310 A History of Judaism
demonstrate the history of the Karaites in converting the Khazars to
Judaism. His legacy was the astonishing collection of Hebrew manu-
scripts in the St Petersburg Library, which remains of huge significance
today.^32
By the early twentieth century, there were around 13,000 Karaites
officially recorded in Russia, with smaller numbers in Poland, Constan-
tinople, Cairo, Jerusalem and a few other places. In eastern Europe,
separation from Judaism served Karaites well during the Holocaust in
the middle of the twentieth century, so that they were saved from Nazi
persecution, in some cases with the active help of Rabbanite Jews. After
1945, relations of these European Karaites with Rabbanite Judaism
remained distant, but after 1948 a number of Egyptian Karaites
migrated to Israel, and they have become part of the variegated Jewish
religious life of contemporary Israel. The Jewish state has welcomed
them, issuing (for instance) in 2001 a stamp proclaiming (in English)
‘The Karaite Jews’, in honour of those Karaites who had fought for
Israel. Many rabbis in Israel have also returned to the attitude of Mai-
monides that Karaites are Jews, albeit mistaken in their ideas. There are
around 40,000 Karaites in Israel in the twenty- first century, primarily in
Ramleh, Ashdod and Be’er Sheva. Another 4,000 live in the United
States, where the biggest concentration is in the San Francisco area, and
there are smaller communities in Istanbul and France. In recent years
Karaites have begun increasingly to seek to spread their ideas, partic-
ularly through outreach on the internet. Karaites can claim, as they have
since the time of al- Kumisi in Jerusalem at the end of the ninth century,
to have turned to the law of Moses from which other Jews have strayed:
for al- Kumisi, the Rabbanites ‘have not taught me to bear the yoke of
the ordinances as set forth in the Law of Moses, but rather have led me
astray with “an ordinance of men learned by rote”, and it is time to
repent’.^33
Why has Greek Judaism petered out and Karaism survived up to now?
One reason may be the roots of the Karaite movement in principled
opposition to the rabbinic mainstream, which has often left them in
uncomfortable isolation but has provided them with a distinctive iden-
tity. Greek Jews, by contrast, inherited a worldview compatible with that
of the rabbis, and in time their distinctiveness merged into that of rabbis
trained in more vigorous traditions elsewhere in the Jewish world. We
shall see more cases of the elimination of difference by such processes in
later periods in the history of Judaism down to the present day.