But in the USA, where mainstream Orthodox rabbis are educated at Yeshiva University, which combines high standards of Torah and secular studies, it is much less surprising.

Dayan Professor Michael Broyde, whose curriculum vitae runs to all of 23 pages, always expected to become an academic.

Not only has the son of a father with a chemistry doctorate achieved his ambition, as a professor of both law and Jewish studies at Atlanta's Emory University.

But he is also a congregational rabbi and a dayan on the Beth Din of America.

But the biology graduate and law professor, who has written profusely on such disparate subjects as civil law in Israel, covering of the hair, genetics, ethics of war, homosexuals, cloning, child custody, women's prayer, terrorism, torture and Thanksgiving celebrations, is surprisingly unassuming.

At a question and answer session recently at a Manchester synagogue, having participated in an academic conference in the city, Prof Broyde insisted on not replying to questions on subjects like Israel's security and astronomy on which he did not consider himself an expert.

And in person, Prof Broyde is equally unassuming.

I was scheduled to interview him after one of the Manchester University sessions.

Little did I dream that the tubby guy in shirtsleeves who kept leaving the conference hall to pick up calls on his mobile was my prospective interviewee.

After having spent all of 14 years at New York's Yeshiva University, which he describes as a "unique institution" he admitted to me: "Every aspect of Jewish law fascinates me."

One area of his expertise is the prenuptial agreement, which he claims is virtually eliminating the agunah problem in the USA.

He is the author of Marriage, Sex and the Abandoned Wife in Judaism in Jewish Law - A Conceptual Understanding of the Agunah Problems in America and is currently proposing a prenuptial agreement, which will obviate the halachic problems posed by previous PNAs.

As one of those rabbis who refuse to marry a couple unless they have signed a PNA, he says: "The American agunah situation has vastly improved.

"The number of agunot goes down every year because of the PNA, which has become exceedingly common in the USA.

"I think it will completely solve the problem."

So why has the American PNA been so much more successful than the British version instigated among much controversy by Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks more than 10 years ago?

Unlike some of their British colleagues, who are scared to even mention the possibility of divorce in premarital sessions, many American rabbis make the PNA signing compulsory.

Prof Broyde also says that the American version was written in such a way that it could be enforced in secular courts all across the USA, which unfortunately has not proved to be the case in Britain.

Prof Broyde was at the Manchester conference with his younger son Aaron who has just graduated.

And the dayan's travelling is not restricted to the many academic conferences he attends.

At home across the pond, he travels across the USA to adjudicate on Beth Din of America cases.

He says: "I travel more than my wife thinks I should."

But for Jewish marriage expert Prof Broyde, absence obviously makes the heart grow fonder.

He and his Israeli-born lawyer wife Channah have four children - Joshua, Aaron, Rachel and Deborah.