Narratives of Enlightenment 109

where he declares that the one who denies the existence of the Oral Torah is an apkoros(heretic) but that this designation applies only to the one who denies the Oral Torah on the basis of his own thought and reason, who is the first to behave in this silly and arrogant way, like Tzadok and Boethius and their original followers. But the children and the descendants of these errant ones, whose ancestors led them astray, who were born among the Karaites and were raised according to their opinions, are like the captive infant(ketinok shenishbah) who was taken and raised by them. For this reason they are not careful to observe the mitzvot, for they are like one who is coerced(ke‘anus).*® Even though they may have heard later that they are Jews and have seen Jews practice their religion, they(the Karaites ) are still regarded as coerced, for they were raised in that heresy... It is therefore a good thing to draw them to repentance with words of peace, so that they return to the practice of Torah .’

These statements embody Maimonides ’ conciliatory policy toward the Karaites of his day, in the hope that they might be enticed to return to the true faith. Our concern here, though, is the way in which he justifies that policy as a matter of law. That justification rests entirely upon the“captive infant” motif, which Rambam transforms(in brief outline) into a narrative history of the Karaite community. In his telling, that community originated in the rebellious acts of stiff-necked and deceitful men who consciously threw off the yoke of the two-fold Torah and thereby betrayed the covenant of Sinai." Under Jewish law such persons are heretics and are deserving of death.’ Yet we do not apply this harsh verdict to the Karaites of “today,” who are not held fully responsible for their continued heresy, since they have been raised in the erroneous Karaite doctrine and therefore lack the intellectual foundation to discern the truth of the Rabbanite tradition. They resemble, therefore, the captive infant of whom the Talmud speaks. Yet they are not precisely that same captive infant, for in two important respects Rambam substantially reinterprets the metaphor that he has inherited from the Rabbis . First,