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

5 On the Origins and Race of the Jews

30 The work’s title page informs readers that the material in the two-volume Soziologie der Juden (Sociology of the Jews) derives from lectures delivered at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943) was born in Posen, then a district of Prussia. He studied law and national economy at the Universities of Berlin and Halle. After a short stint as a lawyer, in 1904 he accepted the position of director of the newly founded Bureau of Jewish Statistics in Berlin. In this capacity, Ruppin was responsible for the publication of the Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden (The journal of the demography and statistics of the Jews), which he edited with his assistant Jakob Thon. Ruppin was keenly interested in the question of the Jews as a race, and the theme appears in almost all of his most important writings. His most influential work was Die Juden der Gegenwart (The Jews of today), published first in 1904 and then in a revised edition in 1911. See the entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica, 14:430–31. 1. the three volk elements: canaanite, bedouin, philistine The Jewish people emerged during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries before Christ, when Palestine was controlled by Egypt, and its cities ruled by the nomarchs of the pharaoh. During this time, according to the biblical account, a nomadic people—the “sons of Jacob”—came from the desert, advancing into the eastern part of Jordan, and then went on to western Jordan. They were perhaps identical to the “Chabiri” (= Hebrews?) who had invaded from the East, mentioned in fourteenth-century reports made to the pharaoh by Palestinian landlords, and discovered at Tel-el-Amarna. These sons of Jacob subjugated the inhabitants of Palestine, the Canaanites or Amorites.42 In the ensuing period, 5 | On the Origins and Race of the Jews Arthur Ruppin “The Composition of the Jews in Palestine,” chapter 1 of Soziologie der Juden (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), vol. 1. 42. According to Kautzsch (Das Alte Testament, Tübingen 1922, commentary on Genesis 15:19), the Canaanites and the Amorites are identical; in his view, the name “Amorite” was used by the Elohistic writer, and the name “Canaanite” by the Jawhist biblical source. Ac- “On the Origins and Race of the Jews” | 31 the sons of Jacob gradually amalgamated with the other inhabitants of the land and became one Volk, which has commonly been named the Israelites, the sons of Israel. Later, the Israelites engaged in fierce battles with the Philistines. The Philistines had launched an attack by sea against the Egyptians from their dwelling place in Caphtor (Crete) in the year 1196 bc. They were, however, fended off by Ramses III, and then settled on the Mediterranean coast of Palestine—giving it its name (Philistina = Palestine). The struggles between these two peoples, which lasted for centuries, ended with the Philistines losing their ethnic unity and being amalgamated into the Israelite Volk. Thus, there are three Volk elements out of which the Jewish people in Palestine were composed: the sons of Jacob, the Canaanites, and the Philistines. The Philistines belong—like the Greeks of antiquity—to the Aegean cultural circle, and brought the highly evolved Cretan culture (for example, iron tools and chariots of war) to Palestine. Considering that Palestine was a small land without permanent natural borders, and that for thousands of years it had been a point of entry (a bridge) for the Aramaeans living to the north and for the Bedouins living to the east and to the south, the Canaanites have to be seen as a cross between Aramaeans and Bedouins. The same goes for the sons of Jacob. The Bible reports that the heros eponymos [founder of a people or nation] of the Israelites, Abraham, came from Haran in Aram-Naharajim43 and identifies Jacob explicitly as an Aramaean (Deuteronomy 26:5). On the other hand, it appears that before their entry into Palestine, the sons of Jacob united and intermixed with a Sinai Bedouin tribe, called the Kenites. It has been claimed repeatedly that already in the second millennium before Christ, or even earlier, a blond Volk, belonging to a Northern European race, made its way from Northern Europe to Palestine during a period of great migration . Various researchers think they can prove, on the basis of visual depictions found in Egyptian tombs, that the Amorites were blond and blue-eyed, cording to Albright (Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, vol. 8, p. 255...