Iggun has existed for as long as we have records of Jewish life – for as long as kinyan and kiddushin have been used to enact rabbinic marriage.

 

Here is just a bit of information about agunot from the past that we know about. For more, see my book, Jewish Marital Captivity.

 

The Cairo Geniza is a vast treasure trove of documents from Jews over thousands of years.

 

Many of its documents are appeals for help from women whose husbands have deserted them—husbands deserting wives and children was extremely common and a huge problem throughout the Jewish world

 

These women were AGUNOT.

 

Desertion of their husbands while the women were still tied in marriage meant

 

• Poverty

• Social limbo

• And often social discrimination for them.

 

Women were desperate—in the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th—etc.—centuries—just as agunot are today—

 

And sought help from their families, from Jewish community leaders, just like now.

 

How prevalent was this problem in the Jewish Middle Ages?

 

One scholar of Geniza material, Eve Krakowski, writes:

 

“Geniza documents mention abandon wives so often that the topic easily deserves a book of its own.”

 

If mention of abandoned wives in the Geniza documents is abundant enough to fill its own book, we get a measure of the dimensions of iggun in the world of medieval Jewry of the Middle East and North Africa—Egypt, Eretz Yisrael, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran—then by far the most numerous Jewish population in the world.

 

The term used in Geniza documents for agunot was: "widow of a living man."

 

We have plenty of evidence of agunot in Ashkenazi societies, as well.

 

The seventeenth-century memoirs of Glikl Hamel (Gluckel of Hameln, 1646-1719), mention several women made agunot because of the disappearance of their husbands—in the cases she records, because the men had been murdered.

 

The agunot in these cases got very lucky: Gentile authorities got involved; their husbands’ bodies were found—with enough identifying characteristics preserved (very cold climate), for the widows to be deemed such, free to remarry—after several years, in both cases.

 

Glikel faced the perpetual danger of becoming an agunah herself, since her husband was both of frail health and traveled long distances frequently for the family’s business.

 

Salomon Maimon (1754-1800), was a Talmud prodigy from an impoverished backwater in Poland who became a famous member of both the Jewish enlightenment movement in Berlin, in the circle of Moses Mendelssohn, and of the German enlightenment. 

 

He left his wife and children back in Poland for years as he pursued his intellectual passions far from home. His wife—whose name he only mentions in his famous memoirs in describing their engagement—pursued him for years, first, sending messengers to track him down across Germany; finally going there herself, with their eldest son, to press for divorce, for a get, which Maimon saw “no reason” to grant. 

 

When he finally relented and gave his wife a get, he complained about “the booty”—his wife’s ketubah payment—that he—an authority on “ethics”!!—had to pay—evidence among much other evidence, that Jewish men often deserted rather than divorced wives in order to avoid having to make good on prenuptial financial agreements in case of divorce.

 

In her book, Vanished Men (Hebrew); The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm (1648-1850) (English version), the Israeli scholar, Noa Shashar, documents hundreds of cases of agunot—and what really transpired in rabbinic courts across Ashkenazi Europe between 1648-1850 when agunot sought relief from marital captivity.

 

It is a dismal record. 

 

Rabbis absolutely did not “turn every stone” to give captive women relief. They multiplied administrative difficulties to the women's cases even being heard, and the odds of agunot being freed from marital captivity made very unlikely.

 

All this is NOTHING NEW.

 

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