Ori Aronson is an associate professor of law and the deputy director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law.

The post is a part of the Religious Law and Human Rights series.

In 2017, Israel’s Supreme Court was asked to decide a peculiar question: could a state court tell a religious community to shun one of its members? The case involved a husband who refused to grant his wife a Jewish religious divorce, a gett. Under Orthodox Jewish law, without her husband’s consent the woman could not remarry or have children who would be recognized as legitimate. Israeli law, by giving exclusive jurisdiction over Jewish marriage and divorce to rabbinical courts, effectively entrenches this discriminatory rule. To mitigate its harshest consequences, state rabbinical courts have long been empowered to impose coercive civil sanctions, executed by the state’s enforcement apparatus: freezing assets, revoking drivers’ licenses, even jailing recalcitrant husbands. But these powers do not always work. In some ultra-Orthodox communities, social shame matters more than loss of liberty. So rabbinical judges began invoking traditional sanctions from medieval Jewish law—calling on neighbors to ostracize the stubborn husband until he relented.

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