Page 205 - GQ 12

26* Bruno Chiesa and Miriam Goldstein

generally scant attestation of the Kuzarī in later sources.33 In at least one
case Yefet’s text offers a text better than any other Arabic testimonies, in
the additional description regarding the Sadducees and Boethusians that
‘they are but dissenters who behave as unbelievers and deny the afterlife’.34

Yefet concludes his lengthy introduction with a reconstruction of the
history of Karaism, in which he presents a historiography that differs from
what is presented by al-Qirqisānī in the first book of Kitāb al-anwār. The
chain of tradition and the Jewish maḏhab were single and unified until the
time of Hillel and Shammai: ‘Each individual was writing down, according
to his ability, parts of the explanation of the Torah and of its laws that he had
heard from his teachers’.35 Dissent arose at the time of Hillel and Shammai
due to the fact that some transmitters of tradition turned to the ‘heavenly
voice’ (bat qol) in order to provide support for their claims.36 Following
that time, the tradition split: The Karaites adopted the point of view of the
school of Shammai, which was a unified and uncontested view, while the
adherents of the Mishnah (benei mishnah) took the path of Hillel’s school
with its deep internal contradictions and differences of opinion.

The first five chapters of Yefet ibn Saghir’s Book of Commandments
establish a succinct quasi-historical and utterly polemical narrative
regarding Karaite Judaism, its origins and its relationship to its Rabbanite
rivals as well as to neighboring religions. Yefet’s narrative diverges from
that of earlier Karaite sources, and further examination of the composition
as a whole and its author’s positions on theology and law will reveal the
extent to which fourteenth-century Karaites were establishing a new path
for their movement in the Arabic-speaking world.

Z. Ankori to the 1966 Karaite reprint of Bashyatzi’s Aderet Eliyahu (Ramle:
‘Adat ha-Yehudim ha-Qara’im be-Yisrael, 1966), 12.
33 Yefet’s work adds to the short list noted in D.H. Baneth and H. Ben-
Shammai, Kitāb al-radd wa-’l-dalīl f ī ̇’l-dīn al-dhalīl by Judah ha-Levi
(Jerusalem: Magnes, 1977), viii–ix/ ‫יא‬-‫י‬.
34 ‫פלם יכונו אלא ̇כוארג מתזנדקון מנכרון ללא ̇כר ̈ה‬
35 Yefet repeats the same passage from Maimonides’ Introduction to the
Mishneh Torah that he cited above.
36 See bEruvin 13b; cf. S. Cook, On the Question of “The Cessation of
Prophecy” in Ancient Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 159–164.