LUTZKI, JOSEPH SOLOMON BEN MOSES. Igereth Teshu’ath Yisrael [Epistle of Israel’s Salvation: History of the Karaites under Tsar Nicholas I]

(KARAITICA)

Goslow (Eupatoria)

(1841)

Hebrew and Judeo-Tatar with nikud

Vinograd, Goslow 24; The Jacob M. Lowy Collection (1981) no. 107

In 1827, Tsar Nicholas I systematically began conscripting Jewish males into the military to serve twenty-five year terms of service ( “Cantonists.”) Immediately, the Crimean leaders of the Karaites, Simcha Babovich (1790-1855) and Joseph Solomon Lutzki (d. 1844) travelled to St. Petersburg to seek an exemption for the Karaites. This work is a detailed account of their ultimately successful mission by Lutzki and in Judeo-Tartar by his brother-in-law the renowned Karaite scholar Abraham Firkovich. The draft exemption was procured by having Karaism classified by the Tsar as a religion apart from Judaism. When the German-Nazis invaded the Crimea in World War II, the Karaites were once again spared draconian treatment due to the ruling that they constituted a separate religion from mainstream Jewry. The printed version of the Igereth appeared without a title page or even a date of approval by the censor. However, the colophon of Firkovich’s Judeo-Tartar version states that the translation was completed on 24 Tishri 5601 (1840). Therefore, scholarly opinion dates the publication of the Igereth around 1841 (Miller, p. 39). See P.E. Miller, Karaite Separatism in Nineteenth-Century Russia (1993) - a full-length transcription of Lutzki’s Igereth. See also Scripture and Schism: Samaritan and Karaite Treasures from the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary (2000) pp. 112-4 (no. 57)