SUMMARY:

The article focuses on the plight of Karaite Subbotniks during the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Subbotniks are known as non-Jewish followers of rabbinical Judaism, but since the late eighteenth century, a smaller community of Slavic followers of Karaism also developed. Karaites are an ancient community of Turkic speakers, mostly in Crimea, who rejected the Talmud and rabbinical teachings. The Nazis had a hard time figuring out their policy toward the Karaites, who did not fit the binary understanding of Jewishness, and Karaite Subbotniks offered an even more mind-boggling example of hybridity. Their treatment by the Nazis, which was genocidal in some instances, underscores the archaic religious nature of the self-proclaimed “scientific” racial policy of the Nazis and the lack of centralization and control in its implementation.