Crimea and the Krymchaks קרים והקרימצ׳אקים

Jews have been in Crimea since Roman times: at Panticapaeum inscriptions of the first century were found recording the manumission of slaves "at the synagogue". Then come the Khazar centuries, Genoese Kaffa, the Crimean Khanate.

Two communities that are constantly confused. The Krymchaks are Jews of the Oral Torah, descendants of several waves of settlement, who went over to the Crimean Tatar tongue and wrote it in Hebrew letters. Their chief town was Karasubazar. Their order of prayer was given them in 1515 by Rabbi Moshe ha-Golah, who came from Kiev: he drew the various customs into one, and the result was the Kaffa rite. The Karaites—the movement that rejected the Oral Torah—lived alongside them, at Chufut-Kale and Yevpatoria, and through their whole history in Russia sought not to be counted as Jews.

In that argument stands the name of Abraham Firkovich: the nineteenth-century Karaite collector brought together an enormous stock of manuscripts, part of it beyond price—but scholars hold that he altered the dates on tombstones and in colophons to prove that the Karaites came to Crimea before the crucifixion and so bore no guilt for it. The government believed him: the Karaites were freed from the Jewish disabilities.

In December 1941 the Germans killed almost all the Krymchaks: some six thousand people, three quarters of the nation. The Karaites, by their own racial reckoning, they left alone. The surviving Krymchaks were deported in 1944 together with their Crimean Tatar neighbours to Central Asia. Today they are counted in hundreds, and the eleventh of December in Crimea is a day of remembrance.