Early 20th-century US reports classified most Eastern European immigrants as feebleminded

Evidence

Due in part to their religious beliefs, Catholics from Ireland, Italy, and Germany and Jews from Eastern Europe were assigned racial traits inferior to those of Anglo-Saxons. One report, for example, found that “83 percent of the Jews, 80 percent of the Hungarians, 79 percent of the Italians, 87 percent of the Russians were classified as Feebleminded.” Sixty percent of Jews were classified as Morons. Political elites of the time also believed Jews were unfit for citizenship because they were antisocial and antidemocratic by nature. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 237

Categorization

• CANDY: “83 percent of Jews classified as feebleminded” is a striking, tweetable data point about the absurdity of early eugenic testing.
• QUESTION: What was the actual testing instrument that produced these percentages? The intelligence tests of the era were wildly biased toward English-speaking literacy.