“La Prétendue race juive,” Actes, Revue des études juives 48 (1903):1–14.
Salomon Reinach (1858–1932) was born in Paris and educated at the École Normale Supérieure. An archaeologist, philologist, and historian, he published widely on these topics. He was also an educator, museum director, and vice-president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. As is evident in places, this essay began as a public lecture. See the entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd edition, 17:205. Also see Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), chapter 9; and Aron Rodrigue, “Totems, Taboos, and Jews: Salomon Reinach and the Politics of Scholarship in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 1–19.
If the idea that the word “race” awakens is vague, obscure, and contested, the origin of the word itself is no more assuredly established. We want first to recognize in it the Latin radix, or rather radicem, meaning root; but radicem would have given to French the word rais1 and would never have elicited the word razza in Italian. Diez had thought of a word in High German, reiza, meaning “line”; race would therefore be a synonym of lineage. But the “a” from the first syllable in razza, race, creates further difficulty. Following a second hypothesis, razza may have come from another Germanic word, raki, meaning dog, from which we get race and racaille [riffraf]. A racaille was, properly speaking, a family of dogs, or a pack, corresponding consequently to the word canaille (canaglia) [scoundrel, rabble], which also signified, originally, a pack of dogs. In Italian, razza di cane is still used as an injurious term as are kelb ben kelb, “dog, son of a dog,” in Arabic, [and] canaille and racaille in French.
If this final etymology, which presents a certain probability—for the words race and racaille must certainly be explained in the same way—merits our preference, it is quite interesting to ascertain that the very origin of the word race should be strictly limited in use to a variety of domestic animals, a variety whose characteristics, constituting a [biological] type, are preserved from degradation and from mixing by artificial selection. Take terriers or greyhounds, which under human surveillance breed only with terriers or greyhounds, and give them the liberty to mate with other individuals of their species: after only a short amount of time, you will no longer have either terriers or greyhounds, but street dogs—that is, the permanent characteristics that constitute the race will have disappeared on account of mixing or crossbreeding. Every domestic race has the tendency to return to a certain more general type, which is that of the species; the only ways to combat this tendency are isolation and artificial selection. As one of the leaders of the French school of anthropology, Mr. [Paul] Topinard, wrote, “No physiological barrier can defend the races against dislocation.”2
What is true of the races of domestic animals is equally true of the races of cultivated plants, which we improperly call species. Mr. Topinard frequently insisted upon this fact, already well known, but which it is essential to recount here: “Horticulturists say that the types that they create, in practicing artificial insemination and in attending to the conditions of the environment, degenerate and disappear the moment when they are no longer looked after. The natural tendency is not in the fixing of types, but in their disaggregation.”3
One essential remark, owing once again to Mr. Topinard, is that the word race is hardly ever employed by naturalists when they speak of wild animals and plants. They prefer words like variety, which suspend the question of permanence, a condition sine qua non of race. On the other hand, naturalists have no scruples about using the word race when it is a question of domestic animals and plants—that is, in those cases where within the species, the reproduction of individuals is not left to chance.
Is it permitted, given the above, to apply the word race to a particular subdivision of the human species? Can we speak of a French race? A Slavic race? A Jewish race? The majority of anthropologists are not of this opinion at this time. They think that the word race should be reserved for general types that are determined for us through the analysis of the principal branches of humanity, and that we should renounce the word for all types of the third and fourth order that we create out of idle fancy, without basis and without scientific criterion. “Race,” says Mr. Topinard plainly, “does not exist in the human species, once one moves beyond these general types.”4
What are these general types? On this matter, everyone is in agreement: there are the white of Europe, the yellow of Asia, the red of America, and the black of Africa and Oceania. The origin of these types is completely unknown to us, but we have at one and the same time established their existence and perpetuity. A Negro from Africa resembles the Negroes represented on Egyptian monuments from four thousand years ago; a Chinese from today resembles those that Marco Polo saw in the thirteenth century. Despite individual differences and those that exist between different groups of whites, blacks, reds, and yellows, each of these four large divisions of the human species offers, in addition to color, characteristics that can be defined and rigorously ascertained. On the other hand, these are varieties or races, but not species; the human species, whatever its origin, is one. This follows from an experimental fact, the fecundity of unions between individuals from every country and of every color. For physiological reasons that are still rather obscure, infertility is like a wall that bounds species, that traces between them an impassable line of demarcation. Within each species, as we have seen, the natural tendency is toward fusion and mixing; this tendency is counterbalanced by geographical conditions, by social and religious prejudices; but it exists and has already produced appreciable results, to which the mulattos and mestizos testify.
Not only have naturalists never been able to define what it is that we commonly call the Germanic race, the Slavic race, [or] the French race, but they almost unanimously agree in condemning such associations of words. It is however, in the name of the so-called rights of the Germanic race that France was mutilated in 1871, and this absurd conception, unjustifiable in the eyes of science, was used against us by politicians, served at times by blind scholars.5 As early as the day following the treaty of Frankfurt, the anthropologist [Abel] Hovelacque protested against this abuse of false and vague ideas, placed at the service of the spirit of conquest and oppression. “Germanic blood! May as well speak of Latin blood or Slavic blood! Never has the confusion between languages and races been pushed so far. This is a fiction almost as puerile as that of a Germanic race, a Germanic blood, just as much as that of a French race, a Spanish race, an Italian race, a Slavic race . . . This French race, is it the Gascon, the Savoyard, or the Lorrain? This Slavic race, is it the Russian, the Czech, or the Slovene? Once again, fiction, all of this!”
And, in the same work, Hovelacque wrote these beautiful lines: “It is not for all the evil it has done to us that we claim to condemn the theory of race: had it been more calamitous for us, we would not look on it as more detestable. But [the theory] claims to depend on a series of scientific concepts with which, quite to the contrary, it finds itself in flagrant contradiction.”
These words of Hovelacque, sirs, the Israelites could repeat and use to their advantage. Yes, the false and absurd theory of race has done and continues to do us harm; it is used against us at every occasion, in interviews, in newspapers, at the theater; but even if it were a thousand times more calamitous for us, I would say that I myself would be the first to adopt it, that I would even contribute to spreading it, if it were scientifically admissible—but instead I reject it disdainfully, because it is stupid.
It is in the victorious Germany of 1871 that this theory found most of its followers, where it became almost a dogma in education; an explosion of antisemitism followed it, to which Mr. von Bismarck, a grand apostle of furor teutonicus, was not a stranger, and which he even encouraged because he dreaded the liberal tendencies of German Israelites. Fifteen years afterward, one found men in France, allegedly better Frenchmen than their compatriots, to dig up this grave Germanic error and turn it into a weapon against a portion of their fellow citizens. The same fraudulent theory that justified the conquest of Alsace was the inspiration for French antisemitism. I hasten to add that the anthropologists from our country, those who honor science, showed themselves to be equally impervious to the theory of race, whether it was invoked to give an appearance of entitlement to violence, or whether it had as its purpose, toward the citizens of France, to substitute a régime d’exception [emergency rule] for the law.
In truth, the theory of race belongs neither to anthropologists nor to naturalists, but to linguists and historians. Linguists, at first, were victims of an illusion. When it was recognized, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the languages of most of the civilized peoples of Europe and Asia are divided in two large groups, languages related to Sanskrit and languages related to Hebrew, it was hastily concluded that the people who spoke these languages also belong to two groups, two races, one of which was called Aryan—due to the Aryas of India—the other Semitic, due to the biblical legend that gives the Hebrews and other peoples of Asia the son of the Patriarch Noah, Shem, as an ancestor. For a long time, one spoke of Aryans and Semites as large families, each of which were identified with a distinct ancestor—something like the Montagues and Capulets. A little reflection is enough to recognize the sophism. A Negro who speaks English in the United States nonetheless does not belong to the white variety of the human species; language is not a physical characteristic, but something taught and acquired; it is madness to want to conclude that the language a man speaks determines his physical descent. Max Müller6 and [Ernest] Renan, who in their youth had shared and propagated this common error, did not hesitate, when they saw the truth, to come around. “You speak,” said Max Müller, “of a Semitic vocabulary, of an Aryan syntax, or you speak to us of a group of men with kinky hair or black skin; you express clear ideas, we understand you. But if you speak of a kinky-haired vocabulary or a black syntax, we will understand you as poorly as if you speak of a Semitic race or an Aryan race.”7 This was quite right, but a bit late. Mr. Bérard told us two weeks ago that public opinion, whose education is provided by the press and novels, is in general a half-century behind the current state of science; it is therefore necessary to wait until the people of the world and the journalists cease speaking of Aryans and Semites and placing in opposition the qualities or the defects of the Semites and the Aryans.
Historians at first fell in behind the linguists. They found on their path peoples, ethnic collectivities, who were called, for example, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Gauls. The Hebrews spoke a Semitic language related to Arabic, Assyrian, Syriac; they were designated as Semites. The Greeks and the Gauls spoke Aryan languages, related to Sanskrit, Persian, Latin; they were designated as Aryans. From there, it was but one step to climb in order to introduce to history a Gallic race, a Jewish race, a Hellenic race. The sophism, as you can see, was two-sided: on the one hand, one equated the community of a language to the community of physical descent; on the other hand, one devised anthropological groups, designated abusively by the names of races, on the model of political or religious groups. Is it necessary to point out that a political grouping does not presuppose a unity of origins? Does not history itself show us a succession of empires—those of the Egyptians, [of the] Assyrians, of Alexander, of Augustus, of Charlemagne, of the Arabs that united in one more or less stable body politic peoples that did not speak the same language and whose respective origins, from the point of view of physical descent, are absolutely unknown to us?
Today, a self-respecting scholar speaks of the Hebrews, the Greeks, [or] the Gauls, but does not say the Hebraic or Jewish race, the Greek race, or the Gallic race. “To argue the notion of races,” writes the Abbé Houtin, “to hold forth on their qualities of attraction or repulsion, this ordinarily serves to explain historical problems with words that correspond to no reality whatsoever.”8 Pages were filled with citations of this genre, borrowed from our best historians. Unfortunately, as I have already told you, well-informed scholars are always ahead of their time, and the public continues to live for a long time on false opinions taught by their predecessors.
Around 1860, anthropologists joined in. You know that anthropology is a very new science; if it has dispelled various errors, it has substantiated others for not having known how to defend itself at the start. Forty or fifty years ago, the sophism that confounds linguistic, political, and anthropological groups was almost universally accepted. One looked to distinguish the Aryan anthropologically from the Semite, and we must say loud and clear that it was not a success. The populations that speak Aryan languages, like those that speak Semitic languages, belong, in general, to the white race; but there are blonds and brunets, tall and short, rounded heads and elongated heads. The Arab from the Syrian desert, the Bedouin, was taken as an example of a Semite, and it was remarked that he often had an aquiline nose, an elongated head, black hair, and an attractive build. It was concluded that the Semite—and, by consequence, the Jew—was a tall, brown-haired dolichocephalic with a long and arched nose. Once verified, it was found that the type in question was not dominant, but quite rare among real Jews. We know that the Jews are divided into two large groups, the Sephardim, or Jews of the Portuguese rite, and the Ashkenazim, or Jews of the German rite. The first live for the most part in the countries neighboring the Mediterranean; the second are widespread throughout Central and Eastern Europe, notably in Poland and Russia. It was believed, quite naturally, that the true Jews were the Sephardim, nearer than the others to Palestine, especially since it was believed that the Bedouin type was recognized more frequently among them. The Ashkenazim, following this theory, would not represent the Jewish race in the least; they would be Germanic or Slavic, more or less mixed with Jewish blood. But this opinion does not withstand consideration. There are blonds with slender heads, short height, and flat noses among the Sephardim as [there are] among the Ashkenazim; in London, where both groups are well represented, one finds even more slender heads among the Sephardim than the others.9 Even more serious, it was eventually acknowledged that if, following a famous saying, each country has the Jews it deserves, the Jews also contribute in large measure to the physical characteristics of the inhabitants of the diverse countries in which they reside. For instance, the Jews of England and Germany are taller;10 the Jews of Russia often represent what is called the Slavic type; the Jews of Palestine, of Asia Minor, [and] of North Africa resemble the Bedouins to a much greater extent than their Occidental coreligionists.
These observations were summarized in 1891 by a woman with a large heart and great knowledge, Mrs. Clémence Royer, before the Society of Anthropology of Paris.11 “It is certain,” she said, “that the Jews from every country resemble one another less than they resemble the populations that surround them, and that those from the North are distinguished as clearly from those of the South as the Germanics are from the Latins. There is no pure race; that of the Jews is a bit more pure than the others because, having been persecuted everywhere and forced to live apart [from non-Jews] for long centuries, they are less mixed than the other ethnic elements among whom they lived during the entire Christian era. But previously the Jews were perhaps less identifiable than today. During the last centuries before the Christian era, they produced a large number of proselytes. Each Jewish colony was recruited from among the ambient populations. It is mostly, and perhaps only, since they have been persecuted by the Christians that their type became characterized and fixed because, as soon as this moment occurred, they no longer had alliances except among themselves.”
This doctrine more or less conforms to that which Renan developed in 1883, a doctrine that was equally upheld by Hebraists like Loeb and Neubauer, and by anthropologists like Topinard and Ripley.12
Let’s take the Hebrews at the moment when they appear in history, at the close of the legendary period, at the time of the conquest of Palestine. The Bible teaches us that this conquest was very long, that the indigenous peoples were not exterminated, and that the invaders married women from the region.13 These conquerors of Palestine were united by a religious and political link; but no historian would want to believe that all of them were the descendants of Abraham. Let’s admit it all the same, for the sake of argument. Just as the Frankish people were absorbed into the Celtic and Roman populations of Gaul, all the while imposing their name on the region that became France, likewise the Hebrew element, supposedly homogeneous, tended to blend with the indigenous population that became Judea. Now we do not know exactly what this indigenous population was; but we are sure that it was not homogeneous, that it was comprised notably of tribes coming from the east—that is, from Asia—and others from the west—that is, the islands of the archipelago and probably the coasts of Greece and Africa. It is possible that the Philistines were Cretans; this was the opinion of the ancients, and it should be noted that an old Cretan cult of Jupiter existed at Gaza in Philistia. On the other hand, those whom the Bible calls the Hittites had penetrated Palestine from the north and seem, according to the Egyptian monuments, to have presented certain characteristics of the Mongolian type. In a word, the Syrian coastline was populated by people of every provenance, the residue of successive invasions by land and by sea.14 It is in the midst of this human dust that the Hebrew invaders came to establish themselves. Then even had these invaders all been descendants of the same father, the ethnic mixture resulting from the conquest could not have had anything in common with this extended family that we call a race.
One wanted at times to discover, in this tribal melting pot placed under Jewish hegemony around the year 1000, anthropological elements of contemporary Jews; it was said that the old Bedouin background was responsible for the tall, brown-haired dolichocephalics; that the blonds were the descendants of the Amorites; the flat-nosed were those of the Hittites.15 These are unwarranted hypotheses, for we know the indigenous peoples of Palestine only by the rare and quite insufficient representations on Egyptian monuments. Who is to say that the refined Bedouin type actually existed at that time? It is even rather improbable because it exists today and because, as with everything human, it is a product of evolution.
The Jewish tribes are taken into captivity; those of Israel disappear—dreamers of our day wanted to find them in England and America—those from the Kingdom of Judah returned to their homeland. Then, after Alexander the Great, the Jews began to spread throughout the Mediterranean world and gained converts everywhere; many Greeks and Asians—that is, people speaking languages other than Hebrew—became Jews and started a Jewish lineage. Then came the Roman war, the destruction of the Temple, the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Jews, the reducing of hundreds of thousands of others to slavery, a new dispersion of survivors across the world. Despite the simultaneous spread of Christianity, Judaism did not lose its expansive force; there were new converts, new marriages between Jews and non-Jews to such a point that councils concerned with this were held on several occasions to prohibit mixed marriages and conversions to Judaism. In the eighth century, in southwestern Russia, a large portion of the Turkic people of the Khazar region converted to Judaism.16 It was alleged that these Khazars began the line of the millions of Jews who populate Russia at present; others preferred to see them only as the ancestors of the Karaites, Russian Jews who reject the Talmud and do not marry Talmudist Jews. In reality, nobody knows. We do not even know how the large present-day population of Jews in Russia was formed; if the jargon17 they speak inclines us to believe that they came from the west—that is, from Germany—on the other hand it is certain that there were, as early as the beginning of the Christian era, Jewish communities in the south of Russia. The jargon could very well be a commercial language, developed out of necessity by relationships with Central Europe, and not the mother tongue of all Russian Jews. It remains the case that the conversion of the Khazars, and quite a lot of other less important conversions whose memory was not kept by history, must have introduced into the already confused masses of the Jewish population a whole host of heterogeneous elements that it would be absolutely impossible to untangle.
You see how legitimate is the conclusion thus formulated by Mr. Topinard: “The Jews are but a religious federation. They are neither a nation nor a race.”
Nevertheless, there are two important facts that must not be neglected. The first is of a historical nature: the Jews—for a long time penned up in ghettos, subject to the same conditions of existence, almost always poverty-stricken—have, for at least a thousand years, married among themselves. Conversions to Judaism, although more numerous today than one might believe, especially in Russia, could exercise in this respect but a feeble influence; the same can be said of illegitimate or clandestine unions with non-Jews. The second fact is of an anthropological nature. The Jews, although greatly varying among themselves, nonetheless have a particular facies [facial aspect] that enables any person to recognize them with a little practice; he will not recognize them without some doubt, but—the experiment has been attempted in Russia—he will not make an error more than thirty times out of one hundred.
These two facts are closely related. The Jews do not present a unique type, but a number of relatively limited types, which is a natural and inevitable result of endogamy—that is, of the habit of marrying among themselves. Certain types prevail in certain countries, for example Poland or Salonica [sic], because, despite the present-day ease of moving around, most of the Jewish population of the great [urban] centers intermarry, and because in the struggle for life that thus establishes itself between the types, sometimes one group and sometimes another prevails.18 In this struggle or, better yet, this selection, the conditions of the environment and the climate naturally exercise a large influence. Now the environment and the climate, in each country, are favorable to the predominance of one or of several types—from the tall, blond type in Northern Europe to the short, brown-haired type along the Mediterranean. If, therefore, so many English Jews resemble Englishmen and so many Russian Jews resemble Russians, this is not explained by legitimate or clandestine unions between Russians, Englishmen, and Jews, but simply because the English environment favors the production of the English type or types, [and] the Russian environment, Russian types. These types do not come out of the land, needless to say, but they tend to prevail following the progressive elimination of others that are, for reasons that escape us, less well adapted to the environment.
The Americans paid high prices to purchase our most beautiful stallions from Perche; their ambition was to have a race of large horses, for those in the New World are small. And yet after a few generations, there were no more Percherons in America; they had lost the essential characteristic of their race, which is their size. The indigenous type had prevailed.
After having cited for you the Percherons, may I, without being disrespectful, speak to you of Parisian women? What has not been said of these charming, spiritual, refined beings, who know how to dress like queens in rags and who walk in a way even queens could not? Now Parisian women are comprised of women from every provenance—even Jews—few of whom were born in Paris, perhaps none of whom can count back three generations of Parisians. When one of these exquisite Parisian women, who finds herself having learned the trade of a seamstress or milliner, decides to emigrate to the United States, the daughters she can have there with a Parisian immigrant are Yankees, not Parisians; much more than that, after ten or twelve years, perhaps even sooner, she herself will have lost her Parisian qualities, her particular grace and her inventive genius. One must not believe that this sovereign action of environments was unknown to the ancients; it is the moderns who have left it unrecognized for so long. Here, in this respect I extract a rather curious phrase from the Agricola by Tacitus: “Among the Britons (of Great Britain), some resemble Germanic peoples, others Iberians; those closest to Gaul resemble Gallic people, either by the persistent influence of origins, or because the island was advancing on all sides; nature alone and the climate have marked the Britons with these varied characteristics” (position caeli corporibus habitum dedit).19 Tacitus hesitates between the theory of race and that of atmosphere, but one sees that he is already familiar with the second and knows that the resemblances of physical types can be explained by environmental factors.
The ghetto is also an environment, a sad environment, whose influence is transmitted by heredity. Among the emancipated Jews of our countries, sons, and sometimes grandsons of the emancipated, one sees again the short height, the fearful look, the apparent nervousness betraying a heritage of long centuries of oppression. These Jews are a living testimony to the accusation against the blasphemous regime of the gospel, whose support on certain points around the globe, at the very moment at which I am speaking to you, is one of the tragedies and shames of humanity.
Renan, in 1883, had concluded that there is not a Jewish race, that there is not a Jewish type, but Jewish types.20 This great sage was right. But we may ask ourselves if, over the centuries, Jews continue to marry among themselves, will they not give birth to a true race—that is, to a group of men possessing that which they do not yet possess, certain common and well-defined physical characteristics. In theory, this would be quite acceptable. Take, as Renan said, three hundred individuals from the boulevard, lock them away on a desert island, and let them intermarry over five generations or more; by the end of a few centuries, a dominant type will form, which will tend to dominate more and more, and you could say that you have created, on a desert island, a “boulevard race.” But, in practice, it cannot be so. The tendency of present-day Judaism is to spread itself out more and more across the surface of the globe; today, the greatest conglomeration of Jews in the world is no longer in Warsaw, but New York. An increasing number of Jewish centers are therefore being formed, in the most different environments and climates, where, as I have shown you, the Jewish type that tends to prevail is necessarily the one that conforms most to the indigenous type, to the type best adapted to the climate and to other exterior conditions of life. Thus, the number of Jewish types is bound to multiply again in the future; these types will localize—naturalize, if one may use that word—and the formation of a defined type, which will constitute a race, will become more and more impossible given the different conditions of existence and environments.
My conclusion, sirs, is clear and may be formulated in but a few words: “There never was a Jewish race; there is not one now; there never will be one.” Those who speak today of a Jewish race commit what Leibnitz called a psittacism, “parrot talk”—that is, they couple together words, each of which offers a meaning in isolation, but which, thus associated, have none.
Translated by Shaina Hammerman
1. As opposed to the French word race.
2. L’Anthropologie, 1898, p. 643.
3. Congrès Anthropologique de Moscou, p. 108.
4. L’Anthropologie, 1896, p. 480.
5. See G. Hervé, La question d’Alsace et l’argument ethnologique, in the Revue de l’Ecole d’anthropologie, 1903, pp. 285ff.
6. [Max Müller (1823–1900) was a renowned German philologist and scholar of comparative religions.]
7. This is the sense, but not the literal translation, of a famous passage from one of Max Müller’s last works, Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas, London, 1888.
8. G. Houtin, L’Americanisme, Paris, 1903, p. 44.
9. J. Jacobs and J. Speilman, in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. XIX (London, 1890).
10. The short height of Jews in certain centers like Warsaw is simply the effect of physiological poverty; the well-to-do classes have a greater average height than the poor classes.
11. Bulletin de la Société d’Anthropologie, 1891, p. 544.
12. A very abundant bibliography may be found in the book by J. M. Judt, Die Juden als Rasse, Berlin 1903, pp. 234–240.
13. See, among other passages, Deuteronomy, XX, 14; XXI, 11; XXIII, 8; Judges, III, 6; Chron., II, 35.
14. “The better informed we are about the state of Syria at the time of the Egyptian conquests, the more we must observe the mixing of the races and their almost infinite dividing up” (Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient, vol. I, p. 148).
15. V. Jacques, in the Revue des Études juives, Paris, 1893, p. liv.
16. On this question, see the fine article in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. IV (New York, 1903).
17. [“Jargon” was the term employed by many Jews in Central and Western Europe to refer to Yiddish, which they considered a “bastard” language, less than legitimate.]
18. The same appearance of relative homogeneity due simply to endogamy was observed in certain isolated valleys in the Swiss mountains by Martin (L’Anthropologie, 1897, p. 91). Cf. what Mr. Mahoudeau says about Algerian Jews (Bulletin de la Société d’Anthropologie, 1901, p. 543).
19. Tacitus, Agricola, cap. XI.
20. Ernest Renan, Le Judaisme comme race et comme religion, Paris, 1883 (cf. Th. Reinach, Revue des Études juives, vol. VI, 1883, p. 141).