ARIEL STONE
“wealthy and influential” Karaite Moses Hakkohen ben Aaron in 1082 c.E., each side made concessions to the other’s religious sensibilities. On the Karaite side, the usual rule that the husband might not inherit his wife, was abrogated; on the Rabbanite side, the bride was promised that, to accommodate her beliefs, she was
not to have to keep her husband company on Friday nights in a room lit by the Sabbath candles, nor to partake of the fat-tail (prohibited by Karaite legalism) and not to desecrate the Festivals according to the Karaite calendar, while she had also to observe the Rabbanite festivals.
In another example, a Karaite groom promises to observe the festivals in accordance with his Rabbanite spouses’s custom. In a third ketubah, the safeguarding of Karaite practices dictated the exclusion of“the meat of a pregnant animal,[the] bread and wine of non-Jews” and further stipulated“no light on Friday nights...no heat on Sabbath , and also the absence of sexual intercourse, the latter prohibition extending also to the Festivals.” In this examination of Genizah materials, Mann also includes a ketubah of the fourteenth century that mentions the Rabbanite leaders, the Nagid Abraham ben David ben Abraham Maimuni, as well as the Karaite Nasi of the time.” The ketubah formalizing the intermarriage of Karaite and Rabbanite in the year 1107 C.E. lists as the legal essentials mohar, documentation, sexual intercourse, witnesses, and kiddushin.” In these ketubot we are confronted with the fact that in the course of marriages contracted between Karaite and Rabbanite, both sides repeatedly seem quite ready to lay aside very ideological issues that had originally divided them into two distinct Jewish sects and that would continue to do so in the future of their relationship.
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