In the wake of diaries by JayinPortland, Jewish Teens Pelted With Eggs in the City of My Birth, and by Bluebird of happiness, The Why of anti-Jewish Bigotry, I decided to post as a diary a D'var Torah I gave to my synagogue about five years ago, on the Shabbat before Tisha B'Av. As I emphasized the development of the pseudo science of "racialogy" in the 19th and early 20th centuries and its impact on the rise of Nazism, I don't think I am taking anything away from Bluebird of happiness's excellent diary. I've updated the references to time and have added some links. I apologize for the length.
The massacre by the Crusaders of 30,000 Jews in 1096 was significant not only because of this tragic slaughter, but because the Crusaders ushered in hundreds of years of religious persecution that still finds its echoes today. For centuries, in the name of Christian brotherhood, Jews were confined to ghettos, forced to wear designated clothing identifying them as Jews; Jews were expelled from one land after another, Jews were denied the opportunity to enter most professions. Christians were taught that we Jews not only denied the divinity of Christ, and not only did our ancestors murder Jesus, but that, before every Passover, we murdered a Christian child to use the blood to bake matzoh. And, on a regular basis, Jews were slaughtered by Christian mobs, often under the incitement of a town priest who was supposed to have dedicated his life to spreading the word of Jesus, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
But if we could go back in time to the early 1800’s, at least in Western Europe and the United States, things were starting to look bright for the Jews. Religious freedom for the Jewish people had its birth in the Netherlands, which came under Spanish rule in 1482. When the Protestant Reformation began, and the Spanish began to burn to death their Dutch subjects for the crime of being Protestants, the Dutch revolted. In the Dutch declaration of independence of 1581, the Dutch proclaimed for the first time the right of religious freedom for all. The Dutch war for independence lasted for 80 years; for 80 years Dutch guerrilla insurgents fought the far stronger Spanish armies. In 1648, after 80 years of war, the Spanish finally recognized Dutch independence, and Jews began to flock to Holland as the one country in Europe where Jews could practice our religion without fear.
From the Netherlands in 1648 the concept of religious freedom for Jews moved across the English Channel. In 1290 King Edward I had expelled all Jews from England, but, in 1656 the British Parliament, not only ended the expulsion, but invited the Jews to settle in England to live in a land in which their freedom of worship would be guaranteed. The law of 1656 also guaranteed that Jews would be granted British citizenship with all the rights of British citizens, except for the right to serve in Parliament, a restriction which would not be removed until 1858.
The founders of the United States founded our country on the principle of religious freedom for all. Many of America’s founders, Jefferson and Washington included, wrote that Jews were full and equal citizens who would not only be guaranteed the right to worship but full citizenship as well. These ideas became enshrined in Virginia’s statute for Religious Freedom, authored by Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution’s prohibition of any religious test for holding government office, and the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
Now we recross the Atlantic Ocean, to go to France, a country which had expelled its Jews except for the province of Alsace. It wasn’t until 1785, just four years before the French Revolution, that King Louis XVI revoked the expulsion order and gave Jews permission to settle anywhere in France. And at the very beginning of the French Revolution, in August of 1789, the Estates General enacted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which guaranteed that "No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views."
Beginning in 1792, Revolutionary France was at war with the crowned heads of Europe, and except for a few short-lived periods of peace, Europe would be engulfed in war until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. As the French army advanced across Europe, one of their aims was to bring freedom of religion and equality for the Jewish people. In 1799 and 1800, the French army, under a general named Napoleon Bonaparte, marched down the Italian peninsula. And, as they marched south, whenever they conquered a town and discovered that the town’s Jews were forced to live in a ghetto, the French soldiers would tear down the ghetto walls and tell the Jews they were now free and equal citizens of the French republic.
Turning to Germany, before the French Revolution, Germany was divided into over 300 independent states, but after the Napoleonic Wars the number of German states was reduced to 39. The western German state of Mainz in 1819 declared its Jewish citizens to be free and equal in all respects, but the other 38 German states held back. Except for Mainz, each state had some kind of legal restriction, for example, barring Jews from serving in the army, barring or limiting their admission into universities, and barring Jews from entering certain professions. But in 1848, the entire German nation was overtaken by revolution, and the aim of the revolutionaries was to make Germany into a single liberal democratic nation, with full and equal rights for all German citizens. German Jews, of course, overwhelmingly supported the revolution (including one or two of my great grandfathers). In 1849 the revolutionaries convened a Congress in Frankfurt; they wrote a constitution for a united Germany, article 13 of which declared minorities, including Germany's Jews, to be equal citizens. When the conservative forces, led by Prince Otto von Bismarck, crushed the revolution, many Jews, including my great grand parents, fled Germany and Europe. A triumphant Bismarck could have blamed the revolution on the Jews, but, to his credit, he did not. Tens of thousands of revolutionaries, including Jews, were imprisoned, many of them, including Jews, were executed, but they were punished as Germans who had tried to overthrow the German monarchies, not as Jews. And in 1851, thanks to Bismarck, the Prussian government declared Jews to be free and equal citizens. When Germany became united in 1871, again, at Bismarck’s urging, the law of Prussian equality for Jewish citizens became the national law of all of Germany, enacted as one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the new German Reichstag.
Now you all are wondering, with things going so well, how could Europe in the 20th Century have sunk to such depths? The answer is that there were two widely accepted evil doctrines that merged into an even more horrible doctrine that would be the foundation of Nazism.
The first of these two evil doctrines was the traditional Christian hatred of the Jews that parents drummed into the heads of their children, and those children would drum into the heads of their children, for generation after generation. A Thomas Jefferson or an Otto von Bismarck could declare Jews to be equal citizens, but it’s very hard for an educated elite to change the hearts and minds of the masses, especially when it came to ridding the hearts and minds of the masses of a hatred of Jews that had built up over many centuries. But the political elite, with their laws and constitutions and declarations of the rights of man, were able to accomplish something; they were able to create, for awhile, in Western Europe, a climate where it was in bad taste for people in polite company to say nasty things about Jews. And had this atmosphere continued, in a generation or two we might have seen a Europe in which Jews could have lived, and could have still lived today, in a state of peace and love and mutual respect with their Christian neighbors.
That did not happen because of the second evil doctrine that dominated Europe and the United States in the 19th Century – the doctrine that the white European race was the master race and that all other races were biologically and intellectually inferior to the white master race.
About 15 years ago I took a class on the Spanish American War, and our victory over Spain led to President McKinley’s decision to annex the Philippines without asking the Filipinos if they wanted to be ruled by the United States. And, as you may know, for four years the Filipinos resisted the American attempt to take over their country, this war would cause the deaths of 1,500 Americans and 250,000 Filipinos. President McKinley and William Howard Taft, whom McKinley had appointed governor of our new colony, justified the war by declaring the Filipinos to be "our little brown brothers" and declared that it was our duty, as white people with our superior civilization, "take them all and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them."
To illustrate just where President McKinley was coming from, the professor passed out a page from a 1924 World Atlas, issued by a respectable company. The page was entitled "The Races of Man" and the text began by stating that mankind is divided into various sub-species, called races, that the science of studying races is known as racialogy, and that scientists who study races are called racialogists. The text went on to describe each of the races, the least intelligent being the aborigines of Australia and the Pacific islands, the next to lowest level being Africans and their descendants in the United States, and so on up to the smartest race of all, you guess it, the European white race.
And if you go to New York City and visit the Museum of Natural History, carved onto the outside of the 19th century building are human heads representing the races of man, with the aborigine at the end, the African black next, and, at the front, the head of a man representing the master white race. These heads were carved into the building of the museum because, as I have said, raciology was a science. One of the earlier raciologists was Dr. Josiah Nott of Alabama, who, in the 1850’s examined the cadavers of deceased whites and deceased blacks and then wrote a treatise concluding that blacks had smaller skulls, and therefore were less intelligent. And over the next 95 years there would be a lot more of this psuedo medical research, culminating in Dr. Mengele’s experiments.
The question was, were European Jews part of the white master race, or were we one of the inferior races?
One American who very much believed in the master race was Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Davis, along with his vice president, Alexander Stevens, openly pronounced blacks as biologically inferior to whites. According to Davis and Stevens, blacks lacked the intelligence to live on their own, and therefore were fit only for slavery.
But there is no doubt Jefferson Davis considered Jews to be part of the white master race. His best friend, whose slave plantation faced his own directly across the Mississippi River, was Judah Benjamin, a Jew who left the synagogue as a young man, never to walk into a synagogue again, but who never denied he was a Jew. Judah Benjamin and Jefferson Davis served together in the United States Senate, Davis representing Mississippi and Benjamin representing Louisiana. When the South seceded, President Davis asked Judah Benjamin to serve as Secretary of State. Davis would urge Benjamin to attend the synagogue in Richmond, but Benjamin always refused.
I mentioned earlier President McKinley and how he considered the Filipinos to be his inferior. But there is no evidence that McKinley was the least bit anti-Semitic.
McKinley’s successor, Teddy Roosevelt, regularly spoke of the superior Anglo Saxon race. And because the Anglo Saxon race was the superior race, it was very important to Teddy Roosevelt to keep the United States an Anglo Saxon country. President Teddy Roosevelt warned the immigrants flooding into the United States, which then consisted mostly of Italians and Eastern European Jews, that they would have to abandon their inferior life styles and assimilate into the culture of the superior Anglo Saxon race. But it was Teddy Roosevelt who appointed the first Jew to a cabinet position: Oscar Straus, brother of the blue jeans inventor Levi Straus, whom Roosevelt named to be Secretary of Commerce and Labor.
Turning our attention back to Europe, during the second half of the 19th Century the European powers, mostly Britain and France, conquered all of Africa, and expanded their conquests in Asia. There were several reasons why the Europeans conquered most of the Third World, but the master race philosophy played a role. Europeans in the late 19th century were convinced that it was their burden, as members of the master race, to conquer the inferior people and rule over them. This was "The White Man’s Burden" that the British poet Rudyard Kipling mocked in his famous poem.
By far the worst colonial ruler was Belgium. I always thought of Belgium as this nice little European country with chocolate and waffles, but then in 1999 the book Leopold’s Ghosts was published and promptly went to the top of the best seller list for non-fiction. The author Adam Hochchild described a genocide that the world had forgotten, of how the Belgium rulers, armed with master race ideology and the means to kill Africans, between the years 1890 and 1910 murdered at least half the population of the Congo, reducing the population from 20 million to 10 million. One historian has since criticized Hochchild’s figure of 10 million murdered as too low and places the loss at 13 million.
The leading proponent in Europe of the master race concept was the French writer Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, author of Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Gobineau wrote that "The racial question dominates all the other problems of history. The inequality of races alone explains the whole unfolding of the destiny of peoples." Gobineau wrote that there were three principle races, the subhuman black race, the intermediate yellow race, and the master white race. And, although he was French, Gobineau wrote that it was the Aryan race, which he equated with the Germans, who made up the most superior beings of the white master race. As you can imagine, Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, would become sacred writ in Nazi Germany, but not before the Nazis had done some editing. Because in another chapter Gobineau wrote that there was a second subset of the master white race that was equal to the superior to the German race, and that was the Jewish race, and he proceeded to say lots of nice things about the Jews.
But there were two writers, one German by birth and the other German by choice, both fanatical haters of Jews, would arise to fuse these two evil ideas, the old religion based hatred of Jews, and the new concept of the master race, into a new kind of hatred that would form the ideological foundation of Nazism and the Holocaust.
The first of these was the composer Richard Wagner. In the early 1990’s I bought a book entitled The Fifty Greatest Composers, and the author of this book placed Wagner in fourth place. If you know anything about classical music you know there is unanimous agreement about who are the top three greatest composers, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. You can argue which of these three should be one or two or three, but everyone agrees Bach Mozart and Beethoven are the top three. So this author made quite a statement declaring Richard Wagner to be the fourth greatest composer. My wife and I have held season tickets to the Baltimore Opera for over 20 years (until its temporary demise in 2009), and for some reason the Baltimore Opera only performed a Wagner opera once during this period. This was his early work Tannenhauser, which the Baltimore opera put on about 14 years ago. Sitting in the Lyric, watching and listening, I could hear a richness and power in this music that Wagner’s great contemporary Giuseppe Verdi, or any other opera composer, could never match.
The author of The 50 Greatest Composers conceded that, as a human being Wagner was a jerk, and he was. If he had stuck to writing operas and had kept his anti-Semitism to himself, Wagner would probably not have become a Nazi icon and the Ring and his other operas would be performed without controversy in Israel, and maybe even in Baltimore. But he instead chose to make his hatred of Jews public, in an essay he wrote in 1850 he entitled "Judaism and Music." This is a disgusting piece of anti-Semitic dribble that is famous because the author was one of music’s greatest geniuses. The essay is packed full with the anti-Semitic stereotypes of the time. Wagner began by stating that he found Jews to be repulsive. He went on to state that Jews were incapable of writing good music, that our Jewish minds were too full of what he called "Jewish musical garbage" to write good music, and that Jewish composers were degrading music. Wagner launched into an attack on Giacabo Meyerbeer, a French Jew who, like Wagner, wrote almost nothing but opera, and whose operas are almost never heard today but were very popular in the mid-Nineteenth century. Wagner labeled Meyerbeer’s operas as shallow and artificial, and sneered that a Jew such as Meyerbeer could do no better. As to Felix Mendelssohn, who had died three years before Wagner wrote "Judaism and Music", Wagner said that Mendelssohn was overrated because Mendelssohn never wrote an opera, nor, as a Jew, was he capable of writing an opera. Never mind that Felix Mendelssohn was forced by his father to convert to Christianity at the age of 6 - Judaism is a race, not a religion, and a person cannot escape his race by converting - never mind that he wrote his overture to Midsummer Night’s Dream at the age of only 17, never mind that he Mendelssohn died at the age of 38 and had Mendelssohn lived, like Wagner did, to the age of 70, maybe he too would have written opera. In any event, Wagner stood by this diatribe for the remaining 33 years of his life, and 50 years after his death he would be exalted as one of the saints of Nazism.
Probably Nazism’s greatest saint from the 19th century was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, no relation to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain was born in England in 1855 but lived in Germany from the age of 15 until his death in 1927. At the age of 27 he met Richard Wagner, a year before the composer’s death, and although Wagner was 42 years older than Chamberlain, the two became very close. Although Chamberlain was undoubtedly already an anti-Semite, it’s likely that Wagner fine tuned his young admirer’s hatreds into an elaborate master race theory. Later, Chamberlain would marry Wagner’s daughter.
In 1898 he published the book that would inspire Nazism, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Chamberlain, like Wagner and Gobineau before him, saw the world solely in terms of race. For Chamberlain, the greatest races of all time were the ancient Greeks and Romans, but they had lost their greatness because of racial miscegenation. All the other races had become degenerate because of interbreeding, except two, the German race and the Jewish race. Between these two pure races, the German race was, you guessed it, the master race, and the Jewish race the degenerate race. The Germans were superior because they had conquered ancient Rome and thus inherited Roman greatness. He claimed that Jesus was not a Jew, but a German, and asserted that Germany and the other countries of Western Europe had made a mistake in emancipating the Jews.
If you have the stomach to read Judaism and Music, and can read excerpts of Foundations of the Nineteenth Century without throwing up, then you would be ready to tackle Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf follows Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by repeating, briefly, that everyone should have the freedom to worship God as they please. Mein Kampf then proceeds along the same path plowed by Wagner and Chamberlain by asserting that Judaism was not a religion but a race, and an inferior one at that. Mein Kampf proceeds to discuss Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race, conveniently omitting mention of the chapter where Gobineau praised the Jewish "race", Wagner’s Judaism and Music, and Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. In 1923, the authors of Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and Mein Kampf met, and became close friends. The two met for the last time just a few weeks before Chamberlain's death in January of 1927, and were said to have warmly embraced. By this hug, Chamberlain symbolically passed his evil words onto the next generation of evil, a new generation who would not only speak evil but do unimaginable evil.
There is only one master race and that is the human race. All of us need to work to combat religious hatred and ignorance, all of us need to work to combat racial hate. Each form of hatred is an unspeakable evil. Combined, the worst of horrors occurred, and unless we resolve ourselves that this should happen "never again", such horrors may well occur in the future.