Translation of the Tanakh Into Crimean Karaim: History, Manuscripts, and Language

chapter 2 Translation of the Tanakh into Crimean Karaim: History, Manuscripts, and Language

Henryk Jankowski

1 Introduction and History of Tanakh Translations into Karaim

The aim of this chapter is to outline the history of the study of Crimean Karaim translations of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and to discuss some issues regarding the ways in which the translators and the copyists approached the original and how their Karaim translations differed from each other linguistically. Crimean Karaim is a Turkic language which was traditionally spoken in the Crimea by the Karaite community and written in a form of the Hebrew alphabet. The chapter first addresses the question of the time and place of the emergence of written translations into Karaim. It then provides samples of translations presented in Henderson (1826) and Karaite bibliographies, as well as short descriptions of eleven manuscripts and two printed editions. Lastly, it provides new evidence for the translation of Chronicles into Karaim. Before examining the emergence of Karaim translations of the Tanakh, it is first necessary to provide some historical background. As is widely known among scholars, the Crimean Khanate was formed from the Golden Horde in the fifteenth century. Before the Ottoman conquest, the first Crimean Khan, Haji Gerey, maintained his chancellery, which produced documents written in the literary language patterned on Khwarezmian Turkic or Literary Eastern Turkic, with some features of North-Western Turkic or Kipchak (dialects of which were spoken in the vast area of Eurasia including the Crimea and the North Caucasus). We can see this from the surviving documents from the short-lived inde- pendence of the Crimean Khanate, which ended with the Turkish conquest of Caffa (present-day Feodosia) in 1475. There are five documents concern- ing inner affairs and two documents pertaining to foreign diplomacy (Vásáry 1987: 12, 13). The Literary Eastern Turkic and Kipchak features of these documents can be seen in Hacı Gerey yarlığı ‘Haji Gerey’s Decree (Granting Privileges)’, dated to 1453 (Kurat 1940: 62). Even the diplomatic letter of 1469 issued by the next Khan, Mengli Gerey, to the Turkish Sultan Mehmed II is written in this language (Kurat 1940: 84–85), which is similar to the language

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004376588_004 40 Jankowski in a letter sent by this Khan to a Turkish dignitary in 1475, a short while after the Turks had set foot in the Crimea – although some Turkish features can already be seen in it (Kurat 1940: 89). In the fifteenth century, Khwarezmian Turkic was replaced with so-called ‘Chaghatay’, which is in fact its later devel- opment (Eckmann 1988: vii, xi–xiii). In my view, the Crimean Karaites, who were naturally well educated as Scripturists and who had already spoken the Turkic language for a few generations, could likely have adopted the literary Turkic language then used in the Crimea and added some local Kipchak ele- ments to it. However, the prestige of Chaghatay was so great that they retained the name of this language, albeit in a slightly distorted form. Even if Shapshal’s (Šapšal 1918: 6) evidence of this ‘Chaltay dialect’ (чалтайскiй дiалектъ), which was confirmed by Gordlevskij (1928: 87), can be cast into doubt, any doubts disappear when we read Henderson (1826), who around a hundred years ear- lier evidenced that the Crimean Karaites called their language ‘Djagaltay’. Interestingly, the same tradition existed among the Krymchaks (Rebi 2004: 4). This was prior to the time of Vámbéry and Pavet de Courteille, who popular- ized this term in Europe. Some atypical language features of the presumably fifteenth-century manuscript (Evr. I 143) may also be explained on the grounds of certain linguistic features of Chaghatay. For example, there is the rendering of close [e] in the first syllable in the initial with an aleph and a yod and with a kėtkän כיטכן ėrkäk ‘man; male’ and אירככ yod after a consonant, for example ‘(he) has gone away’, respectively. This is a typical property of Chaghatay and to some degree also contemporary Turkish, but the impact of Turkish should be rather excluded at that time. It is evident that the Turkic Tanakh translations are later than other Near Eastern Bible translations, such as the Aramaic, Persian, and Arabic translations. We cannot compare the Turkic translations to the Arabic translations, since the historical setting was different and the Turkic languages have not enjoyed the political prestige that Arabic once had. The date of the emergence of the translation of the Bible into Karaim is unknown. The suppositions that the written translation emerged in the eleventh century (Šapšal 1918: 6) or that it emerged from an oral translation as early as the eleventh or twelfth century (Zajączkowski 1980: 161) cannot be maintained due to a lack of evidence, although the tradition of an oral translation may be quite old (Zajączkowski 1961: 793–794) and we know that the Jewish Targums emerged from oral translations (Knudsen 1981: 1). The question of when the Karaim Tanakh translations came into being is related to when the Karaites in the Crimea and beyond adopted their Turkic language. Based on the linguistic features of their language and on some historical events, Kowalski (1929: xxv) states that we can maintain with a high