Colonial observers framed African peoples through anti-Semitic racial typing

Evidence

Carl Peters, the founder of German East Africa, who was forced to resign from the German Imperial Service (accused of cruelty to the local population) and who retired to British South Africa wrote some years earlier of a neighboring group in Rhodesia: “How absolutely Jewish is the type of this people! They have faces cut exactly like those of ancient Jews who live around Aden. Also the way they wear their hair, the curls behind the ears, and the beard drawn out in single curls, gives them the appearance of Aden—or of Polish—Jews of the good old type” (as opposed to the assimilated and successful Jews of the Germany of his own time). — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 335

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier handling of race, imposture, and the orientalist gaze in Kalmar’s other chapters and to Sander Gilman’s work on Jewish self-stereotyping.