The effect of ethnicity and educational attainment on Jewish marriage patterns: Changes in Israel, 1957-1995

This paper presents a study of changes in marriage patterns among the Jewish population of Israel over nearly 40 years. Using data from four Israeli Censuses spanning experience from the late 1950s to the mid 1990s, we employ Schoen's harmonic mean model in a multivariate framework to consider, simultaneously, changes over time in age-specific marriage rates by ethnicity and educational attainment. Our analyses point to a number of clear and interesting findings: (1) an increasingly positive association between marriage and educational attainment, especially for women; (2) the continuing central role of ethnicity in mate selection, despite important declines in ethnic endogamy over the period; (3) a decrease in the prominence of unions of 'exchange'; (4) some evidence of increasing 'block' endogamy among Jews of Asian and African origin; and (5) a small increase in educational homogamy over the period. Interpretations and implications of these findings are discussed.