The Role of the Karaites in the Transmission of the Hebrew Bible and Their Practice of Transcribing It into Arabic Script

Geoffrey Khan

doi:10.1163/2212943x-20201013

Abstract

Abstract In the Middle Ages the Karaite Jews in the Islamic world used both Arabic and Hebrew script in their writings. They wrote not only Arabic texts in Arabic script but also many of their Hebrew Bibles in Arabic transcription. The Rabbanites, by contrast, used Hebrew script for writing both Arabic and Hebrew. This paper examines the association of the Karaites with the Masoretic transmission of the Hebrew Bible and the motivation for their transcribing the Bible into Arabic script. It is argued that the Arabic transcriptions reflect the polemical stance of the Karaites against the bases of scriptural authority of the Rabbinites and an advanced degree of rapprochement of the Karaites with the Muslim environment. They represent a convergence with the external form of the Muslim Arabic Qurʾān and also with the concepts of authority associated with the transmission of Muslim scripture.

Highlights

In the Middle Ages the Rabbanite Jews of the Middle East wrote Arabic predominantly in Hebrew script
By the 11th century, the orthography came to replicate in Hebrew script the spelling practices of Classical Arabic
A large proportion of Arabic literary and documentary texts that have been preserved in medieval Jewish collections of manuscripts such as the Cairo Genizah collections and the Second Firkovitch collection are, written in Hebrew script

Summary

The Use Arabic Script by Karaites

In the Middle Ages the Rabbanite Jews of the Middle East wrote Arabic predominantly in Hebrew script. In the High Middle Ages (predominantly in the 10th and 11th centuries C.E.) many Karaite scribes in the Middle East used Arabic script to write the Arabic language and to write the Hebrew language. Such Hebrew texts in Arabic transcription were predominantly Hebrew Bible texts. The transcriptions, are an important source for the reconstruction of this reading tradition of Biblical Hebrew.[12] Many of the manuscripts are vocalized with Tiberian Hebrew vowel signs and accents. Only in rare cases does the orthography of the transcriptions reflect deviations from the standard Tiberian tradition of pronunciation

Karaites and the Hebrew Bible

The Motivation for the Karaite Transcriptions