7o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ARE THE JEWS A "PURE RACE"? 



By ABRAM LIPSKY, Ph.D. 



NEW YORK CITY 



DR. MAURICE FISHBERG has brought together in a book on 

 " The Jews " x a great mass of valuable anthropological and soci- 

 ological statistics. The work is likely to become a standard reference 

 handbook for some time to come. For that reason it is deplorable that 

 the author should have marred its value by over-zealousness in sup- 

 porting a thesis that did not actually lie within the scope of his under- 

 taking. He believes that the Jews are destined to be assimilated by the 

 races among whom they live in Europe and America, and it is appar- 

 ently in order to facilitate this manifest destiny that he arrays all the 

 arguments he can muster tending to show that the Jews are not a pure 

 race. 



There are certain physical traits generally assumed by anthropol- 

 ogists to be distinctive of race. Dr. Fishberg finds that in these respects 

 the Jews are not different from the races amongst whom they live. 

 Certain other characteristics of a moral, social and vital or physiological 

 nature, often ascribed to the Jews, are either denied existence or 

 attributed by the author to economic and social status rather than to 

 race. 



The chief physical characteristics relied upon to distinguish races 

 are stature, head-form and color. As to stature, Dr. Fishberg shows 

 that the Jews rise and fall with the people in the land of their nativity, 

 being short where the gentiles are short, and tall where they are tall, 

 though never quite as tall. That stature is influenced by environment, 

 is conceded by Dr. Fishberg — his own measurements on Jews in New 

 York and those of Dr. Jacobs on the Jews in London leave no doubt 

 on this point. A little of the Jewish variability in stature is reserved, 

 nevertheless, to be ascribed to racial intermixture. 



As to head-form Dr. Fishberg is more decided. The heads of Euro- 

 pean, Caucasian, African and Arabian Jews vary in shape. Some are 

 long, some are broad, some are round. Only the commingling of the 

 blood of different races could have produced these differences, argues the 

 author. 



Now, strange to say, in eastern Europe — in Russia, Poland, Hun- 

 gary, Roumania — the Jews have remarkably uniform heads. These Jews 



w< The Jews, a Study in Eace and Environment," by Maurice Fishberg, 

 M.D., Contemporary Science Series, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1911. 



