MARRIAGE WITH SECTARIANS
but, rather, a matter of a covenant entered into by the Jews who were at Sinai and incumbent upon all their descendants. On that level, then, it is astonishing that throughout the centuries of Rabbanite halakhic sources, we find conflicting decisions, contradictory attitudes, and lasting ambivalence toward the Karaites , a Jewish sect that completely rejects Torah she-be’al peh harabbanim. Why were the Karaites not simply labeled heretics and declared off limits to the self-defined national Jewish identity, which was the Rabbanite community? How is it conceivable that relations between the two groups might be so amicable that marriages would be contracted between them in the past and in recent times as well?
The traditional litany of Jewish identity and survival—is it good for the Jews ?—is the litmus test that informs the historical attitude of Rabbanites toward Karaites . Jack J. Cohen of the He brew University suggests that“the discouragement of racial mixture, whenever it was felt necessary in biblical times, involved considerations of religiocultural loyalty rather than concern about the biological purity of the Hebrews and Israelites .” Group survival required a high degree of“conscious commitment to historically evolved group norms.” In order to control and proscribe racial and ideological mixture in the Jewish nation, the Rabbis had to define the requirements for group belonging; once again, the question is, “Who is a Jew?”
The question that might be inferred by the evidence consiered above is that, as so much else in life, the question of how Rabbanites and Karaites interact has to do with power and who has it. Where the Karaite community is large, wealthy, and powerful, Rabbanites contract marriages with them, appeal for their intercession in difficult times, and call them“our brothers.” In the
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