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

8 The Jews as a Race

60 J. M. Judt was a physician and anthropologist who lived and worked in Warsaw. The original Polish edition of Die Juden als Rasse was published in Warsaw in 1902. preface The present work was originally intended to be the introduction to a study of “the biostatistics and racial pathology of the Jews.” However, as an analysis of the anthropological characteristics of the Jewish Volk brought to light numerous and significant issues, this separate monograph had to be devoted to addressing these. Furthermore, the Jewish Volk, as a racial group with particular traits, deserves a thorough anthropological analysis. We are not dealing with an ethnic mass (Völkerhaufen) here, akin to that of other cultural peoples (Kulturvölker), because they [the Jews] do not possess a common soil; rather, they live in small communities scattered throughout the world. When we consider their separate and solitary fates, their centuries-long odyssey, and the most heterogeneous influences of their physical as well as their intellectual environments, it is easy to see that the Jews as a race make for extremely interesting research material. The starting point for our analysis will be the questions: What are the Jews as a physical race, and what is their place in the overall anthropological racial scheme (Rassentabelle)? We understand by this a description defined or supported chiefly by anthropological data. Naturally, an anthropometric description alone cannot provide a complete answer to our question, since it does not address the issue of the racial characteristics of ancient Jewry, but limits itself to contemporary Jews. Furthermore, it gives us little insight into the question if and to what extent the centuries-long wanderings influenced the physical traits of the Jews of antiquity. We therefore have supplemented this anthropometric data with those concerning the influence of milieu and history since the very beginnings of the Semitic races. Along the obscure paths of these earliest wanderings, we went to Meso8 | The Jews as a Race J. M. Judt Preface and Part 1 of Die Juden als Rasse (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1903). “The Jews as a Race” | 61 potamia, Syria, and Canaan, and from there westward, into the realm of the Diaspora, striving to understand the origins of the Hebrew race, the relationship of the Jews to natives of the regions involved, as well as the nature and extent of racial crossings or intermixture. [. . .] part i: the jews as a race in the light of current opinion Before we proceed to the solution of the problem of the Jews as a race, we will consider the currently prevailing views. We will thus mention quite a few theories, presenting them objectively, offering only their most characteristic or representative features. 1. The Jews as a Pure Race Until the sixth decade of the last century, the prevalent opinion was that the Jews were a pure race, free from all foreign ethnic admixtures. The Volk, surrounded by an impenetrable wall of traditions, was supposed to have preserved not only a racial spirit (Rassengeist), but also uniform physical characteristics. The chief traits of the so-called Jewish type manifest themselves uniformly under all geographic conditions and in each and every world-historical era. Already Edwards (1829)17 remarked on the great similarity between the Jews of today and their medieval representation in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper and ancestral representations in pharaonic tombs. [. . .] Still, those who accept this general notion nonetheless are divided on many points. There are those, such as [Josiah] Nott (1850),18 who endorse the notion of the immutability of the Jewish race, and who trace [the Jewish race] back to the anthropological type that emigrated from Mesopotamia four thousand years ago.19 17. [W. F. Edwards, Des charactères phyisiologiques des races humaines considérés dans leur rapport avec l’histoire (Paris: Chez Compère jeune libraire, 1829).] 18. [Josiah Clark Nott (1804–73) was an American physician and ethnologist.] 19. “From the time of Patriarch Abraham to the present the Jewish race has preserved its blood more purely than any other of antiquity. The original type brought by Abraham from Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago has been substantially handed down to the descendants of the present day” (The Physical History of the Jewish Race). [This footnote is in English in the German text.] 62 | A N T H R O P O LO G Y Others (Graetz20...