THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 343 



body of the Jews in Europe to-day — certainly all the Ashkenazim, 

 who form upward of ninety per cent of the nation, and quite proba- 

 bly the Sephardim also, except possibly those in Africa — have de- 

 parted widely from the parental type in Palestine; or else the 

 original Semitic type was broad-headed, and, by inference, distinctly 

 Asiatic in derivation; in which case '"it is the modern Arab which 

 has deviated from its original pattern. Ikof is the only authority 

 who boldly faces this dilemma, and chooses the Asiatic hypothesis 

 with his eyes open.* Which, we leave it to the reader to decide, 

 would be the more likely to vary — the wandering Jew, ever driven 

 from place to place by constant persecution, and constantly exposed to 

 the vicissitudes of life in densely populated cities, the natural habitat 

 of the people, as we have said; or the equally nomadic Arab, who, 

 however, seems to be invariable in type, whether in Algeria, Mo- 

 rocco, the Canary Islands, or Arabia Felix iself? There can be 

 but one answer, it seems to us. The original Semitic stock must have 

 been in origin strongly dolichocephalic — that is to say, African as 

 the Arabs are to-day; from which it follows, naturally, that about 

 nine tenths of the living Jews are as widely different in head form 

 from the parent stock to-day as they well could be. The boasted 

 purity of descent of the Jews is, then, a myth. Renan (1883) is 

 right, after all, in his assertion that the ethnographic significance of 

 the word Jew, for the Russian and Danubian branch at least, long- 

 ago ceased to exist. Or, as Lombroso observes, the modern Jews are 

 physically more Aryan than Semitic, after all. They have uncon- 

 sciously taken on to a large extent the physical traits of the people 

 among whom their lot has been thrown. In Algiers they have re- 

 mained long-headed like their neighbors, for, even if they intermar- 

 ried, no tendency to deviation in head form would be provoked. If, 

 on the other hand, they settled in Piedmont, Austria, or Russia, with 

 their moderately round-headed populations, they became in time 

 assimilated to the type of these neighbors as well. 



Nothing is simpler than to substantiate the argument of a con- 

 stant intercourse and intermixture of Jews with the Christians about 

 them all through history, from the original exodus of the forty thou- 

 sand (?) from Jerusalem after the destruction of the second temple. 

 At this time the Jewish nation as a political entity ceased to exist. 

 An important consideration to be borne in mind in this connection, 

 as Neubauer suggests very aptly, is that opposition to mixed mar- 

 riages was primarily a prejudice of religion and not of race. It was 

 dissipated on the conversion of the Gentile to Judaism. In fact, in 

 the early days of Judaism marriage with a nonbeliever was not in- 



* Compare Brinton, 1890 a, p. 132, and 1890 b, for interesting linguistic data on the 

 Semites. 



