Inquiries into Jewish racial identity and difference consisted of much more than questions of origins and development, and of physical attributes. The idea of a distinct Jewish racial identity or nature also raised questions related to health and disease. And statistics played a crucial role in this discussion. Working with numbers generated largely by offcial governmental agencies, racial and social scientists compared Jewish and non-Jewish rates of birth, death, infant mortality, and affliction by a host of diseases—and then sought to explain the differences.
Thus, if Jews seemed to suffer in appreciably lower numbers from tuberculosis or certain forms of cancer, or in higher numbers from diabetes or mental disorders, was this due to their racial nature or to some social or environmental set of factors? Were Jews racially immune to certain diseases and susceptible to others? What impact did Jewish religious law and ritual have on Jewish health and disease? What were the consequences of the abandonment of religious observance by many Jews in the wake of civic, social, and cultural emancipation? What impact did the Jews’ physical isolation in ghettos have on their immunity or susceptibility to illness? What was the result of the end of this isolation and the subsequent integration or assimilation of the Jews into the surrounding populations? Were Jews strengthened or weakened physically by assimilation? These issues bore directly on debates between Jews and antisemites, but also between Jewish integrationists and Jewish nationalists.