Chapter One The Karaite Community of Jerusalem in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Background and Development A time of intellectual change The eighth and ninth centuries were a time of great political and intellectual change for Jews ...

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Poznanski's Mabo' 'al 'ofen ketibat ha-Qara'im 'et dibrey yemehem remains, despite its flaws, the only essay expressly devoted to Karaite historiography. al-Qirqisani's Kitab al-an war wal-maraqib is an historical piece of work viewed, by personal choice or owing to his own cultural development or under the historical circumstances, through theological glasses. al-Qirqisani was writing for the benefit of his own co-religionists in order to strengthen their faith. However limited his historical perspective may appear, it resolves into a public appreciation of (...) the author's party, which is founded on a recovery of the past, and which aimed to strengthen the Selbstverstandnis of a Jewish minority. It would be difficult to describe such an approach otherwise than as an attempt to historicize the past. The Kitab al-anwar appears not only as a document of the literary history of Karaism, but as an original reading of the history of Judaism, the differentiation between secular and religious being only ours. (shrink)

In some publications in book and newspaper forms, in the thoughts of civil servants who are concerned with national and religious issues, the version of Crimean Karaites belonging to Jewry still exists, considering their Karaite religion as a kind of Judaism only on the grounds that they have the Old Testament with their Holy Book The bible However, if one is to be strict in the logic of such reasoning, then Christianity should be included in Judaism, because in Christianity the (...) Sacred Book also has the same Old Testament. But for some reason, such conclusions about Christians do not apply to recipients of karayism. (shrink)

Background -- Major thinkers -- Contacts with Rabbanite thinkers -- Topics -- Into the modern period.

Saadya Gaon (882 – 942), one of the outstanding Rabbis in the period of the Geonim, rejected the legitimacy of legal inference, as part of his polemics with his contemporary Karaite scholars. The paper analyzes Saadya's stance regarding the logical basis of legal inference, and shows that Saadya's distinction between reason and revelation in the domain of legal inference is only in regard to the ‘illah– the factor that connects the case with its law. The rationality of the commandments, on (...) the other hand, is based according to Saadya upon the manfa‘ah– the utility of the commandments, and hence Saadya's religious doctrine turns out to be coherent and consistent. Maimonides (1138–1204), who was one of the most important figures in the Jewish scholarly world in the Middle Ages, adopted the Aristotelian concept of dialectics in order to facilitate his theory of Jewish legal argumentation. Unlike Saadya, Maimonides saw inferences in the realm of the law as legitimate. His position can be considered an inclination towards the Karaite ideology according to which reason must be the ruler in the realm of the law. Nevertheless, Maimonides' stance deviates from that of Karaites in a crucial point: according to Maimonides, only authorized institutions are qualified to use legal inference. Since the Talmud, according to Maimonides, represents the teachings of the rabbinical authorized institutions, its legal instructions must be followed. The article describes Maimonides' position regarding legal and Talmudic inferences, and shows that Maimonides' inclination towards the Karaite theory remains within the limits of the Rabbanite ideology. (shrink)

: The medieval Karaite grammarian and exegete Abū l-Faraj Hārūn b. al-Faraj was a broad reader of the literature available in Arabic, in a variety of genres. Earlier studies have demonstrated that in his grammatical works on the Hebrew language, Hārūn adapted discussions from well-known compositions focused on Arabic and the Qurʾān. The following examination of Hārūn’s treatment of the subject of biblical majāz, non-literal language, aims to show that in constructing his sophisticated and innovative discussion of the topic, the (...) Karaite scholar read widely – and adapted creatively – incorporating the methods of a variety of genres in Arabic, including uṣūl al-naḥw, uṣūl al-fiqh and even iʿjāz al-Qurʾān and combining them together with earlier Jewish and Karaite scholarly tradition to produce what seems to be the first comprehensive discussion of non-literal language in Judeo-Arabic. (shrink)

Rau, D. Die Ethik R. Saadjas.--Neumark, D. Saadya's philosophy.-- Vajda, G. Saadia Gaon et l'amour courtois.--Diesendruck, Z. Saadya's formulation of the time-argument for creation.--Altmann, A. Saadya's conception of the law.-- Vajda, G. Saʻadyā commentateur du "Livre of la création."-- Vajda, G. Études sur Saadia.--Harkavy, A. Fragments of anti-Karaite writings of Saadiah in the Imperial Public Library at St. Petersburg.--Eisler, M. Vorlesungen über die jüdischen Philosophen des Mittelalters.

The basic axiom of Judaism over the generations has been that the Torah is of divine origin and was transmitted to Israel by Moses. Numerous and diverse notions regarding the composition of the Torah and Moses’ role in writing it can and have been derived from this conservative doctrine, however. To date, no full and exhaustive inquiry into the matter having been conducted into the subject to date, some relevant sources and the relationship between the diverse views or their influence (...) on one another still awaiting investigation. This paper seeks to fill this lacuna, focusing on the most primary and influential developmental stages of the tenet, and demonstrating that the emergence of these has largely been determined by polemics with other religious groups, including Pagans, Christians, Muslims, and Karaites. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 24, Issue 2, pp 163 - 223 The paper demonstrates that when translating explicit anthropomorphisms in Scripture, medieval Karaites are neither particularly more nor less literal than their rabbinic counterparts. Indeed, they often propose translations similar to those of Targum Onqelos and Saʿadyah Gaon. Moreover, although their lines of argument are different, both Saʿadyah and the Karaites insist that human language is responsible for corporeal descriptions of God in the Bible, and they resort to the linguistic conventions (...) of figurative language and extension of meaning to justify these theologically disturbing expressions. The Karaites’ contribution consists of advancing and refining these linguistic justifications by introducing, for example, the concept of polysemy to account for certain kinds of problematic formulations. In addition, they are probably the first commentators in the history of Jewish Bible exegesis to cite the rabbinic dictum, “the Torah speaks in the language of man” to explain the presence of anthropomorphisms in Scripture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Islamic Disputation Theory: The Uses & Rules of Argument in Medieval Islam by Larry Benjamin MillerKhaled El-RouayhebLarry Benjamin Miller. Islamic Disputation Theory: The Uses & Rules of Argument in Medieval Islam. Logic, Argumentation and Reasoning 21. Cham: Springer 2020. Pp. xviii + 143. Hardback, €77.99.Very few unpublished PhD dissertations have had a formative influence on a field. One of the precious few is Larry Miller's Princeton dissertation from (...) 1984 on Islamic disputation theory. It proposed an original and compelling account of the development of the discipline, from the earliest extant Arabic works in the tenth century to the composition of classic madrasa handbooks in the late thirteenth century. It has been cited regularly in the past decades and has served as the starting point for all later studies of Arabic/Islamic dialectics in European languages. The fact that it has finally been published is a fitting tribute to a study that is even more admirable for having been written when many of the primary sources were still only available as manuscripts.Part of the explanation for why the dissertation was not published sooner may be that its author did not pursue an academic career. And as he states in a short preface, he has not kept abreast of all relevant studies and editions that have appeared since his dissertation. A thorough revision and update has therefore not been possible. Though some minor corrections and revisions have been made, the book is still by and large the influential 1984 dissertation, now made available with a short introduction by Walter Young, one of the leading younger scholars in the field, along with helpful indices of proper names and subjects.Miller's narrative begins with Arabic works on disputation (jadal) by a number of theologians from the late ninth and tenth centuries, such as Ibn al-Rāwandī (d. 911), [End Page 518] al-Ash'arī (d. 935), and the Karaite Jewish scholar al-Qirqisānī (d. ca. 960). The basic assumption was that a questioner (sā'il) would ask a claimant (mu'allil) (i) what his view is; (ii) what the ground or reason ('illa) for that view is; (iii) the appropriateness of the ground/reason for the view; and (iv) to verify the ground/reason by showing it to be commensurate with the view. The ground/reason for the theological dialecticians was standardly an entity or property, not a premise. The reasoning tended to be informal and analogical, as opposed to explicitly making syllogistic deductions from quantified premises.Parallel to this theological tradition of jadal, there was an Arabic Aristotelian tradition that took its point of departure from Aristotle's Topics, translated into Arabic more than once in the period from the late eighth to the early tenth centuries. Though also often referred to as jadal, this tradition, represented by the writings of al-Farabi (d. 950), Avicenna (d. 1037), and Averroes (d. 1198), retained distinct features. It tended to deny any epistemic value to dialectics, instead seeing it as useful only insofar as it provided logical training. For the Aristotelian/Neoplatonic philosophers, the pursuit of truth was the preserve of demonstrative syllogism (burhān). Whereas the theological dialecticians envisaged a claimant (mu'allil) and a questioner (sā'il), with the burden of proof on the former, the philosophical tradition had a questioner (sā'il) seek, in the manner of Socratic elenchus, to elicit from a respondent (mujῑb) a series of answers that would allow the construction of a syllogism whose conclusion contradicted the respondent's initial position.From the time of al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Islamic theologians tended to take over the syllogistic ideal of reasoning from the philosophers, perhaps explaining why theological writings on jadal trail off after the eleventh century. The informal, analogical jadal tradition continued, however, in the writings of Islamic jurists. From the eleventh century, scholars such as Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī (d. 1083) and al-Juwaynī (d. 1085) wrote works on jadal in which the examples are disputes about questions of Islamic law and the disputants are partisans of the various legal schools. This tradition of what Miller calls "juristic dialectics" (74, 95) later adopted some... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 273-274 [Access article in PDF] Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, and William R. Newman, editors. Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. viii + 610. Cloth, $186.00. The nineteen papers of this weighty (handsomely produced, but expensive) volume are mostly devoted to the views of one thinker or group of persons on "corpuscularism" (see 17ff.), in (...) either physics or mathematics, with few synthetic or diachronic studies. Only a quarter of the volume is devoted to the medieval period: Danielle Jacquart on minima in the Salerno school of medicine (twelfth century); the late George Molland on Roger Bacon's and Grosseteste's "corpuscular tendencies"; Charles Lohr on Ramon Lull; John Murdoch on minima naturalia in the medieval and Renaissance periods; and the greater part of William Newman's study of corpuscularian conceptions in "Aristotelian alchemy" from Geber to Sennert. The early-modern part includes studies on mostly expected figures: Francesco Patrici, Giordano Bruno, the Northumberland circle, Francis Bacon, David Gorlaeus (a little-known Dutch theology student; 1591-1612, sic), Daniel Sennert, Honoré Fabri, Galileo, Gassendi, Charleton, Boyle, Locke, and Homberg. Alan Gabbey more generally distinguishes different patterns of explanations in mechanical philosophy.As far as I can judge, the authors are knowledgeable and competent, and the studies make important contributions. But just because this is a high-quality volume produced with the ambition of making a step toward rewriting the history of a major chapter in the history of science, its two significant and principled deficiencies must be pointed out.The volume follows the intention of "show[ing] the debt of early-modern matter theory to previous traditions and thereby [explaining] its bewildering heterogeneity" (back cover). Now, the study of the corpuscular traditions in the pre-modern period is certainly an important desideratum (although this volume again attends chiefly to the early modern corpuscularians). But the motivation and perspective here announced—the medieval period [End Page 273] is to be studied because early modern science is indebted to it—are astoundingly Whiggish. Worse: the study of the entire Arabic-Islamic tradition is dismissed, on the grounds that "Islamic atomism does not seem to have been of any influence upon Christian fourteenth-century atomism" (8): this is not only Whiggism, but also frank and explicit euro- and Christian-centrism, which in the beginning of the twenty-first century is simply stunning. The method amusingly consists in affirming the consequent: presupposing that "Islamic atomism" did not influence the West and early-modern science, no scholar was asked to examine whether or not this was indeed the case, with the congenial result that the volume seemingly confirms the initial presupposition. Q.E.D. Similarly and no less regrettably, the fact that (ps.-) Geber's Summa Perfectionis is not, as Lasswitz had thought, the translation of an Arabic work is here used as grounds on which to dismiss altogether his claim concerning the importance of the Arabic input (13, but see also 293). This way, incomprehension between civilizations is reinforced instead of being reduced, and I believe we did not need September 11 to know this.The thusly dismissed Mu'tazilite school of Islamic theology had important repercussions in Judaism, so that referring to it as "Islamic atomism" is misleading (see notably Hagai Ben-Shammai, "Studies in Karaite Atomism," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 6 [1985]: 243-93). The volume's forty-page cumulative bibliography, for which the editors are to be congratulated, reflects the volume's parochial viewpoint: H. A. Wolfson's important The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), with some 150 pages on atomism, is not included; nor is the (English version of the) landmark study by the late S. Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1997; the original 1936 German version is mentioned). Wolfson's study, incidentally, shows that the editors' presupposition (8) that the Kalâm tradition could have influenced the West only via the Latin translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is unwarranted, for Isaac... (shrink)

The subject of the study is the cultural code of Judaism in the visual semiosis of the Crimea. The object of the study is the traditional symbolism in the decor of the Jews of the Crimea: Ashkenazi Jews, Karaites and Krymchaks. The article uses the methods of cultural (semiotic, ontological and hermeneutic) analysis in the continuum of signs of the traditional Jewish semiosis, the idiographic method in the concept of the totality of signs, the method of analysis of previous studies, (...) the method of synthesis in substantiating the morphology of signs. The following aspects of the topic are considered in the study: five main codes of Jewish culture are identified, their morphology and interrelationships are substantiated, as well as key meanings and the main central code. The main conclusions of the study are: 1. The multiethnic landscape of Crimea is made up of the cultures of numerous ethnic groups. The main feature of the identification and self-identification of cultures is religion. The Jews of Crimea include Ashkenazi Jews, Karaites and Crimeans. A single source for cultural codes in the Jewish semiosis is the Torah (the Mosaic Pentateuch) for all three ethnic groups, and for two of them (Jews and Krymchaks), the interpretation of the Torah is also the Talmud. 2. Based on the studied material, five main codes of the Jewish visual semiosis of the Crimea are identified, each of which unites a certain group of symbols: skewomorphic, phytomorphic, zoomorphic, numeric. The unifying code and the primary source of all codes is the code Book (Torah). The interrelationships between the codes, the key meanings – symbols of Creation, Paradise, Torah persons and Messianic aspirations are revealed. The semantic center of all codes is the repository of the Torah – Aron Hakodesh, and the Torah itself. Thus, the ring pattern "from Torah to Torah" is revealed. 3. A special contribution to the research of the topic is the systematization of the cultural codes of the Jewish semiosis of the Crimea. The scientific novelty consists in the fact that for the first time a culturological analysis was carried out and the interrelationships of cultural codes in the visual semiosis of the Crimea were structured. (shrink)

The title of the article refers to the excessive ideological force deployed in Zionism to foster national and religious unity. As a closed and totalizing system, the Zionist enterprise precludes the representation of minority cultures and has yet to provide, if it ever can, an adequate definition of Palestinians, Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origins) and other minorities – Karaites, Bedouins and Samaritans – much less one of gender sexuality, religion or personhood. Ironically, it was through the (...) contemporization of Hebrew that a distinctive Israeli society was forged, which set the limits of the imagined geography of the body. Modern Hebrew also produced a hierarchy of different literatures, each with its own ideological parameters of inclusion and exclusion. Paradoxically, as I argue, the cacophonous intertextualiy of the Hebrew canon drowns out the voices of minority Jewish writers, who are ‘relegated to constantly repositioning themselves’ within dominant (Ashkenazi) Israeli culture and society. Eli Bachar and Shelly Elkayam are among the Mizrahi poets I introduce here, whose work powerfully illustrates the colonizing aspects of hunger, eating and feeding through the trope of the ma'akhelet, Abraham's sacrificial knife, as a way to rethink intertextuality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 619-637 [Access article in PDF] Maimonides and the Rise and Fall of the Sabians:Explaining Mosaic Laws and the Limits of Scholarship Jonathan Elukin The Koran mentions the Sabi'un three times (II 6-2, V 69, XXII 17). "Believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabi'un—whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and does what is right—shall be rewarded by their Lord; they have nothing (...) to fear or to regret." This language is repeated in the second citation. The third appearance is slightly different: "As for true believers, the Jews, the Sabi'un, the Christians, the Magians, and the pagans, Allah will judge them on the Day of Resurrection. He bears witness to all things." 1 Early Islamic commentators often disagreed on the identity of the Sabi'un, and the confusion continued throughout the medieval Islamic period. 2 The term Sabi'un was applied by some early Koranic commentators to the survivors of an ancient Jewish-Christian sect, the Elchasites in southern Iraq. 3 One minority group of ethnic Arab "pagans" with a hellenized elite in Harran, in Arabia, also took the Koranic name Sabian in the third/ninth century to claim the status of a "people of the book" and therefore avoid persecution. It is this group that some later Muslims identified as Sabi'. 4 The scholarly consensus now suggests that [End Page 619] the term Sabian refers to some kind of Gnostic identity that can encompass "the disciples of Judeo-Christian baptizing sects... and, on the other, Harranian astrolators, the last representatives of decadent Greco-Roman paganism." 5The mysterious Sabians would play a key role in attempts by early modern European scholars to understand the origins of the Mosaic legislation. It was through Maimonides, the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar, that the Sabians were transmitted to Christian scholars. By the seventeenth century, the Sabians of Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed had become a fixture in how scholars understood or at least debated the history of the origins of Mosaic law. Increasingly perceived as a diffuse paganism rather than a specific ethnic identity or subsumed by the more tangible reality of Egypt, Sabianism drifted to the margins of scholarship by the end of the Enlightenment. During the nineteenth century the Sabians became superfluous to scholarly efforts to understand the origins of Israelite monotheism. This study is an attempt to understand the growth of the enthusiasm for the Sabians by early modern scholars and then its precipitous decline. In a large degree it was the nature of the evidence itself regarding the Sabians that shaped and ultimately undermined the survival of the Sabians in European thinking. Still, both Christian and Jewish scholars well into the twentieth century lived with the ghosts of the Sabians as they sought to explain otherwise mysterious Mosaic commandments.In the Guide Maimonides argued that the sacrificial system legislated by Moses was an example of God's mercy. It would have been impossible for the Israelites to abandon suddenly the style of idolatrous worship learned in Egypt, and so Moses crafted the sacrificial system gradually to replace false gods with the true God. Maimonides still needed to explain the particular details and reasons for the sacrifices and the other ritual laws. 6 To that end he claimed to have read various texts, particularly the so-called Nabataen Agriculture, which purported to describe Abraham's education among and flight from the Sabians as well as a summary of the practices of the Sabians. 7 (The Sabians had made one brief appearance before Maimonides's discussion in the Guide; the tenth-century Karaite Jew, Qirqisani, declared in his Kitab al anwar, "the modern Christian philosophers assert that the laws of the Torah were given to the Children of Israel only because of God's wrath; and that they [Israel] have chosen these laws for themselves only on account of their resemblance to the laws of the Sabians, which was due to the fact that they became... (shrink)

Investigation into the history of the Talmud was sparked by the Karaite rebellion against the authority of the Talmud at the beginning of the eighth century. The most influential work of Talmudic chronology is the Iggeret de-Rav Sherira Gaon , composed in 986, which sought to explain how the Mishnah and the Talmud were compiled, and demonstrate the unbroken chain of the tradition. Maimonides gives a summary of the history of the tradition in his Commentary to the Mishnah. Although Maimonides' (...) reconstruction is an artificial one, with no attempt to verify sources or test their reliability, he stated that the Babylonian Talmud was compiled about one hundred years after the Jerusalem Talmud; in cases of disagreement, therefore, the rulings of the Babylonian Talmud were the ones adopted by the post-Talmudic Halakhah. The French glossators, or Tosafists, argued that a law in the Talmud could be changed when the original circumstances in which it was promulgated were no longer evident. More objective, critical historical accounts have been given by more modern scholars, particularly Yon Tov Lippmann Heller, Jeheil Heilprin, and Hayyim Joseph David Agulai. (shrink)

During the middle ages and early modern period, dozens of Jewish commentaries were written on Qohelet, in Arabic and Hebrew, and representing a very full range of methods and approaches, from Karaite to Rabbanite, grammatical to pietistic, Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, and anti-Aristotelian, even kabbalistic. The purpose of this article – dedicated to the memory of Kalman Bland – is to present some experiments related to the telling of the history of medieval Jewish exegesis of Qohelet in hermeneutical context.

Hertz, J. H. Saadya gaon.--Altmann, A. Saadya's theory of revelation.--Herzog, D. The polemic treatise against Saadya.--Krauss, S. Saadya's Tafsir of the seventy hapax legomena explained and continued.--Leveen, J. Saadya's lost commentary on Leviticus.--Markon, I. explained by Saadya and his successors.--Marmorstein, A. The doctrine of redemption in Saadya's theological system.--Mittwoch, E. An unknown fragment by Gaon Saadya.--Rabin, C. Saadya gaon's Hebrew prose style.--Rawidowicz, S. Saadya's purification of the idea of God.-- Robertson, E. The relationship of the Arabic translation of the Samaritan (...) Pentateuch to that of Saadya.--Rosenthal, E. I. J. Saadya's exegesis of the Book of Job.--Stein, S. Saadya's Piyyuṭ of the alphabet.--Weis, P. R. The anti-Ḳaraite tendency of R. Saadya gaon's Arabic version of the Pentateuch.--Wieder, N. Fourteen new Genizah-fragments of Saadya's Siddur together with a reproduction of a missing part. (shrink)

This essay explores what Jewish ethics has to say about globalization in relation to the AIDS crisis. Special attention is paid to the consequences in affirming current intellectual trends to transcend traditional limits in both society and thought for rethinking traditional Jewish values. The discussion proceeds from two presuppositions. The first is that there is an intimate connection between ethics, science, and politics. The second is that the history of Jewish ethics involves three distinct forms that are generally correlated but (...) rarely identical in content and moral judgment. These three forms are law, wisdom or virtue, and covenant. The discussion considers related issues of accidental connections in time between the bubonic plague and Zionism and between AIDS and homosexuality in relation to moral–theological issues related to divine providence and distributive justice. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 2, pp 149 - 173 In the fourth treatise of his legal-theological work _Kitāb al-Anwār wa-al-Marāqib_, Yaʿqūb al-Qirqisānī analyzes a criticism of the Aristotelian syllogism and its epistemological foundations. Qirqisānī defends Aristotelian logic by quoting a passage from an unknown commentary on Aristotle in which the Aristotelian theory of syllogism is explicated. This paper focuses on the historical, theological, and philosophical meanings of the criticism of the syllogism in Qirqisānī’s discussion and analyzes his interpretation of (...) the syllogism as a source of knowledge that should be applied in the realm of legal reasoning and in the interpretation of biblical law. (shrink)