Preface and Part 1 of Die Juden als Rasse (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1903).
J. M. Judt was a physician and anthropologist who lived and worked in Warsaw. The original Polish edition of Die Juden als Rasse was published in Warsaw in 1902.
The present work was originally intended to be the introduction to a study of “the biostatistics and racial pathology of the Jews.” However, as an analysis of the anthropological characteristics of the Jewish Volk brought to light numerous and significant issues, this separate monograph had to be devoted to addressing these.
Furthermore, the Jewish Volk, as a racial group with particular traits, deserves a thorough anthropological analysis. We are not dealing with an ethnic mass (Völkerhaufen) here, akin to that of other cultural peoples (Kulturvölker), because they [the Jews] do not possess a common soil; rather, they live in small communities scattered throughout the world. When we consider their separate and solitary fates, their centuries-long odyssey, and the most heterogeneous influences of their physical as well as their intellectual environments, it is easy to see that the Jews as a race make for extremely interesting research material.
The starting point for our analysis will be the questions: What are the Jews as a physical race, and what is their place in the overall anthropological racial scheme (Rassentabelle)? We understand by this a description defined or supported chiefly by anthropological data.
Naturally, an anthropometric description alone cannot provide a complete answer to our question, since it does not address the issue of the racial characteristics of ancient Jewry, but limits itself to contemporary Jews. Furthermore, it gives us little insight into the question if and to what extent the centuries-long wanderings influenced the physical traits of the Jews of antiquity. We therefore have supplemented this anthropometric data with those concerning the influence of milieu and history since the very beginnings of the Semitic races.
Along the obscure paths of these earliest wanderings, we went to Mesopotamia, Syria, and Canaan, and from there westward, into the realm of the Diaspora, striving to understand the origins of the Hebrew race, the relationship of the Jews to natives of the regions involved, as well as the nature and extent of racial crossings or intermixture.
[. . .]
Before we proceed to the solution of the problem of the Jews as a race, we will consider the currently prevailing views. We will thus mention quite a few theories, presenting them objectively, offering only their most characteristic or representative features.
Until the sixth decade of the last century, the prevalent opinion was that the Jews were a pure race, free from all foreign ethnic admixtures. The Volk, surrounded by an impenetrable wall of traditions, was supposed to have preserved not only a racial spirit (Rassengeist), but also uniform physical characteristics. The chief traits of the so-called Jewish type manifest themselves uniformly under all geographic conditions and in each and every world-historical era. Already Edwards (1829)17 remarked on the great similarity between the Jews of today and their medieval representation in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper and ancestral representations in pharaonic tombs. [. . .] Still, those who accept this general notion nonetheless are divided on many points. There are those, such as [Josiah] Nott (1850),18 who endorse the notion of the immutability of the Jewish race, and who trace [the Jewish race] back to the anthropological type that emigrated from Mesopotamia four thousand years ago.19
Others (Graetz20) find an analogy with the racial type of the Jews liberated from the Babylonian captivity (520 BC). Still others (Jacobs 1886) see the point of origin in the Roman Diaspora and trace the Jewish type only back to the 40,000 human souls who lost their homeland after losing their unfortunate struggle with the great world power of the day. The wandering masses did not, however, succumb to racial mixing. They remained isolated because of their firm religious beliefs, the power of common sentiments handed down through the generations, and also through the general misery and restrictions of the many years in the ghetto (“Jews are the lineal descendents of the Diaspora of the Roman Empire”21). According to Jacobs, the Jews also did not absorb any foreign ethnic elements during the epoch of their settlement in Palestine. They guarded the purity of marriage in the most stringent way while living among foreign peoples. This view is even today chiefly upheld by nationalists, who, by the way, unjustifiably see purity of race as one of the attributes of national solidarity.
Without reproducing all of the historical proofs and ethnological evidence, I want here only to mention one rather original claim of Buschan (1894),22 which has been put forth to assert the alleged racial purity and unity of the Jews. This author observes differences in the pathological sphere, a greater hereditary immunity to some diseases, and takes these to be a sign of racial individuality. And since he finds an analogy between the different groups of Jews living in different lands, he believes himself to be justified in making the claim that today’s Jews come in a direct line from those ancient Semitic tribes and that they contain no foreign elements.
In the following chapters of this study, we want to examine whether Jews are indeed a pure race. That is, have they really maintained the primordial characteristics of the Semitic tribe?
At this point we should merely like to remark that Buschan’s claim has no rational foundation.
The pathological aspect of the Jews indeed exhibits a few quite peculiar nuances and differences, which, however, can in no way be traced back to aspects of race.
A higher percentage of nervous and mental disorders and a lower rate of susceptibility to infectious diseases can be explained with reference to quite a different set of factors—namely, cultural and social forces.
Buschan is going too far in his conclusions.
Only gradually did the former understanding of the Jews change. A great number of observations point to the inadequacy of the theory of a unified Jewish race. In particular, it was the craniological studies that contributed to lending this theory the power of scientific dogma.
Old legend already confirms the existence of two branches within the Jewish people: the Sephardim, from the tribe of Judah; and the Ashkenazim, who are supposed to have descended from the tribe of Benjamin. Having been separated by a multitude of historical events, the Ashkenazim are supposed to have accounted for the bulk of Jews settled throughout Northern and Middle Europe—that is, in Germany, Poland, and Russia. Conversely, a minority of the Jewish people—that is, about 10 percent of them, who were of Sephardic descent, made their way to Southern Europe, particularly Spain and Portugal. In a later period some fraction of Spanish-Portuguese Jews, the so-called Spagnoli, migrated to England, Holland, and the Balkans.
Even [Karl] Vogt (1863) has put forth a bold hypothesis in an attempt to explain this division. In his opinion, the Sephardic Jews must be considered the genuine descendants of the primordial Semitic tribe, while the Ashkenazim are related to the Aryans from the sources of the Indus River. At almost the same time, in the Bulletin de la Societé d’Anthropologie de Paris (1861 and 1865), these ideas also crystallized, though on a completely different basis. I refer to the famous discussions that took place in the then recently established anthropological society in Paris. The aura of fame that formed around Broca’s school succeeded in bringing the problem [of explaining the division of Jewry] to the attention of a wider public. The most important discussions revolved around the question of the intermixing of the Jews in Europe with the [ancient] Germans and Slavs, as well as the Finns and Tartars. The timid voices of earlier researchers—for example, those of Nott and Gliddon (1857)23—only entered into the discussion when Broca made the claim that in the ninth century of the new era, a Slavic tribe converted to Jewry. Let me quote now references to this particular debate, while I emphasize that this claim, which has so often been presented in consideration of the issue at hand, is in fact false.
Following the triumph of Christianity in Poland, the Jews there exerted over a long period of time a significant influence, and, as we may suppose, often entered into marriages with Christian women. This state of things lasted until 1092, when the Christian King Ladislaus forbade such marriages. Jews now were also forbidden to keep Christian servants. And yet the influence of the Jews continued up to the thirteenth century. Only later did persecutions occur. Entire masses [of Jews] were robbed of their belongings, and forced into exile in foreign lands.24
Somewhere else we read “that even among the Russians many proselytes converted to Judaism.”25
This sort of historical information provided the foundation for the emergence of a new set of views. The idea of the division of Jewry into Ashkenazim and Sephardim found many proponents. This claim quickly gained all the more currency when anthropological and statistical proof was produced. The Vrolik Museum in Amsterdam provided skulls of Dutch Jews; Prunen Bey (1865) did the same for North Africa, Quatrefages and Hamy (1882) for Algeria, and Ikow (1884) for Turkey.
The measurements consequently taken of these skulls of Sephardic Jews produced results completely different from those taken from the skulls of Ashkenazic Jews.
On the basis of these observations, two distinct anthropological types of Jews were posited. The Sephardic Jew is supposedly the descendant of the genuine Semites with elongated skulls, raven-black hair and eyes, dark skin color, and a long, elegant nose—a type approximating the beautiful form of the Arab Bedouins. This is the same type we encounter in Rembrandt’s paintings of Amsterdam’s Jews or in Alloris’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes in the Pitti Gallery. In contrast, the Ashkenazic Jews represent a short-headed type, with a low forehead, brown or often blond hair and blue eyes, a thick nose, large mouth, a slightly protruding lower jaw, and prominent cheekbones.
This is the general outline of the characteristics of these two alleged types. Even now, this view is commonly held by anthropologists. I’ll just mention their names: Blechmann (1881), Stieda and Dybowski (1883), Kollmann (1885), Topinard (1885), Hervé and Hovelacque (1887), Talko-Hryncewicz (1892), Deniker (1900).
The classification of the Jews as Sephardic and Ashkenazic discussed above left the problem unresolved. There exist a number of different groups within the Jewish population that could not be included among either the Sephardim or Ashkenazim. The various racial types of Jews in Western Europe, the Caucasus, south Russia, Poland, and Germany induced [Constantine] Ikow to put forth another grouping. Ikow’s view is interesting insofar as he has shed light in an original way on the question at hand. This anthropologist’s treatise, based on the vast amount of data on the historical mass migration, offers new motifs for our consideration and for that reason alone deserves great attention. By referring to, among other things, the evidence related to skull measurements, Ikow sets forth the following division.
(1) The Jews from the East and from the South (the Balkans, Spain, Italy, Algeria, and the coast of the Mediterranean). They represent a genuine Semitic lineage, with a very weak or minimal admixture of alien elements. The analogy with the Arab as an anthropological type is striking: they are long-headed and brunet.
(2) The Jews from Western Europe—a race that resulted from extensive crossing of the Semitic type with the native population [of Western Europe].
(3) The Jews of Russia26 display no signs of Semitic descent whatsoever; they are short-headed.
[. . .]
We see in Ikow’s hypothesis, besides its false anthropological foundation, a whole host of doubtful theories on which his conclusions rest. Among others one could mention the unfounded conjecture that the cradle of the Semites was North Africa, and the merely hypothetical notion of a mass emigration of Jews to Slavic lands over the Caucasus, Crimea, and Dnieper.
[Gustave] Lagneau offers another three-group division of the Jews (1891).
(1) The Jews of North Africa: the result of the intermixture of Jews who were natives of that region (Egypt, Carthage) with local tribes of Berbers, Copts, and Phoenicians; and later with Greek and Roman colonists; and finally, in the Middle Ages, with Arabs. Since this mixing occurred with predominantly dark-haired and dolichocephalic populations, the Jews there retain the notable traits of the Jewish type.
(2) The Roman Jews: from the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, mostly converts of Greek and Latin descent.
(3) The German, Polish, and Russian Jews: they are the product of a mixing with the ancient German, Slavic, and Cossack races.
The author has refrained from interpreting his classification in any great detail. It is, nonetheless, easy to expose the lack of discrimination in this arrangement. And when I cite Lagneau’s theory of division, it is only to show just how complicated the terminology has become in our effort to define the Jews as a race.
New insights gained from ethnology have made the problem even more confused. The parameters of the previously mentioned schemas were not able to contain all possible varieties. The skull measurements and a series of other anthropological data only brought the absence of unity about racial type into stronger focus. Moreover, ethnology came along and introduced either new or recovered evidence, above all about the so-called exotic Jews. The Jews of Abyssinia, the Falashas, are a Volk characterized by powerful physiques, dark eyes and hair, and brown skin color.
On the eastern coast of Madagascar live those Jews who are the so-called Zafy-Ibrahim, that is, the descendants of Abraham. According to the report of the traveler Sibree (The Great African Island), it is difficult to distinguish these Jews from other social strata of the indigenous population.27
In the account of the German expedition to the Loango Coast [central Africa], Bastian28 mentions the inhabitants living in that region, the Mawambu, who adhere to the Jewish faith (jüdischer Konfession). They are said to be the descendants of those Jews who were driven out of Castile (1493) [1492] to St. Thomas Island; now, however, their countenance and skin color are similar to those of the Negroes (Andrée, 1881). On the Malabar Coast of Hindustan, near Bombay, mainly in Cochin and Travancore, “black” Jews have lived for a long time—the so-called Kallah Israel. The missionary Joseph Wolf, who visited Cochin in 1833, confirmed already at that time the significant similarity of the Jews with the local Hindus29 (Nott, 1850; The Church Missionary Atlas, 1897).
An even more remarkable appearance is that of the so-called Chinese Jews. They constitute a quite particular colony in Kaï-fung-fu, in Hunan Province, and are said to have come to these places via Persia after the destruction of Jerusalem. Travelers note their yellow complexion, long pigtails, and physiognomic similarity to the Chinese (Cordier, 1891; Katz, 1900; etc.).
Identical reports come from researchers who examined the Daghestani Jews of the Caucasus. Here the mountain Jews possess both the same facial features and the same notably short heads as do the Chechens (Chantre, 1887; Erckert, 1881, 1883, 1885). At the same time, one can demonstrate the great similarity between the Jews of the Caucasus and the Kabardynier, Lezgins [Lesghier], Aranen, and so forth. One merely has to look at the photographs compiled by [Ernest] Chantre in his great four-volume work.30
The above-mentioned racial fragmentation should serve as proof of the Jewish ability to resemble the native-born population, even when it comes to their physical appearance; this, by the way, is supposedly also taking place, albeit to a lesser degree, in Europe—as some anthropologists would argue. Renan’s far-reaching definition (1883)—”il n’y pas un type juif, il y a des types juifs” [“there is not one Jewish type, there are Jewish types”]—has become the working principle of many researchers. However, no one today would join Renan in claiming that “judaïsme est une religion, mais n’est pas un fait ethnologique, mais un type accidentel” [“Judaism is a religion, not an ethnological fact but an accidental type”].
No one today believes any longer that the Jews are a haphazard aggregate of different ethnic traits, with accidental characteristics. On the contrary, the reigning opinion is that there occurred intermixing in some countries, an intermixing that is said to have produced a certain similarity in physical appearance between the Jews and the local native populations among whom they have lived. As an example, let me quote Krzywicki [Krzywickis]: “Despite their fanatical separateness, the Jews actually have a good deal of non-Semitic blood in them. In India, on this side of the Ganges, they are black, in England blue-eyed and blond, in the western districts of Russia they have wide faces and ‘Slavic’ noses: they always evince the physical traits of the population surrounding them. According to the survey of German schools, 10.32 percent of Baden Jews were found to be of the pure blond type, 10.38 percent in Bavaria, 11.23 percent in Prussia, 11.77 percent in Hesse, and 13.53 percent in Braunschweig.31 This is absolute proof of foreign admixture. Among the Polish Jews the foreign component is even more significant than among the German Jews. So one finds for instance among the Galician Jews that 14.1 percent are of the blond type. We arrived at the same sort of results concerning the distribution of short-headed types among them. Western Russian and Polish Jews often possess wide faces and noses, fair hair, and gray eyes—in a word, all those characteristics that make apparent that the Jewish racial traits are inhibited to a high degree by the blood flowing in the veins of the surrounding native populations. And if we hold on to the indexes of cranial measurements, it becomes evident that the aforementioned Jews possess more Polish and western Russian racial traits than genuine or ancient Hebrew ones” (Die Völker, pp. 210–41).
Alongside the results of anthropological research, various historical facts are put forth as evidence. Of course, we are speaking here only about the last two thousand years—that is, about the admixture of Aryan elements on the European terrain. The pre-Christian epoch has been ignored, apart from the comments of Flieger (1897), Alsberg (1891), Luschan (1892), and Jacques (1893) in regard to racial mixture during the period of Jewish national independence. In the opinion of a large number of researchers, the mixing of Jews with the native population is observable in almost every country; this occurs either through intermarriage or through conversion to Judaism. The marked racial mixing, which had reached a high level during the Hellenistic and Roman periods in the first century BC due to Jewish proselytism, had already begun to decline in the period immediately following; it begins to emerge again, according to Neubauer, in the era of Aryanism (fifth century) and during Moorish rule on the Iberian peninsula (from the eighth century on).
It is claimed that in this same period Gaul became a site of racial mixing for the Jews, indeed, to such a large extent that, according to Loeb [. . .] the majority of Gallic Jews at the time of Gontrand and Hilperic were descended from those heathens who had been converted to Judaism.
The same thing is said to be true for the Germanic and Slavic territories, and for southern and eastern Russia.
The Khazars, the Karaites, the sect of the so-called “Subotniki” were supposedly the most convincing proof for the above claims. There were so many intermarriages at the time that the clergy was forced to try to bring them to a halt through decrees passed by the various councils of Elvira, Chalcedon, Orleans, Toledo, and Rome. Moreover, even today, as some claim, so much intermarriage occurs in some countries that this must absolutely be seen as one of the factors modifying the particular physical elements of Jewry.
Although I will offer a detailed critique and analysis of this viewpoint in a later chapter, at this point I will only remark that the theory of the identification of the Jews with other ethnic groups has now become an accepted doctrine among many researchers. Let me only mention the name of [William] Ripley,32 who in his splendid work (1900) shares and backs up the hypotheses of Loeb, Neubauer, and Krzywicki [Krzywickis].
As we can see from the above overview, in the field of the racial anthropology of the Jews there exist diametrically opposed views, and over and above this, between these oppositional approaches there is a whole range of different, intermediary theories.
In pursuit of a clearer orientation, I offer the following schema.
(1) The Jews as a pure, unified race:
(a) the prototype—Jews from the time of Abraham (Nott);
(b) the prototype—Jews from the Babylonian captivity (Graetz);
(c) the prototype—Jews from the time of the Diaspora (Jacobs).
(2) The division of Jews into southern (Sephardim) and northern (Ashkenazim):
(a) Vogt’s theory: The Sephardim are Semites, the Ashkenazim are Aryans;
(b) Broca’s theory: The Ashkenazim are the result of the racial mixing of the Jews with the ancient Germans and Slavs.
(3) The division of the Jews into three groups:
(a) Ikow’s theory: The Southern, Western, and Eastern European Jews;
(b) Lagneau’s theory: The Jews of North Africa, Northern Europe, and Central Europe.
(4) The Jews as an aggregate of different ethnic elements:
(a) The Jews are the result of their mixing with the native populations of those countries in which they settled in their exile (Renan, Krzywicki, Ripley);
(b) The Jews are a race that succumbed to intermixing in exile and during the time of political independence (Flieger, Alsberg, Buschan, Jacques).
The goal of this essay, then, should be perfectly clear: an exposition and critique of the dominant theories, by means of an analysis of the anthropological results and the relevant historical facts, so that in the end we might offer an answer to the question: What would it mean for the Jews to be a pure race?
17. [W. F. Edwards, Des charactères phyisiologiques des races humaines considérés dans leur rapport avec l’histoire (Paris: Chez Compère jeune libraire, 1829).]
18. [Josiah Clark Nott (1804–73) was an American physician and ethnologist.]
19. “From the time of Patriarch Abraham to the present the Jewish race has preserved its blood more purely than any other of antiquity. The original type brought by Abraham from Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago has been substantially handed down to the descendants of the present day” (The Physical History of the Jewish Race). [This footnote is in English in the German text.]
20. [Heinrich Graetz (1817–91), an eminent German Jewish historian, was the author of the most important work of Jewish history in the nineteenth century, the multivolume History of the Jews.]
21. [The quote is in English in the German text.]
22. [Georg Buschan (1863–1942) was a German physician and anthropologist.]
23. “The votaries of Judaism may be divided into two broadly marked and distinct types, viz: the one above mentioned (Semitic type) and another distinguished by a lank and tall frame, clear blue eye [sic], very white and freckled skin, and yellow-reddish hair. Poland seems to be the focus of this fusion of Jews with German and Samaritan races” (Indigenous Races of the Earth, p. 580).
24. According to Tscherny, Ethnographie de l’Empire d’Autriche.
25. According to Hanthausen, L’Empire Russe.
26. “The Jews of Russia (probably along with the Karaites) must be excluded from the number of Semites for good since they share no essential relation with them and belong to a completely different race” (“Neue Beiträge zur Anthropologie der Juden,” Arch. f. Anthrop., vol. 15, page 369 and passim.)
27. “. . . but could not detect any difference in color, feature, or dialect between them and the other people of the eastern coast” (The Great African Island). [The note is in English in the German text.]
28. Die Deutsche Expedition an der Loangoküste I. 43, 277.
29. “Their complexion is like that of Hindoos [sic], indeed, even at this time many of the Hindoos at Cochin become converts to Judaism” (Die Aussage des Missionärs Wolf vom Jahre 1883, cited in Andrée, 1881). [The quote is in English in the German text.]
30. [Recherches anthropologique dans le Caucase (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1885–85).]
31. [These numbers refer to the famous 1886 survey of German schoolchildren undertaken by the German physician and anthropologist Rudolf Virchow. See the discussion in John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 25–26.]
32. “The modern Jews are physically more Aryan than Semitic, after all. They have unconsciously taken on to a large extent the physical traits of the people among whom their lot has been thrown. In Algiers they have remained long-headed like their neighbors; for even if they intermarried, no tendency to deviation in head form would be provoked. If, on the other hand, they settled in Piedmont, Austria, or Russia, with their moderately round-headed populations, they became in time assimilated to the type of these neighbors as well” (The Races of Europe 1900, p. 390). [This note is in English in the German text.]