308 A History of Judaism
the two groups coexisted throughout the Near East as members of a
single, albeit fractious, Jewish community down at least to the twelfth
century. As leader of the Jewish community in Cairo, Maimonides was
to find himself a spokesman to the Muslims for Karaites as much as for
Rabbanites, and he urged his flock to show respect to Karaites:
These Karaites, who live here in Alexandria, Cairo, Damascus, and other
places of the Land of Ishmael [Islam] and outside, should be treated with
respect and approached with honesty. One should conduct oneself with
them with modesty and in the way of truth and peace, as long as they con-
duct themselves with us with integrity, avoiding crooked speech and
devious talk and preaching disloyalty toward the Rabbanite Sages of the
generation; all the more that they avoid mocking the words of our holy
Sages (peace upon them), the Tannaim, the Sages of the Mishnah and the
Talmud, whose words and customs we follow, which they established for
us from Moses and the Almighty. Therefore, we should honour them and
greet them, even in their houses, and circumcise their sons, even on the
Sabbath, bury their dead, and comfort their mourners.Similarly, although Karaites varied in their attitude to Rabbanite teach-
ings, social contacts were often close, as is apparent in the marriages
between Karaites and Rabbanites recorded in a series of documents
from the Cairo Genizah, with surprisingly modern- sounding arrange-
ments to allow for different customs in the keeping of festivals and
other domestic arrangements:
He shall not light the Sabbath candles against her, and not force her in her
food and drink ... And this Rayyisa accepted in favour of her afore-
mentioned husband that she shall not profane against him the festivals of
our brethren the Rabbanites all the time she is with him ... They both
took upon themselves to be together with full resolve, willingness and
honesty, and to behave according to the custom of the Karaites who
observe the holy festivals according to the sighting of the Moon.Relations over discrepant timings of festivals were not always so toler-
ant: a Rabbanite in Byzantium in the eleventh century wrote to his
brother in Egypt that ‘the Karaites assaulted us again last year and des-
ecrated the festivals of the Lord ... Now a violent enmity has developed
between us and great quarrels have taken place.’ But in the thirteenth
century Sa’ad ibn Kammuna, a Rabbanite philosopher living in Iraq
who described the mutual accusations of the two camps and the
responses proffered in each case, implied that their disputes were not