This article provides the first historiographical analysis of the origins of Jewish Orthodoxy in Helsinki and describes the development of the rabbinate from the establishment of the congregation in the late 1850s up to the early 1980s. The origins of the Finnish Jewish community lies in the nineteenth-century Russian army. The majority of Jewish soldiers in Helsinki originated from the realm of Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) culture, that is, mainly non-Hasidic Jewish Orthodoxy that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Initially, the Finnish Jewish religious establishment continued this Orthodox-Litvak tradition. After the independence of Finland, the Helsinki congregation hired academic, Modern Orthodox rabbis educated in Western Europe. Following the devastation of the Shoah and the Second World War, the recruitment of rabbis faced new challenges. Overall, the rabbi recruitments were in congruence with the social and cultural development of the Helsinki community, yet respected its Orthodox roots.

Hebrew was the main language of the early modern Karaim culture. Nearly all Polish -Lithuanian Karaim scholars wrote poetry in Hebrew for various occasions celebrating the Karaim cycle of life: for Sabbaths and festivals, for weddings and circumcisions, or as eulogies for a fellow scholar. Their poems cover exegetical, philosophical, and mystical topics from a Karaim point of view and contain historical details about Karaim life in Eastern Europe. Karaim Hebrew poets followed the footsteps of earlier Karaite generations: Byzantine Karaite poetry, emulating the Andalusian standards of poetics and familiarised through shared literary sources, served as their main literary model.

In modern research, Karaite Jews are often viewed, discussed, and scrutinized against their relationship with the Jewish mainstream-rabbinic Jews. Through centuries of survival as a minority form of Judaism, Karaites did adjust some of their ideas and traditions to conform to certain rabbinic standards, but they did so without losing their distinctive identity.¹ Nonetheless, Karaite halakha is often of interest due to its "deviations" from rabbinic halakha, and Karaite customs are worth mentioning due to their divergences from rabbinic minhagim.² Even certain Karaite individuals have roused attention, not because of the individuals themselves, but because of their relationship with someone more prominent from among the folds of mainstream Judaism.A case in point is the chief personality of this article, the Lithuanian Karaite Zeraḥ ben Nathan (ca. 1578 -1657/8),³ whose intellectual musings helped to inspire the Rabbanite scholar and polymath, Joseph Solomon Delmedigo of Candia (1591-1655).⁴ The ephemeral rise of Zeraḥ ben Nathan to fame owes to his correspondence over scientific questions with Delmedigo, published by the latter in  On such renewals in the fifteenth-century Byzantine Empire, including the use of candles on the Sabbath, see Daniel Frank, "Karaite Exegetical and Halakhical Literature in Byzantium and Turkey," in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Studies, ed. Meira Polliack (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 550-52.  This trend has been pointed out by Yoram Erder, "Daily prayer times in Karaite halakha in light of the times of Islamic prayers," Revue des études juives 153 (1994): 5 -6. For a comparison of Karaite customs mainly with rabbinic ones, see, e. g. Percy Selvin Goldberg, Karaite Liturgy and its Relation to Synagogue Worship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957).

The article discusses the manifestations of religious renewal in devout Karaite Hebrew poetry written in Poland-Lithuania in the early modern period. While this type of Hebrew poetry is entrenched in tradition and derivative in nature, certain innovative elements appear both in the wordings and in the performance of Karaite Hebrew poetry during the early modern period. Alluding, for example, to new Sabbath rituals, the poems reflect the influence of popular mysticism on Karaite ideology. Hebrew poetry also indicates slight changes in the societal status of Karaite women as well as an increase in the use of the vernacular.

Abstract. The ten principles of Karaite faith were originally compiled by medieval Byzantine Karaite scholars to sum up the basics of the Karaite Jewish creed. Early modern Karaites wrote poetic interpretations on the principles. This article provides an analysis and an English translation of a seventeenth-century Hebrew poem by the Lithuanian Karaite, Yehuda ben Aharon. In this didactic poem, Yehuda ben Aharon discusses the essence of divinity and the status of the People of Israel, the heavenly origin of the Torah, and future redemption. The popularity of Karaite commentaries and poems on the principles during the early modern period shows that dogma-and how to understand it correctly-had become central for the theological considerations of Karaite scholars. The source for this attentiveness is traced to the Byzantine Karaite literature written on the principles and to the treatment of the Maimonidean principles in late medieval rabbinic literature.