Religiosity and Marital Fertility: Israeli Arab Muslims, 1955-72

Jona Schellekens, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Zvi Eisenbach, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This paper examines the relationship between religiosity and marital fertility in a Muslim society around the onset of the transition. Our questions are, first, whether the effect of religiosity remains significant after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics and variables associated with women's status; and, second, to what extent the decline in religious commitment 'explains' the transition. We use the 1973-74 Israeli Fertility Survey to investigate the effect of religiosity on marital fertility among Israeli Arab Muslims.