Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Frakes, “Collation of the Laws of Moses and the Romans”

One of the earliest works of comparative law was created by an anonymous author in the 4th century AD, the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanorum, or Collation of the Laws of Moses and the Romans, on the similarities and differences between Roman and Jewish law.  Robert M. Frakes (University of Munich) has now published Compiling the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanorum in Late Antiquity (OUP 2011), which explores the work of this anonymous collator.  The publisher’s description of this fascinating book follows.

The expansion of Christianity and the codification of Roman law are two of the most significant facets of late antiquity. The Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum, or Collation of the Laws of Moses and the Romans, is one of the most perplexing works of late antiquity: a law book compiled at the end of the fourth century by an anonymous editor who wanted to show the similarity between laws of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and Roman law. Citing first laws from the Hebrew Bible – especially from Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy which he believed were written by Moses – the anonymous Collator then compared corresponding passages from Roman jurists and from Roman laws to form discussions on sixteen topics such as homicide, adultery, homosexuality, incest, and cruelty towards slaves. While earlier scholars wrestled with dating the Collatio, the religious identity of the Collator, and the purpose of the work, this book suggests that the Collator was a Christian lawyer writing in the last years of the fourth century in an attempt to draw pagan lawyers to seeing the connections between the law of a monotheistic God and traditional Roman law.

Frakes’s volume presents a five-chapter historical study of the Collatio with a revised Latin text, new English translation, and a historical and juristic commentary.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Israel’s Rabbinical Court Jails Husband Indefinitely for Refusing to Divorce Wife

A fascinating story from Israel. According to the Jerusalem Post, the country’s Supreme Rabbinical Court of Appeals has ordered that a man be imprisoned indefinitely for refusing to grant his wife a bill of divorce, or get, under Jewish law. Tzivya Gorodetzki sued her husband, Meir, for divorce in 2001. Under Israeli law, religious tribunals have exclusive jurisdiction over marriage and divorce, so the case went before a rabbinical court, or beit din, which ordered Meir to give Tzivya a get. Under Jewish law, a divorce is effective only when the husband voluntarily gives the wife a get. Otherwise, the wife is an agunah, or “chained woman,” who may not remarry.

This is where things became interesting. Meir refused to give his wife the get. To punish him for contempt, and to encourage him to change his mind, the rabbinical court sentenced him to prison, where he has been for the last 10 years, the maximum term the rabbis could impose. Prison authorities tried various methods to make him relent, including solitary confinement, but nothing worked. Fearing that Meir would flee the country after his release, Tzivya went back to the beit din and asked it to extend Meir’s sentence indefinitely. In what the Post calls a “groundbreaking ruling,” the rabbinical judges complied. “The keys to your release are in your own hands,” the chief rabbinical judge told Meir at the hearing, “through the fulfillment of your obligations as a Jew. Release your wife and then you will receive your freedom.”

Accommodating religious law in a civil legal system is often problematic. Values clash, and it is difficult to know how much authority to give religious tribunals.  Countries adopt different approaches. From the outside, this particular accommodation seems extreme. Granting religious courts the power to imprison people indefinitely is no small matter. As I understand it, Israel’s Supreme Court has reserved the right to review the decisions of religious tribunals for compliance with Israel’s Basic Law, though rabbinical courts dispute this. I wonder if the Supreme Court will have an occasion to review this ruling.

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Sezgin on Women’s Rights Under Religious Law

Yuksel Sezgin (Harvard Divinity School) has posted Women’s Rights in the Triangle of State, Law, and Religion: A Comparison of Egypt and India. The abstract follows.

The main premise of this Essay is that personal status laws, whether based on Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu tradition, are men-made (implying that no females were involved in this process), socio-political constructions that have come invariably to discriminate against women and deny them equal rights in familial relations. However, women do not silently acquiesce in violation of their rights and liberties by male-dominated religious norms and institutions. On the contrary, women-led hermeneutic communities all over the world are spearheading a silent but steady revolution that redefines women’s role as rights-bearing and equal individuals in familial and public space. In doing so, women’s groups contest the scriptural monopoly of state-sanctioned religious institutions, reinterpret religious laws, and reinvent the tradition by vernacularizing international human rights and womens’ discourses. Against this background, Part I of this Essay demonstrates the implications of personal status laws on the rights and freedoms of women by looking at the Egyptian and Indian personal status systems. Part II of this Essay traces women-led reform movements emerging in the last two decades in these two countries and demonstrates how Egyptian and Indian women have claimed the rights and freedoms that current systems have denied them by forming reinterpretive hermeneutic communities.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Reporting Child Sex Abuse in the Orthodox Jewish Community

The Jewish Daily Forward reports on a controversy in Brooklyn over D.A. Charles Hynes’s refusal to name scores of Orthodox Jews arrested for child sex crimes over the last three years. Hynes has charged 85 members of the Orthodox Jewish community with such crimes, but says that releasing their names might identify the victims, which NY law forbids.  Critics say this is a pretext and that Hynes, an elected official, is in fact trying to maintain the support of the influential Orthodox Jewish community, which opposes releasing the names. The Forward article also discusses a controversial policy adopted by Agudath Israel, an umbrella group of Orthodox rabbis, that requires Jews who suspect child sex abuse to consult their rabbis before reporting their suspicions to secular authorities. Critics argue that Orthodox rabbis often persuade people that approaching the civil authorities would violate Jewish law principles such as the prohibition on lashon harah, or “evil gossip.”

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Westreich on Annulment in Jewish Marriage Law

Avishalom Westreich (Ramat Gan) has posted The “Gatekeepers” of Jewish Marriage Law: Marriage Annulment as a Test Case, on SSRN. The abstract follows.

From early classic commentators to modern Jewish Law scholars, the character of marriage annulment in Jewish Law has been much debated. These debates revolve around the appropriate reading of Talmudic sources. Nevertheless, textual analysis of the main passages reveals support for almost all the competing opinions.

Normally, as the paper argues, Jewish Law is characterized by a pluralist discourse and, despite acrimonious controversies, the merits of competitive arguments are recognized, receiving some legitimacy – at least on a post factum level. Nevertheless, Jewish family law, and especially the case of marriage annulment, is characterized quite differently. In the last few decades some proposals of marriage annulment were raised as a solution to the problem of chained wives (agunot). On the basis of the Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

No More “Back of the Bus” in Israel

From Reuters yesterday, an article about a recent protest against segregated seating on public buses in Jerusalem. A group of women entered Bus No. 56 through the front door and sat in the front seats. The problem is that No. 56 runs through an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood that frowns on the public mixing of the sexes. In fact, until very recently, women on Bus No. 56 were told to enter through the rear door and sit in the back. Only this year, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that women traveling on public buses cannot be told to sit in the back, and signs now say that people have a right to sit wherever they want. Segregation continues, however. Whatever secular law requires, many ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem — and not only men, according to the article — believe that the Torah forbids the mixing of men and women on buses; other Torah experts dispute this. The author draws on the protest to highlight the increasingly bitter divide between secular and religious Jews in Israel. – MLM

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Stroumsa on Maimonides

Non-Jews mostly know Maimonides as a medieval philosopher who, much like Aquinas in the Christian tradition and Averroes in the Islamic, attempted to reconcile Aristotelian thought with Abrahamic faith. He was also one of the great scholars of Talmudic law, whose works are still regarded as canonical within Judaism. Sarah Stroumsa (Hebrew University) has written a new book, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton University Press 2011), that positions Maimonides within the larger  Mediterranean world of which he was a part. The publisher’s description follows. — MLM

While the great medieval philosopher, theologian, and physician Maimonides is acknowledged as a leading Jewish thinker, his intellectual contacts with his surrounding world are often described as related primarily to Islamic philosophy. Maimonides in His World challenges this Read more

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Gavison on the Law of Return

Ruth E. Gavison (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) has posted The Law of Return at Sixty Years: History, Ideology, Justification. The abstract follows. – JKH

The Law of Return, passed unanimously by the Knesset with much excitement and elation in 1950 on the day commemorating Theodor Herzl, establishes the principle that ‘every Jew is entitled to come to this country as an Oleh’ and lays the foundation for the preference given to Jews in Aliyah and in the acquisition of citizenship in Israel. The law is considered one of the primary expressions of Israel as a Jewish state. In this position paper the author rejects the principal claim of the law’s opponents, that the preference given to Jews in Aliyah to Israel is either unjustified or needs to be limited in time. Read more

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Westreich on Wife’s Right to Jewish Divorce

Avishalom Westreich (Academic Center of Law and Business) has posted The Wife’s Right to Divorce in Jewish Law: History, Dogmatics and Hermeneutics. The abstract follows. –YAH

The paper has two aims: historical and dogmatic. Historical, in studying two actual Jewish Law traditions in which divorce was issued at the wife’s demand, with analysis of the legal interaction between them; dogmatic, in examining the status of three legal concepts of unilateral termination of marriage derived from these traditions: coercion of a get (a Jewish writ of divorce), terminative conditions, and annulment of marriage. The two topics lead to one integrated outcome: exploring the status of the tools which enable issuance of divorce in Jewish Law against the will of a recalcitrant spouse.

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Levine on Jewish Law and Tragic Choices in the Holocaust

Samuel J. Levine (Touro Law Center) has posted Jewish Law from Out of the Depths: Tragic Choices in the Holocaust. The abstract follows. – ARH

This article is from the author’s remarks at the Second Annual Holocaust Remembrance Lecture at Washington University. In the article, the author explores the phenomenon of fidelity to Jewish law and morality amidst the horrors of the Holocaust. History records some of the remarkable efforts of Jewish communities and individuals who, in the face of unimaginable conditions, in ghettos and concentration camps, continued to turn to the teachings of Jewish law and ethics for lessons and guidance. The questions and answers that were presented—a portion of which have survived in written form—span all areas of life: from ritual and holiday observance, to commercial law, to domestic relations, to—literally—daily questions of life and death.