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ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century saw the beginning of modern historical research and methodology as well as intense development of historical thought in the Russian Empire. This century was also marked by the emergence of the Haskalah, which reached its peak in Russia in the 1860s and introduced a new area of scholarship – Wissenschaft des Judentums, or Hokhmat Israel. It included, inter alia, research endeavors to trace the history of Jewish communities in the territories that became part of the Russian Empire. The first Jewish researchers, both maskilim and Karaites, tried to employ research methods used by their European and Russian counterparts. Simultaneously, there appeared multifarious forgeries of historical documents – manuscripts, colophons, tomb inscriptions, as well as forged chronicles and “folklore” texts, both in Jewish and Russian educated circles and in the scholarly world more broadly. This article examines historical forgery in the Russian Empire as a socio-cultural phenomenon in a wider temporal context. It proposes a number of factors that contributed to the coexistence of the two, apparently conflicting, parallel processes – the emergence of modern science and the rise of historical forgeries.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Golda Akhiezer (PhD) is a senior lecturer at the Israel Heritage Department at the Ariel University. Her research interests include: the intellectual history of Eastern European Jewry, Karaism, Jewish historiography and historical thought, and the Haskalah. Her last monograph is Historical Consciousness, Haskalah, and Nationalism among the Karaites of Eastern Europe (Leiden – Boston: Brill 2018).
Notes
1. On forgeries in European history see Grafton, Forgers and Critics. Grafton considers forgeries from ancient to modern periods, while classifying authorial motives and means, as well as the historical circumstances of their creation. Bak, Manufacturing a Past for the Present. See also Parppei, “The Oldest One in Russia.” This case study of eighteenth-nineteenth-century Russian historiography deals with the image of the Valaam monastery, created according to the national romanticist agenda through the use of textual forgeries. The work by Osipian, “Forgeries and Their Social Circulation,” presents a case study of a charter's forgery by the Armenian community in Lviv in the context of a cultural, ideological, and political agenda in the host society.
2. See, for example, Strack, A. Firkowitsch und seine Entdeckungen; Harkavy, Altjudische Denkmaler aus der Krim, mitgeteilt von Abraham Firkovisch (1839–1872) und geprüft von Albert Harkavy; Shapira, “Remarks on Avraham Firkowicz and the Hebrew Mejelis ‘Document;’” Kizilov and Shchegoleva, “Osen’ karaimskogo patriarkha, Avraham Firkovich po opisaniyam ochevidtzev i sovremennikov.”
3. Grafton, however, uses the concept of forgery in a very wide sense, including ahistorical narratives, pseudepigraphaic sources like “Aristea's letter,” and some books of the New Testament. See Grafton, Forgers and Critics, 16, 17.
4. Lomonosov's theory was based on the early twelfth-century Primary Russian Chronicle, according to which in 862, the Slavic natives of Novgorod invited a Scandinavian (Varangian) chieftain, Rurik, to rule in their city. He became a prince of Novgorod and founded his dynasty, which ruled Kievan Rus, and later the Grand Duchy of Moscow. Some Russian historians saw in this event the beginning of Russian statehood. Others rejected it by claiming that Rurik was of Slavic origin.
5. Novikova and Sizemskaya, Russkaya Istoriosofia.
6. Lomonosov, Drevniaya rossiiskaya istoriya ot nachala Rossiyskogo naroda do konchiny Velikogo Knyazya Yaroslava Pervogo ili do 1054 goda, 176.
7. Lomonosov, Drevniaya rossiiskaya istoriya, 183.
8. Lomonosov, Drevniaya rossiiskaya istoriya, 171.
9. Pushkin, Otryvki iz pisem, mysli i zamechaniya, 148.
10. Kozlov, Tainy falsificatsii, 155–186.
11. Vostokov, Perepiska A. Vostokova v povremennom poriadke, c obyasnitel’nymi primech. I.I. Sreznevskogo, 391–392.
12. Kozlov, Tainy falsificatsii, 176.
13. Kozlov, Tainy falsificatsii, 199–207.
14. Kozlov, Tainy falsificatsii, 200.
15. For more on the modernization of East European Jewry see Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881.
16. About the Karaite struggle for civil rights see Miller, Karaite Separatism in Nineteenth-Century Russia.
17. According to the 1897 census, the Karaite population in the Russian Empire amounted to 12,894 souls. See Sinani, “K statistike karaimov,” 2. In the same year the population of Rabbanite Jews amounted to no less than 5,215,805 people.
18. The movement of the Karaite Jews (Benei Miqra – followers of the Scripture) who rejected the Oral Law, formed from the late ninth to the eleventh century in Babylonia, had its Golden Age in Jerusalem, and its adherents settled in Egypt, Byzantium, and in Crimea, Lithuania, and Poland. Their appearance in Crimea and Eastern Europe is quite obscure. The earliest documents to support this originated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In Crimea, the Karaites used a Tatar ethnolect of the Turcic language and dressed like Tatars as well. See relevant bibliography on Karaite history in Walfish, Bibliographia Karaitica.
19. Akhiezer, “Mordechai Sultanski – Kavim li-Dmuto u-Khtivato ha-Historit.”
20. Sultanski, Zekher Zaddikim.
21. Zekher Zaddikim and Hod Malkhut, which Sultanski planned to dedicate to Nicolas I, were translated into Russian. See Beim, Reshimot Sefarim, B 468 (MS), 21v.
22. Sultanski, Zekher Zaddikim, 104.
23. Karaism, however, formed in the second half of the ninth century, after the presumed conversion of Khazars to Judaism.
24. These plots were published by Harkavy, “Letter.”
25. Sefer Toldot Yaakov, Russian National Library.
26. This text, which is presented in a number of drafts with some later additions of the events from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jewish history, obviously belongs to the nineteenth century, based on the handwriting and the paper. See Akhiezer, “Mordechai Sultanski,” 183–186.
27. Firkovich changed burial date inscriptions (or carved the dates where they were absent) in the Karaite cemeteries of the Crimea in order to make them appear more ancient. In some cases he dated them back to the first centuries BC, in order to prove Karaite presence there before the crucifixion of Jesus. For more about the methods of Firkovich's forgeries see Harkavy, Altjudische Denkmaler aus der Krim and Dan Shapira, “Chwolsson, Firkowiicz and their Inscriptions.”
28. On the special attitude of some maskilic circles toward Karaites, their scholarly and publishing co-operation, their divergences, and rupture with the Karaites see Akhiezer, “The Research Project of Abraham Firkovich as an Outcome of Haskalah and Hokhmat Israel.”
29. Beim, Pamiat’ o Chufut-Kale.
30. In Russian educated society, this process began in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
31. Schrijver, “Saul of Berlin's ‘Besamim Rosh.’”
32. Levinsohn, Te’uda be-Israel, 34–5, note **.
33. The Polish historian and public figure Tadeusz Czacki took part in discussions on improving the status of Jews in Poland. He published a book, Rozprawa o Zydach Karaitach (1807), on the history of the Jews and Karaites, their rites, and the distinctions between them.
34. An allusion to the Khazar king.
35. Harkavy, Ob yazyke evreev, zhivshikh v drevnee vremia na Rusi i o slavianskih slovakh, vstrechaemykh u evreiskikh pisatelei, 7–9.
36. For more on Friedländer, see Oberländer, Forgery vs Authenticity.
37. On the emergence of the historiography of Orthodoxy as a reaction to these processes, see Bartal, “Ha-yediah ve-ha-hokhmah ha-amitit.”
38. The first claims of their forgery were made only in the twentieth century by Hayim N. Bialik. His conclusions were supported by Simon Dubnow, Meir Balaban, and Gershom Sholem.
39. On different tendencies of the maskilic historical writing see Feiner, Haskalah ve-Historya.
40. Firkovich created two epitaphs: one of Sangari, the rabbi of Judah Halevi's Sefer ha-Kuzari (called by Halevi Haver), and the other ostensibly belonging to Sangari's wife (Sangarit), on whose existence no one had any information. Firkovich claimed that Sangari was a Karaite who had converted the Khazars to Karaism and died in Çufut-Qaleh (in the Crimea). For more on this forgery, see Shapira, “Yitshaq Sangari.” Firkovich accused Halevi of corrupting the original text of the Kuzari, which was written, according to him, by Sangari, in order to conceal the fact of Sangari's Karaite origin and his conversion of the Khazar king. See this claim in Deinard, Masa Qrim, 28.
41. Deinard, Masa Qrim, 28.
42. See the ahistorical works of Karaite leader Seraya Shapshal (1873–1961), who claimed that Karaites were the descendants of Khazars and other Turkic people, and maintained the pagan elements in their religion and culture. See Shapshal, Karaimy i Chufut-Kale v Krymu. Shapshal, who graduated from St. Petersburg University, was one of the main historical forgers in Russian and Soviet research of the twentieth century, who created “authentic” folklore and “historical” texts in order to disprove any connection of the Karaites to Jews and Judaism.
43. Ephraim Deinard prepared a volume on the Khazars, but his plan remained unfulfilled. See Harkavy, Skazaniya evreiskikh pisatelei o khazarah i khazarskom tzarstve; Lerner, Ha-Kuzarim.
44. See Kohn, A zsidóság története Magyarországon, legrégibb időtől a mohácsi vészig.
45. The most important Russian scholars, such as Vasily N. Tatishchev, Nikolay M. Karamzin, Sergei M. Solovyov, Vasily O. Klyuchevsky were involved in the Khazar studies. On these tendencies during the Soviet period, see Mishaev, “The Stereotyping of the Jews in Soviet Historiography.”
46. Hecht, “The Beginning of Modern Jewish Historiography.”
47. The direct influence of Herder's ideas on Russian culture (and less on historiography) has not been the subject much research. Only some of his works were translated into Russian. See Zhukova, Gerder i filosofsko-kulturologicheskaya mysl’ v Rossii.
48. See, for example, the historical novels by Abraham Mapu. Although the question of any direct impact of Herderian ideas on Russian maskilim was not systematically researched.
49. Such as the “Proceedings of the Odessian Society of History and Antiquities” established in 1839 by the governor of Novorossia, Mikhail Vorontsov, or the “Journal of the Ministry of Education” (1834–1917), which published some studies by Abraham Harkavy.