Independence and Diversity:Unknown Karaite Bible Commentaries in Judeo-Arabic from the Early Classical Age

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Medieval Judaism was divided between two religious movements, the Karaites and the Rabbanites. The Karaites broke off from mainstream Rabbanite Judaism in 9th-century Iraq, and became a powerful Jewish movement in the following centuries. Their main tenet was a call to reject the authority of the Talmud and rabbinic tradition, and to rely instead on a fresh reading of the biblical scriptures. Scholarly study of Karaite biblical exegesis of the early classical age (10th-11th centuries) has concentrated on just a few authors of the Jerusalem school of the Karaite “Mourners of Zion,” with most research having been devoted to the commentaries of Yefet ben ʿEli. However, the Karaite community produced a number of important and interesting exegetes of whose work scholarship knows very little. What can be said about the exegetical and literary diversity among the Karaites, as well as the different interpretations and practices it entailed, at this formative time? In order to advance our understanding of the great diversity that is known to exist within Karaite exegesis, we will undertake two interconnected tasks in the proposed project. First, we propose to edit and translate into English the Judeo-Arabic commentaries on Genesis and Exodus by Yaʿqūb al-Qirqisānī (Baghdad) and Sahl ben Maṣliaḥ (Jerusalem), significant and lengthy works that are currently largely unknown to scholarship. Second, we will analyze and compare the exegetical content, techniques and style of the commentaries of the two authors to provide a deeper understanding of the two schools of Karaite exegesis, in Iraq and in Jerusalem, and thus of the development of Karaite exegesis as a whole. We will also shed new light on the relationship of Karaite Judeo-Arabic exegesis to non-Jewish modes of scriptural exegesis. Our broader purpose in this study is to contribute to the study of the Arabic scholarship of medieval Jewish communities of the East as a whole and the way it was embedded in a larger Islamic context.