The book focuses on the history, ethnography, and convoluted ethnic identity of the Karaites, an ethnoreligious group in Eastern Galicia (modern Ukraine). The small community of the Karaite Jews, a non-Talmudic Turkic-speaking minority, who had been living in Eastern Europe since the late Middle Ages, developed a unique ethnographic culture and religious tradition. The book offers the first comprehensive study of the Galician Karaite community from its earliest days until today with the main emphasis placed on the period from 1772 until 1945. Especially important is the analysis of the twentieth-century dejudaization (or Turkicization) of the community, which saved the Karaites from the horrors of the Holocaust.

Mikhail Kizilov, D.Phil (2007) in Modern History, University of Oxford, is a Kreitmann Fellow at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Beer Sheva). He has more than 60 publications on Karaite, Crimean, Khazar, and Jewish history in the English, Russian, German, and Hebrew languages including The Karaites Through the Travelers' Eyes (New York, 2003).