persecution and motives for emigration were ten times as strong as even under the iron rule of the Russian Czar.
History, then, as I read it, has nothing to say against the purity of descent of contemporary Jews from those of the Bible. What has anthropology, as interpreted by Professor Ripley, to produce against this negative evidence of history? Mainly, it would appear, the fact that Jews of the present day are predominantly brachycephalic. Of the fact there can be little doubt. The list given by Professor Ripley in the Popular Science Monthly (vol. liv, page 340), of over twenty-five hundred heads, would be sufficient to establish this. But the very uniformity of the index is almost sufficient by itself to refute the deduction Professor Ripley draws from it. If there had been any general amount of admixture, that would have tended rather to produce variety than uniformity. Surely Professor Ripley does not contend that the Jewish young men and maidens, who, on his theory, so freely welcomed outsiders into the family circle, have never fallen in love with long-headed persons of the opposite sex. His argument requires that the original Jews of the Diaspora were long-headed, and that they have uniformly intermarried with the broad-headed varieties of the genus homo. Now, he adduces no evidence whatever that Jews originally were dolichocephalic, and even if he succeeded in proving this he would have the further difficulty of finding a European race with skulls so broad as to raise the average index of the race considerably over 80. If we assume that the original index of the Jewish skull was 75, Professor Ripley would have to find some race with an average index of nearly 90 before the mixture would raise the contemporary Jewish skull to its present broad-headedness. Dr. Ammon has shown[1]that there are only two small regions in Europe where such abnormally broad skulls exist, neither of them centers of Jewish population.
But Dr. Ammon has shown more. By comparison with the skulls found in the long barrows in Germany, he shows that the index of German skulls has risen from 77 to no less than 83 during the last thousand years or so; and he further shows, by reasoning similar to that which I have just given, that this rise in index can not be due to any admixture of race. Now, to what is this rise in head index due? Dr. Ammon, who is a professed disciple of Weismann, does not go into the question of causation, but the simplest and most obvious explanation is that cranial capacity has followed brain development, and that, roughly speaking, brachycephalism implies intellectual development. A few instances may be given, confirming this impression of the superior intellectual capacity of
- ↑ Die Natürliche Auslese beim Menschen, Jena, 1883.
