This is a matter about which our sectaries are especially fierce in their denunciations of the laxity of the orthodox. The argument they employ is the same which Kirkisani attributes to Zadok. It is, however, the obvious argument, if the principle of analogy be admitted in the interpretation of the law; it is common [pg 367] in the Karaite books, and is ascribed to the Samaritans also.[89] Kirkisani also says that the Zadokites absolutely forbade divorce, which the Scripture permitted, agreeing in this with the Christians and with the Isawites, whose founders, Jesus and Obadiah of Ispahan,[90] had likewise forbidden it. We are not told expressly that our sect prohibited divorce, but their prohibition of remarriage during the life of the divorced wife would have the same effect. Finally, Kirkisani says that the Zadokites fixed all the months at thirty days each,[91] and that they did not count the Sabbath among the seven days of the celebration of the Passover and the Tabernacles, making the feast consist of seven days exclusive of the Sabbath. Substantially the same statements are made about the Zadokites by another Karaite author, Hadassi, who flourished in the middle of the twelfth century, and perhaps derived his information from Kirkisani.
What the “Zadokite” writings really were to which these authors refer is not known. It is certain, however, that both the Karaites and their opponents took them to be Sadducean works. In the passage about Zadok, part of which Dr. Schechter quotes (see above), Kirkisani says: “After the appearance of the Rabbanites (the first of whom was Simeon the Just), the Sadducees appeared; their leaders were Zadok and Boëthus.... Zadok was the first who exposed the Rabbanites,” etc.[92] Zadok's disclosure of a part of truth was followed by the full discovery of the truth about the laws by Anan, the founder of the Karaites. Not only do the opponents of the Karaites stigmatize Anan and his followers as the remnants of the disciples of Zadok and Boëthus, but the older Karaites expressly claim this origin. Thus Joseph al-Baṣir (first half of the eleventh century) says that, in the times of the second temple, the Rabbanites, who were then called Pharisees, had the upper hand, while the Karaites, then known as Sadducees, were less influential.[93] The Karaite author [pg 368] of an anonymous commentary on Exodus preserved in manuscript in St. Petersburg[94] polemizes against a disciple of Saadia, the great Malleus Karaeorum, about the proper way of determining the beginning of the months (and consequently the dates of the feasts), which the Rabbanites fixed by calculation of the conjunctions, while the Karaites depended on observation of the visible new moon. The ancients, he says, required evidence of the appearance of the new moon.[95] Saadia, who mistakenly assumed that the beginning of the month had been determined astronomically from remote antiquity—the calendar was, in fact, of Sinaitic origin[96]—asserted that the taking of testimony about the appearance of the moon was an innovation occasioned by the contention of Zadok and Boëthus that the law required the beginning of the month to be determined by actual observation; witnesses were heard only to prove that observation confirmed the calculation. To this the author replies: “The book of the Zadokites (Sadducees) is well known, and there is no such thing in it as that man (Saadia) avers. In the book of Zadok are various things in which he dissents from the Rabbanites of the second temple with regard to sacrifices and other matters, but there is not a syllable of what the Fayyumite (Saadia) says.”[97] Saadia himself appears not to have questioned the authenticity of the writings that went under the name of Zadok, with which he seems to have been acquainted, directly or indirectly, for in a passage quoted by Yefet ben 'Ali he says that Zadok had proved from the one hundred and fifty days in the story of the flood just the opposite of what the Karaites try to prove from them.[98]
Zadokite books thus meant, for all those from whom our information comes, Sadducean books; and so, in the sense that, whatever their age and origin, they contained substantially Sadducean teachings, most modern scholars, also, have understood the name.
The possibility that Sadducean writings from the beginning of the Christian era had survived to the Middle Ages cannot well be denied, especially in view of the preservation of the book of the unknown sect that forms the subject of our present study in copies as late as the tenth or eleventh century; and even if the book which the Karaites took for Sadducean was erroneously attributed to that sect, there is no sufficient ground for identifying it with the texts in our hands or for ascribing it to our sect. A thirty-day month, and the prohibition of divorce and of marriage with a niece, are much too slender a foundation to support so large an inference, and it is hardly legitimate to argue that if we had the entire book, of which only a part—or, according to Dr. Schechter, excerpts—is preserved, we might find other and more significant agreements.
Dr. Schechter has also remarked certain coincidences between the tenets of our sect and those of the Falashas, or Abyssinian Jews, whom, with Beer, he is disposed to connect in some way with the Dositheans. Their Sabbath laws resemble those in the Jubilees and in the texts before us; they also prohibit marriage with a niece; they have a tradition that the Pentateuch was brought to Abyssinia by Azariah, the son of Zadok (1 Kings 4 2); certain features of their calendar may possibly be related to that of the Zadokites as described by Kirkisani. Here, again, the correspondences are not numerous or distinctive enough to establish an historical connection.
Putting together these scattered indicia, Dr. Schechter arrives at a theory of the history and relations of the sect which must be given in his own words:—
We may, then, formulate our hypothesis that our text is constituted of fragments forming extracts from a Zadok book, known to us chiefly [pg 370] from the writings of Kirkisani. The Sect which it represented, did not however pass for any length of time under the name of Zadokites, but was soon in some way amalgamated with and perhaps also absorbed by the Dosithean Sect, and made more proselytes among the Samaritans than among the Jews, with which former sect it had many points of similarity. In the course of time, however, the Dosithean Sect also disappeared, and we have only some traces left of them in the lingering sect of the Falashas, with whom they probably came into close contact at an early period of their (the Falashas') existence, and to whom they handed down a good many of their practices. The only real difficulty in the way of this hypothesis is, that according to our Text the Sect had its original seat in Damascus, north of Palestine, and it is difficult to see how they reached the Dositheans, and subsequently the Falashas, who had their main seats in the south of Palestine, or Egypt. But this could be explained by assuming special missionary efforts on the part of the Zadokites by sending their emissaries to Egypt, a country which was especially favourable to such an enterprise because of the existence of the Onias Temple there. The severance of the Egyptian Jews from the Palestinian influence (though they did not entirely give up their loyalty to the Jerusalem Sanctuary), prepared the ground for the doctrines of such a Sect as the Zadokites in which all allegiance to Judah and Jerusalem was rejected, and in which the descendants of the House of Zadok (of whom indeed Onias himself was one) represented both the Priest and the Messiah.
The evidence adduced in support of this ingenious hypothesis has already been examined in detail, and the results need only be summarized here: There is nothing in the book before us to warrant classing the men who made the new covenant in the land of Damascus as a Zadokite sect;[99] neither the external nor the internal evidence suffices to identify the work quoted by Kirkisani as Zadokite (by which he and all the rest understood Sadducean) with the book before us; the connection of the sect with the Dositheans rests in great part on misunderstanding of the testimonies about the Dositheans—misunderstandings, it is fair to say, which are not all original with Dr. Schechter,—in part upon points of resemblance which are not distinctive enough to prove anything. Of the peculiar organization of our sect, which would be conclusive, there is no trace anywhere.
A much more sensational hypothesis was broached by Mr. G. Margoliouth in the Athenaeum for November 26, 1910, under [pg 371] the title, “The Sadducean Christians of Damascus.” He takes “the root” which God caused to spring from Israel and Aaron (1 7) for the same person who is subsequently called the Anointed one (Messiah), and distinguishes this figure from the Teacher of Righteousness, also called the Anointed one, who appeared twenty years later. “Both these Messiahs were dead when the document was composed, but they were both expected to reappear in the latter days.”