Concepts of Scripture among the Jews of the Medieval Islamic World 89charted relationship between the Bible and tradition was the rejection of
interpretive authority and authoritativeness. In other words, the revered
place of a chain of tradition, as passed on from a renowned rabbi to his
pupil in a particular circle or school, was replaced by the individual’s free-
dom to interpret. Th is freedom was not without bounds. It relied on the
new literate mentality as discussed earlier and on an acquired education
in the rational and linguistic tools of biblical study. But once one mastered
these tools, one was given the chance to use them irrespective of one’s per-
sonal and familial background and regardless of status or scholarly class
(though not regardless of the gender divide: women appear to have been
barred from this newly emerging scholarly world, whether Rabbanite or
Karaite).11 In the case of the Karaites, the rejection of these socially au-
thoritative structures was given higher legitimacy since it further endorsed
their wider dispute with and undermining of rabbinic tradition. As a con-
sequence, they did not only encourage, similarly to some Rabbanites, the
individual’s freedom to interpret but also endorsed exegetical inventive-
ness per se as well as interpretations which undermined or subverted what
came to be perceived in rabbinic tradition as the “established” meaning of
the biblical text.
Some Muslim thinkers of the time, especially among the Shi‘ites, also
focused on the unreliability of the transmission chain which traced cer-
tain Muslim oral traditions (H.adīth) back to the Prophet Muhammad.
Early Karaite sources go further by comparison, unequivocally rejecting
the actual institution and literary embodiment of Jewish Oral Law in the
mishnaic and talmudic corpus. It was this (legal) aspect of rabbinic tra-
dition which particularly troubled them. Th e Karaites did not accept that
rabbinic Oral Law embodied any kind of live or authentic legal tradition
which could hail back to Moses, and they did not even see in it remnants of
such a tradition. Rather, it was a concept invented by the Rabbis in the Sec-
ond Temple period to establish their own interpretive authority, over and
above the authority of others, in determining the meaning of biblical law.
Th is purported legal authority was more disturbing to the Karaites than
the Rabbis’ authority in determining the meaning of other genres in bibli-
cal literature, due to the practical binding dimension of religious law in
Judaism. In the Karaites’ view, this mistaken rabbinic tradition plunged the
Jewish people into a state of sin, wherein they were performing wrongly
and even transgressing the God-given commandments of the written To-
rah in order to follow the devices of men (mis.wat anashim melumadah,
“a commandment learned by rote”; cf. Isaiah 29:13). Th is transgression