Page 232 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

In the atmosphere of increasing anti-Semitism in both Nazi Germany and Poland by the mid-

1930s (a subject to which we will return in the next chapter), scholars from the Karaite community in

the Second Republic understandably wished to prove that they were not of the same racial stock as

the Semitic Jewish population. And yet within the Polish regionalist context, these same scholars also

emphasized something else: a common Polish-Karaite history that stretched back for centuries and

was reflected in both the urban landscape and the behavior of Karaites toward the state. By the mid-

1930s, studies increasingly integrated the group within the contemporary kaleidoscope of regional

diversity. A slim volume by the Karaite scholar Aleksander Mardkowicz, entitled Karaite Centers,

reflected the idea that the group constituted just one small colorful set of dots on the “ethnographic

map of our [sic] eastern borderlands.” While they were hidden from all but the most keen-eyed

researcher within what Mardkowicz called “the famous kresy mixture of peoples (ludy) and

77
languages,” Karaites were nevertheless an important part of a quintessentially Polish mosaic. In

many ways, it was the numerically miniscule nature of this group that made them a permissible part

of the regionalist project. Unlike the large number of Rabbinic Jews, the Karaites could be framed as

something of an exotic ethnographic curiosity, just one of the myriad groups that made up the kresy’s

population. By including photographs of “types” of Karaites (Figure 6.5), Mardkowicz also framed

the group in ways that had become standard in contemporary Slavic ethnography, thus suggesting a

common coding by which Karaites and Slavs could be understood.

[INSERT FIGURE 6.5]

Figure 6.5: Types of Łuck Karaites. Source: Aleksander Mardkowicz, Ogniska karaimskie (Łuck,
1936: Third Edition), 13.

77 Aleksander Mardkowicz, Ogniska karaimskie (Łuck, 1936), 1.

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