504 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



long-lieaded. Professor Ripley gives a portrait of a Tunisian Jew, 

 with index 75, who is also probably of Sephardic origin, like most 

 of the Jews of the Mediterranean littoral. But, curiously enough, 

 there is far more evidence for the mixture of race among contem- 

 porary Sephardim than of any other branch of Jews. Even while 

 they were living in Spain as avowed Jews they were persistently ac^ 

 cused of intermarriage, chiefly with the Moors, while a large num- 

 ber of contemporary Sephardim are descended not from refugees 

 of 1492, but from the so-called Marranos — Jews who remained in 

 Spain, professing Christianity and marrying tolerably freely among 

 the surrounding population. If one wished to be hypercritical, 

 one could trace the long-headedness of a minority of Jews to this 

 admixture of race from Spain. 



After all, I must insist that it is to history one must go to de- 

 termine a question of this sort. Jews have shown such marked in- 

 dividuality throughout their career for the last two thousand years 

 among the nations — they have been so much in the world's eye 

 throughout that time — that any appreciable degree of intermar- 

 riage would not have escaped notice, both by themselves and by 

 their enemies. ]^ow there is practically no evidence of this kind 

 during the Christian era. Religious antipathy has been so strong 

 throughout that period as to form an almost insurmountable barrier 

 to intermarriage and the consequent proselytism to Judaism which 

 is necessary for a valid Jewish marriage. Sporadic cases doubt- 

 less occur, but their very infrequency drew attention to them, and 

 all that historical research can discover is under one hundred cases 

 throughout the middle ages, scattered through Europe. Jewish 

 nomenclature has special formulae to name the proselyte, and yet, 

 though we have hundreds of the mediaeval lists of Jewish communi- 

 ties and martyrologies, it is the rarest thing in the world to find 

 one of these names referred to as " sons (or daughters) of Abraham 

 our father." In earlier days, doctors of the Talmud, when dis- 

 cussing hypothetical cases, dismissed that of the proselyte as being 

 so rare.* In my Memoir in the Journal of the Anthropological 

 Institute for 1885 I have taken the marriage statistics of modern 

 Algeria as most nearly representing the most favorable conditions 

 that one could imagine at any time during the middle ages, and 

 have found that during nearly half a century (1830-'77) there 

 were only thirty mixed marriages out of an average population of 

 twenty-five thousand Jews — not one a year. The only instances of 

 proselytism on a large scale are those of the Chozars in southern 

 Russia, converted to Judaism in the eighth century, and the Fala- 

 shas of Abyssinia, about the same time. Yet these are an indirect 



* Babylonian Talmud, Giitin, 85a. 



