ABSTRACT
Within the Rabbinite world, there was competition over the Diaspora leadership between the Jewish establishments in Babylon and its counterparts in Israel. The researchers who posited that Eldad was a Karaite stressed the glaring differences between his legal traditions and the ninth-century Rabbinite lore. Contending with the challenge that Eldad posed to the Rabbinite tradition, the gaon refrained, according to Kadari, from negating the legitimacy of the Lost Tribes’ gospel. A look at the details of Eldad’s law demonstrates that it was inconsistent with the mainstream oral law in many respects, to the point of seeming to cast doubt on the validity of the Rabbinite tradition. To truly understand the debate, one must bear in mind that from the ninth century onwards, the Jewish world was sharply divided between the Rabbinites and the Karaites. In contrast to the former, the Karaites deny the authority of the oral law and its representative texts — the Talmuds and Midrashim.
