in honour of H[is] E[xcellency] the Hakhan H[adży] Seraja Szapszał on the 10th anniversary of his inauguration”). Its panegyric introduction described the sufferings of the Polish Karaite community which it had endured without its religious head and it surveyed Szapszał’s main achievements during ten years of his holding the office of the ḥakhan.1160 This was to be the final reference to his name in this Karaite periodical: post-war “Myśl Karaimska” (only two issues were published in 1946 and 1947), when Szapszał was forced to remain in Lithuania, fails to mention his name at all.

4.2.3 Academic and Publishing Activity

Szapszał started his academic activity as a scholar and lecturer in Polish research and educational institutions almost immediately upon the arrival in Poland. He became a member of the Polish Oriental Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Orientalistyczne; in 1935 he became its vice-chairman), and in 1929 – a member of the Orientalist Commission of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU) in Kraków. From December 1930 he started teaching Turkish at the School of Political Science at the Research Institute

1155 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fols. 9-13; this award can be seen on the ḥakham’s picture published in MK 12 (1938): 1. 1156 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1467, fol. 74. 1157 Seraja Szapszał, “W poszukiwaniu śladów karaimskich w Damaszku,” MK 12 (1938): 81-89. 1158 Excluding the Soviet Union, but including even Harbin (China) where the Polish-Lithuanian Karaites were living. 1159 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fol. 53-54. 1160 Ananiasz Zajączkowski, “W X-tą rocznicę ingresu J.E. Hachana H. Seraji Szapszała,” MK 12 (1938): 3-5. 238 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

for Studies on Eastern Europe (Szkoła Nauk Politycznych przy Instytucie Naukowo- Badawczym Europy Wschodniej) in Wilno. He also occasionally lectured and delivered papers in various academic institutions in Warsaw, Lwów and Kraków.1161 In his curriculum vitae of 1954 Szapszał stated that in 1930 he had received a doctoral degree in the field of Oriental languages at the Lwów University; according to the same document, in 1939 he was elected extraordinary professor in the Department of Oriental Languages at the Philological faculty of the Wilno University.1162 While it is theoretically possible that Szapszał could have received his doctoral degree (PhD) in Lwów honoris causa, it is highly unlikely that he could have received it via the official procedure of earning the degree. He never revealed the title of his doctoral thesis or when he had presented its official defence. The possibility of current research oversights notwithstanding, there appears to be no documentation of the award of a PhD from the Lwów University in Szapszał’s personal archive in LMAB.1163 In 1932, Szapszał organized the Society of Supporters of Karaite History and Literature (Pol. Towarzystwo miłośników historji i literatury karaimskiej). This society regularly organized public lectures on the history of Karaite literature and culture, which were attended both by Karaite and non-Karaite public and scholars.1164 One of the most ambitious of Szapszał’s enterprises during this period was undoubtedly the organisation of the Karaite museum in Troki.1165 His first attempts to organise a Karaite ethnographic museum date back to the 1890s when young Szapszał nourished the idea of establishing the exhibition in Çufut Kale. In 1896, he contacted ḥakham Panpulov and suggested establishing such a museum. In response, according to Sz. Firkowicz, ḥazzan J. Sultanskii provided Szapszał with the letter of support from Panpulov; furthermore, Panpulov asked Szapszał to describe the state of Çufut Kale. This was done by Szapszał in the brochure “The Karaites and Çufut Kale in Crimea.”1166 Szapszał subsequently visited the Karaite communities of Crimea and gathered a number of important ethnographic objects which were temporarily kept

1161 For more details, see Helena Romer, “Turcja w Wilnie,” KW (25.02.1936); B.W. Święcicki, “U żywotnych źródeł wiedzy orjentalistycznej w Polsce,” KW 114 (21.05.1932); Mariusz Pawelec, “Seraja Szapszał i jego wkład w polską orientalistykę,” Awazymyz 1 (34) (2012): 4-8. 1162 “В 1930 г. Львовский Университет присудил мне степень доктора философии по разряду восточных языков... В 1939 году я был избран Филологическим факультетом Вильнюсского университета экстраординарным профессором по кафедре восточных языков” (Yanbaeva, “Iz materialov”). 1163 It is very unlikely that Szapszał would have been awarded his degree for the study KKT (as Mariusz Pawelec stated in his “Seraja Szapszał i jego wkład”). This amateur brochure (29 pp. in the periodical, 43 pp. as a separatum) could hardly qualify for a doctorate. 1164 See Statut towarzystwa miłośników historji i literatury karaimskiej (Wilno, n.d. [1932?]) 12 pp.; “Powstanie i pierwszy okres działalności Towarzystwa Miłośników Historji i Literatury Karaimskiej,” MK 10 (1934): 97-100; “Działalność T-wa M.H. i L.H.,” 111-113. 1165 See the statute of the museum in AAN MWRiOP, no. 1467, fols. 66-68. 1166 Szapszał, Karaimy i Chufut-Kale. Seraja Szapszał’s Life, Public and Academic Activity from 1927 to 1939 239

in the Karaite guest-house in the vicinity of the Bahçesaray kenesa.1167 In the 1910s, Szapszał, then the Taurida and Odessa ḥakham, attempted to establish a Karaite museum in Eupatoria. After his arrival in Poland, Szapszał began collecting materials for a new museum. In 1935 the idea of establishing a Karaite museum was financially supported by MWRiOP.1168 Unfortunately, when selecting items for the museum, Szapszał followed not so much academic or historical, but rather propagandistic aims. This can be clearly seen, especially, in the list of items purchased by Szapszał from Crimean Tatars and Karaites in Turkey in 1935. In the list of 54 items purchased by Szapszał for the museum, one finds objects of everyday life (saddles, pottery, clothing), musical instruments, and costly weaponry (expensive early modern flint-rifles, sabres, guns, chain-mail: in total, 14 objects of this type).1169 Most of these items belonged to local Muslims with virtually no relationship to Karaite ethnography. In one of his letters Szapszał mentioned that he intended to display in the museum “Persian and Turkish manuscripts... Persian, Kurdistan, and carpets; Turkish, Bukharian, and Persian clothes; coins of Abbasid Khalifat and Crimean Khanate; images of Muslim saints,” etc.1170 Although these objects certainly represented much historical value, one would rather expect to find in a Karaite ethnographic museum Karaite ethnographic and religious objects, such as Hebrew and Karaim manuscripts, menorot, kettubot, mecumalar, Torah scrolls, tables-tałky, etc., i.e. objects that could represent to the audience the picturesque world of Karaite life in Eastern Europe. To get a better understanding, one may compare Szapszał’s museum holdings kept in the National Museum of Lithuania in Vilnius and Karaite Ethnographic museum in Troki with the exhibition of the Karaite museum in Halicz/ (MKIK). The Halicz museum was created in the 2000s without any propagandistic aims: as a result, Karaite manuscripts, menorot, kettubot, mecumalar, Torah scrolls and other religious and ethnographic items are abundantly represented there. There is no doubt that Szapszał could, without any difficulty, collect Karaite manuscripts and religious objects in all of the countries that he visited (to give an example, Boris Kokenai, Szemaja Firkowicz, Józef Sulimowicz and Il’ia Neiman, who were active in the interwar and postwar period, collected large collections of Karaite manuscripts although they certainly did not have Szapszał’s authority and funding when they had been carrying out their collector’s activity). However, Szapszał’s main intention in creating the museum was not the preservation and collection of Karaite ethnographic

1167 This is according to Szymon [Szemaja] Firkowicz, “O Karaimskim Muzeum Historyczno- Etnograficznym na Krymie i w Polsce,” MK 12 (1938): 22-23. 1168 “Działalność T-wa M.H. i L.H.,” 113. 1169 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1467, fols. 21-23. 1170 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1467, fol. 89. 240 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

lore, but presenting Karaites as a Turkic people with Turkic traditions to visitors to Troki. In 1938, the Polish government granted 33,000 złoty for the museum’s construction, which began on 6.07.1938.1171 The building of the museum on Karaite Street in Troki was more or less finished before the beginning of the Second World War.1172 Although the museum was not officially opened, there had been Karaite exhibitions presented to visitors as early as 1939 as well as during the Second World War.1173 Szapszał achieved the propagandistic aims which he intended to reach by opening the museum: demonstration of weaponry and Oriental ornaments certainly contributed to the general perception, in the eyes of those who visited Troki, of the Karaites as a non-Jewish Turkic group, invincible guards of the prince Vitold. One should not underestimate this part of Szapszał’s dejudaization propaganda: thousands of tourists visited Troki before, during and after the Second World War and saw his Karaite exhibition. Having critiqued Szapszał’s museum activity, it is worthwhile remembering that in arranging the exhibition in such a “Turkic” and “military” manner, Szapszał undoubtedly was driven by the wish to defend his people from Polish anti-Semitism. Later, this exhibition helped the Karaites to present themselves to the Nazi and Soviet authorities as a Turkic people.1174

***

Szapszał’s strongest side (if one is to discuss his academic merits) was his excellent knowledge of a number of West European, Slavic, and Oriental languages. His first native language was Crimean Tatar (or Karaite ethnolect of Crimean Tatar); upon arrival in Russia in 1884 he acquired a native command of Russian – which became his main language for the rest of the life. While studying at the Karaite midrash in Simferopol he must have learned some Hebrew (although Hebrew has never been his strong suit, he must have certainly improved his knowledge of the language as the ḥakham in Russia and Poland). At the university in St. Petersburg he learned Arabic,

1171 “Poświęcenie kamienia węgielnego pod muzeum karaimskie w Trokach,” MK 12 (1938): 139-141; see also “Muzeum Karaimskie w Trokach,” Słowo (24.2.1938); Henryk Szczerba, “Pierwsze na świecie Muzeum Karaimskie w Trokach,” Kurjer Poranny (10.07.1938). 1172 Alvyra Zagreckaitė, “Dziedzictwo narodu karaimskiego w ekspozycji i zbiorach Trockiego Muzeum Historycznego,” in Karaj kiuńlari: Dziedzictwo narodu karaimskiego we współczesnej Europie (Wrocław, 2004), 57; UO, 158. 1173 Furthermore, there was also the Karaite museum in Vilnius – located in Szapszał’s apartment – which was shut down by the Soviet authorities in 1949; the Karaite Ethnographic Exhibition (Museum) was officially opened in Soviet Lithuania only in 1967 as part of the History Museum. See more in 6.2.1. 1174 See the reports by a Nazi journalist (Werner Klau, “Von der Krim nach Wilna,” Wilnaer Zeitung 148 (26.06.1942); idem, “Standgut der Geschichte,” Die Woche 45 (11.11.1942): 15). Seraja Szapszał’s Life, Public and Academic Activity from 1927 to 1939 241

Ottoman Turkish, Farsi, and French. He was certainly able to read all other Turkic languages and was especially strong in Azeri . After arrival in Poland he also learned Polish and after 1939 (when this language started to gain importance) – some Lithuanian. Szapszał’s wife, Vera Egiz, helped him when Szapszał needed translation from, or into, German. Although Szapszał could certainly understand and read texts in Karaim, it seems that he was not really able to write in this language. In 1931 he published a short story – Szapszał’s only known belletristic story – in the Halicz-Łuck variety of Karaim (nota bene this was also Szapszał’s only publication in Karaim).1175 This story described the adventures of Simcha Babovich (called in the text Chadży-Aha Babowicz) on his trip to Jerusalem in 1830. Nevertheless, the story had been originally composed by Szapszał in Russian, and most likely translated into Karaim by Aleksander Mardkowicz.1176 The same caveat applies to Szapszał’s knowledge of Polish. Most of his early Polish articles for “Myśl Karaimska” were also originally written by Szapszał in Russian and then translated into Polish. It seems that it was only in the second half of the 1930s that Szapszał started writing in Polish by himself, without the mediation of Russian. Nevertheless, even in the 1940s Szapszał preferred reading public lectures on the history and identity of the Karaites – to Karaite audience – in Russian. Many local Karaites, who were Polish, rather than Russian- speaking, had certain difficulties with understanding these lectures.1177 It was in the interwar period that Szapszał published most of his scholarly and ideological oeuvres. Especially important were his strictly scholarly studies on the Azeri folk-literature1178 and the influence of the Catholic tradition on the depictions of Muslim saints in Persia.1179 He was also the first European scholar to draw attention to the importance of the travel account of the Ottoman traveller, Evliya Çelebi, for the history of Crimea.1180 In the review of Osman Aqçoqraqlı’s Russian article on the history of Çufut Kale Szapszał provided many important details about this Karaite settlement, which were known to him not only as to a scholar-Orientalist, but also as

1175 Seraja Szapszał, “Kabakłarynda Aziz Saharnyn (Chadży-Aha Babowicznin ucuru),” KA 1 (1931): 3-8. 1176 See [Seraja Szapszał], “Prikliucheniia Gakhama Khadzhi Aga Babovicha,” Russian (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 836). 1177 Pilecki, Chłopiec z Leśnik, 173, 183, 190. 1178 Seraja Szapszał, Próby literatury ludowej turków z Azerbajdżanu perskiego (Kraków, 1935). 1179 Seraja Szapszał, Wyobrażenia świętych muzułmańskich a wpływy ikonograficzne katolickie w Persji i stosunki persko-polskie za Zygmunta III (Wilno, 1934). See also the bibliography of his publications from 1896 to 1937 in Włodzimierz Zajączkowski, “Bibliografia prac J.E. H. Seraji Szapszała, Hachana Karaimów w Polsce (1896-1937),” MK 12 (1938):6-9. For the detailed bibliography, see Yanbaeva, “Iz materialov,” 31-35. 1180 Seraja Szapszał, “Evliya Çelebi seyahatnamesi. Yedinci cild. Istanbul 1928 [review],” MK 2: 3-4 (1930): 63-67; idem, “Ewlija Czelebi o Chanacie Krymskim [1931],” MS LMAB F. 143, no. 835; idem, “Znaczenie opisu podróży Ewlija Czelebiego dla dziejów Chanatu Krymskiego,” RO 8 (1931-1932): 167- 180. 242 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

a frequent visitor to the town and member of the Karaite community.1181 Of interest, is also Szapszał’s description of the research trip undertaken by him in 1938 to find traces of Karaite presence in Damascus.1182 His other articles, which were published in the Karaite, Polish and Turkish press, with more of an ideological than any scholarly intention, are of importance mostly for understanding the development of Szapszał’s Turkic views and doctrine. In 1928, when he had already been in Poland, Szapszał published in Turkey in the language (in Arabic characters) a highly curious pan-Turkist study Kırım Karay Türkleri, i.e. “Crimean Karaite Turks.”1183 This pan-Turkist work, which tended to present the Karaites as some sort of Crimean Turks of Mosaic belief, was the first comparatively large work of Szapszał’s publications that presented, in detail, his Turkicized version of the history of Crimean Karaites.1184 It was in this work that Szapszał for the first time resorted not only to conscious manipulation of historical truth, but also to direct falsification of sources. In order to prove the alleged (and, in fact, non-existent) Khazar origin of Crimean Karaites, he published there two verses- baits, in Crimean Turkish, that he presented as “popular songs preserved from the times of the ancestors and mentioning the Khazars”. These verses read as follows (in modern Turkish spelling and English translation):

Lapa lapa kar yava Flakes, flakes of snow are falling Erbi baba koy soya Father-erbi is slaughtering a ram Baylarımız toy çala Our rich men are celebrating a wedding Hâzâr oğlu at çapa Khazar son is riding on a horse

Ata mindim sağdağım bar Having mounted a horse I have my quiver Sağdağımda üç okum bar In my quiver I have three arrows Üçü bilen üç yat ursam If with these three [arrows] I kill three enemies Hâzâr bekten tartağım bar I get my reward from the Khazar bek1185

1181 Seraja Szapszał, “Aqçoqraqlı O. Novoe iz istorii Chufut-Kale (Recenzja),” MK 2:1 (1929): 37-42. 1182 Seraja Szapszał, “W poszukiwaniu śladów karaimskich w Damaszku,” MK 12 (1938): 81-89. ,[قريم قراي تركلر :Süreya Şapşaloğlu (Seraja Szapszał), “Kırım Karay Türkleri” [in Arabic script 1183 Türk Yılı 1 (1928): 576-615; also sep.: Istanbul: [s.n]., 1928. 43 pp. This work had been recently republished in a Latin transliteration; the citation here is from a later re-edition (Tülay Çulha, “Sereya Şapşal’a Göre Karay Türkleri ve Karayca,” Türk Dilleri Araştırmaları 12 (2002): 97-188). 1184 For details, see the analysis of this study in Tadeusz Kowalski, “Turecka monografja o karaimach krymskich,” MK 2:2 (1929): 1-8; Shapira, “Jewish Pan-Turkist,” 349-380. 1185 KKT as republished in Çulha, “Sereya Şapşal’a,” 141; cf. “Starinnye stikhi na tiurksko-karaimskom yazyke, v kotorykh upominaetsia imia Khazar,” in the National Museum of Lithuania, Collection of S.M. Szapszał, no. 178, R-13.164; Seraja Szapszał, “Karaimy Kryma (1942 g.)” (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 822, fol. 81). These verses were also published after his death in idem, Karaimy v Krymu, Litve i Pol’she (Karaimskaia Narodnaia Entsiklopediia, vol. 1) (Moscow, 1995), 64-65 as well as in many other recent publications. Seraja Szapszał’s Life, Public and Academic Activity from 1927 to 1939 243

Szapszał never mentions where he found these verses. Needless to say that they are not attested in any manuscript including Crimean Karaite mecumalar (collections of Karaite folklore).1186 The baits, which are written in modern prosody and in Crimean Turkish (with some Crimean Tatar words), certainly cannot be samples of genuine medieval or early modern Karaite folklore. According to Dan Shapira, even “the mere fact that these baits are in Crimean Tatar-Turkish makes their antiquity impossible.”1187 There is no doubt that these verses were composed by somebody living in Crimea in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, i.e. most likely by Szapszał himself or one of his contemporaries. This publication contained the first, but not the last of Szapszał’s falsifications.1188 Kırım Karay Türkleri, full of other false statements and manipulation of historical truth, had been in detail analyzed by T. Kowalski and D. Shapira, warranting no further mention here.1189. In 1934, Szapszał published a letter which was supposedly composed in French by the famous Polish litterateur, Henryk Rzewuski (1791–1866) in 1825. The letter described the visit of Rzewuski’s and Poland’s greatest poet – Adam Mickiewicz – to the Karaite community of Eupatoria.1190 Although, indeed, the letter itself seems to provide an original nineteenth-century source (its facsimile was partly published in Szapszał’s article), its dating and interpretation raise a number of questions. This letter was found and published in the 1930s – when the Karaites so much desired to be noticed by Polish public audience as one of Poland’s unique ethnic minorities. The fact that Mickiewicz – as one reads in this letter – had close contacts with Crimean Karaites certainly produced a strong impression on Poland’s non-Karaite audience. The references to this letter, which was first published by Szapszał in “Myśl Karaimska,” can be found in any standard biography of the poet. The authenticity of this letter was called into question by Polish scholar St. Makowski, who considered this letter to be either falsified or incorrectly dated.

1186 E.g. there is not a single references to these or other verses referring to the alleged Khazar origin of the East European Karaites in the following published mecumalar: Radloff (Radlov), Obraztsy; Tülay Çulha, Kırım Karaycasının Katık Mecuması: Metin – Sözlük – Dizin (Istanbul, 2010); Gulayhan Aqtay, Eliyahu Ben Yosef Qılcı’s Anthology of Crimean Karaim and Turkish Literature: Critical Edition with Introduction, Indexes and Facsimile, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 2009). The same caveat applies to several dozens Karaite mecumalar consulted by me in state and private archival collections (in MS LMAB F. 143 and F. 301; NLR F. 946; cf. two Crimean mecumalar in the possession of A. Efimov in Moscow and one mecuma of A. Eidlisz in New York). 1187 Shapira, “Jewish Pan-Turkist,” 369, 372. 1188 For the analysis of his other important falsification, the note about the attempt to house Timophey, the son of the Cossack hetman Bohdan Chmelnicki, in Çufut Kale, see Mikhail Kizilov, “Il’iash Karaimovich i Timofei Khmel’nitskii: krovnaia mest’, kotoroi ne bylo,” in Fal’sifikatsiia istoricheskikh istochnikov i konstruirovanie etnokraticheskikh mifov (Moscow, 2011), 208-237; ibid., Karadeniz Araştırmaları 6: 22 (2009): 43-74. 1189 Shapira, “Jewish Pan-Turkist;” Kowalski, “Turecka monografja.” 1190 Seraja Szapszal, “Adam Mickiewicz w gościnie u karaimów,” MK 10 (1934): 3-12. 244 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

In his view, it was hardly possible that Adam Mickiewicz, who visited Crimea in August–October 1825, could be there as early as June of 1825.1191 Furthermore, there are many other strange details concerning Rzewuski’s letter. Szapszał published a facsimile of the document without its first and last pages, i.e. its most important parts containing the name of the addressee, the signature and/or the name of the sender and its date. Furthermore, one phrase had been censored out of the text. Present-day searches in Szapszał’s collection – in MS LMAB and every other Karaite collection in Eastern Europe – have yielded neither facsimile nor original of Rzewuski’s letter. As has been mentioned, there is no doubt about the authenticity of the letter. It is evident from its fragments that were published by Szapszał that this was an original nineteenth-century document. However, there still remains a question as to whether the Mickiewicz mentioned there was indeed the Adam Mickiewicz or someone else (in the nineteenth century there were other Mickiewiczs who visited Crimea),1192 whether the letter was correctly dated, and whether its sender was Rzewuski. None of these questions can be convincingly answered without consulting the missing and illusive original or facsimile. Several other ideological articles published in “Myśl Karaimska” were devoted to various problems of the history of Crimean Karaites;1193 one article was dedicated to the general history of the Karaites with specific emphasis on their history in Eastern Europe.1194 Two public letters emphasized the fidelity of the Karaites to their Polish- Lithuanian motherland.1195 Two review articles, where Szapszał presented his new vision of Karaite history and ethnic origin, are analyzed below, in the subchapter dedicated to Szapszał’s dejudaization doctrine (4.3.5).1196 In these publications it was important for Szapszał to emphasise the following: the local Karaites’ anti-Bolshevist tendencies; their non-Jewish origins and adherence to separate, non-Jewish religious tradition; recognition by Anan ben David and early Karaites of prophetic nature of Jesus and Mohammed; conversion of the Khazars to Karaite (i.e. non-Rabbinic) form

1191 Stanisław Makowski, Świat sonetów krymskich Adama Mickiewicza (Warsaw, 1969), 189. 1192 The grave of certain Mickiewicz, who lived and was buried in Crimea in the nineteenth century, can be seen in the lapidarium of Taurida Central Museum in Crimea; there is also a nineteenth-century graphito in a cave in Mangup also containing the name of Mickiewicz. Thus, there were at least two more Mickiewiczs who visited Crimea in the nineteenth century in addition to Adam Mickiewicz. 1193 Seraja Szapszał, “Uzupełnienia i wyjaśnienia,” MK 2:3-4 (1931): 1-11; idem, “Karaimi w służbie u chanów krymskich,” MK 2:2 (1929): 5-22; idem, “Słów kilka o książętach karaimskich Czelebi i ich działalności oświatowej,” MK 11 (1936): 8-11. 1194 Idem, “Przeszłość i teraźniejszość Karaimów”, Wiedza i Życie 3 (1934): 213-224. 1195 “List Pasterski J.E. Hachana Karaimów w Polsce,” MK 2:1 (1929): 3-4; “List Pasterski J.E. Hachana H. Seraja Szapszała,” MK 11 (1936): 5 (a public letter on the death of Marshal Józef Piłsudski (12.05.1935)). 1196 Seraja Szapszał, “Corrado Gini, “I Caraimi di Polonia e Lituania” (Recenzja),” MK 12 (1938): 111- 112; idem, “Alexandre Baschmakoff, “Cinquante siecles d’evolution ethnique autour de la Mer Noire” (Paris, 1937) (Recenzja),” MK 12 (1938): 112-118. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 245

of Judaism; the proselyte character of Karaite belief and, consequently, the professing of Karaism by various ethnic groups and nations such as the Jews, Turks, and Russian Cossacks;1197 the important role played by Karaites in redeeming Polish soldiers from Crimean Tatar captivity; the heroic role of Eljasz Karaimowicz, a Karaite-Cossack fighter against Bogdan Chmielnicki’s treachery; military deeds of Karaite knights at the service of Polish kings and the centuries-old honorary status of the Karaite community in Poland; the Karaites’ use of their Turkic language (Karaim) both for everyday and liturgical activity (without any reference to their use of Hebrew); the anthropological affinity between the Karaites and Mongoloid/ (the Yakuts, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Buriats, Tatars, Nogays, Khazars et al.). All these innovative postulates of his historical and religious doctrine are to be found in his numerous speeches and publications from 1928 to 1939. Unfortunately, because of the fact that Szapszał falsified sources both before and after the 1930s (see 4.2.3 and 6.2.1) any document that had ever been published by him should be carefully analyzed and additionally examined. He was certainly careful while writing his purely scholarly Turkological studies. And yet whenever he wrote about the history of his own people, the Karaites, he always resorted to manipulation of historical truth and sometimes even to direct falsification of sources. It is understandable why he did this in the 1930s and 1940s – he had to defend his flock from the Polish state anti-Semitism and, later, from the Nazi regime. However, why he did this in his Istanbul brochure of 1928 or in Soviet Lithuania after 1945 – when there was no immediate danger to the wellbeing of the Karaite community – remains less clear and understandable.

4.3 Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939

4.3.1 Influence of Kemal Atatürk’s Reformist Activity and Pan-Turkic Doctrine on Szapszał

One cannot help noticing the apparent similarity between the interwar reformation of the Karaite community and the modernisation of Turkish society in the 1920s- 1930s. There is no doubt that Szapszał’s radical changes were to a large extent copied from the linguistic and calendar reforms which had occurred at about the same time

1197 In order to justify his vision of the Karaites as the later nomadic proselytes in his private papers and diaries Szapszał constantly refers to Ex. 12:49, Num. 15:15-16, 29; 9:14; 35:15 (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 912). 246 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

in Turkey during the rule of Mustafa Kemal “Atatürk” (1881–1938).1198 Szapszał, an Orientalist interested in Turkic languages, who lived from 1920 to 1928 in Turkey, was well informed about the transformation of the and society, and took an active part in many linguistic congresses in the country in the 1930s. The first contacts between Szapszał and leaders of pan-Turkist doctrine date back perhaps to the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. There is no doubt that he was acquainted with the father of pan-Turkism – Crimean Tatar nationalist and litterateur, Ismail Gaspirali (Gasprinskii; 1851-1914). His famous pan-Turkist newspaper “Terciman” (The Translator) published several reports about Szapszał in 19011199 and of his 1915 elevation to the office of the Taurida and Odessa ḥakham.1200 It is highly probable that it was from Gasprinskii’s article of 1913 that Szapszał derived the idea of corrupting the Turkic toponym Çufut Kale (“The Jews’ Fortress”) to non-existent Cüft Kale (“Double Fortress”).1201 This is additional evidence that Szapszał was acquainted with pan-Turkist literature already in the 1910s. It does not seem to be very likely that Szapszał himself ever happened to meet with Atatürk personally; at least, Szapszał and his colleagues never mentioned this in any of their speeches or publications. On the other hand, he had certainly seen Atatürk at public events that he attended in Istanbul and often been in touch with Atatürk’s closest associates, both in Turkey and outside it. His contacts with Kemalists began almost immediately after his emigration to Turkey in 1919. In 1920, Szapszał translated the novel “Mumun şekvası” (A Candle’s Complaint) by Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın (1892-1959) who later became an influential Turkish diplomat and politician, a close friend and biographer of Kemal Atatürk.1202 Ünaydın also was a member of the famous Language Commission (Dil Encümeni) whose task was also to modernize the Turkish language, replace the Arabic alphabet with Latin, and purify the language of foreign loanwords (as will be shown below, a similar reform was implemented by Szapszał in Poland in the 1930s). There is no doubt that a close relationship existed between Szapszał and Ünaydın. It was to Ruşen Eşref Bey (i.e. Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın) that Szapszał dedicated his study “Kırım Karay Türkleri”, published in Istanbul in Turkish in 1928. This work, which represented Crimean Karaites not as an independent

1198 Space contraints restrict discussion of theories about Mustafa Kemal’s possible origin in the Jewish sect of dönme. However, a possible “Karaite” episode in his biography is noted: according to Itamar Ben-Avi, nota bene the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (!), Mustafa Kemal told him that it was a Karaite teacher who had taught him to read Jewish prayers in his youth (Hillel Halkin, “When Atatürk Recited Shema Yisrael,” Forward (28.01.1994)). 1199 Perevodchik/Terciman (16.01.1901): 6 (communiqué about Szapszał’s arrival in Persia and his elevation to the position of khan). 1200 See Terciman (25.12.1915); Terciman 2 (3.01.1916); Terciman 5 (8.01.1916) (cf. Yanbaeva, “Iz materialov”). 1201 I. G-ii [Ismail Gasprinskii], “Krymskie azizy,” Vostochnyi sbornik 1 (St. Petersburg, 1913), 214-217. 1202 “La plainte d’une bougie/Zhaloba svechi.” Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 247

ethnic group, but as Crimean Turks (!) of Karaite faith, was obviously written by him under the influence of pan-Turkic doctrine spread in Kemalist Turkey of that period. It was first printed in the almanac Türk Yılı (The Turkish Year), published by Türk Ocakları (Turkish Hearths), a highly influential cultural organization founded in 1912, responsible for the dissemination of pan-Turkic and pan-Turanianist ideas in Turkey. Szapszał’s study was published in Türk Yılı alongside other pan-Turkist articles which aso presented the Kazan, Caucasian and Crimean Tatars not as distinct ethnic groups, but as Caucasian, Kazan, and Crimean Turks.1203 According to Dan Shapira, Türk Yılı included numerous articles on the ongoing reforms as well as a contribution dedicated to calendar reform.1204 All this means that Szapszał, who published his contribution to Türk Yılı, was well- acquainted not only with the most recent trends in Kemalist reforms, but also with the pan-Turkist authors who published their contributions in Türk Yılı. Furthermore, Szapszał’s “Kırım Karay Türkleri,” which presented the Karaites as an integral part of the larger pan-Turkic nation, seemed to play a certain role in the general formation of pan-Turkic ideology. This study was a few times quoted by a Tatar nationalist leader Cafer Seydahmet (1889–1960) in his introduction to a larger pan-Turkist book by Mustafa Edige Kırımal (Kırımal-Szynkiewicz, 1911–1980). There Seydahmet presented the Karaites as “Krimkaraimtürken,” i.e. Crimean Karaim Turks of Mosaic faith.1205 Mustafa Edige Kırımal, in his turn, also had close contacts with the Karaites (perhaps including Szapszał as well) during the Second World War (for more information, see Chapter 5). “Kırım Karay Türkleri” was cited by many other pan-Turkist authors, including Abdulla Zihni Soysal, Hüseyin Namık Orkun and others.1206 Szapszał also continued his contacts with Kemalist and pan-Turkist leaders after the emigration to Poland in 1928. On 27.07.1930, the town of Troki was visited by Reşit Saffet Atabinen (1884–1965) who was a member of Turkish parliament, president of the Turkish Touring Club and a friend of Kemal Atatürk. In his public speech, Szapszał referred to the centuries of friendly relations between Poland and Turkey and emphasized the fact that the Turkic-speaking Karaites presented a vital cultural link between these two countries. He also read a special prayer in honour of Atatürk. Instructed by Szapszał, Atabinen was happy to recognize in the Troki Karaites his Turkic “blood brothers”. Later Atabinen mentioned that he could not hold back his

1203 See Kafkasya Türkleri by Resulzade Mehmet Emîn; Kırım Türkleri by Câfer Seyid Ahmet (Seydahmet); Kazan Türkleri by Battâloğlu Abdallah (as referred to in Shapira, “A Jewish Pan-Turkist, 358). 1204 Ibid. 1205 Edige Kırımal, Der Nationale Kampf der Krimtürken (Emsdetten, 1952), xvii-xviii, xxiii. 1206 Abdulla Zihni Soysal, Z dziejów Krymu (Warsaw, 1938), 65; Hüseyin Namık Orkun, Türk Dünyası (Istanbul 1932), 179-180. 248 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

tears of excitement at meeting a Turkic-speaking people so far away from Turkey.1207 In 1934 he published a pan-Turkic pamphlet on the history of the Khazars in which he wrote extensively about East European Karaites as “the Khazar-Turks of our days.”1208 This book was one of a few pan-Turkic historical pamphlets published by Atabinen.1209 In August 1934 Szapszał and Ananiasz Zajączkowski took part in the Second Congress of the Turkish Language (II Türk Dili Kurultayi). This Congress, where main principles of Kemalist language reforms were discussed, had been organized by Atatürk himself. He, together with many other members of the cabinet, attended the opening ceremony of the Congress. During the Congress Szapszał delivered a paper entitled “Türk dilinin gücü, kuvveti, zenginliği ve Karayim lehçesinin hususiyet” (Turk. “The strength, power and richness of the Turkish language and characteristics of Karaim ”). As a result, a number of Turkish newspapers published interviews with Szapszał and articles on the Polish Karaites.1210 What was perhaps even more important, when the Congress concluded on 26.08.1934, Hamdullah Suphi Bey (a.k.a. Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver (1885–1966), an influential pan-Turkist, politician, litterateur and – for a while – chairman of “Turkish Hearths”), organized a special reception in honour of the Karaite visitors. The reception was attended by a number of significant pan-Turkist figures, including the national poet, Mehmed Emin Yurdakul, Reşit Saffet Atabinen, Atatürk’s close associate of Tatar origin – Sadreddin Maksudov (Sadri Maksudi Arsal), and some others. The official chronicle of the events again emphasized the role of the Turkic Karaites as a link between Turkey and Poland.1211 In the 1930s, Szapszał maintained contacts with noted Turkologist of Azeri origin Ahmet Caferoğlu (1899–1975) of Istanbul. The latter had reviewed Szapszał’s study on the Turkish literature from Persian Azerbaijan.1212 In 1937 the Turkish professor, a Slavic specialist of Tatar origin, Akdes Nimet Kurat (1903–1971) visited the Karaite and Tatar settlements in the Wilno region, where he delivered a public speech in which he emphasized the role of Szapszał as an important Turkologist.1213 In December of

1207 Sz. Firkowicz, “Przyjazd Reszyd Saffet Beja,” MK 2:3-4 (1931): 75-77; “Tureccy turyści na ruinach zamku w Trokach,” Ilustrowany Kuryer codzienny (11.08.1930). 1208 Kara Şemsi Reşit Saffet [Reşit Saffet Atabinen], Hazar Türkleri Avrupa Devleti (VI-XII asır) (Istanbul, 1934). This book was sympathetically reviewed by Szapszał in MK 11 (1935/6): 104-105. 1209 E.g. Reşit Saffet Atabinen, Türklük ve Türkçülük İzleri (Ankara, 1931). 1210 E.g. Bulletin périodique de la presse turque 103 (1934): 7. 1211 Haber 837 (27.08.1934); S. Sz[apszał], “Turecki Kongres językoznawczy,” MK 11 (1936): 108- 109. Although Szapszał left an enthusiastic description of their stay in Istanbul during the Congress, Zajączkowski’s letters to T. Kowalski (22.08.1934, 20.06.1936, 8.07.1936) were much less ecstatic and contained explicit critique of the general ideological atmosphere of the event (UO, 92-93, 108-111). 1212 MS LMAB F. 143, no. 225; cf. Türkıyat Mecmuası 5 (1935): 353-355. 1213 “Prof. Bay Akdes Nimet u Turkologów Słuchaczy Szkoły Nauk Politycznych w Wilnie,” KW (7.07.1937): 7. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 249

that same year, the Karaites of Halicz were visited by a group of Crimean Tatars from Romania and Turkey, headed by Haci Fazil and Bekir Akcar, editors of the Crimean Tatar periodical Emel, published in Romania.1214 In 1936 Emel puiblished two articles about the Polish Karaites; the author of one of them, Crimean Tatar Ibrahim Otar, spent three weeks in Halicz and described impressions of his stay among the “Crimean Turkic brethren” – the Halicz Karaites.1215 These are only a few examples of close contacts between Szapszał and his associates with the Kemalist movement’s ideological leaders, perpetrators and introducers of Atatürk’s reforms. A detailed history of these contacts invites further study. Regardless, it is important at this juncture to emphasize that leading Karaite reformists (S. Szapszał, A, Zajączkowski, Sz. Firkowicz and others) were personally acquainted with leaders of pan-Turkist movement and Atatürk’s close associates. Szapszał, who spent more than seven years in Istanbul in the 1920s, and A. Zajączkowski, both took part in the Second Congress of the Turkish Language in 1934. Zajączkowski visited Istanbul many times in the 1930s for academic purposes. He attended the 1936 Third Congress of the Turkish Language (III Türk Dili Kurultayi).1216 Zajączkowski and Szapszał visited Istanbul again in 1938.1217 As a result, they would be, therefore, acquainted with the latest agenda in Kemalist reform activity, read Kemalist publications – and later published on the pages of “Myśl Karaimska” surveys of what they had seen and read. On the other hand, such influential Kemalists as Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver, Sadri Maksudi Arsal, Akdes Nimet Kurat, Reşit Saffet Atabinen, Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın, and others were also acquainted with the Karaites and their leaders whom they considered a part of a larger pan-Turkic nation in Europe’s utmost north. Atatürk’s secularization policy and his legal and economic reforms find no direct parallels to Szapszał’s reformist activity. However, such aspects of Atatürk’s activity as Turkicization (deottomanization and dearabization) of the Turkish society, language, calendar and liturgy have direct parallels to Szapszał’s policy of Turkicization (dejudaization) of the Karaite spiritual, intellectual and religious life and identity in the 1930s. After his emigration to Poland in 1928, Szapszał apparently sought to apply the Turkish experimental model to the Karaite community, which, of course, drastically differed from Turkish society. This is why – although Szapszał’s reforms were indeed much influenced by those of Kemal Atatürk and his followers – they had different aims, strategies and agendas. The fact that Szapszał’s reforms were cloned from those of Mustafa Atatürk is mentioned by one of his younger contemporaries,

1214 J. S. [Józef Sulimowicz], “Tatarzy krymscy w Haliczu,” MK 12 (1939): 148. 1215 J. Szulimowicz [Sulimowicz], “Emel Medżmuasy, Nr. 99,” MK 11 (1936): 107. 1216 UO, 58-64, 108-111. 1217 UO, 143-144. 250 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

Aleksander Dubiński, a reknown Polish Orientalist of Karaite origin.1218 The necessity of using Kemalist reforms as an example to be followed by the Karaites was mentioned in 1935 by Szemaja Firkowicz.1219 Immediately after his election, inauguration and settling in Wilno in May 1928, Szapszał began to energetically reorganize Karaite religious, social, and cultural life. While managing the community, Szapszał introduced a number of radical religious and linguistic reforms, which considerably transformed the ethnic identity of the East European Karaites. Szapszał’s reforms were first of all aimed at Turkicization of the Karaites’ ethnic identity, language and religious tradition. Alternatively, this process may be also defined as “endogenous dejudaization,” i.e. the internal policy of the community directed at the conscious and deliberate replacement of traditional Jewish values and practices. One interwar Rabbanite journalist called this process “Reformbewegung” (reform movement).1220 For details of Szapszał reforms, see below.

4.3.2 Ḥakhan: the New Naming for the Head of the Community

The reasons which prompted the Karaite leader to start his dejudaization reforms were quite understandable from a survival point of view, as it had become rather “awkward” – even dangerous – to be a Jew in Europe in the interwar period. It was the time of the emergence of fascist and Nazi ideology in many European countries, and even though none could predict the Holocaust nor knew it was coming until it was upon them, Szapszał, with his amazing political acumen and prudence, apparently could feel the growing danger of Nazism for his people. As early as the second half of the 1930s, he began receiving communiqués from his Karaite brethren living in Germany and Italy who provided him with detailed information regarding the persecution of the Rabbanite and Karaite population of those countries (see 3.7.3 and 3.7.4). It is evident that, in this respect, Szapszał turned out to be much more prudent and far-sighted than the Rabbanite leadership, which did not foresee the danger that was coming. Growing anti-Semitism in Poland, where the Jews were constantly publicly and privately humiliated and suffered from numerous legal limitations,1221 was another important factor which influenced Szapszał’s decision to start his reforms. In addition to these objective factors, as an absolutely secular person and

1218 Aleksander Dubiński, “Obnovlenie karaimskogo yazyka v pervoi polovine nashego stoletiia,” RO 49:2 (1994): 59-63. 1219 Szymon Firkowicz, “Przyczynek do zagadnienia wpływów obcych na język karaimski,” MK 11 (1935-36): 69-72. 1220 Wachsmann, “Halitsch,” 13. 1221 Mendelson, Jews of East Central Europe, 73-74. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 251

a great devotee of Turkic languages, Szapszał did not have any particular sentiments with regard to the Karaite Jewish past at all. His first reform, implemented immediately upon his arrival in Poland, was the invention of a new name for the head of the Karaite community. Initially, the Hebrew term ḥakham (Heb. “sage”, “wise man”, “a person learned in religious and scholarly matters”) was used both in the Rabbanite and Karaite nomenclature to simply denote learned members of a community. In the Karaite community of Russia this term received an additional meaning starting from 1839: it began to be used to denote the religious, ideological, administrative and (in a sense) political head of all the Karaite communities in Russia (heads of each particular community were called ḥazzanim; they were the ḥakham’s subordinates). Nevertheless, in the 1850s the Karaites of Poland and Lithuania organized their own consistory headed by the Troki ḥakham – and this was the office that Szapszał received in 1927. Szapszał, whose intention was to turkicize the life of the Karaite community in interwar Poland, was apparently unhappy about being referred to by the traditional Hebrew term. In his opinion, this could evoke unneeded associative link to the Rabbanite community which also used the term ḥakham, although in a slightly different manner. This is why practically immediately upon his arrival in Poland he began calling himself not by the traditional Hebrew ḥakham, but by the pseudo-Turkic ḥakhan. This alteration of just one letter made a great difference: first, the traditional Hebrew form was practically dropped; second, the connotation, which is humorous to the Slavic ear, was avoided (in Russian and Polish the word cham/kham means a “rude and insolent person of low origin”). In addition, for anyone knowledgeable in European history, this term would immediately be linked to the Tatar khans – or to the Khazar rulers-kagans. Needless to say, that the term ḥakhan had never been used by the Karaites – or by any other people or ethnic group – before 1928.1222 Before 1928 only the term ḥakham (or, in Russian pronunciation, gakham/гахам) was used in the writings of Karaite authors composed in the Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and Karaim languages. To give an example, even Szapszał himself, in his article of 1918, used the term ḥakham (and not ḥakhan) to denote the heads of the Karaite community before 1915.1223 One can also compare welcoming publications praising Szapszał’s election to the ḥakham’s office published in “Myśl Karaimska” in 19281224 and his own

1222 Balkan Judezmo is the only language where the term ḥakhan does exist – in the sense of “rabbi” (Paul Wexler, “Is Karaite a Jewish Language?” Mediterranean Language Review 1 (1983): 47). It seems to be very unlikely, though, that Szapszał could have used Balkan Judezmo as a source for his introduction of this term. 1223 G.S [Gakham Seraya, i.e. Seraja Szapszał], “Istoriia proiskhozhdeniia dolzhnosti i kharakter deiatel’nosti karaimskikh gakhamov,” Izvestiia [TO]KDP 1 (1918): 4-6; cf. “List Pasterski J.E. Hachana [sic] Karaimów w Polsce,” MK 2:1 (1929): 3-4. 1224 See Zacharjasz Nowachowicz, “Witaj, Pasterzu!,” MK 1:4-5 (1928): 1-4; “J.E. H. Seraja Bej Szapszał,” MK 1:4-5 (1928): 5-7. 252 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

speech published in the same periodical a year later, where Szapszał called himself “Karaite Hachan in Poland”.1225 In this study, because Szapszał began in 1928 to designate himself as the ḥakhan (and not ḥakham) – when I analyze his biography after this point – I shall also call him by this term, its pseudo-historical character notwithstanding. The earliest Karaite documents which mention the term ḥakhan (in the form hachan) date back to May 1928. In one of them, typed by a secretary, Szapszał with his own hand, in black ink, replaces the last letter of the word hakham with an “n” – demonstrating that in May 1928 the Karaites were not yet accustomed to this new name to denote the head of the community.1226 In 1911, when the term synagogue was replaced by the word kenesa, this decision was publicly and officially announced in Karaite press.1227 This time, however, there was no specific public announcement or explanation whatsoever; evidently, there existed only some sort of a secret instruction, for internal use, which prohibited the use of the term ḥakham. It is also very likely that Szapszał orally explained to his flock the reasons for the abolition of the term. However, how exactly he did this remains a mystery. To our knowledge, it was only once that Szapszał gave the official explanation regarding the emergence of the new term. In his letter to the Minister of Religious Affairs and Public Education in Warsaw of 29.11.1928, he stated that “Hachan (according to the Russian transcription – “Gacham”) is the head of the Karaite autocephalous church.”1228 Thus, here Szapszał attempted to explain his invention of the term ḥakhan simply by the difference in Russian and Polish orthography. This explanation is certainly incorrect: in numerous publications by the Karaites in Polish, which appeared before Szapszał’s arrival in 1928, they used the term ḥakham and not ḥakhan.1229 Szapszał’s insincerity is also evident in his article about Romuald (Romi

1225 See “List Pasterski,” 3-4 (cursive is mine). 1226 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1464, fol. 121. 1227 See 2.7. 1228 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1462, fol. 4. This interesting document also contains an historical sketch of the emergence of Karaism as a religious movement and the Karaites’ settling down in Poland and Lithuania (ibid., fols. 1-6). 1229 E.g. Zacharjasz Nowachowicz, “Witaj, Pasterzu!,” MK 1:4-5 (1928): 1-4; “J.E. H. Seraja Bej Szapszał,” MK 1:4-5 (1928): 5-7. 1230 Seraja Szapszał, “Ś.p. hachan [sic] Romuald Kobecki (Z powodu 25-lecia jego zgonu),” MK 11 (1936): 80-84. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 253

on his visit card.”1231 Gedo Hecht suggested that hachan originated from Hebrew chacham (this is how he transliterated the word ḥakham in Polish). He was right to notice the Hebrew origin of the term; he nevertheless had no idea that the term hachan was, in fact, only an invention and not a product of historical etymology.1232 Thus, use of the Hebrew term ḥakham stopped, and the new one, pseudo-Turkic ḥakhan, came to the fore, starting in 1928. This was the first, but not the last of Szapszał’s radical dejudaization reforms implemented after his arrival in Poland. Official inauguration of Szapszał into the ḥakhan’s office took place on 11.09.1928. He was met in Wilno by representatives of the Karaite (ḥazzanim I. Abrahamowicz, Sz. Firkowicz, J. Łobanos, lawyer Z. Nowachowicz, and poet S. Rudkowski) and non- Karaite audience (i.a. governor of province Wł. Raczkiewicz, Orientalist T. Kowalski, and members of the local Muslim and Evangelical communities). The choir of young Karaites, somewhat surprisingly, sang the famous Jewish hymn Ein ke-Eloheinu (Heb. “there is none like our God”) as a greeting. The journalists who witnessed this event seemed to be especially impressed by the most exotic part of the ritual: Szapszał, who was seated on a special carpet made of yellow felt, was given the so-called “Altın baş”1233 and lifted up in the air.1234 Szapszał, with his knowledge of Oriental traditions, apparently copied this ceremony from those of the Khazar qagans and Muslim rulers of Crimea, Khiva and Kokand in the Middle Asia.1235 This ceremony of the ḥakham’s investiture was certainly invented by him: no other East European Karaite ḥakham before him had been inaugurated in such a pompous and theatrical manner. After all, by September 1928 he already called himself ḥachan and not ḥakham. This is why one may say that this was the first inauguration of the ḥakhan in Karaite history (although after his election to the position of the Taurida and Odessa ḥakham in 1915, Szapszał was inaugurated in a similar Oriental fashion).

1231 Ks. Nikodem Ludomir Cieszyński, “Najmniejsza mniejszość w Polsce,” Dziennik Poznański (29.09.1929). 1232 Hecht, Karaimi: “Synowie zakonu,” 8. 1233 Turk. “Golden head,” a kind of cane with the golden ball at the top with the depiction of certain symbols which were to become later a part of the coat-of-arms of the East European Karaite community (see 4.3.6). 1234 In fact, only the corners of the carpet were lifted up; see “Uroczysty ingres pierwszego chachama Karaimów w Polsce,” Nasz Przegląd (19.09.1928); “Uroczysty ingres pierwszego chachama Karaimskiego w Polsce” in AAN MWRiOP, no. 1465, fol. 4; “Ingres J.E. Hachana Karaimów,” MK 2:1 (1929): 49-50; “Ingres Hachama Karaimów,” Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny 256 (15.09.1928); “Powitanie Hachama Seraja Chana Szapszała,” Słowo 106 (10.05.1928). 1235 Cf. the rite of lifting the rulers on a carpet in László Balogh, “Vostochnye korni rituala utverzhdeniia yazycheskogo vengerskogo vozhdia,” Hungaro-Rossica II. Biulleten’ Obshchestva Vostokovedov 12 (2005): 7-22. 254 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

4.3.3 Language Politics a) Liturgy and the Position of the From the foundation of the Karaite movement in the Middle Ages, one of the main features of the movement was a diligent study of the Torah as well as the Hebrew language and grammar as the only means to understand the true meaning of Scripture. Even in the nineteenth century, when there appeared more and more targumim of the TaNaKh in the Turkic languages of the East European Karaites, the study of the Torah in its original language, that is in Hebrew, was still one of the main points of the creed of the Karaite faith. The necessity of studying Hebrew is mentioned as the sixth/seventh) article of faith in most Karaite catechisms of this period. This is how, for example, the seventh point of Karaite creed reads in Sifrei ḥinukh le-fetaḥ tiqvah edited by Abraham Firkowicz and published in the Hebrew and Turkish languages in Istanbul in 1831: “The Torah was given in the Hebrew language [in original: bi-leshon >ivri/ivri lisani], and for this reason it is a religious obligation to study the language of the Torah and to read it while understanding the meaning.”1236 Practically the same was said by Yakov Duvan in his catechism of 1890: “I believe with the full faith that every son of Israel, believing in the Supreme God and His Torah, is obliged to know the language of the Torah and its explanations/commentaries.”1237 For Szapszał, who grew up and matured both physically and educationally in an entirely secular non-religious surrounding in St. Petersburg, however, these integral parts of Karaite faith, tradition, culture, and mentality apparently had no specific meaning or importance. Moreover, the study of the Hebrew language and adherence to this traditional part of the Karaite culture meant, for him, only a dangerous association with Judaism and Jews that had to be avoided. Although Szapszał never stated this in public speeches or publications, there is no doubt that he was unhappy about the status of Hebrew as the main language of Karaite liturgy that was an obligatory part of academic curriculum in Karaite religious schools and colleges. The sixth/seventh article of faith indicating the necessity of studying the Torah in its original language was deliberately omitted by Szapszał in his main principles of the Karaite creed published in 1928.1238 Some students of Szapszał’s biography state that

1236 Sifrei ḥinukh le-fetaḥ tiqvah, ed. A. Firkowicz (Istanbul, 1831) as translated into English by Dan Shapira in his Avraham Firkowicz in Istanbul (1830-1832). Paving the Way for Turkic Nationalism (Ankara, 2003), 46; the respective original pages of this source are reproduced in ibid., 112, ill. 10a. 1237 Yakov Duvan, Katekhizis. Osnovy Karaimskogo zakona (St. Petersburg, 1890), 64; cf. Shapira, Avraham Firkowicz, 46-47; the respective original pages of this source are reproduced in ibid., 113, ill. 10b). Cf. also catechisms of J. Shamash (1913), S. Prik (1917), and M. Firkowicz (1915) which contain identical statements about the necessity of studying Hebrew as the language of the Torah (Veronika Klimova, “Polish Catechism by A. Zajączkowski in the Light of Russian Catechisms from the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Jewish History Quarterly 4 (2012): 493-496). 1238 KKT as republished in Çulha, “Sereya Şapşal’a,” 111-112; cf. Shapira, Avraham Firkowicz, 4 7. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 255

soon after his election to the office of the Taurida and Odessa ḥakham in 1915, Szapszał banned the study of Hebrew in Karaite schools in Crimea. This, however, seems to be an overstatement. Although Szapszał never welcomed the study of Hebrew, the fact that he explicitly ordered Hebrew to be banned, to our knowledge, is not mentioned in any published or archival source.1239 Already in 1928, i.e. almost immediately after Szapszał’s arrival in Poland, when writing his Karaimische Texte, Tadeusz Kowalski noticed Szapszał’s determination to introduce changes into the religious life of the Polish-Lithuanian Karaites:

Present day Chacham [i.e. Szapszał] is anxious to establish the common liturgy in all the communities. In order to accomplish this, he introduced some innovations in accordance with Crimean pattern. Thus, for example, hazzans did not have to wear beards as before and perform liturgy without shoes – something that had not been seen in the Polish Karaite communities before.1240

What exactly the “innovations” that were introduced by Szapszał looked like (apart from those mentioned above) is unknown. Furthermore, we can only guess what was the “Crimean pattern” that had been mentioned by Kowalski (apparently, this was the liturgical pattern that had been formed by Szapszał himself during his being the Taurida and Odessa ḥakham from 1915 to 1920). Again, we can only guess at what exactly this “Crimean pattern” looked like and how different it was from the traditional Karaite liturgy predating Szapszał’s times. At the end of the nineteenth– beginning of the twentieth centuries the main language of Karaite liturgy was Hebrew; only certain formulas (benedictions, texts of marriage contracts, etc.) were read first in Hebrew and then repeated in peshat, i.e. in Karaim translation. In Kowalski’s opinion, Karaim, in terms of its usage as a liturgical language, had been understood

1239 The periodical “Izvestiia TOKDP,” which was edited by Szapszał in Crimea from 1917 to 1919, published materials and quotations in Hebrew or in Hebrew script. E.g. Szapszał’s own speech in the KCrTat on the holiday of Shemini Aṣeret was published there in Hebrew characters ([Seraja Szapszał], “Slovo, skazannoe Tavricheskim Gakhamom v Evpatoriiskoi Sobornoi Kenase na prazdnik ‘Shemini aceret’,” Izvestiia [TO]KDP 2 (1918): 2-3). Furthermore, in his early publications he did use the Hebrew language and characters (Szapszał, Karaimy i Chufut-Kale). 1240 Kowalski, Karaimische Texte, xii-xiii, ft. 5. 256 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

by the Karaites only as a “Hilfssprache”.1241 Nevertheless, he remarked that despite the bilingual Hebrew-Karaim character of praying, in 1928 the Hebrew language was gradually being edged out by Karaim “as a consequence of the growing national consciousness.”1242 However, in the following year, in Halicz, the liturgical service still was conducted mostly in Hebrew; only szetar hakabała (Heb. “the certificate of the reception [to the status of ribbi]”) was read first in Hebrew and then repeated in Karaim.1243 A similar situation prevailed also in Łuck, at least until 1931. Aleksander Mardkowicz complained to Szapszał that although he had many times stressed the necessity of minimizing of the role of Hebrew in liturgy, his efforts produced virtually no effect.1244 This present research reveals that, as well as in Crimea in the 1910s, Szapszał never issued an official ban on the use and study of Hebrew in Poland in the 1930s. However, there is no doubt that young ḥazzanim (Sz. Firkowicz in Troki, R. Abkowicz in Łuck, M. Leonowicz in Halicz, J. Łobanos in Wilno, Z. Firkowicz in Poniewież) who acquired their positions in most of the Karaite communities in the 1920s and 1930s, were active followers and disseminators of Szapszał’s Turkic doctrine. Unfortunatley, any published or archival sources containing exact descriptions of Karaite liturgical celebrations in the the way it was done in Poland in the 1930s and 1940s have not yet surfaced. One may suppose that although the ḥazzanim may have introduced as many Karaim elements into the service as possible, they could not perform liturgy without the mediation of Hebrew: after all, all the prayer-books available at that moment contained mostly Hebrew prayers while the Bible also was supposed to be read first in the Hebrew original and only subsequently in Karaim peshaṭ. The situation could have changed after 1935 when the Troki ułłu ḥazzan Szymon (Szemaja) Firkowicz composed a short prayer-book (published as a small brochure) containing prayers in Karaim, the new Turkic calendar and new names of the months.1245 One cannot help noticing the

1241 Ibid., xx. Claims of modern Karaite authors that Karaim had been in use for liturgical purposes since medieval times (e.g. Ananiasz Zajączkowski, “Die Karaimische Literatur,” in PTF, vol. 2, 793) are not based on any historical evidence. The earliest extant manuscript translations of the Bible into Karaim date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it does not appear that there existed earlier manuscripts of this type (Kizilov, Karaites of Galicia, 164). The so called Venice siddur (1528), which is often referred to as the first printed prayer-book in Karaim, in fact, does not contain a single Karaim word; it consists of prayers in Hebrew, two songs in Greek, and a few Turkish words (Shapira, “The Turkic Languages and Literatures,” 691-692). The earliest examples of literature in Karaim date to the late sixteenth century (Mikhail Kizilov, “Two Piyyutim and a Rhetorical Essay in the Northern (Troki) Dialect of the Karaim Language by Isaac ben Abraham Troki,” Judaica 1/2 (2007): 64-75). Even if there were earlier attempts at literary activity in Karaim before that, no evidence has yet arisen to this effect. 1242 Kowalski, Karaimische Texte, xiii-xiv. 1243 MS LMAB F. 143, no. 172a, fols. 14-15. 1244 A. Mardkowicz to S. Szapszał, 1931, Russian (LMAB F. 143, no. 465, fol. 16r). 1245 Firkowicz, Karaj Kołtchałary. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 257

explicit similarity between Szapszał’s Turkicization of Karaite liturgy and Atatürk’s reform directed at the decrease of the role of Arabic as the liturgical language and strengthening of the role of Turkish. For example, in Turkey in the 1920s ezan (the call to prayer) was changed from Arabic to Turkish.1246 Important evidence regarding the supplanting of Hebrew by Karaim was left by the Rabbanite author of the 1930s, Gedo Hecht. The journalist wrote:

In liturgy, at the expense of the recently dominant Hebrew language, the Karaim language was introduced into prayers, sermons, and ritual blessings. This tendency, leading to the shaping of common ideas in order to obtain a better future, brings Hebrew to a gradual decline... the Karaim language is becoming a literary language... The language of liturgy is presently mixed: partly Karaim, partly Hebrew.1247

It seems, however, that position of Hebrew remained quite strong in the Karaite liturgy and community of Poland even after the publication of Sz. Firkowicz’s reform prayer-book and complete Turkicization of the Karaite religious calendar. This is evident, for example, in the curriculum of the courses of Karaite religion and liturgical language in the Łuck Karaite community (ca. 1938; these courses apparently took place only a few times a year when pupils were free from studying in Polish state schools). According to this curriculum, a young Łuck Karaite was supposed to receive five hours of Hebrew per week while an adult student was to receive as many as 10 hours per week. Furthermore, they were supposed to attend liturgical services in the local kenesa twice a day during the week, and once during Shabbat and on Sunday. Among the textbooks used for the study were such books as the Bible in Hebrew, Hebrew prayer-books, Duvan’s “Catechism”, E. Kazas’s and M. Sułtański’s textbooks of the Hebrew language and grammar. This means that despite all Szapszał’s dejudaizatory reforms the Karaites continued studying the Hebrew language, TaNaKh and Karaite liturgy in its original form.1248 In 1930s Troki, Karaim and Polish also started to be used as the main languages of tombstone inscriptions. A few tombstones dated 1900s-1920s were in fact erected in the 1930s; they contain such terms as ḥachan and Turkic names of the months that were introduced by Szapszał after 1928. These few tombstone inscriptions remain perhaps the only Karaite tombs with epitaphs in the Karaim language in Hebrew characters.1249 In other Karaite cemeteries in Eastern Europe before the war Hebrew certainly remained the main language of the epitaphs; only short formulas were written in Karaim in Latin or Cyrillic characters.

1246 Özcan Başkan, “Turkish Language Reform,” in The Transformation of Turkish Culture. The Atatürk Legacy, ed. Günsel Renda and C. Max Kortepeter (Princeton, 1986), 100. 1247 Hecht, Karaimi: “Synowie zakonu,” 26-28, 29. 1248 MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1023, fol. 147. 1249 Hersch, “Les langues des inscriptions,” 283-285, 287-288. 258 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

Unfortunately, we do not have at our disposal any information about the changes in Karaite liturgy in Nazi-occupied Poland when any association with Jews and Jewish civilization was a mortal danger to the local Karaites.

b) “Purification,” Turkicization and Dehebraization of Karaim Having raised the status of Karaim to that of a liturgical language on equally- important terms with Hebrew – for centuries known to the Karaites as their only leshon ha-qodesh (Heb. “sacred language”) – Szapszał had to modify Karaim as well. In the 1920s, before Szapszał’s arrival, Karaim was certainly the most important language of everyday use in the Karaite communities in Poland, although practically all local Karaites of the 1930s could speak Polish (as well as some Russian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian – depending on where they lived). The Karaim of the 1920s was full of Hebrew, Slavic, Arabic and Persian loanwords and was usually written down in Hebrew characters.1250 One may examine the unpublished play by Szemaja Firkowicz (?),1251 a Galician text written down by T. Kowalski ca. 1925,1252 S. Rudkowski’s play “Dostłar”1253 and two first issues of “Onarmach” as vivid samples of this “live” and natural sort of spoken and written Karaim of the 1920s and 1930s.1254 Szapszał, who had just observed the language reform of Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, applied reforms of Kemalist type to the Karaim language. It is only due to Szapszał’s and his associates’ efforts that in the 1930s Karaim became not only a full-recognized liturgical language, but also a literary language. It is in this period that a number of periodicals were

1250 The role of Hebrew loanwords in Karaim has not yet received proper scholarly attention. For a preliminary analysis, see Altbauer, “O tendencjach dehebraizacji,” 51-60; idem, “>Al ha->ivrit she- be-fi Qaraal ha-yesodot ha->ivriyot she-bi-leshonam,” Leshonenu 21 (1957): 117-126; ibid., 22 (1958): 258-265. For more information on loanwords in Karaim from other languages, see Włodzimierz Zajączkowski, “Die arabischen und neupersischen Lehnwörter im Karaimischen,” FO 3 (1961): 177-212; idem, “Beitrag zur Erforschung des karaimischen Wortschatzes,” FO 18 (1977): 199-204; idem, “Die mongolischen Elemente in der karaimischer Sprache,” FO 1:2 (1960): 296-302; idem, “Zapożyczenia litewskie w języku Karaimów trockich,” Sprawozdania Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności 49 (1948): 360-362; Aleksander Dubiński, “Über die slawischen Einflüsse in der karaimischen Sprache,” Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 15 (1969): 139-144; Wolf Moskovich and Boris Tukan, “The Slavic Component in the Dialects of the Karaim Language,” Jews and Slavs 1 (1993): 296-303; Paul Wexler, “The Byelorussian Impact on Karaite and ,” Journal of Byelorussian Studies 4 (1980): 99-111. 1251 “Bytovaia kartinka iz karaimskoi zhizni,” the Yurchenko MSS (TrKar. in Cyrillic characters, typescript copy, 1 fol.). Although the title is in Russian, the play is in TrKar. 1252 AN PAN, Spuścizna K III-4, no. 122:2, fols. 81–83; published and translated in Kizilov, Karaites of Galicia, 398-401. 1253 See its analysis in Michał Németh, “Karaim Literature as a Source of Information on the Spoken Language,” Karaite Archives 1 (2013): 113-132. 1254 Cf. also the long list of Slavic loanwords in Karaim in the poem “Sahyšlarym” (My thoughts) by Józef Łobanos (LMAB F. 143, no. 1459, fols. 3-6v). Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 259

printed in Poland in the Karaim language and it is in this period that Karaim for the first time in its history started to be used for composition of journalistic and polemic articles, fairy tales, comic stories, etc. (secular and religious poetry had been already composed in Karaim well before the 1930s). Szapszał’s language reform – the essence of which was the replacement of traditional Hebrew terms with Turkic ones – was evidently cloned from the Kemalist reforms (save for the fact that, unlike Szapszał, who was eradicating Hebrew terminology, the Kemalists replaced the Persian and Arabic loanwords and the names of months). The Turkish language reform consisted of two different undertakings: the change of the script (from Arabic to Latin), and reduction/renovation of vocabulary.1255 Szapszał’s language reform also had two goals: to change the script (from Hebrew to Latin), and to purify vocabulary of foreign (mostly Hebrew and Slavic) loanwords. In the 1920s Atatürk abandoned the Arabic script traditionally used by the Ottoman Turks, replacing it with the . Szapszał, similarly, replaced Hebrew script with Latin alphabet in official publications in Karaim. Thus, in spite of the fact that even after his reforms the was still used for writing letters and other private documents, official interwar publications were printed only in Latin characters. Apart from some short verses published in “Myśl Karaimska,” perhaps the only known interwar publication in Hebrew characters was the Karaim targum of Jeremiah printed in Halicz in 1927 (i.e. before Szapszał’s arrival in Poland).1256 In addition to the alphabet reform, Atatürk decided to purify Turkish from numerous Arabic and Persian loanwords. In September of 1934 Szapszał and A. Zajączkowski took part in the Second Congress of the Turkish Language (II Türk Dili Kurultayi) which was organized by Atatürk himself.1257 It is apparently during this visit to Turkey that Szapszał learned the details of the Kemalist language reforms directed at purification of the language from foreign loanwords. It seems that it was only after this congress that he began to apply similar reforms in the sphere of the Karaim language. In 1935/6 Szapszał published an article in which he described, in

1255 For more details, see G.L. Lewis, “Atatürk’s Language Reform as an Aspect of Modernization in the Republic of Turkey,” in Atatürk and Modernization of Turkey, ed. Jacob Landau (Leiden, 1984), 195-213; Özcan Başkan, “Turkish Language Reform,” in The Transformation of Turkish Culture. The Atatürk Legacy, ed. Günsel Renda and C. Max Kortepeter (Princeton, 1986), 95-111. Özcan Başkan called this process “re-” (ibid.). This term can hardly be applied to the Karaite language reform: in contrast to the Turks, who were originally Turkic-speaking (hence “re-Turkification”), the first Karaite settlers in Eastern Europe were originally speakers of Greek and/or Arabic. Furthermore, there is no doubt that Hebrew loanwords entered their Turkic Karaim language at the earliest stage of its existence. Hence the process of purification (expurgation) of the Karaim language should be called Turkicization and not re-Turkicization. 1256 Yirmiyahu, ed. Z. Zarachowicz (Halicz, 1927). This targum was hectographically reproduced in 27 copies and was intended mostly for the circulation within the Halicz and Łuck community. 1257 S. Sz[apszał], “Turecki Kongres językoznawczy,” MK 11 (1936): 108-109. 260 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

detail, the essence of the Kemalist language reform and also reviewed the study of Turkish philologist, Hamit Zubeyr Koşay. According to Koşay, there were 330 words from the Turkic languages of the Troki, Łuck, and Crimean Karaites on a list of Turkic words that could be used as substitutes for Persian and Arabic loanwords.1258 Two years later Szemaja (now Szymon) Firkowicz, the Troki ułłu ḥazzan and Szapszał’s closest associate, published his language programme in “Myśl Karaimska”, based on his paper read to the session of TMHiLK on 22.04.1935. He wrote that the Karaites should follow the example of “forty-million Turkish people” and start purifying their language from foreign loanwords, which the ḥazzan characterized as “barbarisms” (Pol. barbaryzmy). He said that a special Karaite institution should be organized, similar to that in Turkey dealing with the problems of purification of the language. Furthermore, he stated that the Karaite ḥazzanim should start using this “purified” sort of Karaim in their sermons.1259 Firkowicz’s paper was actively discussed during the seventh session of TMHiLK on 22.04.1935; his idea of purifying the Karaim language was supported by Szapszał, A. Zajączkowski and other speakers.1260 Such a special institution was never organized, but the campaign aimed at the purification of the language started soon afterwards. The main promoters of the purification reform were the ḥazzanim, Turkic-oriented intellectuals and periodicals in the Karaim language that published articles and communiqués in the new, “purified” Karaim. They often simply had to invent new Karaim words in order to find replacements for Hebrew and Slavic loanwords. As a case in point, T. Kowalski praised A. Mardkowicz for the “skilful use of newly-invented [words]”.1261 The Karaite purification politic differed slightly from that of the Kemalists. Purification of Arabic and Persian from Karaim was not of great importance to Karaite reformers, although Turkish words certainly were preferred to those of Arabic or Persian origin.1262 However, in accordance with his new vision of the Karaim language, Slavic and especially Hebrew loanwords were not supposed to be used at all. As a result, in the 1930s Karaim began to be purged of most Slavic and (especially) Hebrew borrowings, which had to be replaced by “pure” Turkic words. Thus, for example, the term often used by the Karaites for “island” – wyspa (a loanword from Polish) became otrac/otracz; “book” (Heb. sefer) became bitik; yerushah (Heb. “inheritance”, in the

1258 Seraja Szapszał, “Osmanlicadan Türkçeye Karşiliklari Tarama Dergisi, Istambuł, 1934 r. str. 1309 (w 12 zeszytach) [review],” MK 11 (1935-1936): 105-107. 1259 Szymon Firkowicz, “Przyczynek do zagadnienia wpływów obcych na język karaimski,” MK 11 (1935-36): 69-72. 1260 “Działalność T-wa M.H. i L.H.,” 112. 1261 Tadeusz Kowalski, “Karaimskie wydawnictwa A. Mardkowicza,” MK 10 (1934): 110. 1262 Szapszał criticized A. Mardkowicz for the inclusion of numerous Hebrew and nota bene Arabic loanwords in the latter’s Karaim-Polish-German dictionary (S. Szapszał to A. Mardkowicz, 8.02.1934, Russian: LMAB F. 143, no. 468, fols. 3-4). Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 261

sense of “inherited traditions”) became adietliar (Kar. “traditions, customs”),1263 etc. What was even more important, the Hebrew names of God, which had been most frequently used by the Karaites (Adonai and Elohim), were replaced with the Turkic word Tengri (Tenri). After the war this provided Szapszał and some other Karaite authors (e.g. M. Sarach, Yu. Polkanov, M.M. Kazas and many others) with the ground to state that the Karaites, in fact, had originally worshipped not the God of Judaism, but a pagan Turkic deity, Ten(g)ri. Striking language differences between the first two and the third issues of the periodical “Onarmach” clearly demonstrate the way in which the Karaim language was purged of loanwords and turkicized. If the first two issues (1934, 1938) contained scores of Hebrew and Slavic loanwords almost on every page of the periodical, its third and the last issue (1939) was published after the arrival in Poniewież of Zarach Firkowicz, an evident follower of Szapszał’s reforms. The periodical’s new editor was Johonodav Rojecki; it was published not in Kowno, but in Poniewież, most likely under the direct surveillance of Szapszał. As a result, the periodical was published in “pure” Turkic Karaim, practically without any Hebrew and Slavic loanwords (for details, see 3.6.2). Michał Németh is certainly correct when he says that dehebraization of the Karaim language should be always mentioned alongside its “deslav[ic]ization”.1264 Yet, these two processes certainly arose out of different agendas and cultural meanings. The elimination of Slavic loanwords that had penetrated the language at a rather late stage of its existence1265 was quite a natural process similar to, for example, avoidance of English terms by today’s purists of the German or French languages. One can quite easily imagine the existence of literary texts in Karaim without colloquial and everyday Slavic words. At the same time, it is simply unthinkable to imagine scholarly or religious texts in Karaim written without hundreds of Hebrew loanwords such as tefiłła, Elohim, Adonaj, sefer Tora, Israeł(łer), hachamłar, caddikler, šabbat, mitsva, gan eden’, gałut, etc. These loanwords penetrated the language at the very beginning of its existence and had constituted an unalienable part of it, at least since the end of the sixteenth century.1266

1263 The word jerušša/yerushah was crossed out by Abraham Szyszman (the owner of the copy of Onarmach that was used by me) and changed to Turkic adietliar. This is how Karaite intellectuals replaced Hebrew terms with Turkic loanwords in the process of the Turkicization of the Karaim language. 1264 Németh, “Karaim Literature,” 116. 1265 Early Karaim texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contain but a few Slavic loanwords; active inclusion of Slavic lexica into Karaim dates back perhaps to the period after the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. 1266 The earliest samples of literature in TrKar from the end of the sixteenth century contain scores of Hebrew loanwords (Mikhail Kizilov, “Two Piyyutim and a Rhetorical Essay in the Northern (Troki) Dialect of the Karaim Language by Isaac ben Abraham Troki,” Judaica 1/2 (2007): 64-75). 262 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

Thus, these two processes of language changes reflect the varying agendas of their respective proponents and the cultural meanings borne within the recipients. To sum up, it was this sort of “purified” reform version of Karaim that was used by Karaite intellectuals and religious authorities of the 1930s. Ordinary Karaites, nevertheless, continued using Slavic and Hebrew loanwords both for everyday and religious purposes.

c) Replacement of Hebrew Names and Surnames Generally speaking, starting roughly from the nineteenth century onwards it was quite usual for the European Jews to have two names: a name and a secular European one. The Hebrew variant was usually used within the community, whereas the Europeanised equivalents or nicknames (Heb. qinnui) were employed when dealing with the wider non-Karaite environment.1267 The Hebrew name was usually given at the birth of a child while its secular equivalent was chosen by an individual (or his family) at a later stage. Sometimes it was European officials that gave the Jews Europeanized variants of their names during the registration process. Originally this tendency (among the Rabbanites and Karaites alike) had very little to do with dejudaization. It was a marker of a growing secularization of Jewish society and its wish to be more European and less Jewish. Principles of finding an appropriate secular variant for a Hebrew name were not uniform. Let me provide a few examples of the policy of finding such secular equivalents on the basis of Karaite first and family names. Official “European” name usually had to be either similar in the spelling of the name (Szemaja = Szymon, Mordecai = Mar(e)k, Ester = Stera/ Stefania), or start from the same letter (Abraham = Adolf, Boaz = Bogusław, Simcha = Sergei, Isaac = Ignat/Izidor, Moses = Monio/Mundek/Edmund/Zygmunt, Menuḥa = Mincia). It seems that sometimes secular names were given just by chance (Nisan or Sar Shalom = Alexander, Ruḥama = Janina, Rebecca = Lina/Regina).1268 In many cases Biblical names were substituted by local Christian varieties of these names (e.g. Shimon = Semen, Yeshayahu = Ivan/Jan, Yosef = Józef). In the 1920s and 1930s this originally non-ideological tendency, which reflected the natural integration of the Karaites into Polish society, began to acquire an evident dejudaizing flavour. This was noticed by the Rabbanite author Gedo Hecht. He quite correctly remarked that despite the fact that such tendency of adjusting traditional names to conventions of the larger Gentile environment had been typical for all

1267 Anna Sulimowicz, “Imiona Karaimów z Halicza,” Awazymyz 1 (8) (2004): 3-8; Michael Nosonovsky, “Judeo-Turkic Encounters in Hebrew Epitaphs from : Naming Patterns,” in Omeljan Pritsak Armağanı/A Tribute to Omeljan Pritsak, ed. Mehmet Alpargu and Yücel Öztürk (Sakarya, 2007), 283-301. The Rabbanite Jews also often had Yiddish names. 1268 MS LMAB F. 301, no. 332, fol. 22. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 263

dispersed Jewish communities, for the Karaite community in interwar Poland it was especially symptomatic: it signified a complete breaking up with the Hebrew legacy and Judaism.1269 Indeed, many Polish-Lithuanian Karaites started actively changing their Hebrew names that sounded too Jewish. Szapszał, for example, dropped the patronymic from his official name and from Seraja ben Mordechaj Szapszał “Yeru” became Hadży1270 Seraja Szapszał. During the Soviet times Biblical “Seraja” was substituted by neutral Russian “Sergei”, whereas the name of his father, “Mordecai,” was referred to as “Mark.” Thus, in the end, Szapszał became Seraja (or Sergei) Markovich Szapszał/Shapshal. To give another example, Troki ḥazzan Szemaja ben Abraham Firkowicz in the interwar period became Szymon, syn Adolfa, and then Russian Semen Adolfovich Firkovich; nevertheless, in the community documents in Karaim he was referred to as Szemaja uwłu Abraham Firkowicz. Famous Karaite exegete Pinachas Malecki started to be posthumously referred to either Finneas or Felix Malecki. Furthermore, a new tendency appeared in the replacement of Biblical Hebrew names with their variants used by the Tatars, Arabs, and other Muslim people. In this way, Polish Karaites named Mosze (Moses/Mosheh) started to be called Musa, Solomon – Suleiman, Abraham – Ibrahim, Szałom – Selim, etc. Furthermore, in 1939, with the growth of Nazism and anti-Semitism in Europe, there appeared the practice of replacing typically Karaite surnames of Halicz origin, which sounded conspicuously Jewish. Most typical among the Halicz Karaites were such surnames as Nowachowicz (from “Nowach” – a Karaim form of Heb. “Noaḥ”), Eszwowicz (from “Eszwa/ Yeshu>ah”), Leonowicz (from “Levi/Leon”), Zarachowicz, Ickowicz, Mordkowicz, Szulimowicz, Abrahamowicz, et al. – all of them, perhaps without a single exception, derivatives of Hebrew names with the Polish ending “-icz.” Surprisingly, some of the family names reflected not the Polish, but the Polish-Yiddish pronunciation of the Hebrew names (e.g. Icko instead of Polish “Izaak,” Mordko instead of “Mordechaj,” Szulim instead of “Szałom” etc.).1271 These family names were given to the Karaites at the end of the eighteenth century, most likely by the local Austrian officials, apathetic toward differences between Karaite, Yiddish, and Polish pronunciations of Hebrew. Nevertheless, it appears that the Karaites themselves never objected to surnames of a Jewish “nature” until 1939, when any association with the Jewish civilization became, at best, unwelcome. Thus, in accordance with the new reform, the family name Ickowicz was to be replaced with “Isakowicz”, Eszwowicz with “Jewsiewicz”,

1269 Hecht, Karaimi: “Synowie zakonu”, 34. 1270 The Hebrew honorary title Yeru[shalmi] (the pilgrim to Jerusalem) was replaced with Turkic equivalent Hadży. 1271 Grzegorzewski, “Türk-tatarischer Dialekt,” 48; cf. Fahn “Le-qorot,” 48, ft. 1. 264 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

Mordkowicz with “Markowicz”, Zoruchowicz with “Zarachowicz”, and Szulimowicz with “Sulimowicz.”1272 The programme of the reformation of the Karaite family names was not fully realized. Our current research reveals only one surname (Szulimowicz – Sulimowicz) that was actually changed. Nevertheless, the other part of this reform – replacement of Hebrew first names was certainly successful. As a result of this reform, many Polish- Lithuanian Karaites stopped using their original Hebrew names and started taking on their Muslim or Christian equivalents.

4.3.4 New Turkic Calendar and Names of Religious Holidays

Having started his dejudaization reforms, Szapszał certainly realized the necessity of transforming the Karaite religious calendar with its almost exclusive use of Hebrew terminology thereby explicitly demonstrating the Judaic nature of the Karaite religious tradition. Szapszał’s calendar reform was one of the most important and boldest of his dejudaization changes. Since the very beginning of their movement, the Karaites had used Hebrew names of the months and celebrated practically the same religious holidays as the Rabbinic Jews, although their interpretation sometimes, as did the appearance of some holidays and observances of fasts.1273 The fact that the East European Karaites used exclusively and names of the months is reflected in numerous printed and handwritten prayer-books, calendrical and astronomical treatises, correspondence and many other sources.1274 In accordance with Szapszał’s new calendar, introduced in the end of the 1920s – early 1930s, the Hebrew names of the months and holidays were replaced with Turkic names, ostensibly used by the Karaites in preceding centuries. According to Szapszał’s new concept of the Karaite religious tradition, the Turks- Karaites had been initially using Turkic names of the months. However, later, under the pressure of Mosaic religion, they started using Hebrew terminology. How did the ḥachan arrive at this conclusion? According to Szapszał’s own assertions, while visiting

1272 MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1064/1, fol. 71; no. 1064/2, fols. 143, 144. 1273 E.g. the Karaites do not celebrate Hanukah as a post-biblical holiday. For more information on the Karaite religious calendar and holidays, see Magdi Shamuel, “The Karaite Calendar: Sanctification of the New Moon by Sighting,” in KJ, 591-629; Samuel ben Moses al-Maghribi, “The Karaite Holidays,” in Karaite Anthology: Excerpts from the Early Literature, ed. Leon Nemoy (New Haven, 1952), 196-229; Aaron ben Elijah, “The Karaite Holidays,” in ibid, 172-189. For the complete bibliography, see BK, 424-437. 1274 E.g. the Karaite calendar from 1735 to 1790 at the end of Meqqabeṣ niddeḥey Yisrael (Qale, 1934); cf. Moledot le-34 shanim mi shnat 5567 >ad shnat 5600, ed. Isaac ben Solomon (Qale, 1805/1806); Duvan, Katekhizis, 82-83; M.Y. Firkowicz, Karaimskii katikhizis vkrattse (Melitopol, 1915), 33-34; for the complete bibliography, see BK, 424-437. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 265

the Karaite prayer house in Hasköy quarter of Istanbul in the 1920s, he discovered a copy of the Karaite prayer book commonly known as “Mekkabech”.1275 At the end of this book he discovered a note in a Turkic language in Hebrew characters containing a small glossary with Hebrew names of the months and their Turkic equivalents.1276 According to Szapszał this was a pristine calendar of the Turkic Karaites which they used before they converted to the Karaite Mosaic faith; the Karaites had originally referred to the months by the Turkic names, but by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they had forgotten them and substituted them with Hebrew names. He first published his discovery in his study in 1928.1277 By 1929, Szapszał’s associates were using the new Turkic names.1278 In 1931/1932 Szapszał publicly announced that from then onwards East European Karaites should “return” to their “original” tradition of using only Turkic names, as being more appropriate for them as they are a Turkic people.1279 It is very likely that this is a case of dealing with one of Szapszał’s forgeries. There are many strange details surrounding the claim of an allegedly pristine Turkic calendar. The original of this note had been seen only by Szapszał; modern scholars have at their disposal only its facsimile, published by Tadeusz Kowalski. Let us analyze the note from a palaeographic and historical point of view. In fact, the folio of “Mekkabech”, wherein this calendar note was inscribed, contains two handwritten notes. One of them is written in Hebrew; the other one, with the calendar, is almost entirely in Turkish or Crimean Tatar (definitely not in Karaim), in Hebrew characters. The question arises: why would the Hebrew-speaking author of the first note suddenly switch the language of the second note to Turkish or Crimean Tatar? In 1737, when this note was allegedly written, it was extremely seldom that Karaites would write in Turkic languages – the dominant written lingua of that time was Hebrew. In the

1275 Meqqabeṣ niddeḥey Yisrael (Qale, 1934). I used a copy of this prayer book originally belonging to Jacob Sinani, son of Moses Sinani-Yerushalmi of Qusdina (Constantinople). In the nineteenth century, this book found its way to the Łuck Karaite community. It was stamped with a seal, bearing inscriptions in Hebrew and Russian; the Russian inscription mentioned that the book was from “the Karaite qehilah of Łuck” (ibid., fol. mem [40])). It later became a possession of Szapszał. The book contains Szapszał’s numerous marginal notes and corrections of a linguistic character (LMAB F. 143, no. 1178). Another copy of Meqqabeṣ, also with numerous handwritten marginalia, is kept in LMAB F. 305, no. 20. Neither of these copies has a “Turkic calendar” analysed in this subsection. 1276 A photo of the glossary is kept in LMAB F. 143, no. 1179; it is reproduced in Tadeusz Kowalski, “Zu den türkischen Monatsnamen,” Archiv orientální 2 (1930): 3-26. 1277 KKT as republished in Çulha, “Sereya Şapşal’a,” 129-130. 1278 See references to Turkic and Hebrew names of the months in accordance with Szapszał’s new calendar in Szemaja-bień-Awraham [Firkowicz], “Jarych sahyncz abajły,” 46-48. To my knowledge, this is the first printed use of Szapszał’s Turkic calendar. 1279 The story of the “discovery” of this calendar is narrated in Kowalski, “Zu den türkischen Monatsnamen” and in [Aleksander Mardkowicz], “Mekabbec da biźnin łuwachłarymyz,” in Łuwachłar dert jiłha (5693-5696) (Łuck 1932), 10. 266 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

eighteenth century the Istanbul Karaites would use either the Hebrew or Byzantine Greek that they inherited from their medieval forefathers, not Turkish. For Szapszał, however, both Crimean Turkish and Tatar were native languages. Although the handwriting in both notes looks very similar, in fact, it is more than likely that they were written by different hands. Before writing the first (Hebrew) note, its author imprinted special lines on which he intended to write the note. If one carefully compares both notes, one can clearly see that the first (Hebrew) note is written below the lines, while the second (CrTat. in Hebrew characters) is written above the lines. This also produces a somewhat strange impression. Furthermore, the Hebrew date above the second note is written according to the praṭ gadol (Heb. “large i.e. 5497 of Hebrew calendar or 1737). However, the) ' ה'ת'צ'ז ;”[calculation [of years which ל'ק' author of the second note had written after the date with his own hand Heb. “small calculation [of years]”). It is highly improbable that) לפרט קטן stands for the author of the note could make such a rude mistake and confuse praṭ gadol with (1737) ١٧٣٧ praṭ qaṭan (it is also interesting to notice on the right margin the date of written in pencil in Arabic numerals, apparently by Szapszał himself). Furthermore, the standard ;ל'ק' as לפרט קטן it is highly unusual that the author of the note abbreviated The abbreviation .ל'ק' but not ,ל''פק or ל'פ'ק' abbreviation for the “small calculation” is .is very seldom to be met in genuine Hebrew texts or tombstone inscriptions ל'ק' The note itself contains a number of strange details. Its first line contains a reference to ulugata sanavınıŋ ayları (CrTat. “months according to the calculation of the Great Father”). There is no reference to this “Ulug Ata calculation” in any of the Karaite manuscripts predating Szapszał’s time. However, from the end of the 1920s, Szapszał actively started using it and even stated that the Karaite Turkic folk calendar had been based on this “calculation of the Great Father”. The note starts calculating the year from the spring month of Nisan and equates it to the Turkic month of artaryk. This also looks highly unusual: in that period, the Karaites, as well as the Rabbanites, began the new year in autumn, in the month of Tishrei and not in Nisan! Shifting the beginning of the new year from Tishrei to Nisan (artaryk) was included in Szapszał’s subsequent calendar reform. The Turkic calendar of the note also appears unusual. Most of its names do not have parallels in any other folk calendar of other Turkic peoples, including those of the Kypchaks and Crimean Tatars, from whom the Karaites borrowed their Turkic languages.1280 Even the Karaites themselves informed Liebmann Hersch in Troki in 1934 that such words simply did not exist in their language.1281 According to Peter

1280 Szapszał’s Turkic names of the months, for example, are not attested in any traditional Turkic calendrical system analyzed in Louis Bazin, Les systèmes chronologiques dans le monde Turc ancient (Budapest/Paris, 1991). 1281 “...ils m’affirmaient que pareils mots n’existaient pas dans leur langue” (Hersch, “Les langues des inscriptions,” 267 (ft.)). Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 267

Golden, “Shapshal’s forms have the look of invented names. None of them correspond to the Cumanic system, which has largely been Russianized today (cf. Qarachay). Some are clear, e.g. jaz aj/yaz ay (“summer month”), kys aj/qïš ay (“winter month”), karakys aj/qaraqïš ay (“deep winter month;” kara kış (lit. “black winter”) is used in Turkish to describe the harsh winter season, but not as the name of a month). This seems to me to be another of Shapshal’s creations… The Karaites would have no reasons to create Turkic names for Christian months and would have used the standard Hebrew names. Alphabets and calendrical usages were quite conservative.”1282 All of the aforementioned lead one to conclude that this calendrical note was most likely composed and inserted on the folio of “Mekkabech” by Szapszał. It was apparently done by him the same way he inserted his other forgeries – the song of Crimean peoples and the story about Timofei Chmielnicki – on the folios of Karaite printed books and genuine manuscripts (for details, see 6.2.1). Even if this calendrical note were genuine (which is highly unlikely), it would be the only testimony to the fact that the East European Karaites ever used Turkic names of the months. As has been mentioned above, all other manuscripts and printed Karaite prayer-books and calendars in Hebrew, Russian and Karaim use only Hebrew terms for the holidays and months.1283 The only exception is the book Moledot le-34 shanim mi shnat 5567 >ad shnat 5600 (1805/1806) in which one can also see the Turkic equivalents of the European months’ names.1284 However, these Turkic names were completely different from those “found” by Szapszał in Istanbul. Furthermore, there is no indication in the book that these Turkic equivalents had ever been in use in the Karaite community: it seems that Isaac ben Solomon, the editor of the book, provided them together with Christian and Muslim names of the months simply to help his Karaite readers to navigate through different calendars which had existed in the Russian empire at that time. This Turkic calendar was also incomplete (e.g. offering no indication as to how to name January, July and August), which made it useless for liturgical purposes. To give an example, Isaac ben Solomon refers several times to a given Hebrew month as a hodesh shelanu (“our month”)1285 – which argues that Hebrew months were the only months that the Karaites considered “theirs”. Eliyahu Kazas, in the 1890s, informed Wilhelm Radloff of the existence of three Turkic names of the months – çürük ay, küz ay, and sohum ay.1286 The fact that this great

1282 P. Golden to M. Kizilov (31.10.2013). 1283 For the bibliography of Karaite calendars, see BK, 424-437. 1284 Moledot le-34 shanim, fol. 38v; cf. B. Kokenai to S. Szapszał, 1945: MS LMAB F. 143, no. 375. 1285 E.g. Moledot le-34 shanim, fol. 40. 1286 W.W. Radloff (Radlov), Opyt slovaria tiurkskikh narechii/Versuch eines Wörterbuches der Türk- Dialecte, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1893), 9; cf. Léon Cahun, Introduction à l’histoire de l’Asie (Paris, 1896), 69-70. These three names of the months correspond to those from Szapszał’s calendar. There is no doubt that Szapszał, who read Radloff’s studies, used these three names while inventing his Turkic calendar. 268 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

Karaite scholar knew only three months by Turkic names, is also evidence that the Karaites used only Hebrew calendrical terminology. An interesting manuscript from Lithuania, which contains various folk (i.e. unofficial non-religious) materials from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, contains references only Hebrew and Polish names of the months. This is more evidence that even non-religious Karaites had no knowledge of Turkic names of the months, either in the early modern period or in the nineteenth century.1287 In passing, one can also question the authenticity of the so-called Karaite tradition of Turkic names for the days of the week that had been so actively popularized by Szapszał and his associates in the interwar period.1288 Present research reveals that the first reference to the existence of the Turkic names of the Karaite calendar dates back to 1923 and belongs to a non-Karaite Turkologist, A. Samoilovich (Szapszał’s student in St. Petersburg).1289 It appears that not a single reference can be found to Turkic names for the days of the week in original archival or in published Karaite documents predating 1917. One cannot help noticing the evident similarity between Szapszał’s and Atatürk’s calendar reforms. In 1926, Atatürk replaced the traditional Arabic lunar-based Hijri calendar, used for religious matters, and the Ottoman Rumi calendar with the new Turkish Gregorian calendar. Although some months of this calendar revealed Arabic () roots (şubat, nisan, haziran, temmuz), they had nothing in common with the traditional religious Muslim (Arabic) calendar. Four names of the months which had Ottoman origin (Teşrin-i Evvel, Teşrin-i Sânî, Kânûn-ı Evvel and Kânûn-ı Sânî) were later replaced by Turkic names Ekim, Kasım, Aralık and Ocak in 1945. Thus, it is very likely that Szapszał took Atatürk’s eradication of Arabic religious calendar as a template for his calendar reform, directed at the eradication of Hebrew calendar.

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The names of religious holidays also underwent Turkic replacements. According to Szapszał’s logic, the Turkic Karaites were expected to have accepted “pristine” Turkic names for Hebrew holidays. For example, Pesaḥ (a.k.a. Ḥag ha-Maṣot or Passover; in earlier Karaim tradition also chydzy/chydży macałłarnyn) began to be referred to in the new Karaite calendar as the chydzy/chydży tymbyłłarnyn (“the holiday of tymbyłs”; tymbył is a Karaim word to denote Heb. maṣah). The traditional holiday of Sukkot began to be called in Karaim ałac(z)ych or chydz(ż)y ałac(z)ychłarnyn (“the holiday of

1287 Piotr Muchowski, Folk Literature of the Polish-Lithuanian Karaites. Abkowicz 3 Manuscript, Part 2 (Paris, 2013), 382-383. 1288 E.g. KKT as republished in Çulha, “Sereya Şapşal’a,” 130. 1289 A. Samoilovich, “Nazvaniia dnei nedeli u tiurkskikh narodov,” Yafeticheskii sbornik 2 (1923): 99-119. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 269

huts”), Yom Kippur – bosatłych kini/boszatłych kiuniu (“the Day of Atonement”), Simḥat Torah – bijency Toranyn (“joy of the Torah”), Ḥag ha-Shavuot – chydz(ż)y aftałarnyn (“holiday of the weeks”), Rosh ha-shanah (or Yom Teruah)1290 – byrhy kiuniu (“the day of trumpeting”). Similar Turkic equivalents were found for all other traditional Karaite and Rabbanite holidays.1291 It is not difficult to notice that most of these new Turkic names of the holidays represented direct Karaim calques from original Hebrew names. Sometimes Szapszał replaced traditional Hebrew terms with Arabic and Turkic words which were phonetically close to Hebrew, but had absolutely different meanings. Thus, for example, the day of Khurban ha-bait (Heb. “destruction of the ”) was replaced with Turkic Kurban (“[day of] Sacrifice”). Szapszał’s explanation that the Karaite holiday of Kurban (sic) comes from sacrifices made on that day1292 is absolutely false: in genuine Karaite tradition Khurban was a day of commemoration of the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar on the 10th of Av.1293 On this day, which is a day of fasting and mourning, both Karaites and Rabbanites never made any sacrifices. It certainly had nothing to do with the Muslim ) which is celebrated on the 10th of Dhu al Hijja and isعيد األضحى) holiday of Eid ul-Adha known in Turkish as the Kurban Bayramı (“Feast of Sacrifice”). The beginning of the calendar year was officially moved from the Hebrew month of Tishrei (dubbed, according to Szapszał’s new terminology ajryksy aj; both correspond to September-October) to Nisan (according to Szapszał’s calendar – artaryk aj or March-April). Perhaps this was done in order not to celebrate the Karaite New Year (Rosh ha-shanah or Yom Teruah, now Turkic byrhy kiuniu) at the time when the Rabbanites celebrated Rosh ha-Shanah (New Year).1294 The aforementioned Turkicization of the calendar terminology was intended to produce the impression upon any external observer that the Karaite religious tradition was somewhat similar to that of the Muslim Turks and Arabs, and thus make Karaite religion look less similar

1290 Both Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Teruah can be found in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Karaite catechisms (Klimova, “Polish Catechism,” 499; cf. “The Day of Shouting (Yom Terouah – Rosh Hashana – New Year),” KJA Bulletin (Sept. 1989): 2-3; Philip E. Miller, “Karaite Perspectives on ‘Yôm tĕrû´â,’” in Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine, ed. Robert Chazan, William W. Hallo, and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Winona Lake, IN, 1999), 537-541. 1291 See the list of the Karaite holidays with new Turkic names in AAN MWRiOP, no. 1464, fols. 71-72; Firkowicz, Karaj Kołtchałary, 22-27; cf. Klimova, “Polish Catechism,” 496-502. 1292 This is how he explained it to Tadeusz Kowalski (Kowalski, “Zu den türkischen Monatsnamen,” 14). 1293 According to the Karaite tradition, the Temple was destroyed on the 10th and not on the 9th of Av (thus, ‘asarah be-av and not tisha be-av; see “Tishah o >asarah be-av,” Dover Bne Miqra 22 (1976): 2, 13). 1294 In fact, the tradition to start the calendar year in Nisan had been an ancient Karaite custom (in accordance with Ex. 12:2), which was later replaced by the tradition of starting the year in Tishrei (most likely under the influence of Rabbanite environment). 270 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

to Judaism. The artificial character of this reform is obvious to anyone knowledgeable about the Karaite religious tradition and calendar. In spite of the fact that some educated Karaites could be aware of the existence of the Arabic and Turkic names of the months, before Szapszał’s time the Karaites of Eastern Europe used exclusively the Hebrew calendar system. Furthermore, as is clear from archival materials, in the second half of the 1930s the great founder of the new Turkic Karaite calendar himself continued using the Hebrew names of religious holidays in his private diaries.1295 Thus, beginning in the early 1930s, the Karaites began officially to live in accordance with the new Turkic calendar and use Turkic terminology to denote their traditional religious holidays and fasts. In our opinion, both Turkic names of the months and of the holidays were invented by Szapszał himself and had never been in use among the East European Karaites before the 1930s. We examine the Karaite community’s reactions to Szapszał’s reforms in 4.4.

4.3.5 “Ecumenisation” of the Karaite Religious Creed

This aspect of Szapszał’s reform activity did not have parallels either in Turkey or in any other country in Europe. In the 1930s, Szapszał and his followers attempted to present the Karaite religion to external readers (and apparently to Karaite audience as well) not as a non-Talmudic variety of Judaism, but as an absolutely distinct tradition – a type of “ecumenical” mixture of Mosaic beliefs, Islam, and Christianity, with elements of paganism. Szapszał was the first Karaite ideological leader to claim that the early Karaites – and particularly the founder of the Karaite movement Anan ben David – recognised the prophetic nature of Jesus and Mohammed (Muḥammad). Evidence shows that Szapszał formulated his revolutionary ideas for the first time in his Kırım Karay Türkleri in 1928. According to Dan Shapira, Szapszał emphasised there that Anan had recognised Mohammed and Jesus (Yeşû hâsâdîk/‘Îsâ al-Sâdiq) as prophets sent to the Gentiles. Szapszał stated that early Christianity was highly similar to Karaism, and only later in its development did Christianity adopt characteristics which drew a clear-cut borderline between it and Karaism (e.g. the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Jesus’ role in that concept as the divine “Son of God”, the use of icons, abolition of circumcision, the transfer of the Sabbath to Sunday, etc.). Furthermore, Szapszał claimed that Christianity did not completely separate from Karaism until in the eighth century. According to Szapszał, Anan’s teachings derived from those

1295 S. Szapszał’s private diary, 1920s-30s: LMAB F. 143, no. 917, fol. 128r. In his letter to Zarach Zarachowicz of 1948, Szapszał greeted the latter on the holiday of Yom Kippur (sic) and inserted a phrase in Hebrew, in Latin characters (S. Szapszał to Z. Zarachowicz, Wilno/Vilnius, 8.10.1948, Russian; the Yurchenko MSS). Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 271

of Jesus; Anan ben David proscribed his followers to avoid intermarriage and any dealings with the Jews (!), thus establishing a completely separate religion.1296 He repeated these radical “ecumenical” statements in many of his later published or archival studies, in memoranda sent to state officials, and during private and official meetings with Karaite and non-Karaite audience alike.1297 In 1932, he repeated what he had written about Christianity and Islam in his Kırım Karay Türkleri to the Swiss writer, Hans Zbinden.1298 In a 1936 interview with French journalist Abel Moreau, he said “We call him “Echou Hatchadik”, that is the “Just”. For us Christ did not modify the Old Testament. On the contrary, he affirmed it... Many of us believe that Christ was a Karaite… Christ is for us a great prophet, but not the Messiah.”1299 These statements caused much interest on the part of Christian missionaries and Muslim thinkers and ideologists. In 1928, Szapszał was visited by the Reverend I.E. Davidson, director of the British Mission to the Jews, who later sent him a copy of New Testament in Hebrew and wrote: “I was interested to learn that you accept the person of the Lord Jesus, as being the Son of God, Who made the Vicarious sacrifice for the sins of the whole World…”1300 In the 1930s there appeared many publications in the press which characterized the Karaites as those who at the same time recognized the prophetic nature of Moses, Mohammed and Jesus. In 1936 Mehmed Handžić (1906– 1944, Sarajevo), the leader of Bosnian Muslim revivalists, professor at Gazi Husrev- beg madrasa in Sarajevo, dedicated an article to the Karaites whom he characterized as those who believe in Mohammed and Jesus.1301 It seems that Szapszał personally met with Handžić during his visit to Sarajevo.1302 Szapszał, in his turn, also tried to establish contacts with noted Christian authorities. In the 1930s he gave several of his publications to Corrado Gini with the request that they be delivered to the Pope Pius XI. According to Gini, the pontiff read these publications with interest.1303 In 1935, Szapszał sent to the Vatican library his

1296 Shapira, “Jewish pan-Turkist,” 361-362. 1297 See Seraja Szapszał, “Przeszłość i teraźniejszość Karaimów,” Wiedza i Życie 3 (1934): 215; idem, “Corrado Gini, ‘I Caraimi di Polonia e Lituania’ (Recenzja),” MK 12 (1938): 111-112; idem, “Alexandre Baschmakoff, ‘Cinquante siècles d’évolution ethnique autour de la Mer Noire’ (Paris, 1937) (Recenzja),” MK 12 (1938): 112-118; cf. his statements in AAN MWRiOP, no. 1462, fol. 2; ibid., no. 1464, fol. 129. 1298 Zbinden, Polen, 92-95. 1299 Abel Moreau, “En Pologne. A Troki, chez le Hachan des Karaїmes,” Revue Bleue 6 (1936): 392 cf. Green, “The Karaite Community in Interwar Poland,” 107). Abel Moreau (1893 – 1977) was a French writer, the author of the novel L’île du Paradis (Paris, 1935). Echou Hatchadik is a French rendering of the Hebrew Yeshuah ha-ṣadiq (Jesus the Righteous); in accordance with the Crimean Karaite pronunciation Szapszał spelled ṣade as ch (hence hatchadik and not haṣadik). 1300 Rev. I.E. Davidson to S. Szapszał (29.07.1929, English) in MS LMAB F. 143, no. 218, Fol.1. 1301 Hadži Mehmed Handžić, “Karaimi (Karaiti),” Novi Behar (01.11.1936): 92-94 (in Bosnian). 1302 MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1492. 1303 MS LMAB F. 143, no. 211, fols. 23-24. 272 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

study on Catholic influence upon the images of Muslim saints in Persia. He received a letter of gratitutde from Cardinal Pacelli, on the Pope’s behalf.1304 Szapszał demonstrated his “ecumenist” perspective with regard to religious differences to Marian Hepke, the traveller and journalist who visited the ḥakhan in his apartment in Wilno in 1935. Szapszał outlined to the visitor the peaceful picture of serene coexistence of eight various denominations in Wilno and told him a story about a religious dispute between a Turk and a Greek which had been solved by a certain passing-by Muslim scholar. By using a philosophical metaphor, the Muslim scholar showed to the both sides that each of them was, in his own way, correct and that real truth can hardly to be found.1305 One cannot help noticing here the casuistic manner of Szapszal’s rhetoric in arguing for harmony among such divergent traditions. In fact, such argumentation, became his life-motto – which he also made obligatory for his followers. Szapszał’s idea about the Karaites’ alleged recognition of Mohammed and Jesus as prophets was further disseminated by his followers, the interwar ḥazzanim. This is evident in the brochure “On the Karaites in Poland” published by the Troki ḥazzan Szemaja/Szymon Firkowicz in 1938.1306 Furthermore, in an interview, given apparently after the war, Firkowicz told the reporter that the Karaite faith “is close to Islam, although the Karaites recognise Mohammed and Christ as equivalent Prophets.”1307 In passing, one cannot help noticing that part of Szapszał’s agenda involved making the Karaite religion appear somewhat similar to Christianity. This is why Karaite religious holidays were sometimes called by Christian Polish names: Pesaḥ = Wielkanoc (Pol. Easter); Shavu>ot = Zielone Święto (Pol. “Green holiday,” i.e. Pentecost).1308 Szapszał also tried to introduce a new terminology for Karaite spiritual officials. As one visitor to Troki noticed, there was a tendency to replace traditional Hebrew terms with Polish-Catholic ones: ḥazzan was called “ksiądz” (priest), ḥakham – “biskup” (bishop), shammash – “zakrystjan” (sacristan).1309 In the 1940s there was a tendency to spell the term ḥazzan as hassan – apparently to provide this term with a supposed “Muslim” flavour.1310 However, presentation of Karaism as some sort of mixed Mosaic-Islamo- Christian faith was not enough for Szapszał. In 1938, under the influence of pseudo-

1304 “Błogosławieństwo Jego Świętobliwości Papieża Piusa XI,” MK 11 (1936): 109-110. 1305 Hepke, Wilno, 72-73. 1306 Firkowicz, O Karaimach w Polsce, 4-5. 1307 “Karaimi, ogórki, historja”, Express, n.d. (a fragment of this article without the date of its publication was found by me in the Yurchenko MSS). 1308 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1464, fols. 71-72. 1309 Blum, “Ha-Qara

scholarly studies by Alexandre Baschmakoff (Башмаков)1311 and Corrado Gini, his theological doctrine underwent a new change. In his review of Baschmakoff’s study, Szapszał stated that the Karaite religious doctrine, which included elements of pre- Talmudic Judaism together with the recognition of the prophetic nature of Jesus and Mohammed, also comprised elements of pagan practices typical of the Chuvashes (!).1312 These non-existent “Karaite” (and Chuvash) practices consisted of the veneration of trees, specifically of the so-called “sacred oaks” growing in the Karaite cemetery near Çufut Kale in Crimea.1313 To our knowledge, this seems to be the first time when Szapszał openly announced that Karaite religion included pagan practices – and the importance of this statement cannot and should not be underestimated. This was, perhaps, the first case in Karaite history when a Karaite religious or secular leader (furthermore, a head of several comparatively large communities) ventured to say such a thing.

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Needless to say, the main postulates of his “ecumenical” creed were invented by Szapszał himself and were not based on any historical evidence: the Karaites never considered Mohammed and Jesus to be prophets (even in the course of Szapszał’s reforms of the 1930s – 1950s the Karaites certainly never included the names of Mohammed and Jesus in public prayers, liturgy and prayer books). Nevertheless, in the 1930s–1940s, the questionable nature of Gini’s and Szapszał’s argumentation concerning the Karaites’ closeness to the Chuvashes and the Khazars seemed far less evident than today, since the scholarship of that time possessed much less information about Khazar history and the methodology of anthropological work. Today the nonsensical nature of Szapszał’s statements is more than evident. Indeed, the pagan beliefs of the Chuvashes did include the veneration of trees. However, the

1311 Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bashmakov/Baschmakoff (1859-1943) was a Russian scholar, supporter of Marr’s Japhetic theory. His letters to Szapszał are kept in LMAB F. 143, no. 191. 1312 The reference to the Chuvashes was included by him certainly under the influence of Gini’s “discovery” that the Chuvashes were anthropologically close to the East European Karaites (see 3.9). 1313 Szapszał, “Alexandre Baschmakoff,” 112-118. In this article and in KKT (1928) Szapszał used the Turkic toponym Balta Tiymez (“The axe may not touch”) to designate the valley of Jehosaphath near Çufut Kale in Crimea. This toponym, which is not attested in any historical source prior to Szapszał, was most likely simply invented by the Karaite leader. Cf. Alexandre Baschmakoff, Cinquante siècles d’évolution ethnique autour de la Mer Noire (Paris, 1937); idem, “Les origines ethniques des Сaraїtes de Crimée,” Journal Officiel de la République Française 232 (3.10.1935). Like Gini’s study, the aforementioned absolutely ignorant and pseudo-scholarly book by Baschmakoff was later often used by the Karaites to support their claim of non-Jewish origins to the Nazi and fascist authorities. 274 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

Karaites, rigorous monotheists, never practised such superstitious rituals.1314 Nor did the Karaites recognize the prophetic nature of Jesus and Mohammed. Indeed, there are a few medieval Arabic authors (al-Makrizi, Abu-l-Fida, and al-Shahrastani) who mentioned that Anan ben David and his followers were friendly with regard to Jesus and Mohammed. These sources, however, were composed by Arab (i.e. non- Karaite) authors who lived much later than the eighth century; furthermore, there was much difference between the Ananite and Karaite doctrine.1315 Finally, there is much difference between being friendly to the teachings of Jesus and Mohammed and recognizing them as prophets. None of the later authoritative Karaite authors (Yefet ben Eli, Aaron ben Elijah, Elijah Bashiachi, Isaac Troki, Solomon ben Aaron, Abraham Firkowicz, Mordecai Sułtański, Elijahu Kazaz etc.) had ever mentioned that the Karaites recognized Jesus and Mohammed as prophets. Numerous later Karaite exegetes criticized both Christianity and Islam.1316 In the 1940s, the tendency to present the Karaite religion as a mixture of Islamic, Mosaic and Christian tradition, was used by the Karaites in order to mask the Jewish character of their religion to the Nazi authorities.1317 Statements of some later Karaite authors (e.g. A. Zajączkowski, M.S. Sarach and Yu. Polkanov) about the “ecumenical” nature of Karaite religious tradition which includes Islamic, Christian and even pagan rituals take their roots certainly in Szapszał’s dejudaization reforms and are not based on any actually existing historical tradition. For the refutation of these “ecumenical” tendencies, see the statement of today’s Eupatoria ḥazzan, Victor/David Tiriyaki.1318 It is important to mention that in the interwar period a tendency to secession from Judaism due to fear of religious and racial persecution, similar to that postulated by Szapszał and his followers, was also present among Ashkenazic Jews.1319 Some interwar Jewish leaders attempted to introduce reforms highly similar to those of Szapszał. To give an example, Angelo Sacerdoti, the chief Rabbi of Rome, in the 1930s attempted to decrease the use of Hebrew as the liturgical language (one may recall that Szapszał, similarly, also tried to decrease the use of Hebrew in liturgy).1320 A few other examples also may be mentioned. However, secessions among the Ashkenazim

1314 For a critique of the non-existent cult of “sacred oaks” see Kizilov, Karaites through the Travelers’ Eyes, 124-126; Aleksandr Babadzhan, “O dubakh i posviashchennykh,” Caraimica 2 (2007): 34-36; idem, “O dębach i o wtajemniczonych,” Awazymyz 1 (2006). 1315 For more details on the attitude of the Ananites and early Karaites to Christianity and Islam, see Moshe Gil, “The Origins of the Karaites,” 89, 110; Camilla Adang, “The Karaites as Portrayed in Medieval Islamic Sources,” in KJ, 191, 196. 1316 Aaron ben Elijah, Eṣ ḥayyim (Gözleve/Eupatoria, 1847), 7. 1317 Müller, Religionswissenschaftliche Minoritätenforschung, 115-117; for more information concerning the Karaite strategy of the survival during WWII, see Chapter 5. 1318 As recorded by Vladimir Matveyev in his “Karaites in Crimea,” Frontier 11 (2006): 30-32. 1319 Ruppin, Jewish Fate, 282-290. 1320 Sarfatti, Jews, 75. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 275

represented individual decisions that never had such an elaborate ideological background as Szapszał’s policy of “ecumenisation” and dejudaization of Karaite religious tradition.

Illustration 7: Szapszał’s Turkic “coat of arms” that replaced the Star of David at the gate of the Troki Karaite kenesa. Photo by M. Kizilov.

4.3.6 Changes in Traditional Symbolism and Invention of the Karaite “Coat of Arms”

As have been mentioned in subchapters 3.4.5 and 3.5.5 in the 1930s Szapszał and his followers began removing from the Polish-Lithuanian Karaite kenesalar images, reliefs and depictions of such traditional symbols of Judaism (Rabbanite and Karaite alike) as the Star of David and luḥot ha-brit (Heb. “tablets of Law”). In this way the Stars of David were removed from the gate and the top of the Troki and Halicz1321 kenesalar, while Tablets of Law – from the cupola of the Wilno kenesa. From the 1930s the Karaites stopped carving images of the Star of David on their tombstone

1321 Wachsmann, “Halitsch,” 13. See the photo of the Star of David on the top of the Halicz kenesa in Kizilov, Karaites of Galicia, 414, pl. 25. Ivan Yurchenko informed me that he had seen the Star of David, supposedly originating from the local Karaite synagogue, in a private collection in Halicz in 2002 (private communication, May, 2002). 276 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

monuments. Although the Star of David remained on earlier Karaite tombstones, in the 1930s many of them were removed or erased.1322 However, the empty space (in the physical and metaphorical senses of the word), which appeared as a result of the removal of Stars of David and other traditional symbols, was supposed to be filled by something else. In the late 1920s a new symbol for the East European Karaites was invented. It was intended to imitate the heraldic coats of arms of Polish-Lithuanian noble families on the one hand, and show the Karaites’ military valour and Turkic origin, on the other. Although some authors suggest that this Karaite “coat of arms” was designed by the Karaite artist, Lidja Szole (a.k.a. Lidia Karakasz-Szole; 1896-1943),1323 there is no doubt that the idea of the emergence of this new symbolism was created by Szapszał. As will be shown later, Szapszał was the first to interpret the symbols scratched on the defensive wall of Çufut Kale as the Karaite “bicorn and shield.” Before Szapszał’s arrival in Poland in 1928 these symbols were unknown to the local community – therefore, Szapszał was the only person who could suggest that Lidja Szole use them for the Karaite “coat of arms”. Furthermore, it seems that these Karaite “bicorn and shield” surfaced already in September 1928, during the ceremony of Szapszał’s inauguration to the office of the ḥakham, i.e. apparently before Szapszał got acquainted with Szole. During this ceremony he received the so-called “Altınbaş” (CrTat. “Golden head”) – a kind of a cane with a golden ball at the top with the depiction of a bicorn and a shield above the image of a castle. It was given to Szapszał by the oldest member of the community, 77-year-old Ławrynowicz.1324 Later Szapszał apparently requested Lidja Szole to create a Karaite “coat of arms” and use these two symbols for it. In the end, bicorn and shield were placed in the centre of the “coat of arms”. The ḥakham’s headgear and ṭallit gadol with ṣiṣit (chichit) were placed above these two symbols. The Eastern wall of Çufut Kale (or, according to some, the entrance to the Troki castle) was situated below. This imagery became the official “coat of arms” of the East European Karaites in the 1930s1325 – and continued to be used as such by all the Karaite communities in Eastern Europe even today. What is the actual historical origin of these two mysterious fork- and heart-shaped symbols which Szapszał interpreted as the non-existent Karaite weaponry? These two signs were carved (or, rather, scratched) on the marble plate placed above the entrance to Büyük Kapı/Biyuk Kapu (Turk./CrTat. “Large Gate”) of the Eastern defensive wall of

1322 During the field work on the Karaite cemetery in Troki in 2014 I discovered at least six cases of erasure of Stars of David from local tombstones; although no further evidence is available, it seems that this was done in the 1930s. 1323 Aleksandr Dziuba, “Kop’io i shchit. Kak drevnie tamgi stali gerbom karaimov,” IKDU 7 (16): 8-10; Mariusz Pawelec, “Płomień zgasły przedwcześnie,” Awazymyz 2011, 1 (30), 12-14. 1324 S. Klaczyński, “Uroczystość ingresu J.E. Hachana Karaimów, Seraja Ben Szapszała,” KW (12.09.1928); “Ingres Hachama Karaimów,” Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny 256 (15.09.1928). 1325 See MK 2:3-4 (1931), figs. 5-6. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 277

Çufut Kale in Crimea. In fact these symbols could hardly have any relationship to the local Karaite community. Most likely, they were the symbols (so-called tamğalar) of the Yaşlov (Yaş-Dağı) bey clan of Crimean Tatars who were de facto owners of Çufut Kale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A strong argument in favour of this hypothesis is the presence of exactly the same signs on the Middle Gate (“Orta Kapı”) of Çufut Kale. The Middle Gate most likely belongs to the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries. This was the time when the Karaite community of Çufut Kale was not very numerous, and hardly influential enough to put its putative community signs at the central gate of the Muslim town. Moreover, it is very unlikely that the Karaites, skilful carvers and sculptors, would engrave such a simple, rough emblem, without biblical allusions and ornate carving. 1326 Although these two signs, which were emblems of Tatar clans, had no relationship to the Karaite community whatsoever, the Karaite nineteenth-century intellectuals began interpreting them as having belonged to the local community. The Karaite ḥazzan of Çufut Kale, Solomon Beim, was one of the first to pay attention to these signs in the second half of the nineteenth century. He interpreted them as symbols of the military victories (stirrups, pitchfork, and a bullet) of the forty Karaite families who had fought together with Toktamish and Mengli Giray.1327 As has been mentioned above, this interpretation did not have any historical background. Simcha Saadievich Eljaszewicz/El’iashevich (1911) suggested an absolutely different interpretation of these signs: according to him, the heart-shaped sign was in fact the Hebrew letter samekh while the fork-shaped sing – the letter >ayin. When grouped together, they constituted the initial letters of the placename Sel>a [ha] >ibrim.1328 This is how, according to Eljaszewicz, the fortress was referred to by the Karaites in the preceding centuries. The unfeasibility of this theory is self-evident. Szapszał, who carefully read Beim’s publications, in 1928 suggested a different interpretation, similar to that offered by Beim. In his opinion, they were depictions of Karaite military weapons: the fork-shaped sign (“senek tamğa”) was, in his opinion, a kind of Karaite military weapon-bicorn, whereas the heart-shaped sign, “kalkan tamğa” (Turk. “shield sign”), was the depiction of shield.1329 In addition to all the aforementioned historical factors against this hypothesis, there is also an additional argument of physical nature against it: within the heart-shaped sign one can clearly see two round incisions which is impossible for a shield. In the 1930s (most likely, between 1933 and 1935), these Tatar emblems replaced traditional Karaite symbols – the Star of David and Tablets of the Law in the Troki and

1326 For more details, see Kizilov, Karaites through the Travelers’ Eyes, 193-195; A.G. Gertsen and Y.M. Mogarichev, Krepost’ Dragotsennostei. Chufut-Kale. Kyrk-Or (Simferopol, 1993), 75-77. 1327 Beim, Pamiat’, 37. 1328 [Simcha Saadievich Eljaszewicz/El’iashevich], “Tainstvennaia nadpis’,” KZh 3-4 (1911): 114. 1329 KKT as republished in Çulha, “Sereya Şapşal’a,” 141-142; cf. Kowalski, “Turecka monografja,” 6. 278 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

Wilno Karaite -kenesalar. In Halicz the local Karaites simply removed the Star of David, but did not replace it with these tamğalar. However, the Galicians were perhaps the first to show the new coat of arms to a wide Polish audience. In 1933, Poland celebrated the 250th anniversary of the victory in the battle of Vienna (1683). On 17 September 1933, the city council of Stanisławów organized a solemn ceremony to commemorate this event. The Karaite delegation, which consisted of a few Galician Karaites, was dressed in slightly modified traditional clothing and carried a “Karaite banner” of white, blue, and yellow colours.1330 Moreover, they carried a large shield with a depiction of the aforementioned “coat of arms” with the inscription “Karaimi Haliccy opiekunowi swemu królowi Janowi III-mu w hołdzie” (the Halicz Karaites in homage to their patron Jan III Sobieski). According to an eyewitness report, the Karaite delegates were greeted with the words “Bravo and long live our Karaites!”1331 There is no doubt that it was Szapszał who gave them detailed instructions regarding their dress and the shield with the “coat of arms.”1332

Illustration 8: Szapszał’s Turkic “coat of arms” the way it was presented in Myśl Karaimska 2: 3-4 (1930).

1330 Again, this “banner with national colours” (chorągiew o barwach narodowych) seems to be Szapszał’s invention. 1331 [Leon Szulimowicz], “Karaimi Haliccy opiekunowi swemu królowi Janowi III-mu w hołdzie,” MK 10 (1934): 118-120; cf. the draft of this article in MS LMAB F. 143, no.1587. 1332 Z. Nowachowicz to S. Szapszał, Halicz, 28 Aug. 1933 (LMAB F. 305, no. 511, fols. 58r-59r). Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 279

In the 1930s this newly invented “coat of arms” was placed on various community seals, official and internal Karaite documents, on the bookcase used for storing the community archive,1333 etc. Thus it became the central symbol of East European Karaism after the 1930s, having completely ousted out such traditional symbols as the Star of David, Tablets of the Law and seven-branch candelabrum. This “coat of arms” is still used by Polish, Lithuanian, Crimean and Russian Karaites as the main symbol of Karaism in Eastern Europe, although hardly any member of these communities remembers now that its origins date back to the late 1920s and not to any medieval past.

4.3.7 Turkicization (Dejudaization) of the Karaites’ Historical Views and Cultural and Ethnic Identity

All the aforementioned Turkicization (dejudaization) changes were carried out by Szapszał with the intention of presenting the Karaites as Turks to Polish authorities and Turkicize the Karaites’ religious, cultural and ethnic identity. This new identity denied all historical links that, throughout the centuries, had connected the Karaites with Jewish civilization and with Jews in general. In order to achieve this end, Szapszał and his associates (Sz. Firkowicz, A. Mardkowicz, J. Łobanos, R. Abkowicz, S. Rudkowski and some others) published in the late 1920s/1930s a number of articles and brochures in various languages in the Karaite and non-Karaite press, delivered a number of public speeches, and propagated their Turkic vision of Karaite origins to visitors to Troki. Szapszał tried to prove his main idea – the ethnic origin of the East European Karaites from the Turkic Khazars – starting from his first publication of 1896.1334 Nevertheless, in order to “prove” the non-Semitic racial origin of the Karaites to the Karaites themselves and to a non-Karaite audience in the 1930s, Szapszał had to use a few new pseudo-scholarly eugenic theories attesting to the Karaites’ supposedly Khazar anthropological origins. Especially important for the transformation of his theory was the study by the fascist demographer Corrado Gini, who, for some reason, came to the conclusion that the Karaites in fact closely resembled not the Turkic Khazars, but Finno-Ugrian Chuvashes.1335 In order to comply with this new theory, Szapszał published in 1938 a small article, a review of Alexander Baschmakoff’s pseudo-scholarly anthropological monograph. There he announced that the Chuvashes were also to be included in the list of non-Semitic ancestors of the East European Karaites. He explained the presence of Chuvash blood in the Karaites

1333 This bookcase was donated to the community by president Mościcki and placed in the Troki kenesa. It can be still seen there by visitors to Troki. 1334 Szapszał, Karaimy i Chufut-Kale. 1335 See 3.9. 280 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

by the fact that the Chuvashes were assimilated by the Khazars, and thus became ancestors of the Karaites.1336 This was neither the first nor the last twist added by Szapszał to his Turkic theory. Professor Bruno Adler, for example, who had seen in Crimea in 1929/1930 an unpublished paper by Szapszał, mentioned that according to the latter, the Karaites were neither Jews nor Khazars, but members of a different Turkic entity.1337 Needless to say that Szapszał’s theory was not historically accurate and the participation of the Chuvashes, Khazars, and in the Karaites’ ethnogenesis is not reflected in any written, epigraphic or archaeological source.1338 Although the Turkicization (dejudaization) of the interwar Karaite community was to large extent a unique process, to some extent, it resembled the interwar de-Ottomanization1339 of Turkish society which, had to not only return to its Turkic identity, but also reconsider it. The Karaite community, which did not really have any Turkic historical past, simply had to invent it. Szapszał was successful in inventing for the Karaites the new Turkic calendar, symbols, to some extent, language, religion, creed, terminology and ultimately ethnic identity. Numerous published and archival materials testify that in the 1930s many (but not all!) Polish-Lithuanian Karaites indeed accepted Szapszał’s reforms and new Turkic identity.

4.3.8 Ways of Implementing Szapszał’s Turkic Doctrine in Interwar Poland

Having analyzed the character of Szapszał’s interwar Turkicization reforms, it is important to understand how exactly these changes were implemented. Active implementation of Szapszał’s reforms in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began in the late 1920s/early 1930s. Turkicization of the interwar Karaite community was a gradual process that started from initial, seemingly small and insignificant terminological reforms, and later resulted in a complete transformation of Karaite society. Turkicization found its first followers among the most emancipated segment of the Karaite intelligentsia, and only then was it disseminated amongst ordinary members of the community, who often failed to understand the necessity of eliminating “obsolete and inconvenient” Jewishness. As will be shown later, complete Turkicization of Karaite society was achieved, perhaps, only after the Second World

1336 Szapszał, “Alexandre Baschmakoff,” 112-118. 1337 Adler, “Krim-Karäer,” 114-115. 1338 For the detailed critique of the Khazar theory of the origins of the East European Karaites, see Kizilov, Mikhaylova, “Khazar Kaganate;” idem, “Khazary i Khazarskii kaganat;” Shapira, “Khazars and Karaites.” 1339 On de-Ottomanization, see Başkan, “Turkish Language Reform,” 99-101. Seraja Szapszał’s Reformist Activity from 1928 to 1939 281

War. There were a few ways to disseminate reforms: via printed word, through oral directives, financial channels, in official public speeches and excursions for tourists. Analysis of the Karaite press of the 1930s is, perhaps, the easiest way to follow the Turkicization of Karaite life in interwar Poland. Szapszał and his associates published a number of leaflets and articles in the aimed at the dissemination of his Turkic doctrine not only among the Karaites, but also among the Poles.1340 Calendars with new Turkic names of the months and holidays were printed and distributed among members of the communities. Today, many academic readers of these interwar publications will simply ignore them because of their appallingly pseudo-scholarly and amateur character. However, in the interwar period, the attitude towards the printed word was much more deferential and less critical than it is now. However, these publications do not provide enough information on the actual mode of introduction of the main postulates of Szapszał’s doctrine in different Karaite communities. If there were any written instructions as to the mode of dejudaization or Turkicization Karaite traditions and identity, they did not survive. Nevertheless, one may suggest that Szapszał gave his instructions (either in oral or written manner) to ḥazzanim who later transmitted them to their respective community members. It is known that, for example, in Troki kenesa the Star of David, which was above the aron ha-qodesh, was removed after Szapszał’s explanation (apparently, a public speech) to the community members. Later it was substituted by the image of the sun with rays.1341 To give another example, in 1933, Halicz was visited by the Troki ḥazzan Szemaja Firkowicz, one of the most active proponents of Szapszał’s doctrine. According to Izaak Abrahamowicz, he arrived in Halicz to introduce some changes in the internal order of the local kenesa and the manner of praying.1342 Abrahamowicz did not explain the exact nature of these “changes.” Nevertheless, one may assume that they were related to the wider usage of Karaim for liturgical purposes and the removal of some conspicuously “Jewish” decorative elements from the synagogue. There is no doubt that Firkowicz was instructed by Szapszał to introduce these changes in Halicz. The Turkic doctrine could have been disseminated also via public speeches and lectures. In the late 1920s/1930s Szapszał often had to deliver public speeches both to Karaite and non-Karaite audience alike. During these speeches Szapszał always emphasized the Turkic origin of the Karaites and other dejudaization propaganda accents he needed to stress. Sources mention that during the war years Szapszał lectured a series of lectures dedicated to the history and essence of the Karaite

1340 E.g. Firkowicz, O Karaimach w Polsce; Ananiasz Zajączkowski, Elementy tureckie na ziemiach polskich (Zamość, 1935); idem, “Karaimi na Wołyniu (pochodzenie i dzieje),” Rocznik Wołyński 3 (1933): 149-191; Mardkowicz, Synowie zakonu; idem, Ogniska karaimskie; idem, Karaim, jego życie i zwyczaje. Cf. also references to Szapszał’s publications above and numerous pro-Turkic articles in MK. 1341 Ya.F. Kokkei to S. Szapszał, Russian (LMAB F. 143, no. 377, fol. 5). 1342 I. Abrahamowicz to S. Szapszał, 22 August 1933 (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 172a, fols. 36-37). 282 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

movement in his apartment in Wilno.1343 This was another handy way to distribute his new, Turkic vision of Karaite history to members of the community. During the war years, when it was mortally dangerous to manifest any relationship of the community to Judaism, Jewish people and civilization, this was especially significant. Szapszał could also control his flock not only through spiritual, but also via financial channels. In addition to his spiritual and administrative power over the community, Szapszał was also responsible for the distribution of financial support provided to the Karaites by the Polish state. Exact financial documentation is lacking in regard to funding of the Karaite community by the state in the 1930s, but in 1928 the total amount of money for its maintenance was supposed to be 30,000 złoty per annum. 12,000 złoty of this sum was supposed to be paid annually to Szapszał as his ḥakham’s salary.1344 Furthermore, the Polish administration provided additional funding and supported various Karaite community projects, such as publication of the periodical Myśl Karaimska and renovation of their houses of prayer (kenesalar). It seems that it was Szapszał who was in charge of distributing state money among the various communities; furthermore, it was he who paid salaries to the interwar ḥazzanim out of this money. It was through Szapszał that the ḥazzanim received their salary, while the communities obtained additional subsidies for its religious school, public centres, renovation works, etc. It was certainly clear to the ḥazzanim and other important members of the communities that funding was directly linked to the following of Szapszał’s reforms. Excursions arranged by Karaite guides to numerous visitors to Troki were another way of transmitting the Turkic doctrine to non-Karaite audience. Starting from the nineteenth century the romantic ruins of the Troki castle became an important site, visited annually by thousands tourists and official visitors. In 1929, the Troki kenesa was visited by the president of Poland Ignacy Mościcki, minister Witold Staniewicz, marszałek Sejmu (Marshal of the Sejm) Ignacy Daszyński, the famous British writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936), a group of Polish litterateurs, members of the French parliament, Latvian state officials, members of the Thirteenth Congress of Naturalists and Healers, etc.1345 In 1930, it was visited by the minister of agriculture, J. Połczyński, vice-wojewoda S. Kirtiklis, a group of catholic priests from Kraków, officers from the High Military School, group of French journalists, artists and scholars from Lille.1346 Among other visitors to kenesa of the 1930s one can find Polish and foreign ministers, pedagogues, statesmen and officers, lawyers, automobilists,

1343 Szymon Pilecki, “Karaimskie życie rodzinne, społeczne i religijne okresu międzywojennego, czas wojny, decyzje o przyjeździe do Polski,” Karaimi, ed. B. Machul-Telus (Warsaw 2012), 47; cf. A. Zajączkowski to T. Kowalski, 30.03.1942 (UO, 175). Szapszał arranged public lectures on Karaite history also earlier, in 1917 (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1519, fol. 14r). 1344 AAN MWRiOP, no. 1464, fols. 101, 111, 115-117. 1345 S. Sz-n [Szymon Szyszman], “Wycieczki i wizyty,” MK 2:2 (1929): 41. 1346 “Wycieczki w Trokach,” MK 2: 3-4 (1931): 75. Outcome of Szapszał’s Reforms 283

tourists, merchants, journalists, scholars, professors, artists, poets, and writers. The list of noteable visitors to kenesa can be continued ad infinitum.1347 Inside the kenesa visitors were guided by specially-trained Karaite cicerones who unfolded to the visitors the Turkic vision of Karaite ethnic history and religion. The pseudo-scholarly speeches of these guides, who championed this new interpretation of Karaite history, had been documented by several visitors to Troki in the 1930s.1348 After taking part in one such excursion in 1936, an angry M. Piątkowski wrote that “the visit to kenesa resonates as unpleasant dissonance in every person of good will.”1349

***

Having analyzed the main agenda and ways of transmitting Szapszał’s Turkicization changes in the Polish-Lithuanian Karaite communities in the interwar period, it is important to understand the reaction of ordinary members of the communities to his radical reforms.

4.4 Outcome of Szapszał’s Reforms

It is important to understand to what extent Szapszał was successful in his reformist activity. Indeed, many of his dejudaization reforms were more or less successfully introduced in the late 1920s/1930s. There is no doubt, however, that before the beginning of the Second World War many East European Karaites accepted most of Szapszał’s innovations only superficially and with serious reservations. The word ḥachan became the only word to denote the religious and administrative head of the Karaite community; the term ḥakham practically ceased to be used although in many less-official publications the Karaites continued using it to denote learned or righteous members of the community.1350 The role of Hebrew was considerably reduced; there

1347 “Wycieczki,” MK 10 (1934): 117; “Wycieczki,” MK 11 (1936): 115-118; S.F. [Szemaja Firkowicz], “Wycieczki,” MK 12 (1938): 151-152. 1348 Piątkowski, “Karaimszczyzna;” Blum, “Ha-Qara

appeared the first Karaite prayer-book in Latin characters which contained prayers only in the Karaim language.1351 Official Karaim, which had been purged of most of its Hebrew and Slavic loanwords, became the Karaites’ most important everyday, literary and (with some reservations) liturgical language. Nevertheless, on an everyday level the ordinary Karaites certainly continued using both Hebrew and Slavic loanwords;1352 this is also attested by the fact that, for example, the first two issues of Onarmach were full of numerous Hebrew and Slavic terms. Although Latin characters now became the Karaites’ main script, traditionalists still continued using the Hebrew alphabet for religious purposes and correspondence.1353 Traditional Jewish symbols (Star of David and Tablets of the Law) were indeed removed from the kenesalar and from some old tombstones in the Troki cemetery (see 3.4.5, 3.5.5, 4.3.6). Furthermore, the Star of David was removed from the official seal of the Halicz community; its later variant contained a depiction of the Karaite kenesa of Wilno.1354 In the interwar period most Hebrew inscriptions disappeared from the walls of the Halicz kenesa (it is unclear whether this happened during the renovation of the building in 1927 or later, in the 1930s). One interwar Jewish visitor remarked, with disapproval, that “in früheren Zeiten waren sie [the interior sides of the synagogue walls] vielfarbig mit Bibel- und Gebetssätzen bemalt, heute mutet das Haus wie das Zimmer eines kleinstädtischen Hotels an.” The same person noted that a certain “national Karaite house” was built in the vicinity of the synagogue.1355 The invented by Szapszał non-existent coat of arms – the pseudo-Turkic senek and kalkan tamğalar depicted above the symbolic image of Çufut Kale fortress – now became the new symbol of the Karaite community. It was placed at the entrance to the Troki kenesa and on the top of the Wilno kenesa – on the spot where the Star of David and Tablets of Law once had been. It became integral part of the ḥachan’s and ḥazzanim’s seals and was often shown to the public as the Karaite coat of arms during various official events. The calendar reform was accepted in the 1930s extremely superficially. Thus, for example, in officially-printed interwar Karaite calendars one can see both Hebrew and Turkic names of the months printed with Latin characters.1356 In internal community

1351 Firkowicz, Karaj Kołtchałary. 1352 E.g. Szymon Pilecki in his diary used numerous Hebrew terms and loanwords (Purym, Rożyszczana, Kippur, Sukkot, mila, tiefinła, hamiećlamiak, hagada, chewra, etc.) from 1939 to 1945 (Pilecki, Chłopiec z Leśnik, 31, 77, 79, 101, 111-112, 159, 236, 282). 1353 See the calendar for 1944/1945 and “Luaḥ roshei ḥodashim/Karaimskii kalendar’ na 5710 god ot sotvoreniia mira (1949-1950)” (the Yurchenko MSS). 1354 The personal seal of the Halicz ḥazzan, however, still contained the depiction of Tablets of the Law (see their photos in Kizilov, Karaites of Galicia, 445-447). 1355 Wachsmann, “Halitsch,” 13. On the other hand, the synagogue’s exterior design became much more expressive: it now also included elegant reliefs in the form of the Karaite ṭallit gadol (prayer- shawl) on the corners of the building (see ibid., 414). 1356 E.g. Karaj łuwachłar jyłha 5699/5700, comp. Refael Abkowicz (Wilno, 1939). Outcome of Szapszał’s Reforms 285

documents, however, the Hebrew alphabet and names of the months were usually used. The hand-written Karaite calendars composed in Halicz in Hebrew characters in the 1940s-1950s contained only Hebrew terms.1357 Moreover, although the year officially started with the holiday of Jył Baszy in the month of Nisan (artaryk aj), many Karaites continued to celebrate Rosh ha-Shanah (also called by the Karaites in Hebrew Yom teruah) in Tishrei (ajryksy aj) and not in Nisan as was prescribed by Szapszał.1358 Szymon Pilecki celebrated this holiday, which he called by the old name – Rożyszczana (a folk corruption of the Hebrew Rosh ha-Shanah) – in the Troki Karaite community in October 1940; A. Zajączkowski celebrated Rosz-ha-szana (sic) in Troki on 8.09.1926.1359 Liebmann Hersch spent a few days in 1934 conducting interviewing both male and female residents of Troki. The conversations revealed that ordinary local Karaites had virtually no knowledge of the existence of the new Turkic calendar! They still referred only to the Hebrew names of the months and mentioned that “such [Turkic] words do not exist in their language”:

J’ai demandé à plusieurs simples Caraïmes (pas des intellectuels) des deux sexes de me dire les noms des divers mois de l’année en caraïme; ils m’ont tous indiqué les noms hébreux. Quand je leur prononçais des noms dé mois d’après le vocabulaire officiel caraïme, ils m’affirmaient que pareils mots n’existaient pas dans leur langue. La même réponse­ me fut donnée, en particulier, par le vieux Caraïme Marek Lawrynowicz (âgé alors de 83 ans) dont la mémoire phénoménale a rendu d’inestimables services à la Commission d’enquête pour l’établissement de la généalogie et des dates de naissance et de décès des Caraïmes de Troki depuis près d’un siecle. A mon observation que ces noms de mois («caraïmes») ignorés de lui figurent pourtant sur des tombeaux, il me répondit: «ce sont là des nouveautés», accompagnant ses paroles d’un geste significatif dans la direction de la rési­dence hachanale [i.e. Szapszał’s house].1360

1357 “Luaḥ roshei ḥodashim/Karaimskii kalendar’ na 5710 god ot sotvoreniia mira (1949-1950)” (the Yurchenko MSS). 1358 This is evident even from the officially published Karaite calendars (e.g. Karaj łuwachłar jyłha 5699/5700). 1359 Pilecki, Chłopiec z Leśnik, 77-78; UO, 26. 1360 Hersch, “Les langues des inscriptions,” 267 (ft.). 286 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

Illustration 9: The Karaite religious calendar for the year 5711 (1950/1951) from Halicz prepared by Z. Zarachowicz. One may notice that it uses only the Hebrew names of the months and religious holidays (Yom Teruah, Sukkot, Yom Kippur, etc.). Source: the Yurchenko MSS. Furthermore, when Hersch asked the Troki ḥazzan Szemaja Firkowicz for the Hebrew equivalent of the Karaim months of kysz (kys) aj, the latter’s answer was that it was Kislev; in fact, however, kysz aj corresponds to Tevet and not to Kislev! This demonstrates that even the interwar Karaite ḥazzanim of the 1930s had problems with switching from the traditional Hebrew calendar to the new Turkic one. Most of the religious holidays also continued to be referred to by their Hebrew (or Hebrew-Karaim) names and not by the newly invented Turkic equivalents. Thus, even the officially printed Karaite calendar of 1939/1940, composed in Wilno in Latin characters by Rafael Abkowicz, contained the following terms: Chydzy Pesachnyn (i.e. Pesach), Chydzy Szawuotnyn (i.e. Shavuot), Jom Terua, Kippur, Simchat Tora, Outcome of Szapszał’s Reforms 287

Purym etc.1361 Handwritten calendars prepared in Halicz by Zarach Zarachowicz in Hebrew characters, naturally, used only Hebrew terminology and Hebrew names of the months.1362 It seems that only young and educated members of the community accepted Szapszał’s new Turco-Karaite identity in the 1930s. Furthermore, there is no doubt that in the 1930s many local Karaites preserved their Judeo-Karaite identity, religious traditionalism and notion that the Karaites were a part of the larger Jewish civilization. For example, the Karaites living in interbellum Halicz were taught within the community that they were Jewish. Outside their homes, however, they were expected to tell strangers that they were of Turkic origin.1363 This double standard is especially evident in the unpublished materials of Corrado Gini’s expedition of 1934. The official administrative leaders of the community, Ezua Leonowicz and Zachariah Nowachowicz, told the members of the expedition about the Tatar origins of the local community, its loyalty to the local government, and its difference from the Ashkenazic Jews. Ordinary members of the community, though, perhaps less informed about Szapszał’s policy, stated that the Karaites had excellent relations with the Jews. Another respondent mentioned that the term “Karaites” meant exclusively a religion, not a nationality, since the Karaites themselves were descendants of the Israelites.1364 Zarach Zarachowicz of Halicz composed a few verses for children where little Karaites were called in Karaim Jisraeł ilisi/Onca ułusu (“part of Israel/A chosen people”).1365 A highly interesting example of the continuing interest in the study of the Hebrew language in the Halicz community was a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Karaite pedagogue and scholar Elijah Kazaz (1832– 1912) in 1933. On that day, Karaite children gathered under the guidance of their teachers (Z. Zarachowicz, L. Eszwowicz, and M. Leonowicz) and recited Kazaz’s Hebrew poems.1366 In 1935, Halicz Karaite children performed a play in Karaim entitled “Mescheracyłany-Purimnin,” which was apparently a Karaim analogue of the Ashkenazic “Purimspiel” – a special comic performance based on the traditional Jewish holiday of Purim.1367 The curriculum of the Karaite religious schools, which

1361 Karaj łuwachłar jyłha 5699/5700. 1362 See the calendar for 1944/1945 and “Luaḥ roshei ḥodashim/Karaimskii kalendar’ na 5710 god ot sotvoreniia mira (1949-1950)” (the Yurchenko MSS). 1363 Oral communication by the Karaite Magdi Shemu

functioned in Łuck and Halicz up until the Soviet annexation of Eastern Poland in 1939, also attests that the Hebrew language and literature were still taught to Karaite children at that time.1368 Some Galician intellectuals continued copying Hebrew manuscripts and translating Hebrew texts into the local variety of Karaim. Isaac ben Yeshua Szulimowicz was translating Hebrew prayers into Karaim in Hebrew characters as late as November 1940, when Galicia had already been annexed by the Soviet Union.1369 Zarach Zarachowicz (1890-1952) copied not only Karaite, but also Rabbanite liturgical works into Hebrew in the 1930s.1370 Janina Eszwowicz of Halicz informed me that in spite of the fact that the Turkic term tymbył, which was so favoured by Szapszał, had been sometimes used by the local Karaites, they normally designated unleavened bread by the Hebrew term maṣah.1371 Even in 1942, during the Nazi occupation (!), the local Karaites were not afraid to draw up a marriage contract in Hebrew, using the traditional Hebrew calendar, and employing such terms as “the land of Israel,” “qehal ha-Qara

1368 See this curriculum in MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1023, fol. 147. 1369 Moreover, he did this from 7 to 10 Nov. 1940, when the whole Soviet Union was celebrating the holiday of the October Revolution. His translations were written on the empty folios of Seder tefillot ha-Qara

a stranger, who – although fluent in Crimean Tatar and Russian – needed to improve his command of Polish, Karaim and Lithuanian. Whatever the case may be, this most radical part of Szapszał’s reforms was only accepted in his native land, Crimea, and not in the place of his final, and most lengthy place of abode, Poland-Lithuania.

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At the same time, Szapszał’s reforms certainly did not pass unnoticed. In the interwar period, the spiritual and intellectual life of the community became much more secular, and there was a clear tendency to abandon many traditional Jewish practices and to acquire more and more numerous “Turkic” features. Furthermore, the ban imposed on the use of Hebrew provoked a sudden rise of literary activity in Karaim. It is in this period that Karaim started to become a full-fledged literary language used for secular poems, stories, historical and polemical articles, translations from foreign languages, and even fairy tales. The renaissance of literary Karaim ended in 1939, with the Soviet annexation of Eastern Poland and Lithuania and the beginning of the Second World War. A famous Karaite Orientalist, Aleksander Dubiński, who himself witnessed Szapszał’s reforms as a young pupil in interwar Troki, claimed that Szapszał’s radical changes in the linguistic sphere could not have been fully introduced in such a short period of time. Nevertheless, in his opinion, in spite of the fact that it is very difficult to calls this programme a “linguistic revolution,” one may define it at least as the beginning of the “evolution” of the Karaim language, which was hindered by the beginning of the war.1374 In our opinion, though, the process of Turkicization (or dejudaization) of the Karaim language and Karaite religious tradition – so drastically transforming Karaite society – certainly struck many Karaites as “revolutionary” event indeed. Public and official reaction to Szapszał’s reformist activity also deserves to be discussed. Polish officialdom enthusiastically welcomed the patriotism of the Karaites and their apparent distancing of themselves from the Rabbanite Jews. The “discovery” that the Karaites were descendants of the Khazars, of obscure Turko- Ugric origin, produced quite a strong impression on official bureaucracies and public opinion in Poland, Italy, and, later, in Nazi Germany. Practical application of the Karaite-Khazar theory became evident quickly. For example, in the year of the official introduction of anti-Jewish legislation in Italy (1938), local Karaite emigrants began experiencing the same “racial” problems as the German Karaites. According to the royal decree 1381/1938 the foreign Jews were to be expelled from Italy.1375 This was apparently the fate which awaited two Polish-Lithuanian Karaites, Michele Lopatto (i.e. Michał/Mikhail Łopatto) and Raissa Iouchniewicz (Juchniewicz), who had settled

1374 Dubiński, “Obnovlenie,” 63. 1375 Sarfatti, Jews, 129, 162. 290 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

in Italy. Nevertheless, in 1938, in order to avoid being identified as Jews, they received a certificate which stated that they were of “of the Karaite religion and from the Khazar race” (Ital. religione caraima e di razza casara) and did not have any connections either with the Hebrew race or Jewish religion (Ital. ne con la razza giudaica ne con la religione ebrea).1376 Gini’s and Szapszał’s publications, which attested to the Karaites’ non-Semitic origins, were one of the main factors that helped them to procure this document of survival.1377 It is worthwhile contemplating here why Szapszał’s radical reforms were so easily implemented in such a religiously conservative community as that of the Karaites. Indeed, somewhat surprisingly, the sources have not preserved a single testimony regarding any firm, open public protest or opposition to Szapszał’s reforms – only scattered data regarding mild resentment on the part of some traditionalist intellectuals.1378 No doubt, there were those who were unhappy about Szapszał’s activity but simply could not openly express their indignation with ḥakhan’s reforms because of censorship in the interwar Karaite press. Personal contacts in Poland and Lithuania in the 2000s failed to yield any evaluations critical of Szapszał’s activity. Only one Warsaw respondent did reveal that “not everybody was happy” about the fact that Szapszał gave Turkic names to all the Karaite holidays; he also pointed out that Szymon Szyszman expressed frustration at Szapszał’s activity (the fact that Szyszman never said a word about Szapszał in any of his publications strongly supports reports of his discontent with Szapszal). Two Troki Karaites, Izaak-Aleksander Abkowicz and Jakób Poziemski, even initiated a legal process against Szapszał’s decision concerning the so-called Pola Karaimskie (Pol. “Karaite fields”).1379 This case, however, was related to property issues and not to Szapszał’s ideological reforms.

1376 MS LMAB F. 143, no. 1023, fol. 371. It was in 1938 that the Italian authorities introduced the law restricting the rights of the Jews (Ruppin, Jewish Fate, 10). 1377 For the further application of Szapszał’s Khazar theory and the “Turkicization” of the East European Karaite community during the Second World War and the Holocaust, see Chapter 5. 1378 E.g. the reaction of Marek Ławrynowicz (Hersch, “Les langues des inscriptions,” 267 (ft.)). In 1932 one Halicz author (most likely, Zarach Zarachowicz) sorrowfully complained that the works and writings of Shalom Zacharjasiewicz, a pious leader of the community at the beginning of the nineteenth century, stood in drastic contrast to current developments in Karaite society (Karaucu, “Unutkan Ribbimiz,” KA 4 (1932): 17). 1379 S. Szapszał attempted to register “Pola Karaimskie” as a property of the Troki Karaite religious union. Most likely, as well as the estate Kiorkłu sała, he intended to use these lands practically for his own needs. Nevertheless, a few members of the Wilno and Troki community, who considered these lands to be property belonging to the members of the community and not to the Troki Karaite religious union, decided to oppose Szapszał’s attempts to get these lands. Two of them (Izaak-Aleksander Abkowicz and Jakub Poziemski) even sued Szapszał to the court. This may have been the only case in the Karaite history, when members of the community tried to sue their ḥakham (see appellation of I. Abkowicz and J. Poziemski to the district court in Wilno (10.01.1938, Polish) in MS LMAB F. 301, no. 10, fols. 130-131v). Outcome of Szapszał’s Reforms 291

One should not forget that in spite of the growing secularization of the Karaite community, there was a traditional reverent fear and veneration of the ḥakham, the highest spiritual authority of the East European Karaites. Moreover, Szapszał’s charisma as an outstanding politician and Orientalist scholar was perhaps too intimidating for there to be any attempt to oppose him. Furthermore, in the 1930s Szapszał and several non-Karaite scholars had reported to have found a variety of anthropological and historical “evidence” supporting his Turkic theories. With today’s historical and ethnographic knowledge, one can easily prove the nonsensical nature of this “evidence,” but in the interwar period, especially among the less educated members of the Karaite community, this was much less apparent. It is also important to remember that Szapszał’s authority and the dissemination of his ideas were largely dependent on his closest associates and assistants – the ḥazzanim of Troki, Łuck, and Wilno. Paradoxically, all of them (Szemaja Firkowicz, Józef Łobanos, and Rafael Abkowicz) happened to be young and quite secularized persons, who enthusiastically accepted Szapszał’s reforms and the new Turko-Karaite identity. The only exception, Izaak Abrahamowicz of Halicz, who was representative of the older generation – and who apparently demonstrated some mild opposition to Szapszał’s reforms – was soon replaced by Marek (Mordecai) Leonowicz, another young supporter of the ḥakhan’s theories.1380 Thus, Szapszał’s directives were usually given to the ḥazzanim, who then disseminated them among the members of their communities. Again, in spite of the growing secularization of the community, it would have been rather unthinkable for one to disobey the word of a ḥazzan that had had the power of excluding one from the kenesa, could excommunicate, refuse to perform a marriage, to withhold child registeration, etc. Furthermore, the younger Karaites apparently had a much less reverential attitude to the religion than their traditionalist forefathers, and were quite happy to be rid of the “obsolete” Jewishness of their ancestors. Thus, there were several factors which helped Szapszał to successfully carry out his reformist activity and drastically change Karaite identity in the course of only a few years – an unparalleled event if one thinks about the static conservative life-style of the Karaite community in preceding centuries. Among these factors were Szapszał’s charismatic personality and academic prestige; the growing secularization of Karaite society and its readiness to abandon its Jewish past; dissemination of Szapszał’s ideas through the press and his closest associates, the ḥazzanim; increasing anti-Semitism in Poland; and, finally, the financial support and enthusiastic welcome of his reforms by the Polish state. Many of his innovations were first accepted only very superficially, especially among Karaite traditionalists. Nevertheless, later, after the Second World

1380 It is important to mention that theoretically the ḥazzanim were supposed to be elected by the community. In practice, however, in the 1930s they were simply appointed by Szapszał. This was noticed even by an external observer such as Corrado Gini (MS LMAB F. 143, no. 211, fol. 35r). 292 Ḥakham (Ḥakhan) Seraja Szapszał (1873–1961)

War, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the Soviet anti-Semitic policy of the 1950s to the 1970s, Szapszał’s doctrine of their rejection of Jewish past became deeply rooted in the Karaites’ consciousness. It is also important to emphasize here that Szapszał’s frequent visits to the German Karaites and his political acumen served to alert him to the forthcoming Nazi danger and peril, which existed by way of the Karaites’ similitude to the Rabbanites in religious and other matters. Thus, undertaken by Szapszał measures of Turkicization of Karaite religious and historical tradition of the 1930s can be explained not only by his personal preferences, but also by his sincere wish, as the head of the community, to rescue his flock from mortal danger – even at the expense of losing all ties with the Jewish tradition that had linked the East European Karaites to Jews and Judaism in the course of many centuries of their coexistence.

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To sum up, in 1939, before the Soviet and German partition of Poland and beginning of World War II, the Karaite community had already been considerably (though by no means completely) dejudaized and ready to embrace the new Turkic identity. The processes of endogenous and exogenous dejudaization of the community were radically accelerated by the drastic events of the Second World War and the Holocaust. This period in the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Karaite community is examined in the next chapter.1381

1381 For more information on Szapszał’s biography after 1939, see Chapter 6.