Abraham Harkavy

Avraam/Albert Yakovlevich Harkavy (Russian: Авраа́м Я́ковлевич Гарка́ви), or Avraham Eliyahu ben Yaakov Harkavy (in Hebrew) (17 October 1835 – 15 March 1919) was a Jewish Russian historian and orientalist.

Harkavy was born in 1835 in Navahrudak, Minsk Governorate (in present-day Belarus). He studied initially in the Volozhin yeshiva and graduated from the Teacher's Institute in Vilna. In 1863, he enrolled at the University of St Petersburg, where he studied Oriental Languages and graduated with the degree of master of history in 1868. He continued his studies in Berlin and Paris, receiving a doctorate in history in 1872.

Harkavy become involved in Jewish communal life in Russia, and was extremely active in various capacities. From 1864 Harkavy was secretary of the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia, and from 1873 he was one of the directors of the Jewish community of St. Petersburg.

In 1876 he was appointed head of the Oriental Division in the Imperial Public Library, an astonishing achievement for a Jew under Czarist society's anti-Semitic policies. He remained in this position for the rest of his life. He died in Petrograd.

Harkavy was a prolific author, both as an individual and in collaboration with other Russian-Jewish scholars. He wrote in Russian, German, and most notably in Hebrew, which had only recently been revived as a language of common discourse. Among his theories, he speculated that certain groups of Eastern European Jews, such as the Krymchaks, Karaims and even many Ashkenazim, might be descended from the Khazars. This theory, largely debunked by modern genetic testing, inspired Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe, which took Harkavy's hypothesis to an extreme. In the course of his Khazar research Harkavy refuted many of Avraham Firkovich's theories and exposed some of his forgeries.

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