This is the preface to the hardcover edition: Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998).

This is the preface to the first paperback edition (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2003).

A writer in the Toronto Globe and Mail (May 11, 1993) comments on the incredible sense of commonality he has with other Jews and his ability to recognize other Jews in public places, a talent he says he has heard called “J-dar”. While dining with his prospective gentile wife, he is immediately recognized as Jewish by some other Jews, and there is an immediate “bond of brotherhood” between them that excludes his gentile companion.

I am greatly indebted to David Dowell, Department of Psychology, California State University-Long Beach, for introducing me to social identity theory as a theoretical approach for understanding group conflict.

For example, in the case of traditional shtetl Jews in Poland in the early 20th century, the self-concept that Jews did not engage in physical labor was so strongly held that even starving Jews would refuse to engage in such labor. The prominent Zionist Arthur Ruppin (1971, 70) recounts an incident in which he observed a Christian chopping wood for a Jew. When the Jew was asked why he did not employ one of the many unemployed Jews in the area, he replied that “A Jew does not undertake such work, even when he is starving; it is not suitable for a Jew.” Jewish avoidance of physical labor was also commented on by gentiles, often with anti-Semitic overtones. The American sociologist Edward A. Ross (1914, 146) wrote that “the Hebrew immigrants rarely lay hand to basic production. In tilling the soil, in food growing, in extracting minerals, in building, construction and transportation they have little part. Sometimes they direct these operations, often they finance them, but even in direst poverty they contrive to avoid hard muscular labor.”

Attitudes of mutual hostility have been common throughout Jewish history. There are numerous examples of mutual hostility and contempt between Greeks and Jews and, later, between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire in both Jewish and Christian sources (see Ch. 2 and 3). Patai (1977, 380ff) notes a general tendency for Jews to reciprocate attitudes of hostility and contempt toward gentiles in pre-Enlightenment Europe, and attitudes of superiority were particularly characteristic of the Sephardim. This Jewish belief in their own superiority has often aroused hatred among gentiles. The 15th-century anti-Semitic chronicler Andrés Bernáldez stated that “They [Jews and New Christians] had the presumption of arrogance; [they thought] that in all the world there were no people who were better, or more prudent, or shrewder, or more distinguished than they because they were of the lineage and condition of Israel” (in Castro 1971, 71).

In the Acts of the Apostles 10:28, Peter says “ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath showed me that I should not call any man common or unclean” (in Alon 1977, 154).

The authoritative 12th-century Code of Maimonides, Book X, The Book of Cleanness summarizes a vast body of the law of cleanness in which a wide variety of very minimal contacts with gentiles and things associated with gentiles brings uncleanness. For purposes of uncleanness, male gentiles over nine years of age and female gentiles over three years of age are considered “in every respect as men who suffer a flux [i.e., a discharge from the penis]” (p. 9; see also especially p. 213). Such a person is a “Father of Uncleanness” and hence capable of rendering persons, utensils, and garments unclean by contact (p. 25). Regarding men with a flux, “they render utensils unclean by contact; they render unclean the couch, seat, or saddle beneath them, making this also a Father of Uncleanness; and they convey maddaf uncleanness to what is borne above them” (p. 207). (Maddaf uncleanness refers to uncleanness of objects borne above a person with flux in which the uncleanness is conveyed to the foodstuffs and liquids inside the utensil.) Their spittle, urine, and semen are unclean, and any man who has intercourse with a gentile female is rendered unclean. Gentiles therefore are viewed as contaminating these objects so that any Israelite who contacts these objects is rendered unclean.

Gentiles are said not to be able to contract corpse uncleanness, the reason being that “it [the gentile] is like a beast which touches a corpse or overshadows it. And this applies not to corpse uncleanness only but to any other kind of uncleanness: neither Gentiles nor cattle are susceptible to any uncleanness” (p. 9). A further indication of the low status of gentiles is that if thieves enter a house, only the areas trodden by the feet of the thieves are unclean, but if a gentile is with them, the entire house is unclean (pp. 246–247). Thus even Israelite thieves impart less uncleanness than gentiles.

Gentile land is also unclean, as is the airspace over gentile land, so that “as soon as anyone brought his head and the greater part of himself into the airspace of a heathen land he became unclean” (p. 43). Moreover, land in Israel where gentiles have lived also is unclean, because there is a fear that they might have buried their abortions there.

A Viennese guidebook during the early 20th century stated that the first question one asks when seeing someone on the street was, “Is he a Jew?” (Gilman 1993, 44). This comment reflects the extreme salience of group membership during this period of ethnic conflict.

In PTSDA (Chapter 4), it was suggested that an important aspect of Jewish religious writings in the ancient world, as well as among some modern apologists, has been to foster the idea that Judaism has been and continues to be highly permeable. The data summarized there and in Chapters 6 and 9 of this volume are highly compatible with the proposition that Judaism has at times presented itself as permeable, thereby mitigating anti-Semitism, while in practice retaining powerful sanctions against crossing group boundaries. See Chapter 9 for a discussion of the permeability of contemporary Judaism.

The finding that crowd members tend to engage in intensely motivated, impulsive collective behavior is highly compatible with the idea of an evolved facultative adaptation for self-sacrificing behavior on behalf of the group. Lorenz (1966) proposed an evolved system that underlies a specialized form of militant, emotionally intense communal aggression in the context of group conflict. The extraordinary susceptibility of crowd members to engage in collective behavior as a member of a group and their tendency to do so in an emotionally intense, impulsive, disinhibited manner strongly suggest an adaptation in which group interests are maximized to the possible detriment of individual interests. The lack of self-monitoring and self-awareness in crowd members (apart from their identity as crowd members) and the impulsive, irrational nature of crowd behavior are difficult to reconcile with selection at the individual level. One might suppose that the interests of the crowd would tend to coincide with self-interest. However, the implication of this research seems to be that individuals caught up in crowd behavior tend to fail to monitor their own interests and get carried along in the group activity. Since the proposed mechanism would not operate in the absence of an ingroup crowd and a perceived emergency, there is no implication that it would lead to a generalized altruism.

Of course, one could also propose that these phenomena are not an evolutionary adaptation but a maladaptive consequence of other evolved mechanisms confronting a novel environment. In any case, whether this type of collective behavior is the result of natural selection for group behavior is irrelevant to the fact that these phenomena are of considerable importance in understanding many historical instances of anti-Semitism; the mechanism is important independent of its putative status as a biological adaptation.

See discussion of crypto-Judaism in Chapter 6. The analysis of Netanyahu, Rivkin, and Roth is controversial because of their view that the vast majority of New Christians were sincere in their Christian beliefs and became crypto-Jews only as a result of the anti–New Christian prejudices. The point here is that even if their analysis is correct, the anti–New Christian sentiment is entirely rational from an evolutionary perspective. These views are discussed in more detail in the appendix to Chapter 7.

This statement is presumably an example of attempted deception, since the condemnation of lending money to gentiles was far from unanimous among Jewish religious authorities. See Chapter 2. In convoking the assembly, Napoleon’s representative noted that “the conduct of many among those of your persuasion has excited complaints, which have found their way to the foot of the throne: these complaints were founded on truth” (Transactions, p. 131; Tama 1807). The editor of the Transactions notes “the enormous usury practised by the Jews, who have been known to take five and six per cent. per month upon bills of landholders, the payment of which was the more secure, as, by the present French laws, landed property is liable to those debts, and a man’s estate may be sold there for the most trivial debt of that nature” (p. 32).

This is essentially a civil libertarian argument and underlines the political importance for Jews of having gentiles perceive them as individuals rather than as a cohesive group. As discussed in The Culture of Critique, a major strand of Jewish intellectual activity in the 20th century for combating anti-Semitism is to attempt to be perceived by the rest of society as a set of individuals rather than as a cohesive group.

Navasky (1980, 116) describes a memo by Andhil Fineberg of the American Jewish Committee (AJCommittee) staff on the repercussions of the fact that the great majority of communist spies were Jews. In a comment that reflects an unconscious understanding of social identity theory, Fineberg suggested that the best way to combat this threat to Jews was to de-emphasize Jewish group identity of “good Jews” like Bernard Baruch as well as bad Jews like the communist spies. Identifying people like Baruch as Jews “reinforces the concept of group responsibility” and “the residue in the mind of the average person whom the editorial is intended to influence, is likely to be, ‘But why is it all those atomic spies are all Jews?’” (in Navasky 1980, 116). Fineberg argued that an attempt by Communist Party members to portray their persecution as anti-Semitism would be “devastating” to Jews generally and recommended that the AJCommittee reply to charges linking Jews and communism to the effect that “criminals operate as individuals, not as members of religious or racial groups” (p. 116). Good advice.

The involvement of Conversos in modernizing intellectual movements was real enough. Conversos were intimately involved in the University of Alcalá as a bastion of nominalism in the sixteenth century (González 1989). Nominalism was widely viewed as subversive of religion at a time when the intellectual basis of religion had become identified with Aristotle and Aquinas. Opposition to nominalism eventually came to be a matter of Catholic religious orthodoxy. Heredia (1972) essentially argues that the intellectual atmosphere of University of Alcalá was the result of a conspiracy by Converso-Nominalists to control the intellectual life of Spain.

Several authors (e.g., Crespo 1987; Haliczer 1989; Lea 1906–1907) have attributed the decline of Spain and Portugal to the extreme level of thought-control and social conformism (i.e., a collectivist, anti-individualist from of social structure) resulting from the Inquisition. Crespo (1987, 185) notes the “intellectual endogamy” brought on by the Inquisition, with its resulting “intellectual fossilization.”

It gravely weakened the principle of academic authority and strengthened official, institutional authority as the sole criterion of truth. As a consequence, the censors’ successive confrontations with the most innovative schools of thought of the period such as mysticism, humanism, philological criticism, Erasmianism, Hebraism, rationalism, the Enlightenment or the first manifestations of bourgeois liberalism, were carried out not from the perspective of an intellectual struggle but from a dogmatic position supported by a powerful judicial institution.

Research supporting the importance of self-esteem as underlying the motivation for social identificatory processes has not been entirely supportive (e.g., Hogg & Abrams 1993). Hogg and Abrams (1993) attempt to elaborate the motivational basis of social identity theory by proposing that ingroup membership reduces subjective uncertainty (by agreement with other ingroup members), with concomitant increases in positive mood and feelings of power and control, self-efficacy, a sense of personal meaning, self-esteem, etc. An evolutionary approach would emphasize the importance of evolved emotional systems as central to motivation generally (MacDonald 1991), but there are a variety of emotion systems that could be involved, including those mentioned by Hogg and Abrams. Evolved motivational systems often include both positive and negative emotions (e.g., anxiety in the presence of danger and relief consequent to deliverance [MacDonald 1995a]). I suspect that studies of naturally occurring groups with a very high degree of group commitment (such as Judaism) would reveal not only very strong positive emotions associated with group membership but a strong role also for negative emotions, such as guilt, for motivating non-defection from the group and compliance with group goals. Indeed, Baumeister and Leary (1995) and Trivers (1971) emphasize the importance of positive emotions of affection, intimacy, and empathy as well as the negative emotion of guilt for cementing ingroup relationships and preventing defection.

Freeman (1995, 130ff) has also proposed specific adaptations that function to make individuals into cohesive groups. He stresses the role of music in producing emotionally intense group identification, as in many preliterate societies and in evangelical congregations.

It is interesting that among the psychological traits found in collectivist societies is a bifurcation of the real and the social selves (Triandis 1991). Here the ritualized form of conversation among Jews in a traditional society suggests that the social self was completely conventionalized and socially prescribed.

. A modern case: On March 25, 1997, the Los Angeles Times (p. A29 OC) reported that Avi Kostner, a Jew from Hackensack, New Jersey, had pleaded insanity after saying that he killed his two children because his ex-wife intended to raise them as Christians. The defendant failed in his plea and was sentenced to life in prison.

Galanter (1989a, 85ff; see also Wenegrat 1989) proposes that the tendency to form cohesive groups as typified by religious cults is a universal, innate psychological adaptation among humans. While I agree that there is a universal mechanism underlying group conflict, my perspective differs in that I also emphasize individual differences in the trait, including genetic and environmental sources of variation. The proposal is that Jews are higher than average on this system, and that in general there are individual differences in the extent to which people are attracted to highly collectivist groups and the extent to which threatening circumstances give rise to the desire to join such groups. People from individualist societies, as typified by Western societies generally (see PTSDA, Ch. 8), are expected to be relatively low on this system compared to Jews.

The Sephardic philosopher Baruch Spinoza is a famous example of a non-conformist who was expelled from the Jewish community.

See especially Stillman (1979, 368–69; 416–17) for examples of ritualized anti-Jewish customs in Arab lands. Ritualized degradation was most common in Yemen and Morocco; in the former it continued without significant interruption for thirteen centuries until the Yemenese Jews left for Israel. See Patai (1986), Ahroni (1986), and Nini (1991) for discussions of the oppression of Yemenese Jews, apparently the most extreme oppression in the Moslem world.

Indeed, there is some indication that the Jews in Muslim lands were physically so intimidated by their Muslim hosts that they were extraordinarily fearful: A 19th-century British observer in the Ottoman lands contrasted the boldness of Jews in England with Ottoman Jews, whose “pusillanimity is so excessive, that they will flee before the uplifted hand of a child” (Lewis 1984, 164). In Morocco and the Ottoman areas even young children could spit on Jews or hit them with rocks without fear of retaliation, and a visitor to Turkey in 1836 noted that “there is a subdued and spiritless expression about the Eastern Jew. . . . It is impossible to express the contemptuous hatred in which the Osmanlis hold the Jewish people” (in Lewis 1984, 165).

Stillman (1979) characterizes the treatment of Jews in Morocco as ranging between extremes of tolerance and intolerance, with the best periods occurring at times of foreign domination when Jews were favored by a non-native ruling class: the Merinids (13th–15th century) and the French in the 20th century. When a popular rebellion ended the Merinid dynasty in 1465, the mellah (Jewish quarter) of Fez was almost entirely exterminated. In the following period, under the native Muslim Wattasids and the Sharifans, a few privileged Jews were employed by the government, but the rest of the Jewish population was forced to endure the extremely harsh “highly ritualized degradation” briefly described here. The status of Moroccan Jews did not change significantly until the French conquest in 1912.

Bosworth (1982, 38) makes the interesting comment that the Jewish dhimmi in the early Islamic period was despised because of its “racial exclusiveness,” suggesting that even in segmentary societies the exclusiveness of outgroups is negatively evaluated.

It is not clear what Tacitus had in mind by saying that “among themselves nothing is unlawful.” He may well have been referring to Jewish practices of polygyny, levirate marriage, and consanguineous marriage (uncle-niece marriage and marriage to first cousins) that were illegal for Roman citizens (see MacDonald 1990; PTSDA, Ch. 8).

Another well-known quote is from Philostratus’s (1980, 341) Life of Apollonius of Tyana: “The Jews have long been in revolt not only against the Romans, but against humanity; and a race that has made its own a life apart and irreconcilable, that cannot share with the rest of mankind in the pleasures of the table nor join in their libations or prayers or sacrifices, are separated from ourselves by a greater gulf than divides us from Susa or Bactra in the most distant Indies.”

The 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon, reflecting these ancient assessments, wrote in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Ch. 16, 78) that the Jews were “an unsocial religion” (p. 80), the “implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but of human kind.” Gibbon was especially struck by what he characterized as Jewish fanaticism in the ancient world and their hostility towards others:

Without repeating what has been already mentioned of the reverence of the Roman princes and governors for the temple of Jerusalem, we shall only observe that the destruction of the temple and city was accompanied and followed by every circumstance that could exasperate the minds of the conquerors, and authorize religious persecution by the most specious arguments of political justice and the public safety. From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives; and we are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but of human kind. The enthusiasm of the Jews was supported by the opinion that it was unlawful for them to pay taxes to an idolatrous master; and by the flattering promise which they derived from their ancient oracles, that a conquering Messiah would soon arise, destined to break their fetters and to invest the favourites of heaven with the empire of the earth. It was by announcing himself as their long-expected deliverer, and by calling on all the descendants of Abraham to assert the hope of Israel, that the famous Barchochebas collected a formidable army, with which he resisted, during two years, the power of the emperor Hadrian.

Rather (1990, 152) notes that Kierkegaard and Tolstoy also had similar views on the contrast between particularistic Judaism and universalist Christianity. In Tolstoy’s words, “In the Gospel we are prohibited not only from killing anyone but even from bearing anyone ill-will; in the Pentateuch: Kill, kill, kill women, children, and cattle. . . . In the Gospel all men are brothers; in the Pentateuch, all are enemies, except the Jews” (in Rather 1990, 152).

In some cases these perceptions were based on personal experience. The German anti-Semite Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904) emphasizes the clannishness of his employers in his account of his early experiences as the only non-Jew in the offices of two different Jewish financial offices. He had obtained his first job as a result of the influence of his father, who became famous as an actor portraying Jews in the theater. Marr states that he was fired from both jobs while less competent Jews were retained. “My Jewish colleagues really were [wonderful people]. But the racial question was of decisive importance, even for these Jews. The ‘goi’ had to be sacrificed as much as they liked and pampered him” (in Zimmerman 1986, 125; italics in text). Marr also recounts an incident in which a young revolutionary acquaintance was reprimanded by his observant father for being baptized and dressing like a Christian. The man disagreed with Marr’s suggestion of rejecting his father by saying that “you don’t know the rules preserving the link between us Jews. None of us can break the iron ring.” Marr replied that Heinrich Heine had broken away, but the man said (prophetically), “Just wait and see. Heine too will return to being Jewish” (in Zimmerman 1986, 132; italics in text). Heine did in fact develop a greater Jewish consciousness toward the end of his life, stating that “I make no secret of my Judaism, to which I have not returned, because I have not left it” (in Rose 1990, 167).

The leaders of Western Jewish communities were highly committed to the overthrow of the czar. For example, in 1907 Lucien Wolf wrote to Louis Marshall of the AJCommittee that “the only thing to be done on the whole Russo-Jewish question is to carry on persistent and implacable war against the Russian Government” (in Szajowski 1967, 8). “Western Jewish leaders actively participated in general actions in favor of the liberal and revolutionary movements in Russia both during the revolution and after its downfall” (Szajkowski 1967, 9).

Nevertheless, Ross held out the hope that Jews would completely assimilate in the long run, including by intermarriage. His opposition to Jewish immigration stemmed from his belief that anti-Semitism based on resource competition and negatively perceived Jewish traits was increasing, and that if immigration was allowed to continue unchecked it would result in violent anti-Semitic riots and legislation.

Writing much later, Henry Pratt Fairchild (1947) also asserted that Jews had failed to assimilate and that their presence prevented a sense of American nationality, because of such discordant Jewish practices as having different holidays. Fairchild also emphasized the Jewish sense of superiority, their strong preference for Jewish marriage partners, and their very open concern with financial considerations in marriage as giving rise to gentile hostility. Fairchild had a strong sense that between-group competition and within-group affiliation characterized relationships between Jews and gentiles: “Ours is not to ask why we crave superiority and yearn to dominate, why we like those who are like us, why we enjoy being with persons who are congenial to us, why we resent the economic competition of members of another group more than that of our own fellows, why devotion to the dictates of our own religion is esteemed piety while the similar loyalty of a different worshipper is called intolerance” (p. 161).

During the same period the conservative political activist Arnold White complained that the Eastern European Jewish immigrants without question “belong to a race and cling to a community that prefers to remain aloof from the mainstream of our national life, by shunning intermarriage with Anglo-Saxons” (in Alderman 1992, 123).

Feldman suggests that resource and reproductive competition was largely omitted in the writings of intellectuals because there was little understanding of or concern with the role of economics in social conflict, and because intellectuals during this period came from social classes who would be little threatened by Jewish economic and reproductive success. Feldman notes that it is remarkable that we do not hear of anti-Semitism in conjunction with the Jewish role as tax collectors under the Ptolemies, since such a role has been a potent source of anti-Semitism in other periods. Similarly, there is no mention of competition between Jewish and gentile artisan guilds, although ethnically segregated guilds existed during this period (Applebaum 1976, 479ff). Competition between Jewish and gentile artisan guilds was often a potent source of anti-Semitism in later periods (e.g., pre-expulsion Spain [Beinart 1981] and Poland [Hundert 1992]; see PTSDA: Chapter 5).

For Spain, see Baer 1961; Lea (1906–1907, I, 96–98); for Poland, see Weinryb 1972, 58ff; for medieval France, see Jordan 1989, 28. Writing of early modern Poland, Beauvois (1986) notes that Jews were disliked for being creditors and for “enslaving” the nobility (Beauvois 1986, 89); “Everything . . . is in Jewish hands” (Beauvois 1986, 89).

Thus Levi ben Gershom (14th century, French) argued that “it was a positive commandment to burden the gentile with interest ‘because one should not benefit an idolator . . . and [should] cause him as much damage as possible without deviating from righteousness’ ” (Johnson 1988, 174). Chazan (1973, 116–117) and Stein (1955, 1959) describe the views of Jewish polemicists in medieval France who argued that the Deuteronomic injunction not to lend at interest to countrymen did not apply to Christians, as some Christian theologians of the period had argued in their efforts to develop an intellectual rationale for ending Jewish moneylending. Based on their interpretation of scripture, the Jewish apologists argued that Christians were indeed foreigners and thus could be charged interest.

Jews were often accused of exceeding legal limitations on interest rates. For example, in Castile Jews were allowed 33-1/3 percent interest “and the constant repetition of these limitations and the provisions against all manner of ingenious devices, by fictitious sales and other frauds, to obtain an illegal increase, show how little the laws were respected in the grasping avarice with which the Jews speculated on the necessities of their customers” (Lea 1906–1907, I, 97). During the famine of 1326 at Cuenca when farmers needed money to buy seed, Jews refused to lend money until they were allowed to charge 40 percent interest instead of the previously allowed 33-1/3 percent (Lea 1906–1907, I, 97).

As a result, the Church’s campaign against Jewish moneylending was also directed against the gentile aristocracy who benefited from the practice. For example: “it has been brought to our notice that certain princes do not have their eyes upon the Lord . . . for, while they themselves are ashamed to exact usury, they receive Jews into their villages and towns and appoint them their agents for the collection of usury; and they are not afraid to afflict the churches of God and oppress the poor of Christ (letter from Pope Innocent III to the Count of Nevers [1208]; in Grayzel 1933, 127).

Similar themes of oppression resulting from Jewish moneylending combined with oppression by gentile elites occur in a 19th-century account on Morocco:

As money-lenders the Jews are as maggots and parasites, aggravating and feeding on the diseases of the land. I do not know, for my part, which exercises the greatest tyranny and oppression, the Sultan or the Jew,—the one the embodiment of the foulest misgovernment, the other the essence of a dozen Shylocks, demanding, ay, and getting, not only his pound of flesh, but also the blood and nerves. By his outrageous exactions the Sultan drives the Moor into the hands of the Jew, who affords him a temporary relief by lending him the necessary money on incredibly exorbitant terms. Once in the money-lender’s clutches, he rarely escapes till he is squeezed dry, when he is either thrown aside, crushed and ruined, or cast into a dungeon, where fettered and starved, he is probably left to die a slow and horrible death. To the position of the Jews in Morocco it would be difficult to find a parallel. Here we have a people alien, despised, and hated, actually living in the country under immeasurably better conditions than the dominant race, while they suck, and are assisted to suck, the very life-blood of their hosts. The aim of every Jew is to toil not, neither to spin, save the coils which as money-lender he may weave for the entanglement of his necessitous victims. (In Smith 1894, 252–253)

The total of debts owed to Jews was often very high during the Middle Ages—amounting to 25 percent more than the ordinary royal revenues in France in 1221. During the confiscations of Jewish property ordered by Philip Augustus, it was said that the Jews owned half of Paris; the confiscation produced “an enormous windfall for the king’s finances” (Baldwin 1986, 52).

See also Weinryb (1972, 63–64) for similar data on Jews as tax farmers in Poland. The ecologically similar role of Jews as estate managers in Poland also resulted in the perception that “the serf was exploited by this tribe foreign to his own people” (Beauvois 1986, 86).

The comment reflects a concern with Jewish reproductive success as an aspect of anti-Semitism. In PTSDA (Ch. 5) I note several other examples of anti-Semitic statements expressing this concern regarding Jewish reproductive success during the period of the Iberian inquisitions (15th–17th centuries). In Germany limitations on fertility were a common component of laws regulating Jews from the medieval period to the 19th century (Goldstein 1981; Lowenstein 1981), and the “Hep! Hep!” riots of 1819 were aimed at revenge at Jews, “who are living among us and who are increasing like locusts” (in Dawidowicz 1975, 30).

The following report from British Vice-Consul L. Wagstaff sums up the public perception of the social and economic causes of anti-Semitism leading to the pogroms of 1881 in Russia and reflects many of the themes of this section and the previous section:

It is chiefly as brokers or middlemen that the Jews are so prominent. Seldom a business transaction of any kind takes place without their intervention, and from both sides they receive compensation. To enumerate some of their other occupations, constantly denounced by the public: they are the principal dealers in spirits; keepers of “vodka” (drinking) shops and houses of ill-fame; receivers of stolen goods; illegal pawnbrokers and usurers. A branch they also succeed in is as government contractors. With their knowledge of handling money, they collude with unscrupulous officials in defrauding the State to vast amounts annually. In fact, the malpractices of some of the Jewish community have a bad influence on those whom they come in contact with. It must, however, be said that there are many well educated, highly respectable Jews in Russia, but they form a small minority. . . . They thoroughly condemn the occupations of their lower brethren. . . . They themselves acknowledge the abuses practised by some of their own members, and suggest remedial measures to allay the irritation existing among the working classes. Another thing the Jews are accused of is that there exists among them a system of boycotting; they use their religion for business purposes. . . . For instance, in Bessarabia, the produce of a vineyard is drawn for by lot, and falls, say to Jacob Levy; the other Jews of the district cannot compete with Levy, who buys the wine at his own price. In the leasing by action of government and provincial lands, it is invariably a Jew who outbids the others and afterwards re-lets plots to the peasantry at exorbitant prices. . . . Their fame as usurers is well known. Given a Jewish recruit with a few roubles’ capital, it can be worked out, mathematically, what time it will take him to become the money-lender of his company or regiment, from the drummer to the colonel. Take the case of a peasant: if he once gets into the hands of this class, he is irretrievably lost. The proprietor, in his turn, from a small loan gradually mortgages and eventually loses his estate. A great deal of landed property in south Russia has of late years passed into the hands of the Israelites but principally into the hands of intelligent and sober peasants. From first to last, the Jew has his hand in everything. He advances the seed for sowing, which is generally returned in kind—quarters for bushels. As harvest time comes around, money is required to gather in the crops. This is sometimes advanced on hard conditions; but the peasant has no choice; there is no one to lend him money, and it is better to secure something than to lose all. Very often the Jew buys the whole crop as it stands in the field on his own terms. It is thus seen that they themselves do not raise agricultural products, but they reap the benefits of others’ labour, and steadily become rich, while proprietors are gradually getting ruined. In their relation to Russia they are compared to parasites that have settled on a plant not vigorous enough to throw them off, and which is being sapped of its vitality.

The vice-consul also noted that peasants often say when they see the property of a Jew, “That is my blood.” The complaints of the pogromists also included charges that Russian girls in service at Jewish households were sexually exploited.

Similarly, in 19th-century England, the socialist Chartist movement, while opposed to persecution of Jews, tended to regard them as part of the wealthy, parasitic class of oppressors (Alderman 1983, 17).

Other pronouncements from revolutionaries during the period stated that “one should not hit the Jew because he is a Jew and prays to his own God . . . but because he plunders the people, sucks the blood of the workingman”; and, “The Jew owns the bars and taverns, rents land from the landowners and then leases it out to the peasant at two or three times the rate, he buys wheat on the field, goes in for money lending and charges percentages so high that people call them simply ‘Yiddish’ rates” (in Frankel 1981, 100). A Jewish socialist, Pavel Borisovich Akselrod, analyzed the situation by writing that “however great the poverty and deprivation suffered by the Jewish masses . . . the fact remains that, taken overall, some half of them function as a nonproductive element, sitting astride the neck of the lower classes in Russia” (in Frankel 1981, 105). These comments agree with the assessment of the British Vice-Consul quoted in note 21.

In later years, Jews assumed a much larger role in the revolutionary movement in Russia. This resulted in a very different interpretation of the 1881 pogroms. Writing in 1905 during another period of pogroms, the Jewish socialist theorist Shimen Dubnov attributed the 1881 pogroms to “imaginary economic factors,” while the recent pogroms had been the result of “revenge for the revolutionary activity of the Jews” (in Frankel 1981, 136). Workers and peasants were active participants in the 1905 pogroms as well.

A 19th-century account presents the perception of Jews as predators on German peasants: “There is scarce a village without some Jews in it, who do not cultivate land themselves, but lie in wait like spiders for the failing Bauer [i.e., peasant]” (Baring-Gould, 114). A German informant told Baring-Gould that “he doubted whether there were a happier set of people under the sun so long as they are out of the clutch of the Jew” (in Smith 1894, 252).

Further examples of the theme of economic domination: In Judaism in Music (1850), Richard Wagner stated that “we can now find the plea of this king for emancipation nothing more than uncommonly naive, since we see ourselves rather in the position of fighting for emancipation from the Jews. The Jew is in fact, in the current state of this world, already more than emancipated. He rules” (trans. by Rather 1990, 163). The Agrarian League stated in 1894 that it was “an opponent of Jewry, which has become altogether too mighty in our country and has acquired a decisive say in the press, in trade and on the exchanges” (in Pulzer 1964, 190). Otto Glagau stated that “actually they dominate us. Once again as in centuries past, an alien tribe, so small in number, rules a truly great nation” (in Levy 1975, 15). Glagau charged that 90 percent of those responsible for the stock market crash of 1873 were Jews, a charge that Lindemann (1997, 120) accepts as possibly exaggerated but as reflecting actual disproportionate Jewish involvement.

The Jewish economic elite appears to have chosen gentiles as members of boards of directors in an attempt to lessen the salience of Jewish dominance of these enterprises (Mosse 1987, 284). Mosse estimates that Jews were overrepresented by a factor of twenty in their control of the German economy.

Smith also presents the following passage from Baba Kamma 113b as an illustration of Jewish behavior toward gentiles. I provide the translation from the Epstein edition (London: The Soncino Press, 1935).

Samuel said: It is permissible, however to benefit by his mistake as in the case when Samuel once bought of a heathen a golden bowl under the assumption of it being of copper for four zuz, and also left him minus one zuz. R. Kahana once bought of a heathen a hundred and twenty barrels which were supposed to be a hundred while he similarly left him minus one zuz and said to him: ‘See that I am relying upon you.’ Rabina together with a heathen bought a palm tree to chop up [and divide]. He thereupon said to his attendant: Quick, bring to me the parts near to the roots, for the heathen is interested only in the number [but not in the quality]. R. Ashi was once walking on the road when he noticed branches of vines outside a vineyard upon which ripe clusters of grapes were hanging. He said to his attendant: ‘Go and see, if they belong to a heathen bring them to me, but if to an Israelite do not bring them to me.’ The heathen happened to be then sitting in the vineyard and thus overheard this conversation, so he said to him: ‘If of a heathen would they be permitted?’—He replied: ‘A heathen is usually prepared to [dispose of his grapes and] accept payment, whereas an Israelite is generally not prepared to [do so and] accept payment.’

Smith (1894, 271) notes the irony of viewing the Israelites of the Old Testament as moral exemplars despite their “belief that the Father of all and the God of justice had a favourite race, . . . [and] pledged himself to promote its interest against those of other races.” Smith goes on to note that during the invasion described in the Book of Joshua following the Egyptian sojourn, the Israelite God stopped the sun so that the slaughter could continue and commanded that nothing remain alive that breathed.

Given the widespread perception, even among many Jewish observers, that Jews often engaged in deceitful economic transactions with gentiles or “outsmarted” gentiles, accusations that Jews have had negative personality characteristics cannot be dismissed out of hand. Data from the late 19th and early 20th century compiled by Ruppin (1913) show that Jews were disproportionately involved in crimes of fraud and deceit in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Netherlands. Jews were also disproportionately likely to be prosecuted for evasion of military service and “spreading immoral literature.”

Katz (1985, 97) notes that one common accusation of Jewish actors in post-emancipation Germany that may well be valid was that they always undercut scenes depicting “tender and sensitive emotions” with irony. He also notes that this has been recognized as a feature of Heine’s poetry and concludes that “Jewish qualities may quite naturally appear—for better or for worse—in artistic creations of Jews, even of those who have joined non-Jewish culture. It would therefore be preposterous to dismiss categorically all observations from the mouths of antisemites as prejudicial misconceptions.”

Similarly, Lindemann (1991) emphasizes that the public perception of Jews as ruthless and immoral was not entirely without foundation. Jewish capitalists were prominent beneficiaries and promoters of the Boer War. Jews were also involved in the ruthless suppression of a Romanian peasant revolt, and were involved disproportionately in international prostitution. Lindemann notes that “the involvement of Jews in these matters was not only plausible but real enough” (p. 33).

Interestingly, this working-class group did not charge Jews with being radicals and communists—charges that were common at the time in conservative circles and which had a basis in reality. The anti-Semitic images center around the types of contacts working-class individuals would be likely to have had with Jews, subject to the usual distortions predicted by social identity theory. Indeed, even T. W. Adorno (first author of the Berkeley studies of anti-Semitism; Adorno et al. 1950) suggested as much, noting also that working-class individuals were less likely to conceal their attitudes behind a “pseudo-democratic” veneer, and that working-class anti-Semitism was “less irrational” than anti-Semitism of other classes (see Wiggershaus 1994, 369). Referring to a more recent era, Ginsberg (1993, 198) suggests that the negative terms (“greedy,” “predatory”) used to refer to those involved in insider trading and stock swindles of the 1980s in America had anti-Semitic overtones because of the preponderance of Jews among this group.

Walter Laqueur (1974, 73) links this cultural domination to anti-Semitism as follows:

Without the Jews there would have been no “Weimar culture”—to this extent the claims of the antisemites, who detested that culture, were justified. They were in the forefront of every new, daring, revolutionary movement. They were prominent among Expressionist poets, among the novelists of the 1920’s, among the theatrical producers and, for a while, among the leading figures in the cinema. They owned the leading liberal newspapers . . . and many editors were Jews too. Many leading liberal and avant-garde publishing houses were in Jewish hands. . . . Many leading theatre critics were Jews, and they dominated light entertainment.

See also the discussion of André Gide in Johnson 1988, 390–391). Katz (1986b) notes that the Zionist Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) held attitudes which were the mirror image of those of Wagner. See Chapter 5.

Metternich insisted that Heine’s name be included in a ban on the “Young German” movement of writers, described in the ban as “a literary school . . . whose efforts openly tend to attack the Christian religion in the most insolent way, to denigrate existing social relations, and to destroy all decency and morality” (in Sammons 1979, 210).

Sorkin notes that Auerbach became a model, for secular Jewish intellectuals, of the assimilated Jew who did not renounce his Judaism. For the most part these secular Jewish intellectuals socialized exclusively with other secular Jews and viewed their contribution to German culture as a secular form of Judaism—thus the “invisible community” of strongly identified Jewish intellectuals. As discussed in PTSDA (Ch. 8), there is an very powerful tendency for Jews to form separatist cultures and subcultures throughout their history; in The Culture of Critique this is discussed as a tendency in Boasian anthropology, radical political ideology, psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School of Social Research.

Werner Mosse (1985) shows that besides Jewish over-representation in a radical, avant-garde intellectual culture, there was also a much more conservative bourgeois cultural movement, represented by Max Liebermann and the “K aiserjuden,” which retained strong ethnic overtones and whose members retained psychological identification as Jews. Both of these predominantly Jewish “counter-cultures” coexisted with the establishment Protestant intellectual culture, among whose heroes were the anti-Semites Richard Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Cultural movements were thus very closely tied to ethnic identifications on both sides.

Rankin’s comment on distorting history brings to mind the well-known address of the Carl Bridenbaugh, president of the American Historical Association, entitled “The Great Mutation.” In comments that were widely believed to be directed at Jews, Bridenbaugh (1963, 322–323) worried that

today we must face the discouraging prospect that we all, teachers and pupils alike, have lost much of what this earlier generation possessed, the priceless asset of a shared culture. . . . Many of the young practitioners of our craft, and those who are still apprentices, are products of lower middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions. They find themselves in a very real sense outsiders on our past and feel themselves shut out. This is certainly not their fault, but it is true. They have no experience to assist them, and the chasm between them and the Remote Past widens every hour. . . . What I fear is that the changes observant in the background and training of the present generation will make it impossible for them to communicate to and reconstruct the past for future generations.

Reflecting the sensitivity of Jewish issues surrounding the committee, the AJCommittee acted swiftly when the Jewish communist Louis Harup (1978) raised the issue of his Jewish identification in his condemnation of HUAC as a witness before the committee. Harup stated that “as a Jew . . . it is my obligation not to cooperate with this committee because, in my view, the activities of this committee are tending to bring this country into the same conditions under which six million Jews were murdered.” The reaction of the AJCommittee was to denounce the testimony as not reflecting the attitude of the American Jewish community.

A partial exception to this generalization is noted by Gabler (1988, 195) who finds a general tendency for Warner Brothers movies in the 1930s to be “permeated by a vague underdog liberalism, and if their films lacked refinement and glamour, they did have a conscience—deliberately so.” Warner Brothers movies “were far more ambivalent toward traditional American values than any other studio, just as the Warners themselves were more ambivalent than the heads of any other studio” (p. 196). This studio made several films depicting the “contributions and victimization of Jews” (p. 195).

The writers continued to write for the movies because, in the words of one close observer, “they believed that socially responsible writers belonged in the film industry because feature films were the most significant way in which the people of the world were being educated. The medium reached so far, that any victory was important” (in Ceplair & Englund 1980, 321).

As indicated above, another major theme of anti-Semitism has been Jewish exclusionary practices in economic activities. Cash provides anecdotal evidence that Jews exclude gentiles from influence on the media, including individuals who disguised themselves as Jews (crypto-gentiles?) in their attempt to become accepted in the industry. Seemingly acknowledging Jewish exclusionary practices, Gabler states that Cash’s article “is another example of how powerless elitists have always dealt with exclusion. Barred from one form of Establishment, they end up spewing anti-Semitic bile.”

Related to this, Medved (1996, 39) suggests that “it’s possible that industry leaders instinctively feel more comfortable working with people who share their own outlook, values, and background.” As an illustration of this phenomenon, a young screenwriter, Adam Kulakow (1996, 43), notes that “recently I had a meeting with a young executive to discuss a possible script assignment. Our conversation began with a discussion of the Eastern European origins of my surname and segued from there to talk of my grandparents’ arrival in America, my parents’ decision to settle in the Maryland suburbs, and mine to attend the University of Michigan. It wasn’t long before we were playing ‘Jewish geography.’ By the time we got around to the business of the meeting, we had achieved a comfort level based on our common ground.” Nevertheless, while agreeing that being Jewish is an advantage, Kulakow cites anecdotal accounts of individuals who deny that Jewish identity is important.

In a reply appended to the Gabler article, Cash stated that there is a double standard in which Jewish writers like Gabler are able to refer to a “Jewish cabal” while his own use of the phrase is described as anti-Semitic. He also notes that while movies regularly portray negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups, Cash’s description of Jews as “fiercely competitive” is regarded as anti-Semitic. Recently Marlon Brando repeated statements originally made in 1979 on a nationally televised interview program to the effect that “Hollywood is run by Jews. It’s owned by Jews.” The focus of the complaint was that Hollywood regularly portrays negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups but not of Jews. Brando’s remarks were viewed as anti-Semitic by the ADL and the Jewish Defense League (Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1996, F4).

Both Cash and Brando have apologized for their remarks and, as part of their apologies, visited the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (Forward, April 26, 1996). (Cash’s apology occurred some two years after publication of his remarks.) The Forward article suggests that Cash has had trouble publishing his work in the wake of the incident. Moreover, the same issue of Forward reported that the publisher of Cash’s comments, Dominic Lawson, editor of the London Spectator, was prevented from publishing an article on the birth of his Down Syndrome daughter in The New Republic when Martin Peretz, the owner, and Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor, complained about Lawson’s publishing Cash’s article. Goldberg (1996, 299) describes Peretz’s strong Jewish identification and his unabashed policy of slanting his journal toward positions favorable to Israel.

Pat Robertson (1991; see also Lind 1995a, 1995b, and Heilbrun 1995) accepts the general premises of a very elaborate conspiracy theory proposed by Nesta Webster (1944) in which Jews have played a prominent role in subversive movements beginning in the 18th century. Webster’s anti-Semitism includes several classic themes of 20th-century anti-Semitic writing: that Jews seek world domination (indicated especially by the writings of the Kabbala); Jews are disloyal (indicated by Jewish internationalism and their role as intermediaries who dominated native peoples in traditional societies); Jews are “the declared and implacable enemy of Christianity” (p. 378); Jews have played a predominant role in revolutionary movements in Russia and Hungary aimed at Jewish domination of these countries in the post-revolutionary period; Jews are responsible for psychoanalysis, “which, particularly by its insistence on sex, tends to subordinate the will to impulses of a harmful kind” (p. 345); Jews have been disproportionately involved in other cultural influences designed to undermine gentile Christian culture, including “Modern Art,” the drug trade, and the cinema (“where . . . history is systematically falsified in the interests of class hatred, and everything that can tend, whilst keeping within the present law, to undermine patriotism or morality is pressed upon the public” [p. 394]).

Goldberg (1996, 46) notes that “within the world of liberal organizations like the ACLU and People for the American Way, Jewish influence is so profound that non-Jews sometimes blur the distinction between them and the formal Jewish community.” The ACLU often has been the target of cultural conservatives writing from non-religious perspectives. See, e.g., Robert Bork’s (1996) Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Bork states that the ACLU “has had, through litigation and lobbying, a very considerable effect on American law and culture” (1996, 97). Bork is also one of many cultural conservatives to emphasize the products of media conglomerate Time Warner as particularly destructive (pp. 130–132). The result is that while Jews and Judaism are never mentioned in books like that of Bork, many of the books’ complaints are directed at Jewish activities and organizations. My personal impression from talking privately to cultural conservatives is that they do not raise the Jewish issue because of fear of being charged with anti-Semitism. (I have never spoken to Robert Bork and have no idea what his attitudes are on Jewish issues.) Their attitudes constitute a sort of underground anti-Semitism and they illustrate the effectiveness of Jewish strategies for combating anti-Semitism (see also Ch. 6).

See also Cohen’s (1972, 433ff) account of the AJCommittee’s attempt to undermine the influence of Christianity in the public schools—efforts that resulted in resentment in both Protestant and Catholic circles as well as among politicians and the public at large. In the early 1960s a writer in a Jesuit publication asked, “What will have been accomplished if our Jewish friends win all the legal immunities they seek, but thereby paint themselves into a corner of social and cultural alienation?” (in Cohen 1972, 444).

In another column, Sobran (1996b) quoted an essay, reprinted in the May 27th issue of the New York Times, by Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist describing his feelings on the killings of a hundred civilians in a military skirmish in southern Lebanon. Shavit wrote, “We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own.” Sobran comments that “in a single phrase—‘in our hands’—Shavit has lighted up the American political landscape like a flash of lightning. Notice that Shavit assumes as an obvious fact what we Americans can say publicly only at our own risk.” Sobran lost his position with National Review because of his views on the influence of American Jews on U. S. policy toward Israel.

According to the article a partial listing of the main mainstream media owned and/or managed by Jews includes the following: Walt Disney Co. (including Capital Cities/ABC, Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television, Walt Disney Picture Group, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Caravan Pictures, Miramax, Disney-related theme parks, ESPN, Lifetime Television, Arts & Entertainment Network, ABC Radio, seven daily newspapers, Fairchild Publications [Women’s Wear Daily], Chilton Publications, and the Diversified Publishing Group); Time Warner, Inc. (Home Box Office cable television network, Warner Music [the world’s largest music recording company], Warner Brothers Studio [feature films], a publishing division that includes Time, Sports Illustrated, People, and Fortune); the article also mentions a proposed deal in which Time Warner would acquireTurner Broadcasting [including Cable News Network], a deal that has since been completed); Viacom, Inc. (television production, Paramount films, twelve TV stations and twelve radio stations, publishing [Simon & Schuster, Prentice Hall, Pocket Books], Nickelodeon cable channel, Music Television [MTV]); the top managers for Rupert Murdoch’s film studio, for CBS television, and for Sony Corporation of America; DreamWorks (Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg); MCA and Universal Pictures [owned by Edgar Bronfman, also president of the World Jewish Congress]; Samuel Newhouse’s print media empire, including New Yorker and other Condé Nast magazines,and twenty-six daily newspapers, several in large cities; the countries most influential newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal) and newsmagazines (Time, Newsweek, U. S. News and World Report), Atlantic Monthly (owned by Mortimer B. Zuckerman, also owner of U. S. News and World Report); three of the top six book publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Time Warner Trade Group (including Warner Books and Little, Brown). The article notes that the top five movie production companies mentioned (Disney, Viacom [Paramount], Warner Brothers, Sony, and Universal) accounted for 74 percent of the total U. S. movie receipts for the first eight months of 1995.

See Whitehead (1993) for a discussion of the scientific literature on single parenting indicating that it is a low-investment form of parenting with devastating social consequences.

Similarly Michael Medved (1996, 42), who acknowledges that the majority of influential production executives are Jewish, describes the messages emanating from Hollywood as stressing “instant gratification rather than deferred gratification; superficial glamour rather than moral substance; and emotion, instinct, and violence rather than self-discipline and self-control.” He also notes that public opinion polls indicate that “the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that movies and television encourage criminal violence, promiscuous sex, and other forms of destructive behavior.” Medved also expresses his concern that the silence of Jewish self-defense organizations about the Jewish role in these phenomena only encourages anti-Semitism.

In their representative sample of the news media elite, 14 percent were religiously affiliated Jews and 23 percent were raised in a Jewish household, indicating that people of Jewish background are overrepresented approximately by a factor of 10 among elite journalists.

Gabler (1994) denies that the media reflect Jewish interests, preferring to ascribe the character of Jewish media influence to Jewish “marginality.”Attributions of Jewish marginality and exclusion are also a major theme of Gabler’s 1988 book An Empire of Their Own, but although Gabler clearly documents the strong Jewish identification of the major studio moguls (e.g., pp. 279–280), there is no documentation that these Jewish entrepreneurs viewed themselves as marginalized or that supposed Jewish marginalization or exclusion from other areas of the American economy was a motive for entering the movie business in the first place. The marginality explanation simultaneously “blames” any negative Jewish influences on putative gentile exclusionary activities and ignores the extent to which Jews are overrepresented on all of the indices of wealth and of political and cultural influence. As Goldberg (1996, 283) notes, because of high levels of Jewish acceptance, status as outsider is even less of an explanation for Jewish overrepresentation in the media in the contemporary era. In Chapter 8 I consider Jewish perceptions of marginalization as an aspect of self-deception regarding their status in America.

Powers et al. (1996, 79n.13) argue against the theory that Jews have been attracted to the movie industry because of its riskiness. They note that even the most successful of the movie elite are radicals on the cultural and social left but that this group is not particularly radical in their economic beliefs.

Moreover, as we shall see in The Culture of Critique, Jewish intellectuals have been in the forefront of developing messianic social and intellectual movements (particularly psychoanalysis and its offshoots) which proposed that relaxing social controls on sexuality among gentiles would result in a decline in anti-Semitism. From this perspective, a common view was that anti-Semitism was caused by pathological parent-child relationships and the repression of the child’s natural sexuality. Given the pervasive influence of these theories within Jewish culture generally, it is possible that Jews in the media would suppose that creating a hyper-sexualized media environment would liberate gentiles from their neurotic repressions and end anti-Semitism and other types of violence.

John Beaty’s (1951) The Iron Curtain Over America and Revilo P. Oliver’s(1981) America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative are American counterparts to this German anti-Semitic literature. These authors emphasize Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik Revolution, American communism, and in government positions via their influence on the American Democratic Party. Although their writings do not suppose that all American Jews are involved, as with much anti-Semitic literature, there is in them a tendency to see a vast interlocking Jewish conspiracy, in this case aimed at making America into a communist society administered by Jewish bureaucrats.

In a controversial work, the German historian Ernst Nolte (1987) argued that the perceived tendency of the Bolsheviks to commit mass murder against their enemies and the tendency among European rightists after 1917 to view the Bolshevik regime as dominated by Jews were important ingredients in predisposing the Nazis toward genocide. Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the Soviet state range between twenty and forty million, and as early as 1918 a prominent ethnically Jewish Bolshevik, Grigory Zinoviev, spoke publicly about the need to eliminate ten million Russians. Nolte was accused of “relativizing” the Holocaust and of questioning its uniqueness. For a summary of the Nolte affair, see Raico (1989). For a summary of the tendency among European rightists to identify the Soviet regime with Jews, see Mayer (1988).

The NAS asked Shafarevich to resign his position in the academy but he refused (See Science 257, 1992, 743; The Scientist 6(19) 1992, 1).

The hostility toward Russia because of its treatment of Jews also figured in another well-known incident, in which Jacob Schiff acknowledged that political considerations were an important factor in his efforts in financing the Japanese war effort against Russia in 1904–1905 (Sachar 1992, 226ff; Sherman 1983, 68). The German-Jewish leaders of the AJCommittee, including Schiff, continued their financial boycott of Russia until the fall of the czar, and their concern about Russian Jews resulted in attempts throughout the period to shape American policy toward Russia in a manner that was contrary to perceived American interests (Goldstein 1990, 284ff). Schiff attempted to have the British and French promise not to use his loans for aiding Russia; failing to receive such promises, his firm, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., did not participate in the financing of the Allied war effort—resulting in a great deal of negative press coverage (Goldstein 1990, 286; Sachar 1992, 239ff). In 1916 Schiff castigated the partners of a Boston investment firm “for caring more for their profits than for the honor of American citizens” by participating in a Russian loan (Goldstein 1990, 285). In making this argument, Schiff, who was actually interested in the civil rights of the Russian Jewish population, was placing the interests of a minuscule number of American Jews to travel freely in Russia above the official foreign policy interests of the United States, as well as the interests of the other Western allies. David R. Francis, the U. S. Ambassador to Russia during the period, pointedly noted that Jews only represented 3 percent of the Russian population (Goldstein 1990, 288)—implying that American policy was directed at aiding the vast majority of Russians while the AJCommittee was advocating a policy that was in the interests of only a small minority.

Mosse (1989, 250) notes that the German-Jewish entrepreneurial elite tended to support free-trade policies long after the gentile middle class had abandoned this ideology, and that they did so not simply out of economic self-interest but because of an ideology of internationalism. During the Wilhelmine era, this class of Jewish capitalists was “less chauvinistic and more internationally minded than Gentiles, a constant source of complaint from Pan Germans and antisemitic hyper-patriots” (Mosse 1989, 256). A particularly visible target of anti-Semites was Theodore Wolff, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, viewed by anti-Semites as a “cosmopolitan” who actively combated German geopolitical interests: “There was not a nationalist, chauvinist, militarist, völkisch, or antisemitic diatribe that did not include a reference to the liberal ‘Jewish press’ and the ‘Jews’ Republic’ (Judenrepublik) and that did not mention the Berliner Tageblatt and usually its editor-in-chief” (Mosse 1989, 285–286).

During the 1950s, North African governments questioned the Jewish commitment to nationalism (Cohen 1972, 522). A Tunisian government report stated that Jews “had not cooperated sufficiently” in the nationalist cause. Jews were also generally viewed as pro-French, at least partly because they had prospered under French rule. (The French actively encouraged Jews to act as a “middleman minority” ruling over native Muslim populations [Stillman 1979, 1991].) Similarly, most Jews actively supported France in the Algerian nationalist struggle; the Algerian leader stated that Jews would be resented if they retained their French citizenship after the fall of French rule. As is common among nations actively seeking a strong national identity, Tunisia also viewed all elements of Jewish separatism as divisive, including the attempt by international Jewish agencies to funnel financial resources to Jews rather than the whole society: “The government will not permit them [the Jews] to live in a closed circle of their own” (in Cohen 1972, 523).

Wilson’s approval was “offhanded” (Sachar 1992, 260), and the State Department was not informed, strongly suggesting less than enthusiastic support for the Zionist program. When the State Department became aware of the situation, the Secretary of State pressed the president to declare his nonsupport for the Declaration; Wilson became increasingly cool to the idea until giving final approval in 1920, apparently as a result of a private plea by United States Supreme Court Justice and Zionist leader Louis D. Brandeis (Sachar 1992, 268).

Goldberg (1996, 229ff) notes a pattern in which Jewish identity influences the behavior of American officials toward Israel. For example, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who inaugurated greatly increased levels of financial support for Israel, feared for Israel’s safety during the Six-Day War. “ ‘As Israel began to fall apart, Henry began to fall apart,’ Defense Secretary Schlesinger would later say” (Goldberg 1996, 248–249). In a 1992 speech to a Jewish group Kissinger stated that “I have been in the position as a Jew, of conducting the foreign policy of a superpower. I have never obscured the fact that twelve members of my family died in the Holocaust, and that therefore the fate of the Jewish people was always a matter of profound concern to me. At the same time, destiny put me in a position where I also had to look at other perspectives” (in Goldberg 1996, 249).

Jewish income may be underreported, at least in some historical eras, in an effort to combat anti-Semitism. Hertzberg (1989, 248) suggests that Jewish community leaders attempted to lower estimates of Jewish income during the 1920s for this reason. See also Shapiro (1992, 116).

The sociological race relations theory of Brown (1934) also would imply such a result. Brown posits that in a situation of colonial domination both the dominant and subordinate group have a tendency to develop self-justificatory racialist ideologies, often with a strong fear of racial admixture. “Race prejudice and race consciousness are operative on both sides to mobilize the races for struggle, define issues, and create an impasse which cannot easily be broken” (p. 46).

In PTSDA (Ch. 8) it was argued that the reason for the long term degradation of Jews in Arab lands was that Eastern cultures are much less predisposed to individualism. Highly collectivist cultures easily adopt group strategies against Judaism.

The word “Nefas” used in the Theodosian Code is an extremely derogatory term. Feldman (1993) translates it as “execrable” (p. 394) or “unspeakable abomination” (p. 90).

According to Maimonides (The Code of Maimonides, Book Five , The Book of Holiness, I. Laws Concerning Forbidden Intercourse, Ch. 12), all slaves undergo immersion and receive a rudimentary religious instruction; male slaves must be circumcised. Slaves are viewed as having left the community of idolators “but without entering the community of Israel” (p. 83). For a slave to become a member of the community of Israel, he or she had to first be manumitted and then marry an Israelite or a daughter of an Israelite. The manumitted slave would then undergo another immersion, thereby becoming a proselyte and a full Israelite (p. 89). If the slave refused to become an official “slave of Israel” and thereby avoid circumcision, immersion, and religious instruction, the master was to sell him or her to a heathen after one year. The basic logic of the Jewish law of slavery is apparent in the Mishnah (2nd century) and Palestinian Talmud (4th century), since slaves were required to say certain Jewish prayers and have certain religious obligations and abilities but not others (e.g., Ber. 3.3). Slaves were consistently distinguished as a category separate from both gentiles and Israelites. A woman was not obligated to enter a levirate marriage if the brother was the offspring of a gentile or slave (Yeb. 2.5), and female slaves had no right of betrothal to an Israelite male (Qidd. 3.12). The offspring of such a woman took the slave status of the mother.

The Nicene prohibition on intermarriage is included only in the canons of the Arabic version of the council (see Pakter 1992, 732n.86). Two later Spanish Church councils (in 589 and 633) reiterated this asymmetrical ban.

In 388 all intermarriage between Christians and Jews was prohibited by the Roman government on pain of death (CTh 9.7.5). Pakter takes the view that asymmetrical laws arose at times when Jews had such low status that marriage of a Christian man to a Jewess would have been unthinkable, while symmetrical laws appeared when Jews had higher status and therefore were desirable mates. My position is that the asymmetrical laws were aimed at correcting an asymmetrical reality in which Jewish males were obtaining gentile females as concubines but very few, if any, ethnically Jewish women were concubines of gentile males. These laws derive from a concern with Jewish domination that is certainly present in the laws related to slavery dating from the same period, and there is good reason to suppose that Jews were quite prosperous and numerous in Spain at the time of the Council of Elvira (DeClercq 1954, 41–42, 117; see below) as well as in other areas of the Empire during this period. Pakter (1992, 722) implicates St. Ambrose, a strident anti-Semite, in the symmetrical legislation of 388. I would suppose that the symmetrical bans functioned not only to prevent Jews from having Christian concubines but also strengthen generally the walls of separation between Christians and Jews—a result of the exacerbation of social identity processes brought on by the heightened Jewish/gentile group conflict characteristic of the period and apparent in the behavior of such prominent anti-Semites as St. Ambrose and St. John Chrysostom. The other situation, where gentiles have become concerned that Christian males marry Jews, emerges when Jews have married daughters into the Christian nobility while preventing any gene flow from gentiles into their stem families (see Chapters 4, 5, and the Appendix to Chapter 7). There is no evidence that this was a concern during the 4th and 5th centuries, but this may only reflect lack of historical sources.

Simon (1986, 358; see also Wilken 1983, 83ff) notes that some gentiles may have had positive images of Jews because of the Jewish role as physicians and healers. (Chrysostom admonishes Christians not to go to Jews for healing.) In the ancient world, healing was closely related to magic, sorcery, and astrology. Many gentiles, especially from the lower classes, may have been fascinated by Jews because of their high reputation in these areas—their reputed ability to “ward off the Powers” (Simon 1986, 341). Jews were so prominently identified with magical powers that “it was largely by the agency of Judaism that the ancient world was impregnated with [syncretistic magic]. So prominent were Jews in this process that pagan opinion assumed magic to be an integral and characteristic element of Israel’s religion” (Simon 1986, 342). Indeed, Wilken (1983, 86) notes that “it is quite conceivable that the same Jews who were welcoming Christians to the Jewish festivals were also healing their sicknesses with magic.” Given this situation, one can easily understand the curiosity, interest, and, indeed admiration which Jewish religious celebrations may have created in some gentiles, as well as the efforts of anti-Jewish leaders to alter gentile conceptions of Jews.

The Roman government since the time of Augustus had taken steps to raise the fertility of the aristocracy. These efforts met with little success until the laws were abolished by Constantine. Congruent with the relationship between individualism and low fertility, Garnsey and Saller (1987, 143–144; see also Hopkins 1983, 79–81) suggest that “it seems likely that many Romans came to take a more individualistic view of life, giving correspondingly less effort to ensuring the success of family and lineage.” In individualistic societies, sexual pleasure tends to become a goal in itself, removed from its reproductive consequences, while Judaism remained committed to fertility and high parental investment as religious commandments.

Simon (1986, 214) argues that 4th-century charges by anti-Semites such as Chrysostom related to Jewish wealth are illusory because (1) they occur prior to the time when Jews were confined to moneylending, and indeed none mention usury as a Jewish vice; (2) pagans are also charged with similar vices; (3) Jews are also depicted as charitable; (4) Christians were ascetics and would therefore regard even normal human resource acquisition behavior as sinful.

However, the proposal that an important source of Christian anti-Semitism during this period involved negative attitudes toward Jewish wealth is quite consistent with the first three of these arguments. The first of Simon’s reasons implies that gentile resentments about Jewish wealth could only have arisen from Jewish moneylending. This is far from true, as indicated by the material in Chapter 2. Moreover, anti-Semites often acknowledge that the negative traits disproportionately found among Jews are shared by some gentiles, and in any case, social identity theory implies that gentiles would preferentially attend to Jewish involvement in moneylending because Jews were a disliked outgroup. Finally, regarding Jewish charity, Chrysostom does indeed accuse the Jews of abandoning the poor” (Adversus Judaeos I.VII.1), presumably referring to the gentile poor; his other comments on Jewish charity may reflect his negative attitudes on Jewish within-group charity.

Simon’s argument based on Christian asceticism is surely speculative, especially since many Christians, including many clergymen, were quite well off economically during this period (Wilken 1983, 6). Education in rhetoric was the pathway to upward mobility, indicating that, as in modern societies (Lynn 1992), verbal intelligence was critical. These are, of course, exactly the types of skills at which Jews have excelled throughout their history and that are the expected consequences of Jewish educational and eugenic practices (PTSDA, Ch. 7). These practices had already been established for at least the nine generations between the destruction of the Second Temple and the end of the 3rd century. Jews during the 4th century provided their children with a Greek education, which would enable them to compete in the Greek world (Wilken 1983, 49).

Regarding Alexandria, Jews had almost vanished after the failed rebellions of the early 2nd century, but by the beginning of the 5th century (at the time of their expulsion in 415) there was a “large and influential” Jewish community there (Wilken 1971, 57). Wilken (1971, 46) notes that Christian-Jewish relations in 4th century Alexandria had deteriorated into increasing hostility well before the expulsion, and, consistent with a resource competition perspective, there is evidence that some of the Jews were wealthy traders and shipbuilders involved in the supply of grain to Rome (Wilken 1971, 49). Unlike the case with Antioch, there is no evidence of large numbers of Judaizing gentiles in Alexandria; instead there was a mob that could be incited by Cyril to expel the Jews and loot their property.

Wilken (1983, 43; see also Ruether 1974, 172) describes the Jewish community of late-4th-century Antioch (the site of Chrysostom’s anti-Semitic tirades) as “large, well established, highly respected, and influential.” Parkes (1934, 163) terms it “rich and powerful.” In Antioch, Jews possessed large buildings and decorated them fashionably to serve as cultural centers. Excavations in nearby areas indicate that the 4th century was a period of a great flowering of Jewish material culture (Wilken 1983, 54; see also Feldman 1993, 73, 364ff). During this period Jews built “large and impressive” synagogues throughout the empire, attesting to their economic affluence and the general flourishing of Jewish culture (Wilken 1971, 37).

Juster also notes that Jewish artisans working in bronze and other metals specialized in making items for the luxury trade, suggesting vertical integration of the Jewish economy to include manufacture, transportation, and retailing, as occurred in later centuries in Eastern Europe (see PTSDA, Ch. 6).

Feldman (1993, 407) interprets such passages as complaints about Jewish aggressive measures intended to convert Jews; I would suggest that they are charges of predatory Jewish economic and social practices against Christians.

Jerome also commented that Jews often reached old age. Jewish survivorship may therefore have been high compared to gentiles during this period—as it has been whenever it has been studied on modern populations (PTSDA, Ch. 7).

Gager (1983, 7; see also deLange 1991) makes the interesting suggestion that the extant literature from the early Church was deliberately selected to emphasize anti-Semitic themes and exclude other voices, much as the priestly redaction of the Pentateuch retained from earlier writings only what was compatible with Judaism as a diaspora ideology. Conceivably, these early works were even edited or elaborated to emphasize anti-Jewish themes. Gager’s suggestion is highly compatible with the present perspective that there was a qualitative shift toward the conscious construction of a fundamentally anti-Semitic version of history during this period.

Michael (1994) provides several highly emotional anti-Jewish statements from several 2nd- and 3rd-century Church Fathers, especially Tertullian. Tertullian’s writings suggest that Christian social identity as defined by anti-Judaism was already established during this period. Tertullian “needed Jews and Judaism as a kind of antitype to define nearly everything he was and stood for. . . . He uses [anti-Judaism] rhetorically to win arguments against his opponents and he uses it theologically . . . to construct a Christianity, a Christian social identity, which is centrally, crucially, un-Jewish, anti-Jewish” (Wilken 1971, x). This suggests that Christianity as an anti-Jewish group strategy originated well before the 4th century, although it only came to power at that time. Netanyahu (1995) makes the improbable argument that anti-Judaism was central to Christianity from its beginnings in the New Testament.

As indicated in PTSDA (Ch. 8), the Church adopted the exogamous practices of the Roman empire and subsequently extended them to include an ever wider set of spiritual and blood relatives. The Church also idealized celibacy, and as a result Constantine repealed the Augustine laws that promoted marriage and fertility.

This interpretation of Judaism remained a staple of Christian theology in later periods. For example, during the height of papal power and influence in the 13th century, Pope Innocent III accused the Jews of following the Mosaic law, which promised earthly riches and reproductive success: “Such are the carnal Jews, who seek only what sense perceives, who delight in the corporeal senses alone” (in Synan 1965, 88). Innocent interpreted Christianity as an attempt to unite Jews and gentiles so that “the enclosures that formerly separated the pagans with their idolatries from the Hebrews with their ceremonies have now been broken down” (Synan 1965, 88).

St. Ambrose, who in 388 prevailed on Emperor Theodosius to rescind an order to a bishop to rebuild a synagogue destroyed by anti-Jewish actions, appears to have originated the idea that the emperor should be subservient to the Church rather than the reverse (see Ullman 1970, 13). In order to be effective in achieving its political goals, an anti-Semitic movement must control the government. This doctrine became elaborated in later periods, with the eventual result that the Church became “the most influential and important governmental institution [of Europe] during the medieval period” (Ullman 1970, 1).

Chazan (1989, 170ff) argues that there is no basic change from the Augustinian doctrine of Christian toleration of Jews in a subservient status. However, Chazan agrees with the idea that the 13th century marked a major shift toward “aggressively negative” (p. 180) polemics aimed at converting the Jews and stigmatizing the Jewish religion, and he agrees that the Church played a prominent role in the deterioration of the status of the Jews during the period. Only these latter points are central to my discussion.

This suggests that the rise of gentile middle classes in Western Europe was facilitated by the exclusion of Jews by the medieval Church as an exclusionary, collectivist entity (see also PTSDA, Ch. 8). Houston Stewart Chamberlain apparently held a similar view. When asked to propose a Jewish policy for Romania, Chamberlain noted that the exclusion of Jews from England from 1290 to 1657 had, according to Field’s (1981, 222n) paraphrase, “enabled a strong, vigorous British race to grow and sustain itself.”

In an incident indicating the importance of genetic ancestry among this group of Ashkenazic Jews, one Jacob ben Sullam, the offspring of a Jewish father and a gentile mother, is described as committing suicide along with others during the disturbances. According to a contemporary Jewish chronicler, Jacob’s last words were, “All the days my life till now, you have despised me. Now I shall slaughter myself” (in Chazan 1987, 241). The implication is that his low status was the result of his genetic ancestry, another indication of the importance of racial purity among historical Jewish groups.

Beinart (1981, 28) reports that Isabella had no interest in accumulating wealth as a result of the Inquisition and even used some of the confiscations to provide dowries for the children whose parents had been victims of the Inquisition. This suggests less concern with biological relatedness as a criterion of persecution early in the Inquisition.

This overt racialism of the Inquisition fits well with Netanyahu’s (1966) thesis that the purpose of the Inquisition was “not to eradicate a Jewish heresy from the midst of the Marrano group, but to eradicate the Marrano group from the midst of the Spanish people” (p. 4; italics in text). Thus, although Netanyahu’s interpretation that most New Christians were not really Jews at heart is, in my view, apologetic (see Appendix to Chapter 7), his thesis is certainly consistent with the importance of ethnicity in assessing the aims of the Inquisition.

Netanyahu’s (1979–1980) arguments against Castro’s view are discussed in the Appendix to Chapter 7.

Political scheming to control the Inquisition occurred on both sides. Contraras (1992) describes a case where Conversos who had successfully obliterated their background or at least their current sympathies were able to obtain positions as inquisitors and used their office against Old Christians or to ameliorate the fate of New Christians brought before the Tribunal.

Hillgarth (1978) gives a population of Castile in 1528–1536 of under five million, and asserts that the figure of 1.5 million hearths in Castile in 1482 is doubtful. Castro (1954) gives a figure of 108,338 hidalgos in 1541 for Castile and Leon. Even a much lower figure would not affect the conclusion that the percentage of admixture was low.

The Libro Verde de Aragón, written in 1507, also records very little intermarriage—the predominant message being the extent of endogamy among New Christian families.

Guilds segregated along racial lines occurred prior to the Inquisition in Spain, indicating that ethnic segregation at this level of society had remained intact long after the forced conversions of 1391 (Kamen (1965, 33). Also consistent with a general lack of intermarriage among the lower classes of Conversos, Roth (1995, 225) notes that at the beginning of the Inquisition in Castile it was the lower class of Conversos that was most suspected of religious heresy.

The limpieza laws therefore created external pressure reinforcing New Christian endogamy. As Yerushalmi (1971, 41) notes, however, this cannot be the entire explanation for New Christian endogamy. (See the discussion in the Appendix to Chapter 7.)

According to the First Decree of the Reich citizenship law of November 14, 1935, a Jew was defined as an individual with at least three Jewish grandparents “who are fully Jewish as regards race” (in Dawidowicz 1976, 45–47). However, a person was considered to be a “Jewish Mischling” and therefore classified as a Jew if he or she had two Jewish grandparents who belonged to the Jewish religious community as of September 15, 1935, or thereafter, or was the offspring of a marriage concluded by a Jew, or was married to a Jew on that date or later, or who was the result of extramarital relations between a Jew and a gentile. Apart from individuals married to a Jew, individuals who were one-eighth Jewish or less were considered Germans.

Harris (1994, 227) notes that propagandists like Stoecker “made the anti-Semitism of the common man intelligible to the educated, not vice versa. Their anti-Semitic activities show the gradual acceptance of anti-Semitism by polite society rather than the injection of those ideas into mass culture by either fanatic zealots or Machiavellian politicians.” Indeed, it was the educated elites who were most supportive of Jewish emancipation (p. 230)—a finding that is highly compatible with the general tendency throughout Jewish history for Jewish alliances with gentile elites in the context of popular anti-Semitism (see Chapter 2 and PTSDA, Ch. 5). Nevertheless, Field (1981, 227) notes that aristocrats “hard pressed by declining land revenues and higher property taxes, resentful of the purchase of Berlin’s sumptuous palaces by Jews, and eager to share the Kaiser’s new fads” familiarized themselves with the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Harris (1994, 227) notes the high degree of personal popularity of Hitler and the substantial support for the NSDAP and its highly salient anti-Semitism in the elections of 1932. He makes the interesting point that the National Socialists were the only party to draw substantial support from all social classes—suggesting that National Socialism transcended class divisions and was perceived as the political embodiment of the ideal of hierarchical harmony long held as an ideal in the Volkische intellectual tradition.

The data provided by Lowenstein (1992, 24) indicate that in 1901–1905 in Germany 8.8 percent of Jewish men and 7.6 percent of Jewish women intermarried. These percentages increased in the following years so that by 1926–1930, 25.6 percent of Jewish men and 16.6 percent of Jewish women had intermarried. These figures include Jews who married other secular and converted Jews and who remained part of the Jewish community and hence are useless for conceptualizing the extent to which Judaism had continued as a genetically closed group evolutionary strategy. Moreover, defections from Judaism, as measured by conversions to Christianity, remained low. Lowenstein (1992, 24) finds that conversions averaged 168 per year in the period from 1800 to 1924 and 256 per year in the period from 1880 to 1899. These figures are also overestimates of true defection, however, since many of these conversions were conversions of convenience by individuals who continued to identify as Jews and continued their associations with the Jewish community (see also Chapter 6). Patai and Patai (1989) note that intermarried couples in Germany during this period, at least in the earlier surveys, tended to have fewer children and not to raise them as Jews with the result that only 4.05 percent of the children born to Jewish mothers were children of intermarried couples who raised their children as Jews or were children born out of wedlock to Jewish women with Christian fathers.

The phrase “hierarchic harmony” comes from Américo Castro’s (1954, 497) description of the social structure of the Western Middle Ages. Not coincidentally, many Volkische thinkers idealized the Middle Ages.

Volkische ideology was compatible with a strong but muted role for individualism. The anti-Semite Paul de LaGarde emphasized that individuals should be able to maximize their unique potentials within the cohesive group (Stern 1961, 28). On the other hand, he was greatly concerned that the working classes had become alienated from German society because of the individualistic behavior of capitalists.

The tract also contains the following exhortations: “Thou shalt have no social intercourse with the Jew”; “Thou shalt have no business relations with the Jew”; “Thou shalt not entrust thy rights to a Jewish lawyer, nor thy body to a Jewish physician, nor thy children to a Jewish teacher. . . .”; “Keep away all Jewish writings from the German home and hearth lest their lingering poison may unnerve and corrupt thyself and thy family” (in Massing 1949, 306–307).

Marr later repudiated the idea of genetic assimilation via intermarriage in his 1879 book The Victory of Judaism over Germanism.

See Krausnick (1968, 10); Field (1981, 447). Beginning in 1923, Chamberlain’s and Hitler’s circles increasingly intersected. Chamberlain met Hitler on more than one occasion, and there was a mutual admiration between the two, including highly laudatory letters from Chamberlain to Hitler which Hitler greatly appreciated (Field 1981, 436–438). By the end of Chamberlain’s life, Hitler seems to have developed a great deal of affection for him, and he personally attended his funeral. Another high-ranking National Socialist closely associated with Chamberlain was Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg was ecstatic about Chamberlain’s Foundations when he first read it in 1909 as a seventeen-year-old, and he became a fervent disciple (Cecil 1972, 12–14; Field 1981, 232). Other National Socialists who had read Chamberlain and claimed to be influenced by him include Hess, Geobbels, Eckart, Himmler, and von Shirach (Field 1981, 452). Geobbels met Chamberlain and declared that Chamberlain was “the pathbreaker,” “the preparer of our way,” “the father of our spirit” (in Reuth 1993, 53).

See also Derek Wilson (1988, 286). It is interesting that the marriage of the only child of Salomon and Adele Rothschild (of the French branch of the family) to a Christian resulted in a complete excision of the daughter from her mother’s life, without any inheritance. This is compatible with supposing that only-daughters were in a different category than daughters with brothers, quite possibly because the marriage of the only-daughter outside the group would, in practical effect if not according to Jewish law, place all of the family’s descendants outside the Jewish community. The consequences of a male attempting to marry outside the group were severe: When a male in the Austrian branch of the family fell passionately in love with the daughter of an American boardinghouse keeper, his father was inflexible in his opposition, and the son, in despair, committed suicide in 1909 (Derek Wilson 1988, 276).

Moreover, it is worth noting that there was considerable doubt expressed in the Palestinian Talmud (Y. Qidd. 3.12) about the status of the offspring of an Israelite female married to a gentile, with some authorities pronouncing the offspring mamzers (bastards) following the (non-Israelite) status of the father. It is therefore highly doubtful that such individuals would have been welcomed in the Jewish community even had they attempted to remain.

Consanguinity often overlapped with economic interests among these families. Mosse (1989, 97) notes that a “distinctive form of economic co-operation involving close kinship links was that between members of allied families, the Ellingers, Mertons, and Hochschilds in the Frankfurt Metallgesellschaft, for example, the Oppenheims, Warschauers, and Mendelssohn-Bartholdys in the AG für Anilinfabrikation (Agfa) in Treptow, or the Ganses and Weinbergs in Leopold Cassella. In all, the cases of joint economic activity by close kin are so numerous that the family rather than the individual could almost be regarded as the typical Jewish entrepreneur.”

As discussed in several sections of PTSDA, group selection has made a resurgence in evolutionary thinking, most notably as a result of the work of David S. Wilson (see Wilson & Sober 1994).

Degler (1991, 46) notes that despite the opposition of socialist newspapers, four of five socialist representatives in the Wisconsin legislature voted for a eugenic law mandating sterilization of certain criminals, and Edward A. Ross, the prominent progressive sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, testified in favor of the law. Such laws were much more characteristic of the reformist North and West than the conservative South.

Neither Francis Galton nor Karl Pearson, the guiding lights of British eugenics, emphasized race as a variable in their publications on eugenics. During the 1880s Pearson became attracted to German ideas and became a strong advocate of the idea that eugenic practices should be a component of competition among groups rather than among individuals, but he conceptualized the group as the nation, not a race (Kevles 1985, 23). Earlier, Alfred Russel Wallace and W. R. Greg (but not Darwin) emphasized the need for eugenic practices to make the group more competitive, but again, the group was conceptualized as the nation (Farrall 1985, 17). Nevertheless, the beliefs that eugenics would improve the ability of the race and that Caucasians were a superior race were probably common among British eugenicists, including Galton and Pearson (Farrall 1985, 51). During the 1920s, Pearson opposed Jewish immigration on the grounds that Jewish girls were inferior and Jewish boys did not possess “markedly superior” intelligence compared to the native English (Pearson & Moul 1925, 126). This is a group-based argument, but it is certainly not the type of argument based on competition between well-defined racial groups that Chamberlain would have made. Pearson and Moul also wrote of Jews that “for men with no special ability—above all for such men as religion, social habits, or language keep as a caste apart, there should be no place. They will not be absorbed by, and at the same time strengthen the existing population; they will develop into a parasitic race, a position neither tending to the welfare of their host, nor wholesome for themselves” (pp. 124–125). The argument, then, is that if Jews did have markedly higher IQs, there would be no objection to immigration. Clearly Pearson is not casting his argument in a racialist manner.

Despite their dislike of the Ostjuden and their concerns that the Ostjuden increased anti-Semitism, the German Jewish community provided aid to the immigrants and strongly opposed official discrimination against them, especially after 1890. Moreover, Volkov (1985, 211) notes that many Westjuden eventually developed positive attitudes toward their highly observant coreligionists from the East—an aspect of the increasing sense of Jewish identification among them.

The quotation from Rather is completed as follows: “ . . . if we are foolish enough to bestow such titles on people who are merely repeating what they take to be the wisdom of their own fathers. Sidonia [the hero of Tancred] was in fact repeating the post-exilic doctrines of Ezra and Ezekiel when he warned against racial intermarriage, and these same doctrines gave biblical authority to Old Testament Christians in North America and South Africa to pursue their policies of segregation and apartheid, respectively.” Rose (1992, 234) states that Rather’s book “verges on veiled antisemitism,” but, minimally, I see no reason to question Rather’s scholarship on Disraeli. As Rather notes, the racialism of Disraeli and Moses Hess have been severely downplayed by Jewish scholars attempting to link National Socialism with gentile racialist thinkers of the 19th century such as Gobineau and Chamberlain. (Similarly, Lindemann [1997, 77n.76] notes that George Mosse “devotes only a few lines in a single paragraph to Disraeli, yet he devotes pages of dense description and analysis to scores of anti-Semitic writers and theorists, many of whom attracted a limited readership and obviously exercised little influence on their contemporaries.”) As noted below (see note 21 below), Rose has been a prominent apologist for 19th-century Jewish racialist thought.

Disraeli’s assertions of Jewish superiority were quite unsettling to Richard Wagner, especially since Disraeli was the prime