While there have been Jewish groups whose beliefs were claimed to be based on the written text of the Torah alone ( e. g., the Sadducees, and the Karaites ), most Jews believed in what they call the oral law.

Many believe that the ben Asher family were Karaites.

Evidently the regulations preferring male descendants came to be disregarded in some respects, as the Book of Job, which textual scholars date to the fourth century, states in its epilogue that Job's daughters were given equal inheritance rights to his sons, and the Karaites always gave daughters the same rights as sons.

The readiness with which vows were made and the facility with which they were annulled by the scribes gave the Karaites an opportunity to attack rabbinic Jews.

Karaites were the first Jewish Sect to subject Judaism to Mu ' tazilah.

Karaites absorbed certain aspects of Jewish sects such as Isawites ( Shi ' ism ), Malikites ( Sunnis ) and Yudghanites ( Sufis ), who were influenced by East-Islamic scholarship yet deferred to Ash ' ari when contemplating the sciences.

He argued that throughout this history the Masorites did not invent the vowel points and accents, but that they were delivered to Moses by God at Sinai, citing Karaite authorities Mordechai ben Nisan Kukizov ( 1699 ) and his associates, who stated that " all our wise men with one mouth affirm and profess that the whole law was pointed and accented, as it came out of the hands of Moses, the man of God ," The argument of the Karaites shows that some copies have always been pointed and some copies were not pointed with the vowels, especially those copies in Synagogues which Gill talks about.

In 1835 there were 1, 363 Jews with 113 Karaites living in the town of Kutais ( Kutaisi ) and its surroundings: 1, 040 in Gori, 623 in Akhaltsikhe, and 61 in Tiflis ( Tbilisi ).

) His descendants were regarded by the Karaites as the true exilarchs.

That the personage of the exilarch was familiar to Muslim circles is also shown by the fact that the Rabbinite Jews were called Jaluti, that is, those belonging to the exilarch, in contradistinction to the Karaites.

His followers were called Ananites and, like modern Karaites, do not believe the Rabbinic Jewish oral law ( such as the Mishnah ) to be divinely inspired.

In the 10th century, the Karaites were believed to have comprised about 10 % of the world's Jewish population.

At the time of the traveler Benjamin of Tudela in the 12th century, Karaites were widely dispersed around the eastern Mediterranean, both in Islamic areas and the Byzantine Empire.

Karaites maintain that all of the divine commandments handed down to Moses by God were recorded in the written Torah, without additional Oral Law or explanation.

When interpreting the Tanakh, Karaites strive to adhere to the plain or most obvious meaning (" peshat ") of the text ; this is not necessarily the literal meaning, but rather the meaning that would have been naturally understood by the ancient Israelites when the books of the Tanakh were first written.

However, the claim has been made that Karaites were already living in Egypt in the first half of the 7th century, the evidence consisting of a legal document that the Karaite community in Egypt had in its possession until the end of the 19th century, which document was said to be stamped by the palm of ˁAmr Ibn al-ˁAṣ, the first Islamic governor of Egypt, in which he ordered the leaders of the Rabbanite community not to interfere in the way of life of the Karaites nor with the way they celebrate their holidays.

Karaites have always maintained that, while there are some similarities to the Sadducees, there are also differences, and that the ancestors of the Karaites were another group called Benei Ṣedeq during the Second Temple Period.

Karaites were at one time a significant proportion of the Jewish population, In the early 21st century, it was estimated that there were somewhat more than 50, 000 Karaites worldwide, over 40, 000 of whom had made aliyah ( emigrated to Israel ) from Arab countries such as Egypt and Iraq.

In the times of the said princes lived Simeon ben Shetach, and Judah ben Tabbai, who flourished A. M. 3621, these two separated, the latter from the former, because he could not embrace his inventions which he formed out of his own brain ; and from him the Karaites sprung, who were first called the society or congregation of Judah ben Tabbai, which was afterwards changed into the name of Karaites.

Only one thing can be said that the Turkic blood in them is less than Karaites, although certain kinship with the peoples of both the Khazars can hardly be denied.

There are also approximately 50, 000 adherents of Karaite Judaism, most of whom live in Israel, but exact numbers are not known, as most Karaites have not participated in any religious censuses.

Their sect is believed to have become extinct sometime after the destruction of Herod's Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, but it has been speculated that the later Karaites may have had some roots or connections with old Sadducee views.

The ben Asher family and the majority of the Masoretes appear to have been Karaites.

" This belief is known to have been held by Karaites.

Under this view, the Karaites would not have been significantly distinct from any other form of Judaism until the formation of the Pharisees far after the return of the exiles in Babylon.

Rabbinic scholars have traditionally held that, because the Karaites do not observe the rabbinic law on divorce, there is a strong presumption that they are mamzerim ( adulterine bastards ), so that marriage with them is forbidden even if they return to Rabbinic Judaism.

Some recent Ashekenazi Ḥaredi scholars have held that Karaites should be regarded as Gentiles in all respects, though this is not universally accepted.

The Karaites appear to have followed the same practice, and Benjamin Nahawendi, as well as Elijah Bashyazi, favored it.

Karaites had a wide following between the 9th and 12th centuries ( they claim that at one time they numbered perhaps 10 percent of Jewry ), but over the centuries their numbers have dwindled drastically.

They have historically lived in close proximity to the Crimean Karaites.

" The Karaites, have interpreted these two verses as saying that the four species were meant for building the sukkah, based upon Neh.

13-15, 37 ); A. Geiger in his Jüdische Zeitschrift ( 1865, p. 166 ), Schorr in He-Ḥaluẓ, and A. Neubauer in the Journal Asiatique ( 1862 – 63 ) and in his Aus der Petersburger Bibliothek ( Leipsic, 1866 ) have challenged the correctness of the facts and the theories based upon them which Jost, Julius Fürst, and Heinrich Grätz, in their writings on the Karaites, took from Pinsker's Liḳḳuṭe Ḳadmoniyyot, in which the data furnished by Firkovich were unhesitatingly accepted.

The name " Crimean Karaites " or " Krymkaraylar " pertains only to several hundred members of the clerical families currently living in the Crimea and is a misnomer in reference to all other branches of the Karaims and Karaylar who have long been established in other parts of Europe, Crimea being only one such location.

From such, Karaites have come to consider the most logical understanding of the Hebrew word " Mamzer " to actually speak of a nation people.

* Several Turkic peoples of Ukraine, including the Crimean Tatars, the Crimean Karaites and Krymchaks have also self-identified as indigenous peoples, i. a.

Though he opposed Karaism, the Rabbinic commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra regularly quoted Karaite commentators, particularly Yefet ben ‘ Eli, to the degree that a legend exists among some Karaites that Ibn Ezra was ben ‘ Eli's student.

Lacking the philosophic training common among the Spanish Jews – although he was acquainted with Ibn Ezra, Saadia, some of the Karaites, and perhaps Maimonides – Judah did not reduce his mystic-theosophical theories to a system, and they are therefore difficult to survey.

8 ), in view of the fact that works circulated among the earlier Karaites named after Zadok and containing Sadducee opinions.

As a consequence certain names became characteristic of certain districts: Japheth and Caleb in Greece, and hence among the Karaites ; Kalonymus in south Italy ; Sheshet and Joab in Rome ; Sinai and Pesaḥ in Germany.

Even the Karaites incorporated some of them into their prayer-book ; so that there is scarcely a synagogue in which Judah's songs are not sung in the course of the service.

Therefore, Karaites may consider arguments made in the Talmud and other works without exalting them above other viewpoints.

As opposed this, in 1971 Rav ‘ Ovadia Yosef, who was then the Rishon LeṢiyyon / Chief Rabbi of the Sefaradim and ‘ Edot HaMizraḥ of Israel proclaimed that Karaites are Jews " LeKhol Davar " ( literally, for all purposes ) and that it is permissible for Rabbanite Jews to marry with them.

For example, he studied attentively the conditions of the Karaites in Alexandria, and did not hesitate to praise them for the possession of the very virtues which the Rabbinites denied to them, such as generosity and liberality ( l. c.

Karaites wear tzitzyot with blue threads in them.

The Karaites in the same neighborhood adopted Tatar names, one of them being known as Toktamish ; but elsewhere Karaite names are mostly Arabic and Persian.

In the Crimea, Crimean Karaites did not wear payot, and the Crimean Tatars consequently referred to them as zulufsız çufutlar, meaning Jews without payot, to distinguish them from the Krymchaks, referred to as zuluflı çufutlar, meaning Jews with payot.

The Karaites were needed in order to serve as a middle class, between the aristocracy on one hand and the serfs working the land on the other, and therefore were granted privileges in order to induce them to settle and stay.

The statement that the festivals were abolished, probably means that the Dositheans celebrated them on other days than the Jews ; but as, according to a trustworthy statement of Epiphanius, the Dositheans celebrated the festivals together with the Pharisaic Jews, an approximation may well be assumed toward the Karaites, a sect with which the Samaritans had much in common in later times.

As Hakham Bashi he was known for his mild attitude toward the Karaites, an attitude inherited from his teacher Elijah ha-Levi ; he even held that it was permissible to teach them Talmud.