Source: The Menorah Journal, Volume 3. December 1917. Page 290"
A race is a smaller species — a breed of men, animals, or plants. All members of a race are born with certain common features and traits which they cannot lose. Nor can the race become divested, except in small degree and after lapse of ages, of its special qualities. It may dilute and wash itself out by intermixture with other races. It can be supplanted by a new and higher type. But for all practical purposes, it is unalterable. Only as the geologist reckons time does race alter.
It is among those rare things in the world which may be broken and destroyed, but which cannot be bent. The plum tree will not bear apples. The hen may, indeed, hatch out duck eggs, but she will not lay them. Race horses are not born from Percherons nor from Shetland ponies. The children of Caucasians do not come into the world black-skinned and kinky-haired - nor the descendants of Mongolians blond - nor the offspring of Negroes slant-eyed.
And these permanent, ineradicable features of race are mental as well as physical. The pure pedigreed bulldog never loves noise and incessant activity as does the terrier. The collie is gentle and affectionate, the pug morose and self-satisfied. The coach dog will not point a quail, nor the setter follow the wheels of a wagon.
Even among men it is generally believed that we can detect some of these innate differences of race in their minds and temperaments. The Negro is unstable, emotional, quickly moved to tears and as quickly to laughter, responsive to stimulus, extravagant in expression. The Mongolian and the American Indian are slow, reserved, taciturn, self-repressed, and stoical. The Caucasian has the nature of a child compared with the contained Mongolian, but he is an aged man in disposition alongside of the movable Negro.
All these differences, and all these peculiarities, are something far beyond the individual. They exist before him. He is born to such and such an appearance, to such and such a mentality, the moment he is born into a race at all. Heredity is the great conservative factor, the forever steadying fly-wheel of race. And if heredity means anything, it means permanence, repetition of the same, generation after generation.
What is individual in us may therefore be distinctive; but what we owe to race is inevitable, fixed before our birth, and ineradicable. What human minds acquire, they receive from education, from environment. What human minds inherit from their race is instinctive and unalterable. The leopard cannot change his spots.
By these tests, are the Jews a race?
Physically, as judged by measurements and anatomical examination, the ancient Jews and their modern descendants in the Orient were one, in all essentials, with Phoenicians, Arabs, Syrians, Egyptians — yes, even with Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards. Even today, physical anthropology recognizes only one racial type among all the nations that fringe the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in Asia and Africa as well as in Europe, with the sole exception of the Greeks and the Turks ; —and the Greeks appear to be a changed people from their ancient namesakes, while the Turks are newcomers and invaders from afar. The expert in the field of comparative human anatomy does not speak of an Italian race, nor an Egyptian race, nor a Spanish race, nor an Arab, nor a Moroccan, nor a Jewish race. To him all these nationalities together form only a single unit, the Mediterranean race, one of the main branches of the Caucasian stock.
One of the commonest beliefs is that a Jew may be told anywhere; that whatever his country and his garb, he may be recognized at sight. Exact science has shown how utterly fallacious such impressions of the unaided eye may be. Measurements, accurately controlled, and made on large numbers of persons, reveal that the native population of Algiers and Portugal is long-headed. They prove also that the Jews of Algiers and Portugal are long-headed.
The Poles are a short-headed race. If the Jew were everywhere the same, if he formed, physically, a true race, then the Polish Jew should be long-headed like his fellow Jew of Africa. But the Polish Jew resembles, instead, the Polish Gentile, and is short-headed!
The German or English Jew is often blond, like a large element of the Gentile population of these countries. And the Chinese Jew is stiff-haired and slant-eyed! Wherever the Jew is subjected to the acid test of real measurement, his body proves to be practically identical in proportions and traits with the body of the native population of the same region.
Whether the cause of this similarity is the influence of environment, or of gradual intermarriage with Gentiles, is not yet ascertained. The latter view will provoke the repugnance of the orthodox of both faiths. But probability is in its favor, and it is not one to be dismissed lightly. Three percent of intermarriages in each generation for five or six centuries, or only one per cent since the destruction of Jerusalem, would make the smaller of two associating populations - in this case obviously the Jews - more than half Gentile today. Experience shows that such a proportion of intermarriages is usually exceeded even where religion and speech operate jointly to maintain a cleft; and the Jews have long been at one with their various neighbors in language. We are too wont to think that because a law ordains, the moral statute is invariably observed. As a matter of fact, it invariably is violated: the only question is the proportion of violations to observances. Speaking collectively, the Jews have adhered long and faithfully to their precept of religious endogamy, and this prescription is surely characteristic of their group attitude. But lapsing or compromising by individuals, which is as inevitable among them as among any other people, must have gone on sufficiently through the ages to affect the blood and physical type of the majority of Jews of any region today.
In any event, whatever the cause, the fact remains that throughout the civilized world the Jew, in his body, is essentially the same with the Gentile of the same country.
The popular impression is the opposite; and it is certainly true that any one who has given the matter frequent attention, whether himself a Jew or not, can in many cases instantaneously "spot" the Jew. But it does not follow that this something which so often marks out the Jew is necessarily a brand of race. This is clearly evident from the so - called "Jewish nose." If there is anything bodily supposed to be distinctive of the Jew, it is certainly this organ. Yet the more closely and accurately is examined, by Bertillon and similar methods, the more elusive, deceptive, and non-existent this famous "Jewish" nose becomes. The professional anthropologist utterly refuses to have anything to do with it. He recognizes only a "Mediterranean nose." In length and breadth, in prominence, in curvature, in droop, the Jewish nose is identical with that of the other Mediterranean nationalities.
The only feature at all characteristic of what passes as the Jewish nose has been shown to be the contour of the curl of the nostril; and this is not a matter of anatomy, but of physiognomy; a matter not of race, but of expression. A sneer or a smile, a surge of anger or a pang of fear, instantaneously changes such features as this; and it is only necessary for an individual (or for a body of people) to think frequently the same thoughts, or to feel similar emotions — and the corresponding facial (or nasal) expression becomes fixed.
Common religion, a common education, a common occupation and habits of life, are therefore amply sufficient to cause such traits of physiognomy. It is a delusion to ascribe them to heredity, or to look upon them as marks of race. If the congregation of Temple Emanuel were mixed at random with that of the First Congregational Church — the rank and station in the community of the individuals composing the two bodies being assumed to be the same — it would be far harder to distinguish the Jews from the Gentiles, than to segregate by appearance alone a hundred poets from a hundred bankers, or a hundred pickpockets shuffled in with a hundred clergymen.
Just so when mentality is considered. There is no doubt a "typical Jew" in character and temperament, but he is the product of social conditions, not of heredity and race. The "typical Jew" —who by the way is typical of a generation ago, not of today — is the outcome of mediaeval Ghetto environment and of post-mediaeval conditions, which, in spite of considerable amelioration, still retained much of the Ghetto flavor. He was excluded, and he was exclusive; and he came to form not only a denomination but a caste as well, with all the unifying influence of caste.
As a matter of fact, the "typical" or Ghetto-made Jew is not at all typical of Judaism in its wider historical aspect. It is only short-sightedness that projects him into a past in which he never existed. The Jew of patriarchal times, the Jew of the period of national independence, and the Roman Jew, had very, very little in common in disposition, in occupation, in distinctive character - in anything but religion, in fact — with the latter-day Jew. The inclination to trade, the reluctance to engage in heavy or agricultural labor, the genius for finance, the avoidance of physical conflict, the readiness to be charitable, the tendency to city life, all these traits with which the mediaeval and modern Jew is credited or charged, were lacking in ancient times, or completely reversed. There is really no point, except religion, in which the Jew has through the entire course of history adhered to the same mental disposition.
In this country, after the breaking of the roots grounded in the older soil of Europe, and under the influence of general leveling, loosening, and recasting, the character and spirit of the Jew have changed even in a single lifetime. The vaudeville stage still cherishes jokes about the Jew who got into a fight with an Irishman, and with the aid of his father, his brothers, his cousin, his uncle, and his brothers-in-law, nearly succeeded in "licking" his opponent. Such humor survives because to a large element of the public subtleties are perplexing, and only a joke that has aged for thirty or forty years, and has been trodden under countless feet, is sufficiently familiar to appeal. Such caricature, of course, is not representative but misrepresentative of the Jew of today, as the long list of Jewish names in the pugilistic columns of our newspapers' sporting pages proves - proves for better or for worse, but proves. The same may be said with reference to professional baseball. And it is a more serious, though no doubt related phenomenon, noted with grave concern especially by Jews themselves, that a less reputable profession than prize - fighting is being entered and followed by hundreds of Jewish women for every one that went wrong in their mothers' lifetime.
When the average standard of courage and chastity changes either upward or downward in so short a space of time, it must be clear that these standards, and the temperament that produces them, are not fixed by heredity, are not inborn or due to race, but are the result of changing and variable social conditions.
If, then, the Jew is not a race, what is he? For over two thousand years he has not formed a nation in the political sense. For nearly as long he has not been a geographical unit. For the same period he has not even possessed the unifying bond of a common language, except for ritual purposes. Only one thing is common to Jews of the past and present and to all Jews of today - their faith.
The Jew, then, is a group, a caste, in the better sense of the word, held together by religion. Hence the emphasis is justified which the Jew always has laid and still lays on his faith. The Jews were the first people in the world to actively nationalize their religion; and ever since, they have been religionizing their nationality. Their future as Jews, therefore, is clearly and indissolubly bound up with Jewish belief and worship; but their future as human beings is in no sense limited or predestined by any bonds of race, but lies in themselves as individual men, and in their ideals and character.