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Notes -
If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?
There's lots of suggestions, most of them bad. For example, Scandinavian countries have been touted as "doing it right" by offering generous perks to families such as paid family leave. But these efforts, despite outrageous costs, have done little or nothing to stem the falling birth rate. Sweden's fertility rate is a dismal 1.66 as of 2020, and if trends hold, the rate among ethnic Swedes is far lower.
I think that, like everything, deciding to marry and have a family comes down to status.
Mongolia is a rare country that has managed to increase its fertility rate over the last 20 years, from about 2.1 children per women in 2004, to about 2.7 today. This feat is more impressive considering the declines experienced worldwide during the same period. It's doubly impressive considering the fertility rate in neighboring Inner Mongolia (China) is just 1.06!
What is Mongolia doing right? Apparently, they are raising the status of mothers by giving them special recognition and status.
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1827418468813017441
In Georgia (the country), something similar happened when an Orthodox patriarch started giving special attention to mothers with 3 children:
https://x.com/JohannKurtz/status/1827070216716874191
Now, raising the status of mothers is more easily said than done. But I think it's possible, especially in countries with a high degree of social cohesion like in East Asia. In Europe, a figure like the King of Netherlands could personally meet and reward mothers. In the United States, of course, this sort of thing would be fraught as any suggestion coming from the right might backfire due to signalling. Witness the grim specter of the vasectomy and abortion trucks at the DNC. But the first step to fixing a problem is to adequately diagnose the cause. To me, the status explanation is more compelling (and fixable) than any other suggestion I've seen.
There was also a discussion last week about fertility = female status to check out too. I 100% agree. I don’t think people realize how completely the Hasidim in America debunk an environmental or economic cause. It can’t be environmental because they live in Brooklyn and Jersey. (A good researcher should look into microplastics and their garments however, perhaps how often they eat liver.) It can’t be economic because they are poor. It’s true that the Hasidic billionaires and millionaires subsidize the lives of the poor and that they all sorts of tax fraud schemes, but they are still poor, and in fact Hasidic women will work fully or part-time to support their husbands’ Talmud studies. So, what do they do? Having children is a status marker for both men and women; Hasidic girls at a young age learn about motherhood and how to value motherhood; they are completely cut off from America’s misogynistic culture of telling women that they need to sacrifice their life-potential to work.
It’s a mix of two things. (1) Status: I get fulfillment, social respect, attention, and conversation revolves around that; I am fulfilling God’s will by increasing the number of my people’s children; I am doing a good deed by increasing the number of my children because my people are oppressed. (2) Something we don’t have a word for: “the satisfaction in going through with the skills and stories you have heard from your youth”. It’s easy to do something you were trained in as a kid. Hasidic women don’t have to google anything about child birth or motherhood. They know everything already and what they don’t know will be explained by a wise elder over a cup of coffee (do they drink coffee? I actually don’t know). It’s not stressful or arduous at all. Not having children is stressful as you fall saliently behind your peers.
Japan was mentioned ITT as an example of a country that idolizes homemakers but has a low TFR and I think this misses something. It can’t be “you get respect from economic success and homemaking”, because then women will choose economic success. It has to be homemaking. By homemaking I mean raising children and all tasks associated with it. Japan is a consumerist culture, more so than America, and women have infinite distractions to enjoy which aren’t having children, and walking around as a mother does not grant you any status. In Hasidim, walking the streets as a mother of 16 kids would have you greeted like a saint for the blessings you have brought forth in the world.
“Artificial wombs” should be left out of this discussion entirely because it’s as ridiculous as believing in spontaneous generation. That isn’t going to happen. We are trying to raise healthy children, and they need mother-child contact for years.
The primary outgroup for Hasidim isn’t gentiles at all, and their education doesn’t really stress that they’re oppressed by gentiles the way that some secular Jewish identitarians do. The primary outgroup is secular Jews, and the enemy are those raised orthodox who leave (apikorsim - heretics), who lack the excuse of ignorance. This makes sense when you consider that the main hubs for the ultra-orthodox are in or in close proximity to (in NYC and Israel) the largest populations of secular Jews, who believe you can still be Jewish and otherwise live a normal materialist, secular life with 1.5 (or zero) children, and without praying and making the Talmud central to your entire existence.
Hasidic education therefore stresses most constantly and most seriously the evils of abandoning religion and joining the sinners next door, up to the point that some question whether secular Jews are Jews at all in some spiritual sense, despite the fact that (at least by matrilineal descent) they are unquestionably Jewish according to Halacha. Chareidi commentary about the gentile world is often confused or limited, especially outside of Chabad and a couple other groups that engage with it; dissident rightists pick out the occasional choice quote, but in truth, it’s not something they think about much at all.
The outgroup of Hasidim is gentiles. Secular Jews are the subject of intense outreach attempts by Hasidic organizations. Hasidim would love nothing more than every maternally-born Jew to become Hasidic. They spend money attempting to do this. There’s a first person account of this in Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (which is an amazing read). The head of a Hasidic dynasty (Rubashkin) personally made time to recruit a secular Jewish journalist, drawing a firm line between us (Jews) vs them (Iowan Christian Whites). There are abundant quotes by Rubashkin to that effect. Rubashkin had him put on teffilin, and at a dinner party spoke at length about how he should have lots of Jewish children. Rubashkin only ostracized this secular Jewish journalist when he learned that the Jewish journalist was sympathetic to the mistreatment of the gentiles by his Agriprocessors business. Once the Hasidic head realized the Secular Jew was siding with the gentiles, there was no more cameraderie and he was no longer a member of the ingroup. But for every moment before, he was greeted and invited and loved as a fellow Jew.
I can take screenshots of the book if you’d like. It’s probably the best single piece of evidence of the relationship between the workings of ultra orthodox Jewish ingroup vs outgroup dynamics. The Hasids truly hated the gentiles and likened them to animals, and they rejoiced at the prospect of scamming them. To the secular Jew they extended a sympathetic hand and beckoned them to join their side, all while advising him to have lots of children, criticizing him for only having one.
Now, compare this to the “new Orthodox Jews” of Colombia. Hundreds of Colombians converted to Orthodox Judaism, following every custom, but the head rabbi of Colombia has specifically excluded them from the eligibility of birth right. They are only “Jewish” as a parallel community that can’t taint the actual orthodox community of Colombia. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/04/14/converts-judaism-colombia/#:~:text=The%20emerging%20Jews%20are%20not,They%20are%20a%20parallel%20community.%E2%80%9D
I don’t think Rubashkin’s story is really comparable. Of course he attempted (and failed) to convert a secular Jewish journalist, attempted conversion is precisely the kind of behavior that governs ingroup-outgroup relations (like politics in countries without extreme ethnic divisions). It’s the far group that you never even intend to convert, and that describes most relations between the ultra-orthodox and gentiles. Even in this case Rubashkin is a non-central example; the vast majority of Chareidim have few interactions, commercial, personal or otherwise, with gentiles, and do not regularly think of them except in some cases as they relate to their way of life.
True, Chareidim (to varying extents, it must be said) believe in a form of evangelical mission toward secular Jewry, which they consider debased and degenerate. But the implication that this means they consider secular Jewry the in-group is highly misplaced. In America and Russia, the masses of them are sheep corrupted by secular society, the rich ones sometimes paypigs at best and evil influences on their children at worst. In Israel, the Chareidim are happy for secular Jews to die for them in large numbers while their young men stay safely ensconced in kollels and yeshivas.
Rubashkin’s case is sad, but the exploitation of cheap illegal immigrant labor is hardly a particularly Jewish phenomenon in the United States. As for the situation with the Colombian Christians converting to Orthodoxy, I think you misunderstand. Chareidim are usually moderately tolerant of converts. But Colombian Ashkenazim are, even if nominally orthodox, closer to secular Anglo-American Jews than to Chareidim. They are not, with few exceptions, a highly observant population. Their hostility is to peasant evangelical Christians bored of Catholicism invading their social club and marrying their children. You may disagree with that impulse, but it is again not particularly Jewish in character.
The truth is, and I cannot stress this enough, that the ultra-orthodox are unconcerned by antisemitism. The Jews who are - neurotic, secular Jews, whether of the left of right - spend their time building huge fortunes to support Israel, or write and produce movies like Ben Hur, or establish great publishing and media empires, or plough fortunes into creating ‘museums of tolerance’ to teach children about the Holocaust.
The ultra-Orthodox do little to none of this. They are unconcerned by antisemitism, unconcerned by a defensible racial or ethnic homeland for their people, whom they do not even see in wholly ethnic terms anyway (in some cases even considering 100% halachic Jews who have converted to another faith gentiles). This is in fact why so many - almost all of them - died in the Holocaust, because unlike secular middle-European Jewry (a substantial proportion of which had fled by 1941), they didn’t leave. To the Chareidim, antisemitism is a force of nature, a fact of the universe, like gravity. They do not think about it, they do not challenge it. Secular Jewry is the outgroup, not the in-group.
By the description you’ve given- I think I’ve always had this instinct, but your description really made it click- it’s not only that ultra-orthodox are unconcerned about anti-semitism, they almost want it back? Ghetto laws and explicit discrimination would push more Jews towards stricter modes of observance.
IME very hardcore Jews(understand that there are not true Hasidim in DFW, but there are very strict modern orthodox who are probably similar) and Copts are the friendliest of the ethnic-exclusivist groups. That would track with what you’re saying as well.
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