Topics: Family and Household, Main Topic: Other, Jewish Continuity, Anthropology, Ethnography, Intermarriage, Intermarriage: Children of Intermarried Couples, Conversion, Gender, Jewish Women, Religious Observance and Practice, Jewish Community
Abstract: There are less than 1300 Jews living in Finland who are members in the two officially Orthodox Jewish communities in Helsinki and in Turku. After the Civil Marriage Act was put in effect by the Finnish Parliament in 1917 the number of intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews started rising in the communities. Most of these marriages were officiated between Jewish men and non-Jewish women. In the beginning, the non-Jewish spouses kept their respective religious affiliations, but in many cases, their halachically non-Jewish children converted to Judaism. In the 1970s, adulthood conversions to Judaism became far more frequent in the communities—especially in the Jewish Community of Helsinki. Today, most of these individuals and their families concerned are still active members of the Jewish congregation. The high number of intermarriages and the conversions to Judaism have had a crucial impact on the development of the religious customs of local Jewry. Through the analysis of archival sources and new ethnographic material derived from semi-structured qualitative interviews, this case study investigates how intermarriages formed the traditions and habits in the families and in the communities. By relating the topic of intermarriage to the question of conversion, the study sheds light on institutional changes within the Jewish Community of Helsinki, and analyzes how women, who converted to Judaism in 1977, articulate and perform their religious practices, identities, and agencies when consciously aiming at building Jewish families.
Abstract: The anthropologist Robert H. Lowie (Towards understanding Germany. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1954) offers a historically informed ethnography of Jewish/non-Jewish relations in German speaking lands. Jewish families in Germany, Jews in families, and Jews and their families in post-1945 need to be seen in the context of these historically informed structures that shaped family histories: Interfamilial transmissions of identities and praxes that impacted on family, marriage, and partnership patterns. Issues of family structures including endogamy and exogamy cannot solely be explained by drawing on the religious (halachic) prohibition of exogamy, they need to be understood as a means of boundary management of a specific ethnic group (Rapaport, Jews and Germans after the holocaust. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997), to forestall assimilation (Kauders, Unmögliche Heimat. dtv, Munich, 2007), and within a specifically fraught context (Czollek, Desintegriert Euch! Hanser, Munich, 2018; Ginsburg, I’m a German Jew, and I’d Love to Be Normal, In HaAretz, May 19, 2020. https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-i-m-a-german-jew-and-i-d-love-to-be-normal-1.8856650. Accessed May 19 2022, 2020; Kranz, Shades of Jewishness: the creation and maintenance of a Jewish community in post-Shoah Germany, University of St Andrews: St Andrews. Open Access: https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/872. Last accessed 19 May 2022, 2018) that drives the creation of transnational family networks (Bodemann, A Jewish family in Germany today: an intimate portrait. Duke University Press, Durham, 2005)—and neither can proximity, intimacy and love across the ethnic – and religious – divide be phased out because a very significant number of Jews marry and partner up with non-Jews (Kauders, 2007; Kessler, Jüdische Migration aus der ehemaligen Sowjetunion seit 1990. Beispiel Berlin. Magisterabschlußarbeit Sozialwissenschaften. Unpublished Master’s thesis, Fern-Universität Hagen, Hagen, 1996; Umfrage 2002: Mitgliederbefragung der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin. Unpublished research report, 2002; Körber, Zäsur, Wandel oder Neubeginn: Russischsprachige Juden in Deutschland zwischen Recht, Repräsentation und Neubeginn. In: Körber K (ed) Russisch-jüdische Gegenwart in Deutschland, Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, Göttingen, pp 13–36, 2015; Osteuropa 69:83–92, 2019; Kranz, Notes on embodiment and narratives beyond words. In: Hoffmann B, Reuter U (ed) Translated memories, Rowman, Farnham, pp 347–369, 2020a; Landesbetrieb Information und Technik Nordrhein-Westfalen 2019; Rapaport 1997), and cross an ethno-sexual boundary (Bodemann, 2005; Nagel, Race, ethnicity, and sexuality: intimate intersections, forbidden frontiers. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003; Schaum, Being Jewish (and) in love. Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin, 2020; Schaum, Love will bring us together (again)? Nachwirkungen der Shoah in Liebesbeziehungen. In Chernivsky M, Lorenz F (eds) Weitergaben und Wirkungen der Shoah in Erziehungs- und Bildungsverhältnissen der Gegenwartsgesellschaft, Verlag BarbaraBudrich, Leverkusen, pp 159–174, 2022). This chapter offers a comprehensive overview of Jewish families, Jews and their families and Jews in families in Germany after 1945 by drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, and by way of contextualizing individual and collective Jewish praxes.
Abstract: In this article, I discuss the issues of mixed marriages, referring to research conducted by Polish sociologists, psychologists and educators. On this basis, I try to show possible areas of conflict in this type of relationships, various strategies for working out compromises as well as various relations with the social microstructure. I emphasise problems related to bringing up children in a bi-cultural family environment, in particular aspects of bi-religious home education. My intention is also to identify potential areas of intercultural enrichment and the emergence of new cultural capital in mixed families. I also reflect on Polish- Jewish marriages by recalling the biography of a representative of the third generation of the Holocaust survivors, married to a Catholic, who has introduced, together with her husband, a model of dualistic education. The research was based on the biographical method, unstructured/in-depth interviews. The article presents one of the elements of broader research, which focused on the construction of the socio-cultural identity of the narrators
Abstract: With Finnish independence in 1917, long-awaited legislative reforms were put in force in the country. Jews gained the right to obtain Finnish citizenship. The same year, the Finnish Parliament implemented the Civil Marriage Act (CMA), allowing the country’s Jewish citizens to marry non-Jews without converting to Christianity. In 1922, the constitutional right to freedom of religion was affirmed in the Freedom of Religion Act (FRA), granting the right to practice religion in public and private and allowing Finnish citizens to refrain from belonging to any religious community altogether. The FRA also addressed the question of children whose parents belonged to different religious congregations or who were unaffiliated. The FRA defined the religious affiliation of children after their father; this was, however, against the Orthodox Jewish law (halakhah) that the local Finnish Jewish communities wished to follow, which traced a child’s religious affiliation matrilineally.
Due to the small size of the Jewish marriage market and to the secularizing tendencies of the Jewish congregations, the number of intermarriages started to grow in the early twentieth century, and soon, they became a characteristic phenomenon of Finnish Jewish realities. This resulted in a growing number of halakhically non-Jewish children. Thus, the communities faced several challenges in terms of their administration and everyday practices.
This article-based dissertation provides an overview of Finnish-Jewish intermarriages from 1917 until the present by analyzing archival materials together with newly collected semi-structured ethnographic interviews. The interviews were conducted with members of the communities who are partners in intermarriages, either as individuals who married out or as individuals who married in and converted to Judaism. The key theoretical underpinning of the study is vernacular religion, which is complemented by relevant international research on contemporary interreligious Jewish families.
The results of the study show that while most informants understand Jewish law flexibly and rarely consider themselves “religious,” the differences between the practices of intermarried men and women are remarkable. Whereas women employ creativity and “do Judaism” to establish practices they consider meaningful for their Jewishness and Jewish identity, men tend to draw on their cultural heritage and often refrain from creative practices. The study also indicates that the adult conversion of women is far more common than that of men, making conversion a gendered phenomenon in the Finnish Jewish communities. Most informants of this study “do Judaism” in various ways and often choose to perform certain traditions to strengthen their connection to Judaism and ensure Jewish continuity through their children. Intermarried members and converts form a large part of the Finnish Jewish communities, and thus the results shed light on patterns that can be assumed to characterize multiple Finnish Jewish households.
Abstract: Статья посвящена проблеме межэтнических брачных союзов, в основу исследования легли экспедиционные материалы, собранные в Приднестровье в 2017-2019 гг. В еврейской среде в советский период традиция смешанных браков получает широкое распространение, такие союзы приводят к трансформации классического определения еврейства, что в свою очередь оказывает влияние на представления партнеров о собственной идентичности. Авторами было собрано и проанализировано 29 интервью с информантами (евреями и неевреями), состоявшими в смешанных браках, и их детьми; были выделены три основных зоны напряжения в межэтнических семьях (восприятие данного союза окружающими, имянаречение ребенка и похороны) и три стратегии преодоления напряжения: выбор нейтральной и светской традиции; компромисс (сочетание двух традиций) и интеграция одного из партнеров в культуру другого. В качестве зоны кросс-культурного взаимодействия информанты выделяли праздники; связанные с ними традиции, как правило, были смешанными (например, Песах и Пасха). Авторы приходят к выводу, что описываемый синтез культур приводит к дрейфу идентичности информантов и трансформации представлений о «настоящем еврее», согласно которым знания о традиции или практические навыки становятся важнее принципов галахи.
Abstract: Most academic research on Jews in Germany addresses the past, culture, and religion. If the present is discussed, researchers mainly focus on antisemitism. Ina SCHAUM breaks this pattern. Her research needs to be located in a transdisciplinary framework. In her work, she introduces individual lives, and expressions of agency, indicating the divide between the diversity of Jews, and their experiences, and how they are perceived by non-Jews. Boldly, she uses case studies to depict what "doing being Jewish" means for young Jews in connection to their intimate love relationships. The outcome is refreshing; it does full justice to Jewish life-worlds in Germany. By way of presenting two young Jews in Germany in depth, SCHAUM lifts the lid on the underlying diversity of Germany's Jewish population. She contrasts constructions of Jews with real living Jews, revealing that Jewishness is but one aspect in their quest for love, and that the researcher of the bespoke Jew is indeed also an implicated subject. SCHAUM's work needs to be appreciated as a harbinger in the country where she is based. Informed by English-language anthropology and sociology, she pushes methodological boundaries, consistently questioning the line between researcher and researched from late 1960s onwards. Jews are her case study; yet her theoretical considerations and methodological reflections extend much further.
Abstract: Jewish communities often do not endorse the idea of intermarriage, and Orthodox Judaism opposes the idea of marrying out. Intermarriage is often perceived as a threat that may jeopardise Jewish continuity as children of such a relationship may not identify as Jews. When a Jewish woman marries out, her children will in any case become Jewish by halakhah – the Jewish law – by which Judaism is inherited from mother to child – and thus usually faces less difficulties over acceptance in Jewish communities. Even though the Torah speaks of patrilineal descent, in post-biblical times, the policy was reversed in favour of the matrilineal principle, and children of Jewish men and non-Jewish women must therefore go through the conversion process if they wish to join a Jewish congregation according to most Jewish denominational requirements. The aim of this article is to analyse what happens when Jewish men, who belong to Finland’s Orthodox communities, marry out. Do they ensure Jewish continuity, and raise their children Jewish, and how do they act as Yidishe tates – Jewish fathers? If yes, how do they do so, and what problems do they face? These questions are answered through an analysis of thirteen semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with male members of the Jewish Community of Helsinki and Turku in 2019–20.
Abstract: This detailed and thorough report is rapidly becoming the ‘must-read’ study on European Jews, taking the reader on an extraordinary journey through one thousand years of European Jewish history before arriving at the most comprehensive analysis of European Jewish demography today.
Written by leading Jewish demographers Professor Sergio DellaPergola and Dr Daniel Staetsky, the Chair and Director of JPR’s European Jewish Demography Unit respectively, it explores how the European Jewish population has ebbed and flowed over time. It begins as far back as the twelfth century, travelling through many years of population stability, until the tremendous growth of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by the dramatic decline prompted by a combination of mass migration and the horrors of the Shoah. Extraordinarily, after all this time, the proportion of world Jewry living in Europe today is almost identical to the proportion living in Europe 900 years ago.
Using multiple definitions of Jewishness and a vast array of sources to determine the size of the contemporary population, the study proceeds to measure it in multiple ways, looking at the major blocs of the European Union and the European countries of the Former Soviet Union, as well as providing country-by-country analyses, ranging from major centres such as France, the UK, Germany and Hungary, to tiny territories such as Gibraltar, Monaco and even the Holy See.
The report also contains the most up-to-date analysis we have on the key mechanisms of demographic change in Europe, touching variously on patterns of migration in and out of Europe, fertility, intermarriage, conversion and age compositions. While the report itself is a fascinating and important read, the underlying data are essential tools for the JPR team to utilise as it supports Jewish organisations across the continent to plan for the future.
Abstract: Emma was born in 1956. Her parents survived the Holocaust with the help of false documents and their Slavic appearance – goes the family legend. Emma was brought up by her parents, according to communist principles. She is already 17 when she first learns from her aunt that she is Jewish. She meets her husband, Ben, a Nigerian, in 1976, and they leave for Nigeria. A year later Emma returns alone, pregnant, and from then on, her relationship with Ben is almost completely cut off. In 1990, Emma sends her child to a Jewish school. The analysis of the narrative interview reveals that for Emma, the meaning of choosing a stranger from a different culture was to get rid of a stigma. The presence of the colored child born from the relationship comforts her – if she manages to hide the Jewishness of the child, this covers her Jewishness as well. Along with this, she seems to be trying to protect her son from her identity problem: the color of his skin gives clear evidence of who he is and where he comes from. A decade later, she changes her strategy: now she wants the hidden stigma to be revealed and seen. And once more she uses her son to achieve this: if her son attends a Jewish school, he becomes Jewish. And if he is Jewish, that means that she too is Jewish.
Abstract: This paper is the first output of the new European Jewish Demography Unit, set up by JPR in January 2019 with the generous support of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, to undertake demographic research about Jewish populations across Europe.
Demography provides answers to questions such as how many Jews exist in the world? Or in Europe? Or in any particular country of Europe? And where will European Jewry go from here?
The objective of the Unit is to create demographic profiles of European Jewish populations at a country level, documenting their size, structure, composition, patterns of Jewish identity, factors of growth and decline and past and projected trajectories over time. The foundational paper demonstrates the practical sides and uses of demography, with the focus on its use by the Jewish community.
The paper is written in three parts. Part 1 describes what Jewish demography is, as a subject area, and its purpose and value, with specific reference to Jews in Europe. Part 2 explores some of the critiques of demography from the past and present and responds to these by outlining how the data should be used and have been used for highly constructive purposes. Part 3 outlines what the European Jewish Demography Unit will do, and the methods and approach it will take.
Abstract: A large share of Russian/Soviet Jews, especially among younger cohorts, are descendants of intermarriage. In this essay, I reflect on the implications of the built-in ambivalence of these mixed ethnics, comparing their identity qualms and social strategies in their native Russia and after migration to Israel. My analysis draws upon participant observation and interviews conducted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and across Israel over the last 20 years. My theoretical anchors are recent discussions on the evolving nature of Jewish identity, formed at the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and culture, in the context of ongoing intermarriage and assimilation. The comparison between the (ex-)Soviet and Israeli context underscores the role of local social constructions of ethno-religious belonging, nationalism, and citizenship as synergistic forces in shaping social locations of mixed ethnics. It also sheds light on the tactics of adjustment and “passing” among individuals with ambivalent ethnic identities who experience rapid social transformation or migration.
Abstract: JPR’s report, European Jewish identity: Mosaic or monolith? An empirical assessment of eight European countries, authored by Senior Research Fellow Dr David Graham, asks whether there is such a thing as a European Jewish identity, and, if so, what it looks like.
The question of whether there is a Jewish identity that is at once common to all European Jews but also peculiar to them, has intrigued scholars of contemporary Jewry since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This study contrasts the European picture with the two major centres of world Jewry, the United States and Israel, and examines the nature and content of Jewish identity across Europe, exploring the three core pillars of belief, belonging and behaviour around which Jewish identity is built.
This research was made possible by the advent of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) survey in 2012 examining Jewish people’s experiences and perceptions of antisemitism across nine EU Member States: Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Romania, Sweden and the UK. As well as gathering data about antisemitism, the study investigated various aspects of the Jewishness of respondents, in order to ascertain whether different types of Jews perceive and experience antisemitism differently. This study focuses on the data gathered about Jewishness, thereby enabling direct comparisons to be made for the first time across multiple European Jewish communities in a robust and comprehensive way.
The report concludes that there is no monolithic European identity, but it explores in detail the mosaic of Jewish identity in Europe, highlighting some key differences:
• In Belgium, where Jewish parents are most likely to send their children to Jewish schools, there is a unique polarisation between the observant and non-observant;
• In France, Jews exhibit the strongest feelings of being part of the Jewish People, and also have the strongest level of emotional attachment to Israel;
• Germany’s Jewish community has the largest proportion of foreign-born Jews, and, along with Hungary, is the youngest Jewish population;
• In Hungary the greatest relative weight in Jewish identity priorities is placed on 'Combating antisemitism,' and the weakest level of support for Israel is exhibited;
• In Italy, respondents are least likely to report being Jewish by birth or to have two Jewish parents;
• The Jews of Latvia are the oldest population and the most likely to be intermarried;
• The Jews of Sweden attach a very high level of importance to 'Combating antisemitism' despite being relatively unlikely to experience it, and they observe few Jewish practices;
• In the United Kingdom, Jews observe the most religious practices and appear to feel the least threatened by antisemitism. They are the most likely to be Jewish by birth and least likely to be intermarried.
According to report author, Dr David Graham: “This report represents far more than the culmination of an empirical assessment of Jewish identity. Never before has it been possible to examine Jewish identity across Europe in anything approaching a coherent and systematic way. Prior to the FRA’s survey, it was almost inconceivable that an analysis of this kind could be carried out at all. The formidable obstacles of cost, language, political and logistical complexity seemed to present impenetrable barriers to the realisation of any such dream. Yet this is exactly what has been achieved, a report made possible through an FRA initiative into furthering understanding of Jewish peoples' experience of antisemitism. It reveals a European Jewry that is more mosaic than monolith, an array of Jewish communities, each exhibiting unique Jewish personas, yet united by geography and a common cultural heritage."
Abstract: Que transmet-on lorsque l'on est juif, que l'on ne pratique pas, que l'on partage sa vie et que l'on élève des enfants avec un conjoint non juif ? Comment ce dernier perçoit-il et vit-il le judaïsme de l'autre ? Circoncire ou ne pas circoncire ? Quelle cuisine prépare-t-on ? Autant de questions auxquelles le présent ouvrage, dans un langage simple et synthétique, s'attache à apporter des pistes de réponses. Les résultats de l'enquête sociologique menée par l'auteur montrent que les deux conjoints, juif et non juif, homme ou femme, souhaitent transmettre un judaïsme qui ne soit pas seulement une religion. Ce faisant, ces personnes mettent en oeuvre des « opérations de bricolage » individuelles, en réinventant des espaces, symboliques ou réels, pour donner corps à leur identité et à leur mémoire : elles transmettent ainsi un judaïsme qu'elles pourront qualifier de « culturel ». Souvent, ce désir de revendiquer une identité juive est intimement lié à la Shoah. Cet ouvrage, très accessible, ouvrira le lecteur à l'évolution du judaïsme et, au-delà, aux débats contemporains sur la transmission, la mémoire et la notion d'identité.
