INTRODUCTION

THE Ban of Rabbenu Gershom (R. Gershom ben Judah of Mayence, 960‒1028) has been seen by historians as a key determinant of the singularity of Ashkenazi Jewish culture. Hence, analysis of its fate in Poland is a most appropriate means of examining how far Polish rabbis adhered to the Ashkenazi legal tradition.

In sixteenth-century Poland there were two approaches among halakhic scholars: one, represented by R. Solomon Luria (1510‒73, known as Maharshal), was closed to other Jewish legal traditions; the second, represented by R. Shalom Shakhna (d. 1558) and his great disciple R. Moses Isserles (c. 1522‒72, known as Rema), was, conversely, characterized by openness to other legal traditions. At the turn of the sixteenth century, R. Joel Sirkes (1561‒1640) developed a position that harmonized these two approaches.

The Ban of R. Gershom (who was often known also as Me'or Hagolah, ‘Light of the Exile’) forbade both polygamy and divorcing a woman against her will. Its promulgation brought about a revolutionary change in Ashkenazi Jewish family life and in the body of law that regulated it. R. Asher ben R. Jeḥiel (known as Rosh), an Ashkenazi rabbi who emigrated to Spain in the early fourteenth century,

drew, for the Sefardi Jewish community, a comparison between the Ban and the geonic takanah on the rebellious wife, noting that the Ban was of higher status and was considered by Ashkenazi Jews to be on a par with Mosaic Law.

In medieval Ashkenazi tradition, conduct unbefitting a wife, such as rebel-liousness or immodest behaviour, constituted just cause for waiving the Ban. However, in divorce suits based not on the wife's behaviour, but on barrenness, levirate marriage, madness, or the proscription of cohabitation through no fault of the wife (‘abandonment of the man’), the Ban was upheld. Even in those cases where cause was found for waiving the Ban, the preference was to waive the enactment forbidding a man to divorce his wife against her will rather than the enactment prohibiting polygamy.