Race and Civilizational Difference in Syria and Palestine

Abstract

Starting with items on display at the Hall of Asian Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History, this essay tells the story of an expedition to Greater Syria (including today's Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria) from 1899 to 1901, told through archival records of a young college graduate and biological anthropologist, Henry Minor Huxley, who was brought on to identify “types of peoples” in Syria through techniques of “anthropometry,” the systematic measurement of physical properties of the human body. Figures of great and minor historical significance appear in this story: the anthropologist Franz Boas; Princeton professor and archaeologist Howard Crosby Butler; business leaders of Philadelphia and New York City at the turn of the twentieth century; and the US president Woodrow Wilson, who, in preparation for the Versailles peace conferences at the end of World War I, commissioned a group of scientists and academics to assess the “civilizational capacities” of Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire. Findings from this expedition were used to support the decision to deny self-determination and sovereign nation-states to Syria. The essay broadens more familiar accounts of early twentieth-century debates about race and racialization in anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century to bring today's Middle East squarely into view.