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Old August 18th, 2015 #1
Karl Radl
The Epitome of Evil
 
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Default Professor John Baker's Commentary on Jewish Physiognomy

Professor John Baker's Commentary on Jewish Physiognomy


Professor John Baker's 1974 book 'Race', published by Oxford University Press, has long been known as a classic assertion of biological reality in racialist and hereditarian intellectual circles. (1) It was indeed this work that race realist publicist Jared Taylor reviewed early on in his periodical 'American Renaissance'. (2)

In his review Taylor was generally fair to Baker's work in all but one respect; Taylor, probably deliberately, suppressed mention of Baker's comments on the subject of jews. This is hardly surprising given Taylor's famous, and dare I say rather unscientific, attitude to the jewish question vis-a-vis his 'if they look white, then they are white' comment. (3)

That this supposed 'whiteness' of jews has been disproved time and time again by genetic studies, which Taylor for reasons known only to himself likes to simply ignore, almost goes without saying for anybody who has even cursorily studied jewish history and Judaism could have worked out that jews were a 'people apart'.

Now Baker it should be stated is no anti-Semite and he explicitly deplores the 'repression' aimed at jews by the Axis powers in the Second World War. (4) However he also, quite rightly, detests the lunacy of the 1951 UNESCO statement on race; where it was claimed that: 'Muslims and Jews are no more races than are Roman Catholics and Protestants.' (5)

This, he weightly opines, is simply outright rubbish, because the UNESCO is defining jews as a purely religious grouping and assuming that Judaism, like Christianity and Islam, is a universal religion based purely on religious confession and practice.

Baker's sarcastic rejoinder to this is that:

'Anyone who wishes to do so may accept the UNESCO doctrine and refuse to regard a person as a Jew unless he or she practices the Jewish religion; but there can be no doubt that many people in Europe and America who do not practice this religion are regarded by others as Jews and have no hesitation in agreeing that this description is correct.' (6)

In other words; he is stating that the idea that jews are simply a religious group is not simply a nonsensical idea, but one that is obviously contrary to the observable and accepted usage of the label of 'jew'.

Baker compounds his point by reference to the halakhic rules of jewishness, which explicitly require an individual to have a jewish mother, while correctly citing the fact that conversion is possible but if one wants to become an Israeli then it has to be an Orthodox, not a Reform or Conservative, conversion. (7)

He also shows penetrative insight, as well as diligent research, by pointing out that:

'If anyone who wished to adopt the Jewish faith were free to do so after receiving the necessary instruction, and if any considerable number of persons did so wish, the word 'Jew' might be used as the words 'Roman Catholic' are, to denote the adherents to a religion, though in this case it could not be applied to anyone who had first accepted and then rejected the religion. In fact, however, there is no close resemblance between Judaism in the religious sense and proselytizing religion such as the Roman Catholic. A person can only be accepted into the faith if he or she can satisfy the requirements mention on p. 234 [previously described – KR], and conversions are rare.' (8)

This fundamental point, which is so rarely recognized in modernity with its frankly weird conflation of Judaism and Christianity as the same religion, is devastating to the UNESCO position; since it highlights the fact that statement is contrary to the evidence. Baker doesn't mention it, but the statement was decidedly ideological. The leading light, and the man who wrote it, Ashley Montagu was both a dedicated Marxist and a jew (he was born with the name Israel Ehrenberg). (9)

Baker is even more intellectually brutal however; in his discussion of whether jews are merely a religious group. He points out that if so considered then major jewish figures such as Benjamin Disraeli, Heinrich Heine, Ferdinand Lassalle, Karl Marx, Ludwig Borne and so on; would not be considered jewish at all. (10)

As he sarcastically puts it:

'It follows from what has been said that if Jacobs had restricted his interpretation of the word 'Jew' so as to exclude all who did not practise the religious rites of Judaism, he would not have been able to name a single 'illustrious' Jew among those who lived in the century covered by his studies [the nineteenth – KR], and the number of 'eminent' Jews would have been considerably reduced.' (11)

Following from this, and having discounted the numerically and historically insignificant groups of Ethiopian, Indian and Chinese jews, Baker points out, correctly as it happens, (12) that the Khazars were not a significant originating population for the Ashkenazim. (13) He then summarizes the scientific, as well as some of the historical, literature on jewish physiognomy.

I quote:

'Persons of Ashkenazic stock can generally be recognized by certain physical characters that distinguish them from other Europeans. It will be understand that no every member of this group exhibits all the distinctive characters, but many of them show most of the ones that will now be described. The description will apply in particular to the adult male.

Typically the Ashkenazim are brachycranial, though some of them fall into the range of the mesocranial. The relative breadth of the skull is produced in a special way. In several ethnic taxa the brachycranial condition arises simply from the fact that the head is particularly broad, but this is not so here. It is caused by the head being very short, the cranial capacity being maintained by the unusual height of the vertex. The shortness of the head is due to the suppression of the occipital region. A skull of this type is said to be hypsibrachycranial.

[...]

In some cases the impression is given in the side view that the back of the head has been sliced off by a vertical cut. The forehead is special in two respects. It tends to recede rather noticeably, and also to be rounded in the horizontal plane, instead of being squared off on each side, as it is in certain types of head, in which the forehead is almost rectangular section. Thus in the Ashkenazim the front and sides of the head tend to curve smoothly upwards to a high vertex. In front view the face is seen to be rather wide above and narrow at the rounded chin, which somewhat recedes.

The upper and lower eyelids, especially the latter, tend to be somewhat puffed out. The iris is large. The ear is large, wide in its upper part, and provided with a large lobe.

The mouth is large. The lower lip is everted so as to appear thick, but it not swollen out like that of a Negro; on the contrary, it tends to be rather flattened. The flattened area is formed mainly of the 'transition zone', of Lippensaum of German authors. This is the reddish zone of modified skin – the lip in the narrower sense of the word – that separates the ordinary skin of the face from mucous membrane of the mouth. In Asheknazim this zone of the lower lip is sometimes rather sharply marked off from the facial skin by being raised somewhat above it. This gives a curious appearance in black-and-white photographs, especially when the lip is strongly; for the ordinary facial bordering the transition zone may be mistaken for the transition zone itself, and the latter for the mucous membrane of the mouth, or even for the tip of the tongue.

[...]

The nose is large in all dimensions. It is in some cases straight in profile, in others somewhat convex. It is wide at all levels, especially towards its lower end, and is sharply divided by the deep grooves that separate the alae from the rest of the organ. The alae are thick ('fleshy') and generally curved out widely at the sides.

[...]

In the typical Ashkenazic nose the distance from the sellion to the tip is longer than that from the sellion to the subnasale, with the result that the tip projects downwards below the horizontal plane passing through the subnasale. It followers that an observer who holds his eyes in the plane of the subject's subnasale, while the latter holds his head horizontal, may not be able to see the nasal septum, for it may be hidden by the tip. In some cases one cannot the nostrils at all in such circumstances. It is quite usual, however, and indeed rather characteristic, for the alae not to extend downwards so far as the septum does. In this case the lateral parts of the nostrils can be seen from in front, and a considerable part of the septum can be seen when the face is viewed in profile.

The breadth of the nose, as expressed by the nasal index, does not necessarily reach a high figure, because the distance from the sellion to the subnasale is great; but the absolute breadth is considerable, on account of the thickness of the alae. This is a particularly distinctive character.

[...]

As Jacobs remarks, when the part of the figure that is twisted round is omitted, the characteristic form to a large extent disappears, while if the part representing the edge of the nasal septum is drawn horizontally and the groove is not shown (because weakly developed in the subject), the whole character of the organ is changed, and it no longer resembles the nose of a Jew.

The skin is swarthy. The scalp-hair is generally (but not always) very dark brown or almost black; it is more wavy than is usual in Europid sub-races.

The facial hair of the male is abundant, but there is not an unusual amount of body-hair.

The legs are rather short, and the total height is therefore moderate or rather short. The shoulders are broad and the form is thick-set, with some tendency to corpulency in elderly persons.' (14)

This analysis of the scientific literature on the physiognomy of Ashkenazi jews Baker backs up with blood group data that strongly indicates the cousin hood of the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim with Armenians and Bedouin, while indicating their genetic distance from their host populations (in this case the Dutch and the Russians). (15)

Baker uses this data, supporting it with a summary of jewish history, to argue that the jews are a hybrid population and are the result of crossbreeding between many different Semitic peoples and, to a lesser extent, their European hosts. (16)

He concludes from his survey of the scientific literature and the, then recent, genetic and blood group studies that the small minorities in Judaism, such as the Ethiopian, Indian and Chinese jews, are simply converts with a little bit of admixture from those who were responsible for converting them, but are otherwise indistinguishable from their host population.

Meanwhile the two large groups, the Sephardim (in which Baker, following general convention, includes the Mizrahim) and the Ashkenazim, he concludes are Armenoids as a rule and, broadly speaking, similar to the Syrians, Kurds, Armenians, the northern Arabs and the people of the Caucasus. They are not, Baker stresses, that closely related to Europeans, but rather are not as physically divergent from them as other racial types.

In essence what Baker is saying is that jews are indeed, broadly speaking, a racial typology in their own right.


References


(1) For example; a racialist zoologist heartily applauded him in the early 1980s. Lothrop Stoddard, 1981, [1924]. 'Racial Realities in Europe', 1st Edition, Historical Review Press: Uckfield, p. xi
(2) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...-and-jews.html
(3) Cf. Jared Taylor, 2006, 'Jews and American Renaissance', American Renaissance, Vol. 17, No. 5, p. 11
(4) John Baker, 1974, 'Race', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 232
(5) Ibid.
(6) Ibid, pp. 234-235
(7) Ibid, p. 235
(8) Ibid, pp. 235-236
(9) Roger Pearson, 1997, 'Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe', 2nd Edition, Scott-Townsend: Washington D.C., pp. 106-107
(10) Baker, Op. Cit., p. 235
(11) Ibid.
(12) Cf. Kevin Alan Brook, 2006, 'The Jews of Khazaria', 2nd Edition, Rowman & Littlefield: New York, pp. 234-235
(13) Baker, Op. Cit., p. 234
(14) Ibid, pp. 238-242
(15) Ibid, pp. 242-243
(16) Ibid, pp. 244-245

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This was originally published at the following address: http://www.semiticcontroversies.blog...entary-on.html
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