442 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



of adults of marriageable ages. If statistics of the number of mar- 

 riages per 1,000 Jews over fifteen years of age, and especially of un- 

 married adults, were obtainable, the rates for the Jews as compared 

 with the christians in Europe would show that they are yet less apt 

 to marry than the figures in the above table indicate. Thus it was 

 found in Berlin during the census of 1900 that of all persons over 

 twenty years of age the following percentage were married: 



Men. 



Jewish 51.62 per cent. 



Christian 60.38 per cent. 



Women. 

 52.51 per cent. 

 53.83 per cent. 



These low marriage rates, which are only a recent social phenomenon 

 among the Jews, are not confined to western Europe. Even in Kussia, 

 where the bulk of the 5,000,000 Jews live to-day under strict adherence 

 to their faith and traditions, early marriages are less frequent than 

 among the christians. The poor muscular development of the eastern 

 European Jews, which has in part been attributed to early marriages, 

 will have to be explained by some other causes. The following figures, 

 from the census of Eussia of 1897, give the percentage of persons who 

 married at certain ages, both among the Jews and among the general 

 population of the so-called ' Pale of Settlement.' 



It appears from this table that the Jews in Eussia marry later in 

 life than the christians in that country. Only 5.95 per cent, of all 

 the Jews who married in 1897 were less than twenty years of age, while 

 about five times as many christians married at this youthful age. 

 Even among the Jewesses only 27.76 per cent, married before reaching 

 twenty, as against double that number, 55.01 per cent., among christian 

 women. Marriages between twenty and thirty, on the other hand, are 

 more frequent among the Jews — 77.78 per cent, as against only 54.58 

 per cent, among christians, and 63.91 per cent, among the Jewesses, 

 and 38.53 per cent, among the christian women. Finally, marriages 

 among persons at advanced ages, over thirty, are contracted in about 

 the same proportions in both groups. In general, Eussia has an ex- 

 traordinarily large number of youthful marriages. Nowhere in 



