Rabbeinu Gershom

Gershom ben Judah, known as Rabbeinu Gershom or Meor HaGolah, the light of the exile, was a rabbinic scholar born around 960, probably in Metz, who settled in Mainz in the Rhineland and built it into a center of Talmudic study whose influence spread across the whole of Ashkenazi, or northern European, Jewry before his death around 1040. Rather than writing a legal code, Gershom issued a set of communal ordinances known as the takkanot of Rabbeinu Gershom, the best known of which banned polygamy among Ashkenazi Jews, required a wife's consent before a divorce could take effect, limited the reading of another person's private correspondence, and softened the treatment of Jews who had been forced to convert under duress and later returned to Judaism. Within less than a century of his death, the commentator Rashi could already write that the whole Ashkenazi diaspora were students of Gershom's teaching, and later medieval scholars treated his ordinances with an authority some compared to law handed down at Sinai. The ban on polygamy in particular remained binding on Ashkenazi religious practice for centuries afterward and continues to be cited today in the law of the State of Israel.