ABSTRACT

This study centres on a form of Jewish sectarianism, or Karaism, which traces its roots to ancient currents of thought in the Middle East and which “travelled,” or was intellectually transmitted, from east to west upon the establishment of Islamic hegemony in eighth-century Spain. The trajectory by which ideas that challenged rabbinic authority came to flourish in Islamic Spain as a result of the tolerant climate that facilitated their transmission is an object of focus, as is the reverberation of Karaism in the late medieval Jewish communities which came under Christian control during the Reconquest. Particular emphasis is placed on works that played key roles in documenting the transmission of Karaite doctrines to late medieval Spain, including Benjamin of Tudela's Itinerary and Abraham ibn Daud's The Book of Tradition, as well as on the dissemination of these doctrines during early modern times by conversos, descendants of forced converts from Judaism to Christianity. The “travel” of these doctrines from Spain to the places where conversos reunited in exile, in particular the community in seventeenth-century Amsterdam that included Baruch Spinoza, is ultimately understood to form a key component in shaping Spinoza's anti-Rabbinism in his Theological-Political Treatise.

Keywords: conversos, Karaism, Sadducees, Baruch Spinoza, Benjamin of Tudela

AS A CONSEQUENCE of the late medieval decimation of Iberian Jewry, sectarian ideas that received currency within Spain for centuries resurfaced in communities formed in the Sephardic diaspora. The seeds of this sectarianism were sown in the wake of the eighth-century Islamic conquest of Christian Iberia. During the following two hundred years, Muslim hegemony in Al-Andalus produced the political stability that fuelled economic prosperity and a flourishing culture in which exposure to Middle Eastern schools of thought encouraged Jewish defiance of traditional religious authority. The legacy of this cross-cultural contact created a lasting impact in Karaism, according to which Rabbinic Judaism lacked the antiquity, and thus the authority, of the Old Testament Rather than physical movement from one place to another, the present study focuses on the travel and spread of religious concepts. My point of departure is the arrival to Spain of Karaism and the ensuing rabbinic reaction that perceived it as a continuation of a sectarian threat that had persisted since biblical times.