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
We are confirmed in our belief in the potency of an artificial
selection, such as we have described, to perpetuate or to evolve a
Jewish facial type by reason of another observation. The women among
the Jews, as Jacobs[27] notes, in confirmation of our own belief,
betray far more constantly than the men the outward characteristics
peculiar to the people. We have already cited Weissenberg's testimony
that brunetteness is twice as prevalent among Russian Jewesses as
among the men. Of course this may be a matter of anabolism, pure and
simple. This would be perhaps a competent explanation of the
phenomenon for physiologists like Geddes and Thompson. For us this
other cause may be more directly responsible. Artificial selection in
a social group, wherein the active choice of mates falls to the share
of the male, would seem to tend in the direction of an accentuated
type in that more passive sex on which the selective influence
directly plays. At all events, observations from widely scattered
sources verify the law that the facial individuality of a people is
more often than otherwise expressed most clearly in the women. Thus,
for example, the women betray the Mongol type more constantly than the
men among the Asiatic tribes of eastern Russia.[28] On the other hand,
Mainof, best of authority, confirms the same tendency among those of
Finnic descent.[29] The _Setti Communi_ in northern Italy still
preserve their German language as evidence of a historic Teutonic
descent. They seem to have lost their identity entirely in respect of
the head form,[30] but Ranke[31] states that among the women the
German facial type constantly reappears. This, I confess, is not
altogether easy to understand, unless the Lombards, of whom these
colonies are supposedly the remnants, brought their native women with
them across the Alps. Perhaps, however, not bringing their women, a
new Teutonic resemblance has been evolved out of whole cloth. A better
example than this is offered among the Hamitic peoples of Africa north
of the Sahara. These peoples, from Abyssinia to Morocco, really belong
to the white races of Europe. Among nearly all their tribes the
negroid traits are far more accentuated among the women, according to
Sergi.[32] It is not necessary to cite more specific testimony. The
law occupies a respected place among anthropologists. That the Jews
confirm it, would seem to strengthen our hypothesis at every point.
Our final conclusion, then, is this: It is paradoxical, yet true, we
affirm. The Jews are not a race, but only a people, after all. In
their faces we read its confirmation, while in respect of their other
traits we are convinced that such individuality as they possess--by no
means inconsiderable--is of their own making from one generation to
the next, rather than as a product of an unprecedented purity of
physical descent.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] 1877, p. 214.
[12] 1861 b, pp. 227 and 331.
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