Description:
A new perspective on the factional conflict between two medieval Jewish sects: the Rabbanites and the Qaraites.
Brief description: Marina Rustow is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History at Princeton University. She is a 2015 MacArthur Fellow and coeditor of Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition.
Review Quotes:
Rustow's book provides us fascinating new insights into the history of Jewish Eastern communities of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine during the crucial and politically unstable period of the rule of the Fatimid caliphs.... Her focus on documentary and epistolary sources and on the caliphal administration allows Rustow to present a picture of Rabbanite-Karaite relations which differs from the more standard views of modern scholarship... that present Karaism as a separatist 'sect' and a threat to Judaism.... On the contrary, Rustow shows, the Karaites constituted one among other Jewish groups of the period and were fully engaged in Jewish community life as a whole.
-- "Journal of Jewish Studies"