Colonial racial science held that inner racial nature eventually overwrites passing whiteness.

Evidence

Even Jews who do not “look Jewish,” who look “white,” will eventually reveal their inner nature in their appearance. They look “white” (read: British) for “as yet the stress of trade had not awakened the ancestral greed which would one day dominate his blood and modify his physiognomy.” At that point the Jew becomes a “Peruvian,” an odd, turn-of-the-century term for Jewish trader in South Africa. A “Peruvian,” perhaps because of his non-Western, nonwhite exoticism that puts the Jew on the very margins of the known world. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 744

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the obscure colonial term ‘Peruvian’ as a label for the visibly nonwhite Jewish trader.