Who’s a Jew?

WHEN is a Jew not a Jew? When he’s a Karaite. Or so says Israel’s chief rabbinate, which, after 65 years of relative harmony with an ancient Jewish sect, is reopening an old and bitter schism. In recent months, rabbis working for Israel’s ministry of religion have deemed Karaite marriages invalid, fined their butchers for claiming to be kosher, and demanded that Karaites marrying Orthodox Jewish women should convert, sometimes having to undergo tavila, or baptism. “We are already Jews,” protests Moshe Firrouz, a computer engineer who heads the Karaites’ Council of Sages. “The rabbinate is denying us our religious freedom.”

For over 1,300 years Karaites have battled with Rabbanites (adherents to mainstream Judaism) over their rejection of the Talmud, the corpus of an oral tradition that Rabbanites claim God gave Moses with the written Torah on Mount Sinai. Clinging to the biblical word alone, Karaites regard skullcaps, phylacteries (little leather boxes containing Torah scrolls), matrilineal descent and non-biblical festivals, such as the Festival of Lights, as pagan accretions. Like Muslims or—as they prefer to say—like Temple-era Jews, they prostrate barefoot on carpets. “The Orthodox add and the Reform take away,” says a recent Karaite convert. “It is only we who follow the Torah.”

Once almost as numerous as Rabbanites, today’s Karaites make up less than 1% of Israel’s 6m Jews. Persecution has whittled their number down. The greatest classical Jewish theologian, Moses Maimonides, denounced them as minim, or heretics, and banned them from public prayer; others termed their children bastards, since their parents married in weddings which diverged from the Orthodox rite. The rabbinate recently slapped a fine of 1,000 shekels ($280) on a Karaite butcher for calling his meat kosher. The chief rabbinate, Israel’s state religious authority, reluctantly began legitimising their marriages again after a recent order by Israel’s Supreme Court, but it continues to argue that since Karaite rites are not Jewish, Karaites have lesser Jewish rights, too. “Israel is a Jewish state and Jews have superior rights,” says the chief rabbinate’s spokesman. “But the Karaites are not Jewish.”

Threatened by a two-pronged assault of assimilation and intolerance, Karaites have begun building up their own defences. Though they have no yeshivas, or religious academies, they have begun studying at home. Elders have sloughed off their skullcaps and stopped lighting candles on Friday nights, in line with a biblical injunction against burning flames on the Sabbath. At a packed seminar at Bar Ilan, Israel’s religious university near Tel Aviv, Mr Firrouz called on Israel’s prime minister to free Israel from the Orthodox yoke. To the harmony of an all-male Karaite choir, the Karaite sage asked the Israeli state to recognise his Bet Din, or religious court, so that he could license marriages and be paid a salary.