Karaites

Summary

The Karaite Jews — a small minority within Judaism who reject the validity of the Talmud as a source of Jewish law — and their Egyptian community, in Egypt for over a thousand years, some 5,000 strong in 1948, presented in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as the most thoroughly Arabized element of Egyptian Jewry and the limiting case of Jewish belonging in Egypt (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 87-109, 534-574).

Details

• Karaites date the beginnings of their community to the late second temple period and identify with non-Pharasaic [as printed] (Essene and Sadducee) currents; the term Karaites (kara’im) was first applied to followers of ‘Anan ben David (ca. 754–75), who broke with the Jewish communal leadership in Mesopotamia and established himself in Jerusalem. By the ninth century the community was established in Fustat (later incorporated into Cairo). The Egyptian rabbi Sa’adya ben Yosef al-Fayyumi (882–942) declared their doctrines heretical, but before the modern era disputes between the two rites “were regarded as internal to the Jewish community.” Under the Tulunids (868–969) and Fatimids (969–1171) Egypt’s Karaites were at times stronger than the Rabbanites; their numbers later dwindled sharply, to some 5,000 in Egypt in 1948 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 87-109).

• In the modern era, Eastern European Karaites were progressively distinguished from Jews: Catherine II exempted them in 1795 from the double tax imposed on Jews and allowed them to own land; in 1827 the Crimean Karaites were exempted from military service; and in 1939 the German Ministry of Interior declared the Karaites were not Jews, after consulting orthodox Rabbanite authorities — during the Nazi era the Karaites of Poland, Lithuania and Crimea were not treated as Jews. “Despite ambiguities about the Jewish identity of the Eastern European Karaites in the modern era, in Egypt there was never any doubt that the Karaites were Jews”; neither the state authorities nor the two Egyptian Jewish communities ever considered them anything but Jews (Introduction, note 3: Alexander Lesser, “Don’t Call Us Jews,” The Jerusalem Report, June 18, 1992, pp. 36–38) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 87-109, 294-467).

• Traditionally both communities banned marriages between the two rites; the last Karaite chief rabbi of Egypt, Tuvia Babovitch (r. 1934–56), held that Karaites who married Rabbanites excluded themselves and upheld the ban on conversion to Karaism, while Murad Farag (1866–1956) and his protégés openly called for intermarriage and closer relations. The twentieth-century tendency was toward closer cultural and social relations: the Rabbanite harat al-yahud and the Karaite harat al-yahud al-qara’in stood adjacent in Cairo, members of both rites worked in some of the same trades, Karaites used the Rabbanite hospital (to which their community contributed annually), and Maurice Shammas wrote for the Rabbanite al-Shams and then the Karaite Al-Kalim (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 87-109).

• The Karaites were integrated into Cairo’s ethnic division of labor, typically working as goldsmiths and jewelers; remnants persist in Karaite family names of firms in Cairo’s gold market, like al-Sirgani, though no Karaites remain in the trade. In the twentieth century wealthier Karaites moved to ‘Abbasiyya and Heliopolis and adopted bourgeois Francophone cosmopolitan culture, but “in all respects except religious practice, the daily lives of the Karaites of harat al-yahud al-qara’in were indistinguishable from those of their Muslim neighbors” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).

• Their communal council was organized and recognized by the Egyptian state in March 1901; its somewhat archaic Arabic name, majlis milli, “expresses the Karaites’ self-conception as an ethnic-religious Ottoman millet” (Chapter 2, notes 25–26). Their community newspaper defined the community’s existence by religion and “the law of our lord Moses” (shari’at sayyidina musa) (note 27), and their historical narrative legitimated their presence through Islam: residence since ‘Amr Ibn al-‘As’s conquest, a cemetery plot at Basatin and exemption from the jizya, and good relations with Muslim neighbors except under the Fatimid Sultan al-Hakim (note 31) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).

• The Young Karaite Jewish Association (formed 1937) and its Arabic bimonthly al-Kalim (published regularly until 1956) promoted communal reform — Hebrew study, a boy scout troop, a youth orchestra, theater, sports, mixed outings, and an improved status for women (note 33) — and elected seven of its ten candidates in the 1946 council elections against Babovitch and the council (note 34). Al-Kalim called the Karaites “abna’ al-balad” (sons of the country), used Arabic names for contested places (“Nablus,” “al-Quds al-sharif,” “Filastin,” note 37), and published colloquial zagal poetry (note 38) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).

• In October 1949 a governorate official rejected the Karaite court judges’ claims to Egyptian citizenship and demanded certificates of citizenship, though admitting he had none himself; council head Jacques Mangubi answered, “It is known that we are Egyptians. The government must determine if we are foreigners or Egyptians. And as long as we are not foreigners, then we are Egyptians” (note 44). The book’s judgment: “even Jews who regarded themselves as fully Egyptian and who eschewed political Zionism were not treated exactly like other Egyptians” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).

• The community held a religiously based love of Zion but no organized involvement with political Zionism (notes 47–48); yet several hundred young Karaites emigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1956 against Babovitch’s advice (note 49), and the community’s best-known Zionist was Moshe Marzuq, executed for Operation Susannah, whose arrest and execution “had a chilling effect on the Karaites” (notes 50–51). Because most Karaites were thoroughly Arabized and defined themselves as an Ottoman millet, “they tended to remain in Egypt longer than Rabbanites,” a significant proportion remaining until the 1960s — but they “could not resist the forces reshaping the Egyptian political community in ways that effectively excluded Jews” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).

• The Introduction’s note 2 adds, citing Mourad El-Kodsi, The Karaite Jews of Egypt, 1882–1986 (1987), and Yosef Algamil (1985): “In 1996, the last formally affiliated male member of the Karaite community living in Cairo, Yusuf al-Qudsi, died” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 294-467).

• In Chapter 3, the June 20, 1948 bomb in the Karaite quarter of Cairo killed twenty-two Jews and wounded forty-one; the authorities blamed fireworks stored in Jewish homes and Karaite-Rabbanite antagonism, Jewish witnesses contradicted the official account of a prompt response, and Al-Kalim left censored blank spaces in protest (Chapter 3, notes 20–22) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1187-1189).

• The chapter’s emigration estimate: at least 60 percent of the roughly 5,000-member Karaite community remained in Egypt until 1956, and over 20 percent remained until the early 1960s — figures suggesting Jews more assimilated to Arabo-Egyptian culture tended to remain longer; the World Jewish Congress counts the chapter uses exclude the Karaites (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1208-1210).

• Muhammad Naguib received Tuvia Babovitch and Karaite leaders in October 1952 and visited the ‘Abbasiyya Karaite synagogue on October 25, signing the register with the 1919 slogan, with a poem by Murad Farag for the occasion (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1244-1245).

• Karaite Chief Rabbi Babovitch had died several months before the 1956 Suez/Sinai War, one of the key personnel losses after which Jewish communal life in Egypt could no longer be viably sustained; among the better-off post-1957 emigrants were those who formed the core of the Karaite community in the San Francisco Bay Area treated in Chapter 7 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1327-1329).

Related pages

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Murad Farag, Tuvia Babovitch, Al-Kalim, Moshe Marzuq, Communitarianism