Thursday 17 September 2015

heterodox - Are there jews not following the rabbinic laws?


Trying to learn about Judaism more I have been reading this StackExchange for the past few months. As a non-Jew using the correct terminology is a bit hard, so please do feel more than free to edit this question to improve it.


Regarding the rabbinic laws (The derabanan if I am not mistaken) there is often discussion and if my understanding is correct they can be 'overwritten' through time. Either way, regarding specific cases I have read about Jews not following some of these instructions (for example regarding what may and may not be done on the Shabbat) which made me wonder whether there are Jews which disregard Rabbinic law as a whole (a movement like the Sola Scriptura movement in Christianity for example), especially after reading a question like Why are we bound to rabbinic laws?.



Answer



The most famous instance of Jews choosing to follow only the written Torah without the oral rabbinic interpretations would be the Karaites who flourished from about 760 CE to 1100 CE. Today their numbers are relatively small. Wikipedia gives a worldwide estimate of about 45,000 people, but the source of their numbers is not given. Karaite Judaism is probably the closest analogue to the Sola Scriptura movement that you mention in Christianity.


There have of course been other movements through history that have declared themselves to not be bound by at least certain aspects of rabbinic law. Pauline Christianity and Reform Judaism are two of the more famous religious movements that did so. A more disturbing instance of Jews throwing off rabbinic law can be found in the events surrounding the life of Jacob Frank.


Orthodox Jews generally consider all of these examples to be people who have fallen away from the path of Judaism, but the followers of those movements would not always characterize it as such. While they all made a conscious choice to change their practice, whether they continued to self-identify as Jews varied according to the time and place.


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