EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 179from all over did indeed appeal on disputed questions of belief and prac-
tice.^73 But just as resistances emerged to the assertive political and religious
elites of the Muslim world, so by the late ninth century the rabbis confronted
a rejectionist movement, the Karaites.^74 The Karaites espoused rational the-
olog y and ditched oral Torah in favor of scripture, and Aramaic/Hebrew for
the new world- language Arabic. That exposed them to the latest currents in
both Muslim and Christian thought, especially in Baghdad where the whole
world flowed together. Until very recently the Karaites seemed obscure and
peripheral, but thanks to the improved accessibility of Russian libraries they
are now an exciting new frontier in scholarship. One result is realization that
their intellectual choices were more typical of late First Millennium Judaism
than had been appreciated.
Here again, scriptural exegesis is central, both as the channel through
which the Karaites imbibed Christian and Muslim thought and as the cudgel
with which they set about the rabbis. Already Dāwūd al- Muqammas in the
early ninth century^75 shows a taste for the more coherent exegetical style of
Christian writers over the rabbis’ competitive, contradictory, too- ingenious,
punning, or off- the- wall interpretations arranged into loose structures.
Growing up at Raqqa in Northern Syria, Dāwūd converted to Christianity
and studied at Nisibis with a Christian philosopher who taught him some
Aristotle.^76 (Besides the Categories and Isagoge he rather surprisingly, at this
early date, invokes On the soul as well.) Reverting to Judaism, he wrote the
first Jewish (and, as it happens, earliest surviving Arabic) summa theologica,
titled Twenty chapters; refutations of Christianity; and translations into Ara-
bic of Syriac commentaries on Genesis (the hexaemeron) and Ecclesiastes.
Dāwūd is accounted a philosopher not a Karaite; but Karaites too—notably
Daniel al- Qūmisī (late ninth century) in Hebrew, and later another member
of the important Jerusalem community, yefet ben ʿEli (d. after 1006) in Ara-
bic^77 —espoused systematic, sequential, contextual commentary with a single
authorial voice and attention to philological and historical issues, also to lit-
eral translation into Arabic (after al- Qūmisī). With these tools they aspired
to show how, if taken at face value and assessed in the light of reason, the
73 D. E. Sklare, Samuel ben Hofni Gaon and his cultural world (Leiden 1996) 69–97, esp. 71–72.
74 M. Polliack (ed.), Karaite Judaism (Leiden 2003), esp. F. Astren’s “Islamic contexts of medieval
Karaism,” H. Ben- Shammai’s “Major trends in Karaite philosophy and polemics,” and M. Polliack’s
“Major trends in Karaite Biblical exegesis”; D. Frank, Search scripture well: Karaite exegetes and the origins
of the Jewish Bible commentary in the Islamic East (Leiden 2004) 1–32, 248–57.
75 S. Stroumsa (ed. and tr.), Dāwūd ibn Marwān al- Muqammis’s Twenty chapters (Leiden 1989)
15–35; id., “The impact of Syriac tradition on early Judaeo- Arabic Bible exegesis,” ARAM 3 (1991) 83–
89; id., Ginzei qedem 3 (2007) [5:110] 137–161.
76 H. G. B. Teule, “Nonnus of Nisibis,” in D. Thomas and B. Roggema (eds), Christian- Muslim re-
lations: A bibliographical history 1 (Leiden 2009) 743–45.
77 M. G. Wechsler (ed. and tr.), The Arabic translation and commentary of Yefet ben ʿEli the Karaite
on the Book of Esther (Leiden 2008) 3–71 H. Ben-Shammai, “Daniel al-Qūmisī”, EIs^3 2013–2.87–90.