Note 1176 — Chapter XIV · —Plains, Steppes And Deserts

Isolation tends to breed among nomads pride of race and a repugnance to intermixture. The ideal of the pastoral Israelites was a pure ethnic stock, protected by stern inhibition of intermarriage with other tribes. Therefore, Moses enjoined upon them the duty of exterminating the peoples of Canaan whom they dispossessed.1176 While the urban Arabs show a medley of breeds, dashed with a strain of negro blood, among the nomad Bedouins, mixture is exceptional and is regarded as a disgrace.1177 The same thing is true among the nomad Arabs of Algeria, and there it has placed a stumbling block in the way of the French colonial administration, by preventing the appearance of half-breeds who might bridge the gap between the colonials and natives. Where pastoral Semites have settled in agricultural lands, intermixture on a wide scale has followed, as in the Sudan from Niger to Nile; but even here, when a tribe or clan has retained a strictly pastoral life in the grassland, and has held itself aloof from the agricultural districts of the Negro villages, relatively pure survivals are to be found, as among the Cow or Bush Fulani of Bornu.1178 On the other hand, the Hausa, a migrant trading folk of mingled Arab and Negro blood, spread northward along the trans-Saharan caravan route to the oasis of Air before the fourteenth century, and there have infused into the local Berber stock a strong Negro strain.1179 Among the nomads of Central Asia, one wave of race movement has so often followed and overtaken another, that it has produced a confused blending of breeds. The mixtures are so numerous that pure types are exceptional,1180 and the exclusiveness of the desert Semites disappears.