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Egyptologist and eugenicist Flinders Petrie wanted Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany to settle in Britain. Why?

In September 1934, the archaeologist Sir W.M. Flinders Petrie wrote a letter to The Times on ‘The Jews’ (Petrie, Reference Petrie1934). Citing his ongoing excavations in British Mandate Gaza, he described the racial history of the Jews as one of a ‘mixture’ of peoples of the ancient world, whose physical characteristics varied, some ‘aquiline fair … with blue eyes’, some ‘short, with course features and thick hair’. He concluded that ‘there is thus no Jewish race except as a religious confederacy.’ As such, ‘they resemble the English in being distinguished by qualities which have been naturally selected from a variety of sources. Both Jews and Englishmen are examples of the adaptable advantages of a mixed ancestry, and “pure races” have little chance against their intrusion.’ This racial history lesson was a pointed one with reference to the German Nazi party, who were gearing up to pass the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws in 1935. Discrimination against Jewish people as a race would soon be part of the German legislative system.

In January Reference Petrie1939, Petrie again wrote to a newspaper to shed historical light on contemporary politics, this time to The Palestine Post, the English-language newspaper of British Mandate Palestine, where Petrie had been continuously excavating since 1926, and primarily resident since 1933. In the years since Petrie scoffed at the notion of a Jewish race, the situation facing German and Austrian Jews had deteriorated significantly. This time, Petrie was more direct about the contemporary relevance of ancient history, touting the ‘Benefits of Migration’ for Britain of persecuted Germans (Jewish and non-Jewish), outlining the positive contribution to Britain from generations of foreign migrants, such as the Romans, Huguenots and, more recently, German figures, citing by name the wealthy German Jewish industrialist Ludwig Mond. ‘The dogged perseverance of the English has proved a firm basis – as it were a stem on which there have been repeated graftings’; his message was unambiguous: ‘Foreign migration has been the making of Britain.’ He concluded by noting that ‘tolerance’ was the ‘most needful quality for the present time, in all countries’ (Petrie, Reference Petrie1939).

Petrie, one of the most significant figures in developing ‘scientific’ Egyptian archaeology, was a notorious eugenicist and racist who advocated against measures to decrease infant mortality among the British poor, moved human remains of thousands of individuals out of Egypt en masse, collected skulls for anthropometric measurement, and took photographs of Egyptian labourers without their consent to assist his colleagues at UCL, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson in developing the field of eugenics (Challis, Reference Challis2013, Reference Challis and Stevenson2015, Reference Challis2016; Matić, Reference Matić2018; Ramsey, Reference Ramsey2004; Sheppard, Reference Sheppard2006, Reference Sheppard2010). He first took a crucial step towards combining Egyptology with racial science and eugenics when the British Association for the Advancement of Science funded him to photograph and make casts of from ancient Egyptian monuments of the faces of Egyptians and their enemies in battle in order to create racial typologies. In fact, the amount of money given was small, so the independently wealthy Galton effectively bankrolled Petrie’s freelance expedition. Today, there are few copies of Petrie’s resulting Racial Photographs from the Ancient Egyptian Pictures and Sculptures (Petrie, Reference Petrie1887) and even fewer of the casts he made and exhibited (at what would become the Manchester Museum and the South Kensington Museum) and sold (Challis, Reference Challis2013, pp. 103–106). However, this rarity belies the impact and influence of these imposed racial typologies from ancient Egypt on Egyptological thought from the 1880s onwards.

Petrie’s archaeological practice in Egypt also reflected his racial and imperial beliefs. Edward Said (Reference Said1979, pp. 79–80) quotes Petrie as writing that the Arab inhabitants he encountered while digging in Palestine were: ‘as disgustingly incapable as most other savages, and no more worth romancing about than Red Indians or Maoris’ (citing Rosen, Reference Rosen1976, pp. 18–21). This quotation from Petrie appears to stem from his earlier excavation in 1890–1891 in Tell el Hesy, where he struggled with the workforce and the (lack of) authority of the Ottoman government. Petrie’s archaeological work in Egypt and Palestine took place in a system of deeply unequal labour relations between foreign archaeologists and local workers. This inequality was valorised and naturalised by Petrie and his associates, as we see in an 1895 watercolour by Henry Wallis, honorary secretary for the Society for the Preservation of the Monuments of Ancient Egypt, depicting Petrie on excavation at Thebes (Figure 1). Surrounded by partially clothed Egyptian workers who present objects for his expert gaze, Stephen Quirke points out that it is ‘an abstracted power of European knowledge, triumphant in a land that is unable, according to imperialism, to rule itself’ (Quirke, Reference Quirke2010, p. 25).

Figure 1.

Henry Wallis, Excavating in Egypt: Professor Petrie at Thebes (1895), UCL EDC2674.

Yet as these two 1930s newspaper letters reveal, imperialist and eugenicist Petrie also opposed Nazi advocacy for the supremacy of ‘pure races’ (a position contemporary readers will likely sympathise with) – but on the grounds that mixing of the ‘right’ races was more eugenic. In his 1939 letter, at a time when British immigration policy did very little to help refugees from Nazism, Petrie advocated for migration and urged Britain to show ‘tolerance’ to racialised refugees – but through arguments grounded in race science and logic that privileged the ‘right sort’ of potential migrants, and while enmeshed within a British Mandate administration governing Palestinian Arab subjects he regarded as ‘savages’.

Today, race science is often popularly understood primarily as a practice that sought to delineate separate and pure races, contributing thereby to a politics of racial separation and, inevitably, hierarchy. Petrie’s scholarly work on and popular advocacy for the benefits of (controlled) racial mixing show that this was not the only direction that race science, and its frequent ally, eugenics, could lead. Indeed, British historians and archaeologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were far more likely to see migration and mixture as the driving forces of historical change, forces which could be positively harnessed for political ends in their own time. Recognising this complicates a story we often tell ourselves about race science and eugenics, in which these modes of thought reached horrific conclusions in the Nazi Holocaust and, across the sea, in the anti-Black White Supremacist segregation politics of the United States. These are often portrayed as the logical endpoint of eugenic theories, the terrible results that prove the evil of the theory. Yet such a narrow understanding of how race science has constructed the world will inevitably blind us to the pernicious persistence of its frameworks in popular discourses about migration and culture today (see Das, Reference Dasn.d.; Saini, Reference Saini2019). Advocating for some forms of inward migration or ‘race mixing’ was not and is not incompatible with allegiance to racist hierarchies and the discredited notion of biological racial difference. We must reckon with the fact that even when Petrie had what we might now call ‘good takes’, these nonetheless emerged from the same pernicious logics of race science and eugenics as the rest of his work.

This article first establishes the centrality of racial determinism as an analytic category for Petrie’s archaeological work, in part because he saw himself as much an anthropologist as an archaeologist, whose views accorded with those of many members of the Royal Anthropological Institute in the 1900s. With a case study of his racially deterministic analysis of the ‘Semitic’ character of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, we will then consider where his work fits within wider scholarly theories about migration and the mixed race of various peoples, particularly Jews. We will explore how Petrie’s letters about Jews and Jewish refugees reflected his status as a celebrity intellectual, Mandate Palestine’s most prominent archaeologist, and a supporter of British imperial power. Finally, we conclude by noting how these discourses in the interwar period reveal a logic that persists in political and media discourse around migration today.

1. Petrie as a race scientist: archaeology and anthropology

At the bottom of the first staircase in the unassuming town house on Tavistock Street, which is the home of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, is a wooden plaque with gold lettering. It records all recipients of the Huxley Memorial Medal and the givers of the annual Huxley Memorial lecture. Begun in 1900 in memory of Darwin’s so-called ‘bulldog’, biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, this annual lecture is the highest honour at the disposal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, awarded by ballot of the Council. In 1906, Flinders Petrie delivered the annual Huxley lecture. The previous year, John Beddoe was awarded the medal for his work, among other areas, on defining the origins of English people by hair, skin tone, and eye colour (his lecture title: ‘Colour and race’). Beddoe’s (Reference Beddoe1885) book, Races of Britain, was one of a number of works that had ushered in a more racially determinist intellectualism, based on the presumed superiority of some European races and ideas about racial inheritance. Francis Galton, who coined the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883, was awarded the medal in 1901 (his lecture: ‘The possible improvement of the human breed under existing conditions of law and sentiment’); his ‘disciple’ and friend and colleague of Petrie at UCL, Karl Pearson won in 1903 (‘On the inheritance in man of mental and moral characters, and its relation to the inheritance of physical characters’). Arguably, this prize and lecture cemented Petrie’s position as a celebrity intellectual and archaeologist in a lineage of thinkers focused on questions of race. It was also the start of his public activity in socially conservative politics.

Petrie was well positioned to receive the Huxley Medal, given his work on race in ancient Egypt and his eugenic ideas – he had himself been a protégé of Galton. For his lecture, Petrie spoke on ‘Migrations’, by which he meant racial migrations across Europe and western Asia. Petrie referred to portraits or faces on monuments and other places as evidence for migration and racial mixing. He provided cranial measurements against a diagram of ‘low’ and ‘high’ racial groups as evidence; the racial hierarchy of Aborigines and Black Africans at the lower end and the ‘white’ races of the Libyans or Amorites at the upper end were assumed. In the first part of the lecture, Petrie concentrated on racial changes in Egypt over 10,000 years. He argued that early man or ‘Bushmen’, whose portraits were seen in cave paintings, were exterminated by an invading race that was connected to Libyans and the (in his words) Semitic Amorites. This race mixed with others before being taken over by an incoming race that became the dynastic race of Egypt, whose face is ‘wholly different from all the other types’ (Petrie, Reference Petrie1906, p. 12). In essence, Petrie argued that the 10,000 years of Egyptian history were marked by invading races who subjugated other races, followed by racial mixing, which Petrie considered useful, provided the right elements were fused.

The second part of Petrie’s lecture detailed racial movements across Europe from the time of the Roman Empire, which Petrie argued would not have declined if the Romans had mixed racially with the invading Goths, up to the ninth century AD. He finished the main part of his lecture with a look at the ‘meaning of migrations’ and the problems caused by them, which he summed up with one word: ‘Weeding’ (Petrie, Reference Petrie1906, p. 32). By this, he meant allowing those who were not ‘fit’ and potentially detrimental to a sturdy race to die, or not to breed. Effectively, in Britain at that time, this meant not supporting recipients of welfare benefits or tackling many of the causes of infant mortality amongst the poorest people, and separating unfit men and women from each other, as he explicitly outlined the following year in his book Janus in Modern Life (Reference Petrie1907). Already in the first decade of the century, Petrie had not only developed an understanding of history based on migration and the interbreeding of races but was also advocating that the lessons of history could be applied to shaping contemporary society. Petrie was not against immigration, as defined in the 1905 Aliens Act (the legislation that placed the first restrictions on modern immigration into Britain), if the migrants were industrious and of the right ‘type’, which could be defined by race and face.

Petrie’s Egyptology combined ‘some tenets of diffusionism’ – the idea that Egypt was the ‘cradle of civilization’ and exported its technological advances across the world by intermittent contact with other ‘races’ globally – with the ‘diffusion of cultural traits into Egypt from outside influences’ (Sheppard, Reference Sheppard and Challis2013, p. 227). In his book, The Making of Egypt, published in 1939, written at the same time as his letter to The Palestine Post, Petrie argued that the ‘assimilation of immigrants’ and/or ‘an adoption of foreign ideas’ assisted the growth of civilisation in Egypt, as well as in England (Petrie, Reference Petrie1939, p. 9). His use of elements of diffusionism was influenced by his long-term colleague (and former student) Margaret Murray as well as by Grafton Elliot Smith, also a colleague at UCL with whom he had a bitter feud (Challis, Reference Challis2013, pp. 178–179).

From the moment that he produced his 1887 series of Racial Photographs from the Ancient Egyptian Pictures and Sculptures (Figure 2), Petrie had persistent (and contradictory) interests in both the existence of visually and culturally recognisable races, whose distinctive characteristics, he argued, explained all civilisational development, and in making repeated ‘discoveries’ of mixtures in culture, bodies, and civilisations. Petrie’s early and influential analysis of the Pharaoh Akhenaten demonstrates how his visual methodology worked, with analysis of art as a true record of parentage allowing him to ‘see’ ‘Semitism’ in a face.

Figure 2.

A page from Petrie’s Racial Photographs (1887), interpreting Egyptian art as representations of ‘races’. Public domain.

2. Visual theories of race: Akhenaten’s ‘death mask’

Akhenaten reigned during Dynasty 18 of the New Kingdom (c. 1351–1334 BCE), when it was one of a club of powerful ‘great kingdoms’ in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and North Africa, with imperial holdings in the Levant. The son of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye, he was called Amenhotep IV at his coronation, but changed his name to Akhenaten in the sixth year of his reign. That same year, he created a new city as a royal residence, dedicating it to the sun-god Aten, today known as Tell el-Amarna. This act has been interpreted in scholarship from the late nineteenth century onwards as a significant, unique, and even pivotal event in the history of human civilisation: Akhenaten was the so-called ‘heretic pharaoh’ whose reign had ushered in an artistic and religious reformation with the worship of one deity. As Dominic Montserrat (Reference Montserrat2000, p. 36) points out, the epithets ‘heretic’ and ‘reformation’ belong to the historical traditions of writing European history rather than any accurate account of the complex interplay between politics, kingship, and religion that occurred in ancient Egypt.

Petrie’s excavations at Tell el-Amarna followed the discovery in 1887 of diplomatic and other correspondence on clay tablets dating from the period of Akhenaten and shortly before his reign. The archive mainly consists of ‘letters received’ from vassal states in the Levant, mostly from today’s Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, though diplomatic correspondence with other major powers from kingdoms in present-day Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Cyprus was also represented. In The Races of the Old Testament (Reference Sayce1891, p. 100), A. H. Sayce, philologist and President of the Society for Biblical Archaeology, described the importance of this ‘remarkable discovery’ for understanding the court of the kings of Dynasty 18 in Egypt, who had conquered the area known as Canaan and come into contact with kingdoms in western Asia. Sayce argued that these letters showed intermarriage with the royal family of Mitanni, from an area that would today be Syria or southeastern Turkey, and the appointment of ‘Semites from Palestine and Syria’ into high office in Egypt. He drew on the faces shown in Petrie’s ‘racial photographs’ from Egypt as evidence, and found in ancient depictions of Israelites in Egyptian and Assyrian art ‘features which mark the typical Jew of to-day’ (p. 77).

Petrie’s excavations at the site of Tell el-Amarna aroused great interest, and the results were displayed in an exhibition in Oxford Circus from September to October 1892. The artistry of the objects displayed particularly struck reviewers. The Times described a fragment of a head ‘consisting of the nose, one side of the face and the lips’, as ‘fit to be compared with the best Greek work’ (‘Mr Flinders Petrie’s excavations’, 1892). This writer saw this sculptural fragment in terms of artistic achievement, but it was also taken by Petrie, as it had been by Sayce, as a clue about race and parentage. Petrie contended that Akhenaten’s bloodline and his ethical character traits were closely linked to his racial Semitic identity from his maternal line, which could be seen in his face. Petrie argued that Akhenaten’s ‘artistic revolution’ was matched to a revolution in religion and ethics with the worship of one god, the sun disk Aten. He described Akhenaten as an original thinker whose revolutionary philosophy was due to his familial link with the peoples of West Asia through his maternal inheritance as the child of diplomatic marriage with a ‘Semitic’ princess (Petrie, Reference Petrie1894, pp. 40–41).

Figure 3.

Akhenaten’s ‘Death Mask’, frontispiece for Petrie’s Amarna excavations publication (1894). Public domain.

Finally, portraits were records not just of artistic innovation and racial inheritance, but also of individual character. He finished his excavation report on Tell El-Amarna with a meditation on Akhenaten’s so-called death mask (Figure 3):

Defining Akhenaten’s parentage was important for understanding such a profound visionary since Petrie believed that certain races had a predilection towards higher thinking and the civilised arts. This definition would have a long legacy on modern receptions of Akhenaten and his reign, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. One of Petrie’s former students, Arthur Weigall, became Inspector General of Antiquities of Upper Egypt and a writer of popular historical biographies between his official duties in Egypt. Weigall’s biography, Life and Times of Akhnaton (Reference Weigall1910), was a highly sentimentalised portrait, more akin to a novel than a historical biography, and told the story of Akhenaten as a gentle pacifist who lost an empire but gained his soul (Hankey, Reference Hankey2001, p. 119). The book went through several editions. Part of its appeal lay in the fact that it was also heavily illustrated with objects found at Amarna, from Petrie’s excavations and later German excavations, many of which were in the Cairo Museum. Weigall argued that Akhenaten was half Syrian with ‘much foreign blood in his veins’ and that Akhenaten’s powerful character could be seen in his face. The ‘death mask’ was reprinted as evidence for Akhenaten’s ‘foreign blood and parentage’ with this fanciful description:

In late 1922, a new edition of Weigall’s Life was published due to the Egypt Exploration Society excavations that began at Amarna in 1921 and concluded in 1936. These excavations were regularly featured in the Illustrated London News, where the close historical connections between Amarna and Tutankhamen were stressed. The Life and Times of Akhnaton was published just before the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb and sold 700 copies by December 1922 (Hankey, Reference Hankey2001, p. 259), its popularity fuelled through 1923 by ‘King Tut’ mania. Weigall updated the 1910 edition with reference to material excavated from Amarna by the German Archaeological School between 1907 and 1913, including the now infamous bust of Nefertiti held in Berlin’s Neues Museum. The bust was not put on public display in Berlin until 1923, but had been discovered in 1912. Weigall (Reference Weigall1922, p. 91) described the ‘unpublished head in Berlin’ as ‘that of a strange, dreamy, heavy-eyed girl’.

In both editions, Weigall devoted a chapter to the ‘Great Hymn to Aten’, which is a poem to the sun-god Aten, who replaced the traditional Egyptian gods during Akhenaten’s reign. Inscribed in hieroglyphs on columns of the Amarna tomb of the courtier Ay, it is traditionally ascribed to Akhenaten himself. Weigall compared the hymn to nineteenth-century Romantic nature poetry and the Old Testament Psalms, using the hymn as evidence of Akhenaten’s religious expression and of his spiritual connection to ancient Judaism and Christ. In his doctoral thesis completed in Germany in the 1890s, and then in popular books, the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted (Reference Breasted1894) compared it to the biblical Psalm 104, and also promoted the idea of Akhenaten as a moral visionary (Breasted, Reference Breasted1912, Reference Breasted1933; Miller, Reference Miller2024, pp. 246–250).

Sigmund Freud, renowned for his interest in antiquity and collection of objects from Egypt, Greece, and Rome, both countered and reinforced these ideas. Akhenaten took centre stage in Moses and Monotheism (Reference Freud1939), in which Freud, citing Breasted, rewrote Moses as an Egyptian who took the main elements of Judaism, notably monotheism, from Akhenaten and his new religion (Schorske, Reference Schorske1999). Freud argued that ‘if Moses was an Egyptian and if he communicated his own religion to the Jews, it must have been Akhenaten’s, the Aten religion’ (Freud, Reference Freud1939, p. 24). At a time of virulent antisemitism across Europe, Freud claimed that the Jewish people carried on the traditions of culture and ethics from Akhenaten through Moses, really an Egyptian Atenist priest. Freud was a refugee in London at the time of writing, having fled Nazi-occupied Vienna; like Petrie’s letters about ancient migrations, his last work cannot be understood in its full significance without this context (Pinkas, Reference Pinkas2025). His rewriting of Jewish parentage was also, however, not uncontroversial among Jewish receivers, for, as Robert Lippman puts it (Lippman, Reference Lippman2001, p. 20), his theory ‘would deprive the children of Moses of the Law, of Judaism itself’ – even if it also awarded them the inheritance of a great pharaoh.

Arguably, Akhenaten’s ‘death mask’, from which Petrie read so much, has been replaced as icon of the Amarna age by Nefertiti’s bust: both offering the illusion of gazing into the face of a real person from the past. The death mask lies in a drawer in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL: it was unable to be put it on display in a 2016 exhibition on Amarna and Akhenaten there due to its poor condition. Yet, many recent creative re-imaginings of Akhenaten draw on ideas from the 1890s through the 1930s. In 1983, Philip Glass used Akhenaten to explore religious identity and artistic expression in Akhnaten, the last in a trilogy of operas exploring large themes through historical figures. Glass was influenced to create this opera by the ‘partially told story revealed in the exhibition cases of modern museums’ (Goldman, Reference Goldman2016, ‘In Conversation’). He also incorporated Psalm 104, as sung in Hebrew by the chorus in Akhenaten’s ‘Great Hymn to the Aten’, and his co-librettist, Shalom Goldman, drew on ancient Hebrew texts and modern constructions around Jewish Identity. It is crucial to unpack the stories and myths created in modern museums, particularly those around race, as they have a significant (and sometimes creative) impact on society.

3. Migration and race in history

As the above demonstrates, race was an important category for analysing historical figures for many thinkers in the early twentieth century. Petrie was not alone in assigning racial migrations a primary role as a force of change in history (Tevebring & Vollgraff, Reference Tevebring and Vollgraffforthcoming; Manias, Reference Manias2013, pp. 16–17). As Felix Wiedemann (Reference Wiedemann2020b) argues, in the nineteenth century, migration came to be understood across Europe in disciplines like archaeology, ancient history, and other fields studying the ancient world as the vital force in human history. Wiedemann delineates different narratives that emerged in scholarship about migration, including stories about civilisations brought by migrating founder races, civilisations destroyed by invasive migrations, and finally a widely held historical narrative of racial mixture through migration as the very mechanism by which ‘civilisation’ arose.

This understanding of history also came to play a role in some European nationalisms, most notably in Britain, where ‘not astonishingly, British writers identified similarities between the supposed mixed origins of their own nation and those of other empires in history’ (Wiedemann, Reference Wiedemann2020b, p. 57). In the 1930s, Petrie’s claim that the English were characterised by repeated graftings onto their ‘stem’ was shared by various scholarly luminaries of widely varying politics (Clark, Reference Clark1966; Cook, Reference Cook2014; Manias, Reference Manias2012). The liberal evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, a proponent of both international cooperation and eugenics, and the evolutionary anthropologist A. C. Haddon, in Reference Huxley and Haddon1935’s We Europeans, argued that the mixed nature of the British, and the peoples of the European continent, carried an imperative to avoid intra-family conflict. Meanwhile, the Marxist archaeologist of European prehistory V. Gordon Childe, in many respects the anti-Petrie, nonetheless shared Petrie’s obsession with migration as the force of history – and, like Petrie, compared Jews and Englishmen as similar mixed groups. In an October Reference Childe1933 article aimed in part at debunking what he regarded as Nazi pseudoscience, he identified them as parallel examples of ‘a people’ containing various racial strata within them. Of Jews, he noted:

The three ‘stocks’ he identified were drawn from a comparison of living people to ancient art, borrowing both the methodology and the types from Petrie’s (Reference Petrie1887) earlier work on racial types in Egyptian monuments.

While these were all scholars who saw histories of migration as a tool to counter Nazi ideology, Wiedemann (Reference Wiedemann2020b, p. 58) stresses that the widely held belief in racial mixing as the seed of civilisation in much nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship should not be confused with postmodern or postcolonial emphases on the positive benefits of difference and diversity. If race was real and essential, as Petrie believed, then not all mixtures were equal, and a mixture left unchecked was as likely to go wrong as right, as he argued in his Huxley Lecture. Thus, while these narratives countered the importance of race purity, they credited the migrations and mixings of peoples with the power to create civilisations or bring down empires. Naturally, this understanding of human history freighted contemporary migration and refugee movements with significant import. It is easy to see how eugenic guidance and related immigration restrictions and incentives – ‘weeding’, as Petrie put it – could be promoted as necessary to obtain the fruitful mixtures upon which civilisation is built, and limit destructive and ‘dysgenic’ potential.

Theories of ancient migration contain a central paradox that race scientists and historians could never satisfactorily resolve: if history was hopelessly mixed from the earliest moments of prehistory, how could it still be described through discrete and identifiable peoples with their own characteristics? Somehow, ‘Hittites’ were still distinct from ‘Libyans’, ‘Sumerians’ innately artistic and gentle, ‘Semites’ warlike (or spiritual, or cowardly, depending on the scholar’s opinions on contemporary ‘Semites’). The entire model presumed mixtures of utterly distinct, self-evident types, like separate colours of ink marbled over paper, with their individual qualities nonetheless still discernible. Some German scholarship designated such peoples as ‘Urrassen’, ‘original races’ (see Wiedemann, Reference Wiedemann2020a, p. 195). But why and how these original races had formed as discrete entities only to suddenly become part of a repeated, ongoing historical process of mixture and movement was difficult to explain.

Petrie closed his Reference Petrie1911 magnum opus on the history of ancient civilisation, Revolutions of Civilisation, with an unexpected prognosis for the future of mankind. Petrie wondered, rhetorically, whether perhaps ‘the mixture of race going on in many countries at present will tend to fuse the whole world, owing to the ease of communication which has never existed before. In a few centuries, will not the people of every country be blended, and be alike?’. Drawing on much earlier conceptions of race as not merely the inheritance of biological material but also the influence of environment, he suggested that climate and economic conditions would prevent a full homogenisation. Indulging his utopian dreams, he dared to imagine a future in which processes that had previously happened by chance might be guided:

4. The mixed race of jews

If the ‘source of every civilisation has lain in race mixture’, Jews were not unique as a mixed confederacy or, as Petrie put it in his 1934 letter, ‘no true race’. Petrie’s views on Jewish race were also not unique to him. The notion of Jews as an inherently mixed race also has a prominent history across highly politically divergent strands of race science, with Petrie’s (Reference Petrie1887) early research on racial types in Egyptian art a key component through which other scholars constructed the notion of Jews as a mixed group.

An influential version of this theory was derived from the German anthropologist–archaeologist Felix von Luschan (Reference von Luschan1892, Reference von Luschan1894, Reference von Luschan1905). Like Petrie, von Luschan pursued knowledge of the ancient past and contemporary ethnological research together through travel in the Ottoman Empire. Although von Luschan, like Petrie, sought to apply a visual diagnostic gaze to the body and to art, unlike Petrie, he was sceptical of the value of race as an explanation for history and civilisation. He participated in the 1911 antiracist Universal Congress of Races in London, in which speakers and attendees included the Black American activist W. E. B. Du Bois, the Jewish German-American founder of cultural anthropology Franz Boas, the Native American activist Charles Eastman, and non-presenting delegates from Mohandas Gandhi to Jane Addams to H. G. Wells (see Smith, Reference Smith2002). The anthropologists who participated in this congress reached consensus that, as Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1911, pp. 402–403) wrote, ‘there were no “pure” races and that modern peoples were all more or less mixt’. (Though, Du Bois noted, they also agreed that ‘while many of these mixtures were obviously beneficial, it was not clear whether all racial mixtures would be.’) Petrie later entered into correspondence with Du Bois in a letter in which he repeated many of his views on Egyptian Arabs, to which Du Bois replied fiercely rebutting these ideas. Du Bois published these letters in The Crisis magazine under the title ‘Self Righteous Europe and the World: Correspondence between W. E. B. Du Bois and W. M. Flinders Petrie’ (Petrie & Du Bois, Reference Du Bois and Petrie1912, pp. 34–37; see Davies, Reference Davies2019). In his first letter, Petrie – among many racist assumptions – argues for the right kind of mixing in the United States to solve the ‘colour problem’ and for land to be free to all to encourage the industrious races, such as Russian Jews, to succeed.

While von Luschan is often remembered in postwar historiography as a figure of liberal, enlightened science, lauded for his defense of Jews and his commitment to antiracist efforts, he was also, like Petrie, a committed eugenicist. And while he wrote against antisemitism in German society, his theories relied on unexamined assumptions about the reality of race and our ability to discern it, both through the physical body and, crucially – just as in Petrie’s methodology – through ancient art. Thus, speaking in 1892, von Luschan cited Petrie’s (Reference Petrie1887) previous analysis of ancient Egyptian depictions of ‘racial types’ (Challis, Reference Challis2013, pp. 85–106) to argue that Jews incorporated elements of the ancient Anatolian-dwelling Hittites, the ‘Aryan’ Amorites, and Semites. Von Luschan bolstered his argument for Hittite survivals in the modern Jews through a striking act of racial syllogism: he displayed a photograph he had taken in 1883 in eastern Turkey of an Armenian Christian man whose prominent, hooked nose, he claimed, was immediately recognisable in the 3000-year-old art of the Hittites recently uncovered during German excavations at Zincirli in central Turkey. The image of this contemporary Armenian man was taken to demonstrate that a Jewish type of face and Judennase (Jewish nose), presumed to be well-known and easily recognised by his contemporaries (even when on a Christian Armenian body), was really Hittite.

Amos Morris-Reich (Reference Morris-Reich2013) has traced the reuse of this same Armenian Christian man’s photograph and the convoluted racial diagnoses von Luschan attached to it through three subsequent works in which it is also used to illustrate Jews’ mixed racial nature, by the Jewish-American anthropologist and eugenicist Maurice Fishberg, the liberal German-Jewish scientist Sigmund Feist, and the leading intellectual of Nazi race science, Hans F. K. Günther. Although Morris-Reich acknowledges this only in a footnote, the same image was also used for this purpose by Petrie’s Egyptological colleague in the United States, James Henry Breasted, in his Reference Breasted1916 popular school textbook Ancient Times (Figure 4). Breasted had to persuade his publishers that Jewish readers would not take offense at the passage on the Hittite nature of their noses (Abt, Reference Abt2012, pp. 197–198). He was correct: the claim was well-received in Jewish press reviews of the book (p. 202). In 1917, when Breasted visited the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation, the sponsors of his Oriental Institute at Chicago, he was delighted when one of his hosts told him that Abraham Flexner, the only Jewish Rockefeller lieutenant, had a new riposte to his colleagues’ (antisemitic) office banter: whenever they told a ‘good Jews story’, ‘Flexner side-stepped and said he was a Hittite!’ (10.4.1917 James Henry Breasted to Frances Breasted, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum Archives, University of Chicago).

Figure 4.

James Henry Breasted repackaging images and ideas from W. M. Flinders Petrie and Felix von Luschan in his Ancient Times (Reference Breasted1916, p. 240). Public domain.

Figure 4 Long description

Detail from an academic text of 1916 featuring a line drawing of a detail from an Egyptian sculpture of a face in profile, next to a line drawing of a photo-realistic man’s face in profile with his striped robes and inner clothing visible and receding, chin-length hair. The caption below it identifies it as ‘146. An Ancient Hittite and His Modern Armenian Descendant’. In full, it reads: ‘At the left is the head of an ancient Hittite as carved by an Egyptian sculptor on the wall of a temple at Thebes, Egypt, over three thousand years ago. It strikingly resembles the profile of the Armenians still living in the Hittite country, as shown in the modern portrait on the right. The strongly aquiline and prominent nose of the Hittites was also characteristic of the neighboring Semites along the eastern end of the Mediterranean, including the Canaanites (see headpiece p. 197).’

Morris-Reich’s study shows that the political import of an alleged Hittite survival in contemporary Jews, and the wider notion of a mixed Jewish race, was highly contingent. For the liberal von Luschan, this was an illustration of how Jews were, like all European peoples, a mixture; this supported von Luschan’s larger conception of the unity of humankind and the social construction of race (albeit a construction his own work naturalised and reinforced). Von Luschan’s original claim also more specifically suggested familial kinship with the same set of mixtures that made up Gentile Germans – the Amorites and later the Hittites being understood by most scholars as ‘Indo-European’, ‘Aryan’, or in some way adjacent to these categories, a racial identification that was strengthened for the Hittites in 1916 when the Hittite language was proved to be Indo-European (see Efron, Reference Efron1994, pp. 86–90). This idea appealed to a range of von Luschan’s German Jewish colleagues, from the left-wing eugenicist Arthur Ploetz, who celebrated the discovery that Jews were largely Aryan (Hirsch, Reference Hirsch2009, p. 598; Mosse, Reference Mosse1978, pp. 80–82), to the Zionist sociologist Arthur Ruppin, who, as a professor at Hebrew University in British Mandate-era Jerusalem, claimed that Ashkenazi Jews were really Aryans, not Semites (Bloom, Reference Bloom2011, pp. 87–89).

The idea that Jewish ‘race’ was really a phantom might offer the possibility of assimilation either into the great imperial powers of the ancient world (Jews are really Hittites or Egyptians) or into the national bodies of contemporary nation states (see Hart, Reference Hart1999). This might have seemed to many Jewish readers like science offering them a more than adequate compensation for giving up their traditional role as the unique biblical Chosen People.

But for the Nazi race theorist Günther and other professional antisemites like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Jewish mixedness instead suggested the uniquely dangerous ‘mongrel’ nature of Jews, aliens defined against an alleged European racial purity (Morris-Reich, Reference Morris-Reich2013, pp. 165–170; Efron, Reference Efron1994, pp. 13–32). While the idea of a mixed Jewish race might seem unremarkable given the popularity of academic theories in which all civilisation was shaped by repeated inter-racial mixing, the question of mixed Jewish race was clearly significantly more politically sensitive than the allegedly mixed nature of the English or other European national groups. Unlike Jews, Englishmen were not a racialised minority widely perceived as ‘others’ within the native body of Western nations.

As Petrie made clear in his letters of the 1930s, he regarded Jews’ mixedness positively – not least because of how it made Jews like Englishmen, the highest compliment an English gentleman could pay. Petrie’s race-inflected reading of the course of human history suggested that Nazi racial politics were, above all, foolish and would serve Germany ill in competition with the hardy British, especially if those British were ready to welcome clever German refugees to their number.

5. Petrie as celebrity philosemite

By the 1920s–1930s, Petrie was both the grand dean of British archaeology and Egyptology and a veritable celebrity at a time when archaeology was an extremely popular subject among the British public (Maloigne, Reference Maloigne2023; Thornton, Reference Thornton2018). Petrie was skilled at manipulating press attention and had a long-standing taste for pronouncing on issues of public concern (not least on eugenics) (Challis, Reference Challis2013, pp. 187–204). His letters to The Times and The Palestine Post were printed as communiques from a famous public intellectual.

Petrie’s initial arguments against Nazi racial ideas were, unsurprisingly, well received by the Jewish community around the world, for whom Petrie represented an independent expert speaking with all the authority of history and science. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency circulated the claims from his 1934 Times letter under the headline ‘No “Jewish Race” Says Archaeologist’. They called Petrie a ‘renowned archaeologist’ and ‘noted scientist’ and described his letter as ‘an analysis of Nazi racial claims and allegations’ (Petrie did not need to explicitly mention the Nazis for readers to know what his letter was about).

Petrie’s archaeological work had long before endeared him to many Jewish readers. Petrie was part of a wider project in Middle Eastern archaeology to substantiate the historical basis of the Hebrew Bible, through allegedly rigorous, sceptical, scientific methods – even if the original motivation for this sceptical attention was motivated by, in Petrie’s case, serious Christian faith (Gange, Reference Gange2006).

In 1922, Petrie gave a named lecture at the Jewish Historical Society, introduced by Sir Philip Sassoon, on ‘The Status of the Jews in Egypt’ (it was ‘fully equal to that of the other important races, native and Greek’, Reference Petrie1922, pp. 39–40). In 1925, he was invited by Walter Rothschild to speak at a meeting of the Maccabeans, a London-based Friendly Society for Jewish gentlemen founded in 1891 and, by this period, officially committed to Jewish colonisation in British Palestine (18.12.1925 Lord Rothschild to W. M. F. Petrie, PMA/WFP1/115/2/2. Flinders Petrie Correspondence, Petrie Museum Archives, UCL). In 1930, a gala dinner at the Savoy honouring 50 years of Petrie’s career was hosted by the politician Henry Mond, Baron Melchett, scion of a wealthy family of Jewish industrialists; Henry was baptised in the Church of England but re-embraced his Jewish roots in adulthood. He and other Mond family members sponsored Zionist settlements in British Palestine and would later also become patrons of Jewish refugees from Nazism in Britain. The guest list for this celebratory dinner represented a remarkable assemblage of the great and good of archaeology, Egyptology, anthropology and politics, as well as the Chief Rabbi of Britain and Herbert Samuel, prominent Liberal Party politician and first Jewish member of the cabinet, who had advocated for the creation of the Balfour Declaration (Dinner Given by Dr. & Mrs. Mond to Celebrate Fifty Years’ Research by Sir Flinders Petrie, List of Guests, 6/DIN/01. Flinders Petrie Correspondence, Petrie Museum Archives, UCL). In 1932, Samuel and Robert Mond, Henry’s brother, were co-founders with Petrie of the ‘Friends of the Palestine Museum’, which sought to collect ‘objects throwing light on the development of the Jewish, Moslem and Christian religious arts, now distributed throughout the world’ (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 1932).

Petrie’s personal dealings with ‘the Jewish community’ in Britain were mostly with elite Anglo-Jewry, many of whom were prominent figures in the strand of British Zionism that proposed working with the British government, at home and in Mandate Palestine (see Barak, Reference Barak2021). In many ways, this form of Zionism dovetailed with Petrie’s own agenda for archaeology in Mandate territories. As Billie Melman has argued (Reference Melman, Crouzet and Miller2025), Mandate-era archaeology in the Middle East formed part of a European rhetoric of colonial ‘development’; digging the past was inseparably linked to modernisation (see also Irving, Reference Irving, Crouzet and Miller2025).

Petrie’s popular promotion of British modernisation efforts in Palestine can be seen in his publicity push for his late-in-life digs in Gaza. A 1933 interview with the 80-year-old Petrie by the Associated Press following his first aeroplane trip, a short hop between Croydon and France, featured him claiming he would take the plane in future to his excavation work in Gaza. Reports of these comments appeared in numerous British papers, and Petrie was quoted in the Nottingham Evening Post (‘Off to Gaza by Air in August’, 1933) explaining that ‘Gaza was the Clapham Junction of the ancient world.’ His excavations, he boasted, had revealed ‘a great mix-up of peoples there that is waiting to be explained’. As Amara Thornton (Reference Thornton2018, p. 102) observes of these puff pieces:

Petrie’s media strategies for promoting his own excavations and expertise also effectively promoted British colonial development abroad.

Today, it is jarring to see Gaza, currently a byword for genocide and ongoing tragedy, in another context: as part of British Mandate territory, a quick day trip from Jerusalem, and open for development and modernisation under British power, perhaps to be restored to its status as another Clapham Junction. While Petrie positioned air travel to Gaza as part of an emerging tourist infrastructure, it should be recognised that in fact air power has formed a very significant element of how first Britain and later Israel has subdued, controlled, and carried out mass violence in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, in technologies that were also developed through early applications in archaeology (Anani, Reference Anani2020; Griswold, Reference Griswold2019; Meskell, Reference Meskell2020). It is especially chilling to look back on this puff piece in light of proposed plans by US President Trump and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for turning Gaza into a ‘development zone’ (BBC News, 2025) – arguably signing off on the final stage of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian peoples laundered through neo-colonial rhetoric of development and technocratic governance.

6. Conclusion: the ‘benefits of migration’ in Britain today

In the postwar period, the notion of Britain as a land shaped by successive waves of migration continued to be promoted by experts and popularisers, some of whom, like Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon, saw this as a mandate for intra-European cooperation. Today this is how British history is still widely popularly conceived, taught in British schools, and represented in the official guide for immigrants planning to the take the ‘Life in the UK’ test in order to earn settlement or naturalisation: as a series of invasions that left their cultural and ethnic mark on the nation, up through the Norman Invasion in 1066, which marks the end of the period of migratory mixture. Thereafter, common narratives presume that ‘the British’ remained mostly unchanged up until the advent of large-scale postwar, postcolonial migration.

In liberal discourses, postwar migration can be connected to Britain’s founding history, understood as a resumption of the same forces that originally shaped the nation, a place that has always been a land of immigrants (Ashcroft & Bevir, Reference Ashcroft, Bevir, Ashcroft and Bevir2019; Meer & Modood, Reference Meer, Modood, Ashcroft and Bevir2019). This narrative can be deployed as a riposte to racist, nativist, or anti-migrant rhetoric. We might think, for instance, of the scholar Mary Beard’s advocacy for recognising the multiethnic nature of Roman Britain to help us ‘re-examine the myths we have about ourselves’ (Hunter, Reference Hunter2017), or the stand-up routine by Stewart Lee in which he imagines nativist discourses about migrants ‘coming over here’ to absurdist ends, ultimately decrying organic life’s first steps out of the ocean (Kirkby, Reference Kirkby2014).

But as Felix Wiedemann (Reference Wiedemann2020b, p. 60) notes, ‘all narratives are fundamentally ambivalent and offer possibilities for constructing counter-narratives.’ Thus, the story of migration as the force that has shaped British culture and people in the past also offers fruitful ground for right-wing and reactionary discourses (Farrell-Banks & Richardson, Reference Farrell-Banks, Richardson, Vaughan, Braune, Tinsley and Mondon2024; Bonacchi et al., Reference Bonacchi, Altaweel and Krzyzanska2018; see Frieman & Hofmann, Reference Frieman and Hofmann2019). Postwar migration can also be narrativised as a redux of past violent invasions, which (if history is our guide) will inevitably transform Britain as a civilisation – and, although this might often be sotto voce, as a ‘race’. As Akala (2018, p. 20) argues, the British government and public discourse have so successfully ‘racialis[ed] British citizenship while pretending not to’, that race does not need to be explicitly evoked for it to play a clear role in how individual immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants, however long in Britain, are widely regarded.

We write this in a period of rising anti-migrant violence and racism in Britain (Shankley & Rhodes, Reference Shankley, Rhodes, Shankley, Byrne, Alexander, Khan and Nazro2020; Venkataramakrishnan, Reference Venkataramakrishnan2025a, Reference Venkataramakrishnan2025b). Some of the most visible targets of this rhetoric are refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, the regions that Petrie identified with the birthplace of human civilisation and excavated under colonial regimes. All around us, the politics of migration are animated by concerns that usually (in respectable spaces) avoid the mention of race, yet nonetheless displace many of the same terms of early twentieth-century race science onto observations about ‘culture’. Hence, Tory MP Katie Lam calling for deportations of legally settled immigrants to create a ‘culturally coherent’ Britain (Elgot, Reference Elgot2025). Hence, the Reform leader Nigel Farage pledging to end paths to citizenship and even permanent residency, and to deport fanciful hundreds of thousands of people (Walsh & McNeil, Reference Walsh and McNeil2025). Hence, Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood floating plans to force migrants, including those who are employed full time in Britain, to do voluntary work in order to ‘contribute to society’ (Malik, Reference Malik2025). Hence, Tory Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, dropping any pretence that race is not at stake, decrying that he had not seen ‘another white face’ during a visit to a Birmingham neighbourhood (Mason, Reference Mason2025). While wider cultural fears of ‘intermarriage’ or ‘dysgenic breeding’ may have become less acceptable to air outside of fringe far-right spaces, they have slipped seamlessly into this rhetoric about cultural ‘incoherence’ or the racially loaded notion of ‘replacement’, which posits races as distinct and exclusive, with one race capable of swallowing another. In recent years, the term ‘remigration’ – a new twist on the old ‘send them home’ slogan deployed against postwar migrants – has moved from fringe far-right sources to increasing social media prominence (Venkataramakrishnan, Reference Venkataramakrishnan2025b), and clearly underlies much of the rhetoric of mainstream politicians cited above. The above examples were compiled before Mahmood released her November 2025 ‘Restoring Order and Control’ white paper on immigration, with proposals for keeping legal migrants and refugees in decades-long limbo, without entitlement to settlement, let alone citizenship (Secretary of State for the Home Department, 2025), while her office floated the possibility of seizing the jewellery of asylum seekers (Walker, Reference Walker2025).

In noting the cruel anti-migrant rhetoric deployed by politicians across the British political spectrum, we must resist the urge to point out how many minority racialised migrants work in the National Health Service or other vital services, as if this noble contribution to beloved public services must justify their presence in a Fortress Britain whose boundaries we should otherwise protect from the consequences of Western colonial and neo-colonial meddling in the Middle East and North Africa and the various succession of crises it has created. This kind of mainstream, liberal rhetoric still positions migration to Britain as a right earned only by providing something useful for an existing British national body – a category from which racialised minorities, whether immigrants or not, can be discursively excluded at a moment’s notice (Akala, 2018; Shukla, Reference Shukla2016). As Musa Okwonga (Reference Okwonga2016, p. 231) writes:

Today’s migration discourse echoes debates that took place in the 1930s, when British policy and many ordinary people were not as welcoming to refugees from the Nazis as Petrie suggested they should be (Sherman, Reference Sherman1973; Snowman, Reference Snowman2004; ‘A Bitter Road’, n.d.). ‘Once it was known that Britain offered sanctuary to all who cared to come, the floodgates would be opened, and we should be inundated by thousands seeking a home’, the Daily Mail opined in 1938, following the Anschluss. ‘It is essential to avoid creating an impression that the door is open to immigrants of all kinds’, the Home Secretary Leslie Hore-Belisha told the Commons in March 1938 (for these, see Sherman, Reference Sherman1973, pp. 93–94). Many Jewish refugees who were accepted to Britain in the 1930s were later interned on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens (Pistol, Reference Pistol2019), and as late as 1945, local Hampstead socialists were still organising marches to protest ‘race hatred’ against refugees whom local agitators were proposing should be forced to cede their housing to ‘natives’ (Warwick Digital Collections 325/43/N45(34)).

Against this sort of explicit racial hatred, an interpretation of history defined by racial mixing and migration, as Petrie offered, might seem preferable to one based on division, purity, and separateness. Yet both versions reify the reality, and the significance, of race – often even when their authors explicitly claim they are doing otherwise. Though Petrie’s racial vision could be a means to promoting an unobjectionable end – accepting refugees from the Nazis – the premises it must instantiate to do so nonetheless perpetuate the phantom power of what is arguably modernity’s most destructive construct. Today, we can glimpse the racial logic constructed by Petrie and fellow interwar archaeologists and anthropologists in contemporary discussions about good and bad migrants, and in the cross-party consensus that the British government should deploy selective immigration policies in pursuit of a ‘coherent’ United Kingdom.