Esther and Other Captive Women

The Book of Esther is one of several books in the Jewish library that reveals horrors when re-read as an adult. Stripped of childhood candy coating, Haman is not some Marvel supervillain; his eliminationist antisemitism still resonates dangerously. Mordechai, meanwhile, is not the loving uncle acting with his niece’s best interests at heart. And Esther is not a beauty queen—she is a captive.

Hadassah (Esther’s Hebrew name) was taken from her home and chained to a political marriage with King Ahasuerus. In her marital home, a harem, her body was controlled: “Twelve months’ treatment prescribed for women, for that was the period spent on beautifying them: six months with oil of myrrh and six months with perfumes and women’s cosmetics” (Esther 2:12). She hid her authentic self: “Esther did not reveal her people or her kindred” (Esther 2:10). She lived in fear of violence—any wrong move could result in her death, for “if any person, man or woman, enters the king’s presence in the inner court without having been summoned, there is but one law for him—that he be put to death” (Esther 4:11). In Ahasuerus’s court, Esther was dominated and controlled.

A little over thirty-five years ago, a group of Jewish activists began to think of Queen Esther as an agunah, a woman unwillingly tied to an unhappy marriage, marking the fast day in her honor, Taanit Esther, as International Agunah Day.

The distinguished historian Shulamit S. Magnus begins her new book, Jewish Marital Captivity: The Past, Present and End of a Historic Abuse, with the story of her own mother’s experiences as an agunah. Magnus’s father became clinically paranoid, and especially suspicious of her mother, when Magnus was just four. Four years after that, her mother finally asked him for a get, a Jewish divorce—he refused. Years later, still chained to her husband and unable to halachically remarry or move on with her life, her mother turned to some of the most influential rabbis in America. They made efforts to arrange a get, but when her father resisted and cursed them, they gave up.

When she was an undergraduate, Magnus herself got involved on her mother’s behalf, but when the rabbis took no responsibility and put all the onus on her, her mother “exploded.” She remained an agunah until her husband’s death.

This experience drove Magnus away from Orthodoxy for good. “One day, when I was in graduate school, it struck me suddenly and with unerring clarity: Whatever the rabbis have to say about women does not apply to me. And I knew in that instant that I was no longer Orthodox.”

Nevertheless, Magnus rejects the pervasive myth that this is only a problem for Orthodox Jews. “Assumptions that dismiss iggun as an Orthodox or an Israeli rather than as a Jewish problem also perpetuate abuse.” You don’t have to be Orthodox for this issue to impact your life, and, according to Magnus, you don’t have to be Orthodox to help finally solve this problem. “Meaningful change will come only from . . . active, effective, and ongoing cross-border, communal support, informed by a full history of this problem and understanding of its workings, past and present.” That is the project of her book.

The book draws on and synthesizes the research of scholars like Noa Sharshar, Avraham Grossman, Eve Krakowski and Simha Goldin Magnus skillfully takes readers through Jewish time and space, introducing us to agunot like Hayfā’ bt. Sulaymān from the Cairo Geniza who petitioned a Fustat official to send a letter to a beit din in Palestine pressuring her husband to either return to her or give her a get. We meet the daughter-in-law of Rabbi Joseph Karo (author of the Shulchan Aruch) who, in Safed in 1580, marched into synagogue in the middle of Monday morning services and forced Karo’s son to free her. From Frankfurt an der Oder in 1792, we meet the agunah Frida daughter of Mechel who reached out to her “dear friend” Yakev for help in detaining her husband and directing him to give her a get. Chiara, daughter of Abram Salom, had such a powerful prenup in seventeenth century Italy that when her husband violated their agreement and married a second wife in Cairo, she sued him in Venetian court and had his assets seized and reappropriated to her.

From the Middle Ages through modernity, the main reason Jewish women were agunot was that their husbands had abandoned them. Magnus quotes work by Haim Sperber who identified an astonishing 9,051 cases of agunot in Eastern Europe between the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. The Hebrew-language newspaper Hamagid published a dedicated page starting in 1867 for ads from agunot seeking their husbands. New York’s Yiddish newspaper the Forverts similarly included a “Gallery of Abandoning Husbands.”

Today, though, cases of iggun are almost never due to abandonment. If a husband does disappear, courts are usually able to locate him. Instead, Magnus suggests that today most are cases of financial extortion, “abetted and enabled by rabbinic courts.”

I am not so sure. In my work with the International Beit Din, we frame today’s agunah crisis differently. Most of the men we see who cruelly refuse to divorce their wives seem to be doing so not to extort them but to abuse and control them. The sociologist Evan Stark called this coercive control. Nearly all of the agunot we work with have described this type of abuse as existing during the marriage, so they aren’t really surprised when the abuse continues by halachic means. Withholding a get is not so very different from prohibiting them from visiting family and friends or emptying their bank accounts. In short, it is our view that the extortion so often attempted in these cases is not actually a bid for material gain. Rather, it’s a means of a husband making a wife do as he says once more.

It is hard to get a full picture of these cases without the intimate perspective offered in confidential beit din hearings. So many of the women who come to our court could jeopardize their custody agreements, face ruinous litigation, or even physical violence by telling their stories in public. That is why the International Beit Din has produced a podcast, which will be released this Sunday called Getting Free. It will be released in time for International Agunah Day 2026 (a day, incidentally, about which Magnus remains skeptical: “‘Agunah Days’ enshrine the problem, enabling it.”). The podcast presents the stories of five women that came before our court.

Please mark the date on your calendar and take a listen. Magnus is certainly right that the agunah problem is something that we must all solve together.