Abstract
Drawing on the economics of marriage markets together with the sociology of marriages and families, this chapter covers some of the forces that help explain trends in Jewish family formation and high rates of failed marriages that were initiated by wives who turned to civil courts for their divorces. In addition to covering first and follow-on marriages, we ask if the stability and quality of family lives reflect more general disordering forces in the larger society.
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Notes
- 1.
Silvana Seidel Menchi, Marriage in Europe, 1400–1800 (University of Toronto, 2016).
- 2.
Menchi, Conclusion, 333 ff.
- 3.
David W. Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieu, eds., Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300–1900) (Berghahn Books, 2007). “In the late Middle Ages, kinship became patrilinear, and primogeniture the new norm. This system replaced bilateral inheritance and reflected a desire by noble families to build family fortunes by marrying outside and then transmitting them intact to a single heir. Around the mid-1700s this “vertical” organization was replaced by a “horizontal” one that stressed alliances, marriages within kinship groups, and less structured relationships, like god-parentage.… [other chapters] cover the change towards a more “horizontal” kinship organization during the eighteenth century.” See the H-Net review at https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45665/tebbe-sabean-and-teuscher-and-mathieu-kinship-europe-approaches-long. The final essay in this book tightly links class formation and kinship .
- 4.
Although role and status sets may appear to be sociological jargon, such concepts contribute to an understanding of static and evolving social systems. For the pioneering distinction between status and role sets, see Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Free Press, 1957), Chapter 9, Continuities in the Theory of Reference Groups and Social Structure.
- 5.
We do not know if, how, and why Jewish marriages and divorces were different from those involving non-Jewish Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Prussians, among others.
- 6.
General population statistics can be misleading if they ignore the different stages within a single marriage. For example, the present author and his wife were in junior high school when we first met at the age of 13. We started going “steady” at the age of 15 and married five years later. Neither of us was aware that we were in a commercial-type relationship subject to economic analysis. But there was a division of labor between us with the arrival of our first of three children and my career responsibilities. What had been a close one-to-one relationship in which we were one (we) became a relationship between two spouses and our individual children. Just the sheer volume of husband–wife relations shifted along with the content of the relations. That is, life and family cycles and tensions shift over time. Analogously, the tensions that lead to divorce differ according to the ages and number of family members involved. Overall statistics can mask these dynamics.
- 7.
Eliach, 334 ff.
- 8.
Eliach, 336.
- 9.
See ChaeRan Freeze’s article on “Marriage” in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/marriage.
- 10.
Leiserowitz, “Livak Migratory Decisions.” My ancestors came from this village, suggesting that my grandfather’s sisters came to America to find husbands in a market more friendly to Jewish women.
- 11.
Eliach, 354.
- 12.
Polonsky, 160.
- 13.
Freeze, 291. Also see Jacques Siler, “Some Demographic Characteristics of the Jewish Population in Russia at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Jewish Social Studies 42.3/4 (1980).
- 14.
Freeze, 56.
- 15.
See, for example, Stephani Coontz, Marriage, a History (Viking, 2005) and Andrew Chrerlin, The Marriage-Go-Around (Knoph, 2009).
- 16.
After my great grandmother Rosa died, his new wife Jennie brought two of her children, Ray and Annie Rohn, into the reconstituted family that included four of her new husband’s children still at home.
- 17.
Freeze, 62–63. She follows these statistics with how they related to changing gender roles and power relations within the household.
- 18.
I recall that proportionally few American Jews bought Ford cars prior to the late 1950s because of Henry Ford’s support for anti-Semitism.
- 19.
These terms were used in a joint article by two Columbia University sociologists: Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, “Friendship as a Social Process: A Substantive and Methodological Analysis,” in Freedom and Control in Modern Society, ed. Monroe Berger (New York: Van Nostrand, 1954).
- 20.
Petrovsky-Shtern, 216.
- 21.
Betty Starkman reported that she had rarely seen a walking stick in such old-country photographs. Elisa New wrapped her ancestral story around her Latvian great grandfather Jacob Levy’s cane. See her previously referenced Jacob’s Cane: A Jewish Family’s Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore; A Memoir in Five Generations. I too mix the personal with the academic.
- 22.
For a history of early studio photography in the Pale, see The Photographic Studios of Eastern Europe at http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/pse-4.htm. A Russian language site is at http://fototikon.blogspot.com/.
- 23.
Eliach, 356.
- 24.
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/jewish-mating-patterns-in-nineteenth-century-russia/. There is a growing body of DNA-based studies of historical and contemporary Jewish populations suggesting relatively high rates of cousin marriages. A study in England in 1875 found that 7.5% of all English Jewish marriages were among first cousins, three times the rate among gentiles. Dan Rottenberg, Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy, 47. I am not aware of any studies comparing and contrasting Jewish kinship systems and practices with those of their non-Jewish neighbors. On the basis of Spitzer’s and other studies, it seems likely that there was more internal social and economic diversity within Jewish settlements than among their non-Jewish neighbors. Since homophily forces operated among all populations, this might suggest that non-Jews would be more likely to find their marriage mates within the same flat class system of their local village than would Jews who possibly had more diverse class systems.
- 25.
The Memorial Book for Korczyna, Poland, begins: “If a marriage resulted as a result of love, the parents would not divulge it for it was considered in poor taste.” Marriages could also be a community celebration as indicated in the Memorial Book for an excerpt from the book of Krements in the Ukraine. It describes the festive atmosphere in the town where “the entire Jewish street, rich and poor, rejoiced for a week before and a week after the wedding.” See https://www.facebook.com/JewishGen.org/posts/1334280629927422:0. For a detailed description of how marriages were arranged and executed, see “A Wedding in Town” from the Yizkor book of Kobylnik available online at https://business.facebook.com/JewishGen.org/posts/1619210974767718.
- 26.
Are Jews a romantic people? This and other questions concerning matchmakers and marriage-related issues explored by Jewish novelists are covered in Naomi Seidman’s The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (Stanford University Press, 2016).
- 27.
Although role and status sets may appear to be sociological jargon, such concepts contribute to an understanding of static and evolving social systems. For the pioneering distinction between status and role sets, see Chapter 9 “Continuities in the Theory of Reference Groups and Social Structure” in Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Free Press, 1957).
- 28.
Eliach, 356.
- 29.
For a history of how Jews acquired their names, see Alexander Beider, “Did Jews Buy Their Last Names?” (Forward, January 3, 2018). His etymological dictionary of Galicia lists about 37,000 surnames.
- 30.
Robert E. Mitchell, “Changes in Fertility Rates and Family Size in Response to Changes in Age at Marriage , the Trend Away from Arranged Marriages , and Increasing Urbanization ,” Population Studies (November 1971).
- 31.
Or how orphans were supported.
- 32.
Freeze’s article on “Marriage” in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
- 33.
Polonsky, 160.
- 34.
Yael Granot-Bein, “The Breakdown of the Jewish Migrating from Eastern Europe to England 1881–1914,” originally available at http://WWW.isragen.org.il/NROS/YY2007/Bein-Granot.htm but no longer online. Also her Conflict and compromise: Anglo-Jewish policy towards destitute immigrants. Jewish Families from Eastern Europe, 1881–1914 as reported at https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-12813.
- 35.
Eliach, 343.
- 36.
Petrovsky-Shtern, 237–239.
- 37.
As usual, Polonsky helps place these divorce trends in a larger perspective. See his Chapter 4, Social and Religious Change, 1750–1914.
- 38.
Yaffa Eliach, The Shtetl Household, RTF Foundation http://www.rtrfoundation.org/shtetl-front.shtml.
- 39.
One possible answer suggests that despite the constrictions represented by the multiple rituals and social controls that Ansky would have studied, Jews were freer to act individually in meeting the challenges of the time. They were relatively quicker on their feet and in their minds—all potential strengths for progressing in an accelerating commercial market place. Instead of emphasizing being victims of tradition, Jews could become the puppet masters rather than the marionettes. Of course just as not all gentiles were the same, not all Jews were copycats of one another. And there were certainly change agents among the gentiles.
- 40.
Freeze’s Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 154–155 and her Chapter 3 more generally. It is a challenge to fully reflect Freeze’s approach and discoveries.
- 41.
Freeze, 159. There used to be an American reference to an hour-glass period of marriage. If a couple could get through the first seven years, it was likely that they would continue on for many more years. This was the “seven-year itch.” Today, the itch seems to start much earlier in American marriages.
- 42.
Freeze’s article in the YIVO encyclopedia.
- 43.
Mary Antin, 165.
- 44.
Wirth, The Ghetto , 216.
- 45.
Wirth, 216.
- 46.
For more on these letters, see Isaac Metzker, A Bintal Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (Behrman, 1971). The Forward regularly published the National Desertion Bureau’s The Gallery of Missing Husbands. Evidently many of these deserters were found.
- 47.
See Ruth Leiserowitz, “Litvak Migratory Decisions in the 19th Century and Their Consequences: Prussian Transit Migration,” Avotaynu online at http://www.avotaynuonline.com/author/ruth-leiserowitz/. Also see Mark Baker, “The Voice of the Deserted Jewish Woman, 1867–1870,” Jewish Social Studies (1995).
- 48.
For some of the letters Hamagid published, see Mark Baker, “The Voice of the Deserted Jewish Woman, 1867–1870,” Jewish Social Studies 2.1 (1995).
- 49.
Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America (Columbia University Press, 1989). He did not provide the source for this number and his other generalizations.
- 50.
Freeze, Jewish Marrige, 231.
- 51.
Yael Granot-Bein, “The Breakdown of the Jewish Migrating from Easter Europe to England 1881–1914.” A lecture in Hebrew that is no longer online.
- 52.
Polonsky, 161.
- 53.
My mother’s parents were pioneer farm-settlers in Midland County. As noted earlier, a genealogist traced the family history back to Duncan, the first king of Scotland.
- 54.
Freeze’s YIVO article. Today’s America has a similar male-female imbalance among the elderly single. According to one recent AARP study, 45% of American adults 65 and older are divorced, separated or widowed. The US Census estimates that 58% of people 65 and older were married in 2012. The CDC statistical report issued in December 2004 reported separately for males and females: “Among adults aged 65 years and over, more than 7 in 10 men (74.4%) were currently married compared with 4 in 10 women (41.4%). Nearly one-half of women aged 65 years and over (46%) were currently widowed compared with 13.5% of men.” The absolute numbers are large. The US Census in 2012 found 17 million unmarried U.S. residents 65 and older in 2011. That’s larger than the population of Ohio and just around two million shy of New York State’s total population . Taken from James Jordan, Joy, Love and Loss in Late Life: An Epistolary History of How Early Life Experiences, Long Marriages, and Divorces Shaped a Late-in-Life Relationship (CreateSpace, 2015).
- 55.
One of my father-lawyer’s clients in the 1930s married and remarried his wife four different times. My parents, especially my father, seemed to have been the glue that reconnected the husband and wife time after time.
- 56.
Also see Paula Hyman, “East European Jewish Women in an Age of Transition,” in Judith Baskin, ed., Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Wayne State University Press, 1998). Also Naomi Seidman, “Gender and the Disintegration of the Shtetl in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature,” in Steven Katz, ed., The Shtetl: New Evaluations (New York University Press, 2007).
- 57.
Quoted in Petrovsky-Shtern’s The Golden Ghetto, 54. Of course male shopkeepers were probably not different, as anyone who has walked the streets of Indian and other market places will recognize. That is, this may be a cultural rather than a gender trait. And it may also be relevant to certain kinds of smaller commercial establishments. But as either sellers or buyers, married women of all classes were exposed to how best to bargain. During his four years of living and working among the local Chinese in Hong Kong during the 1960s the author would be reminded never to argue with a cleaver-holding Cantonese woman.
- 58.
Freeze, 199.
- 59.
Economists tend to have only a few measures of a country’s social and economic health: gross or net national product (or income) and the distribution of this national total (questions of inequality). However, there are other non-economic measures such as the dashboard approach. For a discussion of these concepts, measures, and their limitations, see Robert E. Mitchell, The Language of Economics: Socially Constructed Vocabularies and Assumptions, Chapter 5.
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Mitchell, R.E. (2019). Order and Disorder in Jewish Marriages, Families, Kinship Systems and the Immediate Built and Social Environments. In: Human Geographies Within the Pale of Settlement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99145-0_7
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