The Firkovich Controversies:
Scholarship in the Service of Separatism

Karaïmes
(Karaites, with Abraham Firkovich shown seated at right)
From Description ethnographique des peuples de la Russie (Ethnographic Description of the Peoples of Russia)
By Theodore de Pauly
Drawn by C. Huhn
Lithographed by J. B. Kuhn
St. Petersburg, 1862
B2.52.11

No nineteenth-century Karaite is more notorious than Abraham Firkovich (1786-1874). Born in Lutsk, like many other Karaites of his day, Firkovich settled in the Crimea. Beginning in the 1830s, he traveled all over the Russian and Ottoman Empires, seeking out Jewish manuscripts in the Crimea, Constantinople, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nablus, and Cairo. His collections were donated to the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg in several stages; in all they numbered fifteen thousand items. Among them were exceedingly important (and mostly still unpublished) medieval Karaite works, more than a thousand Samaritan pieces, and numerous Rabbanite manuscripts as well.

The legacy Firkovich's collecting expeditions bequeathed to future generations of scholars cannot be overestimated. At the same time, that legacy has been shrouded in confusion for more than a century because of the suspicion that Firkovich forged much of his material. Beginning immediately after his death and until the end of the nineteenth century, a succession of scholars attacked him for tampering with his evidence. Scholarly works on Karaism are crowded with footnotes dismissing the documents from his collections as useless for scholarship. But since 1989, when the Russian government opened the Firkovich collections in St. Petersburg to non-Soviet scholars, it has become clear that the extent of Firkovich's forgeries was overstated; they were probably limited only to some of the tombstone inscriptions and colophons that he published. The works he retrieved during his voyages remain of tremendous value to scholars, who are beginning once again to use his collections in the historical reconstruction of Karaite thought and literature.

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