Mini Study: Jewish Features

As I’ve taken about a year and a half or so studying and researching on Hebrew anthropology (see my Scattered Hebrew series), some noticeable patterns occurred that I could not ignore. I would run into journals of explorers that had run into civilizations throughout the world and were associated to having “Jewish features.” As I read through some of these descriptions, they differed vastly from what I had been taught in Eurocentric christianity, what is shown on TV of what Jews look like and what they looked like in the past. Here’s some examples of the journals I found and what they had to say about this term “Jewish features.”

This first journal entry was written in the 1600s about North American Natives and the description of them among other notes:

So here we learn that the author William Penn (author of the original letter) had a certain understanding of what Jews looked like in which they consisted of having very dark eyes. It is also worth mentioning that he came to the conclusion that these Natives must have been of the lost ten tribes (of the House of Israel).

This next journal entry is an explorer describing complexions and ethnicity of inhabitants of West Africa in…