Narratives of Enlightenment 141
50. See, in general, Ya'akov Shapira,“Hityahasut hahalakhah laKara’im,” Mehkerei Mishpat 19(2002), 285-361. On Maimonides in particular see Ya'akov Blidstein,“Hagishah laKara’im bemishnat haRambam,” Tehumin 8(1988), 501510; reprinted in Ya'akov Blidstein, fyunim Bemahashavat Hahalakhah Veha'agadah(Be’er-Sheva : Ben Gurion University Press , 2004), 165-176.
51. In the edition of R. Yosef Kafah, pp. 116-117. The tinok shenishbah passage does not appear in the traditional printed editions of the commentary. Kafah(p. 117, n. 33) surmises that Rambam himself added it to the commentary“at the end of his life.”
52. See Kafah, p. 116, n. 17: the word meshumad appears in all the manuscripts of the commentary and is altered to mumar in the printed edition.
53. B. Hulin 5a. And see Yad, Shabbat 30:15.
54. Rambam makes this point explicitly in Yad, Mamrim 3:2, immediately prior to his discussion of the status of the descendants of such heretics.
55. Note here that Rambam departs from the accepted halakhic position that the “captive infant” is a shogeg rather than an anus(note 49, above).
56. Yad, Mamrim 3:1-3.
57. The story appears in more detail in Rambam ’s Commentary to M. Avot 1:3. The Karaites , in his view, are the direct ideological descendants of Tzadok and Boethius , two students of Antigonos of Sokho who denied the authenticity of the Oral Torah and only pretended to maintain their fidelity to the Written Torah; had they not maintained that pretense, they would have had no hope of attracting followers to their new heresy.
58. See Rambam ’s Commentary to M. Hulin(ed. Kafah, 117), along with Kafah’s note 28. Rambam makes a distinction between Tzadok and Boethius on the one hand and those heretics whose error involves their beliefs about God (i.¢., God ’s
unity, incorporeality, and providence; see Yad, Teshuvah 3:7). The founders of Karaism are not classified with the latter group; nonetheless, they are minim an have thus committed a capital offense.
359. See note 46, above.