Karaim, from the Hebrew word קראים, meaning "readers", refers in the literal sense generally to practitioners of the Karaite sect of Judaism. In customary usage, however, it is often used to refer to the distinct Turkic-speaking Karaite community of Crimea and the related community of Karaites living in Lithuania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, as well as to their Judæo-Crimean Tatar language. For more information see: Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by more than 7 million people, mainly in Israel, the West Bank, the United States and by Jewish communities around the world. ... Karaite Judaism is a Jewish denomination characterized by reliance on the Tanakh as the sole scripture, and rejection of the Oral Law (the Mishnah and the Talmuds) as halakha (Legally Binding, i. ... Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people. ... The Crimea /kraɪˈmia/ is a peninsula and an autonomous republic of Ukraine on the northern coast of the Black Sea. ...
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The Karaim language lost ground as a common spoken language, although as a written language it came to be used more widely owing to the emergence of a distinctly profane literature.
Spoken Karaim is a mixture of Karaim and the predominant language of the neighbourhood.
Karaim scriptural texts continued to be published in the 19th and the early 20th centuries, together with a smatter of original and translated profane literature, including some periodicals (in Vilnius, Moscow, Panevezhys, Lutsk).
The Karaims increasingly engaged in agriculture and horticulture, horse breeding and different handicrafts and gradually came to constitute a middle class between the aristocracy and the framers who tilled the soil.
When the Karaim center was moved from Baghdad to Jerusalem, the religion began spreading through missionary activities to the Turkic-speaking peoples on the Crimean peninsula and the steppes of the lower Volga region.
The Karaim school was converted into an apartment building and the kenesa built in Vilnius during the period of Lithuanian independence became a warehouse.
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