Reviewed by: Karaism: An Introduction to the Oldest Surviving Alternative Judaism by Daniel J. Lasker Marzena Zawanowska Daniel J. Lasker. Karaism: An Introduction to the Oldest Surviving Alternative Judaism. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2022. x + 253 pp. For centuries, Karaism has presented a major intellectual challenge to Rabbanite traditionalists, who have regarded the adherents of this alternative form of Judaism as heretics—Jewish Others—and their movement as an alien sect. This bias has affected the scholarly study of Judaism as a whole, which has tended to relegate Karaism to the margins. True, there have always been important exceptions to this rule, and, at least since the early twentieth century, a steadily growing interest in the history and intellectual achievements of the Karaites. Yet many Karaite works still remain unpublished and/or unexplored. Moreover, because scholarly studies tend to focus selectively on narrow topics, on the one hand, and because of the lack of reliable source texts written for a general audience, on the other, there is still much disinformation on the subject. The new publication by Daniel J. Lasker promises to rectify this situation, offering the first comprehensive overview of Karaite history, literature, culture, religious beliefs, and practices, contextualized against the backdrop of rabbinic Judaism, and geared to a nonspecialist audience yet grounded in the latest research. As befits its purpose, the book is written in an engaging style that dispenses with footnotes (and thus—unfortunately for academic readers—also with precise references to cited works), while Hebrew and Arabic words are transliterated in a simplified (though sometimes inconsistent) way into Latin characters. The book is clearly structured. Each chapter, including the introduction, is a self-contained unit—a format that occasionally necessitates some repetition. Each opens with a relatively long source text offering an intriguing introduction to the subject of the following pages. And each, except for the introduction and the concluding chapter, ends with a short summary and suggestions for further reading. The chapters are divided thematically. The first five are devoted to history and intellectual achievements; six, seven, and eight focus on religious practices and beliefs; nine, ten, and eleven examine various genres of Karaite literature. The twelfth and final chapter, which serves as a conclusion to the book as a whole, ponders the future of Karaism. In the preface, Lasker describes his interest and professional involvement in researching Karaism, his reasons for writing this book, and the readers he envisions for it. In the introduction, he presents Karaism as “the oldest surviving alternative Judaism” in relation to other varieties of Judaism and surveys the challenges involved in its research. Chapter 1 focuses on the origins of Karaism and the role played by ʿAnan ben David, as described both by scholars of Karaism and by the Karaites themselves. It also considers the relevance of ancient Jewish sources, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and contemporary Islamic movements, like Shiʿism, for understanding the emergence of Karaism. Chapter 2 is devoted to the [End Page 191] “Golden Age” of Karaism in the Land of Israel, beginning at the end of the ninth century with the earliest settlement of Karaites in that region and the appearance of the Mourners of Zion movement, through the flourishing of the Karaite center in Jerusalem in the tenth and eleventh centuries, to the aftermath of the First Crusade (1099), when the center of Karaite intellectual activity moved to Byzantium. It also surveys Karaite communities in the rest of the Middle East and Rabbanite-Karaite relations of the time. Chapter 3 scrutinizes the history and literature of the Karaite community in Byzantium, from its inception in the tenth century, through the period of its intellectual prosperity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to its gradual rapprochement with Rabbanite Judaism between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, and its decline over the course of the sixteenth century, when it was eclipsed by a new center in eastern Europe. It also briefly surveys other contemporaneous Karaite communities. Chapter 4 is devoted to eastern European Karaites from the period of the first Karaite settlements in the Crimean Peninsula (around the twelfth century) and in the Polish Commonwealth (Poland-Lithuania) (likely in the fifteenth), through their...
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Nov 11, 2024
Gregg E Gardner 
Just Published
Open Access