But the point in discussion seems to me to raise also a problem of exceeding interest within the anthropological sphere itself. Professor Ripley assumes that round heads beget round heads, and long heads descend from long heads for all time unchanged. That appears to carry with it the assumption that no amount of brain activity can increase the mass of brain, that skull capacity has no relation to mental capacity, and that alone among the organs of the body the brain and skull are incapable of growth, change, or development. The crux of Jewish anthropology raises this problem, as I shall proceed to show, and, if I have interpreted history aright, offers valuable material toward its solution.

I might have met Professor Ripley's arguments on narrower grounds, which would have enabled me to evade this larger question. His main, I might say his solitary, argument is that contemporary Jews are predominantly brachycephalic, or round-headed, whereas contemporary Arabs, whom he takes as the type of the Semites, are as predominantly dolichocephalic, or long-headed. Accepting Professor Ripley's own criterion of purity of race, I might point to the almost universal round-headedness of the Jew as a proof of their racial unity. The fact that Arabs do not share that quality really does not affect the question. Linguistically and geographically the Hebrews of history were associated with the Aramæans and Assyrians of Asia Minor, and Professor Ripley himself allows that Asia Minor was mainly brachycephalic. Till Professor Ripley brings forward craniological evidence that the cephalic index of the ancient Hebrews was below 77.8, his reference to the contemporary Arab must be ruled out of court. But, quite apart from this, the Arabic evidence would be of little significance, since the chief characteristic of Moslem civilization has been the predominance of marriage by capture and descent from slave concubines. Every caravan that has entered Arabia for the last twelve hundred years has had its contingent of female slaves of alien race, mainly from dolichocephalic Africa. I must confess my surprise that Professor Ripley has based his main argument on the shifting sands of Arabic racial purity.

The only attempt Professor Ripley makes toward a proof that the pure Hebrew is dolichocephalic is a half-hearted endeavor to claim that quality for the Sephardim, or Spanish and Portuguese Jews, descended in the main from Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal in 1492. As a matter of fact, the largest number of measurements of Sephardic heads has been made by Mr. Spielman and myself,[11] and of the fifty-one heads examined by us only eight were long-headed. Professor Ripley gives a portrait of a Tunisian Jew, with index 75, who is also probably of Sephardic origin, like most of the Jews of the Mediterranean littoral. But, curiously enough, there is far more evidence for the mixture of race among contemporary Sephardim than of any other branch of Jews. Even while they were living in Spain as avowed Jews they were persistently accused of intermarriage, chiefly with the Moors, while a large number of contemporary Sephardim are descended not from refugees of 1492, but from the so-called Marranos—Jews who remained in Spain, professing Christianity and marrying tolerably freely among the surrounding population. If one wished to be hypercritical, one could trace the long-headedness of a minority of Jews to this admixture of race from Spain.

After all, I must insist that it is to history one must go to determine a question of this sort. Jews have shown such marked individuality throughout their career for the last two thousand years among the nations—they have been so much in the world's eye throughout that time—that any appreciable degree of intermarriage would not have escaped notice, both by themselves and by their enemies. Now there is practically no evidence of this kind during the Christian era. Religious antipathy has been so strong throughout that period as to form an almost insurmountable barrier to intermarriage and the consequent proselytism to Judaism which is necessary for a valid Jewish marriage. Sporadic cases doubtless occur, but their very infrequency drew attention to them, and all that historical research can discover is under one hundred cases throughout the middle ages, scattered through Europe. Jewish nomenclature has special formulæ to name the proselyte, and yet, though we have hundreds of the mediæval lists of Jewish communities and martyrologies, it is the rarest thing in the world to find one of these names referred to as "sons (or daughters) of Abraham our father." In earlier days, doctors of the Talmud, when discussing hypothetical cases, dismissed that of the proselyte as being so rare.[12] In my Memoir in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1885 I have taken the marriage statistics of modern Algeria as most nearly representing the most favorable conditions that one could imagine at any time during the middle ages, and have found that during nearly half a century (1830-'77) there were only thirty mixed marriages out of an average population of twenty-five thousand Jews—not one a year. The only instances of proselytism on a large scale are those of the Chozars in southern Russia, converted to Judaism in the eighth century, and the Falashas of Abyssinia, about the same time. Yet these are an indirect proof, by the method of difference, of the comparatively pure descent of the rest of the Jews, for neither the Karaites, who are the descendants of the Chozars, nor the Falashas show any of the characteristic Jewish features or expression.

Those who contest the purity of the Jewish race lay great stress upon the Chozars as forming the nucleus of the Russian Polish Jews, who are, as is well known, a predominant majority among present-day Jews, probably ninety per cent of whom either dwell in the Russian dominions or are descended from former inhabitants of old Poland. Yet against this is the absence of any reference to Jews in Poland during the time the Chozars flourished (eighth to eleventh centuries), while the very speech of the Polish Jews—the so-called "Yiddish," really archaic German mixed with Hebrew—indicates their true source, the German kingdoms and principalities. Professor Ripley throws some doubt upon the possibility of such large numbers as those of the Polish Jews having been derived from Germany. Nowadays there are probably five millions of Jews in the regions once possessed by Poland, but the remarkable fertility of Jews is one of the most striking characteristics of their vital statistics, to which, indeed, Professor Ripley has called attention in his remarks upon their vitality. The development of a generation depends, as is well known, upon the relative number of deaths under five years of age, and it is just at this period that Jewish mortality presents so favorable an aspect, owing to the care of Jewish mothers and the absence of alcoholism among the fathers. I have estimated that the Jewish population of the world in 1730 (six generations ago) was only 1,300,000, whereas at the present moment it is at least nine times as much. If one could assume the same rate of progress to have existed through the middle ages the Jewish population in the fourteenth century would have been not much more than 25,000. Such a rate of progress is, however, extremely unlikely, considering the large losses by persecution, which in Poland alone, during the disastrous Cossack inroads between 1648 and 1656, is said to have removed no less than 180,000 Jews. But, making every allowance for this disturbance in the rate of progress, it would have been quite possible for 50,000 Jews who had migrated to Poland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to increase to over half a million at the beginning of the eighteenth. Americans, who have seen nearly half a million Russian Jews land upon their shores within the last twenty years after crossing nearly half the world, need not be incredulous as to the possibility of one tenth of that number passing over the borders between Germany and Poland in a couple of centuries during the middle ages, when, if means of transit were less numerous, intensity of persecution and motives for emigration were ten times as strong as even under the iron rule of the Russian Czar.

History, then, as I read it, has nothing to say against the purity of descent of contemporary Jews from those of the Bible. What has anthropology, as interpreted by Professor Ripley, to produce against this negative evidence of history? Mainly, it would appear, the fact that Jews of the present day are predominantly brachycephalic. Of the fact there can be little doubt. The list given by Professor Ripley in the Popular Science Monthly (vol. liv, page 340), of over twenty-five hundred heads, would be sufficient to establish this. But the very uniformity of the index is almost sufficient by itself to refute the deduction Professor Ripley draws from it. If there had been any general amount of admixture, that would have tended rather to produce variety than uniformity. Surely Professor Ripley does not contend that the Jewish young men and maidens, who, on his theory, so freely welcomed outsiders into the family circle, have never fallen in love with long-headed persons of the opposite sex. His argument requires that the original Jews of the Diaspora were long-headed, and that they have uniformly intermarried with the broad-headed varieties of the genus homo. Now, he adduces no evidence whatever that Jews originally were dolichocephalic, and even if he succeeded in proving this he would have the further difficulty of finding a European race with skulls so broad as to raise the average index of the race considerably over 80. If we assume that the original index of the Jewish skull was 75, Professor Ripley would have to find some race with an average index of nearly 90 before the mixture would raise the contemporary Jewish skull to its present broad-headedness. Dr. Ammon has shown[13] that there are only two small regions in Europe where such abnormally broad skulls exist, neither of them centers of Jewish population.

But Dr. Ammon has shown more. By comparison with the skulls found in the long barrows in Germany, he shows that the index of German skulls has risen from 77 to no less than 83 during the last thousand years or so; and he further shows, by reasoning similar to that which I have just given, that this rise in index can not be due to any admixture of race. Now, to what is this rise in head index due? Dr. Ammon, who is a professed disciple of Weismann, does not go into the question of causation, but the simplest and most obvious explanation is that cranial capacity has followed brain development, and that, roughly speaking, brachycephalism implies intellectual development. A few instances may be given, confirming this impression of the superior intellectual capacity of the broad-headed. Prof. Karl Pearson, in his Chances of Death (vol. i, page 205), has given the following sexual ratios of the superiority of English, German, and French men over the opposite sex:

English.German.French.
Brain weight1.1201.1171.125
Skull capacity1.1791.1261.164
Stature1.0811.0781.069

In other words, men's skulls contain about eight per cent more and their brains weigh four per cent more than women's, even allowing for the difference in height. So, too, there is a uniform increase of cubic capacity from the skulls of the Australians (75 cubic centimetres) up to the Teutons (93.5 cubic centimetres).[14] The same authority gives the average weight of brain in a number of brachycephalic individuals as 1,314 grammes, as against 1,287 grammes for dolichocephalic cases.[15] Professor Pearson points out that the higher the caste in India the broader the skull, the Brahmans being highest, with an index of 78.86, according to the measurements of Risley. The same writer gives a long list (page 290) of the indexes of skulls of some thirty-seven races, ranging from Australians at the bottom of the list, with 70.34, and headed by mediæval Jews (only twelve skulls), with an index of 84.74. Every indication seems to point out that in races where progress depends upon brain rather than muscle the brain-box broadens out as a natural consequence. Little investigation has as yet been made as to the influence of brain development on the form of the skull, but what little has been done all points in the same direction. Dr. Giulio Chiarugi[16] has made some careful measurements of twenty-one brains, and has shown that in every instance there is much greater complexity of the cerebral convolutions in the brachycephalic as compared with the dolichocephalic skulls, in which the brains were contained. From the nature of the sutures of the skull it is tolerably obvious that if brain capacity produces an enlargement of brain, the consequent internal pressure on the skull will be lateral and tend to produce brachycephalism. The application of all this to the case of Jews seems obvious. If they had been forced by persecution to become mainly blacksmiths, one would not have been surprised to find their biceps larger than those of other folk; and similarly, as they have been forced to live by the exercise of their brains, one should not be surprised to find the cubic capacity of their skulls larger than that of their neighbors. When it is remembered that they are, owing to their persecutions, the shortest of all European folk, their relative superiority in brain comes out even more strikingly.