A Self-Perpetuating Mourning Myth?
In Hillel Halkin’s review to which I linked here, he repeats one claim which I have never seen a source for, and would love for someone to substantiate or for people to stop repeating it.
Were Jews always as scrupulous about preserving the purity of their bloodlines as was the nineteenth-century Polish or Moroccan Jew who said the mourner’s kaddish for the child who married out?
I am aware of no contemporary source, whether it be rabbinic, ethnographic, popular, etc., which describes such behavior. Many people cite the description of Tevye’s behavior in Shalom Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, but in Tevye, the daughter, Chava, converted to Christianity and did not only intermarry. Here is the description from this edition, p. 78.
I came home and found my Golde curled up like a black ball of yarn in bed, having no more tears to shed. “Get up, my wife. Take off your shoes and let us sit shiva, as God commanded. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away-we are neither the first nor the last. Let us imagine,” I said, “that we never had a Chava, or let us imagine that, like Hodl, she left for the ends of the earth, and who knows if we shall ever see her again. God is compassionate and good and knows what He is doing!”
See this interesting comparison between the literary and various stage and screen depictions of Tevye.
An early description of what happened “a generation or two ago” can be found in Reuben B. Resnik’s article “Some Sociological Aspects of Intermarriage of Jew and Non-Jew” in Social Forces, vol. 12, no. 1 (Oct., 1933), p. 98.
Among certain Jews, a generation or two ago, a father would say Kaddish (a prayer for the dead) over the child who was intermarried, as if he had died.
This is still not a contemporary description of the practice. Others have asked this question, with some explaining it as a misunderstanding of something that Rabbi Gershom Meor Hagolah did.
So, if this is no more than a myth, please stop repeating it. If it is true, let’s see the evidence.
January 11th, 2010 at 12:56 pm
This is a very interesting post–I would also be curious to read any contemporaneous historical accounts of this practice.
One small correction: the last link in your post argues that this is a misunderstanding of something that Rabbenu Gershom Meor Hagola did, not the Maharam of Rothenberg.
If that author is correct, then the Or Zarua’s point in that anecdote is precisely the opposite of what had been assumed: the Or Zarua seems to be saying that Rabbenu Gershom did not reject his apostate son at all, and in fact sat shiva for him when he died.
Josh
January 11th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Josh,
Post corrected.