The Western Karaim Torah pdf download

Book Title	The Western Karaim Torah
Book Author	Michał Németh
Total Pages	1507
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Language	English
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The Western Karaim Torah

THE WESTERN KARAIM TORAH

Introduction

1 The Antecedents of Manuscript ADub.iii.73

The translation of the Torah into Karaim has rather a long history—the question remains, however, of how far this story goes back.

In one of his articles, Seraya Shapshal (1873–1961), a well-educated leader of the Crimean and Polish Karaim communities, stated that the entire Tanakh was translated into Karaim around the 11th century (Šapšal 1918: 6).

This opinion was for the most part shared by Musaev (1964: 8), who stated that the Bible was translated into Karaim in the 11th–14th centuries. A. Zajączkowski (1964: 793) and

W. Zajączkowski (1980: 161), in turn, wrote that the oral—and thus, as should be made clear, unwritten—tradition of translating the Bible into Karaim dates back “ins 12. oder gar in das 11. Jahrhundert”.

At the same time, the latter author stated that the oldest written translations of the Bible originate from the 16th century and that they were recorded in the south-western dialect of Karaim (the Halych dialect, as he termed it), whereas the oldest North-Western Karaim translations were made in the first half of the 18th-century, see W. Zajączkowski (1980: 162).

Although the latter information is in accordance with our present-day knowledge, we have still no evidence of the 16th-century South-Western Karaim Biblical texts referred to by Włodzimierz Zajączkowski and Omeljan Pritsak (1959a: 323).1

One important manuscript worthy of mention here is Ever i Bibl 143, which contains a (probably) 15th-century Kipchak Turkic translation of a large part of the Torah—from Exo 21:11 up till Num 28:15.

Even though it contains a translation of the Torah into Kipchak Turkic written in Hebrew script and its Crimean provenance is very likely (as claimed by Harkavy & Strack 1875, see below), it still needs to be determined whether it was indeed written in Karaim and whether it belongs to the same translation tradition as the sources that are

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