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Notes
The discoverer of the “European marriage pattern” and the originator of the term is John Hajnal. The pattern is described in detail in two articles by Hajnal: “European marriage patterns in perspective,” in D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley, eds.,Population in History (London, 1965), 101–43, and “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System,”Population and Development Review, 8, 3 (1982): 449–94.
Several Jewish historians have attempted to ascertain overall medieval Jewish patterns of marriage age based on rabbinic sources such as responsa and legal codes. Although they do not agree in their conclusions, a number of them have found that very early marriage was widespread in medieval Jewry. This is the conclusion, for instance, of Abraham Grossman in “Nisuei Boser Behevrah Hayehudit Biyemei Habenayim ad Hameah Hashlosh-esre,” [Early marriage in Jewish society of the Middle Ages up to the thirteenth century],Peamim 45 (Autumn 1990): 108–25. Jacob Katz, inTradition and Crisis. Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, transl. Bernard Dov Cooperman, (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 116. Katz states his conclusion as follows: “There were thus many incentives for early marriage and anyone who could, fulfilled this ideal. Sixteen was considered the proper age for a girl and eighteen at the latest for a boy. Parents were never censured — indeed, they were praised — for arranging a match for daughters of thirteen or fourteen and sons of fifteen or sixteen and even for marrying off their children at such a young age.”
David Biale,Eros and the Jews. From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 64. He speaks about the development of patterns of marriage of sons near bar mitzvah age as a creation of medieval Ashkenazic Jews. Biale contrasts this Ashkenazic paradigm with Jewish marital patterns in Muslim countries in which men married in their late teens or early twenties. See also Biale, 127–28.
Ibid., 153, 278, n. 13. Biale states that “the typical goal was to celebrate the bar mitzvah and the marriage at the same party.” The Jewish Enlightened writer in nineteenth-century Russia, Abraham Ber Gottlober, said that “everyone he knew was engaged by the age of eleven.”
Moses Hadas, ed.,Salomon Maimon. An Autobiography (New York: Schocken Books, 1947), 30–34. When his first son was born, Maimon was 14 years old (p. 33).
Biale,Eros and the Jews, 149–51, 153–56. Among other Haskala writers, Adam Hacohen Lebensohn was married at age 13 and Mordecai Aaron Guenzburg at 14.
This is documented very fully in Jacob Jacobson,Jüdische Trauungen in Berlin, 1759–1813 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968).
Biale,Eros and the Jews, 128, 272, n. 21 mentions that a number of central European rabbis of the middle and late eighteenth century (he cites Jacob Emden and Ezekiel Landau) saw very early marriage as a typically Eastern European practice, which they themselves considered very strange.
In my forthcoming bookThe Berlin Jewish Community 1770–1830: Enlightenment, Family and Crisis (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), I present much evidence for the correlation between wealth and participation in such varied activities breaking with traditional Jewish patterns as subscription to Haskala (Enlightenment) works, support for Reform Judaism, abandonment of the dietary laws and even conversion to Christianity.
Alice Goldstein, “Village Jews in Germany: Nonnenweier 1800–1931,” in Ritterband,Modern Jewish Fertility, 112–43. The figures quoted are for the years 1800–1849. In the nearby village of Altdorf, Jewish marriages seem to have been slightly earlier, hovering around 29 for men and 27.4 for women in the middle of the century. See Alice Goldstein, “Aspects of Change in a Nineteenth Century German Village,”Journal of Family History (Summer 1984): 151, n. 2. The records from Darmstadt are found on microfilm 870,532 at the Genealogical Society of Salt Lake City.
See Steven Lowenstein, “Voluntary and Involuntary Restriction of Fertility in 19th century Bavarian Jewry,” in Ritterband,Modern Jewish Fertility, 94–111. In another Bavarian village, Harburg in Swabia, marriages were also quite late, though not as late as in the Mittelfranken villages. Average ages at marriages were: Reinhard Jakob,Die jüdische Gemeinde von Harburg (1671–1871) (Nördlingen: Verlag F. Steinmeier, 1988), 61. Similarly, very high marriage ages are found among Jews in the Central German city of Zerbst in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the small Jewish community of Zerbst in the Duchy of Anhalt, there were only 12 Jewish marriages between 1850 and 1874. The median age of grooms was 33.5 and of brides, 30. We do not know if any of the grooms were previously widowed or divorced although it would seem from the ages of a few of them that they might have been. We do know from the records that none of the brides had been married previously. The median age at marriage in the last quarter of the century (N=8) was much lower: 26 for grooms and 22.5 for brides [Salt Lake City microfilm number 1,185,024]. The main cause for such late marriage may be the relative isolation of Jews in Zerbst far away from other Jewish communities rather than legal restrictions.
Bavarian Christians also seem to have had a pattern of later marriage than did Christians in other parts of Germany. See John Knodel, “Demographic Transitions in German Villages,” in Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins, eds.,The Decline of Fertility in Europe.The Revised Proceedings of a Conference on the Princeton Fertility Project (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 352. Knodel gives data showing average age at first marriage in three Bavarian villages for the period 1700–1899 at 31.8 for men and 29.0 for women which is about three years later than the average he gives for a sample of German villages (28.6 and 26.1 respectively). This may indicate that even the very late marriage age of Bavarian Jews was not only caused by governmental restrictions. On the other hand, there seem to have been legal restrictions on the marriage of the non-Jewish population of Bavaria. Some general information on government restrictions on marriages of Christians in German states is found in John Knodel, “Law, Marriage and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth Century Germany,”Population Studies 20 (1967): 279–94. Such regulations often required evidence of ability to support a family, sometimes charged a marriage fee, and in some places set a minimum age for marriage (for instance 25). Marriage laws (which were generally in effect from the 1820s to the 1860s) were especially strict in southern Germany. None, however, compares in strictness to the Bavarian Matrikel laws on Jews which limited the number of Jewish families to a fixed number.
Paula Hyman, “Jewish Fertility in 19th century France,” in Ritterband,Modern Jewish Fertility, 83 shows the following median ages of women at first parity. To estimate the median age at marriage, one should subtract approximately one year from these figures.
Goldstein, “Village Jews in Germany,” 123, Table 4 gives the following figures for mean age at marriage: These figures indicate that Jews continued to marry later than Catholics in all periods but that the gap was reduced from 4.2 years for grooms and 2.3 for brides in the early nineteenth century to 0.9 years for grooms and 0.6 for brides in the third quarter of the century. In later years Jewish marriage age in the village increased again as did the gap between Jews and non-Jews.
See Wilhelm Freund,Zur Judenfrage in Deutschland. Vom Standpunkte des Rechts- und der Gewissensfreiheit (Berlin: Veit und Comp., 1843), 74. Permission to marry before age 24 could be granted only by the governor of the province (Oberpräsident) and only in emergency cases.
The percentage of births registered as illegitimate in Galicia were (in percentage): Source: Hugo Nathansohn, “Die uneheliche Geburten bei den Juden,”Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 6, 7 (July 1910): 103. It is clear that this statistic was the result of the non-registration of Jewish marriages rather than actual out-of-wedlock births since the Jewish illegitimacy rates in other countries, including Russia, was extremely low. In Russia it was 0.35% in 1895 (Nathansohn, 104). The only other country which showed relatively high rates of Jewish illegitimacy was Hungary, where it was 10.20% in 1906, almost identical to the overall rate for the population of the country. (Nathan Weldler, “Die Bevölkerungsbewegung des Jahres 1906 bei den Juden in Ungarn,”Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 4, 8 (August 1908): 119.)
Joseph Markus,Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939 (Berlin-New York-Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers, 1983), 166–71.
Joseph Markus, for instance, is quite outspoken in his argument that many of the figures given for Poland are inaccurate. He is seconded in that view by Lucjan Dobroszycki, “The Fertility of Modern Polish Jewry,” in Ritterband,Modern Jewish Fertility. On the other hand, Sara Rabinowitsch-Margolin (see below, note 38) argued strongly for the reliability of the records at least for relative figures.
This may in itself represent a change from patterns in the late eighteenth century when marriage was even earlier. See below note 44 for data from Kurland in 1797.
Detailed figures are given in Sara Rabinowitsch-Margolin, “Die Heiraten von Juden im Europäischen Russland vom Jahre 1867 bis 1902,”Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 5, 10 (October, 1909), 11 (November, 1909), 12 (December, 1909):145–52, 167–73, 177–87. Rabinowitsch-Margolin argues very strongly that the figures are reliable for relative purposes though not for absolute numbers.
Figures for Vilna are found in M. Abramowitsch, “Die Bewegung der jüdischen Bevölkerung in Wilna in den Jahren 1896–1907,”Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 5, 1 (January, 1909): 23–29. In Vilna even between 1875 and 1888, only 3.1% of men and 23.3% of women were marrying at 20 or below and 46.6% of men and 58.8% of women married between 21 and 25. By 1896–1907 the figures for Jewish marriage were as follows (in percentage):
Ibid., 26. Abramovitsch compares Jewish figures of those married by age 25 for 1897 and 1907 in Vilna as follows (in percentage):
Biale,Eros and the Jews, 162–64 presents evidence showing the inroads of the new pattern of later marriage in traditional rabbinic and other circles in Eastern Europe. As early as 1858, a treatise on marriage by Moses Feivish rejected marriage of boys at 13. Rabbi Naphtali Zvi Berlin stated in 1879 that early marriage was medically unsound. Evidence shows that in the late nineteenth century, students at Lithuanian yeshivot began to marry on average at age 25. TheAruch Hashulkhan, a halachic code written in the early twentieth century, in discussing marriage of very young couples (before age 18), wrote “and there is no reason to discuss this matter at length since it is virtually nonexistent in our time.”
A good example of the very early marriages of Russian peasants comes from the Mishino estate in the Gubernya of Riazan in central Russia. Peter Czap Jr. “The Perennial Multiple Family Household, Mishino Russia 1782–1852,”Journal of Family History 7, 1 (1982): 10. The singulate mean age at marriage was as follows: These figures come from a part of Russia well to the east of the Pale of Settlement to which Jews were restricted.
See Ansley J. Coale, Barbara A. Anderson and Erna Härm,Human Fertility in Russia since the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), esp. 148–55 including the maps on 149, 152–53.
Andrejs Plakans and Joel M. Halpern, “An Historical Perspective on Eighteenth Century Jewish Family Households in Eastern Europe,” in Ritterband,Modern Jewish Fertility, 18–32.
See Coale, Anderson and Härm,Human Fertility in Russia, 163–65.
Cezary Kuklo, “Marriage in Pre-Industrial Warsaw in the Light of Demographic Studies,”Journal of Family History 15, 3 (1990): 251. The exact figures (For Holy Cross Parish in south-central Warsaw) are as follows:
See Coale and Cotts Watkins,The Decline of Fertility in Europe, especially the figures for Im on pp. 80–152. These figures tend to show only the extreme northwestern counties of Hungary (the areas around Bratislava and Sopron) with patterns of fairly late marriage while areas of south-central Hungary show quite early marriage.
For a group of Calvinist villages in southern Transdanubian Hungary average marriage ages were quite early. In some towns in western Hungary and near Buda, marriage ages were a bit later. The mean ages at marriage for brides were as follows: Source: Rudolf Andorka and Sandor Balazs-Kovacs, “The Social Demography of Hungarian Villages in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (With special attention to Sarpilis, 1792–1804),”Journal of Family History 11, 2 (1986): 173.
Figures for 1898 show that of those who married the age distribution at marriage was as follows (in percentage): This would give approximate median ages as follows: See Bureau für Statistik der Juden (im Auftrage des Zionistischen Aktions-Komitees),Die sozialen Verhältnisse der Juden in Russland (Berlin-Charlottenburg: Jüdischer Verlag, 1906), 25.
Figures for Muslim families in European Russia in 1898 are as follows (in percentage): Source: Ibid. The great gap in marriage age between men and women may be influenced in part by the fact that Muslims practice polygamy. The difference in age also may be a reflection of greater inequality in gender roles in Muslim families as compared to Christians. The above figures indicate mean ages at marriage of about 26 for men and 20 for women.
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Lowenstein, S.M. Ashkenazic Jewry and the European marriage pattern: A Preliminary survey of Jewish marriage age. Jew History 8, 155–175 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01915912
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01915912