Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth Century America (review)

Historians have long understood that marriage has been both a powerful individual experience and an arrangement of considerable social consequence. We have a number of very capable histories of marriage and family that explore significant transformations in the ways that men and women court each other, enter marriages, and form families. This makes the absence of a sustained historical examination of marriage across religious lines in America so surprising. But Anne C. Rose reminds us that her Beloved Strangers is the first to appear in print. The reasons for this become clear throughout her work, as she must work creatively with the dearth of direct sources to interpret the experiences of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who intermarried between 1820 and 1920. That she succeeds so well is a tribute to her ability to read her sources so subtly and skillfully, and her willingness to transcend the religious boundaries that historians of American religion still so commonly observe.

There are few direct records of intermarriage during the century, so that Rose cannot trace patterns of interfaith marriage across the period. She does not know when, or even if, they became more or less popular during certain decades. It is impossible to say how common they were at any given time, as no systematic evidence exists. But Rose examines the public and private discourses on interfaith marriage very creatively to approach an interpretation of the human experience of these relations, and extrapolates from these sources some general arguments about mixed marriages.

Rose compensates for the absence of statistical sources on interfaith marriage by exploring the experiences of twenty-six families whose members crossed faith boundaries to marry, and then left letters, diaries or memoirs. In addition, she explores novels, religious publications, and the formal discussions of mixed faith marriage that religious officials conducted. Some of these provide rich discussions from which to draw, but many do not. In these cases, Rose reads discussions of related issues cleverly to infer about mixed marriages.

Some implicit arguments run through Rose’s various chapters. The first is that though church officials expounded rules that forbade or severely regulated interfaith marriage, Americans have always married across religious divides. Moreover, individuals who entered into such marriages knew that they stretched the bounds of accepted norms. They negotiated these relationships in various ways, but recognized always that the boundaries had to be negotiated. It seems that these strictures dissipated somewhat over time, so that by 1920 most Americans seemed to accept mixed faith marriages as a matter of course—even if religious officials still worried about them. This is not to say that Americans came to encourage or even endorse them enthusiastically, but rather that they recognized that people from differing faiths would fall in love and marry each other—and that this search for personal happiness and fulfillment trumped religious affiliation.

Rose stresses throughout her work that because individuals who married across religious lines strained, if not explicitly transgressed accepted norms, they exercised agency. They knowingly chose their own destiny rather than comply with prevailing social norms. In this way they both defied and redefined what it meant to be Catholic, Jewish, or Protestant. The family became the agent of religious experience rather than church and synagogue.

Each chapter contains a myriad of other arguments and observations. For example, Rose notes that for most of the 19^th century, Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis worried more explicitly about inter-faith marriage than did Protestant ministers, who seemed relatively silent about them. Catholic priests worried that inter-faith marriage posed a threat to the faith of the Catholic spouse and any children that these marriages produced, and violated canon law if not done in the right way—by a priest, with certain assurances given by the non-Catholic spouse. Rabbis argued over whether the traditional Jewish identity, which followed the mother’s background, could be expanded to include children of Jewish fathers and their non-Jewish mothers. Could the child of a...