Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899: Volume LIV, No. 3, January 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899: Volume LIV, No. 3, January 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
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,[20] in Galicia, found dark hair to be about twice as
frequent as the light. Elkind,[21] 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[22] 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. Facts 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 derivation, while
Pruner Bey traced them from a blondish Eastern source. The English
Jews seem also to be slightly lighter than their continental brethren,
even despite their presumably greater proportion of Sephardim, who are
supposed to be peculiarly dark. As to the relative red blondness of
the Oriental Jew, the early observations of Dr. Beddoe, and those of
Langerhans (1873) as to the blue eyes and red-brown hair of the Druses
of Lebanon, do not seem to be borne out; or, as Jacobs puts it, the
"argument may be dismissed with costs." Certainly the living Semites
are dark enough in type, and the evidence of the sacred books bears
out the same theory of an original dark type. Thus "black" and "hair"
are commonly synonymous in the early Semitic languages. In any case,
whatever the color in the past, we have seen that science corroborates
the popular impression that the Jews as a people are distinctively of
a brunette type. This constitutes one of the principal traits by which
they may be almost invariably identified. It is not without interest
to notice that this brunetteness is more accentuated, oftentimes,
among the women, who are, the world over, persistent conservators of
the primitive physical characteristics of a people.[23]
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