Karaite Jews affirm the written Tanakh alone as the source of divine law and reject the Oral Torah, the rabbinic tradition later written down as the Mishnah and Talmud, as binding revelation. The name derives from a word for scripture, and the movement, which crystallised in the early medieval Near East, called Jews back to the text itself, holding that each believer should study and interpret scripture directly rather than defer to rabbinic authority. Karaites developed their own methods of interpretation and their own calendar, sighting the new moon and reckoning festivals from the biblical text.
Karaism's traditional founder is Anan ben David, an eighth-century Babylonian figure (active around 767 to 770 CE) whose followers, the Ananites, rejected rabbinic authority, though modern scholars debate how directly the later, broader Karaite movement descended from his specific teaching as opposed to converging independently from several earlier anti-rabbinic currents in the Jewish world.
The tenth-century exegete Yefet ben Ali, working in Jerusalem, produced a comprehensive Arabic commentary on the entire Hebrew Bible that became one of Karaism's classical achievements, part of a broader medieval Karaite golden age of biblical scholarship, grammar, and law centred in Jerusalem before the Crusader conquest of 1099 scattered much of that community.