Jewish Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Poland

Summary

POLISH ATTITUDES TO JEWISH MARRIAGE

IN the eighteenth century marriage was viewed differently from how it is today, and practices often varied among different religious groups. Jews as well as many non-Jews, however, acknowledged that Jewish marriages embodied a good, stable model and praised them as examples to be emulated in an era when immorality and marital breakdown seemed to threaten the institution.

Recent historical research justifies the view that ‘the history of households, families and blood relations has a decisive influence on historical–social changes,’ and annals surviving from the era of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth clearly show that this generalization is also true of Jewish marriages in that period. In this study of the complex, multifaceted nature of Jewish marriage, the sources and published research available on the subject of Jewish families of the time, as well as for earlier periods, have been examined. I have also reviewed published work on the subject of problems historically encountered by married couples in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and in west European countries, as well as early research on the history of marriage now being carried out in Russia.

In the second half of the eighteenth century Polish townspeople as well as the first maskilim were equally convinced of the significance and almost universal role of marriage. In 1561 Mrowiński-Płoczywlos, councillor of Kazimierz, near Cracow, wrote a pamphlet called The Married Couple, in which he said: ‘The strengths and very existence of towns in the Polish Commonwealth depend on marriages.’ He went on to add that ‘there is no other kind of love as honest, as sacrosanct, as passionate as that between a husband and wife, and no power on earth can be considered greater than marital love’. Two hundred years later Jakub Kalmanson, a Warsaw maskil, doctor, and translator from Hebrew to Polish, was making a similar statement. Kalmanson viewed contemporary discussions in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth of political reforms and of Jewish marriage as closely related to a number of general contemporary problems. He wrote: ‘in a society, marriage is the most important status people attain, a state that has the greatest influence on social customs and sets the future course of their happiness, a fact attested to by age-old proven practice’.