Marriage as <i>Froyen-handl</i> : Jewish Marital Practices in the Early Twentieth Century

For some early twentieth-century Jewish observers, marriage and prostitution were paradoxically linked, as they were both economic transactions that commodified women. This chapter explores this link and situates it in its broader social, economic, and legal contexts. The growing impoverishment of east European Jews led men and women to treat marriage as an economic arrangement. Although most commentators presented women as passive victims of these transactions, this chapter demonstrates how young Jewish women consciously navigated their uneasy economic and legal situation. By discussing various cases of alleged trafficking of Jewish women from interwar Poland, this chapter reveals how they treated both prostitution and marriage as tools to evade restrictions on migration imposed in the 1920s in places such as Argentina and the United States.