Elkind, Arkadi Daniilovich
ELKIND, ARKADI DANIILOVICH
ELKIND, ARKADI DANIILOVICH (1869–?), Russian physician and anthropometrist. Elkind was born in Mogilev. After graduating in medicine, he became increasingly involved in the scientific study of anthropometry and craniology. As a result, he was entrusted by the Imperial Society of the Friends of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography with the study of the physical anthropology of Russian Poland. His extended investigations resulted in two important monographs for the society's journal, one an anthropological and cranial sketch of the Vistula Poles, the other Yevrei, a study based mainly on his observations of Polish Jews. The latter, which appeared in 1903, was described by M. *Fishberg as the most comprehensive work ever published on the anthropology of a particular Jewish community. Elkind later pursued his demographic and anthropometric research in Germany and Italy. He came to the conclusion that there was a distinctive Jewish type, especially among the Jews of Russian Poland, which had been crystallized for the most part in the pre-Christian period. He published his findings in Zeitschrift fuer Demographie und Statistik der Juden (nos. 4–5, 1906; no. 12, 1908).
[Ellen Friedman]