ARE JEWS JEWS? 503 



But the point in discussion seems to me to raise also a problem 

 of exceeding interest within the anthropological sphere itself. Pro- 

 fessor Ripley assumes that round heads beget round heads, and 

 long heads descend from long heads for all time unchanged. That 

 appears to carry with it the assumption that no amount of brain 

 activity can increase the mass of brain, that skull capacity has no 

 relation to mental capacity, and that alone among the organs of the 

 body the brain and skull are incapable of growth, change, or devel- 

 opment. The crux of Jewish anthropology raises this problem, as 

 1 shall proceed to show, and, if I have interpreted history aright, 

 offers valuable material toward its solution. 



I might have met Professor Eipley's arguments on narrower 

 grounds, which would have enabled me to evade this larger ques- 

 tion. His main, I might say his solitary, argument is that contem- 

 porary Jews are predominantly brachycephalic, or round-headed, 

 whereas contemporary Arabs, whom he takes as the type of the 

 Semites, are as predominantly dolichocephalic, or long-headed. Ac- 

 cepting Professor Ripley's own criterion of purity of race, I might 

 point to the almost universal round-headedness of the Jew as a 

 proof of their racial unity. The fact that Arabs do not share that 

 quality really does not affect the question. Linguistically and geo- 

 graphically the Hebrews of history were associated with the Ara- 

 maeans and Assyrians of Asia Minor, and Professor Ripley himself 

 allows that Asia Minor was mainly brachycephalic. Till Professor 

 Ripley brings forward craniological evidence that the cephalic index 

 of the ancient Hebrews was below 77.8, his reference to the contem- 

 porary Arab must be ruled out of court. But, quite apart from this, 

 the Arabic evidence would be of little significance, since the chief 

 characteristic of Moslem civilization has been the predominance of 

 marriage by capture and descent from slave concubines. Every cara- 

 van that has entered Arabia for the last twelve hundred years has 

 had its contingent of female slaves of alien race, mainly from do- 

 lichocephalic Africa. I must confess my surprise that Professor 

 Ripley has based his main argument on the shifting sands of Arabic 

 racial purity. 



The only attempt Professor Ripley makes toward a proof that 

 the pure Hebrew is dolichocephalic is a half-hearted endeavor to 

 claim that quality for the Sephardim, or Spanish and Portuguese 

 Jews, descended in the main from Jewish refugees from Spain and 

 Portugal in 1492. As a matter of fact, the largest number of meas- 

 urements of Sephardic heads has been made by Mr. Spielman and 

 myself,* and of the fifty-one heads examined by us only eight were 



* On the Comparative Anthropometry of English Jews, in the Journal of the Anthro- 

 pological Institute for 1889. 



