The Introduction of Liturgical Poetry in the Karaite Prayer Book from Moses ben Abraham Dar'i to Aaron ben Joseph

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The proposed research in this renewal proposal aims to uncover and examine the connection between Karaite liturgical poetry and biblical exegesis in the Eastern Mediterranean during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. The main corpus consists of a poetical cycle of 54 poems on the parashot, i.e. the weekly Torah readings on each Sabbath, composed by Aaron ben Joseph ha-Rofe (ca. 1250-1320) and contained in the Karaite prayer book which he compiled while living in Constantinople at the end of the thirteenth century. The proposed research that develops out of the previous work on his liturgical poetry will focus on the impact of Rabbanism on the liturgical and poetic innovations of Aaron in relation to his exegetical oeuvre. After a comprehensive analysis of his literary qualities in comparison to the Rabbanite poems he included in the Karaite prayer book, started in the current funding period of the project, we will subsequently proceed to an essential new question about the biblical exegesis in his 54 poems on the parashot, i.e. the fact that Aaron ben Joseph in paraphrasing the biblical narrative in his poetical cycle could not - and perhaps did not wish to - avoid using words and phrases which were interpretive, reflecting how he understood the biblical text. This notable difference to the liturgical poems by the earliest Karaite poet to write a cycle of poems on the parashot, the twelfth-century Egyptian Karaite poet Moses ben Abraham Dari, as well as to most of the Andalusian Rabbanite poetry he inserted in the Karaite prayer book provides us with an innovative tool to reassess the poems by Aaron b. Joseph on the parashot in the light of the non-liturgical, exegetical materials they contain and refer to. In addition to relating his poems to his own Pentateuch commentary, entitled Sefer ha-Mivhar, the link to Rabbinic source texts, particularly the Torah commentary by Abraham ibn Ezra (ca. 1090-1165) entitled Sefer ha-Yashar, will also be scrutinized. In a last phase of the project, we propose to deal with the transmission and reception of the poems by Aaron ben Joseph on the parashot in later Karaite scholarship. In this part, we will focus on the only other complete cycle of 54 poems on the parashot printed in the Karaite prayer book and composed in early Ottoman times by Judah ben Elijah Gibbor (b. ca. 1460). By selecting those poetic passages in which Aaron ben Joseph clearly relates to exegetical texts and next comparing these to the parallel poems by Judah Gibbor, the research will attempt to discern an exegetical trend in Karaite liturgical poetry of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries in cycles of poems that were on the one hand bound to the liturgy by means of the weekly cycle of Torah reading but on the other hand also to non-liturgical, exegetical texts.