Rabbinic Attempts to Resolve the Agunah Dilemma in Early Twentieth-Century France

After capturing the Senate in 1879, the republicans in France began to dismantle the relationship between church and state. The Ferry Laws of 1881-82 secularized the public schools, and the 1882 burial law secularized municipal burial grounds. Then, in 1884, the republicans reestablished civil divorce, which Louis XVIII had abolished in 1816. My paper will examine the innovative attempts of French consistorial rabbis to harmonize traditional Jewish divorce law with the new French divorce law through the introduction of conditional marriage. Under this controversial and never-implemented plan, a Jewish bridegroom would stipulate that if, in the event of a civil divorce, he refused to grant his spouse a religious divorce, the marriage would be retroactively voided. Had this proposal been instituted, it would have resolved the contradiction between the civil and religious status of a woman whose husband refused to grant her a religious divorce following a civil decree of divorce. Ultimately, the inability of the French rabbinate to resolve the agunah dilemma demonstrates how the republican principle of the secularization of marriage remained elusive long after the separation of church and state. At the same time, both the efforts of French rabbis to tackle the agunah dilemma and the resistance from forces within and without reflect the complexities of balancing tradition with modernity and in reformulating positions in response to the challenges of the times.