A Threat to Survival

Marrying outside the faith--even though Moses did it*--has traditionally been frowned upon by devout Jews. Some traditional families still mournfully recite the service for the dead when a rebellious son weds a shiksa. Nonetheless, the number of mixed marriages in the U.S. is at a level that may well threaten the survival of U.S. Jewry as a religious community. The reason: the Jewish partner often abandons his religious practice and raises his children in the faith, or nonfaith, of his spouse.

The few significant statistics on Judaism and interfaith marriages were summed up by Sociologist Erich Rosenthal in the 1963 American Jewish Year Book, prepared by the American Jewish Committee. In Greater Washington, D.C., the rate of mixed marriages is 17.9% for Jews of the third generation and after, compared with 1.4% for foreign-born Jews. In at least 70% of such mixed marriages, the children are not raised as Jews. Assimilation is an even greater problem in small communities, where the Jewish choice of partners is limited; in Iowa, for example, about 42% of the state's Jews normally marry outside the faith.

Many Jewish leaders deplore the trend. Dr. Emanuel Rackman, former head of Manhattan's Orthodox Jewish divorce court, the Beth Din, urges rabbis not to perform mixed marriages, as some Reform rabbis do. (Conservative and Orthodox rabbis insist upon the conversion of the non-Jewish partner, a tactic that often drives couples to a municipal judge or a broad-minded Protestant minister.) At the golden jubilee convention of the Farband-Labor Zionist Order last month, its leaders warned against the new spirit of assimilation in U.S. Jewry, which they said was reflected "in the alarming growth of intermarriages and in a drifting away from Judaism, particularly on the part of Jewish youth."

But other rabbis believe that intermarriage brings profits as well as losses. One gain is the small but steady national increase in converts to Judaism. "I don't know of a rabbi who isn't constantly busy tutoring non-Jews who want to convert to Judaism," says Dr. Max Vorspan of California's University of Judaism. Another silver-lining view is that intermarriage is an inevitable by-product of a worthy accomplishment, the general acceptance of Judaism in U.S. life. "We want tolerance, understanding and intergroup amity," says Rabbi Joseph Narot of Miami's Temple Israel. "And while this is more likely to bring about intermarriage, we'll take our chances. We've got to take that chance to avoid the ghetto mentality."

* According to Exodus 2:21, Moses married Zipporah, daughter of a Midianite priest.

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