Age of Polemics:
Karaites Come Under Rabbanite Fire

Letter of Judah Halevi in Toledo to Halfon ben Nathanel al-Dimyati in Spain
Toledo, 1125
ENA NS 1.5 L 41

No Gaon would devote as much scholarly energy to eradicating the Karaite 'heresy' as Saadiah had. By the twelfth century, it was left to the great Spanish rabbis Judah Halevi, Abraham ibn Daud, and Moses Maimonides to continue Saadiah's legacy. Each of these three Spaniards took it upon himself to combat the Karaite argument that rabbinic tradition was nothing but "a commandment of men, learned by rote" (Isaiah 29:13) — that is, a human invention that had been blindly and uncritically mistaken for divine. However, each used different means to do so.

Halevi's philosophical treatise, The Kuzari, was aimed at defending Judaism against Christianity and Islam, but in it he also leveled arguments against the Karaite rejection of rabbinic authority through a defense of the Rabbis' exclusive claim to interpret the biblical revelation. As Halevi explained in a letter to his friend Halfon al-Dimyati, he wrote The Kuzari to answer various theological questions that a Karaite from Christian Spain had posed to him. Ibn Daud, for his part, chose to defend Rabbanism by means of a historical chronicle. Maimonides attacked Karaism on the legal plane, seeking to eradicate Karaite influences on Rabbanite halakhic practice and reinforcing the requirement that every Jew accept the words of the rabbinic sages. The challenge posed by Karaism thereby forced some of the greatest medieval Jewish thinkers to clarify the ideas of rabbinic tradition and transmission and to set forth proofs of their centrality. In so doing, they produced some of the most enduring classics of Jewish literature.

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