Page 209 - GQ 12

22* Bruno Chiesa and Miriam Goldstein

down of the Oral Torah should actually have occurred during the first exile
by the Assyrians.

Two of Yefet’s polemical arguments seem to derive from principles
familiar in the Arabic-Islamic milieu regarding the transmission of tradition,
for example that the Mishna is suspect because it was recorded by a single
individual. This would make the traditions fall into the category of what,
in Muslim legal theory, is called khabar al-wāḥid and is unacceptable in
establishing law. He also states that the supposed Oral Torah, unlike the
Written Torah, is not stated to have been transmitted on the authority of
qahal (lit. ‘congregation’). By the term qahal, Yefet means transmission
by a large group of people, which, due to its size, makes the possibility of
collusion or lying on the part of the numerous transmitters impossible.22
Yefet also presents one argument based on the premise that writing is the
best strategy for accurate preservation, rather than oral transmission, and
thus it is unreasonable to claim that any tradition would have been explicitly
commanded to be transmitted in oral form.

Yefet’s final statement explaining the origin of the purported Oral Torah
includes a daring assertion of the support of no less an authority than the
twelfth-century Andalusian Rabbanite Maimonides, an avowed fighter
against Karaism, via a quotation from his Introduction to the Mishneh
Torah. Yefet sets out the Karaite view of the Talmud as a whole, explaining
that according to Karaite belief, the sages quoted in the Talmud were simply
using their ‘knowledge and powers of discernment and deduction’ in order
to overcome the differences of opinion that had developed among the
Jewish people as well as the ‘absence of prophets and teachers’. In this way
the sages created a Talmud based on human endeavor, not a revelation from
God. Following his own explanation, Yefet cites Maimonides himself as an
additional support for this classically Karaite thesis – albeit anonymously
and prefaced only with the usual ‘as it is said’ (ka-mā qīla):23

22 On the concepts of tawātur (uninterrupted transmission) and tawāṭuʾ
(collusion) in Islamic legal theory, see A. Zysow, “The Economy of
Certainty: An Introduction to the Typology of Islamic Legal Theory”
(Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1984), 14–19.

23 On the Karaite adoption of Maimonidean doctrines beginning in at least