342 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



series. They are about like the northern French and southern Ger- 

 mans. More important still, they seem to be generally very closely 

 akin in head form to the people among whom they reside. Thus, 

 in Russia and Poland scarcely an appreciable difference exists in 

 this respect between Jews and Christians. The same is true in 

 Turin, while in the direction of Asia our Jews are as bullet-headed 

 as even the most typical Armenians and Caucasians round about 

 them. 



This surprising similarity of head form between the Jews of 

 North and South Europe bears hard upon the long-accepted theory 

 that the Sephardim is dolichocephalic, thereby remaining true to the 

 original Semitic type borne to-day by the Arabs. It has quite 

 universally been accepted that the two branches of the Jews differed 

 most materially in head form. From the facial dissimilarity of the 

 two a correlative difference in head form was a gratuitous inference. 

 Dr. Beddoe observes that in Turkey the Spagnuoli " seemed ' ' to 

 him to be more dolichocephalic. A few years later Barnard Davis 

 (1867) " suspected " a diversity, but had only three Italian skulls 

 to judge from, so that his testimony counts for little. Then Weis- 

 bach (1877) referred to the " exquisitely " long heads of the Spag- 

 nuoli, but his data show a different result. Ikof, with his small 

 series of crania from Constantinople, is the only observer who got a 

 result which accords in any degree with what we know of the head 

 form of the modern Semitic peoples. On the other hand, Gluck in 

 Bosnia and Livi in Italy find no other sign of long-headedness than 

 a slight drop in index of a point or two. Jacobs, in England, whose 

 methods, as Topinard has observed, are radically defective, gives no 

 averages for his Sephardim, but they appear to include about eleven 

 per cent less pure long-headed types than even their Ashkenazim 

 brethren in London. This, it will be noted, is the exact opposite of 

 what might normally be expected. This tedious summary forces 

 us inevitably to the conclusion that, while a long-headed type of 

 Sephardim Jews may exist, the law is very far from being satisfac- 

 torily established. 



Thus, from a study of our primary characteristic — the proportions 

 of the head — we find our modern Jews endowed with a relatively 

 much broader head than that of the average Englishman, for ex- 

 ample: while the best living representative of the Semitic race, the 

 Arab, has a head which is even longer and narrower than onr 

 own type. It is, in short, one of the longest known, being in 

 every way distinctly African. The only modern Jews who even 

 approach this type would seem to be those who actually reside to- 

 day in Africa, as in the case of our two portrait types from that re- 

 gion. Two possible explanations are open to us: either the great 



