(Author: Clark Zlotchew, Vol. 78, No. 1, Summer 2023)
Crimea has been in the news since Russia seized it from Ukraine and annexed it in 2014. Yet Crimea had been part of Russia since the Czar’s Empire conquered and annexed the Crimean Khanate, inhabited mostly by Muslim Tatars, in 1783. Many Russians settled in Crimea thereafter. In 1954 the Soviets transferred Crimea from Russian SSR to Ukrainian SSR simply because Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered it. No one dared oppose him; besides, it was not considered an important move, since Russia and Ukraine were both part of the Soviet Union.
Kiev and the Rus
The early history of Russia and Ukraine are inseparably intertwined. Ironically, the present Ukrainian capital, Kiev (or Kiyif) was where the Russian nation and state were formed. Many different peoples settled in or passed through these territories for thousands of years. In the 9th Century the Eastern Slavs in Kiev and the surrounding region invited Varangians – a Scandinavian people – to come and organize a state, organize a government and to rule over them. The leader of this group of Varangians was Rurik, whose name gave rise to the term Rus, applied to the inhabitants. More specifically, the state and the people were called “Kievan Rus” (Kievskiy Rus). This marks the beginning of the Russian people and state (Rus-sky, Russky = people of Rus).
South of Kievan Rus was steppe land in which many tribes and peoples warred with each other over the centuries or simply passed through from east to west and vice versa. Since this prairie was under the rule of no government, it was named Ukraine (Ukrayina) which in the East Slavic language meant “at the frontier.”
The Kievan Rus kingdom prospered and spread its rule northward among other East Slavic peoples as well as to the lands of the Finnic peoples, as far north as the White Sea. Ultimately, this area was called Russia (land of the Rus). Various parts of this far-flung territory were subdivided into principalities governed by princes. The total area included what today is Western European Russia, Belarus (White Rus), Northern Ukraine and Karelia (land of a Finnic people in the extreme North.) The Kievan Rus kingdom was destroyed by the Mongol-Tatar invasions of the 13th Century.
After the Mongols were defeated and withdrew, over the centuries Ukraine came under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian monarchy, the Russian Czars, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with frequent raids by Crimean Tatars and Ottoman Turks and again, the Russian Czars. Finally, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, it became one of the Soviet Socialist Republics.
Crimea and Ukraine
In 2010, my wife and I were on a tour of Ukraine, which included Crimea. We visited the Crimean port of Sevastopol where, at the time, the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the Ukrainian Black Sea Fleet were docked side by side. Our ship also docked at the seaside resort town of Yalta, where the leaders of the U.S., Soviet Union and UK (Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill) met in early 1945 to discuss peacetime reorganization of Germany and Europe.
We noticed that in these cities we heard only Russian rather than Ukrainian, and I used my meager knowledge of Russian to ask for directions and get around town. Upon learning that a new Ukrainian law had been passed whereby all schools had to use Ukrainian as the language of instruction, I heard many of the local people complain that they always felt they were Russian, that Russian was their language. They grumbled about having to consider themselves Ukrainian and have their children learn in that language. The fact is that the majority of inhabitants of both Crimea and most of Eastern Ukraine speak Russian while the people of Western Ukraine speak Ukrainian. The Russian Orthodox Church is predominant in the East, while the Catholic Church has the most adherents in the West. The crew and staff members of our river boat were mostly Russian speakers, but with a couple of Bulgarian crew members and at least one Rumanian.
Ancient Crimea & Jews
On one occasion, local guides took us just a few miles from Sevastopol to visit the ruins of an ancient Greek settlement. Among these ruins were those of a more “recent” structure: a Byzantine-era (early Middle Ages) church with an intact mosaic floor. Our local guide mentioned that archeologists had dug through part of that floor and discovered a Jewish synagogue below the church, but the church floor had been replaced, covering this discovery. The reason given for this, our guide said, was to preserve the beauty of the mosaic. She sounded skeptical, even sarcastic, about this. The location of the buried synagogue, below the Byzantine structure, and among or under the ancient Greek ruins indicates the presence of a Jewish community in Crimea in ancient times.
From my reading of history, I knew Jews were among the many peoples who have lived in Crimea over the centuries. In fact, their presence there goes back at least 2000 years, during the time of the Roman occupation of the Land of Israel. But the ruins of a synagogue on a level below the ancient Greek ruins indicates an even earlier presence. Since a synagogue existed in that spot, then a sizeable pre-Christian Jewish community had to be in place there as well.
I was aware that Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine Empire had ruled Crimea for centuries, and were hostile to the Jews. But from the Seventh Century until the end of the Tenth Century the Khazars, a Turkic people, formed an immense empire comprising what is today Southern European Russia, Southeast Ukraine, both sides of the Caucasus Mountains (today’s Chechnya, Dagestan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia) and parts of today’s Kazakhstan, and Crimea. This Empire straddled important trading routes from Europe to the Far East. Their rulers and nobility converted to Judaism and were tolerant of all religions.
During the rule of the Khazars there were two kinds of Jewish communities in Crimea: Krymchaks and Karaites. The Krymchaks (“Crimeans” in the Tatar-Turkic language) were Rabbinic Jews, while the Karaites considered only the Torah, actually the whole Hebrew Bible, as sacred but did not recognize the Talmud as a holy book. Both groups spoke a dialect of Crimean Tatar, a Turkic language. Our tour afforded us the opportunity to see physical evidence of this Jewish presence.
Islam, and Magen David in the Mosque
The Crimean Tatars had converted to Islam in the 14th Century. We were taken to Bakhchisaray, from where the Tatar Khan had ruled (under Turkish suzerainty) before 1783. The Khan’s compound contained his palace, a sixteenth-century structure, with its harem, two mosques, fountains, and gardens. In the mosque, I was mystified by a circular stained-glass window bearing the design of the Star of David in blue against a field of white, located directly over the mihrab. This recess in the wall indicates the direction of Mecca, in which direction the Muslims face in prayer. The local Tatar guide noticed my gazing at it, and said it was a “biblical symbol.” Later, I wondered why a mosque would have a biblical symbol in stained glass. This symbol plus the local production and consumption of wine – alcohol is forbidden to Muslims – lead me to conjecture on the possibility that many of the Muslim Crimean Tatars might have been Jews who had converted to Islam, possibly under duress, but who still thought of themselves as Jews.
A Jewish Stronghold
The window with the Magen David above the mihrab, plus the synagogue under the church in the ancient Greek settlement made me curious as to the extent of the Jewish presence in Crimea. My interest was heightened by learning that a short distance from Bakhchisaray lies Chufut Kale. This name, in the Crimean Tatar dialect of Turkic (according to picture post cards written in Russian and English) means “Jews’ Castle” or “Jewish Fortress”. Within this complex, the Karaites would gather for ceremonial services in the larger of the two Kenasas. Kenasa is the Hebrew-origin term in the Judeo-Tatar language for the Hebrew term (beit) ha-knesset, literally meaning “(house of) the gathering”, i.e., synagogue.
This citadel is situated on a plateau surrounded by stone walls protecting it on three sides with precipices up to 100 feet from the valley below. It had been the stronghold of the Karaite Jewish sect. The fourth side has a reasonably easy approach from Bakhchisaray. By the 16th Century Chufut Kale, under the Muslim Khans, had become a major trading and handicraft center in southwestern Crimea. It is now a tourist site.
Grandfather and Crimea
My maternal grandfather, Nathan Granoff (originally Nissen Granovsky) was a glazer in Jersey City, New Jersey, and had been one in the land of his birth: the Ukraine. When he emigrated, bound for the U.S., this region was part of the Czar’s Russian Empire. But he never felt the land of his birth was home. In the course of a thousand years of living in Ukraine, Jews were never considered Ukrainian; being Jews, they were a despised minority, often the victim of Ukrainian pogroms, involving massacre, rape, looting and destruction by Ukrainian peasants and by Zaporozhian Cossacks. This activity was approved and encouraged by the Russian Czars and Orthodox priests.
Jersey City, N.J., was Grandfather’s true home. He loved the United States, where he was free to pursue happiness in any legal manner of his choosing. Where there was no government persecution of minorities. His sons served in the U.S. military in two World Wars while I was a member of the U.S. Naval Reserves.
My grandfather worked with glass to make windows, mirrors, glass tops for desks – anything that involved glass. I remember seeing him at his shop, big hands covered with black cuts and nicks from working with glass and mercury from making mirrors, cheerily greeting me with a big smile under his nicotine-stained blond moustache.
My memory retains his image, seated in his dull green armchair by his reading lamp. He would be smoking a cigar as he read, enveloped in a gray cloud of smoke. When the cigar burned down to a nub, he would stuff it into his pipe to finish it. When I was a child, he would often put his cigar aside, bounce me on his knee while bawling out a rhythmic tune, Hey! Tuli, tuli, tuli. Hey! Tuli, tuli, tuli, hey!
Grandmother Esther sometimes told me of the bloody pogroms perpetrated against the Jews of Ukraine, involving mass murder, rape, looting and destruction. These massacres were sometimes carried out by vodka-soaked peasants, at other times by the Zaporizhian Cossacks. The police stood by and watched, sometimes joining the attackers.
During one period of her life, Esther worked on the estate of a Polish landowner, a member of the Polish minor nobility in the District – not the city – of Kiev (Kieva Gubernia)[1]. She told me she was in charge of the food supplies on the estate, and she was also a seamstress for the nobleman’s whole family. One evening, as she was working late in making dresses for the landowner’s wife and daughters for a ball, a drunken peasant entered her work room, cursing her, the landowner and the Jews. He continually spat on the fine silk materials imported from Paris while shouting his profanities and threats. He seemed about to physically attack her. At that moment, however, my grandfather just happened to stop in for a visit with the young woman who would one day become his wife. When he saw what was happening, he stomped over to the peasant and beat him into unconsciousness, then dragged him about a mile so he wouldn’t be connected to the nobleman’s manor and deposited him in a ditch.
“But wouldn’t the peasant report this matter to the authorities?” I asked. I knew that in practice, a Jew was not permitted to strike a non-Jew. I have no idea if that was a law, but the local police treated it as if it were.[2]
“No,” answered Esther, “he would be ashamed to admit he’d been beaten by a Jew.”
But Grandfather did not speak of those things. Instead, he would often tell me of his adventures traveling long distances throughout the Ukrainian steppes and beyond in his trade. He had worked as an apprentice from a very early age and had his own business from age fifteen. The travel, by horse drawn cart on bumpy dirt roads on the vast Ukrainian plains, was necessary because at the time there were very few glazers in the Russian Empire. It also meant he constantly had work to do, which was a good thing. Those roads turned to thick mud in rainy weather or during the thaw and were snow covered and icy in winter. That kind of travel carrying fragile sheets of glass struck me as taking a great deal of courage and determination.
Grandfather’s mother tongue was Yiddish, but he learned to speak Russian and Ukrainian early in life in his dealings with peasants and officials. Once he told me how he had traveled far to the western edges of the Empire where the people spoke a language he didn’t understand but in which he learned to count to a hundred as well learning a few other words. He called these people Moldavani, which in my adulthood I realized were the people of the country now called Moldova. Grandpa told me that when he came to the United States and heard Italian immigrants speaking, it struck him that Italian sounded something like the language spoken by the Moldavani. He was right; the Moldovans spoke Romanian which, like Italian, derives from Latin.
On another occasion he told me he once had to travel far to the east, to a city he called what sounded to me like Tavriz. The trip took many days and he had to cross what he called Kavkaz or Kafkaz. When I grew up I realized that Kafkaz was the Caucasus Mountains, and that the city was what on English maps is written as Tabriz. It was hard to believe that my grandfather had journeyed all the way to a large city in Persia (present-day Iran)! But I found that Russia, after several wars with Persia, had a definite influence in Tabriz, capital of the Azerbaijan province of Northwest Persia.
Grandfather and the Tartars
Grandpa told me he more than once did work in a region he called Krym, which I later realized was Russian for the Crimea. He explained that the inhabitants of Crimea at that time were Muslim Tatars who spoke a Turkic language. I would have to suppose the Crimeans of his day were not very strict Muslims since Grandpa said they drank wine, as contrasted to the vodka favored by Ukrainians and Russians. Islam, of course, forbids the consumption of any alcohol. There was a large grape-growing and wine producing industry in the Crimea and still is, as I found when on our 2012 tour of Ukraine, which included the Crimea. My wife and I saw large vineyards in the countryside and stores selling the local wines in Sevastopol and Yalta.
One incident Grandpa described stands out in my mind. He was engaged in conversation with a Crimean Tatar when he heard a loud screeching sound in the distance. There was a man driving his horse-drawn cart to town. The closer the cart came, the louder the ear-splitting noise. Grandpa commented to the local man, “That fellow should really oil his wheels.”
The local man slowly shook his head and calmly declared, “No, no. An honest man doesn’t care if you hear him approaching. Only a thief oils the wheels. And a dishonest man would arrive in the middle of the night, so no one would notice his presence.”
As a child, I was fascinated by the stories my grandfather told me of his experiences in the “Old Country”. His wife, my grandmother Esther, told me stories as well, many of which involved Grandpa as a man of courage. He was too modest to tell those stories; she did it for him. Grandpa traveled great distances over the grassy plains and wheatfields of the Ukraine, to Moldova at the south-western frontiers of Russia and to the land of the Crimean Tatars south of Ukraine, as well as to the East and South, crossing mountains to reach Persia (Iran). But his most satisfying voyage was crossing the Atlantic to America and settling here.
Dr Clarke Zlotchew is Distinguished Teaching Professor at State University of New York. He is the author of seventeen books, including anthologies of short fiction, translations from the Spanish of short stories and poetry by Nobel Laureates and literary criticism of Spanish and Latin American authors. His essays and short stories have appeared in both his Spanish and English versions in the U.S. and Latin America, as well as in Jewish Affairs (http://www.clarkzlotchew.com).
REFERENCES
1. At the time, Jews were not allowed to live, or stay overnight, in the city of Kiev, unless they possessed a skill needed in the city that no non-Jews had. Grandfather, as a glazer, had that skill, but would not live in a city in which other Jews were not allowed to live.
2. Esther’s cousin, a butcher, was once in an argument with a peasant at the open-air market. The peasant had become violent, so he struck the man, and was subsequently given twenty lashes ordered by the Chief of Police in the public marketplace. After the whipping ended, the Police Chief asked, “How did you like that?” The butcher said, “You can kiss me where you whipped me!” He received twenty more lashes and, my grandmother said, was never the same.
