Ильяш Караимович и Тимофей Хмельницкий: кровная месть, которой не было
Eljasz Karaimowicz and Timophei Chmielnicki: Blood Feud That Never Happened

Summary/Abstract: The paper is dedicated to the allegedly seventeenth-century document regarding Eljasz Karaimowicz (or Karaimovich), Timophei Chmielnicki and the Karaites of Chufut-Kale. A Karaite document of rather suspicious origin, allegedly found by the twentieth-century Karaite leader and Orientalist, Seraya Szapszał, in the Karaite library “Karay Bitikligi”, tells about the attempt to house Timophei, the son of the infamous Cossack hetman Bohdan Chmielnicki (responsible for the seventeenth-century Khmelnitski/Chmielnicki massacres), in Chufut-Kale. According to this document (or, rather, to its Russian translation published by Szapszal), the Karaite community refused to house Timophei because of their hatred towards the Zaporozhian Cossacks who killed colonel Eljasz Karaimowicz (according to Szapszał, this colonel belonged to the Karaite clan of the Uzuns). Even the first acquaintance with this document, the absence of its original, and its suspicious style, not to mention the striking improbability of the story, strongly suggestsed that it was a Szapszał forgery. My suspicions were justified in April, 2002, when – browsing one of Szapszał’s notebooks, which he started in İstanbul, in 1927, among quotations from other sources related to Eljasz Karaimowicz – I found a document in Hebrew characters written in Szapszal’s hand. This document, composed in Crimean Tatar, represents two different versions of the “draft” of this “seventeenth century” Karaite document, evidently composed by Szapszał, most likely in the 1930s. Both version are heavily corrected with Szapszał’s own hand, some names are written in a completely different manner, some new characters are introduced into the story – an impossible thing when someone is dealing with the original of a document. Later I found one more version of this “source”, also slightly different from two versions mentioned above. In addition to analysis of this forgery, I also analyze the biography of Eljasz Karaimowicz (often contaminated with Cossack leaders Wadowski or Barabash), as an historical fugure, a colonel of Cossacks, and legendary figure of twentieth-century Karaite scholarship. Furthermore, I also outline the biography of Seraja Szapszał and question the veracity of some other documents published by him. The article is very important for better understanding the history of the Crimean Karaites in early modern period, Cossack-Jewish relations, twentieth-century Karaite scholarship, biography of Seraja Szapszał, and methodology of falsifying historical sources. Appendix contains different versions of the Turkic “document” about the blood feud between the Karaites and Zaporozhian Cossacks.

• Details
• Contents