Dorota Smętek CRIMEAN KARAITE TRANSLATION OF A HEBREW DRAMA MELUKHAT SHA’UL AS AN EXAMPLE OF RABBINIC LITERATURE’S INFLUENCE ON LITERARY ACTIVITY OF THE CRIMEAN KARAITES I There is a limited amount of research conducted on Crimean Karaim handwritten books also known as mejumas. 1 In the present day our knowledge concerning this topic is more profound thanks to the first two critical editions of mejumas which were published recently. They shed a new light on this still not sufficiently examined field of study. 2 Both works present a wide range of Crimean Karaim folklore texts intertwined with literary texts which were also common to other Turkic-speaking nations living in the Crimea. My doctoral thesis entitled „Crimean Karaim Version of Melukhat Sha’ul. Critical Edition and Linguistic Analysis” is also devoted to the Crimean Karaim literature preserved in manuscripts. Nonetheless, its scope differs to a certain extent. The subject of my study is a Turkic translation of a play entitled Melukhat Sha’ul which was copied into the mejuma of Samuel Kohen. This manuscript, No. VI-3/22, was written in the Crimea in the second half of the nineteenth century, namely in 1876 or less probably in 1875. 3 It consists of one hundred twenty folios, of which fifty-one are blank. The above mentioned play occupies almost the entire book, which is quite peculiar in the light of the previously published mejumas. They comprised literary works of wide rage of themes and contents and were by no means coherent. In the case of the manuscript of Samuel Kohen I had an opportunity to analyze a text which was uniform in the terms of style, theme and language. I do not aim to present the entire scope of the mejuma which was a subject of my study. In this article I shall focus on the most important matter, that is on the issue of the Crimean Karaim translation of a Hebrew drama Melukhat Sha’ul. For this 1 See Borys Kokenaj, “Medżuma, Karaj Bitigi”, Karaj Awazy 6 (1933), p. 14-17; Henryk Jankowski, “The contents of Katyk’s Mejuma” [in:] Tenišev, Ė. (ed.) Tjurkskaja i smežnaja leksikologija i leksikografija. Sbornik k 70-letiju Kenesbaja Musaeva. Moskva: Rossijskaja Akademija Nauk. Institut Jazykoznanija, 2004, p. 103–119 and Ananiasz Zajączkowski, „Literatura karaimska (Szkic bibliograficzny)”, Myśl karaimska 1, 3 (1926), p. 7-17. 2 See Gülayhan Aqtay, Eliyahu ben Yosef Qılcı’s Anthology of Crimean Karaim and Turkish Literature. İstanbul 2009 and Tülay Çulha, Kırım Karaycasının Katık Mecuması. Metin-Sözlük- Dizin. İstanbul: Mehmet Ölmez Yayınları 2010. Both works were published in Turkey. I should add that the fist mejuma was published at the end of the nineteenth century in the seventh volume of Radloff’s opus magnum (V. V. Radloff, Proben der Volkslitteratur der Nördlichen Türkischen Stämme. Theil VII. Mundarten der Krym. St. Petersburg 1896), however it was not a critical edition. 3 Both dates are provided in the manuscript, therefore it is impossible to determine beyond any doubt the year in which the work was completed.