Season 1: Episode 16 - Ism and Schism

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Baruch Sminoza says, Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy. And I say that ism and schism will always come into the world together. But that's okay, because I'm trying to tell one story, a story in which the whole world can join. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 16, Ism and Schism. So we left off the last episode with the rise of Islam, but also with a sense that the conversation of the Gemara is ripe for a stage of serious embodiment. Because as the Jews become a minority group within larger Christian and Muslim societies, their ability to maintain the edges of identity is going to become an increasingly important power.

And it's going to be during the Gaonic period that a one-to-one relationship between law and identity will be achieved. This is a time when Am Yisrael will truly transform into the Jews through the final consolidation of Judaism, their religion. And in order to understand the significance of this building, which is undertaken really, or at least completed in the Gaonic period, We're going to have to appreciate exactly who the Gaonim were, what they did, and the story that drove them to do it. Now this full picture is going to actually take us two episodes, so strap in. For now, let's start with this. How do the Gaonim and the Exile Ark emerge in the Islamic era as a triumvirate with virtually autonomous rule over the Jews of Bavel of Babylon?

Now, it seems to me that the story of why the Exilarch has the image of a wasp in his emblem explains it best. The historical record of our Jewish story gets quite patchy in the transition between Persia and the Islamic Empire in the early 7th century, and therefore, whenever the historic record is patchy, the legends are always thick. one thing is certain the name of the Exil Ark Bostanai is bound up with this transition between Persian and Islamic rule there are stories left, right and center stories from before his birth, after his birth but for now, suffice it to say that he was of the house of the Exil Ark which is to say the house of King David through King Yo-Yachin the king of Yehuda, exiled long ago before even the first temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.

And the story goes that in his youth, Boston Ai came before the king to press a claim. Now some say that the king was Omar, the second of the Rashidun Caliphs, who had just come north on conquest, as we actually left him at the end of last episode. Boston Ai had come to press the case that he was now 16, and the Epitropus, the court-appointed guardian who held his household, and therefore the office of the Exilarch, in trust, refused to surrender his claim. And as the young boy stood before the caliph, the caliph looked out and noticed that a wasp had floated through the air and landed on his temple. And not only did the boy not brush it away, or flinch, that the wasp began to repeatedly sting him.

And as the blood trickled down the side of the boy's face, and he still made no move to chase it away, the king was astonished and called the youth forward to say, what exactly is going on? So the young boy said that he, Bostanai, was of the house of David. And he had been taught since his youngest days that since they themselves had lost their throne way back when the first temple was destroyed, that they were neither to laugh nor lift up a hand nor speak when they stood before a king, but to stand in absolutely motionless respect. Now, Omar was so moved by the boy's demeanor and his self-control that he immediately investigated the case found in his favor and rewarded him his rightful office of Exilar.

Furthermore, he elevated the office of Exilar and gave it the power to appoint judges for all the Jews of Babylonia and also to appoint the heads of the two academies, Surah and Pompadita. And in memory of this event, Bosa and I introduced a wasp into the emblem of the Exilarchate. Now, it's a beautiful story, but I think there are two things that we can learn from it for our purposes. First of all, that the rebirth of the office and authority of the Exilarch and the heads of the academies, who will be the Go'onim that we discuss in a few minutes, in the Islamic era will not only be as religious authorities, they will also hold the power of state officials. Because Omar gave Ba'a Sanayi what's known as a reshut, he gave him the right of rule over a specific domain, in fact, a significantly large area of highly concentrated Jewish life.

We also see from the story that the ability of the Jew to stand with integrity and bear pain in honor of the commands that he's received in the past will be the cornerstone to his success in exile. Now, the office of Exilarch had somewhat disappeared toward the end of the Persian period, perhaps due to the unrest we spoke about in the late 6th century, and now it will return in the person of Boston Eye. And, as we said, his office will come with it, and as we said, with this office will come also the official appointment from the Caliph. Furthermore, the divinic lineage, which they're claiming through King Yoachim, is going to be revered by Muslims and Jews alike, and therefore will be a tremendous source of power and pride for these people living a tolerated life as a minority within the Islamic Empire.

So this is the return of the Exilarchate. Before we get to the Gaonim, I just want to touch what exactly are our sources of information for this time period. The first, and perhaps most important, is what's known as the Gerrit of Rav Shreira Gaon. Rav Shreira Gaon actually lives in the middle to late 10th century, and we'll speak about him in place in the next episode, but for now, you should understand that in that period, Rav Nisim of Kerouan, a very important Jewish city in North Africa, wrote a letter asking Rav Shreira the following questions. How did the Mishnahh, the Tosefta, and the Gemara come about? what was their process of formation. And furthermore, tell us the history of all the authors of the Gemara and the leadership of the academies up to our day.

Rabbi Nissen wanted to know, how did we get where we are? He was a master of the oral law himself and a teacher and a leader, a rabbi of his community. But he wanted the backstory. So the Gerrit of Rav Sher Gaon will actually be the first work of Jewish historiography. He's the first person to consciously try and give a sense of continuity to the Gaonic vision of Judaism. It's a very important letter, and we'll refer to it a number of times. Another is a letter of what's known as Rav Natan the Babli. Now, this is written in Judeo-Arabic in the mid-10th century. Judeo-Arabic is a discussion unto itself, which will also come to us later. It's quite brief, but it's a highly colorful description of life in the academies, and it's where we actually get any information that we can really glean about what it actually looked like to be in one of these Gaonic academies.

Now, there's also the responsa. What responsa? Well, the Gaonim really developed a new style of rabbinic literary output. They would receive questions from all over the world, and in response, hence the name responsa, they would write answers. This testifies to the existence of the Go'onim as a central authority of Jewish tradition from all over the world. But it's also going to give us quite a funny window, because it's really going to tell us what others were interested in, and not necessarily what concerned the Go'onim themselves. We're going to come back to the nature and role of these responsa as we go forward. The last source of information we have is what's known as the Cairo Geniza. Geniza is a repository of any written work with the names of God or other sacred subjects on it, which according to Jewish tradition should be buried and not destroyed.

And the contents of this particular storeroom, this Geniza, were found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, that's Old Cairo. Now, over a period of time they were found, but finally, the bulk of the material was actually unearthed and taken by the scholar Solomon Schachter when he made a voyage of discovery to Cairo in 1897. Hundreds of thousands of fragments of documents there, which represent a thousand-year continuum of text from the 9th to the 19th century. So those are our sources of information. It's also going to be important to keep an eye on the fact that we are living within the Islamic era, and therefore one word on the shifting nature of the caliphate. The first caliphate, as we said, is the Rashidun Caliphate, and those will be really the direct inheritors from Muhammad.

And that will come to end in 661, when the Umayyad Caliphate begins and places its capital in Damascus. From 661 to approximately 750 is the Umayyad period, and unfortunately, our documentation for this time is poor to non-existent. However, when the Caliphate moves to Baghdad with the birth of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750, will actually last to well into the 13th century. This is when our records really begin. And we see that Rav Chaya ben David Gaon was the first Gaon who's actually described as living in Baghdad. Because even though Surah and Pompidita, these academies we've described so many times since the Gemara era, will retain their names, they actually, by the time of the mid-10th century, will both be in Baghdad.

So who were the Gaoning? In addition to the Exil Ark this political head who really stood before the Caliph and represented Jewry as a whole there were two Gaonim and their title derives from the full Hebrew phrase Rosh Yeshiva Gaon Yaakov the head of the Yeshiva of the academy the pride of Yaakov Gaon means pride in the sense of genius. The Gaonim were the head of these two academies, which had dominated the later stage of the formation of the Gemara, Surin Pompadita. And it's important to note that while the office of the Exilarch was largely hereditary, being filled with a small familial circle, as we said, from the Davidic line, if not actually inherited from father to son. The Gaonim, however, were the products of a meritocracy.

Each academy had a court of 70 scholars, in a sense parallel to the Sanhedrin, that ancient Jewish high court of old, and these scholars would choose as their head the person most fit for the office of Gaon. Now, politics are always present, as we will see as our story goes on, and they certainly must have played their part in choosing both the Exilarch and the Goanim. But nevertheless, it was genius in Torah, and in particularly a mastery of the Talmud of the Gemara, that brought these men to leadership. And they were indeed leaders, because like the Exilarch, the Goanim wielded significant political power on a regional scale. Because, like the Exilarch, each of the two academies had authority over a certain domain, a reshut that had been granted them by the caliph.

Combined, these three reshuyot, these three domains of the exorc and the two Gaonim, actually stretched from the Jordan River eastward to the Indus Valley, the farthest extent of Jewish settlement in the Islamic Empire. And within this region, the Gaonim and the exorc had the right to raise taxes, to appoint local court judges. They were indeed the inheritors of the two critical elements that allowed Jewish life to thrive, geographic concentration, and autonomous courts. And with this power, they did an astounding thing. They cultivated an entire society which centered on the mastery of Talmud. Now, it's true that to some degree, learning will always be the province of the intellectual elite, as well as the economic elite who actually have the time to pursue it.

Nevertheless, in the era of the Gaonim, they managed to create a social structure which embodied the aspiration, if not the actualization, of placing learning at the center of life. The two months of Adar and Elul, roughly the early spring and fall, were known as the Yarche Kala, the months of gathering. Now, Yerch means moon, as in month. Kala is a mystery term that I did a little digging into, and it's really not worth confusing ourselves about. The months of gathering. These are the two months which, in particular, have a light agricultural load. Duties on the farm would light, and therefore, the widespread attendance at the academies was at full strength. People would come from all over Baaldeh and sit before the Goenim, hear their classes, sit themselves and learn.

And the Gemara already, before the era of the Goenim, testifies to these periodic gatherings, playing a central role in the ability of the sages to shape a larger Jewish culture. This is centuries before the Go'onim. By this time, these months have become a time of intensive study. And in particular, the section of the Gemara which we learned in the coming year was announced in order that all of the Jews of Babylon be on the same learning cycle. In between these two months, in the academies were the Go'onim, these 70 scholars that we mentioned who sat in rows before them, and the students who actually merited to a stipend because of their ability. is the Goenim used their ability to raise taxes and collect money from the diaspora Jewish communities in order to fund a scholarship.

So that's who they were. What exactly did they do? And in particular, how were they able to create the ism of Judaism? Now, the Goenim were able to shape Judaism out of their understanding of the Talmud, first and foremost, by becoming the intellectual masters of its legal content, and then by becoming the undisputed halachic authorities, the legal authorities to whom even the Jewish world well beyond the bounds of Babylon would gradually turn with their questions. The last piece was also by establishing the Babylonian customs as the definitive minhag, the definitive practice, the story of which we'll come to soon. Through these two tools of law and custom, what the Goanian managed to do was create orthopraxis, a surprisingly homogenous religious identity founded on a uniformity of action.

The Jews will become those who practice Judaism. That is, law whose development is driven by authoritative understanding of rabbinic thought, as articulated by the Gaonim. And Judaism will become that which the Jews do, that custom. Meaning, what happens when communities of those who feel themselves bound by the law actually start to live it in real time? this dynamic of the law defining the people and the people through their life in turn articulating the law helps to give us a little bit more of a clear definition of the boundaries of the Jewish community within the Islamic Empire it's critical to remember that within Islamic society the Jews are a tolerated religious minority and an organized community meaning any public services like health and social welfare are taken care of internally, and any relationship to the larger society on an official level, taxes in particular, are dealt with through the communal heads.

We've also seen, by the way, since the Theodosian Code of the 5th century, you can go back and do some homework, that the law of the surrounding majority cultures has been used to hem in and define Jewish identity for, at this point, several centuries. Law is a tool for shaping identity, from more than just an internal standpoint. Furthermore, now that the vast majority of Jews are actually united under the rule of Islam, by some accounts, 90% of world Jewry, the Caliph's recognition of the Exilarch, which we saw through the story of Boston Eye, and the Gaonim as state officials, actually makes them by definition the heads of the Jews. And this is how ultimately the Gaonim, and specifically with the Babylonian Talmud in their hand, will become the central drivers of Jewish identity for a thousand years to come.

Now, one last piece in this image of law reigning supreme. It's critical to remember that the Gaonim saw themselves as the inheritors of a closed text. If you're going to give any definition to the distinction between the Gaonim and the active formative periods of the Gemara which preceded them, It will be just that. The Gemara now, in their hands, is no longer a conversation, it's a canonical text. Remember, a conversation is really shaped by the voices of those who are participating in it. But now the Gohonim will take the legal and narrative elements, as they understand it, and use them as a template to shape those who get to participate in that conversation. Now, through their direct rule over the Rishuyo, their domains, and the annual rhythm of the Kala month, they begin to articulate the halakhic aspect in particular of the Gemara into a full-blown local culture.

And through their responsa, these questions which they receive and answer from Jews all over the world, they will export this culture worldwide. Now, the Gemara actually preserves the idea that occasionally halakhic questions were sent from afar. But in the Kaonic period, as we said, this responsa will become the central facet of rabbinic activity. We have between 5,000 and 10,000 responsa which have been preserved, and it's reasonable to assume that they're only a fraction of what was written. And this phenomena of the question and response is in large part due to the shared cultural, linguistic, and communication infrastructure which the Islamic world provided to the Jews. Furthermore, this centralized authority meant that there was someone to whom to turn.

In general, the responses tend to focus on two categories. There are practical, legal, halakhic questions, and there are what we would call questions in learning, the interpretation of a specific Talmudic text. Toward the end of the Goenic period, actually, questions of biblical interpretation and religious doctrine, theology, are going to become more common, And this is the result of forces that we'll actually discuss in the coming episode, the second half of the story of the Gaonim. One classic and highly significant example of the responsa is called the Seder of Rav Amram. Sometime in the mid-9th century, Yitzchak ben Shimon of Spain sent a question to Rav Amram, the Gaon of Surah, asking for, I quote, an order of prayer and blessings for the entire year.

Now again, you can learn as much from the question as you can from the answer. From the question we can see is that at this point there was no agreed upon consolidated prayer book. And the result was the first attempt at a comprehensive sidur prayer book. And we call it the Seder of Rav Amram. Truth is, the Seder of Rav Amram still exists today. But because it was received not as an inviolate text, but rather as a framework with which to work, it's been so worked over by the various communities that received it that it's almost impossible to get at the core of what Rab Amram actually said. But we can see through this that the impact of the responsa is actually going to be dependent on how those who received them put them into action.

It could have been a dead letter, but instead Rab Amram's Seder, his first Sidur prayer book, became the formative moment of Jewish liturgy. Now, how did these response actually go back and forth through the world Well that happened through the shlichim through the Gaonic messengers who were sent to Spain North Africa Italy in order to deliver the responsa, to raise money, because it was customary to send money to the academies when a question was sent or an answer was received, and to disseminate the Gemara. They had a tremendous impact. You know, Rav Shreira teaches that the Tamlin and the Mishnahh were not written, but actually redacted. And the rabbis, meaning the ge'onim, are careful to recite them orally and not from copies.

It's an astounding thing called oral text. The ge'onim knew the entire gemara by heart. Now this doesn't necessarily mean that the level of textual integrity that we associate with the gemara was of any concern to them. Because remember, today if I asked you to copy something for me, you'd say, yeah, why don't you send me via email and I'll just print it out. Whereas in their time, copying meant memorizing complex structure. And the particular issues of syntax or word choice may have been, and often indeed were from the evidence that we have, secondary. And what's even more challenging, as we'll see, is going to return as an issue again and again through Jewish history, is that in a text whose meaning is primary as opposed to whose structure, in the written Torah we developed a whole culture whose purpose was to keep the structure of the text identical, and then we left the interpretive tradition to articulate the meaning but the Gemara, the meaning is primary the wording is secondary, anybody who's ever opened the Gemara has seen that the process of emendation and conflicting what are called Gersot versions is rife but here, if a Gaon understands the Gemara in such a way, and teaches it in a way where he didn't actually receive the literal reading from his teacher, but believes that the reading he is speaking is the true one, where does the integrity of the text lie?

This challenge of oral text is going to come particularly deep when the Kamala, Jewish mysticism, begins to come out of the darker corners of history. But we'll wait for the story of Spain for that one. For now, we should understand that the Shlichim, who both delivered and carried to the Geonim the questions of the Diaspora, were not always simply messengers. Sometimes they were actually scholars of such a degree that they brought the Gemara to the communities of North Africa, Italy, Spain, not in their luggage but in their minds. So through the mastery of the Gemara, the Geonim cultivated a powerful local culture based not only on law, which is a critical component of the Gemara, but also organized around the act of learning.

They also used their role as central illegal authorities for the Jews of the Islamic Empire and thus made law the definitive basis for Jewish identity and placed themselves as its arbiters. But they were not without competition. Because in order to use the Gemara as a cultural matrix, to take it drop it down in the midst of a bunch of Jews and make them into adherents of Judaism. In other words, to create a legal identity. The Go'on of Babel not only had to assert their intellectual supremacy through mastery of the text of the Gemara, they also had to establish themselves as the sole inheritors of a legitimate tradition, minhag. You can picture Tevi right now dancing on the roof. Tradition. So in order to do so, there was one critical opponent they had, and that was the land of Israel.

Because whatever the Go'onim might have thought of their superiority in Torah, the Babylonian academies had no automatic claim on the allegiance of other Jewish communities like North Africa, Spain, and Europe. On the contrary, Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, was geographically closer to these Far-Fung communities, and it had deep historic ties with them from the whole Greco-Roman period that we've discussed. and even within the context that I've articulated of the Islamic empire that gave the Go'onim of Babel so much of their aura of officialdom the caliph also recognized the rabbis of the land of Israel actually had hegemony over the Jewish population in Syria, Lebanon, Israel and down through Egypt now what is clear from the very patchy existing documents that we have about rabbinic life in the land of Israel at this period is that the academy which still exists at this time primarily in Tveria, we'll move around a few places, had nowhere near the focus on Talmudic law, which the Gaonim of Bavel had established.

What they were interested in will actually be discussed in the coming episode. But for now, suffice it to say, is that they did not pose themselves as masters of law. There exists a letter from Picoi Ben Baboi. That's a fun name, huh? He is a student, or he claims to be, a student of the student of Rav Yehudai Gaon, who we can identify from Rav Shur's letter as the head of the Surah Academy in approximately the year 760 of the Common Era. The letter was written a few generations later, around the turn of the 9th century, and is an open letter to the Jewish communities of North Africa and Spain, with the avowed purpose of convincing the reader of the exclusive legitimacy of the Babylonian halachic tradition and the practiced customs of Bavail.

Picoi claims that there is no continuity to Palestinian tradition, that any hopes of continuity had been lost due to the Christian persecutions that had wracked the land of Israel for centuries, as opposed to the unbroken Babylonian tradition that had been safe there since the destruction of the Second Temple. He goes on to say, that the practice, the customs, the minhag of the Jews in the land of Israel are basically a mixture of ad hoc emergency responses and fragments that have been preserved without a strong learning tradition. And thus he says, if you want to know who the Jews really are, you have to look to Bavel. Now what's interesting is as he goes through a much more detailed account, the only defense that he says that the Jews of Eretz Israel offer of their continuity of tradition is what's called minhag oker et hahalacha.

That means custom actually uproots the law. Because Picoi is saying, listen, we have all this legal precedent, and then we're looking at the practices of the Jews of Eretz Yisrael. We're seeing that the two don't line up. It must be that they lost their tradition. And the Jews of Eretz Yisrael said, no, no, no. Custom actually trumps law. And this is going to be a critical piece in understanding the life of Am Yisrael. There's a phrase that the Gemara uses, which is, Min Hag Yisrael Torahi, that there's more to the Torah than law. What the Jews do is Torah. And so this idea that your legal analysis can be set aside, and that you look at the organic practice of the Jewish people, will be the core posture of the Jews of Eretz Yisrael.

Now, his letter, Pico's letter, is symptomatic of a much larger effort by the Goenim to consolidate Jewish identity, and thus Judaism, around Babylonian tradition. And interestingly, it's at this point in history that we begin to see records of synagogues of Babylonian Jews, even in Israel and Egypt. Now, this is a turning point in the interplay between custom and identity. What does it mean that there are Babylonian Jews in Israel? When the Mishnahh, that great record of rabbinic thought, the portable homeland, actually, which is the basis of the whole conversation that we've been having for episodes and episodes, when the Mishnahh speaks of minhag ha-makom, in the tractate of Makom Jenagu, the idea of local custom, it's an assumption that local custom is a product of geography.

We do what we do because we are where we are. And here where we are, we've always done it this way. The question that the Mishnahh wants to know is at what point when I change my location do I become obligated to adopt local custom? But now, six centuries later, we're seeing the transformation of custom, which was once reflective of geography, into a separate and portable component of identity. What do I mean? I'll give you an example. How many people listen to me right now think of themselves as Ashkenazi Jews? Ashkenaz, as we'll discuss in coming episodes, is actually located in the Rhineland, in that border territory between France and Germany. I'm willing to bet most of you who think of yourselves as Ashkenazi Jews have never even been to the Rhineland, much less did you or your parents or your grandparents ever live there.

But nevertheless, there is a communally preserved set of customs and identities which now is not a product of geographic location, but actually is an portable element of identity. And this is going to play a very important role in articulating that story I told in the last episode about my daughter's devoured Torah. Because as the hammer blows of exile break the Jews into ever smaller components, it will be law and in particular custom because people cling to custom in a way in which law can never really appeal. It will be these forces that serve to hold the Jews together as well as to separate them from the non-Jews around them. But they will also separate them from Jews who are not like them. And that's going to become a pressing issue in the modern era.

All you have to do is walk the streets of Jerusalem and see how that plays out. In the long run, when it comes to this battle for the Gaonim, to establish not only their legal hegemony, but their claim to sole legitimate minhad custom, they'll win. But it will actually be certain communities in Italy and in the Rhineland, which becomes Ashkenaz that will be unknowingly the last bastions of the influence of the custom of Eretz Israel Now what strange is that both of these communities will have a conscious allegiance to the literary tradition of the Babylonian Talmud, because it will reign supreme sooner rather than later. But they'll have a tension which plays itself out if you spend enough time learning the Gemara, and particularly in the Tosfos, for those of you who are in the know, there will be a tension that's felt between lived tradition and literary tradition.

But no matter how you slice it, here we are. The Goenim have managed to establish their legal authority and their minhag, their custom, as supreme. And thus, they've more or less finished the rabbinic project of unifying practice into religion, of shaping Judaism out of diverse sets of Jews, and in turn using that Judaism to shape the Jews for a thousand years to come. Now it's worth noting that both the Gemara itself and the archaeological evidence which has been uncovered of the Gemara's period suggests that during the Tanaitic and Amoriic periods there were plenty of Jews, sometimes and often the majority who acted in ways of which the rabbis completely disapproved. but we have not seen an organized opposition to rabbinic authority since the days of the Sadducees in the time of the Second Temple until now because remember, ism and schism are born into the world together with the birth of orthodoxy what might have been seen as heterodoxy will now be labeled as heresy I refer you to the process of the Nicene Council and the birth of Christian Orthodoxy, which occurred in the early 4th century, and how that was bound up with the persecution of heresy for many centuries to come.

So, when it comes to the story of Judaism, in the 8th century, as the Gaonim are really beginning to reign supreme, And to create Judaism with this one-to-one mapping between identity and law, arises the movement which is known as Karaism. Now there are many individuals and groups who contribute to this movement. In fact, it's even difficult to call it a movement in any formal sense. But they're called Karaites likely because of the word Mikra. Mikra is the Hebrew term for the written word. and their name really indicates the primary bone of contention between the Go'onim, and the rabbinic tradition which they represent, and the Kairites. The Go'onim argued, in tradition of the sages all the way back to the Pharisees of Second Temple times, that the Torah itself presupposes some external law, without which it would be impossible to live by.

This is the oral law, whose development we've been following since the time of the Maccabees. go back and listen to a little bit of episodes 4 through 10 I believe now the Karaits took a verse from the Psalms as their slogan, it's 19.8 if you want to look it up the Torah of the Lord is perfect, meaning that the Torah is completely self-sufficient and can be understood and lived without reference to any outside authority granted even the most extreme element of this diffuse movement recognize that it's simply not possible to live many of the laws of Torah without some level of interpretation. For instance, when it says in Davarim, you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, what exactly does that look like?

Therefore, the Karaites will be continually forced to develop their own interpretive tradition, one which, by the way, is often marked by literalism, stricture, and even asceticism. Because if you take the injunction of the Torah, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, literally, you're going to walk around in a world of the blind and toothless. The most famous name of all the leaders of this many-faceted and decentralized movement who would actually be retroactively claimed as its founder was Anand ben David of whom we unfortunately know very little that can be relied upon. Most of what we know about Anand actually comes through rabbinic anti-Karaetic polemics and a lot of argumentation that was going on even though we see evidence in the Kaira Geniza that these communities often live peaceably side by side.

Anand lived in the mid-8th century, and we know that he wrote one major work called Sefer HaMitzvot, the Book of Commandments, fragments of which have actually been preserved in the Kaira Geniza. He is also reputed to be the author of the Karite slogan, Search diligently in the Torah and do not rely on my opinion. It's a big question about Anand and the other leaders of the Karite movement, whether they thought that they were creating anything authoritative in their own words at all, or whether what they were simply doing was enjoining everyone to be their own leader. Rav Natronay Gaon actually attributes him another saying, Forsake the words of the Mishnahh and the Talmud, and I will compose for you a Talmud of my own.

And in these two phrases we can see that aside from the philosophical and even legal distinctions, there was an argument going on here about authority. Now the center of Karate activity, up until the Crusades of the 11th century, would be in Jerusalem. And in a very strange twist of events, the Karates apparently came under the influence of what we now think of as the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is a letter from the Nestorian Catholicus of Baghdad, Timotheus, who reports that the Karates had learned from local Bedouin of ancient manuscripts found in caves above the Dead Sea. Now, this letter remained a strange footnote in our understanding of charism until the uncovering of the Cairo Geniza. Because in the Cairo Geniza, amongst those hundreds of thousands of pages and fragments of pages, were found two copies of what was known as the Damascus document.

It was one of the central instructionals of the Qumran sect. and so the Essenes and their particular sectarian worldview of Judaism lives on within the Karate movement. History is full of twists and turns. In a sense, the Goonim and the Karates are re-battling the fights of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes at the end of the Second Temple period. Well, maybe it's best to end as I began with a story. Because even though we know little about Anand ben David, that personality most associated with the origins of the Karate rebellion, rebellion against rabbinic authority in particular, there is a 12th century account of his rise, which was found in the Kairogeniza. And though it's clearly an attempt to cast a negative light on this man whose teaching led to a schism with the freshly forged ism of Judaism, I think it still has something to offer us.

so it says in approximately 760 of the common era Shlomo ben Chizda II the exilarch of Babylon died childless and two brothers amongst his nearest kin Anan ben David and his brother Hanania also known as Josiah were next in the order of succession now eventually it was not Anan who was chosen but rather his brother because they had a judgment on Anan that he was not worthy unclear why and that choice was confirmed by the caliph of Baghdad as was the custom. The difference is that Anand refused to accept the decision of the Ghanim and he declared himself the true exilarch, gathering followers around himself and basically beginning to hold court. It's at this point that an intra-Jewish struggle becomes an affair of state.

Remember, the exilarch is the appointee of the caliph and by claiming to be the rightful exilarch, Anand is now imprisoned as a rebel against the state and condemned to death. Now the story goes that in jail, he meets a prominent fellow prisoner, the Muslim philosopher Abu Hanifa al-Numan ibn Thabit. And to me, it's fascinating that Abu Hanifa could be loosely translated in Arabic and Hebrew as the father of hypocrisy. Nevertheless, it says in the story that he gave Anand ben David a piece of advice which will save his life. He said, don't claim to be the head of the Jews. Set yourself to teach the Torah in a manner completely opposite to the traditional interpretation, and then claim that you're not a rebel, but the head of a new religion.

It was a strategy that saved his life and split the Jewish people. So, as I said, there are many reasons to doubt the historicity of this tale. Nevertheless, I believe it contains a message for us all, even in our time. Note that even the rabbinic opponents of charism sensed where the problem might actually lay. And that is, it's all well and good to found your identity on law. But when you join power to law and use it to create official religion, this is when you place your authority in ism. And just remember, schism is never very far behind. I just want to thank all the people for helping make this possible. I want to thank, we're coming up, the numbers are coming up, the over 30 individuals who give their hard-earned money to keep this content free, syndicated, and widely distributed.

If you want to join them, go right now to www.patreon.com and you can find my M. Foyer page. I'd also like to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network for giving me a platform to reach such a broad spectrum of the world. I want to thank Pardes, that's P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L, for giving me the opportunity to touch so many good Jewish hearts and minds. I want to thank Suwam Yaakov, suwamyaakov.com, because it's my home. And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Lav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.