ABOUT ANTI-SEMITISM and ITS ROOTS
Teaching Page Edition: 15a16

Anti-Semitism: The Racial Purity Myth
Let’s face it – We are all prejudiced in some way.  We also need to consider that prejudice is not always a negative characteristic.  While most of us consider prejudice to describe a frame of mind against something, most commonly people who, for some reason (culture, race, colour or faith) are different from us, we must concede that we can also be prejudiced in favour of something - sometimes people whom we admire or respect, but more often than not,  it is inanimate objects which muster our positive prejudice – a good restaurant, a good menu (Chinese,  Japanese, Italian [such as the ‘best’ Pizza), a good book (or author), a good movie, and so on.  The point is that “prejudice” – the concept -   simply categorizes for us a state of mind either ‘in favour of’, or ‘a dislike for’, something or someone.

Anti-Semitism, or more commonly what is often labelled 'Anti-Semitism' but more accurately is actually Anti-Jewish sentiment, categorizes a state of mind which describes a strong dis-like, dis-trust, or dis-favour of a group of people based partly on their and our supposed faith dis-similarities, though there are other factors at play as well.  Anti-Semitism is (or should be) every bit as repugnant to the human race as is the prejudice many people feel toward other races or ethnic groups and just as unreasonable as the prejudice which exists between the genders.

In our parallel Teaching Page (See "Sh'mot" Parsha 13) we have just entered into the study of the Scriptural Book of Sh’mot / Exodus, the second book of the Torah – whether in the Jewish Scriptures (The Tenach) or those of Christianity.  Exodus is a book all about prejudice, all about the first (recorded) rise of anti-Jewish sentiment in the world.

I came across the following information while doing some research for this week’s Torah reflection.  I have copied it word for word from: “The Book of Jewish Knowledge” (An Encyclopedia of Judaism and the Jewish People, Covering All Elements of Jewish Life from Biblical Times to the present), by Nathan Ausubel, and published by Crown Publishers, INC in New York in 1964. (4th Printing 1970)  Library of Congress Card Number 62-20063.  I have re-printed the material [beginning on page 6 through 8] directly so as to honour the work of the original author and those who assisted him.  The reason for studying this material (on Anti-Semitism) here is to provide a parallel article for this week’s Parsha, though it too, will soon be Archived.  I copy the material because most of our readers will not have a copy of the source material, so this is a service to them and others who are interested.

This article deals mostly with the phenomenon of European anti-Semitism, the rise of the term itself, and the history of the mind-set in recent history.  The Parsha reading; however, deals with a much earlier form of anti-Jewish thought.  In innumerable ways, the two are closely related – as it says in the article: “The pretexts change, but the hatred remains.”........


"The “Scientific Myth: Semites and Aryans. 
"In reality, the term ”anti Semitism”, with its biologic and racial connotations was first used in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the notorious Anti-Semitic League, who, ironically, was said to the baptized son of a Jewish actor.  Having everywhere a grass-roots anti-Jewish  movement of sizable proportions to cater to, the word “anti-Semitism” was soon in general currency, and since the cult of science had become very popular during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, all of the “scientific’ postulates of the term were eagerly accepted by the hordes of the half-baked, the partly informed, the uninformed, the gullible, the neurotic and the malicious.

"Marr based his term “anti-Semitism” on racial identity, averring that the ‘inborn’ character of Jews or Semites – the presumed descendants of Shem, one of the three sons of Noah mentioned in the Bible – was antithetical to the noble character of Aryans (when he said ‘Aryans’, Marr had in mind Teutons and Nordics such as Germans, Austrians, Scandinavians, Dutch, English, French, etc.).  Broad-mindedly, he conceded that Jews could not help being what they were; namely, morally and physically inferior humans, because Nature had so pre-determined.

"This mixed fodder of pseudo-scientific nonsense that was being fed by the rabid racists to the ignorant and the unthinking either amused or outraged the eminent men of science of that time.  It drew from Friedrich Max Muller, the great Orientalist and philologist, this censure:
“It is but too easily forgotten that if we speak of Aryan and Semitic families, the ground of classification is language and language only.  There are Aryan and Semitic languages, but it is against all rules of logic to speak… of an Aryan race, of Aryan blood, of Aryan skulls, and to attempt ethnological classification on purely linguistic grounds”

"It all began this way:  In the year 1808, and quite innocently, in the course of his philological researches, Friedrich von Schlegel, the noted Sanskritist (a Catholic who was married to Dorothea, Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter) noticed a kinship between Persian and Sanskrit on the one hand and the Teutonic languages (German, Swedish, Dutch, etc) on the other.  From these observations and from others made by a number of philologists, he finally wove an elaborate hypothesis which held that these ‘related’ tongues were derived from a common ancestor-language called ‘Aryan’, one that had supposedly been spoken by a people named ‘Aryans’, who inhabited the land of ‘Aryana’.  Needless to say ‘Aryan’ was a lost and forgotten language, the ‘Aryans’ themselves had disappeared into historic limbo, and as far as the land ‘Aryana’ – there were only bare references to it in the “Zend Avesta”, the half-mythic Scriptures of Persian Zoroastrianism (written c. 1000 BCE) but where ‘Aryana’ lay there was not the slightest intimation.

"It was from these hypothetical Aryans, the inhabitants of the hypothetical country Aryana, who spoke a hypothetical tongue called Aryan, that the nineteenth-century anti-Semites among the German professors, journalists, and demagogic pamphleteers derived both their noble ancestry and their pride in constituting the “master-race” of mankind.  There is no doubt but that the national chauvinism which followed the stupendous triumph of the Germans over the French during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 greatly stimulated the development of the anti-Semites’ “scientific” principle of Aryanism;  it made it appear persuasive.  At the same time, drawing from the same ancient literary source of inspiration – the Zend Avesta – the nineteenth-century anti-Semites applied the Zoroastrian principle of the duality and the deadly opposition declared to the existing between the deity of light (Ormuzd) and deity of darkness (Ahriman) to the equally deadly opposition supposedly existing between the Aryan race (the German “master-race”) and the Semitic race (the Jewish “slave-race”).  The conclusion some of the academic German anti-Semites came to was that just as the Persian god of light was locked in unyielding battle with the god of darkness until the latter was defeated – so must “the Aryan race” engage in mortal combat with Jewry until the latter was destroyed.

"The legal aspect of the term “Aryan” was disposed of with finality decades later when in its decision in United States vs. Bhagat Sing Thind (1923), the United States Supreme Court paid its respects to it in this fashion:

“The Aryan theory as a racial basis seems to be dis-credited by most, if not all, modern writers on the subject of ethnology.  A review of their contentions would serve no useful purpose.  It is enough to refer to the works of Deniker (Races of Man, p 317), Keane (Man: Past and Present, 445-6), Huxley (Man’s Place in Nature, p 278). And to the Dictionary of Races (Senate Document 662, 61st Congress, 3d Session, 1910-11, p. 317).
The term “Aryan” has to do with linguistic, and not at all with physical characteristics, and it would seem reasonably clear that the mere resemblance in language, indicating a common linguistic root buried in remotely ancient soil, is altogether inadequate to prove common racial origin.  There is, and can be, no assurance that the so-called Aryan language was not spoken by a variety of races living in proximity to one another .  Our own history ahs witness the adoption of the English tongue by millions of Negroes, whose descendants can never be classified racially with the descendants of white persons, notwithstanding both may speak a common root language.”

"On the question of the “racial purity” (limpieza) of the Aryans or the Jews, quite the consensus among reputable anthropologists was, and still is, that it too was a myth wholly unrelated to reality. A typical expression the view about the Jews as a “race” is given by the noted English  scientists Julian S. Huxley and A. C. Haddon in We Europeans: A Survey of Racial Problems (1936):
“The Jews can rank neither as a nation nor even as ethnic unit, but rather as a socio-religious group carrying large Mediterranean, Armenoid and many other elements, and varying greatly in physical characteristics.  Like many other groups, its members are held together by external pressure of various kinds, partly by a long historic memory, partly be a sense of common suffering, partly be religion.  These factors, acting through long ages, have produce a common consciousness which is replaced when the pressures are relaxed and intensified with the reverse process.”

"As for the “racial purity” claims made on behalf of the German people by the “Aryan” apologists, the eminent French anthropologist, Pittard, made this observation at the turn of the this century: “There is as much difference between a Pomeranian from the Baltic Coast and a Bavarian from the Ammer Massif, as there is between a horse and a zebra.”

"In the years intervening between the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of all German states in 1871, and Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany in 1932, there was a relatively large number of Jews in Germany whose worldly fortune began to look up.  Under Prince Bismarck’s opportunistic policy of reaction and liberalism at one and the same time, the country’s Jews acquired full civil emancipation and, therefore, equal opportunities under the law in every field of endeavour.  It is certain that during the three decades that wound up the nineteenth century, the great industrial and commercial expansion of Germany gave many Jews a ready outlet for their talents.  Many became rich – and pillars of society – as manufacturers , merchants, bankers, doctors engineers, musicians, lawyers and writers.

"That the element of envy (or resentment) entered into the thinking of many anti-Semites toward their fellow Germans of Jewish extraction needs no further comment.  Ever since the Knights of the Cross [i.e.: the Templars, (Ed.)] late in the eleventh century raised the cry of “Hab, Hab” (“Give, Give”), the enemies of the Jews during the ensuing centuries in every country of Europe became adept at mingling their love of Jewish money and possessions with the unction of Pious sentiment.  This combination of feeling was undoubtedly the spark behind the mass-petition signed by 300,000 Prussian citizens in 1880 – and followed by two days of near-riotous debate in the Parliament – asking the Iron Chancellor (Bismarck) to exclude the Jews from all schools and universities and not allow them to hold public office.  The petition declared: ‘The blending of the Semitic with the German element of our population has proved a failure.  We are now face with the loss of our superiority through the ascendancy of Judaism, whose steadily increasing influence springs from racial characteristics which the German nation cannot and must not tolerate unless it wishes to destroy itself.’

"How different was the approach to the well-advertised “Jewish” failings (as if other peoples did not share the same shortcomings!) by Robespierre during the French Revolution.  Pleading with the delegates of the National Assembly that they include the Jews in the humane provisions of he Rights of Man, he said: ‘The vices of he Jews are born of the abasement in which you [Christians (sic)] have plunged them.  Raise their condition, and they will speedily rise to it.’  One hundred and fifty-four years later (in 1945) the American psychologist W. M. Krogman courageously touched on the same subject and virtually in the same manner as Robespierre: [declaring] ‘centuries of injustice and of rigorous competition [have forced the Jew to] (sic) compensate – by a tremendous drive – this fact has given him a set of behavioral attitudes and responses that are often characteristic to the point of recognition and group definition – but that is cultural, not biological.’”

"As the old saying goes: ‘the Jews were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.’  The Rev. Dr. Stocker, the Kaiser’s fashionable preacher at Potsdam, declared: ‘The Jews are at one and the same time the pace-setters of capitalism and of revolutionary socialism, thus working from two sides to destroy the present political and social order.’

"The Beginnings of the Myth:
"The German anti-Semites, always strong in their national penchant for metaphysics, for reaching ‘scientific’ conclusions, and for drawing up precise formulations of them, developed their hatred of the Jew into an irrefutable scientific system – so they thought.  It has often been observed that, when societies or groups of men want certain of their actions to appear to others less objectionable and more ‘righteous’ that they actually are, they adorn them with high-sounding, moral, and legal rationalizations – perfuming the stench, as it were, by such sanctions.  However as Max Nordau, the noted Jewish journalist and wit (1849-1923) once dourly observed about the ‘intellectual’ antics of the anti-Semites: ‘The pretexts change, but the hatred remains.’

"The hatred of the anti-Semites in Germany and Austria remained, but beginning with the middle of the nineteenth century, a brand new pretext was furnished – this time by the intellectuals and the professors; ethnologists, biologists, psychologists, and historians – and aimed at the complete suppression of the Jews.  This new approach had been pioneered by two men: count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816 – 1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1885 – 1927)

"Gobineau, a French diplomat and Orientalist, who issued his essay: ‘On the Inequality of the Human Races’ in four volumes (Paris, -), took for his thesis the proposition that the Jews (Semites) were ‘a mongrel race’ and that ‘everything great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man…belongs to one family (Aryan), the different branches of which have reined in all civilized countries of the globe.’  The other intellectual mentor of the German anti-Semites, Chamberlain, was the son-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner, who, on his own, had mercilessly flayed the Jews in his not-so-musical essay, ‘Judaism in Music’.  Chamberlain was the author of perhaps the most libelous work ever produced on the subject of the Jews and published under the completely misleading but academic title ‘The foundations of the Nineteenth Century’ (1899).  It won the enthusiastic patronage of Kaiser Wilhelm II and sold almost one million copies in the German language alone.  A choice reflection in the book is this: ‘the Jewish race is altogether bastardized, and its existence is a crime against the holy laws of  life…’

"Speaking of ‘the holy laws of life’, another equally influential and pious enemy of the Jewish people, the Rev. Dr. Adolph Stocker , Wilhelm I’s court preacher and the leader of the anti-Semitic bloc in the Reichstag, also entered the lists as a champion of ‘holiness’, but the sanctity he fought for was the so-called purity of  German blood.  He stated: ‘modern Judaism is an alien drop of blood in the German body – one with destructive power.’  It was Stocker, the founder in 1878 of the Christian Socialist Party, who at that time coined the slogan which became a battle cry of the Nazis against the Jews a half century later: ‘Deutschland – erwache!’ (Germany – awake!).  The Christian Socialists also adopted a central plank in their political program calling for a Germany which would be Judenrein (purified of Jews). 

"Curiously, in this preoccupation with the racial purity of the German people, Chamberlain and Stocker, as also the other intellectual leaders of the ever-proliferating German anti-Semitic movement – Wilhelm Marr, Hermann Ahlwardt, Heinrich van Treitschke, Count Walter Puckler-Muskau, and the philosopher Eugen Duhring – had ‘scientific’ views with the limpieze, purity of blood ([the] obsession of the Spanish racists during the fourteenth century).

"The Jewish problem no longer was to be a concern for the Christian religion.  The intellectual anti-Semites, like the beer-hall rabble-rousers, were violently opposed to the conversion of the Jews to Christianity on account of the ‘taint’ of ‘Jewish blood’ that could enter the pure German blood-stream through intermarriage.  This stand was entirely consistent with their ‘racial purity’ notions, and was clearly expressed by the popular jingle:

"Was der Jude glaubt ist enerlei
In der Rasse liegt die Schweinerei…’

"(What the Jew believes is meaningless;
In the race lies the swinishness.’)

"Duhring, from his lofty eminence as a philosopher, gave the following genocidal counsel to the German people on how to deal with the Jews:  They were not to be hampered by any ‘scruple, to use the most modern methods of disinfection.’  From his ‘philosophy of  disinfection’ to the gas chambers of the Nazis, where six million Jews were asphyxiated in the 1940’s was just one step removed and only six decades away."

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[It is my personal hope, based on this material, that those who hold Anti-Jewish feelings, will now examine their thoughts and motives, now that they are aware that the concept of Anti-Semitism or Anti-Jewish thinking is based on faulty logic and 'manufactured' evidence.  There is no reason in this world for realistic and educated people to cling to such unfounded prejudice against a people.  Editor]