By the middle years of the nineteenth century, the term “race” came to be commonly and unapologetically used by nearly everyone… Most observers concluded that there was a link between body type and psyche; the common use, again by Jews and non-Jews, of the term the “Jewish race” is a prime example… [F]ew questioned that there was a Jewish race. Many spoke of it as an unusually clear example of a pure race…
A number of twentieth-century anthropologists have observed that primitive tribes typically do not recognize the humanity of others; indeed the very concept of a universal humanity is alien to the thought patterns of primitive peoples…
The sons of Noah were supposed to have fathered the major races of the world: Japheth was the father of the Europeans; Shem of the “Orientals” (which included the Jews); and Ham of the Africans (Gen. 9.21-27) The Book of Deuteronomy has been described as providing a religious source for modern racism, and its various exhortations concerning the extermination of the indigenous peoples of Canaan (eg. Deut. 19, 20) offer justification, for those who seek it, for policies of racial extermination.
In talmudic commentary, protoracist elements are common. The rabbis increase the racist potential of the story of Ham beyond the bare biblical text, for example, by making the sons of Ham “ugly and dark-skinned.” Thus, religious exclusiveness meshed with “racial” exclusiveness, for in traditional Judaism lineage or ancestry (yikhus) — indeed, hereditary or “racial” sinfulness, as int he case of the descendants of Ham — remained categories of central importance… In the opinion of later influential Jewish thinkers, such as the Maharal, inborn racial qualities were to be found in every nation; he considered it impossible that a member of one nation could become part of another…
Judaism, or at least major and deep-rooted traditional interpretations of it, must be considered only uncertainly a community of belief; mixed into the belief system of the religion as traditionally defined are “essentialist” (or “racist”) notions in that one is born a Jew…
The Jewish priestly caste (kohanim) is ruled by especially stringent regulations. Its members may not, for example, marry a convert to Judaism, why by definition lacks the necessary ancestry. A Gentile child, adopted by Jews at birth and brought up according to the faith, must still at a later point undergo a formal, individual conversion ceremony, according to halakha. Such a child can never qualify for priestly status, even if the ancestry of his adoptive parents would permit it for their natural children. A mamzer (roughly, a bastard, the product of adultery between Jews) may never marry a “full” or “real” Jew (that is, one born of a properly married Jewish mother), however faultless his practice of Judaism. Unions between mamzerim and Gentile converts are permitted, since both qualify as inferior types of Jews… Again, their moral probity or fidelity to the beliefs and rituals of Judaism, no matter how perfect, cannot alter their lower status…
Nazis, too, said that one is born a Jew and Jewishness could never be relinquished.
“Blood,” “seed,” and “soul” have been used by Jews in defining Jewishness, and according to such definitions Jewish qualities have been seen as both permanent and mysteriously latent or immanent, springing from inner, invisible, or otherwise obscure determinants — an unchanging and unchangeable Jewish essence. Even a modern Jew like Freud, who had broken entirely with traditional Jewish belief, spoke of a mysterious “inner identity of Jews,” since they have…a similar “psychic structure,” “a miarculous thing in common, which [is] inaccessible to any analysis so far.” Eugene Borowitz has recently written that Jews have a mystical bond with one another, which allows them to “know how to find” one another.
The belief that blood in some way determines character was held long before the advent of Christianity in Europe and lies deep in European culture…
Jewish blood, then, was widely believed, by non-Jews and Jews alike, to be responsible for Jewish character. Indeed, the argument in favor of an unmixed strain of blood was assumed to be especially strong in the Jewish case, because of the Jews’ non-European origin and their own stringent prohibitions against intermarriage…
Yiddish-speaking Jews distinguished between Gentile koyekh (brutish, physical power) and Jewish moyekh (brains, guile, mental subtlety), a distinction related to those identified with Esau and Jacob. Non-Jews throughout most of recorded European history seem to have been impressed with a peculiar Jewish sharpness of intellect, a cleverness and cunning that baptism did not alter…
In spite of his having converted to Christianity as a child, [Benjamin Disraeli] emphatically insisted that he remained a member of the Jewish race. He believed, moreover, that the Jewish race had been extremely influential in the course of European civilization. That influence was to be explained…by the inherent genius of the Jewish race and because of the way Jews stuck together, assiduously keeping their race pure and disregarding national borders in pursuit of common interests as Jews…
In his novel Coningsby, Disraeli depicted a vast and secret power of Jews, bent on dominating the world. His noble Jewish character, Sidonia (based on Lionel Rothschild), describes race as a supremely important determinant (“all is race; there is no other truth”)…
Consistent with the belief that if a race became impure, it would weaken and decline, he wrote that if the “great Anglo-Saxon republic” [the United States] allowed its white population “to mingle with [its] negro and coloured populations” it would be the beginning of the end for the new country…
It was the ever more extensive contact with sub-Saharan Africa that seems to have reinforced racist interpretations of European superiority… African appeared physically more primitive to European observers, more animal-like… A popular work on slave buying described black Africans as “fickle and careless. Dancing and beating time are engrained in their nature.”
…[Immanuel Kant] concluded that race was both distinctive and immutable. Climate would not make blacks out of Scandinavians transplanted to central Africa, nor would African blacks become blond and white-skinned if moved to northern Europe.
…[H]e still implicitly accepted that there were distinctly different and permanent spiritual qualities, as there were physical, among the various races of mankind…
The concept of race also meshed nicely with the kind of nationalism that began to gain strength in the course of the nineteenth century, since one aspect of that nationalism was a belief that certain groups, or races, properly belonged within the confines of certain nation-states. The French race, the German race, the Italian race, so the reasoning went, deserved a nation-state composed uniquely of the appropriate race.
Johann Gottfried von Herder was an admirer of Hebrew literature, but he saw a deep-seated corruption in the Jews of his day, deriving from their long-standing status as peddlers, merchants, and moneylenders… He, like nearly all of his contemporaries, including Mendelssohn, did not believe that Jews were or could become Germans.
Count Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882)…dismissed environmentalist theories of the rise and fall of civilizations, nothing that civilizations rose, failed to rise, or declined in the same kind of environment. The real cause for the periods of decadence in earlier civilizations, he asserted, was the mixing of races, the corruption of aristocratic blood by that of the inferior races. The lowest of all human races, he believed, was the Negro, and the lower classes in countries like France had qualities like those of Negroes: low intelligence and self-discipline, an inability to organize socially, and an overdeveloped sensuality and an inclination to destructive rampages…
Moses Hess (1812-1875) [said] Judaism would become the spiritual guide of humankind, whereas Christianity, “a religion of death”, would wither. He was a good friend of [German-Jewish historian Heinrich] Graetz, who wrote him of his delight in “scourging” Germans. Graetz added that “we must above all work to shatter Christianity.”
Jewish racism, and of course Zionism, could build upon the tribalistic-nationalistic elements within Judaism, but no doubt equally important in the nineteenth century was the simple fact that nearly everyone believed in racial determinism…
The French-Jewish man of letters Julien Benda reported that among his Jewish acquaintances at the end of the century “were certain magnates, financiers rather than literary men, with whom the belief in the superiority of their race and in the natural subjection of those who did not belong to it, was visibly sovereign.” Similarly, a number of Jewish politicians on the left in France harbored a sense of their special merit or destiny as Jews to be political leaders, what they considered as their “right to rule.”
…The work of Sir Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (1869), listed Jews as one of the groups that should be encouraged to reproduce, because of their racial superiority. Alphonse de Candolle, perhaps the most influential theoretician of race inside France, considered Jews to be a crowning culmination of the white race…
Darwin was merely the most famous of a growing corp of natural scientists who took pride in careful procedures, exact measurements, and theories based on solid facts. Darwin’s illustrious contemporary, Paul Broca, the founder of the Anthropological Society of Paris in 1859, focused his attention on a meticulous measuring of human bodies. He devoted particular attention to an obvious human organ, the brain. Did a larger one mean greater intelligence? And did different races have different-sized brains? Broca arrived at a positive answer to both of those questions, based on careful measurement. Negroes have smaller brains than Europeans, just as women have smaller brains than men.
…Broca was a man of the left, and what is particularly interesting in his case is that he did not ostensibly want to believe in human inequality, but he felt driven in the direction of believing in the inequality of races, and sexes, by what he deemed overwhelming evidence… He stated that it was necessary for scientists to put aside their ethical hopes for human equality: Truth was truth, even if unpleasant, and the truth was that races were unequal.
…Jules Carvallo…concluded that since Jews had a larger cranial capacity than other races, they were particularly suited to survive in the world. Another Frenchman, Alfred Legoyt, emphasized the lower death rate among Jews as further scientific or objective evidence of their biological superiority…
The brilliant and famous Scottish anatomist Robert Knox proclaimed, “race is everything, civilization depends upon it.”
