ARIEL STONE
...who arranges their marriages, instructs them for evil and not for good.” Having made the point that, although they are Israel , they are a separate sect that could never be mistaken for Rabbanite, and that Karaite kiddushin was no kiddushin, there cannot therefore be any possibility of safek mamzerut; Hazan therefore ruled that “Egyptian Karaites are permitted, if they wish,‘to enter the community’ and so to blend into the local rabbinic community,”*8
1918 CAIRO
Zohar cites a rabbinic proclamation issued by the chief rabbis of Cairo in 1918, in which the rabbis Raphael Aharon ben Shimon, Aharon Mendel Hacohen, and Massoud Hai ben Shimon announced that“any Egyptian Karaite is permitted to come into the kahal if he will commit himself to the Rabbanite tradition.” Recognizing that they themselves were following in the giant halakhic footsteps of such as the Rambam , the Radbaz , Darkhei No’am, and Ginat Veradim, all Egyptian Rabbanite leaders, they pointed out that“all of them accepted Karaites into the community lekhathilah, converted them, and allowed them to come into the kahal.”*
Soliciting the opinion of the Rishon le-Zion Ya’akov Meir, Rabbi Yehudah Masalton later built his case upon theirs, starting with the same four g'dolei hador:
All of them allowed Karaites into the community lekhathilah, as explained in their writings; and even more so in the case of Avraham the Nagid, son of the Rambam , who brought an entire Karaite community into the[Rabbanite] kahal in one day. The Radbaz testified that these[Karaite converts] married the g’dolei hador. If this was so in their time, and they had the power to “stand firm on religious matters,” then all the more so in our
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