302 A History of Judaism
The story of Anan’s high birth and supplanting by his brother appears,
however, to have been unknown to earlier authors, both Rabbanite and
Karaite, and the version of the great Karaite scholar al- Kirkisani in the
second quarter of the tenth century records only Anan’s Rabbanite wis-
dom and the hostility that his teachings aroused:
Anan’s appearance occurred in the days of the Caliph Abu Gaʿfar al-
Mansur. He was the first to make clear a great deal of the truth about the
divine ordinances. He was learned in the lore of the Rabbanites, and not
one of them could gainsay his erudition. It is reported that Hai, the presi-
dent of the Rabbanite Academy, together with his father, translated the
book of Anan from the Aramaic into Hebrew and encountered nothing in
it of which they could not discover the source in Rabbanite lore ... The
Rabbanites tried their utmost to assassinate Anan, but God prevented
them from doing so.^20
In both traditions, the attribution of a religious movement to a single
founder may be a commonplace which disguises the extent to which
Anan fitted into a wider movement of dissent within the world of Bab-
ylonian Judaism during the decades following the rise of Islam. The
Islamic conquests of Persia and Babylonia in the mid- seventh century
opened up new regions for settlement by Jews as well as others, and
loosened the grip on Jewish communities distant from Baghdad both of
the Babylonian exilarch and of the religious authorities in the Babylo-
nian rabbinic academies. Already at the start of the eighth century, a
certain Abu ʿIsa, originally called Yitzhak b. Yaakov but known by his
followers as Obadiah (‘Servant of the Lord’), led a considerable armed
rebellion of the Jews of Isfahan, a major centre of Jewish settlement,
against the Abassid state. He claimed to be the last of five messengers
(after Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad) who would precede the
coming of the Messiah. Abu ʿIsa himself was killed in the fighting, but
he left a distinctive ascetic and mystical legacy, nurtured by Islamic
notions, to his surviving followers, and these Isawites, as they were
known, were still to be found, albeit in small numbers, in the tenth cen-
tury in Damascus.
Among the pupils of Abu ʿIsa, a certain Yudghan, who came from
Hamadan in Persia, moved a great deal further from rabbinic norms by
claiming to be a prophet of those followers of Abu ʿIsa who believed
that he was the Messiah. The Karaite historian al- Kirkisani wrote in the
mid- tenth century of the Yudghanites that they ‘prohibit meat and
intoxicating drinks, observe many prayers and fasts, and assert that the