Inversion of \"Written\" and \"Oral\" Torah in Relation to the Islamic Arch-Models of Qur'an and...

$: Inversion of \"Written\" and \"Oral\" Torah in Relation to the Islamic Arch-Models of Qur'an and Hadith; Jewish Studies Quarterly (JSQ) Volume 22, Number 3, 2015, pp. 243-302(60);$
JewishStudiesQuarterly Volume 22 (2015) No. 3

Mohr Siebeck

JSQMatan OrianHyrcanus II versus Aristobulus II and the Inviolability of JerusalemMeira PolliackThe Karaite Inversion of “Written” and “Oral” Torah in Relation to the Islamic Arch-Models of Qurʾan and Hadith

Jewish Studies Quarterly 22, 243–302 10.1628/094457015X14368800705201 ISSN 0944–5706 © Mohr Siebeck 2015

Author’s e-offprint with publisher’s permission.

The Karaite Inversion of “Written” and “Oral” Torah in Relation to the Islamic Arch-Models

of Qurʾan and Hadith

Meira Polliack

סיבלא ד’ל אלכף מני פי אלתראב // ואלכ’ט באקי פי אלכתאבThis hand of mine will perish in the ground /while the writing in the book remains sound *

Introduction

The premise put forward in this article is that the rise of Karaite Juda-ism during the mid-ninth to 10th centuries CE was primarily motivated by the Jews’ urgent need to authenticate Hebrew Scripture (“written Torah”). This need resulted from their cultural awakening to Arabic lit-eracy in general, and to the Islamic conception of the formation of the Qurʾan as a book, in particular.

Part I focuses on the Karaite deconstruction of Judaism: the Karaites argued for the inauthenticity of Jewish oral tradition (“oral Torah”), as a necessary complementary step to their reinforcement of written Torah. They strove to prove that oral Torah did not emanate from a divine source, and rejected the canonicity and authority of the Mishnah and Talmud as the textual embodiments of this allegedly revealed oral Torah. Leading Karaite thinkers of the early 10th century (e. g., Abu Yaʾqub Yusuf al-Qirqisani and Salmon ben Yeruham) deconstructed the Jewish founda-tional narrative of the “dual Torah” in response to the changes brought

* From the colophon of Yefet ben ʿEli’s Commentary on Genesis; see M. Zawa-nowska, The Arabic Translation and Commentary of Yefet ben ʿEli on the Abraham Narratives (Genesis 11:10–25:18) (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 203. The current article was prepared within the framework of the DFG-DIP research project Biblia Arabica: The Bible in Arabic Among Jews, Christians and Muslims (C. Adang, M. Polliack, S. Schmidtke). My heartfelt gratitude goes to Camilla Adang and Sidney H. Griffith for their invaluable comments on the initial draft.

244 Meira Polliack JSQ 22


about by the Jews’ internalization of the Islamic-Arabic model of literacy at large and of written Scripture, in particular. In its place they recon-structed a new foundational narrative in which a single written Torah formed the sole revealed basis for Jewish creed.

The Karaites perceived in their reconstruction of Judaism a viable solution to the erosion of the dual Torah edifice among the Jews, as well as a credible response to the Islamic undermining of the Hebrew Bible as a revealed Scripture distorted by the Jews and abrogated by the Qurʾan. The Karaites’ overall purpose was to bolster Judaism as a valid and authentic re li gion within the Islamic milieu. Nevertheless, there was also a degree of ambivalence in the Karaite reconstruction of Judaism, which is generally typical of heretical movements that are empowered by the dissemination of literacy among their folk.

Part II of this article shows how this ambivalence can be detected in various Karaite attempts to retain the kudos of orally-received tradition. Such was their envisioning of a distant oral past that originally informed various genres of the Hebrew Bible – to wit: varied materials, mostly of an oral nature, especially “reports” (khabar/ aʾkhbar) and “stories” (qiṣṣah/qiṣaṣ) that were either directly revealed or transmitted to the Bible’s ancient author-compilers (mudawwin/un). In the Karaite view, these authors-compilers were essentially anonymous writers and editors who lived during the lengthy biblical period and were responsible for the “textualization” of the “raw” varied materials into individual books and also for the gradual formation of larger biblical divisions or sub-col-lections (such as the Pentateuch, the Twelve Minor Prophets, the collec-tion of Proverbs, the Five Scrolls). Eventually they also oversaw the final codification of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, sometime during the Greek period. In explaining the textual formation of the Hebrew Bible in this way, the Jerusalem school of Karaite exegetes, and especially the illustrious 10th-century commentator Yefet ben ʿEli, appropriated cer-tain notions pertaining to the writing down of Islamic traditional lit-erature (tadwin al-ḥadith). In these subtle ways, the Karaite exegetes submerged the “oral” within the “written,” thus retaining some of the former’s prestige as part of the Karaite cultural heritage, while confirm-ing the latter as the only revealed source of Jewish lore.

(2015) The Karaite Inversion of “Written” and “Oral” Torah 245


I. Karaite Deconstruction of Judaism in Relation to the Islamic Arch-model of the Qur ʾan

1. Jewish Responses to the Qurʾanic ModelStudies in early Islam tend to agree that by the mid-ninth century edu-cated Muslims could satisfactorily put forward a fairly unified and clearly articulated notion concerning the formation of their Scripture. By this time, the content of the Qurʾanic text and its language were con-ceived as “miraculous” in respect of their historical uniqueness and lit-erary inimitability (i jʿaz al-qur aʾn). From a theological perspective, the Qurʾan’s appearance as “God’s book” (kitab aʾllah) in the form of an actual book in the hands of humans was explained as the earthly embodi-ment of the celestial book (ʾumm al-kitab) containing the direct word of Allah, solely revealed to his Prophet Muhammad. From a historical-lit-erary perspective, the formation of the Qurʾan as a written text was also accounted for: first as verses culled from various written and memorized records in the keeping of the Prophet’s wives, disciples and devotees; then as a collection undertaken by his companions and immediate suc-cessors, Abu Bakr, the first Khalif, who is traditionally described as “the first to have collected the Qurʾan between two covers” ( aʾwwal man jama aʿ al-qur aʾn bayna lawhayni), and ʿUmar, the second Khalif; and lastly as a fully written text, codified in a model copy (nuskhah) and fur-ther disseminated in the form of an authorized codex (muṣhaf ) – that is, a book – by Uthman, the third Khalif.1

1 For the Arabic quotation, see J. Burton, The Collection of the Qur aʾn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1977) 3. Later in this book (esp. pp. 160–189) Burton sug-gests that the Hadith reports of the Uthmanic recension and suppression of pre-Uth-manic codices of the Qurʾan are fictional and says they may have been patterned after ancient Jewish debates reported in the Mishnah and Talmud, concerning the exclusion of certain books from the biblical canon. The function of these reports was to provide a basis for the Islamic doctrine of abrogation (naskh), while the collection and codifi-cation of the Qurʾan was the work of the Prophet Muhammad himself. The alternative hypothesis is held by J. Wansbrough, who considers these reports to reflect a historical reality in which the Qurʾan gradually received its standard form throughout the forma-tive period of the first two centuries of the Islamic community, that is, by the mid ninth century CE; see Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), esp. 33–52. Possibly, a more refined functional separation of the Qurʾanic authorship from its consolidation as a book seems to have been offered by J. Burton, “The Collection of the Qurʾan,” in J. D. McAuliffe, Encyclopaedia of the Qur aʾn (5 vols., Brill: Leiden, 2001–2006) 1.351–361: “The inherited book or written manifestation is called the mushaf and the hadiths about the collection of the Qur aʾn are concerned with its identity, provenance and com-pleteness as a textual object” (352). On this ongoing debate and its relation to the man-uscript evidence see further in F. Leehmuis, “Codices of the Qurʾan,” in McAuliffe,



Dissenting voices that undermined this foundational narrative – in particular, the Shiʿite questioning of the authenticity of the Uthmanic version, which concentrated on alleged additions (ziyadah) and omis-sions (naqṣ/nuqṣan) to Muhammad’s original prophecy, especially in regard to the figure of ʿAli – appear to have abated by the 10th century.2

The self-referential quality of the Qurʾan itself, and the information per-taining to its formation in the emerging Hadith collections, demonstrated in different ways how God regulated the transference of His revelation to the Prophet Muhammad, who ordered scribes to write down some of the revelations he received, while others of his followers committed them to memory.3 Though historians of Islam consider Muhammad’s alleged illiteracy to be untenable, it is recognized that the traditional distanc-ing of the Prophet from the writing down of the Qurʾan solved potential and actual disagreements regarding the original content of God’s book, especially after the Prophet’s death: No faction could claim possession of the Prophet’s original text, since all were equally dependent on trans-mitters.4 An essential separation took place, therefore, between “God’s Word” as conveyed to Muhammad and the “written Word” of Scripture. In the religious thinking and wider mentality of early Islam, revelation and written authentication were effectively disengaged in this manner,

Encyclopaedia 1.347–351. Further on the stages of the solidification of the Qurʾan as a book, see J. Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans. G. French (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984; orig. 1946) 3–36; G. N. Atiyeh, ed., The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), and G. Schoeler’s seminal article “Writing and Publishing : On the Use and Function of Writing in the First Centuries of Islam” Arabica 44 (1997) 423–435.

2 According to E. Kolberg, from this time the leading Shi ʿite imams consciously limited their textual criticism of the Uthmanic version to instances of alternative read-ings and limited changes in the inner order of some verses (taqdim wa-ta aʾkhir); see Kolberg, “Some notes on the Imamite Attitude to the Qurʾan,” in Islamic Philosophy and the Classical Tradition: Essays Presented by His Friends and Pupils to Rich-ard Walzer on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. S. M. Stern et al. (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1972) 209–224; See also M. Bar-Asher, Scripture and Exegesis in Early Imami Shiism (Brill: Leiden, 1999) 90–91, and cf. H. Modarressi, “Early Debates on the Integrity of the Qurʾan: A Brief Survey,” Studia Islamica 77 (1993) 5–39.

3 On the Qurʾan’s “self-referentiality” in the form of “numerous verses comment-ing upon and analyzing the processes of the text’s own revelation and reception in time,” see A. Madigan, The Qur aʾn’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam’s Scripture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 61, and cf. S. Wild’s empha-sis: “The resolute and irreversible self-referential or meta-textual turn of the Qurʾan is a noteworthy and far-reaching feature connected to a specifically Muslim view of scripture … The relation between divine speech and human history is a constant and explicit topic in the Qurʾan,” in Wild, “Why Self-referentiality?” in Self-Referentiality in the Qur aʾn, ed. S Wild (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006) 3, as well as other articles in this collection.

4 See works mentioned in n. 1.



yet both were directly connected to the person of Muhammad (through the roles of his disciples and wives as collators of the revealed text). The emergent field of Arabic rhetoric also contributed to this separation by demonstrating the inferiority of all Arabic literature to the Qurʾan, through elaborating the Qurʾan’s aesthetic “uniqueness” or “inimitabil-ity” ( iʾ jʿaz), in terms of textual form and content.5

Thus, in a comparatively short time, a span of between one and two centuries, Islam formulated a relatively detailed and ordered theological and historical answer – one especially acceptable to a literate body of believers – as to who authored the Qurʾan, who received it, who wrote it down, and when and how it was collated, codified and disseminated as a book. Of paramount importance to this narrative, which functioned in many senses as a foundational religious narrative, was the presentation of the role of the Companions as purely secondary in respect of the role of the Prophet, and of that of the Prophet as purely technical in respect of the Divine – namely, the only direct receiver of the revealed text, which was authored solely and completely by God.

Unsurprisingly, this narrative proved its efficacy in polemical and inter-religious contexts. Possessing the unmediated word of God, which in its mere writing-down was properly regulated by God, the Prophet and his devotees, amounted to a water-tight compositional theory of the Qurʾan, which could in itself serve as proof that the Jewish and Chris-tian scriptures that historically preceded it were in some way defi-cient. In turn, Islam’s acknowledgement of these earlier scriptures as containing some core of divine revelation compelled it to address their nature as books in the specific context of the Qurʾan’s appearance as a book. Hence the doctrines of their abrogation (naskh) by the Qurʾan, and the alteration and distortion (taḥrif ) of their prophetic message by the “People of the Book” ( aʾhl al-kitab), was intricately bound up with the establishment of the Qurʾan’s superiority as a revealed text whose composition was divinely regulated and as such incomparable to any other text.6 The foundational narrative regarding the Qurʾan’s for-

5 Cf. R. C. Martin, “Inimitability,” in McAuliffe, Encyclopaedia, 2.526–536; M. Radscheit, “Iʿjaz al-quran im Koran?” in The Qur aʾn as Text, ed. S. Wild (Leiden: Brill, 1996) 113–124, and further implications in G. J. H. Van Gelder, Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem (Leiden: Brill, 1982) 4; J. Wansbrough, “Arabic Rhetoric and Qurʾanic Exegesis,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 31 (1968) 469–85.

6 On the connectedness of the Torah’s abrogation (naskh) and the Qurʾan’s inimita-bility (i jʿaz) as presented in interreligious Muslim polemic, see D. Sklare, “Responses to Islamic Polemics by Jewish Mutakallimun in the Tenth Century,” in The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam, ed. H. Lazarus-Yafeh et al. (Wiesbaden:



mation as a book came to demonstrate (inter alia) why the Qurʾan was not corrupted by its transmitters and codifiers, in contrast to the former Jewish and Christian scriptures.7

Even though disputations concerning relations between the oral and the written persisted in Islamic religious discourse throughout its first centuries, the early Muslims clearly grasped the urgency of laying to rest any formidable doubts concerning the literary crystallization of their Scripture. They succeeded in offering a concise foundational narrative – one not overly simplified, nor too convoluted, yet sufficiently trans-lucent – and in highlighting its relatively quick transition from an oral into a written mode, something “between two covers.” No less important was the fact that the verisimilitude of this narrative was hard to match in the competing (Jewish and Christian) traditions in regard to the textual formation of their revered books.8

Of additional importance was the arch-model this narrative supplied in regard to Islamic literature at large, as illuminated by Gregor Schoeler:

The evolution of the Qurʾan into a fixed written text – as portrayed by native tradition and considered most likely by most European scholars – took place in several stages. In its basic outlines, it anticipated the process leading to literacy as the dominant medium for the majority of the genuinely Islamic sciences: from notes written as mnemonic aids, it led to systematic collections, and finally, to an edited and “published” book.9

Harrassowitz, 1999) 137–161. Sklare highlights Jewish responses to such claims (including the notion of ʾi jʿaz al-qur aʾn), especially by the Karaite Yusuf al-Basir and the Rabbanite Samuel ben Hofni, whose works reflect the live philosophical inter-religious debates (majalis) that took place in 10th- and 11th-century Baghdad (see esp. p. 150). Cf. also the discussions by M. Goldstein, “‘Arabic Composition 101’ and the Early Development of Judaeo-Arabic Bible Exegesis” JSS 55 (2010), 451–478 (and esp. 466–469); J. Sadan “Identity and Inimitability: Contexts of Inter-Religious Polemics and Solidarity in Medieval Spain in the Light of Two Passages by Moses ibn ʿEzra and Yaʿakov ben El ʿazar,” Israel Oriental Studies 14 (1994) 328; D. Thomas, Anti-Chris-tian Polemic in Early Islam, Abu Iʿsa al-Warraq’s “Against the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

7 On the Islamic conception of the Qurʾan as the final and complete form of scrip-tural revelation and its wider interreligious consequences, see further n. 22, below.

8 On the convoluted process of formation of the Jewish and Christian Canons, see, for example, J. Kugel, The Bible As It Was (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); C. Markschies, “The Canon of the New Testament in Antiquity: Some New Horizons For Future Research,” in Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Reli-gious Canons in the Ancient World, ed. M. Finkelberg and G. Stroumsa (Leiden: Brill, 2003) 175–195; E. P. Sanders, ed., Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, Vol. I: The Shaping of Christianity in the Second and Third Centuries (Philadelphia, 1980).

9 See G. Schoeler, The Oral and the Written in Early Islam (trans. U. Vagelpohl and ed. J. E. Montgomery (Routledge: London, 2006) 73, in the chapter “Writing and Publishing: On the Use and Function of Writing in Early Islam.” Later in this chapter,



What notion did the Jews have of the formation of the Hebrew Bible as a book, in the full light of the Islamic era?10 Did they openly address this issue, either internally or in their inter-religious polemic? Did they have a ready narrative that could compete with the Islamic authentication of the Qurʾan as a book? The general answer is that the Jews had no clear and overriding foundational narrative regarding the textual formation of their Scripture. What they had were complex and sometimes conflicting reflections upon this process, found in the Bible itself and in post-bib-lical rabbinic literature.11

Schoeler compares Judaism’s opposition to the writing of “oral teaching” (i. e., the Mishnah and Talmud) to Islam’s opposition to the written dissemination of Hadith “which emerged as the second, originally orally transmitted teaching alongside the Qurʾan” (84, and see his wider argumentation in ch. 5, “Oral Torah and Hadith: Trans-mission, Prohibition of Writing, Redaction,” 111–141). The analogy between oral Torah and Hadith has long been a source of contention in the comparative study of Juda-ism and Islam. My restricted perspective on this issue is that the dual Torah concept was more intrinsic and fundamental to the Jews’ religious self-conception and dis-course than the “pairing” of Qurʾan and Hadith were to the Muslims. Rabbinic sources equated the written and the oral, openly allowing hermeneutic precedence to the latter as the “overruling” form of revelation, whereas Islamic sources do not appear to align Hadith with Qurʾan in the same emblematic way, and seem to allot to Hadith a more limited place in their hierarchy of religious “books.” This further explains, I think, why the Jews were more resistant to the textualization of their oral Torah than the Muslims were, despite some fierce opposition, to the textualization of Hadith. Nev-ertheless, there may have been additional factors at play in the Islamic opposition, as suggested by M. Cook in the path-breaking, “The Opponents of the Writing of Tradi-tion in Early Islam,” Arabica 44 (1997) 437–530, esp. “ a self-conscious oral Tradition was being brought into being by the Muslim traditionalists within an already literate society. This was a more peculiar, not to say perverse, cultural project, and I have argued in this study that its adoption makes historical sense only as a residue of Rab-binic Judaism” (527). On additional factors in the Gaonic opposition to the textualiza-tion of oral Torah, see T. Fishman, “Guarding Oral Transmission: Within and Between Cultures,” Oral Tradition 25 (2010) 41–56.

10 On the Islamic challenge to eastern Christianity in respect of similar questions pertaining to the formation of its Scripture, see S. H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the ‘People of the Book’ in the Language of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); S. H. Griffith, “When Did the Bible Become an Arabic Scrip-ture?” in The Bible in Arabic among Jews, Christians and Muslims, ed. C. Adang et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2013) 7–24. The intensive translation enterprise of the Bible into Arabic from the eighth century suggests, among various motives, that though self-reflection upon issues of scriptural textualization and formation were not an initial or paradig-matic concern to Judaism and Christianity, they became vital in the medieval stage of their development as religious traditions. This concern was to a significant extent the result of having to contend with the Islamic counter-narrative and its intense focus on the nature of the Qurʾanic text, its formation and function as the model for the Arabic book.

11 See S. J. Wyrick, The Ascension of Authorship, Attribution and Canon For-mation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 2004) 80–110 and literature cited there, and cf. S. Fraade’s detailed



The learned Jewish elites of pre-Islamic times were by no means unconcerned with the question of Bible’s written formation. In the Talmud (BT Baba Batra 14b) the sages discuss which biblical figures “wrote” (Heb. katav) the various biblical books.12 Nevertheless, it is unclear whether the ancient sages are referring to the composition or even editing of the books, or to the mere process of committing them to written form.13 More detailed views on biblical composition have been identified in Hellenistic Jewish sources, mainly in the works of Philo and Josephus, and in Christian Syriac sources.14 Nonetheless, these views do not appear to have amounted to any compelling or overriding Jewish explanation – certainly not a foundational narrative – on the formation of the Hebrew Bible as a book, not even its Pentateuchal portion.

Judaism’s main modus operandi in the pre-Islamic era was one of con-tinuous interpretation and adaptation of the biblical text, and many of the answers to religious and existential questions were couched in this widely interpretive form of reflection upon the Bible.15 As a re li gion

discussion of the Tannaitic materials, “Moses and the Commandments: Can Her-meneutics, History and Rhetoric Be Disentangled?” in The Idea of Biblical Interpre-tation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, ed. H. Najman and J. H. Newman (Leiden: Brill, 2004) 399–422.

12 Whether these books bear their name in their titles and are attributed to them (such as Samuel) or whether they were written by others (such as Lamentations, attrib-uted therein to Jeremiah) or Job (attributed to Moses). The tractate begins with the statement Moshe katav sifro (Moses wrote his book), excluding, according to a minor-ity opinion of some of the sages, the last eight verses of the Pentateuch and allotting their “writing” to Joshua, since they describe Moses’ death and its aftermath. This aspect of the rabbinic debate was disturbing to various medieval Jewish commenta-tors, especially Karaites, since they understood its potential for anti-Jewish polemic, and especially for the Muslim undermining of the authenticity of the Jews’ transmis-sion of the Bible. Qirqisani and Yefet, for instance, insist that Moses had authorial-editorial responsibility over the entire Pentateuch, including its last eight verses, yet they differ in respect of his more detailed functions as author-compiler; see recent dis-cussions in M. Goldstein, Karaite Exegesis in Medieval Jerusalem: The Judeo-Arabic Pentateuch Commentary of Yusuf ibn Nuh and Abu al-Faraj Harun (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2011) 119–138, and Zawanowska, Arabic Translation, 27–57. In a similar vein the Karaites rejected certain rabbinic views that gave Ezra the scribe a formative role in the Torah’s transmission.

13 See J. Wyrick, Ascension of Authorship.14 In which Moses is also credited with a prominent role in the written for-

mation or composition of the Torah; see J. Wyrick, Ascension of Authorship, 136–202; H. Najman, Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Y. Moss, “Scholasticism, Exegesis, and the Historicization of Mosaic Authorship in Moses Bar Kepha’s On Paradise,” Harvard Theo logical Review 104 (2011) 325–348.

15 As James Kugel and others have shown, ancient and rabbinic Jewish sources from the first centuries CE are highly adaptive in their mode of “re-writing” the bib-lical text; see J. Kugel, In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts



that grew out of the ancient world, Judaism retained oral modes of scrip-tural learning and discourse in high esteem well into the medieval period and beyond (to this very day). It was less agile in contending with top-ical issues aroused by the philosophically-minded and highly literate Islamic-Arabic milieu, especially in regard to historical questions such as how and when its literary canon came into being. Its multilayered textual traditions and complex forms of identity as a minority re li gion were additional factors that obscured its answers and interfered with their articulation in contemporaneous modes of Arabic discourse. Hence the question of the Bible’s detailed textual formation was not framed in foundational terms in ancient Jewish thought until the onset of the Islamic era and well into the ninth century. Even then there were no cul-tural or intellectual mechanisms in place that could be readily applied in addressing this question.16

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) and Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1997) 1–41; also cf. Wyrick and Frade in n. 11 above). On Midrash as a hermeneutic system, see also the discussions of J. Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); D. Stern, Mid-rash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evan-ston: Northwestern University Press, 1997); D. Halivni, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (New York, 1991); A. Yadin, Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash (Philadelphia: University of Penn-sylvania Press, 2004).

16 It has been suggested that the ancient rabbis’ avoidance of writing books in the first millennium was intended to buttress the status of the Hebrew Bible as the unique Book of the divine revelation; see J. Sussman, “The Oral Torah in the Literal Sense: The Power of the Tail of a Yod” (Hebrew), in Mehkerei Talmud 3 (2005) 209–384. If so, the paradoxical consequence of this policy had come full circle with the estab-lishment of Islam, when this policy was perceived, especially by the Karaite Jews, as actively undermining the Bible’s revelatory status. On the missionary function of the Christian codex as “a new kind of book, unfettered by tradition, solely valued from a functional point of view, and which can be translated with no damage to its content,” see. G. Stroumsa, “Early Christianity: A Religion of the Book?” in Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious in Canons in the Ancient World, ed. M. Finkel-berg and G. Stroumsa (Leiden: Brill, 2003) 170. On the dynamic interplay of oral-ity and literacy in early and late antique Christianity and its definition as a “textual” (rather than “literate” community), see Kim Haines-Eitzen, “Textual Communities in Late Antique Christianity,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. P. Rousseau (Chi-chester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 246–257. Further on the demise of oral modes in the late medieval Jewish milieu (mostly focusing on Christian Europe), see T. Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud, Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); S. C. Reif, “Aspects of Mediaeval Jewish Literacy,” in The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 134–155; D. Stern, “The First Jewish Books and the Early History of Jewish Reading,” JQR 98 (2008) 163–202.



Michael Cook has pointed out the surprising silence of the medieval Geonim, the heads of the Jewish academies of learning in Palestine and Babylonia, as to how the post-biblical canonical compilations of the Mishnah and the Talmud were formulated into written texts:

The Rabbanite silence was an embarrassed one: the major scholars of Geonic Judaism had no explanation for the fact that a literary situation had come about that was in flagrant contradiction to the oralist principles enshrined in their heritage.17

We may extend his astute observation even further: If this was the case with regard to the canon of Jewish oral law, what could the Geonim say about the Hebrew Bible as their written heritage? Could its mere antiq-uity serve as proof of its textual authenticity in the eyes of the Muslims and of their own communities? Clearly, Muslim claims as to the Bible’s textual alteration (taḥrif ) by the Jews and its ultimate abrogation (naskh) by the Qurʾan acted to demonstrate the contrary. Hence, an even greater embarrassment for the learned Jewish elites at large would have been engendered by questions pertaining to when and how the Hebrew Bible became a written text, including: Why is it vocalized (and read aloud) differently in the synagogues of Tiberius, Jerusalem and Baghdad? And why are there so many contradictions between the literal sense of the commandments in the biblical text and their “derived” sense in Jewish oral law (which by this time also existed, at least in part or a few copies, in the written canonical works of the Mishnah and Talmud)?

The two questions – namely, how the Hebrew Bible (Torah she-bikhtav, “the Torah that is in writing”) came to be formulated as a written text in a collection of 24 books, and how Jewish oral law (Torah she-be-al-pe, “the Torah that is in the mouth”) came to be formulated as written texts

17 See M. Cook, “Opponents,” 516. Cook further argues in this context (512–519) that even some celebrated passages in the Epistle of Sherira Gaon and in Saadia Gaon’s Sefer ha-Galuy, which relate to the oral Torah, largely circumvent the contradiction inherent to its writing. Cook stresses that the Geonim’s silence should not be construed as a sign of unawareness on their part of the Karaite attacks on the authenticity of this oral canon. Further on the Geonim’s reticence in regard to the “textualization” of the oral law and issues pertaining to the canonization and consolidation of the Talmud as a book, see R. Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 239–248; Y. Elman and I. Ger-shoni, “Transmitting Tradition: Orality and Textuality in Jewish Cultures,” in Trans-mitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, ed. Y. Elman and I. Gershoni (New Haven: Yale University Press 2000) 1–26; and more recent dis-cussions by S. Friedman, Talmudic Studies: Investigating the Sugya, Variant Readings and Aggada (Hebrew, with a rich list of further references at the end of the Eng-lish part, pp. v–x) (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2010); and T. Fishman, Becoming the People, 21–64.



in the Mishnah and Talmud – were bound up as two sides of the same coin. Answering the latter meant thinking about the former, and vice versa; and admitting there were inherent contradictions in the process of writing down oral law entailed contemplating possible contradictions in the process of the Bible’s textualization.

Moreover, vis-à-vis Islamic polemic, the questioning of the written Torah’s textual base was potentially more detrimental to the Jews than the inquiry into the sources of the oral Torah, and so had a more under-mining dimension. The paradoxical formulation of the notion of a dual Torah, attributed to the sages of Yavneh in the second and third centuries, is reflected in the opening of m.Avot 1.1, which refers to the transmis-sion of the oral Torah: “Moses received the Torah in Sinai and gave it to Joshua, and Joshua gave it to the Elders.”18 Yet while in regard to the oral Torah the Jews could point to an eligible foundational narrative in the form of this mishnah which reports its “chain of transmission”, in regard to the written Torah they had no such foundational narrative or text. The only evidence in the Bible itself is rather dubious: the writing of the Decalogue (first by God and then by Moses) and other aspects of Moses’ involvement in the writing of the law (e. g., Exod 34:27–28; Deut 31:9). There is no explicit “transmission chain” self-referentially described in the Hebrew Bible or in post-biblical canonical literature (aside from the limited passage in Baba Batra 14b).19 On the other hand, there are quite a few potentially embarrassing indirect testimonies in biblical histori-ography and in rabbinic literature as to possible changes or transmuta-tions that occurred during the Bible’s transmission, such as the recovery of a lost “book” of the Torah in the time of Josiah (2 Kgs 22–23), Ezra’s

18 See, for instance, M. S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, Writing and Oral Tradi-tion in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE–400 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 140–146; E. Shanks Alexander, “The Orality of Rabbinic Writing,” in Cam-bridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. C. E. Fonrobert and M. S. Jaffee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 38–57. Earliest among these sages was Rabban Gamliel II, whose response to a Roman official’s question, “How many Torahs were given to Israel?” is given in Sifrei Devarim, 351: “Two: one oral and one written.”

19 On the popular dissemination of Mishnah Avot, we learn from the high number of fragments of this tractate preserved in the Cairo Geniza, including Judaeo-Arabic translations of it, which also suggests it had foundational religious implications for the Jews of the Islamic world, see O. Tirosh-Becker “Translations of Rabbinic Sources into Arabic (including Mishnah, Midrash, Talmud)” in The Encyclopedia of the Jews of the Islamic World, ed. N. A. Stillman (Leiden: Brill, 2010), vol. iv, 530–32.



public reading of the Torah (Nehemiah 8), or changes initiated by Ezra in the shape of the Torah’s Hebrew letters during the Persian Period.20

In this light, the Jews’ encounter with the Islamic scriptural model at large is likely to have destabilized the entrenched perceptions not only of their oral but also of their written Torah. In general, the dual Torah edi-fice which was so central to their age-old religious self-perception began to erode.21

In my view, this erosion was the main trigger behind the Karaite-Rabbanite rift, which fully imploded into a major schism within Juda-ism from the latter part of the ninth century until the 12th century. This erosion was expressed in professional and also in more mundane set-tings. On the one hand, in the professional-type settings such as the inter-religious debates (majalis) that took place in cities like Baghdad, Jews were compelled to address accusations of scriptural falsification or alter-ation (taḥrif ), alongside claims of the Qurʾan’s supersession (naskh) and uniqueness (i jʿaz). This was done by leading Jewish figures of the 10th and 11th centuries, especially the Rabbanite Shemuel ben Hofni, Gaon of the Sura academy, and the Karaite theologian Yusuf al-Basir, as reported extensively in their writings.22 In these inter-religious contexts, the Jewish thinkers generally tended to move the ball into the Muslim field, as a much safer tactic. They preferred to engage in rebutting Muslim

20 For an illuminating discussion of medieval Karaite unease in respect of biblical and rabbinic accounts concerning the textual situation in the time of Josiah and Ezra, see E. Krakowski, “‘Many Days Without the God of Truth’: Loss and Recovery of Religious Knowledge in Early Karaite Thought,” in Pesher Nahum: Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature from Antiquity Through the Middle Ages Presented to Norman (Nahum) Golb, ed. J. L. Kraemer and M. G. Wechsler (Chicago: Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, 2011) 121–40, and bibliography cited there. On the Islamic use of some of these arguments, see n. 22 below.

21 On the possible connection of the dual Torah notion to the competition with Christianity, “a re li gion that also spoke of two teachings, the Law of Moses and the Law of Christ,” see I. J. Yuval, “The Orality of Jewish Oral Law: From Pedagogy to Ideology,” in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts, ed. L. Gall and D. Willoweit (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2011) 237–260 (quote p. 243); Yuval’s suggestion that rabbinic insistence on the oral-ity of the Oral Torah was formed as an antithetical anti-Christian polemic, especially against the textuality of the New Testament, offers an interesting historical analogy, I believe, to the Karaites’ insistence on the singular written nature of the Jewish Torah, which also functioned antithetically as an anti-Muslim polemic, especially against the textuality of the Qurʾan. Yet, whereas the ancient rabbis were ‘subverting’ Christian theology, the Karaite Jews were ‘inverting’ Islamic theology. In both instances, how-ever, this polarized positioning vis-à-vis the competing religious culture enabled the Jews to converse with a major aspect of their host cultures’ belief system.

22 On the connectedness of the Torah’s abrogation (naskh) and the Qurʾan’s inimita-bility (i jʾaz), see Sklare, Goldstein, Sadan and Thomas in note 6 above.



claims regarding the superiority of the Qurʾan, rather than refuting direct Muslim charges against the Hebrew Bible’s authenticity, or explaining how their own Scripture came into being or was shaped as a book.23

The majalis were sophisticated settings in which religious philos-ophers debated in Arabic in a particular “closed” kalamic jargon and context. The sharpened intellectual and polemical context of the debates may have had a profound affect in engendering chains of thought or argu-mentation regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible as a revealed text. But also in more mundane settings, through their day-to-day encounters with Muslims or as part of their more immediate intellectual environment and general mentalité, the Jews were likely to encounter the Muslim position regarding the formation of the Qurʾan as a book, which by the late ninth century was widespread and widely agreed upon as a foundational narrative of sorts. Thus, it was the inter-religious context at large, including its most ordinary expressions in Muslim religious con-sciousness, that influenced and awakened the Jews’ self-conception of their Scripture and compelled them to address it in the most basic sense, as part of their religious interaction and convergence with the Islamic host culture.

It may be plausibly suggested, therefore, that it was the Jews who were first to internalize and react to this challenge that became Karaites, or began to identify with Karaite ideology, whether due to their intellectual acumen or other aspects of their social and ideological background. In any event, the early Karaites were motivated to reject the conception of the dual Torah, which was a commonplace in Jewish religious thinking of their time, as a necessary and complimentary step in their validation of the Hebrew Bible. As part of this process, they consciously accentu-ated and polarized the differences between what they perceived as the authentic, written Torah and the inauthentic oral Torah. In their view, the latter did not emanate from a divine source, and hence the books that

23 On the Islamic conception of the Qurʾan as the final and complete revelation of the heavenly prototype of the divine (“mother”) book (umm al-kitab) and the charges of falsification and abrogation made in relation to its former apparitions in Jewish and Christian scriptures, and their wider interreligious polemical consequences, cf. C. Adang, Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, From Ibn Rabban to Ibn Hazm (Leiden: Brill, 1996) 192–248; cf. M. R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 139–161; Grif-fith, Bible in Arabic; H. Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 19–49; “Tahrif and Thir-teen Torah Scrolls,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 19 (1995) 81–88; I. Res-nick, “The Falsification of Scripture and Medieval Christian and Jewish Polemics,” Medieval Encounters 2 (1996) 344–380.



contained it – the Mishnah and Talmud – were also rejected as its tex-tual embodiments.

Various statements by leading Karaite thinkers of the early 10th cen-tury (e. g., Qirqisani, Salmon ben Yeruham and Yefet ben ʿEli) dem-onstrate their attempt to deconstruct the Jewish foundational narrative of the dual Torah along these lines, and in response to the changes brought about by the Jews’ internalization of the Islamic Arabic model of literacy at large and of written Scripture in particular. They strove to reconstruct a new foundational narrative in which a single written Torah forms the sole revealed base for Jewish creed.24

2. Rabbanite and Karaite Positioning on the Bible’s FormationHow much the change in the Jews’ conception of their Scripture was expressed in Jewish debate and study of the Bible is a complex ques-tion. For the answer we must turn primarily to Jewish exegesis of the

24 Hebrew qara/qaraʾim is derived from the same root as miqra (Bible); hence their name defines the Karaites as “the upholders of the Bible.” For more on this name and the general background of the Karaite movement in the context of the Islamic milieu, see C. Adang et al. (eds.), A Common Rationality: Mu tʿazilism in Islam and Judaism (Wurzburg: Ergon, 2007); F. Astren, Karaite Judaism and Historical Under-standing (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004) esp. 1–123; F. Astren, “Islamic Contexts of Medieval Karaism,” in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources, ed. M. Polliack (Leiden: Brill, 2003) 145–177; H. Ben-Sham-mai, “Return to the Scriptures in Ancient and Medieval Jewish Sectarianism and in Early Islam,” in Les Retours aux Ecritures: Fondamentalismes Présents et Passés, ed. E. Patlagean and A. Le Boulluec (Louvain: Peeters, 1993) 319–342; M. Cook, “Anan and Islam: the Origins of Karaite Scripturalism,” Jewish Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987) 161–182; D. Lasker, “Islamic Influences on Karaite Origins,” in Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions, vol. 2, ed. W. M. Brinner and S. D. Ricks (Atlanta: Scholars, 1989) 23–47.; S. Schmidtke, “The Karaites’ Encounter with the Thought of Abu l-Husayn al-Batsri (d. 436 / 1044): A Survey of the Relevant Materials in the Fir-kovitch-Collection, St. Petersburg,” Arabica 53 (2006) 108–142; W. Madelung and S. Schmidtke, Rational Theology in Interfaith Communication: Abu l-Husayn al-Batsri’s Mu tʿazili Theology among the Karaites in the Fatimid Age (Leiden: Brill, 2006). For views on the mixed “internal” Jewish factors and forces that combined in the emergence of Karaism, see Y. Erder, “The Karaites’ Sadducee Dilemma,” Israel Oriental Studies 14 (1994) 195–226; M. Gil, “The Origins of the Karaites,” in Kar-aite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources, ed. M. Polliack (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 73–118; J. Reeves, “Exploring the Afterlife of Jewish Pseudepigrapha in Medieval Near Eastern Religious Traditions: Some Initial Soundings” Journal for the Study of Judaism 30 (1999) 148–177; N. Wieder, The Judean Scrolls and Kara-ism (London: East and West Library, 1962). A juxtaposition and reconsideration of the various views prominent in research is offered in M. Polliack, “Re-thinking Kara-ism: between Judaism and Islam,” Association of Jewish Studies Review 30 (2006) 67–93, and M. Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008) 3–288.



time. In many respects, exegesis was the main and innate locus of Jewish thinking on the Bible, more than the polemical or philosophical genres of Judeo-Arabic literature. Nevertheless, reactions can also be gleaned from references to the Bible in grammatical, literary and poetic Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew works, since the Bible gradually became central to all these genres in various ways (although a detailed analysis of these materials is beyond the scope of this article, which explores the general contours of the debate).

In respect of these general contours, a pronounced difference comes into view between Rabbanite and Karaite sources. While Rabbanite sources are quite reticent and generally refrain from direct engagement with the question of the historical or literary formation of Hebrew Scrip-ture, Karaite sources are amply and openly reflective upon this matter, almost as if they were filling in those spaces left vacant in the Rabban-ite discourse. Thus, what is introverted or concealed in the Rabbanite reckoning of the Bible’s origins becomes extroverted and unveiled in the Karaite surmise.

This contrast is suggestive of the self-positioning of both groups vis-à-vis each other and their host culture – though perhaps not always con-sciously. In effect, the two groups were responding to the same impetus in opposite ways, as alternative expressions of the Jewish reaction to the encounter with the Islamic scriptural and wider religious model: whereas the Rabbanites opted for a conservative strategy, the Karaites were much more radical. For instance, the absence of a detailed discus-sion of the Hebrew Bible’s formation on the part of Saadia Gaon, the otherwise highly innovative Rabbanite thinker, is conspicuous when we consider his Bible-centered reforms in light of his general engagement with Arabic literary models.25 The same can be said of Geonic literature in general.26

25 On Saadia’s specific role in this engagement, see Rina Drory’s seminal work, The Emergence of Jewish-Arabic Literary Contacts at the Beginning of the Tenth Cen-tury (Hebrew; Tel-Aviv: Porter Institute of Poetics and Semiotics, Tel-Aviv Univer-sity, 1988) 156–178, and cf. R. Drory, Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and Its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2000), which contains a syn-opsis of certain sections of her Hebrew work, plus additional materials. One of the few places Saadia comments on the formation of the Bible is his commentary on Prov 25:1 (“These are the Proverbs of Solomon which were copied [naqalaha] by the men of Hezekiah, King of Judah”), where he explains that this verse teaches us that many “reports” were passed on by our forefathers for a long while in non-written form, until they were written later on ( aʾkhbar kathirah aʾqama aʾbaʾuna yatanaqalunaha muddah min al-zaman gayr maktubah thumma annaha kutibat badʿa dhalika). Yet, disappoint-ingly for our discussion, Saadia’s argument on the basis of this and other verses (such as Jer 17:2) does not relate to the Bible itself. Rather, he finds in them proof of the



Nevertheless, this is perhaps less surprising when we consider the dif-ferent course of Jewish, and especially rabbinic, intellectual tradition, which grappled with the divine origin of the Torah through a variety of forms of exegetical (and especially midrashic) discourse, rather than through strictly theological or philosophical modes.27 In addition, the Geonim, who saw themselves as heirs to a re li gion that was more ancient than Islam, with roots reaching back a millennium in time, may have felt less of a need to openly reflect upon the historical question of the for-mation of Jewish scripture, partly because it was self-evident to them and therefore self-explanatory. In any case, we do not find in Rabbanite writing of the time, whether in Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic, a clearly artic-ulated discourse or treatise devoted to the subject of the material or his-torical consolidation of the Hebrew Bible as a written text, whether as a

transmission of Jewish oral law from the time of Moses until its “fixing as a book” in the Mishnah and Talmud (wa-lam yathbatuha ʾila waqt kutibat al-mishnah wa-waqt kutiba al-talmud); see Y. D. Qafih, Mishley im targum u-ferush ha-gaon (Jerusalem: Akiva Yosef , 1976) 194., and cf. the discussion by U. Simon, Four Approaches to the Book of Psalms: From Saadia Gaon to Abraham ibn Ezra (Hebrew; Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1982) 88 n. 75 (Engl. ed., Albany: SUNY Press, 1991).

26 Though Samuel ben Hofni defined a wide list of exegetical principles, com-mented on the Bible extensively and polemicized with Muslim critics, he is not known to have elaborated on the issue of the Bible’s historical formation per se; see D. Sklare, Samuel ben Hofni Gaon and his Cultural World: Texts and Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1996) 1–67. The famous letter of Sherira Gaon (completed 987 CE, ed. B. Lewin, Haifa, 1921), which was written in answer to questions put to him by some scholars of Qayrawan, refers extensively to the writing down of the Mishnah and Talmud, yet there is no parallel surviving correspondence or treatise discussing the Bible’s composition in the same way (see Cook’s pointed discussion of this epistle in “Opponents,” 512–519) and the wider discussions in Brody, Geonim, and Fishman, Becoming the People. The early ninth-century polemic of the Babylonian Pirqoi ben Baboi against the Palestinian Jews refers to the erroneous existence of written texts of the Palestinian Talmud, hailing the oral law preserved in Babylonia as more reliable. In discussing a talk I gave in the Open University’s workshop “Text and Context” (Feb 2013), Oded Irshay suggested that Pirqoi’s polemic may already foreshadow, in some way, the Babylonian concern with the problematic results of “delving” too deeply into the nature of texts produced in Palestine, as jeopardizing not only the oral law, but the Hebrew Bible itself. I take this opportunity to thank him and the other participants of this unique venue, especially Avriel Bar Levav and Miriam Frenkel for their encour-agement and helpful comments on my talk.

27 On midrashic hermeneutics, see n. 14 above. On Saadia’s attempt to incorpo-rate the minutiae of midrash (halakhah and aggadah) in his Judaeo-Arabic exeget-ical enterprise, see the illuminating discussion by H. Ben Shammai, “The Tension between Literal Interpretation and Exegetical Freedom: Comparative Observation on Saadia’s Method,” in With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. J. D. McAuliffe et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 33–50, and see his overview in “The Exegetical and Philosophical Writ-ing of Saadia: A Leader’s Endeavor” (Hebrew), Pe aʿmim 54 (1993) 63–81.



scroll or as a codex or book. There are various comments and digressions into the topic, but no substantial composition or text relating directly to this subject has come down to us.28

The lack of open reflection on this subject in Rabbanite literature of the 10th and 11th centuries, despite its innovativeness in other fields, may also be the result of a heightened awareness on the part of the Geonim and their pupils that discussions concerning the formation of the Hebrew Bible were best kept internal and out of the reach of the Muslims.

Indirect evidence for such a motive is found in remarks made by Qirq-isani, a younger contemporary of Saadia Gaon and the leading Karaite theologian and exegete of Baghdad, in Kitab al-anwar wal-maraqib (Book of Lights and Watchtowers), his treatise on the legal parts of the Pentateuch, composed c. 937 CE (315 AH). In the first discourse of this work, Qirqisani devoted a lengthy discussion to the authentication of the biblical text, in which he points out that if the Muslims were to become aware of certain Rabbanite claims concerning Ezra’s role in the for-mation of the Torah, the Jews would have much to contend with.

They (the Rabbanites) assert that the Torah which is in the hands of the people is not the Torah which Moses – on whom be peace – brought, but was composed by Ezra, for they say that the Torah brought by Moses per-ished and was lost and disappeared. This amounts to the destruction of the whole re li gion. Were the Muslims to learn of this, they would need nothing else with which to revile and confute us, for some of their theologians argue against us, saying: “Your Torah is not the Torah brought to Moses.” Against one who makes this claim we proclaim that he is lying out of a desire to con-tradict, and that they are reduced to this because they have nothing to say and need an argument. But were they to discover this teaching of the Rab-banites – may God forgive them – the field would be open to them and they would need nothing else.29

It is not clear whether Qirqisani is attributing certain known assump-tions about Ezra found in ancient Jewish sources to the Rabbanites of his day as a means of disparaging them, or whether he actually knows of such current views among the Rabbanites of his time, whether in oral

28 See earlier discussion and references in nn. 11–15 above.29 For the Arabic text, see Al-Qirqisani, Kitab al-anwar wal-maraqib, ed. L. Nemoy

(2 vols.; New York: Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1939–1943), Discourse (maqalah) 1, Chapter (bab) 3, Passage 3 (vol. 1, 14–15). Chapter title: “Aspects of the Rabbanite doctrine which differ from those of all the other groups among the Jews”; see Nemoy ed., 1.2. For English, see B. Chiesa and W. Lockwood, Ya qʿub al-Qirqisani on Jewish Sects and Christianity (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1984) 105–106.



or written form.30 In any event, he is affording us an indirect view of the Rabbanite reluctance to open the Pandora’s box of the formation of the Bible.

The Geonim may also have been sensitive to the inner tension such reflection might arouse, not only in undermining the sanctity of the Hebrew Bible, but also in undermining rabbinic tradition itself. Given their innate interest and instinct to preserve and uphold the founda-tional Jewish narrative of the dual Torah, questions pertaining to the tex-tual formation of the Jewish religious canon were best avoided or, or at the most, answered evasively.31 On the other hand, as evident in Qirqi-sani’s comments, this very subject held a natural attraction for the rising learned elites amongst the Jews as part of their newly acquired Arabic lit-eracy and general awakening to the competing scriptural model offered by Islam, as well as to its overall rationalistic outlook.

It is in Karaite sources, therefore, that we find an intensive and direct reflection of the Jewish reckoning with the Bible’s formation as a text. That the Karaites were profoundly interested in this topic as a means of reshaping Jewish re li gion and giving it an unfaltering base within the Islamic milieu is evident from their exegetical, philosophical and polem-ical writings. Already from the late ninth and certainly throughout the

30 Several rabbinic sources connect what is called sefer ha- aʿzarah, i. e., a master copy of the Torah against which other scrolls were proofread, to the eventual alter-ation or loss of the Pentateuchal text (see Sifrei Deut. 160, BT Sanhedrin 21b–22a); some of these specifically refer to a tradition that Ezra altered the biblical script from Paleo-Hebrew to Aramaic. BT Sukkot 20a states, in a different context, that Ezra rees-tablished Torah after it had been “forgotten from Israel.” See S. Naeh, “The Script of the Torah in Rabbinic Thought (A): The Tradition Concerning Ezra’s Changing of the Script” (Hebrew), Leshonenu 70 (2008) 126–143, and cf. Krakowski, “Many Days,” who discusses the Karaite sources in this context (including Qirqisani’s and Yefet’s commentaries on the “recovery” of the Torah scroll in the days of Josiah (2 Kgs 22:3–23:25). Krakowski (p. 124) also notes Salmon ben Yeruham’s comment on Ps 44:17: “[They] revile us for what we … have not done … [when] they state that we have said, ʿUzayr is His son, and that we have reversed the letters of the Torah”; L. Marwick, The Arabic Commentary of Salmon ben Yeruham the Karaite on the Book of Psalms, Chapters 42–72 ([Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1956) 9. While in the Muslim cri-tique of the authenticity of the Jewish Bible Ezra was generally upheld as the restorer of the Torah to its original glory after it had been lost and forgotten, in the view of Ibn Hazm (994–1064), which appears to have been influenced by Qirqisani’s work, Ezra had produced a new Torah. See the detailed discussion of this critique by Adang, Muslim Writers, esp. pp. 246–248, and cf. also C. Adang, “The Karaites as Portrayed in Medieval Islamic Sources” in M. Polliack, Karaite Judaism, 187–194; Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, 50–74; M. Whittingham, “Ezra as the Corrupter of the Torah? Re-Assessing Ibn Hazm’s Role in the Long History of an Idea” in Adang, Bible in Arabic, 251–269.

31 The same basic strategy was employed in relation to the oral Torah; cf. Cook, “Opponents.”



10th century, we find in Karaite works a varied and extensive grappling with the issues of the Bible’s composition and literary formation, as well as with its “texture” (that is, the nature of its language and discourse) as a written work, of a kind unprecedented in Jewish exegetical tradition. In fact, many aspects of medieval Karaite writing and thought on the Bible may be construed in their wider cultural context as forms of rational response to questions pertaining to its historical and textual (linguistic and literary) formation and structure.32

3. Karaites on the Dual Torah and the Bible as a BookYaʿqub al-Qirqisani

Qirqisani devotes a large part of the second discourse of Kitab al-anwar (“Philosophical and Theological Principles of Jurisprudence”33) to a dis-cussion of the historical-literary formation of the Bible as a book. In Chapter 22 he resumes discussing Ezra’s alleged role in the formulation of the biblical materials, this time clearly presenting it within the context of the Muslim polemic against the Jews regarding scriptural alteration (taḥrif ).

There are two implications to this (claim) – one is that he who changed (gayyara) this (the text of the Bible) and altered it (wa-baddalahu) was wiser and more knowledgeable than the prophets who wrote/composed it (al- aʾnbiyaa al-ladhina dawwanuhu); and it is extremely implausible that Ezra and Nehemiah were wiser than Moses, may he rest in peace, … and wiser than the Creator … and if it were so that he changed Scripture (al-kitab) and altered it and took out of it what was not found to be of benefit,

32 For recent discussions stressing Karaite innovation in structural thinking on the Bible’s linguistic and literary forms, and their proximity in certain respects to modern formalist and structural methods, see G. Khan, The Early Karaite Tradition of Hebrew Grammatical Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2000) 128–133; M. Goldstein, “Arabic Composition 101”; M. Polliack, “Karaite Conception of the Biblical Narrator (Mudaw-win),” in Encyclopaedia of Midrash: Biblical Interpretation in Formative Judaism, ed. J. Neusner and A. J. Avery-Peck (2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2005) 1.350–373; M. Polliack, “The ‘Voice’ of the Narrator and the ‘Voice’ of the Characters in the Bible Commen-taries of Yefet ben ʿEli,” in Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. C. Cohen et al. (2 vols.; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008) 2.891–916; M. Polliack, “‘The Unseen Joints of the Text’: On the Medieval Judaeo-Arabic Concept of Elision (ikhtiṣar) and Its Gap-filling Functions in Biblical Interpre-tation, “ in Words, Ideas, Worlds in the Hebrew Bible: The Yairah Amit Festschrift, ed. A. Brenner and F. H. Polak (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2012) 179–205.

33 See Nemoy ed., vol.1, title page.



would the shamefulness34 remain in its place and the disgracefulness not be removed? All the more so if what they say, namely, that the Torah which is in our hands was collated and composed by Ezra (hiyya min jamʿ eʿzra wa-ta lʾifih) – if this were so, and there was no one besides him that would have compelled him to say that this was so and (to say) “I am the one who has changed it and fashioned it in this way” ( aʾna gayyartuhu wa-ja aʿltuhu kadha) – he could have just (re-)written it (katabahu) in the way he wanted and left the matter hidden, without informing anyone that he had changed it!35

In a seminal discussion,36 Geoffrey Khan has pointed out that the argu-ments adduced in this passage formed part of Qirqisani’s wider objection to the rabbinic principle of tiqqunei soferim (corrections of the scribes), the 18 places in the Bible that Masoretic tradition claimed had been cor-rected by Ezra:

It implies that the alleged authors of these changes, Ezra and Nehemiah, were wiser not only than the prophets but also than God himself. More-over, if Ezra the scribe had made changes in the text, it is inconceivable that he would have recorded the earlier version of the verses, thus perpetuating them.37

Notwithstanding his discussion of Ezra’s role, Qirqisani sets it apart in Kitab al-anwar, recognizing it as a matter of contention in the Islamic-Jewish debate. The major part of his discussion concerning the Hebrew Bible is found in Chapter 13 of the same discourse, which concentrates on how the Bible, as a revealed message, became a written text. Whereas the immediate polemic with the Islamic accusations of alteration (tabdil/tagyir/taḥrif) could be contained in the argumentation indicated above, the matter of dealing with the Jews’ cultural awakening to the trappings

34 According to Nemoy the reading of this word is uncertain due to the state of the manuscript. Nemoy suggests deciphering the Arabic as al-qabḥ, which means “shame-fulness”, as I have translated above.

35 Kitab al-anwar 2.22.2 (Nemoy ed., 1.153–154). English translation is mine; ellipses indicate omission of some of the Arabic original for the sake of succinctness.

36 G. Khan, “Al-Qirqisani’s Opinions Concerning the Text of the Bible and Parallel Muslim Attitudes Towards the text of the Qurʾan,” JQR 81 (1990) 59–73.

37 Khan, “Al-Qirqisani’s Opinions,” 62. In Kitab al-anwar 2.19.1 (Nemoy ed., 1.149–150), Qirqisani also mentions what he describes as a Rabbanite view that during biblical times (the time of the ayam al-dawlah = kingdom) the nation possessed only one copy of the Torah, which was subsequently lost. This opinion may be traced to rabbinic sources (see notes 29–30 above). Again, this would imply that Qirqisani was reacting to known Jewish narratives that acknowledged a historical interruption in the transmission of the Torah text, suggesting that since Ezra’s or even Josiah’s times the nation did not follow the original Torah recorded by Moses.



of a “world of communications governed by texts”38 was more com-plicated and required a different kind of argument. The Jews’ wider encounter with the Islamic-Arabic conception of the Qurʾan as a book, and their growing conception of their own cultural heritage within a new literate milieu, affected their self-searching as to their Bible’s textual formation. The Karaite intellectuals gave open expression to their ear-nest preoccupation with the question of the Bible’s textual origins and its authenticity as a book.

In Kitab al anwar 2. 13. 10–15, Qirqisani provides a detailed rebuttal of Rabbanite claims regarding the validity of the transmission tradition of Jewish oral law.39 In it, he unfolds his conception of the textual for-mation of the Bible within the context of what he perceives as the inner-Jewish debate on the oral Torah, rather than in the passages contra Islam. The main impetus behind his exploration of this topic seems to lie, there-fore, in his sense of the erosion of the Jewish conception of the dual Torah, rather than in any direct polemic with Islam. Due to their impor-tance to our wider discussion and in order to enable a proper glimpse of Qirqisani’s chain of argumentation and detailed grappling with the sub-ject, these passages (which are not translated elsewhere) are fully trans-lated into English below:

2. 13. 10It should also be said to them (the Rabbanites): The Muslims require of us

to prove the authenticity of the prophecy (ṣiḥḥah nubuwwah) of Moses, may he rest in peace, and if we answer them (that it lies) in the performing of mir-acles, whose traditions have come down (naqala khabaraha) collectively and profusely, (traditions) of the kind which cannot be connived, they counter us with similar ones among the traditions of their Prophet (khabar ṣaḥibi-him) and claim that (the traditions of) his miracles were also transmitted

38 The phrase is quoted from Brian Stock’s monumental work, The Implications of Literacy; Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) 3, in the following context: “But throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries an important transformation began to take place. The written did not simply supersede the oral, although that happened in large measure: a new type of interdependence also arose between the two. In other words, oral discourse effectively began to function within a universe of communica-tions governed by texts. On many occasions actual texts were not present, but people often thought or behaved as if they were. Texts thereby emerged as a reference system both of everyday activities and for giving shape to many larger vehicles of explana-tion.” Although Stock’s study is devoted to the effects of the rise of literacy in Chris-tian Europe, many of the insights it provides are relevant to the understanding of the transition undergone by various groups in the Islamic world several centuries earlier. I am grateful to Miriam Frenkel for referring me to his work.

39 Nemoy ed., 1.119–123. The Rabbanite claims were expounded in the preceding section 2.12 (Nemoy ed., 1.65).



collectively (naqala mu jʿizathu jama aʿtan), similarly to the collective that transmitted the traditions of Moses, may he rest in peace (mithl al-jama aʿh alati naqalat khabar musa). Nevertheless, the most important aspect that differentiates these two parties is that the traditions of our prophet (Moses) are written in a book which was transmitted by the entire nation ( aʾkhbar ṣaḥibihina mudawwanah fi kitab tatanaqalathu al-ʾummah bi- aʾsriha), and there is no disagreement among them (the Jews) in this regard, they all know this: young and old, female and male, I mean, what it contains of the tradi-tions concerning the miracles (khabar al- mu jʿizat) performed by Moses, may he rest in peace. Whoever you may ask among them (the Jews) in this respect would be able to recount (these traditions), in keeping with that written compilation (akhbara bihi yuḥfaẓ dhalika al-diwan al-mudawwan), without allowing for addition or omission (al-ziyadah wal-nuqṣan). Whereas the miracles that they (the Muslims) claim with regard to their Prophet are not as this, for one cannot find in his book (the Qurʾan) any (mention) of them, and so they are dependent on a weak matter ( aʾmr ḍa iʿf ) – namely, so and so reported (i. e., an oral tradition) from so and so (ḥadathana fulan aʿn fulan);40 and whoever takes up this method cannot come to anything relia-ble, and correct knowledge cannot issue from him; since those who issue such reports (al-qawm aladhina yurwa dhalika aʿnhum) are from the start a small (closed) group who are capable of conniving and lying in this respect as in many others.

2.13.11And the same (conclusion) obligates you (the Rabbanites) in regard to

your claim regarding this Torah which you allege is “in the mouth” (ba-peh): since it has not been written (kanat lam tudawwan) and does not depend on a (written) record/document (wathiqah), then it is possible for it to undergo addition and omission (al-ziyadah wal-nuqṣan). On the other hand, it is (also) possible that most of it was lost and forgotten, especially when being preoccupied with the debasing (aspects) of this world and its degra-dation ‒ and this cancels your claim regarding (the continuity and reliabil-ity of) its transmission.41 And if they (the Rabbanites) were to say isn’t it all collated (majmu aʿn) in the Mishnah and in the Talmud, written in both of them (mudawwanan fihima)? – we (the Karaites) would answer, surely, it was not written (yudawwan) in the generation of the prophets and it has not been transmitted by the nation in its entirety (wa-la tanaqalathu al-ʾummah bi- aʾsriha)! Rather, the Mishnah was written (duwwinat) 200 years after the (time of the) prophets; proof of this (is found) in their saying in the Mishnah as to how the transmission occurred (wa-kayfa waqa aʿ al-naql), and that is in Avot (1:1), wherein they say: “Moses received the (oral) Torah from

40 Clearly a reference to the establishment of chains of transmission in the Muslim science of Hadith.

41 Nemoy (ed., 1.120, n. 1) remarks on the uncertainty of the reading here, where he suggests ألرميــة� (or its variant ألدميــة�) – bidhull al-rimayyah wa-muhanatiha, which make no sense in the given context. I have corrected the reading to ألدنيــة� (debasing aspects of this world and its degradation).



Sinai and passed it onto Joshua, and Joshua passed it onto the elders, and the elders passed it onto the prophets, and the prophets passed it onto to the men of the Great Assembly. Among these (men) were those who belonged to the generation of Zerubavel and Haggai and Zechariah and Malachi; then, they claim, Simeon the Righteous was among the remnants of the Great Assembly (Mishnah, Avot 1:2), and that after him came Antignos the man of Sokho (Avot 1:3), and he is the one whose pupils, we explained (earlier in Kitab al-anwar), were Zadok and Baytos. And Antignos received it from Simeon, and after Antignos there were Yosef ben Yoʿezer (Avot 1:4), and from him received Yosef ben Yohannan (Avot 1:5), and after these two there were Joshuah ben Perhayah (Avot 1:6) – and he is the one who is said to have been the same as Joshua ben Pandira, that is, Jesus the son of Mary, and with Joshua ben Perahyah was Nitay Ha-Arbeli (Avot 1:7), and after these were the pair Yehudah ben Tabbay and Shimon ben Shatah (Avot 1:8), and from these there received and continued Shemaʿayah and Avtalyon (Avot 1:10) and after them the pair Hillel and Shammai (Avot 1:12), and these are the ones who fell into dispute and their students (as well), and some of the dif-ferent factions killed each other, and this happened, as they say, on the 13th of Adar in the loft of Hananyah ben Hezekaiah ben Gurion ,42and the people of the Land of Israel (al-sham) follow the school (madhab) of Bet (the house of) Shammai, while the people of Babylon (al- iʿraq) the way of Bet Hilel, and they claim that Hillel had eighty pupils, among whom thirty succeeded in receiving divine inspiration 43similarly to Moses, may he rest in peace, and thirty succeeded in making the sun stand still, similarly to Joshua, may he rest in peace, and twenty were able to do both (mutawassiṭin).44 They claim the oldest and most exalted of these eighty was Yonatan ben Uziel, and he is the one who translated (tarjama) the eight books of the prophets ( aʾsfar al- aʾnbiya), and the youngest of them was Yohanan ben Zakkai. Then they claim Yohanan had five pupils, one of whom was Eli ʿezer ben Horka-nos and the last of whom was El ʿazar ben ʿArakh, and about him it has been said that if all the wise men of the people of Israel (al iʾsra iʾl) were weighed in one hand of the balance and Eliʿezer ben Horkanos in the other hand, he indeed would have outweighed them all.45 This characterization in his portrayal is why they excommunicated him and set him apart, after he had performed miracles (to prove) the truthfulness of his words in which he dis-puted them, and after the Creator, Mighty and Exalted, had become a wit-ness in his favor in this regard, according to the story (qiṣṣah) we mentioned earlier.46 And this Eliʿezer ben Horkanos – he and his section are the last of those mentioned as the pupils of Yohanan ben Zakkai, who was the pupil of Hillel – (yet he) is the first (sage) mentioned in the Mishnah, I mean Eli ʿezer and with him Gamliel, who was his brother-in-law on the side of his sister.

42 See m. Shabbat 1:4, Tosefta Shabbat 1:16 but especially YT Shabbat 1:4.43 In Judaeo-Arabic, al-sakinah, a loan-word from Hebrew shekhinah.44 See Mishnah Avot 2:8.45 See Mishnah Avot 2:8.46 See the famous story on the Akhnai furnace in BT Baba Metsia 59b.



And how is it possible to say that this composition (al-diwan),47 which is the Mishnah, was transmitted in this way, if the first sage is the last of the pupils of those whom they counted and placed one after the other in its transmis-sion?48 What makes this matter (of the Mishnah’s transmission chain) even more easy (to disprove) is that none of the Rabbanites claim that the Mishnah was transmitted in written form (al-mishana naqlan mudawwanan) but that it was written down (duwwina) at the end of the Second Temple (al-bayt al-thani); this is something they claim (unanimously), the uneducated as well as the notable ones.49

2.13.13And it may also be said to them (i. e., the Rabbanites): The book of the

Mishnah (kitab al-mishnah) is not exempt from (the issue) of whether it is self-sufficient or not, I mean, whether everything that had been transmitted tradition is recorded in it (duwwina fihi jami ʿ ma kana fi al-naql) or whether not all of it was recorded ( aʾm la yudawwan), but there were matters which were left (out) that were not recorded in it (lam tudawwan). For if it were self -sufficient all that was in transmitted tradition would have been written in it ( fa- in kana mustagniyan bi-nafsihi wa-qad duwwina fihi jami ʿ ma ka na fi al-naql) – and then what is the meaning of the Talmud and what has been established/recorded (ʾuthbita) in it, if all that was in the transmitted tradition (al-naql) was already put down in writing in the Mishnah (qad taqaddama tadwinahu fi al-mishnah)? And if the Mishnah is not self-suf-ficient and not all that was in the tradition is written in it (wa-lam yudawwan

47 The word diwan in this context may be a deliberate attempt to underline the so-called “fictional” nature of the Mishnah.

48 Qirqisani’s argumentation is not clear at this point. If we assume that the order of the Mishnah tractates in Qirqisani’s time is similar to our own, he may be refer-ring to the fact that the first sage whose name is recorded in the Mishnah outside tractate Avot (i. e., in Berakhot 1:1) is Eli ʿezer ben Horkanos. There, he is the first to speak, followed by hakhamim (scholars) and Rabban Gamliel (his brother-in-law), while none of the accounts of the earlier sages who partook in the oral Torah’s trans-mission (in accordance with Avot 1) are actually mentioned. The concept of the dual Torah is considered by modern scholars to be the formulation of Rabban Gamliel II in the third century. Another possibility is that Qirqisani might be referring to a discrep-ancy in Avot itself. Up until Gamliel (Avot 1:16), each link in the chain is said to have “received” (qibbel) the oral Torah. However, Gamliel is said to have “said” it (amar), and so are the sages who follow him, until Avot 2:8, whereupon Yohannan ben Zakkai is said to have “received” from Hillel and Shammai. Ben Zakkai’s five pupils are again described as having “said.” If Qirqisani assumes Avot 2:8 continues from 1:15, then Gamliel and Eli ʿezer ben Horkanos are the first sages who are not counted and placed one after the other in the transmission chain of the oral Torah; this is signified by the disappearance of the terminology "received” in regard to them. I am grateful to Sivan Nir for pointing out this possibility to me.

49 For 2. 13. 12, which discusses the flaws of Yonatan ben Uzziel’s Aramaic trans-lation of the Prophets, see M. Polliack, The Karaite Tradition of Arabic Bible Trans-lation: A Linguistic and Exegetical Study of Karaite Translations of the Pentateuch from the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries CE (Leiden: Brill, 1997) 68 (Engl.) and 295 (Arab.).



fihi jami ʿ ma kana fi al-naql), then why did they act this way and for what reason did those who wrote it down postpone its writing ( aʿkhkharu tad-winahu) until there came later men (qawm aʾkharun) and wrote it in the Talmud? And so is not their claim that the Mishnah and the Talmud are tra-dition (naql) impossible? It is meant to establish their (views) in roundabout and circumventing (ways), for no path and necessity can be found for this (that arises) from the book (kitab, the Mishnah), and they resorted to this saying in order to mislead the common people by means of it.

2.13.14The most impudent insolence is demonstrated by him who claims that this

Torah, which is in the hands of the nation, is not the Torah that was given by Moses, may he rest in peace, with transmission (naql) of this great crea-tion (al-khalaq50 al- aʿẓim) by him (Moses) from the East to the West, and at the same time calls for the acceptance of the necessity of the Mishnah and Talmud, although they are both in the hands of a small group of people, the likes of whom are capable of conniving, and claim that they have been trans-mitted by the prophets (manqulah aʿn al-nubuwwah) – can anyone fathom the fallacy of whoever makes such claims? For he turns the truth into false-hood and falsehood into truth if he allows that the Torah, whose transmission is factual/true (naqluha naql ṣaḥiḥ), to become null and void, and turns what has not been transmitted (truthfully) into transmitted tradition (wa-ja aʿla ma laysa bi-manqul manqulan). We will relate their (the Rabbanites) sayings on this and clarify their incorrectness after we complete the discussion of trans-mission and consensus (al-naql wal- iʾjm aʿ).51

2.13.15Also it can be said to them: Is there any (obligatory) commandment or

laws that we need to know, which are not written (lam yudawwan) in the Mishnah and the Talmud and whose knowledge requires analogy and deduc-tion (al-qiyas wal- iʾstikhraj) – or is there nothing at all except what has been decreed in writing (ʾuḥkima bi-al-tadwin)? And if they claim that there are

50 Nemoy’s reading is al-khalaq al- aʿẓim, which refers to the Torah, yet one may also render al-khalāq al- aʿẓim (= the great Creator) in reference to God. I think Nemoy’s reading makes more sense in the context. According to Qirqisani, the cor-rectness of Jewish Scripture is analogous to the knowledge and incidence of the Sab-bath and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in that all depend on true consensus and transmission. For a detailed analysis of Qirqisani’s identification between naql (trans-mission) and ʾijmaʿ (consensus), and the relationship of these terms to the “majority principle” used in early Muslim sources to establish the reading of the Qurʾanic text, as well as in Muslim jurisprudence, see Khan, “Al-Qirqisani’s Opinions.” In Kitab al-anwar 2.18.5, Qirqisani reiterates “the correctness of the Torah and other books of the prophets, which are in the hands of the nations (ʾummah) from East to West”; see Khan, “Al-Qirqisani’s Opinions,” 61.

51 Again it is evident that Qirqisani considers the Rabbanite Jews and not the Mus-lims to be responsible for the basic claim that the existing text of the Torah is not the one which was written by Moses, but a later version written by Ezra (see also 2.13 and 18, esp. 5–6).



things that have not been put down in writing (lam yudawwan), then their claim regarding transmitted tradition (naql) is void – namely, that it con-tains all that is necessary and requires induction and analogy; and if they claim that there is nothing left except what has been decreed in the writing (ʾuḥkima bi-al-tadwin, of the Mishnah and Talmud), their claim is incor-rect for two reasons. One is that there are many new things that occur in the world which require intricacies in the laws of the kind that cannot be adjusted when condensed and cannot be determined or calculated, and it is not possible that the prophet (Moses) was able to reach all that he wanted of these types of new things that occur in this world and to have mentioned them all without leaving even one matter out – rather, he mentioned what is necessary in terms of the law, since this is the most that is possible. The second reason is attested in their (the Rabbanites’) own actions, and this is what is presented as a legal question52 that is forwarded as a letter ( fa-yuk-tub biha) respectively to the two heads of the Academies,53 and each of them gives an answer concerning it and decides differently to the answer given by the other; and if this was written transmitted tradition ( falaw kana dhal-ika talqinan wa-naqlan mudawwanan), there would have been no disagree-ment; and it is evident from this that each one of them, when he answers, gives a decision according to what occurs to him and what appears to him through deduction and analogy. And so they (the Rabbanites) cannot escape from this, and it affirms (the method) of analogy (al-qiyas), and nullifies what they claim regarding tradition (al-naql), and so the argument collapses.

It is beyond the scope of this article to offer a detailed excursus on the passages cited above, but they represent and well convey the intensity of the Karaite concern with the textual embodiment of Jewish lore – in other words, the formation of this lore and its standing as written dis-course. They also reflect the essential move made by the 10th-century Karaites in the reshaping of Judaism within the new literate milieu, in which two steps had to be taken in tandem and became entirely inter-dependent: the validation of the Hebrew Bible as a written text, and the invalidation of the Mishnah and Talmud as written texts.

When subjecting the Bible alongside the Mishnah and Talmud to equal scrutiny as written works, Qirqisani embraces literary-historical criteria of the kind that became standard in his rationalistic milieu and age. Accordingly, he argues that the prophecies and miraculous stories of the Hebrew Bible are authentic because they are all there and were trans-mitted from ancient times as written works, commanding the consensus

52 Qirqisani uses the Hebrew term she eʾlah here to define a known rabbinic genre of questions-and-answers and does not employ possible parallel terms from Islamic jurisprudence.

53 Al-mathaʾib, plural of mathibah, used in Judaeo-Arabic to render the Aramaic metivta (Heb. yeshiva).



of the Jewish nation in its entirety and up to his day. The Mishnah and Talmud, however, which according to Rabbanite claims were transmitted orally from the same source (God, via Moses), are self-evidently and self-admittedly layered in their composition, dating as texts to a later histori-cal period than that of the Hebrew Bible. According to Qirqisani, there is no overall consensus among the Jewish people as to the divine origins of the truths these texts may contain, and the rabbis themselves use analogy and deduction in expanding them, by providing legal answers to living questions or current situations which are not (and cannot be) covered in full by these works.

In his presentation, Qirqisani inverts the Rabbanite claim regard-ing the antiquity and prestige of oral tradition and learning, by turning written composition into the paramount criterion by which to judge the Jewish religious canon. One can only judge the historicity of Jewish oral law, he claims, by examining the texts in which it has become written (the Mishnah and Talmud) and what they tell us about their composi-tion and time. If these texts tell us that they derive from Second Temple times and later, and tradition itself concurs with this late textual deri-vation, then their alleged co-appearance with the Bible as divine rev-elations cannot be deemed authentic. The juxtaposition of these texts as the embodiments of an oral Torah and a written Torah in the mental con-struct of a dual Torah received by Moses on Sinai is thus unconvincing.

Effectively, Qirqisani claims that the dual Torah is a fabricated con-struct, devised by the ancient sages and upheld by the rabbinic leaders and Geonim to his day in order to afford them command over the larger Jewish populace, as a self-interested closed group. In his eyes, the dual Torah narrative is thus the narrative of the self-serving learned elite. Such accusations appear repeatedly in Karaite texts that label the oral Torah with the biblical phrase “a commandment of men learned by rote” (Isa 29:13).54 This phraseology underlines what the Karaites saw as the invented (man-made) nature of the so-called oral Torah, its nonsensical transmission, and gradual textualization and canonization in the Mishah and Talmud. Qirqisani makes it clear that it is textual criteria (and to a certain extent historical ones) that inform us of the inauthenticity of these books, insofar as their claims to divine revelation are concerned.

54 See also Yefet ben ʿEli’s usage of this phrase, below.



Salmon ben Yeruham

The connection made by Qirqisani in the application of textual criteria to both corpuses of the dual Torah is re-echoed by his younger Karaite con-temporary, Salmon ben Yeruham (fl. 930–960), who was active mostly in Palestine. Salmon’s earliest work is a Hebrew polemical treatise, The Book of the Wars of the Lord (Sefer Milhamot Adonai), written c. 934 in rhymed and acrostic quatrains. His argumentation in this work is clearly influenced by Qirqisani’s more elaborate theological argumentation in Kitab al-anwar.55 Nevertheless, Salmon gives Qirqisani’s position a more direct expression, which amounts to a powerful poetic declaration of the Karaite creed, especially in Canto 1:12–16:

We believe firmly that the written Law56

Was in truth given to Israel by the right hand of the Almighty,According to the testimony of the whole congregation of the Lily,57

Who are scattered in every land.All of them, believers as well as unbelievers,58

Divided as they are by language and tongue,All Israel, from the east to the westernmost ends of the world,Testify to the sanctity of the written Law,59 all of them, the little and the

great.This testimony has become firmly established in their midst,By their united and universal consent, without challenge.Likewise, the signs and miracles which the Dweller of the heavenly abode

has wrought,Are written therein and are explained for them who wish to understand.Selah! They remember the splitting asunder of the Red Sea,And they do not deny the words spoken by the Almighty on Mount Sinai;And with their mouths they sing the glory of the Law and of other miracles.Israel and all other nations60 speak of this as one.Now if Israel and Judah are all unitedConcerning the validity of the oral Law which is, as they say, perfect,Let them offer their testimony, and let their voices be heard.

55 On this influence, see, for instance, L. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology: Excerpts from Early Karaite Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952) 70.

56 Heb. torat ha-ketav.57 A self-appellation of the Karaites, referencing Song 2:1–2; cf. D. Frank, “Karaite

Commentaries on the Song of Songs from Tenth-Century Jerusalem,” in McAuliffe, With Reverence, 51–69.

58 Heb. ma aʾminim u-mahlifim59 Heb. torat ha-ketav.60 Heb. yisra eʾl we-khol ha- aʿmim.



If not, then the Fayyumite’s61 words are void and his tongue has been silenced.62

Qirqisani’s arguments concerning universal Jewish recognition of the miraculous events recounted in the written text of the Hebrew Bible are adapted by Salmon to include non-Jews as well (“Israel and all other nations speak of this as one”). Qirqisani’s emphasis on the Bible’s “written” dimension and transmission as a received revelation since time immemorial, is also re-cast by Salmon, though less pertinently, as proof of its authenticity (mirrored by the inauthenticity of oral law).

In offering his complementary attempt at undermining the authentic-ity of the Mishnah as the written embodiment of the oral Torah, Salmon reiterates some of Qirqisani’s detailed arguments in simple terms, while adding some others. In Canto 2:2, for instance, he emphasizes the Mish-nah’s lack of antiquity (“I have looked again into the six divisions of the Mishnah, and behold, they represent the words of modern men”), as well as its generic and stylistic departure from the norms of Hebrew Scripture:

There are no majestic signs63 and miracles in them (the six divisions),And they lack the formula: And the Lord spoke unto Moses and Aaron.I therefore put them aside, and I said, There is no true Law in them,For the Law is set forth in a different manner,In a majestic display of prophets, of signs, and of miracles;Yet all this majestic beauty we do not see in the whole Mishnah.64

61 Saadia Gaon (882–942) is the main addressee of Salmon’s anti-Rabbanite polemic. On the history of the debate between the two, see I. Davidson, The Book of the Wars of the Lord, Containing the Polemics of the Karaite Salmon ben Yeruhim against Saadia Gaon (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1934) 1–7.

62 See Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 73–74; for Hebrew, see Davidson, Book of the Wars, 37–38. The line division follows Nemoy, who parsed the text according to the rhymed Hebrew original. For recent studies of Salmon’s overall work and his place in the Karaite Jerusalem school, see D. Frank, Search Scripture Well: Karaite Exe-getes and the Origins of the Jewish Bible Commentary in the Islamic East (Leiden: Brill, 2006) 45–164; J. T. Robinson, Asceticism, Eschatology, Opposition to Philos-ophy: The Arabic Translation and Commentary of Salmon ben Yeroham on Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 18–135, and the literature cited there; M. Wechsler, “Salmon ben Jeroham (Sulaym ibn Ruhaym)” in Encyclopedia of Jews of the Islamic World (= EJIW), ed. N. Stillman (5 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2010) 4.216–218.

63 Heb. moftim, which appears parallel Qirqisani’s mu jʿizat in Kitab al-anwar 2. 13. 10.

64 Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 75; Davidson, Book of the Wars, 40. And cf. Canto 2:18: “If thou shouldst say, ‘This took place in the days of the Prophets and in the days of Ezra’; why is there no mention in it of these Prophets, in the same manner as the names of the Prophets are recorded throughout Scripture?” (Nemoy, Karaite Anthol-ogy, 78; Davidson, Book of the Wars, 43).



In cantos 2:7 and 2:20 Salmon underlines the contradictory content matter of the Mishnah and Talmud, which is a constant motif in Karaite anti-Rabbanite polemic (though it receives less emphasis in the Qirqi-sani passages cited above). The overall enterprise of Muʾatazilite Kalam, which became a shared enterprise among Muslim, Jewish and Chris-tian theologians throughout the 10th and 11th centuries, was to draw Scripture into the realm of rationality.65 Logic was thus conceived as a hallmark of the new literate Islamic-Arabic culture in which Jews and Christians also sought to re-appraise their faiths. Salmon was not a professional theologian and was partly dismissive of “extraneous” (non-Jewish) fields of knowledge, as were several of the Jerusalem Karaites. Nevertheless, he clearly shares in the wider cultural milieu, which was imbued with rationalistic notions. He did not have to be a professional mutakallim in order to reflect upon re li gion in rationalist terms: this was a characteristic of the general intellectual atmosphere in his time.

Hence, Salmon’s uncovering of blatant (and even celebrated) inner contradictions in rabbinic lore is a form of discrediting the revelatory origin of the orally-transmitted corpus inscribed in the Mishnah and Talmud by charging oral tradition with the negative value attributed to “illogical” tenets, as is evident in the following:

I have set the six divisions of the Mishnah before me,And I looked at them carefully with mine eyes.And I saw that they are very contradictory in content,This one Mishnaic scholar declares a thing to be forbidden to the people

of Israel, while that one declares it to be permitted.My thoughts therefore answer me,And most of my reflections declare unto me,That there is in it no Law of logic,Nor the Law of Moses the Wise.66

…Moreover, if the Talmud originated with our master Moses,What profit is there for us in “another view,”And what can a third and fourth view teach us,When they tell us first that the interpretation of this problem in law is

thus-and-so, and then proceed to explain it with “another view”?The truth stands upon one view only,For this is so in the wisdom of all mankind,And right counsel cannot be based upon two contradictory things.67

65 Adang, Common Rationality; Madelung and Schmidtke, Rational Theology; Schmidtke, “Karaites’ Encounter.”

66 Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 76; Davidson, Book of the Wars, 41.67 Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 78; Davidson, Book of the Wars, 43–44.



In Canto 2:15–17 Salmon further accentuates Qirqisani’s observation that the writing down of the oral Torah is incompatible with its definition as oral and hence exposes its untrustworthiness. He does so by drawing attention quite brilliantly to the way in which this process breaks down the distinction between the categories of oral and written lore, resulting in what he sees as their intolerable fusion into one and the same thing. It is in Salmon’s wording, more than Qirqisani’s, that we see how the rabbinic conflation of the oral and the written became anathema to the Jewish literate elites, in whose new value system, affected by the wider Arabic culture, Jewish orality was branded as a form of illiteracy, and so became negatively charged in their minds.

He (Saadia) has written that the six divisions of the Mishnah are as author-itative as the Law of Moses,

And that they wrote it down so that it would not be forgotten.…He who remembers forgotten things and knows what is hidden,Had He deemed it proper to have them skillfully written downIn order that they might not be forgotten upon earth,He would have ordered His servant Moses to inscribe them, with might

and power, in a book.If it is proper for men like us,Who have none of the Holy Spirit in us,To turn the oral Law into written Law68 by writing it down,Why would it not be right for us to turn the written Law into a Law pre-

served only in our mouths?69

Yefet ben ʿEli

The rabbinic blurring of the oral and the written is also severely con-demned by Salmon’s younger contemporary, the great Karaite exegete of Jerusalem, Yefet ben ʿEli (fl. 960–1005). Yefet translated the entire Hebrew Bible into Arabic and commented upon it prolifically.70 The following appears in his commentary on Zech 5:7–8:

And in the end of the time of the exile, those books which people claim to have been (derived) from Moses (al-kutub al-ladhi adda aʿ al-qawm annaha

68 Heb. le-ha aʿtiq torat ha-peh u-le-sumah Torah bi-khtav ke-haqeqenu.69 Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 77–78; Davidson, Book of the Wars, 42–43.70 On Yefet, his times and hermeneutic concepts, see the wide-reaching intro-

duction by Zawanowska, Arabic Translation, 3–255, and her appraisal of the state of research and publication of his immense biblical corpus in “Review of Scholarly Research on Yefet,” Revue des Etudes Juives 173 (2014 97–138. For more on the Jeru-salem school and the relationship of Yefet’s work to that of his contemporary, its alleged founder, Yusuf ibn Nuh, see M. Goldstein, Karaite Exegesis, 59–64.



aʿn moshe) will become null, and no one will follow them. Rather they will go back to the written Torah (al-Torah al-mudawwanah) … and no one will turn to the Mishnah and Talmud, for they will know that they are a com-mandment of men learned by rote (Isa 29:13) … for they (the Rabbanites) are sinners before God, since they established/wrote ( aʾthbatu) these (talmudic) books (kutub) and compelled the nation to believe in them and act accord-ing to them … (They) sealed (khatamu) the Mishnah and Talmud and did not leave a path for those who came after them to establish/write even a single letter (wa-lam yaj aʿlu sabil li-gayrihim al-ladhi yajri min badʿihim an yath-bit harf waḥid).71

In this passage the recurring term “books” (kutub) clearly resonates in the description of the Mishnah and Talmud. It pinpoints the Karaite abhor-rence with the canonized textual guise given to the oral Torah which set it in lieu of the only originally written Torah (al-Torah al-mudawwa-nah).72 The rabbinic affront lies in the false claim to textual authenticity it affords the oral Torah, in the presentation of what was not a revealed book as a revealed book, and making it equivalent to Scripture.

4. The Karaite Inversion of the Rabbinic and Islamic ModelsThe Karaite exegetical and conceptual strategies resulted in inverse out-comes.73 The concept of “inversion” has several definitions. In rhetoric, it refers to “the turning of an opponent’s argument against himself,” and in logic, “a form of immediate reference in which a new proposition is formed whose subject is the negative of that of the original proposi-tion.”74 In the sphere of literature, “inversion” often constitutes a means of generating a new genre from old forms.75 The medieval Karaite texts

71 For the Judaeo-Arabic original, see Ms BL Or. 2401 fl. 174b–175a. English trans-lation is mine. On the immediate context of this passage, see Ben-Shammai, “Return,” 320–27; M. Polliack, “Medieval Karaism,” in Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. M. Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 314–315.

72 The somewhat awkward Arabic phrase al-Torah al-mudawwanah, which appears here and in Qirqisani’s writings (lit., “the Torah that is written/in writing”) and is echoed in Salmon’s Hebrew expression torat ha-ketav, may constitute a deliber-ate Karaite attempt to coin an alternative to the Hebrew Torah she-bikhtav, typical of Rabbinic sources. The rabbinic formulation implies that the Torah has a dual expres-sion: one “which is written” (she-bikhtav) and one “which is oral” (she-be-al-pe). The Karaite formulation emphasizes there is only one (definitive) Torah – the written one.

73 My thanks to JSQ’s anonymous reader for detailed reading of this article and helpful advice in regard to this use of the term “inversion.”

74 See OED, electronic edition, s. v.75 See the definition of the formalist literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, who describes

genre, literary or otherwise, as the outcome of the process of social codification, whose norms require a measure of transgression so that they retain their visibility and vitality. Thus, “a new genre is always the transformation of one or several old genres:



clearly demonstrate various forms of inversion, as generally outlined in these definitions.

First, they present arguments that effectively invert the Muslim polemic regarding the Jews’ distortion (taḥrif) of their written Scrip-ture, by implying that if there is a form of falsification in Judaism, it is in the concept of a Jewish oral Torah. The falsification lies in the rabbinic casting of oral tradition as a revealed text, at the expense, of the Hebrew Bible, the written Torah, whose text contained the only true revelation, transmitted over generations “intact.” In transferring the accusation of “alteration” of the Law to the oral Torah and its textual embodiment in the books of the Mishnah and Talmud, the Karaites were deflecting it from the Hebrew Bible, the main focus of Muslim polemic, and clearing its history of transmission from any shadow of textual doubt.

At the same time, they cast Islam’s claims in regard to the Bible as meaningless, and that had immediate consequences for the Muslim con-ception of the Qurʾan as the revealed text that abrogated the Bible. If the Muslims misidentified the problem, then of course the Bible needed no abrogation, and what they saw as a rectification of revelation, through and by the Qurʾan, was actually a mistake. The inverting character of the Karaite argumentation placed Rabbinic Judaism and Islam in the same boat, and presented them, in parallel, as the “out of touch” re li gions, in which the unsorted relationship between oral and written, history and reality, is the actual distortion.

Inter-religious inversion and inner-religious subversion appear in other instances as well, as an effective textual mechanism in the cultural fram-ing of the Karaite form of Judaism. This type of structural inversion also demarcated Karaite Judaism in terms of the “other” – both in relation to Rabbinic Judaism and in relation to Islam. In this way the adherents of Karaism could claim they were rightly superceding both Rabbinic Juda-ism and Islam as the bearers of the original form of revealed Scripture.

A fine example of the Karaites’ perception of the essential nexus between Judaism and the biblical commandments, as opposed to their

by inversion, by displacement, by combination”; T. Todorv, “The Origin of Genres,” New Literary History (1976) 161–162. The term “inversion” has also been used in psy-choanalytic theory, especially in the works of Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. Lacan’s post-war works connect it to what he called the “‘specular image,” in that what appears on one side of the real body is “inverted” – that is, appears on the opposite side of the image of the body when reflected in the mirror; see J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) and J. Kristeva, “Within the Microcosm of the Talking Cure,” in Interpreting Lacan, Psychiatry and the Humanities, ed. J. Smith and W. Kerrigan (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1983) 33–48.



fulfillment in Islam and/or Christianity, is found in Yefet’s commen-tary on Prov 14:34 (“Justice exalts a people, but the faith of the nations is wrong”):

The re li gion of Israel is the most just because they know the command-ments of the Lord ( fara iʾḍ allah) in their entirety, while the others do not. For they (the commandments) are their (Israel’s) virtue when they perform them. Every confusion found in the traditions of [other] nations, which is not [part of] the Torah’s re li gion (din al-tawriyah), is an error. If those who profess laws such as Edom’s and Ishmael’s, the tradition of a yearly pilgrim-age to their Qibla, the tradition of praying toward it and maintaining the five prayers, say that they are all received commandments which are known to them; still, these are all in conflict with the Torah and no doubt they are wrong.76 As for Edom, they are worse in this regard.77

Such texts, which resulted in inverse outcomes, underlined the Kar-aites’ “otherness” and their self-identification as a radical reformative voice. They also strengthened their attempts to draw new believers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, to their creed,78 as well as oppressed sectors of Jewish society.79

76 For “wrong” (khatath), Yefet employs a Hebrew word (חטאת) transliterated into Arabic characters (ـــاث .as sometimes happens in Judaeo-Arabic writings ,(حط

77 See I. Sasson, “Methods and Approach in Yefet ben ʿEli al-Batsri’s Translation and Commentary on the Book of Proverbs” (PhD diss., Jewish Theological Seminary, 2010) 175 and Introduction.

78 The “missionary” aspects of early Karaism, whether internal or external, may be perceived in Salmon’s polemic where he mentions “believers and unbelievers … Israel and all other nations,” and in early Karaite manifestos and writings; see the excel-lent texts and discussions by J. Mann, “A Tract by an Early Karaite Settler in Jerusa-lem,” JQR 12 (1921/22) 257–298; J. Mann, Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature, Vol. 2, Karaitica (1935, repr. New York: Ktav, 1972) 3–257. On the possible appeal to non-Jews, see, as an example, Yefet’s commentary on Job, where he empha-sizes Job’s non-Israelite identity: “the first thing we can understand from the book of Job is that there were people in the past who believed in God, knowledgeable people not from our community because Job and his companions were not from the seed of Jacob.” In Yefet’s view, the biblical portrayal of Job’s unfailing monotheism as a non-Israelite individual, in the face of extreme trials, is intended to pose a monotheistic ideal for the Jewish people as a whole, i. e., one they should strive to fulfill as a nation; see Haider Abbas Hussain, “Yefet ben Ali’s Commentary on the Hebrew Text of the Book of Job 1–10” (PhD diss., University of St. Andrews, 1986) xiii, and cf. Haggai Ben-Shammai, “The Arabic Commentary of Yefet ben ʿEli on the Book of Job 1–5” (Hebrew; MA thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1972) 11–12. For more on the attitude to non-Israelites, see M. Polliack and M. Zawanowska, “‘God Would Not Give the Land, But to the Obedient’: Medieval Karaite Responses to the Curse of Canaan (Genesis 9:25),” in The Gift of the Land and the Fate of the Canaanites in the His-tory of Jewish Thought, from Antiquity to the Modern Period, ed. K. Berthelot et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 112–152.

79 On the Karaites’ appeal to women and their empathetic and novel psychologi-cal portrayal of biblical heroines, see M. Zawanowska, “The Literary Approach to the



Yet such an independent self-presentation is also a clear sign of the efficacy of the new literacy, on which the Karaite movement could ride, as they so aptly recognized. For they could only succeed in delegiti-mizing oral law as a “written” corpus or “book” in a society whose awakening self-consciousness could not abide the blurring of the newly demarcated categories of the oral and the written into one and the same thing.

As shown by various historians, especially Miriam Frenkel, the mental world of the Jewish elites of this period was informed by a new system of values in which Arabic and Judeo-Arabic books, their reading, copying, and composition, were a central component of self-definition and personal esteem. The material expression of this “book culture” may be found in private libraries, where classical Judeo-Arabic and Arabic works were placed alongside canonical Hebrew and Aramaic composi-tions, as well as in the wide exchange and the buying and selling of books among the emerging merchant class and their dependents.80 Literature scholars, especially Rina Drory, have also demonstrated how models of written Arabic composition permeated the Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew oeuvre from the 10th century.81 Written manifestos, which appear to

Bible and Its Characters: Yefet ben ʿEli and His Commentary on the Book of Genesis: An Example of Competing Females in the Story of Abraham,” in Proceedings of the 14th World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2008) 69–84; I. Sasson, “Gender Equality in Yefet ben ʿEli’s Commentary and Karaite Halakhah” AJS Review 37 (2013) 51–74. Yefet’s unique psychological insight was first noted by S. D. Goi-tein: “Among the eleven authors discussed by Mann, Texts, II.8–48, were several of the classics of Karaite literature, for instance, Japhet b. Eli, whose multivolume Bible commentaries, written about 960–990, reveal a spirit of observation of human nature not readily encountered in medieval commentators”; see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vol. 5, The Individual (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1988) 363.

80 See M. Frenkel, “Literary Canon and Social Elite in the Genizah Society” (Hebrew), in Uncovering the Canon, Studies in Canonicity and Genizah, ed. M. Ben-Sasson et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2010) 88–110; she describes this “book cul-ture” as constituting “a revolutionary development, similar in scale to that of the printing revolution, both in the scope of book production and dissemination and in the quality and range of the books” (quote p. 93, my translation). And cf. Goitein, Mediter-ranean Society, 5.363–367; N. Allony, The Jewish Library in the Middle Ages: Book Lists from the Cairo Genizah (Hebrew), ed. M. Frenkel and H. Ben-Shammai (Jeru-salem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2006); Rustow, Heresy,36–66; A. Bar-Levav, “The Sacred Space of the Portable Homeland: An Archeology of Unseen Libraries in Jewish Cul-ture from the Medieval Period to the Internet” (Hebrew), in Ut videant et Contingant: Essays on Pilgrimage and Sacred Space in Honour of Ora Limor, ed. Y. Hen and I. Shagrir (Raanana: Open University Press, 2011) 296–320.

81 See Drory’s ground-breaking work, The Emergence of Jewish-Arabic Literary Contacts at the Beginning of the Tenth Century (Hebrew; Tel-Aviv: Porter Institute



have constituted a unique and early Karaite genre, are attested from the late ninth century. These were read privately or aloud, as a means of spreading their new creed throughout the Jewish orient, specifically call-ing for a return to Jerusalem. While the early manifestos were in Hebrew, the Karaites quickly realized that Arabic could allow them wider access to larger audiences who were informed by this new literacy and could identify with their individualistic and anti-traditional message.82

The Karaite self-awareness of the importance of books and reading in establishing their movement is well illustrated by the following from Yefet’s introduction to his commentary on Exodus:

It is incumbent upon whoever reads our book that he should not criticize our words in the Arabic language, for it is not our language, but fix his inten-tion on the meanings and objectives …. At the end of exile there awakened a people (the Karaites) who fixed their intention upon the Lord of the Uni-verse, and they did not seek knowledge for the purpose of (political) leader-ship in this world; rather, their quest was to attain the truths and to comply with them in all their might, as they said, Lead me in the path of thy com-mandments (Ps 119:35). And when the Lord of the Universe perceived their intention, he opened their eyes and showed them the way to most of the truths, and they wrote books and taught pupils, and they did not become stingy with their knowledge, as it is said, The Lord God has given me a tongue of those who teach, that I may know to sustain with a word he who is weary (Isa 50:4). And we, the most junior of their pupils, have continued from them, and we trace back to them what we have heard concerning this, as it is said, I have not hid thy righteousness within my heart … do not thou, O Lord, withhold thy mercies from me (Ps 40:11).83

Three aspects of Yefet’s wording are especially revealing in our current context of discussion. First, his apologetic opening words regarding the accuracy of his written Arabic suggest Yefet did not perceive Arabic as his native tongue or feel he had full control of it.84 Yet, his apologetic tone also conveys that he was conscious his imperfect Arabic might lead to a dismissal of his work by his potential audience – some of whom he knew to be more literate in Arabic than himself. There is an enhanced self-awareness, therefore, of the art of writing Arabic and its place among

of Poetics and Semiotics, Tel-Aviv University, 1988). See also R. Drory, Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2000), which contains a synopsis of certain sections of her Hebrew work and addi-tional materials.

82 See Mann, “Tract” and cf. Drory, Emergence, 93.83 See Russian National Library, manuscript YEVR-ARAB I:54, fol. 4 (my

translation).84 Similar apologies may be found elsewhere in Yefet’s works; see, for instance, his

preface to the Book of Job.



his readership which distinguishes this passage and frames Yefet’s self-depiction as one typical of a literate age and mentality.

Second, Yefet’s comment on the “stinginess” of the Rabbanites in sharing their knowledge is a deliberate slight on Geonic Judaism’s authoritative hold over Jewish re li gion, and especially over the study of its literary sources. Karaism, according to Yefet, opens the field of relig-ious knowledge for the study of all who seek divine truth. Here again is a typical self-portrait of the “enlightened” reader, the man of books, who perceives books as the key to knowledge and considers the individual’s ability to unlock their content as dependent upon his personal acquisition and individual training in the tools of reading. Obviously, the oral cul-ture of Rabbinic Judaism, is the main target of this criticism. The trans-mission of religious knowledge in such a culture is dependent mainly on living men who function as live books, human repositories of knowl-edge, and who constitute a relatively closed group of privileged scholars, often connected through class or family ties. Such sages guard religious knowledge by effectively keeping it within the group and denying full access to it on an individual basis.

Third, at the end of Yefet’s remarks, ambivalence surfaces – yet another characteristic of the self-consciousness of a literate age that emerged out of an era steeped in oral tradition. His reference to aural learning from his teachers (“what we have heard”) can be construed as an expression of this ambivalence, which creeps in unconsciously, despite the recurring references to “what we have read in their books.” Yefet often describes both oral and written teachings that have come down to him from his Karaite masters. This would suggest the Karaites still retained methods of live oral teaching and learning and that in some ways the prestige of this kind of learning persisted, despite or alongside the book culture that informed so much of their new identity.85

85 On the interdependence of the oral and the written and the ambivalence towards oral culture as hallmarks of the High Middle Ages’ transition from what may be deemed a “non-literate” (which is not equivalent to “illiterate”) environment to a dom-inantly literate mentality see Stock, Implications ,7 and elsewhere in his work, and, in regard to Judaism and Islam cf. the references to Cook, “Opponents’; Fishman, “Guarding Oral Transmission”; and Schoeler, The Oral and the Written; and refer-ences in n. 17, above, as well. Teaching methods in the medieval Islamic madrasa and in the Jewish yeshiva included the memorizing of extensive texts and their reading out loud from memory. This way the teacher could make sure that the materials he taught (whether his own works or those of others) were being reproduced and transmitted accurately; see Y. Elman and D. Ephrat, “Orality and Institutionalization of Tradition: The Growth of the Geonic Yeshiva and the Islamic Madrasa,” in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, ed. Y. Elman and I. Gershoni (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) 107–137.



5. Social and Intellectual Ramifications of the Karaite InversionWe have demonstrated how 10th-century Karaites such as Qirqisani and Salmon attempted to reconstruct Judaism as a book-oriented, textually-authentic re li gion. In seeking to uncover its genuine and singular scrip-tural base, they were reacting to the destabilization of the dual Torah edifice that had informed and distinguished post-biblical Jewish thought and was now being questioned as the result of the encounter with the Islamic-Arabic model of literacy at large, and of written Scripture in particular. These Karaite thinkers saw in their solution a valid response to the Islamic presentation of the Hebrew Bible as an abrogated and dis-torted Scripture, as can be seen most clearly in Qirqisani’s references to the Muslims in the passages quoted above.

Nevertheless, the anti-Islamic polemic appears to have been a second-ary concern for the Karaites, whose main focus was turned inward to provide a new matrix for Jewish cultural definition in their time. The tex-tual and logical criteria they adopted as part and parcel of their reformed self-conception as Jews compelled them to reject the pairing of the oral and the written law sanctified by Rabbinic Judaism. For the Karaites, the attempt to maintain such a dual structure meant that its “defective” part (the oral) would undermine its “perfect” part (the written). Suspi-cions pertaining to the textual transmission and revelatory content of the oral would seep into the written and corrupt it as well, thereby disinte-grating the entire basis of Judaism as an authentic re li gion. Such a sce-nario had already been put into motion through Muslim argumentations regarding Jewish falsification and fabrication (taḥrif ) of divine lore. The Karaites thus sensed that holding onto the foundational narrative of the dual Torah would be dangerous to Judaism; they were more sensible to this threat than were the Rabbanites, partly because they shared in the literate consciousness of their Arabic host culture in a deeper and more committed way.

Nevertheless, the points gained by the Karaites in doing away with the dual Torah narrative were fairly negligible in terms of their anti-Mus-lim polemic. Their new single-Torah narrative was unlikely to dissuade Jewish intellectuals or the upwardly mobile middle class from convert-ing to Islam. The Karaite motivation in the re-appraisal of the dual Torah edifice is more profoundly explained by the synchronic context of Jewish cultural history: it was primarily an expression of the medieval Jewish awakening to new and fairly widespread ideas prevalent in the Arab-Islamic milieu, which sensitized the Jews to the textual aspects of their canon at large and to the development of Hebrew Scripture as a book.



The move engendered by the early Karaites resulted from their internal-ization, as Jews, of these new perceptions, which challenged them to the point where they wished to re-define Judaism’s foundational narrative in accordance with the newly cherished norms of literacy.

In doing this, they subverted the rabbinic claim concerning the pres-tige and antiquity of oral tradition, by judging it in textual terms and denting its status as an elevated and hallowed ancient tradition. When this oral tradition, as embodied or codified in the Mishnah and Talmud, was found wanting in terms of the new literate criteria, the only worthy text the Jews still had, which sufficiently withstood the test of time and textual authenticity, was the Hebrew Bible. Hence, it fell to the lot of the Karaites to concentrate their efforts on this written text and extrapolate its revealed commandments afresh. The primary focus of their theolog-ical, grammatical and exegetical preoccupation became the exploration of the Bible as a text, and even as an entire book.

It was inevitable, therefore, that the Karaites should adopt the self-conscious bolstering of Scripture in textual terms by demonstrating that nothing about its text was inauthentic. This is the reason they were so anxious to dismiss rabbinic references to Ezra’s role in the Torah’s tex-tual transmission, or any other problem that might undermine the Bible’s textual credibility. This is also why they upheld the Tiberian vocaliza-tion and cantillation systems, in a sustained effort to establish one over-all Masoretic system for reading the Bible that would enjoy the universal consensus they claimed for it in other respects. In the same vein, they were not averse to transcribing the consonantal biblical text into Arabic characters and creating model codices with red vocalization signs as known from Qurʾanic codices, precisely because these recast the Bible’s “original” text in the most accurate and advanced “scientific” form known to them.86 The validation of the Bible also encouraged grammati-cal and lexicographical exploration, unprecedented (and unsurpassed) in depth and scope in medieval Jewish thought. By demonstrating that form and meaning were intimately connected in the language of the Bible, the early Karaite grammarians of the ninth century, especially Yusuf ibn Nuh, also contributed to its authentication as a revealed text.87 The trans-lation of the biblical text into Arabic was part of this “scientific”

86 On this Karaite practice, cf. G. Khan, Karaite Bible Manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); G. Khan, “The Medieval Karaite Transcriptions of Hebrew into Arabic Script,” Israel Oriental Studies 12 (1992) 157–176.

87 On the linkage between form and meaning in Karaite grammatical thought, see G. Khan, Early Karaite, 12, 133.



exploration of its meaning: the Karaites’ was a “literal” translation enterprise, in the sense that it was meant to preserve and elucidate the unique forms of Hebrew syntax and lexicon in Arabic.88 Finally, system-atic, cohesive exegesis was the medium through which the truth of the revealed text was ultimately explored, in great detail and depth.

The practical purpose behind all of these efforts was to understand God’s commandments in their only original and unique apparition, that of the text of the Hebrew Bible. Thus, the literate enterprise was har-nessed to the re-establishment of a form of Jewish halakhah ( fiqh) that would not depend on an allegedly flawed oral dimension of the law.89 The immense difficulties in executing such an endeavor after a millen-nium of live halakhic discourse in Judaism are evident, and the Karaites were aware of them from the early stages of their movement.90

What concerns us here, however, is not the socio-religious and polit-ical profile and destiny of Karaite Judaism, but the profound intellec-tual expression it gave to new forms of literacy and scriptural perception experienced by the Jews of the Islamic domain. In this respect, the Kar-aites confronted the intellectual challenges that resulted from the Islamic-Jewish encounter at its height, as Judaism’s most resolute, staunchest advocates. Their tenacity was not meant to Islamicize Judaism, nor to destabilize it and replace its revered codes with a diluted set of their own making, as has sometimes been claimed in hindsight, whether by their Rabbanite opponents or in the history of modern research. On the contrary, within its medieval Islamic context the Karaites’ tenac-ity was meant to uphold Judaism within its new environment as a valid and authentic re li gion – the only re li gion that embraced the divine com-mandments in their correctly revealed written form.

The intellectual acumen the Karaites put into this enterprise was meant to strengthen their faith as Jews, and prevent its erosion. The high quality and large scope of this effort in the 10th to 12th centuries, espe-cially in the Jerusalem center, suggest that Karaite Judaism was able to draw many of the inquisitive minds of its time. These innovative thinkers found their individual expression in the sectarian Karaite milieu, sim-ilarly to Christian and Muslim intellectuals who turned to “radical” or

88 See Polliack, Karaite Tradition.89 See Polliack, Karaite Tradition, 63–64.90 On the Karaite acknowledgement of error in the reinterpretation of the law and

the existential difficulties that ensued from their enterprise, see M. Polliack, “Major Trends in Karaite Biblical Exegesis in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries,” in Polliack, Karaite Judaism, 363–413.



“heretical” movements in the Middle Ages.91 For many of these thinkers, the deconstruction and reconstruction of Judaism offered by Karaism was the most engrossing and exciting experience in which self-identi-fied Jews could engage at that time. The Karaites were sustained by their sense of uniqueness and piousness as “true” Jews, in the same way that other radicals throughout history who broke away from orthodoxy have felt sustained by the radicalism of going back to the source (“radix”) of their faith and hence to its “correct” understanding.

In Marina Rustow’s recent thought-provoking re-consideration of the “tripartite community” of medieval Babylonian Rabbanites, Palestinian Rabbanites and Karaites, she rightly notes “the relative latitude Jews possessed to organize their loyalties.”92 Building on the work of ear-lier historians such as Jacob Mann and Zvi Ankori, who emphasized the “profound interrelation” between Rabbanites and Karaites in the Middle Ages, she further stresses that in her view, Karaism, particu-larly during its formative period, should be viewed as an Islamic school of law (madhhab),

in the same sense in which both Sunnis and Shiʿis had schools of law that included both religious specialists and their loyalists. … As madhahib, Rabbanites and Qaraites established social and political networks with each other, competed for affiliates, acquired them, lost them, and allied them-selves with other networks in religious pursuits, economic ventures and high politics. … The Qaraites were not merely a part of the Jewish people but a central part of it, living among Rabbinic Jews and forming alliances of all types with them. Their leaders shaped Jewish politics and community life. Their works changed medieval Jewish culture profoundly.93

Such a socio-historical approach, which fully integrates Karaism as a Jewish stream of thought and practice into the medieval history of Juda-ism and Islam, is desirable and concurs with the specific aspect of Jewish intellectual and cultural history discussed in this article. Inner Jewish tensions were too often exaggerated or over-interpreted by those who tended to an isolating (or even biased) view of Karaism. Yet it would

91 See, as an example, Ben-Shammai, “Return,” 319–339 and cf. R. Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Copeland has also made a case for the heretic reclaiming of the literal sense as an instrument of her-meneutics; see her Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages, Lol-lardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 51–140. The literal sense also became a determining factor in the Karaites’ classroom and their biblical exegesis.

92 Rustow, Heresy, 3.93 Rustow, Heresy, xxviii–xxix.



be wrong to err in the other extreme by blurring the Karaites’ self-conception of their intellectual and religious distinctiveness, so amply reflected in the rich literature they produced during the formative 10th and 11th centuries. It is in this literature, and especially in their vast exegetical works, often overlooked by researchers, that they concentrate their intellectual efforts on developing the textual and critical tools to undermine the tenets of traditional Judaism and tear them down. These works’ tenacity in ‘deconstructing’ Judaism does not seem to justify the description of medieval Karaism as analogous to an Islamic madhahb anymore than it does its tagging as a marginal “sect”.

The Karaite threat to Rabbinic Judaism was obviously a real and palpable intellectual challenge, even if the Karaites continued to be integrated into Jewish society. This threat could not have been under-estimated by Rabbanite intellectuals of their time, especially due to the complex forms of inversion apparent in Karaite literature, as highlighted above. Rustow’s re-consideration is thus well applied to the sphere of community politics and interaction. Yet when it comes to their robust intellectual voice and unique literary oeuvre it is doubtful whether the Karaites could be cast as a Jewish madhhab. The Karaites’ stance towards traditional Judaism was more undermining than that of the Shiʾites against the Sunnis, because it questioned the dual core structure that informed a millennium of Jewish thought. The social and historical rupture between Rabbanite and Karaite Judaism was therefore intrinsic, even if for a time they could co-exist, probably because the implications were still unhindered by the Rabbanites. This primal tension eventually imploded into a full schism from the 12th century onwards. The fact that historically the Karaites were less successful in overturning the tradi-tional agenda than other scriptural movements, such as the Shi ʿites in Islam or the Protestants in Christianity, may be partly explained through the social latitude and other factors that distinguished medieval Jewish communality. Yet this does not mean the Karaites did not deeply oppose this agenda and strive to replace it. In effect, the mere emergence of Kar-aism, as a continuous and vibrant stream in Jewish life and thought that questions the sanctified status of the dual Torah up to modern times, may in itself be construed as a self-validating Jewish response to the overall doubt as to how the biblical text consolidated into an authentic book, on the one hand, and how the validation of oral tradition took place, on the other hand.

In this sense, Karaite works changed medieval Jewish culture pro-foundly and undoubtedly aroused the deepest opposition among their Rabbanite brethren, as reflected in the major works of Saadia Gaon,



Judah Halevi, Abraham ibn Daud and Maimonides. It was only a matter of time before the intellectual debate would enter the social sphere, and Karaism would become a heresy.94 Historians have suggested several reasons for the failure of Karaism to become a dominant historical force in Judaism: some have pointed to the Karaites’ Zion-centered ideology, which formed a centerpiece of their scriptural re li gion. The demolition of their thriving Jerusalem center by the Crusade of 1099 proved this ide-ology unattainable and brought about their dispersal and absorption in the already extant diaspora of Karaite communities in Egypt, Byzantium and Spain. Other factors have also been highlighted, such as the nature of Judaism as a minority re li gion, often prone to persecution. Ideological dissent in such cases always had to be diluted in retaining a collective ethos of Jewish survival.95

In my view, an important factor was what may be deemed Juda-ism’s “inherent” orality, or its oral “reflex”.96 In other words: the Kar-aite attempts at inversion came too late, after a millennium in which consolidated oral tradition governed every aspect of daily Jewish life. The attraction to oral tradition and the acumen of the ancient sages were too established and revered to be fully overturned. At the same time, the foundational narrative of the dual Torah proved more resilient than the narrative of a singular Torah in answering the needs of an ancient and often persecuted minority and enabling its continuing adjustment to reality. Hence, while Karaite Judaism continues to exist to this day, it never recovered the cultural dominance it exerted on Judaism during its formative period, from the 10th up to the 12th centuries. 97 Nevertheless, the intellectual imprint the Karaites left on the development of medieval Jewish literature and thought was irreversible, and its results are

94 On the relevance of Karaism to medieval Jewish philosophy, see, of late, D. Lasker, “The Impact of Interreligious Polemic on Medieval Philosophy” in Beyond Religious Borders, Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic Era, ed. D. M. Freidenreich and M. Goldstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) 115–123; and also cf. Lasker’s important overview, “Karaism and Jewish Studies” (Hebrew), in Jewish Culture in Muslim Lands and Cairo Geniza Studies, no. 1, ed. M. Friedman (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University) 1–29.

95 For various historical explanations on the demise of Karaism, see the works of Y. Erder, “The Mourners of Zion: The Karaites in Jerusalem in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries” in Polliack, Karaite Judaism, 213–235, and F. Astren, Karaite Judaism; and see further discussion of the historical contextualization of Karaism in M. Polli-ack, “Re-thinking Karaism.”

96 See notes 16–21 above.97 On the pre-modern and modern developments, see the relevant contributions in

Polliack, Karaite Judaism.



enduring, especially in the fields of biblical exegesis, Hebrew language and Jewish philosophy.

II. Karaite Deconstruction of Judaism in Relation to the Islamic Arch-model of Hadith

1. The Karaite Appropriation of HadithThe argumentation presented in this article cannot be brought full-circle without a closer look at the issue of ambivalence. Radical or heretical movements, of the kind that emerge or are empowered by the rise or wider dissemination of literacy among their folk, are not devoid of ambi-guity in regard to oral culture, and such ambivalence towards tradition may in fact constitute a hallmark of their inner conflict.98 The Karaites’ rejection of Jewish oral law is rife with ambiguity, as attested in their sources in two distinctive ways.

First, notwithstanding their dismissal of the Mishnah and Talmud as texts that authentically record Jewish oral law, the Karaite exegetes engage intensively in discussing possible interpretations of the Bible as preserved in these texts. Qirqisani and the Jerusalem Karaites delve into rabbinic literature as into a reservoir of optional biblical understandings. They cite or refer to the Mishnah and Talmud and other rabbinic sources quite profusely in their exegetical works, to the extent that some ancient halakhic midrashim have only come down to us in Karaite sources.99 Moreover, the degree to which Karaite exegetes take up rabbinic views cannot be fully measured, since some of their anonymous references to “another opinion” are traceable to rabbinic sources. In this manner, the Karaites found a legitimate way to appropriate the prestige of their oral heritage as learned Jews. As long as one accepted that these rabbinic sources were divested of their traditional authority and could not be con-strued as going back to Mount Sinai – i. e., as a revealed oral Torah trans-mitted to Moses – it was commendable to draw on them as representing the unending possibilities of human reasoning on the Bible. These tra-ditions could be weighed in the balance and reconsidered as part of the

98 See notes 38 and 80 above.99 On the Karaites’ continuous engagement with rabbinic works as a source for

biblical study and exegesis, see O. Tirosh-Becker, “The Use of Rabbinic Sources in Karaite Writings” in Polliack, Karaite Judaism, 319–338; M. Polliack, “Historiciz-ing Prophetic Literature: Yefet’s Commentary on Hosea and its Relationship to al-Qumisi’s Pitron,” in Kraemer and Wechsler, Pesher Nahum, 149–186.



Karaite interpretive enterprise, which sanctioned both literal and non-literal forms of interpretation of the biblical text.100 In cultural terms, this process salvaged some of the prestige of oral Torah, while nonethe-less affirming the written Torah as the sole revelational base of Judaism.

The second major expression of Karaite ambiguity is more complex, in that it takes shape within Karaite hermeneutic theory on the Bible. Some Karaite exegetes attempted to retain the inexorable prestige of tra-dition by envisioning a distant (historical) oral past to the Hebrew Bible and explaining how its convoluted text was shaped from various divinely revealed or transmitted sources, mainly of a “spoken” nature, into written works and eventually into larger sub-collections that came to make up the final 24 hallowed books. By developing an intricate theory of biblical composition and reduction, Karaite exegetes of the 10th and 11th centuries, such as Yusuf ibn Nuh, Salmon ben Yeruham, Sahal ben Masliah and especially Yefet ben ʿEli, appropriated notions regarding the writing down (tadwin) of Islamic Hadith literature and applied them to the formation of Jewish Scripture.

The Islamic debates over the evolution of Hadith traditions into fixed written texts, though projected onto earlier times, appear to have been at their most pertinent in the second and third centuries AH (roughly eighth and ninth centuries CE). The Jews were likely to have been affected by these debates no less than by the foundational Islamic narrative regarding the formation of the Qurʾan as a book (which was itself largely informed by various Hadiths).

The issues pertaining to writing down the literature of the Muslim tradition offered a topical and flexible parallel model through which the Karaites could reflect upon the process of writing down Jewish Scrip-ture without putting it in direct competition with the Qurʾan. They could learn from the consolidation of Hadith literature taking place in their times, how “live traditions” (oral revelations to the prophets) that were eventually contained within the Hebrew Bible might have come to be committed to writing, formed into individual parts of books and then complete books (such as the Pentateuch, the Book of Proverbs), then sub-collections (the Twelve Minor Prophets or the Five Scrolls), and eventually one canonical book. They could discern through the Hadith debates, much more than through the succinct and fragile reports on Qurʾanic composition, how a collection process of ostensibly revealed, varied and divergent materials (oral and written) could happen over an extended time period. This was a model that fit what they understood to

100 See Polliack, “Major Trends.”



have occurred within the historical time frame of the textualization and canonization of the Hebrew Bible itself.

The Karaites could fathom how this process was executed by various conscientious generations of author-compilers, of a different nature and proximity to the materials themselves. Some of these author-compilers were subject or privy to divine revelations themselves (such as Moses, especially according to Qirqisani, or some of the classical prophets) and actively composed their auditory materials into individual diwans like the Pentateuch or the prophetic books. Others worked as the final redactors of wider written collections, piecing together sections, adding superscriptions or colophons, re-arranging and making editorial remarks to pre-existing written materials (such as Proverbs, Psalms, Esther, the Minor Prophets). As part of this conception of scriptural formation, the Jerusalem Karaites, and especially Yefet, developed a hermeneutical theory concerned with the figure of the biblical author-compiler whom they designated by the Arabic term al-mudawwin. Accordingly, each book of the Hebrew Bible had its mudawwin (often more than one), and so the Hebrew Bible, as a whole, had many mudawwinun. 101

Through their rich usage of this terminology, the Karaites showed, on the one hand, how oral tradition was cast into writing in the Bible, and on the other hand, they retained the prestige attached to oral tradition in both Jewish and Islamic cultures, towards which they still felt some ambiguity. In discussing this process the Karaites deliberately opted for Arabic terminology associated with the textualizing of Hadith literature, rather than that employed in relation to the collation of Qurʾan as a book.

2. Tadwin and Mudawwin in Relation to HadithThe Arabic root d-w-n is not attested in Islamic sources that deal with the compilation of the Qurʾan; the terms usually employed in this respect are jama aʿ and kataba, which refer solely to the technical act of bringing the Qurʾanic text “between two covers.”102 As far as I have been able to ascertain, it is not used in Qurʾanic exegesis. Nevertheless, the Arabic

101 On the Karaite conception of the biblical narrators/redactors see, among the more recent discussions, M. Goldstein, Karaite Exegesis, 119–138 and Zawanowska, Arabic Translation, 27–57, and cf. U. Simon, Four Approaesch (Hebrew), 67–95 (Engl., 71–96); Ben-Shammai, “On Mudawwin: the Editor of the Books of the Bible in Judaeo-Arabic Exegesis” (Hebrew), in Rishonim ve-Achronim: Studies in Jewish His-tory presented to Avraham Grossman, ed. J. Hacker et al. (Jerusalem: Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2009) 73–110 ; Polliack, “Karaite Conception,” 350–374; Polliack, “Voice,” 891–915.

102 See Burton (note 1 above)



root d-w-n and the verbal noun tadwin are amply attested in Hadith litera-ture, either in the sense of “collecting” or “registering” textual materials. It is reported that the Khalif ʿUmar issued the order of tadwin al-ḥadith to Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (d. 124 AH / 742 CE), exhorting Ibn Shihab to return to Medina and collect all the traditions he could lay his hands on; hence, Ibn Shihab is portrayed as “the first to have collected (religious) knowledge and written it down” ( aʾwwal man dawwana al- iʾlm wa-kata-bahu).103 According to Juynboll, the term tadwin al-ḥadith “indicates the collecting of traditions in writing in order to derive legal precepts from them and not as a mere memory aid, for which the terms kitabat al- iʿlm or kitabat al-ḥadith were used.” 104 Thus the derivatives of dawwana seem especially suited to expressing the transition of revealed materials from oral to written mode – in other words, the process by which these rev-elations became written text. As such, this terminology was particularly attractive to the Karaites in thinking of the process behind the Hebrew Bible’s consolidation and codification as a text.

Nevertheless, the concept of the biblical mudawwin (pl. mudawwi-nun) and the general hermeneutic it conveys appear to be a sui generis Karaite invention.105 Qirqisani, who worked mostly in Baghdad, was the first Karaite to use the term mudawwin. In the introduction to his com-mentary on the Pentateuch, he confined it to Moses and emphasized that Mosaic authorship-compilation of the Torah in its entirety is “one of the fundamental principles of biblical exegesis.”106 Yefet, whose family originated from Basra, wrote most of his work in Jerusalem; he and other Jerusalem Karaites such as Salmon were more reticent in pinpointing the historical identity of the various biblical mudawwinun and generally

103 Schoeler, The Oral and the Written, 122.104 See G. H. A Juynboll, “Tadwin,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. P. J. Bearman

et al., vol. 10 (Leiden: Brill, 2000) 81; note his further comment: “out of tadwin there arose the tabwib: there we see the first attempts at bringing the material together in chapters (Ar. bab, pl. aʾbwab) under certain subject headings of gradually increasing detail and sophistication.” Also cf. G. Schoeler’s definition: “to codify traditions in writing (tadwin) on a large scale” (The Oral and the Written, 123) and “the official collection, or collection on a large scale, of any group of cognate materials, such as poetry or the Hadith” (The Oral and the Written, 168). Nevertheless, the noun mudaw-win (n. 102 above) is not attested in Hadith literature. Rather musnad came to be used in ascribing collections to certain ancient individuals and muaṣannaf in relation to un-ascribed/thematic collections; see further G. H. A. Juynboll, “Hadith and the Qurʾan,” in McAuliffe, Encyclopaedia, 2.376–397.

105 See n. 101 above.106 See Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 60; Arab. nabiyyuna sayyiduna musa aʿlayhi

al-salam huwa al-ladhi dawwana hadhihi al-tawarah … fa-hadha aʾḥad al-ʾuṣul; see H. Hirschfeld, Qirqisani Studies (London: Jews’ College Publications 6, 1918) 43.



preferred to underline their anonymity.107 In Yefet’s commentary on Ruth, for instance, he observes that the book’s opening (“and it came to pass during the time of the Judges”) indicates that it is “annexed to accounts that took place during the period of the Judges, but since their accounts were written down in the Book of Judges, the mudaw-win set the account of Ruth and Boaz separately, for none of the judges are mentioned there” (huwa muḍaf ʾila aʾkhbar jarat fi zaman al-shofṭim wa- iʾn kanat aʾkhbarhum mudawwanah fi sifr shofṭim fa- iʾn al-mudaw-win ja aʿla khabar rut wa-boaz mufrad ʾidh laysa lil-shofṭim madkhal fi khabarihima).108 Who was the mysterious biblical figure responsible for the division of historical reports between two books, Judges and Ruth, and for linking them in this first phrase? Yefet does not provide any identification.

The general anonymity of the biblical author-compiler(s) allowed Yefet and other Jerusalem Karaites to underline the Hebrew Bible’s unity and wholeness as a written work, its ancient background and the consen-sus surrounding its authenticity as a revealed text. The biblical text was safeguarded by what appears to have been conceived as the collective endeavor of schools of writers, rather than specified hallowed men (of whom the Karaites were generally suspicious as part of their individual-istic ideology and rejection of rabbinic tradition).109

Exegetically, anonymity was also a good solution to the problem of anachronism, which could result from human involvement in the author-ship, compilation or transmission of the biblical text – that is, recognition that a particular biblical verse could not have been written at the histori-cal time in which it is set. In Josh 15:63, for instance, the tribe of Judah is described as being unsuccessful in disinheriting the Jebusites of Jeru-salem, who dwelled with the Judahites in the city “to this very day.” This phrase clearly refers to a period later than Joshua’s time. In his commen-tary Yefet underlines the anachronism, noting “and this was after the

107 They accept, for instance, Solomonic authorship of Eccelsiastes, Proverbs and the Song of Songs, yet do not identify Solomon as the final mudawwin of these books. These seem to be separate persona working with Solomonic materials, cf. Simon’s dis-cussion, Four Approaches.

108 For the Arabic text, see S. Butbul, “The Commentary of Yefet ben Eli the Kar-aite on the Book of Ruth” (Hebrew), Sefunot 23 (2003) 483. Furthermore, the mudaw-win was also responsible for the incorporation of Ruth in the subcollection of the Five Scrolls, as transpires from the continuation of this comment: fa-ja aʿla hadhihi al-majalah ma aʿ jumlah al-majalat wa-dawwanaha qabla al-majalat ʿala tartib al-zaman idh boaz qabla shlomo (and he placed this scroll with the other scrolls and wrote/edited it before the other scrolls (i. e., as the first scroll), according to historical stages, since Boaz is earlier than Solomon.).

109 See Part I, 6 above.



death of Joshua.” However, he adds, “but the mudawwin wrote this (daw-wanahu) on the order of God (bi- aʾmr allah).”110

The anonymity of the mudawwin is helpful to Yefet (and other Kar-aites) in dealing with the historical incongruity of the biblical report in the following way. On the one hand, it distances the final writer of the book from the historical figure of Joshua, and so bypasses the possibil-ity that Joshua was responsible for the anachronism (for otherwise what would have prevented Yefet from specifying that Joshua was the mudaw-win?). On the other hand, it places the mudawwin within the historical time span of the biblical period in general, as one privy to a divine dic-tate concerning the Jebusites. Thus the textual crux in this part of Joshua is “smoothed out” into an “authentic” expression of the historical process of compilation, contained within the biblical period at large.

Nevertheless, there is no mistaking of the apologetic tone of this expla-nation: it lies behind the Karaite identification of the potential corruption of the biblical text, in the form of retrospective information incorporated into the Book of Joshua long after its hero had died. In this respect the mudawwin hermeneutic theory had its limits, for the Karaites knew it served them as a double-edged sword: on the one hand it sensitized them to the innate structures of the biblical text, its styles and layers, and as such it informed their deepening sense of the Bible’s textual formation; on the other hand it was potentially damaging to the Bible’s unity as a divinely revealed utterance and as such to its credibility. Historically identifiable mudawwinun might render certain aspects of the biblical text as inauthentic or “fabricated.” The anonymity of the mudawwin was their solution to this tension: for anonymity in itself creates unity and equality, as it bespeaks an ancient consensus underlying the biblical col-lection and thus upholds its veracity and authenticity.

Yefet, who most developed the mudawwin theory, used various Arabic terms in describing the diverse types of “raw materials” – both oral and written – which were textualized by the various author-compilers of the Hebrew Bible over a long period of time: laws (shara iʾ ʿ), speeches/words (khutub), prophecies (nubuwah), stories (qiṣaṣ), accounts ( aʾkhbar), poetry (shi ʾr) and even written documentation per se (nuskah).111 More-over, Yefet was systematic in demonstrating how the textual adaptation

110 See the discussion of this source in Simon, Four Approaches, 88.111 For further discussion of the unique terminology used by the Karaites in relation

to these raw materials, see M. Polliack, “Biblical Narrative and the Textualization of Oral Tradition: Innovations in Medieval Judaeo-Arabic Biblical Exegesis” (Hebrew), in Ben ‘Ever la- Aʿrav, Contacts between Arabic Literature and Jewish literature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times, Vol. 6: A Collection of Studies dedicated to Prof. Yosi



of divinely revealed (mostly oral) material lay behind the formation of the major genres of biblical literature (law, narrative history, prophecy). The connection between the “pre-existing” raw materials in the hands of the mudawwinun of the prophetic and historical books of the Hebrew Bible is especially underlined in Yefet’s commentary on Hosea 1:1 (“The word of the Lord that was to Hosea son of Beʾeri in the days of Uzziah, Yotam, Ahaz, Yehizqiyah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jerobam son of Yoʾash, king of Israel”):

The first matter that needs to be prefaced is the order of the books of the prophets that are mentioned (in the Bible), and we say that they are 15 proph-ets, each of whom established/wrote the collection of his prophecy ( aʾthbata kul waḥid minhum diwan nubuwatihi), and they are: Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and those Twelve whose prophecies have been collected in this book ( jumi aʿt nubuwatuhum fi hadha al-sifr) […] Since the prophecy of Hosea and Micah was not recorded fully (lamma kanat nubuwah hosh eʿa wa-mik-hah mukhtaṣarah min al-tadwin),112 he (the mudawwin) noted the duration of their prophecy, so that we understand that they prophesied many proph-ecies, yet he omitted recording most of them, and related only the part ( fa- iʾkhtaṣara tadwin al-akthar wa-dhakara al-baḍʿ) that would prove necessary for the people of exile (i. e., for subsequent generations). Their prophecies which they prophesied for the purpose of their (own) generation, however, he did not record fully ( iʾkhtaṣara tadwinaha), just as he shortened the accounts of the kings (mithl ma iʾkhtaṣara aʾkhabar al-muluk) and recorded (wa-daw-wana) (only) some of them in Chronicles and Kings, as he says in each of them: Now the rest of the acts of so and so (e. g., 2 Chr 13:22; 2 Kgs 10:34). 113

It is clear that for Yefet, not all of the “original” materials were preserved for posterity in the Hebrew Bible, a factor which explains its continuing historical relevance and textual intricacies. The degree of divine rev-elation of these original materials, however, is not made explicit; in other words, Yefet rarely addresses the question of their divine dictate or rev-elation to the mudawwinun. Clear statements to this effect are found only when the exegized biblical passage suggests later tampering by authors/editors (as in the case of Joshua cited above). It is obvious that in such cases

Tobi on the Occasion of His Retirement, ed. A. A. Hussein and A. Oettinger (Haifa: University of Haifa, 2014) 109–152.

112 It is also possible to translate here “was summarized in its writing.”113 For the Judaeo-Arabic source, see M. Polliack and E. Schlossberg, Yefet ben

ʿEli’s Commentary on Hosea, Annotated Edition, Hebrew Translation and Intro-duction (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2009) 141–144; For English trans-lation and further discussion, see M. Polliack and E. Schlossberg, “Historical-literary, Rhetorical and Redactional Methods of Interpretation in Yefet ben ʿEli’s Introduc-tion to the Minor Prophets,” in Exegesis and Grammar in Medieval Karaite Texts, ed. G. Khan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 1–39 and cf. Simon’s discussion of this source, Four Approaches, 91.



the reference to a divine dictate (bi- aʾmr aʾllah) is intended to deny any possible inauthenticity in the Bible’s composition process, which would play into the hands of the Muslim allegations of Jewish corruption of the text.114 Furthermore, divine will did not pre-define which of the many authentic prophetic speeches or other accounts would be preserved in the biblical collection. This was the concern of the biblical mudawwinun, who had a fairly active role in the decision making. Like the compilers of Hadith literature, therefore, they worked with what they had and what appeared to withstand the criterion of time and religious significance.

Nevertheless, the process of biblical compilation could not be end-less, lest it merge with the corpus of the oral Torah. Accordingly, Yefet delimits the final consolidation of the Hebrew Bible to the Greek period, as may be inferred from his commentary on Dan 9:23:

To seal up vision and prophecy took place during the reign of the Greeks […] – this must mean the cutting off of vision and prophets from Israel. Vision refers to prophesies relating to future time, such as those of Haggai and Zechariah, and prophecy is what is told relating to the present. Accord-ing to some authorities, the Holy Spirit was cut off from the time of Sol-omon; the Singers remained, who recited the Psalms.115 Or again he may mean by to seal up vision and prophecy that the revealed books (kutub al- aʾnbiya) were sealed and collected, 24 books (khatamat wa-jama aʿt aʾrba aʿh wa- iʿshrin sifr), and fixed by Masorahs116 and other institutions necessary for this purpose.117

In many instances the terms used by Yefet and other Jerusalem Karaites to refer to the materials of the biblical mudawwinun are typical of Islamic Hadith literature or generically associated with it, such as khabar/ aʾkhbar (account), qiṣṣah/qiṣaṣ (story). In this context it suffices to quote but one

114 Some of the Karaite strategies in interpreting biblical narrative technique, such as the explanation of a character’s wording, elision or resumptive repetition, are also intended to underline the authenticity of the narrated materials and the narrators’ data. Thus, for instance, biblical characters do not lie unless the narrator specifically describes them as liars, and if the reader perceives them at certain points of the story as “not telling the truth,” the explanation of their wording is to be found in “missing data,” whose reporting was deliberately delayed by the biblical narrators; see Polliack, “Voice” and “Unseen Joints.”

115 Possibly, this is a reference to 2 Chronicles 29.116 The text is unclear at this point. Margoliouth deciphered the Hebrew word

-in wa-ḍabaṭat bi-mosrot wa-saʾir ma yaḥtaj ʾilayhi fi hadha al-bab and inter מוסרותpreted it as a reference to Masoretic tradition, See D. S. Margoliouth, ed., A Com-mentary on the Book of Daniel by Yefet ibn Ali the Karaite (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), Engl. 50, Arab. 101. Yet, in such a case one would expect מסורות. In my view, it is possible to interpret mosrot as “bindings/ropes,” in which case Yefet would actually be referring to the binding of the “book” of the Hebrew Bible.

117 Margoliouth, Commentary on the Book of Daniel, Engl. 50, Arab. 100–101.



example in which these terms appear interchangeably and in relation to the work of the biblical mudawwin, from Yefet’s commentary on Gen 25:19 (“And these are the accounts of Isaac son of Abraham”):

After he (the mudawwin) completed the accounts ( aʾkhbar) of Abraham, he connected to them the accounts (yansuqu aʿlayha aʾkhbar) of Isaac. For this reason he narrated/edited them (dawwanahum) by (use of) the connective waw (and). And he omitted recording accounts ( iʾkhtaṣara tadwin aʾkhbar) of the sons of Qeturah and Ishmael, since the purpose of the mudawwin was to connect the accounts of our forefathers (wa-kana gard al-mudaw-win yansuqu aʾkhbar ʾuṣulina). Furthermore, he did not wish to preoccupy us with the accounts of those (other descendants of Abraham) who are like the accounts of the rest of the world. Rather, he mentioned for us the accounts of the forefathers which are of benefit to us (as Jews), and for this reason he omitted ( iʾkhtaṣara) mentioning those (others) and mentioned (only) the accounts of Isaac.118

Though the concept of the biblical mudawwin was most thoroughly developed in Yefet’s magnum opus, the mudawwin hermeneutic at large became an integral part of Karaite thought on the formation of the Hebrew Bible as a written text. The verb dawwana and its derived forms figure widely in Qirqisani’s as well as in Salmon’s and Yefet’s works. Thus, al-Torah al-mudawwanah is their Arabic appellation for the written Torah (as opposed to the oral). The term tadwin is attested in the grammatical writings of Yusuf ibn Nuh as connoting “the written form of the biblical text.”119 In short, the Karaite exegetes of the Jerusalem circle shared in the application of dawwana terminology to biblical literature, including the mudawwin concept.120 This Karaite innovation became so helpful to the Jews of the Islamic milieu in thinking of the Bible’s formation as a text that it was eventually adopted by Rabbanite Judeo-Arabic exegetes as well, and is attested, for instance in the works of ʿEli ben Yisrael, Tanhum ben Yosef Ha-Yerushalmi and Isaac al-Kinzi. Moreover, it is likely to have influenced the development of Hebrew terminology, espe-cially in Byzantium, where Judeo-Arabic Karaite works were rendered into Hebrew. The Hebrew term sadran used in Rabbanite and Karaite

118 See further on this source in Polliack, “Unseen Joints,” 195–196. For further discussion of the unique terminology used by the Karaites in relation to biblical narra-tive, see M. Polliack, “Biblical Narrative.”

119 See Khan, Early Karaite, 133: “The concept is that these words exist implicitly in the structure of the text, but have been omitted in the explicit written form: ʾukhtuṣira fi al-tadwin,” and cf. p. 150 “תדוין […] the form of the text that is actually expressed in language as opposed to elements of the meaning that are not directly expressed.” See also pp. 48–49, 128–131, 147.

120 On which, see secondary literature in n. 105 above.



exegetical works composed in Byzantium during the 10th and 11th cen-turies appears to cover the functions of the mudawwin concept and is most likely to have been influence by it.121

3. The Karaite Inversion of HadithThe Muslim identification of a process through which orally-transmitted traditions about the Prophet Muhammad were preserved in writing (tadwin al-ḥadith), and in relatively close proximity to his lifetime, was especially appealing to the Karaite Jews as an arch-model in envisaging the literary process behind the Hebrew Bible’s formation as a written text. That such a process occurred among the ancient Israelites many centuries before the Hadith traditions were being collected and canon-ized among the Muslims would have been to the Jews’ advantage in portraying them as more experienced and thus “authentic” in handling this process. Viewing the textual formation of the Hebrew Bible through the lenses of Hadith distanced Jewish Scripture from an uncomfortable pairing with the Qurʾan, for the Karaites did not wish to present their Hebrew Bible in the guise of the Qurʾan, nor as competing with it, either in inter-religious or inner-Jewish contexts. They were not interested in creating an Islamic form of Judaism or in being seen as doing so by basing the Hebrew Bible on a Qurʾanic arch-model.122 Tadwin al-ḥadith

121 On the first author, see, for instance, H. Ben-Shammai, “On mudawwin,” 99–110 and cf. R. Steiner, “A Jewish Theory of Biblical Redaction from Byzantium: Its Rabbinic Roots, Its Diffusion and Its Encounter with the Muslim Doctrine of Fal-sification,” JSIJ 2 (2003) 123–167.

122 In this aspect my argument counters Drory’s description of Karaite Scriptur-alism (Drory, Emergence, 95–128). In Drory’s analysis the Karaites’ re-focusing on Scripture influenced Saadia Gaon, who followed them in turning it into a central fea-ture of medieval Rabbanite Judaism as well. Though I fully accept the second part of Drory’s argument, I consider its first part, which poses a direct adoption process between Karaism and Arabic literature, as providing a partial picture of the evidence at hand. Ideology and literature were connected in early Karaism, and it appears that the Karaite relationship to the Islamic and Arabic models was hence much more subver-sive (as well as more complex and ambivalent), both on ideological and literary levels. The adoption of Arabic literary models certainly occurred. Yet these were mitigated, from the earliest stages, by other content. This difference was admitted by Drory herself, who mentioned that while Arabic structures and terms were widely used in Karaite exegetical works, these remained in other respects completely detached from Arabic literature and beholden to Jewish exegetical tradition and its methods (Emer-gence, 120). Though Drory acknowledged the significance of the “oral-written oppo-sition” in Jewish literature (Emergence, 39–40), she afforded it limited place in her overall analysis, and so appears to have underestimated the effects of rising Arabic lit-eracy upon the Jews at large, and especially its imprint on the radical world-view of the Karaites.



offered a more accessible and detailed model than the more restrictive foundational narrative on the Qurʾan’s compilation by the Khalifs.

Nevertheless, this model had its potential drawbacks, as Hadith was “extra-scriptural” in the Islamic perception and thus secondary to the Qurʾan (even if it qualified as “revelation” for legal purposes). The Kar-aites wished to avoid or deflect this “extraneous” character, since it could imply that the Hebrew Bible contained secondary or extraneous forms of textual revelation as well. The Karaites were able to do this, because they had already framed Jewish oral Torah, and its embodiment in the Mish-nah and Talmud, as extraneous to biblical revelation.

Thus they were free to apply theoretical advantages of the Hadith arch-model to biblical literature. First, it enabled them to appropriate a distant oral kudos to the Hebrew Bible, while maintaining its authenticity as a written text. Second, it explained the historical stages of the Bible’s lit-erary formation as a text, while protecting its uniqueness as emanating from a divine source. Third, it contained this process within the biblical time period of ancient Israel, up to the Greek era. Whereas the Qurʾan’s consolidation as a text was described as terse in Muslim sources, these same sources often reflected on the Hadith’s history of transmission as turbulent and slow, involving the painful sifting of expansive mate-rials by the ancient collectors and a prolonged period of textualization. Accordingly, the Karaites conceived of the biblical mudawwinun as working in live contact with the biblical materials – sometimes as their authors, contemporaneously with their revelation and as the subjects of this revelation; at other times as their editors, in close contact with their “original” authors. Since the historical testimony of the Hebrew Bible itself is one that bespeaks of a lengthy literary formation, spanning var-ious world empires up to the era of the Greeks, the Karaites had a wide backdrop on which to pose their theory of the Bible’s gradual textual for-mation. Unlike the Qurʾan, which claimed a highly condensed history of transmission, the Hebrew Bible’s was, by its own evidence, highly protracted, and so could sustain generations of individual mudawwinun who were entrusted, over various periods, with the writing down of con-tinuous and varied forms of divine revelation until prophecy had been “sealed” (in the wording of Dan 9:23).

There was an additional polemical benefit in the Karaite appropria-tion of the Hadith arch-model, which lay in the recognizable inversion it offered of the Islamic positioning of Hadith and Qurʾan vis-à-vis divine revelation. The Jews of the ninth and 10th centuries would have been well aware of the general Muslim stance that the Qurʾan was fully revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, and only later collected and codified as a



book by the Companions. They would also have known that the Hadith traditions were transmitted orally, through “weak” or “strong” chains of transmitters, to be put down in writing and compiled as “books” only after the Qurʾan’s codification. Hence the Hadith texts, though contain-ing revelations, were perceived as secondary to the Qurʾan itself, at least in terms of their immediate relationship to revelation, and they had an extra-Qurʾanic quality. That this quality was a source of profound dis-agreement among the Muslims did not escape the Jews: Qirqisani makes a specific point of underlying it in Kitab al-anwar 2.13.10, where he refers to the dubious transmission chains (including the terms “weak” and “strong”) of Muslim tradition.

The Karaite conception of the Hebrew Bible’s tadwin effectively inverted the Islamic positioning of Hadith and Qurʾan vis-à-vis divine revelation, by suggesting it took place the other way round, i. e., in the “proper way”: first there were oral revelations to various known and unknown biblical figures (including Moses), and then these were sifted out by these biblical figures themselves (including Moses), who later recorded, fashioned and edited the revelations in writing. Only the sig-nificant revelations were preserved in the biblical text, while those deemed insignificant for posterity were left out. In polemical terms, this meant that the Hebrew Bible was a more completely revealed and dis-tilled scripture than was the Qurʾan, which was complemented and aug-mented by Hadith at a secondary and later stage to its actual formation, as admitted by the Muslims themselves. In the Karaite presentation of the Hebrew Bible, there were no secondary “remnants” left around to be pondered as vestiges of God’s divinely revealed message.

In the Karaite inter-religious “reconstruction,” Islamic Hadith was perceived as extraneous to the Qurʾan and preserved outside it, while the “original” Jewish ḥadith was perceived as having been absorbed into the Hebrew Bible itself, forming an integrated part of its revealed message. In such a scenario there lies an evident inversion of the ruling norms of inter-religious discourse: On the one hand, the very “extraneousness” of Islamic Hadith is construed as a sign of its belatedness and possible in-authenticity (a charge also voiced in Muslim contexts, especially Shiʿite sources, with whose criticism of Sunni Hadith the Karaites were prob-ably familiar).123 On the other hand, the inherent dimension of Jewish ḥadith as “inbuilt” within the Hebrew Bible is construed as a sign of the Bible’s authenticity and superiority as a Scripture. In the Karaite

123 On the possible connections historians have drawn between Karaism and Shi ʿite Islam, see Astren, Karaite Judaism, 8, 94; Astren,”Islamic Context”; Gil, “Origins.”



perception, a distant oral echo was thus made embryonic to the written Torah. This specific inversion formed part of the wider Karaite strategy of inversion that enabled the early Karaites to create new forms of Jewish religious definition and to widen their appeal by targeting various poten-tial audiences. It completed the Karaite deconstruction and reconstruc-tion of Judaism contra the Muslims.

On the inner-religious level the Karaites were no less subversive. By making Hadith inborn to the Bible, the Karaites implied that the Rabban-ite construct of Jewish oral Torah had an even lesser pedigree than that claimed by the Muslims for their Hadith. For whereas the Muslims had a science by which they could investigate weak or strong chains of trans-mission (or appear to investigate them), Rabbinic Judaism had no com-patible mechanism for investigating its oral Torah or trying to prove how it coiled back to a divine source. By reconstructing an ancient “authen-tic” ḥadith as an internal and integral part of the Bible’s long-past consol-idation as a book, the Karaites further subverted the dual Torah narrative as the foundation of Rabbinic Judaism. In this reconstruction the rab-binic “oral Torah” became the Jewish counterpart of Islamic Hadith, and even less reliable than Muslim Hadith.

Both Rabbinic Judaism and orthodox Islam were thus cast by the Kar-aites as preserving an internally flawed understanding of the relationship between the oral and the written, which lies at the base of their re li gions, respectively. The reversal of the rabbinic and Islamic models by way of incorporating the oral within the written, encompassing oral tradition within revealed Scripture itself rather than allowing some “extra-scrip-tural” dimension of revelation to co-exist with it, was an ingenious move on the part of the Karaite radicals, through which they sought to pose Karaite Judaism as the ultimate and only valid religious answer in a new age of literacy.124 For it was in this medieval age and in the Near East that the question of the relationship between the oral and the written in the textual formation of revealed Scripture became paramount to the relig-ious thought and self-understanding of Muslims, Christians and Jews alike.

124 In practical terms, this move was inflexible, since it stifled the growth of Kar-aite legal interpretation, which became based for a while on deduction alone, until mitigating concepts that referred to a sanctified corpus of Karaite legal “tradition” – extraneous to the Bible – were allowed some practical force from the 12th century; see, for instance, Astren, Karaite Judaism, 185 ff. and cf. note 95 above.



4. Concluding Remarks on InversionFinally it remains for us to clarify, how can Karaite Judaism’s internal-ization of the oral into the Bible’s textual history be more deeply rec-onciled with its rejection of the Jewish oral Torah and its deconstruction of the dual Torah edifice? Ambivalence seems to provide part of the answer – namely, the particular ambiguity regarding the past and its institutions that accompanies the transition of a self-consciously oral or semi-oral culture to a self-consciously literate culture.125 As the Karaite polemic with Jewish oral law became less urgent, the generation after Qirqisani and Salmon could lower its defenses with regard to its oral past and thus allow for a more relaxed flow of oral residue into its conception of the Bible as a written text. Yefet is thus more moderate in his out-look, allowing the prestige of the oral to enter his understanding of the revealed or transmitted materials – most notably, the accounts ( aʾkhbar) that informed the biblical mudawwin/un, and hence the formulation of the Hebrew Bible as a book. Yefet was therefore in a prime position to consolidate the Karaite theory of the Bible’s tadwin. In doing so he also appropriated the prestige afforded by the Islamic host culture to the oral traditions that were afloat about the Prophet Muhammad and which were subsequently (and partly in parallel to Yefet’s life-time) being collected into official Hadith collections.

Varied patterns of appropriation and inversion have been noted in this article as ways through which the Karaites situated themselves in rela-tion to their Jewish and Islamic rivals. The Karaites’ reversal of the exist-ing relationship between basic religious elements within Islam and/or Rabbinic Judaism served as a means of defining their new creed and accentuating its radical message. Yet, it was accompanied by an under-current of ambiguity, as a consistent expression of the psychological and mental difficulty experienced by individuals and groups who self-consciously sever themselves from their cultural heritage and past.126 Patterns of inversion may be identifiable in general among different rad-ical groups as powerful structural mechanisms in the usurping of older systems of belief. The Karaites would have been acquainted with their expression, at least as typologies, in the inverting relationship of Chris-tianity to Judaism, and that of Islam to both. The scriptural dimension of

125 See note 85 above.126 The early Karaite practices of asceticism and mourning, often described by his-

torians (see, for instance, Erder, “Mourners”), can in fact be construed as psychologi-cal symptoms of this ambiguity.



this relationship is especially pronounced in the way the New Testament inverts the Old Testament and the Qurʾan inverts both.

The Karaite Jews were driven to similar formulations as part of their general religious milieu. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they turned on their head some of the known structures in their host and rival cultures, creating an intricate interplay between Rabbanism and Islam, as their parallel rivals. As a consequence, the two became paired in some ways as reversed mirror-images – the negatives, as it were – of Kar-aite Judaism, thus accentuating its attractiveness in the context of the common religious milieu informed by literacy and logic that was emerg-ing in the Near East.127 In this game of mirroring, just as the alleged Jewish falsification (taḥrif ) was actually to be found in Rabbanite oral Law and thus distanced from the Bible itself, the original Jewish ḥadith was to be found in the Hebrew Bible itself and not in Rabbanite oral Law. This positioning undermined the dual Torah edifice as an authentic base for rabbinic Judaism.

Simultaneously, the Karaites were also reversing the established relationship between Qurʾan and Hadith, by implying that the Islamic scheme of literary canonization in which the Qurʾan was followed by Hadith was flawed. If Hadith contains materials contemporaneous with the Prophet’s life-time, why is it secondary to the Qurʾan’s formation as a book – and even more so, if the story of this formation is depend-ent on what is recorded in various Hadiths? The Karaites’ perception of the Hebrew Bible’s history of transmission partly destabilized that of the Qurʾan, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The final form of Muhammad’s prophecy, as preserved in Islamic Scripture, was to a cer-tain extent dependent on its later compilers (Abu Bakr and ʿUthman). Yet the Hebrew Bible was presented as having been transmitted in unbroken fashion as a text since the time of Moses, and finalized as 24 books during the life-time of the last biblical prophets (and no later than the Greek period). In other words, the Bible was presented by the Karaites as a text unlike the Qurʾan, authored and compiled by various (known and mostly unknown) biblical figures, whose account of divine revela-tion was narrated within the biblical period. In this manner, the Hebrew Bible reached overall codification in (biblical) prophetic times and did not, like the Qurʾan, become a book in post-prophetic times.

127 On rationalism as a common language, see C. Adang et al. (eds.), A Common Rationality; S. Schmidtke, “The Karaites’ Encounter”; W. Madelung and S. Schmidtke, Rational Theology in note 24 above.



Incorporating the notion of tadwin into their conception of the for-mation of the Bible as a book was a resourceful move on the part of the Karaites. Showing how the Bible too had an oral past of sorts, yet very distant and forged by the personae of the biblical period itself in a live prophetic period, enabled the Karaites to address their ambivalence as Jews towards the loss of the longstanding authority and status of Jewish oral Torah and tradition at large. In this way, “the oral” – that is, oral-ity as a wider category of human and religious expression than oral tra-dition per se – subtly re-entered their new cultural equation by being subsumed into the Bible itself, submerged into its textual history. This submergence enabled, on the one hand, a Karaite claim to orality, which built on its long-cherished cultural esteem among the Jews (and to a cer-tain extent Arabs), and yet afforded it, on the other hand, a new literate legitimization within the Bible’s historical world and horizon, as the only authentically revealed text. In this manner, the concept of the dual Torah became part of the Bible’s textual history, and Jewish Scripture came to carry the embryonic traces of its far-reaching and distant-looming oral past. The oral could only be sought, therefore, within the Bible itself, and not outside it in the body of interpretations the sages claimed to have inherited from Moses.

The Karaites’ bid was an antiquarian one in this respect, as they sought more and more to situate and Bible and the textual processes behind its formation as a book in some distant antique age. This his-torical distancing had an additional benefit – it re-established the Bible vis-à-vis a much more recent Scripture, the Qurʾan, whose almost con-temporary naissance, a mere two to three hundred years gone by, became its weakest claim to authenticity. In this, the Karaites were seizing upon what they saw as the Achilles heel of the rival Muslim Scripture: not only was it recent, it did not really abrogate the Hebrew Bible because the latter was not the locus of any textual modification by the Jews at any time. Accordingly, in the eyes of the Karaite Jews, the Muslims simply got it wrong when they mixed up Jewish oral Torah with written Torah. They were not the ones to blame: this mix-up was the result of Rabbinic Judaism’s false framing of the oral and written Torahs in the paradoxi-cal construct of the dual Torah as interwoven and inseparably bound-up expressions of divine revelation to Moses.

The Muslims were succeeding in undermining Judaism by their log-ical response to this rabbinic foundational narrative. It hence became the self-imposed task of Karaite Judaism to dismantle this narrative, and clear up the confusion. This could only be done by splitting the dual Torah apart, and so clarifying that the Hebrew Bible in the entirety of



its 24 books was the singular revealed Torah. It was through inversion, rather than direct adoption or emulation of the Islamic arch-models, therefore, that Karaite Judaism re-situated the Hebrew Bible as the only authentic form of divine revelation made to mankind, including Jewish co-re li gionists, Christians, Muslims and other groups alike – all those who had in common the quest for a monotheistic faith and a rationalist fulfillment of God’s commandments and who shared in the new cultural milieu and perceptions engendered by Arabic literacy.

Inversion of \"Written\" and \"Oral\" Torah in Relation to the Islamic Arch-Models of Qur'an and...

Documents

Transcript of Inversion of \"Written\" and \"Oral\" Torah in Relation to the Islamic Arch-Models of Qur'an and...