Eve Krakowski (Princeton University) Presents: The Mourners of Zion and the Early Karaite Movement

Rabbinic Judaism triumphed during the first Islamic centuries, displacing or assimilating most other elements of Jewish thought and practice known from pre-Islamic late antiquity. The only major exceptions were Karaites – members of a medieval anti-rabbinic and staunchly scripturalist Jewish movement. 

This colloquium presents sources for the early history of Karaism, focusing especially on the “Mourners of Zion,” a group of Jews with origins in Iraq and Iran that settled in Jerusalem during the late ninth century. They developed there a distinctive missionary, ascetic, anti-philosophical, and messianic brand of Judaism centered on mourning the long-destroyed Second Temple and on criticizing other Jews. We will trace the Mourners’ medieval origins and eventual assimilation into more diverse and less radical forms of Karaism during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Eve Krakowski is an associate professor of Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She studies the social history of the medieval Middle East, mainly through everyday documents preserved in the Cairo Geniza. Her work to date has focused mainly on gender, kinship, and rabbinic law among Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt. Her first book, Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture, was published in 2018. She is now working on a second book tentatively titled Jewish Writing in the First Millennium, which examines how and why new forms of Jewish documents developed and spread widely across the Islamic Mediterranean during the ninth and tenth centuries.

Cosponsors: Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Department of Classical & Near Eastern Religions & Culture, Department of History, the Center for Premodern Studies, and the Religious Studies Program