ABSTRACT
The bulk of the Jewish population in the Orient and Eastern Europe live mostly in the oldest and most congested parts of cities, amid squalid and unsanitary surroundings, where the mortality rates are by general experience known to be excessive. In England and the United States the immigrant Jews also live, as a rule, under similar conditions, as can readily be seen in the East End of London and the East Side of New York. Death, as a biological phenomenon, cannot be influenced by purely ethical or metaphysical factors, such as, for instance, religion, when Jews are compared with Christians. Racial uniformity would imply also demographic uniformity, which is by far not the case. Arthur Ruppin, who has studied the problem thoroughly, insists that the superiority of the expectation of life of the Jews is mainly due to the higher infant mortality among the Christians, which drags down the average duration of life.
