"Should I go to other Rabbis … or should I go to court": Eastern European Jewish women and Marital Litigation, 1900–1920

Abstract

"Should I go to other Rabbis … or should I go to court":Eastern European Jewish women and Marital Litigation, 1900–19201 Geraldine Gudefin (bio) In March 1906, a woman, signing as "the friendless woman of Lynn, Mass.," reached out to the Yiddish Forverts's advice columnist Abraham Cahan to decry her forced divorce, and the devastating financial hurdles that had resulted from it. The young mother of a two-year old and a one-month-old baby described, in A Bintel Brief, how the process of spousal desertion had unfolded. After she and her husband mutually agreed upon a divorce, the couple turned to a rabbi in Providence, Rhode Island, to dissolve the marriage.2 When the rabbi refused to proceed with the ceremony, rebuking the couple for "leaving a living orphan," the husband tried his luck with a different religious authority, this time with more success. By then, however, the wife no longer agreed to a divorce. Yet, she was taken to the other rabbi by force, and divorced against her will. Lured by the twenty-five-dollar bill that the husband had placed in front of him, the second rabbi hurried to prepare the get (bill of divorce). Following this procedure, the man disappeared, leaving the "friendless woman" and their children entirely destitute. Consequently, the newly divorced woman wrote to the Forverts in search of the financial support necessary for her survival: "Now there remains for me to ask some advice of you, as to what I should do. [End Page 1] Should I go to other Rabbis and tell of my great misfortune or should I go to court. I think, that the court will perhaps prevail upon him, to support me and my child, because I am friendless in Lynn and I have no one to turn to. I will get nothing from him with kindness: he does not want to see nor hear of me. Save me …"3 Four days later, the Yiddish newspaper published a follow-up to the first letter, signed "Destitute with Two Living Orphans from Lynn, Mass."4 This time, the young mother exhorted the editor to "issue a call for help to all the rabbis of the country" in the hopes of getting her divorce annulled. Besides highlighting the social and economic vulnerability of Yiddish-speaking female immigrants in the United States, these poignant letters also reveal new insights about how the newcomers interacted with American legal institutions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like other of her foreign co-religionists, "Destitute with Two Living Orphans" weighed which legal and extra-legal options would best serve her interests, in a classic case of "forum shopping."5 On the one hand, her first letter displayed awareness of the secular6 legal system, as well as trust that the court system might have a greater impact on her husband than rabbinical authorities. Through her veiled threat to her former [End Page 2] husband—"I will get nothing from him with kindness"—she publicly signaled her willingness to use all the means available to her, including legal ones if necessary.7 On the other hand, as illustrated by her second missive, she remained hopeful that her situation could be resolved within a Jewish legal framework, without the interference of the American judicial system. Though rabbinical authority was waning in the United States, especially since the country's vastness, combined with religious voluntarism, allowed for the type of "internal" forum shopping that her own husband had used to his advantage, she was hesitant to fully give up her confidence in the rabbis' authority to assist her.8 As suggested by these epistles, the American court system formed an integral part of the female Jewish immigrant imagination in the early twentieth century. It is not clear whether "Destitute with Two Living Orphans" eventually went to court. However, there is substantial evidence that a myriad of her female co-religionists actively solicited the intrusion of legal institutions into their private lives. Seeking redress against their runaway husbands, Jewish women from Eastern Europe, illiterate for the most part, brought their husbands to American courts on charges of abandonment or bigamy, and sometimes both at once...