Bibliographia Karaitica: An Annotated Bibliography of Karaites and Karaism, Karaite Texts and Studies (Etudes Sur Le Judaisme Medieval)

893 Pages·2010·5.32 MB·English

by  Barry Dov Walfish

Bibliographia Karaitica
Études sur
le Judaïsme Médiéval
Fondées par
Georges Vajda
Dirigées par
Paul B. Fenton
TOME XLIII
Karaite Texts and Studies
Edited by
Meira Polliack
Michael G. Wechsler
VOLUME 2
Библиография Караитика
Аннотированная библиография караимов и караимизма
составитель
Барри Дов Валфиш
при участии
Михаила Кизилова
Институт Бен-Цви
Иерусалим
Лейден • Бостон
Брилл
Bibliographia Karaitica
An Annotated Bibliography of Karaites and Karaism
By
Barry Dov Walfish
with
Mikhail Kizilov
THE BEN-ZVI INSTITUTE
JERUSALEM
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2011
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walfish, Barry.
Bibliographia Karaitica : an annotated bibliography of Karaites and Karaism / by Barry Dov
Walfish with Mikhail Kizilov.
p. cm. — (Études sur le judaïsme médiéval ; v. 43) (Karaite texts and studies ; v. 2)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-90-04-18927-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Karaites—Bibliography. I. Kizilov, Mikhail,
1974–
Z6371.K37B55 2010
[BM185]
016.2968’1—dc22
2010033350
ISSN 0169-815X
ISBN 978 90 04 18927 0
Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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For Adele
ךָתֶ יבֵ יתֵ כְּרְיַבְּ היָּרִפֹּ ןפֶ גֶכְּ ךָתְּ שְׁ אֶ
and
Miriam-Simma, Mordechai, Shoshana, and Simcha
ךָ נֶֽחָלְשֻׁ לְ ביבִסָ םיתִ יזֵ ילֵתִ שְׁ כִּ ךָינֶבָּ
ג:חכק םילהת
(Psalms 128:3)
(The carrots are finally cooked.)

PREFACE TO THE SERIES
KARAITE TEXTS AND STUDIES
Interest in Karaism—a stream of Judaism that may generally be described as “scripturalist”
and, at least with respect to established rabbinic halakhah, “anti-traditional”—has seen a
significant and steady increase in recent years. While Karaism as a cohesive religious move-
ment covers a wide span both in time and location—from the ninth century to the present
and from Persia to North America—the focus of this scholarly efflorescence has been pri-
marily on the history and literature of the Karaite “Golden Age,” centered in Persia-Iraq and
Palestine of the late ninth through eleventh centuries. It is from this period that Karaism’s
most prolific littérateurs, adept thinkers, and influential personalities emerge—figures who,
as recent studies have made increasingly clear, impacted the lives and thinking not just of
their coreligionists, but of the Jewish community at large.
Contributing to this flowering of interest in Karaism—and hence to the establishment of
the present series—are three essential factors, the first of which is the significantly increased
accessibility of primary sources relating to medieval Karaism. The bulk of these sources
consists of roughly 10,000 Karaite manuscript codices, collected in the first half of the nine-
teenth century from various Karaite communities in the Middle East (especially Cairo) by
the Karaite communal leader and bibliophile Abraham Firkovich (1786–1874). These manu-
scripts were eventually acquired by the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in St. Petersburg (now
the National Library of Russia) and are presently divided, along with several Karaite manu-
scripts from sources other than Firkovich, into various sub-groups identified by the sigla
Evr. (Еврейские = Hebrew) or Evr.-Arab. (Еврейско-арабские = Judaeo-Arabic). Access
to these manuscripts was generally denied to Western scholars during the Soviet period and
has only been made widely possible since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Over the past
two decades the vast majority of these manuscripts have been made more widely accessible
through the photography and cataloguing projects undertaken by the Institute of Micro-
filmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem.
Among the various West European libraries containing manuscripts of Karaite prove-
nance, important collections of primary sources are also to be found in the Bibliothèque
nationale in Paris, which contains around 25 Karaite manuscript codices (primarily the bib-
lical commentaries of Yefet ben Eli), and the British Library Collections of Hebrew manu-
scripts, which includes approximately 140 Karaite manuscript codices written in Arabic and
Hebrew script. This latter collection was purchased from the illustrious bookseller and col-
lector M. W. Shapira in 1882, who acquired the manuscripts during travels through Hīt (in
Iraq) and Cairo.
In addition, there exists a relatively small number of Karaite manuscript fragments among
those salvaged from the Rabbanite Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo, generally known as the
“Cairo Genizah.” The Genizah’s vast contents, the majority of which are housed at Cam-
bridge University Library (Taylor-Schechter Collection) and date primarily from the tenth
to the thirteenth centuries, range across the spectrum of medieval documentary and literary
texts, and hence provide fascinating insight into the life and literature of Mediterranean
Jewry—primarily Rabbanite, though to a certain degree also Karaite—during a period that
was previously shrouded in relative obscurity. The ability of scholars to navigate this corpus
and attain a broader measure of accessibility has been greatly assisted over the past decade
through diligent efforts at cataloging. These have so far resulted in the publication of several
catalogues prepared by the Cairo Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library,
describing thousands of fragments in Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic.
The second factor relates to a certain tendentiousness which has to some extent character-
ized the history of research on Karaism. In popular Jewish circles, and in the wider academic
discipline of Jewish Studies, Karaism has sometimes been viewed as an isolated phenom-
enon. Its literature has not always been recognized as authentic, innovative, or interesting,
and the productive influence it may have had on Jewish history and thought has some-
times been dismissed. In part, this position has been shaped by the antagonistic mindset
of certain medieval rabbinic sources in which Karaism was portrayed as the “enemy from
within,” seeking to undermine the validity of Jewish tradition and threatening it, alongside