THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 349 



are tliese traits. Not even to the Jew himself are they always a sure 

 criterion. Weissenberg gives an interesting example of this.* To a 

 friend, a Jew in Elizabethgrad, he submitted two hundred and fifty 

 photographs of Russian Jews and Christians in undistinctive costume. 

 Seventy per cent of the Jews were rightly chosen, while but ten per 

 cent of the Russians were wrongly classed as Jews. Of what concern 

 is it whether this characterization be entirely featural, or in part 

 a matter of expression ? The first would be a matter of direct hered- 

 ity, the second hypothesis partakes more of the nature of a charac- 

 teristic acquired from the social environment. Some one — Jacobs, I 

 think — speaks of it as the " expression of the Ghetto." It certainly 

 appears in the remarkable series of composite Jewish portraits pub- 

 lished in his monograph. It would not be surprising to find this true. 

 Continued hardship, persecution, a desperate struggle against an in- 

 exorable human environment as well as natural one, could not but 

 write its lines upon the face. The impression of a dreary past is deep 

 sunk in the bodily proportions, as we have seen. Why not in the 

 face as well? 



We are now prepared, in conclusion, to deal with what is perhaps 

 the most interesting phase of our discussion. It is certainly, if true, 

 of profound sociological importance. We have in these pages spoken 

 at length of the head form — primary index of race; we have shown 

 that there are Jews and Jews in this respect. Yet which was the 

 real Jew it was not for us to decide, for the ninety-and-nine were 

 broad-headed, while the Semite in the East is still, as ever, a long- 

 headed member of the Africanoid races. This discouraged our hopes 

 of proving the existence of a Jewish cephalic type as the result of 

 purity of descent. It may indeed be affirmed with certainty that the 

 Jews are by hereditary descent from early times no purer than most 

 of their European neighbors. Then we discovered evidence that in 

 this head form the Jews were often closely akin to the people among 

 whom they lived. In long-headed Africa they were dolichocephalic. 

 In brachycephalic Piedmont, though supposedly of Sephardim de- 

 scent, they were quite like the Italians of Turin. And all over Slavic 

 Europe no distinction in head form between Jew and Christian ex- 

 isted. In the Caucasus also they approximate closely the cranial 

 characteristics of their neighbors. Hypnotic suggestion was not 

 needed to find a connection here, especially since all history bore us 

 out in our assumption of a large degree of intermixture of Gentile 

 blood. Close upon this disproval of purity of type by descent came 

 evidence of a distinct uniformity of facial type. Even so impartial 

 an observer as Weissenberg — certainly not prejudiced in favor of 

 cephalic invariability — confesses this featural unity. 



* 1895, p. 563. 



