At first glance, the left-hand face seems greatly more attractive, but after a while of looking the differences somehow become less stark. Happens every time I look.

Within the Levant, the Hizballah is easily scarier than any Sunni terrorist outfit.  
How this reflects on the 'progressiveness' of individual Sunnis and Shi'ites in the region is open to interpretation ( ie, to the extent that a Lebanese Shia is more open-minded than a Jordanian Sunni, it might be because he is Lebanese rather than Shia..etc, etc ). 
In any case, perhaps Arcane's opinion is best applied to Persians specifically...

That's why it was funny. I'm thinking of an adventurous Yekke, dressed in the late 19th century equivalent of a polyester suit, fleeing for his life on a dusty trail in the Atlas Mountains, a horde of pissed off older brothers close behind.

Kind of funny : 
 
The Moroccan Jewesses are generally uneducated, being, as a rule, unable either to read or to write; they are described as being childish and fond of ornaments. On the other hand, they are distinguished for their unusual beauty, this being perhaps the only point upon which all travelers are agreed. The most beautiful Jewesses are said to live in Mequinez, so that a woman of extraordinary beauty is termed "Meḳnasiyyah" (E. Réclus, "Nouvelle Géographie Universelle," p. 697, Paris, 1886). E. de Amicis (l.c. p. 19) describes the beauty of the Moroccan Jewesses thus: "The beauty of the Jewesses of Morocco has a character of its own, unknown in other countries. It is an opulent and splendid beauty, with large black eyes, broad, low forehead, full red lips, and statuesque form." The Jewesses of Morocco have been suspected by Chénier and, after him, by other travelers of not being very conscientious in regard to womanly virtue. A more careful investigation, however, shows that this aspersion is unfounded (see Horowitz, l.c. p. 53). 
 
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=801&letter=M

"Are Ashkenazim supposed to be 'smarter' than Sephardim?"

Sephardic Jews are diverse. A Francophone Morrocan Jew in Paris and a Berber Jew from a village in the Atlas Mountains are both considered Sephardic. And those are just the ones from North Africa.

As such, collective IQ statistics on them should be taken with a grain of salt.

"BTW, there are (or were) some Sephardim in eastern Europe. E.g. the writer Elias Canetti was born in a Sephardic community in Bulgaria. I have no idea whether M Howard's ancestors were Sephardim or Ashkenazim."

Romania had Sephardim from the Ottoman Empire, but they were largely outnumbered by Ashkenazi immigrants pouring in from the north in the 19th century. Sort of like what happened in the USA.

Interestingly, in Israel of the 1950's, Romanian Jews were considered the 'lowliest and least civilized of the Ashkenazim' by the ruling Polish/Russian-descended elite...one person referred to them as being 'almost as bad as the Morrocans'.

"The "social justice" trend among Jews predates the Holocaust. Jews were disproportionately Communists, both in the US and Russia. The whole "social justice" phenomenon is, in my opinion, the root of a lot of right-wing anti-Semitism."

You've hit the nail on the head. If Jews stopped trying to fix the world's injustices and went back to their ages-old practice of just *surviving* ( which is what Israel is all about, basically ), there would be no Jewish 'problem' in the USA - at least not in its current form.

You forgot the most famous '-ian' of them all - Yossarian.

Does anybody know if Joseph Heller truly intended him to be an Armenian? I read about it being an Assyrian name somewhere.

Just goes to show you how two similar religious ideologies can seem very different - because of the ethnic character of their believers.

"It doesn't matter what you believe, but how you believe it?"

I don't think Jews and Armenians, Hittites, etc, were ever originally the same people. The only true 'Armenoid' element in Jews comes from autochthonous Jewish communities in the Caucasus, who may have racially influenced Ashkenazim in Southern Russia to a certain extent.

The reasoning behind this is simple - classic Armenoids tend to have large, broad faces, while proto-typical Ashkenazic Jews have narrow faces.

Incorrect. Syrians and Lebanese are brachycephalic, but not Armenoids. They are Asiatic Dinarics.

Oh, and I don't need to mention that the German Alpines that Jews mixed with are also brachycephalic. ;)

Acheson -

Take a look at my e-mail address. ;) ;)

Webpage on Syrian/Lebanese genetics and physical anthropology -

http://phoenicia.org/ychromodrafteng.html

Shalom!

OK, you're the boss. I know the discussion was off the mark for GNXP, but I felt I had to touch on the subject to explain my view of the origins of Jews. And it is a crucial point - the Caucasus and the Middle East are fairly close, but their peoples are quite different from each other, culturally and physically.

"Koestler's "The Thirteenth Tribe", one of his last works, is or was available in full on line. It contains a weird attempt to demonstrate that Jews don't have hooked but "fleshy" noses. But he winds up saying that wherever the Jews hailed from should not affect their title to Israel."

Hehe. The truth is that most Jews don't have true hooked noses, but most have prominent noses with a tendency to convexity. There *is* a difference.

In Palestine? Maybe they'll ask the IAF to bomb it. ;)

I still think Ashkenazic Jews have more 'German' then 'Slavic' genes, the mixed up Russian Jews notwithstanding. This is supported by classic physical anthropology.

I'd love to see a lot more research done on Jewish maternal DNA.

Oh, the sweet irony of it. :) The Nazis made them blonder!

I've read these theories before. Especially on white nationalist websites, who don't want to admit Ashkenazic Jews get their looks from European admixture.

Nevertheless, I agree with you that there was a certain selection effect, most notably of skin tone. You won't find Ashkenazic Jews with the brunet skin tone common in the Levant ( as well as in Southern Europe ). They simply *don't exist*, except maybe a few aberrant individuals.

However, I believe hair and eye blondism in Ashkenazic Jews are mostly the result of a large dosage of German mtDNA, coupled with strong founder effects in a very small initial population.

By the way, in Southern Germany and Austria you can find a few fairly dark individuals. So even an Adam Sandler-type Jew might not have looked totally out of place racially. Culturally - that's a different matter. :)

Well, if the entire Ashkenazic community was founded by exclusively male Jewish merchants taking local Germanic wives, then that would no longer be a consideration, since a European appearance would be a part and parcel of the wider Jewish phenotype. ;)

It's possible that the *percentage* of European phenotypes among Jews has risen over the centuries, in a sort of ongoing 'Holocaust effect' ( as I've dubbed it ). However, do remember that unlike today, fertility rate of Ashkenazic Jews in the Middle Ages was extremely high.

So surely despite pogroms and persecutions, they would have churned out enough 'swarthy' children to keep that look in existence. Keep in mind that even today, Ashkenazic Jews are 75~% of the world Jewish population - but once they were more like 10%.

If all of these swarthy Jews had been killed in pogroms, leaving the lighter minority alive, how could the Ashkenazic population have boomed as it did?

Yes, that's what I meant.

I think that there are quantifiable phenotypic differences between Ashkenazic Jews and Europeans, but - and this is the more important point - you will *never* find one single Ashkenazic Jew who looks distinctly non-European.

This may be because all Europeans have Middle Eastern ancestry to a certain extent.