Jews and Race: Writings on Identity and Difference, 1880–1940

22 The Mixed Marriage

170 For biographical information on Arthur Ruppin, see the headnote for selection 5. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the social gulf throughout Europe between Christians and Jews was so great that a marriage between Christians and Jews would have seemed completely impossible, even if such unions had not been prohibited by religious, ecclesiastical, and civil statutes—akin to [the situation ] today in the colonies of Africa ruled by the European powers, in which marriages between natives and whites are seen as abnormal and hardly occur anywhere. Certainly, one finds individual cases of Jews converting to Christianity and then marrying a Christian spouse, but such cases do not fall under the category of mixed marriage. For, in the usual sense of the term, mixed marriages are characterized by the fact that, at the wedding, one of the two marrying belongs to the Jewish and the other to the Christian religion—a characteristic missing in all cases in which one of the two individuals has already converted to the other’s faith before the ceremony.13 For the anthropological researcher, certainly, conversion before marriage is of no significance. According to him, a marriage between a Christian and a Jew remains a mixed marriage whether there is conversion or not; that is, it constitutes a marriage between members of different races. However, this anthropological point of view cannot serve as a conceptual foundation if a valid comprehension of statistics on intermarriage is to occur; and, indeed, it is unfeasible on purely practical grounds. The racial affiliation of the individual does not fall within the purview of official statistics, at least not in Europe, and probably never will given the difficulty or impossibility of assigning European whites to specific, anthropologically uniform groups. If one thus wishes to grasp the prevalence of mixed 22 | The Mixed Marriage Arthur Ruppin “Die Mischehe,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 4, no. 2 (1908): 17–23. 13. Note that it would be significant if the registrar inquired into the religious affiliation of the individuals not only at the time of the ceremony but also prior to that. But this never occurs. “The Mixed Marriage” | 171 marriage with the aid of statistics, one can proceed only from the religious affiliations of the individuals at the time of their entering into the marriage. Though, to the anthropologist, such results are not complete because they do not include the change of religion that occurred before the abovementioned marriage ceremony, yet they still hold meaning for him as minimum figures. Among all other Völker, religion and race have very little to do with one another; whereas among the Jews, religion is a certain indicator of racial affiliation. One should not, however, overextend the concept of race. If race is to be understood only to refer to those communities whose characteristic anthropological traits were formed in ancestral times, and which over the course of history have completely refrained from sexual commingling with other communities, then there is no racial difference whatsoever between humans of white skin color. Over the millennia they were all repeatedly thrown together and not only crossed with each other, but in a few areas also mixed with individuals of yellow and black skin color. Whether the Jews have constituted a unified race since their entrance on the historical stage and have always preserved this unified character is completely uncertain. What is certain, however, is that at the end of the eighteenth century the adherents of the Mosaic religion, on account of their centuries-long rigorous inbreeding in a relatively small and geographically curtailed region, constituted in terms of anthropological traits a community sharply distinct from that of the surrounding Christians. The totality of those individuals who are descended genealogically from this community can, lacking a better term for anthropologically unified human groups, be termed a “race”—that is, the Jewish race. In the nineteenth century many members of this race converted from the Jewish to the Christian religion; others have taken Christian spouses, and their children have been raised as Christians, so that one now finds members of the Jewish race who are adherents of the Christian religion. Contrary to this, the cases in which a Christian (that is, anthropologically speaking, a German, a Slav, and so on) converts to Judaism or, on account of entering into a sexual relationship with a Jew, becomes a follower of the Mosaic religion are so rare as to be totally negligible...