MARRIAGE WITH SECTARIANS

Though no less an authority than Maimonides averred that “one may associate with them, may enter their homes, circumcise their children, bury their dead, and comfort their mourners,”* and leaders of both sects did sometimes declare personal respect for the learning of the other, bans and counterbans on the part of Karaites and Rabbanites have been the norms that characterized the relation­ship.

Today, at least in the State of Israel , the two communities do not intermarry, but this was not always the case. Under what conditions did halakhah accept or reject intersectarian marriage of Karaite and Rabbanite Jews, and why? Under what conditions are such marriages considered unacceptable? In other words, in the view of Rabbanite halakhah, when is a sectarian not a sectarian, and, finally, what might we possibly extrapolate for our own day?

REVIEW OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE: SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND THEOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Israel did not go into exile until it had split into twenty-four sects.” Where did the Karaites originate? What were their begin­nings? Historians such as Mann, Lasker, and Korman have all pointed out that the Karaites , who appear on the historical scene in the tenth century, are not a singular manifestation of disagreement with the institution of Rabbanite Oral Law but are, more precisely, simply the most successful of all those Jewish groups that rejected Rabbanite leadership after the destruction of the Second Temple.

The Karaites ” advocacy of individual religious understanding of sacred texts was contrary to the Rabbanite reliance on the interpretive prism of Oral Law for normative and accepted un­

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