Jews were physically indistinguishable from other Germans by the late 1800s

Evidence

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, western European Jews had become indistinguishable from other western Europeans in matters of language, dress, occupation, location of their dwellings, and the cut of their hair. Indeed, if Rudolf Virchow’s extensive study of more than ten thousand German schoolchildren published in 1886 was accurate, they were also indistinguishable in terms of skin, hair, and eye color from the greater masses of those who lived in Germany. Virchow’s statistics sought to show that wherever a greater percentage of the overall population had lighter skin or bluer eyes or blonder hair, a greater percentage of Jews also had lighter skin or bluer eyes or blonder hair. Although Virchow attempted to provide a rationale for the sense of Jewish acculturation, he still assumed that Jews were a separate and distinct racial category. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 779

Categorization

• QUESTION: Virchow’s 1886 study of 10,000+ schoolchildren is a striking empirical anchor — worth chasing the full methodology and how contemporaries reacted to it.
• SEED: A surprisingly good essay angle: science being used to prove assimilation (Jews look just like Germans) while still enforcing a racial category — how measurement can normalize and pathologize at once.
• XREF: connects to: Wealthy German Jews saw themselves as fully German until forced out in the 1930s