Sacred Trash (24 page)

Al-Kirkisani is of particular interest here because his writings contain a self-conscious history of, as he puts it, “dissension in the Jewish religion,” which of course sounds like an entertaining if also vaguely tautological prospect. His long list of sectarians and heretics traces division to the heart of the notion of Israel, at least as a political entity, and it runs from the biblical Jeroboam (who led ten of the twelve tribes in revolt against Solomon’s son Rehoboam, resulting in the split kingdom that lasted for more than two hundred years) to the aristocratic and priestly Second Temple Sadducees (who, in sharp distinction to the far more popular and populist Pharisees, rejected the authority of the oral tradition of the day, and differed with their rivals on numerous central points of doctrine, including belief in angels and the immortality of the soul). Post–Old Testament factions on al-Kirkisani’s list of Jewish dissenters include the disciples of Yeshua (Jesus); the rival rabbinical schools of Hillel and Shammai; the Persian and then Damascene Isunians (who saw their founder, Abu Isa al-Isfahani, as the final harbinger of the Messiah); the Yudghanites (who sought to abolish the Sabbath altogether); and the followers of Anan, who was now viewed by Karaites, revisionistically, as the founder of their movement. Al-Kirkisani’s schismatic survey, which concludes with Anan’s successors, is our clearest if
still quite distant echo of the Palestinian Talmud’s noting that Second Temple Judaism consisted of no less than twenty-four different sects—the existence of which, it says, drove Israel into exile. A late-eleventh-century anti-Rabbanite tract reports that Judaism once comprised fourteen “religions” (or “paths”), but only four had survived into the writer’s day: the Rabbanites, the Karaites, and two others, of which the Geniza has left us no trace.

While it’s both difficult and risky to generalize about Karaite doctrine—since so much work remains in manuscript, and since the movement at root defines itself by the need for constant internal reform (al-Kirkisani wrote that “hardly two Karaites can be found who agree on everything,” thereby providing historical precedent for a long line of jokes on the theme of “two Jews, three opinions”)—broadly speaking, Karaism as reflected in the work of these thinkers might be summed up as follows: The Karaites saw their seemingly heretical version of the faith as the true and original Judaism, and they rejected the exclusive authority of the Talmud and its rabbis. Moreover, they refused to recognize the authority of
any
permanent religious leader (let alone a Rabbanite-appointed Gaon), and many of them embraced Jerusalem as the center of their faith’s attention, mourning in sackcloth the Temple’s destruction. On the intellectual plane they placed an emphasis on written rather than oral transmission, this too as a way of distinguishing themselves from the rabbinic tradition. Concomitantly, they encouraged the close study not only of scripture, but of the Hebrew language itself—taking great pains to ensure the accurate codification of the scriptural text. Ironically, in their attempt to return to a pure, unadulterated Judaism, the Karaites ended up—in ways they could not have anticipated—introducing the contemporary Arabic intellectual and religious Zeitgeist into the bloodstream of Hebraic culture, as they drew both the inspiration and technique for this linguistic inquiry from the Islamic context in which they lived.

Nowhere is that irony more pronounced than in the association
between the “marginal” Karaites and the Masoretes—the eighth- and ninth-century Tiberian scholars who standardized the biblical text, and whose name (from the root “to pass on”) suggests authoritative transmission of a tradition. Both groups were known as
ba’alei mikra,
masters of scripture, and speculation that their circles were related is borne out by the fact that numerous Masoretic manuscripts have been preserved by Karaite communities to whom these particular works were dedicated. In all likelihood the latter movement evolved out of the former. One curious by-product of this unlikely pairing is the Karaite practice of transliterating the Hebrew Bible
in Arabic characters
and “outfitting” them with the traditional Hebrew signs for the vowels above and below the letters. The Cairo Geniza held several mutant hybrids of this sort. We still don’t know just why these Arabic-Hebrew Bibles were made. Some scholars have argued that it was out of the Karaites’ desire to distinguish themselves at some point from the Masoretes (though this doesn’t quite jibe with the evidence of their ongoing association); others have suggested that it was an expression of the radical and even experimental impulse at the heart of the Karaite movement. What we do know, or believe, is that it appears that these “Karabic” Bibles, as we might call them, were part of the Karaites’ effort to preserve the original Tiberian reading and correct pronunciation of the text, which the living tradition of spoken Arabic may have been able to indicate more precisely.

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Photo Credit 8.1
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A similar reverence and desire for the authentic lay behind the intensified
study of grammar among the Karaites, who believed that immersion in the intricacies and subtleties of biblical language would bring the reader closer to scripture’s meaning. God in this scenario was quite literally, and absolutely, in the details, and numerous Karaite works were therefore devoted to the study of scripture’s linguistic DNA—the nature and origins of language, the formation and precise definition of words, the structure of sentences, and so on. In the process, these Karaite scholars set the standard for future medieval biblical commentary—“shaming,” as it were, the rabbinic leadership into matching the intensity and manner of their engagement with Hebrew and its most important literary product. In this and so many other ways, on the broader cultural level Karaism acted as what Jacob Mann called “a leavening agent” and what later scholars—having much more evidence to go on—have come to think of as a central if stealth ingredient in the renaissance and virtual re-creation of Hebrew culture that swept across the Jewish world from Baghdad to Cairo to Cordoba and Granada between the tenth and twelfth centuries.

Back in the land of practice, distinctive Karaite religious rituals included—in addition to allowing the consumption of milk with meat, and forbidding the use of any light or heat on the Sabbath (and all expressions of joy in its arrival)—the refusal to observe postbiblical Jewish holidays such as Hanukka; the eschewal of the use of phylacteries and mezuzot; the rejection of rabbinic texts of any sort for use in the prayer book (which consisted solely of biblical passages, largely Psalms); and the forbidding of sexual intercourse on the Sabbath. The Karaites understood the latter to be “labor” while for the Rabbanites it was part of the day’s pleasure. In addition, the spilling of sperm was seen to cause impurity and to go against the biblical injunction of Exodus 34:21, “Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest in plowing and in harvesting”!

One other seemingly innocuous but in fact nearly catastrophic difference between the Rabbanite and Karaite schools involved their contrasting
methods of calendrical computation. While each party at times made use of the other’s technique, the divergent methods resulted in the Karaites and Rabbanites employing distinct religious schedules, so that, for example, the two communities observed Yom Kippur and all the major festivals on different days. This made for serious awkwardness, especially in a place like Fustat, where the Karaite synagogue was within shouting distance of the Babylonian and Palestinian Rabbanite synagogues, and where many members of all three communities lived and worked in close proximity and sometimes owned businesses together. The Geniza makes clear that this situation and others like it led early on—especially in Iraq and Palestine—to mutual recrimination and, on occasion, to physical confrontation and attempts at excommunication. Recent scholarship, though, has demonstrated how, over time, and despite the more forceful attempts by Rabbanite leaders to draw a sharp and exclusionary line between normative Judaism and Karaism, the two communities evolved side by side, particularly in Egypt and later in Palestine, and they saw each other as part of a single religious body—the Jewish nation.

G
iven the “heretical” content and context of the two manuscripts that Schechter discovered, it becomes easier to see how it is that an esoteric Second Temple text and Anan’s
Book of Commandments
might have wound up together in the same geniza. But their presence on the “battlefield of books” of
the
Geniza of the
Rabbanite
Ben Ezra synagogue is still something of a mystery.

Various explanations have been offered. One suggests that both these documents were considered “harmful” by Rabbanite Jews and so were taken out of circulation to prevent them from doing any more damage. Another scenario envisions these fragments coming from a different Cairo geniza—perhaps even the one attached to the Karaite synagogue, which the Russian Karaite collector Avraham Firkovitch had mined for
manuscripts. A third line of reasoning proposes that the Zadokite fragment’s sectarianism, along with its rejection of Pharisaic rabbinism, would have been of interest to the Egyptian-Palestinian Karaite community, but that, in the course of their normal and highly fluid social exchange with the Egyptian Rabbanites, documents moved freely and frequently between the communities and must have landed, if only by chance, in Rabbanite hands. This explanation sits well with one scholar’s conclusion that, while early sectarian groups vanished from the script of history after the destruction of the Second Temple, “some of their traditions remained in circulation long enough to influence the Karaites and … some of the texts found at Qumran circulated in different versions among the Jews of the early middle ages.” And, finally, a fourth and related possibility seems to be borne out by evidence that has emerged only in recent years and in large part from the Geniza; namely, that the Fustat Jewish community was simply far more flexible (and perhaps fickle) than we’d realized, and that there may have been serious interest in both of these “sectarian” works even within this mainstream Rabbanite context.

On a less esoteric plane, one sees that flexibility and the interaction between the different Jewish communities embodied in correspondence from the Geniza, such as when the scribe of the Palestinian yeshiva writes from Ramla to a distinguished Palestinian Rabbanite colleague in Egypt—a religious judge in Fustat—warning him about complaints that had reached the academy in Palestine that the latter’s overbearing manner has been alienating his Egyptian synagogue congregation: “Because of you and your son-in-law many people have switched over to the other synagogue [the Babylonian Rabbanite synagogue in Fustat] and to the Karaite congregations.” In other words, congregational affiliation was highly fluid and driven by social as much as by ideological concerns. And several
ketubot,
or marriage contracts, demonstrate the degree to which—certainly in tenth-to-twelfth-century Egypt—the two movements saw themselves as denominations of a single faith,
fully aware of each other’s beliefs and practices and by no means always threatened by them.

Drawn up in a Karaite court and signed in August 1117, one of these
ketubot
commemorates in Hebrew the union of a Rabbanite doctor named Yahya ben Avraham and an extremely well-off Karaite woman named Rayyisa bat Saadia. The document is decorated in unusually elaborate fashion—with biblical verses winding through the margins in a gold-and-blue-flecked lattice-like weave of miniature script—and it makes clear that, not only was this Rayyisa’s third marriage, but
it was the second time she was marrying Yahya.
Their first marriage had ended in divorce and now they were trying again:

[in the mo]nth of Elul [August], of the year one thousand four hundred and twenty eight … of the era of the Greeks, in Zoan [Fustat] which is on the Nile.… I [Yahya] declare before you an absolute, firm, and abiding declaration, being neither coerced, mistaken, in error, deceived, drunk, nor under duress, but [acting in accordance with my will and my wish and with full resolve, that I have returned to] my wife, the glorious and precious Rayyisa.… According to the law of Moses, the man of God, peace be upon him, and in accordance with the custom of Israel.… [I shall dress, clothe and] support her, and see to all her legitimate needs and desires to the best of my ability and strength, and I shall be with her in truth, justice, love, compassion, [honesty, and faithfulness. And I shall not diminish her] rights: raiment, sustenance, and sexual intercourse in the manner of the children of Israel who feed, support, and clothe their pure wives and fulfill all that is due them in faithfulness.

All this is fairly standard, including the promise of connubial satisfaction. The
ketuba
goes on to specify the particular payments exchanged and to give the shimmering details of the bride’s trousseau (bracelets, rings, amber, a silver jewelry box, a deep bowl with a cover and spoon, a
large and colorful wardrobe—mostly silk, wool, and linen—cushions, furniture, dishes, and utensils), then segues into the more delicate question of religious difference and tolerance: