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James Robinson presents a critical edition and translation of Salmon ben Yeroham's Judaeo-Arabic commentary on Qohelet. The introduction situates the work in the history of Qohelet exegesis and discusses the primary themes: asceticism, eschatology, opposition to philosophy.

In a book with a bold new view of medieval Jewish history, written in a style accessible to nonspecialists and students as well as to scholars in the field, Marina Rustow changes our understanding of the origins and nature of heresy itself. Scholars have long believed that the Rabbanites and Qaraites, the two major Jewish groups under Islamic rule, split decisively in the tenth century and from that time forward the minority Qaraites were deemed a heretical sect. Qaraites affirmed a right to decide matters of Jewish law free from centuries of rabbinic interpretation; the Rabbanites, in turn, claimed an unbroken chain of scholarly tradition. Rustow draws heavily on the Cairo Geniza, a repository of papers found in a Rabbanite synagogue, to show that despite the often fierce arguments between the groups, they depended on each other for political and financial support and cooperated in both public and private life. This evidence of remarkable interchange leads Rustow to the conclusion that the accusation of heresy appeared sporadically, in specific contexts, and that the history of permanent schism was the invention of polemicists on both sides. Power shifted back and forth fluidly across what later commentators, particularly those invested in the rabbinic claim to exclusive authority, deemed to have been sharply drawn boundaries. Heresy and the Politics of Communitypaints a portrait of a more flexible medieval Eastern Mediterranean world than has previously been imagined and demonstrates a new understanding of the historical meanings of charges of heresy against communities of faith. Historians of premodern societies will find that, in her fresh approach to medieval Jewish and Islamic culture, Rustow illuminates a major issue in the history of religions.

The article provides an analysis of the geographic origins of Karaites in four areas where Karaite congregations were commonly found after the Middle Ages, namely, Arabic Middle East (territories of modern Iraq, Syria, Israel, and Egypt), Constantinople/Istanbul and its area, the Crimean Peninsula, and Eastern European territories belonging today to Lithuania and Ukraine. It combines available historical, onomastic, and linguistic data revealing the migrations of Karaites to and inside these regions. For the first two regions, no ambiguity exists about the roots of local Karaites. Their ancestors were Jews who adopted the Karaite version of Judaism. For the Crimean communities, various factors favor the hypothesis about the territories of the Byzantine Empire (which later became Ottoman), and more specifically, Constantinople and its area are the only major source for their development. The Karaite communities in such historical Eastern European provinces as Lithuania (properly speaking), Volhynia, and Red Ruthenia were created after migrations from Crimea to these territories. The article also discusses medieval, cultural, and potentially genetic links between Karaites and Rabbanite Jews in the areas in question. It also addresses one phonological feature, the sibilant confusion, shared by the Galician–Volhynian dialect of the Karaim language and the Lithuanian dialect of Yiddish.

This book describes the Karaite contribution to the development of Jewish biblical exegesis in the Islamic East during the tenth century. Comprising a series of linked, thematic studies, it includes extensive selections from manuscript sources in Judeo-Arabic with English translation.

One of the most salient divisions between medieval Rabbanites and Qaraites was in the field of calendar. Qaraites and Rabbanites disagreed on how to determine which years to intercalate (i.e., to extend with the insertion of a thirteenth month) in order to keep up with the seasons. While the Rabbanites used a fixed nineteen-year cycle of intercalation, the Qaraites maintained that intercalation must be based on the state of ripeness of barley crops in Palestine. This created problems for Qaraite communities outside of the Land of Israel, many of whom found it impossible to receive information about the state of crops in Palestine in time to celebrate Passover. This article investigates how medieval Qaraite Diaspora communities made a decision to intercalate. Based on a wide range of sources many of which were not previously discussed, it studies the Diaspora communities' approaches to empirical intercalation and provides an in-depth analysis of the Qaraites' attitude toward and use of mathematical methods, such as the method of the vernal equinox and the Rabbanite nineteen-year cycle of intercalations. The article also reflects on the attitude of Palestinian Qaraite ideologists toward the calendar situation in the Diaspora and argues that the division between Qaraites as adherents of an empirical intercalation vs. Rabbanites as followers of a fixed calculated scheme was never clear-cut when considered in the context of the entire Qaraite Jewish community, and of lived practice rather than ideology.

Karaim is a severely endangered language belonging to the Turkic language family and its only surviving dialect is Northwest Karaim with speakers in Lithuania and Poland. In the past few years numerous Karaim translations of the Bible have been discovered. Some of these are among the oldest texts written in this language. The authors present some of the oldest Karaim texts known today as well as recently discovered Karaim translations of the entire Tanakh. It is shown how these recent research results have broadened our knowledge regarding the Karaim written heritage. Furthermore, some preliminary conclusions are drawn on the relationships among the manuscripts and the biographies of the copyists and translators involved in their creation. Textual similarities between sources created separately in communities located far from one another in the regions of Crimea, Lithuania, Volhynia, and Galicia suggest that a common Karaim tradition of Bible translation must once have existed. Moreover, the textual complexity and the use of sophisticated translation techniques in the oldest known texts support the claim that they were based on older texts or on a well-established oral tradition of translation.

This article focuses on the controversy and theological polemics advanced by the Jewish-Karaite movement against one of the central concepts of mainstream Rabbinic Judaism—the Oral Torah and the legitimacy of its transmission (“Chain of Tradition”). This process passed through a series of formative stages of Karaism: from radical scripturalism fundamentally rejecting any transmitted tradition to the gradual development of alternative “authentic” Chain of Tradition, adjusting its principles to vital social and intellectual needs. This case of intra-confessional Judaic debate is presented here in the wider context of comparative religious phenomena. In fact, this paradigm present in different forms in the other Abrahamic religions can be viewed as a search for balance between the oral and written traditions. In spite of numerous differences between religions, this paradigm explains to some extent the similarity in arguments of the intra-confessional polemics in Abrahamic religions, as well as the similarity in the argumentation of Muslim, Christian, and Karaite polemicists against the Talmud.

Drawing on the variety of archival sources in the host of European and Oriental languages, the book focuses on the history, ethnography, and convoluted ethnic identity of the Polish-Lithuanian Karaites. The vanishing community of the Karaites, a non-Talmudic Turkic-speaking Jewish minority that had been living in Eastern Europe since the late Middle Ages, developed a unique ethnographic culture and religious tradition. The book offers the first comprehensive study of the dramatic history of the Polish-Lithuanian Karaite community in the twentieth century. Especially important is the analysis of the dejudaization (or Turkicization) of the community that saved the Karaites from horrors of the Holocaust.

Józef Sulimowicz (1913–1973), a Polish Karaite, Turkologist and passionate bibliophile, collected a large number of Karaite manuscripts, books and documents in his lifetime. His collection, which includes items originating from both western communities and Crimea, is the only one of its kind in Poland. However, neither an inventory list, nor a catalogue have ever been assembled for the collection. Therefore, its exact content has remained largely unknown. The present paper discusses archival materials of the Karaite community in Lutsk stored in the Sulimowicz collection. It also looks at their origin, status and their research value.