"Also relatively insignificant as a predictor of ethnic conflict is the degree of assimilation between two populations. It might be thought that a high level of social integration would discourage conflict, if only because of the difficulty of identifying and isolating a highly assimilated minority. Paradoxically, however, a sharp rise in assimilation (measured, for example, by rates of intermarriage) may actually be the prelude to ethnic conflict. Assimilation, to give perhaps the most important of all examples, was in fact quite far advanced in Central and Eastern Europe by the 1920s. In many places of mixed settlement, rates of intermarriage across ethnic barriers rose to unprecedented heights. By the later 1920s, nearly one in every three marriages involving a German Jew was to a Gentile. The rate rose as high as one in two in some big cities. The trend was similar, with only minor degrees of variation, in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, parts of Poland, Romania and Russia (see Table I.i). This could, of course, be interpreted as an indicator of successful assimilation and integration. Yet it was in precisely these places that some of the worst ethnic violence occurred in the 1940s."