ARIEL STONE

one according to the observation of the moon, the other according to their previous practice.” According to Salo Baron , in Babylonia and Byzantium, Karaite Jews living in an overwhelmingly Rabbanite area observed Rabbanite customs, and Rabbanite Jews living in predominantly Karaite communities similarly followed Karaite norms.

Moving between the two groups“appears to have been no more difficult than is change of membership from a Reform to a Conservative or an Orthodox congregation today.”'® Neither did enemies see any essential differences: in 1099, when the Crusader Godfrey of Bouillon conquered Jerusalem and began to massacre its inhabitants, he did not hesitate to count Karaite and Rabbanite Jews together. On July 15 he and his men crowded them all into a synagogue and burned it down."

Even Saadiah Gaon , whom scholars considered the era’s great intellectual opponent of the Karaites , was not an implacable foe; in his conflict with the exilarch he“welcomed the support of the Karaite chieftains in Jerusalem .”'® Lasker notes that his major work of philosophy, Emunot vDe’ot, the Gaon “surprisingly has almost nothing to say about Karaism .”'® Baron describes a letter from the Gaon Shlomo ben Yehudah, written at a time in which Karaites enjoyed great power and wealth in Egypt , in which the Gaon “actually wished the Karaite chief in the Holy City, of whom he speaks with great respect, full success on his political mission to Cairo”; he adds to this the account of another letter from the elders of a community in Palestine in which they“unconcernedly addressed themselves to the two communities, Rabbanite and Kara­ ite , in Cairo and requested, in particular, the intervention of‘our elders, the elders of the Karaites ’.””

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