Karaite Ethnographic Museum

This is within the kenesa (synagogue) of the local Karaite Jews. Theirs is a bizarre story played out over 800 years, none of which you will glean from this museum, even if it hadn't been closed since 2020. The Karaites emerged as a community in Crimea and spoke Kipchak, a Turkic language. They define themselves by patrilineal descent (Jewish identity is traditionally matrilineal) and recognise only the Torah as scripture, rejecting Talmud the compendium of rabbinical commentary and interpretation. Over the centuries, they persuaded a series of anti-semitic rulers that they weren't truly Jewish (subtext "we had nothing to do with the killing of Jesus") and shouldn't be treated as such. Thus they were not required to re-locate to the Pale of Settlement, though many did so, and especially to medieval Lithuania. They also largely escaped the Holocaust. However modern genetics such as mitochondrial DNA points to kinship with the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, and Israel has deemed the Karaites eligible for citizenship under the Law of Return. There are nowadays perhaps 200 Karaites in Lithuania, mostly in Vilnius.

Source: Wikivoyage, „Trakai“ · authors per page history · CC BY-SA 4.0 · as of 3/24/2023