Reform Judaism and Divorce. 189
The Brunswick Conference of 1844 appointed a committee to look into all the questions connected with marriage and divorce. They reaffirmed the Paris statement that marriage and divorce were subject not only to Jewish law, but to the laws of the land in which Jews reside. Although various reports and motions were presented to the rabbinic conference in Breslau in 1846, as well as to that of Leipzig in 1869, none of these resulted in any definite action. In 1871, in Augsburg, another commission was appointed to study the matter and to bring definite recommendations to a further meeting(CCAR Yearbook, Vols. 1, 2, 3). Holdheim had earlier suggested that divorce be eliminated entirely from the set of Jewish proceedings and that civil divorce simply be accepted(Holdheim, Uber die Autonomie der Rabbinen, pp. 159ff). This was the point of view the Philadelphia Conference of 1869 accepted, with only Sonnenschein and Mielziner expressing the sentiment that the ge should not be entirely abolished, but should be modified in some form(Mielziner , The Jewish Law of Marriage and Divorce, p. 135), a view Geiger also held (S.D. Temkin, The New World of Reform, p. 61). The resolution of the Philadelphia Conference remained somewhat unclear, as it permitted the rabbinic court to look into the decree of the civil court and reject some grounds for divorce.
The discussion of divorce continued at later rabbinic conferences, but without any formal action being taken. Generally, the civil decree was simply accepted(CCAR Yearbook, Vol. 23, p. 154; Freehof , Reform Jewish Practice, vol. 1, p. 106). One might say that this is in keeping with at least one talmudic decision, as quoted by Ezekiel Landau when he stated that the get is really a matter of civil law(Dinei Mamonot in Noda Biyehuda, Even Ha-ezer 114, based on Yev. 122b). Kaufmann Kohler , in his discussion of the problems of marriage and divorce and their relation to civil laws, recommended that civil divorce be recognized as long as the grounds for such divorce were consonant with those provided by previous rabbinic tradition(CCAR Yearbook, Vol. 25, pp. 376ff). His recommendations were heard by the Conference, but not anner. Technically, of course, the child of a woman(and possibly a man) that has remarried without prior religious divorce would be considered illegitimate (mamzer). Such a child would, according to Orthodox law, be
accepted in any formal m