ARIEL STONE

cousins; that is, the question of marriage between Karaite converts and Rabbanite Jews does not seem to center on suspicions of safek mamgzerut. Rather, the rabbis are apparently divided over whether conversion to Rabbanite doctrine is sufficient to allow a Karaite into the Rabbanite kahal. Although some authorities held that it was indeed permissible to marry a Karaite who returned to the“true way,” others insisted that even a Karaite who denied the teachings of his sectarian ancestors could not be permitted to marry a Rabbanite and, in so doing, be allowed to enter the congregation. Since the opinion of poskim such as Rambam and Radbaz is appa­rently insufficient to carry this later day, we might perhaps expect the“doubtful bastardy” question to dominate the historical discus­sion; it does not. This practical issue of safek mamzerut, which speaks to the very formation of the basic family unit and Jewish descent, seems to be sublimated to the ideological question of how to treat a heretic that wishes, in Rabbanite eyes, to“return to the fold” of the true believers.

SIXTEENTH THROUGH NINETEENTH CENTURIES

In the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, evidence exists in the form of written teshuvot that in Egypt rabbis continued to give their permission for Karaite-Rabbanite marriages. Rishon le­ Zion Ovadyah Yosef, who had been Chief Rabbi of Egypt , knew of

. Such permissions granted to many Karaites over the years, as he

wrote in a responsum:“Generation after generation of Egyptian rabbis acted to permit their entry into the community.”*" The evi­dence is very sparse that rabbis in any other country of Sephardi Jewish residence did so, but so is the evidence to the contrary.

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