Hitler and his God

Intelligence

“Intelligence is the mortal sin of the Jews”, said one Friedrich Gentz. The Jews were indeed thought to be an intelligent sort of people, and they were hated and feared for it. Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf: “The intellectual faculties of the Jews have been trained through thousands of years. Today the Jew is looked upon as especially ‘clever’, and in a certain sense he has been so throughout the ages. His intellectual powers, however, are not the result of an inner evolution but rather have been shaped by the object lessons which the Jew has received from others … Since the Jew never had a civilization of his own, he has always been furnished by others with a basis for his intellectual work. His intellect has always developed by the use of those cultural achievements which he has found ready-to-hand around him.”

It was part of the stereotype of the Jew that his mind was dry, sterile, incapable of creation, and that he was a parasite or a vampire of the life-force and creativity of others. “The Jewish intellect will never be constructive but always destructive”, wrote Hitler. “In the course of a few years [the Jew] endeavours to exterminate all those who represent the national intelligence. And by thus depriving the peoples of their natural intellectual leaders, he fits them for their fate as slaves under a lasting despotism” 602 – which was exactly what he himself and others of his ilk, like Stalin and Pol Pot, were going to do.

In his History of Anti-Semitism, Léon Poliakov writes: “One has been able to state that the history of the Jews commences in 586 BC in Babylonia [where the two remaining tribes of Judea were taken into slavery] … It is there that the unfailing faithfulness to Zion was born and that the last remnants of idolatry were extirpated; it was there that the Pentateuch was redacted in its definitive form; and it was especially there that the exiles drew the consequences from their history, that they managed to give a meaning to their tribulations and permanence to this meaning, and that they developed their particular historical memory of being Jews.”

In Babylonia most of the Jews were farmers. Studying that period “one discovers how highly manual labour was esteemed by the sages of Israel; it was then the predominant occupation and placed well above commerce”. It was in Babylonia that the Talmud was codified in its definitive form, and if there is one point in the Talmud on which everybody agrees, stresses Poliakov, “it is the absolute primacy of study. As one text says in a very expressive way: ‘The whole world lives by the breath of the scholars’. Elsewhere it is assured that, day by day, only the sight of the savants and the students can turn the divine anger away from the world. From those times onwards, Jewish instruction was obligatory, free of charge and general.” 603

Many centuries later, when for the Jews “the indispensable money” had become “that precious commodity without which it was impossible to affirm oneself in a hostile and loathsome world”, “the inner world of study constituted a not less indispensable counterweight. Through the ages the rabbis had placed the study of the Law above earthly possessions, but these prescriptions had never before been followed with such intense ardour. The way the Jews in Germany and in the North of France plunged into the Talmud was really frenetic; they analyzed it day and night in the synagogues, without even laying down to rest. One text says: it is good to kill oneself by studying. Thus originated that famous Jewish ambiguity which caused money to become overestimated, as without money one ran the risk of death and expulsion – while, being overestimated, money became also an object of contempt and the first place was given to other values.” In this way was developed the intelligence and the high culture of “the people that has been reading for a thousand years”. “The rabbis taught incessantly that nothing was more admirable than study, and that to help poor children obtain instruction was the most pious act imaginable, surpassing even the building of a synagogue.” 604

Once the Jews had become emancipated and were (relatively) free to lead their lives within the host society, their intellectual capacities became apparent, especially at the institutions for higher education. “The proportion of Jewish undergraduates was high”, writes John Weiss about the last decades of the nineteenth century. “For every 100 000 males of each denomination in Prussia, 33 Catholics, 58 Protestants and 519 Jews became university students. In 1885 one student in every eight in Berlin was Jewish, though Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population. The figures were even more lopsided in Vienna. In part it was a natural reaction to discrimination. Upper-class students had connections and lower-middle-class Germans could rise by ability, but Jewish males had to cultivate professional skills if they were to avoid discrimination: higher education meant liberation … Law and medicine were the favourite studies of Jews because careers in these professions avoided institutional discrimination, but this meant competition with Germans unable to count on family connections, fearful of becoming an academic proletariat. Consequently they were among the most extreme racists in Austria as well as Germany, highly overrepresented in the Nazi elite. In western societies university attendance tended to lessen racism and conservatism; in Germany emphasizing one’s racial uniqueness and identifying with the ruling class advanced one’s career …”

No wonder that Jews were generally associated with the Enlightenment, the high tide of Reason and the intellect in Europe, even if they had had nothing to do with the formulation of the ideas of the philosophes. On the contrary, as has been mentioned, some philosophes, e.g. Voltaire and d’Alembert, were caustically anti-Semitic. But it was the Enlightenment which had prepared the French Revolution and the emancipation of the Jews, and in the Napoleonic Code they had acquired an equal status with all others, something Napoleon implemented in the countries he conquered. From then onwards the Jews were identified with “the French spirit” and would remain so, even when later on they were vehemently opposed by the nationalist and Catholic right in France itself, and when French deism and atheism were strongly condemned by the orthodox Jews. Most of the assimilated Jews, however, saw in the ideals of liberty and equality a gateway to freedom, an opportunity never offered to their people before. They were to be found among the liberals at the centre of the political spectrum, and some, more progressive or revolutionary, joined the ranks of the Socialists and Communists.