The press and the ethnic identity: Turkicisation of Karaite printing in interwar Poland and Lithuania

In the late mediaeval and early modern period scattered communities of the Karaites (i.e. non-Talmudic Jews) settled in several regions of Eastern Europe such as the Crimea, Poland and Lithuania. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Karaites printed their books (mostly exegetical and theological works in Hebrew) in several Karaite and Rabbanite typographies. Nevertheless, after 1917 the centre of Karaite printing shifted from the Russian Empire to interwar Poland and Lithuania. Surprisingly, a tiny Karaite community of interwar Poland and Lithuania (ca. 800 individuals) had been publishing as many as five periodicals in three languages! Furthermore, the Karaites also printed quite a number of separate brochures and leaflets, and published articles in non-Karaite periodicals. From the 1930s the Karaite community started losing its Judeo-Karaite identity and accepted a new Turkic ethnic self-identification which was based mostly on the use of the Turkic Karaim language and a few pseudo-scholarly theories testifying to the non-Semitic origins of the Karaites. The renaissance of Karaite printing was stopped in 1939, with the Soviet intervention in Poland and the beginning of the Second World War. The paper analyses the main tendencies in the development of the Karaite printing in Poland and Lithuania in the interwar period. A special emphasis is placed upon the role of printing in the unusual transformation of the East European Karaites’ ethnic identity — from pious non-Talmudic Jewish believers to an isolated ethnic enclave with a bogus Khazaro-Turkic identity