“D ie Mischehe,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 4, no. 2 (1908): 17–23.
For biographical information on Arthur Ruppin, see the headnote for selection 5.
Until the end of the eighteenth century, the social gulf throughout Europe between Christians and Jews was so great that a marriage between Christians and Jews would have seemed completely impossible, even if such unions had not been prohibited by religious, ecclesiastical, and civil statutes—akin to [the situation] today in the colonies of Africa ruled by the European powers, in which marriages between natives and whites are seen as abnormal and hardly occur anywhere. Certainly, one finds individual cases of Jews converting to Christianity and then marrying a Christian spouse, but such cases do not fall under the category of mixed marriage. For, in the usual sense of the term, mixed marriages are characterized by the fact that, at the wedding, one of the two marrying belongs to the Jewish and the other to the Christian religion—a characteristic missing in all cases in which one of the two individuals has already converted to the other’s faith before the ceremony.13
For the anthropological researcher, certainly, conversion before marriage is of no significance. According to him, a marriage between a Christian and a Jew remains a mixed marriage whether there is conversion or not; that is, it constitutes a marriage between members of different races. However, this anthropological point of view cannot serve as a conceptual foundation if a valid comprehension of statistics on intermarriage is to occur; and, indeed, it is unfeasible on purely practical grounds. The racial affiliation of the individual does not fall within the purview of official statistics, at least not in Europe, and probably never will given the difficulty or impossibility of assigning European whites to specific, anthropologically uniform groups. If one thus wishes to grasp the prevalence of mixed marriage with the aid of statistics, one can proceed only from the religious affiliations of the individuals at the time of their entering into the marriage. Though, to the anthropologist, such results are not complete because they do not include the change of religion that occurred before the abovementioned marriage ceremony, yet they still hold meaning for him as minimum figures. Among all other Völker, religion and race have very little to do with one another; whereas among the Jews, religion is a certain indicator of racial affiliation. One should not, however, overextend the concept of race. If race is to be understood only to refer to those communities whose characteristic anthropological traits were formed in ancestral times, and which over the course of history have completely refrained from sexual commingling with other communities, then there is no racial difference whatsoever between humans of white skin color. Over the millennia they were all repeatedly thrown together and not only crossed with each other, but in a few areas also mixed with individuals of yellow and black skin color. Whether the Jews have constituted a unified race since their entrance on the historical stage and have always preserved this unified character is completely uncertain. What is certain, however, is that at the end of the eighteenth century the adherents of the Mosaic religion, on account of their centuries-long rigorous inbreeding in a relatively small and geographically curtailed region, constituted in terms of anthropological traits a community sharply distinct from that of the surrounding Christians. The totality of those individuals who are descended genealogically from this community can, lacking a better term for anthropologically unified human groups, be termed a “race”—that is, the Jewish race. In the nineteenth century many members of this race converted from the Jewish to the Christian religion; others have taken Christian spouses, and their children have been raised as Christians, so that one now finds members of the Jewish race who are adherents of the Christian religion. Contrary to this, the cases in which a Christian (that is, anthropologically speaking, a German, a Slav, and so on) converts to Judaism or, on account of entering into a sexual relationship with a Jew, becomes a follower of the Mosaic religion are so rare as to be totally negligible; and thus, one can, without fear of grave error, maintain that even today all adherents of this religion [Judaism] are also members of the Jewish race. If we term all adherents of the Mosaic religion “Israelites,” and all members of the Jewish race “Jews,” we can phrase the result of our contemplations in short as follows: all contemporary Israelites are Jews, but not all contemporary Jews are Israelites.
It was necessary methodologically to clarify these relations. We will now proceed to discuss the spread of intermarriage in the present.
The first impetus to the revocation of the regulations prohibiting marriages between Christians and Jews emerged out of the great French Revolution and then spread slowly from land to land—to Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Scandinavia, England, and the United States. This process was facilitated by the fact that marriage in these countries had been transposed from an ecclesiastical to a civil act. In a novel by K. E. Franzos,14 set in Galicia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the conflict is that of a Christian nobleman in love with a Jewess whom he cannot legally marry. The solution to this conflict is that, for the first time in a small German confederate state, a marriage between a Christian and a Jew is allowed to occur. With the law of the Reich dated February 6, 1875, which makes no mention [any longer] of difference of religion as legal grounds for prohibiting a marriage, unions between Christians and Jews became permissible in all German states, insofar as such marriages were not already permitted by law [in some particular states].
In Hungary, mixed marriages were first legally permitted in 1895; they are also allowed in the Christian Balkan states. However, mixed marriages are still forbidden in Austria, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Islamic countries today.
The most propitious places for mixed marriages are those countries in which the Jews have been settled and prosperous for quite some time, but in which their numbers are so small that their rise into the upper classes does not anger the Christians and result in anti-Semitism. The list of such places today includes Denmark, Italy, and Australia.15
[. . .]
Summarizing all the relevant data collected thus far, one can divide those countries in which mixed marriages take place into four classes, depending on the frequency of occurrence.
Denmark, Australia, and Italy belong in the first class. In these countries, mixed marriages make up more than one-third of all of the Jewish marriages and constitute a genuine threat to the continued existence of the numerically small Jewish populations in these countries, as the children resulting from these marriages will overwhelmingly be raised as Christians. The same holds true for England, France, and the United States, at least if one considers only those Jews who have resided in these places for an extended period of time and not the immigrants who arrived in the past three decades. In addition, conditions in a number of German capitals (Berlin, Hamburg) are such that one should include them in this first category.
In the second category are Protestant Germany, Holland, Lower Austria (Vienna), and Budapest. Here mixed marriages constitute 10 to 25 percent of all Jewish marriages and show a tendency to rise steeply. This tendency does not yet, it is true, threaten the numbers of the Jewish population, though the increase is already limiting its growth.
Catholic Germany, Hungary (without Budapest), and Bohemia belong to the third category, where mixed marriages make up 2 to 10 percent of all Jewish marriages.
Finally, in the fourth category, with less than 2 percent mixed marriages, we have Galicia, Bukovina, Romania, and the recent immigrant communities in England, France, and the United States.
13. Note that it would be significant if the registrar inquired into the religious affliation of the individuals not only at the time of the ceremony but also prior to that. But this never occurs.
14. [Karl Emil Franzos (1848–1904) was an Austrian Jewish novelist. The novel in question is Judith Trachtenberg (1890).]
15. [Three pages of statistical data on mixed marriages in individual countries follow.]