17
OTHER JEWISH CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN RACIST
CURRENTS
Racial theories of intelligence were especially
popular in the late 1800's and early twentieth century, ending -- we would
have hoped -- with the Nazis' Master Race abominations in the 1940's. Born
of colonialist and imperialist world-views, respected academics in the western
world -- Jews among them -- spent a lot of time in those decades measuring
brain sizes and skull capacities of different peoples, usually towards putting
themselves on top of the human pyramid.
"Race," notes Michael Marrus,
"... provides Jews with the means to express their sense of a distinct
Jewish identity, a sense which was difficult to achieve in other terms, and
which they themselves were not always ready to admit." [MARRUS, p. 10]
"The Jewish race," wrote, Ben Mosche, a contributor to an 1893 Jewish
Yearbook in France, "is not an ordinary race, let us admit it. It
is endowed with a certain number of diverse characteristics ... which make
it the most noticed and most envied of human families." [MARRUS, p. 18]
Hannah Arendt noted the opinion of Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish prime minister
of Great Britain in the late 19th century, about his
racial heritage:
"[Disraeli] was ready to assert that
the Semitic principle 'represented
all that is spiritual in our nature,' that
the vicissitudes of history find
their main solution -- all in race,' which
is 'the key to history' regardless
of 'language and religion,' for 'there
is only one thing that makes a race
and that is blood' and that there is only
one aristocracy, the aristocracy
of nature 'which consists of 'an unmixed
race of a first-rate
organization.'" [ARENDT, p. 73]
One of the most influential thinkers in
the theory of a criminal typology in physical appearance was an Italian Jew,
Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909). The founder of the "science of criminal
law," Lombroso argued that "degenerate criminality" was expressed
in physical traits (i.e., criminals looked like criminals). For example, in Lombroso's view, the same
kind of ears were to be found in "criminals, savages, and apes."
[MOSSE, G., 1978, p. 83-84] Lombroso
wrote that criminals tend to be irrecoverably "born for evil;" their
"atavism shows us the inefficacy of punishment for born criminals"
and society should "eliminate them completely, even by death." He
also labeled entire groups of handicapped people as criminals and that "almost
every 'born criminal' suffers from epilepsy to some degree." Gypsies as a group were identified by Lombroso
as inherently criminal: "They have the improvidence of the savage and
that of the criminal as well." "The Nazi killers," says Henry
Friedlander, "used the language of Lombroso to target the same victim
groups, including Gypsies and the handicapped. Thus members of the judiciary
considered the killing of convicted criminals if their 'physical shape no
longer deserved to be called human.'" [FRIEDLANDER, p. 3]
Another Jew, Max Nordeau (1849-1923), a
friend of both Lombroso and right hand man for the Zionist leader Theodore
Herzl, was the "real populizer of the concept of degeneration,"
defined by George Mosse as "those who stood against scientific methods
and middle class morality." [MOSSE, p. 84-85] (Nordeau's volume, Degeneration,
was dedicated to Lombroso. Jewish scholar Mosse argues that Lombroso and Nordeau
were not racists, (?) "but their ideas became a staple of racist thought."
[MOSSE, G., 1978, p. 86] Both men's works were appropriated by Nazi
ideology and institutionalized against Jews.
A turn-of-the-century Jewish doctor (and
Zionist), Felix Theilhaber, published arguments that Jewish racial preservation
was rooted in Jewish sexual law and ethics, limitations that maintained procreation
within the expressly Jewish community: "the categorical imperative of
Judaism." [EFRON, p. 147]
In 1907, Eliot Auerbach, a German-Jewish
doctor, argued that a Jewish racial purity orientation was rooted in Jewish
law and that "in the course of their entire racial history it has been
the Jews themselves and not other peoples who have promoted the strongest
resistance to racial mixing." [EFRON, p. 131] "Auerbach's hypothesis,"
says John Efron, "built on the mystical premise that there existed a
Jewish racial instinct whose effectiveness had ensured racial exclusiveness
and therefore Jewish racial purity, was reminiscent of much of the German
Volkisch literature being disseminated by nationalist (and other anti-Semitic)
groups." [EFRON, p. 136] Auerbach even used buzzwords of warlike defiance.
In the contest between German and Jewish nationalism, he said, "it will
be will against will. And the will to live will be more powerful than the
will to go under." [EFRON, p. 136]
Also influenced by the racist ideas in the
air at the time, in 1910 an Austrian Jewish doctor, Ignaz Zollschan, published
a "sensational" volume arguing that "Judaity was based strictly
upon biological criteria." Without the separatist possibilities of future
Zionist nationalism, he argued, Jewry would either dissolve away or, in intermarriages
with non-Jews, face "physical degeneration." [TRAVERSO, p. 30]
The well-known German socialist, Karl Kautsky,
attacked the growing interest of some Jews in racial theories, sarcastically
wondering:
"If this [racist] theory permits Christian-Teutonic
patriots to declare
themselves demi-gods, why should Zionist
patriots not use it in order to
stamp the people chosen by God as a chosen
race of nature, a noble
race that must be carefully guarded from
any deterioration and
contamination by foreign elements?"
[EFRON, p. 124]
In England, another Jewish "racial
scientist," Joseph Jacobs, argued that "brain activity" could
increase brain size and this had evidenced itself in Jews who had to live
by their wits and intelligence amidst persecution by non-Jews during former
centuries. Jacobs therefore argued that the cubic capacity of Jewish skulls
were "larger than that of their neighbors." One of his studies,
for instance, purported to prove that, on the average, Jews have 4% more "brain
ability" than Bretons and 2% more than Scots. [EFRON, p. 86-88]
Third World Hottentots and the like were
routinely dismissed by Gentile racial theorists as brainless bumpkins, but
Jews -- with so much economic and cultural impact in western countries --
were less easily dismissed as brain dead. Even hostile Gentile observers had
little choice but to accord them some degree of respect. A variety of theses
were invented to explain Jewish achievement (by both non-Jews and Jews) in
hereditary terms, often focusing upon presumed "traits" for their
remarkable "parasitic" assimilation in host lands, social Darwinism
where only the smartest Jews survived Gentile hostility to them over the ages,
or a genetic hybridization of centuries-old interbreeding of scholarly elite
within the Jewish community.
Sander Gilman, a Jewish scholar, argued
in 1996 that "the myth of Jewish superior intelligence has its origins
in the age of biological racism. It is part of the discussion of Jews as a
racial category." As Gilman copiously notes, there certainly was a deluge
of academic speculation about the subject, by both Gentile and Jews, for a
number of years, but Gilman -- following
the standard "Jews as consummate victims" scenario -- places the
origin of such myth entirely into Gentile hands in the late 1800's.
It is true that both Nazi-oriented writers and prideful (or worried) Jews
wildly speculated about the relationship between Jewish intelligence and their
social, economic, and cultural achievements, but obsessions with innate "superiority"
and "racial" distinction go back further to seminal Jewish religio-nationalism,
and its tribal founding as the Chosen People.
Mordechai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist
movement in Judaism, suggests that modern Jewish preoccupation with their
self-perceived communal superiority over others really reflects a malaise
of insecurity. He writes that
"To the modern Jew who boasts of the
Jews being the Chosen People,
this belief expresses itself, for the
most part, in scanning every bit of
news from the sport sheets to the financial
columns for success stories
of Jews that might serve to better bolster
up his pride in the sense of
inferiority that his position as a Jew
imposes." [KAPLAN, p. 94]
A Jewish researcher, Miles Storfer, as recently
as 1990 (in his book published by a respected academic publisher, Jossey-Bass)
harkens back to the Chosen People root for Jewish intellectual (and moral)
superiority. His thesis is that "even though human intelligence is primarily
a function of heredity," (STORFER, p. xiv) and that an "exceptionally
large percentage of Jewish people ... score at or near the genius level"
on intelligence tests, [Storfer's emphasis, p. 320] others can get their IQ
scores up a few degrees if they follow the Jewish model for child rearing:
"What an optimistic scenario
this Jewish model offers the human
race! If the child development principles
employed by the Jewish
family can generate such a
multifold increase in the rate of
productive genius, [Storfer's emphasis] then understanding and
utilizing this knowledge for the
betterment of all mankind could
and should be viewed as a golden
opportunity -- not just an
opportunity to develop a future
population of highly intelligent
people but, most importantly, an
opportunity to use these
heightened gifts of intellect to
promote the kinds of achievements
exemplified by the Jewish mission."
[STORFER, p. 330]
Storfer's parochial, chauvinistic, selfish,
messianic, and sometimes racist world view finds common expression in all
realms of Jewish discourse, from the religious to the political. Shalom Carmy, for instance, noted to his 1992
Jewish scholarly audience an apparent in-house truism:
"Honesty, fidelity, modesty, conscience,
courage, altruism, love are
not unknown in the gentile world past
and present. That these qualities
have survived and sometimes even prospered
is largely due to the
insertion of the Jewish people into history."
[CARMY, p. 45]
After indirect Israeli army culpability
was established in the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in
Lebanese refugee camps, Rabbi Walter Wurzberger, former President of the Rabbinical
Council of America, expressed shock, publicly noting that "we [Jews]
are the people who established the standards of morals." [JEWISH WEEK,
10-11-82]
Completely ignoring the self-obsessed and
self-absorbed essences of Jewish tradition and religious law, even a left
wing ideologue like Michael Lerner cannot resist but to gush elitist Jewish
messianism:
"The universalistic dream of
a transformation and healing of
the world, that belief that peace
and justice are not meant for heaven
but are this-worldly necessities
that must be fought for, is the
particularistic cultural and religious tradition of the Jews."
[TIKKUN,
v.1, no. 1]
Meanwhile, one of Lerner's (politically)
ideological opposites, Israeli right-winger Yehuda Etzion, one of the masterminds
behind a 1984 plot to blow up Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock (the third holiest
Muslim shrine in the world) to usher in a planned world war, international
chaos, and Jewish redemption, also subscribes to the Jewish self-conception
of a 'community of fate':
"For Gentiles, life is mainly a life
of existence while ours is a life of
destiny, the life of a kingdom of priests
and a holy people. We exist in
the world in order to actualize destiny."
[SPRINZAK, p. 258]
For far too many Jews, all valuable qualities
in their human capacities revolve in their minds around the fact that they
are Jewish. Will Herberg proudly proclaims that
"The Jewish socialist, too, reveals
the Messianic origins of the impulse
that animates him, and, indeed, often
relates his 'idealism' to 'Jewish
ethics,' just as the Jewish scholar or
scientist will find his intellectual
concern quite natural in view of the
'Jewish tradition of learning' and
the 'Jewish zeal for the truth.' I have
myself heard Jewish labor leaders,
men remote indeed from the faith and
practice of Judaism, explain
confidentially that their 'progressivism'
was somehow the consequence
of their being Jewish. These things are
matters of common experience,
and I have yet to find a Jew who does not in some manner or form
exhibit this profound sense of 'difference'
and special vocation."
[HERBERG, p. 275]
Versions of messianic arrogance are expounded
by Jews of all political persuasions, everywhere, internationally, addressing
even their victimization mythology in Russia and Eastern Europe.
In this context, Israel Shahak writes that
"The whole racist propaganda on the
theme of the supposed superiority
of Jewish morality and intellect (in which
many Jewish socialists were
prominent) is bound up with a lack of sensitivity
for the suffering of that
major part of humanity who were especially
oppressed during the last
thousand years -- the peasants." [SHAHAK,
p. 53]
Even Michael Goldberg, a scholar who incisively
argues for a reevaluation of the myths of Jewish victimization, cannot himself
shake the millennia-old chauvinism. Goldberg critically points out that Jews
who complain about non-Jews holding the modern state of Israel to a higher
moral standard than other nations are on shaky ground, since current Jewish
views of themselves supposedly affirms such a higher moral standard anyway.
But after this ironic insight, Goldberg swallows the whole arrogant myth of
Jewish superiority and separateness as his own -- even fattening it to its
obnoxious maximum, claiming:
"In the last analysis, to be a member
of the House of Israel [i.e., Jews]
is to bear a family resemblance to its
most venerated and beloved
relation, God. To be a member of the community
of Israel means
being a resemblance to no other community
on earth." [GOLDBERG,
p. 149]
The curious expression of all proclamations
of Jewish superiority over others, (even when it is cloaked in its most supposed
benevolent form that they
have bestowed to mankind the possibility of righteousness, justice, and universalism)
is an absolute guarantee to invoke anti-Jewish sentiment in non-Jews. Gentiles
are not -- and never will be -- fond of being systematically slighted, degraded,
and insulted by Jews, who position themselves as a special caste at every
turn, currently and historically. An added curiosity is that the foundation
for a endemic Jewish self-celebration has an intra-Jewish chauvinism as well.
In the intelligence realm, all such claims for innate Jewish intellectual
superiority rest upon the visible status-laden achievement of successful Jews
in various fields in the Western world, or in "scientific tests"
that measure the exceptional skills of, specifically, Ashkenazis (Jews
of European descent). Jews who lived for centuries in the Mediterranean, North
Africa, and Middle East (the Sephardim, technically meaning Spanish Jews,
but colloquially encompassing Jews from the "Orient"), and other
countries, in recent decades reunited with their historic brethren in modern
Israel, are never part of the "God's intellectual gift to mankind"
scenario. In fact, Sephardic Jews (who are second-class citizens, economically
and otherwise, in Israel) measure poorly against Ashkenazis on intelligence
tests and other measures of achievement. It should be no surprise that those
in Israel who dictate the parameters of "intelligence" measurement
in the first place, and who legislate the whole country for that matter, are
Ashkenazi.
In 1994 Richard Herrnstein, a Jew, and
his non-Jewish co-author, Charles Murray, came out with a controversial book,
The Bell Curve, hell-bent on again resurrecting in new form the old
racist and classist argument that intelligence is hereditary in that some
"races" are inherently smarter
-- and some, conversely, stupider -- than others. But the authors are
especially particular about Jewish superiority. "Ashkenazic Jews of European
origins," they say, "test higher (for intelligence) than any other
ethnic group." Such Jews "constantly show their disproportionate
level of success, usually by orders of magnitude, in various inventories of
scientific and artistic achievement."
So what might the obvious explanation for
this discrepancy, per "intelligence," between Ashkenazi and Sephardim,
(let alone non-Jews) be? Both groups are, supposedly, of ancient common origin
as Jews, the Sephardim of the Middle East are usually even closer to their
racially "Semitic" origins than the Ashkenazi. So what is different
about them? Europe, of course. Setting aside the possibilities that purely
cultural motivators expressed as ambition, aggressiveness, opportunity, encouragement,
and other such traits may play a major role in the displaying of "intelligence"
as it relates to, and is evidenced by, accomplishment, if an argument for
innate "Jewish (Ashkenazi) superiority" is to be taken seriously
at all the explanation must focus on the fact that A) Ashkenazi Jews interbred
over hundreds of years with Europeans and acquired European genes, or B) that
Ashkenazi Jews developed the way they did -- intellectually or otherwise --
due to conditions in relation to -- and/or the influence upon them by--
the surrounding European culture. Neither one of these obvious explanations
for Jewish "genius" is an expression of Jewish superiority; rather,
European "blood" and/or culture are afforded major shares of responsibility.
It's not difficult to discern that the whole argument explicating some kind
of innate Jewish superiority is unsupportable. If simply being Jewish meant
one was genetically "smart," what happened to the Sephardim (the
most purely Semitic of Jews), who apparently are "innately" disposed
to be, intellectually, "like normal people?"
Whoever they originally are, there are,
in fact, some very negative consequences
of, and evidence for, Jewish genetic separateness from the non-Jewish European
gene pool over many centuries. Ashkenazi Jews have high incidences of about
a dozen hereditary diseases. Referring to Tay-Sachs disease, Eve Glickman
notes that the "inbreeding of Jews in Eastern Europe over generations
explains the disease's bloodline." [GLICKMAN, 1997, p. 45]
Citing a research article in the medical journal Nature Genetics,
the Baltimore Jewish Times suggested that the insular, and fast-growing,
Jewish community of Eastern Europe "reinforced genetic mutations in the
originally small -- and homogenous -- population, accumulating defective genes
that 'inter-breeding' might have diluted." [MARCUS, A., 1996, p. 62]
Ashkenazi Jews have a 1 in 7 chance that
they carry the gene for the diseases Tay-Sachs, Canavan, Gaucher (the most
common Jewish genetic disease), Niemann-Pick, or cystic fibrosis. Other genetic
diseases found in the Ashkenazi population are Dystonia, Mucolipidosis 4,
and Familial Dysautonomia. If both male and female partners carry the same
disease gene, there is a 1 in 4 chance their child will develop the disease,
and a fifty percent chance he or she will carry the gene. [GLICKMAN, 1996,
p. 45] As noted in a study by the
journal Nature Genetics, Jewish women of Ashkenazi descent also "have
a much greater risk of developing early onset hereditary breast cancer."
[PR NEWSWIRE, 4-29-96] In the early 1980s Rabbi Joseph Ekstein founded the
Dor Yeshorim Committee for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases, which
features testing programs for marriageable men and women in the Orthodox Chasidic
community. [OSTRER, H., 1996, p. 9]
Jewish author Dan Rottenberg notes Jewish interwoven consanguinity in
the late 19th century:
"In the past, Jews have married their
near relatives more often than the rest of the
world has done. A study in England in
1875, for example, indicated that 7.5
percent of all English Jewish marriages
were among first cousins -- a proportion
that was about three times as great as that
among gentiles. Marriages of first cousins
and even of uncles to nieces are common among
Jews and quite legal according
to Jewish law." [ROTTENBERG, D.,
1977, p. 47]
Complicating Jewish genealogy debates even
further, there are even some Jewish authors -- Alfred Lilienthal, A. N. Poliak
(a former professor of medieval Jewish history at Tel Aviv University), and
Arthur Koestler among them -- who
have published arguments that most Ashkenazis are probably not even truly
racially Jewish, or at least have little Jewish genes in them, and that they
are largely descended from Turkish and Slavic converts to Judaism: mostly
the so-called Khazars of the eighth century. "A substantial part,"
suggests Koestler, "and perhaps the majority of eastern [European] Jews
-- and hence of world Jewry -- might be of Khazar, and not, Semitic origin."
[KOESTLER, p.17] Another Jewish scholar, Paul Wexler, has written two volumes
even arguing that -- based on largely linguistic analysis -- most Ashkenazis
and Sephardim are not of authentic
Jewish "stock." In Wexler's view, even the Sephardim are "primarily
descendants from Arabs, Berbers, and Europeans." [WEXLER, p. 1-12] In such research, Wexler
follows the terrain of other Jewish scholars obsessively searching for authentic--
usually racial Jewish pedigrees by following linguistic clues.
"It is very probable," notes
French Jewish scholar Maxine Rodinson, "-- and physical anthropology
tends to show that this is true -- that the so-called Arab inhabitants of
Palestine (a majority of whom, moreover, are people who have 'become Arabs'),
have much more of the ancient 'Hebrews' blood than most of the Jews of the
Diaspora." [RODINSON, p. 79]
A little known African tribe, the Lemba,
can even make stronger genetic claims to being Jewish than can many European
Jews. In scientific testing of DNA samples, the Lemba have been discovered
to have markers on their Y chromosome that are comparable to Jews of the
kohanim (the traditional Jewish priest
caste, a degree of Jewishness attainable, by Orthodox rules, only by birth.
Common kohanim surnames in the Western
world include Cohen, Kahn, Kaplan, Rapaport, Katz, Azoulay, and Harunoff).
The Lemba, who are today mostly Christian, nonetheless believe themselves
to be racially Jewish. Lemba tradition asserts that their forefathers emigrated
to Yemen 2,500 years ago, later forging to Zimbabwe and South Africa. [HIRSCHBERG,
P., 1999, p. 30-32]
In the medical realm, other genetic evidence
about Jews in general, particularly the Ashkenazim, is contradictory. While
some argue that fingerprints, enzyme markers, and other genetically-based
evidence points to a common gene pool, there is also evidence that questions
Jewish Ashkenazi racial lineage to Abraham. "A genetically controlled
enzyme deficiency, G6PD," notes Joshua Halberstam, "is rare among
both Ashkenazis and Eastern European non-Jews but common among both Mediterranean
Jews and Mediterranean non-Jews. Nor do Jews appear related by blood. Blood
types are variably distributed around the world, and here again Jews most
closely represent their host population." [HALBERSTAM, p. 76]
If such evidence -- linguistic and genetic
-- is what it obviously seems, for many people in the world who call themselves
"Jews" their important hereditary connection to Abraham as members
of the Chosen Race is illusory, just another in the many paradoxes of Jewish
identity. Nonetheless, personal and communal conviction are powerful things.
Whatever it is, the incessant obsession with the mythic, pan-Jewish self,
distinct from others, endures and is well reflected in this impassioned appeal
from a prominent Jewish fund-raiser, Jacob Loeb, in 1925 Chicago:
"From [a Jew's] obligation as
a Jew, to Jews, there is no escape.
There is no escape from his ancestry,
there is no refuge from
himself. His kinship with his people
is deeper than he knows,
deeper far than he dares acknowledge.
He is shackled forever
from the past from which he comes...
This is a drive for Jews to
carry the burden of Jews. It matters
terribly that we should
know -- that we should ask, one
of the other, "Are you a Jew?"
[LOEB, in WIRTH, p. 277]
"There is no way to stop being Jewish,"
says Charles Silberman, "... [because] Judaism defines itself not as
a voluntary faith but an involuntary community of fate." [SILBERMAN,
p. 70] Eugene Borowitz even argued in the 1970s that Jews were deluding themselves
with their assimilation into American culture. Borowitz argued that Jews were
wearing non-Jewish masks, deceiving themselves and others. "We are not,"
he wrote, "... who we say we are. The truth about us ... is that we are
more fundamentally Jewish than we are willing to admit ... We have repressed
an inner identity. The time has come to end this inauthenticity ... We are
Jews." [BOROWITZ, p. 10]
Not all those born of Jewish descent, however,
rush to the call of the Clan. Robert Moses, for example, a prominent urban
planner in New York City threatened to sue the editors of the Jewish Encyclopedia
if they claimed him in its pages. [SILBERMAN, p. 65] In 1930 a German refugee
scientist, Karl Landsteiner, filed an injunction against inclusion in Who's
Who in American Jewry. [WHITFIELD, p. 12] Clifton Fadiman, the quintessential
"Jewish intellectual" of the 1930s and 1940s, "for years refused
to let Who's Who list him as Jewish." [GOLDEN, H., 1973, p. 57]
"Few cultures," writes Amos Funkenstein,
"are as preoccupied with their own identity and distinction as the Jewish.
It asserted and reasserted its uniqueness in every mode of creative expression,
not the least in the liturgy, which includes a daily Thanksgiving to the Creator
'that he did not make us like all the nations of the land, and did not set
us up like other families of the earth.'" [FUNKENSTEIN, p. 1]
In this context then (the endless avalanche
of Jewish self-obsession and superiority claims at every turn through history),
it is amusing to find in the pages of the journal Judaism the dredging
up of a Gentile hack to do some of the difficult apologetic work of the Jewish
traditional worldview for its Jewish editors. "There is," says the
non-Jewish professor, Bernard Harrison, (with presumably a straight face),
"built in the very structure of Judaism, what I can only call a certain
epistemic modesty which I have always found both charming and admirable."
[HARRISON, p. 8]
