Jews and Race: A Pre-Boasian Perspective, Part 2
PRE-BOASIAN JEWISH DISCOURSE ON INTERMARRIAGE
The Zionist Elias Auerbach viewed Jewish intermarriage as not necessarily a problem providing the endogamous Jewish racial core population remained unpolluted by the taint of non-Jewish blood. The offspring of mixed marriages (Mischlinges) are, he noted, overwhelmingly lost to the Jewish community — leaving the “sacred chain” of Jewish heredity within that community intact. As Kevin MacDonald pointed out in A People that Shall Dwell Alone, this had the eugenic effect of selecting for high levels of ethnocentricity among the remnant Jewish community. Those with low levels of ethnocentricity (manifested in a propensity for intermarriage) were lost to the Jewish community — leaving a hyper-ethnocentric endogamous core behind. Accordingly, Auerbach writes that:
In Germany at present [1903], the rate of Jewish intermarriage is approximately one sixth of pure (rein) Jewish marriages. This number is so large that one would be forced to derive from it a total and imminent dissolution of German Jewry. A genuine intermixture, however, has only really taken place when the offspring of this intermarriage then introduce this foreign blood into the Jewish Volk. Now the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of these offspring of mixed marriages (Mischlinge) withdraw from Jewry both religiously and nationally, shutting themselves off thereby from any union through marriage with the Jewish nation (Stamme der Juden); thus, they remove themselves from the equation, for the most part, when it comes to [our analysis of] racial mixture. The Jewish human material (Menschenmaterial) that we are analyzing from an anthropological viewpoint and that is the foundation of the Jewish race in the progressive movement of history will consequently have altered very little and remains a homogeneous mass; they [the Jews] seldom lose elements to another people through dissolution. A careful and scrupulous authority on this issue, the statistician Arthur Ruppin, estimates the number of offspring of mixed marriages who remain within Jewry to be only 10 percent of all offspring produced by the mixture of Jews and non-Jews in Germany. As to actual mixing of blood, we would thus have to figure that at only 1/60 of the racial stock of German Jews. However, even this small, though nevertheless not infinitesimal, number is valid only for Germany and for a few other countries, in which altogether a very small percentage of the Jewish people (Stamm) live.
If one goes back just a few decades, the number of Jewish intermarriages declines precipitously in relation to the Jewish population overall. In Prussia the number of mixed marriage declines by half, if one goes back twenty years; for the Jewish population in general this occurs only when one goes back sixty years. Before this period, around the turn of the nineteenth century, the intermixing of the Jews [with other peoples] in Europe dwindles almost to the vanishing point. For the entirety of the Middle Ages — and for Jewish racial history, the term “Middle Ages” is valid up until the French Revolution — the number of intermarriages was so minute as to be negligible, the more so as barely any offspring of such marriages mingled their blood with that of Jews. The law of racial isolation of the Jews from the peoples around them in Europe held true for the entire Middle Ages. [Italics in the original] [i]