KARAITE LANGUAGES AND KARAITE HISTORY
KARAITE LANGUAGES AND KARAITE HISTORY

Summary/Abstract: The languages used by Karaite Jews over the centuries tell us a great deal about the Karaites who employed those languages and can serve as a strong indicator of the nature and history of Karaism at each stage at its development. A review of Karaite languages and their significance also provides a response to those who think that Karaism has been an unchanging monolith throughout the centuries, rather than a dynamic alternate form of the Jewish religion, sharing many of the same developmental characteristics of Rabbinic Judaism. Karaite languages include Babylonian Aramaic (used by the proto-Karaite Anan ben David); Hebrew (Benjamin al-Nahawendi, Daniel al-Qumisi and other early Karaites); Judaeo-Arabic (during the Golden Age of Karaism in the Land of Israel, tenth and eleventh centuries); a Greek infused, Arabicized translation-Hebrew (Byzantine Karaites in the eleventh and twelfth centuries); Rabbinic Hebrew with some specifically Karaite terms (from the thirteenth century to the present); and a Turkic language, Karaim (used by early modern and modern Crimean and Eastern European Karaites, which contributed to Karaite separatism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). The article presents a brief summary of the circumstances of the use of each language.

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