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T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 213–216 ANNE C. ROSE. Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xii Ⳮ 288. Among my students in southern New Jersey, surnames seldom indicate religious commitments. This semester, for example, McGarry told us about chanting trop in her synagogue, Roth about singing hymns in her church. Their experiences are hardly unusual. Intermarriage is so acceptable that a popular television comedy featuring a minister’s large family in a small American town has made these sorts of relationships central to its plot. A recent story line wedded the oldest son to a daughter of a rabbi, while his sisters dated brothers who are Roman Catholic. Although the parents were in anguish, the lovers cannot figure what the fuss is about. The show’s sympathies are clearly with the lovers. Lest we conclude, encouraged by the 1990s National Jewish Population Survey, that intermarriage is a phenomenon both new and particular to Jews, Anne C. Rose’s important new volume explains that it is neither. Nor is it simply the result of the combined forces of proximity, assimilation , and disestablished religion. Just as the television writers illustrate, the ‘‘children’’ who enter these matches often believe that they are living out the core values taught them by their parents. Rose shows that this is an old story in America. She follows the lives of twenty-six intermarried families who wed between 1812 and World War I, using journals, diaries, letters, family histories, diocesan and other clerical records along with popular fiction, religious tracts, and magazine essays to assess both the actual marriages and the cultural climate in which the families constructed their lives. They are Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Readers familiar with Rose’s earlier work on nineteenth-century American culture will recognize her sophisticated style. Rose begins her exploration with a generation she calls ‘‘children of the religious enlightenment.’’ The subtle points explained in this chapter ready the reader for later discussions. In the earliest post-Revolutionary generation, intermarriage was not simply an act of rebellion by children. Rose argues that it ‘‘acted out a subversive strain in their parents’ values.’’ While parents ‘‘balanced (intra-familial) faith and (extra-familial) civility . . . their children . . . not only . . . treated strangers amicably, they married them’’ (p. 15). Intermarriages exemplified the high value placed on civility, social accord, and civic duty that emerged out of the Enlight- 214 JQR 94:1 (2004) enment strengthened by the American Revolution. The parents of the first generation of intermarried couples often were leaders in their own religious communities. Such was the case with the families of Mathew Carey, Michael Gratz, and Jacob Mordecai. Parents and those who, like Rebecca Gratz, took it upon themselves to stand for family traditions often responded to the intermarriages within their families by writing tracts and organizing institutions to strengthen religious life. Mathew Carey published 2,322 pamphlet pages in less than ten years following his children’s marriages to Protestants. Yet families maintained loyalty to kin even if children married outside their faiths and often reshaped religious practices and faith to do so. Rose argues that Jewish women were in part attracted to non-Jewish spouses because Jewish religious life in the early national period gave them little to do. Anyone familiar with the burdens of maintaining a kosher home, preparing for holidays, and regulating family relations with mikveh attendance might gasp at that idea, but kosher meat and mikvaot were only irregularly available and few people believed vegetarian diets healthy. Rose notes that it was not until late in the nineteenth century that Jewish women organized on a national scale comparable to Protestant women. Indeed, Rebecca Gratz founded Jewish women’s charitable organizations, the first Jewish Sunday School, and the first Jewish residential foster home/orphan asylum between 1819 and 1855 in part to provide a means for Jewish women to serve their Jewish communities in ways comparable to those common among Protestant women. By the Civil War, most Jewish communities had their Female Hebrew Benevolent Society or Hebrew...

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