Texts dealing with Jews and race were unavoidably political. Thus, one might argue that every selection in this volume has some political thrust or underlying motive. The texts in this section articulate political concerns and impulses in a fairly direct and explicit way. Given the centrality of racial theories and ideas to modern antisemitism, itself an ideology with a strong political agenda, it is no surprise that one major impulse behind narratives of race produced by Jews was political in turn. Racial narratives written and disseminated by Jews about Jews were intended in part as a direct polemical response to antisemites. Jewish racial thinkers believed that the Jews could use racial science as an intellectual weapon against their enemies.
One key theme in this sort of racial defense of Jews and Judaism was the cultural value or worth of Jewry. This was a response to arguments made in the middle of the nineteenth century by antisemites such as Richard Wagner, who—like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Werner Sombart, and others more than half a century later—insisted that the Jewish racial “spirit” or nature existed in opposition to the Germanic spirit, and that this manifested itself in the cultural as well as the economic realm. Jews, Wagner had argued, were incapable of true cultural or artistic production; at best, they could mimic true art. Jews were more often instrumental in buying and selling culture than in creating it. And this materialist approach to the spiritual, so antisemites argued, had degraded German and European culture and society in general. Jewish scholars felt it necessary to respond to such charges, and to demonstrate that Jews had indeed made significant contributions to Western civilization and culture. Jewish racial thinkers, unsurprisingly, made their arguments in the context of a racialized interpretive framework.
Jews were indeed a race, these thinkers believed, but not an inferior one. Rather, Jews were at least the equal of the Aryans or Teutons. Their past contributions to civilization could be catalogued, and on the basis of this past, the promise of future contributions from the Jewish race could be guaranteed. Such discussions of racial worth and the value of the Jewish Volk’s contribution to civilization constituted a specific instance of a more general Jewish apologetics that characterized much of Jewish scholarship at the time.
Racial history and thought could also be brought to bear in the Jewish response to a peculiar but highly important turn in theological antisemitism: the racialization of Jesus, or the insistence that Jesus was not a Jew, but an Aryan, born and raised in the northern, “Aryan” part of Palestine. The selection here by Leo Sofer demonstrates that one Jewish response to this widespread “Aryanization” of Jesus was to use racial anthropology and history to demonstrate that Jesus was, in fact, racially a Jew. Just as with the question of racial value or worth, the general terms of the debate were accepted by these Jewish thinkers—in this case, the validity of the question of Jesus’s race. It was the antisemites’ answer to that question, and the political and cultural consequences of this answer, that disturbed Jewish racial thinkers.
Yet racial narratives about Jews were also intended as interventions in another political or ideological struggle, that between so-called Jewish assimilationists and Jewish nationalists. Here the issue was not first and foremost the influence that the Jews had had on European society, but the effect of European culture and society on the Jews themselves. What impact did emancipation and assimilation into the modern nation-state have on the Jewish body and mind? Was assimilation a form of collective suicide, the willful disappearance of a two-thousand-year-old race and people? Or was it a necessary development in the life of this people, a sort of Darwinian process of adaptation to new environments and conditions?