The Rise of Scientific Racism

Like sexism, racism and anti-Semitism took on new forms after the French Revolution. Proponents of the rights of man, though still harboring many negative stereotypes about Jews and blacks themselves, no longer accepted the existence of prejudice as sufficient grounds for an argument. That the rights of Jews in France had always been restricted proved only that habit and custom exercised great power, not that such restrictions were warranted by reason.

Similarly, for abolitionists slavery did not demonstrate the inferiority of black Africans; it merely revealed the rapacity of white slavers and planters. Those who rejected the idea of equal rights for Jews or blacks therefore needed a doc­trine–a cogently reasoned case–to buttress their position, espe­cially after Jews had gained rights and slavery had been abolished in the British and French colonies, in 1833 and 1848, respectively. Over the course of the nineteenth century, opponents of rights for Jews and blacks increasingly turned to science, or what passed as science, to find that doctrine.

The science of race can be traced back to the end of the eigh­teenth century and the efforts to classify the peoples of the world. Two strands woven in the eighteenth century twined together in the nineteenth: first, the argument that history had seen the successive development of peoples toward civilization and that whites were the most advanced of the lot; and second, the idea that permanent inherited characteristics divided people by race. Racism, as a systematic doctrine, depended on the con­junction of the two. Eighteenth-century thinkers assumed that all peoples would eventually achieve civilization, whereas nineteenth-century racial theorists believed that only certain races could do so because of their inherent biological qualities. Elements of this conjunction can be found in scientists of the early nineteenth century.

Only after midcentury, however, did these ideas appear in their fully articulated form. The epitome of the genre can be found in Arthur de Gobineau‘s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-55). Using a hodgepodge of arguments derived from archeology, eth­nology, linguistics, and history, the French diplomat and man of letters argued that a biologically based hierarchy of races deter­mined the history of mankind. At the bottom sat the animalis­tic, unintellectual, and intensely sensual dark-skinned races; next up on the ladder came the apathetic, mediocre, but practi­cal yellow ones; and at the top stood the persevering, intellectu­ally energetic and adventurous white peoples, who balanced “an extraordinary instinct for order” with “a pronounced taste for liberty.”

Within the white race, the Aryan branch reigned supreme. “Everything great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth, in science, art and civilization” derives from the Aryans, concluded Gobineau. Migrating from their initial home in Central Asia, the Aryans had provided the original stock for the Indian, Egyptian, Chinese, Roman, European, and even, through colonization, the Aztec and Incan civilizations. Racial miscegenation explained both the rise and fall of civ­ilizations, according to Gobineau. “The ethnic question domi­nates all the other problems of history and holds its key,” he wrote. Unlike some of his later followers, however, Gobineau thought that the Aryans had already lost their edge through intermarriage and that, though it sickened him, egalitarianism and democracy would eventually triumph, signaling the end of civilization itself.

Although Gobineau’s fanciful notions got lit­tle traction in France, Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany (who ruled from 1861 to 1888) found them so congenial that he con­ferred honorary citizenship on the Frenchman. They were also taken up by the German composer Richard Wagner and then by Wagner’s son-in-law, the English writer and Germanophile Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Through Chamberlain’s influ­ence, Gobineau’s Aryans became a central element of Hitler’s racial ideology.

Gobineau gave a secular and seemingly systematic cast to ideas already in circulation in much of the Western world. In 1850, for example, the Scottish anatomist Robert Knox pub­lished The Races of Men, in which he argued that “race, or hereditary descent, is everything; it stamps the man.” The next year, the head of the Philadelphia typesetters union, John Camp­bell, offered his Negro Mania, Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Races of Mankind. Racism was not confined to the southern United States. Campbell cited Cuvier and Knox among others to insist on the savagery and bar­barism of Negroes and to argue against any possibility of equal­ity between whites and blacks. Since Gobineau himself had criticized  the treatment of African slaves in the United States his American translators had to excise those sections in order to make the work more palatable to pro-slavery southerners when it was published in English in 1856. The prospect of the aboli­tion of slavery (which only became official in the United States in 1865) thus only heightened the interest in racial science.

As the titles of Gobineau’s and Campbell’s works demon­strate, the common feature in most racialist thinking was a vis­ceral reaction against the notion of equality. Gobineau confessed to Tocqueville the disgust provoked in him by the “dirty overalls [workers]” who had participated in the revolution of 1848 in France. For his part, Campbell felt revulsion about sharing a political platform with men of  color. What had once defined an aristocratic rejection of modern society–having to mix with the inferior orders–now took on a racial meaning. The advent of mass politics in the last half of the nineteenth century may have gradually eroded the sense of class difference (or given the semblance of doing so), but it did not eliminate difference altogether.

Difference shifted from the register of class to that of race and sex. The establishment of universal male suffrage combined with the abolition of slavery and the beginning of mass immigration to make equality much more concrete and threatening.

Imperialism further aggravated these developments. Even as the European powers abolished slavery in their plantation colonies, they extended their dominion in Africa and Asia. The French invaded Algeria in 1830 and ultimately incorporated it into France. The British annexed Singapore in 1819 and New Zealand in 1840 and relentlessly increased their control over India. By 1914, Africa had been split up between France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, and Spain. Hardly any African states emerged unscathed.

European imperialism and racial science developed a symbiotic relationship: the imperialism of the “conquering races” made racial claims more credible, and racial science helped justify imperialism. After the 1870s, these attitudes found a mass audience in new cheaply produced newspapers, illustrated weeklies, and ethnographic exhibitions.

The New Anti-Semitism

Gobineau had not considered the Jews a special case in his elaboration of racial science, but his followers did. In his Foun­dations of the Nineteenth Century, published in German in 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain combined Gobineau’s ideas about race and German mysticism about the Germanic “people” (Volk) with a vitri­olic attack on the Jews, “this alien people” that has  enslaved “our governments, our law, our science, our commerce, our lit­erature, our art.” Chamberlain offered only one new argument, but it had a direct influence on Hitler: the Aryans and the Jews alone of all peoples had maintained their racial purity, which meant that now they must struggle to the death with each other. In other respects, Chamberlain packaged together a variety of increasingly common ideas.

Although modern anti-Semitism built on the negative Christian stereotypes about Jews that had been circulating for centuries, the doctrine took on new qualities after the 1870s. Unlike blacks, Jews no longer represented an inferior stage of historical development, as they had, for instance, in the eigh­teenth century. Instead, they stood for the threats of modernity itself: excessive materialism, emancipation of minority groups and their participation in politics, and the “degenerate,” “root­less” cosmopolitanism of urban life.

Newspaper cartoons depicted Jews as greedy, duplicitous, and lecherous; journalists and pamphleteers wrote of Jewish control of world capital and conspiratorial manipulation of parliamentary parties. One American cartoon from 1894, less malevolent than many of its European counterparts, shows the continents of the world encircled by the tentacles of an octopus sitting at the site of the British  Isles. The octopus is labeled ROTHSCHILD, after the rich and powerful Jewish family.

These modern efforts at defamation got added fuel from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraud­ulent document purporting to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to set up a supergovernment that would control the whole world. First published in Russia in 1903, exposed as a forgery in 1921, the Protocols were nonetheless repeatedly reprinted by the Nazis in Germany and are to this day taught as fact in the schools in some Arab countries. The new anti-Semitism thus combined traditional and modern elements: the Jews should be excluded from rights and even expelled from the nation because they were both too different and too powerful.