The Mixed Multitude. Pawel Maciejko

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СКАЧАТЬ giving the matter deeper thought or intention. By August of the same year, it became a crucial element of a deliberate strategy: “anti-Talmudism” became the focal point of the Frankist case, and Sabbatianism came to be presented in Christian sources as a branch of Judaism closer to its original biblical form than was the Judaism of the rabbis. Suddenly, the tables were turned: Jewish leaders who had tried to denounce the heresy of Sabbatianism to the Christian authorities found themselves vulnerable to the Christian accusation of heresy because of their talmudic belief. The definition of Sabbatians as contra-talmudic Jews invited, of course, an analogy to the Karaites.

      The Karaite schism emerged around the middle of the ninth century in Babylonia and Persia and defined itself as an opposition to the postbiblical rabbinic tradition. As a matter of principle, the Karaites held the Hebrew Bible as the one and only foundation of Judaism and maintained that all tenets of belief and conduct must derive directly from the literally interpreted Scriptures. The fundamental disagreement between the Karaites and other Jews (called the “Rabbanites” for the purpose of polemics) over the authority of the postbiblical oral tradition as embodied in the Talmud led to heated dispute and the development of a substantial apologetic and polemical literature on both sides. Karaism spread among the Jews in Egypt, North Africa, and the Land of Israel, as well as in the hotbed of the schism, Persia and Babylonia. By the thirteenth century, however, the movement had decayed and the intellectual debate had essentially been won by the anti-Karaite rabbis: while Karaite communities continued to exist in the Orient, they were no longer treated by the Rabbanites as a serious threat to their hegemony.

      The Karaites never managed to establish a foothold in the Western world, and for medieval European rabbis, they remained a subject of a (quite limited) scholarly curiosity rather than actual polemics. However, despite the absence of actual Karaites in Christian Western Europe, from the early seventeenth century onward the appellation “Karaite” began to appear in rabbinic works attacking contemporary dissenters who sought to subvert the authority of the rabbinate and reject the rabbinic tradition. Shalom Rosenberg, the first scholar to discuss the issue, maintained that this new rabbinic anti-Karaism was a “purely literary” extension of the medieval polemic: when the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rabbis spoke about the Karaites, “they refer[red] strictly to contemporaries who have arrived at conclusions which resemble those of the Karaites, but who owe[d] no actual intellectual debt to the Karaites.”¹⁷

      Other scholars have interpreted the phenomenon differently. In 1712, the Sephardic board of elders of Amsterdam excommunicated three local Jews for “following the sect of [the] Karaites and act[ing] as they do, entirely denying the Oral Law.”¹⁸ Yosef Kaplan, who analyzed the case in great detail, has argued that the “Karaism” of a few Amsterdam Jews was “nourished by growing interests [in the sect] among the Hebraists of Protestant Europe,” among whom the idealized Karaites came to represent “the original, pure Judaism, before it was infected with the superstitions of the Talmud and the kabbalah.”¹⁹ According to Kaplan, the self-proclaimed Amsterdam Karaites did have a connection to actual Karaites, but this connection was indirect, mediated by Christian accounts of Karaism. In the context of the confessional cleavage between the Protestants and the Catholics, the very existence of a Jewish group that advocated the return to the uncorrupted text of the Bible naturally provoked interest.

      Protestant scholars promptly interpreted Karaism as a Jewish embodiment of the sola Scriptura principle and thus an external confirmation of the Protestant rejection of papist distortions and corruptions of the original biblical message. Yet even Catholic scholars tended to view the Karaites with sympathy, emphasizing their rationalism and the rejection of rabbinic “fantasies and aberrations.”²⁰ On the basis of such accounts, some dissenting members of the Amsterdam Sephardic community took upon themselves the garb of Karaites, viewing them as a “positive reference group”²¹ and adopting the Christian ideal picture of Karaism.²² According to Kaplan, while the image of Karaism expounded by the Amsterdam Sephardim was based on literary accounts, their “heresy” was a concrete “attempt to free themselves from the yoke of traditional Judaism and form a new kind of Judaism in keeping with their spiritual desires.”²³

      The movement of the Amsterdam “Karaites” was an abortive one: the idealized Karaism never became an organized religious movement. In the Polish context, however, the Karaites were more than just a “positive reference group” for contemporary Jewish dissenters. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth boasted the only sizable Karaite group in the Christian world. At the end of the fourteenth century, Grand Duke Witold of Lithuania granted right of residence in Troki (near Vilna) to a group of Karaite families arriving from Crimea; by the fifteenth century, Karaite settlements existed in Troki, Łuck, and Halicz. The Karaites were treated as Jews by the state authorities and paid their poll tax through existing Jewish institutions, such as the rabbinic council of the Duchy of Lithuania.²⁴ In places where they lived alongside the Rabbanites, the two communities often shared cemeteries and bathhouses,²⁵ and, in some cases, they also initiated litigation in common rabbinic courts.²⁶ Intermarriages between Rabbanites and Karaites were very infrequent, but a few cases are known to have occurred.²⁷ There were even cases of individuals moving from one community to the other.²⁸ Both groups were often embroiled in bitter economic competition, protected their boundaries against the other, and sometimes expressed mutual derision in proverbs and folktales. Nevertheless, they saw each other as two branches of a single Jewry.

      For Polish rabbis, the Commonwealth’s Karaites never became the subject of religious polemic. In addressing them in official writings, the Rabbanites of Poland-Lithuania used the expression anshe britenu ha-yekarim, “dear people of our covenant”;²⁹ in internal documents, they usually spoke simply of “the Karaite congregation,” edat ha-karaim,³⁰ without adding any positive epithets but also without dysphemisms habitually added by their Western counterparts. The Karaite leaders, in turn, addressed the rabbis as ahenu (our brethren).³¹ The Christian authorities also acknowledged the legal equality of Rabbanites and Karaites, sometimes emphasizing that the Crown’s grant of general privileges to the Jews included both communities.³² The multiethnic, multireligious corporative structure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth provided a framework for treating the Karaites as another legitimate Jewish denomination. In contrast to other Christian countries, which offcially acknowledged only one Jewish religion, the legal system of the Commonwealth explicitly allowed for the existence and free practice of Karaism as an alternative form of Judaism. The concept of rite, used in Poland to define the offcial status of Greek Catholics and Catholic Armenians (that is, recognized non-Roman denominations of Catholicism), was employed in delineating the status of the Karaites (that is, a recognized non-talmudic denomination of Judaism) as well: for instance, King Władysław IV guaranteed the freedom of confession to Judaeorum Trociensum rithus Karaimici.³³

      There is no evidence of any direct contact between the Frankists and the Karaites. However, defining the Sabbatians as anti-talmudic Jews who—on the basis of royal privileges—demanded equal rights with other Jews was clearly a strategy aimed at deploying the Karaite precedent as a legal framework to govern the case of the Frankists. The Karaites enjoyed the same rights as the Rabbanites and shared some communal institutions, but in matters of faith and ritual were practically autonomous. Since the legal system of the Commonwealth had already recognized two legitimate independent Jewish rites, there was no prima facie reason that it could not recognize Sabbatianism as a third, or, alternatively, simply subsume the Sabbatians and the Karaites under a wider rubric of “contra-talmudic Jews.” Christian sources explicitly mentioned such a possibility; some later accounts even used the term “Karaite” when talking about Frank and his followers. Thus, the first dispatch of the papal nuncio in Warsaw concerning the Frankists defined the group as “the Jews of other religions, called Karaites [gli ebrei di varie religioni, detti caraiti],”³⁴ while Father Stanisław Mikulski, the administrator sede vacante of the Lwów archdiocese after the death of Bishop Wyżycki, described the Frankists as the “Karaites,” whom he characterized as “the Contra-Talmudists confessing the Trinity, Incarnation, and other dogmas СКАЧАТЬ