Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth Century America. .

Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth Century America. By Anne C. Rose (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Xii plus 283 pp.).

Historians have long understood that marriage has been both a powerful individual experience and an arrangement of considerable social consequence. We have a number of very capable histories of marriage and family that explore significant transformations in the ways that men and women court each other, enter marriages, and form families. This makes the absence of a sustained historical examination of marriage across religious lines in America so surprising. But Anne C. Rose reminds us that her Beloved Strangers is the first to appear in print. The reasons for this become clear throughout her work, as she must work creatively with the dearth of direct sources to interpret the experiences of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who intermarried between 1820 and 1920. That she succeeds so well is a tribute to her ability to read her sources so subtly and skillfully, and her willingness to transcend the religious boundaries that historians of American religion still so commonly observe.

There are few direct records of intermarriage during the century, so that Rose cannot trace patterns of interfaith marriage across the period. She does not know when, or even if, they became more or less popular during certain decades. It is impossible to say how common they were at any given time, as no systematic evidence exists. But Rose examines the public and private discourses on interfaith marriage very creatively to approach an interpretation of the human experience of these relations, and extrapolates from these sources some general arguments about mixed marriages.

Rose compensares for the absence of statistical sources on interfaith marriage by exploring the experiences of twenty-six families whose members crossed faith boundaries to marry, and then left letters, diaries or memoirs. In addition, she explores novels, religious publications, and the formal discussions of mixed faith marriage that religious officials conducted. Some of these provide rich discussions from which to draw, but many do not, In these cases, Rose reads discussions of related issues cleverly to infer about mixed marriages.

Some implicit arguments run through Rose's various chapters. The first is that though church officials expounded rules that forbade or severely regulated interfaith marriage, Americans have always married across religious divides. Moreover, individuals who entered into such marriages knew that they stretched the bounds of accepted norms. They negotiated these relationships in various ways, but recognized always that the boundaries had to be negotiated. It seems that these strictures dissipated somewhat over time, so that by 1920 most Americans seemed to accept mixed faith marriages as a matter of course--even if religious officials still worried about them. This is not to say that Americans came to encourage or even endorse them enthusiastically, but rather that they recognized that people from differing faiths would fall in love and marry each other--and that this search for personal happiness and fulfillment trumped religious affiliation.

Rose stresses throughout her work that because individuals who married across religious lines strained, if not explicitly transgressed accepted norms, they exercised agency. They knowingly chose their own destiny rather than comply with prevailing social norms. In this way they both defied and redefined what it meant to be Catholic, Jewish, or Protestant. The family became the agent of religious experience rather than church and synagogue.

Each chapter contains a myriad of other arguments and observations. For example, Rose notes that for most of the 19th century, Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis worried more explicitly about inter-faith marriage than did Protestant ministers, who seemed relatively silent about them. Catholic priests worried that inter-faith marriage posed a threat to the faith of the Catholic spouse and any children that these marriages produced, and violated canon law if not done in the right way--by a priest, with certain assurances given by the non-Catholic spouse. Rabbis argued over whether the traditional Jewish identity, which followed the mother's background, could be expanded to include children of Jewish fathers and their non-Jewish mothers. Could the child of a Jewish father and a Catholic or Protestant mother be Jewish? Protestant ministers left little written record of attitudes toward inter-faith marriage at all, perhaps because, as Rose speculates, they understood that such marriages more often drew the non-Pro testant spouse into the fold rather than pulling the Protestant spouse away. In later decades, Protestant ministers took note of mixed marriages, but shied from criticizing them directly.

Despite Rose's creative and nuanced reading of her sources, this book may prove frustrating to social historians. It relies for much of its evidence on the lives of twenty-six couples from the top social strata of society. Their experiences likely differed significantly from most Americans who crossed faith boundaries. In addition, their experiences often differed dramatically from each other, so that Rose is left with discerning patterns or ideal types from a handful of couples with very dissimilar experiences. Rose always packs her interpretations with interesting observations, but their general applicability eludes her. It is fascinating to read of General William Tecumseh Sherman and Senator Stephan A. Douglas's private lives, but it is not clear how unique or representative they were. Furthermore, these families did not always reflect on their crossing of the religious boundaries, so that Rose must interpret from scant evidence even in the families that left letters and diaries. Such is the case with pub lished sources such as novels, autobiographies and newspapers, which often treat interfaith marriage minimally or superficially. This is no criticism of Rose's efforts, but rather a sympathetic lament. She proves so adept with the dearth of sources available that one wishes she had more with which to work.

Beloved Strangers is a creative and long overdue interpretation of interfaith marriage in 19th century America that places husbands and wives at the center of religious history and reminds us that Americans have always crossed and negotiated religious boundaries even in our most intimate spheres. That Anne Rose has accomplished this so skillfully is a tribute to her creativity and breadth of understanding. That so much remains unearthed should spur historians to further work.