The debates about outlawing slavery in Great Britain and the civil emancipation of European Jews beginning in the late eighteenth century were paralleled by the growth in the rhetoric of scientific racism throughout Western Europe. The nineteenth century was for European Jews, especially for Jews in the German-speaking lands, the best of times and the worst of times. Civil emancipation, increased economic and social mobility, and access to secular education were all slowly acquired by European Jews, and counterbalanced by the rise of a political antisemitism that sought to reverse civil emancipation, and the reappearance in altered form of older manifestations of antisemitism such as the “blood libel,” the accusation that Jews used the blood of Christians in their religious rituals. Meanwhile, political realities within the Russian Empire led to massive pogroms and the flight of millions of Eastern and mainly unacculturated Jews to the cities of Western Europe and beyond. The range of Jewish responses to these political realities included assimilation and conversion, the rise of political and cultural Zionism, and the establishment of secular Jewish political parties (at least in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). This snapshot is, of course, reductive, but it is broadly accurate.
Throughout Western Europe the gradual integration of Jews into the body politic was seen both as the cause of Jewish psychopathology and a source of danger to the nation-state. Various theories were put forth to explain the nature of Jewish madness. All of these explanations functioned to produce a uniform biological category, “the Jews.” Thus Georg Burgl’s handbook of forensic medicine of 1912 states quite clearly, “[T]he Jewish race has a special predisposition for hysteria.” For Burgl, this was a result of the degenerative nature of the Jew, marked by “physical signs of degeneration such as asymmetry and malocclusion of the skull, malocclusion of the teeth, etc.”1 The visibility of the Jew was identical to the visibility of the degenerate, with signs and symptoms pointing to Jews’ susceptibility.
Nineteenth-century liberal views of Jews shared a similar notion of a Jewish predisposition to madness.2 In Paris, the most important neurologist of the time, Jean Martin Charcot, lectured that there is the stated presumption that “nervous illnesses of all types are innumerably more frequent among Jews than among other groups.” Charcot described Jews as “the best source of material for nervous illness.”3 He described the predisposition of Jews for specific forms of illness as the result of the biological consequences of their religious practice, rather than as a result of their racial makeup. Jews were mad because of their consanguineous marriage (read: endogamous marriage), which in terms of nineteenth-century thought was understood as a form of incest. Religious practice, to Charcot, a radical opponent of all organized religion, was as much a sign of the primitive nature of the Jewish psyche as it was of Catholic sophistication. Acculturation could ameliorate this tendency but never eliminate it.
The madness of the Jews was also seen as a racial predisposition triggered by acculturation. Wilhelm Erb, at a birthday celebration for the king of Baden, commented on the increased nervousness among the “Semites, who already are a neurotically predisposed race. Their untamed desire for profit and their nervousness, caused by centuries of imposed life style [auferlegte Lebensweise], as well as their inbreeding [Inzucht] and marriage within families [Familienheiraten], predisposes them to nervousness.”4 The emancipation of the Jews was also seen as one of the explanations of their predisposition for madness. The dean of fin-de-siècle German psychiatrists, Emil Kraepelin, professor of psychiatry at Munich and founder of the Institute for Psychiatry there, spoke with authority about the “domestication” of the Jews, their isolation from nature, and their exposure to the stresses of modern life.5 As with Charcot, according to Kraepelin it is the inherent biological weakness of the Jew that determines this predisposition.
By the turn of the century the view that the Jew was inherently predisposed to specific forms of mental illness had become a commonplace, with multiple etiologies proposed. In his widely read and translated General Psychopathology (1913), Karl Jaspers, the Heidelberg psychiatrist and one of the major innovators of clinical psychiatry in his day as well as one of the creators of a systematic existentialist philosophy, argued for the close relationship of race and mental illness, citing in great detail the claims that the Jews as a race were disposed to mental illness.6 Such views about the madness of the Jews were not limited to medical conservatives in the German-speaking world. Jaspers, as a member of the sociologist Max Weber’s circle in Heidelberg, was certainly liberal, if nationalistic, in his politics.
Given that the biology of race stands at the center of nineteenth-century “sciences of man” (which would include biology, medicine, and anthropology), anyone who thought of himself as a “scientist” during this period could hardly have avoided confronting this aspect of science. Meaning, even those male scientists (such as Jews) who were labeled as different within this knowledge regime had to come to terms with the fact that the arena of endeavor that assigned to them the status of “scientist” also demanded they acknowledge (or refute) their inherent biological difference. Even acculturated Jewish doctors had to accept this type of predisposition, as it was part of what defined clinical medicine at the time. Jewish physicians were forced to deal with the potential of Jewish mental illness because the problem reflected on their own mental stability. The standard Jewish medical rationale for the higher incidence of psychopathology among the Jews came to be that of the Jewish brain’s inability to compete after “a 2,000-year diaspora” and “a struggle for mere existence up to emancipation.”7
The premise that immigrant Jews were more at risk from mental illness was actually debated before the New York Neurological Society on April 7, 1914. The presentation was by the Jewish psychiatrists A. A. Brill (who was also trained as a psychoanalyst) and Morris J. Karpas, who focused on newly arrived Eastern European Jews admitted to the public mental hospitals from which they gathered their samples.8 Functional psychopathologies, such as hysteria, they said, were more evident among Jews even in New York City, where they supposedly were freed from the state oppression of the Russian Empire. They stressed that the differences among the statistics reflect the national status of the Jews, and that while “the Jewish race contributes a rather high percentage to the so-called functional form of insanity . . . the Jew is not disproportionately insane.”9
The debate that followed Brill and Karpas’s presentation was intense. George H. Kirby argued that it was important to understand the frequency among the diseases, such as dementia praecox, in order to better treat the various immigrant groups. Smith Ely Jelliffe, the president of the Society, threw up his hands and stated that statisticians could make what they wanted out of the figures and render the superficial important. The physician-anthropologist Maurice Fishberg, a New York City public health official, who was present by invitation, presented his argument of the contextual cause of the higher incidence of mental illness. Jews were urban dwellers, they were engaged in “financial and commercial pursuits” more than others, and their proclivity for mental illness seemed to change based on where they lived and what the local conditions were. Indeed, he argued earlier, the new Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who were the focus of the debate were actually of a different racial stock than the older German immigrants, who seemed to be less at risk and more at home in the world of American capitalism: “the Jews in Russia are not Semites at all . . . and actually belong to an entirely different race.”10 In sum, the Jews as a collective, a race, or a social group, could be defined by a higher risk for insanity—but was racism at the root of this madness? Could such madness be manifested as self-hatred? Is racism, itself, a form of madness?
Such views were not limited to the discussions of the racial biology of the Jews. In the United States parallel diagnoses of mental illness aided in constructing blacks as physically inferior or weak, and the categories of mental illness were employed from the early nineteenth century to depict the nature of the black character and will as part of a justification of slavery. Drapetomania, explained by Samuel A. Cartwright as the desire of the slave to escape their master, was well-known as a classification of mental illness. Writing in 1851, Cartwright posited that if a slave owner keeps a slave “in the position that we learn from the Scriptures he was intended to occupy, that is, the position of submission; and if his master or overseer be kind and gracious in his hearing towards him, without condescension, and at the same time ministers to his physical wants, and protects him from abuses, the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away.”11 Cartwright’s claim was founded, in part, in a belief in blacks’ unruly nature as wild savages requiring structure and servitude.
Among American abolitionists, Cartwright’s conclusion was viewed with a certain amusement. For example, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, in his A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), observed that white indentured servants had often been known to flee as well. Thus, Olmsted satirically hypothesized that the supposed disease was actually of white European origin, and had been introduced to Africa by traders.12 Among abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, the charge of the slave’s madness came to be read as a sign of the mentality of slaves:
A Kentucky master owns a negro child. He brings that child up in a state of moral and mental blindness—in consequence of that blindness, the child commits many blunders and is guilty of many crimes. Can the child be held accountable for the crimes, which resulted from the control which his master exerted over him? If a man could render his neighbor insane and could induce him, which in a state of insanity, to cut the throat of a third person, no one would hesitate to excuse the madman and to hold the man who caused the insanity and induced the murder responsible. Now, although the master who holds a slave may not be to that fatal extent accountable for the slave’s transgressions, those vices and crimes perpetuated by the slave that are directly, clearly and only traceable to the power exerted over him by the master, must be charged to the master.13
The argument here is from analogy, but the image of a man driven mad by his destructive environment is one that sees all actions of an oppressed people that are labeled sociopathic or psychopathic as having their roots in slavery.
Among white Southerners, however—medical professionals and laypersons alike—Cartwright’s diagnosis became central to the design and implementation of treatment protocols for black slaves, and later, following Emancipation, for black mental health patients.14 Central to the lasting legacy of Cartwright’s claim was the misinterpretation of rates of insanity among black Americans in the 1840 United States Census. The 1840 Census had mistakenly (or fraudulently, depending upon the interpretation) reported the incidence of insanity among blacks in Northern states as roughly seven times greater than among Northern whites, and almost eleven times greater than among Southern blacks.
Edward Jarvis, a black physician and statistician, had challenged the findings of the Census in his 1844 paper “Insanity among the Coloured Population of the Free States,” published in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences. Jarvis had examined the summary reports of each state and found “the secret of error”: many of the reported “coloured insane” supported as public charges were actually white patients. In fact, within many towns, the Census had reported the presence of black mental health patients, but no black inhabitants! Jarvis cut straight to the heart of the matter when he wrote, “The same carelessness, which gave insanity without subjects in some places, may have given none in others, where it actually existed.”15 Despite Jarvis’s criticism, a letter from the American Statistical Association to Congress, and a letter from former president John Quincy Adams to Congress to revisit the report, no corrections were issued. The 1840 Census became an especially powerful tool following Emancipation, as white physicians and reformers heralded this report and others as evidence of Reconstruction’s failure, and the need to recreate some semblance of slavery’s structure for the sake of the South’s now-freed black population.16
Among Southern hospitals and asylums for blacks, for example, a therapy known as “moral treatment” was advocated: highly structured, slow-pace daily routines, including labor, combined with nearly absolute authority of the medical staff over the everyday lives of the patients. These conditions were intended to mimic what many whites believed to be the actual conditions of slavery. Moral treatment, for them, represented a medical ideal of “freedom from” rather than the more dangerous “freedom to.”17 Consequently, hospitals throughout the South experienced a sharp increase over the next several decades in the admission of black patients. For example, the number of black patients increased from roughly 3 percent in 1865 to almost 16 percent by 1870. By the turn of the twentieth century, blacks were close to a quarter of the patients, and the state of Alabama, in response, opened a second mental hospital at Mount Vernon. By 1910, blacks were roughly one third of the patients between the two hospitals, an increase of nearly 1,000 percent in just fifty years.18
The response among black intellectuals and white abolitionists during this time to claims about blacks’ inherent dispositions to madness was, surprisingly, mixed. Some held fast to the notion that the price of freedom was perhaps too great for the “undeveloped” faculties of blacks. In 1887, presenting his paper entitled “The Future of the American Negro,” General Samuel C. Armstrong, a member of the Freedmen’s Bureau and founder of the Hampton School in Virginia, an institution dedicated exclusively to the education of black and Native American students, claimed the “real loss” of Emancipation had been on the part of white owners.19 Armstrong was echoing a conclusion drawn by the superintendent of the Alabama Insane Hospital, James T. Searcy, who had written two years earlier that while slavery had provided whites “high tone and manliness,” Emancipation only produced among them broken homes and laziness.20 Two years after Armstrong’s address, while speaking at the National Conference for Charities and Corrections in 1899, John H. Smyth, then president of the Negro Reform Association of Virginia, explained to a predominantly white audience that “up to 1860 there could not have been a dozen insane negroes in our State. Today we have in Petersburg alone one thousand.”21 The ensuing discussion among those in attendance suggested insanity was the result of blacks’ inherent inability to civilize. Smyth’s seemingly unquestioned acceptance of blackness as a marker of susceptibility to madness is odd, given that he was one of the earliest pan-Africanists in the United States, and through his organization had established the Virginia Manual Labor School as an alternative to prison for black children convicted of petty crimes.22
Meanwhile, the few black medical professionals in the United States challenged claims about increasing rates of insanity and blacks’ susceptibility to insanity on the grounds of insufficient evidence. For example, in a paper read before the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane in 1851, Edward Jarvis responded directly to the Bureau of the Census’s claims of increasing rates of insanity among freed blacks, stating the report featured gross and “palpable” errors.23 In that same paper, however, Jarvis did not necessarily disagree with conventional wisdom that claimed an introduction to advanced civilization would produce higher rates of insanity among a previously disenfranchised caste:
[In] an uneducated community, or where people are overborne by despotic government or inflexible customers, where men are born in castes, and die without overstepping their native condition, where the child is content with the pursuit and the fortune of his father, and has no hope or expectation of any other, there these undue mental excitements and struggles do not happen, and men’s brains are not confused with new plans, nor exhausted with struggles for a higher life, nor overborne with the disappointment of failure. Of course, in such a state of society . . . insanity cannot operate. But in proportion as education prevails, and emancipates the new generations from the trammels and condition of the old, and the manifold ways of life are open to all, the danger of misapplication of the cerebral forces and the mental powers increases, and men may think and act indiscreetly, and become insane.24
In his concluding remarks, speaking more generally, Jarvis continued: “Insanity is then a part of the price we pay for civilization. The causes of the one increase with the developments and results of the other.”25 Jarvis’s contention, then, is that slavery cannot produce insanity because it requires little mental expenditure of its constituents. However, as slaves entered into free society, as they encountered the complexities of free life, their rates of insanity should increase in proportion to their incorporation. To the reader, of course, this logic flies in the face of contemporary evidence suggesting that the ill effects of American racism, like massive disparities between whites and blacks in nearly every socioeconomic indicator, produce among the latter poorer health—including mental health—outcomes. However, for Jarvis and his contemporaries, mental illness was simply a byproduct of complex societies, an argument that would be revisited by intellectuals in subsequent decades, including Sigmund Freud.
In comparing the medicalized responses of Jews in Western and Central Europe to those of blacks in the United States in the nineteenth century, the central difference is the gradual integration of Jewish males into the world of science, where they were required to accept such arguments concerning race as part of their certification as physicians and scientists. There was an inherent difference in the acceptance of such language of biological race between groups that saw themselves as being able to enter into the world of science and those who were seen as perpetually marginalized.26
This assumption became part of the negative eugenics of the nineteenth century. Visual categories were literally seen as the markers of racial pathology among European Jews, and the physical and biological inferiority of the Jews was equated with psychopathology in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. No longer easily identified by external markers such as dress, occupation, or location, the Jew came to be identified by specific biological and, thus, physical markers. Further, perceived physical markers of degeneration (the Jewish nose, eyes, etc.) were linked to a prevalence of diagnoses of mental illness among the European Jewish population. Central to this development was that this paralleled, and was partly driven by, newer theories of race science, such as Francis Galton’s notion of eugenics as the improvement of the race through selective breeding for what were seen as positive qualities and the elimination of those understood as defective, especially mental illness. In an interview with a British Jewish newspaper at the end of his life, he remarked:
It is one part of eugenics to encourage the idea of parental responsibility: the other part is to see that the children born are well born. It is a praiseworthy feature of the Jewish religion that, as a religion, it enjoins the multiplication of the human species. But it is still more important to determine that the children shall be born from the fit and not the unfit.27
Social practice may encourage positive eugenics, but eliminating the unfit trumps all. At this point the unfit are the mentally ill; but the corollary is eventually the elimination of the unfit racist.
Thus by the late nineteenth century, there was a growing trend among academicians in Europe and the United States to locate the foundations of mental illness in social relations. Like their European counterparts, many medical authorities in the United States perceived mental illness as rooted in physiological dysfunction, or anatomical disorder, of the brain and nervous system. Blacks, they argued, possessed less advanced neurological functions, making them more susceptible to mental illness, which was viewed at the time as a physical disease. As we demonstrated above, this logic led to arguments that Emancipation had removed blacks from the sheltered confines of forced servitude to compete independently in a world for which they were simply “unfit.”28 Freedom for the African American as well as emancipation for the Jew provides the context for their increased rates of mental illness.
Epidemiological findings in Europe about the excessive numbers of mentally ill Jews, and in the United States of the equivalent problem among American freemen, came at the beginning of the expansion of statistical evidence in the mental health field. The new science of measurement became one of the tools of contemporary clinical psychiatry among public health figures such as Joshua Billings, the creator of the Surgeon-General’s Library in Washington, D.C., and one of the most important epidemiologists of his day.29 Madness became linked to notions of degeneracy in race science, and rates of mental illness among African Americans and Jews were frequently evoked as empirical evidence of their inability to deal with “modern life.” This drove the development of new tools for the evaluation of mental status that later became linked to both restrictive immigration policies in the early twentieth century and, subsequently, the modern-day Civil Rights Movement.
By the close of the nineteenth century, certain ideas about the science of race became commonplace: there was always a fixed boundary, a bright line, between races; there was a hierarchy of the races based on observable phenomena; mixed races were inherently inferior to pure races; race was mapped in some inherent way on to geography; and less able races could trump superior races by sheer numbers. Now all of these claims were clothed in the newest sciences of the day, from epidemiology and its statistical apparatus, to eugenics and early genetics with its models of inheritance, to clinical medicine with its classification of diseases and its claims of a biological and often inherent etiology for such diseases. The techniques of governance were well established within the medical and biological sciences, and in the first three decades of the twentieth century would become essential for social policy intervention concerning the “Jewish problem” in Western Europe and the “Negro problem” in the United States.
During the nineteenth century, more and more members of minorities entered into the public sphere (and, especially among Jews, into the world of academic medicine and biology), which led to a questioning of the mechanism of causation, but not the claim of predisposition. Thus major medical figures such Cesare Lombroso, the Jewish founder of the Italian school of positivist criminology and the most vocal proponent of the theory of degeneration, denied any inherent biological weakness in the Jewish psyche but rather saw the inheritance of such predispositions as the result of “2,000 years of oppression.” After authoring a number of studies on the degeneracy of the prostitute and the criminal, Lombroso was confronted with the charge that Jews, too, were a degenerate subclass of human being, a class determined by their biology. Lombroso’s answer to this charge, Antisemitism and the Jews in the Light of Modern Science (1893), attempted to counter the use of medical or (in his estimation) pseudoscientific discourse to characterize the nature of the Jew. For Lombroso “antisemitism” is a faulty appropriation of what looks like a scientific term for a political purpose. Indeed, the term seems first to appear in 1860 in the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider’s use of the phrase “antisemitic prejudices” (“antisemitische Vorurteile”) in categorizing the French philosopher Ernest Renan’s contrast between the “Semitic” and the “Aryan” soul.30 The term, however, was popularized only in the 1880s by the journalist Wilhelm Marr in his widely read pamphlet attacking the “Jews,” The Way to Victory of the Germanic Spirit over the Jewish Spirit Der (Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum) (1880), in which the word first appeared to mean “Jew hatred.”31 That year Marr founded the League of Antisemites to combat Jewish influence in Europe. The term had a clearly political meaning thereafter, not as a pejorative label for a prejudice but as a call to arms.
Yet Lombroso and many of his Jewish contemporaries also accepted the basic view that the Jew was more highly prone to specific forms of mental illness. He quotes Charcot to this effect, but he sees the reason for this tendency not in the physical nature of the Jew but in the “residual effect of persecution.”32 Lombroso assumes that there is an inherent plasticity to the psyche that can be so deformed by prejudice as to cause mental illness, but that (as in his case) acculturation would lead such forms of madness to become less frequent.33
Yet Lombroso does not define why such persecution occurs, only seeing it as an historical given. He accepted the view that some type of degenerative process, leading to the predominance of specific forms of mental illness, exists among all Jews. The only difference from non-Jewish savants was what he saw as the cause of this process. In rejecting the charge of inbreeding, Lombroso also rejected the implications that Jews indulge in primitive sexual practices that violate a basic human taboo against incest. The confusion of endogamous marriage with incestuous inbreeding was a result of both the level of late-nineteenth-century science and the desire of this scientific discourse to have categories with which to label the explicit nature of Jewish character, as Charcot did.
Such views are echoed in Martin Engländer’s essay on The Evident Most Frequent Appearances of Illness in the Jewish Race (1902).34 Engländer was one of the early supporters of the Viennese intellectual and newspaperman Theodor Herzl and the early Zionist movement. He discussed the cultural predisposition of the Jews to neurasthenia as a result of the “over-exertion and exhaustion of the brain . . . among Jews as opposed to the non-Jewish population.” He wrote, “the struggle, haste and drive, the hunt for happiness” have caused a “reaction in their central nervous system.”35 He echoed Lombroso in describing neurasthenia as the result of the Jewish brain’s inability to compete after “a two-thousand year Diaspora” and “a struggle for mere existence up to emancipation.” Engländer thus attempted to dismiss the etiology of neurasthenia as a result of inbreeding, citing the U.S. population as an example of a “race” in which neurasthenia predominates and in which Americans marry outside of their “racial” cohort. He pinned European Jews’ illnesses on their confinement in the city, the source of all degeneracy, prescribing “land, air, light.”36 Engländer’s views were not idiosyncratic. Theodor Herzl too had spoken of the potential plasticity of the urban Jew given his own land and his own ability to tend it. Herzl’s views on adaption and maladaptation aligned with the evolutionary notion of regeneration: “Education can be achieved only through shock treatment. Darwin’s theory of imitation [Darwinsche Mimikry] will be validated. The Jews will adapt. They are like seals that have been thrown back into the water by an accident of nature . . . if they return to dry land and manage to stay there for a few generations, their fins will change back into legs.”37 For Herzl and the Zionists the madness of the Jews is a direct result of the Jews’ political and social position in the West, yet he never articulates why this is the case.
The question of why Jews in the Christian West were the targets of opprobrium had been easily answered for more than a thousand years: they had committed deicide.38 It was the fault of the Jews alone that they were socially excluded and condemned. They were to be excoriated and damned because they were blind and would not see the revealed word of God as manifested in Jesus Christ. As Paul stated: “We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). In other words, Christian anti-Judaism was clearly the fault of the Jews’ obduracy. As the age of belief morphed into the age of science during the course of the nineteenth century, this view of a Jewish intransigence that warranted such condemnation became part and parcel of secular anti-Jewish feelings. Even liberals such as Lombroso’s equally famous contemporary, the Italian physician Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910), condemned in 1885 what was seen as the Jewish separatism that was the cause of their social isolation:
Circumcision is a shame and an infamy; and I, who am not in the least anti-Semitic, who indeed have much esteem for the Israelites, I who demand of no living soul a profession of religious faith, insisting only upon the brotherhood of soap and water and of honesty, I shout and shall continue to shout at the Hebrews, until my last breath: Cease mutilating yourselves: cease imprinting upon your flesh an odious brand to distinguish you from other men; until you do this, you cannot pretend to be our equal. As it is, you, of your own accord, with the branding iron, from the first days of your lives, proceed to proclaim yourselves a race apart, one that cannot, and does not care to, mix with ours.39
No question that those who disdained the Jews saw them as being at fault; the Jews were the sole cause of their own dilemma, even as Mantegazza says, to their friends and supporters. Yet in this new age of science, the idea that the Jews themselves were at fault for their own exclusion and condemnation seemed incoherent and aberrant, especially to Jewish scientists.The first documented explanation of the why that did not rest on blaming the Jews themselves could have been found in the subsequently important but, at the time, little recognized work of the proto-Zionist physician Leon Pinsker (1821–1891), Auto-Emancipation (Mahnruf an seine Stammgenossen) (1882). Pinsker was born in Polish Russia and educated at the University of Odessa, where he trained to be a physician. His training was “modern,” which in the nineteenth century meant German and biologically oriented. Horrified by the series of pogroms against the Jews beginning in 1871 in Odessa, Pinsker, writing in German, pleaded for a Jewish state on the basis of the inherent nature of Jew hatred (Judenhass) in Europe. As a physician he uses the category of mental illness to explain this hatred, calling it an obsession of the European Christian regarding Jews as “for the living . . . a dead man, for the natives an alien and a vagrant, for property-holders a beggar, for the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, for patriots a man without a country, for all classes a hated rival.”40 He undertakes the first systematic attempt at analyzing “Judeophobia” as a disease that can never be cured:
Along with a number of other unconscious and superstitious ideas, instincts, and idiosyncrasies, Judeophobia also has become fully naturalized among all the peoples of the earth with whom the Jews have had intercourse. Judeophobia is a form of demonopathy, with the distinction that the Jewish ghost has become known to the whole race of mankind, not merely to certain races, and that it is not incorporeal, like other ghosts, but is a being of flesh and blood, and suffers the most excruciating pain from the wounds inflicted upon it by the timorous multitude who imagine themselves threatened by it. Judeophobia is a psychic disorder. As a psychic disorder it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.41
For Pinsker it is in racism as an “inherited predisposition” that madness lies.42 In this passage he may be employing a German version of the term Hebrewphobia, first used by the Irish reformer Richard Lalor Sheil in his speech “On the Disabilities of the Jews,” delivered February 7, 1848, before the House of Commons on the occasion of the reelection of the British Jew Lionel de Rothschild to the House. Rothschild, a practicing Jew, would not take the oath that required he state, “I make this Declaration upon the true Faith of a Christian.” The Whig leader, Lord John Russell, introduced the Jews Relief Act, also called the Jewish Disabilities Bill, following the election to allow him to take the oath without this caveat. The ninth speaker who arose to debate the measure was Sheil, who had sat in the Commons as a Whig representing constituencies in Ireland since 1831.43 Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he was one of the Irish stalwarts who had accompanied Daniel O’Connell (“The Emancipator”) to London to protest against the suppression of the Catholic Association, of which he was a founding member, and continued to support O’Connell until Catholic emancipation was granted in 1829.44 Unprepossessing in appearance to his contemporaries, as he was only five foot tall, he was acknowledged to be one of the greatest of the Irish orators of his day, even if, as a contemporary member of the House said of his “detestable” brogue, “he was not pleasant to listen to.”45 William Gladstone was somewhat more complimentary, comparing his voice to
a tin kettle battered about from place to place, knocking first against one side and then against another. . . . There was a peculiar character, a sort of half-wildness in his aspect and delivery; his whole figure, and his delivery, and his voice and his matter, were all in such perfect keeping with one another that they formed a great Parliamentary picture.46
George W. E. Russell wrote in his memoir: “Sheil was very small, and of mean presence; with a singularly fidgety manner, a shrill voice, and a delivery unintelligibly rapid. But in sheer beauty of elaborated diction not O’Connell nor any one else could surpass him.”47 What is striking about all of these comments are the euphemisms (“half-wildness,” “shrill”) that branded Sheil as Irish. Nevertheless Sheil’s oration came to be one of the classics of British parliamentary oratory addressing the question of the legal equality of the Jews.48
Sheil makes the most extraordinary claim concerning the beliefs in Jewish difference that underpinned the older objection to Jewish civic emancipation:
What is it you fear? What is the origin of this Hebrewphobia? Do you tremble for the Church? The Church has something perhaps to fear from eight millions of Catholics, and from three millions of Methodists, and more than a million of Scotch seceders. The Church may have some thing to fear from the assault of sectaries from without, and still more to fear from a sort of spurious Popery and the machinations of mitred mutiny from within; but from the Synagogue—the neutral, impartial, apathetic, and unproselytising Synagogue—the Church has nothing to apprehend. But it is said that the House will be unchristianised. The Christianity of the Parliament depends on the Christianity of the country; and the Christianity of the country is fixed in the faith, and inseparably intertwined with the affections of the people. It is as stable as England her self; and as long as Parliament shall endure, while the constitution shall stand, until the great mirror of the nation’s mind shall have been shattered to pieces, the religious feelings of the country will be faithfully reflected here.49
Sheil had seen Parliament go from Anglican to Protestant (when the Quakers were allowed to affirm their oath) to Christian (with Catholic emancipation in 1829, which allowed him to enter the House of Commons). Why does Sheil evoke the phobic in his talk if he does not believe that prejudiced individuals were suffering a form of mental aberration?
In Sheil’s day the notion of the “phobia” had reached beyond the merely medical. Indeed the most often cited “phobia” in the medical literature of his day was “hydrophobia,” rabies, which even in the mid-nineteenth century before the work of Louis Pasteur was no longer to be associated with the run-of-the-mill various forms of mental illness, from aerophobia to photophobia, which are much less often cited.50 Phobias were popularly understood at the time “to be a fear of an imaginary evil, or an undue fear of a real one.”51 While the metaphoric use of “phobias” proliferated in the early nineteenth century (Anne Seward in 1824 notes that one of her acquaintances “laboured under a perpetual dustophobia; and a comical disease it was”), it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that the French conceit of labeling dislike of nationalities as “phobias” (as in “Anglophobia”) had appeared in English. Indeed, Sheil’s use may be counted among its earliest appearances, as the Times first used “Anglophobe” in 1851.52 Sheil uses it only to signify a chronic aversion to the Jews, and certainly framing his defense of the Jews against “Hebrewphobia” was a sense that “Irishphobia” was as endemic a disease in Great Britain.53
Leon Pinsker is the first to provide a clinical definition of the term “phobia” in the context of the Jews of Europe as well as a forensic label to answer the widely popular term “antisemitism,” which had become the marker for the political attack on Jewish emancipation after the 1880s. Pinsker also isolates the etiology of the madness of the Jews from the inherent racism of “Judeophobes.” For him it was the Enlightenment demand that the Jews become “like everyone else” in a national society—become Germans, French, English, while repressing their own Jewish national identity—that was the cause of their madness. He agrees with the notion that the Jews are predisposed to mental illness, but sees the endless torment from the pressure to acculturate, not from religious persecution, as the cause. The statelessness of the Jew in the age of nationalism condemns him to be an outlier. Judaism, he writes,
The stigma attached to this people, which forces an unenviable isolation among the nations upon it, cannot be removed by any sort of legal emancipation, as long as this people produces in accordance with its nature vagrant nomads, as long as it cannot give a satisfactory account of whence it comes and whither it goes, as long as the Jews themselves prefer not to speak in Aryan society of their Semitic descent, and prefer not to be reminded of it, as long as they are persecuted, tolerated, protected, emancipated. . . . Intelligent and rich in experience . . . we have never asked whether this mad race . . . will ever come to an end.54
Pinsker’s ideas seem to be a radical break from the claim of nineteenth-century biological psychiatry that madness lies in the predisposition of racial cohorts to madness. His attribution of Jewish madness to the loss of nation, and with it independence, and the resulting fall “into a decay which is not compatible with existence as a whole vital organism” responds to such constructions. As a result of this decay, according to Pinsker, Jews began to seem to others like ghosts—which is the root of Judeophobia, as “the fear of ghosts is something inborn.” It is interesting how the metaphor of ghostliness is concrete enough for Pinsker to incorporate, as though literal, into a medicalizing statement. His claim that the madness of the Jews is the result of faulty acculturation was widely recognized in the critical literature about European Jewry of the time. Intellectuals of the late nineteenth century agreed that the Jews were mad, but some thought that their madness was a reflex of antisemitism internalized as self-hatred. Friedrich Nietzsche’s poetic reading of Spinoza makes this quite clear. Christianity’s claim of universal love was the Jew’s vengeance for his treatment by Christianity:
Unheimlich glimmernder Rachebrand:
—am Judengott fraß Judenhaß!—
—Einsiedler, hab ich dich erkannt?
[an eerily shimmering fire of vengeance:
—The Jewish God devoured by Jewish hatred—
Hermit, have I recognized you?]55
Ultimately, Pinsker’s argument relies on the notion that “the misfortunes of the Jews are due, above all, to their lack of desire for national independence.”56 Nationalism will cure self-hatred, but nothing can cure the obsessive racism of the world in which the Jew is exiled. But is it the Christian alone who is racist? Is this the category that alone perpetuated Jew hatred or is it also the fault of the Jew who has lost any sense of national identity? And, if this is the case, what about other forms of race hatred that are not tied to the experience of Jews in the West?
The power of the argument rests on the image of psychopathology. Pinsker writes, “In a sick person the absence of desire for food and drink is a very serious symptom,” and “we would hear nothing of taking our malady at the root, in order to effect a complete cure.”57 His essay uses pathological language for both Jews and antisemites, and acknowledges fault on the part of the oppressors, while placing the onus for change on the oppressed. Pinsker writes, “If the basis of our reasoning is sound, if the prejudice of the human race against us rests upon anthropological and social principles, innate and ineradicable, we must look no more to the slow progress of humanity”58 Pinsker’s views become part of the ideology and the vocabulary of Zionism. He is not alone in such a position.
If Pinsker sees himself in the role of physician as political commentator, then the earlier work of Martin Robison Delany may provide a moment of contrast to nineteenth-century racialist fears of black emancipation by a commentator situated similarly to Pinsker. Delany, like Pinsker, was trained as a physician, and was one of the first three black students admitted to Harvard Medical School (though they were soon dismissed at the request of a group of white students). Delany was also the first black American man to publish a novel.59 Now recognized by contemporary black studies scholars as a pioneering expression of the nineteenth-century pan-Africanist emigration movement, Delany’s 1852 The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States was, at the time, a controversial book among both abolitionists and proponents of chattel slavery. In it, Delany sees the refusal of freed blacks to acknowledge their inherent marginality as a “folly to deny, insanity not to understand, blindness not to see, and surely now full time that our eyes were opened to these startling truths, which for ages have stared us full in the face.”60 Madness is the state of denial, not the position of the slave owner.
Both Pinsker and Delany evoke the other’s collective in underscoring their own situations. Pinsker relates the Jewish plight to that of blacks, Delany compares the oppression of “Colored People” to that of the Jews. Pinsker, however, assuming black inferiority through the lens of contemporary racial science, writes that the Jews must be emancipated “like the negroes, like women, and unlike all free peoples, they must be emancipated. It is all the worse for them if, unlike the negroes, they belong to an advanced race, and if, unlike women, they can show not only women of distinction, but also men, even great men.”61 Delany, meanwhile, compares blacks to Jews when he writes of “the Jews, scattered throughout not only the length and breadth of Europe, but almost the habitable globe, maintaining their national characteristics, and looking forward in high hopes of seeing the day when they may return to their former national position of self-government and independence, let that be in whatever part of the habitable world it may.”62 Delany goes on to justify the necessity of black emigration by providing the Biblical example of the Hebrews escaping Egypt, arguing that “that there are circumstances under which emigration is absolutely necessary to their political elevation, cannot be disputed.”63 Here is the key difference between arguments such as Pinsker’s, with the language and power of scientific medicine at their core, and Delany’s argument. As one of the present authors, Sander L. Gilman, argued about Delany’s use of Biblical models in his later Principia of Ethnology (1879):
[H]is strategy made sense within the black tradition but it rendered his book a cultural and linguistic hybrid reflected in its very title, half English, half Latin. Religiously oriented ethnology survived as a form because it served the political and psychological needs of the African-American. Isolation from the norms of science meant that those norms were less internalized. The creation of a different narrative form resisted the conventions of science, but as a strategy of resistance, theological arguments had the disadvantage of seeming illegitimate or “unscientific” when measured by the canons of mainstream science.64
As an epistemic culture, the rhetoric of science is more powerful if it is presented unadulterated, even if its assumptions about racial science seem to a contemporary reader “unscientific.”65
Both Pinsker and Delany offer emigration as a necessary solution to oppression, but emigration must be self-initiated. Human autonomy stands at the center of the political claims of both. Pinsker and Delany agree that the law of the oppressor is not to be trusted in such matters, as it is simply a façade for the continuation of social oppression. Legal statutes, they acknowledge, are an inadequate form of, as Pinsker calls it, emancipation—“legal emancipation is not social emancipation”—or freedom, as Delany, who references and reprints the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, claims.66 Understanding the Jew as a perpetual “stranger par excellence,” Pinsker acknowledges that the Jew is “not a native in his own home country, but he is also not a foreigner.”67 The only way that Jews will be recognized as independent subjects, not subject to the reality of a foreign nation as home, is if they emancipate themselves and emigrate to a new, permanent land. But this sounds a lot like Delaney’s definition of “freedom.” For Pinsker’s Jew, “the only thing known is that he has no home.”68
Delany’s struggle, meanwhile, is not just for freedom. He asks, “Where shall we go? We must not leave this continent; America is our destination and our home.”69 He continues: “We love our country, dearly love her, but she don’t love us—she despises us, and bids us be gone, driving us from her embraces; but we shall not go where she desires us; but when we do go, whatever love we have for her, we shall love the country none the less that receives us as her adopted children.”70 Delany advocates for an emigration of “Colored People” to other newly free nations without slavery in the Western Hemisphere such as Canada, Mexico, and various countries in the Caribbean and South America, but not slaveholding Brazil, or Liberia, the creation of the oppressor as a means of exiling blacks rather than emancipating them, and located in Africa, a continent “benighted enough, even to an apparent hopeless degeneration.”71 For Delany, the rhetoric of racial science disqualifies Africa as a site for true emancipation. He does not imagine an ideal “homeland” but a safe harbor. It is in such safe harbors that Delany imagines a physical, mental, and moral recuperation of “Colored People.”
Pinsker, too, sees a specific national state as the catalyst of the moral, mental, and physical regeneration of the surplus Jews (a version of the Victorian notion of the deserving poor) who are saved by the actions of “our greatest and best forces—men of finance, of science, and of affairs, statesmen and publicists—must join hands with one accord in steering toward the common destination. This would succeed chiefly and especially in creating a secure and inviolable home for the surplus of those Jews who live as proletarians in the different countries and are a burden to the native citizens.”72 This claim is rooted in a science that has different valences in the claims of the European Jew and the American black.
The question of social, political, and mental emancipation for the Jew is at the center of the work of Max Nordau, the most important figure in early Zionism after Theodor Herzl. In his opening speech at the Second Zionist Congress in Basel on August 28, 1898, he invented one of Zionism’s most famous, most fraught, and most challenging ideals: the “muscle Jew.” For him the diasporic experience makes the Jews unhealthy physically, morally, and mentally. It is only with the new ideal of a self-conscious Jewish identity that such illnesses can be cured and the Jew become “deep chested, sturdy and sharp-eyed.”73 This claim becomes central to modern Zionism. Aaron David Gordon (1856–1922), the Labor Zionist, could write of the “parasitism of a fundamentally useless people” that “was broken and crushed . . . sick and diseased in body and soul.”74 Zionism would cure the ills of the body and those of the mind.
Zionism was a form of nineteenth-century European nationalism rooted in the notion that a national state was necessary to define a people and that a people was necessary to define a state. This was in tension with the Enlightenment notion that the Jews were themselves not a people in the sense of a nationality but rather a religious or ethnic community that could become integrated into a new national state no longer defined by religious or ethnic homogeneity but by the “rights of man.” Jewish defenders of the Enlightenment ideal in the late nineteenth century became viewed, as Pinsker showed, as having a false consciousness as a German or Frenchman while all the time being seen as a Jew.
The debates about Zionism very early included the labeling of the defenders of the status quo of European Jewry as self-hating, as Pinsker had done; Theodor Herzl, for example, attacked his Jewish opponents in October 1897 as Mauschel, unhealthy ghetto Jews without the mental capacity to understand the need for an independent Jewish national identity. Such an understanding was defined by him and his supporters, including Max Nordau, as demonstrating a healthy, rather than pathological, psyche.75 Herzl labels those who are opposed to Zionism as corrupt and see the proof of this in their attitude toward Zionism: “Mauschel was quick to put forward an insidious catchword against the Zionists: namely. That they are Jewish antisemites. We? We, who acknowledge before all the world, without consideration for our acquired positions and our advancement, that we are Semites; we who cherish the cultivation of our national heritage, who stand by our unfortunate brethren? But Mauschel figured out with lightening speed what we are: we are anti-Mauschel.”76 Being anti-assimilationist, Herzl argues, is seen in the eyes of acculturated European Jews as a form of self-hatred. The early Zionists also made the counterargument. Nordau, a neurologist and one of Herzl’s earliest supporters, had argued in 1896, “It is the greatest triumph of antisemitism that it has brought the Jews to view themselves with antisemitic eyes.”77 For the early Zionists identification with the aggressor defined not only anti-Zionists but also acculturated Jews.
In the major New Free Press daily in Vienna, Herzl writes a feuilleton entitled “New Noses” in 1903:
It is now a question of style . . . every province must have its own nose! Still others will let national interests rather than the lottery of birth determine the selection of the nose. Whatever the case, even in this matter we will certainly see the reappearance of the demand that those closest as well as most distant be converted to a specific nasal shape, instead of each being happy with the cut of his/her nose [statt jeden nach seiner Façon sich schnäuzen zu lassen].78
Theodor Herzl was mocking the claims of the new cosmetic surgery pioneered in the 1890s by the Berlin surgeon Jacques Joseph, who argued that making new German noses out of Jewish noses was not primarily a surgical intervention but rather a psychological one. For Joseph, “the psychological effect of the operation is of utmost importance. The depressed attitude of the patient subsided completely. He is happy to move around unnoticed.”79 Herzl sees this as a manifestation of false consciousness, for to imagine that you could be happy by living with someone else’s nose is a sign of psychopathology.
The paraphrase that ends Herzl’s comment is of a marginal note in 1740 by Friedrich II of Prussia commenting on the rights of Catholics in his state to practice their religion. It came to be shorthand for Jewish emancipation and acculturation by the nineteenth century, though it had nothing to do with this. By the 1920s Zionists such as Leo Strauss had accepted Herzl’s and Nordau’s views of self-hating Jews. Strauss, building on Herzl’s essay on Mauschel, stated that the support of German national interests by German nationalist Jews has no basis in German law. Jews are not a national minority, according to him, but rather adherents of a religion, and thus should not oppose Zionism as “against nature” as their own civic position as German nationalists was at best tentative.80 The journalist and critic Theodor Lessing, whose 1930 book Jewish Self-Hatred did more than any other work to publicize this category, saw it as an inherent quality of all Jews in the Diaspora: “There’s no person of Jewish blood in whom we couldn’t find at least signs of Jewish self-hatred.”81 The collective was seen as a totality under the pressure of antisemites, however defined.
Self-hatred was the model for a sense of the inauthenticity of a Jewish identity that was in opposition to that which the writer or speaker held as healthy. Indeed, as Paul Reitter has noted, radical assimilationists of the pre-war period took the label of “assimilationist” as signifying their healthy psyche, showing their competency within European culture in opposition to the Zionists.82 Authenticity is a concept, Kernis and Goldman have written, “at the ‘limits of language,’ being loosely described in such diverse topics as ethics, well-being, consciousness, subjectivity, self-processes, and social or relational contexts, or characterized in terms of its opposite (i.e., inauthenticity), with references to inauthentic living, false self behaviors, or self deception.”83 One can add here psychopathology. For normality can be defined in these terms only by the existence of its antithesis, the pathological. Thus self-hatred came to define those whose sense of Jewishness was different in some way from the writer’s.
From the beginning of the biological definition of race, in fields such as medicine in the course of the nineteenth century, it was the neutral medical observer who defined the nature of madness and its causes. Racial theory defined who was most at risk for madness. With the rise of the sciences of sociology and psychology in the course of the same period, race continued to play a substantial role in defining the objects of study. Later, the construction of the crowd as an alternative form of classifying human beings as a collective, analogous to the construction of race, provided a space where asocial activities, such as criminal acts, could be defined by analyzing this new collective. It is only with this theorizing of the crowd within the debates during and following World War I that the shift from seeing the racialized victim as mad to seeing the crowd as mad because of its racism begins to become clearly defined. While we pick up this movement in Chapter Three, we first must attend to the shift from pathological accounts of race to “racial attitudes” as pathological conditions—what we refer to as the long, slow burn in the social and behavioral sciences, from roughly 1890 to 1940. While the development of crowd theories to explain racism and group prejudice in many ways overlaps this period, we want our readers to understand that a “crowd” explanation for group prejudice cannot exist without a redefinition of the very concept of race itself—from a biological predisposition to a socially constructed phenomenon.