"Search Diligently in the Torah":
Karaite Beginnings

Judeo-Arabic Paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus with Commentary Japheth ben Eli, Egypt, seventeenth century (?)
ms. 3420

The Karaites are those Jews who reject the Talmud and instead advocate reliance on the Hebrew Bible as the source of all Jewish law. The word Karaite means "scripturalist" and translates a variety of Hebrew and Arabic terms with roughly the same meaning: benei mikra, baalei mikra, kara and karai. Although Karaism had its beginnings in the eighth century CE, these terms were not coined until a century or two later.

Karaism came onto the scene at a time when the Talmud had been completed but had not yet taken root in the Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora. The Geonim, the heads of the Jewish academies in Babylonia (Iraq) and Palestine, saw themselves as the vital link between the Talmud's wide-ranging discourses and a unified set of Jewish precepts and practices. They consequently spread their teachings to the Jewish diasporas. No sooner had the Geonim begun their work than the Islamic conquests brought nearly the entire Jewish world into a single cultural and linguistic sphere for the first time since Alexander the Great.

The cultural unity of Islamic rule eased the promulgation of rabbinic law. At the same time, the new unity was not without its detractors, and the very expansion of empire that helped the spread of geonic authority and rabbinic law also strengthened the forces of divergence. As Karaism began to spread, it shifted westward to Jerusalem, where it was freer to pursue its own religious and intellectual ideals unimpeded.

In Jerusalem, Karaism embarked on a period of systematization and extraordinary literary productivity that scholars have named "the golden age of Karaite literature" because of the plethora of biblical commentaries, sermons, polemics, and legal works the nascent Karaite community produced there. The scholars of the Jerusalem period effected an important linguistic shift in Karaite intellectual culture. They abandoned Aramaic, which was too burdened with the talmudic past and now became the sole province of the Rabbanite camp. They turned their attention to Hebrew, the language of the Bible, and to Arabic, the new lingua franca of scholarly endeavor. This shift led to an outpouring of Hebrew and Arabic works that would profoundly affect the history of medieval Jewish biblical exegesis.

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