Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T18:34:24.008Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Nazi Germany and the Karaites in 1938–1944: between racial theory and Realpolitik

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Kiril Feferman
Kiril Feferman*
Affiliation:
Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center, Moscow, Russia
*
*Email: kiril.feferman@mail.huji.ac.il
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores the policies of Nazi Germany towards the Karaites, a group of Jewish ancestry which emerged during the seventh to the ninth centuries CE, when its followers rejected the mainstream Jewish interpretation of Tanakh. Karaite communities flourished in Persia, Turkey, Egypt, Crimea, and Lithuania. From 1938 to 1944, the Nazi bureaucracy and scholarship examined the question of whether the Karaites were of Jewish origin, practiced Judaism and had to be treated as Jews. Because of its proximity to Judenpolitik and later to the Muslim factor, the subject got drawn into the world of Nazi grand policy and became the instrument of internecine power struggles between various agencies in Berlin. The Muslim factor in this context is construed as German cultivation of a special relationship with the Muslim world with an eye to political dividends in the Middle East and elsewhere. Nazi views of the Karaites’ racial origin and religion played a major role in their policy towards the group. However, as the tides of the war turned against the Germans, various Nazi agencies demonstrated growing flexibility either to re-tailor the Karaites’ racial credentials or to entirely gloss over them in the name of “national interests,” i.e. a euphemism used to disguise Nazi Germany's overtures to the Muslim world.

Keywords

Nazi GermanyKaraitesHolocaust
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , March 2011 , pp. 277 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Algamil, Yosef. Ha-yehudim ha-karaim be-mizrach Europa be-avar u-be-hove. Ramie: “Tif'eret Iosef” Institute for the Study of the Karaite Jewry, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Algamil, Yosef. Toldot ha-yahadut ha-karait. 2 vols. Ramie: National Council of the Karaite Jews in Israel, 1979. Print.Google Scholar
Aliglashvili, Levi. “How Georgian Jews in Occupied France Were Saved.” Yad Vashem Studies 6 (1967): 217–20. Print.Google Scholar
Angrick, Andrej. Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Arad, Yitzhak. Toldot ha-shoa. Brit ha-moetsot ve-ha-shtachim ha-mesupachim. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Atchildi, Asaf. “Rescue of Jews of Bukharan, Iranian and Afghan Origin in Occupied France (1940–1944).” Yad Vashem Studies 6 (1967): 257–81. Print.Google Scholar
Backer, Avraham. Die Karaimer. Historisher Iberblik. Tel Aviv: H. Leivik, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Bareket, Elinoar. “Karaite Communities in the Middle East during the Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries.” Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources. Ed. Polliack, Meira. Leiden: Brill, 2003. 237–54. Print.Google Scholar
Ben Shamai, Haggai. “Major Trends in Karaite Philosophy and Polemics in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries.” Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources. Ed. Polliack, Meira. Leiden: Brill, 2003. 9–24. Print.Google Scholar
Earl, Hilary Camille. The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial: 1945–1948: Atrocity, Law, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Ehrenreich, Eric. The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Efstafyeva, Tatyana. “Tragediya Babyego Yara.” Druga Svitova Viina i dolya narodiv Ukrainy. Kiev: Zovnishtorgvidav, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Feferman, Kiril. “Nazi Germany and the Mountain Jews: Was There a Policy?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21.1 (Winter 2007): 96–114. Print.Google Scholar
Freund, Roman. “Karaites and Dejudaization: A Historical Review of an Endogenous Paradigm.” Acta Universitatis Stockholiensis. Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion 30 (1991). Print.Google Scholar
Friedman, Philip. “The Karaites under Nazi Rule.” On the Track of Tyranny. Essays Published by the Wiener Library to Leonard G. Montefiore, on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Ed. Beloff, Max. London: The Wiener Library, 1960. Print.Google Scholar
Friedman, Philip. Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust. Ed. June Friedman, Ada. New York: Conference on Jewish Social Studies, 1980. 97–123. Print.Google Scholar
Fuki, Aleksandr. Karaimy – synov'ya i docheri Rossii. Rasskazy i ocherki ob uchastii v boyakh ot krymskoi voiny do Velikoi Otechestvennoi. Moscow: AO “Interprint,” 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Gil, Moshe. “The Origins of the Karaites.” Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources. Ed. Polliack, Meira. Leiden: Brill, 2003. 73–118. Print.Google Scholar
Green, Warren P. “The Fate of the Crimean Jewish Community: Askenazim, Krimchaks, and Karaites.” Jewish Social Studies 46.2 (1984): 169–76. Print.Google Scholar
Green, Warren P. “The Karaite Passage in A. Anatoli's [sic] Babi Yar.” East European Quarterly 12.3 (1978): 283–87. Print.Google Scholar
Green, Warren P. “The Nazi Racial Policy towards the Karaites.” Soviet Jewish Affaires 8.2 (1978): 35–45. Print.Google Scholar
Lutz, Hachmeister. Der Gegnerforscher: Die Karriere des SS-Führers Franz Alfred Six. München: Beck, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Harviainen, Tapani. “The Karaites in Eastern Europe and the Crimea: An Overview.” Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources. Ed. Polliack, Meira. Leiden: Brill, 2003. 633–56. Print.Google Scholar
Hauer, Jacob Wilhelm. Religion und Rasse. Tübingen: Wissenschaftliche Akademie Tübingen des NSD=Dozentenbundes, 1941. Print.Google Scholar
Kefeli, Valentin. Karaim. Pushino: Pushinskii nauchnyi tsentr RAN, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Kizilov, Mikhail. The Karaites of Galicia: An Ethnoreligious Minority among the Ashkenazim, the Turks, and the Slavs, 1772–1945. (Studia Judaeoslavica. Vol. 1). Leiden: Brill, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Kropotov, Vladimir S. Viiskovy traditsii krymskikh karaimiv. Simferopol: Dolya, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Kunz, Norbert. Die Krim unter deutscher Herrschaft 1941–1944. Germanisierungsutopie und Besatzungsrealität. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Kupovetsky, Mark. “Dinamika chislennosti i rasselenie karaimov i krymchakov za poslednie dvesti let.” Geografiya i kul'tura etnograficheskikh grupp tatar v SSSR. Moscow: Nauka, 1982.Google Scholar
Leers, Johann. Rassen, Völker und Volkstürmer. Langesalza: J. Beltz, 1938. Print.Google Scholar
Lvov, Alexander. Prostonarodnoe dvizhenie iudeisvuyushikh v Rossii 18–20 vekov. Ph.D. diss., European U in St. Petersburg, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Maurach, Reinhart. “Die Karaimen in der russischen Gesetzgebung.” Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde 10.2–3 (1939): 163–75. Print.Google Scholar
Michman, Dan. Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective. Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues. London, Portland, OR: Vallentine, Mitchell, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Pegelow, Thomas. “Determining ‘People of German Blood', ‘Jews’ and ‘Mischlinge': The Reich Kinship Office and the Competing Discourses and Powers of Nazism, 1941–1943.” Contemporary European History 15.1 (2006): 43–65. Print.Google Scholar
Piper, Ernst. Alfred Rosenberg. Hitlers Chefideologie. München: Karl Blessing, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Polkanov, Alexander. Krymskie karaimy. Simferopol, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Rahe, Thomas. “Höre Israel” Jüdische Religiosität in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Roth, Karl Heinz. “Berlin-Ankara-Baghdad: Franz von Papen and German Near East Policy During the Second World War.” Germany and the Middle East, 1871–1945. Ed. Schwanitz, Wolfgang G. Princeton, NJ: Max Wiener Publishers, 2004. 181–216. Print.Google Scholar
Schmaltz, Eric J., and Sinner, Samuel D. “The Nazi Ethnographic Research of Georg Leibbrandt and Karl Stump in Ukraine, and its North American Legacy.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14.1 (2000): 28–64. Print.Google Scholar
Schröder, Christel Matthias. Rasse und Religion: Eine Rassen- und Religions- wissentschaftliche Untersuchung. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1937. Print.Google Scholar
Shapira, Dan. “Beginnings of the Karaite Communities of the Crimea Prior to the Sixteenth Century.” Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources. Ed. Polliack, Meira. Leiden: Brill, 2003. 709–28. Print.Google Scholar
Shapira, Dan. “A Jewish Pan-Turkist: Serayah Szapszał's Work Qırım Qaray Türkleri.” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 58.4 (2005): 349–80. Print.Google Scholar
Shapira, Dan, and Harviainen, Tapani. “On Scholarship, Firkovicz, and Forgeries”. Omeljan Pritsak Armağani. A Tribute to Omeljan Pritsak. Ed. Alpargu, Mehmet and Oztürk, Yücel. Sakarya, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Shneer, Aharon. Plen. Jerusalem: Mosty kul'tury, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Schur, Nathan. History of the Karaites. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Semi, Emanuela T. “L'oscillation ethnique: Le cas des Caraites pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale.” Revue de l'Histoire des Religions 206.4 (October–December 1989): 377–98. Print.Google Scholar
Semi, Emanuela T. “The Image of the Karaites in Nazi and Vichy France Documents.” Jewish Journal of Sociology 32.2 (1990): 81–93. Print.Google Scholar
Spector, Shmuel. “Ha-karaim be-Europa she-be-shlitat ha-Natsim be-rei mismachim germanium.” Peamim 29 (1986): 90–108. Print.Google Scholar
Spector, Shmuel. “Shoat ha-yehudim ha-krymchakim bi-tqufat ha-kibush ha-natsi.” Peamim 27 (1986): 18–27. Print.Google Scholar
Steigmann-Gall, Richard. “Old Wine in New Bottles?: Religion and Race in Nazi Anti-Semitism.” Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust. Ed. Spicer, Kevin P. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2007. 285–308. Print.Google Scholar
Teich, Gerhard, and Rübel, Hanz. Verzeichnis der Völker, Volksgruppen und Volksstämme auf Gebiet der ehemaligen UdSSR: Geschichte, Verbreitung, Rasse, Bekenntnis. Leipzig: Steglitz, 1941. Print.Google Scholar
Vikhnovich, Vsevolod. “Massovye etnicheskie deportatsii iz Kryma v 1944–1945 gg. i Krymskie karaimy.” Paralleli 4–5 (2004): 89–93. Print.Google Scholar
Vikhnovich, Vsevolod. 2000 let vmeste: evrei Rossii. St. Petersburg: Piter, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Die Völker des Kaukasus und seiner Vorländer. Berlin und Stuttgart: Deutsches Ausland-Institut, 1941.Google Scholar
Yedidya, Asaf. The Nazi's Attacks on the Talmud in the Third Reich. Post-doctoral project. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009–2010. Unpublished.Google Scholar
Yitzhak, Arad, Krakowski, Shmuel, and Spector, Shmuel (eds). The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selection from the Dispatches of the Nazis’ Death Squads Campaign against the Jews (July 1941 – January 1943). New York: Holocaust Library, 1989. Print.Google Scholar