MARRIAGE WITH SECTARIANS

It is also forbidden at the present time to circumcise their sons on Shabbat , because they do not uncover the membrane of the corona after the circumcision, and milah without pri’ah is not milah, and this constitutes a hillul Shabbat b’lo mitzvah.>

Rabbi Isaac Klein discussed the question of intermarriage of Karaites and Rabbanites in his Guide to Jewish Religious Practice, noting that“the codes are very explicit about the Karaites .” After quoting the Rema and the reiteration of his Mapah ruling“in a de­cision of the Chief Rabbanite of Israel”(by which we may perhaps surmise that he meant the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbinate), he continued by giving examples of intersectarian marriages at times when relations between the two sects were friendly, and concludes that,

[w]hile in the past the Karaites disassociated themselves from Klal Yisra’el, today they have reversed the process and have even suffered martyrdom for Klal Yisra'el. In Israel , although the official policy has been to forbid such marriages, exceptions have been made that may indicate a new trend.*

Scholars are divided as to whether one can attribute socio­logical and political pressures to changes in halakhic decision­making trends, but we can observe that when the two sects enjoy friendly and mutually respectful relations, marriages occur between them. Similarly, the distancing between the two sects that has oc­curred over the last several hundred years is clearly indicated by the Karaites ’ successful suit in the court of Catherine the Great , to be treated in such matters as taxation in a fashion different from that of the Rabbanite Jews. Nemoy ascribes such Karaite efforts to escape the legal and social persecutions of Jews in Poland and Rus­ sia , as resulting in“a quiet but profound estrangement.”(History,

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