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Abstract
Intermarriage is generally regarded as the litmus test in the process of assimilation of ethnic-minority groups. The Jewish community in Amsterdam was a religious minority. When a Jew married a Gentile it was assumed that Judaism lost a family. Odds ratio calculations based on marriage tables for 1911–1941 show that the rate of intermarriage among Jews was much lower than among Catholics, Protestants and religious unaffiliated. Although the Jewish community might still be more homogeneous than the Protestant and Catholic communities, it was rapidly assimilating as the log odds ratios for Jews dropped more heavily. While mutual aversion is reflected in the remaining high log odds ratios for Jewish–Catholic marriages, Jewish–Protestant marriages and Jewish–unaffiliated marriages increased because of the higher propensity among Protestants to marry a Jew and the higher propensity among Jews to marry an unaffiliated spouse from the 1920s onwards. Next, we created life courses for a sample of 480 descendants from Jewish grandparents living in Amsterdam in 1941 of whom we know were married to a Gentile or to a Jew. The collected data from the Amsterdam registry allow us to test several hypotheses on preferences, opportunities and third parties in a logistic regression analysis. One's own affiliation significantly influenced the preference to marry a Gentile or a Jew. Successive marriage cohorts showed a higher chance to marry a Gentile among those who had Jewish parents at birth. A similar but weaker effect is found for those born in the old Jewish neighborhood. These differences in effect on later marriage cohorts indicate that religious and social barriers within the Jewish community had largely diminished. Opportunities like the social network of the mother and the living district during one's adolescents' age also significantly influenced the choice of a spouse.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a Veni grant of the Netherlands organization for scientific research (NWO 257-52-007). A first draft of this article was presented at the congress ‘Dag van de Sociologie 2009’, June 11, 2009, Amsterdam. We would like to thank Wout Ultee for his comments during that congress and for providing marriage data for the years 1931–1934, and Leo Lucassen for his comments.
Notes
1 The increase of the proportion of married Jews does not necessarily indicate a higher number of marriages over time as the Jewish population was aging and the average number of children per family decreased.
2 Boekman (Citation1936, p. 57) remarked on the presented numbers and percentages of Jewish–Gentile marriages that they do not include those Jews who before they entered into matrimony converted to their spouse's religion or during wedding said not to belong to any affiliation. Ultee and Luijkx (Citation1998, p. 175) also pointed to the possibility that rising chances of intermarriages is related to the fact that people who used to convert before marrying no longer do so; though a rise in intermarriage solely attributed to a desire for conversion, is highly unlikely.
3 For example, if there are ten Jews getting married and four of them have married a Gentile, the percentage of religious intermarried Jews is 40. In this example the six Jews who married a Jewish spouse make together three couple, while the four Jews married to Gentiles make four couples. Four out of the seven couples are religious intermarriages, that is 57%.
4 The percentage of couples intermarrying is (b+c)/N. The percentage of Jewish couples intermarrying is (b+c)/(a+b+c). The percentage of Jewish married men intermarrying is b/Male Jews, and for Jewish woman c/Female Jews.
5 The odds ratio for women is equivalent to (a/c)/(b/d).
6 Odds ratios can become extremely large and are hypersensitive to relatively minor changes in the cell frequencies that are very small. The odds ratio is therefore sometimes transformed into a log odds ratio. When taking the log of an odds ratio, 0 implies that marrying a Jewish woman is equally likely for both Jewish man and Protestant man, and a log odds ratio greater than 0 implies that marrying a Jewish woman is more likely among Jewish man.
7 This category also includes those of whom their religion was unknown. We have no indication that the numbers of whom the religion is unknown are substantial.
8 A case-control study is especially convenient in the study of rare conditions or when cases appear too seldom in a random population sample. The case-control design is therefore very suitable for studying e.g. religious intermarriage.
9 The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), 77, 1411–1413.
10 Persons who had one or two Jewish grandparents were defined as ‘quarter’ Jews and ‘half’ Jews respectively. Grandparents were Jewish if they belonged to the Israelite congregation.
11 The Amsterdam list is not dated. We assume that this list was being finished in the second week of May 1941 as the youngest person on this list was born at May 7.
12 This line of reasoning might not be hundred percent waterproof, as some Jewish spouses could had lived temporarily somewhere else.
13 Historical Sample of The Netherlands (HSN). Dataset ‘Jewish Dutch or Dutch Jews?’ (JDJ), release 2009.01. For more information about the HSN, see http://www.iisg.nl/~hsn.
14 NIW, vol. 31, 1896, nr. 31, p.1.
15 NIW, vol. 32, 1896, nr. 17, second section p.1.
16 NIW, vol. 40, 1905, nr. 51, p.2.
17 NIW, vol. 42, 1907, nrs. 51 and 52; vol. 143, 1907, nrs. 1, 2, 5, 6 and 19. The dispute concerned a Jewish man living in Rotterdam who married to a non-Jewish woman. Later a liberal Rabbi in Brussels converted this woman to Judaism and next solemnized their wedding. Thereafter, the couple requested to be registered in the administration of the Jewish community in Rotterdam.
18 NIW, vol. 43, 1907, nr. 2, p. 2.
19 To match the addresses and letter code of the living areas we used the information on the website http://www.amsterdamhistorie.nl/ (visited in May 2009). The streets and areas in the district ‘Jonker-, Ridder-, Konings-, en Keizerstraat en omgeving’ (areas C, P, Q, R and S) and ‘Overige Jodenbuurt en Hoogte Kadijk’ (areas N and O), and some parts of the areas U and V are taken as streets that constitute the Jewish neighbourhood.