Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
DEATH DEBATE
At the height of WWII, the Nazis summoned three Jewish professors who were im-
prisoned in the Warsaw and Vilnius ghettoes and told them to voice their opinion
on the subject they had studied all their lives. The question was - are Crimean
Karaites Jewish or not? In a series of debates with leading scholars, each of them
independently gave a negative answer, which largely contradicted everything they
had said before in their long, scholarly careers. Their names were Meyer Balaban,
Yitzhak Schiper and Zelig Kalmanovich. None of them survived the Holocaust. But
the Karaites did - following the debate, the Nazis classified them as 'impure' but
not warranting extermination. They even reopened the kenassa(temple) in Yevpat-
oriya, which had been closed by the Bolsheviks, allowing services in Hebrew! All
Crimean Jews captured by the Nazis were killed.
Today the Karaites number about 2000, with 650 living in Crimea, mostly in
Yevpatoriya and Feodosiya. Although their leaders deny it - perhaps a legacy of
their survival tactics - the name of the people probably derives from the ancient
Hebrew word for 'reader'. Initially, it was an early medieval Jewish sect in Baghdad,
which rejected the Talmud, believing the Old Testament to be the only source of
holy wisdom. No one is sure how this teaching spread to Crimea, but by the Middle
Ages it became the second most important religion for the Turkic population of
Crimea after Islam. It mixed with shamanism and the pagan beliefs of the ancient
Turks. To this day the Karaites worship sacred oak groves and call their god Tengri,
as did their pre-Judaist ancestors. Speaking a pure version of ancient Turkic, the
Karaites even donated 330 words to the modern Turkish language when Kemal
Ataturk was getting rid of Arabisms in the 1920s.
CENTRAL &
WESTERN CRIMEA
TOP OF CHAPTER
Simferopol
0652 / POP 345,000
With its odd mixture of Levantine and Soviet, the Crimean capital is not an unpleasant
city, but there is no point lingering here, as everything else on the peninsula is much
more exciting - and it's only a short bus ride away!
