become the father of “children of a hated wife.” But when once it came to be recognised that married life cannot tolerate constraint, this recognition, limited at first to the side of the husband, was bound to be gradually extended to the wife. Hence arose the provisions under which a man may be compelled to divorce his wife (_K’thuboth_, ch. vii). These provisions enabled the wife to obtain a divorce against the husband’s will, by decree of the courts, on many and various grounds. Thus it is impossible to assert that Judaism does not allow a woman to divorce her husband. In the cases just mentioned it is, in fact, the wife who divorces, though the bill of divorcement is technically given by the husband. What matters is not who performs the legal action, but whose wish it is that brings about the divorce. This tendency to emancipate the wife reached its highest development in the dictum of Maimonides, that if a woman says “My husband is distasteful to me, and I cannot live with him,” although she gives no specific reason for her dislike, the husband is yet compelled to divorce her, “because she is not like a captive woman, that she should consort with a man whom she hates” (_Laws of Marriage_, xiv. 8). Here we see the Jewish attitude to marriage in its full development. Marriage is a social and moral cord, the two ends of which are in the hearts of husband and wife; and if the cord is broken at either end—whether in the husband’s heart or in the wife’s—the marriage has lost its value, and it is best that it should be annulled. It is true that the jurists who came after Maimonides could not rise to the conception of so perfect an equality of the sexes, and did not wholly accept his dictum. But the mere fact that the greatest authority deduced this decision _from the Talmud_ (and the Talmud, in fact, affords ground for his view—see _Maggid Mishnah ad loc._) is proof conclusive as to the real tendency of the Jewish law of divorce, and shows whither it leads in the straight line of development.