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Home , Karaite Judaism

KARAISM AND : AN EVOLVING RELATIONSHIP

Daniel J. Lasker*

Karaism is the oldest surviving Jewish sectarian movement, with ori- gins going back at least to the ninth century. Karaites reject the rab- binic concept of an Oral Law, given by to on Mount Sinai, that offers the authoritative interpretation of the Written Law. Though Karaites are not literal scripturalists, as many are accustomed to think, often Karaite interpretations of the seem to be more consistent with the plain meaning of the text. Rabbanite have generally con- sidered Karaites as part of the Jewish community; in the last century or so, however, Karaites in Eastern Europe separated themselves from other Jews. This essay will survey changing Karaite attitudes towards Christianity over the centuries.1 The emergence of Karaism as an independent alternative form of in the ninth-century Islamic world coincided with the first manifestations of a Jewish literary critique of Christianity as marked by a number of original polemical compositions.2 Indeed, the first identifiable Jewish anti-Christian polemicist, Dāwūd ibn Marwān al-Muqammaṣ, was later claimed by the Karaites as one of their own, even though there is no sure indication of his religious affiliation.3 His contemporary, Benjamin al-Nahawendi, who was the first to refer to

* To David Berger, who has taught us original and innovative approaches to the Jewish-Christian encounter. 1 For a general introduction to Karaism, see Meira Polliack, ed., Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources (Leiden, 2003). In the context of Karaism, rabbinic Jews are known as Rabbanites. 2 Although there were proto-Karaites before then, including the followers of the eighth-century Anan b. David, and, perhaps, certain Second groups, Karaism as a historical phenomenon can be traced back only to the ninth century. Similarly, although Jews had reacted to Christianity in various ways before the ninth century— both in and in the parody Yeshu (The Story of ), of unclear provenance and date—the first full-fledged polemical treatises, written in Islamic countries in Judaeo-Arabic, date only from that century. 3 See Sarah Stroumsa, Dāwūd ibn Marwān al-Muqammiṣ’s Twenty Chapters (ʿIshrūn Maqāla) (Leiden, 1989). The possibility of al-Muqammaṣ’s Karaism is discussed on pp. 16–19 (Stroumsa now that the name should be read al-Muqammaṣ). 478 daniel j. lasker

Beney or Ba‘aley Mikra’ (Karaites, apparently with some connotation of scripturalists), regarded Jesus as having been one of five prophetic pretenders who fulfilled the words of the prophet Daniel, who wrote (11:14): “Also the children of the violent among the people shall lift themselves up to establish the vision, but they shall fail.”4 Apparently, internal controversies in ninth-century provided a fertile back- ground for both inter- and intrareligious confrontations among the non-Islamic of the region.5 In the tenth century, both Rabbanites and Karaites engaged in cri- tiques of Christianity, most notably Saadiah Gaon of the former and Jacob al-Qirqisānī and Japheth b. Elie ha-Levi among the latter. A full range of polemical arguments was developed by these authors. Saa- diah and al-Qirqisānī provided a number of philosophical arguments refuting the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation. They were both aware, as was al-Muqammaṣ before them, that Christians tried to explain the Trinity by reference to divine attributes, so these authors developed their own theories of attributes in the context of the anti-Christian debate.6 Furthermore, all tenth-century Jewish crit- ics of Christianity presented exegetical arguments challenging Chris- tian interpretations of verses from the Hebrew . Al-Qirqisānī also questioned the legitimacy of Christianity since, he claimed, Jesus did not intend to found an independent , an observation borrowed

4 As reported by Jacob al-Qirqisānī in Kitāb al-Anwār wal-Marāqib (The Book of Lights and Watchtowers), ed. Leon Nemoy, vol. 1 (New York, 1939), 42; see Bruno Chiesa and Wilfrid Lockwood, Yaʿqūb al-Qirqisānī on Jewish and Christianity (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 135. This is the opinion as well of the late-tenth-century Karaite Japheth b. Elie ha-Levi in his Commentary on Daniel; see D. S. Margoliouth, A Commentary on the Book of Daniel by Jephet ben Ali the Karaite (Oxford, 1889), 61–62 (English), 119–120 (Arabic). also understood Daniel 11:14 as referring to Jesus; see , Hilkhot melakhim, chap. 11 (in uncensored versions). Judah Hadassi, however, reports this attribution as a Rabbanite one, presumably distancing himself from it; see Wilhelm Bacher, “Inedited Chapters of Jehudah Hadassi’s ‘Eshkol Hakkofer,’ ” Jewish Quarterly Review, o.s., 8 (1896): 436, repr. in Hadassi, ’Eshkol ha- kofer (Westmead, England, 1971). 5 For a survey of Jewish polemics against Christianity in Islamic countries, see Dan- iel J. Lasker, “The Jewish Critique of Christianity Under Islam in the Middle Ages,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 57 (1991): 121–153. For the Christian-Muslim debate in the first Islamic centuries, see Sidney H. Griffith,The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton and Oxford, 2008). 6 See Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 112–132; idem, Repercussions of the Kalam in (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 1–40.