ARIEL STONE
however, gives examples of Rabbanite communities that have similarly sought to gain advantage at the expense of their coreligionists.) Nemoy documents the January 1, 1939, decree of the German Ministry of the Interior which“expressly stipulated that the Karaites did not belong to the Jewish religious community; their‘racial psychology’ was considered non-Jewish .” In Arab countries, however, when the State of Israel was established, they were the victims of equal-opportunity persecution with their neighbor Rabbanites.**
Tzitz Eliezer is among those whose rulings seem to echo the bitterness of the past or at least to steadfastly uphold the modern Orthodox ban on intermarriage of Karaite and Rabbanite Jews. In a teshuvah Rabbi Eliezer Waldenburg describes how the Jewish Agency approached him for a decision on whether Karaite Jews should be considered for aliyah to Israel from the Soviet Union . In his response he takes a very strong line, quoting Isserles , and, because they deny the Torah she-ba“al peh, proclaiming the Kara ites “worse than idolaters.”“When I think about our fellow Jews, out there in the Golah without a roof over their heads,” he writes,” the Karaites are not to be compared with them.”
In his Yabbia Omer Ovadyah Yosef specifically replies to Tzitz Eliezer in a prolonged and somewhat more measured discussion of the status of Karaite Jews . He notes that the bread, the cooked food, and the wine of a mamzer are acceptable, so is it with a Karaite . He reviews the history of the halakha, writing that“the prohibition against allowing Karaites into the kahal is not from the
165