A few years ago my husband was contacted by one of those companies which traces the next of kin of people who die without making a will.
He had, it turned out, a cousin he had never heard of, son of a great uncle who had died in 1975, also never mentioned by the family. Samuel, the great uncle, survived the first world war. But once he married one Muriel Olive Hogg, a baker’s daughter from Levenshulme, he might as well have been dead to his family.
The couple moved to Glossop in Derbyshire where their son Roy appears to have lived a solitary life — no siblings, wife or children. His estate was tiny, and once it was established that there were quite a few people with a claim to it, we never heard from the heir hunters again.
This apparently melancholy story stood in contrast to Samuel’s brother Lazarus, who had two wives (one died young) and four children. While Jewishness, we imagine, played little part in Roy’s life, all seven of Lazarus’s grandchildren have Jewish homes, five of them in Israel. This month, one of his British great-grandchildren joined the Israeli army. The moral of the story appears to be stark and clear. Marry Jewish, and your flourishing family can have a strong religious and cultural identity. Marry ‘out’ and you die alone.
For many years this was the Jewish message when faced with intermarriage. Threaten the Jewish partner with ostracism, cut them off from the family. Treat them as though they were dead. It was cruel, it was ruthless, it caused enormous pain on all sides.
It also stoked hatred. When my husband first moved to London, for a few months he shared a flat with two women known ever after as “the antisemitic nurses”. One of them bore a grudge after a Jewish boyfriend had broken up with her under pressure (she believed) from his family. Of course, the story may have been different, and her unpleasant reaction indicates that the boyfriend had a lucky escape. But still, it was not impossible to imagine the rejection triggering hurt and incomprehension.
Things have changed. For many decades now the custom of cutting off a child for marrying out has been vanishingly rare. But often there still exists a feeling that marrying ‘out’ is taking an inevitable step away from Judaism. Parents encourage their children to sign up for JDate or JSwipe, in the hope that they will find a partner who is “one of us”.
One hundred years after Samuel and Muriel wed, the Liberal branch of Judaism has just made it possible for interfaith couples to get married under a chupah. The open, welcoming, inclusive philosophy behind this change is the polar opposite of the freezing out that made Samuel a stranger to his family. The hope is that non-Jewish partners will undertake to bring up Jewish children in a Jewish home, that marrying ‘out’ will not mean a loss of Jewish identity, but instead bring people into the fold.
Conversion has, of course, done this for many families. In this month’s Vogue Jessica Diner writes movingly about her spiritual journey to Orthodox Judaism. She wanted to do it in part because she had a Jewish partner, but it took years of study and living with an Orthodox family. “It requires dedication and desire beyond any relationship. The love of a person can definitely be part of the equation, but not its sum. In Judaism, you talk about things being beshert, or destiny. As dramatic as it sounds, this was my destiny. ”
Conversion played its part in my husband’s family tree as well. One of Lazarus’s sons might have married out, but his fiancée converted with the Reform movement. All four of their children now live in Israel. Marrying ‘in’ wasn’t all it took to made Jewishness thrive, conversion plus Zionism worked too.
But not everyone wants to convert. Not everyone feels that religion is for them. It’s quite likely that many couples taking advantage of the new Liberal policy will be Jews marrying people of no faith, people who lack the feeling of dedication and destiny that Jessica Diner describes, but who are happy to support their partner in building a Jewish home. In an age of rising antisemitism, when we need every Jew who is prepared to stand with us, this can only be a good thing.
I wonder how Samuel and Muriel would have felt if this had been an option open to them? Perhaps their families would still have disapproved. And it is possible that Muriel did not want to take on her husband’s traditions. Maybe Samuel was looking to shun his background. Was he pushed out, or did he escape? Emotional blackmail didn’t persuade Samuel to spurn Muriel. One hundred years on we need better ways to ensure Jewish continuity.
