ARIEL STONE
East, however, were much like their neighbor Rabbanites in appearance and manner, and thus the closer relations and the possibility of marriage. Lincoln concludes by dismissing the question of safek mamzerut and, to counter the possible assimilation of the small group of Karaites that can be found in the United States today, advocates accepting them“without reservation.”®
Solomon B. Freehof , in his 1965 responsum on the subject of marriage with Karaites , also dismisses the question of safek mamzerut for the Reform Movement on the grounds that Reform Judaism accepts civil divorce. Further, since a Reform ritual divorce would have no more standing in the eyes of Orthodoxy than that of the Karaites , by that standard Reform rabbis marry people who are of doubtful halakhic status comparable to that of the Karaites on a regular basis,“without hesitation”:
Since the authorities agree that Karaite marriages are valid and Karaites are of Jewish descent, and since the only objection is the validity of their divorce and the consequence drawn from it, we should have no hesitation in officiating at the marriage of a Karaite and a Jew.
Freehof did specify, however, that“we might ask” the Karaite to make a declaration of full loyalty to the Jewish community. Taking the ruling of the Radbaz as his precedent, he avers that the Karaite “will not need conversion, but merely a statement of Haverut.”®!
For Rabbanite—that is, halakhic Judaism --the sine qua non of Jewish individual identification and communal belonging is the acceptance of Torah she-bikhtav through the interpretative prism of Torah she-be’al peh. According to Rabbanite dogma, the acceptance of the double Torah was never a question or an issue open to a vote
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