THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 165 



the linguists, the archaeologists, and the students of religious tradi- 

 tions. Our testimony is derived from facts of shape of head, color of 

 hair and eye, of stature, and the like. These alone are the data 

 indicative of racial descent. To these the geographer may add the 

 probabilities derived from present distribution in Europe. No more 

 do we need to settle the primary racial facts. Further speculations 

 concerning matters rather than men belong to the historian and the 

 philologist. 



The number and geographical distribution of the chosen people 

 of Israel is of great significance in its bearing upon the question of 

 their origin.* While, owing to their fluid ubiquitousness, it is ex- 

 ceedingly difficult to enumerate them exactly, probability indicates 

 that there are to-day, the world over, between eight and nine million 

 Jews. Of these, six or seven million are inhabitants of Europe, the 

 remainder being sparsely scattered over the whole earth, from one 

 end to the other. 



Their distribution in Europe, as our map opposite shows, is 

 exceedingly uneven. Fully one half of these descendants of Jacob 

 reside in Russia, there being four or five million Jews in that 

 country alone. Austria-Hungary stands next in order, with two 

 million odd souls. After these two there is a wide gap. No other 

 European country is comparable with them except it be Germany 

 and Roumania with their six or seven hundred thousand each. The 

 British Isles contain relatively few, possibly one hundred thousand, 

 these being principally in London. They are very rare in Scotland 

 and Ireland — only a thousand or fifteen hundred apiece. Hol- 

 land contains also about a hundred thousand, half of them in the 

 celebrated Ghetto at Amsterdam. Then follow France with eighty 

 thousand more or less, and Italy with perhaps two thirds as many. 

 From Scandinavia they have always been rigidly excluded, from 

 Sweden till the beginning and from Norway until nearly the middle 

 of this century. Spain, although we hear much of the Spanish Jew, 

 contains practically no indigenous Israelites. It is estimated that 

 there were once about a million there settled, but the persecutions of 

 the fifteenth century drove them forth all over Europe, largely to 

 the Balkan states and Africa. There are a good many along these 

 Mediterranean shores of Africa, principally in Morocco and Tripoli. 



* Andree, 1881, pp. 194 et seq., with tables appended; Jacobs, 1886 a, p. 24; and quite 

 recently A. Leroy-Beaulieu, 1893, chapter i, are best on this. Tschubinsky, 18*7*7, gives 

 much detail at first hand on western Russia. In the Seventeenth Annual Report of the 

 Anglo-Jewish Association, London, 1888, is a convenient census, together with a map of 

 distribution for Europe. On America, no official data of any kind exist. The censuses 

 have never attempted an enumeration of the Jews. Schimmer's results from the census of 

 1880 in Austria-Hungary are given in Statistische Monatsschrift, vii, p. 489 et seq. 



