Drawing on the variety of archival sources in the host of European and Oriental languages the
book focuses on the history ethnography and convoluted ethnic identity of the
Polish-Lithuanian Karaites. The vanishing community of the Karaites a non-Talmudic
Turkic-speaking Jewish minority that had been living in Eastern Europe since the late Middle
Ages developed a unique ethnographic culture and religious tradition. The book offers the
first comprehensive study of the dramatic history of the Polish-Lithuanian Karaite community in
the twentieth century. Especially important is the analysis of the dejudaization (or
Turkicization) of the community that saved the Karaites from horrors of the Holocaust.
