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The author discusses the prohibitions of heresies imposed by premodern Judaism and argues that the mechanism for defining and the circumstances for the prohibition of Jewish heresy varied greatly according to time and place. She discusses three cases of Karaites, scripturalists who departed from rabbinic tradition and focused on the Bible for interpretations, in an attempt to understand the importance of doctrine to medieval and early modern judgments about religious conformity in Judaism and that the changing circumstances of heresy's articulation changes its definition over time.