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Unusual and rare ethical work in the Tatar טאטארית language set in square vocalized Hebrew letters. The title is from “You are my hiding place; you shall preserve me from trouble; you shall surround me with songs of deliverance (ranei palait. Selah.” (Psalms 32:7). The title page describes it as being concerned with cries of tahanun, cries of confessions (viduii), cries of reproof, cries of selihot, cries of bakasha, piyytim, kippurim, and more. It was translated in the Tatar language by Pinhas ben Aaron Makitsky. There is a table of contents, detailing the prayers in the volume and an introduction in Tatar.
The Tatar or Krimchak language (or dialect) is spoken and written language of the Krimchaks, which is close to the Crimean-Tatar language or basically a variant of the latter.
The Krimchaks (Inhabitants of the Crimea) are a Jewish ethnic and linguistic community. Prior to World War II Krimchaks lived mainly in the Crimean peninsula. Before the Russian invasion of 1783 they called themselves Yehudi (Jew) or srel balalary (sons of Israel). Only at a relatively late period - in the end of the 19th-beginning of the 20th century - did they begin to call themselves - Kirymchakh from the Russian Krymchak. The name Krimchaks (the Crimean Jews) first appeared in official Russian sources in 1859. Evidently the term was coined to distinguish the Rabbanite Jews in the Crimea from the Karaites who lived in the same region, and also from the Ashkenazi Jews who had moved there. In the documents issued by the Crimean rulers before the peninsula was captured by Russia the members of the community were called yehudiler, i.e., the Jews, which was the name also given to the Karaites. Neither the documents of the European colonies in the Crimean nor the writing of European travelers visiting the region in the Middle Ages differentiated between the two. The Crimean Tatars called the Krimchaks colloquially zuluflu chufutlar (Jews with earlocks), while they called the Karaites zulufsuz chufutlar (Jews without earlocks). The Krimchak language is akin to the Crimean-Tatar languages.
However, today their language is considered an independent language belonging to the Kipchak group of Turkic languages. A distinguishing feature of the language is a broad lexical stratum of Hebrew-Aramaic origin, e.g. adoni - sir, hodesh - month, mazon - food, nes - miracle. In the Krimchak language, written in the Hebrew script, Hebrew words undergo phonetic adaption; the letter \ade (x) is pronounced “ch” (e.g., rachon - wish, will), the Hebrew tav without a dagesh (T) as “s” as in Yiddish and Ashkenazi pronunciation (e.g., akosev, from ha-Kotev, the writer). Krimchak appears in two variations: the spoken language, and the literary language (the language of the Bible translation). Almost all printed works in Krimchak consist of religious literature translated from Hebrew published in the early 20th century in Russia and in Erez Israel. A number of these translations contain Hebrew-Krimchak glossaries. Transcriptions of the rich Krimchak folklore has partially been published in scientific editions. The Krimchak language also had a connection to Yiddish as well as to Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish (for example, the word pastel, a kind of pastry, in all likelihood derives from Judeo-Spanish.
Of the total population of approximately 2,000 Krimchaks today, several members of the older generation still know the Krimchak language. |
