Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 151, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 June 1910 — STRUGGLE OF THE HEBREW. [ARTICLE]

STRUGGLE OF THE HEBREW.

Jew of To-Day on Illustration ot the Great Law of Selection. All over the world the Jews tend to shortness of stature. This tendency is clearly inborn, in that the Jews aro everywhere shorter than the Christian population; it is largely Influenced by environment, in that there is no uniformity of size. In other words, the Jewish stature varies everywhere in accordance with economic conditions, and yet, strangely enough, never quqite reaches the height of other populations living in precisely the same surroundings. In London, for example, Biston J. Hendrick says in McClure’s, the prosperous west end Jew is taller than the denizens of the east end ghetto; but he Is about three inches shorter than his Christian neighbor in the west end. That environment is the important factor is shown by the way in which stature varies automatically with occupation. Statistical Btudies show that the shortest Jews are tailors, cobblers and factory workers, while carpenters and house painters are somewhat taller, and merchants and clerks are taller still. The narrow chest and the bent shoulders also seem to be typically Jewish —another penalty exacted by nature from unsanitary and crowded conditions in which these people have lived for centuries. In spite of their apparently poor physique, however, the Jews evince a marvelous vitality. The tenement sections in New York with the lowest death rate are those that hare the largest Jewish population; and the Jews seem, to a considerable degree, to be insusceptible to tuberculosis. In these facts some scientists see another illustration of the great law of natural selection; it is their theory that, in the face of ages of persecution and confinement within ghettos, the struggle for existence among the Jews has been so terrible that the weaker strains have been eliminated, leaving only the most efficient to perpetuate their kind.