Nadene Goldfoot
Muslims, with Islam established after Mohammad's death in 620, have allowed men to have 4 wives at a time.
Endogamy was very common among Ashkenazi Jews; they very rarely married non-Jews, and if they did it usually meant that the offspring were not raised Jewish. That's why it is more common to find traces of Jewish DNA among non-Jewish Slavs than it is to find Slavic DNA within Ashkenazi Jewish populations.
Being they stayed together as a group, and often lived in very close proximity, such as in ghettos, they were marrying their spouses who were actually related to them with unions happening in their families in previous generations so they were not aware of their family trees.
Abraham had married Sarah who was his niece, and they knew of this. One thing the Jews never did, and the Egyptian royalty did, was to marry their sisters. Cousins were acceptable, however.
Polygamy was practiced with Solomon setting the example, having a 1,000 wives and concubines. His reasoning was more for making peace with other people by marrying into their royal families, which seemed to work, however.
Jacob had 4 wives while his father, Isaac had only one, Rebecca. Proverbs 31 seems to picture a monogamous household. The society reflected in the Talmud is essentially monogamous, with only a handful of rabbis being recorded as having more than one wife. This ideal of Jewish life with one wife continued.
The takkanah of Rabbi Gershom Ben Judah (965-1028)forbade polygamy in about 1000 CE. This was like a law now that gave formal sanction among Ashkenazi Jews to what was already generally accepted.
How was such a law policed? We have no policing in Judaism. I would think that peer pressure would control such a law to being prescribed. My thinking is that by 1500, people were doing pretty well in not taking multiple wives with the exceptions of divorce and death like today. No more harems like Kings David and Solomon. So we can say that for the past 1,000 years, there has been no polygamy within the Jewish Community.
The Rabbi, known as Rabbenu (Our teacher) Gershom Meor ha-Golah (Light of the Diaspora) was born in Metz of Lorraine thatwas a former region in northeast France bordering Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. and later lived in Mainz, Germany where he directed an academy.
He was considered the earliest notable Western European Jewish scholar, a famous Rabbinic authority. He was one of the 1st commentators on the Talmud. Since there are 2 distinct Talmuds, one from Palestine and the other called the Babylonian Talmud, he may have worked on the Palestinian one, and corrected many copyists' errors. Gershon also transcribed the biblical Masorah to ensure accurate reading. According to tradition, he wrote an entire commentary on the Talmud, but only fragments have survived. Rabbi Gershom's legal decisions and regulations (takkanot) were accepted as binding by European Jewry; they included bans on polygamy, divorcing a woman without her consent, reading letters directed to others, cutting pages out of books, and mocking converts who had returned to Judaism (which would have been mainly the the Marranos, Spanish who were forced to accept Catholicism to evade death.
As if G-d is listening to all this horror coming from his mind along with the good decisions, what happened to his family seems just. His son (and possibly his wife) was forcibly baptized in 1012, and Gershom wrote a number of penitential prayers expressing his grief.
Joshua Cohen also agrees with me with his article about the twisted logic of Medieval German piousness. "Sefer Hasidim, or Book of the Pious", was its greatness, authored by Rabbi Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg (1140-1217) and/or his father Samuel (the latter working under the influence of his father, Kalonymus ben Isaac the Elder). Most scholars agree that Rabbi Judah’s student, Rabbi Eleazar Rokeach, compiled the extant text. Kalonymus is a family line my Goldfoot family is connected with. Seems as if some rabbis were overworking their minds on what compiled a sin in Germany during this period.
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It was in 1096 that the German Crusaders massacred Jews in European towns. Shortly after in 1099, the Jewish community in Jerusalem was massacred by the Crusaders.
Among the Spanish and Oriental Jews (Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews) on the other hand, polygamy continued to be legal, though by no means general.
In Italy, down to the 17th century, a person whose wife was barren was occasionally permitted by papal license (Catholicism) to take a 2nd wife. With Europeanization of many oriental communities in recent generation, polygamy has become increasingly rare.
In Israel, monogamy is now enforced by law, though existing polygamous marriages are recognized. Being 20% of the population are not Jews, but Muslims who allow 4 wives to this day, I'm not sure how Israel is handling this situation. Their population as increased quickly, I note. Since at least 1959, polygamous marriages have been prohibited in Israel, which applies to members of each confessional community, including the Jewish and Muslim. And that's how the law is written. DNA testing will tell the tale.
In the Palestinian Territories, unless its been changed recently, "Polygyny, whereby a husband has more than one wife, is explicitly permitted under Islam. There are also the classical injunctions that a man must treat all co-wives equitably and provide them with separate dwellings, and a man must declare his social status in the marriage contract. This is why their numbers have increased.
Polyandry, whereby a wife has more than one husband, is not permitted. Residents of East Jerusalem are subject to Israeli marriage law, which since at least 1959 has barred the formation of polygamous unions in Israel.
In the USA Polygamy as a crime originated in the common law, and it is now outlawed in every state. In the United States, polygamy was declared unlawful through the passing of Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882.Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practiced polygamy between 1840 and 1890. At present, the Church strongly asserts that God's standard for marriage is only between one man and one woman. Devoted Church members opted not to practice polygamy. During the year 1857, about half of the people living in the Utah Territory are in a polygamous family. By 1870, this number of people living in polygamous households dropped to about 25 to 30 percent. It has continually declined through the passage of time. Mostly, groups living in Mexico practiced it. However, the LDS (Mormons) have continued, and even have TV sit-coms about all living together.
Well, Polygamy helped to create endogamy that we find in our DNA today. it's not surprising to find that some of our relatives are related to each other. My father's sister's DNA shows a genetic connection to her husband from Germany, and she and my father's line were from Lithuania. The connection, quite obvious in the DNA, is not prevented by countries of the people. It could go back as far as to ancient Israel, or obviously-to Germany where Ashkenazic Jewry started. I think that's our situation.
I've traced my father's line of Goldfus as far back as to the 1700s in Telsiai, Lithuania finding Iones 'Jonah' Goldfus c:1730. There was a Swedish invasion in 1710 into Telz, as it's called today, which had to have been the Vikings! 2/3 of its population perished from epidemics with that happening. A few Jews were known to be living in this city in the 1400s. The Crusaders mentioned Jews being there in 1320. Chances are that my father's people were there from Germany by the 1500s at least.
Diseases inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern often occur in endogamous populations. Among Ashkenazi Jews, a higher incidence of specific genetic disorders and hereditary diseases has been verified, including: Alport syndrome. Colorectal cancer due to hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer is another.
Tay–Sachs disease is the most commonly known, which can present as a fatal illness of children that causes mental deterioration prior to death, was historically extremely common among Ashkenazi Jews, with lower levels of the disease in some Pennsylvania Dutch, Italian, Irish Catholic, and French Canadian descent, especially those living in the Cajun community of Louisiana and the southeastern Quebec. Since the 1970s, however, proactive genetic testing has been quite effective in eliminating Tay–Sachs from the Ashkenazi Jewish population.
Parkinson's has hit my family in a cousin by marriage who turns out to be my 4th cousin. The disease (G2019S/LRRK2 mutation; The LRRK2 mutation on the main haplotype, shared by 1. Ashkenazi Jews, 2.North Africans, and 3.Europeans, initially arose in the Near East at least 4000 years ago. Because of a founder effect, the ancestors of present-day Ashkenazi Jews may have kept the low-frequency G2019S mutation through the different diasporas, whereas Near Eastern daughter populations lost the mutation. The mutation might then have been "reintroduced by recurrent gene flow from Ashkenazi populations to other Jewish, European, and North African populations. The present-day frequency of the mutation in control populations (0.05% in Europeans, 0.5% in North-African Arabs and 1% in Ashkenazi Jews) may support this scenario".)
What's happening to the Diaspora? Two out of every five Diaspora Jews is married to a non-Jew, though rates of assimilation vary widely with two European countries representing the extremes: Poland has the highest rate of intermarriage and Belgium the lowest. These are some of the findings of a special report on intermarriage published. About two-thirds of U.S. Jewish adults are either married (59%) or living with a partner (7%). Among those who are married, many have spouses who are not Jewish. Fully 42% of all currently married Jewish respondents indicate they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among those who have gotten married since 2010, 61% are intermarried. That's higher than in Europe. The closeness of our Jewish population is widening to the point of losing the Endogamous character today in the Dispora, though it is continuing in Israel. At least there, Ashkenazi and Sephardi marriages are happening along with mizrachim, giving the genes fresh partners.
Resource;
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/marriage-families-and-children/
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