Jews, Race, and Environment (1911; New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2006).
Maurice Fishberg (1872–1934) was a physician, professor of medicine, and anthropologist. He was born in Russia and emigrated to the United States in 1889. Fishberg authored an important textbook, Pulmonary Tuberculosis (1916), and worked and taught at numerous New York City hospitals, as well as for the United Hebrew Charities. He was regarded as the leading American Jewish authority on the subject of Jews and race, having published numerous articles on the subject in both general and Jewish journals and newspapers. Jews, Race, and Environment was a comprehensive collection of contemporary research as well as a statement of Fishberg’s belief that Jewish traits had social, rather than biological, origins. The book was reprinted in 2006.
This volume is an attempt to present the results of anthropological, demographic, pathological, and sociological investigations of the Jews. Considering that one-fifth of all the Jews in the world live at present in English-speaking countries, and that the migrations of Eastern European Jews tend toward the United States and England with its colonies, I believe I need not apologize for claiming attention to this subject. The facts presented are not available in any book, and it may safely be declared that the whole world is interested in the subject of the Jews as a race, and the getting into closer touch with the ethnic relations of the Jews. Moreover, the perennial problem, whether it is possible to assimilate the vast number of Southern and Eastern immigrants to the United States and British colonies has been applied more to the Jews than to any other white people. It has even been questioned whether there is ever a probability of incorporating the Jews into the body politic of Anglo-Saxon communities.
That anthropology only is competent to answer this question is agreed. Yet there is no book in English treating of the race traits of the Jews. The literature on the subject in English consists mostly of investigations by special parliamentary commissions, containing opinions of statesmen, social workers, educators, etc. It appears that the prevailing opinion is that the Jews, alleged to have maintained themselves in absolute racial purity for three or four thousand years, may prove hard to assimilate. On the one hand we have those Jews who take great pride in the purity of their breed, and, on the other, the people among whom they live who see a peculiar peril in the prospect of indefinitely harboring an alien race which is not likely to mix with the general population. This apprehension is confirmed by the Jewish nationalists, who look for repatriation in Palestine, or some other territory, thus corroborating the opinion that they are aliens in Europe, encamped for the time being, and waiting for an opportunity to retreat to their natural home in Asia. Indeed, the problem has of late been given official recognition in Anglo-Saxon countries. When bills were introduced in Parliaments aiming at the exclusion of Asiatic immigration, it was questioned whether Jews might not be considered Asiatics under the law; and in the United States a bill was recently introduced in Congress specifially declaring that the law prohibiting immigration and naturalization of Asiatics does not refer to Jews, Armenians, and Syrians.38
This inquiry into the race traits of the Jews could not be carried out by a study of these people in any one country, because we find at the outset that they present significant differences depending greatly on their birth-place, social and political conditions, and, in general, the environment in which they find themselves. Their anthropological characteristics could best be studied in New York City, where exist a million Jews from Europe, Asia, and Africa; and we have taken advantage of the material thus offered by obtaining anthropometric measurements of about three thousand Jews in this city. The conclusions as to the anthropological types of the Jews are based on these measurements, as well as on a collation of the scattered literature on the subject. The demography of the Jews could best be studied from offcial government publications in those countries where the censuses classify the population by religious confession. The changes in the physical, social, and economic conditions of the Jews under emancipation could best be studied in Western Europe and America, and this study involved a careful search into the literature on the Jews to bring out certain points which might have practical social bearings, especially on the problem of assimilation.
While speaking of the changes which the contemporary Jews have been undergoing within the last fifty years, we have avoided taking the position of partisan or advocate, and have treated the subject objectively. Books aiming at sympathetic apologies, defending, often excusing, Israel’s existence among the nations, are on the same plane as those containing venomous diatribes full of scurrilous invectives against the Semites. It should also be understood that while pointing at the process of assimilation of the Jews, we by no means advocate their absorption by the surrounding people of different faiths. We do not find it important for the welfare of the remnants of Israel, or of those around them, that Jewry should commit race suicide. What is aimed at, however, is to point out what appears to be the tendencies, the Zeitgeist, of the Jews at the threshold of the Twentieth Century. Showing that while discarding the greater part of their separative ritualism the modern Jews commit suicide as Jews, because they cease to be peculiar, it is difficult to avoid describing in detail the metamorphosis this change works on the children of Israel. The large number of mixed marriages, which keeps on growing, could only take place among Jews who have discarded the separative tenets of their religion. People obeying the dietary laws religiously could not come in close and intimate contact with those whose table they could not share. The fact that the differences between Jews and Christians are not everywhere racial, due to anatomical or physiological peculiarities, but are solely the result of the social and political environment, explains our optimism as regards the ultimate obliteration of all distinctions between Jews and Christians in Europe and America. This optimism is confirmed by conditions in Italy, Scandinavia, and Australia, where anti-Semitism is practically unknown. When intermarriage between Jews and Christians will reach the same proportions in other countries, and the facts presented in Chapter IX clearly show that the time is not distant, anti-Semitism will everywhere meet with the same fate as in Italy, Scandinavia and Australia. Both Jews and Christians have been contributing to this end, the former by discarding their separative ritualism, and thus displaying willingness to bridge the gulf which separated them from others, and the latter by legalizing civil marriage. Whether this means that ceasing to be peculiar may prove deadly to Judaism can only be conjectured. All I could do was to present the facts.
[. . .]
38. [The bill (H.R. 24,993) was introduced in April 1910 by Representative Everis Hayes of California. The House of Representatives passed the bill on May 2.]