The Karaites: And the Question of Jewish Identity

The Karaites by Juan Marcos Bejarano Gutierrez

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Gutierrez has published a number of these monographs on Jewish history. He explains in this volume that his main interest focuses on the Conversos of Spain, which implicates Sephardic Jews. He became interested in the Karaites when he discovered a text describing the circumstances of a Converso group that returned to Judaism through the Karaite sect of Judaism.

I had heard the term Karaite before but never gave it much thought. On a side note, I had just learned about the treatment of “mamzers” in Judaism last week. These two topics came together in a glorious coincidence in this monograph.

Briefly, Karaites were a sect of Judaism that opposed Rabbinic Judaism because of the Rabbinate doctrine of the Oral Torah passed down through the rabbis from Sinai and preserved in the Mishnah and the Talmud. Karaites repudiated the concept of the Oral Torah, holding to the written Torah alone. Because of this approach, Karaites did not adhere to the rituals and traditions in Rabbinic Judaism, which meant that their rituals were not the rituals of Rabbinic Judaism.

Karaite Judaism is now probably down to a population of less than 100,000. Most Jews are Rabbinical Jews. However, back in the 7th to 13th century, Karaite Judaism was a substantial tradition in the Islamic world and dominated Rabbinical Judaism in many areas.

For Rabbinical Judaism, Karaite Judaism presented a problem - the mamser problem. Mamsers are “bstrds” under Jewish law. More importantly, Mamsers are children born of adulterous relationships. Worse still, mamzers are condemned to the 10th generation, cannot marry Jews (although they can marry other mamzers and converts) and are kept outside the synagogue. The problem for the Rabbis was that Karaites did not adhere to rabbinical laws of divorce, which meant that any Karaite who divorced under Karaite law, remarried, and had children, was producing mamzers.

This was a serious issue. It remains a serious issue for Judaism as the Orthodox Jewish community, which controls divorce law, still (largely) refuses to recognize Karaites as being entitled to entry to Israel as Jews.

All of this can be gleaned from this thin monograph. Gutierrez is not so much interested in the history of the sect. His interest is in comparing the treatment of Conversos with Karaites. The comparison is that Rabbinical Judaism generally takes a more lenient attitude toward the Conversos who are not viewed as having a real choice in their lax rituals.

The book is readable. I found it very interesting.