BOOK TALK: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850

An agunah, literally a “chained woman,” is a woman unable to secure a rabbinic divorce because her husband has disappeared or is unwilling to sign the divorce papers. In The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850, Noa Shashar sheds light on Jewish family life in the early modern era and on the Jewish legal rulings of rabbis, which determined the fate of these marginalized agunot. How did Jewish society deal with the danger of women becoming agunot? What kind of reality was imposed on women who found themselves as agunot, and what could they do to extricate themselves from their plight? How did rabbinic decisors discharge their task during this period, and what were the outcomes given that the agunot were dependent on the male rabbinic establishment? Shashar reexamines the halakhic activity concerning agunot in the early modern period and proposes a new assessment of the attitude that decisors displayed toward the freeing of these women. This study also fills a void in the scholarship on agunot by describing the lives of these women and of the men who brought this about..

Join YIVO for a discussion with Shashar about this book, led by historian Elisheva Carlebach.