Having pricked the “Aryan” race-myth balloon and adopted a new stand on Palestine as a Jewish national homeland, the Jewish Academy of Arts and Sciences last night closed a sweltering two-day convention with a banquet at the Hotel Greystone, Broadway and Ninety-first street.
At the dinner, six honorary members, elected to the Academy Saturday night, were formally inducted. They were: Dr. Bernard Sachs, president of the New York Academy of Medicine; Dr. Moses Hyamson, rabbi and educator; Dr. Samuel Schulman, rabbi emeritus of Temple Emanu-El; Dr. Adele Bildersee, dean of Brooklyn College; and Rubin Goldmark, composer.
At the opening of the conference Saturday night, Dr. Benjamin Jablons, head of the Physicians’ Division of the American Jewish Congress, dissected the “Aryan” race hypothesis in a lecture on “Blood Groupings and Racial Differentiations” and found it lacking a shred of scientific basis.
He explained how scientists examine race by blood groupings. There are four blood groups, he said, and the racial characteristic in blood is determined by the percentages of each group found in the blood.
“Inbreeding and isolation,” he stated, “have developed what is considered to be the segregated racial groups of today. If blood groupings are used as a basis, it is difficult to find a difference between the German Jew and the German so-called ‘Aryan.’
“PURE” RACE SCOUTED
“The German Jew has been found to have a blood grouping almost identical with that of the German Gentile. Therefore, when anthropology and ethnology are turned to an instrument of politics, as is being done in Naziland today, they may become a boomerang.”
Denying the existence of any pure race, Dr. Jablons contended that the Jews were a mixed race when they left Palestine with the fall of the Second Temple, and that they have further intermingled in their travels over the globe.
The purest Jews, Dr. Jablons said, are found in Georgia, U.S. S.R., where the 21,000 Jews have been isolated for 2,000 years. There they are almost exactly like their Gentile neighbors in appearance and blood-groupings. Only because they say they are Jews are they known to be of the Jewish religion.
Dr. Jablons concluded that the standards by which races are judged are really sociological rather than biological standards. Customs, language, culture and traditions form the bases by which we judge races, he said.
ZION “CULTURE CENTER”
In an address yesterday afternoon, Dr. Henry Keller, president of the Academy, advanced Palestine as a spiritual and cultural center for Judaism. “Palestine,” Dr. Keller pointed out, “cannot and never will accommodate more than a remnant of the Jewish people. Local prosperity is likely to remain a local interest because it is of local benefit.
“The only development of Palestine which is destined to become of world-wide influence and probably will make the nations of the world turn to the little country for guidance is the conversion of Palestine into the cultural and spiritual center of the Jews of the world.
“I look upon the institutions of learning in Palestine as of greater importance for the future of Jewry and the world at large than the addition of a few orange groves or the formation of another Kvutzah cooperative colony.”
Other speakers at the convention were: Dr. Bernard Drachman, on “Judaism and Modern Thought;” Professor David I. Macht, on “Job’s Disease,” Dr. Benjamin M. Lewin, on “Gaonic Literature,” Dr. Solomon Gandz, on “Science of Judaism,” and Dr. Aaron M. Margalith on “The Legal Status of the Jew in International Law.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
