Racializing Pacific Islanders: Jewish Facial Features, Popular Anthropology, and the German Colonization of the Palau Islands, 1873–1925

In 1862, the German naturalist Carl Semper traveled through the Palau Islands, a Spanish colony in the Southwestern Pacific. He published an account of his travels in 1873 and claimed that the people of Palau possessed Jewish facial features. Although his book was rejected by professional anthropolo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inGenealogy (Basel) Vol. 8; no. 2; p. 49
Main Author Weston, Nathaniel Parker
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.06.2024
Subjects
Anthropology
Antisemitism
Carl Semper
Colonies & territories
Ethnography
German racial science
Imperial Germany
Imperialism
Islands
Jewish facial features
Jewish people
Morphology
Pacific Islander people
Palau Islands
popular anthropology
Race
Racialization
Stereotypes
New Guinea
Pacific Islands
Philippines
Pacific Ocean
Palau
Germany
Spain
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Summary:In 1862, the German naturalist Carl Semper traveled through the Palau Islands, a Spanish colony in the Southwestern Pacific. He published an account of his travels in 1873 and claimed that the people of Palau possessed Jewish facial features. Although his book was rejected by professional anthropologists in Imperial Germany, popular anthropologists widely circulated his observation that Palauans shared physical characteristics with Jewish people. This article demonstrates that the racialization of Pacific Islanders, specifically those inhabiting the Palau Islands, was rooted in antisemitic notions about Jewish people as a race built on stereotypes about particular traits. This topic has been thus far overlooked by scholars of German colonialism, German anthropology, and German discourses on the Pacific Islands, particularly the Palau Islands.
ISSN:2313-5778
2313-5778
DOI:10.3390/genealogy8020049