Crimean Karaites Erotic

The Crimean Karaites are what happens when a religious minority and a linguistic minority turn out to be the same few thousand people. They are Turkic speakers who practice a form of Judaism that takes the Hebrew Bible as its only authority and rejects the rabbinic Talmud outright. That pairing is found in no other people, and it has made the question of who they are, Jews, Turks, or a people who are neither, the central argument of their modern history. They call themselves Karaim or Qaraylar. Their historic base is the Crimean peninsula, above all the plateau fortress town of Chufut-Kale near Bakhchysarai and the port of Yevpatoria, where the old prayer houses still stand. In the late fourteenth century Grand Duke Vytautas brought several hundred families north to Trakai in Lithuania, by tradition as castle guards, and others settled at Halych and Lutsk in what is now western Ukraine. Those three colonies became the three dialects of Karaim, a Kipchak Turkic language close to Crimean Tatar that was written for centuries in Hebrew letters. Today it survives mainly among a handful of elderly speakers in Trakai, and everyone else speaks Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian or Polish.

The prayer house is the kenesa, not the synagogue, and its interior tells you something: worshippers leave their shoes at the door and pray on carpets, with prostrations, in a manner closer to a mosque than to any Ashkenazi shul. The traditional calendar follows the sighted new moon and the ripening of barley in the Holy Land, so Karaite holidays can fall a day or a month off the mainstream Jewish ones. In the nineteenth century community leaders, notably the manuscript collector Abraham Firkovich, argued to the Russian crown that Karaites had reached Crimea before the time of Jesus and so deserved exemption from the laws that pressed on other Jews. The argument worked. The hakham Seraya Shapshal pushed it further, recasting the group as a Turkic people of Khazar descent with a religion of its own. Whatever its scholarly merits, that framing shielded most of the community when German racial authorities ruled in 1939 that Karaites were not Jews by blood, a finding the rabbinic scholars consulted under occupation quietly endorsed. The debate has never closed: some Karaites today identify as Turkic with a faith of their own, others as Karaite Jews. Outsiders are more likely to meet them through food than theology. The kybyn, a crescent pastry stuffed with chopped mutton, has become practically the emblem of Trakai, sold from wooden Karaite houses whose three street-facing windows are said locally to stand for God, the Grand Duke and the family.