A morphological approach to the problem of the biological similarity of Jewish and non-Jewish populations

The genetic kinship between various Jewish and non-Jewish groups, from the biochemical standpoint, has been much investigated, frequently with very contradictory conclusions. The present paper reports the results of two comparative analyses of several Jewish and non-Jewish populations as based on morphological measurements of adult males. The first analysis employed data on Jewish and non-Jewish communities from five geographic regions of the world. The dendrogram resulting from the cluster analysis clearly indicates that Jewish populations are much closer to one another than to non-Jewish neighbour groups. In the second analysis, 25 ethnoterritorial groups of the USSR (one Jewish and the rest non-Jewish) were evaluated on the basis of 27 anthropometric characters. The latter Jewish group was markedly separate from the other 24 ethnic groups, and especially distinct when only traits with high coefficients of heritability were employed.