Jewish Shunning of Interfaith Marriages

In My Humble Opinion
1

I almost posted this last Friday, for the double-whammy of posting a Jewish question both on the Sabbath and the first night of Passover but managed to restrain myself. (Also, I had a seder to go to.)

Anyhow… as seems typical these days I wound up explaining about being the product of a mixed marriage again and it got me to thinking.

For those not in the know, in the Olden Days when a Jewish person married out of the faith they were “dead”, to the point that the family sat shiva (held funeral rites) for the person in question and ostracized them.

This did, in fact, happen to my dad when he married my mom. His family sat shiva and even set up a coffin in the parlor (which, in a sense, was not a big deal as they ran a funeral home and probably had a stack of coffins ready to go in the back of the place.) Some of the relatives did, indeed, never speak to or associate with him, or us, again. Others were inviting mom and dad for dinner within a week. Obviously, in urban St. Louis of the 1950’s observing this custom was a bit spotty already. Best illustrated by my grandmother’s funeral. When Grandma died and we all showed up at the cemetery for the service (graveside in February - brrr!) we, the family, were seated on the shiva stools and definitely occupied the role of immediate family mourners. Then the cousin from out east shewed up and made a scene about how “those people shouldn’t even be here!” blah blah blah. At which point the rabbi glared at her and said “Shut the hell up and sit down on the stool or leave if you can’t behave.” (In case you’re wondering, she left rather than sit down with us. Her loss.) So yes, by the 1980’s the rule(s) was far from universally enforced.

Roll the clock back - prior to the 20th Century and some definitely changing ideas and practices, in those days was it just the immediate or perhaps extended family that was supposed to do the ostracizing? Or the entire village/local community? Or was every Jew everywhere supposed to participate in shunning the person and their family? (And how the heck would that work, when one could move to a new place with the family where no one knew the story?) How many generations down the line was that supposed to be in force? I know that it definitely was supposed to apply to the immediate children of that “offending” couple, but how many generations out? Grandkids? Great-grandkids?

Or, maybe like so many other Jewish customs and traditions, this varied from place to place and group to group.

(In case you’re wondering - in the present day in Northwest Indiana everyone seems quite welcoming. Jews do not proselytize, but it’s also very clear that I am welcome to become more involved, join a synagogue, etc. if I decide that’s something I’m inspired to do going forward. Hence the seder invitation, among other things.)

2

One of my Jewish friends married a Christian husband in the late 80s and nobody thought anything of it. No shunning or anything. They did have to get special permission to marry in church.

3

It’s not exclusive to any one religion. It’s not unknown in any cultural community, particularly among those who feel themselves to be a minority under potential threat, to react against ‘marrying out’ with hostility, even to the point of “You’re dead to us!”. Though they might not go so far as to formalise it with a ceremony.

4

The concept of “interfaith marriages” is itself pretty new: Basel (Switzerland) claims to have the oldest civil registry (f. 1876) and that its creation was triggered precisely by an interfaith marriage between two people who insisted in wanting to get married without either of them wanting to change denomination, something that their respective churches considered completely unacceptable (one was Catholic, one Lutheran). Previously, marriage was seen as a religious thing with civil consequences: your parents would have married into his faith (with your mother converting) or into her faith (with him converting). So the person who was converting out was leaving their community behind, not being kicked out; a man who’d converted out of Judaism wouldn’t be supposed to take part in Jewish ceremonies any more (for a very small community this might even have led to the inability to reach minyan), or to call a Jewish tribunal in those situations were which ones to use was faith/community-based.

In our modern world it may seem strange, but once you look at where the custom comes from it does make a certain kind of sense.

5

Of all my extended Jewish family, not one has married outside the faith, except me and my brother, who has had two Christian wives, with no shunning. Not only was my husband raised Muslim but we are a same-sex couple. There hasn’t been any shunning to our faces, but I’m sure there’s much behind our backs. Some relatives are positively accepting, others not so much. My in-laws are wonderful in this respect.

6

My mom was Jewish, my dad was Christian, and their families were assholes (neither had siblings, but their parents shunned them). On the positive side, I learned a bit about both religions, got xmas presents and Chanukah gelt, played with a dreidel under the xmas tree, while also learning that there are no gods.

7

I met a distant cousin of mine via a Jewish genealogy board when he was searching for the grave of his uncle in Natal, South Africa. I recognized the name because I knew this uncle had married a non-Jew and been cut off by the South African branch of the family, but they had come to the U.S. and visited my grandparents. (The family, on my paternal grandfather’s side, was originally from Latvia.) He had been cut off from the family to the point that nobody in South Africa even knew where he lived anymore. These people were born around 110 years ago.

The husband has predeceased the wife by quite a lot, and the wife had just died, but my grandparents were able to help the distant cousin find the cemetery where they were buried via a neighbor in South Africa.

8

I have always found this method of maintaining the purity of the genetic line through selective breeding amusing. You know who else was a fan of eugenics? Yep, dog breeders! Er, and also Hitler.

9

Did the tradition vary based on the sex of the couple? That is to say, would a Jewish man marrying a gentile woman (whose children would therefore be born gentiles) be regarded differently from a Jewish woman marrying a gentile man (whose children would still be born Jewish)?

10

:confused:
My mom was Jewish, yet I wasn’t born Jewish.

11

When my Aunt Mary (a nice Catholic girl) married Uncle Simon (a nice Jewish boy) in 1970, Steve’s mother sat shiva and had nothing to do with her grandchildren for years. She did come around eventually and at least reconciled with her son before she died.

Simon and Mary are still alive, still married. They’re both pretty much agnostic and brought up their kids to make their own choice with regard to religious beliefs. I’ve no idea what religion their son does or doesn’t follow; we don’t keep in touch. Their daughter played around with Catholicism and Judaism as a teen, and had both a confirmation and bat mitzvah. She and her wife are mildly Reform these days.

12

My grandmother complained about my “mixed marriage,” and I never knew if was because my wife wasn’t Jewish or wasn’t white. I never asked. Whatever it was, she got over it. She was much more upset 35 years earlier when my father married a non-Jew. (she got over that too)

13

To a lot of Jews, you were. It may not matter to you, but it does to them.

14

Huh. My wife’s mother, Jewish, married a Catholic. After that guy took off she married a Protestant. My wife’s very Jewish bubby and the extended family seemed to be able to live with it.

15

I like your expression “olden days”,because I think it accurately expresses more than you intended.
In American experience you could define the “olden days” and , hence, the older generation --by the language they spoke. This is true for lots of ethnic groups, but especially for Jews.
The generation that entered thru Ellis Island (1900-1920) spoke their native language and lived in close communities with others of their same group.(Poles, Italians, Irish, and for Jews, Yiddish speakers).
And back in those olden days, marrying out of the group caused real, serious, pain to the older relatives.

Their children, born say 1920 till World War II, also knew the language, but were much less confined by the culture it came from.Still, some of the old attitudes remained, naturally. People don’t give up their cultural values so easily.So interfaith marriages were still a tense issue.

And , let’s face it–interracial marriages were off the charts and unacceptable to practically everybody. It just wasn’t done. The movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, was a risky venture for Hollywood back in 1967, and would have been impossible 10 years earlier.(And most of the audience who watched it thought, “well, it’s a nice story, and okay for those two actors, but I’m glad it didn’t happen in my family.”)

So let’s not judge past generations by modern standards. Things were different, and that’s just the way they were, and most people kind of liked it that way.

I wasn’t alive back then, but some things are still true: when human beings get pissed at each other, they tend to apply their anger to their entire social circle.
(Think of, maybe, one of your friends today —who went thru a nasty divorce, and forced you to choose sides, and ostracize the other partner. Your decision affects more than just you, right? )The same logic applied in Fiddler on the Roof, set in the 1890’s .

16

This sort of thing may not have varied ( or varied much) in the old days, but it certainly varies in more recent history , perhaps because there are more different “groups” ( I’m not sure if “denomination” is the correct word) than in the past. I wouldn’t expect a Reform Jewish family to sit shiva for a member who married a Christian , but that doesn’t means a Hasidic family wouldn’t do so.

17

I have nothing against Jews, I mean, my mother was one, but I was not.

18

From my Irish in-laws: “At least he’s not Italian”
From my Italian in-laws: “At least he’s not Irish”
From my Jewish family: “What a lovely girl!”

That was over 40 years ago, it’s just not that much of a thing anymore.

19

My older brother experienced a bit of tension when he married Outside The Faith (to a nice Catholic girl in the '70s), but by the time I met my dream woman (a lapsed Methodist) no one gave a rat’s ass about the interfaith aspect. Then again, our family was nonobservant to the point of agnosticism.

Resistance to interfaith or inter-ethnic marriages is not about eugenics.

20

Important to note that Jewish exogamy and relative wealth have led to a double whammy of people leaving the faith as well as low birth rates. It’s a real concern for the Jewish community and there is disagreement on how exactly to deal with it. Exogamy rates are up to nearly 60% currently and there is a real concern that suggests that American Judaism, especially in its non-Orthodox forms will no longer exist except in isolated pockets within our children’s lifetimes.