Marriage patterns among Jewish immigrants in Israel

ABSTRACT

Immigrants’ marriage patterns and spouse selection carry important long-term implications for their economic and social integration. This study focuses on immigrants’ spouse selection and asks whether immigrants tend to marry co-ethnics. Israel’s 2010 Labor Force Survey, collected by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, is used to reveal effects of ethnicity, age at immigration, education and age at marriage on spouse selection among immigrants in Israel. The results show that immigrants tend to marry immigrants of the same ethnicity; when they marry out of their ethnic group, they tend more to marry Israeli-born partners than to marry other immigrants. Also, 1.5-generation and second-generation immigrants tend more than first-generation immigrants to marry native-born Israelis, both co-ethnics and of different ethnicity.

KEYWORDS:

• Spouse selection
• assortative mating
• marriage patterns
• immigrant generation

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Asaf Levanon and Pablo Mitnik for their generous help and insightful guidance throughout this project. The data were obtained via the Israel Social Sciences Data Center at the Hebrew University.].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The term Sephardi is still used in the Israeli religious context, and refers to religious traditions and to rabbinical authorities.

2 Jewish immigrants from the FSU are primarily of Ashkenazi origin but we consider them as a distinct ethnic category.

3 Immigrants arriving from the Asian republics of the FSU are included in the ‘FSU’ category.

4 Immigration to Israel is primarily Jewish, and the immigrants in our sample are considered Jewish according to the Law of Return (and are defined as such by the Central Bureau of Statistics). A few cases (n=61) were classified as “other religion.” We included them in the study because they are primarily recent immigrants from the FSU who most likely entered the country under the Law of Return. Excluding these cases does not affect the findings.

5 The plural of Mizrahi is Mizrahim, the plural of Ashkenazi is Ashkenazim.

6 There were no cases of Ethiopian immigrants married to Israeli-born Ethiopians, therefore this category is not included in the matrix.

7 There are no Israeli-born people of Ethiopian ethnicity in our sample.

8 BenEzer (2013) reports similar results, as he found 750 mixed couples in the entire 2008 Israeli census.