Eastern European Karaite Attitudes towards Modern Science
Journal: Aleph
Year: 2010

In the early modern period there were small but flourishing Karaite communities in the Crimea, Volhynia, Galicia, and Lithuania. In general, these Karaites did not adopt modern science, preferring a Maimonidean Aristotelianism they had inherited from medieval Byzantine Karaism. A good example of a Karaite intellectual who rejected modern science although he was familiar with it is the most prominent Karaite of the eighteenth century, Simḥah Isaac Lutski, whose two dozen books are steeped in pre-