Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/528

510 Jewish features and expression. So marked is this that Andrée mentions an instance where the negroes of the Gold Coast even distinguish between other whites and Jews by its means, saying not "Here are three whites coming," but "Here are two whites and a Jew." So marked a community of expression and appearance would be, to an ordinary mind, an absolute proof of unity of race, but Professor Ripley prefers to judge by the skull beneath, rather than by the expression and features on the surface. He hints at some obscure embryological process by which Jewish mothers can stamp on their offspring the Ghetto expression, whatever be the racial formation of skull. According to him, it would appear that noses are more plastic in this regard than skulls, I do not quite see how this would work out in detail. Are we to suppose that a pair of snub-nosed converts to Judaism would produce offspring with the characteristic Jewish nose because the lady convert had her imagination influenced by the hook-noses surrounding her? Are we to suppose that round heads can only beget round heads, but that snub noses can produce the hooked variety as a mere result of imagination?

Mere expression one could understand could be produced by sociological causes, and it is certainly my impression that Jews who mix more with their fellow-citizens lose a good deal of the characteristic Jewish expression, but that Jewish features should be influenced in this way few people would be prepared to allow. Jewish "nostrility," as I have termed it, and the "Jew's eye," can not be affected by change of environment. They can be affected, I grant, by admixture with races snub-nosed or dull-eyed, but as they have persisted throughout the ages they are themselves a striking proof of the absence of such admixture.

Altogether I remain unconvinced by Professor Ripley's arguments as to any large admixture of alien elements among contemporary Jews as unvouched for by history, and not necessarily postulated by anthropology. The broad skulls of the Jews, if they differ from those of earlier date (of which Professor Ripley has produced no evidence whatever), are due to the development of Jewish capacity, owing to their consistent attention to education and to the conditions under which they have pursued the struggle for existence. The persistence of Jewish features throughout the ages and the existence of an influential minority who are not allowed by Jewish law to marry outside their race is further proof of the position for which I have throughout contended. If there has been a tolerably large admixture of Jewish and alien blood throughout the Christian centuries it has been by conversions to Christianity or Islam, not by adoption of Judaism, and it is confirmed by history that the offspring