MARRIAGE WITH SECTARIANS

In Europe , however, where by the thirteenth century the Karaite communities had already spread as far as Troki in Lithua­ nia , an apparently full consensus had formed among the Ashkenazi poskim of Europe against allowing Karaites to join the Rabbanite fold; they all ruled that the Karaites were under suspicion of being safek mamzerim. In their Lithuanian coexistence Rabbanite and Karaite Jews used the same cemetery in Vilna for a time, and later the Rabbanites defended themselves against royal decrees and blood libels by means of the Karaite charters of Troki. Apparently the two groups, however interdependent they were for survival, did not intermarry.*

Zohar attributes the trace of a hardening attitude in Egypt at least partly to the emigration to Egypt of European Jews , who brought the Ashkenazi ruling of the Rama against the Karaites :

As far as Karaites are concerned, it is forbidden to marry with them; all are considered safek mamzerim and we do not receive them into the community even if they wish to return.”*

By the midsixteenth century, ambivalence had spread as far as Palestine, where Caro, writing in Safed , reports in his commen­tary to the Tur, Beit Yosef:

I have read in responsa... as far as Karaites are concerned, it is forbidden to marry with them as their women marry through a monetary transaction or intercourse and their divorces are not in accordance with the law...and they marry others while their husband is still alive, so their children are safek mamzerim.*

In his gloss, Isserles writes.“If Karaites marry in accordance with Israelite law, although they are sinners, we consider them as Israel­ ites . In contradistinction to his words in the Mapah to the Shulhan

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