Defying the trend: Jewish romance amongst the dreaming spires of Oxford

With the recent growth of Jewish life in Oxford, one thing has not gone unnoticed: an explosion of Jewish marriages over the last couple of years amongst the Jewish students.

This academic year alone Oxford will be celebrating five student marriages - two in a single week during the current winter vacation, with both couples in their early twenties. Furthermore, two couples got married last year, plus a young professional couple. This makes eight Jewish weddings from Oxford within 18 months.

In a student community of around 700, this must represent, proportionally, one of the highest densities of marriages within a single Jewish community in such a short space of time.

The Oxford Chabad Society is proud to have played a role in this exciting phenomenon as six of these students were resident in the Oxford Chabad Jewish student accommodation - a novelty for Oxford.

In addition, four of these students were former presidents of the Oxford Chabad Society and eight of them were active members on the Oxford Chabad Society executive student committee!

This domino effect of young Jewish student marriages bucks every statistic coming out about the future of the family nucleus and marriage in general. The Office for National Statistics released figures in February showing marriage rates at their lowest since records began in 1862: 3.3% down on 2006's figures, with a massive 34% fall since 1981. The crisis is such that the debate isn’t any longer about how to reverse this trend but rather whether it is necessarily a bad thing.

Michael Gove, Shadow Secretary for Children, Schools and Families, thinks that society is impoverished when, as he puts it, the ‘I’ comes before the ‘we’, while Terence Blaker in the Independent suggests that it might not be such a terrible thing after all. He writes, that ‘there might even be a case for bringing marriage licenses into line with driving licenses, requiring them to be renewed at specific intervals.’

This decline in marriage is not just the case in the wider society. The report "Jews in Britain: A Snapshot from the 2001 Census" - released in 2007 - reveals that the nuclear family is no longer a normative model for UK Jews, and indeed even less so than for their fellow Britons.

While I have no compelling explanation for this interestingly defiant upward trend in Oxford, the facts speak for themselves. Marriage and the desire to raise a family within a traditional family nucleus do not appear incongruous to the highly ambitious and clever students that this historic city attracts.

If Oxford sets the stage for many things in this world, this newfound attraction to basic family values in society seems to be most unexpected. The indication of a revival of the family nucleus among students is hopefully an early harbinger of change in attitude within society at large towards what should be perceived as one of the most important things in life: the creation and raising of a secure and stable family.