MARRIAGE WITH SECTARIANS

Sages, but rather mi-de-oraita.” He points out that the Rambam never issued any prohibition against marrying them, and that“there are many gedolei olam who allow the Karaites .”*®

In 1984 the American Conservative Movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards adopted a teshuvah written by David H. Lincoln regarding the attitude of the movement toward accepting Egyptian Karaites into the kahal. Lincoln notes the reluctance of several halakhists to take a stand on the question, including Ouziel (quoted above, p. 21) and Abraham Zevi Hirsch Eisenstadt, rabbi in nineteenth-century Lithuania , who was concerned about safek mamzerut, since the majority of them have not been divorced. Although we can draw a line of reasoning from the Radbaz through Masalton, both of whom permitted such intersectarian marriages, to Eisenstadt, he is not ready to declare himself with them and, rather, concludes:

As so many of the earlier authorities were willing to accept them even in established communities...therefore I am not willing to prohibit or permit.*

In adopting Lincoln’s teshuvah, the Conservative Committee on Laws and Standards agreed with his statement that“their‘Jewish descent’ is not really in question.” Like Aaron Mendel HaCohen and Hazan before him, Lincoln distinguishes between Karaite communities, but draws the opposite halakhic conclusions in so doing. The European Karaites , those found in Russia , Poland , and Lithuania , Lincoln writes, were“mostly a strange community with Tatar -like features, speaking a Tatar dialect and distancing themselves from the Rabbanite Jews ...It was hardly possible for a Polish Jew to marry such a person.” Thus, the Rema’s ruling and the Ashkenazi attitudes on the subject. The Karaites of the Middle

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