University Place

Jews and the Science of "Race" in America

– So, it is my pleasure to introduce the first speaker, Professor Eric Goldstein, who is the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, where he’s also professor of history and Jewish studies. He’s the author of a book called “The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity,” which came out through Princeton University Press and won the Saul Viener Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society. It also won the Theodore Saloutos Prize from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the very prestigious Sami Rohr Lore Literary Prize from the Jewish Book Council. A very, very highly acclaimed study. His most recent book is called “On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore,” which is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins, and he’s currently working on a book on the history of reading and reading culture among Yiddish-speaking immigrants in America in the 19th and 20th century. So please join me in welcoming Eric Goldstein. [applause]

– What I’m going to speak about today is, as Tony told you, is drawn from my larger study about race and Jewish identity in America called “The Price of Whiteness.” I became interested in this topic as a graduate student because I was in a program that was largely framed around US history, and I was also studying modern Jewish history. And it was quite evident that race, discussions about race was at the very center of scholarship on US history. And so, as someone interested in Jews in the US, I felt that this was a topic that historians absolutely had to tackle to understand the impact of American society on Jews. And there had been studies, for example, of African American Jewish relations, but there had been a more recent scholarly trend to think about racial identity and how people, you know, came to think of themselves in racial terms. And there had particularly been some work on immigrants because immigrants usually came from societies where the categories relevant in America, the categories of black and white, were not part of their experience. And then, coming to the United States, they had to adapt to thinking of themselves within this new system. And so I got to think about this process for Jews, and it ended up being very fruitful not only because it’s an interesting topic but also it provided a new way of thinking about the American Jewish experience.

Traditionally, American Jewish history has been written in a very celebratory tone. We like to think of it as a success story, a story in which Jewish immigrants came to America and they found a place where they could neatly synthesize their Jewish commitments and their desire to be part of American society and that those things did not conflict with one another as Jews had experienced in other less tolerant settings. But when you view the American experience through race, you find an aspect of American culture that was much more problematic for Jews for several reasons. First of all, Jews were ambivalent in their developing relationships with African Americans. On the one hand, they found that to be accepted in American society they had, to some extent, tow the American racial line on African Americans. In other words, they had to adapt, adopt many of the racial mores and support the system of racial segregation, particularly in areas like the south or the western United States where they were an essential part of the local white, middle class culture. And yet, at the same time, there were aspects of the Jewish historical experience of oppression, of being the victims of pogroms, of being the victims of segregation that provided a context for Jews to identify, on some level, with the African American experience. So this was a constant, you know, source of tension and confusion for Jews, and it really depended on their geographical location, their level of acculturation, how they responded to this question over the years.

The other related question that I explored was how the terms that Jews use to describe themselves, and I found that that’s something we haven’t really, that scholars hadn’t really thought about very much. But that’s intertwined with the first question. And what I mean by that is in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was very common for Jews and many other European immigrant groups to be referred to in racial terms. The Hebrew race, the Irish race, and so on. And it was also very common for them to refer to themselves that way. So Jews quite often referred to themselves as members of a distinct race. Part of this is because in those days there was– They didn’t have the terminology that we have that has developed over the decades of ethnicity. In general, in the scientific and social scientific spheres, there was not a neat distinction made between race and culture. Cultural traits, character traits were thought to be innate and inheritable traits. And so race was the term available to describe a sense of Jewishness aside from just religious belief. In other words, Jews were not just understood as a religious denomination, as sometimes they might be described today, but they were understood as a people, a social group with a distinctive set of characteristics, a shared bloodline, a family of common descent. And for all those reasons, race was a term that was used by the larger society. And for Jews, it was often a very emotionally satisfying term, especially because Jews were integrating into American society. They were often giving up many of the markers of behavior, of religious practice, of social cohesion that had previously marked their membership in the Jewish community, and yet they still felt an attachment to Jewishness. And so race gave them a term that they could use to describe a kind of intangible sense of connection to Jewishness, even if nothing in their life was particularly Jewish. Nothing about their behavior was particularly Jewish, yet they felt this connection.

So the idea of using the term race, it signified their descent, their sense to connection. So this was a very prevalent terminology in the 19th and early 20th century. Now, part of the problem was that race itself was very ill-defined in America during this period. There were, you know, race is usually considered a modern concept, something that grew out of a scientific revolutions of the early modern period. And in different parts of the world race came to mean different things, to be defined in different ways because the idea grew out of different historical situations. So in Europe, race was often used as a way of distinguishing between different populations in Europe. As far as Jews are concerned, the notion of a Semitic race grew out of the study of philology, of languages, which noted a distinction between the Aryan languages and the Semitic languages. And then those linguistic labels grew into racial designations. And then, also, different groups, like the British and Germans, became understood in racial terms as Anglo-Saxons and Teutons and so on. But in colonial areas, like the North American colonies and also in Africa and Australia and other places, race emerged more around the history of colonization and slavery. And so, in the United States, race was generally understood as being about color and distinguishing between blacks and whites.

Now, by the 19th century, of course, the United States was a country of immigration, and there were many European groups. And so these different definitions were circulating in the United States, and they were often used indiscriminately and, you know, not consistently. This didn’t cause a lot of problems for Jews until the late 19th century. If you look at Jewish discourse and discourse about Jews in the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, you’ll often see that Jews were able to use racial language to define what it meant to be Jewish without the risk of being understood as non-white or being a racial outsider. Unlike some other European groups, for example the Irish who were often vilified in racial terms. They were caricatured in the newspapers and magazines of the day to look like apes, and they were called a simian race. But, in general, because the Jewish immigration to America was small in the middle of the 19th century and because Jews were very upwardly mobile, they were often retail merchants, they rose quickly on the economic ladder, there was not as negative a portrayal of Jews. So, in general, Jews used this racial self-definition to serve their own needs. They used it as a way of marking their special, what they considered their special qualities. They used it to praise themselves as a group and their heritage. And it did not seem dangerous to them that somehow they would be linked to African Americans, for example, or peoples of color. It didn’t interfere with them being considered part of the larger white group in America. But at the end of the 19th century, there were some important changes that altered the calculus of how Jews fit into the racial landscape of America. There were many destabilizing changes in the United States at the end of the century.

There was massive immigration, mostly from new areas of Europe, bringing people who were culturally and religiously different than the mostly white Protestant majority, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, including many, a few million Jews from the Russian empire in eastern Europe. And it was also a time of great urbanization. People were leaving their familiar small communities and moving to large cities. Industrialization was taking hold. It was a time of great cultural and economic change, and this caused a lot of anxiety about the future of the United States. And so, as often happens in those times, the opinion-makers of society began to try to firm up the boundaries of American society and to be more exclusive in the way that they understood the population because it was shifting and they were uncertain about the future. So Americans, white Americans became much more rigid in the way that they categorized people by race beginning in the 1880s and 1890s. Of course, this is the era when the Jim Crow laws were enshrined in the south. But even in other places, race and a heightened insistence on categorizing people according to hierarchical racial categories became a key factor in the larger project of the progressive era of creating an ordered and manageable society in the midst of this chaos that modernity had brought on. So this created a somewhat dangerous situation for Jews because part of this was there were increasing attempts to kind of systematize and better understand the different meanings of race. And it was no longer as possible to use racial terms to describe groups like Jews without also linking them in some way with non-whites and people of color. And so Jews perceived that racial language as applied to them was becoming much more of a liability by the end of the century. And the Jewish community had to react to this.

So this is, you know, I just wanted to paint with broad brush strokes to kind of set up the problem of why at the turn of the century Jews, and especially Jewish leaders who were concerned for the image and the welfare of the Jewish community, were so concerned with race and issues of how Jews were defined. And there were certain aspects of the Jewish communal agenda that were particularly, you know, mobilized around this question. One, of course, was, again, this was not so much taken up by Jewish communal leaders, but in the general Jewish populace there was an increased sensitivity about the Jewish stance toward African Americans. There were some key moments at the turn of the century, for example during the Kishinev pogrom in Russia in 1903, there was a lot of discussion in the press about the similarities between Russian pogroms against Jews and the lynching of African Americans in the south. And this is an example where many, although some Jews agreed with this comparison, especially in the north, many Jews objected to the comparison because they saw in it an attempt to liken Jewish group difference to African American group difference. And they perceived a danger in that, that they were being perceived as a group that was different from the white mainstream like African Americans were. Another thing that happened is, in the 1890s and early 1900s, social discrimination against Jews was on the rise. So Jews were being excluded more often from hotels or resorts. And happening precisely at the same time as the Jim Crow laws in the south, they, again, perceived a danger that they were being considered a group to be different like in the same way that African Americans were. So that was one point of concern among American Jews at that time. Another issue was the problem of intermarriage.

There was a lot of, especially around immigration, there was a lot of discussion of what would happen to the immigrants eventually. Would they become part of the melting pot? Would they eventually lose their distinctiveness, marry into, the larger white population and basically disappear? And this was generally the vision of most leaders of white middle class society. This was kind of actually at the time considered a very liberal, progressive idea that, you know, Jews and other immigrants would be able to enter the mainstream through intermarriage. Of course, most Jewish leaders chaffed at the suggestion. They did not necessarily support intermarriage because they saw it as spelling the end of Jewish group existence. And yet, publicly, they found it very hard to defend their position because in doing so it seemed to suggest that Jews did not want to merge with the larger population. So, in other words, you had a different definition among Jews of what was required to become a solid part of American culture than you had among the larger native-born population. And so on all these issues Jews tried to navigate these issues as best as possible, trying to satisfy the demands of the larger society, but often they had contrary views and they had to navigate these as best as possible. An even more serious issue came with the topic of the government’s desire to classify immigrants according to race. And this, again, shows the desire of the larger society to create a more hierarchical system in which they felt they could gain control over understanding their population and to make social policies which would be based on this new data. So that first appeared in the statistics kept by the US Immigration Commission. In other words, I don’t know if any of you have ever done genealogy, for example, and looked up your ancestors’ ships’ passenger list, but if you have, you might notice on there in a certain period one of the things that they recorded about each immigrant was their race. And they used this kind of European system of racial designation. So for, say, a Jew from the Russian empire, it would asked nationality in which it would say Russian, but then it would say race, and it would say Hebrew. So they were keeping track of what they called race as well as the country that the person came from.

And the Jewish community grew worried about this because they felt that if the government was collecting this kind of statistics on them, it could only be used for negative purposes. And they became even more alarmed in 1909 when there was a suggestion that the Commerce Department, which was in charge of the census, was going to adopt the same racial designation. So previously in all censuses they recorded people according to race, but using the more traditional American system of black, white, and a few other designations based on color. But now the proposal was, well, look, we have all these people coming in from Europe, we have to have a more complex understanding of the population, so the census will now record people as Hebrew, etc. , etc. , all the different European racial designations. The Jewish community came out in force. The American Jewish Committee, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and they successfully lobbied not to have the census bureau adopt this kind of practice. There was also a brief concern that in some courts in the United States Syrian immigrants were denied naturalization based on the understanding that they were not white because in the naturalization law from 1790 it limited naturalization to free white people. And Jews became alarmed because they felt that if Syrian immigrants who were of Middle Eastern origin were being judged non-white in the courts that it was only a matter of time before someone decided the Jews were of similar origin as Syrians and Jews would have the same problem. So all of these things were mounting concerns in the early 20th century. So this brings me finally to science, which is our topic for today. Science was one of the arenas in which this battle was fought in a very important way.

And I want to, first of all, I just want to take a moment to just show you for example. This is a cover of a joke book that was published in 1902 of Hebrew jokes. It just shows you just a little taste of some of the images of Jews that circulated in popular culture at the time, which show the Jew to be, you know, different physically, different racially, and you can perceive in this particular image a tendency to draw features of Jew that also are reminiscent of some stereotypes against African Americans. The way that this hair is, the lips. This is just part of why Jews were very aware during this period of the dangers of their changing racial image in American society. Okay, so back to science. Science was a very important arena. And before I tell you kind of the story about how this battle was fought in the scientific community, I want to say few words just about studying Jews in the context of science. Science is kind of an important entryway into Jewish history. For one, the Jewish group produced a disproportionate number of scientists. And I can speak mainly about the United States, but of all the immigrant groups, Jews were the most upwardly mobile. Of the southern and eastern European immigrants, they were the ones who entered higher education the earliest, often because they came to this country as skilled workers with experience living in urban areas. And they advanced on the social and economic ladder more quickly than a lot of other immigrants who had been laborers or agricultural workers in Europe.

So at the time that these issues were being fought out in academia and the scientific community, Jews were one of the only immigrant groups that were already beginning to be represented in the academy. So there were some Jewish individuals who were well-placed to contest some of the conclusions that were coming out of the scientific community regarding the racial difference of Jews and other immigrants. So that’s kind of an important aspect in which the history of science is, you know, Jews played an important role in that regard in contesting some of the conclusions of science and anthropology and social science and other areas. Another thing to mention is science was a particularly attractive avenue for Jews in this kind of defense work because of the authority of modern science. In other words, science was understood as a value-neutral universal field of inquiry in which just facts existed. But, you know, opinion and bias didn’t enter into the situation. This was the way science was understood. As I’ll explain in a minute. That’s not exactly the way it works. But because of that, first of all, that ease the entry of Jews into science. Jews sometimes had trouble in academia getting positions as literature professors, for example. Ludwig Lewisohn, the German Jewish writer, for example, if you’ve ever read his autobiography, he had an awful time getting a position teaching English literature because the assumption was how can a Jew understand the culture and pathos of people of, you know, native-born and English background.

But in science, background was thought to be less important because of the notion that science was a kind of universal, value-free field. And so, many of the Jews who first got involved in academia, the scientific fields were often the first area. As a matter of fact, the first Jewish professor in the United States in the 19th century was Professor Sylvester. I think it was John James Sylvester, at the University of Virginia, and he was a mathematician. And if you look at the history of Jews in higher education, you’ll find that they were often in the sciences, in mathematics. Sometimes languages was a vehicle. Also, especially the field of, as we’ll see in a minute, of Semitic languages because Jews were thought to have a kind of natural understanding of that field. So, anyway, science was a very important avenue for Jews looking to break into the intellectual community. And the other thing I want to say is that a starting point for understanding this whole discussion is to understand that despite its reputation, despite the idea that science was a kind of value-free, neutral sphere of inquiry, it was actually, of course, like all endeavors, situated historically and culturally. In other words, the people who conducted science were always shaped and informed by the concerns that they brought to their research, by the values of the larger culture in which they lived. So as much as scientists protested that it was just about the facts, the science of every period is necessarily biased in some way and situated within the assumptions of the larger culture in which it’s produced. So sometimes people have been loath to look back and to study seriously what we call racial science because they say, well, that was just pseudo science.

It wasn’t really science so it doesn’t sort of merit serious consideration. But that keeps us from really confronting the fact that science in every period is shaped and reflects the values and assumptions of the period in which it was created. So we have to take, we have to understand that in this day, in the late 19th and early 20th century, racial science was considered real science. The people who did this work felt that they were dealing in facts, and they were not willing to admit and they were not aware of the fact, the way in which their work was shaped by the larger set of assumptions of their society. And so it helps us also understand how science works in all settings and even today. So it’s important, in a way, to study these things to understand the large way in which science is contingent on historical and cultural factors. So, the last thing is that, as you’ll see in this story, science had its limits for Jewish for kind of working out the complexities of Jewish identity partially because Jewish identity is often, especially in the United States, was a very contradictory, almost paradoxical thing. Jews coming to America were often confronted by a lot of mixed feelings about what it meant to become an American. And science was a field that demanded rigid ideological consistency. So, as we’ll see, it kind of had its limits in the end for fully helping Jews to work out the fine points of their questions of identity.

Okay, so I want to step back now and tell you the story about how scientists, and I’m going to focus particularly on two scientists, struggled with and tried to come up with answers about Jewish racial identity in the early 20th century. First, I want to go back to this idea of Jews being descended from what was understood as a Semitic race. As I said, this was an idea that grew out of 19th century philology. And it became a kind of racial orthodoxy in European and racial thinking. And, of course, these ideas, even though the United States did have this kind of black/white understanding of race, These ideas did filter into American scientific thought, as well. And during the progressive era, as I said, there was this kind of project of trying to really systematize and understand all of these different definitions and to try to square one with the other. And so there was a lot of discussion about the Semitic race, what people understood as the Semitic race, during this time, and there was a theory emerging that the origin of the Semitic race was in Africa. And this became a very widely understood idea at the turn of the century. And, as you can see, it’s a way of kind of taking one system of race and trying to fit it with another. In other words, to fit all of these different racial groups into a kind of black/white framework. Some of them are more akin to black races; some of them are more akin to white races. The first scholar who talked about the African origin of the Semites was a professor named Daniel Brinton. He was an archaeologist and language specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. And his view quickly gained authority. Even his research partner, the Jewish Semitic scholar Morris Jastrow, agreed with the idea that the Semites were of African origin.

And when the race scientist William Z Ripley published a very widely known book, “The Races of Europe,” in 1899, he adopted Brinton’s view and he helped spread it to a larger audience. Ripley was an important thinker for the understanding of Jews. And I have reproduced a chart here. Ripley was essential to kind of mapping the European racial map onto the American one. And what he did was he classified Europeans according to region. He divided them into three main categories: a group of what he called the Teutonic race in the north, later scholars called this the Nordic race; another group, the Alpine group, which inhabited kind of the middle parts of Europe; and then the Mediterranean, which occupied the southern reaches of Europe into northern Africa. And, as you see, this was a way of kind of taking all the confusing designations of Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic and Celtic and so on and fitting them into a kind of hierarchy which kind of conformed to the hierarchy of color that was prevalent in the United States. So the Mediterraneans were the darker race. They were more akin to the African races that they were geographically near. The Nordic races in the north, the Teutonic, were sort of more akin to how Americans thought of white Europeans. So this was part of the is project that racial scholars were involved in during the progressive era. And Jews figured in Ripley’s work, and, as I said, he adopted this idea of the African origin of the Semites, and this just an example of some of the pictures that he included in these books. All of these early racial studies include these what are called racial types. As you see, it says African Semitic types. In other words, a Muslim from Tunis. And the last one is a Jew from Tunis.

Now, if you read Ripley, he had a whole section of his book about Jews. And ultimately, his book was not particularly– It did not particularly cast aspersions on Jewish racial identity. As a matter of fact, his larger thesis about Jews was that they had been so spread around the world, that they had intermarried wherever they had lived, and that essentially they were not really a unified group anymore in terms of their physical descent, but he said they were essentially racially related to the groups wherever they lived around the world. So if Jews were living in eastern Europe, they were basically akin to the groups living in that area. And so you have the Jew from Tunis looking like the other people in North Africa, but that wouldn’t have fit for an Ashkenazic Jew, for example, in Ripley’s way of thinking. Nonetheless, even though Ripley was not specifically endorsing the idea that all Jews were of Semitic or African origin, there was a kind of crisis in the Jewish community because they were very used to thinking of their “Semitic origin” in positive ways. In the 19th century, you could read the Jewish press, and Jews would proudly talk about their Semitic roots. As a matter of fact, Jacob Schiff, one of the leading philanthropists in the Jewish community endowed an entire museum at Harvard University, the Semitics Museum, as a way of lauding the accomplishments of the ancient Israelites, of what he understood as the Semitic, ancestors of the Jews, and they would be described in Jewish publications and Jewish discourse as the group that gave the world some of the key principles of western civilization, gave us the bible, etc. , etc. So in a way, there was this kind of romantic notion in the Jewish community about being of Semitic background. It was not necessarily a negative thing.

But when scientists started associated Semites with Africa, it became more problematic. And what you see is several scholars beginning to kind of question and deny the link of modern Jews to the ancient Semites. And I’m giving air quotes because I’m certainly not endorsing all of these racial theories. I just want you to understand this was the way they would have described it. So, for example, in those days there were no Jewish studies departments and programs like we have today. As I said, there were Semitic language programs at certain universities, and they were generally staffed by rabbis because there weren’t really people often studying these things outside the Jewish community. So at many colleges and universities, the way Jewish studies began was that there was a local rabbi who would teach Semitic literature, Semitic studies, Hebrew. So just as an example, there were a couple of these scholars, Martin Meyer, who taught at the University of California in Berkeley. So he was an example of someone who was moving away from the idea of the Semitic origins of the Jews in the early century, and he said the Arab of the desert, the true representative of the Semitic world of yore, you know, has nothing to do with modern American Jews of today. Okay, well, all of this came to a head. Despite such protestations, there was generally a concern in the Jewish community to work out this problem. And there was a notion that science was the best avenue to kind of answer all of the concerns and misgivings and confusion about exactly what the status of Jews were, whether they were white, whether they were Semites, how they fit into the racial categorization of the United States.

One of the first scholars to take this up was a man named Franz Boas, who you might have heard of. Boas was not particularly interested in– He didn’t work mostly on Jewish questions, but because, in 1911, you see here there was an immigration, the Immigration Commission created a study of immigration. There was a congressional committee called the Dillingham Commission, and they ordered a kind of massive study of immigration to answer some of the questions that troubled people about incoming immigrants. And one of the things they did was they wanted to study the racial background of immigrants. They created this dictionary of races and peoples, listing all the different racial designations. So here you have the entry on Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. A race of people that originally spoke the Hebrew language, primarily of Semitic origin. Anyway, Boas was part of this effort in that he was commissioned to help gather statistics on the adaptability of immigrants. Did immigrants have some kind of racial characteristics that would keep them from assimilating into American society? Or was that not an issue that the Congress needed to be worried about? Boas was a German Jew. He was born in Minden, Westphalia, in 1858. He received his PhD in Germany, and he came to the United States in 1887. Most of his work was on other groups. He originally studied the native people of Baffin Island in northern Canada. He later wrote a book called “The Mind of Primitive Man” in 1911. He was mostly concerned with native peoples, with groups like African Americans. But this one study he did, he focused on Jewish and Sicilian immigrants for the Immigration Commission. And this is a kind of spread in the New York Times about this particular research that he was doing.

If you look at this one graphic, it gives you an insight into what he argued. Boas was unusual. He was really a pioneer in physical anthropology in the US, and he was also unconventional in that he challenged many of the assumptions of racial science. In fact, he ultimately argued that race was not a really meaningful category to use to classify people. And he particularly argued in the mind of primitive man that culture was not really shaped by racial origin. That even though people distinguished between civilized and less civilized people, primitive peoples, that, really, humans basically shared the same characteristics and that he was trying to fight the idea that people should be defined so rigidly and divided so rigidly into racial categories. So he favored thinking about environment and culture as more determinative factors in shaping human difference than innate racial characteristics. And so this study fits into that paradigm. He studied Jewish and Sicilian immigrants to the US, and he based his studies mainly on head form. There were skull measurements taken of different groups at this time. He used this data, and what he showed in his study was these three diagrams. Number one, it says the extreme broad-headed type of eastern European Hebrew. So apparently the Jewish immigrants were judged to have a certain head type of being broad-headed.

Figure number two shows what he called the extreme long-headed type of Sicilian immigrant. But then what he found is that among those who had been in the United States for a long time that he found a more, a different head shape that was of American-born children. What he was arguing was that these physical traits change with the environment, with things like diet and climate and so on. So his argument was these physical traits that everybody thought were these markers of innate physical difference were really pliable and that in the American environment people would assimilate and they were approaching a kind of American type. And they were all becoming more similar to one another. And this was a kind of brief for the assimilability of southern and eastern European immigrants. Okay, so this was one of the first important studies that kind of tried to fight against the idea of scientific racism. The last scientist I want to talk about is Maurice Fishberg. He was really a physician originally. He was most known for his work on tuberculosis. He was from Kamianets-Podilskyi, Russia. Born in 1872. Came to the US in the 1890s and received a medical degree at the New York University College of Medicine. He got his first job with the United Hebrew Charities, which was kind of like a Jewish federation of the day. And it was a place where poor Jewish immigrants could go for free medical care if they couldn’t afford to go to a doctor. And he was one of the doctors that they would see. But he was– And so he became interested in the problem, the health problems of the Jewish immigrant population, and particularly in the fact that Jews were often understood at this time as carriers of disease. One of the arguments that people who wanted to restrict immigration used was Jews shouldn’t be let in because they tend to have tuberculosis and they carry certain diseases. And his first studies were an attempt to show that this was not true and that Jews were no more prone to diseases than other groups.

But in the context of this research, he became interested in the larger question of Jewish racial identity. As a matter of fact, he is the one who measured the skulls of his patients at the United Hebrew Charities. That’s the data that Boas actually used in his study. So Fishberg in some ways was similar to Boas and in some ways different. This interests me because what it shows is that people who were situated differently in the culture responded to scientific racism in different ways. Boas was an acculturated, fairly assimilated Jew of German origin. He did not publicly identify with the Jewish community. He was a professor at Columbia University. In the press I found mention of people who said that they were not aware that he was Jewish. He wasn’t identified with any Jewish organization. I think that’s one factor that allowed him to be a little more oppositional in his research than Fishberg was. Fishberg was in a different position. He worked for a Jewish organization. He was a Russian Jewish immigrant. People were very aware that he was Jewish and that his work was sort of on behalf of the Jewish community. And to some extent what you see with Fishberg is that he had to accept more of the assumptions of the larger scientific community, and he did not feel as free to challenge some of the larger assumptions about race. So while Boas questioned the very relevance of racial difference, which was revolutionary at the time, Fishberg tried to defend Jews by agreeing with and bolstering the larger assumption of the difference between blacks and whites. In other words, he felt that he could make the brief for Jewish integration by saying Jews could assimilate to be part of the larger white majority. And to make that more convincing, he kind of reaffirmed, he reaffirmed the society’s assumptions that there were basic differences between blacks and whites. And so, as whites, Jews could be a productive part of American culture, unlike African Americans. So it’s a very different approach than Boas, who totally tried to delegitimize the entire racial project in ways that were, as I said, I think a little easier for him. I don’t want to overstate that because it was certainly very revolutionary and very brave.

But, ultimately, in the moment, fewer people were willing to accept those kinds of conclusions, and I think from a defense position, Fishberg felt that this was a way of convincing people about Jewish identity by framing it within a set of widely accepted and understood ideas about the differences between blacks and whites. Fishberg, like many Jews, started off thinking of the Jews as a distinctive race, but as he got into this, he was particularly bothered by this idea of the African origin of the Jews that was circulating in the scientific community. And he kind of was drawn to Ripley’s idea that Jews really were racially related to the groups among whom they lived all over the world. This went against the grain of Jewish, the kind of Jewish romantic attachment that all Jews were from a similar ancestry, and that they were one group, one family. And so, for many reasons, that was– Many Jews did not like that theory. But he felt this was the best way of kind of making an argument for Jewish assimilability. The Jews were just like the peoples among whom they lived. So he wanted to conduct more research to affirm Ripley’s ideas, and so he went to Africa. And in North Africa there were a series of Jewish schools run by and for North African Jews. And he did the same kind of measurements on the children in those schools that he had done on the immigrant children in New York.

And what he argued was that the two samples were totally different. So he felt this was proof that the African Jews were totally different in their physical characteristics than the east European Jews, showing that the two groups were not really racially related. So he said these Jews, and this is from his book, “The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment,” while these Jews were maybe from the original Semites, the eastern European Jews were the products of racial intermixture with Europeans. And so since most of the Jewish immigrants to America were eastern European, they shouldn’t really be linked to this African Semitic past that was associated with Jews. And here is his portraits of American Jews, which, it kind of helped that he dressed the guy in a military uniform and a hat, you know? But the point is he’s trying to show that they look just like other white Americans. This was all laid out in his book, “The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment,” in 1911. He used the black/white divide. Just to give you kind of one quotation from a later article that he wrote, he said, “It is clear that certain strata of the population cannot assimilate merely by adopting the language, religion, customs, and habits of the dominant race. Negroes in the United States cannot be rendered white merely by speaking English or becoming Christians. Yet the Jews, as whites, are by no means debarred from assimilating with their fellow man of other faiths.”

So he was different from Boas in that he didn’t see head form and these traits as necessarily as plastic. And that there were differences between whites and people of color that couldn’t be changed. And his whole argument was based on the fact that Jews were really part of the larger white group. The logical conclusion of this work led him to argue that ultimately Jews would assimilate into American society and that ultimately Jews would disappear as a separate group. And this is where he parted company with the leaders of the American Jewish community because as much as they wanted him to find ways of defending their racial belonging in America, they didn’t want to endorse the idea that Jews would assimilate and disappear within American society. Fishberg was so convinced of this that he took every aspect of Jewish difference and predicted how it would disappear. Just as a funny example, he talked about Jewish names, and he said, as proof of how Jews were assimilating, at one time Jews gave their children very Hebraic names like Abraham, Sara, Rebecca and Isaac. And he said today Jews steer away from obviously Jewish names and they give their children only purely Anglo-Saxon names, such as Isadore, Hyman, Ethel and Sadie. [laughter]

So, anyway, as I said, you know, science exists in the context in which it happens. And sometimes looking back we don’t share the same conclusions. I just want to wrap up by revisiting three ideas which I think all of this points out. Again, first of all, let me just tie up Fishberg by saying that in a sense he was a failure because he didn’t solve the problem that he set out. He solved the problem, he thought, in responding to the scientific literature, but it was not an answer that Jewish community was really satisfied with. So he didn’t help them solve the contradictions and problems of fitting themselves into the larger culture because assimilation for them was not a good answer, a disappearance. So I want to just say, again, that science is a very important avenue for thinking about Jewish history. It was a powerful tool for contesting some of the ideas about minority groups, and Jews, more than many other groups, were very well situated to participate in that dialog. More so than many other ethnic and minority groups. So that’s a way in which Jewish studies is an important part of the larger study of science and especially the development of racial and ethnic categories. Also, we have to always remember the fact that science was always historically and culturally situated. And thinking about Jews in relation to science reminds us of that. That they tried to unseat scientific ideas and assumptions by challenging them in some ways but also by agreeing with some of them. And you see this kind of negotiation, but what it really entails is understanding the larger cultural and historical context in which scientific ideas took shape. And that it wasn’t just about finding the facts, finding the kind of objective truth, but that it was all situated within a larger set of social and cultural relationships and circumstances.

And, finally, that as powerful a tool as science was for Jews in contesting some of these ideas, it was not a panacea because, ultimately, Jewish identity was a very complex, often contradictory, and often paradoxical thing. The encounter of Jews with modern society, and particularly American society, was fraught with all sorts of tensions and problems and those couldn’t necessarily be worked out with the rigid consistency that scientific research demanded. So, ultimately, as powerful a tool as science was for Jews, it was often not, didn’t provide a solution to the questions of Jewish identity. So, with that, I’ll end, and I’m happy to take your questions. [applause]