Anan ben David

Origins and early life

Anan ben David was born around 715 in Babylonia, into the exilarchic family that traced itself to King David and led the Jews of the Abbasid caliphate from Baghdad; he was nephew of the reigning exilarch and himself a leading candidate for the office.

Work and career

Around 760 the succession went to his brother Josiah instead, and Anan took the road that gave him his place in history: rejecting the authority of the Talmud and of the rabbinic academies, he founded a movement that held Scripture alone as binding — the Ananites, out of whom Karaite Judaism developed, the largest and most durable alternative to rabbinic Judaism the Jewish people has known. His Book of Precepts, the Sefer ha-Mitzvot, composed around 770, became its foundational legal code; 'search thoroughly in the Torah' was the principle attributed to him.

This fiche states the matter plainly: he was the founder of a schism, and rabbinic tradition remembered him as a heretic, while Karaites honored him as their first teacher; modern scholars debate whether later tradition simplified a more gradual, many-handed origin of Karaism, but his historicity and his central role are not disputed. He died around 795.