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115 Felix Theilhaber (1884–1956) was a German Jewish physician, sexologist, racial scientist, and Zionist activist. He was born in Bamberg, Germany, and raised in Munich. He published works on health and medicine, sexual politics and social reform, and Jewish politics. In 1911 he published his best-known work, Der Untergang der deutschen Juden (The decline of German Jewry), in which he employed statistical evidence to prove that German Jewry would eventually disappear unless Jews embraced Jewish nationalism and reversed the process of assimilation. The work generated a great deal of public attention and controversy. See John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 142–45; and Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 84–87. The question as to whether the Jews constitute a distinct race is so interesting that researchers are continually inquiring into it. In some Jewish circles the question has been quickly solved, according to the subjective position of a given Jewish individual to the Jewish Question. Not so in science. Here the controversy still rages. Therefore the following research results dealing with the Jewish race question, results that heretofore have not been dealt with, should be of interest. First, however, allow me to set forth a few general remarks. The Jewish race cannot be proven to be distinct or particular by referring to the fact that Jews suffer in smaller numbers statistically from certain known infectious—that is, communicable—diseases. We know that the Jews often suffer less from infectious illness because of their different social conditions and their better hygienic habits (where the religious laws are no longer a factor, a higher material standard of living often accounts for this). These circumstances are in no way conditioned by racial disposition. At most, one might ask whether their race offers a specific protection when they are exposed to infection under external living conditions analogous or similar [to those of non-Jews]. 14 | Contributions to the Jewish Racial Question Felix Theilhaber “Beiträge zur jüdischen Rassenfrage,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 6, no. 3 (1910): 40–44. 116 | M E D I C I N E A N D B I O LO G Y Here, for instance, it would be both interesting and important to undertake a scientific inquiry into whether those Germans settled in Palestine actually suffer from malaria to a greater degree and whether, as is claimed, they tend toward sterility, while such phenomena are encountered to a far smaller degree in those Jews recently settled there. Although those Russian farmers who converted to Judaism, the Gerim, and those who have settled at Jemma in the Galilee, were so afflicted with malaria that they were forced to abandon their small portion of land, Jews are now settled in that same area.53 However, here as well, we are not necessarily dealing with some specific traits of the Jewish race that have been guarded over the centuries. As Dr. L. Sofer54 has set forth elsewhere, a selection process had occurred earlier in those areas where malaria raged, producing a formidable antidote against the disease. Those elements highly susceptible to malaria died out. Today’s Jews would thus be the descendants of those settlers who came to terms with malaria. Their grandchildren therefore can nowadays overcome this illness more easily than do the Nordic immigrants. One can see how interesting the question is, but we have neglected one point. Might there not be something else? The Gerim were drinkers of hard liquor who, as is sometimes said, somewhat weakened their cells through alcohol and poisoned themselves, thus making themselves abnormally weak and susceptible to malaria. How are the Germans presently settled in Palestine faring? Infectious diseases are largely the product of purely external conditions, so that the search for racial characteristics can only consider them last of all. Rather, we must explore the realms of hereditary and congenital illnesses. According to what von Lubarsch has recently set forth in what can now be virtually considered a classic study,55 something inherited can only be what was already apparent in the individual lives of the ancestors; a disposition to disease, then, can only be designated as heritable when it is already present within one’s ancestral line. “If, however, a deterioration of the germ plasm of the ancestors, emerging as a consequence of an...

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