Masoretes

The Masoretes (ba'alei hamasorah, Hebrew בעלי המסורה) were groups of mostly Karaite scribes and scholars working between the 7th and 11th centuries CE, based primarily in present-day Israel in the cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem, as well as in Iraq (Babylonia). Each group compiled a system of pronunciation and grammatical guides in the form of diacritical notes on the external form of the Biblical text in an attempt to fix the pronunciation, paragraph and verse divisions and cantillation of the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, for the worldwide Jewish community. (See the article on the Masoretic text for a full discussion of their work.)