Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives

1. Abandoned Wives in Jewish Family Law: An Introduction to the Agune

1 chapter 1 Abandoned Wives in Jewish Family Law An Introduction to the Agune For two millennia, from Talmudic times well into the twentieth century , the agune, a woman “chained” or “anchored” to her husband because she is unable to divorce or remarry, has been regarded as a figure of considerable interest and importance for Jewish religious and legal authorities. Although agunes have suffered mightily because of their marginal position in the largely family-oriented Jewish community, it is perhaps the embarrassment of that community in the face of patent injustice against these women that accounts for the scant attention their plight has received from cultural, social, and literary historians and critics. Despite the fact that the agune is accorded considerable importance in many Jewish writings—rabbinical responsa, treatises on family law, and institutional social documents—she rarely emerges as a figure of central importance in historical or literary texts. Instead, she is often found hovering, silent or silenced, at the margins of those works. Even though, for example, the title of Khayim Grade’s novel Die agune (The Agune) heralds the importance of the protagonist, her relevance is substantially diminished by her function as the occasion for an extended narrative about the disastrous confrontation between two generations of rabbinic authorities with opposing views, and for a comprehensive depiction of Vilna’s social, religious, and moral tensions.1 The agune in Grade’s novel may be divested of her titular prominence, but her textual marginality nonetheless reflects the reality of her position within the social milieu and religious practices of the traditionally patriarchal Jewish society. The story of a bereft woman who has lost her primary 2 ABANDONED WIVES IN JEWISH FAMILY LAW social identity and status—as a wife—is thus transmuted into a narrative about powerful men of the community, rabbis, seeking to control the woman’s fate. Paradoxically, however, although the agune is relegated to the margins of traditional society, her situation has for centuries actually garnered significant attention from Jewish legal authorities: the Encyclopedia Judaica notes that “the problem of the agunah is one of the most complex in halakhic [Jewish legal] discussions and is treated in great detail in halakhic literature.”2 Moreover, the extensive concern with the ostensibly halakhically insoluble problem of the abandoned agune does indeed disclose, even acknowledge, the serious consequences of the unalterable gender and power differential operative at the very foundation of the Jewish legal system. In Jewish law, only the husband has the prerogative of executing and delivering a divorce, or get, and there are essentially four reasons why a woman may be unable to obtain a Jewish divorce: the husband is mentally ill, thus legally incompetent to grant a divorce; the husband has died but there is no legally valid evidence of his death; a recalcitrant husband refuses to divorce his wife; or the husband abandons her and disappears. Of these reasons, the one that has virtually no halakhic solution is that of the abandoned wife, a situation whose considerable repercussions are explored here in this discussion of the relevant aspects of Jewish law. Whereas the extensive halakhic consideration of the problem of the agune in the Talmud, and in the rabbinical responsa literature from the Middle Ages to the present, focuses largely on recalcitrant and deserting husbands, my study concentrates primarily on representations of the abandoned agune in selected texts from early modern Jewish history in the seventeenth century well into the twentieth.3 The broad range of writings that I consider in this book includes the diverse social and individual situations of a number of agunes; different genres—autobiographical texts, novels, institutional social documents, and a personal narrative; and texts in German, Yiddish, and English written in Germany, Eastern Europe, and the United States. While the book’s structure embraces a range of perspectives on the agune figure and on the religious, social, and political dynamics of aginut, all the agunes in this study—the considerable disparity among the individual texts notwithstanding—share a common experience of marginality. Marginality is evident not only in the subaltern legal status of women within traditional Judaism but also in their marginal positions as agunes in the particular social environments and narratives they inhabit. But in order to engage in a meaningful discourse about the agune and aginut, ABANDONED WIVES IN JEWISH FAMILY LAW 3 some relevant knowledge of Jewish family law is necessary, for only then can...