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.
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