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Home , Judah Halevi

CHAPTER NINE

JUDAH HALEVI AND KARAISM

According to a letter written by Judah Halevi, discovered in the Geniza, it is very likely that a first edition of Halevi's Book if was composed as a response to a Karaite from Christian . Halevi seems to have been none too pleased with this literary effort, since, in the letter, he dissociated himself from the tract which he had written. 1 Nonetheless, in the final edition of the Kuzari, the only edition known today, a polemic against Karaism was included,2 and Halevi stated specifically at the beginning of the book that the Kuzari was intended to provide answers against the claims of the philosophers, the other (i.e., Christianity and ), and the Jewish heretics (i.e., the Karaites).3

I The original publication and discussion of this letter can be found in Shlomo Dov Goitein, ')\utographs"; idem, "Biography"; and David H. Baneth, "Remarks." Both Goitein and Baneth assume that Halevi's Karaite correspondent was a philosopher, explaining thereby why Halevi wrote what they consider to have been the first edi• tion of the Kuzari, i.e., a tract which criticizes both Karaism and philosophy. Halevi's letter, however, contains no such indication, and what Halevi's exact motives were in writing the lost first edition of the Kuzari remains unknown. In addition, the scope of that edition and the reason for Halevi's later disapproval of it are matters of dispute among scholars; see, in addition to the articles mentioned above, Yohanan Silman, Philosopher and Prophet, and Shlomo Pines, "Shl'ite Terms," pp. 210- 217 . A connection to Karaism has been rejected by Y Tzvi Langermann, "Kuzari," p. 501. The letter has been discussed and reedited in Moshe Gil and Ezra Fleisher, Yehuda Ha-Levi, pp. 181 - 186,324-326, with a facsimile of it on p. 526. 2 While there is no reason to assume that the anti-Karaite chapters of the extant Kuzari are not the original ones, it is impossible to establish the exact relationship between the first edition and those chapters, which are found inJudah Ha-Levi, Kuzari, 3:22-63, pp. 112-137. The remaining sections of Kuzari 3, namely the attack on asceti• cism (chaps. 1-22, pp. 9G-1l2) and the account of rabbinic tradition and literature (chaps. 64-74, pp. 137- 146), might also be seen as anti-Karaite; see Eliezer Schweid, Ta 'am Va-Haqashah, pp. 48- 54. 3 I: I, p. 3. Halevi refers to the Karaites as al-khawiiridj (dissenters, rebels). Despite Halevi's explicit statement that the Karaites, unlike the , are not minim (3 :65, p. I 39), Judah ibn Tibbon, Yehuda Even Shmuel, and Nehemia Allony, "The Kusari," p. 142, translate al-khawiiridj as ha-minim (Allony adds ha-Qgra 'im in parentheses). Judah ben Isaac Cardinal translated it as ha-Qgra 'im; see Allony, "Two Book-Tides," p. 115, n. 22 . The contradiction between Ibn Tibbon's translation of minim and Halevi's statement in 3:65 is the subject of comment by the two classical commentators on 142 CHAPTER NINE

In light of Halevi's anti-Karaite aims, it is somewhat ironic that for many centuries Karaites relied upon Judah Halevi's Kuzari as the main source for their own reconstruction of Karaite history.4 In his discussion of rabbinic tradition in Kuzari 3:65, Halevi asserts that the Karaite schism began in the Second Temple period and that the Kara• ites were not Sadducees. At a time when most of his contemporaries were convinced that Karaism was started by the disgruntled exilarchic candidate Anan ben David in the eighth century, and that its religious doctrines consisted of revived Sadduceeism,5 Halevi gives an entirely different interpretation of Karaite origins and . Basing himself on the talmudic account of King Yannai's persecutions (Qiddushin 66a), he states that, in the generation of Judah ben Tabbai and Simeon ben Shettah, one of the sages questioned the propriety of Yannai's being both king and high priest. In response, Yannai's friends advised him to kill or exile the sages. When Yannai hesitated because he was afraid that there would be no one to teach the Torah, his friends replied: "You see that the Written Law is present [among us]. Whoever wishes to study, let him come and study. But do not be concerned about the Oral Law." Yannai took their advice and exiled the sages. Simeon ben Shettah went to Egypt, where he kept the Oral Torah alive, but returned to the Land of when it became apparent that the Written Torah could not be observed by logical analogy (qiyiis) alone. He was, however, too late to prevent a schism; Karaism, according to Halevi,

Kuzari, , Qgl Yehudah, ad 1:1, and Israel of Zamosc, O;:.ar Nebmad, ad I: I, neither of whom had the Judaeo- text in front of him; see Kuzari, Warsaw edition, pp. 8a~b. Halevi's terminology, however, does not seem to be consistent. In the letter from the Geniza mentioned above (see n. I), Halevi does refer to the Karaite recipient of his work as being "one of the exponents of (al-minut; Goitein's comments in '~utographs," p. 411, were made before the Arabic original of the passage in the Kuzari 1:1 was available). In 3:49, pp. 128~131, Halevi states a number of times that the Karaite reliance on personal effort (idjtihiid) and logical analogy (qiJiis; on these terms, see below) leads to minut. On the other hand, in 3:65, p. 138, Zadoq and Boethus, founders of Sadduceanism, are said to be the root of the heretics (khawiiridj). Halevi's threefold division of the opponents of rabbinic may be reflected in a similar classification in ' "Laws of Repentance," 3:8 (deniers of the Torah). 4 For a history of Karaite historiography, see Fred Astren, ; and Samuel A. Poznanski's introduction to his edition of Mordecai Sultansky's Zekher Zaddiqim, pp. 5~69. 5 See, for instance, Halevi's younger contemporary, , Book qf Tradition, pp. 37~38, 67 (Hebrew); 48~50, 91 ~92 (English).