With his staff, wild tangled beard, fierce penetrating eyes and flowing oriental robes, Abraham Firkovitch could easily have been mistaken for a biblical prophet. He wasn’t a prophet, he lived far too late for that, but by all accounts he was every bit as fierce and compelling as a prophet might have been. He always got what he wanted. People didn’t say no to Abraham Firkovitch.
Abraham ben Shmuel Firkovitch was born in Volhynia, today’s Ukraine, in 1786 and died in Crimea 88 years later. He was a collector of manuscripts and archaeological artefacts and, it was later discovered, a forger. He would have argued that he committed forgery for the very best of reasons. He was a Karaite and he faked documents and inscriptions to save his people from persecution.
Karaites are an ancient Jewish sect who reject many of the practices, rules and beliefs of mainstream Judaism. They are not concerned with what rabbis have to say and they do not accept the authority of the Talmud, which, together with the Bible, is the basis of normative Judaism. Karaites only follow the Bible, interpreting it literally, or at least as literally as is possible to do.
The classic example of how Karaites and Talmudic Jews differ is in their interpretations of the biblical prohibition of fire on shabbat, on the Sabbath. The Talmud understands the prohibition to mean that although one cannot light a flame on shabbat, if a fire has already been lit it can continue to burn and provide warmth and light. The Karaites disagree, they say that fires may not burn at all on the day of rest; rather they sit in the dark and cold. (This a bit of a simplification but it illustrates the basic difference between the two approaches).
Abraham Firkovitch was a proud and partisan Karaite. A leader of his community, he travelled widely, collecting Jewish and Karaite manuscripts as he went, persuading communities who had long treasured their antiquities to entrust them to him, and recording the inscriptions on tombstones in ancient Karaite cemeteries. He believed that the Karaites had once been a numerous and important nation, with links to the Khazar tribe who are said to have converted to Judaism in the 8th century CE.
He went searching for lost or remote Karaite communities in Eastern Europe, Egypt, Turkey and Iraq and travelled to Jerusalem where he involved himself in rebuilding the city’s ancient Karaite synagogue. He sent letters to places where he had heard that there might be a Karaite community, hoping that he might get a response, and he asked everyone he met whether they knew anything about those Karaites who, he had been told, lived in India and China.
In fact, he only came across one remote Karaite community, just 67 people living in the city of Hit in Iraq. Firkovitch paid for them to move to and settle in Jerusalem, but they soon became disillusioned and went back home. Nevertheless, as a reward for his efforts he asked that they give him all their manuscripts, whatever condition they were in, even if they were just torn scraps of parchment. Like everyone else he came into contact with, the Karaites in Hit handed over their ancient treasures.
Firkovitch showed himself at his most persuasive when he visited the Samaritan settlement at Mount Gerizim in Palestine. The small Samaritan community regarded themselves (and still do) as the true Israelites whose history dates back to biblical times. They possessed manuscripts and documents dating back over centuries which, understandably, they guarded zealously. Collectors who had visited the Samaritans previously would count themselves lucky if they managed to persuade the to part with just two or three documents. Firkovitch, who stayed with them Samaritans for a fortnight, paid them the equivalent of $50,000 in current money and departed with 1,300 manuscripts.
When he arrived in Egypt he visited the Cairo Genizah, a vast storehouse of ancient Hebrew documents, 30 years before its ‘discovery’ by Solomon Shechter. For reasons that aren’t clear, he was unable to remove any of its papers, but he did manage to clean out the city’s Karaite genizah on the same trip, adding its thousands of documents to his collection.
Abraham Firkovitch sold his collections, numbering around 16,000 or 17,000 documents to the Imperial Public Library, now the National Library of Russia, in St Petersburg. It is considered to be one of the most important Jewish manuscript collections in the world. Among its treasures is the Leningrad Codex, the most authoritative, and oldest surviving manuscript of the Hebrew Bible.
Abraham Firkovitch was a passionate defender of Karaite tradition and history, but the history that he defended was often very far from the truth. Nobody knows for certain when the first Karaites lived, but the consensus is that they emerged during the 8th century CE and that one of their first leaders, if not their founder, was a man named Anan ben David. The earliest known Karaite author was Jacob al-Kirkisani, who lived in the 10thcentury CE but fragments of an earlier book, apparently written by Anan ben David, have also been discovered. However, Abraham Firkovitch came up with a much earlier date for the Karaites. He argued that they predated Judaism and had been living in Crimea since the 6th century BCE. He had good political reasons for doing so. He was trying to prove to the Russian Czar that the Karaites had never been Jews and had nothing to do with them.
By the 19th century, life for Jews in the Russian empire was becoming increasingly difficult. They were subject to discriminatory taxes, their young men were drafted into the army for periods of up to 25 years, attacks on Jews were increasing, murderous pogroms were breaking out. Jews were beginning to flee. It made absolute sense for Karaites who lived in the Empire to distance themselves as far as they possibly could from the unfortunate Jews, to persuade the Czar that the Karaites were not Jews; that there was no reason to persecute them. Indeed, according to the new fiction that Firkovitch and others promoted, not only were Karaites not Jews, but Jesus himself had been a Karaite and that it was the Jews who had killed him, for that very reason.
Firkovitch used to tell a story that he had first heard from his teacher, that when the Crusaders besieged Jerusalem in 1099, they preserved the lives of the Karaites because they knew that they had not been in the city at the time of the Crucifixion. The Crusader King Baldwin absolved them of any responsibility for the Crucifixion and indeed he was so enamoured of them that he gave them special freedoms including a charter granting them the right to live in Crimea. The story was of course untrue but it helped to promote the myth that Karaites were not Jews.
However, stories were not enough to prove that the Karaites were not, and had never been, Jews. Documentary evidence was needed. And so Abraham Firkovitch turned his hand to forgery. When he recorded tombstones in Karaite cemeteries he wrote the dates down incorrectly, knocking 1,000 years off the Hebrew date. It only involved changing one letter, few people were likely to notice unless they had a good grasp of Hebrew and a sharp eye when it came to reading tombstone inscriptions. Sometimes, if he could, he might even chisel a new date on the tombstone itself.
He was even more creative with manuscripts. He doctored the colophons, the inscriptions at the end containing the date, provenance and authorship of the document. He changed the dates, invented fictitious authors and reinvented the origins of the Karaites. He wrote a book based on his forged tombstone inscriptions, to prove that the Karaites had been in Crimea at the time of the Crucifixion (I’m not sure how this squares with the claim that Jesus had been a Karaite).
Firkovitch succeeded in his attempts to distance Karaites from Jews in the Russian Empire. In 1863 they were granted the same rights as the Russian Orthodox Christians. They did not suffer the years of pogroms and persecution heaped upon the Jews during the closing decades of the 19th century, nor, it appears, were they targeted by the Nazis.
Firkovitch, had he still been alive, would have claimed that he had been vindicated. But the few small Karaite communities that exist today, mainly in California and Israel, have not preserved Firkovitch’s rewriting of history. They know where the origins of their culture lie, they acknowledge and are proud of their Jewish roots. The very name of the Karaite community in San Francisco says as much; they call themselves the Karaite Jews of America. You can find them at karaites.org.