Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  The confusion and secrecy surrounding the conversion of O’Connor’s mother was not atypical for conversions in either Jewish or non-Jewish immigrant families. What we don’t know about this story is possibly more interesting than what we do know. How did the future cardinal’s Jewish or Catholic relatives feel about religious intermarriage in the first decade of the twentieth century? Tina Gumpel died when her daughter was a toddler, but Gustav lived until 1914. (They are both buried in a Jewish cemetery near Bridgeport.) Did Gustav the kosher butcher have any contact with his daughter after she converted to Catholicism? Or would he have sat shivah when his daughter converted? How did the O’Connor side of the family feel about the Jewish convert in their midst? Did they even know that Dorothy Gumpel had been born into a Jewish family? (She did not marry the cardinal’s father until nearly a year after her conversion.) If they knew, did the elder O’Connors embrace their Jewish-born daughter-in-law as they would have accepted a “cradle Catholic” of Irish heritage?

  The historical importance of mixed marriages in the early twentieth century, whether they involved different sorts of Christians, Christians and Jews, or, for that matter, religious believers and atheists, lies not in how they were viewed by families or society at that time but in the stage they set for the pluralistic future in which we live now. There is no way to understand the exceptionalist American affinity for religious conversion without understanding the social consequences of the great immigration and its aftermath between the twentieth-century world wars. Only one generation separates O’Connor, one of the leading American Catholic clerics of the late twentieth century, from those Bridgeport grandparents buried beneath headstones carved in Hebrew letters. For that matter, only two generations separate Susan Jacoby, born in 1945 and raised a Catholic, from the young Jewish student Max Jacoby, who sought refuge in America in 1849 after participating in the unsuccessful democratic uprising of 1848 in Prussia.*2 If one measures history in generations rather than years, these are astonishingly short spans.

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  The era of unlimited mass immigration to America ended abruptly in 1924, when, in the wave of xenophobia and anti-Bolshevism that followed the First World War, Congress passed a restrictive law establishing a system of “national origins quotas” for would-be entrants to the United States. The legislation was basically an attempt to stop immigration of Jews and Catholics from the poorer regions of Europe. Chinese were already shut out by the Exclusion Act of 1882, and the 1924 law excluded other Asians as well.

  The most tragic effect of the national-origins quota system would become apparent only in the late 1930s, when the Golden Door was slammed shut to German and many prescient Polish and Russian Jews, desperate to leave what was becoming Hitler’s Europe. From 1880 until the quota system was instituted, approximately one hundred thousand Jews a year had immigrated to the United States, reaching an estimated total of three million. In the first year after the 1924 law went into effect, only ten thousand Jews were able to enter the country—even though many already had relatives here. The impact on southern Italians was just as dramatic (though they would not wind up dead in Nazi gas chambers as a result). Under the old system, approximately two hundred thousand Italians came to the United States each year in the first decade of the twentieth century; the new quota was set at just four thousand. The blatant bigotry underlying the law was apparent in its statistical basis: annual quotas were set according to the proportion of a particular “nationality” in the American population in 1890—a time when white Americans were still, overwhelmingly, of Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent.3

  None of this changed until the 1960s, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a signature piece of legislation, now largely forgotten, embedded in his vision of a “Great Society”—an act abolishing the quota system. As he signed the bill into law on October 3, 1965, Johnson described the immigration system imposed in the 1920s as “un-American in the highest sense.”*3 In one of the near-poetic speeches for which the rough-hewn, controversial Johnson is almost never remembered, he declared, “Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide. The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources—because it was nourished by so many different cultures and traditions and peoples.”4 And religions. That many of the strangers did not remain strangers became apparent as every sort of religious and ethnic intermarriage—still a relatively unusual phenomenon during the period when Cardinal O’Connor’s parents began their life together—became increasingly common with each decade of the twentieth century.

  Although the 1924 quota system did clamp down on what contemporary white Protestants considered the immigration of “undesirables,” the closing of the door came too late to preserve the Protestant domination of American religious life that had existed, in one form or another, since the beginning of the republic. Given that the main purpose of quotas was the preservation of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant power, the law became a failure in spite of itself. If the secular Constitution was the critical first element shaping American exceptionalist attitudes toward religious conversion, the great immigration to the United States in the four decades bracketing the turn of the twentieth century—the last period of essentially unlimited immigration in American history—was the second. Americans rarely consider the obvious fact that no other modern nation has been constructed entirely of people from elsewhere. Yet immigration remains a part of our national DNA, in spite of the ease with which we forget disgraceful policies like the quota system, and in spite of our ambivalence (to put it mildly) about both legal and illegal immigration today. No other country in modern history has ever voluntarily created a society in which people of very different faiths were placed, in large numbers, in close proximity to one another on an equal civil (albeit not social) footing. For people even to consider changing their religion, they must, at some point, become acquainted with people of other religions. And when they do develop relationships with people of other religions—in spite of the dire injunctions of small-“o” orthodox priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, and defenders of many other faiths—human beings display a maddening tendency to have sex with, fall in love with, and marry people outside their group. It happened in the late Roman Empire, as Christians, pagans, and Jews intermarried; it happened during the Iberian Convivencia, as both Muslims and Jews intermarried with Christians; and it began to happen in America, on a previously unimagined scale, when immigrants of different faiths and cultures began living near one another and often attending the same schools in poor and working-class neighborhoods from sea to shining sea.

  Although the actual incidence of religious mixed marriage was undoubtedly much lower in the first three decades of the twentieth century than it is today, the best proof that intermarriage was a growing phenomenon lies in the documented efforts of American Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish authorities to discourage and, insofar as possible, anathematize the practice. At the heart of these ultimately unsuccessful efforts was the conviction that a mixed marriage would usually lead to the conversion of one spouse to another faith, or to a general attenuation of religious belief and practice on the part of both partners. In this gloomy analysis (from their point of view), the arbiters of faith were absolutely right—although attenuation of belief was probably a cause as well as a result of mixed marriage. However, laxity in religious practice and belief did not always ensue after a mixed marriage, especially if one partner converted to the religion of the other. During my years in parochial school, I often heard the nuns say that converts make the most devout Catholics—and this certainly must have been true when parents born into different religions, as Cardinal O’Connor’s were, produced children who became nuns or priests. Yet it is a mistake to generalize about the religious outcome of intermarriage, regardless of whether one partner converts. My father, as a Catholic convert, was not especially devout—quite possibly because m
y mother, the “cradle Catholic,” was downright subversive in her attitudes toward the church. “You don’t have to believe what the nuns say; you can make up your own mind” was her standard comment whenever I would challenge something Sister Mary So-and-So had said about a theological question like the virginity of Christ’s mother. It is now clear to me that attenuated religious belief long preceded my parents’ marriage.

  •

  By the 1880s, the United States was not the only country whose government eschewed any interference with religious intermarriage. From the French Revolution through the unification of Germany—followed by Bismarck’s 1875 law establishing civil marriage—one European country after another had disengaged the state from its long involvement with upholding and enforcing the laws of church and synagogue regarding marriage outside their faiths. The United States was, however, the only country in which the national government never backed up religious institutions in their efforts to discourage members from marrying outside the fold. You could be married by a minister, a priest, a rabbi, or a judge—all of whom were licensed to perform weddings in most states right from the start—and the government recognized you as husband and wife. The state did not care whether you were a Catholic marrying a Lutheran, a Baptist marrying a Methodist, or a Jew marrying an Episcopalian: you were married in the eyes of the law, whatever your family or your church thought about the religious appropriateness of the match. You want to sit shivah for your son if he marries a shiksa? Fine. You want to welcome the new daughter-in-law, teach her to make latkes, and hope that she’ll see the wisdom of converting? Mazel tov. Your government doesn’t care. The same was (and is) true of divorce. Orthodox Jewish women, for example, are required by Jewish law to receive a get—a divorce decree allowing them to remarry in the faith—from their husbands. But the get has no standing in civil law: if an Orthodox Jewish wife receives a divorce decree from a civil court, she is legally, albeit not religiously, free to remarry. In similar fashion, American courts repeatedly refused to uphold prenuptial agreements, required before 1970 by the Roman Catholic Church, that children of a mixed marriage be raised in the Catholic faith. Catholic prenuptial agreements governed by Canon Law, like all religious contracts, were private affairs and no business of the state.

  American public schools posed another problem for clerical authorities who wished to discourage, even though they could not legally prohibit, mixed marriage. As the new immigrants began arriving, local and state governments, particularly in the Northeastern, Middle Atlantic, and Midwestern states, began an unprecedented expansion of elementary and secondary school education. The new Jewish immigrants, so often shut out of the schools that existed in Russia and Poland, eagerly embraced American public education. Protestants, except for the small upper class that attended private schools, had always gone to public, called common, schools. The Catholic Church alone, after the Civil War, had begun to finance the only large, alternative religious school system in the United States. American Catholic leaders originally had hopes of arriving at some sort of arrangement with American states and localities, resembling a settlement that had emerged in Germany, in which parochial schools of all religions would receive taxpayer subsidies. Their hopes were stymied in the late 1870s and early 1880s, when sixteen states passed so-called Blaine Amendments, prohibiting taxation for any religious education.*4 In spite of the intense Catholic emphasis on education—and this was still true at the high-water mark of parochial school attendance after the Second World War—only about half of Catholic children ever went to parochial schools. The rest either could not afford the tuition, or had parents who simply preferred public school. (The preference for public school was stronger among Italian Catholic immigrants, who often viewed the American church as “the Irish church.”)

  Jews, including many religiously observant immigrants from Russia and Poland, had very different attitudes from Catholics toward public schools. Jewish yeshivas enrolled only the most traditionally observant American Jews, regardless of whether they were first-generation immigrants, and were largely ignored by working-class immigrant parents, who saw their children as future clerk typists, bookkeepers, or business owners—and, by the second generation, teachers, doctors, and lawyers. For the most part, Jews were simply grateful for the opportunity to send their children to school, and they had no expectation of or desire for state support of religious education. If they wanted their children to go to a Jewish school, they would pay the tuition themselves. A state that left religion alone and allowed everyone to attend taxpayer-supported schools was the Jewish immigrant’s dream.

  Most significant from the standpoint of religious and ethnic intermarriage was the great expansion of high school enrollment that began shortly after the turn of the century. From 1900 to 1940, the population of high school graduates nationwide increased from 7 to 49 percent. The rise in high school attendance began well before the First World War and, in metropolitan areas, included many children of those who had immigrated in the preceding two decades. High school, for those generations, was a time when teenagers were not only “dating” in the modern sense but choosing marriage partners. Religious leaders would have been fools not to be fearful of the consequences, from the standpoint of keeping the faithful faithful, of having Jews, Catholics, and Protestants—the Big Three—go to school together at a time when hormonal urges are most powerful.

  So it was that, in 1918, the Catholic Church revised Canon Law with its first explicit rules for priests confronted by lay Catholics who wished to marry someone of another faith. Pastors were urged to use every possible form of moral suasion to discourage mixed marriages, but the church recognized that, in countries like America, where individual rights were highly valued and a secular government prevailed, it was unrealistic to hope that all intermarriage could be prevented. Without the assistance of state coercion, priests would not be able to convince all young lovers that their desire to be together was unholy. In such instances, the priest was urged to treat the marriage as an opportunity to convert the non-Catholic. In a manual based on the 1918 Canon Law revisions that might well have been titled “Advice to Crafty Proselytizing Pastors” (its real title was “Pastoralia, Way of Approach”), priests were urged to conceal their displeasure when a “mixed” couple seemed bent on marrying.

  It will not help matters to visit our severest displeasure on the offenders, for such an attitude may only serve to force them into a more regrettable course of action. The non-Catholic party in particular should be treated with the utmost kindness and consideration. If this is done, a real opportunity may be created and a convert may be won to the Church….If it is gently hinted that the prospects for future domestic happiness and peace will be brighter and that the necessary dispensation can be obtained more easily on condition that the non-Catholic consents to familiarize himself or herself with the doctrines of the Church, the latter rarely will manifest any reluctance to undergo the required instruction….In this manner we may succeed in making a convert; but, whatever may be the outcome, nothing will be lost. For if the non-Catholic party does not enter the fold, at least he will gain a better appreciation of the Church, and the danger of perversion on the part of the Catholic will be lessened.5

  If the non-Catholic, in spite of all this friendly persuasion, did not agree to convert before marriage, a special dispensation was required from diocesan authorities. A small local Catholic population, which might leave a Catholic woman an old maid if she insisted on a husband of her own faith, was one ground for such a dispensation. That a Catholic man in such a setting might be left a bachelor if he held out for a Catholic wife was not a cause for dispensation. One can only speculate about the reasons for this sex disparity in church recommendations. Perhaps it was assumed that a man was free to travel in search of a wife, but a good Catholic girl was not. Certainly, the status of a single woman in Catholic communities was much lower than that of an unmarried man. Becoming a nun was the only way to escape the stigma; in early twentieth-century Ca
tholic America, there was no equivalent of the respectable New England Protestant spinster. Another cause for dispensation was unflinchingly realistic, in that it covered cases where there was “a strong suspicion that the two parties have had sexual relations,” and that if they remained unmarried “worse things might happen.” Another valid rationale kicked in when the worst had already happened and the woman was pregnant.