Jewish Population Study Discloses Trend Toward Increased Intermarriages

Some 2000 Jewish communal leaders from the United States and Canada meeting here this weekend to discuss plans and launch programs to assure the strengthening of Jewish bonds and intensifying Jewish identity and consciousness were presented with a report disclosing an alarming trend of increased intermarriage among American Jews. Data released at the 41st General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds showed that “of current marriages some 16.8 percent intermarriages appear in the United States Jewish population.” Moreover, the initial report specified that available data “indicates strongly that in recent years the proportion of intermarriages has attained a level which, in the history of the United States Jewish population since the century’s turn, are unprecedented.”

The report, however, also disclosed that there is a “positive balance in favor of ‘conversion into’ rather than a ‘conversion out of’ Judaism,” that at the present time, “it remains that nearly 96 percent of children in Jewish households (of intermarried couples) are/will be raised as Jews.” and that in homes where the wife is Jewish and the husband is not, “nearly all children are being, or were, raised as Jewish.”

This picture of American Jewry emerged with the first in a series of reports dealing with a demographic profile of the American Jewish community. Based on the findings of the CJF’s three-year National Jewish Population Study, the most ambitious and comprehensive study to date, the 41-page working paper, “Explorations in Intermarriage,” presents a graphic overview of the trends and basic factors and perspectives in “the shadow land separating Jewish survival from Jewish oblivion…the complex and crisis-arousing field of intermarriage.”

The report, written by Dr. Fred Massarik of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), director of the CJF study and of the research service bureau of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation-Council, and released at the General Assembly, is a series of statistical tables and conclusions on a more comprehensive study to be released at a later date. The released findings, which deals exclusively with marriages intact at the time of the study, does not specify how many were interviewed either directly or by any means or how many of those sampled indirectly responded to a series of questionnaires. Neither is there any indication of which cities were selected as sample testing areas nor do the findings indicate the basis for comparative statistics showing the rates and proportions of intermarried and non-intermarried couples surveyed.

INTERMARRIAGE RATE RISES SHARPLY IN 1960’S

It was reported by Dr. Massarik at the General Assembly that the study was conducted in cities with Jewish populations of 40,000 or more and several smaller cities based on 39 geographical areas in which 7600 households were sampled. He noted that the statistics and findings in the report are subject to further refinement, clarification and changes as additional information is gathered.

The report focuses on “the two typical intermarriage patterns: husband Jewish/wife not Jewish; and wife Jewish/husband not Jewish.” This pattern is, according to the report, substantially one in which either marriage partner identified with a religious-cultural viewpoint before meeting the future spouse and “with no recourse as yet to their mutual accommodations as may be effected by conversion or by change in religious identification in response to their relationship.”

The other type of intermarriage considered in the report is the “more ambiguous category of marginal intermarriage” in which at the time of initial meeting one or both partners expressed no preference concerning a religious viewpoint or affirming “only vague relatedness to Jewishness at the time of meeting. This group, the report notes, have such “tenuous ties to Jewish background or practices” that there is some question of whether they should even be included in a definition of being Jewish, according to the authors of the report. If, they add, this group is eliminated from consideration by “arbitrarily classifying them as ‘non-Jewish,’ ” the current intermarriage rate is 14 percent.

According to the report, the rate of intermarriage from 1900 to 1940 ranged from 4 percent to 6.8 percent, followed by a significant upswing in the rate to 12.5 percent beginning with World War II and maintaining this plateau until 1956 when the rate dropped to 11.1 percent between 1956-1960.

“Commencing in the early sixties (1961-1965), the rate rises dramatically, to 29.7 percent and thereafter to the present reaches still higher levels, at 48.1 percent.” This, the report observes, represents “what might be described as the Jewish community’s ‘portfolio’ of marriages ranging back to the turn of the century,” There is no immediate explanation in the released report for the shifts in the rate of intermarriage at certain times and no economic or psychological backdrop for these developments.

The figure of 16.8 percent of current intermarriages appears to be a statistical average for the years 1900 to 1972 which in this report is divided into nine time segments. Again, there is no indication of why some time segments represent 20 years while others are segmented into 10, 6, 5, or 4 year periods.

CHILDHOOD ENVIRONMENT STRONG INFLUENCE

The report does show that childhood environment bears heavily on subsequent marital relations. According to the test samplings of those not intermarried, 55.2 percent indicated that they were “strongly Jewish” in their upbringing and 34.4 percent “somewhat Jewish.” In intermarriages where the husband is Jewish only 15.2 percent had a “strongly Jewish” upbringing and 54.3 percent “somewhat Jewish.” in cases where the wife is Jewish 55.9 percent indicated “strongly Jewish” upbringing and 32 percent “somewhat Jewish” upbringing.

Dealing with conversion, the report states that “with one significant exception, formal conversion is a relatively rare phenomenon when the overall pattern of Jewish marriage and intermarriage is considered.” The most frequent conversion into Judaism “is found for the initially non-Jewish wife of a Jewish husband,” the report states. “Here, in this most prevalent of intermarriage types, somewhat more than one-fourth, 26.7 percent, report formal conversion into Judaism. A similar trend fails to appear for non-Jewish husbands of Jewish spouses; here only 2.5 percent report formal conversion. The only other significant conversion pattern, “though numerically small because they relate to intrinsically small groups, are noted for conversions out of Judaism, particularly in the marginal intermarriage groupings,” the report adds.

Another set of statistics dealing with children’s’ religious orientation shows that 99.2 percent are raised as Jewish in non-intermarried households while 63.3 percent are raised as Jewish where the husband is Jewish, and 98.4 where the wife is Jewish. The same set of statistics discloses that where the husband is Jewish 13.9 percent of the children are oriented as Protestants and 10.1 percent as Catholics; where the wife is Jewish only 0.3 percent of the children are oriented as Catholics and none as Protestants. Where the husband has no religious preference 76.9 percent of the offspring are oriented as Catholics and 23.1 percent as Protestants.

In the sphere of general Jewish identity, in response to the question “is the person Jewish now?”, some 43-46 percent of initially non-Jewish spouses described themselves as Jewish. “Thus, close to half of spouses in intermarriages who entered the marriage as non-Jewish, or who may have converted at some time proximate to the marriage, report that they ‘feel Jewish,’ regardless of formalities,” the report states. “This does not, of course, define the depth or the quality of their Jewish commitment.”

Other reports comprising the National Jewish Population Study due to be released soon, include: patterns of philanthropic giving, general education, religious affiliations and practices, Jewish education, economic profile, attitudes toward Judaism and other religions, attitudes toward civil rights, and attitudes toward Israel based on impressions gained during initial visits there. Alvin Chenkin, population study consultant of the CJF, is the author of the demographic profile. Dr. Saul Kaplan, director of research, Jewish Federation of Chicago, is the author of the study dealing with attitudes toward communal services.