It is with great pleasure that we present a volume of the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought devoted to Jews and racial thinking. Jews were famously the targets of racial thinking in modern times, but they also engaged in it. Mitchell Hart’s fascinating and unprecedented survey of how they did so offers rich materials for teacher and student to engage this often forgotten chapter of Jewish intellectual history. Across Europe and the United States, as this volume thoroughly documents, Jews wrestled in different ways with the rise of this new scientific category, which assumed the status of a pervasive orthodoxy—one that is now thankfully a relic of the past. Hart’s compilation, which is augmented by a wonderfully illuminating introduction, focuses on the sciences, but it is relevant to political theory as well. The volume helps expand the meaning of “modern Jewish thought,” which was the preserve of anthropologists and statisticians as much as it was of the perennial thinkers that our other volumes address.
Eugene R. Sheppard and Samuel Moyn, Editors
The Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought