THE BULWARK OF CHRISTENDOM 149were brought to Lithuania from the Crimea in the fifteenth century by Grand
Duke Witold, and settled at Troki, which remained their headquarters there-
after. In doctrinal matters, they adopted a fundamentalist position, admitting a
literal interpretation of the Old Testament as their sole source of revelation.
They derived many of their practices from Islam, and from Islamic attitudes to
the Koran. In the Reformation period, they shared their interest in textual crit-
icism of the Bible with the more radical Protestant sects. Interestingly enough, it
was the biblical studies of the Polish anti-trinitarians which provided their most
famous luminary, Isaac ben Abraham of Troki (1525-86), with his principal
inspiration. Troki, in fact, was a natural laboratory for religious cross-
fertilization. The Karaite kenessah nestled on the shore of the lake alongside a
Tartar mosque, a Catholic church, and a Uniate monastery. The anti-
trinitarians began to arrive in the 1570s. They included a group, scathingly
described as 'uncircumcised Jews', who adopted the ritual practices of Mosaic
Law. In 1582, they were joined by Szymon Budny, who has been called 'the best
Hebrew scholar of the century', and whose Greek and Hebrew annotations to
his translation of the New Testament, published at Nieswiez in 1572, proved a
sensation for Jewish and Christian scholars alike. During this period, Isaac ben
Abraham followed the disputes between Budny and Czechowicz on the validity
of the Scriptures with intense, professional interest; and painstakingly compiled
their arguments for purposes of his own. Whereas the anti-trinitarians were
attacking the conventional Christian views in order to show that Jesus Christ
was the natural fulfilment of the prophecies of the Old Testament, the Karaite
sage now proceeded to draw the opposite conclusions from the same points. His
life's work, the Hizzuq Emunah, the 'Fortress of Faith', was designed to refute
the basic claims of Christianity, and to protect the Karaites from doctrinal con-
tamination. Its historical arguments were based almost entirely on Bielski's
Chronicles; its theological arguments were justified by a detailed comparison of
the texts of the Brest Bible, of Budny's annotations, and of the Cracow Bible of
1575, which was a Polish Catholic translation of the Latin Vulgate. It was pub-
lished posthumously, in Italy in 1585, by the author's disciple, Joseph ben
Mordecai ha-Qodesh Malinowski. In its own day, this Polish-Hebrew theolog-
ical cocktail passed virtually unnoticed in the outside world; but with time it fer-
mented into a mixture of explosive proportions. Translated into Latin in 1681,
and later into French and English, it provided the very ammunition which later
generations of humanist scholars had long needed to blast the bastions of obscu-
rantism of the established Christian churches. It was exploited at length by
Voltaire, by the Encyclopedists in France, and by the Deists in England, and can
thus be regarded as a seminal text of the European Enlightenment and of
Tom Paine's Age of Reason. By that time, the Karaites of Lithuania had
amassed a rich literary tradition. Incorporated into the Russian Empire at the
Second Partition, they were encouraged by the Tsarist Government as a means
of dividing the unity of Judaism, and they continued to flourish into recent
times.^27