Recently I was blessed with the opportunity to acquire a very large collection of original responsa and correspondence of Hakham Ovadia Yosef (1920-2013), the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1973 to 1983, and the foremost Sephardic Posek of the last century. Within the collection I found 10 different letters addressing the same issue, an issue that has occurred on regular occasions in the last 11 centuries and has been discussed intensely in rabbinic literature but with the shifting world demographics following the Holocaust and establishment of a Jewish state took on a new dimension.
The issue at hand was the permissibility or prohibition of a halachic Jew marrying a Jew who descended from Karaites, the religious movement characterized by the recognition of the written Tanach alone as its supreme authority in halacha, not following the rabbinic/Talmudic tradition. While the Karaite movement today are estimated to have just a few thousand members, there are scholars who estimate that in the 9th and 10th centuries up to 40% of Jewry were members of the Karaite sect. Being that the marriage ceremony of the Karaites appears to be halachically valid, and their divorces not halachically valid, this created an issue for Rabbinic Jews, where the children of second marriages of Karaite women would be considered halachic Mamzerim.
In the Shulchan Aruch, the Rema forbids marriage with Karaites, though historically, we have many records of Karaites rejoining the Rabbinate community and numerous rabbinical authorities have been recorded as allowing such marriages. With the founding of the state of Israel and the gathering of many communities from exile, many Karaite Jews left their native lands to the holy land, often leaving their Karaite beliefs behind and joining the overwhelming majority of religious Jews in Israel which were Rabbinic Jews. In recent times, the largest concentrations of Karaites were living in Crimea, Turkey and Egypt, where they had their own communities and mostly married within their own members, but with the move to Israel, this was often not the case.
Basing himself on many historic precedents, including that of the Rambam, the testimony of R. Avraham Hanagid who wrote that in his times many Karaites joined the rabbinic community, the Noda Beyehuda and others, Hakham Ovadia found a novel solution to the problem. Being that the witnesses at the marriage ceremony of the Karaites were also Karaites, their weddings were thus halachically invalid and therefore there was never a need for them to obtain a halachic divorce, eliminating the issue at hand. The letters I obtained are each directed to a specific officiating rabbi in different towns in Israel directing them to allow the couple to marry, despite the groom or the bride being from a Karaite family, as they have since accepted upon themselves to follow the rabbinic traditions.
