Rationale

The German theologian and Hebraist Johann Buxtorf der Ältere (1564–1629) was the first commentator to inform European readers that the Karaims read the Bible in a translation into a Turkic vernacular written in Hebrew script. Buxtorf mentions this fact in the second, posthumous edition of his Bibliotheca Rabbinica printed in 1640, in the lexicon entry שחומ Chumaʃsh (the first edition of Bibliotheca Rabbinica f rom 1613 l acks t his entry), see Buxtorf (1640: 444–445). This work has only been very rarely cited in the scholarly literature: Buxtorf’s report was either not mentioned in works detailing the first references to the Karaim language and its Bible translations, or it was quoted after Schudt (1714: 208) who reported concisely, in German, what Johannes Buxtorf wrote in Latin – see, for instance, Zajączkowski (1939: 93), Szyszman (1952: 215, 218; 1957), Dubiński (1959 [1994]: 64) or Jankowski (2009; 2018). To a certain extent, however, this is understandable given that Buxtorf did not actually provide the reader with any Karaim linguistic samples. In fact, we know that he had never seen any written Karaim sources (see Szyszman 1952: 215).

The Swedish Orientalist Gustaf Peringer Lillieblad (1651–1710) was the first to document a passage written in Karaim. He presented the first three verses of the Torah in a letter dated 15 April 1691 addressed to the German Ethiopist Hiob Ludolf (1624–1704). The letter was published by Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel (1659–1707) in 1691 (Tentzel 1691: 572–575). The fate of the original correspondence remains unknown.

For a long time Peringer’s short passage was the oldest known text written in Western Karaim and it has justly received substantial attention in the scholarly literature, see, for instance, the works of Zajączkowski (1939: 90–99), Szyszman (1952: 228), Dubiński (1991: 219), Csató (2007: 191–192; 2008: 169) or Jankowski (2019: xii). It is still one of the oldest linguistic samples of Western Karaim: we know only of six other (17th-century) Western Karaim texts that are older than Peringer’s report.