THE JEWS: RACE AND ENVIRONMENT 257 



THE JEWS : A STUDY OF E ACE AND ENVIRONMENT 



Bt MAURICE FISHBERG 



I N the search for the causes of various social phenomena characteristic 

 -*- of the Jews, most writers have been content to give ' race influ- 

 ence ' a prominent place. The effects of the physical and social environ- 

 ment on the individual, or group of individuals, have been neglected. 

 Once that remarkable cloak for our ignorance, ' race,' had served the 

 purpose of explaining easily the causation of a given social fact, it was 

 an easy matter to rest content with this explanation. It was repeatedly 

 alleged that the Jews, though scattered in all the regions of the habit- 

 able globe, subjected to all varieties of climatic, social and economic 

 conditions, nevertheless present everywhere the same characteristics 

 with a remarkable uniformity. Demographic and social phenomena, 

 such as fertility, mortalit}', marriage rates, illegitimacy, intermarriage, 

 divorce, criminality, etc., were all attributed to ethnic origins, to 

 Semitic influences. 



Anthropological research has, however, revealed that there is no 

 such thing as Jewish race, that ethnically Jews differ according to 

 the country and even the province of the country in which they happen 

 to live, just as catholics or protestants in various countries differ from 

 each other. It was shown that there are various types of Jews, tall and 

 short, blond and brunette, brachycephalic and dolichocephalic, etc.; 

 and that all these types appear to correspond to the types encountered 

 among the non-Jewish population among which they live. ' Eace ' 

 can, consequently, not be the only cause of the demographic and social 

 peculiarities said to be characteristic of the Jews. Other causes are to 

 be sought for. 



In the following studies statistical data of recent censuses in various 

 European countries have been utilized in an attempt to find primarily 

 whether the Jews do actually present uniformly, as has been alleged, 

 similar social and demographic phenomena in every country, irrespect- 

 ive of difference of the physical and social environment. While the 

 ethnic factor has not been neglected, still, in cases in which race in- 

 fluence is not sufficient to explain satisfactorily a social or demo- 

 graphic fact, or is in direct contradiction with actual conditions, the 

 effects of the physical environment and of social conditions have been 

 looked into. The author assumes that if an ethnic cause exclusively 

 underlies a given social fact observed among the Jews, then we should 



VOL. LXIX. — 17 



