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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 652-654



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Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia. By ChaeRan Y. Freeze (Hanover, University Press of New England, 2002) 399pp. $65.00 cloth $29.95 paper

This study offers a comprehensive investigation of Jewish marriage and family breakdown from the early nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. Informed by meticulous archival research in major centers [End Page 652] of Jewish life (Vil'na, Odessa, L'viv, Kiev, Zhitomir, among others), the book is, in fact, about more than the title suggests. Weaving together family, legal, cultural, and administrative history, Freeze situates changes in Jewish family life within their broader context—in particular, the growing tensions between Jewish aspirations to religious and social autonomy and the integrating ambitions of the state.

The central question that Freeze seeks to answer is why rates of Jewish divorce in the early nineteenth century, astonishingly high according to her calculations, declined over the court of the nineteenth century, even as divorce increased among other social groups in Russia and among the Jews of other nations. In Russia, each religious confession regulated its own marriages and divorces. Among Jews, divorce was relatively easy for husbands, much harder for their wives. Rates began to decline, in part, because of the rising age of marriage, a consequence of Russian Jews' growing poverty, but also because of cultural changes that condemned the early marriages that had long been customary. The rising age of marriage, Freeze asserts, gave the young more power to determine their marital fates and, thus, increased the likelihood of marital satisfaction. In addition, administrative changes, especially the post- reform courts, raised new obstacles to divorce. Offering Jewish women a means to defend rights that had hitherto been denied them, the new courts raised the expense of divorce for men, and represented a significant breach in the insular Jewish community. Equally important, a growing crisis of rabbinical authority—the consequence of state efforts to establish stricter control over Jewish life in general and marriage and divorce in particular—left marital law contradictory and confused, thereby generating a legal vacuum in which the Jewish family was left to fend for itself.

Yet, Freeze contends, while divorce declined, marital breakdown remained widespread. The causes were both traditional (family feuding, childlessness, etc.) and new. In addition to men's religious conversion or emigration abroad, changing gender roles and expectations, particularly of newly educated women, intensified marital conflict and "prompted spouses to reassert control over their traditional spheres" (132). However, women were more often the victims than the beneficiaries of family breakdown without divorce. Left as agunah, women anchored to a man, they were unable to remarry and start a new family.

The book interweaves many themes, and its methods are eclectic. Tables, many of which the author has constructed from metrical books in select communities, demonstrate changes in Jewish family patterns; literary and periodical sources reveal the ways that Jews understood and responded to that change. Appeals for marital separation are mined for evidence of new gender expectations. Tracing the incursions of the tsarist state into Jewish religious and everyday life, and the consequences, the book explores important dimensions of the imperial administration's relations with its Jews. [End Page 653]

Some parts of the argument are more compelling than others: It is easier, for example, to prove assertions about divorce rates than about rates of marital breakdown. Freeze does not fully succeed in adopting "the postmodernists' close attention to language" (6), especially when she explores the testimony of discontented spouses. Nevertheless, this book remains an impressive achievement, a major contribution to the history of Russia's Jews and of the Jewish family, and to that still-underexplored subject, the family in imperial Russia.

 



Barbara Alpern Engel
University of Colorado, Boulder

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