Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany

By Alan E. Steinweis

Book Overview

Early in his political career, Adolf Hitler declared the importance of what he called "an antisemitism of reason." Determined not to rely solely on traditional, cruder forms of prejudice against Jews, he hoped that his exclusionary and violent policies would be legitimized by scientific scholarship. The result was a disturbing, and long-overlooked, aspect of National Socialism: Nazi Jewish Studies.

Studying the Jew investigates the careers of a few dozen German scholars who forged an interdisciplinary field, drawing upon studies in anthropology, biology, religion, history, and the social sciences to create a comprehensive portrait of the Jew--one with devastating consequences. Working within the universities and research institutions of the Third Reich, these men fabricated an elaborate empirical basis for Nazi antisemitic policies. They supported the Nazi campaign against Jews by defining them as racially alien, morally corrupt, and inherently criminal.

In a chilling story of academics who perverted their talents and distorted their research in support of persecution and genocide, Studying the Jew explores the intersection of ideology and scholarship, the state and the university, the intellectual and his motivations, to provide a new appreciation of the use and abuse of learning and the horrors perpetrated in the name of reason.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674027612
• ISBN13: 9780674027619
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Hitler's "Scientific Antisemitism"

This is a review of Professor Alan E. Steinweis' excellent book entitled STUDYING THE JEW: SCHOLARLY ANTISEMITISM IN NAZI GERMANY which was published in 2006 by Harvard University Press. This book is only the most current in a series of other publications by Professor Steinweis on Hitler's Third Reich and its handling of what Nazis euphemistically described as "the Jewish Question." Steinweis brings an impressive array of sources to bear in his description of how Nazi scholars served their Fuhrer in the academic arena. He shows how German scholars responded to Hitler's oft-repeated statement that a "movement like ours mustn't let itself be drawn into metaphysical digressions. It must stick to the spirit of exact science. It's not the Party's function to be a counterfeit religion." (HITLER'S TABLE TALK, p. 49). Instead, the Fuhrer preferred that National Socialism remain a counterfeit science. Skulls were measured and demographics analyzed in scholarly tomes complete with graphs, charts, illustrations, footnotes and extensive bibliographies all of which demonstrated with scientific precisions that Jews were "a race" which threatened to contaminate and destroy the "Aryan Master Race" like some evil "virus." Hitler's "scientific antisemitism" didn't seek to convert Jews over to Christianity. It sought instead to destroy them. You don't convert a "virus." You kill it and an estimated five to six million innocent Jewish men, women and children would pay the price for the Fuhrer's counterfeit science before what is now called "the Holocaust" finally ended in 1945. Professor Steinweis introduces us to the scholars who supported Hitler's scientific antisemitism. He places them within what he describes on pages 14-15 to be a "three tiered phenomenon." The lowest tier was the most familiar, to me at least. Brownshirted thugs beating up Jews and laughing at crude depictions of them on posters and in Jules Streicher's notorious STURMER are what I always thought about when the term "Nazi" was mentioned. Nazi street thuggery was certainly prominent and effective at times, but it was reinforced by two other tiers. This second tier included such things a motion pictures with sound tracks entitled THE ETERNAL JEW and THE JEW SUSS, both of which featured anti-Jewish plots and characters. Popular radio shows, periodicals and text books followed the same theme as Jewish instructors were forced out of teaching and replaced by more politically reliable Aryans. This more refined second tier drew its inspiration from the authoritative scholarship of the third tier. This was populated by professors and doctors doing original research on "the Jewish Question" and proving beyond any shadow of the a reasonable doubt that Jews were, indeed, a race and that this race presented a complex and dangerous array of "problems" for other "races" notably the "Aryan race." Thus, a short, pudgy, swarthy, homosexual, Austrian native possessed of on

A Harsh Reminder of the Potential Consequences of the Institutionally Supported Scholarship

The use of science and scholarship to support government policy, a political movement, or ideology is always problematical. In addition to issues related to the personal bias and preconceptions on the part of the scholar, the potential for unreliability is enhanced by the inherent tendency of all researchers to find what they are looking for (i.e., the tendency to interpret results in such a way as to support their premises) and their need to avoid displeasing the sources of material and institutional support upon which scientists and scholars rely. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this more starkly than Nazi scholarship, where the output was used in the service of evil. It seems to me that understanding how this could have happened can help explain how the personal biases, outlook, and ideologies of scholars and scientists affect their work. "Studying the Jew" provides several key insights into the basis for Nazi anti-Semitic scholarship. I would mention two in particular that are difficult to accept now, and serve to demonstrate how much thinking on these issues has changed. First, the Nazis scholars fully accepted that the Jews could be categorized as a genetic "race". The science supporting this was almost non-existent, it was instead evidently based on an anecdotal observations and an assumption of centuries of marriage within the community. That is, it is incorrect to assume that their anti-Semitism was irrational or atavistic. Secondly, once it was accepted that the Jews were a separate race, the idea of a competition for resources and its consequences seemed to them to follow logically and unpleasant consequences became relatively easy to accept, which was a key contribution to Nazi policies. In fact, it appears that at least some of the Nazi scholars looked at the supposed ability of the Jews to establish a racial identity as something that the German nation needed to emulate. The book makes it clear that these academics believed that were applying accepted scholarly methodology in treating the Jews as a race. Given this, key questions that remain to be answered are why they did not question the weak to non-existent genetic foundation on which it rested (i.e., no link between the behavioral characteristics attributed to the Jews and inheritable traits was ever shown) and also why they also did not recognize that the essentially anecdotal evidence on the behavior attributed to the Jews could be the result of their being treated differently, and not the cause of it.

documents pseudo-scientific drivel

Steinweis reveals a time and place where "Jewish Studies" was not the multicultural subject that it suggests to a current reader. Instead, in the Third Reich, it was a twisted look at and a pseudo-scientific attempt at justifying antisemitism. In several German universities, it became popular amongst some intellectuals who supported the government. The book describes the ravings that were generated by these academics. All in the name of "reason" and National Socialism. In page after page, Steinweis outlines the hateful drivel that was output in the guise of research. A sobering look at what can happen when reason is distorted in the service of a feral government. What is especially unsettling is the realisation that most of the German academics mentioned in the book were not out and out charlatans or dolts. The failings of the German antisemitic scholars were moral rather than intellectual. Wittingly, they made themselves accomplices to dreadful events.

A helpful book

It is not a suprise that many leading nazis had Phds or that they were academics. It turns out that academia, lends itself to nazism because it dehumanizes man by classifying him as if he is beast, by treating him as biology, thus it is not suprising that in the name of 'science' and 'progressive ideas' man committed genocide and killed far more efficiently than he ever did in the name of religion. Many beleived that secularism would be a harbinger of peace in the 19th century but it led directly to race thoery and anti-semitism. The leading philosopher of Nazism, Hiedegger, was widely respected after the war, as were many other academics who traded their souls during the nazi era. THis book exposes the truth behind the Nazi collaboration with the academy and in many ways it there is much we could learn from it today in terms of the way in which academics can be coopted to tragedy. Seth J. Frantzman

When 'Jewish Studies' was nefarious

Many colleges and universities now have programs or departments in ethnic studies, or specifically in Chicano Studies, Jewish Studies, etc. And we think that is fine, although some twenty or thirty years ago some academics questioned such fields. But in Nazi Germany "Jewish Studies" were big on campus. They were the place where ambitious and/or anti-semitic academics -- biologists, demographers, sociologists, criminologists, historians -- lent their academic skills and insights to the Nazi program of denegrating Jews as foreign, dangerous, insidious, and noxious to Germans. No one claims that without seemingly scholarly studies of Jewish communities in Lithuania and Ukraine, or of Jewish marriage patterns in Leipzig or Frankfurt, the Nazi would have in any way been impeded in their plans for the elimination of Jews from Europe. Nevertheless many academics -- some with splendid credentials -- were willing to use their talents in the service, ultimately, of genocide, whether they saw this clearly or not a few years before. Nothing here is surprising, since scholars have been showing for decades how much German elites helped and favored the Nazi assault on liberal, democratic, socialist, and Jewish life in Germany and beyond Germany. But it is good to have the way this occurred shown in some specificity. Alan Steinweis has written a most timely and important little book and it deserves to be read and pondered. Scholars and intellectuals have often betrayed their calling -- in America as well as in Europe -- but rarely has this taken place with such murderous consequences. The nature of scholarship, objectivity, science, and learning is laid very bare here for all to see. It needs to be more than a blame-the-Germans game, for it could very well happen here -- indeed, in some ways it has already happened here, with regard to slavery, African-Americans, Jews, and non-northern European immigrants. It can happen again.