• RACE AND MYTH 1 The Jews of our times fall into two main divisions: Sephardim and Ashkenazim.
• The Sephardim are descendants of the Jews who since antiquity had lived in Spain (in Hebrew Sepharad) until they were expelled at the end of the fifteenth century and settled in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and to a lesser extent in Western Europe.
• Thus, in common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew.
• But the term is misleading, for the Hebrew word Ashkenaz was, in mediaeval rabbinical literature, applied to Germany – thus contributing to the legend that modern Jewry originated on the Rhine.
• For the sake of piquantry it should be mentioned that the Ashkenaz of the Bible refers to a people living somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Ararat and Armenia.
• For Ashkenaz is also named in Jeremiah 51, 27, where the prophet calls his people and their allies to rise and destroy Babylon: `Call thee upon the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz.` This passage was interpreted by the famous Saadiah Gaon, spiritual leader of Oriental Jewry in the tenth century, as a prophecy relating to his own times: Babylon symbolized the Caliphate of Baghdad, and the Ashkenaz who were to attack it were either the Khazars themselves or some allied tribe.
• Accordingly, says Poliak,1 some learned Khazar Jews, who heard of the Gaon`s ingenious arguments, called themselves Ashkenazim when they emigrated to Poland.
• 2 Summing up a very old and bitter controversy in a laconic paragraph, Raphael Patai wrote:2 The findings of physical anthropology show that, contrary to popular view, there is no Jewish race.
• Anthropometric measurements of Jewish groups in many parts of the world indicate that they differ greatly from one another with respect to all the important physical characteristics – stature, weight, skin colour, cephalic index, facial index, blood groups, etc.
• Moreover, there is general agreement that comparisons of cranial indices, blood types, etc., show a greater similarity between Jews and their Gentile host-nation than between Jews living in different countries.
• However, before attempting to tackle the apparent contradiction, it will be useful to look at a few samples of the data on which the anthropologists` denial of a Jewish race is based.
• The author, Professor Juan Comas, draws the following conclusion from the statistical material (his italics): Thus despite the view usually held, the Jewish people is racially heterogeneous; its constant migrations and its relations – voluntary or otherwise – with the widest variety of nations and peoples have brought about such a degree of crossbreeding that the so-called people of Israel can produce examples of traits typical of every people.
• Hence, so far as our knowledge goes, we can assert that Jews as a whole display as great a degree of morphological disparity among themselves as could be found between members of two or more different races.3 Next, we must glance at some of the physical characteristics which anthropologists use as criteria, and on which Comas`s conclusions are based.
• In The Races of Europe, a monumental work published in 1900, William Ripley wrote: `The European Jews are all undersized; not only this, they are more often absolutely stunted.`4 He was up to a point right at the time, and he produced ample statistics to prove it.
• But he was shrewd enough to surmise that this deficiency in height might somehow be influenced by environmental factors.5 Eleven years later, Maurice Fishberg published The Jews – A Study of Race and Environment, the first anthropological survey of its kind in English.
• It revealed the surprising fact that the children of East European Jewish immigrants to the USA grew to an average height of 167·9 cm.
• averaged by their parents – a gain of nearly an inch and a half in a single generation.6 Since then it has become a commonplace that the descendants of immigrant populations – whether Jews, Italians or Japanese – are considerably taller than their parents, no doubt owing to their improved diet and other environmental factors.
• Fishberg then collected statistics comparing the average height of Jews and Gentiles in Poland, Austria, Rumania, Hungary, and so on.
• In general it was found that the stature of the Jews varied with the stature of the non-Jewish population among which they lived.
• 4 And yet – to return to the paradox – many people, who are neither racialists nor anti-Semites, are convinced that they are able to recognize a Jew at a single glance.
• Part of the answer, I think, was given by Ernest Renan in 1883: `Il n`y a pas un type juif, il y a des types juifs.`23 The type of Jew who can be recognized `at a glance` is one particular type among many others.
• One of the most prominent features – literally and metaphorically – which is said to characterize that particular type is the nose, variously described as Semitic, aquiline, hooked, or resembling the beak of an eagle (bec d`aigle).
• But, surprisingly, among 2836 Jews in New York City, Fishberg found that only 14 per cent – i.e., one person in seven – had a hooked nose; while 57 per cent were straight-nosed, 20 per cent were snub-nosed and 6·5 per cent had `flat and broad noses`.24 Other anthropologists came up with similar results regarding Semitic noses in Poland and the Ukraine.25 Moreover, among true Semites, such as pure-bred Bedouins, this form of nose does not seem to occur at all.26 On the other hand, it is `very frequently met among the various Caucasian tribes, and also in Asia Minor.
• Among the indigenous races in this region, such as the Armenians, Georgians, Ossets, Lesghians, Aissors, and also the Syrians, aquiline noses are the rule.
• Among the people living in Mediterranean countries of Europe, as the Greeks, Italians, French, Spanish and Portuguese, the aquiline nose is also more frequently encountered than among the Jews of Eastern Europe.
• Only a minority – a particular type of Jew – seems to have a convex nose, and lots of other ethnic groups also have it.
• An ingenious way out of this conundrum was suggested by Beddoe and Jacobs, who maintained that the `Jewish nose` need not be really convex in profile, and may yet give the impression of being `hooked`, due to a peculiar `tucking up of the wings`, an infolding of the nostrils.
• FIG 1 FIG 2 FIG 3 To prove his point that it is this `nostrility` which provides the illusion of beakedness, Jacobs invites his readers `to write a figure 6 with a long tail (Fig 1); now remove the turn of the twist, as in Fig 2, and much of the Jewishness disappears; and it vanishes entirely when we draw the lower continuation horizontally, as in Fig 3`.
• That there is in reality such a phenomenon as a Jewish nose, even though it be differently constituted from our first assumption [the criterion of convexity].28 But is there?
• Figure 1 could still represent an Italian, or Greek, or Spanish or Armenian, or Red Indian nose, `nostrility` included.
• That it is a Jewish, and not a Red Indian, Armenian, etc., nose we deduce – at a glance – from the context of other features, including expression, comportment, dress.
• Taken separately, they are common property of the most varied nations; put together, like an identi-kit, they combine into a prototype of – to say it once more – one particular type of Jew, of Eastern European origin, the type with which we are familiar.
• The collection of portraits published by Fishberg, or Ripley, can be used for a `believe it or not` game, if you cover the caption indicating whether the portrayed person is Jew or Gentile.
• It will, of course, remain inconclusive because you cannot walk up to the experimental subject and inquire after his or her religion; but if you play the game in company, the amount of disagreement between the observers` verdicts will be a surprise.
• How could I have missed it?` And when you have played this game for some time, you begin to see Jewish features – or Khazar features – everywhere.