INTERMINGLING OF RACES 261 



Alpine and Mediterranean peoples than even the south of 

 England and Wales. But even so, the racial differences 

 have not been so great but that France has become one 

 people, with all the chances for good held by a compara- 

 tively small united nation, when an amount of close 

 breeding has taken place sufficient to bring out the in- 

 herent possibilities. 



Another people, great in their influence on the civil- 

 ization of western Europe, are the Jews. They should 

 not be overlooked in this connection, because of the mis- 

 taken idea that they form a pure race of narrow vari- 

 ability characterized by fixed traits. Nothing is further 

 from the truth. If it were the truth it might be questioned 

 whether the Jew would have produced the great number 

 of illustrious men who must in all fairness be credited 

 to them. 



The very term race applied to the Jew is a misnomer. 

 There is no more a Jewish race than there is an English 

 race. The fiction has been kept up because of a cult of 

 racial purity in their religion. As a matter of fact, the 

 early Jewish people arose from complex crosses in whicli 

 at least three different stocks entered: the Arabs, the 

 Assyrioides or Hittites and the Aryan Amorites. More 

 or less inbreeding did follow before their dispersal, but 

 that great racial variability must have remained at the 

 most nationalistic period of their history any student of 

 history knows. After their dispersal there was a period 

 of proselyting which broadened their possibilities. Later, 

 moving into every part of Europe, they mixed with tlie 

 people with whom they sojourned to a very considerable 

 extent, though keeping up the while the religious ideal of 

 racial purity. In actual fact the Spanish Jew, the German 



