Klaus Hoedl

In Europe, Jews formed a distinct community within a Gentile environment for a long time. This was to change as the importance of religion within society declined. Jews gained—at least formally—the opportunity to integrate into society at large. However, this did not mean that they lost their purported otherness. Instead of religion, somatic features came to serve as criteria of Jewish difference. It is a widely held belief that the shift from religion to physical signs as marks of Jewish distinctiveness took place in the last third of the nineteenth century and found its most explicit expression in the substitution of the hostility called anti-Judaism by antiSemitism. According to anti-Semitic teachings, the essence of Jewishness can be found in the body. It does not matter if a person maintains ties to the Jewish community, if one observes the Jewish religious laws, or if one converts to Christianity. The moment one is born, or even earlier, from the moment of conception, one is genetically determined to be Jewish. There is abundant evidence, however, that physical features played an important role in determining Jews well before the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The nose, for example, had served as a Jewish characteristic as early as the thirteenth century. The same holds true with respect to the so-called ‘Jewish foot’. For a long time there was an intimate associative connection between the devil and the Jew. The former was portrayed as limping, having a cloven-foot and thus, as (being) diseased. Through analogy, the same traits were ascribed to Jews. The purpose of this article is to show that Jews were defined by physical characteristics well before the appearance of anti-Semitism. The onset lies with the beginning of physical anthropology in the eighteenth century. In contrast to—occasional—references to somatic features of the Jews in preceding periods, the eighteenth century did not only put forth a steady stream of literature on their alleged morphological peculiarities, but also tried to “prove” them “scientifically”. Thus, anti-Semitic stereotypes do not necessarily stem from anti-Jewish attitudes. They can also be construed by—purportedly—“objective” science.