Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View: Being the Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford university junior scientific club on November 17, 1919 — John Shaqi
Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View: Being the Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford university junior scientific club on November 17, 1919Keith, Arthur, Sir
History
Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View: Being the Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford university junior scientific club on November 17, 1919
Keith, Arthur, Sir
Nationalism; Race
In the strict sense in which the anthropologist uses the term 'Race'
there is in Europe no racial problem. Our universal disturbances are
those of nationality. There are no two nationalities in Europe, so
different in physical appearance, that their hybrid progeny may not pass
as a member of either parent nationality. In the anthropologist's sense
there are no racial bastards produced by the union of European
nationalities. If we except the Lapps and other Mongolian elements in
Russia there is only one people in Europe with a legitimate claim to be
regarded as racially different from the general population. That
exception is the Jewish people. There are seven millions of them forming
an archipelago in the sea of European peoples, their main islands lying
in the centre of the continent, north and south of the Carpathians. The
Jews maintain a racial frontier, such as dominant races surround
themselves with; they carry themselves as if racially distinct. Their
original stock was clearly eastern in its derivation; the peoples of
Europe sprang from another racial source. The outliers of the Jewish
racial archipelago are exposed to the cross-currents of the Gentile
seas. The smaller islets are too far removed to be sheltered and
strengthened by the race sense which is bred and nursed wherever
permanent Jewish settlements are established. However much the Jewish
racial frontier may be strengthened by the faith which is the standard
of the race, raids have been made, are now made, across that frontier
and a certain degree of hybridization has occurred. Even thus exposed in
the eddying seas of modern civilization, the race spirit of the Jews has
preserved the greater part of the original characters carried into
Europe by the pioneer Semitic bands. In 90 per cent. of Jews the
physical or Semitic characters are apparent to the eye even of the
uninitiated Gentile. In the Jewish people we see Nature steering one of
her cargoes of differentiated humanity between the Scylla and Charybdis
of the modern sea of industrial civilization. And race instinct is her
steersman.
NATIONAL MOVEMENTS ARE OF TWO KINDS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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