Das Buch der Karaer...etc. A collection of surveys and translations into German of the history and literature of the Karaites (Falkovitch, Fahn, Szapszal, etc.)

KALMANOWITSCH, ZELIG (Scholar and translator, 1881-1944).

Vilna

c. August, 1941-

Typed carbon copy with numerous and detailed autograph manuscript corrections. Approximately 380pp. (5 separate reports)

Following World War I, Vilna became an important center of Karaite life, led by its Haham, Seraja ben Szapszal. Upon occupying Vilna in June 1941, the Nazis queried the “Racial Psychology” of the Karaites in order to determine whether they belonged to the Jewish people. The scholarship of Zelig Kalmanowitsch was brought to bear on this issue and in order to save the Karaites from a certain destruction he gave the opinion they were not of Jewish origin. As a result, the Karaites escaped the Nazi era entirely unscathed (- although later, was to lead to their near complete assimilation and disappearance as a people). Kalmanowitsch himself was deported in September 1943 to an extermination camp in Estonia from which he never returned. See Z. Kalmanowitsch, A Diary of the Nazi Ghetto in Vilna, (English trans.), YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science Vol. VIII (1954) pp. 23,29,50,52,54; M. Dworzecki, Yerushalayim Delita in Kamf un Umkum (1948) p.243; P.E. Miller, Karaite Separatism in Nineteenth-Century Russia (1993)