ARIEL STONE
derstanding of the written law(at least as far as the masses are concerned). This caused the sect to be known as and named Karaim—those who“read” for themselves, following a dictum attributed to Anan ben David by Binyamin ben Moshe:“Search well in the Torah , and do not rely on my opinion.”® It also caused the sect to be proclaimed heretical. Many Rabbanite sources consider the Karaites to represent a continuation of the Second Temple period Sadducean sect; thus, Saadiah Gaon ’s explanation of the emergence of Karaism :”“Anan gathered together under[a] date palm every evil man and brigand who remained from the righteous destruction...” Lasker points our that many anti-Rabbanite Jewish sects that appear in the eighth and ninth centuries, sectarians and informers, do bear a resemblance in their teachings to dissenters of the Second Temple period. At the very least we can assume that, in the intervening centuries for which we have no records yet dis
covered, Jewish political and theological unity did not obtain. Various Jewish sects, united only in their opposition to Rabbanism, seem to sporadically appear and disappear.
Karaism , however, did not disappear. Instead, between the ninth and twelfth centuries, it grew to become a large and influential community of Jews—Iliving, studying Torah , instituting some different ritual practices, and engaging in a lively philosophical debate about those practices with the representatives of Rabbanite Judaism throughout the Byzantine Empire . Their insistence that in‘dividuals might legitimately interpret the Scriptures differently and, therefore, that legitimate differences in belief and practice might exist in some places, apparently appealed to many Jews . These were perhaps those antinomians that resented the power of the rabbis and their all-encompassing Oral Law, which had become the required intermediary between Jew and Jewish revelation. If so, those free
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