Karaim

Zachowany w rękach prywatnych diariusz trocki opracowany z okazji wizyty w Trokach prezydenta Ignacego Mościckiego przez przedstawicieli władz samorządowych jest cennym dokumentem życia społecznego miasta, w tym społeczności karaimskiej, opisującym wydarzenia z lat 1918–1927. Informacje dotyczące wizyty Prezydenta 4 lipca 1927 r., która była powodem powstania tego dokumentu, pozwalają również na sprecyzowanie okoliczności, w jakich karaimska społeczność otrzymała w darze skarbczyk do przechowywania przywilejów królewskich.

The Trakai Journal, prepared by representatives of the local authorities on the occasion of the visit to Trakai of President Ignacy Moscicki and which is currently in private hands, is a valuable source of information on city life, including the life of the Karaim community, describing events from the years 1918–1927. Details on the President’s visit of 4th of July 1927, which was the main motivation for preparing this record, offers an accurate insight into the circumstances in which the treasury box was received as a gift for keeping royal privileges.

For a long time Peringer’s short passage (Gen 1:1--3) was the oldest known text written in Western Karaim and it has justly received substantial attention in the scholarly literature. Nevertheless, Peringer’s quotation of Genesis 1–3 has two serious flaws. Firstly, the fate of the manuscript it was taken from is unknown. Secondly, seven words – out of a total of thirty-four – are distorted due to printing errors. There are altogether nine errors in what is a very short text.

Despite the substantial attention that Peringer’s material received, it has never been critically edited or properly discussed and compared with other manuscripts. To fill this gap, we have presented it in extenso – in both its original form and in our transcription – supplemented with a critical apparatus, a translation into English, as well as a philological and linguistic commentary.

This paper is a critical edition of Jehoszafat Kapłanowski’s (a Trakai-born Karaim-speaking Odessan) two letters written in Hebrew script that were sent in 1868 to Lutsk. The critical apparatus that accompanies the transcription and translation includes commentaries on each linguistic peculiarity or irregularity. The study is augmented by a glossary and facsimile, as well as brief historical comments on some of the persons mentioned in the text.

What do Jews think scripture is? How do Jews view the anthology they variously call Tanakh, Miqra or “the Bible? Until now, no book has surveyed the answers Jews through the ages have given to these questions. This is the more surprising, since one would think that the conception of the Book among the People of the Book would be a topic of interest. The way Jews construct scripture, after all, is one way Jews construct themselves. The purpose of this anthology is to fill this gap. The seventeen essays in this collection explore how various figures, movements, or texts conceptualize scripture. Issues they address include:
- Ways in which the Tanakh is and is not thought to be authoritative
- The  relationship between Tanakh and tradition (in rabbinic parlance: between the Oral and Written Torahs)
- The question of who has the authority to interpret scripture
- The special status of the Bible’s language, or the ways its use of language differs from that of other texts
- The relationship of scripture to God and/or heavenly intermediaries
- The place of the Tanakh in the life of Jewish communities"

This monograph presents the contents of a Crimean Karaim manuscript of Samuel, son of
rabbi Kohen in the second half of the nineteenth century, namely in 1876 with short fragments
copied in 1875 and 1879. The manuscripts of this type are a unique source of knowledge of
the languages used by Crimean Karaims in the nineteenth century, that is Crimean Karaim
and Crimean Turkish. The majority of the linguistic material from that period is either not yet
published or difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the manuscripts provide us with information on
popular literature of the Crimean Karaims. Hitherto published Crimean Karaim manuscripts,
that is the first edition of a mejuma published by Radloff (1888, 1896) and contemporary
critical editions of Joseph Qılcı’s mejuma prepared by Aqtay (2009) and Qatıq’s mejuma by
Çulha (2010), contain folklore texts such as tales, songs and proverbs. The novelty of our
study lies in the fact that the core of the manuscript I present consists of new literary material,
namely a translation of a Hebrew drama entitled Melukhat Sha’ul into Turkic, which
heretofore has not been examined.
My thesis comprises a short outline of the religion, history, language and literature of
the Crimean Karaims. It is followed by a chapter dedicated to the description of the
manuscript along with the characteristics of the translation of the drama Melukhat Sha’ul and
a chapter in which I present a linguistic analysis of the language of the drama. These
introductory chapters precede the main part of the dissertation which consists of the
transcription of the translated drama with a translation into English.

VIII. yüzyılda Anan ben David tarafından kurulan Karai mezhebi, Orta Çağ’da büyük bir coğrafya da hüküm süren Hazar İmparatorluğu egemenliğinde en parlak dönemini yaşamıştır. Talmudist İbranilerin karşısında olan Karailer, Hahamların ortaya koyduğu öğretileri reddederek, sadece Tora (Tevrat) öğretilerini kabul ediyorlardı. Böyle bir düşünceyle Hazar Devleti’nin en yüksek mevkilerine kadar gelen Karailer, Hazar-Türk toplumunun dini yaşayışını derinden etkilemiştir. İbrani dininin bir mezhebi olarak bilinen “Karailik” Hazar toplumundaki tekâmülünden sonra, bugün “Karay Türkleri” olarak tanımlanan, çoğunluğu Kıpçak Türkçesi konuşan Türk topluluğunu Hazar Devletinin varisi olarak bırakmıştır. Hâlâ mevcudiyetlerini sürdüren Karailer, İsrail başta olmak üzere Türkiye, Polonya, Litvanya ve dünyanın çeşitli ülkelerinde varlıklarını sürdürmektedir.

Conversion to a religion usually has a positive impact on the written culture of a given community. The conversion may or may not result in the adoption of a new writing system. In the Turkic world, we find examples for both cases. The Karaims, by their conversion into Karaitism, adopted the Hebrew script. They used the Hebrew alphabet up till the beginning of the 20 th century in their everyday life for writing; for example, private letters and secular and religious texts in Karaim. Another Turkic speaking group, the heterogeneous Rabbanite community of Krimchaks (whose majority is of Sephardic origin) also used the Hebrew script to write their vernacular. Some characteristics of the writing systems of the Karaim and of the Krimchaks have been described, but no comparative research has thus far been carried out. In this study, the peculiarities of the Hebrew alphabet used by both Turkic speaking peoples will be discussed and illustrated. For instance, the new characters, which were introduced in order to indicate specific Turkic phonetic values, and the ways the same Hebrew vowel sign or letter is used in the different Krimchak and Karaim manuscripts.

The work presents – as far as is now possible – the language spoken by Lutsk Karaims in the second half of the 19th and in the first two decades of the 20th centuries. This is attempted by means of editing 16 letters written in Lutsk Karaim – with Hebrew interpolations. The manuscripts were written by different authors in Hebrew script.

The present publication appears to be the first critical edition of this type of texts written in this particular dialect. Previous editions of south-western Karaim manuscripts either concerned very short texts from Halych or were prepared with no intention of being professional.

The linguistic description of the manuscripts aims to present a grammar of the manuscripts’ language. It is complemented with a separate chapter dealing with the Slavonic structural influences exerted on the authors’ idiolects, and with the lexicon of the texts. A separate part deals with the orthography and the features of the writing itself. The transcription and translation of each manuscript are preceded with a concise palaeographic description and a summary of the content. The work closes with a glossary, several in¬dexes, maps, and the facsimile of the manuscripts.

In this article two manuscripts are compared: the oldest known Western Karaim and the oldest known Eastern Karaim translation of Biblical texts — both found by the present author. These texts are juxtaposed with the Eupatorian printed edition of the Tanakh from 1841 the language of which is a subject of discussion.

In Turkish:
Çalışmamızda, birisi Batı Karaycası öbürü Doğu (Kırım) Karaycası olmak üzere iki tane Tanah çevirisi karşılaştırmaktadır. Her ikisi de bilinen en eski Tanah çevirileridir. Ayrıca, 17. ve 18. yüzyıllarda istinsah edilen bu nüshalar 1841'de Gözlevede basılan Tanah çevirisiyle karşılaştırılmaktadır.

This volume offers the first comprehensive study on the history of
Middle Western Karaim dialects. The author provides a systematic
description of sound changes dating from the 17th–19th-centuries and
reconstructs their absolute- and relative chronologies. In addition, the
main morphological peculiarities are presented in juxtaposition to
Modern Western Karaim data.

The textual basis for this historical-linguistic investigation is a critical
edition of pre-1800 Western Karaim interpretations of Hebrew religious
songs called piyyutim (149 texts altogether). The reason behind this
choice is that some of these texts are among the oldest known Western
Karaim texts in general, and that until now no study has brought the
Karaim translation tradition in this genre closer to the reader.

The role of the grammatical cases’ category expressing the relationships between the nouns and other words, especially verbs, within the word groups and sentences is very important in the agglutinative languages. The number and functions of the suffixes of this category, formed of the morphemes called case suffixes in the agglutinative languages, differ according to the language. According to its structure Turkish language belongs to the group of agglutinative languages and thus the case
suffixes take a very important place within its morphology. The relationship of the modern Karaim language and historical Kipchak Turkic has been pointed out by some of the researchers. After performing the comparative analysis of the case suffixes in the works of the field of the historical Kipchak language that has been the source of today’s Karaim language, quite a lot of similarities may observed. These similarities are both seen in respect of morphology and function.
        In this paper, the case suffixes in the works of the field of Kipchak, being the historical heritage of the Karaim language, shall be analyzed using the comparative method. The case suffixes of Codex Cumanicus among the works of historical Kipchak field shall be compared with the modern Karaim language in terms of form and function. Thus the historical relationship between the Kipchak Turkic and modern Karaim language in terms of the case suffixes shall be proved.

Key Words: Karaim language, Kipchak language, case suffixes, comparison

This paper provides a brief review of the manuscripts originating from the Crimea and constituting a part of the collection of Karaite manuscripts assembled in the 1950s and 1960s by the Turkologist Józef Sulimowicz. An inventory list that is currently being compiled comprises 96 such items. However, this number may change as in many cases no precise information on their provenance is available and it will require a more detailed analysis to determine the origin of some of the documents. This part of the collection includes manuscripts with a religious and secular content, written in Karaim and in Hebrew. As far as the Karaim manuscripts are concerned, the mejumas, i.e. collections of popular literature, and a 17 th century translation of the Bible are particularly worthy of attention. The physical condition of the manuscripts is not infrequently poor since they might have been stored in lofts or basements before they came into the hands of Józef Sulimowicz. In 2012 the Association of Polish Karaims launched a project to restore and preserve Karaim manuscripts. Financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland the project made it possible to complete the conservation of the twenty most valuable items in the collection, including the above-mentioned Bible translation. In 2015 two other Crimean manuscripts are due to undergo restoration and subsequently digitalization, which will make them accessible to researchers.

The report gives a summary of the talks presented at a workshop on Karaim studies which took place in November 2010 at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala
University. The report also contains a selective list of the participating institutions’ publications on Karaim issues.

A Krím félsziget kedvező földrajzi helyzetének köszönhetően mindig is vonzó területnek számított a különböző népcsoportok számára. A történelem folyamán számos nép lakta (az ókorban többek között szkíták, szarmaták, görögök, gótok, hunok, a középkorban a szláv nyelvű beszélők mellett az északi steppe régióban török nyelvű népek, délen pedig megjelentek az itáliai telepesek is), és az évszázadok során több birodalom is kiterjesztette uralmát a félsziget területére. Mindezek következtében mind etnikailag, mind nyelvileg sokszínű kultúrával találkozik a térség kutatója.

В статье рассматриваются разные точки этнической истории караимов, специфические особенности их языка и религии.

The article discusses different points of the ethnic history of the Karaites, the specific features of their language and religion.

This article is an attempt to establish the time-frame and relative chronology of the š > s and ö, ü > e, i changes that occurred in south-western Karaim. The sample material used for the present article comes from Halych Karaim handwritten prayer books dating back approximately to the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century, and are written in the Karaim semi-cursive variant of the Hebrew script. The final conclusion of the article is that both changes occurred in the final decades of the 18th century.

Kayrat BELEK 111-128 9 SÖZLÜKLERİN ORTAYA ÇIKIŞIYLA İLGİLİ TEORİLER ÜZERİNE BİR DEĞERLENDİRME An Analysis on Theories about the Emergence of Dictionaries Pelin KOCAPINAR 129-141 10 KARAYCADAKİ ALINTI KELİMELER The Loanwords in Karaim Abdulkadir ÖZTÜRK 143-164 11 RUS İHTİLALLERİNİN AZERBAYCAN'A ETKİLERİ: BAĞIMSIZLIĞA GİDEN YOL The Influences of Russian Revolution on Azerbaijan: The Way Leading to Independence Ramin SADIGOV 165-185 12 SOVYET RUS EDEBİYATI SÜRECİNDE ATATÜRK İMGESİ Ataturk image during the Soviet literature Apollinaria AVRUTİNA 187-194 13 MUHAVERELİ ATASÖZLERİ Conversational Proverbs Yasin ŞEN 195-206 ÇEVİRİLER / Translations 14 NAGY SZENT MİKLOS HAZİNESİNE AİT BİR KAPTAKİ AVAR YAZISI Aвaрскaя нaдпис нa сосуде из клaдa Нaдь-Сент-Миклош O. MUDRAK (Çev. Reshide ADZHUMEROVA-Emine ATMACA) Abstract: Karaites are writen the Turkish language with the Hebrew alphabet and they have carried their existence from ten centuries to today. Today, Karaim Language is under the threat of disappearance and it is seen that the given place to many quotations from the other languages when analyzed the vocabulary of Karaim Language as a result of several factors. While the dominant languages, especially Slavic languages influence the Karaim Language, They feel the their reflections. These are mainly vocabulary and the grammar structure. The term is used in the form code-copying by Western linguist and is used in the form alıntılama by linguists of Turkey. It is the area that examined of the interaction between languages. In this study, the quotes in Karaim language will comment and classify as vocabulary. The ideas will exhibit about the quote in line with some determination. Аннотация: Караимы, которые в письме употребляют еврейский алфавит, сохранили свое существование на протяжении десяти веков. При исследовании запаса слов Караимского языка, который на сегодняшний день является одним из вымирающих языков, выявлено много заимствованных слов принятых из раных языков и по разным причинам. Доминирующие языки, особенно славянские языки, взяли под свое влияние караимский язык; этот факт можно заметить и в запасе слов, и в грамматической структуре языка. Термин alıntılama / kopyalama (заимствование) известная у западных лингвистов как code-copying является между языковой взаимодейственной темой. В этом исследовании, определяются заимстованные слова в Караимском языке, приводится ихняя классификация, а также будут представлены некоторые определения о них опираясь на некоторые выводы. Ключевые слова: заимствование, караимский, запас слов. * Dr., Erciyes Üniversitesi, Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi, Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü, Kayseri/TÜRKİYE. akadirozturk@erciyes.edu.tr 14 4 | A b d u l k a d i r Ö z t ü r k / G a z i

Karaim Turkic, which is classified geographically amongst the Northwestern group of Turkic dialects and within the Kipchak group in terms of its ethnic structure, is one of the present-day Turkic dialects with dramatically declining number of speakers. Having three dialects of Trakai, Halitz-Lutsk and Crimea, Karaim Turkic has preserved some archaic words and suffixes of the general Turkic language.
In the written and spoken language of Karaim Turkic basic suffixes of verbal adjectives and verbal adverbs of the Old Turkic language, present in many Turkic dialects today, continue to exist while verbal suffixes that emerged through formation of fixed forms by combination of more than one suffix are still in use. One of the suffixes that emerged through formation of a fixed form in combination of more than one suffix in Karaim Turkic is the suffix - Adoğon / -ydoğon. The suffix -Adoğon / -ydoğon is observed to be used in formation of both verbal adjectives and verbal adverbs. Use of the same suffix in the formation of both verbal adjective and verbal adverbs simultaneously is not commonly observed in Turkic. The structure and use of the suffix -Adoğon/-ydoğon in Karaim Turkic is therefore an interesting case.
In this paper information on the structure and formation of the suffix -Adoğon / -ydoğon shall be provided by revealing the use and functions of the suffix based on examples taken from texts in the Trakai dialect of Karaim Turkic. Comparison with similar suffixes in other historical and modern Turkic dialects shall be made while establishing the structure and functions of the suffix.
Keywords: Karaim Turkic, verbal adverb, verbal adjective, Turkic dialects

The present article is a continuation of a description of manuscript III-73, which
contains the earliest known Western Karaim Torah translation (from 1720) along
with the North-Western Karaim translation of four books of Ketuvim – more precisely,
the translation of the Book of Ruth, the Book of Jeremiah, Ecclesiastes and the Book
of Esther. The linguistic peculiarities of the Torah were presented in Németh (2014b).
This paper, in turn, contains a linguistic description of the Haphtarah – in particular
a critical edition of the Book of Ruth and its comparison (in the critical apparatus)
with the Book of Ruth as printed in the Eupatorian Tanach in 1841. Importantly,
the two parts of manuscript III-73, i.e. the Torah and the Haphtarah, as tentatively
notified in Németh (2014b), are very much different from a linguistic point of view,
and for this reason they are presented separately. Finally, observations that stem from
a comparison between the manuscript fragment edited here and the Eupatorian
print will be presented in the third part of this series of articles, since they primarily
concern the Eupatorian print rather than manuscript III-73.

‫העברית‬ ‫הלשון‬ ‫לחקר‬ ‫עת‬ ‫כתב‬ ‫לה‬ ‫הסמוכים‬ ‫והתחומים‬ ‫התשע"ו‬ ‫א-ב,‬ ‫חוברת‬ ‫ושמונה,‬ ‫שבעים‬ ‫כרך‬ ‫העניינים‬ ‫תוכן‬ ‫ם‬ ‫י‬ ‫ר‬ ‫מ‬ ‫א‬ ‫מ‬ ‫תופעות‬ ‫של‬ ‫ולקסיקליות‬ ‫טקסטואליות‬ ‫משמעויות‬ ‫על‬ ‫קיסטר‬ ‫מנחם‬ 7 ‫לשוניות‬ 21 ‫לשבת‬ ‫בברכות‬ ‫מפויטות‬ ‫פסקאות‬ ‫בשתי‬ ‫המקראי‬ ‫הרקע‬ ‫בר-אשר‬ ‫משה‬ 37 ‫א‬ ‫זֵ‬ ‫חָ‬ ָ ּ ‫י‬ ‫מַ‬ ְ ׁ ‫ש‬ / ‫א‬ ‫זֵ‬ ‫חָ‬ + ‫א‬ ָ ּ ‫י‬ ‫מַ‬ ְ ׁ ‫ש‬ / ‫שמחזאי‬ / ‫שמחזי‬ ‫שמיחזה:‬ ‫אידל‬ ‫משה‬ 43 ‫לשוניים‬ ‫עיונים‬ ‫העיבור:‬ ‫ופרשת‬ ‫הדין‬ ‫עיבור‬ ‫עיבר,‬ ‫סיגל‬ ‫בר-אשר‬ ‫מיכל‬ 60 ‫יצירתן‬ ‫ודרך‬ ‫המסורה‬ ‫בהערות‬ ‫אקרוסטיכון‬ ‫חתימות‬ ‫עופר‬ ‫יוסף‬ ‫ההלכתיים‬ ‫במקורות‬ ‫כן"‬ ‫מורין‬ ‫ואין‬ ‫"הלכה‬ ‫למשמעות‬ ‫ויסמן‬ ‫יהושע‬ 78 ‫המשפט‬ ‫ובבתי‬ ‫של‬ ‫במשנתו‬ ‫ההברה‬ ‫ובמבנה‬ ‫התנועות‬ ‫בתורת‬ ‫עיון‬ ‫וורמסר‬ ‫יהונתן‬ 95 ‫הבלשנית‬ ‫לתפיסתו‬ ‫צוהר‬ ‫הענא:‬ ‫זלמן‬ ‫ר'‬ 110 ‫לאדם"‬ ‫ב"יתרון‬ ‫הספרדיות‬ ‫התנועות‬ ‫מישור‬ ‫מרדכי‬ 130 ‫ימינו‬ ‫בלשון‬ ‫הייחוס‬ ‫בשמות‬ ‫ומלרע‬ ‫מלעיל‬ ‫שתיל‬ ‫נמרוד‬ ‫וטקסט‬ ‫מילון‬ ‫י:‬ ‫נִ‬ ‫נוּ‬ ‫בְ‬ ַ ‫תּ‬ ‫ר‬ ‫עוֹ‬ ְ ‫ן-בּ‬ ‫ובֶ‬ ‫שועל‬ ‫ן‬ ָ ‫ר‬ ‫מָ‬ ‫עורב,‬ ‫ן‬ ָ ‫ר‬ ‫מָ‬ ‫פרוכטמן‬ ‫מאיה‬ 155 ‫רטוש‬ ‫יונתן‬ ‫של‬ ‫בתרגומו‬ ‫לה-פונטן"‬ ‫ב"משלי‬ ‫י‬ ‫ר‬ ‫ו‬ ‫ט‬ ‫ס‬ ‫י‬ ‫ה‬ ‫ה‬ ‫ן‬ ‫ו‬ ‫ל‬ ‫י‬ ‫מ‬ ‫ב‬ ‫ה‬ ‫ד‬ ‫ו‬ ‫ב‬ ‫ע‬ ‫ה‬ ‫ן‬ ‫מ‬ ‫יודיצקי‬ ‫(אליהו)‬ ‫אלכסיי‬ 168 )4Q254( ‫ג‬ ‫בראשית‬ ‫פשר‬ ‫במגילת‬ ‫הגבולים"‬ ‫"בין‬ ‫הבר‬ ‫ואסתר‬ ‫"ספר‬ ‫עין",‬ ‫"מאור‬ ‫הקראיים‬ ‫החיבורים‬ ‫בין‬ ‫הזיקה‬ ‫געש‬ ‫אמיר‬ 177 ‫הכופר"‬ ‫ו"אשכול‬ ‫הפתרון"‬ ‫ת‬ ‫ו‬ ‫וב‬ ‫ג‬ ‫ת‬ ‫ו‬ ‫ת‬ ‫ו‬ ‫ר‬ ‫ע‬ ‫ה‬ 194 ‫חוזר‬ ‫עיון‬ ‫ולהתלחלח":‬ ‫"לחזור‬ ‫הלבני‬ ‫בצלאל‬ ‫אפרים‬ 197 ‫הלבני‬ ‫בצלאל‬ ‫לאפרים‬ ‫תשובה‬ ‫משנה:‬ ‫של‬ ‫פשוטה‬ ‫מסטיי‬ ‫עמנואל‬ ‫ת‬ ‫ו‬ ‫ר‬ ‫ו‬ ‫ק‬ ‫י‬ ‫ב‬ 201 ‫המשנה‬ ‫לשון‬ ‫של‬ ‫הצורות‬ ‫תורת‬ ‫שרביט‬ ‫שמעון‬ 211 ‫התלמוד‬ ‫ולשון‬ ‫התלמוד‬ ‫חקר‬ ‫על‬ ‫ברויאר‬ ‫יוחנן‬ 219 ‫חכמים‬ ‫לשון‬ ‫להכרת‬ ‫נוסף‬ ‫מקור‬ ‫גמליאל‬ ‫חנוך‬ 225 ‫והמצוי‬ ‫הרצוי‬ ‫חיוג':‬ ‫של‬ ‫הדקדוק‬ ‫חיבורי‬ ‫מהדורת‬ ‫על‬ ‫האורד‬ ‫יונתן‬ V ‫באנגלית‬ ‫תקצירים‬ 193-177 ‫עמ'‬ ‫(תשע"ו),‬ ‫עח‬ ‫לשוננו‬ ‫געש‬ ‫אמיר‬

In this article an early Bible translation into north-western Karaim is described. The man-uscript, written in Hebrew script (in its Karaim semi-cursive variant), dates back to 1720 what makes it the oldest western Karaim Bible translation to be hitherto critically analysed. The manuscript was copied in Kukizów by Simcha ben Chananiel (died in the 1720s). The language of the manuscript reveals archaic features, among others the consonant harmony being in the process of emerging.

During more than a century of investigation, northwestern Karaim has been labelled as being consonant-, vowel- and syllable-harmonical. The present paper attempts at summarizing the debate and drawing some conclusions from it. Views of 36 researchers are presented chronologically together with a commentary and information on their impact on our discussion.

This short review-article contains a number of observations regarding the new Crimean Karaim–English dictionary authored by Aqtay and Jankowski (2015) and the state of Crimean Karaim lexicography, as well as remarks on the discussion of the position of Crimean Karaim in the classification of Turkic languages.

On December 12, 2021 the Karaim National and Cultural Association “Fidan” held its third international conference entitled “Issues in the protection of Karaim cultural heritage“, in Sevastopol. Due to the pandemic, the conference had to be organised in hybrid mode. The event was attended by people from several countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, France, Israel and Australia.
The following report presents the summaries of the speeches of conference speakers who discussed a wide range of topics, including
former press publications, museum collections, historical and cultural events, preservation of the Karaim language, digitization of collections and tombstones, outstanding families and individuals, restoration activities and others.

Sie heißen Achmatowicz, Chazbijewicz und Musatowicz, Besikowitsch oder Firkovičius. Es sind alte Familiennamen aus Osteuropa, von Angehörigen kleiner muslimischer und jüdischer Minderheiten turkstämmiger Herkunft, die bis heute auf dem Gebiet des heutigen Litauen, Polen, Weißrussland und der Ukraine leben. Seit mehreren Jahrhunderten gehören die muslimischen Lipka-Tataren und die jüdischen Karaim (Karaimer, Karäer) zum festen kulturellen Bestandteil Osteuropas. Eine zusammenfassende Darstellung von Geschichte, Kultur und Religionen der Lipka-Tataren und Karaim für abrahamicstudies.com.

In the first part of this study (Karaim Letters of Jehoszafat Kapłanowski. I. A Critical Edition) a critical edition of two Karaim letters is presented. They were sent in 1868 from Odessa to addressees living Lutsk by a citizen born in Trakai. This paper (the second part of the study) contains a detailed linguistic analysis of the letters. Special attention is paid to the dialectal affiliation of the manuscripts’ linguistic material, to interdialectal contacts and to the irregularities recorded.

Józef Sulimowicz (1913–1973), a Polish Karaite, Turkologist and passionate bibliophile, collected a large number of Karaite manuscripts, books and documents in his lifetime. His collection, which includes items originating from both western communities and Crimea, is the only one of its kind in Poland. However, neither an inventory list, nor a catalogue have ever been assembled for the collection. Therefore, its exact content has remained largely unknown. The present paper discusses archival materials of the Karaite community in Lutsk stored in the Sulimowicz collection. It also looks at their origin, status and their research value.

A considerable part of the Karaim manuscripts stored in the loft of the kenesa in Łuck until the First World War were destroyed during the war and the Russian Revolution in 1917. Luckily for us, some of those manuscripts, mostly private letters and circulars, after having been stored and partly edited in 1933 by Aleksander Mardkowicz,1 ended up in a private collection and have survived in almost perfect condition to this day. The majority of the surviving manuscripts is written in Hebrew semicursive script – most of them in the Łuck subdialect of Łuck-Halicz Karaim (hereinafter called, for the sake of brevity, the Łuck Karaim dialect), a smaller part of the collection being written in Troki Karaim. Even though some of the manuscripts display glosses from other dialects, the reader normally has no particular difficulty classifying the manuscript from the linguistic point of view. They are going to be presented in the near future in another, more extensive study. The collection, however, contains a document of which we cannot be entirely sure which dialect some of its fragments represent. As it exhibits a number of interesting features, including traces of far-reaching dialect mingling, it undoubtedly deserves a separate presentation.

Karaim is oft en treated as an exceptional Kipchak Turkic tongue in which certain, otherwise widespread Turkic verbal constructions are not present. Philological discoveries of recent years show, however, that some of these categories did exist in Karaim. As a response to this issue, the present article documents the Western Karaim equivalent of the Tkc. -a jaz- approximative construction. It is based on 18th- and 19th century Biblical texts which are then juxtaposed with both phonetically and morphologically atypical 20th century data. Th is contribution is part of a series of works describing Karaim grammatical categories hitherto undocumented in the scholarly literature.

Open Access: https://akjournals.com/view/journals/062/74/2/article-p325.xml

La storia e gli usi della minoranza etnico-religiosa dei caraiti rendono arduo affermare che il giudaismo sia scisso prevalentemente fra ashkenaziti e sefarditi, differenziati dalla provenienza geografica. All'interno del giudaismo difatti si sono sviluppate alcune correnti, tra cui quella del caraismo, che però sono rimaste minoritarie sia per numero di appartenenti sia per vitalità ideologica.
L'origine etnica dei caraiti è stata oggetto di accanite discussioni.

Karaim Settlements in Villages and Farmsteads around Lutsk The Karaim community in Lutsk appears to have been widely dispersed in the 19 th century and beginning of the 20 th , with its members living not only in the town of Lutsk and its surroundings, but also in relatively distant villages and farmsteads. A list of the settlements where Karaims once resided was published in 1933 by Aleksander Mardkowicz. It contains 40 names that the Karaim activist found in old documents. Among those documents there are five 19 th and 20 th century Karaim letters in Hebrew script edited by Németh and a list – still unpublished – of community members living outside Lutsk around 1845. However, those documents include a few toponyms not registered by Mardkowicz. The presence of Karaims in numerous villages and farmsteads is also recorded in public records from 1871-1914. Based on the data from the death register the number of villages with Karaim inhabitants should be increased up to 80. The paper discusses the above-mentioned sources and their use in creating not only an exact map of Karaim settlements around Lutsk, but also in tracing family relations and migrations of the Lutsk Karaim population.

Recent research results have substantially broadened our knowledge regarding existing translations of the Hebrew Bible into Karaim. In the past few years numerous Biblical texts have been discovered that are among the oldest texts written in this moribund language. In this paper, the author presents the oldest known Karaim texts as well as recently discovered Karaim translations of the entire Tanakh and attempts to draw some preliminary conclusions on the relationship between them. Namely, the textual and stylistic similarities between Biblical manuscripts created separately in Karaim communities located far from one another in the regions of Crimea, Lithuania, Volhynia, and Galicia (including a considerable number of shared errores significativi) highlight the close affinities between these manuscripts and suggest that a common tradition of Bible translation must have existed among the Karaims. Moreover, the textual complexity and the use of sophisticated translation techniques and literary methods in the oldest known texts suggest that they could have been based on older texts or on a well-established oral translating tradition.