Part 3

Again, from Arkansas, to which State we have looked more for excellent cotton than for grain, "there are fifteen million acres of good wheat land; wheat is fast becoming a cash crop, displacing cotton--the capacity of a considerable part of the land at the beginning being forty bushels to the acre, which, being much better than five-cent cotton, is leading the farmers to take advantage of existing prices."

Time has not sufficed since my questions were sent out for replies to reach me from Oregon, Washington, and Montana, where the potential in wheat production is probably equal to that of Minnesota, North and South Dakota combined.

Sir William Crookes makes reference to the future necessity of providing fertilizers, a matter to which the closest attention is now being given by the cultivation of renovating crops. But regard must be given to the fact that we have the most complete and adequate supply of phosphate of lime and phosphate of potash in the vast deposits of bone or mineral phosphates of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida, while again we may look to nitrate of soda as a very inexpensive source of nitrogen, of which the most adequate supply can be assured at very low cost. Known methods are also being applied to saving the enormous waste of nitrogen from our coke ovens and iron furnaces.

I almost feel it right to apologize to Sir William Crookes for the presentation of these facts. My function is that of the practical business man who deals with these economic problems wholly from that point of view, and not from the high standard of a complete mastery of the physical sciences.

As I have stated, I happen to have dealt with this question several times at meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in other ways in Great Britain as well as in this country. I deem it of the utmost importance at the present time that the interdependence of the English-speaking people should be brought into view in the most conspicuous manner. In their relative production and conditions the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the United States are the complement of each other. Their mutual relation or interdependence is now being recognized, and it can not be long before many of the legal obstructions to mutual service will be removed. The people of this country are now passing through a stage in their economic education closely corresponding to that through which Great Britain passed between 1840 and 1856 under the wise leadership of Sir Robert Peel, Richard Cobden, and William E. Gladstone. We move more quickly, not only in acts but in ideas, than we did fifty years ago. The revolution of ideas which has followed the revolution of institutions in the Southern States has made the people of this country into one homogeneous nation. A revolution of ideas in regard to the conditions of international commerce will presently bring the English-speaking people of the world into one homogeneous body governed by the same common law, the same common principles of action, and the same policy in the collection of revenue. When thus united, there can be no competition in the commerce of the world on the part of the continental states of Europe under their present burdens--the blood tax of standing armies and navies and the money tax of debts that can never be paid. There have been within a few months two witnesses to the growing influence and power of the English-speaking people when united for the maintenance of commerce and for the conduct of the works of peace, order, and industry: one is the warning of the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, calling upon the states of middle Europe to unite their forces in order to remain capable of maintaining government by privilege and taxation by force of arms; the other, the recent manifesto of the enlightened ruler of Russia, calling upon the states of continental Europe to disarm, lest they should hereafter be incapable of competition with the English-speaking people of the world when they become bound together by a union of mutual service and by community of interest which without any formal alliance will give to them the chief control in rendering service by the exchange of product for product to all other states and nations, to the mutual benefit of all who are thus joined in the bonds of peace.

On my visit to Russia last year, to meet the leading economists and statisticians of Europe, it was stated to me by well-informed men that a plan had been considered by several continental states in the event of war to change the present international custom by making food products contraband of war, the purpose being to cripple England. To such desperate conditions have some of the European states been brought under the burden of the policy of blood and iron. My comment upon this insane proposal was that I hoped it might become a matter of public discussion, since nothing could so surely and quickly bring about a commercial union of the English-speaking people, to the end that, even if no other alliance were made, their navies might at any moment be combined for the protection of their commerce, and for the total cessation of any interference by war vessels or privateers with their traffic.

The prime motive of this article is to remove from the minds of our English friends many false impressions which I have constantly met in my intercourse even among men who hold important positions, of which the address of Sir William Crookes is but an extreme expression, and to bring into common view a comprehension of the resources of this country and of the mutual dependence of the United Kingdom and the United States in the supply and consumption not only of wheat, but of all the other necessaries of life.

THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE.

A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY.

(_Lowell Institute Lectures, 1896._)

BY WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, PH. D.,

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY; LECTURER IN ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

SUPPLEMENT.--THE JEWS.[1]

Social solidarity, the clearest expression of which to-day is nationality, is the resultant of a multitude of factors. Foremost among these stand unity of language, a common heritage of tradition and belief, and the permanent occupation of a definite territory. The first two are largely psychological in essence. The third, a material circumstance, is necessary rather to insure the stability of the others than for its own sake; although, as we know, attachment to the soil may in itself become a positive factor in patriotism. Two European peoples alone are there which, although landless, have succeeded, notwithstanding, in a maintenance of their social consciousness, almost at the level of nationality. Both Gypsies and Jews are men without a country. Of these, the latter offer perhaps the most remarkable example, for the Gypsies have never disbanded tribally. They still wander about eastern Europe and Asia Minor in organized bands, after the fashion of the nomad peoples of the East. The Jews, on the other hand, have maintained their solidarity in all parts of the earth, even in individual isolation one from another. They wander not gregariously in tribes, often not even in families. Their seed is scattered like the plant spores of which the botanists tell us; which, driven by wind or sea, independently travel thousands of miles before striking root or becoming fecund. True, the Jews bunch wherever possible. This is often a necessity imposed for self-preservation; but in their enforced migrations their associations must change kaleidoscopically from place to place. Not all has been said even yet of the unique achievement of this landless people. That the Jews have preserved their individuality despite all mutations of environment goes without saying. They have done more. They have accomplished this without absolute unity of language. Forced of necessity to adopt the speech of their immediate neighbors, they have only where congregated in sufficient numbers been able either to preserve or to evolve a distinctive speech. In Spain and the Balkan states they make use of Spanish; in Russia and Poland they speak a corrupt German; and in the interior of Morocco, Arabic. Nevertheless, despite these discouragements of every kind, they still constitute a distinctive social unit wherever they chance to be.

This social individuality of the Jews is of a peculiar sort. Bereft of linguistic and geographical support, it could not be political. The nineteenth century, says Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, is the age of nationality; meaning obviously territorial nationality, the product of contiguity, not birth. To this, he says, the Jew is indifferent, typifying still the Oriental tribal idea. As a result he is out of harmony with his environment. An element of dislike of a political nature on the part of the Christian is added to the irreconcilability of religious belief. It has ever been the Aryan versus the Semite in religion throughout all history, as Renan has observed; and to-day it has also become the people _versus_ the nation, as well as the Jew _versus_ the Christian. Granted that this political dissonance is largely the fault of the Gentile, its existence must be acknowledged, nevertheless.

How has this remarkable result been achieved? How, bereft of two out of three of the essentials of nationality, has the Jew been enabled to perpetuate his social consciousness? Is the superior force of religion, perhaps abnormally developed, alone able to account for it all? Is it a case of compensatory development, analogous in the body to a loss of eyesight remedied through greater delicacy of finger touch? Or is there some hidden, some unsuspected factor, which has contributed to this result? We have elsewhere shown that a fourth element of social solidarity is sometimes, though rarely, found, in a community of physical descent. That, in other words, to the cementing bonds of speech, tradition, belief, and contiguity, is added the element of physical brotherhood--that is to say, of race. Can it be that herein is a partial explanation of the social individuality of the Jewish people? It is a question for the scientist alone. Race, as we constantly maintain, despite the abuses of the word, really is to be measured only by physical characteristics. The task before us is to apply the criteria of anthropological science, therefore, to the problems of Jewish derivation and descent. Only incidentally and as matters of contributory interest shall we consider the views of the linguists, the archæologists, and the students of religious traditions. Our testimony is derived from facts of shape of head, color of hair and eye, of stature, and the like. These alone are the data indicative of racial descent. To these the geographer may add the probabilities derived from present distribution in Europe. No more do we need to settle the primary racial facts. Further speculations concerning matters rather than men belong to the historian and the philologist.

The number and geographical distribution of the chosen people of Israel is of great significance in its bearing upon the question of their origin.[2] While, owing to their fluid ubiquitousness, it is exceedingly difficult to enumerate them exactly, probability indicates that there are to-day, the world over, between eight and nine million Jews. Of these, six or seven million are inhabitants of Europe, the remainder being sparsely scattered over the whole earth, from one end to the other.

Their distribution in Europe, as our map opposite shows, is exceedingly uneven. Fully one half of these descendants of Jacob reside in Russia, there being four or five million Jews in that country alone. Austria-Hungary stands next in order, with two million odd souls. After these two there is a wide gap. No other European country is comparable with them except it be Germany and Roumania with their six or seven hundred thousand each. The British Isles contain relatively few, possibly one hundred thousand, these being principally in London. They are very rare in Scotland and Ireland--only a thousand or fifteen hundred apiece. Holland contains also about a hundred thousand, half of them in the celebrated Ghetto at Amsterdam. Then follow France with eighty thousand more or less, and Italy with perhaps two thirds as many. From Scandinavia they have always been rigidly excluded, from Sweden till the beginning and from Norway until nearly the middle of this century. Spain, although we hear much of the Spanish Jew, contains practically no indigenous Israelites. It is estimated that there were once about a million there settled, but the persecutions of the fifteenth century drove them forth all over Europe, largely to the Balkan states and Africa. There are a good many along these Mediterranean shores of Africa, principally in Morocco and Tripoli. The number decreases as we approach Egypt and Palestine, the ancient center of Jewish dispersion. As to America, it is estimated, although we know nothing certainly, that there are about a half million Jews scattered through our cities in the United States. New York city, according to the last census, contained about eighty thousand Poles and Russians, most of whom, it may be assumed, were Jews. But they have come since in ever-increasing numbers, with the great exodus from Russia, at the rate of scores of thousands annually. A recent writer places their present number in New York city at a quarter of a million. The British provinces, on the other hand, do not seem to offer great attractions; as late as 1870, for example, the census in Nova Scotia could not discover a solitary Jew.

A more suggestive index of the problems of Jewish distribution, however, is offered in the ratio of the number of Jews to the entire population. This is directly illustrated by our map. To be sure, this represents the situation twenty years ago, but no great change in relativity is to be suspected since that time. Even the wholesale exodus from Russia of recent years has not yet drawn off any large proportion of its vast body of population. Inspection of our map shows that the relative frequency of Jews increases in proportion to the progressive darkening of the tints. This brings out with startling clearness the reason for the recent anti-Semitic uprisings in both Russia, Austria, and the German Empire. A specific "center of gravity" of the Jewish people, as Leroy-Beaulieu puts it, is at once indicated in western Russia. The highest proportion, fifteen per cent, more or less, appears, moreover, to be entirely restricted to the Polish provinces, with the sole exception of the government of Grodno. About this core lies a second zone, including the other west Russian governments, as well as the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Germany, as it appears, is sharply divided from its eastern neighbors, all along the political frontier. Not even its former Polish territory, Posen, is to-day relatively thickly settled with Jews. Hostile legislation it is, beyond a doubt, which so rigidly holds back the Jew from immigration along this line. _Anti-Semitismus_ is not, therefore, to-day to any great extent an uprising against an existing evil; rather does it appear to be a protest against a future possibility. Germany shudders at the dark and threatening cloud of population of the most ignorant and wretched description which overhangs her eastern frontier. Berlin must not, they say, be allowed to become a new Jerusalem for the horde of Russian exiles. That also is our American problem. This great Polish swamp of miserable human beings, terrific in its proportions, threatens to drain itself off into our country as well, unless we restrict its ingress. As along the German frontier, so also toward the east, it is curious to note how rapidly the percentage of Jews decreases as we pass over into Great Russia. The governments of St. Petersburg, Novgorod, and Moscow have no greater Jewish contingent of population than has France or Italy; their Jewish problem is far less difficult than that of our own country is bound to be in the future. This clearly defined eastern boundary of _Judenthum_ is also the product of prohibitive legislation. The Jews are by law confined within certain provinces. A rigid law of settlement, intended to circumscribe their area of density closely, yields only to the persuasion of bribery. Not Russia, then, but southwestern Russia alone, is deeply concerned over the actual presence of this alien population. And it is the Jewish element in this small section of the country which constitutes such an industrial and social menace to the neighboring empires of Germany and Austria. In the latter country the Jews seem to be increasing in numbers almost four times as rapidly as the native population. The more elastic boundaries of Jewish density on the southeast, on the other hand, are indicative of the legislative tolerance which the Israelites there enjoy. Wherever the bars are lowered, there does this migratory human element at once expand.

The peculiar problems of Jewish distribution are only half realized until it is understood that, always and everywhere, the Israelites constitute pre-eminently the town populations.[3] They are not widely disseminated among the agricultural districts, but congregate in the commercial centers. It is an unalterable characteristic of this peculiar people. The Jew betrays an inherent dislike for hard manual or outdoor labor, as for physical exercise or exertion in any form. He prefers to live by brain, not brawn. Leroy-Beaulieu seems to consider this as an acquired characteristic due to mediæval prohibition of land ownership or to confinement within the Ghetto. To us it appears to be too constant a trait the world over to justify such a hypothesis. Fully to appreciate, therefore, what the Jewish question is in Polish Russia, we must always bear this fact in mind. The result is that in many parts of Poland the Jews form an actual majority of the population in the towns. This is the danger for Germany also. Thus it is Berlin, not Prussia at large, which is threatened with an overload of Jews from the country on the east. This aggregation in urban centers becomes the more marked as the relative frequency for the whole country lessens. Thus in Saxony, which, being industrial, is not a favorite Jewish center, four fifths of all the Jewish residents are found in Dresden and Leipsic alone.[4] This is probably also the reason for the lessened frequency of Jews all through the Alpine highlands, especially in the Tyrol. These districts are so essentially agricultural that few footholds for the Jew are to be found.

A small secondary center of Jewish aggregation appears upon our map to be manifested about Frankfort. It has a peculiar significance. The Hebrew settlers in the Rhenish cities date from the third century at least, having come there over the early trade routes from the Mediterranean. Germany being divided politically, and Russia interdicting them from 1110, a specific center was established, especially in Franconia, Frankfort being the focus of attraction. Then came the fearful persecutions all over Europe, attendant upon the religious fervor of the Crusades. The Polish kings, desiring to encourage the growth of their city populations, offered the rights of citizenship to all who would come, and an exodus in mass took place. They seem to have been welcomed, till the proportions of the movement became so great as to excite alarm. Its results appear upon our map. Thus we know that many of the Jews of Poland came to Russia as a troublesome legacy on the division of that kingdom. At the end of the sixteenth century but three German cities remained open to them--namely, Frankfort, Worms, and Furth.[5] Yet it was obviously impossible to uproot them entirely. To their persistence in this part of Germany is probably due the small secondary center of Jewish distribution, which we have mentioned, indicated by the darker tint about Frankfort, and including Alsace-Lorraine. Here is a relative frequency, not even exceeded by Posen, although we generally conceive of this former Polish province as especially saturated with Jews. It is the only vestige remaining to indicate what was at one time the main focus of Jewish population in Europe. It affords us a striking example of what legislation may accomplish ethnically, when supplemented, or rather aggravated, by religious and economic motives.

Does it accord with geographical probability to derive our large dark area of present Jewish aggregation entirely from the small secondary one about Frankfort, which, as we have just said, is the relic of a mediæval center of gravity? The question is a crucial one for the alleged purity of the Russian Jew; for the longer his migrations over the face of the map, the greater his chance of ethnic intermixture. A moot point among Jewish scholars is, as to the extent of this exodus from Germany into Poland. Bershadski has done much to show its real proportions in history. Talko-Hryncewicz[6] and Weissenberg,[7] among anthropologists, seem to be inclined to derive this great body of Polish Jews from Palestine by way of the Rhone-Rhine-Frankfort route. They are, no doubt, partially in the right; but the mere geographer would rather be inclined to side with Jacques.[8] He doubts whether entirely artificial causes, even mediæval persecutions, would be quite competent for so large a contract. There is certainly some truth in Harkavy's theory, so ably championed by Ikof (1884), that a goodly proportion of these Jews came into Poland by a direct route from the East. Most Jewish scholars had placed their first appearance in southern and eastern Russia, coming around the Black Sea, as early as the eighth century. Ikof, however, finds them in the Caucasus and Armenia one or two centuries before Christ. Then he follows them around, reaching Ruthenia in the tenth and eleventh centuries, arriving in Poland from the twelfth to the fourteenth. The only difficulty with this theory is, of course, that it leaves the language of the Polish Jews out of consideration. This is, in both Poland and Galicia, a corrupted form of German, which in itself would seem to indicate a western origin. On the other hand, the probabilities, judging from our graphic representation, would certainly emphasize the theory of a more general eastern immigration directly from Palestine north of the Black and Caspian Seas. The only remaining mode of accounting for the large center of gravity in Russia is to trace it to widespread conversions, as the historic one of the Khozars. Whichever one of these theories be correct--and there is probability of an equal division of truth among them all--enough has been said to lead us geographically to suspect the alleged purity of descent of the Ashkenazim Jew. Let us apply the tests of physical anthropology.