SELECTED REFORM RESPONSA
and said they had been married in a church, or in the cases of civil marriage in modern times. Are such marriages valid?
It is true that there is a considerable disagreement as to what is the basic requirement for the validity of a Jewish marriage, but the majority of opinion, which is becoming increasingly weighty in modern times with the spread of civil marriage, is that the validity of the marriage is not dependant at all upon most of these ceremonial or ritual requirements.
The basic marriage requisite is that the man speaks of his intention to be married and gives the woman an object of some value-"he says and he gives." And, indeed, the basic ground for marriage is that the man takes the woman into his house and they live together in physical relationship. Now, while this Mishnaic method of marriage(biah) was frowned upon in the Middle Ages by Israel Isserlein (7erumat Hadeshen 209), nevertheless when it does occur the general attitude of the law is that such a marriage is valid, This is based upon the opinion of Rav(Ketubot 72b to 73a), that if a man takes a woman into his house for the purpose of marriage, she cannot be freed from that marriage without a formal divorce(i.e., this simple marriage is valid). The opinion of Rav is based upon the belief that a man does not generally intend his sexual relationship to be adulterous(ein adam oseh, and so on). However, this presumption that the sexual relationship is intended as a marriage relationship, and not as an adulterous one, broke down in later years and was no longer held to be valid; as, for example, in the case of certain Marrano marriages about which some authorities said that, since they could have escaped and did not escape, we no longer apply to them the presumption which we grant to righteous people, that their sexual relationship was meant to be a marriage relationship.
184