Protestant–Karaite Dialogue or Anti-Judaic Polemic? A Case Study of Jacobus Trigland and Mordecai ben Nisan

From the early Middle Ages to the Modern Period, most documented polemics between Christians and Jews took the form of fierce disputes about the tenets of both religions, with the two sides almost never engaging in dialogue. The emergence of Protestantism brought about a new phenomenon in anti-Judaic debates: a dialogue between Protestants and representatives of the Karaites’ Talmudless version of Judaism. The Protestants’ interest in Karaism stemmed from their perception of the Karaite movement as rejecting the “distortions” of the Oral Torah. They perceived Karaism as similar to Protestantism, which repudiated the “distorted” Catholic tradition in favor of Scripture, the sole legitimate source of authority for both Protestantism and Karaism. The Protestants therefore formed a positive and even idealized image of Karaism and initiated dialogue with Karaite sages. One of the most illustrative examples of such dialogue was the interaction in the late 1790s between Jacobus Trigland, a Protestant Hebraist and professor at Leiden University, and Mordecai ben Nisan, a prominent Eastern European Karaite sage. This study considers the interaction not merely as a dialogue between representatives of two religious movements, but also as an instrument of interreligious and interconfessional polemics expressed by Protestantism and Karaism against both mainstream, Rabbanite Talmudic Judaism and Catholicism.