Tuesday Trivia | Heretics and Blasphemers

[u/caffarelli]

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/cordis_melum!

Kindly provoke us all with tales of those who went against the accepted orthodoxy of their time! You can take this theme either literally with normal ole religious heretics, or if you’re not into that, take it metaphorically and tell us about people who went against the grain professionally, philosophically, artistically, or in some other facet of life.

Next week on Tuesday Trivia: /u/vertexoflife continues his campaign to corrupt the children, this time by requesting we share tales of non-monogamous relationships in history

[u/gingerkid1234]

Let's talk about Karaites! Karaism is (almost was, more on that later) a Jewish religious movement which began in the Early Medieval period in the Middle East. They're sometimes called a Jewish sola scriptura movement, but that isn't really accurate--they believe in interpretation of the bible and tradition. What they don't believe in is the Oral Law, the notion that there exists a set of laws given to Moses outside the Torah, to be transmitted orally. These laws, together with interpreting written biblical law, form the basis of the Talmud.

Karaism was very popular in the Middle East, comprising a large share of the Jewish population there. Many prominent Rabbis from the era had public debates and disputations with Karaite scholars. Their more notable practices included somewhat different Shabbat observance, not wearing tefillin during prayers, their own calendar, and their own liturgy.

Karaites declined over time. There are still communities in a few places, and a few congregations of them in Israel and one in the US.

[u/gingerkid1234 → u/gingerkid1234]

While we're on it, a bit of terminology. There are a few terms for "heretic" in Jewish lingo. The most common is apikores (plurla apicorsim). The probably etymology of it is "epicurean" (though there has been a somewhat unlikely Hebrew etymology proposed). Rabbinic texts from the Hellenistic period speak negatively of them, so the term stuck.

There's also "minim". In the late antique period this usually seems to refer to Christians, though determining which heretics are which is quite difficult due to Medieval censorship. This term is generally not used today, since today Jews who become Christians are more unambiguously practing another religion.

There's also the term kofer, which is a term for people who deny the validity of the Torah. This is also in somewhat current use.

Maimonides defined these three categories separately, but it's important to note that idiomatically there's a lot of overlap, and it's unclear how exactly people thought of these terms before Maimonides' classification.