Jewish-Gentile intermarriage in pre-war Amsterdam

Intermarriage is generally regarded as the litmus test in the process of assimilation of ethnic-minority groups. The Jewish community in Amsterdam was a religious minority. When a Jew married a Gentile it was assumed that Judaism lost a family. Odds ratio calculations based on marriage tables for 1911-1941 show that the rate of intermarriage among Jews was much lower than among Catholics, Protestants and religious unaffiliated. Although the Jewish community might still be more homogeneous than the Protestant and Catholic communities, it was rapidly assimilating as the log odds ratios for Jews dropped more heavily. While mutual aversion is reflected in the remaining high log odds ratios for Jewish-Catholic marriages, Jewish-Protestant marriages and Jewish-unaffiliated marriages increased because of the higher propensity among Protestants to marry a Jew and the higher propensity among Jews to marry an unaffiliated spouse from the 1920s onwards. Next, we created life courses for a sample of 480 descendants from Jewish grandparents living in Amsterdam in 1941 of whom we know were married to a Gentile or to a Jew. The collected data from the Amsterdam registry allow us to test several hypotheses on preferences, opportunities and third parties in a logistic regression analysis. One's own affiliation significantly influenced the preference to marry a Gentile or a Jew. Successive marriage cohorts showed a higher chance to marry a Gentile among those who had Jewish parents at birth. A similar but weaker effect is found for those born in the old Jewish neighborhood. These differences in effect on later marriage cohorts indicate that religious and social barriers within the Jewish community had largely diminished. Opportunities like the social network of the mother and the living district during one's adolescents' age also significantly influenced the choice of a spouse.