“Intermarriage between Jews and Christians,” in Eugenics in Race and State: Papers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkens, 1923), volume 2.
For biographical information on Maurice Fishberg, see the note at the beginning of selection 3.
From the standpoint of the preservation of Judaism, intermarriage has been considered a disaster, robbing as it does the Jews of its best adherents. In fact, those who have recently taken stock in Jewish affairs have arrived at the conclusion that mixed marriages rob the Jews of more adherents than persecutions [do]. The reasons are obvious when we consider that it [intermarriage] is the final result of the abjuration of nearly everything that has kept the Jews alive among the nations for centuries. Without the separative tenets of its religious practices, Judaism is inconceivable and in danger of extinction through absorption by the surrounding majority of other faiths. In fact, those who marry Christians are lost to Judaism within two or, at most, three generations.
Available statistical data show that the children born to Jews married to Christians are nearly all raised as Christians. Even the few that are raised as Jews are more apt to marry out of the faith than those born to Jews [married to other Jews]. This has been the case in Scandinavian countries, as well as in Germany, Italy, France, and so forth.
Moreover, it appears that intermarriage robs the Jews of their best racial elements. Careful observation of Jewish life during the past century reveals the following interesting fact: success for a Jew in any line of human endeavor, be it financial, industrial, scientific, literary, or artistic, means that his descendants will be lost within two or three generations through intermarriage with Christians. The result is that of nearly all great and talented Jews during the nineteenth century, hardly any have left descendants within the fold of Judaism. The few exceptions that may be mentioned prove this contention because they also have Christian relatives by marriage.
Another important harm is done by intermarriage to those who remain within the fold. The proportion of parvenus is enormous among them because those who have attained eminence in any field are lost, and their descendants, if they remained within the fold, might have created a nucleus of a Jewish aristocracy. Intermarriage deprives them of it, and they are apt to be judged by their worst, or by those who have not yet adapted themselves to the higher things in life, though they have achieved success in some field.
But the Jews are not only robbed of the exceptionally able and talented through intermarriage. Wherever it is carried very far, the Jews are more or less completely absorbed by the Christians around them. Thus, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in England and the United States, and to a certain degree in France and Italy, have nearly all disappeared by fusion with the non-Jewish population. Many of them are now recognized as members of Christian churches in the countries in which their parents or grandparents prayed in the synagogues. It is curious that in one country in which the church and state were not in the way for three or four centuries, intermarriages have completely wiped out the Jews. This occurred in China, where about three hundred years ago large and flourishing Jewish communities existed, but at present they have all disappeared. The Jews who live there at present are recent arrivals from Europe. Of the endogenous Jews hardly a trace has been left.
The Jews disappeared in China because of intermarriage with the Mongolians among whom they lived and they were not replaced by immigration from other countries. In the United States, England, France, Italy, and other Western countries, conditions not unlike those mentioned prevail. The Jews who have lived there during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have almost all been fused with the Christian population; very few of their descendants have been left within the fold of Judaism. But in the Eastern European countries, in which, as was already shown, intermarriage was not permitted, the number of Jews kept on increasing during the past two or three hundred years, so that more than one-half of the total number of Jews in the world live in Russia, Poland, Austria, Rumania, and so on. These Eastern Jews have been immigrating West during the past fifty years and replaced those who were lost through intermarriage. In fact, it appears that very few of the Jewish families in Germany, England, France, and so forth can trace back their ancestry as residents of those countries for more than two or three generations. Inquiry also reveals that in most cases they had immigrated from Eastern Europe during the past fifty or seventy-five years.
However, things have changed in Eastern Europe during recent years. Since the revolution, the prohibition of intermarriage in Russia and Poland has been abrogated and the result is that marriages of this sort have already become very common, and they are bound to increase in number. Some even maintain that, for special reasons, the number of Jews who will marry Christians in those countries will exceed that observed in Western countries. It is thus clear that in the near future there will not be a surplus of Jews for migration to Western countries to replace those lost through fusion with Christians. The recent nationalist movement among the Jews is mainly the result of these conditions. They face extinction among the European and American nations because they cannot rigidly observe the separative tenets of their religion, and relaxation in this regard brings them into intimate contact with the surrounding majority of other faiths. Intermarriages are the inevitable result. The Zionists believe that only in their own home, in Palestine, will they be in a position to save the remnants of Israel.
Intermarriages of the kind spoken of in this paper have been objected to because it has been alleged that race mixtures are not desirable. Some have stated that most of the vices of both original stocks are accentuated in the offspring, while hardly any of the virtues are transmitted. It has also been stated that mixed marriages turn out unfortunate in too many cases, and sterility is rather common. Most of these contentions come from sentimentalists, Jewish as well as Christian, and do not deserve serious consideration. One thing, however, must be emphasized: the flow of so-called Jewish blood into the veins of other white peoples does not introduce any new or alien racial elements. It has been agreed by nearly all competent anthropologists that the Jews are a composite ethnic unit, a racial blend into which nearly all the types of white humanity have entered. While they [the Jews] are predominantly brunet, about 30 percent have blond traits. In Italy and France fusion results, as a rule, in a racial product which cannot be differentiated from the rest of the population. In northern countries the same is true, because the proportion of brunets is more or less high everywhere. In fact, within two or three generations, the descendants of mixed marriages are fused with the general population of any country beyond recognition.
For those who look with apprehension at “race mixture,” it may be stated that the flow of Jewish blood into the veins of the European and American peoples does not infuse any new racial elements for the reasons just stated. And it is well known that the intermixture of European ethnic elements has proved to be of immense advantage to the European nations. The most progressive nations are those who can lay least claim to ideal racial purity. England, Germany, France, Italy, and especially the United States, though populated by peoples in whose veins flow the blood of nearly all ethnic elements in creation, cannot be considered backward nations. On the other hand, witness the homogeneous populations of central Asia and Africa, free from any racial admixture, but in a low stage of mental evolution.
Moreover, it appears that the offspring of mixed marriages of which we just spoke is apt to be superior. Grant Allen16 some years ago said that the number of talented and distinguished people is rather extraordinary among those descended from Jewish-Christian married couples. Indeed, when we contemplate the number of persons of half-Jewish origin who have attained distinction and eminence in various fields of human endeavor, it appears that Grant Allen was right. To mention but few: Montaigne, the great French essayist, had a Jewish mother; Sir John Herschel, the English astronomer, had a Jewish father; [others include] Mendelejeff, the great chemist, and Metchnikoff, the biologist; Bret Harte, the novelist; Francis Turner Palgrave, the critic; W. Clifford Palgrave, the traveler; Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, the English diplomat and politician; Prevost Paradol, the journalist and author; Paul Lindau, the German critic; G. Ebers, the Egyptologist; Paul Heyse, the German novelist and poet; Edwin Booth, the actor; Mrs. Keely, the actress; Daniele Manin, the Italian revolutionist; Leon Gambetta, the French statesman; Sir John Millais, the British painter; Sir A[rthur] Sullivan, the noted English composer and conductor; Ludovic Halévy, the French composer; and many others. Among those who have achieved notable success in commercial, industrial, and financial fields, the number of half-Jews appears to be enormous.
It is for this reason that those interested in improving the human breed have no apprehension at the infusion of so-called Jewish blood into the veins of modern European and American nations.
16. [Charles Grant Allen (1848–99), a Canadian author and teacher, was known as a strong advocate of evolutionary theory.]