Description

A pamphlet on the Karaite Jews was written by Seraya Shapshal (1873–1961), a hakham and leader of the Crimean and later the Polish and Lithuanian Crimean Karaites. Born in Bahçesaray, Crimea, Shapshal had an interesting biography. After his studies in philology and oriental languages at St. Petersburg University, he served as the personal tutor of the crown prince if Iran, Mohammad Ali Shah, allegedly working as a Russian spy at the same time, and upon his return to Russia he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as interpreter and translator. Before becoming Chief Hakham of the Crimean Karaites, Seraya Shapshal worked atthe Chair of Turkish-Tartar Literatures of the Faculty of Oriental Languages.

In 1920, he moved to Turkey and joined the Pan-Turkic movement, when he was elected the head of Karaims in Poland and moved to Vilnius in 1928.

In his work before the war, Seraya Shapshal supported a theory of the Turkic origin of the Crimean Karaites and denied any connection with Rabbinic Jews. Upon the German occupation of Poland he urged the German Nazi government to recognize the Crimean Karaites as its own ethnicity on non-Semitic roots.

Seraya Shapshal’s actions during World War II are today controversial and he is suspected of forwarding information on Jews, who lived under forged documents, to Germans. After the war, he resigned from any religious assignments and became a researcher at the Institute of History of the Soviet-dominated Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, where he authored several works with a focus on the military past of Crimean Karaites. As it turned out later, Seraya Shapshal forged several documents, which supported his theories.

Worldcat mentions one institutional example, held by Bilkent University Library, Turkey.
The text was also published in a magazine Turk Yılı in the same year as the book (pp. 576-615).

References: OCLC 282463169. Barry Walfish – Mikhail Kizilov, Bibliographia Karaitica. An Annotated Bibliography of Karaites and Karaism, 2011, p. 238, 3037.