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Chapter 6
Concepts of Scripture among the
Jews of the Medieval Islamic World
Meira Polliack
Th e medieval Islamic period brought about great intellectual growth and a
fl owering of literary creativity among the Jews. Arabic language, thought,
and literature, as well as Islamic religion and politics, represented a signifi -
cant challenge for the Jewish communities who came under Islamic rule
and whose social and cultural structures had been forged in the classical
rabbinic age. During this period, and especially throughout the 10th to 12th
centuries, Judaism was consolidated, and many of its central institutions
took shape. A principal religious rift also occurred during this period be-
tween traditional rabbinic Judaism (or Rabbanism) and Karaism — a new
sectarian movement which sprang up in the late 9th century in the Jew-
ish intellectual centers of Babylonia and Persia. Karaism is a scripturalist
Jewish movement which rejects the authority of oral Jewish tradition as
canonized in rabbinic literature and upholds the text of the Bible as the sole
source for Jewish religious law and practice. Karaites follow laws that diff er
from those of talmudic tradition in their interpretation of the biblical text.
Th e Hebrew names by which the Karaites designated themselves (qara’im,
ba’aley miqra, beney miqra) highlight their upholding of miqra, which is the
uniform term for Scripture used in classical and medieval Jewish sources.
Karaite Judaism quickly became centered, as an expression of its scriptur-
alist ethos, around the Land of Israel and especially Jerusalem, where a
Karaite school of learning was established in the early 10th century and
thrived for around two hundred years. Aft er the 12th century, especially as
the result of the Crusaders’ conquest of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the
Karaite community to Byzantium and Egypt, Karaite scripturalism became