intelligible and sheds further light on his use of his chosen halakhic sources:
Certainly even for the small percentage who observe the dietary laws, the Sabbath and Jewish marriage laws, even for them, loyal, self-sacrificing Orthodox Jews in a bewildering modern world, the whole Jewish civil law code, the Choshen Mishpot no longer exists. They no longer, except in rare instances, resort to rabbinical law for the settlement of their business matters....They go to the civil law courts. Scholars, of course, still study Jewish civil law....It is as the introduction to the Even Haezer of the Shulhan Arukh puts it: “There are many laws in this book which are not customary in Israel these days... but he who studies these matters... nevertheless fulfills the commandment of learning the Law.” A few generations ago the law governed life. Now the study of the law is intellectual exercise and pious self-absorption.”
Freehof ’s point, implicit here but far more explicit in subsequent writings, is that the Orthodox resort to secular courts in matters of mamon constitutes an abandonment of Jewish law different only in degree but not in kind from the Reform abandon
ment of Jewish law.® The autonomy of the corporate Jewish community made it possible for Jewish civil law to exist; now that there is no more autonomy, that part of the law has no purpose. Freehof implies that those who still adhere to Jewish law in the other three sections of the Shulhan Arukh are fighting a losing battle. Like the Reformers, they, too, will eventually give in to the inevitable tide of history and will begin to“practice” Judaism in the way which is suitable to the modern world.
Freehof is correct, strictly speaking, in asserting that by turning to the civil courts even Orthodox Jews are violating Jewish law. There are numerous halakhic pronouncements warning of dire consequences to any Jew who turns to the Gentile courts for redress against a fellow Jew. * But a scholarly examination of the issue of Jewish use of non-Jewish courts to adjudicate matters of mamon cannot overlook the crucial historical question, namely, the extent of Jewish self-adjudication allowed and enforced by non-Jewish rulers. As Elon notes, the rabbinic prohibition against use of non-Jewish courts“was promulgated at a time when the Jewish legal system was about to set out on the long and difficult course of maintaining juridical autonomy without a sovereign state; and this pronouncement established one of the sturdiest bulwarks protecting the continuous existence and development