Concepts of Scripture among the Jews of the Medieval Islamic World 81somewhat mollifi ed, as the Karaites gradually accepted the need for an au-
thorized interpretive tradition of the Bible. Karaite Judaism exists to this
day, mainly in Israel.1
One of the main factors that fueled the Rabbanite-Karaite rift was the
renewed prominence of “Written Torah,” that is, the Bible, in the cultural
consciousness of the Jews of the Islamic world as of the 10th century. Th e
Bible appears to have been conceived more and more as a textual entity
in tension with “Oral Torah,” or received tradition. Unease emerged as to
the reliability and validity of this oral tradition, which had gradually un-
dergone canonization in the midrashic, mishnaic, and talmudic corpuses,
gaining the status of a complementary and sanctifi ed interpretive tradi-
tion throughout the classical and early medieval periods. Some scholars
have explained this unease in light of the central role Islamic scripture, the
Qur’ān, occupied in the literary hierarchy of medieval Arabic literature.
Th e tension regarding oral tradition resulted in part from the Arabization
of the Jews, which reached a peak in the 10th century. Th is transformation
entailed the adoption of the Arabic language and culture (including new
genres of literature and philosophical and scientifi c thought). It also forged
a new concept of the literate Jew, including the scholarly intellectual, which
diff ered from that of rabbinic Judaism in pre-Islamic times.
Th is new literacy centered on the Bible as a textual reference system and
on the individual skills of the interpreter as one who interrogates this ref-
erence system. One of its fi rst manifestations was the undermining of the
established relationship between the “oral” and the “written” in Jewish reli-
gious literature. Yet the written did not supersede the oral completely. Even
the Karaites, who redefi ned Judaism as based on written tradition, did not
reject the content of oral tradition altogether and engaged in wide debates
with ancient rabbinic and talmudic sources. Nonetheless, a new type of in-
terdependence was created in which “oral discourse eff ectively begins to
function within a universe of communications governed by texts,” as as-
tutely described, albeit in a diff erent context (of medieval Christendom),
by the historian Brian Stock.2 Whether of Rabbanite or Karaite persuasion,
the Jews of Islam grappled with the eff ects of this shared new conscious-
ness, which enforced a diff erent evaluation of oral tradition, including
midrashic tradition, as one which should be cast into a logical relationship
with the written Bible and fi ltered into fresh textual modes that gave it a
form of literary legitimacy.
Logic (and what some scholars would defi ne as rationalism), whether
juridical, philosophical, theological, linguistic, or textual, was a dominant