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We have traced objectively and with greater or less detail the rationalistic movement in mediæval Jewry from its beginnings in the ninth and tenth centuries in Babylon among the Karaites and Rabbanites to its decline in Spain and south France in the fifteenth century.
Thus the notion that good and bad are adjectives applied to acts not in view of their inherent character, which is per se neither good nor bad, but solely to indicate that they have been commanded or forbidden; the idea that only the dependent subject can do wrong, but not the master, since his will is the source of all right and wrong these views are frequently discussed in the Muʿtazilite works of Arabs and Karaites.
Judah Halevi has no more sympathy with them than with the philosophers. Owing to the fact that the Karaites were implicit followers of the Kalam and for other reasons, no doubt, more objective, he thinks less of them than he does of the philosophers. The only possible use, he tells us, of their methods is to afford exercise in dialectics so as to be able to answer the arguments of unbelievers.
A problem that occupied the minds of the Mutakallimun, Arabs as well as Karaites, but which Maimonides does not discuss, is the purpose of God's giving commandments to those who he knew would remain unbelievers, and refuse to obey. That God's knowledge and man's freedom co-exist and neither destroys the other, has already been shown.
Every chance remark she happened to overhear she took to be meant for herself. Well, this same sensitiveness one may find in most of the Cantonists. For instance, in the regiment of General Luders, in which I served once, we had many Tatars, some Karaites, and a goodly number of Jews.
In the doctrine of attributes Aaron ben Elijah likewise maintains the views of the Muʿtazilite Karaites against the philosophers, and especially against Maimonides. The general problem is sufficiently familiar to us by this time, and we need only present the salient points in the controversy.
Travellers go in dread of them in the Syrian desert and all along the Euphrates. Doughty mentions that they, more than any other tribe, resemble the Jews both in appearance and disposition. He further states that the Jews of Damascus and Aleppo shun them as they are non-observant Jews, considered by some to be Karaites.
The Karaites were a sect among the Jews, who confined their observances and religious belief to the precepts of Moses, while the Rabbinists followed all the wild fancies of the Talmud. An excellent account of these sects is to be found in the Lettres Juives, or Jewish Spy, by the Marquis d'Argens.
No Rabbanite after Maimonides would think of going back to the old arguments made popular by the Mutakallimun the theory of atoms, of substance and accident in the Kalamistic sense of accident as a quality which needs continuous creation to exist any length of time, the denial of law and natural causation, the arguments in favor of creation and the existence of God based upon creation, the doctrine of the divine will as eternal or created, residing in a subject or existing without a subject, the world as due to God's will or to his wisdom, the nature of right and wrong as determined by the character and purpose of the act or solely by the arbitrary will of God these and other topics, which formed the main ground of discussion between the Muʿtazilites and the Ashariya, and were taken over by the Karaites and to a less extent by the early Rabbanites in the tenth and eleventh centuries, had long lost their significance and their interest among the Rabbanite followers of Maimonides.
Karaism was only a sect and never showed after the days of Saadia anything like the life and enthusiastic activity of the great body of Rabbanite Judaism, which formed the great majority of the Jewish people. The Karaites had their important men in Halaka as well as in religious philosophy and Biblical exegesis. But they cannot be compared to the great men among the Rabbanites.
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