“Rasse, Jüdische,” in Jüdisches Lexikon (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), vol. 4.
Fritz Kahn (1888–1968) was born in Halle, Germany. Trained as a physician, he published a number of medical works, including the four-volume Das Leben des Menschen (Human life; 1922–29). He served as editor of the Sammelblätter jüdischer Wissens (Occasional papers on Jewish knowledge) and of the natural science section of the Encyclopedia Judaica. He published Die Juden als Rasse und Kulturvolk (The Jews as a race and a cultural people) in 1920. See the entry in the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, 6:287.
In zoology, race is defined as groups of individual beings that can be considered to have a common origin and blood relation on account of a unity of identifiable physical and mental traits. Human groups, to which the zoological notion of race applies, today are to be found only within those areas untouched by world history and the mixing of peoples that it produces. Among world historical peoples there are no pure races, on account of the countless occurrences of mixing that took place in prehistoric and historical periods. Certainly, there is the ideal concept of “the Teuton,” and there are numerous individuals of this Germanic type; but there is no larger or more coherent ethnological group of Germans. So-called Teutonic or Germanic Völker, such as the Germans, English, and Scandinavians, emerged out of numerous mixings of Saxons, Celts, Slavs, Mediterranean peoples, Jews, and others, and only over the course of many centuries of inbreeding and adaptation (sharing climate, ways of life, language, education, political forms, religions, and historical fate) were they blended together into Völker of a certain unified character. Nonetheless, one cannot identify this as race, but at most as ethnoculture (approximately identical to the idea of nation). Within the nation, the different constitutive races appear to a degree pure, but to a much greater degree in mixed form. Thus, they provide a particular nation with a particular “racial” stamp vis-à-vis other nations, while these Völker themselves are made up of other components. For instance, the German Volk is characterized by the relative frequency of the Teutonic type, the Russian by the Slavic, and the Italian by the Mediterranean; at the same time, however, there is also often found to a not inconsiderable degree all other types of races mixed in: for instance, the Slavs in the eastern part of Germany, the Alpine type in the south; in Russia the Teutonic type in the west, in the east, the Mongolian; and so forth. Truly, one ought not to speak of a homogeneous or immutable racial character among any of the great nations within the European or Near Eastern cultural spheres.
The Jews, too, considered as a cultural phenomenon, emerged out of a mixture of many different races and cultural peoples. They are made up of certain human groups of various origins who were joined together first as a religious, then as a cultural, and finally as a political unity; and through a centuries-long process of inbreeding and reciprocal physical and intellectual assimilation, and through the leveling influences of a common environment and a common fate, were melded into one coherent group characterized by a distinct and unified type: the Jew. According to the, on the whole, reliable evidence found in the Bible, the Jews were constituted from the following identifiable groups:
(a) The families of the patriarchs, “the descendants of Terach,” who came from southern Babylon (Ur in the Chaldees), and around 2200 wandered from north Babylon (Haran in Padan-Aram) to Canaan. As Babylonians, they belonged—in terms of biological race—in all probability to the Arab-Iranian mixed contingent of the Mediterranean race (mittelländischen Rasse).
(b) The Hittites who, during the period of the entry of the patriarchs (into Canaan), made up the ruling class within the Canaanite population and intermarried with the patriarchs—the conversion of slaves and mixed marriage being legal. In antiquity the Hittites were representative of the Armenian type [. . .] and transmitted to the Jewish Volk certain elements that in Europe—especially in caricature—are deemed particularly Jewish: slight stature; smooth skull; a bent, birdlike [literally, candle-snuffer] nose; a minor slanting of the eyes; a tendency toward obesity; and short, slightly bent limbs. [The transmission of these elements] began at the time of the patriarchs and continued with the second conquest of the land of Canaan; it occurred through an intensive process of intermixture of Hittites with Jews.
(c) Egyptians from the period of the “Egyptian enslavement” (around 1200 [BCE]) and through intermarriages, the purchasing of slaves, and slave conversions that are testified to in numerous places in the Bible, Arabic-Negroid elements became part of the Jews (large eyes, a dark complexion, black woolly hair, protruding lips, large teeth [. . .]).
(d) Arabs, through the union of the patriarchal tribes, who came out of Egypt, with the “Hebrews” (the tribes of Israel around the year 1000 [BCE]) who were nomadic Bedouins of the Arabic type; they are today often designated as the “beautiful Orientals” among the Jews, and are found above all among the Jews of Spain and North Africa.
(e) Canaanites, who were a population that mixed Arabic Semites of an older cultural stratum (the so -called Amorites) with more recently immigrated Babylonian, Egyptian, and Hittite transmitters of culture (Kulturträger), who came there by virtue of colonization and foreign rule. These latter were only gradually absorbed by the Judah-Israel tribes invading Canaan, through military means (enslavement, conversion of military captives, concubinage of captured women), and later through peaceful means of assimilation and intermarriage (1000–800 BC). (This, according to the theory of [Felix] von Luschan.39 [. . .]).
(f) Blond Germanic elements, absorbed over many centuries, first through military means (enslavement), then through peaceful assimilatory intermarriage with the Philistines, who were quite likely of Nordic origins and who belong to the blond type (900–400 BC).
(g) Greeks and Romans, through intermarriage and the absorption of slaves during the centuries of Hellenism and Roman rule in Judea (300 BC to 70 BC).
(h) Converts from all of the peoples who made up the civilized world at the time, during the centuries of the decline and decay of antiquity, the conversion of pagans, and the abolishment of slavery (from 1 to 1000 [CE]): peoples such as the Arabs, Egyptians, Babylonians, Syrians, Persians, Armenians, Greeks, Romans, Berbers, Germans, Celts, Slavs, Hungarians, etc.
After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jewish Volk was dispersed, through exile, into the Diaspora as two distinct groups: a Northeastern group that spread out through Turkey, the Balkans, northern Italy, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Galicia, and southern and western Russia; and a southwestern group that settled in the greater Arabian cultural spheres, in North Africa and in Southern Europe from the Bosporus to Spain. Due to completely different historical trajectories, milieus, intellectual and physical developments; through intermarriage and assimilation with and into two thoroughly different ethno-racial and cultural spheres; and on account of the different realities of the northern and southern climates (the brightness of the north), these two groups developed into two distinct types, the German or Ashkenazic, and the Spanish or Se phardic Jew. The Ashkenazim are Germanized and Slavicized, the Sephardim are Mediterraneanized Jews. Of the Sephardim, a large number disappeared after the expulsion from Spain (1492) on account of persecution, forced baptism, and assimilation in later periods.
Of the various components or elements of the Jewish Volk mentioned thus far, which have been completely integrated into the body of the Jewish Volk through hundreds of years of assimilation, intermarriage, and inbreeding, it is necessary to strictly differentiate those “Jews” who, in all likelihood, have accepted the Jewish faith as outsiders and call themselves Jews. These remain distinct autonomous Völker, without actually having mixed through intermarriage [with other Jews], and thus retain their anthropological and ethnological distinctiveness. Such foreign races of the Jewish faith are:
(a) The Yemenite Jews of Arabia, believed to be descendants of southern Arabian (himjarish) tribes, and who around 450 [CE] became Jews.
(b) The Falashas in Abyssinia [Ethiopia]—a mixed group living by the Red Sea, made up of whites and Negroes (?) and numbering approximately 50,000 (?) individuals.40
(c) The Caucus Jews on the Caspian Sea, Georgian (Grusinich) tribes of Iranian racial descent, who later mixed with the Kyrgyz (Mongolians of the Volga region); they were, probably, converted to Judaism by Persian Jews. The latter intermarried with the converts, so that the Georgian Jews are a combination of three different races: Semitic Jewish, Aryan Iranian, and Mongolian Turanian.
(d) The black Jews of the Kallah Israel in Bombay. [. . .] These are Hindustanis who were probably converted to Judaism by Spanish Jews, and today live as “black Jews” in proximity to the “white Jews” (descendants of the Spanish) on the Malabar Coast (compare to Negro Jews).41
(e) The Chinese Jews in the province of Hunan.
(f) The Mawambu Negroes, of the Loango Coast, who follow Jewish ritual (compare to Negro Jews).
(g) The Chazars.
These foreign tribes were brought to Jewry, though not to the Jewish Volk, through conversion. They belong today to the Jewish community of faith; however, they are in no way a part of the Jewish Volk. Through their relatively vibrant participation in the recent colonization efforts in Palestine, there could possibly occur there in the future a consolidation of these racial elements, as new components of the body of the Jewish Volk, and thus influence the contemporary type of Jew.
The general genealogy of civilized Völker from various races, a history we have sketched above, and in particular the abundant transformations found in the racial history of the Jews, is the reason that all attempts to characterize contemporary civilized Völker anthropologically remained without result. Aside from the facts that the criteria of anthropology (cranial measurements, body size, skin and hair color, hair texture, etc.) are in the main unreliable and insufficient, and that statistical results tend to be exploited and interpreted in a wide variety of ways, it is the multitude of components and the great number of intermixings that make it impossible to establish indices for any civilized Volk, let alone for the Jews—whose racial history is more multifaceted and problematic than that of any other Volk. All of the theories put forth by race theorists about “the Jews as a race” are premature and untenable. There still is no methodological scientific (fachwissenschaftlich) basis for building such theories. The few anthropological investigations carried out on Jews thus far [. . .] can be considered only as precursors to a future anthropology of the Jews, which requires large-scale, systematic, decades-long inquiries. And one can predict the results of such investigations with a fair amount of certainty, given the evidence already accumulated and the theoretical assumptions that will be brought to bear: there will be considerable anthropological differences among the groups investigated, produced by variations of environment. Whether these differences ought to also be interpreted as “racial”—that is, as a matter of historical antecedents—or as secondary environmental influences will be difficult, if not impossible, to decide. In general, the interpretation of established facts of anthropology, once these facts had been established, has thus far always proved itself to be very problematic. It [interpretation] is to be initiated and conducted with utmost caution. One really ought not to expect anthropology to arrive at a solution to the racial problem as racial theory conceives of it, given that it [racial theory] associates the notion of race with cultural worth. The former [anthropology] only grasps the somatic aspect, which in general possesses only a very limited value for judgments regarding psychological, moral, and cultural characteristics.
39. [Felix von Luschan (1854–1924) was an anthropologist and professor at the University of Berlin.]
40. [Question marks in the original.]
41. [The reference is to Aron Sandler, “Negerjuden, schwartze Juden,” in Jüdisches Lexikon—also the source for this selection—(Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), 4:447.]