Tu b’Av: When Jews get in the mood for love

Intermarriage of Jews in the US led to a ‘decade of renewal’ in the UK

In the 1990s, the British, American and other Diaspora Jewish communities went through a period of angst over the question of intermarriage. US figures at that time suggested that around half of US Jews were married to a non-Jewish partner. The implications of this were much debated. Whether intermarriage was seen as an existential threat to Jewish existence or as an opportunity to bring more households into Jewish life, a consensus emerged that Jewish life needed to be renewed and revitalised.

This sense of a crisis that had to be addressed was exported to the UK. In 1991, Chief Rabbi Sacks inaugurated a ‘decade of renewal’, and a new organisation, Jewish Continuity, was set up to push the process forward. As Ben Gidley and I argue in our 2010 book Turbulent Times, the renewal process had an impact beyond the United Synagogue, bringing about a more vibrant and creative British Jewish community.

At the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, intermarriage is an essential topic for research as part of our long-term commitment to demography. One striking finding reported by JPR’s David Graham in 2016 is that the UK Jewish intermarriage rate has held steady at around 25% since the 1980s. It does not seem to have been dramatically changed by the institutional efforts to ensure Jewish renewal and continuity (then again, there is no way of knowing how much higher that rate may have been without those efforts). Graham’s research also showed that only a third of children of intermarried couples were being raised as Jews.

There is no single dominant type of Jewish household.

JPR’s research has also found that British Jews are more likely to live as part of a couple (60%) than the wider population, and 90% of those living in a couple are married or in a civil partnership. While there is no single dominant type of Jewish household, Jews are less likely to cohabit or live in single-parent families than the general population. Jews are also less likely to divorce. While such findings suggest that the majority of British Jews are capable of finding Jewish partners and building households together, stable in-marriages are not panaceas for demographic decline. As JPR’s Daniel Staetsky has shown, on a global scale, intermarriage is a less important driver of decline than Jews as a whole having children at less than ‘replacement’ rates. It stands in contrast to the fertility of strictly orthodox Jewish populations; the UK Haredi population is growing at over 4% per year).

So, how does love fit into the picture? While JPR might be able to demographically track the consequences of love and its endurance (or lack of it), the processes through which Jews do or do not form relationships are largely unexplored outside of the strictly orthodox Jewish community. It is striking that, amidst the sense of crisis about intermarriage in the 1990s, no organisation thought to commission research on Jewish love, sexuality and sexual attraction. Then, as now, we can say nothing beyond anecdotes on how Jews may or may not want to couple up.

Tu B’Av reminds us that Jews are sexual beings and that ‘love’ is an unruly emotion. It also reminds those of us who count Jews that behind every demographic statistic, the erotic lurks and will not be tamed.