Rejection of the Oral Torah (Talmud)

Karaite Jews affirm the written Tanakh alone as the source of divine law and reject the Oral Torah, the rabbinic tradition later written down as the Mishnah and Talmud, as binding revelation. The name derives from a word for scripture, and the movement, which crystallised in the early medieval Near East, called Jews back to the text itself, holding that each believer should study and interpret scripture directly rather than defer to rabbinic authority. Karaites developed their own methods of interpretation and their own calendar, sighting the new moon and reckoning festivals from the biblical text.

Karaism's traditional founder is Anan ben David, an eighth-century Babylonian figure (active around 767 to 770 CE) whose followers, the Ananites, rejected rabbinic authority, though modern scholars debate how directly the later, broader Karaite movement descended from his specific teaching as opposed to converging independently from several earlier anti-rabbinic currents in the Jewish world.

The tenth-century exegete Yefet ben Ali, working in Jerusalem, produced a comprehensive Arabic commentary on the entire Hebrew Bible that became one of Karaism's classical achievements, part of a broader medieval Karaite golden age of biblical scholarship, grammar, and law centred in Jerusalem before the Crusader conquest of 1099 scattered much of that community.

The rejection of the Oral Torah produced practices markedly different from mainstream (Rabbanite) Judaism: Karaites keep no fire or lights through the Sabbath, count the festival of Shavuot differently, and diverge on marriage and purity law. The affirmation defines Karaism against the great current of rabbinic Judaism, which regards the Oral Torah as given at Sinai alongside the Written.

Once a substantial movement, Karaite communities survive today chiefly in Israel, preserving a scripturalist alternative within the Jewish world. The medieval conflict between the two camps produced substantial polemical literature; the Rabbanite scholar Saadia Gaon, head of the Sura academy in Babylonia in the tenth century, wrote influential refutations of Karaite positions that shaped Rabbanite self-definition as much as they attacked Karaism.

A distinct Karaite community developed among the Crimean and Lithuanian Karaites, who over centuries emphasised a Turkic ethnic identity distinct from rabbinic Jews; this self-differentiation had grave consequences during the Second World War, when Nazi racial authorities, after disputed internal debate, classified Crimean Karaites as not racially Jewish, so that most were spared the mass killing inflicted on Rabbanite Jewish communities in the same region, a history that remains sensitive and debated in Karaite and Jewish historiography today.