Hitler and his God

A Jewish Race?

Has there ever been a pure race which might be called Jewish? The historical data are dubious, according to André Pichot, to whom we turn once more for our information. At the time of Vacher de Lapouge and Ernst Haeckel, when in Darwin’s footsteps the first trees of humanity were drawn up, the Jews sometimes came out on top on the same level as the Aryans, although, as we have seen, many of those trees were the result of a fertile imagination and cultural prejudice, not of facts gained by a scientific method. Pichot calls such constructs of the imagination a “roman”, literally a novel, which is a story based on the imaginative quality of the intellect.

“It was difficult to characterize a Jewish race, even if Haeckel admitted in the 1860s the existence of such a race”, writes Pichot. What did exist were, in Eastern Europe, communities of Jews who separated themselves from the rest of the population and who, by marrying among themselves, bred “characteristic genetic groups”, by the later racist scientists wrongly defined as determinants of a race. As a matter of fact, the Jews “had been mixed for many centuries with the other European populations”, and were certainly “well integrated” into German society.

Vacher de Lapouge did not believe in the existence of a Jewish race. “In sum, the Jews are not a race but a nationality, of which the primary common characteristics are the religion and a special psychology, due to a small number of Canaanite infiltrations. In reality, Israel is outspread over the nations, and even weighs heavily upon them, but there is no Israelite race in the anthropological sense of the word … The persecution of them, which has little by little raised its head everywhere, has slowly eliminated the elements which were not sufficiently homogenous; what remains of the assumed ubiquity of the Jews is nothing but one more example, and a curious one, of social selection.” The community of people called “the Jews” was therefore based on “psychic convergence” and not on the physiological or taxonomic facts. To be a Jew, according to Vacher de Lapouge, was to belong to a group with the “Jewish mentality”, which was the result of religion and tradition.

Pichot concludes: “The notion of race – whether Jewish or any other – has never had the essentialist aspect with which the historians have endowed it.” This means that the notion of “race” has never been based on scientific fact. It was precisely because the notion of race lacked a strict definition that it was possible to designate the Jews as a race, “although there were no clearly defined biological criteria in their case. Was this quasi-race of the Jews held to be an inferior race? Not really. It was rather ‘unwanted’. Vacher de Lapouge, however anti-Semitic, does not qualify the Jews as an inferior race; he rather holds them up as a kind of model for the establishment of a new aristocracy by natural or eugenic means.” Here Pichot quotes from Hitler’s dictates to Bormann, on one of his very last days at the bunker in Berlin, saying that the Jew is fundamentally a stranger, and that the Jewish race is foremost a community of the mind, shaped by a common destiny through all the persecutions they had to suffer in the course of the centuries. 595 There are several indications of Hitler’s grudging admiration for the Jews, because of their spirit of resilience as a people and their remarkable intellect. But this secret admiration too will add fuel to his burning, obsessive hatred of them.