The Ban Decared Against Karaites on Sukkot on the Mount of Olives

Recently my friend, Rabbi Yosef Leichter highlighted in his weekly column in the weekly Shabbat B'shabato the role the Mount of Olives played in the Geonic period as a sort of an alternative pilgrimage site during the three major festivals. At the time of Father-son Rabbis Sherira and Hai Gaon, there is evidence of the site also being used as a platform from which to assert the central authority of the Rabbinic Academies of Babylonia.


Leichter quoted some Genizah findings to that effect. Which is why I was surprised to see that he omitted mention of the excommunication recited there against all schismatics, chiefly among them the Karaites who were then a real threat to the authorities of the Academy and Rabbinic Judaism in general.

In the excellent booklet Scripture and Schism (JTS, 2000), there is a facsimile of a  very interesting document found in the Genizah that sheds some light on this topic.

It is entitled "Letter from Eli ben Ezekiel in Jerusalem to Ephraim ben Shemariah in Fustat"

Ibn Daud (Raabad) described a Jerusalem custom in which every year on Hoshana Raba, the seventh day of sukkot, Rabbanite pilgrims who had convened on the Mt. Of Olives would hear the yearly blessings and bans declared. Included in the bans were defaulted debtors, Sabbath desecrators, and anyone who had infringed upon the authority of the Gaon and the other leaders of the Jerusalem Yeshiva. A special ban of excommunication was reserved for the "eaters of meat and milk" by which was meant the Karaites. Although as a sign of mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem, the Karaites did not consume the meat of cattle or sheep in Jerusalem, they nonetheless ate dairy and fowl together in violation of the Rabbinic extension of the meat and milk prohibition to include poultry (in itself an interesting subject, as this extension was not accepted by all Rabbanites as late as the 3rd Century CE).

In Ibn Daud's description, the Karaites remained utterly passive in the face of this yearly indignity. But the Genizah has shown how exaggerated his description was. Letters like this one demonstrate that the ban was not issued every year, and when it was, it was declared only by a minority of upstart Rabbanites who did no go unpunished. The Karaites, for their part, were quick to exact revenge on the Rabbanite issuers of the ban.

In this Judeo-Arabic letter writtten by Eli b Ezekiel, a scholar of the Yeshiva in Jerusalem, to his colleague Ephraim b Shemarya, representative of the Yeshiva in Fostat (old Cairo), we learn that the Muslim authorities had thrown the rabbinic instigators of the ban into prison in Damascus. The Karaites, perhaps encouraged by this turn of events, ascended the Mount.of Olives and destroyed the pulpit from which the ban had been declared, declaring "May no Rabbanite come to Jerusalem any more!".

עמק יהושפט; The Karaite Necropolis of Crimea

Emek Yehoshaphat, The valley of Yehoshaphat, is the name given to the ancient Karaite necropolis at Chufut Qale ("Jews' Fortress") in the Crimea where the local Karaites buried their dead for centuries.

The size of the area is about 80 dunams and is now known by its 'new' Tatar-Karaite name “Balta-Teymez”, which means ‘the place where an ax is never lifted’.

The area was first explored by the Karaite Hakham and Scholar Abraham Firkovitz in the second half of the 19th century. The study was conducted as part of a more comprehensive research into the history of the Crimean Karaites on behest of the Czarist authorities. Some scholars believed that the results of that study was not 100 percent accurate and some forgeries were suspected.

A new full comprehensive epigraphical study was conducted in 1997 by the Ben Zvi Institute and published in Hebrew in 2008 under the title מצבות בית העלמין של היהודים הקראים בצ׳ופוט־קלעה

Why Emek Yehoshafat?

Already in Tanach and even more so in the New Testament,
the Valley of Yehoshafat has eschatological significance (1).
The moniker appears to have been first coined by the German zoologist Peter Simon Pallas when he visited the site during his travels throughout Russia and its territories at the end of the 18^th century (2).

The reason for this, is the very similar topography between Chufut Qale and the biblical Emek Yehoshafat in Jerusalem.

The Russian traveler Y. Markoff, also noted this stark resemblance during his travels there in the sixth decade of the 19^th century. At the beginning of the 20^th century, The Russian writer S. Vajsenberg writes, the local Karaites would often compare the surroundings of chufut qale to the outskirts of Jerusalem and named the mound in front of the ancient castle “the mount of olives”. Kizilov opines (in "matzevot", p. 72) that the name emek yehoshafat was first given by Karaite pilgrims to Jerusalem in the 17^th and 18^th centuries who noticed the stark similarites between the 2 localities.

Karaites, like other Jews (and perhaps even more) always maintained a close connection to Jerusalem and put a special emphasis on making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem at least once during their lives (not dissimilar to the Muslim hajj to Mecca). Many recordings of such travelogues have been preserved. In addition, many of the tombstones at the necropolis likewise contain references to Jerusalem. Aside from the obvious religious connection to Jerusalem, Karaites were also able to do so relatively easily during the many centuries when both Crimea and Jerusalem were under Ottoman rule.

Why the Change to Balta Teymez?

The first one who called the burial grounds by this new name appears to have been Hakhan (emphasis on the 'n) Seraya Shapshal. Shapshal undertook the radical turkicization of the Karaite community of Crimea and Eastern Europe and stripped them of all vestiges of Judaism (even going as far as to ban the Hebrew language). The name arose because of the heavily wooded area in the center of the cemetery, particularly the "great oak" that had attained almost sacred status among the local Karaites. Shapshal spoke of religious ceremonies having been conducted there to pray for rain or to put a stop to plague. This kind of shamanistic pagan worship is not foreign to the region and was cited as “proof” of the non Jewish Turkic origin of the local Karaites (some local Karaites still practice this holdover from dark times when any connection to Judaism was tantamount to a death sentence. See here beginning at the 3:12 mark) . Interestingly enough, the Tatar rulers took full advantage of this adoration and often extorted money from the community by threatening to uproot the trees. Kizilov ( in "matzevot" p. 141, note 7) puts forth a different theory as to why the Karaites guarded the trees so zealously. He claims that it is tied in with the Karaite tendency to generally neglect their burial grounds because “from dust hast thou arisen and to dust thou shalt return” (Genesis 3:19). This is also the reason why Karaites generally frown at the (increasingly common) Jewish custom of praying at a gravesite. (see for instance the Karaite sage Sahl b. Mazliah's sharp rebuke of this custom in Pinsker, Likuttei Kadmoniot II, Ch. 32. Mentioned in El-Gamil, Toledot Part I, p. 73).

NOTES:

(1) One notes that the eschatological midrashic work Sefer Zerubavel mentions עמק יהושפט as a place that would take center stage in the Messianic age:

כי שם יהיה משפט לרשעים ושמחה לצדיקים

see Wertheimer, בתי מדרשות תק'

(2) Bemerkungen auf einer Reise in die südlichen Statthalterschaften des Rußischen Reichs in den Jahren 1793 und 1794 (Leipzig, 1799—1801), p. 35