But the point in discussion seems to me to raise also a problem of exceeding interest within the anthropological sphere itself. Professor Ripley assumes that round heads beget round heads, and long heads descend from long heads for all time unchanged. That appears to carry with it the assumption that no amount of brain activity can increase the mass of brain, that skull capacity has no relation to mental capacity, and that alone among the organs of the body the brain and skull are incapable of growth, change, or development. The crux of Jewish anthropology raises this problem, as I shall proceed to show, and, if I have interpreted history aright, offers valuable material toward its solution.
I might have met Professor Ripley's arguments on narrower grounds, which would have enabled me to evade this larger question. His main, I might say his solitary, argument is that contemporary Jews are predominantly brachycephalic, or round-headed, whereas contemporary Arabs, whom he takes as the type of the Semites, are as predominantly dolichocephalic, or long-headed. Accepting Professor Ripley's own criterion of purity of race, I might point to the almost universal round-headedness of the Jew as a proof of their racial unity. The fact that Arabs do not share that quality really does not affect the question. Linguistically and geographically the Hebrews of history were associated with the Aramæans and Assyrians of Asia Minor, and Professor Ripley himself allows that Asia Minor was mainly brachycephalic. Till Professor Ripley brings forward craniological evidence that the cephalic index of the ancient Hebrews was below 77.8, his reference to the contemporary Arab must be ruled out of court. But, quite apart from this, the Arabic evidence would be of little significance, since the chief characteristic of Moslem civilization has been the predominance of marriage by capture and descent from slave concubines. Every caravan that has entered Arabia for the last twelve hundred years has had its contingent of female slaves of alien race, mainly from dolichocephalic Africa. I must confess my surprise that Professor Ripley has based his main argument on the shifting sands of Arabic racial purity.
The only attempt Professor Ripley makes toward a proof that the pure Hebrew is dolichocephalic is a half-hearted endeavor to claim that quality for the Sephardim, or Spanish and Portuguese Jews, descended in the main from Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal in 1492. As a matter of fact, the largest number of measurements of Sephardic heads has been made by Mr. Spielman and myself,[1] and of the fifty-one heads examined by us only eight were
- ↑ On the Comparative Anthropometry of English Jews, in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1889.
