HEREDITY AND THE JEW. 



By REDCLIFFE N. SALAMAN, M.D. 



The object of this paper is to lay before Anthropologists some 

 results in the domain of Ethnology which, though arrived at by methods 

 as yet foreign to anthropological research, promise a rich harvest in 

 every direction. Mendelian methods, by which is meant the analytical 

 observation of specific characters in the individuals and their occurrence 

 in the immediate offspring, have for the last decade been the all-powerful 

 weapons of the modem student of heredity. To the Botanist and 

 Zoologist who can plan his experiments as he will, the results have been 

 immediate and surpassingly important. To the student of mankind, 

 whether he be the anthropologist or the medical man, the application 

 of the method is of necessity limited. It is impossible to frame his 

 experiments according to design and it remains with the enquirer to 

 search out from the confused mass of facts those which conform most 

 nearly to the requirements of an experiment 



Painstaking collections of family histories and pedigrees have 

 already shown that in man several abnormal conditions behave as unit 

 characters. A classic example is that of Brachydactylism(5) in which 

 the deformed hand condition is dominant to the normal. The principles 

 which underlie Mendelian research are well known and need no 

 repetition here. So far this type of research has hardly been applied 

 to man except with respect to diseased or abnormal conditions of one 

 sort or another. Some opponents of Mendelism have directe<l their 

 criticism to the fact that when black mates with white in man, the 

 offspring is a blend, and in future generations complete segregation 

 does not occur. From this observation some have gone further and 

 implied that to so complex and withal hybrid an animal as man, such 

 crude principles as those of Mendelism could not be expected to hold 

 good. The work of G. C. Davenport and C. B. Davenport(4) on the 

 mating of negroes and whites shows that the problem is by no means 



