502 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ARE JEWS JEWS? 



BY JOSEPH JACOBS, 



PRESIDENT OF THE JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 



IN the December (1898) and January (1899) numbers of Apple- 

 tons' Popular Science Monthly Prof. William Z. Ripley con- 

 cludes the remarkable series of articles on the Racial Geography of 

 Europe, originally delivered as Lowell Institute lectures, by a couple 

 of articles on the Jews. Strictly speaking, the articles might seem 

 to have no right in the particular series in which Professor Ripley 

 has included them, since their main object is to show that the Jews 

 are not a race but a people, and have therefore no claim to be con- 

 sidered in the racial geography of any continent. But one can not 

 regret that a daring disregard for logic has caused Professor Ripley 

 to conclude his interesting series with the somewhat startling para- 

 dox that Jews are not Jews, in the sense of the word in which both 

 their friends and their enemies have hitherto taken it. As Pro- 

 fessor Ripley has been good enough to refer to me as having written 

 with some authority on the subject, and as I have not been con- 

 vinced by his arguments against the comparative racial purity of the 

 Jews, I am glad of an opportunity to discuss the question, which is 

 of equal theoretic and practical interest. 



The theoretic interest, with which alone we need concern our- 

 selves here, seems to me of two kinds. Professor Ripley, as a stu- 

 dent of anthropology, declares, as the result of his inquiries, that 

 there has been so large an admixture of round skulls with the (hypo- 

 thetically assumed) original long skulls of the Hebrews that all 

 signs of racial unity have disappeared. I, on the other hand, who 

 have approached the subject as a student of history,* see no evi- 

 dence of any such large admixture of alien elements in the race 

 since its dispersion from Palestine, and have come, therefore, to 

 the opposite conclusion that the Jews now living are, to all intents 

 and purposes, exclusively the direct descendants of the Diaspora. 

 Here, then, anthropology and history if Professor Ripley and I 

 have respectively interpreted their verdicts aright appear to speak 

 in two opposite senses, and no conference at La Hague or elsewhere 

 can appoint a court of appeal which can decide between contrary 

 propositions by two different sciences. 



* To prevent misunderstanding, I should perhaps add that I have not neglected the 

 anthropological aspects of the question. My paper on The Racial Characteristics of Modern 

 Jews, which appeared in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1885, contained, 

 I believe Professor Ripley would allow, the fullest account of Jewish anthropometry col- 

 lected up to that date. 



