Page 218 - GQ 12

13*

A 14th-century Karaite view of Jewish history

and philosophy of religion

Bruno Chiesa and Miriam Goldstein

The Karaite community of Jerusalem known as the ‘Mourners of Zion’ was
a flourishing and vibrant centre of scholarship until the Crusader conquest
of 1099. Following the bloody and destructive conquest of the city, the
Jerusalem Karaite community fled to other Karaite centres – mainly in Egypt
and in Byzantium – where they continued their tradition of scholarship,
composing in Judaeo-Arabic in the former community and in Hebrew in the
latter. While the Byzantine Karaite community and its later offshoots in the
Crimea and Eastern Europe have been the subject of numerous studies, the
scholarly output of the Arabic-speaking Karaite communities that continued
to exist following the dispersion of the Jerusalem community has been
largely ignored. The overwhelming majority of the Judaeo-Arabic works of
the twelfth century and beyond have not been published and are accessible
only in manuscript. Scholarly overviews of Karaism typically discuss the
Jerusalem centre of scholarship, and then move directly to discussion of
the Byzantine-Turkish community and from there, to the Eastern European
communities, often concluding with an examination of modern Karaite
communities in Egypt, Israel and the United States.1

* This article originated in a lecture delivered by Bruno Chiesa in Hebrew
on April 10th, 2007 at the Ben-Zvi Institute that he described as ‘[a lecture]
in honor of Haggai Ben-Shammai, a uniquely learned and dear friend’. In
recent years, Bruno Chiesa and I (Miriam Goldstein) had begun to work
on an article and an edition and translation of the text, which I completed
following his untimely passing. I thank Dr. David Sklare and Prof. Haggai
Ben-Shammai, two dear friends of Bruno’s and of mine, as well as an
anonymous reviewer, for their generous advice, comments and corrections
on the article and text.

1 Cf., for example, the most comprehensive source on Karaism to date, M.
Polliack ed., Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources

GQinezdeiem
12 (2016)