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14* Bruno Chiesa and Miriam Goldstein

To be sure, the major reason for this relative scholarly neglect of the
Arabic-speaking Karaite communities of the twelfth century and beyond
is due to a tendency among the small group of scholars skilled in Judaeo-
Arabic and within this field specialising in Karaism, to focus primarily
on the richly varied, innovative and plentiful oeuvre of the community
of pre-Crusader Jerusalem. Yet these ‘post-classical’ Arabic-speaking
communities, their history and their compositions merit our interest:
Karaite Judaeo-Arabic works preserved in manuscript collections hint at a
renaissance of scholarship in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries whose
outlines are now only faintly coming into focus. The following article aims
to make an initial contribution to this lacuna by presenting an influential
and canonical fourteenth-century work in Judaeo-Arabic, Yefet ibn Saghir’s
Book of Commandments (Sefer ha-miṣwōt). We will describe and analyse
what Yefet seems to have considered the introduction to his work: the first
five chapters of its first treatise. Following this, we will include a partial
edition and translation of this introductory section.2

Very little is known about this Yefet.3 Common opinion places his
activity in the middle of the fourteenth century, probably in Egypt. His
scanty bibliography largely relates to his supposed authorship of a short
tract on the history of the Karaites: ‫אלכלאם פי אסנאד עדת בני מקרא‬, On the
chain of tradition of the Karaite community, a tract whose authorship is

(Leiden: Brill, 2003). In this very useful anthology, the medieval period
post-1099 is discussed mainly in the section titled ‘Byzantium and Turkey’.
The single article devoted to the Egyptian community in this period,
which must grapple with a period spanning five hundred years, focuses
on historical developments and does not discuss the literary output of the
community (E. Bareket, “Karaite communities in the Middle East during
the tenth to fifteenth centuries,” 237–252).
2 I plan a later publication of further sections of the partial edition and
translation, which have not been included here due to space constraints.
3 His name, provided that it is the same figure, appears as Yefet b. David
b. Shmu’el b. Saghir ha-Rofe’ in a compendium of a commentary on
Ezekiel (St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Y.-A. i.4416, f. 1a; cf.
Y.-A. i.1112).