Disciplining the Marital Practices of Jewish Immigrants: Attempts at Centralization in The United States and France

• In Event: American Judaism and the “Unity” Impulse

Abstract

In the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish communities in France and the United States attempted to discipline the marital behavior of their foreign coreligionists, either by consolidating existing Jewish institutions, or by creating new ones. In both countries, the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe generated deep anxieties among native Jews. Religious marriage and divorce epitomized these fears as Jewish leaders viewed the marital practices of the newcomers, which repeatedly came into conflict with state laws, as potentially hurting the reputation of their communities.

To combat the nefarious consequences of “unsupervised” marriages and divorces—including bigamy, adultery, desertion, illegitimate children, and prostitution—rabbis and lay leaders sought to organize and supervise the Jewish immigrant population and to regulate its family life. Although French and American Judaism faced a similar challenge, their responses diverged, due to differences in their respective communal landscape. In France, these efforts were centralized through the institution of the state-sanctioned Consistory. In the United States, by contrast, such centralization proved impossible. Instead, an array of organizations attempted to oversee Jewish immigrant life. Geraldine Gudefin accounts for this comparative history and concludes that the successive waves of immigrant influx and the differing forms of the separation of church and state prevailing in both countries essentially doomed these communal efforts to failure, all the more so because Jewish newcomers themselves actively resisted attempts by native-born communal authorities to discipline them.

Author

• Geraldine Gudefin, American University