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A 14th-century Karaite view of Jewish history and philosophy of religion 21*

recorded (kataba) everything and called it Torah’. Yefet then provides, in
contrast, a lengthy polemic against the existence of a second Torah that was
transmitted orally, and presents twelve arguments against the Rabbanite
position. Yefet’s arguments can be characterised as a variety of types.

A number of his arguments are based on a close reading of the Bible: the
Bible commands us to make legal decisions on the basis of ‘the Torah that
[thy fathers] will teach thee’, that is, on the basis of rational investigation,
not on the basis of ‘what they heard from their fathers’, that is, transmitted
oral tradition; the Bible discusses ‘Torahs’ that are explicitly described
as ‘written’ in numerous locations, and thus Torah by definition must be
written, not transmitted orally.

Other arguments are polemics that focus on the chronology and nature
of the rabbinic tradition: the Mishna and Talmud are not asserted to be the
record of a prophet nor were they even written during the time of a prophet,
but rather were written ‘many many years after the cessation of prophecy,
approximately 130 years later’;21 furthermore, they include contradictory
statements, and as such clearly cannot be the product of prophetic inspiration.

Yefet employs rabbinic statements to attack the Rabbanite position
on Oral Torah: one polemic is apparently based on the statement in Temura
15b and 16a that laws were forgotten during the period of mourning for
Moses – these laws were intended to be decisive evidence (ḥuǧǧah), and
decisive evidence, he argues, cannot be subject to forgetting, since this
would annul it. In another argument, he asserts that the actual timing of
the recording of the Talmud in writing does not accord with the Rabbanite
claim that Moses commanded them to transmit the Oral Torah orally only
until the time of ‘the Exile’. If that were the case, he argues, the writing

21 The same date is given by Sa‘adya in his polemical work against Ibn
Sāqawaih: H. Hirschfeld, “The Arabic Portion of the Cairo Genizah
at Cambridge (Third Article): Saadyah Fragments,” Jewish Quarterly
Review OS 16 (1903): 108, l. 4 from bottom; cf. S. Poznanski, “The Karaite
Literary Opponents of Saadiah Gaon in the Tenth Century,” Jewish
Quarterly Review OS 18 (1906): 249 (the St. Petersburg ms referred to is
no doubt Y.-A. 1.317, which seems to have been one of Yefet’s direct or
indirect sources).