ARIEL STONE

Arukh, this statement would seem to indicate his willingness to consider accepting Karaites into the kahal.

Zohar traces the halakhic locus for Sephardi rejection of the possibility of intermarriage with Karaites to the words of the late nineteenth-century rabbi Hayyim Hezekiah Medini, who attributed to the early nineteenth-century Rishon le-Zion Solomon Moshe Suzin the ruling that conclusively prohibits“our brothers the Karaites ” from coming into the Rabbanite kahal:“Karaites can ne­ver be our brothers.”* The accuracy of that statement and its at­tribution, however, are in dispute; and the consensus of rabbis and the Jewish kahal in Egypt demonstrated more tolerance than did its European counterpart.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

1904, BEIT SHE’AN

In 1904 a Rabbanite man emigrated to Beit She’an , Pales­tine, and, after some years, sought to marry a Karaite woman. They turned to the Tiberias rabbinic authority, which directed them to Rabbi Yitzhak Moshe Abulafia of Damascus . Abulafia ruled the marriage permissible, and the two married; but the rabbinic autho­rities of Tiberias, enlisting the support of their Jerusalem col­leagues, rejected the ruling. As Zohar relates the story, they ob­~ jected on technical grounds, but most of all on the principle codified by Moshe Isserles in the Mapah, which they cite: How in the world shall it be understood that a Karaite has been allowed to come into the kahal? The rabbis published a statement citing Susin’s dictum and calling upon all rabbis who might encounter the unfortunate

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