Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/448

444 wives at the same age are not uncommon. Their birth rate is also above that of the non-Jewish population in those countries, as was shown to be the case in Algeria.

In western Europe and America, where the Jews have been intensely influenced by the occidental social environment, their marriage rates are low. But even here conditions have not always been the same as we find them to-day. Statistics of marriage rates in the beginning of the nineteenth century show conclusively that then the Jews married earlier and had comparatively fewer celibates than the christian population of Germany. Their economic, social and cultural condition at that time was about the same as that of the Jews in eastern Europe to-day. Even as late as 1861 to 1870 Austrian statistics show that 34.3 per cent, of all the Jews who married were less than twenty-four years of age, as against only 17.6 per cent, of christians who married thus early; 23.5 per cent, of the Jewesses were married at this early age, and only 15.1 of christian women. Conditions have changed recently, as was shown above, going hand-in-hand with the change in the sum total of the social, economic and intellectual conditions in which the Jews find themselves at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The extraordinarily large number of physical and mental defectives met with among the Jews in Europe has been in part attributed to the frequency of marriage of near kin among them. All available statistical evidence shows that consanguineous marriages are much more often contracted among Jews than among others. Jacobs, adopting Sir George H. Darwin's method, shows that in England 7.5 per cent, of all Jewish marriages are between cousins, while among Englishmen only two per cent, are of this class. Stieda found that in Lorraine the proportion of consanguineous marriages is 1.86 per thousand ordinary marriages among the protestants, 9.97 among catholics, and 23.02 among Jews. In Hungary marriage of near kin can only be contracted after a special permission has been obtained from the civil authorities. The data on the subject in that country are therefore reliable. During 1901 such permission was granted 270 times to Jews and 1,217 times to others. On a basis of the population, it thus appears that the Jews obtained proportionately about five and one half times as many permits as the christians. Among a thousand christian marriages 5.8 were between cousins, while among a thousand Jewish marriages there were 39.3. In Prussia the rates were in 1872-5, among the Jews 23.08 per thousand ordinary marriages; protestants, 14.68, and catholics, 9.98. From figures collected by Treitel in Berlin it appears that during 1900 the proportion of