Mikhail Kizilov

Mikhail Kizilov (; born on 27 June 1974 in Simferopol) is a historian. He works on the history of Crimea in the Late Middle Ages and Modern Times and on Jews, Khazars and Karaism in Eastern Europe, especially in Crimea, Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania. From 2007, Kizilov holds a DPhil (PhD) in modern history from Oxford University (United Kingdom) with his dissertation The Karaites, a religious and linguistic minority in eastern Galicia (Ukraine) 1772–1945. His doctoral advisor was R. J. W. Evans.

Kizilov was a visiting scholar at the Simon Dubnow Institute in the winter semester from 2002 to 2003.

Between 2000 and 2026 he published six academic and four popular monographs and also over two hundred articles in the English, Russian, German, Polish and Ukrainian languages. He also edited six collections of articles in the Russian language. Some of his studies were translated into French, Hebrew and Turkish. In his studies Kizilov uses sources and scholarship in about twenty modern and dead languages, including Slavic, European and Oriental languages.

Awards 2008, Kreitman Fellow at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Beer Sheva, Israel). 2012 Judaica Bibliography Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries for his book Bibliographia Karaitica (2011). 2013-2014 Sosland Fellow of the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Works

Thesis

Books

Kizilov, Mikhail (2009). The Karaites of Galicia: An Ethnoreligious Minority Among the Ashkenazim, the Turks, and the Slavs, 1772-1945. Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2009 (Studia Judaeoslavica. Vol. 1). 461 pp. Kizilov, Mikhail (2015). The Sons of Scripture. The Karaites in Poland and Lithuania in the Twentieth Century. Warsaw / Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015.

Кизилов, Михаил, Никифорова, Людмила. Айн Рэнд. Москва: Молодая Гвардия, 2020 (=ЖЗЛ. Т. 2013). Kizilov, Mikhail. La Judée Criméenne. Histoire du Judaїsme en Crimée. Translated from Russian by Jean-Claude Fritsch. Simferopol: Dolia, 2016.

Selected articles

Kizilov, Mikhail. “Karaite Pies and Samurai Swords: The Karaite Theme in David Shrayer-Petrov’s Life, Fiction, and Memoirs.” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów / Jewish History Quarterly 3 (2021): 857-876. Kizilov, Mikhail. “It Was the Poles that Gave Me Most Pain”: Polish Slaves and Captives in the Crimea, 1475–1774.” In Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c. 900–1900. Forms of Unfreedom at the Intersection between Christianity and Islam. Edited by Felicia Roşu. Leiden–Boston, 2022, 145-186. Kizilov, Mikhail. “Re-reading Rand through a Russian Lens.” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 21:1 (2021): 105-110. Kizilov, Mikhail. “Polish Slaves and Captives in the Crimea in the Seventeenth Century.” Acta Orientalia Hungaricae 73:2 (2020): 251-265. Kizilov, Mikhail. “Crimean Museum Collections as a Source of Information on Jewish History, Religion, Culture, and Everyday Life.” In Moreshet Israel: A Journal for the Study of Judaism, Zionism and Eretz Israel 16 (2018): 67-92. Kizilov, Mikhail. “Karaites and Communism: The Positive Side of the Relations of the East European Karaites with Bolshevik and Soviet Authorities.” Karaite Archives 4 (2017): 61-75. Kizilov, Mikhail. “National Inventions: The Imperial Emancipation of the Karaites from Jewishness.” In An Empire of Others. Making Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR. Edited by Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2014, 369-394.