There is an interesting article I found a couple years back that had a section on the history of polygamy within the Jewish community. This is the section of the article.
"The change from expressing monogamy as an ideal and forbidding polygamy outright occurred about one thousand years ago in Germany (for Ashkenazi Jewry). Rabbi Gershom Ben-Yehudah (960-1028, called 'our Rabbi Gershom the light of the Diaspora') and his associates lived in a particularly difficult time for the European Jewish community. They sought to reduce the friction between the Jewish community and their Christian neighbors and to answer some new problems which had developed in Europe. These rabbis issued a series of regulations (takanot); the most important, of course, was the ban on polygamy. They also made divorce more difficult so that men could not “dump” their wives to remarry. The new regulations were for “these lands” (Germany and France etc.) and for a defined period of time (about 250 years). After that period, monogamy was so well entrenched that the takanah became tradition and continues to this day."
"The rabbis left two small loopholes: 1) levirate marriage and 2) the Rule of 100 Rabbis. The rabbis preferred that women bound to marry her husband’s brother through the levirate should release the man from the obligation if he was already married. However, they realized that there could be situations where a woman would prefer the security of the levirate marriage and so left open that possibility. The Rule of 100 Rabbis was the direct result of the new regulations. The changes in divorce law required the woman to physically accept the divorce decree from her husband. If she was incapacitated or mentally ill, she would not be legally able to accept the divorce. In those cases, the husband had to find 100 rabbis in four different “countries” who would agree to sign off on the second marriage. In the Middle Ages this was very difficult and rarely done (today unfortunately, it has been abused by husbands to force the hand of their wives in divorce disputes, see Amit 2001)."
"In the Muslim world, Sephardi Jews continued to practice polygamy should they so desire. However, a codicil was often written into Sephardi marriage contracts obliging the husband to get his wife’s permission to marry a second wife. Over the last millennium, the two traditions existed simultaneously. There is some evidence that Sephardi Jews living in Germany occasionally married additional wives with no opposition from the local Ashkenazi rabbis. This tolerance of polygamy continued in the land of Israel. In fact, when the British authorities tried to ban polygamy and to declare the children of additional wives as illegitimate; the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog defended the right of Sephardi Jews to continue the practice."
"This pluralistic approach to polygamy ended soon after the state of Israel was declared when in 1949, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion‘s government made polygamy unlawful (New York Times 1949). Chief Rabbi Herzog and his Sephardi counterpart, Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim, both Zionists, felt that one united Jewish tradition should be developed in the new Jewish state. In 1950, they convened a large conference of rabbis to discuss the issues separating the communities, first and foremost among them polygamy. The conference decided to ban future polygamy while “grandfathering” existent polygamists. However, like Rabbenu Gershon, they left a loophole: Sephardi men would be permitted to marry a second wife in circumstances where both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Chief Rabbis signed off on the request; in practice, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbis have steadfastly refused to sign off on such requests."
"In the 1970s, this issue reached a climax. Chief Rabbi Yoseph agreed to certify the second marriage of a childless man (he had always emphasized the fertility issue) but the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren refused to sign the certificate. The petitioner took his case to the Supreme Court in Israel which refused to change Goren’s decision. So for all practical purposes, polygamy has been unlawful in Israel since 1950."
Here is the link to the full article if you would like.
https://www.avotaynuonline.com/2015...western-tradition-religion-culture-and-class/
