Benjamin al-Nahawandi

Origins and early life

Benjamin ben Moses al-Nahawandi was a Persian Jewish scholar of Nahavand, in the mountains of western Iran, active in the first half of the ninth century — his exact dates, as for most early Karaite figures, are uncertain, and this fiche says so.

Work and career

He belongs to the generation after Anan ben David, and tradition counts him, with Anan and later Qirqisani, among the three formative authorities of early Karaite Judaism, the movement that held Scripture alone as binding against the rabbinic tradition. A judge by profession, he wrote in Hebrew — unusually, in an age when Jewish scholarship in the East was written in Arabic — a Book of Laws, the Sefer Dinim, and commentaries on the Bible, laying down rulings on civil and ritual law that later Karaites cited and debated; Qirqisani's great Book of Lights engages directly with his opinions.

He was, by the sources' account, more moderate than Anan, ready to keep rabbinic practices that did not contradict the plain text, and in philosophy he proposed that the world was created through an intermediary angel — a doctrine that echoes through later Jewish thought. He died around 850; the name Karaites, 'Bene Mikra', is sometimes said to have been fixed in his generation.