Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/511

Rh by any one. Intellectually we do have proofs that the children born to mixed marriages are not below the average of Jewish and christian in Europe. Grant Allen was the first to point out the striking number of distinguished persons of half-Jewish blood as something simply extraordinary. To mention only some of them—Sir John Herschel, the astronomer; Paul Lindau and his brother; G. Ebers, the Egyptologist; Professor Oldenburg, the philologist; Ludovic Halevy, the musician; Paul Heyse; Francis Turner Palgrave, the critic; W. Gifford Palgrave, the traveler; Sir H. Drumond Wolff, Prevost-Paradol; Edwin Booth, the actor; Bret Harte, the novelist, Elie Metchnikoff, the biologist; David Manin; Leon Gambetta; Sir John Millais, the British painter; and many others.

The church in many countries often complained that mixed marriages are a net loss to Christianity, because the children born to christians married to Jews are more apt to be raised in the tenets of Judaism. The Jews, on the other hand, have always maintained that each marriage of this kind is a distinct loss to Judaism. In fact, it has been pointed out that most of the children are brought up as christians, and that this is a distinct advantage to the Jews, because the race is thus maintained in its desirable purity, unadulterated by the infusion of foreign blood.

From statistical evidence available on the subject, it appears that about 75 per cent, of all the children born to Jews married to christians are baptized immediately at birth, and only 25 per cent, are raised as Jews. This is best seen in Hungary, where the law permitting mixed marriages stipulates that a person intending to marry one of another religion may make provision at the time of making the application for a marriage license about the religion of the children which may be born to them in the future. They may also leave the question open for future consideration, if they so desire. In the latter case it is provided that boys should follow the religion of their father, and girls that of their mother. Of the 3,590 mixed marriages contracted in that country from 1895 to 1903, only 801 have taken advantage of the provision of the law, and decided, at the time they applied for their marriage licenses, about the religious