From the mid-sixties until now, more than 50 percent of French Jews who married took a non-Jewish spouse, according to a survey carried out by the French National Research Center and the Hebrew University’s Institute of Demographic Studies.
The 400-page study, just released here by the National Research Center, also found that there are 535,000 Jews currently living in France, about 200,000 fewer than previous estimates, and that the average age of French Jews is increasing.
The principal authors of the study are Prof. Doris Bensimon of Caen University, who is chief research scientist at the National Research Center, and Dr. Sergio Dela Pergola, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. They reported that the high rate of intermarriage “is particularly serious” for the future of the Jewish community because 60 percent of the Jewish partners in mixed marriages are women.
The researchers noted that in French society “it is the father who is the dominant note in the family’s religious practices and cultural options. “They predicted that there will be fewer Jewish males available for marriage in the years ahead, according to demographic trends in France, and that consequently, an every larger proportion of Jewish women will marry non-Jews.
On the basis of current demographic trends in Western Europe as a whale, and especially in the European Jewish community, the study predicts “at the best” a stabilization of the French Jewish community and probably a drop in its numbers by the end of the century. The French Jewish community is the largest in Western Europe.
Dela Pergola warned that the community’s average age will continue to increase and this ageing process will affect the number of active community members. This factor must be borne in mind by Jewish community leaders and organizations when they allocate resources and lay the groundwork for educational institutions during the next 10-15 years, Dela Pergola wrote.
So far, community leaders have had no comment on the study’s findings. Most lay and professional leaders said they have not yet had an opportunity to thoroughly study its hundreds of pages and dozens of tables and graphs.
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