Israel's Destiny

Fertility and Mortality in a Divided Society

Jon Anson

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351511292
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Sozialwissenschaften
• Thema: Demographie

For over a hundred years, demography has been at the heart of the Zionist project, reflected in the goal of creating and maintaining a Jewish majority in Israel and in ensuring the physical continuation of the Jewish people. Demography continues to be an essential issue in the current struggle between Israel and Palestine. Yet in academic discourse, demography is treated as a minor, largely technical side-issue in the social sciences, with little theoretical consideration given to population processes as social processes. Israel's Destiny: Fertility and Mortality in a Divided Society brings together important recent work in this area. The contributions to Israel's Destiny focus on the influence of religion, religiosity, nationalism, and ethnicity on fertility and mortality in Israel.Israel's Destiny is divided into four sections: the first focuses on fertility, particularly Israel's apparently high birth rate when compared with other countries with a similar standard of living; the second looks at patterns of nuptiality and contraception and the way marriage patterns are shaping group boundaries; the third looks at mortality, particularly among men; and the fourth looks at social policy effects of the demographic process.The main focus is that differential reproduction of the population by national and ethnic group, as well as social class--through fertility and mortality--and the social structuring of the population--through marriage patterns--are critical elements in the creation and evolution of Israeli society. The editors' introduction places all these studies in a wider perspective of current demographic research. The volume provides a concise population history of the state of Israel to help the reader put the studies in their proper local and historical context.

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Israel’s Destiny: Fertility and Mortality in a Divided Society

Jona Schellekens and Jon Anson

Introduction

In Israeli public discourse, demography is associated more than anything else with the relative size of different ethnic groups, and population forecasts. This is a frustrating view of the subject for many academic demographers, who devote so much of their time in an effort to understand a specific domain of human behavior. Counting the population of Israel and making population forecasts are mostly the task of the Central Bureau of Statistics, but this is only a small and very applied part of demography. Most demographers doing scientific research are far more interested in studying the determinants and implications of demographic behavior than in undertaking technical surveys and forecasts.

This stereotype of the demographer as a kind of population accountant is not limited to public discourse. In Israeli academia too, demography is treated as a minor, largely technical side-issue in the social sciences, with little theoretical consideration given to population processes as social processes. This is a reflection of the more general sociological view of society as based on current relations between socially identified roles, with little attention given to the people who fulfill these roles, and even less to their reproduction. The purpose of this book is to correct this lacuna. It is self evident that all societies are made up of people who have been conceived and born, and all of who must die, yet it would appear less self-evident that conception, birth and death are all socially patterned. In this book we focus on work that has been published in the past decade, in particular articles reporting research on the influence of social class, religion, religiosity, nationalism, and ethnicity on fertility and mortality in Israel.

More than any other social institution, the family is at the heart of sociology. Demographers are well positioned to contribute to empirical research on the family because the census, vital statistics, and fertility surveys are the primary sources for studies of the family. In the past, different names were used by sociologist demographers to describe their area of specialization, including social as well as sociological demography (Goldscheider 1971; and Matras 1977). Today, however, social demography is accepted by most sociologist demographers to describe their area of specialization (Hirschman and Tolnay 2005). Social demography covers a wide range of topics, including fertility and nuptiality, household and family structure, morbidity and mortality, senescence, population aging, education, income inequality, and migration.

The substantive areas selected over time for the main focus in the study of fertility have changed with the historical circumstances and with the theoretical perspectives that guide research. After World War II, Demographic Transition Theory was the dominant paradigm in fertility studies. It attributed the decline in fertility that had occurred in the developed countries before the war to social and economic changes including the spread of education and rational thought, changes in the economic benefits and costs of children and the emergence of new economic roles for women that were incompatible with childbearing. Considerable stimulus to the development of transition theory came with the Cold War. In most developing countries mortality was declining, while fertility remained high, and the political implications of this disequilibrium was reflected in an academic concern that the high rates of natural increase resulting from such levels of mortality and fertility would interfere with economic development (Coale and Hoover, 1958).

Explanations of the fertility decline fall into two major categories: adjustment and innovation. The view of fertility decline as an adjustment states that fertility control reflects an adjustment to economic and social change. The view of the decline as a process of innovation, on the other hand, states that the adoption of fertility control represents new behavior due to changes in the acceptability of fertility control on moral grounds. Empirical tests have failed to settle the dispute so far and a consensus view is not yet in sight (Hirschman 1994). This book contains a relatively recent contribution to this debate by Barbara Okun in chapter 4.

In the last thirty years, fertility in most developed countries has declined below replacement level, or below the number of children that is needed to keep a closed population from declining in the long run, which is approximately 2.1 births per woman in low-mortality countries. Three major categories of explanations have been suggested for the recent decline in fertility: economic factors, especially those concerned with women’s employment opportunities and relative incomes (e.g., Engelhardt et al. 2004); cultural or attitudinal change, particularly associated with assertive individualism and secularization (Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988); and contraceptive and related technological factors such as improved contraceptive methods, induced abortion, and sterilization pills (Murphy 1993).

Early mortality decline, particularly in today’s more developed countries, was closely associated with improvement in living standards and public health (Harris 2004; Cutler and Miller, 2005). Following a decade of stagnation in the 1960s, adult mortality in many developed countries started to decline faster in the 1970s, mainly as a result of delayed cardiovascular disease (Olshansky and Ault, 1986). However, more recent analyses indicate that there may also be counter-tendencies at work, limiting mortality decline (Olshansky et al. 2000). These findings raise an old debate about the contribution of living standards to mortality decline. Investigating the period 1850–1970, McKeown (1979) had shown that medical technology only played a very minor role in the decline in mortality in today’s developed countries. Instead, McKeown suggested that improved living standards explain most of the decline in mortality. Obviously, this hypothesis needs reassessment in the light of recent developments. Today, the correlation between per capita income and life expectancy at birth among developed countries is very weak. Life expectancy in Israel, for example, is higher than in the United States and, indeed, life expectancy at birth for Israeli men is among the highest in the world. That of Israeli women, however, ranks near the middle of developed countries.

One of the explanations for the poor performance of the United States is the degree of income inequality. Kawachi et al. (1997) show that income inequality is strongly correlated with both per capita group membership and lack of social trust, both of which are associated with high mortality. However, while early analyses suggested a clear positive relation between income inequality and mortality rates (Rodgers 1979), recent analyses suggest that this may not longer be the case in very high income countries. The changing age distribution of relative poverty may have affected the way income inequality in these countries impacts on mortality measured across all ages (Lobmayer and Wilkinson 2000).

A Concise Population History of the State of Israel

This is not the place to expand on Israel’s immigration history. The story of the different waves of Jewish immigrants has already been told elsewhere many times. Neither is this the place to discuss the (forced) emigration of Arabs.

The renewal of family-building activity by European Jews after the Holocaust is evident in the population pyramid of the Jewish population in Israel, which shows a growing base starting in the late 1940s. Many children were born to European parents in those days, raising the percent of children relative to other age groups. However, the rise in fertility among European Jews is not the only explanation for the growing base of the population pyramid of the Jewish population in Israel. Immigrants from the Near East and North Africa who were starting to arrive at about the same time also contributed to the peculiar shape of the Israeli Jewish population pyramid by an increase in the survival rate of infants and young children (Friedlander 1975). Before immigration, they had suffered from relatively high levels of infant and early childhood mortality. Immediately upon their arrival, improved medical care and sanitary conditions caused their mortality levels to plummet, raising the percentage of infants and young children in the population. Immigrants from the Near East and North Africa also arrived with relatively high levels of fertility. Although fertility decline among these immigrants started within a few years after immigration, its pace was much slower than that of their mortality decline.

Demographic Transition Theory lists infant mortality decline as one of the causes of fertility decline (Caldwell and Caldwell 1997). However, fertility decline among Israeli Arab Muslims only started in the early 1970s, long after infant mortality had started to decline. The reason for this late fertility decline remains an issue of debate (Schellekens and Eisenbach 2006). In many populations, there was a pre-decline rise in fertility (Dyson and Murphy 1985). This can also be observed among Israeli Arab Muslims. Jona Schellekens and Zvi Eisenbach in chapter 6 discuss this episode in Israeli population history.

Today, Israel has the highest fertility level among developed countries and is one of the few to have a fertility level that is still above replacement level. This is true for both major ethnic groups, Arabs and Jews. Part of the decline in fertility is due to a decline in nuptiality. Age at first marriage among Israeli Jews has increased among both sexes in the last thirty years. Celibacy rates, however, are still low compared with most other developed countries.

Fertility and Mortality in a Divided Society

Ethnic and religious identities play an important role in Israeli society, indeed, as Al-Haj (2004) has recently argued, Israel remains a deeply divided society and the recent wave of immigration from the former USSR has probably added to this division. Ethnic identities are relatively easy to ascertain from the census and vital registration and ethnicity has always figured as an important categorical variable in demographic studies of Israeli society. Information on religiosity, on the other hand, needs to be collected from surveys, although a few macro-level studies have measured religiosity indirectly by using voting patterns. Hence, there are fewer studies of the effect of religiosity on fertility and mortality. Papers on the effect of religiosity on fertility are not new (e.g., Matras 1964), but the study of the effect of religiosity on mortality is relatively new. This book includes much of the recent output in research on the effects of religiosity on demographic behavior in Israel.

Fertility

Studies of Israeli fertility in the 1970s and 1980s dealt with issues related to the fertility decline among Asian and African immigrants and the Arab population, such as the convergence of fertility patterns among immigrants (Friedlander and Goldscheider 1978), and the relationship between socio-economic development and fertility decline (Friedlander, Eisenbach and Goldscheider 1979 and Friedlander, Eisenbach and Goldscheider 1980).

Although Israel is a society with characteristics that place it among the developed countries of the world, its fertility history is unlike that of any other developed country. Take, for example, the modern shift to below-replacement fertility, which has been the most significant demographic development in developed countries in the last forty years. Although fertility levels among Israeli Jews have declined, they still remain well above replacement level. The recent immigration wave from the former Soviet Union, where fertility levels are extremely low, has not changed this. Actually, former Soviet Union immigrants are raising their fertility, although the increase is small, as shown in chapter 5 by Petra Nahmias.

One of the explanations for Israeli Jewish fertility being so different may be their religiosity. Dov Friedlander and Carole Feldmann in chapter 2 test this hypothesis. They use regression estimates to show that fertility among secular European Jews is below-replacement level. They control for socio-economic characteristics. Hence, in theory the effect of religiosity could be due to specific doctrines. However, it is unlikely that religiosity in Judaism implies the simple connection between doctrine and fertility, since there is neither a known, clear doctrine in Judaism on family size nor a clear-cut prohibition on the use of all forms of contraception (Goldscheider 2002: 227).

Another hypothesis proposed by Goldscheider (1967) focuses on minority-group status. If a group feels threatened, minority-group status may encourage higher fertility to ensure group preservation and strength in numbers. Resistance may encourage group integration and identification. It may also encourage a greater commitment to religious ideology and to norms particular to the minority group. Jon Anson and Avinoam Meir in chapter 3 follow up on this lead and test the hypothesis that nationalist sentiments mediate the influence of religiosity. They argue that Israel’s high fertility stems from the salience of nationalist sentiments due to its special position in the Middle East. Using voting returns from the 1984 elections, they classified census statistical areas by religiosity and their support for radical nationalist parties. They show that once nationalist support is controlled the effect of religiosity is insignificant, and suggest that both high fertility and religiosity derive from the particular form of national conflict in which Israel is engaged.

Israeli Arab Muslim fertility is even higher than that of Israeli Jews. In the 1960s it had reached levels that are among the highest on record. Jona Schellekens and Zvi Eisenbach in chapter 6 show that the most likely explanation for this unique episode in the demographic history of Israel is a decline in breastfeeding. Arab Israeli fertility started to decline in the early 1970s, but its pace slackened from the mid 1980s. Fargues (2000) suggests that a version of Goldscheider’s minority-group status hypothesis may help us understand what happened to Israeli Arab fertility. He argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shaped ideational change related to fertility sharpening identities and the vision of the nation as a quasi-biological body whose vitality is closely linked to reproduction (see also Kanaaneh 2002). Child allowances may also have contributed to a slackening of the pace of decline among Israeli Muslims (Friedlander, Eisenbach and Goldscheider 1979).

Nuptiality and contraception

Nuptiality and contraception are major proximate determinants (Bongaarts, 1978) of fertility. As in other developed countries, nuptiality is declining while cohabitation is spreading. A comparison between total fertility rates and total marital fertility rates using published data in the Statistical Abstracts of Israel suggests the decline in marriage has contributed to the decline in fertility in the past thirty years.

Besides a paper that focuses on the effects of a marriage squeeze in the early 1970s (Ben-Moshe 1989), the question why marriage is declining has received little attention. There are more publications on ethnic intermarriage. As in other immigrant countries, research on ethnic intermarriage in Israel is motivated by the question of whether the various ethnic groups ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Sources
• 1. Introduction
• Part 1. Fertility
• Part 2. Nuptially and Contraception
• Part 3. Mortality
• Part 4. Related Issues