Turkism, Polish Sarmatism and Jewish szlachta: Some Reflections on a Cultural Context of the Polis

Özet

The purpose of this paper is to clarify one factual context in which the widespread - but erroneous - notion of the Turkic origins of the Eastern European Karaites might have arisen. I am not targeting here the senseless theories of such a politically-motivated falsifier as Seraja Szapszal, for I have done this elsewhere,1 but I will rather try to demonstrate that the initial stages of toying of the Eastern European Karaites with Turkicness should not be seen as some kind of conscious de-Judaization dirty tricks, but rather as a legitimate part of a specific Jewish-Polish discourse of the 18th century.