“Only Through the Court” - Limitations to Women’s Financial Autonomy in mKetubbot 11:1-3

• In Event: Consent, Concubinage, and Women's Autonomy

Abstract

Rabbinic marriage is defined by a contractual relationship in which a husband offers his intended wife basic financial guarantees during the marriage and after its dissolution. The two pillars of a woman’s financial security are MEZONOT–a husband’s implicit obligation to feed and maintain his wife in exchange for her domestic labor during their marriage or upon his death until her remarriage– and her KETUBBAH payment – the financial settlement that the wife will receive if she becomes widowed or divorced (Lapin, 2003). In theory, these complementary forms of spousal maintenance seem clearly defined: once married, the woman is entitled to either maintenance or to her financial settlement at any given time. Nevertheless, mishnaic and talmudic sources reveal various legal complications that arise when women try to realize their financial rights, especially when orphans or creditors have competing legal claims to the husband’s assets. While rabbinic sources recognize the women’s precarious financial circumstances and their legal vulnerability, ultimately, rabbinic law resorts to rabbinic court supervision as a mechanism for verifying, controlling, and limiting these women’s claims.

mKetubbot 11:1-3 articulates legal rules and arguments that reveal the practical difficulties of ensuring women’s access to financial resources to which they are legally entitled either as dependents on their husbands’ estates or as independent rights-holders. Through a close textual analysis of these mishnayot and their parallel tannaitic and amoraic sources in tractate Ketubbot, this paper will analyze the different impediments anticipated by rabbinic legal thinking. The legal solutions that emerge pit a woman’s right to sustenance against her financial autonomy. Reading these sources through a feminist theory of law demonstrates that rabbinic law requires her to choose between her autonomy and her basic economic needs. This paper will finally analyze and reflect on the conflicting rabbinic impulses to understand and protect a woman’s economic rights, while severely curtailing these same rights by prioritizing other claimants.

Author

• Mari Masha Yossiffon Halpern, University of Toronto