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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.

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"The fact that Kizilov used numerous unknown archival sources, which he had been for years collecting in various archives and libraries, makes his study especially valuable."Golda Akhiezer in: Judaica 4/1015

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Mikhail Kizilov, Sosland Fellow of the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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