ARE THE JEWS A "PURE RACE"? 77 



than isolation by which races acquire peculiar characters? The Jews 

 of remote antiquity seem to have had characters sufficiently peculiar to 

 cause themselves to be known as Jews. How did they get those char- 

 acters? Was any thing but isolation ever the cause of such peculiari- 

 ties? How did the American Indians, the Anglo-Saxons, the Ethio- 

 pians get their peculiar characters? Does Dr. Fishberg imagine they 

 inherited them in an uninterrupted line of descent from a primordial 

 group or pair that had them since first there were men on earth ? 



It could easily be shown that there is as much diversity of religion 

 among the modern Jews as of physical type. If we followed Dr. Fish- 

 berg's method we could prove that the Jews are neither a race nor a 

 religious community. And yet what have historians been talking about 

 when they have written about the Jews ? To what have the Jews, if we 

 may still use the term, been loyal all these centuries ? And to what shall 

 be ascribed that Hebraic influence of which writers as diverse as 

 Matthew Arnold and Nietzsche speak with confident appreciation or 

 reprobation ? 



Dr. Fishberg seems to think that in presenting evidence tending to 

 show that the Jews are not a pure race, he has provided the most deadly 

 possible reply against those who dream of reconstituting the Jews as a 

 nation. If the Jews are not a race, if all their peculiarities vanish as 

 soon as you change their economic status, then it is folly with such 

 material to undertake any work of reconstruction. The Jews are an 

 evanescent phenomenon, and we shall be wise if we gracefully acquiesce 

 in their disappearance. As if men interested in the welfare of their 

 kind ever troubled themselves about such metaphysical entities as Dr. 

 Fishberg's " pure race " ! His contention that the Jews are not a pure 

 race has no point. It makes no difference whether they are or not, 

 since the only so-called pure races are a few small groups like the 

 Basques and the Esquimaux, which, through long isolation, have at- 

 tained a high degree of homogeneity — at least to European eyes. 

 " Pure races " are anthropological postulates, like the atoms of physi- 

 cists, which serve a scientific purpose but never can be brought in to 

 decide practical questions of politics or engineering. Dr. Fishberg 

 tries to use the conception of a " pure race " in such an illegitimate 

 manner. In his eagerness he falls repeatedly, as we have seen, into 

 inconsistencies unbecoming, to say the least, in a scientific work. After 

 a candid perusal of it, one has to declare in true Irish fashion 

 that the arguments do not prove that the Jews are not a pure race, and 

 even if they did, it would make no practical difference to any one or 

 any thing. 



