Seder Eliyahu by Constanza Cordoni

Author:Constanza Cordoni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The extratextual audience is addressed in all the levels. As we saw above, it is not always clear when the character in an embedded narrative ceases to be the main addressee of a passage.

5.6Conclusion

According to the typology presented in chapter 3, the passages discussed in this chapter, with the exception of the last one, constitute a sub-group among the characteristic first-person narratives of Seder Eliyahu.749 The main distinctive feature of this sub-group is the presence of an antagonistic interlocutor, who has been identified as a “proto-Karaite.”

For every narrative, both those aspects that appear to indicate that the character is constructed as representing Karaite ideas and those that do not seem to support this assumption have been discussed. I have also pointed out that even if some of the arguments posed by the rabbi’s antagonist do not address typically polemical issues in the later Rabbanite-Karaite debate, they may still be seen as constituting the subtle response of Rabbinic Judaism to real or potential attacks from anti-Rabbinic positions, including those originating in circles that came to be associated with Karaism.750

Even if Karaism is assumed to have crystallised only after751 the assumed date of composition of Seder Eliyahu in the first half of the ninth century, we do get the impression that it is the anti-Rabbinism of early Karaites that this post-talmudic document responds to, which is why the expression “proto-Karaite” appears adequate. An alternative would be to designate these characters as an “unlearned” or “semi-learned others.”752 But then, are they actually depicted as unlearned, or rather as laconic challengers refusing to accept the position the rabbi represents?

Among the central tenets of what scholars regard as constitutive of early Karaism, as evidenced in Karaite sources, it is above all scripturalism as an aspect of anti-Rabbinic ideology753 that is explicitly emphasised in these passages of Seder Eliyahu – an aspect which, as Robert Brody explains, remained a “central source of contention” between Karaites and Rabbanites later on.754

Other distinctive features of early Karaism are merely alluded to in scattered passages of Seder Eliyahu, not just in the first-person narratives: There is reference, for example, to dietary laws prohibiting the consumption of meat in Jerusalem;755 to the return to Palestine and to Jerusalem in particular;756 asceticism;757 to messianism;758 and to the rejection of anthropomorphism in aggadic literature,759 as well as of Rabbinic prayers and liturgy.760

Even if we assume that Seder Eliyahu only uses these narratives to allude to the historical phenomenon of Jewish anti-traditionalism or anti-scripturalism in one of the circles which would eventually coalesce into Karaism,761 and even if we cannot interpret them as authentic depictions of historical encounters with or challenges from heretical movements, we can still read them as fruitful sources of information on the self-perception of their authors, on other cultural agents involved in their production, and on the cultural context in which they emerged. The first-person narratives can be regarded, as Lehmhaus has suggested with respect to those of Seder Eliyahu Zuta, as ideal representations (from a Rabbinic point of view)

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