558 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
difference between these two groups was originally merely geograph- 
ical and accidental, but now they are holding themselves rigidly 
apart, and I know of a small Ashkenazic community in southwestern 
Asia Minor that abstains from meat rather than eat of an animal 
killed by a Sephardic butcher. I could not learn if there were also 
differences in creed, but practically these two groups are like different 
sects, and in most places there is less intercourse between them than 
there is between Protestants and Catholics in the most backward 
villages of Central Europe.t. This is perhaps of some importance in 
connection with the fact that both Ashkenazim and Sephardim are 
equally distinguished by a complete absence of uniform racial char- 
acteristics, just as it is with our Jewish friends in Europe. 
The ‘enlightened public” of course knows better. Some Jews 
themselves state that they are ‘‘pure Semites, chosen and selected,” 
and even in modern scientific papers one may still read of the com- 
plete “uniformity” of the Jewish type. But this uniformity only 
exists in the books and not in reality. There are Jews with light and 
with dark eyes, Jews with straight and with curly hair, Jews with 
high and narrow, and Jews with short and broad noses; their cephalic 
index oscillates between 65 and 98—as far as this index ever oscillates 
in the genus homo. Indeed, since my paper on the anthropological 
position of the Jews? there is, as far as I know, no serious anthro- 
pologist who still maintains the cranial uniformity of the Jews. It is 
also conceded that the great majority of the Jews is decidedly brachy- 
cephalic, whilst the typical Semites are essentially dolichocephalic. 
But even giving up the cranial uniformity, one still speaks of the 
marvelous tenacity, frequency, and distinctiveness of the Jewish type 
of face. Now this “‘Jewishness”’ is much more easily felt than defined, 
and Joseph Jacobs ? (1885) was the first to try an exact definition. 
It is a certain and typical development of the nostrils (Jacobs’s 
‘“‘nostrility’’) that is the best characteristic of what we generally call 
“Jewish.” 
Weissenberg,* wanting to prove a specific Jewishness of type, relates 
how he showed some hundred photographs of Russians and Russian 
Jews without distinguishing or peculiar dress, etc., to two friends, a 
Russian and a Jew; the first was correct in 50 per cent, the second in 
70 per cent of his statements. I do not think this experiment very 
1R. Andrée, in his Volkskunde der Juden, quotes a passage in the Jewish Chronicle, 1878, where an 
Ashkenaz asks if “those Portuguese are real Jews, or only a sort of half-castes but distantly related to our 
glorious race?””? A Portuguese answers him that ‘‘we are the Jews of the highest caste, as may be best 
evidenced by the fact that we have always refused to assimilate ourselves with the lower caste—the Tedes- 
chi.”? So felt the Jews in London, and in 1864 the Sephardim of Bucharest bought a churchyard for them- 
selves, to have nothing in common with the Ashkenazim, even alter their death! 
2‘* Die anthropologische Stellung der Juden,’’ Correspondenzblatt der deutschen anthropol. Gesellschaft, 
1892, Also in an Italian translation by Prof. Ugoliniin Arch. per l’ Antropologia e 1’ Etnologia, vol. 22, 
1892. 
3 “On the racial characteristics of modern Jews,” Journal Anthropol. Inst., 1885, vol. 15, p. 23 ss. 
4 Globus, Bd. 97, 1910, p. 329. 
