Seraya Shapshal

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Seraya Shapshal or Haji Seraya Han Shapshal (Karaim: Хаджи Серая Хан Шапшал; Russian: Серая (Сергей) Маркович Шапшал; Polish: Seraj Szapszal) (1873-1961) was a hakham and leader of the Crimean and then Lithuanian Karaim community.

Shapshal was born in Çufut Qale, Crimea and studied at St. Petersburg University, where he received a doctorate in philology and Oriental languages. He was invited to serve as the personal tutor of the Iranian crown prince, Mohammad Ali Shah, and became a minister in the Persian government in 1907 (rumor had it that he was a Russian spy). In 1911 he returned to Crimea and became Chief Hakham of the Crimean Karaite communities.

From 1919 to 1927 he lived in Istanbul. Here he was active in the pan-Turkic movement. In 1927 he moved to Vilna, and became the head of the Karaims in Poland and Lithuania. A philosophical disciple of Avraham Firkovich, he took Firkovich's ideas to extremes, denying any connection between Karaims and Rabbinic Jews. In 1941 he met with Nazi authorities and was instrumental in the formulation of their policy towards the Karaim. As Hakham of Vilna he was infamous for his confrontations with such Jewish community figures as Zelig Kalmanovich, and having given to the Nazis a detailed list of the members of the Karaim communities of Troki and Vilnius, allowing them to easily discover and arrest Jews who had forged papers stating that they were Karaims.

After the war he lived in Troki and later Vilna, teaching at the Soviet-dominated Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. He co-authored of a Karaim-­Russian-­Polish dictionary (published in 1974) and wrote a number of articles on the Karaims of Crimea. His "History of the Karaims" remains unpublished. Part of his collections and books are kept in a small museum in the old kenesa of Troki, where he died in 1961.

Many Jews regard his actions as having condemned their co-religionists to extermination, and accuse him of making a "death list". Shapshal and his defenders maintain that had he not acted as he did, he and the other Karaim of Lithuania would have been put in danger. As a matter of fact, the rabbis interrogated by the Germans had to lie supporting the notion of non-Jewish identity of the Karaim in order to save human lives.

[edit] References

• Shapshal, S. M.: Karaimy SSSR v otnoshenii etnicheskom: karaimy na sluzhbe u krymskich chanov. Simferopol', 2004