Composite manuscript: Hebrew letters to the Jewish court of Paris by Pinchas Michael Abdallah (Gaster Hebrew MS 1207)

They were killed at the hands of the Philistines, and the wrath of the covenant of the pioneers was enacted due to their sins. And if it were a matter of trust and bravery, it would have been different, but they died without the woman yielding fruit in her womb. And now, according to this, before every reader who counts the number of the men of the generation of the wilderness from twenty years old and upward, every man able to go forth to war in Israel who entered the Land, how many were there over the course of forty years? And it is written in the Torah, in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 26, verse 51: "These were the numbered of the children of Israel: six hundred thousand and one thousand seven hundred and thirty." Verse 63: "These are those who were numbered by Moses and Eleazar the priest, who numbered the children of Israel in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho." Verse 64: "And among these there was not a man of those numbered by Moses and Aaron the priest, who numbered the children of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai." Verse 65: "For the Lord had said of them, They shall surely die in the wilderness, and there was not left a man of them, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun." And now, from this point, we can calculate how much loss and damage to human life has come upon Israel through this severity over these one thousand seven hundred and twenty years since the institution was founded. It is the foundation of the entire Oral Law, a total foundation, and it resists all doubt. These severities and enactments are an ordinance contrary to the perfect Torah of the Lord that restores the soul, stemming from their jealousy and their great hatred for those factions of Israel that hold to the Written Torah, namely the Karaite Scripturalist community, as opposed to the Talmudic Rabbinic community. And so it is with all these laws of ritual slaughter, forbidden animals, the removal of fats and veins, and the laws of forbidden mixtures, illnesses, and damages to life and property—not to mention those who have been killed and lost due to their blood libels. It is not hidden from the eyes of any living person who has a soul in his nostrils that the world is ready, and it is a child exposed to the events of the world that are always ready to come. Time causes the living person or his wife, who keeps the seven clean days not according to the law of God and His Torah, to die, or for him or his wife to refrain from fulfilling the commandment of being fruitful and multiplying, thereby nullifying the word of God who commanded them to be fruitful and multiply, etc. It could be, with the help of God, that by them coming together, man and wife...