THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 347 



tion, while Primer Bey traced them from a blondish Eastern source. 

 The English Jews seem also to be slightly lighter than their conti- 

 nental brethren, even despite their presumably greater proportion of 

 Sephardim, who are supposed to be peculiarly dark. As to the rela- 

 tive red blondness of the Oriental Jew, the early observations of Dr. 

 Beddoe, and those of Langerhans (1873) as to the blue eyes and red- 

 brown hair of the Druses of Lebanon, do not seem to be borne out; 

 or, as Jacobs puts it, the " argument may be dismissed with costs." 

 Certainly the living Semites are dark enough in type, and the evi- 

 dence of the sacred books bears out the same theory of an original 

 dark type. Thus " black " and " hair " are commonly synonymous 

 in the early Semitic languages. In any case, whatever the color 

 in the past, we have seen that science corroborates the popular im- 

 pression that the Jews as a people are distinctively of a brunette type. 

 This constitutes one of the principal traits by which they may be 

 almost invariably identified. It is not without interest to notice that 

 this brunetteness is more accentuated, oftentimes, among the women, 

 who are, the world over, persistent conservators of the primitive 

 physical characteristics of a people.* 



Secondly, as to the nose. Popularly the humped or hook nose 

 constitutes the most distinctive feature of the Jewish face. Observa- 

 tions among the Jews, in their most populous centers, do not, how- 

 ever, bear out the theory. Thus Majer and Kopernicki (1885), in 

 their extended series, found only nine per cent of the hooked type — 

 no greater frequency than among the Poles; a fact which Weis- 

 senberg confirms as to the relative scarcity of the convex nose in 

 profile among his South Russian Jews. He agrees, however, that the 

 nose is often large, thick, and prominent. Weisbach (1877) meas- 

 ured the facial features of nineteen Jews, and found the largest noses 

 in a long series of people from all over the earth; exceeded in length, 

 in fact, by the Patagonians alone. The hooked nose is, indeed, some- 

 times frequent outside the Jewish people. Olechnowicz found, for 

 example, over a third of the noses of the gentry in southeast Poland 

 to be of this hooked variety. Running the eye over our carefully 

 chosen series of portraits, selected for us as typical from four quarters 

 of Europe — Algeria, Russia, Bosnia, and the confines of Asia — repre- 

 senting the African, Balkan Spagnuoli, and Russian Ashkenazim vari- 

 eties, visual impression will also confirm our deduction. The Jewish 

 nose is not so often truly convex in profile. Nevertheless, it must be 

 confessed that it gives a hooked impression. This seems to be due to 

 a peculiar " tucking up of the wings," as Dr. Beddoe expresses it. 

 Herein lies the real distinctive quality about it, rather than in any 



* Weissenberg, 1895, p. 567, finds brunettes twice as frequent among the south Rus- 

 sian Jewesses as among the men. 



