Why the Nazis Spared the Karaite Jews

On January 5, 1939, the Reich Office for Genealogical Research in Berlin issued a written opinion on a community most Germans had never heard of. The Karaites, it ruled, were not to be considered Jewish under paragraph 2 of the First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law. Their religion looked Jewish; their blood, the office decided, did not.

The Karaites had been arguing this point inside Judaism since the eighth century. A Babylonian scholar named Anan ben David, born around 715, had rejected the entire Rabbinic tradition that built up around the Mishnah and the Talmud. His followers held that the Tanakh alone was binding, and that every Jew was responsible for working out its meaning without a rabbinic intermediary. They were, in the strictest sense, scripturalists.

By the early twentieth century the largest concentrated Karaite communities were in Crimea, Lithuania, and Egypt — Turkic-speaking and culturally distinct from Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. When the Nazi racial bureaucracy looked at them, it constructed an answer that suited its theory: the Crimean Karaites were not Semites at all but descendants of the Crimean Goths, a Turkic-speaking population that had taken on a heretical form of Judaism centuries ago.

The ruling was administrative, not absolute. During Operation Barbarossa, Wehrmacht and SS units who hadn't read the genealogical memo killed Karaites alongside other Jews; about 200 were murdered at Babi Yar. But the broader community in Crimea was largely spared, while the Krymchaks — a separate Turkic-speaking Jewish group with no equivalent racial loophole — were almost entirely wiped out.

After the war, most surviving Karaites left Eastern Europe and Egypt for Israel. The community there is small, around 30,000 to 50,000, and it still keeps to its eighth-century rule: scripture alone.