Jews and Race: Writings on Identity and Difference, 1880–1940

21 The Jewish Racial Question

159 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). Wemustask,then:WhatwasthenatureofthefoundationalstockoftheJewish 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. 21 | The Jewish Racial Question Elias Auerbach “Die jüdische Rassenfrage,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 4, no. 3 (1907): 332–61. 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.] 160 | “ R A C I A L M I X I N G ” 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...