A ground-breaking study of Jewish marriage and divorce in 19th-century Russia.

Effectively challenging romantic views of the shtetl family, ChaeRan Y. Freeze explores the domestic lives of Jews in nineteenth-century Russia. Using extensive research in newly declassified collections from archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania, Freeze reconstructs Jewish marital patterns of the time (an astronomical divorce rate that began to drop late in the century) and analyzes the often conflicting interests of Jewish husbands and wives, rabbinic authorities, and the Russian state.

Balancing archival resources with memoirs and printed sources, she provides a provocative glimpse of the desires and travails of Jewish spouses, showing how individual life stories reflect the impact of modernization on Jewish matchmaking, gender relations, the “emancipation” of Jewish women, and the incursion of the Tsarist state into the lives of ordinary Jews.

Cross-listed in the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series

ChaeRan Freeze is associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the history and culture of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union, Jewish family history, and gender studies. She won the 2000 Koret Foundation Publication Award and the 2002 Salo W. Baron Prize, both for Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia.

“Fascinating and very well written, this outstanding book advances our understanding of the history of the Jewish family by a quantum leap.”
–David Biale, University of California, Davis