The Jewish Race Problem
The race question is one of the most difficult but also one of the most important and burning scientific and political problems of the present day. I say scientific and political advisedly. It may be that the worth or worthlessness of a particular race, or of race altogether, is a subject of purely scientific and historically philosophical interest. Yet race can, and does, enter into and determine so much in the political destiny of nations, that were we here considering the cultural value of the Jewish race alone, and trying to trace through its many controversies the destiny of the Jewish people exclusively, it is, nevertheless, certain that—from the study of race hatred and antagonism arising from differences in race values entailed in our inquiries—we should obtain a criterion from which to judge all other cases where the pride and presumption of one race seek the destruction or degredation of another.
But our theme is necessarily a more limited one; and we cannot now engage in the discussion of so vast a subject, except in so far as it touches one special province—the question of the particular race value of the Jews, and the culture value of the Jewtsh race.
Scientific investigations in the sphere of race-anthropology and race-biology have sought to establish the fact of the tuferiority of the Jewish race, an intellectual, spiritual, esthetic, and physical inferiority. To this result we owe, on the one hand, anti-Semitism and all anti-Jewish effort (which sometimes assumes formidable proportions): on the other, the lack of pride and self-respect in the Jews themselves, which tends to their utter disorganization.
The sharpest antithesis may exist between the various Aryan peoples; Germans and Slavs, Celts and Latins may be mutually antagonistic, and each seek the destruction of the other; nevertheless, whenever it is a question of race value,
the Jews are always put on a lower 8 as a non-Aryan people. The theory its that all these peoples having been united in prehistoric days in one great Aryan nation, they share in common certain qualities of mind and soul: whereas the Jews, along with all other non-Aryan nations, while possessing a certain intellectual adroitness and versatility—to which both history and scientific investigations bear testimiony—-are yet totally lacking in all the higher kinds of productiveness.
To what extent people's minds are influenced by these conclusions, which, on the face of them, seem to be arrived at by purely objective methods, I need not now consider. There are certainly no Jews who do not, in greater or less degree, share these views, or at any rate consider them as a serious problem.
We know now, of course. that the hypothesis of an “Aryan” race can ns: longer be maintained, that the distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan is one of the greatest historical lies; that, as Professor von Luschan has expressed it, it is as great an absurdity to speak of blood-relationship and race-relationship 33 tt would be for one to publish, say, a long- skull dictionary; that it was the great fallacy in the science of languages to imagine that similarity of tongue proved a common racial ancestry. In short, the Aryan gospel, though taught from many professional chairs, belongs now to the scientific lumber-room.
Nevertheless, the radical difference between those groups of races, formerly characterized as Aryan and non-Aryan, far from being lessened, is becoming deeper and emphasised almost past endurance. By another direction of speculation the scientific-sociological anthropology which has been made notorious by the remarkable book of Chamberlain—remarkable in point of literary style—and has been widely accepted, the Aryan theory has been