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 CHAPTER
FIVE:Those Who don’t Fit the Model: Family Situations and Status
in Judaism and the Jewish World
6A. Challenge Number Four: The Intermarried
Having addressed the three ever-present Jewish questions of single people,
widows and widowers and divorcees, it is time to address the first of
the two “new” problems: intermarriage.
Strictly speaking, intermarriage is not a new Jewish problem.
- In the long, distant past it was clearly a question on the Israelite
and the Jewish agenda.
- At a certain point in time, it more or less disappears as a problem
within the Jewish community and then in the western world: however,
in the footsteps of modernisation and integration within the modern
world it begins to reemerge as an issue.
- In the last generation it has become one of the major questions on
the Jewish agenda, challenging long-held suppositions and causing great
and impassioned internal debate within the Jewish world.
In a sense, it can be termed an old-new problem, or a new problem with
ancient roots. It is to these roots that we must firstly turn.
 The Torah
is full of intermarriage. Some of the stars of the Torah, such as Joseph
and Moses himself, married out and the second ranks of Biblical figures
reveal other examples such as Judah and Shimon. The tradition assumes
what the text does not usually reveal, namely that all of the spouses
adopted Judaism to become part of the Jewish People (substantiated in
the case of Moses' wife Tzipporah and father-in-law, Yitro), and bypasses
the issue for these generations, with the reasoning that the prohibitions
only come about with the revelations at Sinai.
The main
source prohibiting intermarriage comes in the book of Devarim, Deuteronomy,
where we are told the following, regarding the seven nations of idolators
in the Land of Israel:
Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their
sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your
sons away from following Me to serve other G-ds and the Lord’s
anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. ...For you
are a people holy to the Lord your G-d. The Lord your G-d has chosen
you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be a people,
His treasured possession.
Devarim 7:3-6
Strictly speaking, the prohibition is thus with any one of the seven
specific pagan and idolatrous nations that inhabited the land when the
Israelites entered.
Nevertheless, in later parts of the Bible, it came to be repeated for
all pagan groups. For example, the Prophet Malachi, in a piece immediately
preceding the earlier excerpt regarding divorce, had this to say:
Judah [the Jews] has broken faith. A detestable thing has been
committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. Judah has desecrated the sanctuary
that the Lord loves, by marrying the daughter of a foreign G-d. As for
the man who does this, whomever he may be, may the Lord cut him off
from the tents of Judah – even though he brings offerings to the
Lord Almighty.
Malachi 2:11-12
The episode
about intermarriage that has, however, become burned into the collective
Jewish memory the most concerns a well known phenomenon in the early generations
of the Second Temple period:
When Ezra the Scribe returned from Persian Babylon and found that many
of those Jews who had returned prior to him had intermarried with the
local inhabitants, he realised that the situation was intolerable and
had to be changed. He began to mourn and prayed to G-d for forgiveness
for the people’s sin.
We have disregarded the commands You gave through Your servants
the prophets, when You said: the land that you are entering is a land
polluted by the corruption of its peoples. By their detestable practices
they have filled it with their impurity from one end to the other. Therefore,
do not give your daughters in marriage to their sons or take their daughters
for your sons… Shall we again break Your commandments and intermarry
with the peoples who perform such detestable practices? Would You not
be angry enough with us to destroy us leaving no remnant or survivors…
Here we are before You in our guilt, though because of it not one of
us can stand in Your presence.
Ezra 9:10-15
Following this, Ezra decreed that those who had indeed intermarried must
send away their partners. In a dramatic speech to the Jews of Jerusalem,
he gave the order:
You have been unfaithful: you have married foreign women, adding
to Israel’s guilt. Now make confession to the Lord G-d of your
fathers and do His will. Separate yourselves from the peoples around
you and from your foreign wives.
Ezra 10:10-11
The book of Ezra concludes with a long list of the Jews who had intermarried
and were obligated to send their wives away, from the priests, the leaders
of the people, down to the ordinary Jews.
There is
no question that the Ezra episode is deemed a turning point in Jewish
history:
- We are told that the Jews swore eternal loyalty to the Torah, which
was read out to them in a series of dramatic public readings - and this
is traditionally regarded as the beginning of a new chapter in the Jewish
story.
- More than in any other event in Jewish history, the connection between
intermarriage and collective sin was made completely clear. Never again
would there be a return to the status that prevailed in pre-modern Jewish
history.
- Furthermore, the Rabbis of the post-Second Temple and Talmudic periods
took steps to ensure that the danger to the Jewish collective would
be safely contained:
The Talmudic tractate Avodah Zarah details dozens of rabbinic
decisions to separate the Jews and non-Jews, and to ensure that there
would be no unnecessary integration between the Jews and members of
other communities.
Note: At this time, Judaism did proselytize.
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