THE Jews of our times fall into
two main divisions: Sephardim and Ashkenazim.
.The
Sephardim are descendants of the Jews who since antiquity had
lived in Spain (in Hebrew Sepharad) until they were
expelled at the end of the fifteenth century and settled in the
countries bordering on the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and to a
lesser extent in Western Europe. They spoke a Spanish-Hebrew
dialect, Ladino (see VII, 3), and preserved their own
traditions and religious rites. In the 1960s, the number of
Sephardim was estimated at 500000. .The
Ashkenazim, at the same period, numbered about eleven million.
Thus, in common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with
Ashkenazi Jew. But the term is misleading, for the Hebrew word
Ashkenaz was, in mediaeval rabbinical literature,
applied to Germany - thus contributing to the legend that
modern Jewry originated on the Rhine. There is, however, no
other term to refer to the non-Sephardic majority of
contemporary Jewry. .For
the sake of piquantry it should be mentioned that the
Ashkenaz of the Bible refers to a people living
somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Ararat and Armenia. The name
occurs in Genesis 10, 3 and I Chronciles 1, 6, as one of the
sons of Gomer, who was a son of Japheth. Ashkenaz is also a
brother of Togarmah (and a nephew of Magog) whom the Khazars,
according to King Joseph, claimed as their ancestor (see above
II, 5) But worse was to come. For Ashkenaz is also named in
Jeremiah 51, 27, where the prophet calls his people and their
allies to rise and destroy Babylon: "Call thee upon the
kingdoms of Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz." This passage was
interpreted by the famous Saadiah Gaon, spiritual leader of
Oriental Jewry in the tenth century, as a prophecy relating to
his own times: Babylon symbolized the Caliphate of Baghdad, and
the Ashkenaz who were to attack it were either the Khazars
themselves or some allied tribe. Accordingly, says Poliak,1
some learned Khazar Jews, who heard of the Gaon's ingenious
arguments, called themselves Ashkenazim when they emigrated to
Poland. It does not prove anything, but it adds to the
confusion.
2
Summing up a very old and bitter
controversy in a laconic paragraph, Raphael Patai
wrote:2
- The findings of physical
anthropology show that, contrary to popular view, there is
no Jewish race. Anthropometric measurements of Jewish groups
in many parts of the world indicate that they differ greatly
from one another with respect to all the important physical
characteristics - stature, weight, skin colour, cephalic
index, facial index, blood groups, etc.
This indeed is the accepted view today
among anthropologists and historians. Moreover, there is
general agreement that comparisons of cranial indices, blood
types, etc., show a greater similarity between Jews and their
Gentile host-nation than between Jews living in different
countries. .Yet,
paradoxically, the popular belief that Jews, or at least
certain types of Jews, can be instantly recognized as such,
must not be dismissed out of hand - for the simple reason that
it has a factual basis in every-day existence. The
anthropologists' evidence seems to be at loggerheads with
common observation. .However,
before attempting to tackle the apparent contradiction, it will
be useful to look at a few samples of the data on which the
anthropologists' denial of a Jewish race is based. To start
with, here is a quotation from the excellent series of booklets
on "The Race Question in Modern Science" published by UNESCO.
The author, Professor Juan Comas, draws the following
conclusion from the statistical material (his
italics):
- Thus despite the view usually
held, the Jewish people is racially heterogeneous; its
constant migrations and its relations - voluntary or
otherwise - with the widest variety of nations and peoples
have brought about such a degree of crossbreeding that
the so-called people of Israel can produce examples of
traits typical of every people. For proof it will
suffice to compare the rubicund, sturdy, heavily-built
Rotterdam Jew with his co- religionist, say, in Salonika
with gleaming eyes in a sickly face and skinny, high-strung
physique. Hence, so far as our knowledge goes, we can assert
that Jews as a whole display as great a degree of
morphological disparity among themselves as could be found
between members of two or more different races.3
Next, we must glance at some of the
physical characteristics which anthropologists use as criteria,
and on which Comas's conclusions are based..One
of the simplest - and as it turned out, most naive - of these
criteria was bodily stature. In The Races of Europe, a
monumental work published in 1900, William Ripley wrote: "The
European Jews are all undersized; not only this, they are more
often absolutely stunted."4 He was up to a point right at the
time, and he produced ample statistics to prove it. But he was
shrewd enough to surmise that this deficiency in height might
somehow be influenced by environmental factors.5 Eleven years
later, Maurice Fishberg published The Jews - A Study of
Race and Environment, the first anthropological survey of
its kind in English. It revealed the surprising fact that the
children of East European Jewish immigrants to the USA grew to
an average height of 167.9 cm. compared to the 164.2 cm.
averaged by their parents - a gain of nearly an inch and a half
in a single generation.6 Since then it has become a commonplace
that the descendants of immigrant populations - whether Jews,
Italians or Japanese - are considerably taller than their
parents, no doubt owing to their improved diet and other
environmental factors. .Fishberg
then collected statistics comparing the average height of Jews
and Gentiles in Poland, Austria, Rumania, Hungary, and so on.
The result again was a surprise. In general it was found that
the stature of the Jews varied with the stature of the non
Jewish population among which they lived. They were relatively
tall where the indigenous population is tall, and vice versa.
Moreover, within the same nation, and even within the same town
(Warsaw) the bodily height of Jews and Gentiles was found to
vary according to the degree of prosperity of the district.7
All this does not mean that heredity has no influence on
height; but it is overlayed and modified by environmental
influences, and is unfit as a criterion of
race..We
may now turn to cranial measurements - which were once the
great fashion among anthropologists, but are now considered
rather outdated. Here we meet again with the same type of
conclusion derived from the data: "A comparison of the cephalic
indices of Jewish and non-Jewish populations in various
countries reveals a marked similarity between the Jewish and
non-Jewish indices in many countries, while showing very wide
variations when the cephalic indices of Jewish populations
inhabiting different countries are compared. Thus one is driven
to the conclusion that this feature, its plasticity not
withstanding, points to a racial diversity of the Jews."8
.This
diversity, it should be noted, is most pronounced between
Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. By and large, the Sephardim are
dolichocephalic (long-headed), the Ashkenazim brachycephalic
(broad-headed). Kutschera saw in this difference a further
proof of the separate racial origin of Khazar-Ashkenazi and
Semitic-Sephardi Jews. But we have just seen that the indices
of short-or long-headedness are co-variant with the
host-nations' - which to some extent invalidates the argument.
.The
statistics relating to other physical features also speak
against racial unity. Generally, Jews are dark-haired and
darkeyed. But how general is "generally", when, according to
Comas, 49 per cent of Polish Jews were light-haired,9 and 54
per cent of Jewish schoolchildren in Austria had blue eyes ?10
It is true that Virchov11 found "only" 32 per cent of blond
Jewish schoolchildren in Germany, whereas the proportion of
blond Gentiles was larger; but that merely shows that the
co-variance is not absolute - as one would expect.
.The
hardest evidence to date comes from classification by blood
groups. A great amount of work has recently been done in this
field, but it will be sufficient to quote a single example with
a particularly sensitive indicator. In Patai's
words:
- With regard to blood type, Jewish
groups show considerable differences among themselves and
marked similarities to the Gentile environment. The
Hirszfeld "biochemical index"
- (A+AB)
(B+AB)
- can be used most conveniently to
express this. A few typical examples are: German Jews 2.74,
German Gentiles 2.63; Rumanian Jews 1.54, Rumanian Gentiles
1.55; Polish Jews 1.94, Polish Gentiles 1.55; Moroccan Jews
1.63, Moroccan Gentiles 1.63; Iraqi Jews 1.22, Iraqi
Gentiles 1.37; Turkistan Jews 0.97, Turkistan Gentiles
0.99.12
One might sum up this situation in two
mathematical formulae:
Ga-Ja<Ja-Jb
and:
Ga-Gb~ Ja-Jb
That is to say that, broadly speaking,
the difference in respect of anthropological criteria between
Gentiles (Ga) and Jews (Ja) in a given country (a) is smaller
than the difference between Jews in different countries (a and
b); and the difference between Gentiles in countries a and b is
similar to the difference between Jews in a and b.
.It
seems appropriate to wind up this section with another
quotation from Harry Shapiro's contribution to the UNESCO
series - "The Jewish People: A Biological
History":13
- The wide range of variation
between Jewish populations in their physical characteristics
and the diversity of the gene frequencies of their blood
groups render any unified racial classification for them a
contradiction in terms. For although modern racial theory
admits some degree of polymorphism or variation within a
racial group, it does not permit distinctly different
groups, measured by its own criteria of race, to be
identified as one. To do so would make the biological
purposes of racial classification futile and the whole
procedure arbitrary and meaningless. Unfortunately, this
subject is rarely wholly divorced from non-biological
considerations, and despite the evidence efforts continue to
be made to somehow segregate the Jews as a distinct racial
entity.
3
How did this twin-phenomenon -
diversity in somatic features and conformity to the host-nation
- come about? The geneticists' obvious answer is: through
miscegenation combined with selective pressures.
."This",
writes Fishberg, "is indeed the crucial point in the
anthropology of the Jews: are they of pure race, modified more
or less by environmental influences, or are they a religious
sect composed of racial elements acquired by proselytism and
intermarriage during their migration in various parts of the
world?" And he leaves his readers in no doubt about the
answer:14
- Beginning with Biblical evidence
and traditions, it appears that even in the beginning of the
formation of the tribe of Israel they were already composed
of various racial elements.... We find in Asia Minor, Syria
and Palestine at that time many races - the Amorites, who
were blondes, dolichocephalic, and tall; the Hittites, a
dark-complexioned race, probably of Mongoloid type; the
Cushites, a negroid race; and many others. With all these
the ancient Hebrews intermarried, as can be seen in many
passages in the Bible.
The prophets may thunder against
"marrying daughters of a strange god", yet the promiscuous
Israelites were not deterred, and their leaders were foremost
in giving a bad example. Even the first patriarch, Abraham,
cohabited with Hagar, an Egyptian; Joseph married Asenath, who
was not only Egyptian but the daughter of a priest; Moses
married a Midianite, Zipporah; Samson, the Jewish hero, was a
Philistine; King David's mother was a Moabite, and he married a
princess of Geshur; as for King Solomon (whose mother was a
Hittite), "He loved many strange women, including the daughter
of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Animonites, Edomites,
Zidonians, and Hittites...."15 And so the chronique
scandaleuse goes on. The Bible also makes it clear that
the royal example was imitated by many, high and low. Besides,
the biblical prohibition of marrying Gentiles exempted female
captives in times of war - and there was no shortage of them.
The Babylonian exile did not improve racial purity; even
members of priestly families married Gentile women. In short,
at the beginning of the Diaspora, the Israelites were already a
thoroughly hybridized race. So, of course, were most historic
nations, and the point would not need stressing if it were not
for the persistent myth of the Biblical Tribe having preserved
its racial purity throughout the ages. .Another
important source of interbreeding were the vast numbers of
people of the most varied races converted to Judaism. Witness
to the proselytizing zeal of the Jews of earlier times are the
black-skinned Falasha of Abyssinia, the Chinese Jews of
Kai-Feng who look like Chinese, the Yemenite Jews with their
dark olive complexion, the Jewish Berber tribes of the Sahara
who look like Tuaregs, and so on, down to our prime example,
the Khazars. .Nearer
home, Jewish proselytizing reached its peak in the Roman Empire
between the fall of the Jewish state and the rise of
Christianity. Many patrician families in Italy were converted,
but also the royal family which ruled the province of Adiabene.
Philo speaks of numerous converts in Greece; Flavius Josephus
relates that a large proportion of the population of Antioch
was Judaized; St Paul met with proselytes on his travels more
or less everywhere from Athens to Asia Minor. "The fervour of
proselytism", the Jewish historian Th. Reinach wrote,16 "was
indeed one of the most distinctive traits of Judaism during the
Greco-Roman epoch - a trait which it never possessed in the
same degree either before or since.... It cannot be doubted
that Judaism in this way made numerous converts during two or
three centuries.... The enormous growth of the Jewish nation in
Egypt, Cyprus, and Cyrene cannot be accounted for without
supposing an abundant infusion of Gentile blood. Proselytism
swayed alike the upper and the lower classes of society."
.The
rise of Christianity slowed down the rate of miscegenation, and
the ghetto put a temporary end to it; but before the
ghetto-rules were strictly enforced in the sixteenth century,
the process still went on. This is shown by the ever- repeated
ecclesiastic interdictions of mixed marriages - e.g., by the
Council of Toledo, 589; the Council of Rome, 743; the first and
second Lateran Councils 1123 and 1139; or the edict of King
Ladislav II of Hungary in 1092. That all these prohibitions
were only partly effective is shown, for instance, by the
report of the Hungarian Archbishop Robert von Grain to the Pope
AD 1229, complaining that many Christian women are married to
Jews, and that within a few years "many thousands of
Christians" were lost in this way to the Church.17
.The
only effective bar were the ghetto walls. When these crumbled,
intermarriages started again. Their rate accelerated to such an
extent that in Germany, between 1921 and 1925, out of every 100
marriages involving Jews, 42 were mixed.18 .As
for the Sephardi, or "true" Jews, their sojourn in Spain for
more than a millennium left its indelible mark both on
themselves and on their hosts. As Arnold Toynbee
wrote:
- There is every reason to believe
that in Spain and Portugal today there is a strong tincture
of the blood of these Jewish converts in Iberian veins,
especially in the upper and middle classes. Yet the most
acute psychoanalyst would find it difficult, if samples of
living upper-and middle-class Spanish and Portuguese were
presented to him, to detect who had Jewish
ancestors.19
The process worked both ways. After
the massacres of 1391 and 1411 which swept the Peninsula, over
100000 Jews at a moderate estimate - accepted baptism. But a
considerable proportion of them continued to practice Judaism
in secret. These crypto-Jews, the Marranos, prospered, rose to
high positions at court and in the ecclesiastical hierarchy,
and intermarried with the aristocracy. After the expulsion of
all unrepentant Jews from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497) the
Marranos were regarded with increasing suspicion; many were
burned by the Inquisition, the majority emigrated in the
sixteenth century to the countries around the Mediterranean, to
Holland, England and France. Once in safety, they openly
reverted to their faith and, together with the 1492-7
expellees, founded the new Sephardic communities in these
countries. .Thus
Toynbee's remark about the hybrid ancestry of the upper strata
of society in Spain also applies, mutatis mutandis, to
the Sephardic communities of Western Europe. Spinoza's parents
were Portuguese Marranos, who emigrated to Amsterdam. The old
Jewish families of England (who arrived here long before the
nineteenth-twentieth century influx from the east), the
Montefiores, Lousadas, Montagues, Avigdors, Sutros, Sassoons,
etc., all came out of the Iberian mixing bowl, and can claim no
purer racial origin than the Ashkenazis - or the Jews named
Davis, Harris, Phillips or Hart. .One
distressingly recurrent type of event was miscegenation by
rape. That too has a long history starting in Palestine. We are
told, for example, that a certain Juda ben Ezekial opposed his
son marrying a woman who was not of "the seed of Abraham",
whereupon his friend Ulla remarked: "How do we know for certain
that we ourselves are not descended from the heathens who
violated the maidens of Zion at the siege of Jerusalem?"20 Rape
and loot (the amount of the latter often fixed in advance) was
considered a natural right of a conquering
army.
.There is an ancient tradition,
recorded by Graetz, which attributes the origin of the earliest
Jewish settlements in Germany to an episode reminiscent of the
rape of the Sabine women. According to this tradition, a German
unit, the Vangioni who fought with the Roman legions in
Palestine, "had chosen from the vast horde of Jewish prisoners
the most beautiful women, had brought them back to their
stations on the shores of the Rhine and the Main, and had
compelled them to minister to the satisfaction of their
desires. The children thus begotten of Jewish and German
parents were brought up by their mothers in the Jewish faith,
their fathers not troubling themselves about them. It is these
children who are said to have been the founders of the first
Jewish communities between Worms and Mayence."21
.In
Eastern Europe rape was even more common. To quote Fishberg
again:
- Such violent infusion of Gentile
blood into the veins of the flock of Israel has been
especially frequent in Slavonic countries. One of the
favourite methods of the Cossacks to wring out money from
the Jews was to take a large number of prisoners, knowing
well that the Jews would ransom them. That the women thus
ransomed were violated by these semi-savage tribes goes
without saying. In fact, the "Council of the Four Lands", at
its session in the winter of 1650, had to take cognizance of
the poor women and children born to them from Cossack
husbands during captivity, and thus restore order in the
family and social life of the Jews. Similar outrages were
... again perpetrated on Jewish women in Russia during the
massacres in 1903-5.22
4
And yet - to return to the paradox -
many people, who are neither racialists nor anti-Semites, are
convinced that they are able to recognize a Jew at a single
glance. How is this possible if Jews are such a hybrid lot as
history and anthropology show them to be? .Part
of the answer, I think, was given by Ernest Renan in 1883:
"Il n'y a pas un type juif il y a des types juifs."23
The type of Jew who can be recognized "at a glance" is one
particular type among many others. But only a small fraction of
fourteen million Jews belong to that particular type, and those
who appear to belong to it are by no means always Jews. One of
the most prominent features - literally and metaphorically -
which is said to characterize that particular type is the nose,
variously described as Semitic, aquiline, hooked, or resembling
the beak of an eagle (bec d'aigle). But, surprisingly, among
2836 Jews in New York City, Fishberg found that only 14 per
cent - i.e., one person in seven - had a hooked nose; while 57
per cent were straight-nosed, 20 per cent were snub-nosed and
6.5 per cent had "flat and broad noses".24.Other
anthropologists came up with smiilar results regarding Semitic
noses in Poland and the Ukraine.25 Moreover, among true
Semites, such as pure-bred Bedoums, this form of nose does
not seem to occur at all.26 On the other hand, it is "very
frequently met among the various Caucasian tribes, and also in
Asia Minor. Among the indigenous races in this region, such as
the Armenians, Georgians, Ossets, Lesghians, Aissors, and also
the Syrians, aquiline noses are the rule. Among the people
living in Mediterranean countries of Europe, as the Greeks,
Italians, French, Spanish and Portuguese, the aquiline nose is
also more frequently encountered than among the Jews of Eastern
Europe. The North American Indians also very often have
'Jewish' noses."27 .Thus
the nose alone is not a very safe guide to identification. Only
a minority - a particular type of Jew - seems to have a convex
nose, and lots of other ethnic groups also have it. Yet
intuition tells one that the anthropologists' statistics must
be somehow wrong. An ingenious way out of this conundrum was
suggested by Beddoc and Jacobs, who maintained that the "Jewish
nose" need not be really convex in profile, and may yet give
the impression of being "hooked", due to a peculiar "tucking up
of the wings", an infolding of the nostrils.
|
To prove his point that it is
this "nostrility" which provides the illusion of
beakedness, Jacobs invites his readers "to write a
figure 6 with a long tail (Fig 1); now remove the turn
of the twist, as in Fig 2, and much of the Jewishness
disappears; and it vanishes entirely when we draw the
lower continuation horizontally,
|
Ripley, quoting Jacobs, comments:
"Behold the transformation! The Jew has turned Roman beyond a
doubt.What have we proved then? That there is in reality such a
phenomenon as a Jewish nose, even though it be differently
constituted from our first assumption [the criterion of
convexity].28 .But
is there? Figure 1 could still represent an Italian, or Greek,
or Spanish or Armenian, or Red Indian nose, "nostrility"
included. That it is a Jewish, and not a Red Indian, Armenian,
etc., nose we deduce - at a glance - from the context of other
features, including expression, comportment, dress. It is not a
process of logical analysis, but rather in the nature of the
psychologist's Gestalt perception, the grasping of a
configuration as a whole. .Similar
considerations apply to each of the facial features considered
to be typically Jewish - "sensuous lips"; dark, wavy or crinkly
hair; melancholy, or cunning, or bulging or slit Mongol eyes,
and so forth. Taken separately, they are common property of the
most varied nations; put together, like an identikit, they
combine into a prototype of - to say it once more - one
particular type of Jew, of Eastern European origin, the
type with which we are familiar. But our identi-kit would
not fit the various other types of Jews, such as the
Sephardim (including their very anglicized descendants in
Britain); nor the Slavonic type of Central Europe, nor the
blond Teutonic, the slit-eyed Mongoloid, or the crinkly-haired
Negroid types of Jews. .Nor
can we be sure to recognize with certainty even this limited
prototype. The collection of portraits published by Fishberg,
or Ripley, can be used for a "believe it or not" game, if you
cover the caption indicating whether the portrayed person is
Jew or Gentile. The same game can be played on a caf terrace
anywhere near the shores of the Mediterranean. It will, of
course, remain inconclusive because you cannot walk up to the
experimental subject and inquire after his or her religion; but
if you play the game in company, the amount of disagreement
between the observers' verdicts will be a surprise.
Suggestibility also plays a part. "Did you know that Harold is
Jewish?" "No, but now that you mention it of course I can see
it.," "Did you know that (this or that) royal family has Jewish
blood?" "No, but now that you mention it...." Hutchinson's
Races of Mankind has a picture of three Geishas with
the caption: Japanese with Jewish physiognomy. Once you have
read the caption you feel: "But of course. How could I have
missed it?" And when you have played this game for some time,
you begin to see Jewish features - or Khazar features -
everywhere.
5
A further source of confusion is the
extreme difficulty of separating hereditary characteristics
from those shaped by the social background and other factors in
the environment. We have come across this problem when
discussing bodily stature as an alleged racial criterion; but
the influence of social factors on physiognomy, conduct,
speech, gesture and costume works in subtler and more complex
ways in assembling the Jewish identikit. Clothing (plus
coiffure) is the most obvious of these factors. Fit out anybody
with long corkscrew sidelocks, skull-cap, broad-rimmed black
hat and long black kaftan, and you recognize at a glance the
orthodox Jewish type; whatever his nostrility, he will look
Jewish. There are other less drastic indicators among the
sartorial preferences of certain types of Jews of certain
social classes, combined with accents and mannerisms of speech,
gesture and social behaviour. .It
may be a welcome diversion to get away for a moment from the
Jews, and listen to a French writer describing how his
compatriots can tell an Englishman "at a glance". Michel
Leiris, apart from being an eminent writer, is Director of
Research at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique and Staff Member of the Muse de l'Homme:
- It is ... absurd to talk about an
English "race" or even to regard the English as being of the
"Nordic" race. In point of fact, history teaches that, like
all the people of Europe, the English people has become what
it is through successive contributions of different peoples.
England is a Celtic country, partially colonized by
successive waves of Saxons, Danes and Normans from France,
with some addition of Roman stock from the age of Julius
Caesar onwards. Moreover, while an Englishman can be
identified by his way of dressing, or even by his behaviour,
it is impossible to tell that he is an Englishman merely
from his physical appearance. Among the English, as among
other Europeans, there are both fair people and dark, tall
men and short, dolichocephalics and brachycephalics. It may
be claimed that an Englishman can be readily identified from
certain external characteristics which give him a "look" of
his own: restraint in gesture (unlike the conventional
gesticulating southerner), gait and facial expression, all
expressing what is usually included under the rather vague
term of "phlegm". However, anyone who made this claim would
be likely to be found at fault in many instances, for by no
means all the English have these characteristics, and even
if they are the characteristics of the "typical Englishman",
the fact would still remain that these outward
characteristics are not "physique" in the true sense: bodily
attitudes and motions and expressions of the face all come
under the heading of behaviour; and being habits determined
by the subject's social background, are cultural, not
"natural". Moreover, though loosely describable as "traits",
they typify not a whole nation, but a particular social
group within it and thus cannot be included among the
distinctive marks of race.29
However, when Leiris says that facial
expressions are not "physique" but "come under the heading of
behaviour" he seems to overlook the fact that behaviour can
modify the features of individuals and thus leave its stamp on
their "physique". One only has to think of certain typical
traits in the physiognomies of ageing ham-actors, of priests
living in celibacy, of career- soldiers, convicts serving long
sentences, sailors, farmers, and so on. Their way of life
affects not only their facial expression but also their
physical features, thus giving the mistaken impression that
these traits are of hereditary or "racial" origin.*[Emenon
wrote in his essay "English Traits": "Every religious sect has
its physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face, the
Quakers a face, the nuns a face. An Englishman will point out a
dissenter by his manners. Trades and professions carve their
own lines on faces and forms."] .If
I may add a personal observation I frequently met on visits to
the United States Central European friends of my youth who
emigrated before World War Two and whom I had not seen for some
thirty of forty years. Each time I was astonished to find that
they not only dressed, spoke, ate and behaved like Americans,
but had acquired an American physiognomy. I am unable to
describe the change, except that it has something to do with a
broadening of the jaw and a certain look in and around the
eyes. (An anthropologist friend attributed the former to the
increased use of the jaw musculature in American enunciation,
and the look as a reflection of the rat-race and the resulting
propensity for duodenal ulcers.) I was pleased to discover that
this was not due to my imagination playing tricks - for
Fishberg, writing in 1910, made a similar observation: "....
The cast of countenance changes very easily under a change of
social environment. I have noted such a rapid change among
immigrants to the United States.... The new physiognomy is best
noted when some of these immigrants return to their native
homes.... This fact offers excellent proof that the social
elements in which a man moves exercise a profound influence on
his physical features."30 .The
proverbial melting-pot seems to be producing an American
physiognomy - a more or less standardized phenotype emerging
from a wide variety of genotypes. Even the pure-bred Chinese
and Japanese of the States seem to be affected by the process
to some extent. At any rate, one can often recognize an
American face "at a glance", regardless of dress and speech,
and regardless of its owner's Italian, Polish or German
ancestry.
6
In any discussion of the biological
and social inheritance of the Jews, the shadow of the ghetto
must loom large. The Jews of Europe and America, and even of
North Africa, are children of the ghetto, at no more than four
or five generations removed. Whatever their geographical
origin, within the ghetto-walls they lived everywhere in more
or less the same milieu, subjected for several
centuries to the same formative, or deformative,
influences.
.From the geneticist's point of
view, we can distinguish three such major influences:
inbreeding, genetic drift, selection. .Inbreeding
may have played, at a different period, as large a part in
Jewish racial history as its opposite, hybridization. From
biblical times to the era of enforced segregation, and again in
modern times, miscegenation was the dominant trend. In between,
there stretched three to five centuries (according to country)
of isolation and inbreeding - both in the strict sense of
consanguinous marriages and in the broader sense of endogamy
within a small, segregated group. Inbreeding carries the danger
of bringing deleterious recessive genes together and allowing
them to take effect. The high incidence of congenital idiocy
among Jews has been known for a long time,31 and was in all
probability a result of protracted inbreeding - and not, as
some anthropologists asserted, a Semitic racial peculiarity.
Mental and physical malformations are conspicuously frequent in
remote Alpine villages, where most of the tombstones in the
churchyard show one of half a dozen family names. There are no
Cohens or Levys amongst them..But
inbreeding may also produce champion race-horses through
favourable gene combinations. Perhaps it contributed to the
production of both cretins and geniuses among the children of
the ghetto. It reminds one of Chaim Weizmann's dictum: "The
Jews are like other people, only more so." But genetics has
little information to offer in this field. .Another
process which may have profoundly affected the people in the
ghetto is "genetic drift" (also known as the Sewall
Wright effect). It refers to the loss of hereditary traits in
small, isolated populations, either because none of its
founding members happened to possess the corresponding genes,
or because only a few possessed them but failed to transmit
them to the next generation. Genetic drift can thus produce
considerable transformations in the hereditary characteristics
of small communities. .The
selective pressures active within the ghetto walls
must have been of an intensity rarely encountered in history.
For one thing, since the Jews were debarred from agriculture,
they became completely urbanized, concentrated in towns or
shtetls, which became increasingly overcrowded. As a
result, to quote Shapiro, "the devastating epidemics that swept
mediaeval cities and towns, would in the long run have been
more selective on Jewish populations than on any others,
leaving them with progressively greater immunity as time went
on ... and their modern descendants would, therefore, represent
the survivors of a rigorous and specific selective process."32
This, he thinks, may account for the rarity of tuberculosis
among Jews, and their relative longevity (amply illustrated by
statistics collected by Fishberg).
.The hostile pressures surrounding
the ghetto ranged from cold contempt to sporadic acts of
violence to organized pogroms. Several centuries of living in
such conditions must have favoured the survival of the
glibbest, the most pliant and mentally resilient; in a word,
the ghetto type. Whether such psychological traits are based on
hereditary dispositions on which the selective process
operates, or are transmitted by social inheritance through
childhood conditioning, is a question still hotly disputed
among anthropologists. We do not even know to what extent a
high IQ is attributable to heredity, and to what extent to
milieu. Take, for instance, the Jews' once proverbial
abstemiousness which some authorities on alcoholism regarded as
a racial trait.33 But one can just as well interpret it as
another inheritance from the ghetto, the unconscious residue of
living for centuries under precarious conditions which made it
dangerous to lower one's guard; the Jew with the yellow star on
his back had to remain cautious and sober, while watching with
amused contempt the antics of the "drunken goy". Revulsion
against alcohol and other forms of debauch was instilled from
parent to child in successive generations - until the memories
of the ghetto faded, and with progressive assimilation,
particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the alcohol intake
progressively increased. Thus abstemiousness, like so many
other Jewish characteristics, turned out to be, after all, a
matter of social and not biological, inheritance.
.Lastly,
there is yet another evolutionary process - sexual selection -
which may have contributed in producing the traits which we
have come to regard as typically Jewish. Ripley seems to have
been the first to suggest this (his italics): "The Jew is
radically mixed in the line of racial descent; he is,
on the other hand, the legitimate heir to all Judaism as a
matter of choice.... It affected every detail of their
life. Why should it not also react upon their ideal of physical
beauty? and why not influence their sexual preferences, as well
as determine their choice in marriage? Its results thus became
accentuated through heredity."34 .Ripley
did not inquire into the ghetto's "ideal of physical beauty".
But Fishberg did, and came up with an appealing suggestion: "To
the strictly orthodox Jew in Eastern Europe, a strong muscular
person is an Esau. The ideal of a son of Jacob was during the
centuries before the middle of the nineteenth century, 'a
silken young man'."35 This was a delicate, anaemic, willowy
youth with a wistful expression, all brains and no brawn.
.But,
he continues, "in Western Europe and America there is at
present a strong tendency in the opposite direction. Many Jews
are proud of the fact that they do not look like Jews.
Considering this, it must be acknowledged that there is hardly
a glowing future for the so-called 'Jewish' cast of
countenance."36 .Least
of all, we may add, among young Israelis.
Summary
In Part One of this book I have
attempted to trace the history of the Khazar Empire based on
the scant existing sources. .In
Part Two, Chapters V-VII, I have compiled the historical
evidence which indicates that the bulk of Eastern Jewry - and
hence of world Jewry - is of Khazar-Turkish, rather than
Semitic, origin. .In
this last chapter I have tried to show that the evidence from
anthropology concurs with history in refuting the popular
belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe.
.From
the anthropologist's point of view, two groups of facts
militate against this belief: the wide diversity of
Jews with regard to physical characteristics, and their
similarity to the Gentile population amidst whom they
live. Both are reflected in the statistics about bodily height,
cranial index, blood-groups, hair and eye colour, etc.
Whichever of these anthropological criteria is taken as an
indicator, it shows a greater similarity between Jews and their
Gentile host-nation than between Jews living in different
countries. To sum up this situaton, I have suggested the
formulae: Ga-Ja<Ja-Jb; and Ga-Gb ~
Ja-Jb..The
obvious biological explanation for both phenomena is
miscegenation, which took different forms in different
historical situations: intermarriage, large-scale
proselytizing, rape as a constant (legalized or tolerated)
accompaniment of war and pogrom. .The
belief that, notwithstanding the statistical data, there exists
a recognizable Jewish type is based largely, but not entirely
on various misconceptions. It ignores the fact that features
regarded as typically Jewish by comparison with nordic people
cease to appear so in a Mediterranean environment; it is
unaware of the impact of the social environment on physique and
countenance; and it confuses biological with social
inheritance. .Nevertheless,
there exist certain hereditary traits which characterize a
certain type of contemporary Jew. In the light of modern
population-genetics, these can to a large degree be attributed
to processes which operated for several centuries in the
segregated conditions of the ghetto: inbreeding, genetic drift,
selective pressure. The last-mentioned operated in several
ways: natural selection (e.g., through epidemics), sexual
selection and, more doubtfully, the selection of
character-features favouring survival within the ghetto walls.
lIn addition to these, social heredity, through childhood
conditioning, acted as a powerful formative and deformative
factor. .Each
of these processes contributed to the emergence of the ghetto
type. In the post-ghetto period it became progressively
diluted. As for the genetic composition and physical appearance
of the pre-ghetto stock, we know next to nothing. In the view
presented in this book, this "original stock" was predominantly
Turkish mixed to an unknown extent with ancient Palestinian and
other elements. Nor is it possible to tell which of the
so-called typical features, such as the "Jewish nose", is a
product of sexual selection in the ghetto, or the manifestation
of a particularly "persistent" tribal gene. Since "nostrility"
is frequent among Caucasian peoples, and infrequent among the
Semitic Bedouins, we have one more pointer to the dominant role
played by the "thirteenth tribe" in the biological history of
the Jews.