A thorough and fascinating study of how 19th-century gentile and
Jewish scientists worked to find a scientific understanding of race
and of how that labor affected their views of Jews. The late 19th
century saw "the scientizing of anti-Jewish prejudice," states
Efron (History and Jewish Studies/Indiana Univ.), who then presents
a long background on medical opinion that tagged Jews with male
menstruation, pathological hysteria, and nymphomania. Efron
recounts unusual and often crude theories about the environmental
or genetic factors behind "Jewish" professions (too many tailors)
and proclivities (too few drunkards). Surveys of cranial types and
hair and skin color were all the rage, but racial theories were
often confounded by the facts: e.g., a low percentage of
blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans and a high percentage of
Nordic-looking Jews. But Efron goes beyond the obvious point that
the notion of race lent a scientific legitimacy to anti-Semitism.
Jewish scientists were in fact working with the same data and
assumptions as their non-Jewish colleagues; and some Jewish
scientists were just as convinced as German and Austrian physicians
that the Jews, like the Germans, constituted a distinct race. Among
them were two pioneers of racial science whom Efron examines
closely: Joseph Jacobs, a British Jew who made a statistical and
anthropological study of Jews in Europe; and Samuel Weissenberg, a
Russian-Jewish physician who incorporated Asian and Middle Eastern
Jews into his studies. Just as race science played a role in the
nationalism of France and Germany, it was appropriated by Zionists
in the same way - as an affirmation of Jewish identity. Efron
thoughtfully discusses this science and its practitioners,
providing copious notes (some of which deserve to be integrated in
the text) and ample references (many in German). A significant,
lucid presentation of a little-known slice of Jewish history, the
history of science, and the history of racism. (Kirkus Reviews)
By the late nineteenth century, physical anthropologists were
engaged in debates about the "Jewish Racial Question," asking
whether there was a biological basis for Jewish distinctiveness and
social development. This fascinating book describes for the first
time the response of Jewish race scientists to these debates,
demonstrating that in their participation, the scientists were
involved in a complex process of Jewish self-definition, one that
was impelled by two factors: the external threat of antisemitism
and the internal need to reassert a Jewish ethnic pride that had
been battered by assimilation. John Efron examines the racial
science of Jewish anthropologists and physicians in Germany,
England, Russia, and Austria, showing that their work differed from
place to place because it was contingent on such historical factors
as the nature of Jewish integration in a given country, the
character of a nation's Jewish community or communities, and the
level of antisemitism there. Efron sketches the growth of race
science from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and
considers how Jews were represented in it. He then studies the
image of Jews in British anthropology, discusses the first Jewish
race scientist, Joseph Jacobs, an Anglo-Australian who focused on
the Jews of Western Europe, and the Russian Jewish race scientist
Samuel Weissenberg, who studied the Jews of Eastern Europe, Central
Asia, and the Near East. Finally he examines the link between race
science and the politics of Zionism, showing how Zionist scientists
used race science not to assert Jewish superiority but to bolster a
political cause that was concerned with Jewish spiritual and
physical regeneration.
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