76 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Dr. Fishberg concludes that there is nothing racial, moral or re- 

 ligious about this phenomenon. It is all explained by the Ghetto and 

 by the nature of the occupations in which the Jews are engaged. Their 

 freedom from crimes of violence is due to their weakness and cowardice ; 

 their proneness to mercantile crimes is due to their rapacity in business. 

 As they emerge from the Ghetto and become physically more robust, 

 crimes of violence too increase among them. That the terrible struggle 

 for existence in the restricted areas to which they are confined in Europe 

 is the cause of much transgression against the laws of property is 

 probable; but weakness and cowardice explain nothing. The weakest 

 and most cowardly are often the most quarrelsome and the most cruel 

 among themselves. Jackals fear the lion, but they have no fear of one 

 another. Dr. Fishberg has written a book about the Jews, as a people 

 who are not a race or a nation, in his opinion, but scattered communities 

 unified by religion, yet their religion has had no effect upon their lives, 

 and its only outcome has been the Ghettos that Christians have forced 

 them to live in ! 



As one proceeds through the multitude of figures, assertions and 

 arguments in Dr. Fishberg's book, one becomes doubtful as to what he 

 is really driving at. It would seem, offhand, that he wished to con- 

 vince us of the fact that the people now called Jews are not descendants 

 of the same original stock. " Ethnologically," he says, " there are 

 practically no differences between Jews and other Europeans. Both con- 

 sist of conglomerations of various racial elements blended together in a 

 manner that makes it. impossible to disentangle the components, or even 

 the predominant race out of the ethnic chaos." But if his aim was to 

 prove this, what was the use of wasting so much zeal and labor? On 

 page 135 we are told, " One thing is certain, however, the original stock 

 of the Jews was not made up of a single and homogeneous race, as is 

 supposed by some." And again on the same page we read that the Bible 

 itself records inter-marriages between Jews and gentiles and " that some 

 of these races were not of Semitic stock has been established recently 

 by archeological research." Why was it necessary to produce more 

 evidence; why worry about blonds and long heads and short heads, if 

 the Jews never were Jews ? 



But why should we be concerned whether the Jews are, or ever were, 

 a " pure race " ? What is a pure race ? Would Dr. Fishberg know one 

 if he saw one? If there ever was a pure race how did it come into 

 existence? Was it born pure, or did it issue pure from the Hand of 

 God ? " Eeligion," says Dr. Fishberg, " the Jewish as well as the Chris- 

 tian and Mohammedan, with the assistance of the state, artificially 

 created the types of the Jew at the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century. There is nothing unusual that an isolated community should 

 evolve peculiar characters." Does Dr. Fishberg know any other way 



