Karaism
(7,238 words)
Karaism (Heb. qaraʾut), the form of Judaism which claims to adhere to a more literal interpretation of the Bible (miqraʾ)than that of the Rabbanites, the exponents of Rabbinic Judaism, and which rejects the institution of Jewish Oral Law as codified in the Mishna and Talmud, had its origins and greatest intellectual accomplishments in the Islamic world. It emerged in Iran, Iraq, and the Land of Israel in the late eighth and ninth centuries, and it had a Golden Age in tenth- and eleventh-century Jerusalem. During this period Karaite theology, exegesis, and linguistic studies were influenced by Arabic literature and Islamic thought, as was the Rabbanite oeuvre. Both Karaites and Rabbanites wrote their major philosophical, exegetical, and linguistic works in Judeo-Arabic, and used Hebrew mainly for poetry, liturgy, and some legal documents and responsa. After the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem, the most important Karaite communities were found in non-Islamic environments (Byzantium, Crimea, and Lithuania) and the link to Islam was weakened, but other communities remained in the Islamic world (most notably Egypt) or came under Islamic domination (the Ottoman Empire). The East European Karaites, who distanced themselves from the Jewish people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for reasons of social and political convenience, have almost disappeared. Today, the strongest Karaite community is found in the State of Israel and is made up primarily of immigrants from Egypt and their descendants.
1. Medieval Period: Origins and Influences
The traditional Rabbanite explanation of Karaite origins is encapsulated in the story of ʿAnan ben David (fl. ca. 767), a disgruntled candidate for the post of exilarch (political head of the Jewish community in Iraq). Having been passed over by the geonim (see Gaon and Gaonate) in favor of his younger brother because of suspicions concerning his orthodoxy, Anan justified those suspicions by propagating a rival form of Jewish practice based on his own interpretations of the Bible rather than on rabbinic tradition. This explanation, which was first recorded in the twelfth century by a Karaite who wished to dispute it, is highly suspect, and it is now clear that Anan’s followers, the Ananites, had only a tenuous connection to the later Karaites. The Ananites eventually disappeared, having been incorporated into the much larger Karaism, which then accepted Anan as a central Karaite personality, perhaps because of his noble lineage as a member of the exilarchic family. Even if Anan was not the actual founder of Karaism, many historians consider his form of Judaism, most notably his rejection of the Oral Law and scripturalist approach to the Bible, as reflected in his Sefer Miṣvot (Book of Commandments), to be a medieval phenomenon that was influenced by sectarian trends in the Islamic world but also reflects long-standing internal Jewish disputes.
Early Karaites had no one accepted explanation of their origins. Their historiographical reflections usually revolved around explaining how religious divergence had entered into Judaism altogether. Some Karaites, such as Jacob al-Qirqisānī, claimed that deviant religious practices first arose in the time of the biblical King Jeroboam, the founder of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Later Karaites argued that the Rabbanite concept of an Oral Torah(Heb. tora she-beʿal peh) whose laws took precedence over the Written Torah (tora she-bikhtav) had its origins in the Second Temple period, until which time most Jews were united in a more literal understanding of the Bible. The Karaites saw themselves as steadfast loyalists to the original meaning of the biblical commandments, defending Judaism against what they perceived as the Rabbanite perversion of the holy text. Anan was not considered an innovator but a conservator of the true Judaism.
Although the Karaite traditions concerning the movement’s emergence, many of which were first presented only many centuries after the emergence of Karaism, have little historical value in themselves, they cannot be completely dismissed out of hand in light of discoveries in the Judean Desert and in the Cairo Geniza. A number of scholars have remarked upon the points of convergence between Second Temple literature, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls, and medieval Karaism, but the nature and significance of the relationship are still matters of dispute. The discovery of the sectarian Damascus Document, or Zadokite Fragment, both at Qumran and in the Geniza may have some connection to Karaism.
Other historians of Karaite origins point to the fact that many of the first Karaites came from communities which were at a geographical distance from the rabbinic academies in Iraq, indicating, perhaps, that Karaism, as it eventually emerged, was a product of loyalty to alternative, long-standing, local practices, which had been challenged by the geonim, who were intent on instilling legal uniformity among the Jews of the Islamic world. Hence, there was no conscious rebellion against rabbinic authority but a slow coalescing of anti-rabbinic forces. Whatever its origins, by the end of the tenth century Karaism had fully emerged, having overcome internal divergences and presenting a recognizable alternative Jewish religious ideology and legal system.
Islamic Elements in Karaism
Just as there is no scholarly consensus concerning the origins of Karaism, there is also disagreement as to the extent of Islamic influence on the emergent new form of Judaism. Karaites developed their legal system by means of a close reading of the biblical text, by applying logical analogy through the personal effort of the exegete/legist, and by consulting the practices of the community. These aspects—text (Arabic: naṣṣ), analogy (Ar. qiyās), personal effort (Ar. ijtihād), and consensus (Ar. ijmāʿ)—are common features of Islamic legal systems. Yet, they also have roots in pre-Islamic Judaism and are employed in Rabbinic Judaism (in a manner dissimilar to that of Karaism). In addition, certain Karaite practices, including aspects of synagogue prayer (removal of shoes, full prostration, sitting on the floor) and calendrical procedures (declaring the new moon on the basis of actual astronomical observation) also have both ancient Jewish and Islamic parallels. It is, hence, difficult to determine the extent to which Karaite authorities took their cues from Islamic models and how much was derived from internal Jewish considerations.
Even if Karaite law is less reflective of Islam than of older Jewish practices which had been abandoned by Rabbanites, it is undeniable that the Islamic milieu had a decisive impact on Karaite cultural achievements (as it did on those of the Rabbanites). Although Anan wrote in the scholarly Aramaic of the Babylonian academies, and early Karaites such as Benjamin al-Nahāwandī and Daniel al-Qūmisī wrote mainly in Hebrew, Arabic soon became the dominant language among Karaites, and most of the classical works written during the Golden Age were composed in Judeo-Arabic. Arabic became so deeply entrenched among Karaites that they even produced transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic script, although the motivation behind these transcriptions did not lie in a lack of knowledge of Hebrew, in whose study they excelled as leading Hebrew grammarians, but rather in their mistrust of the rabbinic reading traditions of the Bible. Furthermore, Karaites closely studied Islamic texts, most notably theological and philosophical ones, and without the Karaite transcriptions of these treatises, a number of Islamic literary works would not have survived.
Karaite Cultural Accomplishments
Much like their Rabbanite rivals, Karaite intellectuals pursued a number of different cultural avenues: law, exegesis, linguistics, theology, polemics, and the like. Some have theorized that the Karaites were pioneers in a number of these fields, setting the tone for later Rabbanite responses or imitations, while others have denied the validity of this “pan-Karaite theory” of Jewish culture and understand Rabbanite and Karaite achievements in the Islamic period as complementary. Whatever the case, it is clear that both Karaites and Rabbanites followed Islamic models in their tenth- and eleventh-century intellectual pursuits.
The greatest Karaite legalist of the classical period was Jacob al-Qirqisānī, author of Kitāb al-Anwār wal-Marāqib (The Book of Lights and Watchtowers). This massive summa, written in Arabic in approximately 927 in Iraq, offers a full guide to Karaite practice, acknowledging the legal anarchy which was characteristic of the group until then. Qirqisānī’s legal pronouncements reflect the needs of his diaspora community. In contrast, his Karaite contemporaries who lived in the Land of Israel in the Golden Age were mostly Mourners of Zion (avale ṣiyyon), a group that adopted ascetic practices and rituals which they hoped would lead to the messianic redemption. Legal codes were written by Levi ben Japheth and Yūsuf al-Baṣīr in the early eleventh century in Palestine. In the mid-eleventh century, al-Baṣīr’s student, Jeshua ben Judah , introduced some much-needed reforms, especially in the laws of incest, the Karaite interpretations of which had made finding suitable marital partners in a small community very difficult.
The premier Karaite exegete was Japheth ben Eli, whose commentaries on the entire Bible influenced not only later Karaite interpretations but also the Rabbanite exegete Abraham ibn Ezra, who often cites Japheth’s opinions. Like a number of other Karaites, Japheth presented contemporary prognostic interpretations of biblical prophecies, understanding many biblical passages in light of the experiences of his own Karaite community. Byzantine Karaites compiled Hebrew anthologies based on Japheth’s commentaries, but the long-term impact of his works was vitiated by his use of Arabic and the lack of clear Hebrew translations. Other exegetes included Daniel al-Qūmisī, Joseph ibn Nūḥ, and Salmon ben Jeroham . The latter, along with his mid-tenth-century contemporary Sahl ben Maṣliaḥ, were preeminent Karaite missionaries and polemicists.
Karaites of the Golden Age were especially interested in Hebrew grammar, and their most prominent grammarian was the early eleventh-century Abū ʾl-Faraj Hārūn and his Kitāb al-Mushtamil (Comprehensive Treatise). Other prominent Karaite linguists were David ben Abraham al-Fāsi , who wrote a comprehensive Hebrew lexicon in the second half of the tenth century, and ‘Ali ben Suleiman, the eleventh-century grammarian and exegete who wrote a commentary on Genesis.
The leading Karaite philosopher of the Golden Age was Yūsuf al-Baṣīr (Joseph ha-Ro’eh; euphemistically “the seer,” referring to his blindness) in the early eleventh century, a legalist and theologian. Al- Baṣīr’s thought was situated firmly in the Islamic school of Kalām, greatly influenced by the Baṣrian Muʿtazilite, Abū ʾl ʿAbd al-Jabbār(ca. 935–1025). His major philosophical work was Kitāb al-Muḥtawī (General Treatise; Heb. Sefer Neʿimot, The Book of Delights), a shortened form of which was entitled Kitāb al-Manṣūrī (The Book for Manṣūr), also known as Kitāb al-Tamyīz (Book of Discernment; Heb. Sefer Maḥkimat Peti, Making Wise the Simple, cf. Psalm 19:8). Following kalamic methodology, al-Baṣīr demonstrates the existence of God by means of proofs that the world was created. This God, whose unity is absolute, is fully just and His actions are all wise. Al-Baṣīr’s thought played a central role in Karaite theology, and even when Byzantine Karaites later replaced Kalām with a Karaite form of Maimonidean Aristotelianism, certain aspects of al-Baṣīr’s intellectual legacy remained.
When the centers of Karaite life moved away from the Islamic realm, Karaism progressively fell under the influence of Rabbanite Judaism, and a number of changes were introduced into its practices and beliefs. The Land of Israel and Mourning for Zion became less central for Karaism; the Karaite literary language now was Hebrew. Nevertheless, the original Islamic influences on Karaism remained significant.
Distinct Karaite Practices
When Karaism emerged in the early Middle Ages, Jewish communities were generally not permitted to exercise civil or criminal law, so these areas of jurisprudence received little attention from Karaite legalists. Thus, the distinctions between Karaism and Rabbanism are most notable in matters of ritual, which were under Jewish jurisdiction. In the classical period, differences between the two alternative forms of Judaism can be seen in matters of the calendar, dietary laws, liturgy, laws of purity and personal status.
Calendar . Since the Karaite calendar was set by actual astronomical observation and not by calculation, it usually ran a day or two behind the Rabbanite calendar (and in leap years the two systems could be a month apart). The Karaite calendar also did not have “postponements” (deḥiyyot) which prevented some holidays falling on certain days of the week; thus, holidays would often not be on the same days in the two calendars. In addition, the Karaite calendar places Shavuot invariably on a Sunday (understanding the counting of the Omer from the “morrow of the Sabbath” as beginning on a Saturday night). Since Karaites observed only one day of the biblical holidays, even in the Diaspora, and their Torah lectionary cycle was from Nisan to Nisan, they did not observe Simḥat Torah. Rosh ha-Shana, known by its biblical name, Yom Teruʿa, was only one day, in Israel and in the Diaspora, and the shofar was not sounded. The Karaites did not take the four species on Sukkot, nor did they observe the postbiblical Ḥanukka. Their fast-days in mourning of the destruction of the Temple were held on different days than the Rabbanite ones. On the Sabbath, Karaites sat in dark homes, prohibited from lighting lamps on the eve of the Sabbath; they also desisted from engaging in sexual intercourse. Karaite Sabbath prohibitions led to their being accused of making the Sabbath a day of gloom instead one of joy.
Dietary Laws . Anan ben David ruled that the prohibition of seething a kid in its mother’s milk referred to the first fruits and not to actual meat and milk, but even the later Karaites, who rejected Anan’s interpretation, did not take the verse to mean a blanket prohibition of ingesting or cooking all meat (including fowl) with all milk. The prohibition was either taken literally or was expanded to meat and milk of the same species but not of disparate species. In the absence of clear identification of the forbidden birds mentioned in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, some Karaites prohibited any bird which was not used as a sacrifice (pigeons and doves), whereas others were more permissive. Karaites also prohibited ingesting the fat tail of animals. In the communities of the Mourners of Zion, regulations concerning meat were not very relevant, since the Mourners neither ate meat nor drank wine.
Liturgy . Karaite synagogues were characterized by carpets on the floors on which the worshipers, their shoes removed, sat or prostrated themselves in the direction of Jerusalem; no chairs were present. The recited prayers, taken mostly from the Book of Psalms, were quite different from Rabbanite prayers, which were more often than not postbiblical in origin. A prayer shawl was worn, but phylacteries (tefillin) were unknown, since the relevant biblical verses that were understood by the rabbis as mandating them were interpreted differently by the Karaites. Similarly, the Karaites did not put mezuzot on the doorposts of their houses.
Laws of Purity . The rabbis generally ruled that the extensive biblical system of purity and impurity was no longer applicable in the absence of the Temple. Thus, there was no longer a prohibition of contact with certain creatures (insects, impure animals, and the like). Karaites, however, maintained these prohibitions, mandating cleansing after such contact (by simply washing, not immersion in a miqve). Menstrual prohibitions were restricted to the biblically mandated total of seven days, with no additional days of waiting; postpartum women had to wait forty days (for a boy) or eighty (for a girl) before becoming pure. During their periods of impurity, women were forbidden to enter the synagogue. When the time period was over, purity was achieved by washing, not immersion.
Personal Status . Karaites were much stricter than Rabbanites in their laws of incestual relations. Employing analogy, they extended the biblical laws beyond the strict letter of the law, forbidding, for instance, uncle-niece marriage as an extension of the biblical prohibition of aunt-nephew relations (the Rabbanites approved, and even recommended, uncle-niece marriage). As noted, in the eleventh century, some of the prohibitions were modified in order to make it easier for Karaites to find marriage partners.
Karaite marriage laws were similar to Rabbanite ones, and the rabbis recognized Karaite marriages as valid. Since, however, divorce lawswere different, Karaite divorces were not accepted as valid by Rabbanites. Hence, a Karaite woman who remarried after a divorce would still be considered a married woman by the Rabbanites; her children from the remarriage would be mamzerim (a status of illegitimacy which results in a prohibition of marriage with most other Jews). Karaites rejected the literal application of levirate marriage by a brother-in-law in light of the Levitical prohibition of relations with one’s sister-in-law. Despite these significant divergences in matters of personal status, quite a number of marriage contracts (ketubbot) preserved in the Cairo Geniza indicate that members of the two groups did marry with one other. The marriage contracts often served as a prenuptial agreement outlining the ritual compromises each side would make in order to promote domestic harmony.
Karaite-Rabbanite Relations
Although the literary records of the Karaite-Rabbanite debate give the impression of an almost complete break between these competing forms of Judaism, other evidence, such as letters and marriage contracts, indicates that the two groups normally had cordial if not close relationships. Rather than seeing Karaism as a sectarian, heretical form of Judaism (the ostensible Rabbanite position), it might be more useful to see each group on the model of the Islamic madhāhib (legal communities). The Islamic authorities considered both groups to be part of the larger Jewish community, and the two groups often cooperated with each other when confronted by the Muslim majority. It took several centuries before the boundaries between Karaites and Rabbanites were fully established, and even then Karaites and Rabbanites in the Islamic realm were never characterized by complete schism. The sixteenth-century Egyptian Rabbi David ben Abu Ibn Zimra’s permission for Rabbanites to marry with Karaites stands in stark contrast with his Polish contemporary Rabbi Moses Isserles’s prohibition of such intermarriages. In modern times, the Karaites in Islamic countries (unlike Karaites in Eastern Europe) never denied or rejected their attachment to the Jewish people. Among the Karaites of modern Egypt there were many supporters of Zionism, and one of them, Moshe Marzuk, was executed by the Egyptians as an Israeli agent in 1955. After 1956 most of the Egyptian Karaites emigrated to the State of Israel, while others found their way to the United States (mostly the Bay area of San Francisco) or to Europe. There are perhaps thirty or forty thousand Karaites in the world today.
Daniel J. Lasker
2. The Karaites of Modern Egypt
There are very few scholarly studies of the history and culture of the Karaite community in early-modern and modern Egypt. This is perhaps due to the small size of the community and the fact that its intellectual and cultural output, while not insignificant, does not rival the accomplishments of the medieval period. Moreover, studies of Karaism have traditionally focused on issues of biblical interpretation, liturgy, and religious law and practice. There were some developments in these areas among the Karaites of modern Egypt. However, the efforts to reform and modernize communal institutions, to make a transition from the status of a protected, but subordinate, non-Muslim religious community in late Ottoman Egypt to citizenship in the Egyptian nation-state and participation in its economic, social, and cultural life, and the ultimate failure of the Karaites, as of the Rabbanite Jews, to become full-fledged citizens are more salient. These processes are also of broader interest as they are comparable to the trajectory of other minority communities in Egypt and in the territories of the former Ottoman Empire in the era of emergent nation-states. Because of the paucity of scholarship, the information presented below must considered provisional.
Historical Overview
There is little detailed information about the Egyptian Karaite community during the late Ottoman period. Karaite visitors to Cairo from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century report that the community was small, living on one street in Cairo (ʿatfat al-yahūd al-qarrāʾīn) and possessing two synagogues. They note that its religious practices were stricter than those of the Karaites of Istanbul and the Crimea, that most members of the community were poor, and that some worked as goldsmiths and jewelers—crafts pursued by large numbers of Karaites through the twentieth century. The common view is that the conditions of the community began to improve during the reign of Muḥammad ‘Alī, on the grounds that he permitted the construction of new synagogues by both Karaites and Rabbanites. The imposition of free trade on Egypt in accord with the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Trade Convention provided an opening for some Karaites (and Rabbanites) to work as moneychangers (ṣarrāfs) and in other commercial activities. Some families began to amass wealth. However, the scattered bits of information known about the Karaite community before the late nineteenth century make it difficult to establish the extent of change during Muḥammad ʿAlī’s reign or even to establish criteria to assess the impact of the changes in Egyptian society from the mid-eighteenth to the late-nineteenth century on the Karaites.
Most Karaites lived in Cairo in the Karaite Jewish Quarter (ḥārat al-yahūdal-qarrāʾīn) adjacent to the Rabbanite Jewish quarter (ḥāratal-yahūd al-rabbānīn) in the district of Gamaliyya near the goldsmiths’ street (al-Ṣāgha) and the commercial area of the Muski. The Karaite population of Cairo grew from about two hundred in 1821 to twelve hundred in the 1840s to two thousand in 1877. About twenty families left Cairo for Alexandria around 1860. This small community, numbering only 243 by 1947, was under the authority of the Sephardi community for matters of personal status and never developed an independent identity. Only very small numbers of Karaites lived in other provincial towns.
Not only was the community relatively small, but it was far less significant as a Karaite intellectual center than it had been in the medieval period. The most renowned aspects of the history of the community in the nineteenth century are the efforts of the Crimean Karaite scholar Abraham Firkovich to obtain possession of many of its manuscript texts and documents. He first came to Cairo in 1830, and was followed by others with the same objective throughout the century. In 1862, Firkovich received four chests of documents and papers in return for a donation of £200 for the restoration of the Rav Simḥa Synagogue in the Karaite Jewish quarter. The Karaites claim that the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, which housed the rich cache of documents known as the Cairo Geniza, was originally theirs. Historically, however, this claim has not been substantiated, since the Ben Ezra Synagogue is identified in early sources as serving the distinctive Rabbanite community that prayed according to the rites of the Land of Israel (al-shāmiyyīn). Nevertheless, the Karaites may have used this synagogue at some early stage, even as a repository, since many medieval Karaite documents and writings have been found in the Geniza collection. The synagogue was clearly in Rabbanite hands by the mid-seventeenth century.
In the nineteenth century the Karaite community was led by a chief rabbi (ḥakhāmakbar). There was no community council, and the chief rabbi had no financial resources at his disposal; he had to rely on contributions from wealthy members of the community. These circumstances began to change under the leadership of Shabbetay Elijah Mangūbī, who served as ḥakhāmakbar from 1876 to 1906. He established good relations with the Egyptian heads of state, Khedives Tawfīq (r. 1879–1892) and ‘Abbās Hilmī (r. 1892–1914) and with the British authorities after Britain occupied Egypt in 1882. In 1890, the British viceroy, Lord Cromer, helped Mangūbī obtain the Egyptian government’s recognition of the Karaite Jewish community as an entity separate from the Rabbanites. According to most accounts, the Karaites were not hitherto recognized as a separate religious community (millet), although some claim that this occurred in 1848. Governmental recognition became an impetus to improved relations between the Karaite and Rabbanite Jewish communities and to the institutional reorganization and reform of the Karaite community.
The most significant reform of Mangūbī’s era was the regularization of the community’s internal governance. In 1900, Mangūbī convened a general assembly of the community to chose the first ever Karaite community council(al-majlis al-millī) and to adopt an internal code (qanūn al-majlis al- millī). The inaugural council was sworn in and began functioning in accord with this code in March 1901. The code and the personal-status laws adopted by the council were approved by the Ministry of Interior; council elections were supervised by the deputy governor of Cairo. From 1901 until 1940 the community council served as the supreme authority in the community and also functioned as both a civil and religious court. Council meetings were usually conducted weekly and in Arabic. Detailed minutes of these meetings from 1901 to 1972 are bound in six volumes in the library of the World Karaite Center in Ramle, Israel. The records of subsequent meetings are preserved in a notebook but have no substantive detail.
Another important institutional development was the establishment of a primary school in 1896 and the introduction of a lottery to finance the school the following year. Eventually the community established three schools: boys’ and girls’ primary schools and a kindergarten. Small numbers of Muslims and Christians attended the schools, but Jews comprised the great majority of the pupils. From 1944 to 1956 Murād al-Qudsī (Mourad El-Kodsi) served as the last Karaite principal of these schools, and his book (see below) is the principal source of information on their operations. After the 1956 Suez War, the schools were placed under Ministry of Education supervision and lost their Karaite character.
In the early twentieth century, wealthier Karaites began to contribute monthly dues (ʿarikha) to support the activities of the community. This became the main source of revenue financing the salary of the ḥakhāmakbar, the employees of his office, and communal welfare activities. Communal institutions in the twentieth century included night schools that taught Hebrew and Arabic, a Benevolent Workshop for Girls which taught sewing, and Ahavat Torah, which was responsible for providing circumcisers and ritual slaughterers. ‘Ezrat ha-Betulot, which functioned from 1908 to 1942, assisted poor girls to get married. The Karaite Brothers provided meals for needy residents of the ḥāra from 1945 to 1952.
Egyptian law stipulated that the personal status of all recognized religious communities should be governed by their communal courts. In 1940 a religious court (bet din) independent of the community council was established to undertake this task. It functioned until 1955, when autonomous communal courts were abolished and integrated into the state legal system.
In addition to its synagogues and bet din, the Karaite community owned a kosher bakery, a cemetery at Basātīn, south of Cairo, adjacent to the Rabbanite cemetery, and twenty-two other parcels of land.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the population of the Karaite community increased. The Egyptian census of 1937 enumerated 5,264 Karaites. The tally dropped to 3,486 in the 1947 census without any substantial emigration having taken place; hence this is most probably an undercount. A serious but amateur census conducted by a Karaite engineer employed by the Egyptian central government, Eliyahu Yaʿaqov Aslan, was published in al-Kalim from June 16 to August 16, 1946. Aslan enumerated 3,834 Karaites, but this was also very likely an undercount. Perhaps these low figures resulted from counting only residents of ḥāratal-yahūd al-qarrā’īn. In contrast, Frédéric Abecassis and Jean-François Faü estimate that there were over five thousand or over seven thousand Karaites in 1937. The latter figure seems too high. A reasonable estimate is that there were about five thousand Karaites in Egypt in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Karaite families began to amass wealth, especially through the jewelry and moneychanging trades. By the end of World War I, a commercial middle class had developed. Karaites also entered professions such as medicine, law, and engineering. Among the elite families were the ʿAbd Allāhs, ʿAbd al-Wāhids, Aslan-Kohens, Mangūbis, Marzūqs, Menashes, Murāds, al-Qudsīs, and Tawīls, and some of the Līshaʿs and Masʿūdas; but they were less wealthy and less socially prominent than the Sephardic Jewish elite. These families dominated communal affairs and the community council through the 1940s.
Challenges to the dominant role of the wealthy families began to emerge in the 1920s and were articulated by educated youth who eventually organized themselves in the Young Karaite Jewish Association of Egypt (Jamʿiyyat al-Shubbān al-Qarrāʾīn al-Isrāʾīliyyīn bi-Miṣr) led by Yaʿqūb Faraj ʿAbd Allāh. The educated youth published a series of newspapers—al-Ittihād al-Isrāʾīlī(1924–1929), al-Shubbān (1937), and al-Kalīm (1945–1957)—that articulated a modernist program of communal self-improvement, cultural revival, and acceptance of the responsibilities and opportunities of Egyptian citizenship. In 1942 Yaʿqūb Faraj ʿAbd Allāh was elected president of the Karaite community council, while several like-minded colleagues won seats on the council—a notable victory for this program and its adherents.
Many of the Karaites who acquired wealth and education moved out of ḥārat al-yahūd al-qarrā’īnto the middle-class neighborhoods of ʿAbbāsiyya, al-Dāhir, and Ghamra. As early as 1900, money was donated for the construction of a new synagogue in ‘Abbāsiyya to serve the needs of those who could no longer walk to services in the traditional Karaite neighborhood. The synagogue was finally completed in 1931 and named after the renowned medieval Karaite poet Moses al-Darʿī. At that point the community maintained two synagogues: Rav Simḥa in the ḥāra and the new one in ʿAbbāsiyya; the second synagogue in the ḥara, the semi–underground al-Khaznī, named after the head of the community in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was demolished.
While some Karaites became wealthy and others joined the modern, educated middle class, the majority of the community remained poor and lived in the Karaite Jewish quarter. Slightly more than half the community was literate in 1927; a decade later the literacy rate rose to about 60 percent. Most residents of the ḥāra were craftsmen, especially jewelers, and gold- and silversmiths. There were also opticians, moneychangers, pawnbrokers, and small merchants. It was exceptionally rare for Jews to join the army or the police, but in the 1940s there were several Karaite policemen.
Karaites were shocked by a bomb that exploded in their quarter on June 20, 1948, killing over twenty people. The Society of Muslim Brothers was most likely responsible for the crime, but the Egyptian press spuriously blamed it on a feud between the two Jewish communities. The government censored the issues of al-Kalīm that reported on this affair.
Despite this and other ugly incidents during the first Arab-Israeli war, most Karaites looked forward to remaining in Egypt and rebuilding their lives as they had been before the war. Al-Kalīmcontinued to publish; it was the only Jewish periodical permitted to appear in Egypt after 1948. The Karaite schools and other institutions continued to function. Tuvia Babovitch, the ḥakhām akbar, discouraged the emigration of Karaites to Israel under Zionist auspices, and no more than a few hundred left Egypt between 1948 and 1956.
During these years the Karaites were caught in a complex matrix of competing loyalties and pressures. The great majority of Karaites considered themselves Egyptians. Most were or were entitled to be Egyptian citizens. In principle, the Egyptian government accepted Jews as citizens and distinguished between Jews and Zionists. The Karaites, as the most Arabized and Egyptianized element of the Jewish community, were the ones most likely to be accepted as “real Egyptians.” Nonetheless, in 1949 a representative of the governor of Cairo refused to reconfirm the same members of the Karaite bet din who had served the previous year on the grounds that they did not have certificates of Egyptian citizenship. The official himself, like most Egyptians, did not have such a certificate, but his citizenship was not in question, whereas that of Jews was. Jacques Mangubī, the head of the community council, explained, “It is known that we are Egyptians. The government must determine if we are foreigners or Egyptians. And as long as we are not foreigners, then we are Egyptians” (Al-Kalīm, March 1, 1950, p. 6).
The Free Officers, who overthrew the monarchy and came to power on July 23, 1952, made demonstrative efforts to maintain correct relations with Egypt’s Jewish communities in the early days of their regime. Ḥakhām Akbar Babovitch and two members of the Karaite community council met with General Muhammad Naguib, the titular head of the new regime, on October 1, 1952. Naguib reciprocated by visiting the Moses al-Darʿī Synagogue in ‘Abbāsiyya on October 25 and affirming the equality of all Egyptians regardless of their faith. “Religion is for God and the nation is for all,” Naguib declared, using a slogan first raised to promote national unity in the 1919 nationalist uprising.
Between 1948 and 1956, the community struggled to restore a sense of normalcy and to retain both its Jewish and Egyptian identities. Increased enmity between Egypt and Israel as a result of Operation Susannah and the 1956 Suez War rendered this impossible. Moreover, the death of ḤakhāmAkbarBabovitch and of the leading intellectual of the community, Murād Farag, in 1956 was a severe blow to the cultural vitality of the community. More gradually and later than the Rabbanites, the Karaites began to leave Egypt over the course of the next several years. According to Mourad El-Kodsi, there were fewer than two thousand Karaites in Egypt when he left for the United States in 1959.
The last acting ḥakhām akbar left Egypt after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. At that time, the contents of the Rav Simḥa Synagogue in ḥarat al-yahūd al-qarrāʾīn were transferred to the Moses al-Darʿī Synagogue. The Rav Simḥa Synagogue became a warehouse for a plastics factory owned by Yūsuf al-Qudsī, the great-grandson of ḤakhāmAkbar Moses ben Samuel ha-Levi. Yūsuf al-Qudsī passed away in the late 1990s. He was the last male affiliated with the Karaite community of Cairo, although at least one other male Karaite, Yūsuf Darwīsh, who cut his ties with the community when he became a Communist in the late 1930s, survived into the twenty-first century. The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 paved the way for the Israeli embassy to assist in establishing a library adjacent to the Moshe al-Darʿī Synagogue in the 1990s. By then the synagogue itself was hardly used, and the long history of the Karaite presence in Egypt was coming to an end.
The largest number of Egyptian Karaites is now concentrated in Israel. There is also a community which maintains a synagogue in the San Francisco Bay area in the United States. Smaller communities are located elsewhere in the United States and throughout the world.
Karaite-Rabbanite Relations
In Egypt, unlike in Poland, Lithuania, and the Crimea, there was never any doubt that Karaites were Jews. The Egyptian Karaites clearly identified themselves as Jews and did not seek to redefine themselves ethnically as non-Jews (as was the case in Eastern Europe from the late nineteenth century). The modern Egyptian Karaites also appear to have maintained a live and continuous cultural and religious connection with the ethos of medieval Karaism, as developed among the medieval Jerusalem Karaites, in its emphasis on the importance of the Hebrew Bible and the Land of Israel to Karaite belief. In the early twentieth century, ḤakhāmAkbarIbrāhīm Kohen and Murād Farag encouraged closer relations between Karaites and Rabbanites at all levels, and a certain rapprochement did occur. Karaites used and were employed in the Rabbanite hospital in Ghamra, community schools, and social welfare institutions. The Karaite community council contributed funds to the Sephardic community council for the use of these and other services and eventually had a representative on the Sephardic board of education.
In 1918 three leading rabbis of Cairo, disagreeing with the existing halakhic consensus, argued that there was no barrier to accepting Karaites who wished to convert into the Rabbanite community. Among the Karaites there were three currents of opinion on intermarriage with Rabbanites. The old guard opposed it. Murād Farag and other young intellectuals favored a simultaneous revival of the Karaite heritage and accepting Rabbanites who wished to intermarry into the Karaite community. Secularized, bourgeois Karaites embraced intermarriage as a matter of convenience.
Intellectual and Cultural Activity
Murād Farag (1867–1956) was the leading intellectual figure of the Karaite community in the twentieth century, and his writings have received some scholarly attention from Leon Nemoy and Sasson Somekh. Faraj first made his reputation as a lawyer. In 1902, when he was employed in the service of the khedive, Haim Kahana, a Rabbanite Jew from Port Said, was indicted on a charge of ritual murder. At the request of a Rabbanite official, Faraj defended Kahana and won his acquittal. Faraj favored such friendly cooperation between Rabbanites and Karaites throughout his career. Faraj’s legal skills were recognized beyond the Jewish community. In 1922, when Britain unilaterally declared Egypt independent, King Fuʾād nominated Faraj to be a member of the committee to draft the new constitution.
Faraj wrote twenty-five books on a wide array of topics, including religious law and theology, current legal issues, Hebrew and Arabic philology, and biblical exegesis. He served as editor of the first Karaite reform periodical, al-Tahdhīb , and contributed to leading general-audience dailies like al-Jarīda and al-Muʾayyad. He published four volumes of poetry using classical Arabic meters and also composed colloquial poetry (zajal) for various public occasions.
Faraj embraced a moderate Zionist outlook expressed in a volume of poetry and prose, al-Qudsiyyat , first published in Arabic and then translated into Hebrew, in some of his other poems collected in Diwān Murād, and in his translationinto Arabic of Avraham Mapu’s AhavatṢiyyon(1853), the first Hebrew novel. Like some other Egyptian Zionists, Faraj believed that promoting pride in Jewish culture and revival of Hebrew could be reconciled with Jewish loyalty to Egypt. In the 1920s, this seemed possible. After the Arab Revolt in Palestine from 1936 to 1939, it became increasingly impossible. From then on, Faraj concentrated his attention on philology and biblical exegesis; Zionist themes were no longer evident in his writings.
Dāʾūd Ḥusnī (1870 or 1876–1937) was one of the leading composers of Arabic music in Egypt and a prominent figure in the revival of Arabic music in the twentieth century. He was both a rival and a collaborator with Sayyid Darwīsh, the leading figure of the first generation of Egyptian nationalist composers. Among Ḥusnī’s five hundred songs and thirty operas are the first Egyptian operas, Cleopatra’s Night and Samson and Delilah. Ḥusnī was so prominent that the inimitable perfectionist Umm Kulthūm, the leading diva of Egypt and the Arab world in the twentieth century, sought him out compose eleven songs for her. The Institute for Arabic Music in Cairo commemorates his death every year in December.
Joel Beinin
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Cite this page
Daniel J. Lasker and Joel Beinin, “Karaism”, in: Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, Executive Editor Norman A. Stillman. Consulted online on 30 October 2017 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1878-9781_ejiw_COM_0012630>
First published online: 2010
First print edition: ISBN: 978900417678, 3172
