Call for Papers | “Mixed” Marriages? Debates and Discourses around Endogamy and Exogamy in Jewish History (c. 1850-1950)
28-30 June 2027 | University of Groningen and Kasteel de Haar
Convened by Dr. Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah (University of Groningen), Dr. Laurien Vastenhout (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies), and Dr. Sietske van der Veen (University of Amsterdam)
Organised as part of the Jewish Country Houses & their Worlds project — the international and interdisciplinary initiative exploring Jewish country houses as sites of European memory, mobility, and cultural exchange — this conference examines the role of marriage, kinship, and intimacy in shaping Jewish social worlds in the modern period. It seeks to reconsider marriage not merely as a private or communal institution, but as a key mechanism through which Jews navigated religious affiliation, class, cosmopolitanism, social aspiration, political allegiance, kinship and family networks, cultural belonging, notions of empire and processes of inclusion and exclusion across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Marriage alliances often functioned as vehicles for mobility, integration, diplomacy, economic strategy, and the consolidation — or disruption — of transnational Jewish networks. At the same time, they exposed tensions around communal boundaries, religious continuity and traditions, gender norms, and racialised understandings of identity within both Jewish and non-Jewish societies.
Endogamy — the practice of marrying within one’s own religious, ethnic, or social group — has long been a defining feature of Jewish communal life. Historically, Jewish marriage patterns often reflected not only religious boundaries, but also distinctions of class, geography, language, and communal affiliation, including divisions between Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and other Jewish subgroups. Yet exogamy, or “marrying out,” has always existed within Jewish societies, becoming increasingly visible and socially consequential in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the context of emancipation, secularisation, urbanisation, socio-economic mobility, imperial expansion, colonial encounters, and the emergence of modern nationalism.
What did “mixed” relationships – whether or not institutionalised in marriage – signify in different Jewish contexts? How were such unions understood within Jewish communities, by wider society, and by state authorities? How did individuals and families navigate the complexities of love, kinship, and belonging? To what extent were marriages instruments of social mobility, cosmopolitan aspiration, political alliance, survival, or assimilation? How did imperial structures, colonial encounters, and transnational commercial and philanthropic networks shape marital strategies and notions of communal identity and belonging? What are the heuristic possibilities — and limitations — of the category of “mixed marriage” itself?
This conference seeks to explore the debates, anxieties, lived experiences, and historiographical questions surrounding endogamy and exogamy in modern Jewish history, particularly — though not exclusively — among Jewish elites and across imperial, colonial and transnational settings. Rather than situating Jewish marriage patterns solely within nationally bounded bourgeois cultures, the conference encourages approaches that foreground mobility, empire, diaspora, global Jewish networks, Jewish/non-Jewish relations, and intra-Jewish social hierarchies.
More Information including full conference themes and submission guidelines can be found at: https://jch.web.ox.ac.uk/mixedmarriages