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

Abstract

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.