49$ MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



under the Empire, the Judasi themselves have been a dispersed 

 nationality, and even before those events numerous settlements 

 had been made in different parts of the Greek and Roman worlds, 

 as far west as Tripolitana, and also in Arabia and Abyssinia. 



But most of the present communities probably descend from 

 those of the great dispersion after the fall of Jerusalem (70 A.D.), 

 increased by considerable accessions of converted " Gentiles," for 

 the assumption that they have made few or no converts is no 

 longer tenable. In exile they have been far more a religious body 

 than a broken nation, and as such they could not fail under 

 favourable conditions to spread their teachings, not only amongst 

 their Christian slaves, but also amongst peoples, such as the 

 Abyssinian Falashas, of lower culture than themselves. In pre- 

 Muhammadan times many Arabs of Yemen and other districts 

 had conformed, and some of their Jewish kings (Asad Abu-Karib, 

 Dhu Nowas, and others) are still remembered. About the yth 

 century all the Khazars a renowned Turki people of the Volga, 

 the Crimea, and the Caspian accepted Judaism, though they later 

 conformed to Russian orthodoxy. The Visigoth persecution of 

 the Spanish Jews (5th and 6th centuries) was largely due to their 

 proselytising zeal, against which, as well as against Jewish and 

 Christian mixed marriages, numerous papal decrees were issued 

 in medieval times. 



To this process of miscegenation is attributed the great variety 

 of physical features observed amongst the Jews of 



Diverse , l J 



Physical different countries, while the distinctly red type 

 cropping out almost everywhere has been traced by 

 Sayce and others to primordial interminglings with the Amorites 

 (" Red People "). Dr Dalby declares that there are all kinds of 

 Jews brown, white, dark ; Jews with black and with blue eyes ; 

 tall, short ; concluding that there is, therefore, no longer any 

 question of a Jewish race at all 1 . Nevertheless certain marked 



1 Felix von Luschan also finds that " of our modern Jews nearly 50% are 

 brachy, 1 1 have fair complexion, and not more than 5 correspond to what we 

 have learned to be the real old Semitic type" (Science, Jan. 12, 1894, p. 21). 

 He thinks that the majority of living Jews have the short-headed Armenian or 

 Hittite type, because "they are the descendants of an Armenoid population 

 that had only accepted Semitic writing and language in about 1000 B.C." (ib.) 



