Adolphus Elkin

Elkin was a professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney whose fieldwork and his influential book The Australian Aborigines (1938) pioneered the systematic study of Aboriginal cultures and helped shift Australian policy toward recognising Indigenous rights. His father, Reuben Elkin, came from an English Jewish family, giving him partial (paternal) Jewish ancestry; after his parents' divorce he was raised by his maternal grandparents as an Anglican and was ordained an Anglican clergyman, so he did not practise Judaism.