“Sind die Juden eine Rasse?” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden, new series, 4, nos. 1–2 (1927): 6–11.
Sigmund Feist (1865–1943) was born in Mainz, Germany. Trained as a philologist with a specialty in Indo-Germanic languages, Feist also worked in the field of anthropology. He published numerous books on general philology and also wrote about the Jews in the light of anthropological and ethnological research. His Stammeskunde der Juden (The ethnology of the Jews) appeared in 1925. In addition to his scholarly career, Feist served as the director of the Reichenheim Orphanage, a Jewish institution in Berlin, until 1935. See the entry in The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, 4:269. See also Ruth Roemer, “Sigmund Feist: Deutscher—Germanist—Jude,” Muttersprache 91 (1981): 249–308.
This old and contentious question has now been discussed anew by Professor Hans Friedenthal in issues 1–3 and 4–6 of the 1926 volume of this journal,49 and immediately the answer is given along the lines of what has been proposed by Maurice Fishberg, in his 1913 work Die Rassenmerkmale der Juden,50 and by others, claiming that the Jews represent a religious community (Religionsgemeinschaft) and that there was never a time, even when they still constituted a Volk, when one could speak of a Jewish race, as science would call it today. Even the concepts of family and race diverge, so even if the Jewish Volk, in primordial times, emerged in part out of one family (Abraham and his lineage), the descendants by no means necessarily constitute individuals linked “racially” (that is, by precisely defined inherited traits shared by each), bearing Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance in mind. Pure lines [of descent] exist only on paper and conceptually, not in reality and not in nature. Certain individuals can perhaps by chance appear as racially pure representatives of the original [biblical] patriarchic couple (if they themselves were even racially homogenous); still, the probability of such a chance occurrence is as good as nil.
Now, there are accounts (for example, in Günther’s Rassenkunde des Deutschen Volkes)51 in which the Jews are conceived of as a “second order” race—that is, a race that emerged through inbreeding from an original mixture of many races.
Professor Friedenthal would like to negate even this “modest” view of the “racialness” of the Jewish Volk on the basis of an anthropological evaluation of the Jews living today. The European Jews are as different one from another as Central Europeans are more generally. However, they [the Jews] do belong as a whole to the white race, and only some contemporary Jews possess those traits that are usually taken as racial characteristics of Semites.
Furthermore, Friedenthal discusses the constituent components of the Jewish Volk in antiquity: Semites, Hittites, and Amorites (according to Felix von Luschan’s theory of 1892, later abandoned). This discussion in itself actually contradicts his [Friedenthal’s] assertion at the outset that there never existed a Jewish race. For if that were indeed the case [that the Jews were never a race], then there would be no point in inquiring into its components. Moreover, Friedenthal does not repudiate the idea of the “Aryan” Amorites with quite enough decisiveness. They were actually a pure invention, conjured up to explain the light-skinned element among today’s European Jews. This is to assume that blond and blue-eyed Jews had to have already existed in ancient Palestine. About this, however, we know nothing. We do know very well, however, that the Amorites were a Volk who spoke a Semitic language, just like the Phoenicians, the Moabites, the Edomites, Canaanites, and others. Like the Hebrews, the Amorites were an older immigrant class or group. The physical representations of Amorites that one finds on Egyptian reliefs—for instance, in Medinat Habu one finds an Amorite next to a Hittite52—show in an exact way the Semitic type, akin to other inhabitants of Syria and Palestine. The assumption that the Egyptians had represented the Amorites as blue-eyed and blond can be traced back to the inexact observations of previous scientific illustrators. Dr. Max Burchardt, the leader of the expedition mentioned in footnote 1 [52], wrote the following to me shortly after his return from Egypt:
I have been working for years on a cultural history of the Semites according to Egyptian sources. The old publications of Champollion, Rosellini, [and] even one work by von Lepsius present Semites with blue eyes. I paid particular attention during my work over the past winter to this phenomenon and determined that all these blue-eyed Semites, insofar as I could still gain access to the originals, are the result of errors made by these older illustrators! The eyes are light brown to the darkest brown. At the same time, the hair of the Semites was never blond, but always black or dark brown, and the same held true for the beards. And the beard occasionally had a streak of red. The fantasy or fairy tale about blond Semites can be traced back to inexact observation. Many Egyptian artists used yellow together with black as a foundation or primer. The yellow, however, would cause the color painted on or over it to flake off . And if in some of the tombs one finds Semites with yellow-blond or ash-blond hair, one cannot find a well-preserved black-haired figure in the sepulchers’ pictorial representations! Even the Egyptians are blond there!
There never were “Aryan” Amorites in Canaan, and no one can ever know in any case if the “Aryans” (that is, the hypothetical Indo-Germanic primordial Volk) were blond and blue-eyed. It is not even likely [that this was the case], but I cannot go into this at length here. It is true that in the middle of the second millennium “Aryans” came to Palestine, as the names of the municipal rulers found in the Tel-Amarna letters (from the archive of Pharaohs Amenhopis III and IV) demonstrate; but we do not know if these dynasties in fact even brought with them greater numbers of “Aryans,” who would have exerted a racial influence on the inhabitants of Canaan. And then, as we have already stressed, these need not have been blond and blue-eyed.
There is nothing at all to the notion of the “Aryan” Amorites then; nor can one speak of partial Aryans, as Professor Friedenthal admits. Like all the other historical inhabitants of Syria and Palestine, the Volk of the Amorites spoke a Semitic dialect; as far as the Egyptian representations allow us to judge this, they were not racially different from those other groups.
Those blond and blue-eyed Jews that one encounters today in greater numbers in Eastern and Central Europe, although only sporadically elsewhere, do thus not descend from the primordial period of the Jewish Volk; like many other racial types, they mixed with them later. From what source? One cannot say for certain. Presumably from those very populations, in the aforementioned countries, that evince similar anatomical traits [that are blond and blue-eyed]. Professor Friedenthal is also correct when he declares: “There is no European trait that the Jews lack, and no trait that can be said to be characteristic of the Jews (for example, the crooked nose).”
Likewise, we must agree with him when he repudiates the insistence on a fixed cranial index for the Jews. Among the Jewish population around the world, head shapes range from an extreme dolichocephalism to an extreme brachycephalism; nor is there any clear connection or relationship in this regard between the Jews and the other populations in whose midst they live. One does encounter individual cases of similitude, but this does not allow us to draw any conclusions. The size of the Jewish body, just like the shape of the head, varies quite significantly, and this among Jews living in the same country. In addition to hereditary factors, social conditions play a considerable role, as do certain other environmental influences, which are difficult to grasp scientifically. Anyone can observe at present in many Jewish families that the children grow up to be taller than their parents. This is due not only to better nutrition and more athletic activity, since we encounter this phenomenon even when either one or both of these factors are absent.
Within this category also belong those frequently encountered examples of children whose parents are typically Jewish looking, but who themselves display this characteristic in only a very weak way. Cases such as these are also easily verifiable by everyday observation.
And with this we arrive at a matter that Professor Friedenthal’s otherwise admirable presentation deals with in too cursory a manner: the facies judaica (the Jewish face). It is this more than anything else by which the Jewish race is thought to be identifiable. The development of the soft or malleable parts of the face, however, depends neither on heredity alone nor on the skeletal structure or musculature; rather, it develops in its own way. In it are reflected influences of environment and mental processes that are independent of the abovementioned factors. The facial features of a European scholar, for instance, have greater similarity to a Japanese of equal status than to a lower-class individual53 of his own race and language. In the same way, a Jewish mentality will imprint itself upon the Jewish face. We ought to ignore those external features such as beard and hairstyle (side locks), although these contribute in no small way to the characterization of the Jewish face. The public naturally uses the “Jewish face” to make judgments about whether or not some people belong to the Jewish “race,” and many naive observers are almost indignant when told that no such thing as a distinctive Jewish race exists, for [to these observers] the racial quality of being Jewish is so apparent when “just looking at them.”
Now the Jew certainly does differ from the Northern European not only with regard to the face but also in discernible anatomical differences. The Jew often, though not as a rule, has a long and stocky upper body with short limbs, while the typical Northern European has a short and slender or narrow upper body with long limbs. This difference occurs only in Northern Europe, not in Southern Europe or in the Orient; in these places, the same sort of stocky type [as the Jews] is frequently found. This, therefore, is a trait that is not specifically Jewish, but nevertheless becomes distinct in a racially different environment. I assign little importance to the posture of many Jews: the crooked backs, the rocking back and forth of the upper body, the frequency of bowleggedness. These are not racial traits, but rather characteristics that have been acquired due to external conditions (sitting in a stooped position for long periods of time, traditional habits of prayer, rachitis [inflammation of the spine] due to deficient diet, and so forth); these will immediately vanish with a change in adolescent habits or behaviors.
Professor Friedenthal is thus quite right in claiming that there are no Jewish racial traits; rather, distinct individual Jewish populations display common or average physical and mental abilities and disabilities. These include the following: the shape of the nose—there are just as many Jews with straight noses as there are with crooked noses, it is just that we pay less attention to the former; the shape of the cranium—whether long-, middle-, or round-headed, all variations are represented among the Jews; [and] body size, which varies as much among Jews as it does among the European population in general. Remarkable to me is Friedenthal’s claim that studying is more conducive to greater height than is agricultural labor. One should assume the contrary, if the latter occurs in absence of undernourishment or negative hereditary conditions. In fact, those Jews who have earned their living through manual labor for generations are the ones who are taller and stronger than those Jews who have predominantly engaged in mental labor. One thinks of the Lithuanian wagon drivers; the porters in Salonika, Constantinople, Cyprus, and elsewhere; the numerous Jews engaged in sports (boxing and so on). Where is one to find intellectual laborers characterized by noteworthy physical size? As in all professions, I am aware of only isolated individuals, not an enormous number, of advanced students who exceed the average when it comes to anatomical development.
I have serious doubts as to whether one can deny, as Friedenthal does, the claims about Jews with regard to one of the surest anthropological characteristics—namely, the hair. In Central Europe as in Russia, the curly-headed Jew is a type so often encountered in literature that this could only be a product of real-life experience. In my experience, the Jewish head of hair is specifically distinct from that of the average Northern and Eastern European population; it is more similar to the Southern European type, which displays curly hair more frequently in both males and females. Do we have here a Negroid influence (negritischer Einschlag) that traces back to the primal period of European humanity?
Friedenthal furthermore argues that the racially based talent of the Jews does not deviate in any significant way from that of the general population. If one is going to stress that the great majority of mankind’s geniuses have been non-Jews, then this merely corresponds to the statistical probability, as the Jews have always been a tiny minority. Friedenthal also denies that the Jews possess a special aptitude for intellectual vocations. Is he not in this case proceeding a little too schematically? There must indeed be some advantageous effect of the superior and much older tradition of intellectual training among the Jews in contrast to the European population. This must be true to the same extent that one would acknowledge discernible differences along these lines within the European population itself. Should one really place the average Frenchman on the same intellectual level as the average Russian? In France we have had (Celtic-Roman-French) culture for at least 2,500 years; in Russia, for the most part, culture was introduced only during the reign of Peter the Great, 250 years ago, and it still has not penetrated into all segments of that society as it has in Western Europe. And this is how it stands with the Jews vis-à-vis most of the other European peoples (Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Russians, and so on). Jews on average, for historical reasons, must necessarily stand on higher intellectual ground than the average above-mentioned peoples. Of course, Professor Friedenthal is correct when he writes that this enormous intellectual talent must not be seen as an anthropological—that is, racial—trait. Rather, this gift is a historical outcome that any race could have attained if it had enjoyed a similar continuity in the level of intellectual engagement as had the Jews.
When Professor Friedenthal opposes the notion, at the end of his presentation, that the Jews, as West Asians, constitute an entity foreign to Europe, one must agree with him insofar as fundamental differences with regard to race do not exist between Europe, particularly Southern Europe, and Western Asia. What attracts our attention about the Jews in Central and Northern Europe, however, is the distinctive mixing of their “representative population average,” as Friedenthal puts it. This is the immediate result of the widespread inbreeding that the Jewish Volk has been engaging in for a very long time. A result of this is the (unintended) cultivation of particular types that are conspicuous within the particular population, and that may in part have their origins in primordial elements of the Jewish Volk. This is the only way that one can account for a uniformity of type that exists among Jewish individuals, and not only among those groups or social strata that live in close proximity but also among those that are geographically widely dispersed. Certainly, if one considers the notion of “race” in the narrow definition given to it by Professor Friedenthal, then indeed a pure race could never have continued to exist in the civilized regions of Europe or Asia, for such races—which might at some time in the distant past have been pure or unified—would have been dominated by foreign elements through immigration and conquest. Yet in many cases we can still recognize the geographically determined type, and it is also from this type from which some Jewish groups differ so distinctly by virtue of a different mixture of [racial] features in those groups. This is what one would commonly refer to as the “Jewish race.” Though one might not take this as scientifically tenable, we must nonetheless recognize common or popular opinion (Volksbewusstein) as a reality and integrate it into our considerations.
49. [Hans Friedenthal, “Zur Anthropologie der Juden,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden, new series, 3, Part 1, nos. 4–6 (1926): 45–48; Part 2, nos. 1–3, 86–91. Hans Friedenthal (1870–1943) was an anthropologist and physiologist who taught at the University of Berlin.]
50. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1913.
51. [Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1968) was a German anthropologist and race scientist. He was a strong advocate of Nordic superiority, and his writings were highly popular with Nazis.]
52. Eduard Meyer, Bericht über eine Expedition nach Aegypten zur Erforschung der Darstellungen der Fremdvölker. Sitzungsber. Berl. Akad. Der Wiss., 1913, p. 793 (Nr. 300).
53. [Lastträger—literally, a porter or servant.]