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 CHAPTER
FIVE:Those Who don’t Fit the Model: Family Situations and Status
in Judaism and the Jewish World
6C. The Modern Intermarriage or Outmarriage Question
In the early generations, the numbers of Jews who wanted to remain Jews,
but marry non-Jews, was small - and those who married non-Jews would have
converted voluntarily (or been obliged to convert, if there were no civil
marriage).
 Data from
the early decades of the twentieth century show the numbers of intermarriages
soaring in most parts of western and central Europe, so that intermarriage
became a real issue for the Jewish people and their leaders:
- As Jews became increasingly accepted, and the laws limiting Jewish
participation in society were gradually eliminated, the temptation and
the need to convert diminished - and the numbers of the intermarried
started to climb correspondingly.
- As early as the mid-nineteenth century, some of the leaders of Reform
Judaism were rethinking the traditional ban on intermarriage and beginning
to accept the idea of marriage to non-Jews, provided the children were
brought up as Jews.
The Shoah
(Holocaust) and the decimation of European Jewry, amid the enormous rise
of anti-Jewish hatred throughout the western world (including the situation
in the 1930s in England and the 1940s in America), may have had an impact
in slowing down the rate of intermarriage, from the 1930s to the mid-1960s.
Moreover, many moralists attempted to draw from the Holocaust the lesson
that Jews who assimilate and intermarry can never succeed in avoiding
their fate - namely, to be perceived and judged as Jews for ever - and
maintained that intermarriage was and will be doomed to failure.
There are, however, many who disagree with this analysis or prediction
and believe that the situation in the world today is, indeed, different.
The last
two generations have witnessed a return to the pre-war situation of high
and ever-increasing rates of intermarriage.
It is easy to put a finger on the major causes:
- A more open society that accepts Jews in its multi-ethnic midst;
- The belief in romance which promotes emotional connection as
the sole criterion for a relationship;
- The irrelevance of Jewish religious theology to many contemporary
Jews and the diminished importance of theology in society;
- Ignorance of tradition and history;
- The relaxation of communal prohibitions and sanctions in the
context of an age where Jews mix professionally and socially with non-Jews
at all levels.
These have all contributed their share to the climbing intermarriage
numbers.
One major
question is whether the trend to intermarriage should be viewed as a total
disaster for the Jewish People.
Not all Jews believe so:
- The Conservative movement has followed the Reform in making conscious
decisions to accept non-Jewish spouses into their congregations.
- Professor Jonathan Sarna, a leading Jewish academic, for example,
has argued that intermarriage is, in fact, a measure of Jewish success
within western society - an indication of the acceptance of the Jews
by outside society and, in his opinion, preferable by far to the alternative
– a return to a ghetto mentality that seeks to isolate the Jew
and return the Jewish collective to the protective walls of the ghetto.
Intermarriage, according to Jonathan Sarna, in an article published
in 1982, is a necessary by-product of true Jewish success. He went even
further than this…
In the
same article, Sarna made a claim that would not be accepted by most Jewish
sociologists or demographers: that the Jewish community was not
losing numbers because of intermarriage, since the numbers coming in to
Judaism would be as great as the numbers lost:
In other words, there might be dangers to the Jews, and mass intermarriage
might not be in and of itself a desirable phenomenon, in and of itself.
However, it should not be viewed as the great threat to the Jewish collective
that it was seen to represent.
- There were also others who pointed out that the quality of the Jewish
life lived by many of the originally non-Jewish spouses, who decided
to convert to Judaism and to raise their children as Jews, was superior
to that of many existing Jewish families.
How do these
theses balance objectively?
- There is certainly truth in Sarna’s assertion that intermarriage
with resultant conversion has brought many new Jews into the non-orthodox
community.
- There is also considerable truth to the other assertion, regarding
the quality of Jewish life lived by many of the families where one of
the partners is a “Jew by choice” - the current preferred
term for a non-Jew who has converted to Judaism.
- Nevertheless, it should be clearly emphasised that the
majority of Jewish demographers would not accept Sarna’s optimism,
as expressed in the article, and their conclusions are based in and
substantiated by Jewish population surveys and censuses.
However,
the distinction has tended to be made between disapproval in advance (in
principle) and acceptance post facto. These two have led many
Jewish organisations into major outreach efforts, to ensure that as many
as possible of the intermarriages result in Jewish families, but. the
subject remains problematic for the majority of the Jewish world:
- In the non-orthodox world, this outlook, with important practical
implications, has tended to replace the traditional response of outrage
and collective shunning that was the preferred communal response until
fairly recently at least in the more traditional circles. Outrage has
thus given way to outreach.
- The orthodox world, on the whole, maintains the traditional attitudes
and sanctions towards the subject.
- Even for those who have been moved by conviction or by circumstance
to a thorough embrace of the idea of outreach, there remain, however,l
some complex questions that are not easy to answer.
One of the
key issues revolves around the question of what demands to place on a
Ger (convert):
- The traditional demands of a ger include, besides the traditional
formalities – mikveh, circumcision for men, and a formal
ceremony before a rabbinic forum – a commitment to a thoroughgoing
Jewish life, as defined by Halachah.
In all the non-orthodox movements and - to an extent - in parts of
the orthodox world, the question of what should be demanded in terms
of lifestyle from the would-be convert is controversial. Apart from
the subjective question of identification as a Jew and the demonstration
of some kind of motivation to learn Jewish subjects, what should be
demanded in terms of Jewish content and observance?
- There are those who maintain that very little can or should be demanded:
- After all, the reasoning goes, there is more chance of a Jewish
household with Jewish children if very few demands are made, than
if the demands are prohibitive and prevent a formal conversion.
- Moreover, say some of the proponents of this minimalistic position,
in a world in which so many born Jews do nothing, how can we make
demands of converts? Such demands made sense in a Halachic world
where all Jews followed the Torah in their daily life.
- Opposed to this view, there are many who demand a much more stringent
approach to converts:
- Someone who is not willing to show seriousness in their approach
to Judaism, as displayed by a commitment to a Jewish life that is
recognisably different, should not be allowed to enter the circle
of Jews.
- Moreover, the commitment, argue many, needs to be to Judaism,
not just to Jews – and certainly not just to one specific
Jew, the spouse. The fact that there are many Jews who are ignorant
or non-observant should not make this into an acceptable norm. This
is reenforced by the orthodox view that marriage is not an acceptable
pretext for conversion.
- At the heart of this argument is, of course, the much bigger one
regarding the watering down of the Jewish way of life:
- When does a Jewish way of life cease to be just that?
- At what point is a Jew no longer a Jew in any meaningful
sense, apart from the formal?
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