THE JEWS: RACE AND ENVIRONMENT 47 



population, and in fact show a relative decrease in number. And 

 judging by the fact that the birth and marriage rates keep on de- 

 creasing, while the mixed marriages and conversions to Christianity 

 keep on increasing in number, as was shown in the preceding articles, 

 the future of Judaism in Germany is, to put it mildly, not very bright. 

 The same process of decadence is observed among the Jews in Italy, 

 France, England, America, etc., in varying degrees of intensity. If 

 immigration of Jews from eastern Europe should for some reason 

 cease, the number of native Jews in these countries would dwindle 

 away at a rate appalling to those who have the interests of their faith 

 at heart. In the United States the original Jewish settlers, the Spanish 

 and Portuguese Jews of the seventeenth, eighteenth and the first half 

 of the nineteenth centuries who refrained from intermarriage with 

 their German and Polish coreligionists, have practically disappeared; 

 very few of them have been left. The Jews are thus paying a high 

 price for their liberty and equality — self-effacement. 



Another important conclusion we arrive at while studying the 

 above facts and figures is that most of the demographic phenomena 

 are not rooted in ethnic causes. The high rates of proliferation, the 

 exclusiveness of the Jews manifesting itself in part by endogamy, the 

 alleged excessive proportion of male births, the rates of suicide, etc., 

 were all attributed to racial influences, to ' Semitic ' characteristics. 

 This opinion has its origin in the observations on Jews made during 

 the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, when the 

 Jews all over Europe were a homogeneous social mass, all to the same 

 extent abused, persecuted and confined in Ghettos. Uniformity of 

 social conditions brought about uniform demographic phenomena, 

 which were considered racial traits. But the emancipation of the 

 Jews in western European countries, releasing them from isolation, 

 bringing them into intimate contact with their non-Jewish neighbors, 

 has completely transformed them. Eacial traits are not to be oblit- 

 erated by a change of milieu during a comparatively short period of 

 fifty or one hundred years, nor do they show such wide limits of varia- 

 tion as is displayed by the Jews in different countries. There are to-day 

 more pronounced differences between the Jews in Prussian Poland and 

 Eussian Poland than between Prussian and Italian Jews, although 

 but one hundred years ago the Prussian and Polish Jews were demo- 

 graphically on the same level. The part of Poland which was taken 

 by Prussia with its liberal government has given the Jews an oppor- 

 tunity to assimilate with the christian population, while in the part 

 of that country taken by Eussia they were compelled to live isolated 

 from the general population and they remained backward. 



The demographic phenomena of the Jews are rooted in the social, 

 economic and intellectual conditions in which they find themselves. 



