The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson Page B

Germany, and only in Posen did the Jewish community account for more than 5 per cent of the population. Moreover, the process of assimilation was much further advanced in Germany than in Russia and Austria. Legal obstacles to marriage between Jews and non-Jews were removed in 1875, bringing the Reich into line with Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, Switzerland and the United States. (Hungary followed only in 1895, while in Austria one party or the other was obliged to change religion, or both were obliged to register as ‘confessionless’. In the Russian Empire it remained illegal.) The results were striking. In 1876 around 5 per cent of Prussian Jews who married took non-Jews as their spouses. By 1900 the proportion had risen to 8.5 per cent. For the Reich as a whole, the percentage rose from 7.8 per cent in 1901 to 20.4 per cent in 1914. Such statistics must be used with caution, since the inherent probability of a mixed marriage must be a function of the relative sizes of the two populations concerned; other things being equal, such marriages were and are more likely to occur where Jewish communities are relatively small. However, contemporary researchers were struck by the fact that the intermarriage rates were highest in Germany in those places where the Jewish communities were largest, namely the big cities of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. By the early 1900s, around one in five Hamburg Jews who married took a non-Jew as his or her spouse; Berlin was not far behind (18 per cent), followed by Munich (15 per cent) and Frankfurt (11 per cent). There was also a discernible rise in intermarriage in Breslau. The figures were markedly lower in Austria-Hungary – even in Vienna, Prague and Budapest – while in Galicia and Bukovina there were virtually no mixed marriages. In the United States, too, there was much less intermarriagethan in Germany at this time, reflecting the large proportion of Jews in the US who had migrated from less assimilationist Eastern Europe; indeed, it was not until the 1950s that American Jews began to marry out the way German Jews had done in the 1900s. Switzerland and the United Kingdom also lagged behind; only the Danish and Italian Jewish communities evinced comparable intermarriage rates. In the eyes of the Posen-born sociologist Arthur Ruppin, this trend ‘constitute[d] a serious menace to the continued existence’ of the Jewish communities of Berlin and Hamburg. On the other hand, he could not resist observing, the spread of intermarriage gave the lie to the claims of anti-Semites ‘that Jewish blood destroys the pure “Aryan” race and that physiological antipathy is such that marriage between the two races is unnatural… The parties who contract the marriage are surely the best judges as to whether there exists any physical antipathy!’
    When anti-Semites called for legal discrimination against the Jews, they therefore had to define what they meant by a Jew with considerable care since the progeny of mixed marriages were already quite numerous – even if, contrary to the fears of some anti-Semites, the average number of children produced by mixed marriages was significantly fewer than the number produced by ‘pure’ Jewish or Christian marriages. By 1905 there were already more than 5,000 mixed couples in Prussia alone and by 1930 between 30,000 and 40,000. Estimates for the number of children produced by such mixed marriages in the first three decades of the twentieth century range from 60,000 to 125,000. In fact, only a minority of the children born to such couples were raised as Jews, though that was irrelevant from a racialist viewpoint. The criteria devised by the Pan-German leader Heinrich Class in 1912 were that everyone who had belonged to a Jewish religious community on the date of the Reich’s foundation in 1871 was a Jew and so, too, were all their descendants: ‘Thus for example the grandson of a Jew who had converted to Protestantism in 1875, whose daughter