Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives

About this book

This illuminating study explores a central but neglected aspect of modern Jewish history: the problem of abandoned Jewish wives or agunes ("chained wives")women who under Jewish law could not obtain a divorceand of the men who deserted them. Looking at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany and then late nineteenth-century eastern Europe and twentieth-century United States Enforced Marginality explores representations of abandoned wives while tracing the demographic movements of Jews in the West. Bluma Goldstein analyzes a range of texts (in Old Yiddish German Yiddish and English) at the intersection of disciplines (history literature sociology and gender studies) to describe the dynamics of power between men and women within traditional communities and to elucidate the full spectrum of experiences abandoned women faced.