Anthropological Oddities

Yes, another article. Three in quick succession. This one's to make some notes on another text, namely Maurice Fishberg's Physical Anthropology of the Jews II. - Pigmentation. Published 1903.

Fishberg was a Jewish-American anthropologist.

First up, there's a mention that King Ladislaus of Hungry issued a decree in 1092 prohibiting marriage between Jews and Christians. This comes in a passage where speculation is being made that the blond hair of Jews in Germany and Austria is the product of marriage between Christians and Jews. Clearly if a decree is issued against it it must have been taking place (albeit in Hungry at least). The passage then goes on to state that the,

"decree apparently did not have the desired effect, for in 1229 Bishop Robert van Grau reported that many Jews lived with Christian women illegitimately and that the latter were often converted to Judaism; that Christian parents sold their children to Jews, and that many even permitted themselves to be circumcised. In a few years Christianity thus lost thousands of adherents."

We also get some stats for red hair amongst Jewish populations. (19th century, not medieval.)

"Another interesting point is the high percentage of red-haired Jews. From our own investigations we find 2.53 percent of men and 3.69 of women with red hair. Majer and Kopernicki, Weissenberg, and Talko-Hryncewicz find 4 percent of Jews with red hair, and Beddoe's studies of the Sephardim, who are known to be darker than the Ashkenasim, show 3.5 percent with red hair. Gluck found one red-haired individual among fifty-five Jews in Bosnia"

Finally, there's also a claim in the text that "Jewesses have darker skin than Jews." That is, that females, on average, tend to be slightly darker skinned than males. This is probably just a statistical anomaly, or an error in the way the data was compiled and collected, but it's one of those weird little curiosities worth noting.

(click to enlarge)

Royte Yidelekh Continued..

I feel I should do a follow up to that last post about the "little Red Jews" (royte yidelekh), as it was a bit all over the place. There was too much I wanted to say, so what I shared ended up a little half-explained.

The focus was supposed to be the Yiddish stories about the Red Jews, but I didn't really give an account of the actual stories, so I'll explain the basic archetype here:

The general theme is that the Jews are being persecuted. In Ma’aseh Akdamut, one version of the tale, the persecutor is an evil, wizard monk who's killing Jews. He threatens to kill all the Jews unless they can find someone capable of matching his magic. To find such a person an emissary is sent to the Red Jews across the Sambatyon river. A river that's only supposed to be crossed at the end times, in the messianic age. However, extraordinary circumstances demand extraordinary measures. So someone crosses and the Red Jews send a helper. In this particular tale it's a little, limping old man. In others it's small children. (The motif being that they are (seemingly) physically weak, yet spiritually strong.) Needless to say, the old man defeats the evil monk in an epic battle of magical one-upmanship.

Like some sort of medieval Pokémon battle.

These tales take place within a wider narrative, where the Red Jews represent this heroic force, that one day will come, en masse, as an army of liberators. They're deemed so strong that even a single child or old man from their nation can overcome thousands of enemies ..or the most evil of magical monks.

Their physical prowess stands in contrast to the "effeminate" nature of the Jews in Europe, who weren't in a position to physically overcome the peoples they lived amongst.

One passage from the book Sons of Saviors I failed to share yesterday (in my garbled post) was this one:

Medieval Christian theology and science deprecatingly likened male Jews to women when characterizing them as "unmanly." [..] The French Roman Catholic priest Henri Grégoire, better known as Abbé Gregoire, actually linked this "womanish" weakness to red hair in the late eighteenth century, when he voiced popular opinion that Jewish men "have almost all red beards, which is the usual mark of an effeminate temperament."

This is interesting not just for the mention of red hair, but for the overall observation. I've voiced before the idea that red hair, Jewishness and "effeminacy" are the product of city living. Essentially civilised life or cosmopolitanism. That the melting pot nature of cities (or crossroads cultures) gives rise to red hair, as the diversity and mixing of peoples leads to greater fluidity in pigmentation.

The link between city life and effeminacy is something that Jewish writers were all too aware of. In fact, the dream of a Jewish state in part expressed a desire to counteract this effect. Leaving the city to return to the farm or countryside, to reforge Jewish warriors, in the mould of Biblical figures such as David. Current world events express this human alchemy. It's fascinating how all these things intertwine and overlap.

Little Red Riding Jew

I recently read Sons of Saviors: The Red Jews in Yiddish Culture by Rebekka Voß. It charts the evolution of the story of the Red Jews through the centuries. It was very informative as it explores the Yiddish variants of the story. So, though I was already quite familiar with the general theme, this whole perspective was new to me.

In the gentile telling the Red Jews are portrayed as a group of people locked away in the east. A threat to the Christian world, ready to break loose and cause carnage. Somewhat akin to the eastern horde. Or Gog and Magog, sealed off behind mountains by Alexander the Great.

In the Yiddish tradition it's similar, but the story is flipped. Here they're sealed off beyond the river Sambatyon. A river that's impassable, except on the Sabbath ..the one day the Jews aren't allowed to cross it. Far from being a threat they're viewed as liberators. Saving the European Jews from Christian persecution, at the coming of Mashiach.

Likewise, the Red Jews are also often portrayed as red-haired in these Yiddish traditions. In fact, the book is full of information about red hair. Too much to catalogue in this article. (I genuinely recommend reading it, the context will make more sense that way as well.)

I'll share a few things though. For example, this passage:

Moses b. Elijah Galina writes that redheads are jealous, irascible, and deceptive. Jacob b. Mordecai of Fulda, in Shoshanat Ya'acov (Rose of Jacob; Amsterdam, 1706), a guide to palmistry and the so-called wisdom of the face, states: "Red hair [signifies]: a jealous person, a fraud, an irritable person, one whose speech and tongue are no good."

We've noted the negative stereotypes associated with red hair in European folklore many times before on here. In the Yiddish speaking world it seems this was also the case.

One thing I really liked about the Yiddish stories was how they often gave the Red Jews the moniker Little Red Jews. Things take on a whole new sense once the prefix little is added. It all suddenly gets a bit more cute. Sometimes the Red Jews sent to help European Jews in these tales were actually children too. It brings to mind other European folktales, such as Little Red Riding Hood.

[As an aside, we've speculated about potential links to red hair with some of these tales too. The red is clear, but the word hood also. No doubt cognate with head - where a hood is worn. Robin Hood could give a similar rendering. The word robin quite probably having its root in the word red, hence robin redbreast, or red rubies ..we could go full circle and try to link it to rabbi/rebbe ;) ]

There were so many other interesting things in the book I could mention. For instance, apparently some later Jewish writers equated the Red Jews with the Native Americans - another 'red' people. There were also more modern satires written that used the Red Jews (along with their red hair) to make commentary on the political situation of the Jews in the 19th and early 20th century. In one short story by Sholem Aleichem (the writer whose works provided the basis for the musical Fiddler on the Roof), a Red Jew visits the land on the other side of the Sambatyon river and is shocked to find that the Jews have black hair. He "couldn't even imagine a Jew with no red hair."

I would quite like to read some of these stories. So perhaps that might be a post for the future.