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for the formulation of the main points of the August 1756 manifesto. This seems unlikely: the anti-talmudic intent of the document had not appeared in earlier Sabbatian polemics, and it did not stem organically from any Sabbatian doctrines. The account of Ber of Bolechów, according to which this anti-talmudic element was the personal contribution of Bishop Dembowski, is more convincing. According to Ber, the Sabbatians told the bishop how they had been pursued by the rabbinate; they requested a formal edict granting them rights to establish an autonomous community, to engage in the same trades that other Jews engage in, and to be exempt from the jurisdiction of the rabbinate. The bishop responded: “We cannot set you apart and distinct from the whole community of Israel until you demonstrate that the statements of the Talmud are false and contain lies. Then you will be released from the [obligations] of the Talmud according to a verdict we will issue. And if you demonstrate the Talmud’s hostility toward the Christian faith, it will be possible to condemn it for burning, and you will easily obtain a royal writ of privileges.”¹²

      Since the Jewish religion had in Poland the status of a recognized faith, religio licta, Dembowski (or the Frankists) could not launch a frontal attack on Judaism as such. They could, however, invert the strategy employed by the bet din of Satanów and condemn a particular form of Judaism for its alleged deviation from its own principles. Defining the target of polemics as “Talmudism” was a clever move: although formally the Sabbatians undermined only one text of a broader canon, for most Jews such a challenge would be tantamount to an attack on the very substance of their religion. Accordingly, Sabbatian tenets were presented as based solely on the text of the Pentateuch. Ber Birkenthal stated that at that critical juncture, “the Christians started to call [the Sabbatians] Contra-Talmudists.”¹³ Others maintain that the Frankists themselves “stopped calling themselves believers in Sabbatai Tsevi and started to call themselves Contra-Talmudists.”¹⁴ Whoever was behind the new denomination of the group, the intention was to adapt the Frankist case to the broader framework of the Catholic polemics against the Talmud.

      The canon law principles giving the Church authority to defend Judaism against internal heresy, which I discussed in Chapter 1, were commonly employed by the priests in their polemics against the Talmud: in his argument that the pope may punish Jews for inventing heresies against their own religion, Innocent IV explicitly stated that this was the basis for his order to burn the Talmud.¹⁵ The anti-talmudic thread appeared also in Christian documents concerning the Frankists: the initial justification of the Kamieniec consistory court’s jurisdiction over the Jews arrested in Lanckoronie already contained a reference to Clement VIII’s bull Cum Hebraeorum malitia incipiente (1569), forbidding the reading of the Talmud and condemning it to be burned.¹⁶

      In February 1756, this reference might have been included without giving the matter deeper thought or intention. By August of the same year, it became a crucial element of a deliberate strategy: “anti-Talmudism” became the focal point of the Frankist case, and Sabbatianism came to be presented in Christian sources as a branch of Judaism closer to its original biblical form than was the Judaism of the rabbis. Suddenly, the tables were turned: Jewish leaders who had tried to denounce the heresy of Sabbatianism to the Christian authorities found themselves vulnerable to the Christian accusation of heresy because of their talmudic belief. The definition of Sabbatians as contra-talmudic Jews invited, of course, an analogy to the Karaites.

      The Karaite schism emerged around the middle of the ninth century in Babylonia and Persia and defined itself as an opposition to the postbiblical rabbinic tradition. As a matter of principle, the Karaites held the Hebrew Bible as the one and only foundation of Judaism and maintained that all tenets of belief and conduct must derive directly from the literally interpreted Scriptures. The fundamental disagreement between the Karaites and other Jews (called the “Rabbanites” for the purpose of polemics) over the authority of the postbiblical oral tradition as embodied in the Talmud led to heated dispute and the development of a substantial apologetic and polemical literature on both sides. Karaism spread among the Jews in Egypt, North Africa, and the Land of Israel, as well as in the hotbed of the schism, Persia and Babylonia. By the thirteenth century, however, the movement had decayed and the intellectual debate had essentially been won by the anti-Karaite rabbis: while Karaite communities continued to exist in the Orient, they were no longer treated by the Rabbanites as a serious threat to their hegemony.

      The Karaites never managed to establish a foothold in the Western world, and for medieval European rabbis, they remained a subject of a (quite limited) scholarly curiosity rather than actual polemics. However, despite the absence of actual Karaites in Christian Western Europe, from the early seventeenth century onward the appellation “Karaite” began to appear in rabbinic works attacking contemporary dissenters who sought to subvert the authority of the rabbinate and reject the rabbinic tradition. Shalom Rosenberg, the first scholar to discuss the issue, maintained that this new rabbinic anti-Karaism was a “purely literary” extension of the medieval polemic: when the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rabbis spoke about the Karaites, “they refer[red] strictly to contemporaries who have arrived at conclusions which resemble those of the Karaites, but who owe[d] no actual intellectual debt to the Karaites.”¹⁷

      Other scholars have interpreted the phenomenon differently. In 1712, the Sephardic board of elders of Amsterdam excommunicated three local Jews for “following the sect of [the] Karaites and act[ing] as they do, entirely denying the Oral Law.”¹⁸ Yosef Kaplan, who analyzed the case in great detail, has argued that the “Karaism” of a few Amsterdam Jews was “nourished by growing interests [in the sect] among the Hebraists of Protestant Europe,” among whom the idealized Karaites came to represent “the original, pure Judaism, before it was infected with the superstitions of the Talmud and the kabbalah.”¹⁹ According to Kaplan, the self-proclaimed Amsterdam Karaites did have a connection to actual Karaites, but this connection was indirect, mediated by Christian accounts of Karaism. In the context of the confessional cleavage between the Protestants and the Catholics, the very existence of a Jewish group that advocated the return to the uncorrupted text of the Bible naturally provoked interest.

      Protestant scholars promptly interpreted Karaism as a Jewish embodiment of the sola Scriptura principle and thus an external confirmation of the Protestant rejection of papist distortions and corruptions of the original biblical message. Yet even Catholic scholars tended to view the Karaites with sympathy, emphasizing their rationalism and the rejection of rabbinic “fantasies and aberrations.”²⁰ On the basis of such accounts, some dissenting members of the Amsterdam Sephardic community took upon themselves the garb of Karaites, viewing them as a “positive reference group”²¹ and adopting the Christian ideal picture of Karaism.²² According to Kaplan, while the image of Karaism expounded by the Amsterdam Sephardim was based on literary accounts, their “heresy” was a concrete “attempt to free themselves from the yoke of traditional Judaism and form a new kind of Judaism in keeping with their spiritual desires.”²³

      The movement of the Amsterdam “Karaites” was an abortive one: the idealized Karaism never became an organized religious movement. In the Polish context, however, the Karaites were more than just a “positive reference group” for contemporary Jewish dissenters. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth boasted the only sizable Karaite group in the Christian world. At the end of the fourteenth century, Grand Duke Witold of Lithuania granted right of residence in Troki (near Vilna) to a group of Karaite families arriving from Crimea; by the fifteenth century, Karaite settlements existed in Troki, Łuck, and Halicz. The Karaites were treated as Jews by the state authorities and paid their poll tax through existing Jewish institutions, such as the rabbinic council of the Duchy of Lithuania.²⁴ In places where they lived alongside the Rabbanites, the two communities often shared cemeteries and bathhouses,²⁵ and, in some cases, they also initiated litigation in common rabbinic courts.²⁶ Intermarriages between Rabbanites and Karaites were very infrequent, but a few cases are known to have occurred.²⁷ There were even cases of individuals moving from one community to the other.²⁸ Both groups were often embroiled in bitter economic competition, protected their boundaries against the other, and sometimes expressed mutual derision in proverbs and folktales. Nevertheless, they saw each other as two branches of a single Jewry.

      For Polish

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