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

中世纪的犹太教分为两个宗教运动，即卡拉派和拉班派。卡拉伊特人在9世纪的伊拉克脱离了主流的拉班犹太教，并在接下来的几个世纪成为一个强大的犹太运动。他们的主要信条是呼吁拒绝犹太法典和犹太教传统的权威，而是依赖于对圣经的重新解读。早期古典时代(10-11世纪)对卡拉伊特圣经注释的学术研究一直集中在耶路撒冷学校的卡拉伊特“锡安哀悼者”少数作者，与大多数研究一直致力于叶菲特本ʿ伊莱注释。然而，卡拉伊特社区产生了一些重要的和有趣的释经，他们的工作学术界知之甚少。在这个形成时期，卡拉伊人在训诫和文学方面的多样性，以及它所带来的不同解释和做法，可以说些什么呢？为了促进我们对已知存在于Karaite注释中的巨大多样性的理解，我们将在拟议的项目中承担两项相互关联的任务。首先，我们建议编辑YaʿQūb al-Qirqisānī(巴格达)和Sahl Ben Maṣliaḥ(耶路撒冷)的《关于创世纪和出埃及的犹太-阿拉伯评论》，并将其翻译成英文，这些重要而冗长的著作目前基本上不为学术界所知。其次，我们将分析和比较两位作者注释的内容、技巧和风格，以加深对伊拉克和耶路撒冷两个卡拉伊特注释流派的了解，从而加深对卡拉伊特注释整体发展的了解。我们还将对Karaite犹太-阿拉伯注释与非犹太模式的圣经注释的关系进行新的阐释。我们在这项研究中更广泛的目的是帮助研究整个东方中世纪犹太社区的阿拉伯学术，以及它是如何嵌入到更大的伊斯兰背景中的。

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.