Book Description

Notions of history and the past contained in literature of the Karaite Jewish sect offer in­sight into the relationship of Karaism to mainstream rabbinic Judaism and to Islam and Christianity. Karaite Juda­ism and Histori­cal Understanding describes how a minority sectarian religious community constructs and uses historical ideology. It investigates the proportioning of historical ideology to law and doctrine and the influence of historical setting on religious writings about the past. Fred Astren discusses modes of repre­senting the past, especially in Jewish culture, and then poses questions about the past in sectarian--particularly Judaic sectarian--contexts. He contrasts early Karaite scriptur­alism with the litera­ture of rabbinic Judaism, which, embodying histori­cal views that carry a moralistic burden, draws upon the chain of tradition to suppose a generation-to-genera­tion trans­mission of divine knowl­edge and authority. The center of Karaism shifted to the Byzantine-Turkish world during the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, when a new historical outlook unoblivious of the past accommodated legal developments in­fluenced by rabbinic thought. Reconstructing Karaite historical expression from both published works and previously unexamined manuscripts, Astren shows that Karaites relied on rabbinic litera­ture to extract and compile his­torical data for their own readings of Jewish history. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Karaite scholars in Poland and Lithuania collated and harmonized historical materials inherited from their Middle Eastern predecessors. Astren portrays the way that Karaites, with some influence from Jewish Re­naissance historiography and impelled by features of Protestant-Catholic discourse, prepared complete literary historical works that maintained their Jewishness while offering a Karaite reading of Jewish history.