Color coded

You never know where you’re going to come across the most fascinating theories about human behavior. No, I’m not referring to the recent contretemps about the ASA boycott, though well I might. Instead, I have in mind early 20th century notions about the ways in which people dressed.

Having once published a book, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America about the relationship between clothing and identity, I thought I had covered the waterfront, as the old saw would have it. But in reading a recently published article by my colleague, Steven Fine, about polychromy in the ancient world (Academia.edu), I came across something I had never known before: a set of references to a late 19th and early 20th century discussion that linked any number of Jewish cultural practices to colorblindness. Reportedly a Jewish physical trait, colorblindness was used back in the day to explain a host of things about the Jews, from their lack of a painterly imagination to their penchant for dressing in bright colors.

The handiwork of scientists rather than cranks, this discussion appeared in authoritative, eminently respectable publications such as the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1890) and was later circulated by the equally redoubtable Jewish Encyclopedia (1902). Here, and elsewhere, readers learned that that the high proportion of colorblindness within the Jewish community resulted in a “general lack of interest in the delights of colour, especially in its more refined forms,” the “absence of any painters of great ability among the Jews and the want of taste shown by Jewesses of the lower grades of society.”

Who knew?! More to the point, who would have thought to find this material in an essay about the ancient world? A testament to Professor Fine’s erudition and his wide-ranging command of sources, it is also an invitation to read widely and in areas outside of one’s immediate interests.

As 2013 gives way to 2014, let’s open our eyes and take in the world. We’ll all be the better for it.