ABSTRACT
The traditional view is that Jews are a Semitic people, and that throughout many centuries of dispersion their purity of blood has been preserved. The elementary question as to whether the Jews are a race, a nationality, or a religious or cultural group remains unsettled. Whatever may be said concerning the effect of ghetto life on the physical characteristics of the Jews applies with even greater force to the social characteristics. If their sojourn in the ghetto for many generations was potent in producing the ethnic type of the Jew, it has been more effective in producing and maintaining the social conditions which may be called characteristic of the children of Israel. Behind the walls of the ghetto the Jewish type was carefully protected from the influence of its alien environment, and there it also received a special impress, the product of exile and oppression.
