Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/362

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346
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

marital relations were safeguarded against infusion of foreign blood in every possible way. The name is, perhaps, in its various forms, the most frequent among Jews to-day. But how shall we account for the equally pure Jewish names in origin, such as Davis, Harris, Phillips, and Hart? How did they ever stray so far from their original ethnic and religious significance, unless the marital bars were lowered to a large degree? Some of them certainly claim a foremost position numerically in our Christian English directories. We have an interesting case of indefinite Jewish delimitation in our portraits. The middle portrait at page 341 is certainly a Jewish type. Dr. Bertholon writes me that all who saw it immediately asserted it to be a Jew. Yet the man was a professed Mussulman, in fact, even though his face was against him.

There is, as we have sought to prove, no single uniform type of head peculiar to the Jewish people which may be regarded as in any sense racially hereditary. Is this true also of the face? Our first statement encounters no popular disapproval, for most of us never, perhaps, happened to think of this head form as characteristic. But the face, the features! Is this another case of science running counter to popular belief?

The first characteristic to impress itself upon the layman is that the Jew is generally a brunette. All scientific observers corroborate this impression, agreeing in that the dark hair and eyes of this people really constitute a distinct racial trait. About two thirds of the Ashkenazim branch in Galicia and Russia, where the general population is relatively quite blond, is of the brunette type, this being especially marked in the darker color of the hair. For example, Majer and Kopernicki,[1] in Galicia, found dark hair to be about twice as frequent as the light. Elkind,[2] in Warsaw, finds about three fifths of the men dark. In Bosnia, Glück's observations on the Sephardim type gave him only two light-haired men out of fifty-five. In Germany and Austria[3] this brunette tendency is likewise strongly emphasized. Pure brunette types are twice as frequent in the latter country, and three times as frequent in Germany, among Jewish as among Christian school children. Pacts also seem to bear out the theory, to which we have already alluded, that the Oriental Jews betray a slightly greater blond tendency, thus inclining to rufous. In Germany also the blond tendency becomes appreciably more frequent in Alsace-Lorraine, a former center of gravity of the nation, as the map in our previous article has shown. This comparative blondness of the Alsatian Jew is not new, for in 1861 the origin of these same blondes was matter of controversy. Broca believed them to be of northern deriva-


  1. 1877, pp. 88-90; 1885, p. 34.
  2. Centralblatt für Anthropologie, vol. iii, p. 66.
  3. Virchow, 1886 b, p. 364; Schimmer, 1884, p. xxiii.