Maurice Fishberg (August 16, 1872 – August 30, 1934) was a

Jewish-American American Jews (; ) or Jewish Americans are Americans, American citizens who are Jews, Jewish, whether by Jewish culture, culture, ethnicity, or Judaism, religion. According to a 2020 poll conducted by Pew Research, approximately two thirds of Am ...

physical anthropologist who specialised in the

ethnology Ethnology (from the , meaning 'nation') is an academic field and discipline that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology). Sci ...

of the

Jews Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...

. Fishberg was born in Kamenetz Podolsky (now

Ukraine Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the nor ...

) and died in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

Involvement in the American Eugenics Movement and Self-Discreditation

After emigrating to the United States in 1889, and, arriving in New York, he studied medicine at the university there. He received his degree from New York University in 1897. Fishberg has been associated with Beth Israel Hospital, New York, and is medical examiner of the United Hebrew Charities of that city. During his time as a medical examiner he recorded skull and nose measurements of Jewish immigrants through which he originally asserted a genetic difference between Jews and non-Jews to describe them as another race along with Joseph Jacobs. However his theories were largely discredited by Franz Boas through the application of the scientific method. Opposed to the narrow or vertically arranged studies which Maurice Fishberg conducted which completely ignored the Jewish ethnicity i.e. culture, religion, and even family in the case of adoptions Franz Boas looked at all of those factors as well as across multiple generations and in multiple geographic locations to determine there to be no discernable genetic difference between Jews and non-Jews. This combined with the growth of what Max J. Kholer called Hitlerism or later Nazism in Germany resulted in a national summit where Franz Boas who had legally and scientifically been determined to be the factually correct opinion on the genetics of the Jewish people presided as guest of honor as Maurice Fishberg along with Ellsworth Huntington discredited their prior works before The Judaens and the Jewish Academy of Sciences on March 4, 1934, to emphatically state that there is no genetic difference between Jew and non-Jew nor and superior race. Later this discussion was distributed by Congregation B'nai B'rith in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Works

*''Physical Anthropology of the Jews'' (1902) **
''Jews: A Study of Race and Environment''
(1911)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fishberg, Maurice 1872 births 1934 deaths American anthropologists Jewish anthropologists Emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States