But here he almost was, rising revenant-like up out of the muffling mounds of Geniza documents. The fierce argument Davidson had stumbled on was with one of the most formidable Jewish minds of the age—tenth-century Jewry’s greatest leader and most versatile thinker and writer, Saadia ben Yosef, who was, among many other things, the last person to have quoted from the Hebrew Ben Sira before it disappeared off the medieval radar. Born in 882, in the Egyptian district of Fayyum just south of Cairo, Saadia was appointed to the position of Gaon (Eminence), or head of the Babylonian academy of Sura, in 928. At once a conservative and profoundly revolutionary figure, it was Saadia Gaon, as he came to be known, who, more than any other individual, brought medieval Eastern Judaism into the “modern world” of Islamic civilization—“transform[ing] almost beyond recognition the intellectual and literary agendas of the cultural elite” of his day. As he did so, he fearlessly took on challenge after heretical challenge.
The scrap that Davidson had fished from the Cambridge collection was a small but tantalizing part of Saadia’s polemical reply to some two hundred cutting questions that Hiwi al-Balkhi had launched at the Bible and at Judaism sometime in the ninth century, which is to say, during a period of considerable religious ferment. Saadia’s thirty-one extant answers—composed before he became Gaon, and in a deft Hebrew that Davidson misidentified as rhymed prose—employed the standard prosodic components of the verse of the time, including an elaborate system of both alphabetical and signature acrostics, in addition to rhyme. It was, in other words, a kind of poetry, and it long stood as the earliest example of nonliturgical Hebrew verse, if of a merely didactic sort. In addition to being a highly influential and visionary philosopher, linguist, and commentator on scripture (which he translated into Arabic)—in many ways a much more original, critical, and attractive thinker than Maimonides—Saadia was also an innovative payyetan, the extent and quality of whose literary output was revealed only with the discovery of the Geniza and the work of Davidson, Menahem Zulay, and others. The tough-talking polemic Davidson had found presented him and other scholars with something like a Jewish game of Jeopardy! They had a set of succinct if heady answers; now they had to imagine the questions that prompted them.
As they worked out these equations, the contours of Hiwi’s radical thought and doctrine began to emerge.
Judging from what we hear in the not necessarily faithful echo of Saadia’s answers, Hiwi appears in his “book of questions” to have presented an eccentric, freethinking, and occasionally sneering take on the faith of his forefathers—which he may or may not have sought to leave. Deeply influenced by Zoroastrianism, certain elements of Persian philosophy, Christian and Islamic heretical doctrine, and possibly by the more controversial Jewish midrashim, he posed questions that were seen to “raise the ax over the essential principles” of Judaism as that religion emerges in the Bible and in the oral tradition: Why did God make man vulnerable to suffering? Why should the blood of animals be acceptable to Him as atonement? What would an omnipotent deity have had to fear from the builders of the Tower of Babel? Why did God choose just a single people (the Jews) and give the other nations over to the care of the angels? Why does the Bible present so many contradictory verses? Can’t the biblical miracles be explained rationally? (For example, the Red Sea wasn’t split supernaturally; Moses simply understood its ebb and flow, while the Egyptian troops did not. And manna wasn’t sent from heaven; it’s the Persian food tarjabin, which is found in those parts of the world. Et cetera.) In short, Hiwi seems to be saying, what kind of religion is this anyway? And what right-thinking person could believe in its scripture?
Hiwi’s own theological position can be summarized along the following distinctly nonnormative Jewish lines: God, at least as He emerges in the (problematic) Bible that represents Him, is neither all powerful, all present, nor One, and—moreover—He isn’t always Godlike! He engages in magic and is often neither just nor trustworthy. God did not create the world in the beginning—the world existed before Creation, and it was hardly perfect. God implanted evil in man, and He is also responsible for barbarism (sacrifice and the mutilation of circumcision). In his radical critique, and maybe also in his muttering recalcitrance, Hiwi was, as one modern scholar has put it, “a whole millennium ahead of his time.”
But why was Saadia bothering to respond to Hiwi nearly half a century after the Bactrian Bible-basher had drawn up his questions? What troubled the Gaon so that he would risk bringing still more attention to Hiwi’s heretical line of thought?
The later medieval literature reports that Hiwi composed a kind of expurgated version of scripture, shorn of “objectionable” passages, and that this was taught in schools. While modern scholarship rejects the existence of Hiwi’s alternative commonsense Bible, it does leave open the possibility that he inspired just such a work by someone else, and that this Bible-for-doubters (perhaps by the skeptic Schechter had plucked from his crates) may have been the object of Saadia’s rhymed, proto-rap-like assault. A more plausible explanation, however, lies in the evidence that derives in part from Geniza finds and indicates that Hiwi belonged to the burgeoning cluster of sectarian figures whose teachings in the second half of the eighth century had begun to creep across the periphery of the Jewish world (especially along the Persian frontier, where Hiwi was raised), and that these heretical movements had come to pose a serious challenge to rabbinic Judaism, which was gradually emerging as the mainstream expression of the faith. Saadia had spent the first thirty years of his life in Egypt and Palestine, where sects of this sort had attracted a following, and he was perhaps more alert than others to their danger.
Some seventy years after Davidson’s discovery of Saadia’s response, the Geniza coughed up one of the many quiet surprises that it holds in store for those who tend to its treasures like ants—patiently constructing networks of tunnels and routes along which finds and supplies might move: in 1982, a Jerusalem scholar working with microfilms of Geniza manuscripts happened on a fragment containing eleven lines of Hiwi’s original composition. The page appears to come from yet another work written in response to Hiwi’s dissenting position, and it quotes verbatim three of his questions (attributing one of these directly to him). The find confirms that Hiwi did indeed write in Hebrew, and for all intents and purposes employed the same style that Saadia mirrored in his reply. As with so many of the Geniza discoveries, this one too had passed through numerous hands without being recognized, despite the fact that Hiwi’s name (spelled with a small difference) appeared clearly on the page, in large Hebrew characters cast into Judeo-Arabic: “And about the story of the Egyptian sorcerers, Hiwahi al-Balkhi said …”
In early November of 1901, the same year that Schechter published his article on the Bible doubter, he wrote to his friend Mayer Sulzberger in Philadelphia, complaining bitterly about “the dragging and haggling” of dealing with the board of directors at the Seminary as he negotiated his new position there, which he says he would gladly surrender before having even taken it up—“but for the fact that I want to live among Jews and … hope … to have, God willing, some share in shaping the future of Judaism.” Then he pulls the latest rabbit out of his Geniza hat and mentions that he has just identified large fragments of a sectarian manuscript and that, again, “God willing,” he “intend[s] to edit one day a volume of fragments forming my Heretic’s Gallery which will surprise the world. [But] I am now keeping back the best things for America as I think that such publication will give the Seminary a certain prestige.” A full nine years later, settled at JTS and still bickering with the board over institutional matters, he finally saw into print the manuscript he’d mentioned to Sulzberger, alongside another, older one, in a book called Documents of Jewish Sectaries. The contents of this volume hadn’t been known before the discovery of the Geniza and were, it seemed, related to the origins of a much larger Jewish schismatic movement, the most threatening of the age. This latter group was the foe at which Saadia had aimed his rhetorical cross
bow again and again in fragments found among the Fustat scraps: Karaism.
But first, Schechter’s sectaries—on the face of it, a surprising shift of attention for this scholar and leader whose work and life were devoted to reinforcing the integrity and “vital” center of Jewish history and tradition. Although he was very much a man of cultural progress and in many respects a liberal, and though he believed with all his heart in the unified vision of what he called “Catholic Israel” (in which all the streams of Judaism were, in essence, one), while still in Europe Schechter had developed a pronounced aversion to the dissension of Reform Judaism, whose individualism and Protestant-style reliance on private judgment he felt merely paved the way to Christianity. As Schechter saw it, Reform Judaism in Germany and America had become a modern sect, opposed to the body of Judaism, and like the sectarian movements of the Jewish past (to which some Reformist scholars were drawn, but about which the masses of its adherents were ignorant), it would prove evanescent. Perhaps his Cairo finds would help him make his case.
A zealously particular and utterly fascinating puritanical composition, “Fragments of a Zadokite Work” (the first and principal part of the Jewish Sectaries volume) comprises, as Schechter diplomatically put it, “the constitution and the teachings of a Sect long ago extinct, but in which we may perhaps easily detect the parent of later schisms with which history dealt more leniently.” Arguably second in importance among the Geniza revelations only to the Ben Sira fragments, the find was reported on the front page of the New York Times on Christmas Day 1910. A long feature story occupying the entire opening spread of the Sunday Magazine section followed on New Year’s, complete with a large picture of the bespectacled Schechter and the declaration that this was a “discovery of … extreme importance to the history of religion.” The article noted that the manuscript, which was also known as the Damascus Document, had been found “in the Genizah or Hiding Place under [sic] one of the most ancient synagogues in the world,” and the Times writer plunged into the controversy that had immediately sprung up around the heretical text and which would intensify when, decades later, another copy of the work was found in the caves above the Dead Sea at Qumran: When was this work composed and who are its characters? Is it about John the Baptist, Paul, and one of the earliest Christian groups on record, or—as Schechter postulated—about a Second Temple Jewish community that in many ways anticipated the coming of Christianity and was but one of the many Jewish sects of the day?
Leading a group of Jews on the cusp, or over it, the protagonist of this cultish text—and also a central figure in the Qumran literature—is, as Schechter and most scholars translate the Hebrew, a man known as the Teacher of Righteousness. His mission is to lead Israel away from the erroneous instruction of the Man of Scoffing and back to the ways of God. Rejected by the majority of Jews and the mainstream Judaism of his time, the Teacher—who is considered “an anointed one,” or Messiah from the priestly line of Aaron, not the line of Jesse and David, and was himself a priest—takes his followers to Damascus, where they form a New Covenant, or Testament. While in Damascus the Teacher dies. His disappearance—he is expected to rise again—is followed by a period of backsliding, but the sect survives as a highly organized society scattered among several cities, one of which is designated as “the City of Sanctuary,” where sacrifices are offered.
The sect’s congregation sees itself as the true remnant of Israel, “an Israel … within an Israel,” and accepts the teachings, laws, and legends of the Old Testament, including the Prophets. But it also acknowledges the authority of several noncanonical or “outside” works, some of which today form part of the Pseudepigrapha—that is, falsely attributed books composed in a biblical style, usually dating from between the second century B.C.E. and the second century C.E. (for instance, the Book of Jubilees). Above all, the followers of the New Covenant distinguish themselves from the “transgressors of the Covenant” and “the builders of the fence,” which is to say, the official Judaism of the Pharisees, whose motto was “Make a fence for the Torah.” As Schechter bluntly puts it, this was “a Sect decidedly hostile to the bulk of the Jews as represented by the Pharisees.” Schechter’s translation of the document’s feverish Hebrew tells how the rabbis and their followers
searched in smooth things and chose deceits and looked forward to the breaches. And they chose the goods of the throat and justified the wicked and condemned the just and transgressed the covenant and broke the statute and gathered themselves together against the soul of the righteous man.… But with them that held fast to the commandments of God, who were left among them, God confirmed His covenant with Israel forever, revealing unto them the hidden things in which all Israel erred.
Among these hidden things—apart from the community’s additional sacred books and highly elaborate set of laws (which called for the ritual slaughter of fish and forbade, among many other things, the employment of a “shabbos goy”)—was a calendar of “new moons and seasons and Sabbaths” that differed from that of rabbinic Judaism. Likewise, the sect’s interpretation of the nation of Israel’s past also clashed with that of official Judaism, some of whose heroes (especially David) were singled out for abuse.
At this point a new set of questions float up before us. What was such a bizarre Second Temple sectarian text (the Dead Sea Scrolls proved Schechter right in his dating) doing in high-medieval Fustat? And why, when the manuscript was considered worn out, was it placed in the Geniza of a synagogue belonging to the Rabbanites—descendants of the Damascus Document’s “Princes of Judah, [who] turned not out of the way of the traitors … and walk[ed] in the way of the wicked … and builded the wall and daubed it with untempered mortar”?
The second part of Schechter’s sectarian diptych hints at a possible, though by no means definitive, answer. This Aramaic manuscript fragment by one Anan ben David, an Iraqi Jew who appeared on the Baghdadi scene some time around 770, sketches out the lines of yet another alternative Jewish system. Chafing against the ever-widening and controlling body of rabbinic law, Anan led a Muslim-influenced reform movement within Judaism proper. While he made ample use of rabbinic interpretive strategies, Anan adopted a seemingly libertarian and even postmodern line, declaring that each person was obliged to interpret the Torah for himself and that such independent interpretation of scripture took precedence over everything—tradition, community, and family—even if it led to differences in practice. But his Book of Commandments (Sefer Mitzvot), which was really a sort of maverick’s Talmud (“It reads,” Schechter told Sulzberger, “absolutely like Gemara”), promptly applies a corrective constrictive pressure and preaches anything but tolerance: “Father or mother, brothers or children who do not serve heaven in our fashion are persons from whom we are duty bound to separate.… Any Jew who does not observe the Torah is called a gentile.… And we must of necessity separate from them. And we are required to gather together.” Of specific note in this book of precepts is Anan’s forbidding not only the kindling of fire on the Sabbath (as the rabbis do, per Exodus 35:3), but the burning of fire, as the Bible states. In other words, according to Anan’s literalist reading of scripture, on the day of rest all fire had to be extinguished, including lamps, candles, and coals for cooking that had been lit before the Sabbath had begun. (One imagines Anan and his followers sitting on the floor and eating cold leftovers in the dark.) Likewise the biblical verse that in the rabbinical tradition gives way to the prohibition against the mixing of milk and meat in a meal or a pot is understood by Anan to mean exactly what it tells us: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk”—and nothing more. The consumption of milk and meat together, he ruled, was permissible, so long as the milk wasn’t that of a given kid’s mother. Furthermore, circumcision, Anan by way of the Geniza tells us, should be carried out with scissors, not with a scalpel; and so long as Israel was in exile, alcohol and all meat (except that of pigeons and deer) were forbidden.
These and other depressing precepts put forth i
n Anan’s book were eventually adopted by a community of various marginal Eastern Jewish movements that were united toward the middle of the ninth century and came to be known in Hebrew initially as bnei mikra—disciples or champions of scripture—and in time as kara’im, or readers of scripture. Others believe the term Karaite (kara’i, in Hebrew) comes from a different derivation of the k-r-a root, meaning “to call,” and reflects the influence of the sectarian Islamic Shiite movements of the time, within which the preacher was known as the da’i, or “caller.”
Whatever the origin of the term, Karaism took hold—and the letters and documents of the Cairo Geniza shine something of a klieg light on the movement, seriously revising our view of it and showing just how critical this seemingly heretical trend was to the development of what would become normative Judaism. Evidence of the Karaites’ success comes howling at us from the wrinkled pages of documents written by Rabbanite leaders on whose collective big toe they stepped. Repeatedly. The Gaon of one of the two Babylonian academies, for instance, went at them in the course of a controversy concerning alternative versions of the Passover Haggada then in circulation, and he threatened—Jews of New Jersey and the new Jerusalem take heed—excommunication for anyone who dared to shorten or in any way alter the traditional text, calling those who do so “heretics who mock the words of the sages, and the disciples of Anan—may his name rot—… who said to all those who strayed and whored after him: ‘Abandon the words of the Mishna and Talmud, for I shall compose for you a Talmud of my own.’ And they still persist in their error and have become a separate nation.” This earliest mention of Anan’s Book of Commandments goes on to call it a “book of abominations.”
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