Events - Research Centre for Language Documentation - Faculty of Philology

A 18th-century Karaim manuscript discovered

Successful archival research

A valuable Karaim manuscript was discovered on 15 November 2019 in Kraków—in the private archive of the inheritors of the late Polish orientalist Prof. Tadeusz Kowalski (1889–1948). It contains a translation of the Torah into North-Western Karaim. In 1929 it was in the possession of Dr. Zacharjasz Nowachowicz (1883–1960), an inhabitant of Halych, as mentioned by Tadeusz Kowalski in his Karaimische Texte im Dialekt von Troki. The fate of this manuscript remained unknown for decades—until it was re-discovered by Dr. Hab. Michał Németh and Dr. Anna Sulimowicz-Keruth in cooperation with Dr Urszula Lewicka-Rajewska in the framework of the research financed by the ERC project KaraimBible. The manuscript's analysis showed that this manuscript was translated and copied by Simcha ben Chananel (the hazzan of the Karaim community of Kukizów from ca. 1709 until his death on 27 March 1723). According to his annotation written on the inside of the front cover he finished copying this work on the first day of the parashat Vayeshev in the month Kislev 5483 A.M., i.e. on 7 December 1722 A.D. The manuscript has been corectly identified despite the fact that the place and time of the manuscript’s creation was misinterpreted by Tadeusz Kowalski.

This manuscript contains the second oldest translation of the Torah into Western Karaim (the oldest translation—from 1720—was also created and translated by Simcha ben Chananel). It is written in Hebrew script and is only partially vocalised. Below, we show the first page of the Karaim translation.