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“The pernicious custom of the Russian Jews must not be transplanted upon American soil”: Divorce Law and the American Rabbinate, 1861-1920

Mon, December 15, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Hilton Baltimore, Holiday 1

Abstract

This paper explores the reaction of Americanized Reform rabbis to a conflict that arose between Eastern European immigrant rabbis and the state over the granting of divorces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Czarist Russia, Jewish religious divorces were recognized as civil divorces by the state. When Eastern European rabbis immigrated to America, they continued to grant GITTIN, Jewish religious divorces, to couples who had not obtained civil divorces, failing (or perhaps refusing) to understand that American law only recognized divorces granted by the state. When such couples remarried, they were bigamists in the eyes of the law. American state governments and the secular press vilified these rabbis for their behavior, and at least three states enacted statutes making it a crime to grant an ecclesiastical divorce before a civil divorce.

Embarrassed by their association with co-religionists whose practices seemed “Oriental,” un-American, and even subversive, American Reform rabbis sided emphatically with the state, publicly calling for a legal crackdown on the behavior of the Eastern European rabbis. Simultaneously, they lobbied for the enactment of other laws governing marriage and divorce that would serve to invalidate the status of Eastern European rabbis as religious leaders in the eyes of the state. Distancing themselves from their fellow Jewish clergy, they allied with Protestant ministers whom they believed more closely shared their ideals about appropriately American mores and values.

Using the archival papers of American rabbis and rabbinical associations, state statutes, legislative history and case law, as well as the secular press and the Jewish press, the paper concludes that Americanized Reform rabbis turned to civil law to enshrine their version of Judaism as the proper American form of the religion and simultaneously created for themselves a new “canon” of American, rather than Jewish, law.

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