Karaism was the only major alternative to rabbinic Judaism in the Middle Ages: an anti-rabbinic, scripturalist, scholarly, messianic, and proto-Zionist Jewish movement that developed in Iran and Iraq in the ninth century and that by the tenth century had spread across the Islamic Middle East. This course examines how and why Karaism emerged and flourished during this period and after, and what its history tells us about Judaism in the medieval Islamic Middle East more generally. Proficiency in either Hebrew or Arabic required.
