Transnational Marriage - Historical Attitudes

Historical Attitudes

The Bible and the Laws of Manu are two religious historical documents which give some insight into the views on transnational marriage in antiquity. In the Bible, Abraham's God warns the Israelites not to marry people from other nations for fear that they would then proceed to worship the gods of the other nations.

There are several instances of transnational marriages in the Bible, such as Joseph being given Egyptian wives by Pharaoh, Rahab of Jericho marrying one of the Israelite spies she hid, Ruth the Moabite taking care of her mother-in-law Naomi, and King Solomon marrying Pharaoh's daughter, as well as many other foreign wives. King Solomon married to make alliances and keep the peace, and the others because they lived by each other. However, the difference in reaction to the transnational marriages is how the newcomers responded to the Abrahamic God. King Solomon was punished by God for facilitating his wives' worship of their own gods in Israel and then worshipping alongside them. Intermarriage was discouraged if there was any difference in religious practice or belief. The book of Ezra tells of the response of the Jewish exiles to either separate from their foreign wives they had married in Babylon or be separated from the community of exiles when the exiles were trying to turn back to the Abrahamic God.

The Laws of Manu, a religious document for the Indo-Aryan Brahmins invading India, speaks of how to keep oneself clean but also intermarry with the indigenous peoples in order to create a caste system. A Nepali anthropologist writes on how a Brahmin man might marry four wives of different castes, and keep all the eating and living quarters of his different caste wives and children separate. His children and grandchildren, born to women of lower castes, will have even lower status and not be taught the laws. The only social mobility is downward. Similarly, although no longer specifically due to transnational marriage, the interracial sexual contact in the Americas produced a system that defined social status by skin color, and is still followed by some people, but in particular those whom it subjugated. People would marry those with lighter skin color to keep their social status and were against marrying anyone of "lower" status, particularly around the time of belief that certain people were of a superior race than others.

A slightly different perspective of interracial or transnational marriage is from those who tend to marry their cousins, sometimes even first cousins. They do so in order keep the family together socially and economically, thus disproving of marriage outside. Recently, this practice has become technically transnational due to differences in citizenship, even though the people are still family. An example of transnational marriage that kept the family together was among European royalty. Queen Victoria's grandchildren were all over Europe, keeping the royalty together. She was referred to as the "grandmother of Europe." However, some alliances were to their detriment, as due to them, they had to go to war, (in World War I). More recent examples are from a mass migration from the less developed regions of the world to the more developed regions, helped by the policies of family reunification. A fairly common practice among South Asian immigrants to the UK or USA is to have arranged marriages to someone back "home," in order to keep the culture and traditions within their family.