The Karaim

The climb from the meadows of the valley floor to the summit of Mangup Kale takes an hour, two thousand feet of struggling and sweating upwards until a broken city-wall looms up among the trees. From here the going is a little easier. But now the forest becomes a cemetery. Hundreds and hundreds of stone tombs drift on a sea of dead leaves, tilting, listing, capsizing, engraved with deep-cut Hebrew characters.

The tombs belong to the Karaim. They were a Jewish sect which began in Mesopotamia in the eighth century AD and broke with the mainstream of rabbinical Judaism two hundred years later. The Karaim believed tat the word of the Lord was to be found in Scripture but nowhere else, and that the additions of the Talmud were impious and decadent. (For that reason Christian Protestants, Germans especially, have always been fascinated by the Karaim whom they imagine, quite falsely, to have been harbingers of the Christian Reformation.)

The Karaim reached Crimea in the twelfth century, dislodged from Palestine and Egypt by the upheaval of the First Crusade. They migrated into the Byzantine Empire and beyond it into north-eastern Europe, where parties of Karaim settled in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Many sectarians, like the Albigensian Christians of southern France, have felt safe only in remote, defensible places far from centres of power and population. The Karaim shared this existential terror. They withdrew to the tops of the Crimean mountains or, in Lithuania, to the fortress-islands of Trakai in a lake among birch forests. But, like hermit-crabs, they preferred to settle in fortifications already built and then abandoned by others rather than to raise their own, and the Karaim did not take over Mangup Kale until it ad been sacked and emptied by the Turks. The oldest Karaite grave in the woods below the summit is dated 1468, a few years before the fall of Mangup, but most of them were carved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In Crimea, the Karaim kept their distance from the Christian or Moslem societies around them, living careful Karaite lives, trading and manufacturing small household goods but avoiding service to any government. One historian has remarked that, between about 1200 and 1900 AD, almost nothing happened; Karaite history in Crimea was a long and peaceful blank. However, by staying aloof the Karaim acquired a reputation for being more upright and more honest than other communities, and in consequence, when the history of the Karaim began to happen once more, it took a curious turn. Gentiles, impressed by their probity, began to invent reasons why the Karaim should be exempted from the general anti-Semitism. It was supposed that they must be converts, like the Khazars. Here was an absurb irony; by attempting to be more intensely and primordially Judaic than other Jews, the Karaim ensured that Gentiles would consider them not to be truly Jewish at all.

After the Russian annexation of Crimea at the end of the eighteenth century, Catherine II took a respectful interest in the Karaim. She had added enormous territories to the Russian Empire: in the west, much of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and in the south almost the whole northern shore of the Black Sea. To develop them, she recruited colonists - Germans, Creeks, Armenians, even French settlers - and the Karaim with their sober energy were suitable to her purpose. Catherine moved some of the Crimean Karaim to reinforce their old settlements in Lithuania; and in the huge new frontier province of Novorossiya (New Russia) in the south.

She also granted them full Russian citizenship, which was denied to the main Jewish populations. From Mangup and their other cliff-redoubt at Chufut Kale , above Bakhchiserai, the Karaim began to migrate down to the cities of the Crimean coast, especially to Evpatoria.

When the Scottish traveller Laurence Oliphant climbed up to Chufut Kale in 1852, he found only a handful of Karaim left, looking after the old synagogue. The last of them had abandoned Mangup some fifty years before.

During the Second World War, the Nazi racial bureaucracy in Berlin decreed (vainly, as it turned out) that the Karaim should not be included in the `final solution of the Jewish question', on the grounds that they were not biologically and genetically Jewish but descendants of Khazar converts to Judaism. This was complete nonsense. But the main Jewish communities of the Black Sea, themselves listed for slaughter, seem to have supported the myth in order to save their brethren if they could not save themselves.