Rabbanite-Karaite relations in Fatimid Egypt and Syria: A study based on documents from the Cairo Geniza

This thesis narrates the history of relationships between Karaite and Rabbanite Jews in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine during the eleventh century and asks whether Karaites constituted a sect apart from the Rabbanites in any sociologically meaningful sense of the term. Previous histories have examined polemics, religious law, and other prescriptive literature and represented the Karaite-Rabbanite schism as progressing inexorably until it reached a point of no return. Shifting the inquiry from the literary to the social plane, this work adduces documentary sources from the Cairo Geniza to show that centuries after the first boundaries were drawn, Rabbanites and Karaites stole across them with ease and frequency.; Collaboration between the two groups owed partly to a certain style of social relations in the medieval Near East. Geographic mobility, the breakdown of old social ties, and the resulting tendency of the elites to seek affiliations across a broad variety of social networks created conditions conducive to Karaite-Rabbanite intimacy. Karaites and Rabbanites formed business partnerships and intermarried with the approval of their legal authorities; Rabbanite scribes and judges willingly wrote documents according to the Karaite formulary; rabbinic leaders maintained warm relationships with Karaite grandees, not merely in consideration of their political and economic power but because they took social enmeshment for granted.; More than merely seeking alliances, the two groups depended on one another in their institutional and communal lives. Karaites contributed funds to the rabbinic academy in Jerusalem and helped the rabbinic academies in Baghdad extend their leadership over Mediterranean Jewry by carrying responsa and donations back and forth. Aspiring rabbinic leaders in Palestine recognized that Karaite support was indispensable to their campaigns for office. Over the course of the eleventh century, the ties binding the two groups to each other became stronger rather than weaker, so that as Mediterranean communities turned away from the centers of rabbinic learning in Iraq and Syria, their efforts to develop institutions of Jewish regional self-government drew decisively on Karaite collaboration. Finally, it is argued that the toleration the rabbis evinced toward Karaism forces one to reconsider the nature of 'orthodoxy' and 'heresy' in medieval Judaism.