Karaim, the Karaites in English, are a Jewish stream named from the Hebrew root קרא, to read. People of the reading. Scripturalists. The movement crystallizes in the eighth and ninth centuries CE around Anan ben David in Baghdad, but the posture it carries, Tanakh as sole controlling authority, no co-equal oral Torah layered over the written Word, is older than the name and recurs across Jewish history wherever readers return to the text without a binding mediator.

The core commitment is simple and consequential. Tanakh is the controlling authority. Rabbinic tradition is a tradition, worthy of study, not worthy of the weight of revelation. Where the two conflict, the written Word wins. Karaites keep Shabbat, the moadim, kashrut, and the mitzvot of Torah as Torah reads them, not as the Talmud interprets them. On calendar, on halakhah, on authority structure, the readings diverge from Rabbinic Judaism at the point where Rabbinic Judaism hands the mediator an interpretive role Scripture does not grant him.

Karaim are small, a few tens of thousands worldwide, concentrated in Israel, the United States, and Eastern Europe, but their existence matters far beyond their numbers. They are living evidence that the root-versus-tradition-layer distinction is internal to Jewish conversation, not a Christian invention. A believer who reads Tanakh as authority over later tradition is not doing something anti-Jewish. He is doing something Karaite Jews have been doing for more than a thousand years.