Seraya Shapshal
Seraya Shapshal or Haji Seraya Hachan Shapshal (Karaim: Хаджи Серая Гахан Шапшал; Russian: Серая (Сергей) Маркович Шапшал; Polish: Seraj Szapszał) (1873-1961) was a hakham and leader of the Crimean and then the Polish and Lithuanian Karaim community.
Shapshal was born in Bahçesaray, 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[citation needed]). In 1911 he returned to Crimea and became Chief Hakham of the Crimean Karaite communities.
From 1920 to 1927 he lived in Istanbul. Here he was active in the pan-Turkic movement[citation needed]. In 1927 he moved to Vilna, and became the head of the Karaims in Poland and Lithuania. Although he wrote a Letter to the Falashas in 1905 identifying Karaim as Jews, following the success of Chaimberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century Shapshal began to safeguard his people's future by beginning to deny 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. He was also known for having been forced (under penalty of endangering his own community) to give 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 His "History of the Karaims" remains unpublished.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.
[edit] References
- Shapshal, S. M.: Karaimy SSSR v otnoshenii etnicheskom: karaimy na sluzhbe u krymskich chanov. Simferopol', 2004
- Kizilov M. New Materials on the Biography of S. M. Szapszał in 1928-1939 // Материалы Девятой Ежегодной Международной Междисциплинарной Конференции по Иудаике. – М., 2002. – Ч. 1. – С. 255–273
- Shapira Dan D. Y. A Jewish Pan-Turkist: Seraya Szapszał (Şapşaloğlu) and his Work Qırım Qaray Türkleri (1928) (Judaeo-Türkica XIII) // Acta Orientalia Hungaricae. – December 2005. – Vol. 58, № 4. – P. 349–380
- Зайцев И.В. «Что мне делать и как быть?» (письма Серайя Марковича Шапшала академику В.А.Гордлевскому: 1945-1950) // Вестник Евразии. Acta Eurasica. № 4 (38). М., 2007. С.147-169
- Петров-Дубинский О.В. С.М.Шапшал (Эдиб-ус-Султан) ― учитель Валиахда Мохаммед-Али, генерал-адъютант Мохаммед-Али-шаха // Восток. 2007, № 5. С. 64-78
- Прохоров Д.А., Кизилов М.Б. Шапшал Серайя Маркович (1873-1961) // Крым в лицах и биографиях. Симферополь, 2008. С. 396-400
