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with Jewish and Polish regionalist elites in Volhynia instead drawing particular attention to the tiny

Karaite population that lived in the provincial capital, Łuck.

Who were the Karaites, and why did they come to matter during the 1930s, despite their

small number? As members of a Jewish sect that distinguished itself from Rabbinic Judaism by

rejecting the Talmud as an authoritative interpretation of the Torah, the Karaite community of Łuck

was estimated to encompass just 65 people (or 12 families). During the Russian imperial period, they

had already been able to differentiate themselves from the Rabbinic Jews who formed the

overwhelming majority of the town’s Jewish population and had thus managed to gain exemptions

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from double taxation and military duty. References had first been made to Łuck’s Karaites at the

beginning of the sixteenth century, and indications of their long-standing presence could also be

found in sites across the town—a visitor to Łuck would discover not only a Karaite street (ulica

Karaimska) that featured its own special type of synagogue (kenesa), but also two Karaite

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cemeteries, one of which dated back to the medieval period. In spite—or rather because—of the
population’s somewhat murky history, various scholars from well beyond Volhynia, and even from

well beyond Poland, molded them in concert with their own competing political projects. Most

notably, the Italian statistician and eugenicist Corrado Gini journeyed to Poland and Lithuania in

1934 in order to examine the Karaites (including 38 individuals in Łuck) and to study their blood

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groups, skull dimensions, and eye, hair, and skin color. The Nazis took their own interest in

deciding whether these people were “really” Jews, according to their racial taxonomies, decisions

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that would have important repercussions during the Second World War.

73 Kiril Feferman, “Nazi Germany and the Karaites in 1938–1944: Between Racial Theory and Realpolitik,”
Nationalities Papers 39, no 2 (2011): 279.
74 Mikhail Kizilov, Sons of Scripture: The Karaites in Poland and Lithuania in the Twentieth Century (Berlin,
2015), 69.
75 Ibid., 203-215.
76 Feferman, “Nazi Germany and the Karaites in 1938–1944.”

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