Home > Encyclopedia of Drugs, Alcohol, and Addictive Behavior > Jews, Drugs, And Alcohol

Who hath woe?
Who hath sorrow?
Who hath contentions?
Who hath babbling?
Who hath wounds without cause?
Who hath redness of eyes?
They that tarry long at the wine;
they that go to seek mixed wine.
Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his color in the cup,
when it moveth itself aright.
At the last it biteth like a serpent,
and stingeth like an adder.
Thine eyes shall behold strange women,
and thine heart shall utter perverse things.
Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea,
or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast.
They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick;
they have beaten me, and I felt it not:
when shall I awake?
I will seek it yet again.

—Proverbs 23:29-35

As illustrated by this biblical description of intoxication, alcoholic blackouts, alcohol-related physical and social problems, alcoholic hallucinations, loss of control of drinking, and alcohol dependence was not unknown to the ancient ancestors of today's Jewish population. The Hebrew Bible (called by Christians the Old Testament) includes several illustrations of alcohol-related problems, such as the drunkenness of Noah, which led to family strife, and the incest between Lot and his daughters.

Modern literature about the role of ALCOHOL in the Jewish community displays two very different trends. On the one hand, Jews are regarded as a population with few alcohol problems; and a variety of cultural, spiritual, or physiological explanations are suggested to explain the relatively lowrate of ALCOHOLISM among Jews. On the other hand, studies of alcoholism among Jews point out that many cases often go unrecognized, because of the myth of Jewish immunity to alcohol abuse.

Surveys of U.S. drinking practices conducted in the 1960s found that most males who considered themselves Jewish reported drinking to some extent, but few reported alcohol problems. However, the number of Jewish subjects in these studies was small. A more recent study of U.S. male college students and university employees reported that although Jewish and Christian subjects had generally similar drinking patterns, Jews were less likely to drink more than six drinks on any one occasion and less likely to report alcohol problems.

Israel reports a lower per-capita alcohol consumption than countries in Western Europe or the Americas and a lower death rate from cirrhosis of the LIVER. (Cirrhosis mortality is thought to correlate with rates of alcoholism.) A single study of a sample of 266 adult Jews in the general public in New Haven, Connecticut, found a lifetime prevalence of alcohol abuse of 1.7 percent, significantly lower than the rate reported for Protestants, Catholics, or those without religious affiliation. The prevalence of alcohol dependence was not reported and the actual rates of alcohol dependence among Jews, either in the United States or in other parts of the world are unknown.

Explanations of Jewish sobriety go back at least as far as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who in 1798 theorized that Jews (like women and ministers) avoided drunkenness because their special position in European Christian society was based on the perception that they adhered to a religious law that dictated a higher code of conduct. Intoxication for a Jew would therefore be sinful as well as scandalous. Others have suggested that the traditional use of wine for religious ritual in Jewish life, rather than for hedonistic or social purposes, protects Jews from alcoholism.

In the 1950s, C. R. Snyder studied the drinking patterns of seventy-three Jewish men living in New Haven, Connecticut, and also analyzed data from Jewish and non-Jewish male college students. He concluded that SOBRIETY was a positive factor in Jewish identity, as opposed to drunkenness, which was associated with non-Jews. He also concluded that the greater the adherence to Jewish religion and its "ceremonial orthodoxy," the lower the alcohol problem risk. This finding has led many to theorize that those Jews who do develop alcohol problems are those who have rejected or left Jewish religious practices, abandoning their Jewish identity.

The finding that genetic factors may predispose to alcoholism has led to speculation that there may also be some hereditary protection for Jews. Dr. Y. D. Neumark and his colleagues in Israel studied sixty-eight Jewish families of male heroin addicts, 75 percent of whom also drank to excess. Using statistical methods they found evidence for a combination of genetic and environmental factors influencing the levels of alcohol use in family members. They also found that the presence of a specific gene (the ADH2*2 allele, a variant of the gene for an alcohol-metabolizing enzyme) was associated with lower alcohol intake in a comparison of fifty-three of the heroin-dependent heavy drinkers with a group of ninety-two Jewish male light drinkers. A 1991 study by Monteiro and colleagues found suggestive evidence that young adult Jewish males were more sensitive to the subjective effects of low levels of blood alcohol than were a control group of Christians. Although this finding awaits replication, the authors theorize that heightened sensitivity in Jews might either deter heavy drinking or help facilitate internal mechanisms for the control of alcohol consumption. Nearly all studies of Jewish sobriety concentrate on male subjects, leaving the applicability of these theories to women unknown.

In 1980, Dr. Sheila B. Blume and colleagues published a study of 100 Jewish members of ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS from the New York city area (58 men and 42 women). The subjects had been abstinent for an average of 4 years. The belief among clinicians that Jewish alcoholics would have a high rate of preexisting psychiatric illness (be-cause they would have to be mentally ill to be so deviant from their cultural group) was found not to be accurate. The Jewish subject group generally resembled their fellow non-Jewish alcoholics in treatment and at Alcoholics Anonymous, with similar family histories of alcoholism, drinking histories, and rates of additional psychiatric diagnoses. They did differ in having an unusually high rate of dependence on prescribed psychoactive medications, a combined result of their attempts to obtain professional help and the frequent failure of their physicians to reach an accurate diagnosis. Although there was evidence of less adherence to orthodox Judaism later in life in these Jewish alcoholics, their subjective feelings of Jewish identity were strong and remained so throughout their alcoholism and recovery.

Many subjects reported that their families, their friends, their physicians and they themselves had dismissed the possibility that they might be suffering from alcoholism, because "Jews can't be alcoholics." They experienced great relief when they finally met another recovering person who was Jewish.

It is an interesting footnote to history that the great psychiatrist Sigmund Freud seemed to have accepted the idea of Jews' immunity to alcoholism. He once reassured a Jewish patient who expressed concern about his drinking by saying that alcohol would neither help nor harm him; alcohol was for the gentiles.

During the late 1970s and 1980s interest in helping Jewish alcoholics grew, both in the United States and in Israel. The Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, based in New York City, organized a task force on alcoholism, which later extended its purview to all addictive diseases, including compulsive GAMBLING. In 1980, the Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependent Persons and Significant Others Foundation, Inc. (JACS) was organized to serve as a forum for the sharing of recovery by Jewish addicts and their families. Both groups continue to educate the Jewish community and to encourage prevention, treatment, and the opening of synagogues and Jewish community centers to twelve-step groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS, Gamblers Anonymous, AL-ANON, Nar-Anon and Gam-Anon. In addition, JACS has sponsored the most extensive study of chemically dependent Jews and their significant others in the literature.

The literature on drug addictions other than alcoholism in the Jewish community has been less divided, because of an absence of long-standing belief concerning Jewish immunity to drug dependence. The New Haven study mentioned above found a lifetime prevalence of drug abuse of 1.3 percent in the Jewish adults, which did not differ significantly from the rates for the other religions or those reporting no religious preference. Nevertheless, denial of drug problems in many Jewish households and communities is an ongoing problem.

The JACS study collected information from 538 recovering Jewish alcholics, addicts, and significant others (i.e., those affected by the addiction of a family member or close friend). One hundred thirty seven of the subjects considered themselves both chemically dependent and significant others, 242 of the subjects were chemically dependent but not significant others, and the remaining 159 were significant others and were not addicted. Susan L. Vex and Blume reported that 71 percent of the chemically dependent subjects were dependent on more than one substance. Alcohol was the most prevalent drug of dependence. Alcohol was the primary drug of choice for 54.7 percent of the addicts and a secondary drug for 24.5 percent. The JACS data did not support the idea that alcoholism in Jews was a result of lack of education, poor income, alienation or loss of religious identity, as had been hypothesized earlier. As in the 1980 Blume et al. study, the male to female ratio was much lower than usually found in studies of alcoholism and addiction in the general United States population, but the significance of finding equal numbers of male and female alcoholics is not clear. Like the Jewish alcoholics studied twenty years earlier, the JACS subjects also reported that in their search for recovery they had found little help within the Jewish community, and felt that education of rabbis and Jewish leaders about addiction was of utmost importance.

Efforts to promote education, PREVENTION, and TREATMENT of other drug problems among Jews have gone hand-in-hand with the efforts to fight alcoholism—and have employed the same methods. Self-help fellowships based on the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous can be helpful to alcoholics and to other addicts of the Jewish faith, even though the spiritual base of the twelve steps was originally adapted from the philosophy of a Protestant Christian movement. Several authors have published guides to the twelve steps as related to Judaism.