judaism beyond the rabbis 309
worth continuation. In Crete in the fourteenth century, the Rabbanite
Shemariah b. Elijah urged that the two sides should agree, so that ‘all
Israel might once more become one union of brethren’.^30
It is plausible, but has proven impossible to demonstrate, that the
whole Karaite movement took much of its impulse from trends within
Islam. Parallels between Karaite attitudes to the Bible and the rejection
of hadith by some Muslim theologians intent on preserving the auth-
ority of the Koran are discernible only in sources nearly two centuries
apart. Anan had rejected secular knowledge, but later Karaites embraced
Arabic science with enthusiasm, and in the eleventh century both the
Karaite philosopher Joseph b. Abraham haKohen haRo’eh al- Basir
(that is, ‘the Blind’), who came from Iran to Jerusalem, and his pupil
Yeshua b. Judah (both writing in Judaeo- Arabic) were influenced, even
more than Saadiah had been, by the Islamic scholastic theology of the
Muʿtazilites, with their emphasis on the unity of God and the created-
ness of the world.^31
Half a century after al- Basir the centre of Karaite life was to move
away from Islamic lands (apart from Egypt), and to lose the vitality
stimulated by the surrounding Muslim culture. The Karaite community
of Jerusalem seems to have been wiped out in 1099 by the First Crusade
along with the rest of the Jews of the city, and from the twelfth to the
sixteenth century most Karaites were to be found in the Byzantine empire,
with a considerable religious Karaite literature composed in Constan-
tinople. From c. 1600, many Karaites moved north first into the Crimea
and then up to Lithuania and Poland, where their relationship to Rab-
banites was decisively affected by the incorporation into Russia first of
Crimea in 1783 and then of Lithuania in 1795. When the Russian state
under Catherine the Great in 1795 imposed different taxes on Karaites
and Rabbanite Jews, and allowed Karaites to acquire land, it became
possible for the 2,000 or so Karaites, who were in many cases middle-
class landowners, to argue that, since they did not accept the Talmud,
they were not Jews at all, and in 1835 they were redesignated as ‘Rus-
sian Karaites of the Old Testament Faith’. In 1840 they were allowed to
set themselves up as an independent religion of equal status to Mus-
lims. Among the most prosperous Karaite leaders, and most keen to
establish the independence of Karaites from rabbinic Judaism, was the
curious figure of Abraham Firkovich, originally from Lutsk in Volhynia,
whose search in the nineteenth century for old manuscripts and archae-
ological relics as well as tombstones in extensive travels from the Crimea
and the Caucasus to Jerusalem and Constantinople was intended to