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Beginnings of the Karaite Communities of the Crimea Prior to the Sixteenth Century

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Beginnings of the Karaite Communities of the Crimea Prior to the Sixteenth Century CHAPTER 1WENTY-EIGHT BEGINNINGS OF THE KARAITE COMMUNITIES OF THE CRIMEA PRIOR TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Dan Shapira (With Contributions by M. Ezer, A. Fedortchouk, M. Kizilov) The Crimean Peninsula has been home to Jews since ancient times. Already in the first century B.C.E., Hellenistic Jews, Jewish converts, and "God-fearers" lived in the Greek cities of the northern Black Sea basin, including the Crimea, that were a part of the Kingdom of Pontus. The Romans ruled the Crimea from 63 B.C.E., and were followed by the Byzantines. The Jewish community of Byzantine Chersones (today within the municipal area of Sevastopol'; Turkic Aqyiir) continued, possibly with interruptions, until the ll th century. In in the third century C.E. the Germanic Goths reached the Crimea and their descendants survived there even during the Middle Ages. Mter the Goths came the Huns, and after them the Khazars who in 786/7 conquered a region of the Crimea, near to Mangup today, called since then Gothia, or Alanogothia. 1 It is not known whether the Hellenistic Jews of the earlier times survived the tribulations of the epoch of the mass migrations (Viilkerwanderung) or whether new Jews reached the Crimea from other places. The study of Crimean Jewry, especially that of the Crimean Karaites has been hampered for a long period as a result of the extensive interference with the documentation (manuscripts, burial inscriptions), including actual forgeries, by the collector and com­ munal functionary, Abraham Firkovich during the l840-60s, and due to the nationalist separatists that came after him, who attempted to rewrite the Karaite history of the Crimea. The source material has been affected to such a degree that occasionally it is hard to write about the Jews of the Crimea without relating critically to the 1 For a good introduction, see e.g. Vasiliev, The Goths in; cf. also Brun, Cemomor'je; Braun, "Die letzte Schicksale", pp. 1-88. 710 DAN SHAPIRA rewritten and forged documentation. In the present essay, we will only discuss the reliable findings. 2 In the Khazar period there were Jews who lived in certain parts of the Crimea, primarily in Kerc on the eastern side of the peninsula. This is confirmed both by the archeological discoveries and by two Khazar-Hebrew documents known as the Cambridge Document (or the Schechter Document) and the letter by Joseph, the king of the Khazars to I:Iisdai ibn Shaprut (the longer version of this letter is a document written by a Jew who knew the Crimea better than any other part of Khazaria). 3 It is significant that the author of the longer version of Joseph's letter does not mention by any name the places that later on became the important Jewish-Karaite settlements, such as Sulkhat, Kaffa (Keffe), and Q!.rqyer (Qufut-Qal'eh/Chufut-Kale), for the simple reason that these places did not exist yet in the ninth century. We do not even have information on any Jewish settlement in Qufut-Qal'eh or Mangup in the middle of the thirteenth century, immediately following the Mongolian invasions. The F1emish Franciscan monk, brother Villem de Robrucq (William de Rubruquis, William of Robruck), the envoy of the king of France, Louis IX (St. Louis), who traveled through the Crimea on his way from Acre in the Crusaders' Holy Land to the Mongolian Khan Mongke in 1253,4 mentions var­ ious nationalities living in a place that can be identified with Qufut­ Qal'eh (sunt quadraginta castella inter Kersouam & Soldaiam, quorum quodlibet Jere habet proprium idioma) but does not include Jews among them. This is despite the expectation that had he found any, this sharp-eyed Catholic monk coming from the Crusader Holy Land would have readily told about Jews he found, living, as Firkovich put it, in "the Rock of the Jews", "their eagle's nest". Nevertheless, it was at the beginning of the Mongol era that the first Karaite communities in the Crimea were founded. One may assume that these Karaites came 2 On the problems involved, and for Firkovich's biography, see Shapira (ed.), Studies in a Karaite Community, introduction. Shapira, "Abraham Firkowicz"; Shapira, Abraham Firkowicz; -+ Hariviainen, Overview; Abraham Firkovich. 3 See Schechter, "An unknown Khazar", pp. 181-219 (the Schechter, or Cambridge, Document); for the texts of the Jewish-Khazar Correspondence, see Kokovcov, Jevrgsko­ xa::;arskaja perepiska; for the new Kievan Letter, and for re-edition of the Schechter Document, see Golb and Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew. For a new evaluation of these texts, see now: Shapira, ':Judaization of Central". 4 For the text and English translation, see Beazley (ed.), The Texts and Versions. .
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