FOR MEDIEVAL JEWS, marriage was the only normative framework for sexual gratification and biological reproduction. Marriage bonded a man and a woman together through a complex matrix of economic, legal, and cultural obligations, and established the nuclear family as the basic unit of the community. As such, marriage and the family stood at the confluence of multiple concerns of crucial importance. Marriage occasioned “horizontal” transfer of wealth between different families as well as “vertical” transfer across generations. Proper marriage not only legitimated biological reproduction, it also endowed the resulting progeny with recognized genealogy and social identity. The family was the primary site for the socialization of such progeny, and thus constituted a key locus for social continuity between the past and the future. Indeed, numerous Jewish rituals take place within a family setting just as normative religious texts legitimize and valorize the family as an institution. Marriage and the family also provided one's closest allies and associates. Last, but not least, marriage and raising a family were considered essential for emotional satisfaction and happiness.

With so much at stake, it is little wonder that society tried to regulate marriage and the family. As Maimonides, the great jurist-philosopher living in Egypt in the second half of the twelfth century, began the Book of Women of his legal code:

Through witnesses, the private act becomes public and is subject to social and legal surveillance and control. Indeed, as the self-appointed leaders of Jewish communities, the rabbis made marriage and the family into a major concern of their scholarly tradition early on. With statements like “He who does not know the laws of divorce and betrothal, should have no dealing with them” they sought to carve a monopoly over the arrangement and dissolution of marriage. The regulation of marriage was accompanied by supervision of perceived threats to it, such as interaction between the sexes and extra marital sex.