Abraham Firkovich was born in 1787 into a Crimean Karaite farming family in Lutsk, then part of Poland, now Ukraine.

In 1818 he was serving the local Crimean Karaite communities as a junior hazzan, or religious leader, and he went in 1822 to the city of Yevpatoria in Crimea.

In 1828 he moved to Berdichev, where he met many Hasids and learned more about their interpretations of Jewish scriptures based on the Talmud and rabbinic tradition.

In 1839, Firkovich began excavations in the ancient cemetery of Çufut Qale, and unearthed many old tombstones, claiming that some of them dated from the first centuries of the common era.

The following two years were spent in travels through the Caucasus, where he ransacked the genizots of old Jewish communities and collected many valuable manuscripts.

While in Wilna he made the acquaintance of Samuel Joseph Fuenn and other Hebrew scholars.In 1871 he visited the small Karaite community in Halych, Galicia, where he introduced several reforms.

Firkovich collected a vast number of Hebrew, Arabic and Samaritan manuscripts during his many travels in his search for evidence on the traditions of his people.

[5][better source needed] As a result of his research he became focused on the origin of the ancestors of the Crimean Karaites who he claimed had arrived in Crimea before the common era.

His theories persuaded the Russian imperial court that Crimean Karaites could not be accused of Jesus' crucifixion and they were excluded from the restrictive measures against Jews.

Among the treasures in the Firkovich collection is a manuscript of the Garden of Metaphors, an aesthetic appreciation of Biblical literature written in Judeo-Arabic by one of the greatest of the Sephardi poets, Moses ibn Ezra.

His collections at the Russian National Library are important to biblical scholars and to historians, especially those of the Karaite and Samaritan communities.

His other works are "Ḥotam Toknit," antirabbinical polemics, appended to his edition of the "Mibḥar Yesharim" by Aaron the elder (Koslov, 1835); "Ebel Kabod," on the death of his wife and of his son Jacob (Odessa, 1866); and "Bene Reshef", essays and poems, published by Peretz Smolenskin (Vienna, 1871).

[10][11] Briefly stated, the discoveries include the major part of the manuscripts described in Pinner's "Prospectus der Odessaer Gesellschaft für Geschichte und Alterthum Gehörenden Aeltesten Hebräischen und Rabbinischen Manuscripte" (Odessa, 1845), a rather rare work which is briefly described in "Literaturblatt des Orients" for 1847, No.

[12][9] Another collection of 317 Samaritan manuscripts, acquired in Nablus, arrived in the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy in 1867 (see Fürst, "Geschichte des Karäerthums", iii.

13–15, 37); A. Geiger in his Jüdische Zeitschrift (1865, p. 166), Schorr in He-Ḥaluẓ, and A. Neubauer in the Journal Asiatique (1862–63) and in his Aus der Petersburger Bibliothek (Leipzig, 1866) challenged the correctness of the facts and the theories based upon them which Jost, Julius Fürst, and Heinrich Grätz, in their writings on the Karaites, took from Pinsker's Liḳḳuṭe Ḳadmoniyyot, in which the data furnished by Firkovich were unhesitatingly accepted.

1876); in Strack's A. Firkowitsch und Seine Entdeckungen (Leipsic, 1876); in Fränkel's Aḥare Reshet le-Baḳḳer (Ha-Shaḥar, vii.646 et seq.

In contradiction, Firkovich's most sympathetic critic, Chwolson, gives as a résumé of his belief, after considering all controversies, that Firkovich succeeded in demonstrating that some of the Jewish tombstones from Chufut-Kale date back to the seventh century, and that seemingly modern forms of eulogy and the method of counting after the era of creation were in vogue among Jews much earlier than had been hitherto suspected.