Anthropology was central to the discussion of race. And anthropology, as a discipline, was largely defined before the 1920s and 1930s by research into physical characteristics—rather than, say, cultural practices. Racialism, ultimately, posits a direct correlation between the external and the internal, between physical and nonphysical—for example, intellectual, spiritual, and moral—traits. Thus, skin color or head shape was seen not only or mainly as a physical attribute, but as an indication of a particular individual’s or group’s intellectual, political, and cultural capabilities.
Jewish anthropologists were also interested in the shape of skulls and the color of skin, hair, and eyes, and the texts in this section are intended to offer a small sample of this engagement with physical anthropology. Jewish racial thinkers, like almost all racial thinkers at the time, were also preoccupied with the ancient world, in particular with what the Bible could tell us about racial origins and history. Unlike racial theorists in general, however, Jewish racial thinkers did not appear overly interested in the earliest anthropological accounts in the Bible: the Genesis narratives about the creation of the first humans and the subsequent peopling of the earth. Jewish racial thinkers focused less on Genesis and more on Exodus and the other books that recounted the origins of the Jews as a people.
Thus, a number of the texts in this section are concerned with ancient history, with examining the relations between the Hebrew tribes that settled in Canaan and the native peoples already inhabiting the land. What was the extent of sexual intermixing between these tribes? Was it extensive enough to make a real difference in the racial makeup of the Hebrews, and thus the Jews? (Such questions will also, of course, be central to the texts in part 5, on “Racial Mixing.”) What impact did dispersion in the Diaspora, and subsequent differences in climate and environment, have on the Jewish body and character? Are Jews today racially more or less homogeneous, or do they more closely resemble the non-Jews in whose midst they live than they do Jews on the other side of the world? Such questions were of interest in and of themselves to Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers; they constituted a crucial component of the scientific enterprise. But, as with almost all racial texts, they also bore on political and social issues that were never far in the background.