KARAITES

KARAITES . The Karaites (Heb., Qaraʾim ; Arab., Qarāʾīyūn ) are a Jewish sect that recognizes the Hebrew Bible as the sole source of divinely inspired legislation, and denies the authority of the postbiblical Jewish tradition (the Oral Law) as recorded in the Talmud and in later rabbinic literature. The term, which apparently first occurs in the writings of Benjamin al-Nahāwandī (ninth century ce), is variously interpreted as "scripturalists, champions of scripture" (from the Hebrew qaraʾ, "to read," particularly "to read scripture") and as "callers," that is to say, those who call for a return to the original biblical religion (from the alternate meaning of qaraʾ, "to call, to summon"). Apart from the Samaritans, the Karaites are the oldest surviving Jewish sect and have produced an extensive scholarly literature, much of which has been preserved.

The Rise of Karaite Judaism ("Karaism")

Sectarian dissent in Judaism goes back to the Second Temple period, when it was represented by the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes (with whom the Qumran community is likely to be identified). The growth and eventual codification of the postbiblical rabbinic tradition in turn gave rise to further dissent. The Karaites are one of several groups that have claimed the Hebrew Bible to be the one and only repository of God's word, which may not be modified by any subsequent, traditional law.

According to one early Rabbanite account, the Karaite movement originated circa 750 ce with an aristocratic, Babylonian scholar named ʿAnan ben David, who should have succeeded to the Exilarchate (secular leadership) of the Iraqi Jewish community. Because of his excessive wildness and irreverence, however, he was rejected in favor of his younger brother Hananiah. Consequently, ˓Anan declared himself head of a dissident group; these Ananites formed the nucleus of what later became the Karaite sect. This simplistic account suffers from a number of historical and psychological difficulties. Already in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, the anti-traditional leaders, Abū ʿĪsā and Yūdghān, had been active in the vicinity of Iraq. In the ninth and early tenth centuries, other leaders such as Ismāʿīl and Mīshawayh in ʿUkbarā (Iraq), Benjamin al-Nahāwandī in Iran, Mūsā al-Zaʿfarānī in Iraq and then Armenia, and Malik al-Ramlī in Palestine, presided over their own sectarian followings. All of these separate dissident groups developed their own heterogeneous teachings, although they seem to have vaguely regarded themselves as members of the larger community of anti-rabbinic sectarians.

Theological disagreement seems to have been only one of several causes of this new flowering of schisms; others were political, social, and economic. The large autonomous Jewish community in Iraq was administered by a bureaucracy serving the exilarch and the presidents (called the geʾonim ) of the academies, who codified, interpreted, and developed the rabbinic tradition and acted as supreme courts of appeal. This bureaucracy was maintained by internal taxation that added to the heavy taxes already paid by non-Muslims to the Muslim state. The poorer classes of the Jewish community—and they formed the great majority—thus had ample reason for dissatisfaction with their lot. At the same time, the extension and consolidation of the Muslim empire in the seventh and eighth centuries enabled such discontented elements in the Iraqi community to emigrate to the sparsely settled and less regulated mountainous provinces of the east and north, where they observed the conquered Persian population, united under the banner of Shiism, seething with resentment and resistance against their Arab masters. Finally, the speed and ease with which the Arabs conquered the Byzantine and Persian dominions must have aroused anew Jewish hopes for the end of exile, the restoration of Zion, and the ingathering of the exiles in the Holy Land under their own government. But this hope was quickly shattered: the new Muslim masters, like their Christian and Zoroastrian predecessors, had not the slightest interest in Jewish national aspirations and dreams. All these factors probably contributed to discontent with the status quo, particularly among the disadvantaged elements of the Iraqi Jewish community.

By the beginning of the tenth century, the schism had expanded from its Iranian-Iraqi birthplace into Syria-Palestine. The leading figure was Daniel al-Qūmisī (originally from northern Iran), who preached a spiritual return to biblical Judaism and a physical return to the Holy City. By returning to Jerusalem, studying scripture, leading an ascetic existence, and mourning for the destroyed Temple, these "Mourners for Zion" sought to hasten the divine salvation and the messianic era which they believed to be imminent. The Mourners would become the spiritual and intellectual core of the Karaite movement during the tenth and eleventh centuries, subsuming other sectarian groups such as the Ananites. Zealous Karaite missionaries traveled far and wide to the Jewish settlements in the Near East, preaching to both Karaite and Rabbanite audiences. During the second quarter of the tenth century, however, they encountered stiff opposition. Saʿadyah ben Joseph al-Fayyūmī (882–942), the polymath gaon of the Sura academy in Baghdad, published several polemical works against Karaite teachings, condemning their proponents as outright heretics. Saʿadyah's prestige and forceful scholarly argumentation effected a decisive break between the two camps that has never healed. It also seems to have kept the Karaite mission from ever making serious inroads among Rabbanite populations in the Near East.

Bitter though it was in its earlier stages, the Karaite-Rabbanite controversy stimulated Jewish literary creativity in the East during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Influenced by Islamic and Christian models, Rabbanites and Karaites had begun to experiment with new genres in the fields of theology, philosophy, biblical exegesis, and Hebrew philology. But undoubtedly, the inter-denominational feuding motivated members of both camps to produce scholarship of the highest standard. A Karaite academy flourished in Jerusalem during this period, giving advanced training to students from sectarian settlements as far-flung as Muslim Spain and Byzantium.

Much closer to home, the Karaite community of Egypt grew in wealth and importance, which derived in no small part from the success of several members of the Tustarī family, prominent members of the Fatimid court. Since Syria was under Fatimid control for much of this period as well, Karaite prestige increased throughout the area and on the whole, relations with Rabbanites improved dramatically. Marriage documents and formularies from the eleventh century attest to Karaite-Rabbanite intermarriages, in which bride and groom agreed to recognize each other's respective religious practices. Such alliances—which took place within the highest strata of Jewish society—indicate a general interest in maintaining communal unity and harmony.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Karaite population began to shift geographically. The Turcoman invasion of Syria (1071–1074) and then the Christian victory in the First Crusade (1099) all but ended Jewish settlement—Rabbanite and Karaite alike—in Palestine. While the Cairo community remained intact—surviving in situ until the late twentieth century—it seems to have declined in prestige during the twelfth century. Meanwhile, the Karaites of Byzantium, who had imbibed the teachings of the Jerusalem school, emerged as a distinctive, independent community which created a substantial scholarly literature over the course of seven centuries (see below). Constantinople remained the leading Karaite center until the seventeenth century when it went into a steep decline. In Islamic Spain, on the other hand, the presence of Karaites elicited sharp reactions from leading twelfth-century Rabbanite scholars including Judah Halevi, Abraham Ibn ˓Ezra˒, and Avraham Ibn Daud. Likely because of their isolation from fellow-sectarians and this unrelenting Rabbanite opposition, the Andalusian Karaites seem to have vanished by the end of the twelfth century. New communities were emerging, however, in Eastern Europe. The Rabbanite traveler Petahyah of Regensburg (1180), mentions a scripturalist group he encountered in the Crimea who appear to have been Karaites; there is clear-cut evidence of a community there by the late thirteenth century. Settlements in Poland and the Ukraine may date to the thirteenth century; they were certainly established by the early fifteenth century, when the Lithuanian community in Troki (Trakai, near Vilnius) emerged as the European center of the sect.

There are large gaps in the Karaite historical record between the twelfth and early nineteenth centuries. For thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Byzantium, for example, the sole witnesses are Aaron ben Joseph the Physician and Aaron ben Elijah of Nicomedia, whose writings contain few contemporary references. Bio-bibliographic works, by David Ibn al-Hiti (fifteenth century), Mordecai ben Nisan (1699), Simḥah Isaac Lutski (1757), and others, provide the skeleton for a history of scholarship and are invaluable guides to Karaite self-perceptions and historical consciousness, but yield scant information about social, religious, and cultural developments. Travel accounts—by Karaites, Rabbanites, and non-Jews—correspondence, and topical treatises, on the other hand, give glimpses of communal life and concerns at specific moments. Thus, a dispute with Rabbanites in Cairo (1465) or an internal controversy in Constantinople over Sabbath lights (late fifteenth–early sixteenth centuries) are relatively well documented, while basic data concerning both communities in subsequent decades are lacking. All the same, certain generalizations seem warranted. Not infrequently, Karaite and Rabbanite communities existed in close proximity. Usually, the Christian and Muslim authorities did not differentiate between the two groups, regarding them both as Jews. Since Karaite populations almost invariably seem to have been smaller, they tended to remain on correct, if somewhat distant terms with their Rabbanite brethren. In one striking exception to this pattern, several Karaite scholars in mid-fifteenth-century Constantinople—including Elijah Bashyatchi, Caleb Afendopolo, and Judah Gibbor—studied with an eminent Rabbanite teacher, Mordecai Comtino. Typically, teacher and disciples treated each other with respect, while attacking each other's legal views vigorously.

In general, conversions from one group to the other seem to have been relatively rare. The anti-Karaite polemic of some Rabbanite authors is merely theoretical, and is not grounded in any actual fear of defection to the Karaite cause. Moses Maimonides (Mosheh ben Maimon, 1135/8–1204), the most outstanding Jewish scholar of the medieval period, summed up the Rabbanite attitude by advising reserved but helpful behavior toward Karaites as fellow Jews, albeit wayward ones, so long as they desisted from hostile attacks on Rabbanite dogma and practice.

In the seventeenth century, the Karaite communities in the Crimea, Lithuania, and Poland assumed the leading role. By the end of the eighteenth century, these communities had all come under Russian rule. In the nineteenth century, several energetic leaders succeeded in obtaining from the tsarist government full citizenship rights for Karaites; this set them even further apart from the Rabbanite majority in Russia, which continued to bear the full weight of the oppressive and discriminatory anti-Jewish laws.

World War I affected the Russian Karaites only where they found themselves directly in the way of military operations. During World War II, the Karaites in the occupied territories of Poland and western Russia were generally not molested by the German authorities, on the ground—generously supported by Rabbanite representatives consulted by the Germans—that they were ethnically not Jewish but rather were descended from the ancient Turkic nation of the Khazars, converts to Judaism who once ruled southern Russia. These Karaites were therefore not subject to wholesale extermination, as were their Rabbanite brethren. The nineteenth-century campaign to achieve independent, official recognition and the generally negative attitude in Russia after the 1917 revolution toward religion in general and Judaism in particular, led Karaites in the U.S.S.R. to distance themselves entirely from Jewish history, religion, and culture. In the Middle East after 1945, the Arab-Israeli conflict had a serious effect on the Karaite communities in the neighboring Arab states. Owing to emigration, the ancient community of Hīt, in Iraq, ceased to exist, and the equally ancient community in Cairo was vastly reduced when most of its members moved to Israel, Europe, and the Americas. At present, there are perhaps twenty-five thousand Karaites in the world (in Israel, Eastern and Western Europe, and the United States), though no truly reliable statistics exist.

Karaite Literature

Fragments of ʿAnan's code of law have survived in the original Aramaic. Both in language and in style, the work bears strong affinities to classical rabbinic texts. Benjamin al-Nahāwandī and Daniel al-Qūmisī also wrote codes, and al-Qūmisī composed the earliest surviving Jewish Bible commentaries; these works were all written in Hebrew. Between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, Karaite scholars in Muslim lands produced an extensive religious literature in Arabic. In Asia Minor, the Crimea, and Poland-Lithuania, the Karaite language of scholarship between the eleventh and twentieth centuries was Hebrew. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the Karaites of Eastern Europe and the Crimea also wrote in their vernacular Turkic dialects.

The first major scholar of the golden age of Karaite literature was Yaʿqūb al-Qirqisānī (second quarter of the tenth century), whose magnum opus is a two-part Arabic commentary on the Pentateuch. The first part, titled Kitāb al-anwār waʾl-marāqib (Book of light-houses and watchtowers), comments on the legal parts of the Pentateuch and forms not only a detailed code of Karaite law but also a veritable encyclopedia of early Karaite lore. The second part, Kitāb al-riyāḍ waʾl-ḥadāʾiq (Book of gardens and parks), deals with the nonlegal portions of the Pentateuch. Al-Qirqisānī also wrote an extensive commentary on Genesis that seems to have dealt in detail with various philosophical problems, such as the nature of God and of matter, creation ex nihilo, and good and evil. Of all his works, only Kitāb al-anwār has been published in full. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Karaite scholars connected with the academy in Jerusalem produced a number of important works, mostly in Arabic, in the areas of exegesis, philology, theology, law, apologetics, and polemics. Among the most important authors were Salmon ben Yeruḥīm (a polemicist and exegete), Japheth ben Eli (the first Jew to compose commentaries on the entire Bible), Sahl ben Maṣliaḥ (an exegete, legal scholar, and polemicist), David al-Fāsī (a lexicographer), Joseph ben Noah (president of the Jerusalem academy), Abuʾl-Faraj Hārūn (Hebrew: Aaron ben Jeshua; a grammarian and exegete), Yūsuf al-Baṣīr (Hebrew: Joseph ha-Roʾeh; an eminent theologian), and Abuʾl-Furqān ibn Asad (Hebrew: Jeshua ben Judah; an exegete and legal authority).

With the growth of the Greek-speaking community in Asia Minor, it became necessary to translate the Karaite Arabic classics into Hebrew, the literary language of Byzantine Jewry. Translators such as Tobiah ben Moses and Jacob ben Simeon produced Hebrew versions which are notable for their awkward syntax, strange technical vocabulary, and Greek glosses. In the twelfth century, a more natural Hebrew style appears in an extensive encyclopedia of Karaite scholarship begun in 1148 by Judah Hadassi and titled Eshkol ha-kofer (Cluster of henna), and in Jacob ben Reuben's terse Bible commentary. By the late thirteenth century, the Karaites of Byzantium were writing a fluent Andalusian Rabbanite Hebrew. Drawing upon Maimonides and Abraham Ibn ˓Ezraʾ, Aaron ben Joseph wrote a philosophical commentary on the Pentateuch; he is best known, however, as the redactor of the official Karaite liturgy. Subsequently, Aaron ben Elijah (d. 1369), composed an invaluable trilogy: ʿEṣ ḥayyim (The tree of life), a Karaite Guide of the Perplexed ; Gan ʿEden (The Garden of Eden), a code of law; and Keter torah (The crown of the Torah), a commentary on the Pentateuch. Elijah Bashyatchi (d. 1490) and his brother-in-law Caleb Afendopolo (d. after 1522) compiled another code, Adderet Eliyyahu (The mantle of Elijah), which became the most esteemed legal manual among modern Karaites. A versatile scholar, Afendopolo indexed older books (such as Eshkol ha-kofer and ʿEṣ ḥayyim ), wrote scientific works, and composed Hebrew belles-lettres. A contemporary, Judah Gibbor, composed an important Pentateuch commentary in verse, which was the subject of later Karaite supercommentaries. Other authors of note include Moses Bashyatchi (d. 1572?), who incorporated Arabic citations of al-Qirqisānī into his own treatises, Moses Messorodi, who composed an important collection of sermons, and Elijah Yerushalmi (d. c. 1700), who sought to bring traditional Karaite learning from Constantinople to the Crimea.

Egypt produced a few important Karaite authors. Born in Alexandria, Moses Darʿī (thirteenth century?) was the group's preeminent Hebrew poet, writing an impressive body of secular verse in the style of the great Andalusiams. In the fifteenth century, Samuel al-Maghribī wrote the last known Arabic code of Karaite law and a popular set of homilies on the Pentateuch, while David Ibn al-Hītī composed a brief but important chronicle of Arabic scholars from ʿAnan down to his own time. Moses ben Samuel produced a corpus of Hebrew poetry, including an epic account of his tribulations in the service of the emir of Damascus, who in 1354 forced him to become a Muslim and to join a pilgrimage to Mecca. He finally escaped to Egypt, where he seems to have returned to his ancestral faith.

As the Ottoman Empire progressively declined, the center of Karaite literary activity again shifted northward, to the Crimea, Lithuania, and Poland. The Karaite community of Troki counted as one of its most illustrious sons Isaac ben Abraham Troki (d. 1594, or perhaps 1586), the author of a critical tract against Christianity titled Ḥizzuq emunah (Fortification of the faith), which was later admired by Voltaire. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a group of Protestant theologians (Rittangel, Peringer, Puffendorf, Warner, Trigland) drew parallels between the Karaite secession from the Rabbanite synagogue and the Protestant secession from the Church of Rome. They encouraged the composition of several works by Polish Karaite informants, including Mordecai ben Nisan of Kukizów (near Lviv, in Polish Galicia) and Solomon ben Aaron of Troki (d. 1745), which set forth their view of Karaite history, dogma, and ritual. Simḥah Isaac ben Moses of Lutsk (d. 1766) composed the first substantial Karaite literary history.

In the nineteenth century, the outstanding Karaite man of letters was Abraham Firkovitch (1786–1874), who during his travels in the Crimea, the Caucasus, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt amassed a large collection of Karaite manuscripts, one of the richest in the world, now in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. He was also a prolific writer, although the authenticity of many historical data he cited from colophons and from tombstones has been rejected. An older contemporary of his, Mordecai Sultansky (d. 1862), wrote several works, among them a history of Karaite Judaism, Zekher ṣaddiqim (Memorial of the righteous), valuable mainly as an exposition of the modern official version, authorized by the leading circles of the Russian-Polish-Lithuanian community.

During the twentieth century, several members of the Egyptian community were active authors: Mourad Farag (1867–1956), a jurist and poet; Tobiah Babovitch (1879–1956), the last Karaite Chief Hakham (Rabbi) in Cairo; Mourad El-Kodsi (1919–), a communal historian; and Yoseph El-Gamil (1943–), a historian and editor of texts.

The invention of printing with movable type was eagerly seized upon by Rabbanite Jews to produce an enormous library of religious and secular literature from the 1470s down to the present day. On the Karaite side the picture is quite different. No Karaite incunabula were printed, and only four Karaite books—the first, an edition of the Karaite liturgy, published by the Christian bookmaker Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1528–1529—appeared in the sixteenth century, all set in type and run off the press by Rabbanite compositors and pressmen. Only one Karaite book came out in the seventeenth century, printed in 1643 at the Amsterdam press of Menasseh ben Israel, a Rabbanite scholar and publisher known also for his negotiations with Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell on the readmission of Jews into England. The earliest Karaite presses were those of the brothers Afeda and Shabbetai Yeraqa in Istanbul (1733) and in Chufut-Kale, in the Crimea (1734–1741); there was also another press in Chufut-Kale (1804–1806). They were short-lived and succeeded in publishing only a few books. The first more or less successful Karaite press was established in 1833 in Eupatoria (or Gözlöw), in the Crimea, and published several important old texts.

One can only guess at the reason for the typographical backwardness of the modern Karaites. One factor was very likely their historical dislike of innovative change. Their limited number and the comparative paucity of prospective purchasers and interested readers among them probably also made printing unprofitable unless supported from time to time by a wealthy patron from their own midst. In recent years, however, the Karaites in Israel have issued a large number of texts; some are photomechanical reproductions of nineteenth-century prints, but many more have been newly set and published by Yoseph El-Gamil.

Dogma and Practice

Karaite Judaism is epistemologically grounded in scripture and reason. During its formative period, it borrowed its theology wholesale from the teachings of the Muslim Mutazilites of Basra. The Karaite Yūsuf al-Baṣīr (d. c. 1040) and his Rabbanite contemporary Samuel ben Hophni Gaon thus shared common views on many doctrinal points. While Rabbanite scholars distanced themselves from Mutazilite theories, successively embracing Neoplatonism and then Aristotelianism, the Karaites held fast to their old theology until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In his ʿEṣ ḥayyim, Aaron ben Elijah actually attempts to synthesize the kalām teachings of Yūsuf al-Baṣīr with Maimonidean Aristotelianism. Although the experiment cannot be said to have succeeded in full, it remained influential within the Byzantine Karaite camp.

In his code of law, Adderet Eliyahu, Elijah Bashyatchi formulated the Karaite creed in ten articles, corresponding to the Ten Commandments: (1) that the physical universe was created; (2) that it was created by God, who is eternal; (3) that the Creator has no form and is unique; (4) that He sent Moses, His prophet; (5) that He sent the Torah, which is perfect, with Moses; (6) that the believer must know Hebrew, the language of the Torah; (7) that God inspired all other true prophets who came after Moses; (8) that God will resurrect the Dead on the Day of Judgment; (9) that God rewards and punishes all human beings according to their deserts; (10) that God has not abandoned the people in exile, and that though they suffer, they must anticipate the coming of the Messiah who will effect the divine salvation. No Rabbanite could find any of this objectionable.

Where the two groups have always differed, however, is in their attitude toward the postbiblical (Talmudic and rabbinic) tradition: for Rabbanites, the Oral Law is of Mosaic origin and mediates the understanding of Scripture; for Karaites it is at best a body of non-authoritative knowledge, and at worst a malignant, man-made fabrication. But even the rejection of the rabbinic tradition has turned out to be not quite absolute, for with the passage of time, changing conditions have forced the formation of a native Karaite tradition in order to cope with new situations and problems that were not anticipated by Moses the lawgiver. Hence the development of the three pillars of Karaite legislation: (1) the scriptural text (Heb., katuv; Arab., naṣṣ ); (2) analogy (Heb., heqesh; Arab., qiyās ) based on scripture; and, in cases where the first two pillars are of no help, (3) the consensus of scholarly opinion (Hebrew qibbuṣ or ʿedah, "community," the latter term possibly influenced by the Arabic ʿādah, "customary practice, common law"; Arabic ijmāʿ, "agreement"; later termed in Hebrew sevel ha-yerushah, "burden of inheritance").

Consequently, the Karaites and Rabbanites finally part ways in their religious practices, and here the differences are substantial and fundamental. For the Jewish calendar, which governs the fixing of the dates of holy days, the Karaites rejected the rabbinic mathematical reckoning and depended solely on the observation of the phases of the moon; only comparatively recently was limited reckoning admitted. In dietary law, the scriptural interdict against seething a kid's flesh in its mother's milk was not broadened (as it was in rabbinic law) to cover all meat and dairy foods. In the law of consanguinity, the Karaites originally followed the so-called catenary (chain) theory (Heb., rikkuv; Arab., tarkīb ), which permitted piling analogy upon analogy to deduce further forbidden marriages from those explicitly listed in scripture. The social consequences of this practice finally became so threatening to the physical survival of the Karaite community that Jeshua ben Judah succeeded in modifying it, although the Karaites still employ a much more extensive definition of consanguinity than the Rabbanites do. This remains, however, the only instance of a major reform in Karaite law. The scriptural prohibition of kindling fire on the Sabbath day is interpreted literally to mean the total absence of all fire, even if kindled before the onset of the Sabbath and left to continue burning, as permitted by rabbinic law. The modest relaxation of this rule in the Byzantine, Crimean, and Eastern European communities, where the absence of light and heat throughout the cold and sunless winters inflicted real hardship, aroused strong opposition. Other differences relate to ritual cleanness—particularly rigorous for Karaite women—inheritance (the Karaite husband has no claim upon his deceased wife's estate), and various dietary laws. Polygyny is not officially prohibited—as it was by a medieval European rabbinical enactment recently extended to eastern Jewries as well—but it seems to have been quite uncommon even in Muslim countries, probably for social and economic reasons; in Western countries it was, of course, outlawed and was recognized as such by Jewish law. The Karaite liturgy, originally limited to selected biblical psalms and prose passages, was eventually developed into a large corpus of both prose and verse—some written by Rabbanite poets—quite distinct from the Rabbanite one.

The connection between the Karaites and Sadducees, suggested by some early Rabbanite polemicists, or between the Karaites and the Qumran sect, as advanced by some modern scholars, remains hypothetical. Similarities in some observances may be nothing more than earmarks of the age-old continuous chain of dissent in Judaism. (The outstanding example, the rule that Shavuʿot must always fall on a Sunday, seems to be one of the oldest points in Jewish dissent.) Verbal parallels between certain early Karaite writings and the Dead Sea Scrolls are more suggestive. The chief stumbling block here is the hiatus of some five hundred years between the Sadducees and the Qumran community on the one hand, and the earliest known Karaites on the other. The most that can safely be said at present is that the primitive Karaites may possibly have had access to some Sadducee or Qumranite literary documents. Whether they have been influenced by them, and if so, to what extent, cannot yet be determined.

Bibliography

The modern critical study of Karaite Judaism dates back about a century and a half. Until recently, very few scholars devoted their full attention to the subject, despite the existence of a large and extremely important Karaite literature which remains in manuscript, awaiting publication and analysis. Certain aspects of Karaite history—for example, the role of social and economic factors—have only now begun to attract interest. Many of the older works retain their basic value, but require updating. Fortunately, the situation seems to be changing. During the past two decades, there has been growing interest in Judeo-Arabic literature generally, and Karaite writings in particular. Since 1989, moreover, the great collections of Karaite manuscripts in St. Petersburg at the Russian National Library (RNL) and the Institute of Oriental Studies have become accessible. The RNL manuscripts, which had been assembled by Abraham Firkovitch during the nineteenth century, are now being catalogued for the first time. They will serve as the basis for a comprehensive rewriting of early Karaite history and literature. At the same time, Karaite texts in Hebrew from Byzantium, the Crimea, and Eastern Europe are now being studied critically and analyzed in their proper contexts. Despite their historically small numbers, the Karaites, their forms of belief and practice, and their place in Jewish history, are now beginning to receive the attention they deserve.

Ankori, Zvi. Karaites in Byzantium: The Formative Years, 970–1100. New York, 1959.

Astren, Fred. Karaite Past and Jewish History. Columbia, S.C., 2004.

Baron, Salo W. A Social and Religious History of the Jews. 2d ed. 18 vols. New York and Philadelphia, 1952–1983, 5: 209–285.

Ben-Shammai, Haggai. "The Karaite Controversy: Scripture and Tradition in Early Karaism." In Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter, edited by Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niewöhner, pp. 11–26. Wiesbaden, Germany, 1992.

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Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith. Karaite Marriage Documents from the Cairo Geniza: Legal Tradition and Community Life in Mediaeval Egypt and Palestine. Leiden, 1998.

Polliack, Meira. The Karaite Tradition of Arabic Bible Translation: A Linguistic and Exegetical Study of Karaite Translations of the Pentateuch from the Tenth to the Eleventh Centuries. Leiden, 1997.

Polliack, Meira, ed. Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources. Leiden, 2003.

Poznanski, Samuel. "The Karaite Literary Opponents of Saadiah Gaon." Originally published in the Jewish Quarterly Review, old series vols. 18–20 (1906–1908), reprinted, London, 1908; reprinted again in Karaite Studies, edited by Phillip Birnbaum (see above).

Rustow, Marina. "Rabbanite-Karaite Relations in Fatimid Egypt and Syria: A Study Based on Documents from the Cairo Geniza." Ph.D. diss, Columbia University, New York, 2004.

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