7 - Karaite Synagogue Poets

Summary

GENERAL BACKGROUND

KARAITE SETTLEMENTS appeared in Balkan Byzantium during the mid- tenth Century. It is likely that the earliest of these were in Asia Minor and were linked to the flourishing commercial life in tenth-century Anatolia. Pre- sumably Karaites and Rabbanites profited from the maritime trade between the Byzantine port of Attaleia and Alexandria. A Geniza letter dated Decem- ber 1028, addressed to the Fustat Jewish community in Egypt, asks for funds to redeem Jewish captives brought to Alexandria by Arab pirates. The group comprised three Karaite and four Rabbanite merchants from Byzantium. It is likely that the Karaites (like the Rabbanites) gravitated to the commercially promising coastal settlements in Asia Minor like Attaleia, Ephesus and Nicaea. An added participant in the Attaleia-Alexandria trade route was the island of Cyprus, which in the eleventh century was the scene of a Karaite dispute with the dissident Jewish Mishawite sect. In the following century, Benjamin of Tudela noted in his journal that Rabbanites and Karaites lived on the island.

In the north, Karaites presumably participated in the profitable Black Sea commerce, and there is documentary evidence of Karaite settlements in the Pontic cities of Trebizond and Gangra from the twelfth century. The com- mercially advantaged city of Nicomedia, the natural gateway to the Bosporus, attracted Jewish entrepreneurs as early as Roman times. It was the home of ‘Karaism's keenest mind’, Aaron b. Elijah, who died there in an epidemic in the month of Tišri, 1369. Other likely Karaite settlements in the middle Byzantine period were Adrianople, a thriving commercial centre, and Salonika, the home of the Rabbanite notable Tobias b. Eliezer, whose Midraš Leqaḥ Ṭov bristles with anti-Karaite polemics.

Presumably the largest Karaite community in the mid-Byzantine period was in Constantinople, the cosmopolitan and commercial centre of the eastern Mediterranean. It was the birthplace of the eleventh-century leader of Karaism, Tobias b. Moses, and in the second half of the twelfth century Benjamin of Tudela reported that Constantinople Jews were mainly engaged in the manufacture of silk garments and lived in a separate quarter of the city which comprised ‘two thousand Rabbanite Jews and five hundred Karaites … and between them there is a partition.’