Jewish Views On Incest - Among The Karaites

Among The Karaites

The Karaites interpret the incest regulations in a way which differs from the Talmudic opinions, regarding the Talmud as worthless. The early Karaites adopted the principle that marriage was a true and full union - each spouse was to be considered legally as the same person, and hence someone related to one spouse was seen as having exactly the same relation to the other. Applied to the Biblical regulations, this produced drastically simple rules, prohibiting marriage between almost all relations and spousal relations, except that a man could still marry his niece (or step-niece) and his grandmother (or grandfather's wife, or spouse's grandmother, or spouse's grandfather's wife). However, it also prohibited marriage to the relatives of every subsequent husband of a divorced wife; if just a few women here and there engaged in serial monogamy (repeated marriage then divorce, to different people), there would be no-one left on the planet who could get married to absolutely anyone else.

In the eleventh century, two Karaite reformists rejected the principle that a marriage was a true and full union, instead arguing that the only relationships that should be forbidden were those analogous to those in the Biblical prohibitions. Dividing the principle relatives into two groups:

• First degree relatives - parent, stepparent, sibling, sibling-in-law, child, and child-in-law
• Second degree relatives - aunt (including uncle's wife), uncle (including aunt's husband), grandchild, grandchild's wife

They organised the forbidden relationships into five or six categories:

• 1 - first degree relatives, their direct ancestors, and their direct descendants
• 2 - second degree relatives, their direct ancestors, and their direct descendants
• 3 - first degree relatives of the spouse (e.g. a man marrying two sisters, or a woman and her daughter), and their rivals (the wives of their husbands)
• 4 - second degree relatives of the spouse (e.g. a man marrying a woman and her granddaughter)
• 5 - the relative (by blood or marriage) of a relative's spouse, if such a marriage would create a parallel relation (e.g. a man marrying his brother's wife's sister, his grandfather's wife's granddaughter, or his uncle's niece); near-parallels are regarded as parallel relations (e.g. a man marrying his father's wife's sister, or his brother's wife's mother) for this purpose; stepsiblings are regarded as siblings for this purpose
• 6 - second degree relative's spouse's first degree relatives (e.g. a sister-in-law's aunt); stepsiblings are regarded as first degree relatives for this purpose. This last category is included by only one of the two reformists.

This reformed list of prohibited relations was subsequently adopted by almost all Karaites.