Once Upon a Time There Were Karaites in Romania

Because my family came from Romania in the 1890s, it's only natural to assume that there would have been left behind members of the community that never migrated to North America. That being the case, then finding the remnants of the Karaite community should be simple. But they're gone, vanished, obliterated so to speak, leaving one to ask the qustion, "What has happened to the Karaites that were in Romania?" Once in North America the family spent very little time discussing life back in Peatra Neamt. And since they left in the 19th century they would have lost all contact with Romania during the post World War II communist purge. Well faced with this lacuna in knowledge, I thought about it and realized I probably owe it to my ancestors and any family that may have been left behind to find out exactly what did happen to them. Family wise I know that some emigrated to Hungary from Romania and then on to Israel in the twentieth century but that was only a handful and not necessarily representative of the community. There were still hundreds unaccounted for.

It is said that Karaites in the Ukraine that live in the western provinces of the country are slowly becoming extinct. Therefore it is no surprise to me that this may have already occurred to the small pockets of Karaim in Romania. After all, if the Ukraine with its significant Karaite population in the Crimea can't sustain its smaller pockets outside this region, then how would it have been possible for Romania to do so. There is a report that in the town of Galich, in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of the Ukraine there are only five Karaite women left and they are all betwen the age of 70 and 90. It would be safe to say that the Karaite presence in Galich does not have much longer to survive. It is only the existence of the Crimean Karaites today that suggests that in the past there had been a healthy Karaite Jewish presence around the Black Sea, including in parts of today's Romania, primarily in the trading ports from the mouths of the Danube and the Dneister Rivers; their presence in Moldavia definitely occuring by the 16th century but may have been even earlier.
Even by 1914 the presence of Karaites in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was becoming scarce. The Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph, prohibited Karaites from military service fearing that the Karaites were so few that they could be counted on one hand and if he permitted them to be killed at the front, then the nation would die out completely. Franz Joseph was not prepared to allow that to happen.

The Karaites in the Ukraine built their temples (kenessa) but the last one was erected in Galich in 1836 and remained functional for 120 years. It was that same time period that my third great grandfather left Brody Galicia under a cloud of controversy and I can only hope that this was not related to the demise of the Galich community at that time.

A hundred years ago in the Western Ukraine there were ten Karaite communities. In Galich there were 167 Karaites but after 1939, when the town came under Soviet rule they unsurprisingly, began to die out. When Nikita Krushchev came to power in the 1950s, the communists decided to destroy the religion of the Karaites for whatever reason.Perhpas simply because it was an ancient religion which went against the communist party stance that there is no God. They claimed it was the community's refusal to do military service but so few hardly made a difference. The communists confiscated their property, exterminated their community and completely destroyed the temple buildings. Karaites were even blacklisted by the Committee of State Security of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic and documents regarding their participation in anti-Soviet activities were kept by the KGB. These documents included the efforts in the 1940s of two Karaite women, Yelena and Hannah Leonovicha, who were known members of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, to hide members of the resistance in their home. They also called for the overthrow of the Stalinist regime which resulted in Yelena being stripped of her citizenship for 5 years and sentenced to 10 years in the gulag while Hannah took refuge in an Orthodox church which they set on fire, burning her alive.
The Communist propaganda machine used the activities of Yelena and Hanna Leonovicha as proof of the terrorist threat represented by the Galician Karaites. The communists banned the opening of a Karaite museum displaying domestic artefacts, ritual objects and archive materia. They then completed the job by destroying the last Karaite temple and still not satisfied started destroying the ancient Karaite cemetery in the village of Zaluvka in the Ivan-Frankivsk region. This cemetery had existed for 500 years and had even remained untouched by the Nazis in the Second World War. With official approval, Soviet citizens were permitted to cart away headstones, smash memorials and destroy the graves. With these events occurring with the Soviet Union, it is not surprising that the small communities in Romania also vanished without even a mention.


I'd like to believe that I am wrong and that should I visit Romania in the near future that I find that the old communities still exist. But I really don't hold out much hope for that possibility. I think those of us that have survived did so only because of the migrations in the nineteenth century and those that remained found themselves lost in the Soviet purges. Sadly that has been a historical reality of Karaites. But we're still here and that in itself is a miracle. And that means there's hope that some day we will be able to restore the community to its once glorious past.

Explaining Karaite Teachings (A Short History)

Karaites are an oddity unto themselves. Whereas my adherance stems from the Karaite families located around the Black Sea, from Romania all the way into the Ukraine, you also had similar parcels of families in other locations such as the Baltic, Egypt, Turkey and Byelorussia. You would think being as small as we are, that there'd be uniformity in beliefs and customs, but that is hardly the case. In reading an interesting blog from a Latvian Karaite, I found that besides believing that her community was one of the last outposts of Karaim in the world, that her community had also adopted some Christian and Muslim teachings into their customs. I guess that this is to be expected considering the isolation of the communities and the fact that as a paternal hereditary society, the effects of intermarriage would be more pronounced.

During the nineteenth century, from the printing presses in Turkey there were printed a beautiful edition of the Karaite bible, consisting of the five Books of Moses or the Chumash. This edition was printed in Hebrew with a Turkish Tatar translation in parallel columns. It was arranged and paid for by the Karaite community in Ortakoi, a town near Constantinople, around 1835. To undertake such a project would indicate that barely 170 years ago, the Tatar influence on Karaite history would have been extremely strong. The reasons behind this will be touched upon briefly in my novel ZUTRA, a book that I hope to have released in the near future as soon as I find a new literary agent.
As Karaites, we also refer to ourselves as the B'nai Mikra (Children of Scripture), and as I had mentioned in previous blogs we attribute are beginnings to the imprison Exilarch, Anan ibn David (Kahana family) around 769 AD. The main differentiating point to Rabbinic Judaism is that the only authority accepted is that of the Bible but we reject the Talmudic rabbinic tradition. The major reason for this can also be viewed in some of my blogs but the overriding principle is that the Talmud is nothing but the contentions and impressions of men whom basically wished to enforce their beliefs of scriptural analysis above the direct word of God. Or put even in simpler terms, as soon as God needs an interpreter there's a problem. From its onset, Karaism constituted a serious challenge to traditional rabbinic Judaism, and as time went on Rabbinic Judaism felt it had to react in order to stem the flow and one of these was the slaughter of Karites instituted by Saadiah Gaon around 940AD which is touched upon in Shadows of Trinity http://www.eloquentbooks.com/ShadowsOfTrinity.html . Following the dispersal of this catastrophic event, the numbers dwindled and were concentrated in a few centers. If the main body of Jews and the Karaites differed in matters of faith, they shared the persecutions and pogroms until the incorporation of the Crimea and Lithuania into the Russian Empire at the end of the eighteenth century, when the situation began to change. In 1795, the Empress Catherine 11 permitted the Karaites to purchase land and relieved them of the double taxation imposed upon rabbinic Jews. In 1827, Karaites were not only exempted from the military draft, which meant twenty-five years of military service but also permission to circulate freely in centres of Russian culture. This situation only furthered the animosity that existed between the two Jewish communities and it was only prudent that Karaites distanced themselves as far as possible from Rabbinic Judaism. Fortunately when it came to the Czarist government all you had to dow was emphasize that there were fundamental differences between us and the Rabbic Jews, not only in beliefs and in history, but also from the genetic makeup as well. There is some truth to this n that phenotypically, there are quite a few differences between Ashekenazi Jews of Europe and Karaite Jews with their origins from Mesopotamia. They argued that they were not Jews but "Russian Karaites of the Old Testament Faith," which became their official designation according to the Czarist government. In 1840 they were granted equality of status with the Muslims, and in 1863 with native Russians, a considerable achievement which led to the appointment in 1843 of my ancestor Jakob Goldenthal as the Principal of the Jewish Districts around the Black Sea and based in Kishinev. Unfortunately this appointment did not go over very well, since it meant not only was Jakob in charge of those districts with large Karaite populations but also those with rabbinic populations. What the Rabbinic Jews viewed as his cosmopolitan assimilated makeup, his bastardized Judaism, and his tendency to write commentaries that emphasized the univerasility of Jewish beleifs within a Christian world led to his departure to greener fields in 1846, when he took a position at the University of Vienna and private tutor to the Empress Elisabeth. A position he would not have gained if not for his Karaite beliefs.
During the first decades of the nineteenth century, Russian Karaites increased in The Tatar translation of this Chumash was obviously for a select population of Karaites only. The group of Karaite scholars who edited the text and prepared the translation was headed by Abraham Firkowitz (1786-1874), an antiquarian scholar and bibliographer who as a leader of the separation campaign wrote messages to the Czarist government and collected documents to bolster the Karaite position.
It is rumoured that on occasion Firkowitz doctored the written record to support the Karaite claims of being a distinct ethnic group. So in retrospect the printing of this Chumash was a message being sent to the Czarist authorities that would have proclaimed, "We are very different from the Jews, even having our own veresion of the Bible which is a completely different language." For the intent and purpose of relieving the persecutions suffered by Jewish communities you can hopefully appreciate the motivation behind such an act.

Fighting Windmills

Why should we bother to challenge the accepted historical beliefs if it only means that we in turn become the target of those offended that we 'dared' to confront the established truths? Why is it that in order to protect the established historical beliefs, threats and prejudice are perfectly acceptable? Is it that accepted history is built on so fragile a platform that those dedicated to preserving it know that at any given moment it could crumble to dust?
Those familiar with my writing, blogs and books know that I am classified as an alternative historian. It doesn't mean that my material is any less factual, it only indicates that I'm constantly challenging the norm. And why not? I'm the one in possession of the facts,the dates, the material that demonstrates what they classify as alternative history is in most probability actual history and that which is being taught in many respects is the glorified hype of those that held the reigns of power to make their version the standard. It happens every day. In Japan, you will never hear of the atrocities committed by their army in World War II, though you can read of what occurred on my friend Patrick's blogspot http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=112016879904&h=5F36D&u=70E45&ref=nf to read of some ot these horrible deeds. In Germany one year my friend Hans Hildebrand gave me a completely different version of the holocaust in much of it was laid at the feet of the Poles as their doing, and even now as I speak, the Arab world and Russia are busily rewriting their national histories in order "educate" their populations in the truth. It's common practice. History is a political tool and always has been.
So when I write from a Karaite perspective of events in Jewish history, I expect to feel the backlash. A minority within a minority has no real authority at all. In fact,how little it registers was made perfectly clear in a conversation with an Israeli girl that I had yesterday. She was down here in New Zealand marketing a product and was surprised when I began to speak a little Hebrew to her. It was the limit of my vocabulary so even describing it as a little Hebrew may be too generous It was the first she heard from anyone in this country and wanted to know where I had picked it up. When I explained that I was Karaim, her eyes lit up and she told me how she once dated an Egyptian Jew. In her mind, all Egyptian Jews were Karaites and that was the definition of the word. And then she commented that I didn't look Egyptian.
I could have taken the time to explain that the roots of the Karaim were in Mesopotamia. That the Egyptian population was only one little segment. I could have explaiined the migration history of how we were slowly pushed further and further from centres like Baghdad and Mahoza after Anan ibn David established the tenents of Karaite Judaism in 769 and how in 940 we were attacked and driven from our homes by Saadiah Gaon to the North West to take up residence in the lands around the Black Sea. I even could have spoken of how the Crimean Peninsula became one of the larger population centres of Karaites to be seconded by Bessarabia and Romania. I even could have spoken of how the Rabbinate forbade marriages between rabbinate Jews and Karaite Jews unless the latter abandoned its beliefs and declared them to be false. During World War II, there were recorded findings by the Nazis as they invaded Romania of their enounter with the Karaite population and a request from Berlin to send orders as to whether they should be treated no differently from the rabbinate Jewish populations. You see, the Karaites presented a problem. As the Nazi's were ingrained with their stereotypical version of what Jews should look like, they were not prepared to find a subpopulation that were six feet tall, some with blonde hair and more eastern features. Berlin's final decision was to not include them in it's persecution as it had determined they were actually Tartars and not Jews at all. How ironic that Hitler's final solution would never have been final at all. As Karaites we would have survived.
But, there wasn't the time to try and explain this, and considering that her entire exposure to Karaite history was that she had an Egyptian Jewish boyfriend and that was the only defining point made me realize that even in Israel there is a failure to provide the 'alternative history'. There is no intention to highlight the differences; the goal being that you melt and blend everyone and everything into a singualar pot.
So in answer to my initial questions of why do we do it? Why do we challenge the windmills only to know that we will be beaten back again and again? We do it because it is right or should I say 'write'. Even Don Quixote had his moments of victory.