QUOTE : Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had settled on the Lower East Side of New York City after arriving at Ellis Island in the Upper New York Bay. Between 1881 and 1914, more than 2 million Jews—one third of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe—came to the United States in flight from poverty and persecution. At this point in America’s racial history, the Jewish immigrants were not considered white. To the contrary, as medical historian Sander Gilman notes, the “general consensus of the ethnological literature of the late nineteenth century was that the Jews were ‘black’ or, at least, ‘swarthy.’ ”27 One anthropologist of the period explained the “predominant mouth of some Jews being the result of the presence of black blood.” Most Americans viewed Jews as a biologically inferior race stricken by a host of hereditary diseases that resulted from “inbreeding” and “racial incest.”28 Tay-Sachs disease was highlighted as a racial illness demonstrating that Jews were innately degenerate. Jews were susceptible to developing Tay-Sachs, known as a “Hebraic debility,” because, according to Dr. Isador Coriat, “the Jew possesses certain racial characteristics of organic inferiority through which he differs from the non-Jew.”29 The inferior organ Coriat meant was the Jewish brain.