Maurice Fishberg (August 16, 1872 – August 30, 1934) was a Jewish-American physical anthropologist who specialised in the ethnology of the Jews. Fishberg was born in Kamenetz Podolsky (now Ukraine) and died in New York City.
Involvement in the American Eugenics Movement and Self-Discreditation
After emigrating to the United States in 1889, and, arriving in New York, he studied medicine at the university there. He received his degree from New York University in 1897. Fishberg has been associated with Beth Israel Hospital, New York, and is medical examiner of the United Hebrew Charities of that city. During his time as a medical examiner he recorded skull and nose measurements of Jewish immigrants through which he originally asserted a genetic difference between Jews and non-Jews to describe them as another race along with Joseph Jacobs. However his theories were largely discredited by Franz Boas through the application of the scientific method. Opposed to the narrow or vertically arranged studies which Maurice Fishberg conducted which completely ignored the Jewish ethnicity ie culture, religion, and even family in the case of adoptions Franz Boas looked at all of those factors as well as across multiple generations and in multiple geographic locations to determine there to be no discernable genetic difference between Jews and non-Jews. This combined with the growth of what Max J. Kholer called Hitlerism or later Nazism in Germany resulted in a national summit where Franz Boas who had legally and scientifically been determined to be the factually correct opinion on the genetics of the Jewish people presided as guest of honor as Maurice Fishberg along with Ellsworth Huntington discredited their prior works before The Judaens and the Jewish Academy of Sciences on March 4, 1934, to emphatically state that there is no genetic difference between Jew and non-Jew nor and superior race. Later this discussion was distributed by Congregation B'nai B'rith in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Works
- Physical Anthropology of the Jews (1902)
- "Materials for the Physical Anthropology of the Eastern European Jews by Maurice Fishberg". Memoirs of the American Anthropological Society. Vol. I, 1905–1907. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: The New Era Printing Company. 1907. pp. 1–147.
- Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (1911)
References
- Maurice Fishberg, Jewish Encyclopedia
- Dr. M. Fishberg Dies of Heart Attack at Home
- https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/6159-fishberg-maurice
- https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/4729-craniometry
- https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11598-nose
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/bib264772
- Hattam, Victoria (2007). In the Shadow of Race: Jews, Latinos, and Immigrant Politics in the United States. University of Chicago Press. p. 194. ISBN 9780226319230.
- "Review of Jews: A Study of Race and Environment by Maurice Fishberg". The London Quarterly Review. 116: 159–160. 1911.