Who's a Jew {interesting read about Karaites v/s Rabbinical Judaism}

The Economist | May 2013 | Economist

[Cronos]

WHEN is a Jew not a Jew? When he’s a Karaite. Or so says Israel’s chief rabbinate, which, after 65 years of relative harmony with an ancient Jewish sect, is reopening an old and bitter schism. In recent months, rabbis working for Israel’s ministry of religion have deemed Karaite marriages invalid, fined their butchers for claiming to be kosher, and demanded that Karaites marrying Orthodox Jewish women should convert, sometimes having to undergo tavila, or baptism. “We are already Jews,” protests Moshe Firrouz, a computer engineer who heads the Karaites’ Council of Sages. “The rabbinate is denying us our religious freedom.”

For over 1,300 years Karaites have battled with Rabbanites (adherents to mainstream Judaism) over their rejection of the Talmud, the corpus of an oral tradition that Rabbanites claim God gave Moses with the written Torah on Mount Sinai. Clinging to the biblical word alone, Karaites regard skullcaps, phylacteries (little leather boxes containing Torah scrolls), matrilineal descent and non-biblical festivals, such as the Festival of Lights, as pagan accretions. Like Muslims or—as they prefer to say—like Temple-era Jews, they prostrate barefoot on carpets. “The Orthodox add and the Reform take away,” says a recent Karaite convert. “It is only we who follow the Torah.”

Once almost as numerous as Rabbanites, today’s Karaites make up less than 1% of Israel’s 6m Jews. Persecution has whittled their number down. The greatest classical Jewish theologian, Moses Maimonides, denounced them as minim, or heretics, and banned them from public prayer; others termed their children bastards, since their parents married in weddings which diverged from the Orthodox rite.

...Karaites have lesser Jewish rights, too. “Israel is a Jewish state and Jews have superior rights,” says the chief rabbinate’s spokesman. “But the Karaites are not Jewish.”

[peshat]

There are plenty of Karaite sites around. You can find some in the link section along the right side of the following page where you will find documentation on other chief rabbi’s opinions which hold that Karaites are Jews.

http://www.peshat.com/index.php?itemid=31
Are Karaites Jews?

[Never A Dull Moment]

There were numerous genetic tests run, and by a number of highly respected research and medical institutions, world wide. They are all are conclusive. They are indeed Jews that descend from the original Hebrews.