82 Meira Polliack
feature within this new literacy. A scholar’s accomplishments in logic and
in linguistic control of a text enabled him to gain individual status as a Bi-
ble interpreter and to be judged by his personal level of knowledge and
achievement. Th is ideal of what it meant to be learned undermined and
even overpowered longstanding social norms by which belonging to a cer-
tain school of rabbis or to a certain rabbinic family functioned as one’s main
ticket of entry into the intellectual Jewish elites. In this new atmosphere,
Rabbanites and Karaites alike sought original ways for understanding the
Bible that could refl ect and give expression to their expanding intellectual
horizons and new cultural identity. Sa‘adiah Gaon (882 – 942), who came
from the forlorn town of Fayyūm in Middle Egypt, is the quintessential
example of this development within the Rabbanite sphere. It was his intel-
lectual brilliance, wider personal acumen, and exceptional literary creativ-
ity, in both the Hebrew and Arabic languages, which attained for him the
seat of the Gaon, the head of the Babylonian Yeshiva of Sura in 928, despite
the fact that he was an outsider from an unknown family. Th e Karaite Jews,
nonetheless, formed the intellectual spearhead in internalizing these devel-
opments, due to their scripturalist ideology. Th is enabled them to embrace
the new literary culture with less qualms than the Rabbanite Jews did, es-
pecially when it entailed the rejection of Jewish oral tradition.
Karaite Judaism has been portrayed by historians as the Jewish variation
on the theme of sola scriptura, analogously to movements such as Christian
Protestantism and Islamic Shi‘ism, which aspire to reinstate a revealed text
(in Judaism, miqra [the Bible]; in Islam, the Qur’ān) as the sole or major
basis for religious law. Such scripturalist movements tend to deny or con-
siderably delimit the role of “oral law” or “received tradition” (in Judaism,
torah she-be-‘al-pe; in Islam, sunna) and also have in common a messianic
fl avor. In the case of Karaite Judaism, this messianism manifested itself in
an ideology of return to the Land of Israel, as the locus of written lore,
and a rejection of life in the Diaspora, as a rabbinic invention which un-
dermines the Bible’s binding authority and jeopardizes the well-being and
salvation of the Jewish people.
Th e rise of literacy among Arabized Jews of the 10th century is of no
less import in explaining the Karaite-Rabbanite rift. Karaism signaled the
ascendancy of a new cultural order whose hallmark was individual liter-
acy. Th e unease expressed by various Jewish movements, since antiquity,
with the rabbinic institution of oral law and the authority invested in it
had become accentuated within this new order. Th ere was a new self-per-
ception in the air as to what it meant to be a Jewish man of letters, which