Divorces in the Shtetl - Frequency

Recently, I've been involved in several conversations about the divorce rate in America's Jewish community.  Many people say that there was essentially no such thing as divorce in Eastern Europe and that this is purely a function of American society; they imagine shtetl life to have been some sort of utopia.

Before you read further, guess what percentage of marriages in Europe ended in divorce.  And see how close your guess is to reality.

Because the vital records for Nezhin's Jewish community are largely intact from the late 1850s through the Russian Revolution, I decided to look at the ratio of divorces to marriages each year in that town.  (You can browse through these record books online yourself; information on what is available with links can be found here.)

What I learned about that is below; I also took note of the reasons for the various divorces, which are interesting enough to merit their own future post (so stay tuned).

Nezhin Divorce:  Because he was blind

Was divorce really as infrequent in Eastern European Jewish communities as people say?  Looking at the records shows otherwise.  Here's what the data says:

YEAR	Number of Divorces  (that year)	Number of Marriages (that year)	Ratio of Divorces Compared to Marriages (that year)
1859	9	52	17.31
1860	7	39	17.95
1861	12	69	17.39
1862	13	65	20
1863	13	52	25
1864	5	59	8.47
1865	6 (may be missing end of year)	59	9.83% or more
1866	missing	69	unknown
1867	missing	72	unknown
1868	missing	70	unknown
1869	10	68	14.71
1870	11	54	20.37
1871	10	69	14.49
1872	10	70	14.29
1873	14	51	27.45
1874	14	53	26.42
1875	12	51	23.53
1876	9	58	15.52
1877	17	59	28.81
1878	17	78	21.79
1879	16	55 (through November)	About 26.67
1880	8 (through August)	69	About 17.39
1881	19	69	27.54
1882	18	68	26.47
1883	16	83	19.28
1884	16	55	29.09
1885	17	72	23.61
1886	11	82	13.41
1887	15	69	21.74
1888	12	82	14.63
1889	7	59	11.86
1890	10 (through October)	missing	unknown
1891	14	69 through August	About 13.53
1892	6	71 through October	About 7.04
1893	7 (through October)	missing	unknown
1894	14	56 through September	About 20.83
1895	9	73	12.33
1896	missing	missing	-
1897	missing	missing	-
1898	8	74	10.81
1899	11	67	16.42
1900	2 (through February)	57	About 21.05
1901	8	84	9.52
1902	missing	87	unknown
1903	13	91	14.29
1904	7	64	10.94
1905	3 (through April)	58	About 15.52
1906	missing	69	unknown
1907	4	53	7.55
1908	4	67	5.97
1909	4	63	6.35
1910	6	49	12.24
1911	7	47	14.89
1912	5	63	7.94
1913	6	51	11.76
1914	3	38	7.89
1915	2	15	13.33
1916	1	17	5.88
1917	missing	23	unknown
1918	3	77	3.9

In the above table, there were some data sets which were not complete.  So long as there was some data, I assumed that divorces/marriages (whichever was missing data) would have kept up at the same monthly rate for the rest of the year, for the part of the year from which missing records start.  Where a year's marriage or divorce records are missing entirely, I did not do a calculation for that year.

Since I'm a geek (in case you couldn't tell from this entire post), here's what the divorce/marriage ratio was like for Nezhin's Jewish community from 1859-1917:

Yearly Marriage/Divorce Ratio for Nezhin's Jewish Commnity, 1859-1917

Year Range	Average divorce/marriage ratio (per year in year range)
1859-1869	16.33
1870-1879	21.93
1880-1889	20.5
1890-1899	14.57
1900-1909	11.4
1910-1917	9.73

Drops in the marriage/divorce ratio seem to correlate to war or other unrest.  There is a drastic dip in 1864 & 1865--right when the Crimean War was causing mass military drafts (and ensuing deaths) of Jewish males.  The numbers dropped again starting in 1906, just after the first of several large pogroms in Nezhin (in October 1905).  There was significant unrest through the end of the data, as pogroms led into WWI which led into the Russian Revolution.

There were decades when over 1/5 of the marriages ended in divorce.  There were specific years  (particularly in the 1870s and 1880s) when close to 1/3 of marriages ended in divorce.  Divorce wasn't rare at all!

Nezhin Divorce:  He'd gone to America and proxy-divorced his wife via her father

So while this isn't a comment on the pros or cons of divorce, it's a message to American Jews--things weren't always better in Eastern Europe.  The Jews of the Russian Empire were human.  Divorce happened.

What do you think?  Is this what you would have expected?

Edited to add: Andrew Millard did additional analysis with this data. He says: I replotted the data with 95% confidence intervals on the ratio of divorces to marriages. Allowing for the confidence interval there's not much variation visible at annual resolution but 5-year averages do show a drop and a rise in the early 20th century. His plots:

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