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HEBRAIC POLITICAL STUDIES 111<br />
past, <strong>in</strong> order to clarify, and ennoble, a current religious and scholarly<br />
obsession.<br />
is demarche did not always follow the lum<strong>in</strong>ous royal path of major<br />
theological and literary disputes. It sometimes took place <strong>in</strong> obscure, outof-the-way<br />
places nevertheless <strong>in</strong>habited by a passion for erudition whose<br />
contours and objects may escape us. Indeed, the research and debates of<br />
<strong>this</strong> period, vivified <strong>in</strong> other times by a quest for both philological and religious<br />
truth, have oen become opaque or <strong>in</strong>comprehensible to us; hence<br />
the need to explore the reasons of <strong>this</strong> <strong>in</strong>tellectual world and attempt at<br />
least to grasp its historical significance and, I might add, its depth.<br />
For certa<strong>in</strong> great Protestant scholars, the history of the ancient Karaite<br />
sect was an ideal bridge to a project of identification with a Jewish past<br />
that was simultaneously idealized and brought <strong>in</strong>to the present. e<br />
search for a rigorously scriptural Judaism that entirely rejected the talmudic<br />
and rabb<strong>in</strong>ic tradition served at once as a mirror and an ally <strong>in</strong> the<br />
struggle aga<strong>in</strong>st Catholicism. Certa<strong>in</strong> fundamental pr<strong>in</strong>ciples of Karaism, 2<br />
such as faith be<strong>in</strong>g the sole condition for salvation, and the almost obsessive<br />
<strong>in</strong>sistence on the study of Scripture comb<strong>in</strong>ed with the demand<br />
for freedom of <strong>in</strong>terpretation, exerted a magnetism on erudite Protestant<br />
circles. is Christian <strong>in</strong>terest <strong>in</strong> the Karaite universe was not limited to<br />
the realm of exegesis and search for sources; it extended to voyages, epistolary<br />
relations, and conversation.<br />
Most of the <strong>in</strong><strong>format</strong>ion and <strong>in</strong>itial clarification as to the extent of<br />
the <strong>in</strong>terest <strong>in</strong> Karaism <strong>in</strong> seventeenth-century Europe comes to us from<br />
eighteenth-century bibliographers and scholars, who later were and<br />
sometimes still are unfairly considered to have lacked historical sensitiv-<br />
ity. And yet as early as 1681 Wagenseil published his collection of Hebrew<br />
texts aga<strong>in</strong>st Christianity <strong>in</strong> a Lat<strong>in</strong> translation, Tela ignea Satanae<br />
(e<br />
Fiery Darts of Satan), 3 which <strong>in</strong>cluded Hizz<br />
uk Emuna (e Strengthen<strong>in</strong>g<br />
of Faith, 1593) by the Lithuanian Karaite Isaac ben Troki, who comb<strong>in</strong>ed<br />
a strictly literal read<strong>in</strong>g of the Old Testament with a thrust of rationalism<br />
denounc<strong>in</strong>g the allegorical imag<strong>in</strong>ation at the base of the idea of the<br />
2 For studies of Karaism, see S. Szyszman, Le Karaïsme: Ses doctr<strong>in</strong>es et son histoire<br />
(Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1980); Szyszman, Les Karaïtes d’Europe (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis<br />
Upsaliensis, 1989); L. Nemoy, Karaïte Antholog<br />
(New Haven: Yale University<br />
Press, 1952). e historiographic writ<strong>in</strong>gs of G. Tamani are particularly pert<strong>in</strong>ent: “Gli<br />
studi caraiti <strong>in</strong> Italia,” Studia Patav<strong>in</strong>a–Rivista di scienze religiose 1 (1976), pp. 80–86; and<br />
“G.B. De Rossi e gli studi di storia letteraria ebraica alla f<strong>in</strong>e del Settecento,” Archivio<br />
storico per le prov<strong>in</strong>ce parmensi 34 (1982), pp. 515–527.<br />
3 Cf. J.Ch. Wagenseil, Tela ignea satanae (Altdorf, 1681). On fieenth- and seventeenthcentury<br />
Hebraist Christians, cf. the classical study by Frank E. Manuel, e Broken Staff:<br />
Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); I do<br />
not share the author’s ma<strong>in</strong> thesis.