Byzantine and Ottoman Karaism:
Compromise and Codification

Ez Hayyim (Tree of Life)
Aaron ben Elijah
Cairo, 1436
ms. 3398

The Karaite center in Byzantium had its roots in Jerusalem. Throughout the eleventh century, many Karaites came from Constantinople to study at the great Karaite academy in Jerusalem, and Jeshua ben Judah, a disciple of Joseph al-Basir, counted numerous Byzantine Karaites among his students. Once the Jerusalem academy was destroyed by the Crusader conquests in 1099, Jeshua's Byzantine students returned home and continued his work. With that, the center of the Karaite movement shifted from Jerusalem to Constantinople.

The move away from the Arabic-speaking world occasioned an important linguistic shift in Karaite literature. The Byzantine Karaites were steeped in the Judeo-Arabic scholarship of their Near Eastern predecessors, yet they also knew that if they were to survive as a movement, they would have to render that scholarship into a medium more readily comprehensible to their Greek- and Hebrew-speaking neighbors. Accordingly, they set out to translate the legal, philosophical, and exegetical works of the Golden Age into Hebrew.

As time wore on, the encounter between Byzantine Rabbanite and Karaite communities led to a growing a rapprochement between the two camps. Byzantine Karaite works of the fourteenth century onward are marked by a heavy tendency toward compromise with Rabbanism. After the influx of Spanish exiles to Ottoman Turkey beginning in 1391, Karaites were increasingly exposed to rabbinic learning. By the sixteenth century, two major pillars of Karaite halakhic difference had been all but eroded in the Byzantine-Ottoman sphere: the prohibition against using light on the Sabbath and direct observation of the barley crop in Palestine for the purposes of intercalcating the year.

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