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

4 Jewish Race

24 Fritz Kahn (1888–1968) was born in Halle, Germany. Trained as a physician, he published a number of medical works, including the four-volume Das Leben des Menschen (Human life; 1922–29). He served as editor of the Sammelblätter jüdischer Wissens (Occasional papers on Jewish knowledge) and of the natural science section of the Encyclopedia Judaica. He published Die Juden als Rasse und Kulturvolk (The Jews as a race and a cultural people) in 1920. See the entry in the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, 6:287. 1. general In zoology, race is defined as groups of individual beings that can be considered to have a common origin and blood relation on account of a unity of identifiable physical and mental traits. Human groups, to which the zoological notion of race applies, today are to be found only within those areas untouched by world history and the mixing of peoples that it produces. Among world historical peoples there are no pure races, on account of the countless occurrences of mixing that took place in prehistoric and historical periods. Certainly, there is the ideal concept of “the Teuton,” and there are numerous individuals of this Germanic type; but there is no larger or more coherent ethnological group of Germans. So-called Teutonic or Germanic Völker, such as the Germans, English, and Scandinavians, emerged out of numerous mixings of Saxons, Celts, Slavs, Mediterranean peoples, Jews, and others, and only over the course of many centuries of inbreeding and adaptation (sharing climate, ways of life, language, education , political forms, religions, and historical fate) were they blended together into Völker of a certain unified character. Nonetheless, one cannot identify this as race, but at most as ethnoculture (approximately identical to the idea of nation ). Within the nation, the different constitutive races appear to a degree pure, but to a much greater degree in mixed form. Thus, they provide a particular nation with a particular “racial” stamp vis-à-vis other nations, while these Völker themselves are made up of other components. For instance, the German Volk is 4 | Jewish Race Fritz Kahn “Rasse, Jüdische,” in Jüdisches Lexikon (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), vol. 4. “Jewish Race” | 25 characterized by the relative frequency of the Teutonic type, the Russian by the Slavic, and the Italian by the Mediterranean; at the same time, however, there is also often found to a not inconsiderable degree all other types of races mixed in: for instance, the Slavs in the eastern part of Germany, the Alpine type in the south; in Russia the Teutonic type in the west, in the east, the Mongolian; and so forth. Truly, one ought not to speak of a homogeneous or immutable racial character among any of the great nations within the European or Near Eastern cultural spheres. 2. the jews as a race The Jews, too, considered as a cultural phenomenon, emerged out of a mixture of many different races and cultural peoples. They are made up of certain human groups of various origins who were joined together first as a religious, then as a cultural, and finally as a political unity; and through a centuries-long process of inbreeding and reciprocal physical and intellectual assimilation, and through the leveling influences of a common environment and a common fate, were melded into one coherent group characterized by a distinct and unified type: the Jew. According to the, on the whole, reliable evidence found in the Bible, the Jews were constituted from the following identifiable groups: (a) The families of the patriarchs, “the descendants of Terach,” who came from southern Babylon (Ur in the Chaldees), and around 2200 wandered from north Babylon (Haran in Padan-Aram) to Canaan. As Babylonians, they belonged—in terms of biological race—in all probability to the Arab-Iranian mixed contingent of the Mediterranean race (mittelländischen Rasse). (b) The Hittites who, during the period of the entry of the patriarchs (into Canaan), made up the ruling class within the Canaanite population and intermarried with the patriarchs—the conversion of slaves and mixed marriage being legal. In antiquity the Hittites were representative of the Armenian type [. . .] and transmitted to the Jewish Volk certain elements that in Europe—especially in caricature—are deemed particularly Jewish: slight stature; smooth skull; a bent, birdlike [literally, candle-snuffer] nose; a minor slanting of the eyes; a tendency toward obesity; and short, slightly bent limbs. [The transmission of these elements] began at the...