Karaites real and imagined: Three cases of Jewish heresy

Past and Present

Volumn 197, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 35-74

  Rustow, Marina ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 37249051843     PISSN: 00312746     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtm041     Document Type: Article

References (148)

1. The source sometimes offered for this claim is Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem (Berlin, 1783), which argues that the Mosaic revelation commanded actions but not doctrines. But this was a philosophical claim that belief cannot be commanded since it falls under the rubric of natural religion, not a historical description of Judaism as a religion of praxis only. Mendelssohn also famously opposed the use of excommunication as part of his argument for restricting religion's exercise of certain types of legal authority and granting them to the state instead, and because in his view it ran contrary to the spirit of religion to exclude anyone from its midst (as he put it, 'To expel a dissident from a church is like forbidding a sick person from entering a pharmacy'). The rabbinic use of excommunication for heresy, then, would have been doubly inimical to Mendelssohn's programme, but he would not have denied that such a thing had occurred. For the argument, see his preface to the German translation of Manasseh ben Israel's Vindiciae Judaeorum (originally published in 1656, the same year Spinoza was excommunicated; see below), Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften: Jubiläumsausgabe, viii, ed. Alexander Altmann (Stuttgart, 1983), 3-25
2. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or, On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, 1983), 100-2, 74
3. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia, 1973), 463-74.
4. Livro dos Acordos de Nação e Ascamot, Municipal Archives of Amsterdam, PA 334/19, 408, cited and translated by Asa Kasher and Shlomo Biderman,'Why Was Baruch de Spinoza Excommunicated?', in David S. Katz and Jonathan I. Israel (eds.), Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews (Leiden and New York, 1990), 98-9.
5. On whether Spinoza's 'abominable heresies and monstrous deeds' were infringements of behaviour, see ibid., 115 n. 53
6. Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden, 2000), 108 n. 1
7. Steven Nadler, Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford, 2001).
8. Judaism and Islam are usually taken to be nomothetic religions in mistaken contra-distinction to Christianity, but this is to compare unlike things, the former's regulation of belief with the latter's of practice. See Devin J. Stewart, Islamic Legal Orthodoxy: Twelver Shiite Responses to the Sunni Legal System (Salt Lake City, 1998), 45
9. Mark Gregory Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of1245-1246 (Princeton, 2001), 45-6.
10. Text in Jacob Mann, "The Responsa of the Babylonian Geonim as a Source of Jewish History', Jewish Quart. Rev., new set., x (1919 , 355 n. 276
11. cf. Teshuvot Rav Natronay bar Hilay Gaon [Responsa of Rav Natronay bar Hilay Gaon], ed. Yerahmiel (Robert) Brody (Jerusalem, 1994), 257-9
12. Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven and London, 1998), 96.
13. For a similar instance of gaonic vehemence probably occasioned by anti-scripturalist sensitivity, see the responsum that Natronay's successor in the gaonate of Sura, Nahshon ben Isaac (865-73), sent to the Jewish community of Qayrawān in North Africa alerting them to the finer points of prohibited types of object-carrying on the Sabbath: quoted and discussed in Menahem Ben-Sasson, Semihat ha-qehilla ha-yehudit be-arsot ha-Islam: Qayrawan, 800-1057 [The Emergence of the Local Jewish Community in the Muslim World: Qayrawan, 800-1057], 2nd, revised edn (Jerusalem, 1997), 43-4.
14. On whether doctrine was genuinely at issue when the caliph al-Ma'mūn instituted the inquisition or whether it merely served as a convenient excuse for him to exercise political authority over various factions in his realm, see Michael Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophets in the Age of al-Ma'mūn (Cambridge, 2000), 33-40.
15. For a summary of inquisition-related events and a bibliography, see Encyclopaedia of Islam, new edn (Leiden, 1960-2004), s.v. 'Mihna' (Martin Hinds).
16. M. M. Kasher, Hagadah Shelemah [The Complete Passover Hagadah], 3rd edn (Jerusalem, 1967), 27-8
17. Teshuvot Rav Natronay bar Hilay Gaon, ed. Brody, 258 n. 10.
18. On Iraqi geonim and their struggles for dominance over other Jewish centres, see Brody, Geonim of Babylonia, 100-22.
19. On the distinction between Karaism and Ananism and a discussion of Natronay's responsum in light of it, see Haggai Ben-Shammai, 'The Karaite Controversy: Scripture and Tradition in Early Karaism', in Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niewöhner (eds.), Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter (Wiesbaden, 1992), 17-20,
20. Haggai Ben-Shammai, 'Between Ananites and Karaites: Observations on Early Medieval Jewish Sectarianism', in Ronald L. Nettler (ed.), Studies in Muslim-Jewish Relations, i (Chur, 1993), 20.
21. See, for example, Mishnah, Avot, 1, and Babylonian Talmud, Menahot, 29b - a passage that is ambivalent in its simultaneous denial and admission of change, a point made by Gershom Scholem, 'Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism', in his The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York, 1971), 283.
22. On this question, see most recently Haym Soloveitchik, 'Halakhah, Hermencutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz', Jewish Quart. Rev. xciv (2004).
23. In medieval sources in Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic, rabbinic Jews are known in contradistinction to the Karaites as 'Rabbanites' (rabb∇aniyy∇un), a usage that is standard in modern historiography. The Hebrew equivalent of the term, rabbanim, can refer to rabbis, their followers or both. Both Rabbanite and Karaite religious authorities have always considered the Karaites to be Jewish, with one exception: The Karaites of the Russian empire, who seceded from the Jewish minority. See Philip Miller, Karaite Separatism in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Joseph Solomon Lutski's Epistle of Israel's Deliverance (Cincinnati, 1993)
24. Philip Miller, 'The Karaites of Czarist Russia, 1780-1918', in Meira Polliack (ed.), Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources (Leiden and Boston, 2003).
25. On the Geniza's discovery and its documentary sources (about 15,000 of the total), see S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley, 1967-93), i, 1-28.
26. Eleventh-century letters by and about Andalusians are relatively rare in the Geniza; twelfth-century ones are more abundant. See Simha Assaf, Meqorot u-mehqarim [Texts and Studies], i (Jerusalem, 1946), 100-14
27. Eliyahu Ashtor, 'Documentos españoles de la Genizah', Sefarad, xxiv (1964); Encyclopaedia of Islam, new edn, s.v. 'Geniza' (S. D. Goitem)
28. Moshe Gil and Ezra Fleischer, Yehuda ha-Levi u-veney hugo: 55 te'udot min ha-geniza [Judah Halevi and his Circle: Fifty-Five Geniza Documents] (Jerusalem, 2001).
29. r, in Judaco-Arabic, 11. 22 3: First edition in Moshe Gil, Eres Yisra'el ba-tequfah ha-muslemit ha-rishonah, 634-1099 [Palestine during the First Muslim Period, 634-1099], 3 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1983),ii,doc. 205.
30. See also the updated English translation of vol. i, Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634-1099, trans. Ethel Broido (Cambridge, 1993), 9§36, and Goitein, Mediterranean Society, ii, 555 n. 44.
31. Yehuda b. Barzillay al-Bargeloni, Sefer ha-'Ittim [Book of Festivals], ed. J. Schorr (Kraków, 1903), 267.
32. Among Iberian authors, minut was the epithet of choice for Karaism; for further references, see A Critical Edition with a Translation and Notes of The Book of Tradition (Sefer ha-qabbalah), ed. Gerson D. Cohen (Philadelphia, 1967), p. xxxviii n. 110, and Gil and Fleischer, Yehuda ha-Levi u-veney hugo, 183 n. 46. In citing manuscript material, I have enclosed in square brackets additions for the sake of clarity rather than reconstructions of lacunae.
33. For details, see Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate, Cornell Univ. Press, forthcoming, ch. 8.
34. Letter of Saul and Simon ben Saul ben Israel al-Tulaytul∇i, Jerusalem, to Ball∇uta bat Saul, Toledo, in Judaeo-Arabic, Heshvan 4418 (Oct. 1057): T S 13 J 9, fo. 4; first edition in Assaf, Meqorot u-mehqarim i, 108-10; second edition, with substantial corrections to Assaf's version but also some new errors, in Gil, Eres Yisra'el, iii, doc. 457. Although the letter's return address contains the names of both the father and the son, the letter is signed by the son only, and as he explains in the letter, his father has been almost completely incapacitated by age.
35. r, 11. 29-30: 'wasal∇a il∇a al-quds min bil∇ad al-r∇um ba'd mih∇an jarrat 'alayhim'.
36. v, 11. 3-8.
37. Leon Nemoy popularized the view that Yeshua' abrogated the rikkuv laws because they had rendered Karaite endogamy increasingly difficult and threatened the survival of the community. In fact, as Nemoy knew, Karaites did not hesitate to marry Rabbanites. Could the concern have been the more immediate one of Karaites using the rikkuv laws against other Karaites and thereby driving their poor victims straight into the arms of the Rabbanites? See Encyclopaedia of Islam, new edn, s.v. 'Karaites' (Leon Nemoy)
38. Leon Nemoy, Karaite Anthology (New Haven, 1952), 124-5 (where he assumes that Karaites lived in 'small communities, each more or less self-sufficient and comparatively limited in contact with the others', notions contradicted by documents fromthe Geniza)
39. cf. Leon Nemoy,'Two Controversial Points in the Karaite Law of Incest', Hebrew Union College Ann., xlix (1978), esp. 248.
40. Shii sources from the period refer to themselves and the Sunnis as madhhabs. See Stewart, Islamic Legal Orthodoxy, passim; Ismail K. Poonawala, 'Al-Qādī al-Nu'mān and Isma'ili Jurisprudence', in Farhad Daftary (ed.), Medieval Isma'ili History and Thought (Cambridge, 1996)
41. Paul E. Walker, 'An Isma'ili Version of the Heresiography of the Seventy-Two Erring Sects', ibid.
42. On the appointment of Jewish courtiers with experience in administration under Iberian Muslim rulers to office under Christian ones, see Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd edn, 18 vols. (New York, 1952-83), iv, 36-43.
43. Abraham ibn Dāwūd, Sefer ha-Qabbala, in Book of Tradition ed. Cohen, 69 (Hebrew), 95 (English trans., which I have altered slightly).
44. For other examples, see the following letters and petitions, all from c.1030: T-S 13J 19, fo. 16, and T-S 13J 16, fo. 15; T-S 13J7, fo. 29
45. Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York (hereafter JTS), Elkan Nathan Adler Collection, 4020.65.
46. He uses it in calling the eleventh-century Karaite exegete Abū l-Faraj Hārūn b. al-Faraj 'the elder Abu l-Faraj the Jerusalemite, may he rest in peace, a defector from our school oflaw' ('al-shaykh Abu l-Faraj al-maqdisī, rahamah allāh, al-khārijī'an madhhabinā'). Moses ibn Ezra, Kitāb al-muhādara wa-l-mudhākara [The Book of Discussion and Conversation, c. 1138]: Liber discussionis et commemorationis: Poetica Hebraica, ed. A. S. Halkin (Jerusalem, 1975), 246.
47. Tamer el-Leithy and I are currently preparing a critical edition of the tale. The manuscripts I cite below are JTS, MS 3328 and British Library, London (hereafter BL), MS Or. 2538. Hartwig Hirschfeld published a partial translation of the London manuscript in 'A Karaite Conversion Story', in Jews' College Jubilee Volume (London, 1906),
48. William Brinner summarizes the story on the basis of a manuscript at the Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California, in 'A Fifteenth-Century Karaite-Rabbanite Dispute in Cairo', in Hava Lazarus-Yafeh et al. (eds.), The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam (Wiesbaden, 1999).
49. See also Fred Astren, 'History, Historicization, and Historical Claims in Karaite Jewish Literature' (Univ. of California at Berkeley Ph.D. thesis, 1993), appendix
50. the brief notice in Marina Rustow, Sharon Liberman Mintz and Elka Deitsch, Scripture and Schism: Samaritan and Karaite Treasures from the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary Library (New York, 2000), 90-1 (I was unaware of Brinner's article when I wrote the entry). The extant copies of the text all date from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, and its circulation should be seen as reflecting the concerns of the period when links were more widely presumed between conversos and Karaism of one sort or another (see Section IV below).
51. Tamer el-Leithy, 'Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo, 1293-1524 AD' (Princeton Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2005), with full references to previous scholarship.
52. Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, trans. Louis Schoffman, 2 vols. (1959 (Hebrew); Philadelphia, 1961), ii, 95-138, 277-83; and see n. 28 below.
53. On fifteenth-century conversos returning to Judaism in Egypt, see Eleazer Gutwirth, 'Sephardi Culture of the "Cairo Geniza People" (Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)', Michael, xiv (1997), 12-17.
54. The Mamluk dragoman Taghrī Bardī was evidently a converso (who probably converted to Islam in order to assume his post at court): Meshullam ben Menahem of Volterra, Masa' Meshullam mi-Volterra be-Eres Yisra'el bi-shenat 241 (1481) [The Voyage of Meshullam of Volterra to the Land of Israel in the Year [5]241 (1481)], ed. Abraham Ya'ari (Jerusalem, 1948), 53
55. English trans. in Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages: 19 Firsthand Accounts, ed. Elkan Nathan Adler (London, 1930), 166-7.
56. See also John Wansbrough, 'A Manslūk Ambassador to Venice in 913/ 1507', Bull. School of Oriental and African Studies, xxvi (1963).
57. On fifteenth-century conversos and racializing discrimination, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models (Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, xxvi, New York, 1982)
58. David Nirenberg, 'Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain', Past and Present, no. 174 (Feb. 2002)
59. David Nirenberg, 'Enmity and Assimilation: Jews, Christians, and Converts in Medieval Spain', Common Knowledge, ix (2003).
60. On fifteenth-century Copts, see el-Leithy, 'Coptic Culture and Conversion', 242-7, 457-79.
61. El-Leithy himself draws the comparison between his argument and Nirenberg's: ibid., 267 n. 59.
62. r-v.
63. Uriel da Costa, Propostas contra a tradição (1616), in Die Schriften des Uriel da Costa, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Amsterdam, 1922)
64. Uriel da Costa, Exame das tradições phariseas (1623),
65. see Examination of Pharisaic Traditions = Examedas tradições phariseas: Facsimile of the Unique Copy in the Royal Library of Copenhagen, trans. with notes and intro. H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon (Leiden, 1993).
66. Schriften des Uriel da Costa, ed. Gebhardt,p. xix, cited in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso. A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York, 1971), 297 n. 232.
67. Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 298-9.
68. e siècle', in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Sefardica: essais sur l'histoire des Juifs, des marranes et des nouveaux-chrétiens d'origine hispano-portugaise (Paris, 1998)
69. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, 'Professing Jews in Post-Expulsion Spain and Portugal', in Saul Lieberman (ed.), Salo Wittmayer Baron: Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1974), ii.
70. On fifteenth-century Iberian polemic against rabbinic Judaism, see Moshe Lazar, 'Anti-Jewish and Anti-Converso Propaganda: Confutatio libri Talmud and Alboraique', in Moshe Lazar and Stephen Haliczer (eds.), The Jews of Spain and the Expulsion of 1492 (Lancaster, Calif., 1997)
71. Nirenberg, 'Enmity and Assimilation'.
72. r.
73. Mark R. Cohen, 'Jews in the Mamlük Environment: The Crisis of 1442 (a Geniza Study)', Bull. School of Oriental and African Studies, xlvii (1984), citing (p. 444) the chronicle of Abū Muhammad Mahmud b. Ahmad al-'Aynī, d. 145 1, now ed. M. M. Amīn (Cairo, 1987 , and (pp. 431 4, with exhaustive analysis) T-S AS 150, fo. 3, a petition of 1442 from the Jewish community to the Mamluk sultan Jaqmaq, preserved in a Judaeo-Arabic draft in the Geniza.
74. On the Mamluk state's close supervision of dhimmī houses of worship during this period, see also the Arabic legal document of 1456 preserved in the archives of the Karaite synagogue in Cairo (numbered D 20 according to the photographs held by the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem), in Richard J. H. Gottheil, 'Dhimmis and Moslems in Egypt', in Robert Francis Harper, Francis Brown and George Foot Moore (eds.), Old Testament and Semitic Studies in Memory of William Rainey Harper, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1908), ii
75. D. S. Richards, 'Arabic Documents from the Karaite Community in Cairo', Jl Econ. and Social Hist. of the Orient, xv (1972), 120-1 (no. ix).
76. El-Leithy, 'Coptic Culture and Conversion', passim.
77. Ibid., 87 nn. 51-2 and 417-22 (with reference to this case).
78. v.
79. 'Dangerous': Brinner, 'Fifteenth-Century Karaite Rabbanite Dispute', 185. 'Implausible': Hirschfeld, 'Karaite Conversion Story', 83-4.
80. r: 'wa-in takhallaf fi l-'aqīda bi-hayth kull tā'ifa tukaffir alukhra, fa-man intaqal lā intaqal illā lil-islām'.
81. Yosef Kaplan first published the text ofthe ban's preface along with an exhaustive analysis of the affair in the light of the proliferation of bans of excommunication in the fledgling Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, and he recently revisited the case on the basis of discoveries made since he first wrote about it: Yosef Kaplan, '"Karaites" in Early Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam', in Katz and Israel (eds.), Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews, revised in Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, incorporating in part the findings of Jan Wim Wesselius, 'Spinoza's Excommunication and Related Matters', Studia Rosenthaliana, xxiv (1990), 50-63.
82. See also Yosef Kaplan, The Social Functions of the herem in the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century', in Jozeph Michman and Tirtsah Levie (eds.), Dutch Jewish History: Proceedings of the Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands(Jerusalem, 1984), revised in Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 108-39.
83. English trans. adapted from Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 238-9
84. Portuguese original ibid., 278-9, from the Libro de ascamoth B, Municipal Archives of Amsterdam, PA 334/20, 572.
85. '... siguem a secta dos Karraim, obrando como tais, c negando inteiram[en]te a tradição da ley mental'.
86. Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 108-39, 234-79.
87. Miriam Bodian, '"Men of the Nation": The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe', Past and Present, no. 143 (May 1994)
88. Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, 1997)
89. Matt Goldish, 'Amsterdam Portuguese Rabbinate', in Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan (eds.), Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and Others (Leiden and Boston, 2001), 9.
90. Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 154.
91. The author of the text of the ban was Leone Modena (who adapted it from the Sefer kol bo at the behest of Amsterdam's chief rabbi, Saul Levi Mortera, in 1619): ibid., 239 (and see n. 17)
92. Nadler, Spinoza's Heresy, 3
93. cf. Wesselius, 'Spinoza's Excommunication and Related Matters', 46-7.
94. Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 234-7.
95. Wesselius, 'Spinoza's Excommunication and Related Matters', 52-3.
96. Sabbatians believed in the messianic claims of Sabbatai Sevi (1626-76). On the movement, see Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (1957 (Hebrew)
97. Princeton, 1973)
98. on accusations and counter-accusations of Sabbatianism in the eighteenth century, see Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies (New York, 1990).
99. Cecil Roth, 'The Strange Case of Hector Mendes Bravo', Hebrew Union College Ann., xviii (1944), 242-3
100. also Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 243 n. 25.
101. Schriften des Uriel da Costa, ed. Gebhardt, 150, cited in Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 244 n. 27; I have altered Kaplan's translation slightly.
102. Leone Modena, She'elotu-teshuvot ziqney Yehuda [Responsa of the Sages of Judah], ed. Shelomo Simonson (Jerusalem, 1957), 99 (no. 77), cited in Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 244 n. 26.
103. Talya Fishman, Shaking thePillars of Exile: 'Voice of a Fool', an Early Modern Jewish Critique of Rabbinic Culture (Stanford, 1997).
104. Schriften des Uriel da Costa, ed. Gebhardt, 4, cited in Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 242; 1 have altered Kaplan's translation slightly.
105. Carlebach, Pursuit of Heresy.
106. Moses Hagiz, Sefat emet [Language of Truth], quoted in Shalom Rosenberg, 'Emunat Hakhamim', in Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus (eds.), Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1987), 292.
107. On the controversy, see Carlebach, Pursuit of Heresy, 75-159.
108. Ibid., 10.
109. Ibid., 149.
110. Rosenberg, 'Emunat Hakhamim', 293.
111. For Warner's biography and the history of the Warner Collection in Leiden, see Levinus Warner and his Legacy: Three Centuries Legatum Warnerianum in the Leiden University Library (Leiden, 1970).
112. Jacob Trigland, Diatribe de secta Karaeorum (Delft, 1703).
113. Trigland's letter quoted in Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 259. Kaplan rightly notes that one would search in vain for the ideological roots of these excommunicated 'Karaites'in 'the limited literary connections' between Amsterdam Jewry and the Karaites of Lithuania: ibid., 254.
114. Johannes van den Berg, 'Proto-Protestants? The Image of the Karaites as a Mirror of the Catholic-Protestant Controversy in the Seventeenth Century', in Johannes van den Berg and Ernestine G. E. van der Wall (eds.), Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century: Studies and Documents (Dordrecht and Boston, 1988).
115. For further implications of the reception of Karaite scholarship in early modern Europe, see Richard H. Popkin, 'Les Canraïtes et l'émancipation des Juifs', Dix-huitième siècle, xiii (1981),
116. Richard H. Popkin, 'The Lost Tribes, the Caraites and the English Millenarians', Jl Jewish Studies, xxxvii (1986).
117. On the residue of Trigland's misconstruction of Karaism in twentieth-century scholarship, see Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, Karaite Marriage Documents from the Cairo Geniza: Legal Tradition and Community Life in Mediaeval Egypt and Palestine (Leiden and New York, 1998), 15-27. On the important distinction between Ananism and scripturalism, see n. 7 above.
118. Cf. Paul Fenton, 'The European Discovery of Karaism in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries', in Polliack (ed.), Karaite Judaism, 5-6.
119. Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 271.
120. Ibid., 261-2.
121. Ibid., 277.
122. Ibid., 271
123. Carlebach, Pursuit of Heresy, 75. Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 273.
124. Wesselius, 'Spinoza's Excommunication and Related Matters', 50-4, with the brothers' conversion account on pp. 58-63. The account was originally published in 1714, appended to the sermon that the minister who baptized the brothers delivered on the day of their baptism, 25 August 1713: ibid., 52 n. 12. Kaplan addresses Wesselius's arguments in footnotes, but does not discuss the brothers' conversion account in detail, concluding that 'the charges that they leveled against rabbinic Judaism in their accounts are distinctly Karaite in their character', and that their criticisms 'are entirely in accord with the spirit of the arguments raised by the Karaites in their writings': Alternative Path to Modernity, 272-3 n. 134; cf. 238 n. 14.
125. '... dat wij Tephilim, ofte gebedriemen op de hand bonden ende tussen onse oogen leggen volgens Deut. 6:4.10. en Deut. 11:13.18 en dat sulkx met haar met over een en quam; want sij binden se op hare armen en sij leggen se op bet opperste van 't voorhooft'. Wesselius 'Spinoza's Excommunication and Related Matters', 60.
126. See Mishnah, Magillah, 4:8: 'To put them [i.e. tefillin] on the forehead or on the palm of the hand is the way of heresy i minut ]'. It is unclear what the Mishnah intended by 'heresy', but in early printed editions of the Babylonian Talmud (at Megillah, 24b
127. see the editions of Basel, 1579, Lublin, 1617, and Amsterdam, 1644), censors replaced 'the manner of heresy' with 'the manner of the Karaites' while retaining 'the manner of heresy' in other passages that use the same expression. Why in the sixteenth and seventeenth century censors - usually Jewish converts to Christianity - inserted 'Karaites' for 'heretics' here in particular is a question whose answer should also be sought in the intersection of Christian Hebraism and rabbinic anti-Karaism.
128. Da Costa: See above, text referring ton. 56. Modena: Fishman, Shaking the Pillars of Exile, 41, 46-7, 123-5.
129. Kaplan, Alternative Path to Modernity, 151.
130. Brinner, 'Fifteenth-Century Karaite Rabbanite Dispute', 195 n. 39.
131. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, trans. Werblowsky, 101, 152, 166, 211, 233. For evidence contradicting his claims, see ibid., 332-40.
132. Richard H. Popkin, 'Jewish Messianism and Christian Millenarianism', in Perez Zagorin (ed.), Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley, 1980)
133. David B. Ruderman, 'Hope against Hope: Jewish and Christian Messianic Expectations in the Late Middle Ages', in Aharon Mirsky, Avraham Grossman and Yosef Kaplan (eds.), Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the Jewish People Presented to Professor Haim Beinart (Jerusalem, 1991),
134. repr. in David B. Ruderman (ed.), Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (New York, 1992)
135. Richard H. Popkin, 'Jewish-Christian Relations in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Conception of the Messiah', in Barry Walfish (ed.), The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume, 2 vols. (Haifa, 1992), ii
136. Richard H. Popkin, 'Christian Jews and Jewish Christians in the 17th Century', in Richard H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner (eds.), Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht, 1994)
137. Richard H. Popkin, 'Christian Interest and Concerns about Sabbatai Zevi', in Matt D. Goldish and Richard H. Popkin (eds.), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, i, Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World (Dordrecht, 2001).
138. Silvia Berti makes the point forcefully in' A World Apart? Gershom Scholem and Contemporary Readings of 17th Century Jewish-Christian Relations', Jewish Studies Quart., iii (1996), arguing that Scholem's particular version of cultural Zionism marred his perception not only of post-Enlightenment German Jewish cultural symbiosis but also of Christian-Jewish relations in the seventeenth century. She sharply criticizes the nationalist assumptions inherent in his work and calls for their relinquishment by subsequent generations of scholars of Judaism, who are still' dominated by this gigantic personality' (p. 213), since their logical consequence is 'a definitive loss of faith in the possibility that the Jews might ever coexist with a non-Jewish world in modern democracies' (p. 218).
139. Gershom Scholem, 'The Science of Judaism - Then and Now' (German original 1960), in his Messianic Idea in Judaism, 306.
140. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, trans. Werblowsky, p. xi.
141. Scholem, 'Science of Judaism', 305, 310 (I have restored one phrase from the German).
142. Yitzhak Baer and Ben-Zion Dinaburg, introduction to the new series of the Hebrew scholarly journal Zion (1936), quoted in David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York, 1995), 109; see also 117.
143. See, especially, Yitzhak Baer, 'The Origins of Jewish Communal Organization in the Middle Ages' (Hebrew original 1950), in Joseph Dan (ed.), Studies in Jewish History (Binah, i, New York and London, 1989)
144. Baer, History of the Jews in Christian Spain, trans. Schoffman, i, 1-38
145. the studies of Baer's works cited in Benjamin Gampel's introduction to the English reprint of History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 1ii n. 1
146. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past, 109-28
147. Israel Jacob Yuval, 'Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism', in David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (eds.), The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians (New Haven, 1998).
148. See, especially, Ivan G. Marcus, 'A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis: The Culture of Early Ashkenaz', in David Biale (ed.), The Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York, 2002).