Daniel al-Qūmisī

Born in Damghan, in the province of Qūmis in northern Persia, Daniel ben Moses al-Qūmisī moved to Jerusalem around 880. There, he was the leader of the Karaite Mourners of Zion movement, which found religious purpose in grieving over the loss of the Temple; they helped establish a vibrant Karaite community in Jerusalem in the tenth and eleventh centuries. His anti-Rabbanite writings inaugurated a newly acrimonious stage in Karaite-Rabbanite polemics. In many ways, al-Qūmisī was the true father of Karaism, forging new paths in Karaite law and calendrical practice and insisting on punctilious observance of biblical regulations concerning impurity. Al-Qūmisī wrote commentaries to many biblical books in which he kept close to the “plain sense” of scripture, though not all of them have survived.