The Karaites: And the Question of Jewish Identity by Juan Marcos Bejarano Gutierrez

Author:Juan Marcos Bejarano Gutierrez
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Yaron Publishing
Published: 2020-02-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Intermarriages

In the Ga’on’s tirade against the Qaraites, the Ga’on reveals the following:

“They [the Qaraites] have marked us with the status of one whose prayer God does not accept, but if to them we appear thus, why should they procreate with us or marry us? This should be forbidden to them!”[60]

Evidence of intermarriage has been preserved from Fustat, Ascalon, and Tyre. It appears that authorities from either side did not condemn the practice. The practice, while controversial among some, was nevertheless defended by ga’on even amid the crisis. The Ga’on states:

“As for me, God knows what I would have said to our people when I heard the, say, ‘We want to separate from those people because of the enmity they show towards us,’ I would have said: My brothers, this thing is not good between us. We have found that the house of Judah did not refrain from marrying even the tribes that were worshipping idolatrously. They are our brothers.”[61]

Even after the confrontations of 1029-1030, intermarriages continued. The Cairo Genizah once again provides evidence that Qaraites were apparently in the habit of marring Rabbanite daughters as were Rabbanite men in the practice of marrying Qaraite women.[62] The marriages were most often the product of a complicated array of elements, including business, social, and political relationships.[63] The contracted marriages reveal, however, that neither party was expected to abandon their respective religious practices.[64] While the standard rabbanite ketubah outlined the formal basis of the marriage relationship, including the terms of dissolution, Qaraite ketubot stipulated specific clauses detailing how the husband and wife would comport concerning the observance of the Torah as differently understood by either party, i.e., Qaraite or Rabbanite.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.