Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions by Witte Green Browning Page B

messianism and Hasidism, contributed to fundamental changes in European Jewish family life. Intellectually, the Enlightenment as well began to seep into Jewish thinking in the form of the Haskalah, leading to a more historical thinking and humanism among the elite. The Jews, therefore, who in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century were being considered for entry into central and western European society as full and equal citizens, were already reimagining themselves and the look of their own society.
    From the perspective of the European nation-state, emancipating the Jews came with the expectation of their “normalization,” that is, the shedding of their unique customs and their adoption of the norms of civil society, including intermarriage (Doc. 1–57). “Be a Frenchman outside and a Jew at home” became the formula for successful integration, granting the family, which had always been central to Jewish life, an even more central role in the preservation of Jewish identity. Thus European and American bourgeois society, which relegated women to the home, also elevated the role of women in helping maintain religious identity, closely linking concern for family with religious ritual.
    But the husband’s acculturation to the larger society, the disintegration of extended kinship networks, and the primacy of the nuclear family all worked against the preservation of Jewish identity along old lines. The modernization of the Jewish family, which took place over two centuries in a variety of contexts, affected sexual mores, family size, women’s roles, and parent-child relations everywhere.
    Judaism 11
    In the West an intellectual elite in the nineteenth century articulated a variety of Jewish responses to the dilemma of integration based on radically differing views on the nature of Judaism, including the degree to which change is possible. These divisions, which evolved into denominations, ranged from a humanistic “religion” on the model of liberal Protestantism (Reform), to the distinctive beliefs and practices of a “people” (Conservative), to a divinely revealed set of laws that could not be altered (Orthodox).
    Originally, the debates were centered on ritual, including marriage and divorce. Reform Judaism accepted Western legal forms of entering and dissolving the marital state, relegating rabbis to agents of the state and the marriage contract to a formalistic exchange of vows. For Conservative and Orthodox Judaism, however, who preserved Jewish law in this area, Jews were now living under two jurisdictions—the state and that of Jewish law—and the two did not always match up. Divorce was the greater problem, for the state did not recognize the need for a religious divorce prior to remarriage, but Jewish law viewed this second marriage as adulterous, the children illegitimate. With the acceptance of no-fault divorce in most states starting in the 1960s, this situation left many women who observed Jewish law chained to a dead marriage, and each denomination sought a solution. The Conservative movement composed a ketubah, the religious marriage contract, that could demand a husband and wife submit to a Jewish court, and many Orthodox organizations endorsed a prenuptial agreement, which contractually binds a husband to pay his wife’s maintenance until he divorces her religiously (Docs. 1–58 to 1–60).
    As important as ritual matters were, ethnic and familial ties among Jews were still strong, especially as the West received a steady flow of more traditional eastern European Jewish immigrants. After the destruction of European Jewry in World War II, the rise of Israel as a Jewish state served to enhance Jewish identification through the late twentieth century. But as the twenty-first century approached, intermarriage with non-Jews moved above the 50 percent mark; many American Jews saw it as a crisis that threatened Jewish continuity, with books and conferences devoted to seeking solutions. The