If Daniel had a wife…
Early Responses
In Babylon, during the post-Talmudic Geonic period, Zemah ben Paltoi, Gaon of Pumbedita (872–890), “calls upon a man to flog his wife if she is guilty of assault.” Rabbi Yehudai b. Nahman (Yehudai Gaon, 757–761) writes that: “…when her husband enters the house, she must rise and cannot sit down until he sits, and she should never raise her voice against her husband. Even if he hits her she has to remain silent, because that is how chaste women behave” (Ozar ha-Ge’onim, Ketubbot 169–170). The ninth-century Gaon of Sura, Sar Shalom b. Boaz (d. c. 859 or 864), distinguishes between an assault on a woman by her husband and an assault on her by a stranger. The Gaon of Sura’s opinion was that the husband’s assault on his wife was less severe, since the husband has authority over his wife (Ozar ha-Ge’onim, Bava Kamma, 62:198).
In Muslim Spain, R. Samuel ha-Nagid (936–1056) was one of the first sages to advise the husband to beat his dominating wife so that she stay in her place. His attitude toward the domineering woman is that she can be hit in order to educate her. He writes in his book Ben Mishlei: “Hit your wife without hesitation if she attempts to dominate you like a man and raises her head [too high]. Don’t, my son, don’t you be your wife’s wife, while your wife will be her husband’s husband!” Underlying his words is that the ideal woman is one who is subservient; the bad woman is one who is disputatious.
In the following period, known as that of the “
Rishonim,” Maimonides (1135–1204) recommends in his Code, the
Mishneh Torah, that beating a bad wife is an acceptable form of discipline: “A wife who refuses to perform any kind of work that she is obligated to do, may be compelled to perform it, even by scourging her with a rod” (
Isshut 21:10). Some rabbis, such as Shem Tov b. Abraham ibn Gaon (d. Safed, 1312), in his commentary
Migdal Oz on Maimonides, understand the referent to be the rabbinic court (
beit din), since the word “force” (
kofin) is in the plural, rather than the singular. However, most commentators concur that Maimonides means that it is the “husband” who can force her. R. Vidal Yom Tov of Tolosa, the well-known fourteenth-century interpreter of Maimonides’s
Mishneh Torah, writes in the
Maggid Mishneh that “Na
hmanides wrote that we force her with a stick and it is also the view of Rabbenu (i.e., Maimonides) and the major rabbis.” It should be noted that Maimonides was most liberal in grounds for divorce, allowing sexual incompatibility, “
me’is alai” (lit. “He is repulsive to me”) as grounds (cf. also
Ket. 63b).
An example of a rabbi who understood that Maimonides’s words justified beating one’s wife for a “good” cause was R. Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi (c. 1200–1263), who accepted the idea that a husband may beat his wife if she transgresses: “A man must not beat his neighbor. ... The man who beats his neighbor transgresses two negative precepts...And so it is with the man who beats his wife. He transgresses two negative precepts, if he did not hit her in order to reprove her for some transgression” [emphasis mine] (Iggeret Teshuvah, Constantinople, 1548). Thus R. Jonah distinguishes between wife assault and stranger assault. One can only assault one’s wife if justified, but one can never assault one’s female neighbor.
Yom Tov Assis makes it clear that wife-beating was widespread among Spanish Jews and sees it as a part of the general trend of violence in Hispano-Jewish society. In this society, according to R. Judah, son of R. Asher (Toledo, 1270–1349) the husband is the lord and master and the wife fears her husband and the husband rules in his home and the wife does not contradict him (Zikhron Yehudah 78). In the responsa of R. Solomon b. Abraham Adret (Rashba, 1235–1310), we have examples of husbands who occasionally and/or habitually use force. There are not too many examples of husbands being brought to court for beating a wife in a moment of anger. However, there are many cases in Rashba’s responsa of wives who considered the rabbis as allies against violent husbands (Adret, V 264; VII, 477; VIII, 102; IV, 113).
