Femmes Fatales

by Eliezer Segal

A husband came home early from work one day feeling particularly amorous toward his wife. The wife suspected that his romantic urge had been triggered by something that had happened in the office, and he admitted that he had been dealing with an attractive woman. 

The furious wife immediately went after that beautiful lady, attacked her with a club and drove her out of town.

This spicy tale, worthy of prime time viewing, is related in the Talmud. The husband was the fourth-century Babylonian sage Rava. He had been adjudicating a case involving the finances of Homa, the widow of his colleague Abayé. In the course of her testimony, she happened to make a hand gesture that bared her arm—“and then the courtroom was illuminated,” prompting Rava to go home early for a romantic interlude with his wife.

Of notable interest in this story were the wife’s closing words to the lovely Homa: “You are already responsible for the deaths of three men, and now you have come to slay yet another one!” 

The implication is that Abayé was Homa’s third husband, and that all three of them were deceased. This situation gave her a special, problematic stigma in Jewish legal discourse: she was a “killer wife.”

Elsewhere, the Talmud recorded how Abayé had married Ḥoma despite knowing that she had already outlived two husbands; and it expressed astonishment at how he could have knowingly placed himself in what they regarded as a clear danger to his life.

The Talmud ordains that it is forbidden to marry a repeat widow, concluding that three deaths are needed to confirm her as a “killer.” There is a disagreement as to whether the root of the malady is a kind of physiological infection or a supernatural affliction caused by astrological alignments, designated in Hebrew as her “mazal.” The ancient tale of Tobit in the Apocrypha tells the story of a woman whose seven husbands were all slain at their weddings by the archdemon Asmodeus. 

Many scholars who regarded themselves as rationalists maintained that astrology, with its roots in astronomy and mathematics, was a legitimate science. If the danger to husbands stems from a medical condition, then it is comparable to the law forbidding the circumcision of a child whose older siblings were found to be hemophilic. 

Medieval authorities accepted the Talmud’s ruling, which was consistent with the prevailing worldviews. As a precedent, some adduced the Torah’s story about how Judah refused to allow his widowed daughter-in-law Tamar to marry Shelah after the deaths of her previous husbands Er and Onan.

This perceived danger was so obvious to the medieval rabbis that they treated husbands who disregarded it as if they were actively attempting suicide.

The kabbalists interpreted the law in terms of their doctrine of reincarnation. Accordingly, the Zohar opposed all remarriages of widows, explaining that traces of the first husband’s soul remain embedded in the widow and the couple will be reunited in the next world. 

Not surprisingly, the firmest and most articulate criticism of the “killer wife” concept came from the rationalist Maimonides. An inquiry was addressed to him regarding a woman who had been widowed twice and would now be eligible to marry her brother-in-law, in keeping with the biblical law of levirate marriage.

The rabbis who had been consulted previously disagreed as to whether or not the concerns about a two-time widow should override the fulfilment of a precept from the Torah. In his response, Maimonides expressed astonishment that experienced Torah scholars should be unable to distinguish between obligatory Torah laws and optional practices that are at best discretionary. Whereas the avoidance of circumcision in families with a proven tendency for hemophilia is based on sound medical science, the fear of the deadly widow is nothing more than a kind of “soothsaying, divination, fortune-telling and fantasy.” He pointed out that the established tradition among the Andalusian authorities was to permit such marriages (if only by resorting to legal subterfuges).

Maimonides drew his correspondents’ attention to severe consequences that might ensue if young Jewish women were prevented from marrying and were thereby forced to seek fulfillment in disreputable ways.

Other rabbinic authorities, even though they accepted in principle the Talmud’s disallowance of multiple remarriages, took into consideration various factors that would warrant exceptions to the rule. Some of these were related to differing perceptions of the reasons underlying the prohibition. Thus, if the prohibition was instituted because of some moral stigma in the woman’s character, then it might not apply to cases where the husband’s death had been part of a widespread pandemic (such as the Black Death in the fourteenth century), a pogrom or Inquisition—especially when the husband had sanctified God’s name through martyrdom. Conversely, if the blame could be ascribed entirely to the husband, as in cases of suicide, then the widow could not be held accountable. The influential “Book of the Pious” narrowly confined the prohibition to the cases discussed in the Talmud, of a third or fourth marriage—but not to a fifth or subsequent husband.

It was widely recognized that conditions in medieval society tended to multiply the cases of widowhood. Authorities noted (as had Maimonides) the prevalence of young marriage-ages and the resulting prolonged periods of celibacy that would be forced upon widows (analogous to the dire predicament of the “agunah” to which Jewish law strove to be sensitive). In some economies, Jewish men were particularly involved in international commerce, so that many husbands perished on voyages.

And there were of course crucial differences of world-view. Most Jews accepted the ancient folkloric perspective of a world pervaded by invisible astrological or demonic forces; though rationalists dismissed any theories that could not be validated by science, medicine or philosophy.

Ultimately, like so many of life’s complications, this one is a byproduct of human mortality. The most effective solution might be for husbands to avoid dying, and for wives to work at keeping their husbands alive.

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