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Ambivalent Jew Charles Liebman in Memoriam

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Ambivalent Jew Charles Liebman in Memoriam Ambivalent jew Charles Liebman in Memoriam Intermarriage in America The Jewish Experience in Historical Context* Jonathan D. Sarna edited by STUART COHEN and BERNARD SUSSER The Jewish Theological Seminary of America New York 2007 Intermarriage in America The jewish Experience in Historical Context* jonathan D. Sarna nthropologists teach us that "endogamy, the practice of marrying some- · ne from within one's own tribe or group, is the oldest social regulation f marriage."1 Certainly, it is a very old regulation within Judaism. The Bible, in the book of Deuteronomy (7:3), warned Jews not to intermarry with the seven nations surrounding them. In the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, we are told, the Israelites themselves pledged to uphold God's law that "we will not give our daughters in marriage to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our sons."' The sages subsequently expanded the meaning of "peoples of the land" to embrace people of all lands and nations, and insisted that Jews may only marry among themselves.' The resulting taboo against intermarriage is one of the strongest and most deeply rooted taboos in Judaism-and understandably so, for ... The subject of intermarriage interested Charles Liebman both as a social scientist and as a Jew. Characteristically, he held strong views on the subject, and did not hesitate to express them, even in circles where they proved unpopular. But he never permitted his personal views to cloud his srholar­ ship. The article that follows, prepared originally for a conference, would doubtless have benefited from Charles's comments; he was a brilliant critic and reader, generous with his time and unsparing in his criticisms. I dedicate the article to Charles Liebman's memory. • "Marriage," Encyclopaedia Britannica (15th ed., 1991), vol 7, 871. 2 Nehemiah 10:31 (New Jewish Publication Society translation). ' Maimonides, Laws of Forbidden Sexual Relations, 12:1; Encyclopaedia ]udaica vol. 12 (1972), 167. 125 126 Dlasporajewry intermarriage hindered the transmission of faith and culture from one generation to the next (which was seen as one of the family's main responsibilities) and even more basically it threatened the character and preservation of the jewish group as a whole. Important as it is for judaism, however, endogamy is by no means a universal value in the world at large. Many tribal societies championed exogamy, often dependent on the capture of foreign women. Among more developed societies, the mixing of peoples is, in the words of Paul Spickard, "one of the great themes of world history:• He shows that exogamy is especially prominent in the American past. "People came to America from all over the world;' he writes. "They bore every conceivable color, religion, and national heritage." Over time, he concludes, many Americans "socialized and mated with people who were not like them."< Indeed, as early as 1782, the French-born author and agriculturalist known as J. Hector St. john Crevecoeur, described an American as a "strange mixture of blood, which you will fmd in no other country:' He pointed to a "family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations:' "Here;' he con­ cluded, optimistically, "individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world."' Crevecoeur's optimistic vision posed a considerable challenge to Americans intent on preserving their ancestral heritage, and most especially to Jews. His read­ ing of America, while by no means universally agreed upon, pointed to a yawning gap between mainstream American values concerning marriage, and Jewish marital values. While non-Jewish Americans of the day often married out and some, like Crevecoeur, found positive value in the mixing of peoples, Judaism promoted in-group marriage as a supreme value and considered the marriage of a Jew to a non-jew to be a major transgression, akin to treason. Americans championed the individualistic ideal of robust choice in marriage, and privileged the goal of roman­ tic love; Judaism championed the communitarian ideal of continuity and compan­ ionship through marriage, aud privileged the goal of marrying within the group. This tension between "modern" American values in marriage and "traditional" Jewish ones is a theme that runs all the way through the American Jewish experi­ ence from the very beginning. Indeed, far from being a new community challenge, as so many believe, intermarriage is actually one of American jewry's oldest con­ cerns, dating all the way back to 1656 when one of America's first known Jews, Solomon Pietersen, married a local Protestant and raised his daughter in her mother's faith.6 From then onward, intermarriage has served as something of a 4 Paul R Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in TWentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 4; see also Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), esp. 54-76, 175-239. 5 J. Hector St. John de Crev&oeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957 [1782]), 39. 6 Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American few (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 216-217, 1226. SARNA I Intermarriage in America: The Jewish Experience in Historical Context 127 barometer of intergroup relations in America; the two rise and fall in tandem. Peri­ ods marked by growing interreligious harmony witness growing amounts of inter­ marriage; periods marked by burgeoning interreligous hatred see intermarriage rates fall. Estimates of Jewish intermarriage in the colonial period range from ten to fifteen percent of all marriages, with men intermarrying more frequently than women, and those living far from their fellow Jews more likely to marry out than those who lived near them. Available statistics leave many questions unanswered. Still, the numbers are far lower than for some other religious groups of the day. New York City's French Huguenots, to take an extreme case, experienced an inter­ marriage rate between 1750 and 1769 that exceeded 86 percent!' The entire subject of intermarriage raised thorny questions that American Jews continue to confront to this day. How to respond to intermarriages? How to respond to intermarrieds who sought to maintain their Jewish ties? How to promote in-group marriage without damaging social ties to non-Jews? How to survive in an American religious environment that was becoming increasingly open and competitive? Colonial Jews offered few firm answers to these questions and mostly dealt with intermarriages on an ad hoc basis. For example, when Phila Franks married the wealthy Huguenot merchant Oliver DeLancey in 1742, her pious, grief-stricken mother, Abigail, withdrew from the city and in traditional Jewish fashion resolved never to see her daughter again, "nor Lett none of ye Family Goe near her:• Phila had violated a taboo, disgraced her parents, and deserved, so her mother believed, to pay the price, as a deterrent to others. Phila's father, Jacob Franks, however, demurred: "Wee live in a Small place & he is Related to ye best family in ye place:• he explained, and tried to promote reconciliation.s The two divergent approach­ es--deterrence and reconciliation-reflected opposite worldviews. Mother consid­ ered Jewish group preservation to be the highest value, and advocated excommuni­ cation. Father took account of local conditions-the small number of available Jews, the desire for peaceful relations with non-Jewish neighbors-and sought to promote reconciliation. These two approaches, the one rooted in Jewish tradition the other shaped by modernity and the conditions of American life, typify responses to intermarriage throughout American Jewish history. As a rule in early America, intermarried Jews did sooner or later drift away from the Jewish community, but exceptions to this rule were not shunned, as they might well have been elsewhere. David Franks continued to maintain dose social and economic ties to Jews. Benjamin Moses Clava was buried as a Jew. Samson Levy and Michael Judah had their non-Jewish children ritually circumcised. Ezekiel Solomons, Heineman Pines, John Franks, Barnet Lyons, Uriah Judah, and David Franks, all of them intermarried, numbered among the twenty original founders of 7 Malcolm H. Stern, "The Function of Genealogy in American Jewish History;• Essays in American Jewish History (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1958), 85; Marcus, Colonial American Jew,, 1232; Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,l983), 187. ' Letters of the Franks Family (1733-1748): The Lee Max Friedman Collection ofAmerican Jewish Cor­ respondence, ed. Leo Hershkowitz (Waltham: American Jewish Historical Society, 1968), 116-125. 128 Diasporajewry Shearith Israel in Montreal.• In each of these cases, a Jewish tradition that was uncompromising on the subject of intermarriage clashed with colonial society's more indulgent social norms. Caught between two realms that they strove mightily to keep separate, colonial Jews vacillated. Once again, Jewish law and American life proved difficult to reconcile. In the wake of the American Revolution, amidst the heady atmosphere of free­ dom characteristic of that era, intermarriage rates between Jews and Christians rose sharply. According to Malcolm Stern's careful calculations, 28.7 percent of all known marriages involving Jews between 1776 and 1840 were intermarriages, almost twice the rate that he calculated for the colonial period.'O As before, this was a sure sign of Jewish social acceptance, particularly since many Jews intermarried without themselves converting. Nor was intermarriage confined to those remote from Judaism. In one remarkable case, in 1806, Abraham Hyam Cohen, the son of (and assistant to) Mikveh Israel's hazan, fell in love with a Christian woman, Jane Picken, who was converted to Judaism without an ordained rabbi being present and after only a brief period of preparation.
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