“Die jüdische Rassenfrage,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 4, no. 3 (1907): 332–61.
Elias Auerbach (1882–1971) was a physician, writer, and Zionist. He was born in an Orthodox Jewish home in Posen, Germany. He earned a medical degree in 1905 from the University of Berlin and emigrated to Palestine in 1909. Although he was trained as a physician, most of his written work deals with biblical studies and the history of the Jews. He also published a novel, Prophecy, in 1920. See the entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd edition, 2:653–54. Also see John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 127–41.
The racial question is the question of the components of a racial mixture.1 We call a race that which exhibits a certain indissoluble unity of significant uniformity [of traits]; when the object of our interest in this regard is to be found in a far-distant period of history, then we speak of a primordial race (Urrasse).
We must ask, then: What was the nature of the foundational stock of the Jewish race, and what types of intermixture have led to the partial transmutation of this foundational stock? The first question can essentially best be answered through an examination of the human (subject) matter existing today, and the second through a consideration of the fate of the race. History can offer us only a very unclear and murky notion of the nature of the race at the time when it emerged on the surface of human historical consciousness. And to draw conclusions from living human subjects about intermixtures that took place, without relying on history, remains a dangerous undertaking as long as the laws governing the mixture of human races are not more precisely understood than they are today.
These two modes of consideration, the anthropological investigation of the living race and the historical assessment of its migrations and metamorphoses, must go hand in hand. We can arrive at a reasonably complete picture of a race only if both these paths can be traveled with some confidence. Certain ancient peoples (Völker) whose history, migrations, and intermixings we know about in great detail are still lost forever to racial research because these peoples are no longer available for measurement. Just the opposite holds true when it comes to modern peoples. Measurement is not a problem here; hundreds of thousands suggest themselves to the anthropologist, but in the majority of cases we cannot trace with desirable certainty the historical mixings and mergers of the historical race, cannot trace all the arteries of blood from which the wide—though often quite opaque—stream of contemporary peoples has been constituted.
For this reason, the Jews are a classic object of racial research, because we can work with both history and anthropometry better in their case than in that of other races. There is surely more that needs to be done here, but it can be done. Here we are presented with a race that throughout the time that we identify as historical almost never engaged in racial mixing.
The tribes of Canaan had virtually disappeared by the period for which the Bible offers historical and even contemporary historical (zeitgeschichtlich) documentation. [By this period] a unified nation of Israel already presents itself to the historian. The only influx of foreign blood imaginable would have to have occurred in that brief period from the immigration of the Jews (if this is the starting point from which we should view them as a primordial race, as the term is customarily understood) until their emergence into the clear light of history. Then, however, endogamy begins, which over the course of one hundred generations disperses and distributes the foreign blood equally within Jewry. These are conditions of intermixture, which not even an experiment could improve upon. And what are the results?
The Jewish race is very homogeneous around the world. It is not uniform, as no civilized race (Kulturrasse) is, but its variations do not differ fundamentally from one country to another. A different fate, a distinct environment, did not result in the blurring of a common and wholly durable type, and indeed the Jews demonstrate more clearly than any other race how overwhelming an influence heredity has, when compared to assimilation, in the matter of a race’s fate.
In order to understand the Jews as a race, it is necessary for this study to clarify three points that have already been hinted at:
Were there indeed no noteworthy intermixings in the historical period?
Was there a notably higher degree of intermixture during the prehistorical period?
How should we envision the primordial Jewish race?
We shall proceed from the present to the past! Everyone is aware that today numerous mixings occur between Jews and other peoples in all civilized countries—far more frequently, in any case, than at any other time since the disappearance of the Jewish state. Nonetheless, a curious concatenation of factors, which the racial researcher has to be aware of, does not permit even now a thorough intermixture to occur.
In Germany at present (1903), the rate of Jewish intermarriage is approximately one-sixth that of pure (rein) Jewish marriages. This number is so large that one would be forced to derive from it a total and imminent dissolution of German Jewry. A genuine intermixture, however, has only really taken place when the offspring of this intermarriage then introduce this foreign blood into the Jewish Volk. Now the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of these offspring of mixed marriages (Mischlinge) withdraw from Jewry both religiously and nationally, shutting themselves off thereby from any union through marriage with the Jewish nation (Stamme der Juden); thus, they remove themselves from the equation, for the most part, when it comes to [our analysis of] racial mixture. The Jewish human material (Menschenmaterial) that we are analyzing from an anthropological viewpoint and that is the foundation of the Jewish race in the progressive movement of history will consequently have altered very little and remains a homogeneous mass; they [the Jews] seldom lose elements to another people through dissolution. A careful and scrupulous authority on this issue, the statistician Arthur Ruppin,2 estimates the number of offspring of mixed marriages who remain within Jewry to be only 10 percent of all offspring produced by the mixture of Jews and non-Jews in Germany. As to actual mixing of blood, we would thus have to figure that at only 1/60 of the racial stock of German Jews. However, even this small, though nevertheless not infinitesimal, number is valid only for Germany and a few other countries, in which altogether a very small percentage of the Jewish people [Stamm] live. If one goes back just a few decades, the number of Jewish intermarriages declines precipitously in relation to the number of the Jewish population overall. In Prussia, the number of Jewish mixed marriages declines by half, if one goes back twenty years; for the Jewish population in general this occurs only when one goes back sixty years. Before this period, around the turn of the nineteenth century, the intermixing of the Jews [with other peoples] in Europe dwindles almost to the vanishing point. For the entirety of the Middle Ages—and for Jewish racial history, the term “Middle Ages” is valid up until the French Revolution—the number of intermarriages was so minute as to be negligible, the more so as barely any offspring of such marriages mingled their blood with that of Jews.
The law of racial isolation of the Jews from the peoples around them in Europe held true for the entire Middle Ages. It would serve no purpose here to trace the two-thousand-year migration of Jews throughout all the countries of Europe; we find the same picture throughout. The Jews migrate to sparsely settled countries of low cultural levels, in most cases as welcome guests, sometimes having been called on or invited explicitly [by gentile authorities]. They introduce their more developed [mode of] economy to the country and form a middle class there. When the [host] nations then become sufficiently strong economically, so that they can do without the Jews, they are expelled as bothersome and dreaded competition or harshly oppressed through laws of exclusion. This sort of change occurred in France by the beginning of the seventh century, in Germany in the eleventh, in Poland in the thirteenth, [and] in Spain in the fifteenth. After this, one can no longer speak of racial mixing anyway;3 yet even during the former periods of tolerance, we have no evidence for such mixing—save for a few instances that we must consider separately.
Intermixture between Jews and Arabs most certainly occurred in Spain during the period of Arabic rule. Of course we possess little documentary evidence for this. We can only assume that the undisturbed neighborly relations of the two peoples (Stämme), the lively participation of the Jews in public life, and their complete legal and economic equality made intermarriage possible. Nonetheless, an essential difference exists between this period and that of modern Jewish emancipation: the Jews [of Spain] were not inclined to surrender their racial isolation. This example offers us a perfect opportunity to make the point vigorously that in general, over the course of the entire racial history of the Jews, the most rigorous opposition to racial mixing does not stem from other peoples but from the Jews themselves. It is only by knowing and taking into consideration this tendency that we are able to make anthropological use of the historical facts, for it is this tendency alone that allowed the Jews to remain unscathed [unaffected] by their long wanderings in exile, the enormity and length of which would have long since brought other races to the point of dissolution. The active reserve displayed by the Jews is, notably, taken to such lengths that it is forbidden for them to proselytize, because religious equality [between the Jews as a race and other races] would do away with the most powerful barrier against physical intermixing.
Quite frequently the well-known case of the conversion to Judaism of an entire tribe, the Khazars, is cited. Many researchers, Ikow chief among them,4 viewed this as an opportunity for greater racial mixing. In fact, however, we know for certain only that the king of the Khazars, together with a number of elite Khazars, did convert to Judaism; whether or not the people in general followed is unknown, so we cannot estimate with any certainty the degree of contact [between Jews and Khazars]. Above all, it must be emphasized that in terms of any sort of substantial mixing with the Jews, a significant Jewish mass was lacking in these regions, and that everything the Khazars subsisted on after the destruction of their empire by the Russian principality of Kiev fell to the Karaites. Most of them [the Karaites], however, never mixed with the main body of Jewry, and therefore the Khazars are not a factor in Jewish racial research.
Finally, many—among them, Alsberg5—call attention to the fact that legislation forbidding marriage to a Jew was often enacted in the Middle Ages. According to Alsberg: “If King Ladislaus the Saint of Hungary forbade marriage between Christians and Jews through legislation passed in 1092, this sort of legal measure only makes sense insofar as such relationships actually occurred.” It is obvious that this is a grave syllogism. Such a conclusion could be correct only if the prohibition sprang from a recognition that Jewish-Christian marriages were a [genuine source of] grievance. This, however, was certainly not the case. Such prohibitions were nothing more than one of many examples of a fanatic hatred of the Jews. These prohibitions against intermarriage stood on the books for centuries in countries in which such marriages had ceased to occur long before, and they still exist today in the civilized country of Spain, where hardly any Jews live. This prohibition is merely the expression of the contempt of a putatively superior race for the persecuted Jewish race (Stamm), akin to the [ancient] Egyptian prohibition against marriage to swineherds. In any case, such prohibitions related to marriage cannot be taken as valid arguments for the miscegenation of the Jews (Rassenmischung der Juden).
To sum up, we can say that during the entire Middle Ages and until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Jews completely maintained their racial purity.
For the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the matter presents itself differently. In any case, the preconditions for racial intermixing were present due to the existence of a strong proselytism. This phenomenon is usually underestimated. Yet all evidence from this period speaks to the fact that around the time of the birth of Christ, the Jews were economically and, above all, culturally a significant presence in the Roman Empire. We know of numerous conversions to Judaism; this reached into the highest circles [of Roman society], even into the ruling families. Non-Jews joined or affiliated themselves with numerous Jewish communities, and just as there existed a pagan Christianity during the early period of Christianity, so there existed a pagan Judaism during this period. Thus, we should not reject the idea that during this period, foreign blood entered the ancient Jewish race through conversions.
Certainly, this period came to a quick and sudden end. With the destruction of the Jewish state by Titus, the aforementioned struggle for the self-preservation of the Jewish race began—the principal means of which was the preservation of racial purity, and consequently the abandonment of proselytizing efforts. Tacitus already mentions this exclusive attitude of the Jews, and there is no good reason to go along with Alsberg when he advises us to take Tacitus’s pronouncement about the Jews—“Alienarum concubitu abstinent” [“they abstain from intercourse with foreign women”]—with a grain of salt.
If we thus allow even the possibility that during this time mixed marriages influenced the Jewish racial body, this influence could hardly have been very extensive in relation to the totality of Jewry, given the brevity of time in which it occurred.6 The religious prohibitions against marriage were lifted only for those converts who had taken on themselves the full weight of the ceremonial law. This, however, was only a small minority compared to those who merely attached themselves in a general way to [Jewish] doctrine. On the whole, one can confidently say that over the past two thousand years, the Jews have enforced the principle of racial endogamy with great tenacity. They strengthened and consolidated thereby the [racial] inheritance that they brought with them out of Palestine. What was this inheritance?
In the history of the development of the Jewish race, surely the most significant and interesting chapter is the period of Jewish independence in Palestine, encompassing approximately thirteen centuries. The most fertile—indeed, almost the only—source for our understanding of racial mixing during this time is the Bible. The realization grows ever stronger that the Bible, despite all the criticism directed at it, has inestimable value as a source. Anthropologists as well gladly invoke it in order to substantiate this or that aspect of their hypothesis about the descent and distribution of the Semitic Völker. But when one does this, one is then also obliged to take biblical evidence into serious consideration when it proves less congenial to one’s theory.
Now, what does the Bible say about the racial mixing of the Jews?
Throughout all the historical books of the Bible and the numerous speeches of the prophets, there occurs a constant repetition of the warning against mixing with neighboring peoples. Yet this fact has been evaluated in quite different ways. Many deny any value whatsoever to these [passages], claiming that this prohibition was only put into place later, after the Babylonian exile—that is, after intermixture had already taken place—in order to prevent any further amalgamation of the Jews [with other peoples]. [This is to claim that] the Jews of the pre-exilic period would have had no aversion whatsoever to intermixing. Today, however, there can be little doubt that biblical criticism, in its initial impulse, went much too far: though we are indeed presented, in the historical sections of the Bible, with many cases of a later redaction, mostly we have the use of old, often very old, sources. If we could assume that the prohibition against intermarriage was always observed with more or less that same level of faithfulness, as [we can] with those centuries after the Babylonian exile that are more amenable to historical verification, then we would have to reject almost completely the idea of an intermixture of the Jews with foreign tribes in Palestine.
Here, however, an alternative interpretation comes into play that is in many ways the opposite of the aforementioned. Alsberg7 argues: “Were unions—both within and outside of marriage—between the children of Israel and non- Israelite, at times even non-Semitic, peoples of Palestine not a common occurrence, then those biblical passages in which the Israelites are warned against mixing with foreign peoples would be senseless.” The untenability of this position has been pointed out repeatedly. In any case, it is certainly less accurate with regard to more ancient times than to more recent. In the ancient period, Jews took an active part in the prohibition against intermarriage; in the Middle Ages, they were passively subjected to it. Is such active isolation and concern about purity on the part of an ancient civilized people an exception to the rule? Or is it in fact the rule? We need only consider the Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, and Greeks. Do we have the right to assume that a “racial sensibility” (Rassegefühl) became powerful only after extensive intermixture had taken place, during the period of the Babylonian exile, rather than in the period of relatively greater racial purity? Gobineau8 and Reibmayr,9 in contrast, correctly insist that the resistance to further intermixing declines with the increasing loss of racial purity. With the sort of racial pride that the Jewish nation, on the basis of all our sources, evinces to a high degree, we should hardly wonder that measures against the influx of foreign types into the race were put in place. An analogous example can be found in the behavior of the aristocracy, who during times of minimal intermixture with “inferior” blood also evince an outlook of exclusivity.
The central question remains: Do we find positive proof in the historical sources—above all, in the Bible—of Jewish intermixture in Palestine?
In considering the racial question, there are two categories of Jewish intermixture in Palestine, and the significance of these has to be valued quite differently. On the one hand, there are the Semitic tribes (Völkerschaften) in and around Palestine, most of which immigrated only shortly before the Jews did, and who, on account of their close relationship (Verwandtschaft) to the Jews, could not alter the Jewish racial type significantly. To this group belong the Moabites, Ammonites, Midianites, Amalakites, and Edomites, all of whom more or less carry the imprint of desert-dwelling Bedouin tribes. On the other hand, we have the seemingly non-Semitic tribes, encountered by the Jews when they arrived, and whom the biblical account repeatedly identifies with the following names: Hittites, Emorites, Canaanites, Perisites, Hivvites, Jebusites, [and] Girgashites. The Bible draws a clear distinction between these two categories of peoples. In many places it deals with the first group as kinsmen [of the Jews], or in any case not as implacable enemies (with the exception of the Amalakites). “So we passed by our brothers, the sons of Edom” (Deuteronomy 2:8). The Moabites and Ammonites were also left alone by the Jews during the conquest of Palestine (Deuteronomy 9 and 19). Undoubtedly, intermixing occurred with these tribes in numerous cases. According to the biblical account, Moses’s wife was a Midianite; David was a direct descendant of Ruth, a Moabite; the prophets repeatedly railed against the mixing with these peoples; [and] on his arrival in Palestine, Ezra discovered numerous cases of intermarriage with Moabites, Ammonites, Midianites, and Edomites, and took action against these. And finally, during the reign of John Hyrcanus, the Edomites were forcefully converted to Judaism and quickly dissolved into the Jewish tribe completely, for which they even provided a series of rulers, [known as] the Antipatrid dynasty. Yet all these instances of intermixture could transform the racial character of the Jews very little, since these tribes were quite closely related to them—as both the Bible and the linguistic and cultural remains of these Semitic peoples testify. It has often been claimed that these tribes themselves were already the product of myriad other elements, but we still lack any evidence for this claim. The Bedouin character displayed by these tribes makes it seem likely, judging by the behavior of the Bedouins today, that they guarded their racial uniqueness tenaciously.10
Although Jewish law permitted this first category of tribes to enter the Jewish community under specific conditions and provisos, and thus permitted them to marry [Jews], the law remained all the more firmly committed to the exclusion of and hostility to the other Palestinian tribes mentioned above.11
[. . .]
The above analysis of the facts regarding Jewish racial traits leads us to the following results:
(1) Since the destruction of the Jewish state, no considerable racial mixing on the part of the Jews has occurred.
(2) The Hellenistic-Roman period, which spanned the two centuries previous [to the destruction of the state] witnessed some racial mixing, but to no great extent.
(3) In the period lasting from 1300 to 600 [BCE], mixing with non-Semitic Canaanites undoubtedly occurred.
(4) The theory of the emergence of short-headedness among the Jews as the product of an extensive mixture with Hittites (Alsberg, Luschan) cannot be substantiated.
(5) The explanation of blond hair and blue eyes among the Jews that points to intermixture with Amorites in the ancient period ought to be seriously doubted.
(6) There is justification for doubts about the conventional opinion that ancient Semites must have been dolichocephalic.
(7) The lack of pigmentation among Jews ought to be considered a secondary, more recent racial heritable trait.
From our presentation it ought to be self-evident that the Jewish race offers incomparable material related to questions of general anthropology. It is a textbook example for the study of heredity and adaptation within human races, for the effects of inbreeding and mixing. The Jews are not, as one Jewish author recently exclaimed, the mixed race par excellence, but rather a relatively “pure” race, a truly inbred race.12 Gobineau’s words remind us of their particular durability, which approaches the miraculous: “I say that a Volk will never die so long as it is always constituted out of the same national components.”
1. Others understand by “the racial question” the question of the significance of the factor of race for historical development, or something of the sort. Practicability thus seems to demand that we either let this vague term go or specify it so as to render it unambiguous as a term.—A. Ploetz. [Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940) was a German physician and biologist, and a prominent figure in the early eugenicist and race-science movement in Germany.]
2. Arthur Ruppin, Die Juden der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1904).
3. This is not the place to analyze in detail Fishberg’s admirable work, and his thesis of a strong Slavic intermixture with the Jews (Mem. of the anthrop. and ethnol. Soc. New York, 1905). It is sufficient to say that we are not able to accept his numbers as an adequate proof of his thesis.
4. Ikow, Archiv für Anthropologie, vol. 15, 1884.
5. [Moritz] Alsberg, Rassenmischungen im Judentum, Virchow-Wattenbachs popular-wissenschaftliche Vorträge, 116, Hamburg, 1891.
6. See the apt description by Jacobs, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 15, 1886.
7. Idem.
8. Gobineau, Versuch über die Ungleichheit der Menschenrassen, Volume 1. [Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau (1816–82), a French diplomat and writer, was the author of An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–55), in which he set forth his theory of the superiority of the Aryan races.]
9. [Albert] Reibmayr, Inzucht und Vermischung beim Menschen, Leipzig and Vienna, 1897.
10. Here a rather curious misunderstanding on the part of Alsberg can be mentioned: he presents the unions of Isaac and Jacob with “Aramaean” women as racial mixing. In reality, these are extraordinary examples of a fierce protection of racial purity. According to the representation in the Bible, which agrees well with the accepted knowledge of Semitic migrations, the Abrahamites—the advanced guard of migration—chose their wives from the remnants of those tribes still living in the areas around the Euphrates. Here, in the interest of completeness, it needs to be pointed out that the Bible mentions in many places intermixture with Egyptians. Abraham, who is still treated as the personification of the nation, in terms of the national narrative (Völkertafel) in Genesis, took as his secondary wife (Nebenfrau) the Egyptian Hagar. However, this narration can hardly serve [our analysis of] racial mixing, since the same Bible presents the Arabian Bedouin as the result of this union, an entity that is notably distinct from the Jewish race. Joseph also married an Egyptian. If one wishes to evaluate at all this least known and most debated period in Jewish history, when the Jews dwelled in Egypt, then one can say that such intermixing at most happened only on rare occasions and only among the upper classes. (Compare the history of Moses’s adulthood). The majority of Jews, in any case, lived among Semitic tribes in the eastern Nile delta and, like the Egyptians, they were disinclined to any intermarriage.
11. [Auerbach provides an extensive discussion of the following subjects in the remainder of his article: “non-Semitic Canaanites,” which include the Hittites and the Amorites; “Jewish Racial Mixing in Primordial Times”; and “Blonds and Blue Eyes among the Jews.” He then summarizes the results of his research.]
12. [It is important to note that the German term Inzucht does not carry the same connotation in this context as the everyday English term “inbred.” As Auerbach and others discussing Jews and race used it, the notion of inbreeding referred to endogamy, or marrying within one’s own race, religion, ethnic group, and so forth. It did not signify close marriage within a particular family, or incest.]