Japheth ben Ali

Origins and early life

Japheth ben Ali ha-Levi — Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali al-Lawi al-Basri, in the Arabic of his books — was born in Basra, in Abbasid Iraq, around 914, a Jew of the Karaite movement, which held to Scripture alone and rejected the rabbinic tradition, and he spent the second half of his life in Jerusalem among the 'Mourners of Zion', the Karaite ascetics who had settled in the city to pray for its restoration; his Jewishness is the whole of his life, and this fiche needs no other ground.

Work and career

There, over some forty years, he accomplished a work no Jew had attempted: a translation of nearly the entire Hebrew Bible into Arabic, verse by verse, with a commentary on every verse, of which all the books survive but Lamentations — a commentary of grammar and philology first, in the tradition of the Karaite reading of the plain sense, then of law, history and theology, and finally of polemic, against the Rabbanites and above all against Saadia Gaon, the great defender of the rabbinic tradition, and against the claims of Christianity and Islam, in an age when Jewish writers rarely dared to answer them in the language of their rulers.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls him the foremost Karaite exegete of the golden age of Karaism; his readings, transmitted in Arabic and in Hebrew translation, were used by Abraham ibn Ezra two centuries later in Spain, so that the Karaite scholarship of Jerusalem entered the mainstream of Jewish Bible commentary under the name of 'the Karaite' whom Ibn Ezra cites and disputes. His son Levi ben Japheth continued his work.

He died in Jerusalem around 1009, before the Crusaders' destruction of the community he had led; his manuscripts, scattered from Cairo to St Petersburg, are still being edited.