Jewish engagement with evolutionary theory is an important dimension of
modern Jewish history and thought. While Jewish leaders and intellectuals have
used the science of evolution to bolster notions
of Jewish identity, they have also confronted and (often fiercely resisted) the
use of evolutionary theory to conceptualize conflict between Jews and non-Jews.
Published in 2006, Geoffrey Cantor’s Jewish Tradition and the Challenge
of Darwinism, by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz,
explores the ways Jews – singly and communally – have engaged evolutionary
thought in a variety of historical contexts, and the role it has played in
modern Jewish history. A central focus of the book is exploring how
evolutionary ideas have been deployed, by Jews and others, in the domains of
race, anti-Semitism, and Zionism, and the recurrent use over the last century
and a half of evolutionary ideas to characterize Jews.
Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) postulated natural
selection as the driving force for biological evolution: that individuals in
any species show a diversity of inherited characteristics and compete for the
scarce resources needed to survive and reproduce. If certain characteristics
benefit them in that competition, these are more likely to be passed on to the
next generation and, consequently, the species will evolve over time. By the
time Darwin’s book was published the transformation of species was a familiar
theme, but Darwin was the first to publicly explicate the precise mechanism.
While socialists and communists soon deployed Darwinian evolution in their
antireligious polemics, it also attracted conservative and nationalistic
thinkers. Darwin’s theory could, for example, be seen to justify unfettered
capitalism. Indeed, the centrality of competition in the process of natural
selection raised a host of moral issues for a Christian West. The advent of
Darwinism also spawned a new way of conceptualizing race and racial competition.
Pre-Darwinian Racial Thinking
European racial thinking long
predated Darwin’s famous book. The European colonial expansion from the
seventeenth century saw naturalists and philosophers engaged with classifying
and characterizing the different peoples they encountered. While French intellectual
Jean-Jacques Rousseau enthused about the nobility of the savage, the more
typical response was to “emphasize the vast differences between primitive
peoples and the Enlightened Europeans with their developed intellects,
civilized societies, and refined manners.”[1] Pre-Darwinian
thinking about race in Europe culminated in books like The Races of Man (1850) by Scottish
surgeon, anatomist and anthropologist Robert Knox who stated “as simply a fact”
that “race in human affairs is everything: literature, science, art, in a word,
civilization, depend on it.”[2]The
most advanced races were, he asserted, the Germans, the Saxons, and the Celts;
the least were the dark races of the Earth. He considered Jews, who he
designated a separate race, “sterile parasites” with peculiar physical features
often including a “large, massive club-shaped, hooked nose, three or four times
larger than suits the face.”[3]
Though Knox’s book is now
almost completely forgotten, it was widely admired at the time, by Charles
Darwin among others, and exerted significant popular influence. Knox was
pessimistic about British imperial ambitions of civilizing the world: the dark
races were, he contended, congenitally incapable of being civilized, and a
racially mixed population would only lead to the degeneration of the more
intelligent racial party to the admixture as a product of miscegenation. While
Darwin avoided explicitly addressing human evolution in The Origin of Species, his implicit views were
apparent to many readers, and were later made explicit in The Descent of Man (1871). While embracing a
monogenist conception of human evolution (that all races could be traced to a
common ancestor), Darwin believed that the races were unequal and locked in a
struggle for existence.
Darwin deployed traditional
hierarchical notions in placing the “savages” closest to the primates and the
civilized Europeans at the top. Moreover, he conceived an overall historical
progress – mental, moral, and to some extent biological – from the savage to
the civilized state. While acknowledging the superiority of the European races,
he also on occasions conceived the various races as locked in a struggle with
each other.[4]
Darwinian Theory was
particularly embraced by scientists and intellectuals in Germany, where its
main popularizer in the 1860s was the philosopher Ernst Haeckel. In the second
half of the nineteenth century, the life sciences in Germany (and throughout
the West) became firmly established on materialist assumptions, and the
evolutionary perspective significantly shaped social and political thought.
Prominence was given by social Darwinians and eugenicists to the inborn,
hereditary element of Volk and race in contrast to elements that were culturally
acquired.
Darwinian biologists in Germany
increasingly stressed racial competition as a form of the human struggle for
existence. The anthropologist Ludwig Woltmann, for instance, posited race as
the driving force behind all historical development, noting “the same process
of natural selection in the struggle for existence dominates the origin,
evolution, and destruction of the human races.”[5] Prominent
Jewish sociologist at the University of Graz, Ludwig Gumplowicz, proposed in
his 1883 book Der Rassenkampf (Racial Struggle) that history was dominated by the Darwinian
struggle for existence between the races. History, he asserted, is “the eternal
lust for exploitation and dominance of the stronger and superior. The racial struggle for dominion in all its forms, in the
open and violent, as well as latent and peaceful, is the essential driving principle, the moving
force of history.”[6]
Darwinism and the Jewish
Question
Michael Ruse notes that “in the
years after the Origin, the Jewish Question became something of immediate urgency to the
Victorians,” and from the 1860s, German intellectuals in particular applied
Darwinian principles to the issue, identifying Jews as a distinct race locked
in a struggle for existence with other races.[7] After
Napoleon lifted most legal restrictions on Jews in the German territories in
1806, the native population was confronted for the first time with the social
and economic effects of unfettered Semitism. Before 1806, Germans and Jews had limited
contact in society. This changed throughout the nineteenth century as the urban
Jewish population surged: between 1811 and 1875, Berlin’s Jewish population
increased by a factor of fourteen. Constant discussion of the Judenfrage was triggered not just by
their growing numbers and rapid economic advancement, but the social strife
that accompanied the Jewish penetration and eventual domination of mainstream
German society . Post-emancipation,
“Jews were regarded less as adherents of an alien, barbaric faith and more as
members of a secular socioeconomic group that disproportionately profited from
modern life.”[8] By
the late nineteenth century, Jews “controlled virtually all the major banks in
Vienna and a considerable portion of local industry” a development which
produced in the native population “a sense of danger and of being overwhelmed.”
Generalized anxiety condensed into the charge that “nothing was sacred” to the
Jews.[9]
The native population sensed
Jews were not just a religious community but an endogamous ethnic group that
had adopted a highly successful group survival strategy. Weikart notes that, in
the eyes of many Germans, “Jews posed the greatest and most immediate threat in
this competition to the death.”[10] Wilhelm
Marr invoked Social Darwinian principles in his 1879 pamphlet Der Sieg des Judenthums über
das Germanenthum (The Triumph of the Jews over the Germans), conceptualizing
the Jewish Question along Darwinian lines as not a religious, but a racial or
biological problem. In the past religion had merely served as an excuse, but
the real conflict, Marr contended, was the “the fight of peoples (Volker) and their instincts against
the actual Judaizing (Verjudung) of society, as a struggle for existence.”[11]
For Marr, neither Jews nor Germans were morally responsible for the struggle between them, since it was the result of ineluctable biological processes. As such, he advised his fellow Germans not to hate the Jews, just as they do not hate individual enemy soldiers in wars: “The struggle between peoples (Völkerkampf) must be fought without hatred against the individuals, who are compelled to attack, as well as to defend themselves.”[12]
Marr’s monograph struck a chord with readers, passing through twelve editions in its first year.
For Marr, neither Jews nor Germans were morally responsible for the struggle between them, since it was the result of ineluctable biological processes. As such, he advised his fellow Germans not to hate the Jews, just as they do not hate individual enemy soldiers in wars: “The struggle between peoples (Völkerkampf) must be fought without hatred against the individuals, who are compelled to attack, as well as to defend themselves.”[12]
Marr’s monograph struck a chord with readers, passing through twelve editions in its first year.
German philosopher Eugen
Dühring observed that the mental and moral traits of the Jews were themselves
the fruits of this evolutionary struggle for existence, and that cultural
patterns are simply a reflection of biological character. French anthropologist
Vacher de Lapouge concurred, describing Jews as an ethnic group “founded upon
religion and with a psychic identity forged over centuries of selection. They
were everywhere the same: intelligent, ruthless, gifted money-makers, arrogant
in success and servile in defeat, and congenitally odious, as evinced by their
history of persecution, which antedated the birth of Christ by several
centuries.”[13] For
Dühring, evolution was so gradual no significant change to the Jewish
psychological makeup could occur in the foreseeable future – thus the Jewish
Question would remain an intractable social problem.
Moses Hess, the Jewish
philosopher and pioneering Zionist, also conceived the Jewish Question as a
racial problem, rather than one about equal rights for a religious sect. The
true historical essence of Jewishness was its biological racial roots. Like
Theodor Herzl, Hess concluded that a national homeland in Palestine – rather
than assimilation – was the proper resolution of the Jewish Question.[14] In
1862 he published Rom und Jerusalem: die letze Nationalitätsfrage (1862, Rome and
Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism), in which he claimed that “Jews are
primarily a race that, in spite of all the influences of climate, adapted to
all situations and maintained its integrity.”
The Jewish race [claimed Hess]
is one of the primary races of mankind that has retained its integrity, in
spite of the continual change of its climatic environment, and the Jewish type
has conserved its purity through the centuries. The Jewish race, which was so
pressed and almost destroyed by the many nations of antiquity, would have
disappeared long ago in the sea of Indo-Germanic nations, had it not been
endowed with the gift of retaining its peculiar type under all circumstances
and reproducing it.[15]
Perhaps the best-known instance
of a volkisch manifesto in the history
of Zionism was Martin Buber’s 1911 essay “Zionism, Race, and Eugenics”: a
celebration of blood as the paramount essence of Jewish identity. Buber argued
the Western Jew was rootless, that the languages and customs of his European
hosts were alien to his essential being – having not stemmed from his
“community of blood” (Gemeinschaft seines Blutes). Nevertheless, Jews retained an “autonomous
reality” beyond mere geopolitical continuity with the past which “does not
leave us at any hour in our life. … [B]lood [is] the deepest, most potent
stratum of our being.” When he envisions the line of ancestors that led to him,
the Jew, Buber declared, perceives “what confluence of blood has produced him
…. He senses in this immortality of the generations a community of blood.”[16]
The radical Zionist Vladimir
Jabotinsky (1880–1940) likewise insisted the source of Jewish national feeling
should be sought “in the blood…. The feeling of national identity is ingrained
in the man’s ‘blood,’ in the physical-racial type, and in it only.”[17]
In 1931, Jewish anthropologist Arthur Ruppin joined the Zionist movement and lobbied for the “right of the Jews to come to Palestine not on some ‘political’ agreement and concession, but on their historical and racial connection to Palestine.”[18]
This remains an argument used by Zionist activists today: Australian Jewish leader Peter Wertheim, for example, slams as a “disgraceful falsehood” any claim Jews displaced Palestinians from their land on the basis that Jews “are indigenous to the Holy Land.” With such claims in mind, Falk notes that “Zionism and race are as intertwined today as they were a century ago.”[19]
In 1931, Jewish anthropologist Arthur Ruppin joined the Zionist movement and lobbied for the “right of the Jews to come to Palestine not on some ‘political’ agreement and concession, but on their historical and racial connection to Palestine.”[18]
This remains an argument used by Zionist activists today: Australian Jewish leader Peter Wertheim, for example, slams as a “disgraceful falsehood” any claim Jews displaced Palestinians from their land on the basis that Jews “are indigenous to the Holy Land.” With such claims in mind, Falk notes that “Zionism and race are as intertwined today as they were a century ago.”[19]
Accepting that Jews were a
distinct race and (implicitly) that Judaism was a group evolutionary strategy,
Jewish anthropologists, statisticians, and physicians in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries conducted research and published papers on race
and the Jewish Question to bolster their views on the place of Jews in modern
society. Weindling points out how “Jewish race science texts” from this time
created “a new, ‘scientific’ paradigm and agenda of Jewish self-definition and
self-perception.”[20]By
the turn of the century, the idea of finding a common index for the Jewish race
“proved attractive not only to anti-Semites but also to promoters of secular
Jewish identity.” Jewish scientists and intellectuals “drew from a range of
available ideas, such as Darwinian natural selection, the ‘struggle for
existence’ among individuals and social groups, Mendelian genetics, and the
Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics.”[21] The
prominent Zionist author Max Nordau considered Darwinism an integral component
of his scientific worldview.
Zionist Eugenics
Notions of race and racial
competition pervaded Zionist thinking in the early to mid-twentieth century, a
time when “volkisch conceptions were firmly
established among Zionist intellectuals.”[B1] Raphael
Falk notes how “Zionist writers appealed to biological conceptions of race and
nation and displayed an awareness of their responsibility not only to serve
this biologically circumscribed ethnic group but also to propagate and improve
it.”[B2]
Many Zionists viewed evolutionary theory “as a conceptual framework for understanding the detrimental effects of Diaspora life and argued for the positive benefits that would accrue to Jews in Palestine.” Weikart observes that many “Jewish physicians, feminists and sexual reformers embraced eugenics,” and that leading Jewish anthropologists “embraced scientific racism” in the early twentieth century.”[B3]
Many Zionists viewed evolutionary theory “as a conceptual framework for understanding the detrimental effects of Diaspora life and argued for the positive benefits that would accrue to Jews in Palestine.” Weikart observes that many “Jewish physicians, feminists and sexual reformers embraced eugenics,” and that leading Jewish anthropologists “embraced scientific racism” in the early twentieth century.”[B3]
Several leading Jewish
physicians and educators became flag bearers of a campaign to promote the
eugenic aspects of Zionism. In 1922, the Zionist physician Mordechai Bruchov
emphasized that: “In the struggle of nations, in the clandestine ‘cultural’ struggle
of one nation with another, the one wins who provides for the improvement of
the race, to the benefit of the biological value of the progeny.”[B4] Parental
guidance articles and books published in Palestine from the 1920s emphasized
“the purity of the race and the quality of children required to improve the
nation,” which “subsequently shifted to the need to increase the birthrate in
order to catch up with the high birthrate of the neighboring nations.”[B5]
Jewish biologist Fritz S. Bodenheimer (1897–1959), the son of one of Theodor Herzl’s closest allies, likewise stressed “the external threat posed by the faster reproductive rate of the Arab population.”[B6]
Child care in Israel has long been conceived “as part of a national project” where “every mother who raised her child in Israel, in the past and at present, is conscious that this is not only her personal task, but rather a national task the climax of which – at the age of eighteen – is the recruitment of the Zionist baby to the nation’s army.”[B7]
Jewish biologist Fritz S. Bodenheimer (1897–1959), the son of one of Theodor Herzl’s closest allies, likewise stressed “the external threat posed by the faster reproductive rate of the Arab population.”[B6]
Child care in Israel has long been conceived “as part of a national project” where “every mother who raised her child in Israel, in the past and at present, is conscious that this is not only her personal task, but rather a national task the climax of which – at the age of eighteen – is the recruitment of the Zionist baby to the nation’s army.”[B7]
Jewish Attitudes to Darwinism
after the Advent of National Socialism in Germany
The ascent of the National
Socialists to power in Germany in 1933 “had a profound impact” on Jewish
thought and speech regarding evolution and race. Concluding that hierarchic
social-Darwinian race theory was antithetical to their ethnic interests, many diasporic
Jews publicly abandoned previously espoused racialist beliefs grounded in
evolutionary theory, and worked to discredit that the concept of race among
biologists and social scientists. Cantor and Swetlitz note how “social and
cultural explanations became prominent in the social sciences, where Jews
continued to work in large numbers.”[B8] The
overthrow of hierarchic Darwinian racial theory was, as Kevin MacDonald
explains in Culture of Critique, a campaign by Jewish activists that had nothing to do with real
science, with the “shift away from Darwinism as the fundamental paradigm of the
social sciences” resulting from “an ideological shift rather than the emergence
of any new empirical data.”[B9] For
strongly committed Jews, truth takes a back seat to ethnic interests.
A chapter is devoted to Jewish
anthropologist Ignaz Zollschan (1877–1948), who exemplifies this shift. A
leading early Jewish advocate for Darwinian race science, he changed his public
views “in response the threat posed by Nazi race theory,” and emerged “as a
political activist who helped to orchestrate international opposition to Nazi
ideology.”[B10] Zollschan
worried that by embracing racialist beliefs informed by Darwinian evolution,
“Zionists were playing into the hands of anti-Semites, who had long demanded
special laws for Jews. In effect this was throwing the Jew back into the
ghetto.”[B11] In
the 1920 and 1930s:
Zollschan was alert to the
dangers of eugenics and increased his opposition to eugenics and to
anti-Semitic racism. In 1925 he visited the Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas in
New York to collaborate on X-ray investigations into the various races, having
supported the use of X-rays to eradicate favus (a chronic skin infection) among
East European Jewish children. Boas, who stressed culture over biology,
convened a committee at Columbia University that addressed human anatomical and
psychological characteristics with the aim of refuting racist prejudice.
Zollschan subsequently used a memorandum drawn up by Boas in 1926 as a basis
for intensified lobbying of leading intellectuals in Europe to refute
anti-Semitic racism.[B12]
Zollschan advocated a twofold
Jewish strategy: firstly, to “take a stand against anti-Semitic racial
defamation” where he aggressively “refuted many stereotypes of Jews and the
accusation that Jews damaged their host countries.”[B13]
He flatly denied, for instance, any link between Jews and financial corruption. His second goal was to “strengthen Jewish culture in order to ensure that Jewish identity would be sustained.”[B14]
From the 1920s onwards, he publically “adopted an anti-racialist stance, and played a major role in founding an international network of anthropologists to combat the threat of Nazi racism.”[B15]
His campaign led him to espouse the view that Jews were a culture rather than a race. He did not, however, renounce his earlier views about the Jewish race; instead updating his views in response to Boas’ radical environmentalist theories.
He flatly denied, for instance, any link between Jews and financial corruption. His second goal was to “strengthen Jewish culture in order to ensure that Jewish identity would be sustained.”[B14]
From the 1920s onwards, he publically “adopted an anti-racialist stance, and played a major role in founding an international network of anthropologists to combat the threat of Nazi racism.”[B15]
His campaign led him to espouse the view that Jews were a culture rather than a race. He did not, however, renounce his earlier views about the Jewish race; instead updating his views in response to Boas’ radical environmentalist theories.
During the 1930s Zollschan
attempted to establish an international coalition of scientific experts to
refute the scientific basis of Nazi race ideology, and formulated an antiracist
manifesto he hoped would be signed by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Aldous
and Julian Huxley, the novelist J.B. Priestly, among others.[B16]
Huxley suggested including T.S. Eliot — “blithely overlooking Eliot’s expressions of disgust at Jewish peculiarities — for a public discussion on race.”[B17]
Jewish historian Charles Singer pointed out to Zollschan that “scientific views are not established by international committees,” and cautioned him that efforts to undermine the concept of race in general would undermine Zionism. Singer also warned that nothing could be worse for the prospects of such a “scientific” statement than “for it to appear to have behind it either a foreign or a Jewish motive power.”[B18]
Huxley suggested including T.S. Eliot — “blithely overlooking Eliot’s expressions of disgust at Jewish peculiarities — for a public discussion on race.”[B17]
Jewish historian Charles Singer pointed out to Zollschan that “scientific views are not established by international committees,” and cautioned him that efforts to undermine the concept of race in general would undermine Zionism. Singer also warned that nothing could be worse for the prospects of such a “scientific” statement than “for it to appear to have behind it either a foreign or a Jewish motive power.”[B18]
Zollschan heeded Singer’s
advice, accepting the need to embed the pursuit of particular Jewish interests
in a more universalistic message. Thus, in Racialism against Civilization (1942) he argued that
racism was “not a problem that affected just the target group — the Jews — but
was the common enemy to all religious, moral, and liberal political values.”
Zollschan proposed that the National Socialist drive to force Jews back into
the ghetto “did not just represent a threat to the existence of Jews, but who
attacked the humanitarian basis of Western civilization.”[B19]
This represented a complete reversal of his earlier, long-held, belief “that the ghetto sustained Jewish racial identity.”[B20]
This represented a complete reversal of his earlier, long-held, belief “that the ghetto sustained Jewish racial identity.”[B20]
A Top-Down Revolution
Zollschan’s efforts against
National Socialist racial beliefs formed the basis for the UNESCO declarations
on race and UN Conventions on the elimination of racial discrimination after
1945.[B21]
In 1949 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) convened a panel of “scientists,” chaired by Ashley Montagu (born Israel Ehrenberg), to “produce a definitive verdict on race.” The panel, which include several Jews, including the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, consisted of “a team of ten scientists all of whom were recruited from the marginal group of anthropologists, sociologists and ethnographers affiliated with the scientifically marginalized groups of cultural anthropologists that were mostly students of Franz Boas at Colombia University in New York, and who perceived the race concept primarily as a social construct.”[B22] The panel’s first met at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, and Montagu claimed “only if our deliberations had taken place at Auschwitz or Dachau could there have been a more fitting environment to impress upon the committee members the immense significance of their work.”[B23] Montagu had a strong Jewish identity, stating that: “if you are brought up a Jew, you know that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic. . . . I think it is a good working hypothesis.”[B24] At that time UNESCO House was the former headquarters of the German military during its occupation of France during World War Two. Underpinning the words of the UNESCO declaration “was widespread revulsion at the Jewish Holocaust.”[B25] Leftist academic Anthony Hazard notes that “a clear rejection of anti-Semitism seemed to underline the entire effort.”[B26]
In 1949 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) convened a panel of “scientists,” chaired by Ashley Montagu (born Israel Ehrenberg), to “produce a definitive verdict on race.” The panel, which include several Jews, including the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, consisted of “a team of ten scientists all of whom were recruited from the marginal group of anthropologists, sociologists and ethnographers affiliated with the scientifically marginalized groups of cultural anthropologists that were mostly students of Franz Boas at Colombia University in New York, and who perceived the race concept primarily as a social construct.”[B22] The panel’s first met at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, and Montagu claimed “only if our deliberations had taken place at Auschwitz or Dachau could there have been a more fitting environment to impress upon the committee members the immense significance of their work.”[B23] Montagu had a strong Jewish identity, stating that: “if you are brought up a Jew, you know that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic. . . . I think it is a good working hypothesis.”[B24] At that time UNESCO House was the former headquarters of the German military during its occupation of France during World War Two. Underpinning the words of the UNESCO declaration “was widespread revulsion at the Jewish Holocaust.”[B25] Leftist academic Anthony Hazard notes that “a clear rejection of anti-Semitism seemed to underline the entire effort.”[B26]
The UNESCO panel’s statement
insisted it would be best “to drop the term ‘race’ altogether,” since “for all
practical purposes, ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social
myth.” Montagu and his colleagues ended their “definitive statement on race”
with an endorsement of the idea of a common humanity: “Biological studies lend
support to the ethic of universal brotherhood; for man is born with drives
towards co-operation. … In this sense, every man is his brother’s keeper.”[B27]
Once again the pursuit of specific Jewish interests was embedded in a pretended universal benevolence. UNESCO’s Montagu-drafted “definitive verdict on race,” was published with a press release with the headline: “No biological justification for race discrimination, say world scientists: Most authoritative statement on the subject.”[B28] The New York Times reported on the statement under a headline proclaiming: “No Scientific Basis for Race Bias Found by World Panel of Experts.”[B29]
Once again the pursuit of specific Jewish interests was embedded in a pretended universal benevolence. UNESCO’s Montagu-drafted “definitive verdict on race,” was published with a press release with the headline: “No biological justification for race discrimination, say world scientists: Most authoritative statement on the subject.”[B28] The New York Times reported on the statement under a headline proclaiming: “No Scientific Basis for Race Bias Found by World Panel of Experts.”[B29]
The UNESCO Statement on Race
basically amounted to the imposition of a Jewish ethno-political agenda onto
the global polity — with devastating consequences for the interests of
Europeans and European-derived peoples. With this new agenda now in place at
the highest level, and with the demonization and marginalization of dissenters,
it was almost inevitable in the decades following Germany’s defeat that
remaining policies constructed on the basis of racialist thought and identity
would be progressively dismantled. The 1950 statement on race (which
contributed to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education in
Topeka,
and several UN conventions on eliminating racial discrimination) was described
by one sympathetic commentator as “the triumph of Boasian anthropology on a
world-historical scale.”[B30] British
historian David Cannadine notes that, during the decades that followed, the
United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand “abandoned their policies of
racial discrimination, ended their restrictions on immigration … and embraced
multiculturalism.”
Attitudes to evolutionary
concepts in the post-war era were strongly colored by the Jewish backgrounds
and commitments of Jewish biologists and anthropologists. Cantor and Swetlitz
note, for example, that “some leading critics of the modern synthesis in
evolutionary biology and sociobiology, including Stephen Jay Gould and Richard
Lewontin, were Jewish, and it has been claimed their opposition stemmed in part
from concern these fields are likely to encourage anti-Semitism because they
emphasize genetic determinism and evolutionary progress, which often embed
notions of racial hierarchy.”[B31] Kevin
MacDonald observes that Gould exemplified the “conflation of personal and
ethno-political interests in the construction of science.” Gould falsely
claimed that hereditarian views on intelligence had been prominently used as
justification for restricting Jewish immigration in the 1924 American
immigration laws — laws he directly linked with “the Holocaust.” Gould’s career
is perhaps the preeminent illustration of “how skill as a propagandist and
ethnic activist can be combined with a highly visible and prestigious academic
position to have a major influence on public attitudes in an area of research
with great implications for public policy.”[B32]
Harvard evolutionary biologist
Richard Lewontin spearheaded opposition to the ideas of E.O. Wilson whose
book Sociobiology:
The New Synthesis inaugurated the field of sociobiology. Lewontin’s approach
has been to selectively reject the findings of the traditional reductionist
scientific method, insisting on a “hyper-purism that settles for nothing less
than absolute certainty and absolutely correct methodology, epistemology, and
ontology…. By adopting this philosophy of science, Lewontin is able to discredit
attempts by scientists to develop theories and generalizations and thus, in the
name of scientific rigor, avoid the possibility of any politically unacceptable
scientific findings.”[B33] While
Lewontin portrays his efforts as motivated by a concern for scientific rigor,
his tactical nihilism enables him to pursue an ethno-political agenda
unencumbered by science.
The Boasian revolution in anthropology, taken up by Gould, Lewontin and
numerous other Jewish academics, represents such a dramatic departure from
preceding Jewish thinking about race, that an examination of earlier Jewish
racial writing forces us “to reorient the way we think about the normative
narrative of the Jewish past” according to which historians have “told the
story of the relationship between Jews and race largely within the framework of
victimhood,” whereby “racial science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
was one of the chief weapons used against Jews.”[B34] The
abandonment of Darwinian race theory by Jewish anthropologists from the 1920s
and 1930s necessitated obscuring the inherently racial nature of Judaism, in
order to forestall charges of hypocrisy. Yet race remains “one of the building
blocks of contemporary Jewish identity construction” and that “biological and
genetic arguments possess a power for many Jews as they seek to explain to
themselves and others just what it is that constitutes Jewishness.”[B35]
Even though such thinking may have been submerged or made invisible for many decades, Jews still “think with blood” about Jewish belonging. University of Washington Professor Susan Glenn makes the point that: “Throughout all the de-racializing stages of twentieth century social thought, Jews have continued to invoke blood logic as a way of defining and maintaining group identity.”[B36]
Even though such thinking may have been submerged or made invisible for many decades, Jews still “think with blood” about Jewish belonging. University of Washington Professor Susan Glenn makes the point that: “Throughout all the de-racializing stages of twentieth century social thought, Jews have continued to invoke blood logic as a way of defining and maintaining group identity.”[B36]
Notes
[1] Geoffrey
Cantor & Marc Swetlitz, Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, Eds. Geoffrey Cantor &
Marc Swetlitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 89.
[5] Richard
Weikart, “The Impact of Social Darwinism on Anti-Semitic Ideology in Germany
and Austria, 1860-1945,” In: Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, Eds. Geoffrey Cantor &
Marc Swetlitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 106.
[7] Michael
Ruse, Darwinism
as Religion: What Literature Tells Us About Evolution(Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2016) 140.
[8] Götz
Aly, Why
the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the
Holocaust (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 3.
[10] Weikart,
“The Impact of Social Darwinism,” 94.
[13] Mike
Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 197.
[14] Raphael
Falk, “Zionism, Race, and Eugenics,” In: Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of
Darwinism,
Eds. Geoffrey Cantor & Marc Swetlitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
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[20] Paul
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[B1] Falk,
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[B3] Weikart,
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[B4] Falk,
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[B9] Kevin
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[B11] Weindling,
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[B22] Poul
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[B23] Anthony
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[B25] David
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[B28] Duedahl,
“From racial strangers.”
[B29] Elazar
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[B30] Robert
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[B33] MacDonald
1998/2001, p. 47
[B34] Mitchell
Hart, Jews
and Race: Writings on Identity and Difference 1880-1940, Ed. Mitchell Hart (Waltham
MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 14.
(Republished
from The Occidental Observer by
permission of author or representative)