Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE DISTINCTION 267
During the violent Arab uprising in 1929, Dr. Yaacov Zess, another
physician, published an essay entitled "The Hygiene of the Body and the
Spirit," in which he emphasized that "we, more than other nations, need
racial hygiene." Dr. Yosef Meir, head of the Labor Federation's Sick Fund, who
would later become the first director-general of the Israeli ministry of health,
agreed with Zess, and stated in the 1934 guide to members of the fund, "For us,
eugenics in general, and preventing the transmission of hereditary diseases in
particular, is of even greater value than for other nations!" 23
The greatest of them all was the well-known physician and biologist
Redcliffe Nathan Salaman. This British Zionist, who contributed a great
deal to the Faculty of Life Sciences at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem
and was a member of its board of trustees, was also the first to try to transpose
assumptions from physical anthropology to genetics, which was then a
young science with a brilliant future. An article of his entitled "The Heredity
of the Jews" appeared in the first issue of the pioneering Journal of Genetics in
1911. Thereafter, Salaman insisted that even if the Jews were not a pure race,
it posed no problem—they were still a solid biological entity. Aside from the
fact that the Jew was identifiable by the shape of his skull, his features and
his bodily measurements, there was also a Jewish allele that was responsible
for this distinctive physical appearance. 24 There were of course differences
between the fair Ashkenazi and the swarthy Sephardi, but the reasons for
them were straightforward: the latter had mixed more with their neighbors.
The noticeable Ashkenazi fairness sprang from the ancient Philistines, who
were absorbed by the Jewish nation in antiquity. Long-skulled European
invaders became part of the Hebrew people, hence their whitish appearance.
The reason the Yemenite Jews were of smaller stature and submissive
character was that "they are not Jews. They are black, with an elongated skull,
Arab half-castes ... The true Jew is the European Ashkenazi, and I support
him against all the others." 25
Salaman was more of a eugenicist than a geneticist; to him, Zionism was
a eugenic project designed to improve the Jewish race. The young people in
Palestine seemed to him bigger and stronger: "Some force has acted on them
to produce anew the Philistine type in Philistia." The mysterious force was the
natural selection that reinvigorated the Philistine genes in the genetic stock of
the Jews. A similar process was taking place in Britain, where the Anglo-Jews,
23 Ibid., 150.
24 Ibid., 106-9. An allele is one of several alternative versions of a gene that is
responsible for hereditary variation.
25 Ibid, 129.