The Karaites of Anan ben David
In the days when the Abbasid caliphs had built their new round city of Baghdad, when the rabbis of Sura and Pumbedita ruled the houses of study and the exilarch sat with his courtiers in his palace by the Tigris,…
Biblical Narrative
In the days when the Abbasid caliphs had built their new round city of Baghdad, when the rabbis of Sura and Pumbedita ruled the houses of study and the exilarch sat with his courtiers in his palace by the Tigris, there arose a man who refused them. His name was Anan ben David, and he came of an old and proud Jewish family — a candidate, some said, for the exilarchate itself. When the office passed to a younger brother, Anan retired from the contest and began to teach a Judaism without the Talmud. Search the scriptures well, he is said to have told his disciples, and do not rely on my word.
What he taught was a return — or so he framed it — to the Bible alone. The hundreds of laws the rabbis had drawn from the Mishnah and the Talmud, the calendars they had calculated, the ritual practices they had received as oral tradition: these, said Anan, had no foundation in the written word. The kindling of Sabbath lights, kept by every Rabbanite household, was for him a forbidden fire. The tefillin and the mezuzah were misreadings of metaphor. The very word "oral Torah" was, to him, a Rabbanite invention.
His followers, who came to be called the Karaites — the readers, the scripturalists — spread from Babylon to Persia, to Palestine, to Egypt, and at last to the Crimea and the Caucasus. They built academies of their own; they wrote biblical commentaries that were sometimes deeper than the Rabbanite ones; they fasted longer, prayed differently, calculated the new moon by sighting rather than by reckoning, and would not enter their bedrooms with their shoes on. For three centuries, in some Jewish cities — Jerusalem in the eleventh century, Cairo in the twelfth — they outnumbered their Rabbanite cousins, and the two communities lived in tense and sometimes literary contact.
The great rabbis of the Rabbanite world fought them. Saadia Gaon wrote a refutation of Anan; Maimonides ruled that they should be received back if they returned, but otherwise treated with restraint. The polemic continued for centuries, and the Karaites continued, smaller and smaller. By the modern age the great Karaite communities of Crimea and Lithuania had shrunk to a few thousand; the Egyptian Karaites moved to Israel after 1948 and live there today as a recognized but tiny community. They still pray in their own synagogues; they still read the Bible without the rabbis between them and it; they are still the only living witness to the Judaism that almost was — the Judaism of scripture alone.
Search well in the Torah, and do not rely on my opinion.Anan ben David, attributed (Karaite tradition)
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Karaism (Hebrew: Qara'im, "readers" or "scripturalists") is a Jewish movement that rejects the authority of the Talmud and the rabbinic Oral Torah, holding instead that the Hebrew Bible is the sole source of religious law. Traditionally founded by Anan ben David in Baghdad around 760 CE, the movement crystallized over the eighth and ninth centuries from a confluence of currents — including remnants of older Second Temple-period sectarian groups, anti-Talmudic Persian Jewish movements, and Anan's own programmatic Sefer ha-Mitzvot (Book of Commandments). The standard surveys are Daniel J. Lasker's Karaism: An Introduction (Liverpool 2022) and the multi-volume Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources (ed. Polliack, Brill 2003).
Anan's actual teaching is preserved only in fragments — chiefly in citations by his Rabbanite opponents (Saadia Gaon's Refutation of Anan) and in the reconstructed Sefer ha-Mitzvot edited from Cairo Geniza fragments by Albert Harkavy (St. Petersburg 1903). Modern scholarship distinguishes "Ananism" from later Karaism: Anan was an idiosyncratic legal innovator; the Karaite movement that bears his name developed a more rigorous scripturalism, codified by ninth- and tenth-century figures including Daniel al-Qumisi, Benjamin al-Nahawandi, and the great Jerusalem Karaite scholars Ya'qub al-Qirqisani and Yefet ben Ali.
The Karaite golden age was the late tenth and eleventh centuries, centered in Jerusalem, where the "Mourners of Zion" (Avelei Zion) — Karaite ascetics who wept for the destroyed Temple — produced biblical commentaries of striking philological sophistication. Yefet ben Ali (d. c. 1005) wrote Judeo-Arabic commentaries on the entire Tanakh that anticipate techniques of medieval Andalusi Rabbanite exegesis. The Karaite community of Jerusalem was destroyed by the First Crusade in 1099; survivors fled to Egypt, where the Cairo Karaite community persisted alongside the Rabbanites under the Fatimids.
The Firkovich Collection (St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia), assembled by the nineteenth-century Crimean Karaite scholar Abraham Firkovich, contains the largest body of Karaite manuscripts in the world — though some entries were notoriously falsified by Firkovich to support a separate ethnic identity for Crimean Karaites that distanced them from European Jewry (a maneuver that, ironically, saved most of them from the Holocaust when Nazi authorities accepted the racial argument). The largest contemporary Karaite community is in Israel — the Mo'etzet HaYahadut HaQara'it numbers some 30,000-50,000, mostly Egyptian-origin — with smaller communities in the United States and Turkey. Crimean and Lithuanian Karaite (Qaraylar) populations have nearly vanished after the twentieth century.
Karaism is the great might-have-been of medieval Judaism — the road not taken when the rabbinic synthesis prevailed.Adapted from Daniel J. Lasker, Karaism: An Introduction