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Some of this glory was reflected also upon the neighboring countries under Mohammedan domination, Palestine, Egypt, and Kairuan or northern Africa to the west of Egypt. Thus all the men, Rabbanites as well as Karaites, whom we treated so far lived and flourished in the east in one of the four countries mentioned.
There was no Maimonides among them. And Aaron ben Elijah cherished the ambition of being to the Karaites what Maimonides was to the Rabbanites. Accordingly he undertook to compose three works representing the three great divisions of Karaitic Judaism a book of Laws, a work on Biblical exegesis and a treatise on religious philosophy. The last was written first, having been composed in 1346.
The Rabbanites being staunch adherents of the Talmud, to the influence of which they owed a national and religious self-consciousness much stronger than that of the Karaites, who rejected the authority of tradition, did not allow themselves to be carried away so far by the ideas of the Mohammedan rationalists as to become their slavish followers.
Their purpose is to increase the man's reward later in the future world, and at the same time they have a pedagogical value in themselves in strengthening the person spiritually. Accordingly Aaron ben Elijah, who in the main follows the opinions of the Karaites, differs with the Rabbanites and particularly Maimonides in the interpretation of the "trials" of Adam, Abraham, Job.
The Rabbanites according to him insist that "there is no death without sin, nor suffering without guilt," whereas the Karaites admit that some of the sufferings of the righteous are not in the nature of punishment at all, but are what are known as "chastisements of love."
Authority therefore for the Rabbanites was two-fold, the authority of the direct word of God which was written down as soon as communicated, and about which there could therefore be no manner of doubt; and the authority of the indirect word of God as transmitted orally for many generations before it was written down, requiring belief in tradition.
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.
Later when on account of the exile differences arose among the Jews, there were formed the two parties of the Karaites and the Rabbanites. The Karaites followed the Muʿtazila, and so did some of the Rabbanites, because their views coincided with those of the Bible, from which they were borrowed. The views of the philosophers as being opposed to the Bible they naturally rejected.
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