A Rabbi’s Thoughts on Intermarriage

This article appeared in THE SHIELD, March 1906 and our attention was drawn to it by Bro. John Steele. It is just possible that a word or two upon mixed marriages may not be unprofitable in these days when men are prone to take their own inclination as a guide in preference to the divine instruction of the Bible. We therefore republish from "The Hebrew Standard"[1] portion of a sermon recently delivered in the great synagogue by Rabbi F. L. Cohen. Its primary purport is to urge the continuity and purity of the Jewish race, but its principles are equally applicable to the true Israel of God and are in harmony with His dictates as laid down in the Bible.

All of the soul of the house of Jacob that came into Egypt numbered 70. These lists in Scripture are very similar to modern lists of ratepayers or the like. Every person is considered reckoned in when the representative of each household or each apartment is mentioned, so that wives and young children are included under the name of the person who is legally responsible on their account. Thus the “70 souls” that came with Jacob to Egypt must actually have included at least double the number, since the wives and daughters are not mentioned specifically in the list, which is after all a formal and legal rather than an historical document.

We may consider it all the more strange then, that this very appreciable number of people is spoken of in the Hebrew text in the singular number, “All of the soul”. The household of Esau, although very much smaller than that of Jacob, is on the contrary referred to by a noun in the plural number, “All the souls of his house” (Gen. xxxvi, 6). This peculiar Hebrew idiom was selected, says the ancient Midrash (Vayikra Rabba) to teach us that Jacob’s family shared one feeling, in their service of the one God. They all had but one soul, but Esau’s family, distracted by the different beliefs and worships brought in at the marriage of each son and grandson, was divided by the essential difference of outlook between soul and soul. So it could not be truly spoken of in the singular as one and united, but only in the plural as an assemblage of separated souls.

This remark of the Midrash establishes the whole case against intermarriage between persons of a different religious belief, and emphasises the reason why such intermarriages should be discouraged not only by the Jews alone, but by all religionists who prize the faith in which they have been trained from their childhood. The Torah originally prohibited the intermarriage of Israelites with members of the seven degraded races of Canaan, and stated as its reason, “For they will turn away thy child from following me, to serve other gods” (Deut. vii., 3, 4). Actuated by this motive, and seeing how the purity of the Jewish faith must depend on the purity of the Jewish race, Ezra and Nehemiah extended this prohibition so as to cover all the pagan nations of antiquity (Ezra ix., 1, 2, 10-11, Nehem. x., 30 xiii, 22-25).

Later religious authorities, in the time of the Maccabean struggle and during the wars against the Romans, interdicted matrimonial connections between Israelites and all Gentiles. The very possibility of intermarriage is morally conceivable only when both parties to the marriage are weak and limp in their convictions, and have no respect for the positive doctrines of their respective nominal creeds.

The very thought of intermarriage is impossible where religious conviction itself is at all strong and vigorous, because on mutual understanding and mutual co-operation depend that respect, trust, and unity of purpose which make virtuous family-life the basis of the morals, the ethics, the civilisation of the country and the well-being of society.

The offspring of a mixed union must necessarily suffer since their moral training and instruction in the higher things of life has to remain neglected because husband and wife harbour old prejudices, or entertain a contempt, good humored or otherwise, for what person without any definite religion, and so presumably free from the evil old ecclesiastical prejudices and hatreds, we still have the right and duty of warning those who are born to the privilege of being God’s witnesses, and whose birth in Israel ranks them among the chosen servants of the Most High, from setting up a home where no religion is, or can be.

If the Jew believes, as he ought, that matrimony is a sacred institution, sanctified by the covenant of the Creator and Ruler of the universe and entered upon the blessing of the Most High, it is clearly a sin on his part to dispense with that blessing by marrying one who is not eligible to stand with him in the place where it may be pronounced. If the Jew recognises, as he cannot help doing, that the family is the shrine and centre of Judaism, where the knowledge and service of the one God has been handed down through generations of pure and ennobled companionship, that he is born of the race destined to bring a blessing to all mankind and that the mission of that race is a factor in the hope of spiritual advancement for all humanity, then he becomes a traitor to the very blood in his veins if he sets out to share his home and his family life with one who does not entertain these beliefs and does not recognise this mission.

The peace, and happiness, the prosperity of the family, and the performance of its sublime functions in spreading the fear and love of God and the bringing on of the elevation of mankind, these are the precious treasures at stake, and experience has universally shown that this treasure is lost, utterly and irretrievably, in nine cases out of ten where husband and wife follow the principle of the house of Esau, and are separated in the profound convictions of their two souls.

The question of marriage is indeed, to the Jew or Jewess, the crowning test of sincerity in religious principle, because the intermarried flings away the very birthright of the child of Israel. Therefore our ancient sages went to the root of the matter where they laid it down in the legal summary of the Mishnah (Ketu-both vii, 3) that the persistence of the Jewish religion and the law of Moses fundamentally rests upon the harmonious agreement of husband and wife in those essential principles of thought and action upon which we Jews hold that human salvation depends.

Thus, then, it is to the better and more extended instruction of our youths and our maidens in these essential principles that we must look to strengthen them against any temptation to be false to the spiritual and racial trust reposed in them. The more they reflect on the lofty mission of the race into which they have the honour and dignity to be born, the more cautious they will be to avoid imperiling that mission by entrusting their share in it to others who, however high-minded or sweet natured, lack the vital requirements for its perpetuations and fulfilment, an uncontaminated and whole-hearted belief in it, and the one supreme God who decreed it.

[1] The Hebrew Standard of Australia was first published in 1895, became the The Jewish Times in 1952, the Australian Jewish Times in 1969 and in 1987 merged with the Australian Jewish News.