| THE JEWS: A STUDY OF RACE AND ENVIRONMENT. III. |
By Dr. MAURICE FISHBERG
NEW YORK CITY
Mixed Marriages between Persons of Different Christian Denominations
THE assumption that Jews and christians refrain from intermarriage because of an inherent racial antipathy existing between the Aryan and the Semite is disproved by the large number of mixed marriages in western Europe and America. All the facts go far to prove that the only reason why they have not intermarried during the middle ages and even as far as the first half of the nineteenth century was the difference of religious belief. It was both the church and the synagogue which discouraged intermarriage between Jews and christians. Not only has the church prohibited intermarriage with Jews, mohammedans and heathens, but even the adherents of the different christian denominations have been thus enjoined. In the beginning of the nineteenth century intermarriage between catholics and protestants was comparatively rare in Europe and America. With the change of conditions characteristic of our age, a spirit of toleration has become dominant, and mixed marriages are to-day more or less common. In some countries in Europe denominational statistics have been compiled, and these are of considerable interest in this connection. In Hungary, where many religious confessions are represented, the following are the rates of intermarriage: To 100 marriages contracted in 1903 between persons of the same creed there are mixed marriages among unitarians, 167.73; protestants, 49.39; reformed church, 48.52; Greek catholic, 42.79; Greek oriental, 16.88; Jews, 7.21. Here we find a connection between the degree of religious toleration and the proportion of mixed marriages. The unitarian church, which does not prohibit its adherents to marry outside of their faith, shows the highest proportion of mixed marriages of all the other denominations. In fact, there were more mixed than pure marriages. Next come the evangelical and reformed denominations, with nearly 50 mixed to 100 pure marriages. The large proportion of mixed marriages among the Greek catholics is due to intermarriage with adherents of the Roman catholic and Greek oriental churches; comparatively few marry protestants. The Jews and the Roman catholics have the lowest percentage of mixed mar-
