status not of the founders of that sect but of its present-day adherents. The different rulings stem instead from two very different histories of the sect. Each of these histories is a narrative construction that explains and gives meaning to the religious lifestyles of the Karaites who live in that posek’s time and place. Rambam depicts the Karaites as“captive infants,” largely helpless to overcome the deleterious effects of their heritage, religious education, and communal culture. Radbaz refuses to apply the tinok shenishbah motif in his telling of the Karaites ’ tale. His story includes no extenuating circumstances that would soften our attitude toward them. In both cases— and for our purposes this is the central point— the halakhic decision is totally dependent upon that narrative construction. Without his version of the story, neither authority would have a basis upon which to argue his legal conclusions. And like any story, neither of these accounts can be tested for its objective accuracy. In neither case does the posek offer“proof” for the correctness of his story in any formal, methodological sense of that term. Each of them simply tells the story, offering through that telling his own interpretive framework with which to make sense of the facts. Each of them trusts that his readers will accept that story as the correct portrayal of the realities of their time, so that the specific halakhic decision—how do we relate to the Karaites ?— will strike them as understandable, proper, and coherent with those facts.
R. YAAKOV ETTLINGER AND THE CAPTIVE INFANT NARRATIVE
We see, therefore, that long before the Enlightenment , the “legal fiction” of the tinok shenishbah had played a significant role in halakhic discussion of the phenomenon of widespread religious non-observance. Whether the use of that motif was persuasive is, of course, another matter; not all poskim accepted it, and not all chose to use it to justify a lenient or accommodating stance toward the Karaites or any other group of transgressors. Yet some of them, as we have seen, did just that. Ettlinger’s responsum, therefore, simply