Second, it is astonishing that Karaism rates only passing mention. This proto-Protestant movement, that swept across the Jewish world from east to west and gained many adherents, denied the divine origin and authority of the Talmud rabbinic "oral Torah", and relied instead on Scripture, reason and consensus. No history of the Jews in the Middle Ages can afford to turn a blind eye to Karaism, and least of all a history focusing on the Word. The Karaite challenge to the rabbinic movement is not just of theological interest, it had serious practical consequences. In Constantinople a separation fence was built to limit outbreaks of violence between Karaites and Rabbanites. The challenge spread as far as Spain. Schama devotes several pages to the violent dispute that broke out there between the court grammarians and poets Menahem ibn Saruq and Dunash ibn Labrat, but fails to appreciate the role played in this conflict by accusations of crypto-Karaism levelled against Menahem by his opponent, a pupil of the foremost anti-Karaite polemists in Iraq, Saadia.

A further surprising omission is the medieval tradition of biblical commentary, a central concern of the Jewish intellectual tradition virtually everywhere, which produced major landmarks of scholarship in Ashkenaz and France, Spain and Provence. Rashi, Abraham Ibn Ezra and David Kimhi are barely mentioned in the book, and yet these scholars, whose commentaries are still printed in rabbinic Bibles today and who have had a significant influence on Christian as well as Jewish readings of the Bible, truly deserve the epithet "ministers of the Word".