Jacob al-Qirqisani
Jacob al-Qirqisani · Historical & Religious Figures
The greatest Karaite thinker of the tenth century, whose Book of Lights and Watchtowers codified Karaite law and wrote the first history of the Jewish sects
vers 890, Qirqisiya (Circesium), Irak abbasside — vers 960, Irak
Bagdad, Irak
Jacob al-Qirqisani is recognized among Jewish contributors to Historical & Religious Figures — The greatest Karaite thinker of the tenth century, whose Book of Lights and Watchtowers codified Karaite law and wrote the first history of the Jewish sects
Origins and early life
Jacob al-Qirqisani — Abu Yusuf Ya'qub, in Arabic — was born around 890, probably at Qirqisiya, the ancient Circesium on the Euphrates, and lived in the Iraq of the Abbasid caliphs, a Jew of the Karaite movement, which held to the written Bible and rejected the Oral Law of the rabbis; the Encyclopaedia Judaica calls him 'by far the most formidable champion of Karaism of his age', and this fiche needs no other ground.
Work and career
He travelled through the Middle East, knew the Rabbanite scholars of Baghdad and disputed with them, conversed with Christian and Muslim theologians, and read Aristotle, the Muslim kalam and the sciences of his day with a freedom few Jewish writers of the century allowed themselves. In 937 he completed his great work, the Kitab al-Anwar wal-Maraqib, the Book of Lights and Watchtowers, a code of Karaite law in thirteen parts that begins with a survey of all the sects of Israel — Sadducees, Samaritans, the followers of Anan, the Isawiyya, the Yudghanites and a dozen others — and then of Christianity and Islam as seen from within Judaism, the earliest and most detailed history of Jewish sectarianism that survives and the source of much of what is known about the movements it describes; his Kitab al-Riyad wal-Hada'iq, the Book of Gardens and Parks, commented on the narrative parts of the Torah.
He argued that reason was the first of the sources of truth and that the Bible must be read by its literal sense, its language and its context, and he was as ready to reject a Karaite opinion as a Rabbanite one when it failed that test. He died around 960; his books, in Judeo-Arabic, were rediscovered in the manuscripts of St Petersburg and Cairo and printed only in the twentieth century.
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Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/kirkisani-jacob-al
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The greatest Karaite thinker of the tenth century, whose Book of Lights and Watchtowers codified Karaite law and wrote the first history of the Jewish sects
Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/kirkisani-jacob-al
