Recovering Jewish Women’s Voices: A View from Legal History

For historians seeking to recover women’s voices, legal sources offer a trove of information. For Jewish historians especially, legal records can provide a fascinating window through which to probe how Jewish women in the past have interacted both with members of their own community, and with non-Jewish society at large. Yet, though they are often illuminating, such materials also present myriad methodological challenges.

In this paper I use the example of Eastern European Jewish women and marital litigation in American courts during the period of mass migration as a springboard for discussing the promise and perils of relying on legal records in the writing of Jewish women and gender. Using trial transcripts from New York’s criminal courts, I explore both the social and economic vulnerability of Yiddish-speaking female immigrants in the United States that emerge from these sources, as well as the complex attitude the newcomers displayed towards American legal institutions.

On the one hand, the American court system formed an integral part of the Jewish immigrant imagination in the early twentieth century, and women in particular actively solicited the intrusion of legal institutions into their private lives. Seeking redress against their runaway husbands, Ashkenazi immigrants, illiterate for the most part, brought their husbands to court on charges of abandonment or bigamy, and sometimes both at once. On the other hand, marital litigation was largely disempowering in practice, and Jewish women exhibited a certain ambivalence towards making use of the courts. Thus, I show that while legal sources, especially legal testimony, can yield important insights into women’s agency, there is also much on which they remain silent. Finally, this paper reflects on the development of women’s legal history (now a subfield of legal history in its own right) in the past decade, and what its findings can contribute to the writing of Jewish history.