The Matchmaker

Our young people seem to be fully capable of choosing their own mates. At any rate, they feel that they are, and they deeply resent interference on the part of others. Such a condition has not always existed. It does not exist everywhere even now.

For one thing, parental authority means comparatively little in twentieth-century America. Mothers and, to a lesser extent, fathers, are honored chiefly by the singing of sentimental songs and the giving of useless presents on certain days of the year. In China, the worship of parents and ancestors is still important. In New England, not many centuries ago, it was a serious and sometimes a capital offense to rebel against authority. In some of the most highly civilized countries of ancient times, the paterfamilias had the right of life and death over his offspring. His authority might last until his death. It was usually unimpaired until the child was married. Then the girl became the subject (under some codes, virtually the slave) of her husband. The boy became the head of a new family, though he owed respect and perhaps certain duties of obedience to his own father.

With strong paternal or parental authority goes usually the privilege of marrying off the children, whose tastes and inclinations may or may not be consulted. Right now in the United States, in families of old American stock, there are mothers strong-willed enough to impose their notions of what constitutes a suitable husband upon their daughters. “Mother knows best” in matrimonial as well as in other matters, and is able to carry out her desires. Of course, the motives of the domineering parent may be selfish or not. He or she may be unselfish and still cause a calamitous marriage by bringing together young people who are temperamentally unsuited for each other. On the other hand, inexperienced boys and girls who are free to choose for themselves often become the victims of an evanescent infatuation. From the point of view of, say, Dorothy Dix, the moral is that parental experience should generally be called upon for advice, though the absolute veto, except as to children who are really too young to marry, is hardly desirable. Granting this, it may still be argued that only the companionate marriage offers a genuine solution to many problems of our time.

Of the general evolution of marriage I have already written, and here I shall consider for the most part matters not discussed in Little Blue Book No. 83. With the companionate marriage and other allied questions, a number of Little Blue Book authors have dealt. It may be well to say here, though, that unfamiliar and consequently strange marriage customs should be interesting to us not merely as stray curiosities, but primarily because they throw light on our own manners and morals. Rice is thrown at our weddings without any magical intent, but still because the showering of grain upon bride and groom has been at other times and is in other lands considered a means of promoting fertility. We see little of the chaperon, and when we do see her we hardly realize that she takes the place of the duenna, the eunuch at the seraglio door, and other guards charged with the duty of seeing that persons of the opposite sexes not married to one another shall be kept apart.

The matchmaker has his (or her) place in the economy of things when young people eligible for marriage have insufficient opportunity to meet each other socially, and especially when more or less complex contracts dealing with economic goods, or with questions of precedence and social status, are involved. Thus, the marriage of kings and princes has often hinged upon delicate diplomatic negotiations. A prince of Wales may dance with stenographers and flirt with actresses, but is likely to marry a princess after consulting ministers of state. He had better not fall in love with an Italian princess unless she can be persuaded to become a Protestant or he is willing to renounce his right to succeed to the throne. His limitation in this regard is set by an act of Parliament.

Pecuniary considerations have often been primary problems in amateur and professional matchmaking. The connection between love and money is an old one, though not one which existed at the earliest stages of human development. Money was first used in a comparatively recent period, and the objects of capital which it represents are little known to simple savages. Whatever the nature of the tie men formed with women when human beings first appeared may have been, we may be sure that it did not depend upon the accumulation of goods. The marriage for money must, then, be considered a by-product of civilization.

So far as the matchmaker deals with money, he is an agent of a familiar sort. For example, there are peoples among whom it is customary for the father to think of his daughter as a piece of valuable property. His whole interest is to receive as much as possible for her in cows or weapons or silver. What his daughter will think of her husband is for him a matter of no importance. The purchaser must be able to pay for what he is getting, and he must be trustworthy if there are to be deferred installments. The tribe or the community often limits the circles from whom the husband may be drawn, but it may limit still more the marketability of objects other than daughters.

This is the extreme form of the economic motive in arranging matches. When the husband is “bought,” and in most instances when a bridal price is paid, the person or persons receiving the money pays some attention to the desirability of the marriage from the points of view other than the pecuniary one. The matchmaker consequently becomes something more than a business agent. In fact, he often officiates by virtue of his position. That is, he may act because he is a chief or a priest. Or he may be a relative charged with this delicate duty. Whether or not he receives any compensation depends upon the usages of the community.

Newly married young women make up most of the matchmakers with us. To be sure, cynics say that the sex as a whole is engaged in a conspiracy to deprive bachelors of their freedom. When men who have just been married talk to their friends who are still single about the advantages of matrimony, it is sometimes assumed that they are motivated by the desire to assuage their misery in accordance with the familiar principle. However, the amateur matchmaker can derive no direct (at least, no economic) benefit from his efforts in ordinary cases. Rather he is confronted with the necessity of buying engagement and wedding presents for the beneficiary (if you prefer, for the victim) of his work.

The two chief enemies of marriage are the religious ideal that there is something holy about celibacy and the economic state in which a wife or wives and their offspring are expensive to maintain. Among the early Hebrews, neither the one nor the other existed. It was considered a divine duty to “increase and multiply,” and wives and children were ordinarily put to work at agricultural tasks. The position of bachelors and spinsters consequently became anomalous, and matchmaking was considered a meritorious act. The medieval and modern Jews have been for the most part an urban people. This fact and their living to a large extent in predominantly Christian communities has meant the decline of polygyny among them, but orthodox Judaism still favors fruitfulness.

During the medieval period of oppression and massacres, it was all but miraculous—some rabbis and ministers say it was only because of the direct intervention of God—that the Jewish people survived. Allowing amply for recruits from without, as of the Chazars, a Turkish body living in what is now southern Russia, we must see that survival depended upon fecundity. The personal hygiene of the Jews, it is true, was better than that of their Christian neighbors; but we must not fail to give due credit to the matchmaker.

Perhaps only one Jewish youth survived in a town after a particularly bloody massacre, and the nearest family of his faith was a hundred miles off. It was, then, considered a particularly meritorious act of piety to find him a wife. Soon there arose a professional class of shadkans or shadchans, who enjoyed a legal status at least as early as the twelfth century. In the early days, these men were mostly rabbis and persons engaged in the study of Talmudic law and theology. It was considered improper for them to derive pecuniary benefits directly from their learning, but the matchmaking profession seemed a dignified way for them to earn a livelihood. Old scrolls record the fact that some of the most famous rabbis of the Middle Ages were shadchanim.

The matchmaker’s fee was usually a percentage of the dowry, which it was to his interest to make as large as possible. After a time, the haggling and indecorous competition which arose drove most of the learned men out of the profession, which was no longer held to be so honorable as in the earlier time.

The shadchan has survived among Jews to this day, chiefly in the Slavonic countries and elsewhere among immigrants from them. In old-fashioned families, the girls are not permitted to mingle freely with boys. Negotiations for their marriage are carried on by the parents, usually with the assistance of common friends or a matchmaker. In America, the shadchanim are mostly located in the East Side of New York. They advertise in the Yiddish newspapers, announcing their office hours and setting forth their ability to provide professional men, businessmen and honest workingmen for maidens and widows. A matrimonial bureau has recently been opened in a magnificent apartment house on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Others are found wherever there are large Jewish communities.

The American-born Jew is not particularly likely to patronize the professional matchmaker, since he can meet girls freely in dance halls and in the homes of his friends, just as Gentiles can. There are, indeed, young lawyers and physicians and dentists who appreciate that their education entitles them to large dowries, and who feel that they can find the best selection of beauty and the money that goes with it by visiting a shadchan. There are more or less wealthy Jewish merchants in small cities with daughters to marry off, but only non-Jewish neighbors. It is the matchmaker who wages a vigorous war against assimilation and for his commission.

The shadchan has often appeared in fiction, and almost always as a comic character. It is his business to convince the prospective bridegroom’s family and friends that he is in touch with the most beautiful and desirable of all womankind. If she is hunchbacked, her hump is ignored or else set forth as a slight curve which is but an added embellishment. A first-rate matchmaker can convince a hesitating swain that a one-legged girl is more desirable than she would have been if God had given her two.

There is an anecdote about a matchmaker who finally brought a modest youth to be inspected by a beautiful virgin’s parents. Whatever the young man said about himself, the shadchan made out to be a ridiculous understatement. Thus, “Well, I manage to eke out a living” was followed by an indignant, “Why, he’s a millionaire!” “I come of a pretty good fam—” was interrupted by “I tell you all his relatives are great scholars.” Then the youth was unlucky enough to sneeze, and he apologetically explained, “I got a little cold.” “Pfui,” shouted the matchmaker, “a little cold! Why, he’s got consumption.”

It would be unfair to suggest that all Jews look upon marriage as a money-making venture, or that only Jews take such an attitude in the countries of European culture. After all, matrimonial papers and correspondence bureaus do flourish in the land of the kleagle, the evangelist, and the holy King James Bible. The rich widow is held out as a bait for the yokel’s ten cents in stamps, and sometimes for all the money he has in the bank as well.

In higher circles of society, Americans often purchase titles for their daughters. I do not doubt that the heart of a baron or a marquis can palpitate in honest and passionate love for a sugar or an asbestos princess. It is convenient, though, that the vons and des do not become similarly enamoured of vivacious Yankee misses whose pas do not cut coupons and whose mas do not patronize the opera.

It is hardly necessary for me to inquire into the morality of marrying money. Mores depend upon time and place. In Germany and Austria-Hungary, before the Great War, it was expected that military officers who were not independently wealthy should choose brides who were. According to Bloch, the Geldehe or marriage for money was common also in the higher middle class and in the aristocracies of noble birth and finance. The impoverishment of the nobility in several European countries since the war and the rise of profiteers and successful speculators anxious to win social prestige have operated in many instances to make pecuniary considerations primary in marriage. With the French, the dot or dowry has been and still is very important.

Travelers have found matchmakers at work in Korea and Siam as well as (among non-Jews) in a number of European countries. The go-between in Mohammedan lands is usually an old woman. Westermarck lists a number of peoples at low levels of culture who employ matchmakers. They include a variety of Indian tribes in the two Americas, Philippine Islanders, Formosans, Africans, and natives of the mountains in the north of India.

It is a widespread custom, too, for the young man in love, even if he is free to choose for himself, to ask his parents or other relatives to do his wooing for him. A Koryak youth is expected to do this, but he may declare his own intentions if the match he intends to make is disapproved by his parents. In such case, he is not supposed to say anything. Instead, he proposes by entering the house of his prospective father-in-law and doing such of the housework as becomes a man in his part of the world. It is good etiquette for the host to remain as silent as he.

Clearly, genuine or conventional bashfulness is at the bottom of such a custom. Sexual modesty is, in fact, at least as common with savages and barbarians as it is with civilized people, although the manifestations of it are not entirely the same. Therefore, a matchmaker may be required to bring together shy young people even if the economic aspects of matrimony are simple.