The Jews as a Race

11,316 words

Editor’s Note: 

This is the Introduction to Anthony M. Ludovici’s book Jews, and the Jews in England (London: Boswell Publishing, 1938), published under the pen name “Cobbett.”  

Ludovici canvasses the literature up to his time on the issue of whether Jews are a distinct “race,” meaning a nation, i.e., a biologically distinct subgroup of humanity, stating the arguments for and against this position. The results are invariably interesting, whether because of enduring validity or mere historical interest.

It is quite remarkable, for instance, to see how assiduously certain Jewish scholars argue for the distinctness and purity of their race. Ludovici also offers a number of significant arguments on the nature of race and the relevance of questions of racial admixture in the remote past to understanding the Jewish question in his day or ours.  

The Jews we see to-day in the streets of London, Paris, Berlin or New York, are the near descendants of a branch of that great human family known as the Semites, which, at the dawn of the historical period, spread (owing to pressure of numbers, desiccation of territory, or merely to a desire to seek new pastures or to carry out predatory raids) northwards and westwards from the confines of Arabia into the fertile areas between the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, or, to give the boundaries of their utmost extension, between the Taurus, and the mountains of Armenia and Iran, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, Egypt and the Mediterranean.

There the various waves of immigrants and conquerors settled and multiplied—some to wrest from the Sumerians the dominion of their city states and territories, to absorb their culture, to become urban and produce the early civilizations of Assyria and Babylon; others to retain longer than the rest their original nomad and pastoral habits and to wander all over the country now known as Palestine, in order to settle somewhat later in its western and central areas.

The Semites, therefore, “belong essentially to Asia,”[1] and constitute the group of peoples “known as the Aramæans (Syrians, etc.) in the north, the Babylonians and the Assyrians in the east, the Arabs in the south, and the Phœnicians, Hebrews, Moabites, etc., in the west.”[2] Dialectical differences alone separate the speeches of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar from that of the Israelites whom they subjugated; any Hebraist can understand the characters on the Moabite stone, and we must, therefore, regard the Jews, as we know them to-day, as merely a selected and strangely preserved survival, in a relatively pure state, of that extraordinary people, composed of one race, which once dominated Western Asia from the coast of the Mediterranean to the Zagros mountain chain which bounds Mesopotamia on the east.

They were a religiously mystic, race-conscious people, united more by their spiritual and ethnic bonds than by any sense of a common fatherland or home-country. For, as nomads, their attachment to a territorial home was necessarily faint, if present at all.

Reckoning their ancestors with accurate memories and, as is usual among primitive peoples, probably with the object of ensuring the rights of inheritance, they despised the foreigner and the stranger, usually avoided marriage with his women, and practiced close inbreeding, even to the point of incest.

Owing, however, to the evidence of the Bible and of ancient and modern history, the researches of archæologists, and the notorious differentiation of type in existing Jews, it has often been maintained, particularly in quite recent years, that the branch of the Semitic family known as the Hebrews, the people who originally formed the twelve tribes of Israel, and who suffered slavery in Egypt, captivity in Babylon, and the various other vicissitudes of a weak position amid powerful neighbours in Palestine, ultimately became a mixed or miscegenated stock, and that even before the Roman Dispersion they were already a mongrel people. The record of their many crosses with neighboring tribes and nations in Palestine, which were the despair of their great prophets and leaders, can, indeed, by read in the books of the Old Testament; whilst even their greatest kings and patriarchs are known to have mixed their blood in marriage. Ishmael, for instance, was the son of Abraham by an Arabian woman. Isaac and Jacob both had Aramæan wives. Joseph married an Egyptian and Moses a Midianite. David himself, who descended from Ruth the Moabitess, married a Hittite woman by whom he had Solomon.

Such is more or less the argument advanced, especially by recent special pleaders like Professor Julian Huxley and Dr. Haddon, who in their anxiety to confute Hitler wrote a whole book with the object of proving that there is no such thing as race,[3] and that “the Jews are no more a distinct sharply marked ‘race’ than are the Germans or the English. They are originally of mixed descent.”[4]

But the kind of cross-breeding practiced in Palestine before the Roman Dispersion was hardly such as to prevent the Jews from being regarded as a closely inbred race, for the miscegenation that occurred was chiefly with people of Semitic stock—the Phœnicians on the Syrian coast, the Arabs on the wild steppe, the Canaanites and Moabites in and about Palestine, and the Amorites (Aramæans and Syrians in Syria and Asia Minor). Even if we assume extensive crossing on the part of the Jews with their oppressors, the Babylonians and Assyrians, these were, again, as we have seen, none other than their kith and kin, who had preceded them by a few centuries in emerging from the obscurity of a nomad life in Arabia.[5]

And on these grounds Dr. Andree, with some justice, as it would seem, argues that “all the intermixture with the heathen women, which took place in Asia in old time, had little effect on the constitution of the Jews, because they mostly married women of Semitic tribes.”[6]

There are, however, more serious grounds than the above for supposing that the present Jewish population of Europe and America is of mixed and not pure blood, and in fairness to Professor Julian Huxley and Dr. Haddon, let it be admitted not only that they rely a good deal on these more serious grounds,[7] but also that a great authority on the Jewish question, a man who was writing much more soberly than they many decades before the Great War, and almost a century before Hitler was heard of—Ernest Renan—advanced these self-same arguments against the alleged purity of the Jewish race.

What are these arguments?

The first, and perhaps the oldest, is the alleged fact that, on migrating into the land of Palestine and the areas south and east of it, the various waves of Semites, including the Habiru, or Hebrews, found an indigenous people, who had been settled there from time immemorial, with whom they mixed. Also that the earlier waves which ultimately produced the Babylonians and Assyrians (the former of whom probably mixed with the Jews in later times) must have mixed with the Sumerians, who were, unlike the primitive Palestinians, a civilized people. What the native Palestinians were, whether Hamitic or Pelasgian, is a matter of doubt, but in any case Keane denies that they were Semitic.[8] Renan also felt no doubt that in the formation of the original Israelitish stock there was a mixture of blood with “the primitive inhabitants of Palestine,”[9] and many others have argued similarly.

We must regard it as probable, therefore, that two peoples of more or less unknown ethnic character contributed a certain amount of their blood to the stock composing the ancestors of the Jews at some early period in their wanderings across Mesopotamia and Palestine, and later on when they mingled with the Babylonians. But it is not absolutely established that this strange blood was all non-Semitic, and it may be that despite the fact that some of those who introduced it (the early Palestinians, for instance) followed peculiar burial customs not known to the Semites, they may have been remotely related to them.

A second argument is the fact that, during their four hundred and thirty years of captivity in Egypt, it is hardly likely that they refrained wholly from any mixture with the people who surrounded them, particularly as in Exodus xiii., 38, it is acknowledged that, when they ultimately fled from their oppressors and marched from Rameses to Succoth, a “mixed multitude went up also with them.”

What was this “mixed multitude” if not a hotch-potch of Egypto-Israelites, not unlike the Eurasians that have resulted from our own much shorter occupation of India? Color is, moreover, lent to the belief that a certain amount of friendliness must have existed between the Israelites and the lower-class Egyptians with whom they came into contact by the Jewish tradition which records that many Egyptians gave presents to the departing people,[10] and even by the Bible, which tells us that the Israelites were able before leaving to “borrow” of the Egyptians “jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment and such things as they required.”[11]

Even allowing for the natural eagerness on the part of the native population to be rid of a people who were causing them endless calamities, is it likely that they would have lent them valuable articles unless there was some tie between them?

It seems more reasonable to picture the scene of the departure as in many cases darkened by the wrenching of close, if not intimate, ties—Israelitish daughters-in-law and sons-in-law tearing themselves from their Egyptian parents. If this was so, it would explain that “mixed multitude” that “went up also with them,” and would, to some extent, account for the “borrowing” of jewels of silver and gold and raiment. Evidently some of the departing Israelites, whether of pure or mixed stock, expected, in fact promised, to revisit at some later date those from whom they had borrowed. There would be a return to see their “in-laws” again. After all, had not Joseph, centuries before, married Asenath, the Egyptian priest’s daughter?

Now, if this cross-breeding occurred to any extent, it would mean that a certain amount of Occidental Mediterranean blood had already been introduced into the Israelites in the second millennium B.C., and that in this Occidental Mediterranean blood (as in the Philistine and, possibly, the early Palestinian) there was a genuinely foreign quality, very different from that of the Babylonian,[12] Assyrian, Phœnician, Arabian, Canaanitish, Moabitish, etc., blood, which the Israelites may previously have absorbed to some small extent, and which they were certainly going to absorb in large quantities in subsequent years.

Against this it may be argued that neither the Egyptians nor the Israelites were, at the period in question, in the least inclined to enter into mixed marriages. The Egyptians were not only closely inbred, but actually carried their inbreeding to the point of incestuous matings, while the Israelites were not merely for a time in the position of slaves in Egypt but were also a people who practiced the closest inbreeding and who also went so far as to tolerate incestuous matings, though not quite to the same extent as the Egyptians. Both peoples were, at all events, singularly averse from cross-breeding of any kind. The only other possible reason for supposing that mixed Egypto-Israelitish unions were rare—more rare, that is to say, than those between Moabite and Israelite or Philistine and Israelite—is that we do happen to know that the Egyptians, in addition to cherishing a very powerful bias against outbreeding of any kind, and even against the mixing of classes, had a strong hatred of foreigners.[13] And certainly in the early days—before, presumably, the Israelites had become slaves—it was an abomination to them even to eat in company with the Hebrews.[14]

On the other hand, it has been maintained—Haddon also suggests it[15]—that the Israelites were allowed to settle in Egypt only when a kindred race, the Hyksos, was putting sovereigns on the throne of the Pharaohs. If this is so, the mixing of the Israelites with the Egyptians may have been confined to such marriages as could be contracted with the lower-class Hyksos, i.e., people of their own kith and kin, mating with whom would not modify their blood.

But let it be accepted that there was a certain amount of mixing both in the earliest times with the aborigines of prehistoric Palestine and later on with the Egyptians of pure Mediterranean stock during the four centuries that the Israelites sojourned in the valley of the Nile. Let us also concede to those moderns like Huxley and Haddon who are anxious to deny “race” to the modern Jews, that even in their early intermarriage with the Hittites, Phœnicians, and their subsequent intermarriage with the Babylonians, etc., it is by no means certain that the Israelites were mixing with pure examples of their own race, or even with races related to theirs. Professor Sergi, for one, denies that the Hittites were Semites,[16] and a similar claim has been made regarding the Phœnicians, etc. The weight that has been given here to these instances of miscegenation is—at least, so we suggest here, and as even Renan does not deny[17]—in any case exaggerated. The reasons for this statement will be given later; but, for the time being, let it suffice to point out that, as against the view long held both by Jew and Gentile in Europe, that the Jewish people, as we now find the, constitute a race, these arguments, based on early instances of miscegenation, are, to say the least, not very disturbing.

More serious and more difficult to confute is the claim, made principally by Renan in the past, but naturally given great prominence by modern Liberals, that the Jews, contrary to the generally accepted view, were a people who at one time were not only keen and active proselytizers, but also very successful in their proselytism. If this claim is valid, it would necessarily mean that in comparatively recent times, i.e., ever since the second century B.C., the Jews have incorporated into their body a considerable number of Gentile converts.

Thus Keane declared that “the assumption that they have made few or no converts is no longer tenable,”[18] and Renan, writing many decades before Keane, maintains that the intensive proselytizing era of the Jews lasted from 150 B.C. to A.D. 200 and was most successful.[19]

He then adds that this proselytism “led to the formation of many Israelitish colonies, which were regarded as ‘Jewish’, both in Italy, Gaul, and along the coast of Asia and Africa.”[20]

Dr. A. Neubauer also maintains that “during the time of the second Temple the proselytes became more numerous through intercourse with the Syrians, the Greeks and the Palmyræans, and many professed to be converted to Judaism in order that they might be allowed to marry Jewish women.”[21]

Dio Cassius mentions the conversion of many Romans to Judaism in his time and earlier, and says that Tiberius and Domitian took steps to arrest the movements;[22] Gibbon, referring to the same phenomenon, says: “Their [i.e., the Jews’] converts were confounded with the children of Israel, whom they resembled in the outward mark of circumcision,” and he mentions a law passed by Constantine to protect converts to Christianity from coming under the spell of the Jewish proselytizers.[23] Dr. Neubauer tells us that “a patrician woman of the name of Fulvia embraced Judaism, no doubt with a great number of friends and slaves.” And he adds: “The conversions at Rome were so frequent that a heavy penalty was decreed against those who became circumcised.”[24]

Renan is of the opinion that this era of intense proselytism lasted about three hundred and fifty years. This is long enough in all conscience, and must have meant a fairly considerable influx of foreigners or “Goyim” into the Jewish fold. But it would be inaccurate to suppose that no converts were made earlier than 150 B.C., because we have the testimony of Isaiah that strangers (presumably converts) were being admitted to the Jewish fold in his time,[25] and also the testimony of the author of the Book of Esther to the same effect.[26]

Moreover, we know that before the existence of Mahommed, many Arabs of Yemen (hence the Falashas) and other districts became converted to Judaism, and we also know of the remarkable conversion to Judaism of whole nations, such as the Khasars or Chazars, a renowned Turki people of the Volga, the Crimea and the Caspians, who went over en masse to Judaism as late as the eighth century A.D. True, they ultimately returned to Russian Orthodoxy, but during the period of their Judaism it is impossible to compute how much of their blood may have been mixed with that of the traditional Jew.[27]

Centres of “converted” Jews are also to be found among the Daggatouns of the Sahara, and the Beni-Israel of Bombay, while the black Jews of Malabar are really no more purely Jewish than the Chazars. They appear to be the offspring of the white Beni-Israel and the native concubines with whom they crossed, or else converts of the white Jews.

In addition to the number of prominent people who, during the Middle Ages, became converted to Judaism, and who were probably responsible for introducing non-Semitic blood into Jewish stocks—I refer to such persons as Alfonso VI’s physician, who went over to Judaism in 1106; Joseph Halorqui who, as a convert to Judaism, became a member of the Pope’s court; and Bodo, a member of an old Allemanic family, who under Louis the Pious of France became converted to Judaism and married a Jewess in Saragossa—we know that there was much intermarriage between Jews and Christians in Spain. We also know that, despite stringent laws against mixed marriages with Jews in Hungary, the archbishop of that country reported in 1229 “that many Jews were illegally living with Christian wives, and that conversions [to Judaism] by thousands were taking place,”[28] and we know that even before Constantine raised Christianity to power, colonies of mixed Jews and Gentiles were probably forming in the neighborhood of Cologne and the upper Rhine. Professor Graetz says: “The chronicle has it that the original Jews of the Rhine region were the descendants of the legions who had participated in the destruction of the Temple. The Vangioni had selected the pretty women out of the multitude of Jewish captives, and had brought them to their quarters on the shores of the Rhine and the Main. The children from this mixture of Jewish and Germanic blood were raised by their mothers in the Jewish faith . . . and were the founders of the Jewish communities between Worms and Mayence.”[29]

Further west, in Gaul, where in the fifth century A.D. the Jews lived on very friendly terms with the inhabitants of the country, “marriages between Jews and Christians were not altogether rare,”[30] whilst through the latter half of the fourth to the end of the fifth century A.D., when the Jews were the slave-traders of Europe,[31] and not only had thousands of female and non-Semitic slaves pass through their hands, but also may themselves have possessed and cohabited with many of them, some non-Semitic blood was probably mingled with that of the European Jew.

Even the learned Jewish writer, Joseph Jacobs, who, as we shall see, argues cogently against the alleged impurity of the Jewish race, admits that “the case is somewhat different as regards slaves, and it is possible that some infusion of Aryan blood came in through this means, but the amount would be necessarily small.”[32]

The decree issued by Constantine, six months before his death, prohibiting Jews from possessing Christian slaves,[33] was obviously directed against the danger, at that time probably well known, which threatened these slaves of becoming converted to Judaism, though whether this meant becoming incorporated in Jewish families is at least doubtful.

Constantius, the son and successor of Constantine, also promulgated laws in which the Jews were “forbidden under pain of death from possessing Christian slaves or marrying Christian women,”[34] and these laws were obviously calculated to meet what was considered a widespread abuse.

Similarly, in A.D. 415, a law of Honorius, Emperor of the West, forbade “the conversion of Christian slaves to Judaism,”[35] and the fourth Council of Orleans (A.D. 541) enacted that “any Jew who makes proselytes to Judaism, or takes a Christian slave to himself [probably as wife or concubine], or, by promise of freedom, bribes one born a Christian to foreswear his faith and embrace Judaism, loses his property in the slave.”[36]

Many similar enactments could be mentioned, and they all point to the fact that, owing to the institution of slavery alone, in the Middle Ages, there may have occurred innumerable cases of non-Semitic slaves becoming Judaized, or becoming the mothers of children ultimately treated and educated as Jews.

In England, as early as A.D. 669, Christians were forbidden to sell Christian slaves to Jews. At the beginning of the twelfth century, “Jews were incapable of holding Christian slaves,” and in 1222, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, forbade the Jews to keep Christian slaves.”[37] The enactments responsible for these prohibitions were evidently passed to meet a need, and that need was, not the necessity felt by the Christians of the time to preserve the blood of the Jews pure, but the fear felt by the Church lest her flock should be depleted.

But apart from the slave question in England, there is every reason to believe that, during their sojourn in this country up to A.D. 1290, “the Jews were at least as successful as the Christians in making converts.”[38] The Jewish community was thus enlarged by recruits from the free native English population and “there are records of the conversions to Judaism of at least two Cistercian monks.”[39] Even as late as the thirteenth century, an English deacon of Oxford is known to have gone over to Judaism.[40] True, owing to the enormity of his crime, as committed by a clerk in holy orders, he was hanged. But, although his case is conspicuous, because of his position as a cleric, we are left to infer that the same kind of transfer was probably occurring among scores of people less prominent in the life of the community, and possibly, therefore, more free to effect the change without fuss and bother.

Another line of argument adopted by those who wish to deny the Jews any claim to being a race, is to point to the great diversity of Jewish types. It is urged by those modern opponents of Anti-Semitism that there are fair, rufous, blue-eyed, dark-haired, black-haired, and dark-eyed Jews; that the cephalic index of the Jews is not uniform,[41] and that their stature varies.

All this is perfectly true. We meet with Jews in the East who are as red as any Irishman or Scotsman, just as in the West we come across Jews who are fair with blue eyes, and Jews who are swarthy with black hair and eyes as black almost as their hair. There are also Jews about whose Semitism we are at first glance left in no doubt whatsoever, whilst there are Jews of whom, without special inquiry, we could not positively assert that they were Semites.

With a collection of photographs before us, some of which were of Jews and the rest of Gentiles, many of us would easily fall into the error of mistaking some Jews for Gentiles and vice versa. And, if we relied on stature alone, our mistakes would probably be even greater. For, although, as a people chiefly of urban habits of life, the Jews are, on the whole, appreciably shorter than Gentiles as a whole, their difference from urban Gentiles in this respect would often be found to be not very great, and stature varies with them as it does with us, according to class, West End Jews being taller than East End Jews.

From all these data it is argued that we may no longer say of the Jews that they are a race, if this word is still to be taken as connoting an unmixed heredity and a certain morphological uniformity together with similarities of pigmentation; and that to regard them as a people so different from ourselves as to be denied the right of marrying with our sons and daughters, and taking part in the direction of our national affairs and the framing of our national policies, is anachronistic and unscientific, and is based on blind prejudice rather than on a sober and impartial understanding of the facts.

Now it is not pretended here that the whole of the available evidence has been given in regard to the infusion of non-Semitic blood into Jewish stocks before the Roman Dispersion, and during the Middle Ages in Europe, or in regard to the high degree of type-differentiation now observable among modern Jews. But it is hoped that enough has been said on these matters to show that no effort has been made either to conceal or minimize any of the relevant facts. For it is this class of facts which is now being adduced by the modern opponents of German Anti-Semitism in general (particularly by writers like Professor Julian Huxley and Dr. A. C. Haddon) in order to represent the modern Jews as no longer a race apart, or, at least, as no longer necessarily foreign to the non-Semitic populations of Europe and the rest of the world.

But if we have tried to be more scientific and impartial than the present more ardent opponents of Anti-Semitism, it is less with the object of weakening the case of the advocates of Jewish racial purity, whether Jewish or Gentile, than with the view of laying before the reader the terms of the ultimatum that can be, and is being framed by the other side, against the claim of Jewish racial purity.

The above is thus only a rough but fairly complete survey of their whole case, and as such we are now in a position to examine it, criticize it, and measure its worth.

Let us briefly enumerate what we can at least be certain about.

First, we may positively assert that the Jews are Asiatics.

Secondly, that they are a highly selected group—and this point will be amplified later, in the historical section and elsewhere—of the great family of Semites who are supposed to have spread from Arabia at the dawn of the historical period, and to have been the common ancestors of such peoples as the Phœnicians, the Syrians, the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Arabs, the Assyrians and the Babylonians.[42]

Thirdly, we know that, whether we are dealing with the Ashkenazi Jew, who is found chiefly in Russia, central Europe, western Europe and England, or with the Sephardi Jew, whose haunts are in Spain, Portugal, Asia Minor, Egypt and Arabia, we are at bottom concerned with two groups who “derive directly from the common source in Palestine and Mesopotamia,” and who, “taking different paths in the Diaspora, met with different fates.”[43]

Fourthly, we know that by the designation “Jew” a very definite complex of physical and psychological characters is implied which, although subject to wide variation, nevertheless always comprehends an irreducible kernel which is as unmistakable as it is strange.

With these accepted facts in mind, it will now be our business to criticize the case for the non-racial character of the Jews outlined above.

It may be criticized along two different lines.

(1) We may contest the facts on which it is based, or try to modify their import, or advance other facts (usually overlooked by those who deny race to the Jews) which destroy the force of the first group of facts; or

(2) We may turn the whole position of those who are now trying to deny that there is such a thing as a Jewish race, by pointing out what they never seem to have thought of, namely, that to deny “pure race” in regard to any group of human beings does not dispose of the peculiarities which the rest of humanity, or any section of humanity, may agree that they possess.

Following the former line of criticism first, the reader will remember that part of it has already been given with the statement of the case against “race” as used in connection with the Jews. The primitive people encountered by the Semites on entering Palestine and alleged to have mixed with them, and the Sumerians encountered by the first wave of Semites in Mesopotamia, have been referred to, as has also the alleged intermarriage of the Israelites with the Egyptians during the sojourn in Egypt, and their intermarriage with such people as the Hittites, Moabites, Amorites, etc.

But before passing on to the more serious questions, the mixing of the Jews with the Philistines and the Jewish proselytes and slaves, there still remains something to be said on the whole question of Jewish miscegenation before the Roman Dispersion.

Let us concede, as in some respects we must, even the extreme claims of the post-Hitler group of writers which may be designated as the Huxley-Haddon school, and admit that not only did the ancient Hebrews mix with the primitive Palestinians, but also with the Egyptians, and many other peoples such as the Philistines, Phœnicians and Hittites, whose Semitism may be disputed, and in the case of the Philistines without doubt correctly. Let it be admitted that by thus crossing they incorporated a modicum of Occidental Mediterranean blood in their ancestry, and that in crossing with such people as the Babylonians (if they did so to any extent) they incorporated some Sumerian blood.

We suggest that even so, at least before the Roman Dispersion, we cannot be much concerned with these cases of outbreeding, because not only did many rigorous selections of the Jewish people follow them but also the very conditions which can alone produce race, or type, or kindred qualities in a people—segregation, inbreeding and long periods of communal life led under the rule of the same table of values—were again and again imposed upon the Jews by themselves or by their enemies, after such periods of miscegenation were over.[44]

Let us ask ourselves what a race is, and how it is formed. What do the anthropologists tell us about it?

They show us that from a primeval common source, mankind ultimately became differentiated into Mongoloids, Negroids, Australoids and Whites by segregation of groups, inbreeding, and the specialization among these groups that comes from meeting different difficulties, different climatic conditions, and observing different dietary and other rules over long periods. That is, in fact, the whole story of race. It is the whole story of human differentiation. Isolate or segregate any group, impose inbreeding and peculiar values upon it, and postulate for it different conditions of life, and given a few hundred years, there will occur differentiation. No matter how mixed the original group was, there will result in the end, under the conditions stated, more or less uniformity, more or less group consciousness, or family or race feeling, more or less similarity in instincts, habits of mind, natural gifts and aptitudes, prejudices, etc.[45]

Now, except for Rome, Europe hardly knew the Jew before the Roman Dispersion, or knew him very little. Probably the people of the coast in most European countries, including Britain, knew him as a trader, as a slave, or as an occasional visitor who came to barter. But in the sense of a daily neighbor, a constant figure moving freely in his urban surroundings, the European unity may be said not to have known the Jew before the Roman Dispersion.

This, however, is a very important fact, and from this point onwards the present argument should be closely followed. For if the European did not know the Jew as a familiar figure before the Roman Dispersion, then it follows that the traditional conception of him, both as type and character, must have been formed in Europe after the Roman Dispersion; i.e., long after all the alleged periods and cases of miscegenation recorded up to the time of the Great Dispersion were finished and done with.

Consequently, as far as Europe is concerned, all these instances—not one, but all—may be dismissed as of little account. Because Europe, after the Great or Roman Dispersion, was not concerned with what the Jew might have been had he not mixed with the Egyptian or the primitive Palestinian, or the Hittite and Philistine, etc. She was concerned with an end result, a final blend, which was the cumulative consequence of all these mixings if they did occur. She knew no other Jew.

For better, for worse, the composite type the Jew presented after the Great Dispersion was his irrevocable destiny. To suggest to a Europe which had learnt to know the Jew intimately only after that event that he is not really a pure type, but a mixture, is like telling a laborer that he cannot regard beer as beer, and cannot deal fairly by it, because he did not know the malt before it was mixed with the hops and glucose, and before it was boiled. He would reply, “I mean beer—not the malt before it was mixed. God alone knows what that was!”

Apart from what has already been said in criticism of Israelitish miscegenation above, it is therefore suggested that, on these grounds alone, the whole question of Jewish mixtures before the Roman conquest may be dismissed as irrelevant—irrelevant, that is to say, to us as Europeans examining the Jewish question.

But even if we leave aside this view, we may still urge that in the Jew of the Great Dispersion, Europeans were confronted at all events with something very much closer to the member of a pure “race” than the customary idea of a human hybrid would lead most people to suppose. For, even admitting that he was a hybrid, his hybridity had been subjected, not once, but again and again, to those very influences which make for race qualities. We refer to segregation, inbreeding and observance of the same values.

Constantly brought under the discipline of Jewish Law, constantly reduced in numbers and selected, and, what is even more important, constantly having held up before them the example of the priestly caste which in no circumstances could intermarry[46] with the stranger, the Jewish people underwent an incessant process of crystallization throughout their history by which race was, as it were, repeatedly recovered.

Listen to the words of a Jewish scholar on this very subject. But remember that he was writing in 1931 and not in 1938!

The Jewish people came into being only through a process of progressive isolation lasting over centuries. This striving after isolation has, in fact, continued throughout the ages to the present day, and constitutes a spiritual characteristic of the race, a metaphysical factor. Fate furthermore imposed the law of selection on the Jews. At every turning point in their history their numbers were reduced, the external husks being stripped away, as it were, from the kernel. If this compulsory selection led to the survival of the most viable elements in the race, it is not surprising that these people acquired a vital character which made them superior to any environment in which they happened to be placed.[47]

Above we spoke of an “irreducible kernel” which to-day, although presented under the cover of wide variations, is always present in the Jew. And here we have this “irreducible kernel” described and accounted for by a scholarly Jewish historian himself.

And it was this irreducible kernel which was recognized as the basic peculiarity of the Jew as he presented himself to the European of the early centuries of our era.

But what of the infusion of foreign or European blood due to proselytism and slave-holding?

Renan, as we have seen, makes much of this. But his vehemence is nothing compared with that of the Huxley-Haddon school.

Let us listen to a Jewish scholar again.

Dr. Joseph Jacobs, writing in 1886, joins violent issue with Renan. He expresses surprise that a man of his erudition could have overlooked many essential objections to the sweeping claim that the Jews cannot be a race.

He bases his attack on Renan on four principal points. He first of all argues that the term “proselyte” in the Jewish sense is not to be accepted at its face value, as it might be, for instance, if we were dealing with proselytes joining the Holy Catholic or the Protestant Church. He shows that, to the Jews, there was an important distinction between “Proselytes of the Gate” and “Proselytes of Righteousness.” The former never observed the most stringent Mosaic regulations and were not regarded as real Jews at all by the traditional Jew. They were really beyond the law both of the Christian and the Jew, and may even be suspected in some cases of having accepted the position of “Proselytes of the Gate” in order to exercise a freedom in licentious or immoral living which would not have been tolerated by either of the groups, Christians or Jews, had they been wholly one or the other.

The “Proselytes of Righteousness” alone were regarded by the Jews as real Jews, and their initiation and the demands made of them were much more severe. Three scholars had to teach them the Law and examine them in it. They had to undertake to observe the Jewish law, and their initiation was preceded by three ceremonies—circumcision, baptism and sacrifice—which could not be circumvented. In fact Basnage, writing 179 years before Dr. Jacobs, declares that if by some accident circumcision had already been performed on the Gentile Proselyte of Righteousness before his admission to the Jewish fold, it was necessary to open the scar again and shed blood, before he could be acknowledged as a Jew.[48]

Now the importance of this point is immediately manifest, when we learn that only those proselytes who could strictly be called “of Righteousness” (or, as Basnage says, de Justice), “had the full jus connubi with persons of Jewish race and religion.”[49]

Thus Dr. Jacobs, for example, says: “The Jews of Antioch only made the many inhabitants proselytes ‘after a fashion’ . . . i.e., they were Proselytes of the Gate.”[50] And it was to such Jewish proselytes as these that Paul appealed “and founded Christianity by granting full rights to them. The triumph of Christianity meant, therefore, that this rapidly growing class were drawn off from Judaism to the new sect before they had been fully incorporated into the older body.”[51]

This, of course, greatly modifies our conception of the three hundred and fifty years of active proselytism which the Jews are supposed to have passed through between 150 B.C. and A.D. 200. For, according to Dr. Jacobs, we must assume that the majority of the recruits were of the type known as “of the Gate.” The constant mention of large numbers of Greek proselytes to Judaism referred to in Josephus and elsewhere would, according to Dr. Jacobs, come under this head.[52]

Basnage, however, goes further, and declares that when slaves were proselytized they were invariably attached merely as Prosélytes de la Porte and were not regarded as real Jews at all.[53]

This entirely supports Dr. Jacobs and the immense importance he attaches to this point, whilst it also fortifies his attack on Renan for having overlooked the distinction.[54] Nor must we think of Basnage as a man with an axe to grind, who was either a Jew or writing with the object of proving the purity of the Jews as a race. He was a French Protestant parson who, in the early years of the eighteenth century, wrote a most impartial and wholly objective history of the Jews.

We are now in a better position to appreciate why Jacobs, although admitting that “some of the infusion of Aryan blood came in through this means [slave-holding by the Jews]” adds: “but the amount would necessarily be small.”[55]

So much for Dr. Jacobs’ first point.

His next point, which is also a strong one, is the notorious infertility of mixed marriages (i.e., as between Jews and Gentiles). The evidence he adduces is certainly startling,[56] and is all the more convincing seeing that it has been confirmed since his day. Professor Lundborg, writing in 1931, quotes Dr. E. A. Theilhaber with approval when he speaks of the comparative sterility of mixed Christian and Jew marriages,[57] and Dr. Max Marcuse, in 1920, published a monograph on the subject[58] in which he recognizes the low fertility of Jew-Christian unions but, strangely enough, ascribes it to sociological and psychological rather than to biological causes; while Dr. Luschan, who also stresses the relative sterility of mixed Christian and Jew marriages, explains it on the grounds that only neurasthenics and neurotics ever dream of marrying outside their race or nation, and that from such abnormal people it would be idle to expect a large progeny.[59]

There is much to be said for the point of view of both Dr. Marcuse and Dr. Luschan. But what interests us here is not so much the reasons they advance for the phenomenon, as the fact that they abundantly confirm Dr. Jacobs’ findings to the effect that mixed Christian and Jew marriages are infertile[60]—findings which go a long way towards discounting the extravagant claims recently made regarding the radical modification of Jewish blood through mixed marriages.

Dr. Jacobs not only throws considerable doubt on these claims, from the standpoint of the small progeny of mixed marriages, but further shows that, at least after Charlemagne, when Europe became Christendom, “no great intermarriage of Jews and Aryans can be discerned . . . the Church isolated the Jews more and more by cutting them off from the trade guilds, originally religious, and from all civil rights.” And “the isolation into which the Jews were cast led, in the course of time, to a feeling of combined contempt and terror about them among the populace. The folklore of Europe regarded the Jews as something infra-human, and it would require an almost impossible amount of large toleration for a Christian maiden of the Middle Ages to regard union with a Jew as anything other than unnatural.”[61]

This testimony from a pre-Hitler Jew is most valuable, particularly as he caps it by showing very cogently that even proselytism, through which a leakage of Gentile blood into the Jewish stock might still have occurred, was relatively insignificant during the Middle Ages.[62]

Dr. Jacobs’ third point concerns the phenomenon of prepotency, i.e., the fact that in the crossing of closely inbred with random-bred stocks, the parent of the inbred stock frequently imposes his type and character on the offspring. Dr. Jacobs gives some convincing evidence of this in mixed Christian and Jew marriages, and shows how frequently the Jew father or mother determines the inheritance.[63]

Thus he concludes: “Even if history showed a greater infusion of Aryan blood than the above estimate would allow,[64] the effect of this on Jewish characteristics would tend to be minimized by certain anthropological principles which have been completely overlooked by M. Renan and followers.”[65]

Supporting Dr. Jacobs’ findings at a time when there was no Nazi movement to arouse the opposition of the Jews and liberal Gentiles, we may quote other Jews. The Rev. Dr. Hermann Adler, for instance, in 1886 declared that “on the whole there had not been any large foreign admixture with the Jewish race,”[66] and he is confirmed by Maurice Fishberg, who in 1911 took the view that “the Jews are an exception among a world of universally mixed races.”[67] Both of these Jewish writers, however, were anticipated by Benjamin Disraeli, who, in an essay on the Jews, written in 1850, everywhere speaks of them as a race, and ascribes their genius and their power to this very fact.[68]

Another learned Jewish author, Dr. Arthur Ruppin, writing in 1930, not only claims for the Jews a particular type, which he says very reasonably is the outcome of segregation and inbreeding,[69] but also undertakes to outline the probable ethnic components of modern Jews. He says:

The most approved way, according to ethnological science, of classifying the different kinds of men, is into three races—the white, the yellow and the black race. The white race divides further into three branches—the Northern European (Nordic), the Mediterranean, and the Alpine. The Mediterranean has two main subdivisions, the Oriental (Bedouin) and the Occidental; while the Alpine divides into the Near Eastern and the Dinaric branches. The Jews, according to this terminology, have derived from a mixture of the Near-Eastern branch of the Alpine race with the Oriental and Occidental branches of the Mediterranean race.[70]

Thus Dr. Ruppin definitely outlines the ethnic components of his co-religionists, and concludes that they are chiefly Alpine and Oriento-Occidental Mediterraneans. This is an important admission, because, if it is a fact, we can immediately, on the basis of Ripley, discover the fundamental difference between, say, the Englishman and the Jew.

According to Ripley, the Englishman is the product of a mixture of Occidental Mediterranean and Nordic blood with a conspicuous absence (as compared with Continental peoples) of Alpine blood.[71]

According to Dr. Ruppin, however, the Jew is devoid of any Nordic component, and is chiefly Mediterranean and Alpine. Thus, on the basis of Ripley’s and Ruppin’s findings, there is an irreconcilable difference between the two stocks—a difference which it is not surprising to find manifested morphologically by the representatives of each people, and which must have its particular psychological correlatives.

But even if we may suspect the zeal with which these prominent Jews defended the “purity” of the Jewish race in pre-Hitler days, and regard their testimony as biased, we cannot altogether dismiss their arguments as negligible. For, although pride may have made them force certain points, what is interesting is the fact that a learned Jew like Dr. Jacobs could, in 1886, make such a powerful plea in favor of the “purity” of the Jewish “race” without, as would happen to-day, being hissed out of court by every Jew and certainly every liberal present; and that, in 1930, another Jew like Dr. Ruppin could find so definite an ethnic difference between present Teutonic, English and Jewish stocks.

Moreover, the criticism Dr. Jacobs makes of Renan, who may be regarded as the greatest and soundest of the Huxley-Haddon school, is not undeserved. Renan did overlook the phenomenon of low fertility in mixed Jew and Christian marriages, he did overlook prepotency, he no doubt exaggerated the factor of proselytism, and he did neglect the rigid categories into which Jewish proselytes were classed. Strangely enough, he also even denied “type” to the Jew. And on what grounds?

Chiefly on the grounds of his experience in Paris, where his official position as an Oriental scholar brought him into contact with so many Jews that he was led by the variety of their features, stature and general appearance to doubt the purity of their race.[72]

But—and this brings us to Jacobs’ fourth and last point—even the Jews, relatively pure though they may be, have to a great extent separated and become segregated into groups in Europe, else how could we have come to speak of Sephardic and Ashkenasian, eastern and western, Russian and English Jews? And segregation means so often differentiation of type, however faint, that it would be surprising if individual peculiarities were not discernible.

Besides, as Dr. Jacobs argues, Nature does not produce her creatures out of a stamping machine. Even within a race that has achieved marked standardization, differences are not unusual. Occupation, geographical situation, social position, long habituation to a particular diet: all these things count, so that even if there is claimed, as Dr. Jacobs claims, an irreducible “nostrility” alone as the unifying characteristic of the Jews,[73] it leaves a wide margin for variation in other features.

Apart from ordinary influences affecting physiognomy, moreover, we have to consider degeneracy and regeneracy. The flattening of a nose, the modification of its bridge, the alteration of a mouth and lips may be due entirely to abnormal conditions of health, impaired vigour, or endocrine imbalance. (Adenoid growths alone will often affect the shape of the nose.)

For all these reasons, Renan’s emphasis on the variation of type seems to Dr. Jacobs exaggerated. And a perfectly impartial and independent investigator, like Buxton, supports him.

Writing in 1925, this author says: “With comparatively few exceptions, for exceptions do occur, the Jews from various parts of the world usually retain the characteristic brachycephalic head-form, their main cephalic index being about 81 . . . . But not only do the Jews retain their head-form in the majority of cases,[74] they also preserve the other characters which Deniker mentions, the most noticeable of which is the form of the nose,”[75] their “nostrility” as Dr. Jacobs calls it.

Again, Ripley, whose objectivity has never been called in question, writing as early as 1900, said: “There is in reality such a phenomenon as the Jewish nose . . . this trait, next to the prevalent dark hair and eyes and swarthy skin, is the most distinctive among the chosen people.”[76]

When, therefore, writing as recently as 1936, and greatly influenced by Renan, Dr. N. Neuville says: “Dans tous leurs caractères, les juifs se rattachent en général au type dominant du lieu où ils se trouvent, et l’on a du renoncer à leur trouver quoi que ce soit de racial, ni somatiquement, ni sérologiquement, ni pathologiquement,”[“In all their traits, Jews are generally connected to the dominant type of the place where they are located, and we had to give up trying to find any [distinct] racial traits, whether somatic or serological or pathological”—Ed.][77] he seems to go too far, and by so doing spoils his case. But what he says is quite typical of the Huxley-Haddon school.

At the end of his discussion of the Jews as a race, Dr. Jacobs concludes as follows: “For these reasons I am inclined to support the long-standing belief in the substantial purity of the Jewish race, and to hold that the vast majority of contemporary Jews are the lineal descendants of the Diaspora of the Roman Empire.”[78]

The question is, can we accept this Jewish writer’s conclusion?

Only with reservations! For, quite apart from the fact that over half a century (two generations) now separates us from him, and that during that time there has undoubtedly been an intensive mixing of Jew and Christian,[79] we must allow for his desire to prove at all costs the purity of his race.

But, without insisting on the actual purity of the race, it seems, on the basis of the above facts, not unfair to accept Buxton’s summing up of the whole question in the term “types,” and with this the present argument may fitly be terminated.

Buxton says: “For some reason or other the Jews have been able, with remarkable vitality, to perpetuate a physical type which has, at least in many places, survived to a marked degree . . . . That they have mixed, to a certain degree, with other races in various parts of the world is certain, and the mixed nature of their origin would account for many of their variations, while generally, as a type, they seem to be markedly persistent.”[80]

If, therefore, we bear in mind that morphological characters can no longer be regarded as independent of psychological characters, the fact that we have concluded that the Jews have survived as a type is sufficient to relieve us of any need of pressing, as Dr. Jacobs does, the claim of race. For type, in its essence, is, if not indicative, at least reminiscent of ethnic division and specialization, and, as a distinction, suffices to justify all those who, on what grounds soever, may wish to retain their particular type free from mixture with any other type, using this in the psycho-physical sense which implies morphological as well as psychological influences.

2. We now come to the second possible form of reply to those who would deny race to the Jews, in the belief that by so doing they have removed every possible reason any other nation may advance for not mixing with them or enduring their influence over its national affairs.

From the tone and arguments of “We Europeans,” By Professor Julian Huxley and Dr. A. C. Haddon, it is impossible not to infer that, by having to their own satisfaction disposed of the “fiction”[81] of race, as applied whether to the Jews or to the Nordics, or Teutons, or the so-called “Aryans,” they imagine that they have completely demonstrated the hollowness of any objections German, English or Polish people may have to marrying their sons and daughters to Jews, or to having their national policies influenced by members of the Jewish community. And, as a final, supreme and apparently irresistible inducement to those who might still remain unmoved by their arguments, they remind the reader that “in Soviet Russia there is deliberate discouragement of all race prejudice”!![82]

They furthermore try to convince us of the fact that “what they [the Jews] have preserved and transmitted is not ‘racial qualities’ but religious and social traditions.”[83]

Now, without entering into the question of the “scientific” value of a book which can resort to tactics such as these—for it must be obvious even to an archangel of impartiality that there is more in what the Jewish character has transmitted than religious and social traditions—let us concentrate on the one point, which is the denial of race to the Jews and to everybody else, including ourselves.

What is its import?

Does it remove every objection we may advance against marrying, say, an octoroon, or a Turkish woman, or a Russian moujik’s daughter, or a Jewess? Does it remove every objection we may advance against allowing a Negroid American, a Turk, a Russian Mongoloid, or a “Jewish Englishman” to influence our sentiments and institutions?

Certainly it does not.

Precisely to define race and then to demonstrate that no European people, including the Jews, exactly fit the definition may be a perfectly satisfactory thing to do, and such occasional examinations of words in common use are most necessary, particularly in these days of journalese, and the general abuse of language. But it has little to do either with politics, or with sociology, or with nationality. It leaves, in fact, the whole question of national feeling, national prejudice, national jealousy untouched.

At the present conjuncture in world affairs, “race” may have become a meaningless word. It may even be quite superfluous. If this is so, then by all means let us scrap it. But scrapping it will not remove those factors to designate which it has so far survived, possibly merely as a spurious counter. It will not remove the capacity on the part of non-Semitic Europeans to recognize the Jew as a type (desirable or undesirable). It will not remove the reluctance which is steadily growing to divorce type from character. It will not remove the knowledge which all Europeans have, and which cannot be wholly fallacious seeing that—as will appear below—it is based on history that the Jew traditionally favors certain callings, certain occupations and reveals certain definite psychological characteristics which, whether conditioned by long habituation or not, are nevertheless distinct and may be (probably are) the psychological correlatives of his type. Finally, it cannot remove any objection non-Semites may advance to that irreducible kernel, recognized, as I have shown, by the Jews themselves, which distinguishes them from Gentiles, even if this be shown to consist externally only of “nostrility.” For the believer in the interdependence of body and soul—and who is not a believer in this to-day?—will necessarily look for an irreducible psychological kernel in the Jewish type which must correspond with that nostrility.

Thus, wonderful as may be the Huxley-Haddon effort, as a tour de force, as an anti-Hitler pamphlet, a lampoon, even if it is sound as an argument (which is by no means proved), it does not begin to solve the Jewish question for non-Semitic peoples. It is, therefore, that to the less alert and less critical in all the English-speaking world, it must appear to have done so.

Indeed, there are few of our daily practices and common beliefs which, if subjected to the test of definitions arbitrarily screwed up to wholly artificial rigidity, would be found to survive the test. What about the belief that the English people still stand for something which is not found in the non-English? What about the belief that there is something peculiar about English justice, English mercy, English forgiveness, the English capacity for fighting a losing battle both calmly and with grit, English humor? Whether we admire all these qualities or not has nothing to do with it. The point is, who would say that they are independent of a certain type which is found in England?

There are at least as many real and irreducible factors in the belief that the Jew still belongs to a distinct order of mankind as there are in any of the above beliefs. And by denying him or us the right to the use of “race” as a designation, you in no way remove the irreducible factors in question.

This is not to say that the Jew is therefore despicable, or that we should be justified in treating him with brutality, or hardness. It is not even to say that the complete list of his psycho-physical qualities is as susceptible of exhaustive definition as that of the terrier or the greyhound. But you do not make the Jew equivalent to a German or an Englishman by denying that the word “race” has any meaning as applied to any one of the three nationalities. The error consists in supposing that, by debunking a word like “race” you can dispose of a belief which, after all, as we have seen above, has much to be said for it from the standpoint both of genetics and of history, and which the common man finds confirmed every time he happens to be confronted by a member of the Chosen People. In short, one has only to ask oneself whether the denial of the claim of purity of race to the Englishman disposes of our distinct conception of what an Englishman usually is, in order to see through the Huxley-Haddon contribution to the subject and to appreciate that, after all—even supposing it to be sound—it has done nothing more than perform a piece of philological purification.