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Algerian Jews, like those of other Jewish communities in the Diaspora, used Hebrew as their לשון הקדש lešon haq-qodeš ‘the holy tongue’, namely the language of prayer and religious ceremonies, and had their own Hebrew oral reading traditions of the Bible and the Mishnah. Following the pogroms of 1391 in Spain, and especially after the expulsion of the Jews therefrom in 1492, prominent Jewish poets, bearing the rich and vibrant spirit of the great Iberian Hebrew poetry, arrived in Algeria. Among these were the cel…

The Karaites are members of a Jewish movement that developed in the 9th century C.E. and maintained a mainly literal interpretation of the Bible, opposing the rabbinic Oral Law. Nonetheless, despite the prolonged Karaite-Rabbanite controversy, the Karaite scholars of the Golden Age of Karaism in the 10th–11th centuries were well acquainted with rabbinic literature. This familiarity is reflected in Karaite treatises in which the authors frequently refer to rabbinic notions, often citing from rabb…