Page 233 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Non-Jewish Poles also joined the chorus. Even prior to independence, some Polish

commentators had already begun to describe the Karaites in more positive terms than they had

reserved for the Rabbinic Jews, despite the former’s material poverty. The journalist Józef Smoliński

remarked in an article in 1912 that “even in the poorest house [of a Karaite] you would not find the

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dirtiness and neglect typical of Rabbinic Jews.” Such observations persisted into the interwar years,

with pro-Sanacja statesmen openly arguing that the Karaites positively distinguished themselves

from the rest of the Jewish population. “The Łuck Karaites,” President Mościcki stated on his visit to

the provincial capital in 1929, “represent an example for other ethnic groups, from the moral as well

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as from the political standpoint.” In his English-language survey of the various minority groups in

Poland, the scholar Stanisław Paprocki stated that the Karaites “have always been highly respected

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by the public for their industry and sterling honesty.” The idea that they stood apart from the
Rabbinic Jews in how they comported themselves on a daily basis was made clear in the Polish

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tendency to refer to the Karaites as “the smallest minority in Poland.”
The interest of ethnically Polish regionalists in the Karaites was marked in other ways too. In

1934, the editors of Jakub Hoffman’s Volhynian Yearbook published an article by a leading

Orientalist and Karaite scholar, Ananjasz Zajączkowski, who marshalled evidence about the group’s

language, traditions, and “anthropological type” in order to show a Polish audience that the Karaites

were originally from Asia. Drawing on the pan-European interest in ethnographic and even racial

“types,” he argued that the group was of the “Asiatic type”—they typically had hazel eyes, light olive

skin, and brown or auburn-colored hair that was very often curly, while their eye shape and the fact

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that their ears did not protrude similarly indicated that they were descendants of the “Mongol race.”

78 Cited in Kizilov, Sons of Scripture, 70.
79 Cited in Ibid., 134
80 Stanisław J. Paprocki, Minority Affairs and Poland: An Informatory Outline (Warsaw, 1935), 183-4.
81 See the review of Ogniska karaimskie in the regional journal Znicz. “Ruch Wydawniczy,” Znicz, September 1934,
16.
82 Ananjasz Zajączkowski “Karaimi na Wołyniu,” Rocznik Wołyński (1934), 187.

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