[CTRL] The coming end-2- the reversion to group identity

[Taylor, John (JH)]

 -Caveat Lector-

> The chapters below are on the formation of the Jewish group identity.
> however the point is that the creation of group identities is a universal
> phenomenon between humans. In times of trouble in particular people will
> revert to the group that they trust.
>
> To say that there is no such thing and that we are all world citizens is
> an illusion only prevalent in the west. Say that to the chinese they will
> either laugh or set of to live in your country.
>
> what defines the group identity
> Your :-
> Race(appearance)
> Religion
> Language
> Land
> Culture
> Customs and symbols(inc Sporting)
>
> In the modern western world the major media is the TV and the people who
> control the TV attempt to define your your identity for you, for your own
> good.
>
> Politics is essentially the ability to define and manipulate group
> interests and trying to incorporate as many people/ resources whithin
> your group interest to carry through your main agenda.
>
>
> In times of  deep trouble group interests will often become violent. Again
> politicians step in to manipulate and control these primeval emotions.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> From separation and its discontents-Mr K Mac Donald
> http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/
>
> 1
> A Social Identity Theory of Anti-Semitism
>
>
> The theory of group evolutionary strategies described in A People That
> Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (MacDonald
> 1994; hereafter PTSDA) argued that Judaism may be understood mainly as a
> cultural invention, maintained by social controls that act to structure
> the behavior of group members and characterized by a religious ideology
> that rationalizes ingroup behavior both to ingroup members and to
> outsiders. Although evolved mechanisms of group cohesion are also
> important, it was shown that social controls acting within the group were
> able to structure the group to facilitate ingroup economic and political
> cooperation and resource competition with outgroups, erect barriers to
> genetic penetration from outside the group, and facilitate eugenic
> practices aimed at producing high intelligence and high-investment
> parenting ideally suited to developing a specialized ecological role
> within human societies. Because of these traits, and particularly an IQ
> that is at least one standard deviation above the Caucasian mean, Judaism
> has been a powerful force in several historical eras.
> The proposal that Judaism may be usefully conceptualized as a group
> evolutionary strategy suggests that anti-Semitism be defined as negative
> attitudes or behavior directed at Jews because of their group membership.
> This is a very broad definition-one that is equally applicable to
> anti-Jewish attitudes in any historical era. It is also consistent with a
> very wide range of external processes contributing to anti-Semitism in a
> particular historical era, and also with qualitative changes in the nature
> of anti-Jewish attitudes or the institutional structure of anti-Semitism
> at different times and places.
> One type of evolutionary approach to anti-Semitism considers the
> possibility that humans have mechanisms that cause them to favor relatives
> or others who share genes. There is little doubt that kin recognition
> mechanisms exist among animals (see Rushton 1989), and some evolutionists
> (e.g., Dunbar 1987; Shaw & Wong 1989; van der Dennen 1987; Vine 1987) have
> proposed genetic mechanisms based on kin recognition as an explanation for
> xenophobia, although others have proposed that the genetic mechanism may
> well depend on learning during development (e.g., Alexander 1979,
> 126-128). Genetic Similarity Theory (GST) (Rushton 1989) extends beyond
> kin recognition by proposing mechanisms (possibly based on kin recognition
> mechanisms) that assess phenotypic similarity as a marker for genetic
> similarity. These proposed mechanisms would then promote positive
> attitudes and a lower threshold for altruism for similar others. There is
> indeed considerable evidence, summarized in Rushton (1989) and Segal
> (1993), that phenotypic similarity is an important factor in human
> assortment, helping behavior, and liking others, although whether GST can
> account for these phenomena remains controversial (see commentary in
> Rushton 1989).
> Mechanisms based on kin recognition and phenotypic similarity may have
> some role in traditional anti-Semitism, since in traditional societies
> there would be much more phenotypic similarity among gentiles than between
> Jews and gentiles, due to differences in clothing, language, appearance
> (e.g., hair style), and quite often their physical features. Moreover,
> among Jews, there are anecdotal reports of very high levels of rapport and
> ability to recognize other Jews which are consistent with the existence of
> some sort of kin recognition system among Jews.  As Harvard sociologist
> Daniel Bell notes, "I was born in galut and I accept-now gladly, though
> once in pain-the double burden and the double pleasure of my
> self-consciousness, the outward life of an American and the inward secret
> of the Jew. I walk with this sign as a frontlet between my eyes, and it is
> as visible to some secret others as their sign is to me" (Bell 1961, 477).
> Or consider Sigmund Freud, who wrote that he found "the attraction of
> Judaism and of Jews so irresistible, many dark emotional powers, all the
> mightier the less they let themselves be grasped in words, as well as the
> clear consciousness of inner identity, the secrecy of the same mental
> construction" (in Gay 1988, 601).
> However, theories based on phenotypic similarity do not address the
> crucial importance of cultural manipulation of segregative mechanisms as a
> fundamental characteristic of Judaism. Indeed, I would suggest that the
> segregative cultural practices of Judaism have actually resulted in ethnic
> similarity being of disproportionate importance for Jews in regulating
> their associations with others. Because of the cultural barriers between
> Jews and the gentile world, phenotypic similarity between Jews and
> gentiles on a wide range of traits was effectively precluded as a
> mechanism for promoting friendship and marriage between Jews and gentiles,
> and there was a corresponding hypertrophy of the importance of
> religious/ethnic affiliation (i.e., group membership) as a criterion of
> assortment.
> Moreover, generalized negative attitudes toward dissimilar others seem
> insufficient to account for anti-Semitism directed against individuals
> because of their group membership. The mechanisms implied by GST or
> proposed evolved mechanisms of xenophobia postulate that each individual
> assesses others on a continuum ranging from very similar to very
> dissimilar. The important feature of Judaism, however, is that there are
> discontinuities created by Jewish separatism and the consequent
> hypertrophy of Jewish religious/ethnic (i.e., group) status as a criterion
> of similarity. Fundamentally, what is needed is a theoretical perspective
> in which group membership per se (rather than other phenotypic
> characteristics of the individual) is of decisive importance in producing
> animosity between groups.
> Creating a group evolutionary strategy results in the possibility of
> cultural group selection resulting from between-group competition in which
> the groups are defined by culturally produced ingroup markings (Richerson
> & Boyd 1997). Boyd and Richerson (1987) show that ingroup markers can
> evolve as an adaptive response to heterogeneous environments. Groups mark
> themselves off from other groups and thereby are able to remain
> reproductively isolated from other groups and adjust rapidly to new and
> variable environments. Judaism in traditional societies was indeed
> characterized by a highly elaborated set of ingroup markings that
> effectively set Jews off from gentile society (PTSDA, Ch. 4). The proposal
> here is that the process of creating ingroup markings is central to
> understanding anti-Semitism.
> The body of theory that I believe is most relevant to conceptualizing
> anti-Semitism derives from psychological research on social identity
> (Abrams & Hogg 1990; Hogg & Abrams 1987, 1993; Tajfel 1981; Turner 1987).
> Interestingly, social identity theory was pioneered by Henri Tajfel, a
> Jewish survivor of Nazi concentration camps who regards the group conflict
> that shaped his own life as having a strong influence on his research
> interests (see Tajfel 1981, 1-3).
> Social identity theory proposes that individuals place themselves and
> others in social categories (groups).  In the case of Jews, the categories
> are Jew and gentile, and this categorization into Jew and non-Jew is
> indeed a fundamental aspect of the social world of Jews. One of Portnoy's
> complaints in Philip Roth's (1969, 76) famous novel is that "the very
> first distinction I learned from you, I'm sure, was not night and day, or
> hot and cold, but goyische and Jewish."
> There are several important consequences of this process:
> The social categorization process results in discontinuities such that
> people exaggerate the similarities of individuals within each category
> (the accentuation effect). There is a psychological basis for supposing
> that given the highly salient cultural separatism that has often been
> characteristic of Judaism, both Jews and gentiles would sort others into
> the category "Jew" or "gentile," and that under conditions of intergroup
> comparison they would exaggerate the similarity of members within each
> category (Brewer 1993). By this mechanism, people reconceptualize
> continuous distributions as sharply discontinuous, and the effect is
> particularly strong if the dimension is of critical importance to ingroup
> distinctiveness. When intergroup conflict occurs, the dimensions are
> likely to be imbued with great subjective importance, so that, for
> example, Jews would be expected to exaggerate the extent to which gentiles
> share characteristics and gentiles would be expected to exaggerate the
> extent to which Jews share characteristics. As T. W. Adorno notes, Jews
> are perceived "through the glasses of stereotypy" (in Adorno et al. 1950,
> 617) and even in the ancient world there was a strong tendency among pagan
> writers "to make facile generalizations about the Jews" (Feldman 1993, 45;
> italics in text). As indicated below, similar stereotyping processes are
> evident in Jewish perceptions of gentiles.
> Moreover, people also place themselves into one of the categories (an
> ingroup), with the result that similarities between self and ingroup are
> exaggerated and dissimilarities with outgroup members are also
> exaggerated. An important result of this self-categorization process is
> that individuals adopt behavior and beliefs congruent with the stereotype
> of the ingroup.
> Finally, in situations where there are large proportionate differences in
> group size (as is typical in cases of Jewish-gentile group comparisons),
> there is a tendency for the minority group to stand out, with the result
> that both minority and majority group members tend to overestimate the
> consensus within the minority group (Mullen 1991). Relatively small
> ingroups are thus particularly likely to be perceived as homogeneous by
> the majority group as well as by ingroup members. Thus both Jews and
> gentiles are expected to be relatively prone to developing stereotypes of
> Jews as a relatively homogeneous group.
> Perceptions of Jewish group homogeneity are quite possibly behind the very
> prominent theme of much anti-Semitic writing that despite appearances to
> the contrary, Jews are working together in a vast interlocking conspiracy
> to dominate gentiles. Such "conspiracy" theories, some of which are
> briefly described in Chapter 2, tend to overlook the extent to which
> different elements of the Jewish community have adopted different and even
> incompatible strategies vis-à-vis the gentile community (see Chapter 6).
> Such attributions are readily explicable within a social identity theory
> of anti-Semitism: outgroup members are conceptualized as having a set of
> stereotypically uniform negative qualities, and majority group members
> tend to overestimate the consensus within the minority group (Mullen
> 1991).
> In some cases, at least, perceptions of group purpose also occur among
> Jews, and, from the standpoint of social identity theory, for the same
> reasons; i.e., as members of a very psychologically salient ingroup, Jews
> tend to see other Jews as members of a relatively homogeneous ingroup and
> as having group rather than personal goals. (Nevertheless, there is also
> evidence that in some cases Jews exaggerate the diversity of ingroup
> attitudes and behavior; see Chapter 8). Thus Irving Howe (1978) notes that
> Jewish group identification depends on a powerful sense of shared
> experience and shared obligations and memories. As a result, individual
> and group goals are often not clearly separated, not the least because
> personal experience is filtered through a powerful sense of being a Jew.
> As Abraham Cahan (co-founder of the Jewish Daily Forward) noted in a
> discussion of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, "Every Jew . . . came
> to feel he was part of an historical event in the life of the Jewish
> people" (in Howe 1978, 95).
> Indeed, at the extreme, when there is very powerful commitment to the
> Jewish ingroup, the world becomes divided into two groups, Jews and
> gentiles, with the latter becoming a homogenized mass with no defining
> features at all except that they are non-Jews. The prominent Zionist
> author Maurice Samuel (1924, 150-151) makes the interesting comment that
> "the unbelieving and radical Jew is as different from the radical gentile
> as the orthodox Jew from the reactionary gentile. The cosmopolitanism of
> the radical Jew springs from his feeling (shared by the orthodox Jew) that
> there is no difference between gentile and gentile. You are all pretty
> much alike[;] . . . a single temper runs through all of you, whatever your
> national divisions. The radical Jew (like the orthodox Jew) is a
> cosmopolitan in a sense which must be irritating to you: for he does not
> even understand why you make such a fuss about that most obvious of
> facts-that you are all alike." Similarly, the Orthodox rabbi Mayer
> Schiller (1996, 59) states "Sadly it is . . . the granting of humanity to
> the Gentile either as an individual or as a people . . . that is so often
> lacking in Orthodox circles. Suffering from a kind of moral blindness, we
> find it difficult to see the non-Jew as anything more than a bit player in
> our own drama."
>
> Social identity research indicates that the stereotypic behavior and
> attitudes of the ingroup are positively valued, while outgroup behavior
> and attitudes are negatively valued. The homogenization of the perceived
> characteristics of ingroups and outgroups has strong emotional overtones:
> people develop favorable attitudes toward ingroup members and unfavorable
> attitudes toward outgroup members. Consequently, Jews and gentiles are
> both expected to develop highly negative attitudes regarding the behavior
> of members of the other group and generally to fail to attend to
> individual variation among members of the other group. The ingroup
> develops a positive distinctness, a positive social identity, and
> increased self-esteem as a result of this process. Within the group there
> is a great deal of cohesiveness, positive emotional regard, and
> camaraderie, while relationships outside the group can be hostile and
> distrustful. More-over, there is evidence that where there are
> proportionate differences in group size, individuals in minority groups
> are generally more prone to ingroup bias than are majority group members
> (Mullen 1991), suggesting that Jews would be even more strongly inclined
> toward positive ingroup evaluations than gentiles.
> Social identity theorists propose that the emotional consequences of these
> categorizations of ingroups and outgroups result from the fact that people
> seek a positive personal identity as a group member. Individuals maximize
> the difference between ingroup and outgroup in a manner that accentuates
> the positive characteristics of the ingroup. They do so precisely because
> of this theoretically primitive need to categorize themselves as a member
> of a group with characteristics that reflect well on the group as a whole
> and therefore on them individually. For example, Gitelman (1991, 8),
> describing Jewish identity processes in the Soviet Union, notes that Jews
> developed a great curiosity about Jewish history "not merely from a thirst
> for historical knowledge, but from a need to locate oneself within a
> group, its achievements, and its fate. It is as if the individual's own
> status, at least in his own eyes, will be defined by the accomplishments
> of others who carry the same label. 'If Einstein was a Jew, and I am a
> Jew, it does not quite follow that I am an Einstein, but . . .'." And
> Marshall Sklare (1972, 34), writing of contemporary American Jews, notes
> that "Jews still possess a feeling of superiority, although more in the
> moral and intellectual realms now than in the area of spiritual affairs.
> While the feeling of superiority is a factor that has received
> comparatively little attention from students of the problem, it is of
> crucial importance because it operates to retard assimilation. Leaving the
> group becomes a psychological threat: such a move is viewed not as an
> advancement but as a cutting off from a claim of superiority."
> Moreover, the accentuation effect is greatest on precisely those group
> characteristics that the ingroup perceives as most critical to this
> positive evaluation process. Therefore, if, e.g., gentiles evaluated
> themselves as proportionately less involved in moneylending and more loyal
> to their country than Jews, and if these categorizations were very
> important to their positive evaluation of their ingroup, there would be
> the expectation that gentiles would develop a tendency to exaggerate the
> extent to which Jews engage in moneylending and are disloyal, even more
> than they would exaggerate Jewish representation on traits that are more
> evaluatively neutral, such as type of clothing.
> Further, people very easily adopt negative stereotypes about outgroups,
> and these stereotypes are both slow to change and resistant to
> countervailing examples. Resistance to change is especially robust if the
> category is one that is highly important to the positive evaluation of the
> ingroup or the negative evaluation of the outgroup. In terms of the above
> example, it would be expected that gentiles would change their
> categorization of Jews as having dark hair far more easily than they would
> change their categorization of Jews as usurers or potential traitors,
> because the former category is evaluatively neutral.
> Finally, the stereotypes tend to become more negative and hostile in
> situations where there is actual intergroup competition and tension. And,
> as indicated in the following, intergroup competition is an exceedingly
> likely consequence of the categorization process.
>
> The result of these categorization processes is group behavior that
> involves discrimination against the outgroup and in favor of the ingroup;
> beliefs in the superiority of the ingroup and inferiority of the outgroup;
> and positive affective preference for the ingroup and negative affect
> directed toward the outgroup. Although groups may be originally
> dichotomized on only one dimension (e.g., Jew/gentile), there is a
> tendency to expand the number of dimensions on which the individuals in
> the groups are categorized and to do so in an evaluative manner.
> Thus a Jew would be expected not only to distinguish sharply between Jews
> and gentiles, but to view gentiles as characterized by a number of
> negative traits (e.g., stupidity, drunkenness), while Jews would be viewed
> as characterized by corresponding positive traits (e.g., intelligence,
> sobriety). These processes have been documented in traditional East
> European Jewish shtetl life:
>
> A series of contrasts is set up in the mind of the shtetl child, who grows
> up to regard certain behavior as characteristic of Jews, and its opposite
> as characteristic of Gentiles. Among Jews he expects to find emphasis on
> intellect, a sense of moderation, cherishing of spiritual values,
> cultivation of rational, goal-directed activities, a "beautiful" family
> life. Among Gentiles he looks for the opposite of each item: emphasis on
> the body, excess, blind instinct, sexual license, and ruthless force. The
> first list is ticketed in his mind as Jewish, the second as goyish.
> (Zborowski & Herzog 1952, 152)
>
> As expected, Zborowski and Herzog (1952, 152) found that this world view
> would be confirmed by examples of gentile behavior that conform to the
> stereotype, as when gentiles suddenly rose up and engaged in a murderous
> pogrom against Jews. Moreover, the attributes of the ingroup are superior
> qualities, and those of the outgroup are inferior. Jews valued highly the
> attributes that they considered themselves as exemplifying and viewed the
> characteristics of the gentiles in a very negative manner. There was a
> general attitude of superiority to gentiles. Jews returning from Sabbath
> services " 'pity the barefoot goyim, deprived of the Covenant, the Law,
> and the joy of Sabbath. . . .' 'We thought they were very unfortunate.
> They had no enjoyment . . . no Sabbath . . . no holidays . . . no fun . .
> . .' 'They'd drink a lot and you couldn't blame them, their lives were so
> miserable' " (Zborowski & Herzog 1952, 152; see also Hundert 1992, 45;
> Weinryb 1972, 96). Or as World Zionist Congress President Nahum Goldmann
> (1978, 13) stated regarding Jewish perceptions of Lithuanians early in the
> century, "The Jews saw their persecutors as an inferior race. . . . Most
> of my grandfather's patients were peasants. Every Jew felt ten or a
> hundred times the superior of these lowly tillers of the soil; he was
> cultured, learned Hebrew, knew the Bible, studied the Talmud-he knew that
> he stood head and shoulders above these illiterates."
> The negative attitudes were fully reciprocated. Both Jews and gentiles
> referred to the other with imagery of specific animals, implying that the
> other was subhuman (Zborowski & Herzog 1952, 157). When a member of the
> other group died, the word used was the word for the death of an animal.
> Each would say of one's own group that they "eat," while members of the
> other group "gobble." "The peasant will say, 'That's not a man, it's a
> Jew.' And the Jew will say, 'That's not a man, it's a goy.' " (Zborowski &
> Herzog 1952, 157).
> Stories about the other group would recount instances of deception
> (Zborowski & Herzog 1952, 157), and everyday transactions would be carried
> on with a subtext of mutual suspicion. "There is beyond this surface
> dealing . . . an underlying sense of difference and danger. Secretly each
> [Jewish merchant and gentile peasant] feels superior to the other, the Jew
> in intellect and spirit, the 'goy' in physical force-his own and that of
> his group. By the same token each feels at a disadvantage opposite the
> other, the peasant uneasy at the intellectuality he attributes to the Jew,
> the Jew oppressed by the physical power he attributes to the goy"
> (Zborowski & Herzog 1952, 67). Indeed, the supreme term of abuse within
> the Jewish community was goyisher kop (gentile head) (Patai & Patai 1989,
> 152): the ultimate insult for a Jew was to be at the intellectual level of
> a gentile.
> These phenomena can be seen in contemporary America, as indicated in the
> following passage from Charles Silberman, who validates a generalization
> found in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint:
>
> The attributes and values that Jews developed . . . -a distaste for
> physical combat, for example, and a preference for academic over athletic
> prowess-were endowed with moral superiority. At high school football
> games, Portnoy recalls, there was "a certain comic detachment experienced
> on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely
> the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first
> place.  . . . We were Jews-and not only were we not inferior to the goyim
> who could beat us at football, but . . . because we could not commit our
> hearts to victory in such a thuggish game, we were superior. We were
> Jews-and we were superior. Indeed the only character in Portnoy's
> Complaint who is crippled by feelings of inadequacy is that rebel against
> Jewish particularism, Alexander Portnoy himself. (Silberman 1985, 81)
>
>
>
> These tendencies toward ingroup cohesiveness and devaluations of the
> outgroup are exacerbated by real conflicts of interest (see also Triandis
> 1990, 96). In a classic study, Sherif (1966) assigned boys randomly to
> groups that then engaged in a series of competitions. Under these
> circumstances, group membership became an important aspect of personal
> identity.  The groups developed negative stereotypes of each other and
> were transformed into groups of "wicked, disturbed, and vicious" children
> (Sherif 1966, 85). Competition was thus proposed as a sufficient condition
> for the development of hostility and aggression between the groups. Only
> the development of superordinate goals (i.e., goals that required the
> cooperation of both groups to achieve ends desired by all) resulted in
> lowered animosity and the development of some cross-group friendships.
> Historically, such superordinate goals have not been typical of societies
> in which Jews have resided. Indeed, a major theme of historical
> anti-Semitism has involved accusations of Jewish disloyalty (see pp.
> 60-71).
> Resource competition between Jews and gentiles has been a highly salient
> feature of Jewish-gentile relationships in many societies and in widely
> separated historical periods. In congruence with the results of social
> identity research, anti-Semitism is expected to be most prominent among
> those most in competition with Jews and during times of economic crisis,
> and least common among gentiles who are actually benefiting from the Jews,
> such as aristocratic gentiles who often profited from cooperation with
> them (see PTSDA, Ch. 5). As Jacob Katz (1986a, 7) notes regarding
> anti-Semitism in post-emancipation Germany, "If . . . one wishes to trace
> the development of hostility toward the Jews . . . one ought to disregard
> its ideological foundations and to concentrate on its goal. That goal . .
> . was determined by the pace of the Jews' entry into the positions opened
> up to them. Protests and complaints coincided with the Jews' progress."
> A focus solely on "resource competition" is perhaps too narrow in its
> connotations. Humans compete over many things besides simply economic
> resources. A general point of this volume might be summarized by simply
> saying that Jews are very good at whatever they do, and that anti-Semitism
> arises when there are perceived conflicts of interest between the Jewish
> community (or segments of it) and the gentile community (or segments of
> it). Because of Jewish within-group cooperation as well as eugenic and
> cultural practices that have resulted in an average IQ of at least 1
> standard deviation above the Caucasian mean (PTSDA, Ch. 7.
> The success of these pursuits and the fact that these pursuits inevitably
> conflict with the interests of groups of gentiles (or at least are
> perceived to conflict with them) is, in the broadest sense, the most
> important source of anti-Semitism.
>
> Competition between groups is not a necessary condition for the
> development of ingroup biases. Biases in favor of ingroups and against
> outgroups occur even in so-called "minimal group" experiments, where
> groups are constructed with no conflicts of interest, or indeed any social
> interaction at all. Even when the experimental subjects are aware that the
> groups are composed randomly, subjects attempt to maximize the difference
> between the ingroup and the outgroup, even when such a strategy means they
> would not maximize their own group's rewards. The important goal seemed to
> be to outcompete the other group. As Tajfel and Turner (1979, 39) note,
> "Competitive behaviour between groups, at least in our culture, is
> extraordinarily easy to trigger off." Social categorization by itself is
> thus a sufficient condition for intergroup competition.
> In the case of anti-Semitism, since Jews have throughout the vast majority
> of their history appeared as a highly distinct group, there is the
> expectation that this self-imposed cultural separatism is a sufficient
> condition for developing negative attitudes and competition between Jews
> and gentiles. Indeed, to the extent that an important aspect of Jewish
> religious practice and socialization was the inculcation of beliefs in
> which cultural separatism was positively valued, these effects would be
> likely to be much stronger among Jews than among gentiles. Since the
> Jew/gentile categorization process was not central to gentile
> socialization, except perhaps under conditions of extreme Jewish/gentile
> group conflict, there is the expectation that gentiles would be somewhat
> less invested in this categorization process than Jews.
>
> People tend to manipulate their social identity in ways that provide
> positive self-evaluations. Social identity research has indicated that
> social mobility (i.e., the extent to which group boundaries are permeable)
> influences ingroup/outgroup attitudes. The perception of permeability
> reduces perceptions of conflict of interest and reduces the ability of the
> other group to act in a collective manner, while perceptions of
> impermeability lead to group strategies involving competition with the
> other group and negative evaluations of the outgroup. As a result, it is
> often in the interests of groups to foster the belief that their group is
> permeable when in fact it is not (see Hogg & Abrams 1987, 56). Jews have
> often appeared as an impermeable group, at least in traditional societies,
> thereby exacerbating negative and competitive attitudes toward them.
> Nevertheless, as discussed in Chapter 6, Jewish groups have not uncommonly
> acted to minimize surface appearances of impermeability in order to defuse
> anti-Semitism.  Similar processes would occur among Jews to the extent
> that the gentile world was perceived as impermeable.
> People readily adopt a group mentality and engage in collective behavior
> of an often irrational, intensely emotional sort. In periods of intense
> group conflict, there is a relaxing of normal standards of appropriate
> behavior as individuals become prone to act impulsively on immediate
> stimuli and emotions. Individuals acting as members of groups therefore
> may perform actions that individuals alone would be ashamed to commit-what
> one might term a disinhibitory phenomenon. Although there are other
> theoretical interpretations of this phenomenon, social identity theorists
> interpret these phenomena by proposing that members of a group adopt a
> common social identification in which they accept and conform to
> stereotypical ingroup norms (e.g., anti-Semitic beliefs) and act
> collectively on the basis of these norms. These findings are of obvious
> relevance to anti-Semitism, because they indicate that the behavior of
> groups of anti-Semitic gentiles may well be impulsive, irrational, and
> relatively disinhibited compared to the behavior of isolated individuals.
>
>
> There is no requirement that beliefs regarding either the ingroup or the
> outgroup be true. Irrational beliefs about the ingroup function as "group
> uniforms" to maintain internal cohesion and separation from outgroups
> (Bigelow 1969). The best example of such an irrational belief about the
> Jewish ingroup is the conceptualization of the Jews as a "chosen people"
> which has been a staple of Jewish theology from its inception. This very
> powerful idea has even found an important place in contemporary Judaism as
> a civil religion, despite its incongruity with contemporary intellectual
> currents (see Woocher 1986, 140-146).
> In the absence of tangible, obvious benefits (such as the accomplishment
> of superordinate goals), cultural segregation is expected to maximize
> perceptions of conflicts of interest with the alien group, resulting in
> negative cognitive structures regarding the alien group. These structures
> may "go beyond the evidence" and may well be based on exaggerated or false
> information.
> The false and even contradictory nature of anti-Semitic beliefs has long
> been apparent to writers on the subject. Irrational religious beliefs
> about Jews may well have been a potent source of anti-Semitism beginning
> in the late Roman Empire (see Chapter 3), and similar processes are
> clearly at work in the Jewish religious laws of the uncleanness of
> gentiles summarized above. As Cecil (1972, 72) notes regarding themes of
> anti-Semitic literature in Germany between 1870 and 1933, "Exaggeration of
> Germanic virtues and Jewish vices created a distorted picture of the two
> races [sic] as representing irreconcilable and contrasting cultures." It
> is expected that such beliefs would accentuate the differences between
> gentile and Jew, thereby aiding each group in viewing the other as alien
> and as having different interests. The cognitive structures not only
> sharply differentiate Jews from gentiles but result in negative valuations
> of Jews in general.
> Such negatively toned cognitive structures would typically be in the
> self-interest of the gentiles holding them. Describing late-19th-century
> anti-Semitic beliefs, Katz (1986a, 7) notes that "for the most part these
> [anti-Semitic] ideologies employ arguments of different sorts, often in a
> blend full of contradictions. Their contentions do not, indeed, intend to
> reflect Jewish realities but rather aim at combating Jewish aspirations or
> gains already achieved. No argument that can convince oneself or others is
> scorned here."
> Given the context of mutual suspicion and group competition, individuals
> are ready to believe the worst about the other group. Thus in describing
> the attitudes of Christians toward Jews in 13th-century France, Jordan
> (1989, 257) notes that "ordinary people did not necessarily agree with
> every aspect of policy or every critical note sounded against the Jews by
> popular preachers; but they usually had no vested interest in gainsaying
> it." Indeed they may have had a vested interest in indiscriminately
> believing anything negative about the outgroup. Fantastic beliefs about
> the Jews have been a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda throughout history,
> particularly during the medieval period (see Langmuir 1980).
>
> One very important role of such negative cognitive structures may well be
> fostering a sense of group identity among gentiles that serves as the
> basis of a gentile group strategy in competition with the Jewish group
> strategy. In Chapters 3-5, I explore the possibility that gentile group
> strategies having many of the same collectivist, authoritarian, and
> exclusivist characteristics as did historical Judaism developed as a
> reaction to the success of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. One
> very clear concomitant of these gentile group strategies is the
> development of ideologies in which Jews (meaning all Jews or the vast
> majority of Jews) are portrayed as the very embodiments of evil. The
> suggestion is that these cognitive structures facilitate resource
> competition with Jews by aiding in producing a sense of gentile group
> solidarity and group interest in conflict with Jewish interests. Clearly
> the actual truth of these ideologies is quite irrelevant to their utility
> in facilitating resource competition.
>
> In addition to completely fantastic or unverifiable beliefs about Jews,
> another common aspect of anti-Semitic beliefs is the exaggeration of the
> "grain of truth" in negative beliefs about a subset of Jews. For example,
> Lindemann (1991) notes that one of the more sophisticated theories of
> modern anti-Semitism proposes that anti-Semitism resulted from the
> irrational angers and frustrations of the losers of economic competition
> and reorganization consequent to industrialization or the development of
> capitalism. The "grain of truth" in this case is the fact that Jews were
> indeed highly overrepresented among the groups that were benefiting from
> these transformations and actually displaced gentile groups and lowered
> their place in society during this period. Other examples are the
> overrepresentation of Jews among radical political movements (e.g., Katz
> 1991) and the disproportionate representation of Jews in stock market
> manipulations (Ginsberg 1993, 189-199; Lindemann 1991), etc. The
> disproportionate representation of Jews in these activities is then viewed
> as an indictment of Judaism itself. As noted above, the accentuation
> effect described by social identity research would predict just such a
> tendency.
>
> A slightly different variant of the "grain of truth" argument provides a
> clear illustration of the adaptiveness of the accentuation effect in group
> conflict. While there is good evidence that a great many New Christians in
> 15th-century Spain were in fact crypto-Jews (see Chapters 4, 6, and 7),
> some of them were probably sincere Christians. However, several modern
> scholars (e.g., Netanyahu 1995; Rivkin 1971; Roth 1995) as well as the
> 15th-century apologists for the New Christians have argued that while
> there were some crypto-Jews among this group, the vast majority were true
> Christians. These scholars accuse the Inquisition of uncritically
> generalizing the behavior of a few crypto-Jews to all New Christians.  The
> logic of the Inquisition, however, was, in the words of the associates of
> the Inquisitor General Thomás de Torquemada, that "it is better to burn
> some innocents than allow heresy to spread: 'Better for a man to enter
> heaven with one eye than go to hell with both' " (in Johnson 1988, 227).
> Similarly, Cohen (1967) maintains that the 15th-century rabbis who
> evaluated the orthodoxy of the New Christians who had emigrated from Spain
> or Portugal were inclined to err on the side of assuming that they were
> genuine Christians, since such a judgment coincided with their interests
> in maintaining orthodoxy among their own constituents.
> In the language of statistics, people in this respect behaved as if
> attempting to minimize the probability of committing a Type II error: In
> effect, gentiles were considering the null hypothesis "New Christians are
> not crypto-Jews and do not have group interests which conflict with
> gentiles." They behaved as if they were greatly concerned about making the
> error of accepting this proposition when in fact it is false. They placed
> less emphasis on making a Type I error, which is the error of rejecting
> the null hypothesis when it is true. In this case, the Old Christians were
> rationally avoiding the possibility of a Type II error: by assuming the
> worst about all of the New Christians, there was less possibility of being
> deceived by them.
> The general principle at work in these cases is that if one knows that at
> least some members of a group are deceivers but does not know exactly
> which ones, the safest policy is to assume that all are deceivers, if this
> policy has no negative consequences to self. In the case of the New
> Christians, the belief that all New Christians were deceivers not only
> cost nothing but also rationalized the expropriation of property from the
> New Christians. Moreover, there is overwhelming evidence that a large
> subset of New Christians, whatever the sincerity of their belief in
> Christianity, continued to intermarry predominantly among themselves and
> cooperate economically and politically (see Chapters 4, 6, and 7). As a
> result, the possible overattribution of religious heresy to the New
> Christians was highly adaptive, since it facilitated economic and
> reproductive competition with the New Christians as an endogamous group
> whatever their actual religious beliefs. In these cases even minimal
> evidence for cultural separatism and competition between groups appears to
> result in negative beliefs which are easily generalized.
> In this regard, it is interesting that Öhman's (1993) evolutionary
> perspective on fear and anxiety emphasizes the idea that the systems
> associated with these emotions have evolved to respond to personal threat.
> The systems in both animals and humans are biased toward a low threshold
> for perceiving a situation as threatening, because false negatives are
> potentially far more costly than are false positives. While the latter
> represent only wasted energy and perhaps lost opportunities, the
> overattribution of threat ensures that all potential threats activate the
> system. And in the case of gentiles vis-à-vis Jews in many historical
> societies, there is every reason to suppose that potential losses due to
> false positives were essentially nonexistent because gentiles had nothing
> at all to gain by supposing that most Jews were actually nonthreatening or
> nondeceivers, especially if it was known that at least some Jews fit these
> descriptors. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that gentiles
> had a very low threshold for assuming the worst about Jews.
> Jews have been quite aware of this tendency for overattributing the
> negatively perceived behavior of some Jews to the entire group, and of the
> power of the "grain of truth" to mobilize anti-Semitism. The Paris
> Sanhedrim, organized by Napoleon in 1807, replied to the general
> accusation that Jews were involved in usury as follows:
>
> It cannot be denied that some of them are to be found, though not so many
> as is generally supposed, who follow that nefarious traffic condemned by
> their religion.
> But if there are some not over-nice in this particular, is it just to
> accuse one hundred thousand individuals of this vice? Would it not be
> deemed an injustice to lay the same imputation on all Christians because
> some of them are guilty of usury? (Transactions of the Parisian Sanhedrim;
> in Tama, 1807, 207)
>
>
>
> Though they often functioned in an adaptive manner, there are
> circumstances in which negative attributions about a strategizing outgroup
> may be maladaptive, and this can be the case even if these attributions
> facilitate competition with the outgroup. Thus if gentiles incorrectly
> perceive that Jews are causing a specific problem (e.g., loss of a war or
> economic malaise among the gentiles), successful anti-Semitic actions
> facilitated by these attributions may have negative effects on the Jews
> but would not be effective in solving the problem (the scapegoating
> phenomenon). Opportunistic gentiles may be able to benefit by coloring
> their opponents with the taint of Jewish association, and individuals can
> be manipulated into believing that a certain policy advocated
> disproportionately by Jews was ipso facto against their interests.
> This type of maladaptive anti-Semitism appears to have been historically
> important. Anti-Semitism has often been a useful weapon against liberal
> political movements with strong Jewish involvement (see Ginsberg 1993,
> 56-57), as in the case of opposition to socialism in pre-World War I
> Germany, at a time when the founders and leaders of international
> socialism were Jews (Pulzer 1964, 259). The facts that Judaism has tended
> to thrive in individualistic, liberal societies (see also Ch. 5 and PTSDA,
> Ch. 8) and that Jews backed liberal political views in Germany during the
> Weimar period prompted the conservative intellectual Edgar Jung to state
> that "the Jew needs only to get hold of the party of enlightenment and
> individualism in order to undermine from within the structure of the
> German social framework" (in Pulzer 1964, 311).
> In addition, there are cases in which novel ideas were attributed to
> Jewish subversion in order to discredit them and thus maintain the status
> quo. The Inquisition had a very chilling effect on intellectual endeavor
> in Spain for centuries; one of its common techniques was to discredit new
> ideas as Jewish subversion. For example, Castro (1954, 637; 1971, 576)
> describes the complaint of a biblical exegete in 1584 that any nonstandard
> interpretation of the Bible was considered to be Jewish subversion. The
> result was that "culture and Judaism eventually became synonymous terms,
> and, as a result, scientific research, study, and teaching became
> impossible or fell into disuse in the seventeenth century" (Castro 1971,
> 576; see also Haliczer 1989).  Intellectuals entered the fields of
> jurisprudence or theology and avoided science in order to evade all
> suspicion of Judaism (Castro 1971, 551). Copernican astronomy remained
> prohibited as contrary to biblical doctrine. Even in the late 18th
> century-more than 300 years after the onset of the Inquisition, a
> prominent Spaniard stated in opposition to a plea for scientific freedom,
> "Why does anyone have to pay attention to any heretical dogs, atheists,
> and Jews like Newton, who was a terrible arch-heretic . . . , [like]
> Galileo de Galileis, whose very name implies that he must have been an
> arch-Jew or proto-Hebrew, and others whose names cause people to shudder?"
> (in Castro 1971, 577).
> An Evolutionary Interpretation of Social Identity Processes and
> Collectivism
> The empirical results of social identity research are highly compatible
> with an evolutionary basis for group behavior. Current evidence indicates
> that the minimal group findings can be generalized across subjects of
> different ages, nationalities, social classes, and a wide range of
> dependent variables (Bourhis 1994), and anthropological evidence indicates
> the universality of the tendency to view one's own group as superior (Vine
> 1987). Moreover, social identity processes occur very early in life, prior
> to explicit knowledge about the outgroup. An evolutionary interpretation
> of these findings is also supported by results indicating that social
> identity processes occur among advanced animal species, such as
> chimpanzees. Van der Dennen (1991, 237) proposes, on the basis of his
> review of the literature on human and animal conflict, that advanced
> species have "extra-strong group delimitations" based on emotional
> mechanisms. I would agree and suggest that one emotional mechanism is in
> fact the self-esteem mechanism proposed by social identity theorists.
> Other emotional mechanisms that may be involved are the social
> conscientiousness/guilt mechanism discussed in PTSDA (Ch. 7) and the
> experience of psychological relief obtained by individuals who join highly
> collectivist, authoritarian groups (Galanter 1989a; see below). These
> latter mechanisms, although not considered by social identity theorists,
> would result in strong positive feelings associated with group membership,
> and feelings of guilt and distress at the prospect of defecting from the
> group.
> The powerful emotional components of social identity processes are very
> difficult to explain except as an aspect of the evolved machinery of the
> human mind. I have noted that the emotional consequences of social
> identity processes are a theoretical primitive in the system. As Hogg and
> Abrams (1987, 73) note, this result cannot be explained in terms of purely
> cognitive processes, and a learning theory seems hopelessly ad hoc and
> gratuitous. The tendencies for humans to place themselves in social
> categories and for these categories to assume powerful emotional and
> evaluative overtones (involving guilt, empathy, self-esteem, relief at
> securing a group identity, and distress at losing it) are the best
> candidates for the biological underpinnings of participation in highly
> cohesive collectivist groups.
> An evolutionary perspective is also highly compatible with the falsity and
> contradictory nature of many anti-Semitic beliefs. Evolution is only
> concerned with ensuring accuracy of beliefs and attitudes when the truth
> is in the interests of those having those beliefs and attitudes (Krebs,
> Denton & Higgins 1988). In the case of anti-Semitism there is no
> expectation that specific anti-Semitic beliefs will be accurate, but from
> the standpoint of evolutionary theory, these beliefs may be eminently
> adaptive in promoting evolutionary goals. Similarly, truth is not a
> requirement for the effectiveness of the rationalizations, apologia, and
> self-deceptions so central to maintaining positive images of the Jewish
> ingroup throughout history. These phenomena are the topics of Chapters 7
> and 8.
> Finally, the fact that social identity processes and tendencies toward
> collectivism increase during times of resource competition and threat to
> the group (see Hogg & Abrams 1987; Triandis 1990, 1991) is highly
> compatible with supposing that these processes involve facultative
> mechanisms triggered by between-group conflict. As emphasized by
> evolutionists such as Alexander (1979) and Johnson (1995), external threat
> tends to reduce internal divisions and maximize perceptions of common
> interest among group members. Under conditions of external threat, human
> societies expand government and there is an increase in cooperative and
> even altruistic behavior. Such changes presumably reflect a species-wide
> facultative strategy of accepting higher levels of external authority and
> becoming more group-oriented under conditions of external threat.
> Students of anti-Semitism have often noted that anti-Semitism tends to
> increase during periods of political and economic instability. The
> suggestion is that during periods of perceived external threat, gentiles
> are more prone to form cohesive, cooperative groups directed against
> outgroups, and especially against outgroups perceived as being in
> competition with the ingroup. This will be a major theme of Chapters 3-5.
> Much remains to be done in attempting to develop an evolutionary
> perspective on mechanisms of between-group competition. As is the case for
> many other psychological adaptations (MacDonald 1991, 1995a; Wilson 1994),
> there appear to be important individual differences in social identity
> processes. Thus Altemeyer (1994) finds associations among attraction to
> cohesive groups, authoritarianism, feelings of ingroup superiority,
> hostility toward outgroups, ethnocentrism, a heightened concern for social
> identity, and religious fundamentalism. Congruent with the present
> perspective, there is evidence that Jews are high on ethnocentrism. Using
> an instrument designed to measure ingroup bias-an indicator of
> ethnocentrism, Silverman and Case (1995) found that Jews had the highest
> bias toward their own ethnic group among groups classified as White
> Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), Asians, Italians, Other Europeans, and
> Blacks, with the only significant difference between Jews and WASPs.
>
> The theory and data related to social identity are also highly compatible
> with research on individualism and collectivism (Triandis 1990, 1991).
> Individualism/collectivism constitutes a dimension of individual
> differences, with group (cross-cultural) differences in the trait
> resulting in differences between societies in the extent to which emphasis
> is placed on the goals and needs of the ingroup rather than on individual
> rights and interests. For individuals highly predisposed to collectivism,
> ingroup norms and the duty to cooperate and subordinate individual goals
> to the needs of the group are paramount. Collectivist cultures develop an
> "unquestioned attachment" to the ingroup, including "the perception that
> ingroup norms are universally valid (a form of ethnocentrism), automatic
> obedience to ingroup authorities [i.e., authoritarianism], and willingness
> to fight and die for the ingroup. These characteristics are usually
> associated with distrust of and unwillingness to cooperate with outgroups"
> (Triandis 1990, 55). Like social identity processes, tendencies toward
> collectivism are exacerbated in times of external threat, again suggesting
> that the tendency toward collectivism is a facultative response that
> evolved as a mechanism of between-group conflict.
> The existence of such a mechanism implies that the group has been the
> vehicle of selection, in Wilson and Sober's (1994) terms. It is an
> important theoretical question whether such adaptations for between-group
> competition are compatible with selection at the individual level. Given
> that these mechanisms appear to be highly sensitive to the presence of
> external threat to the group, they may also track individual
> self-interest, since in times of threat, group and individual interests
> increasingly coincide. One could conceptualize a person as choosing
> between a self-sacrificial act that helps a group with whom one shares a
> significant genetic overlap, and a selfish act that is very unlikely to
> help an individual confronted by a menacing group and would also be likely
> to cause the group as a whole to fail. Under such circumstances, it is
> better to hang together than hang separately. The unit of analysis is the
> group, and the psychological mechanisms are the result of between-group
> conflict. However, such a mechanism is compatible with supposing that
> people have an algorithm that attempts to balance the costs and benefits
> to the individual of continued group membership with costs and benefits to
> be gained by deserting the group and engaging in an individualist
> strategy.
> There appear to be examples of people who are so extremely collectivist
> that defecting from the group is not a psychologically available option.
> Especially striking has been the phenomenon of individuals who readily
> undergo martyrdom or mass suicide rather than abandon the group. We see
> examples periodically in modern times, and there are many historical
> examples, ranging from Christian martyrs in ancient times to a great many
> instances of Jewish martyrdom over a two-thousand-year period.
>
>
> Although not all Jews were willing to die rather than betray the law,
> "story after story reveals that this generalization is true" (Sanders
> 1992, 42). "No other nation can be shown to have fought so often in
> defence of its own way of life, and the readiness of Jews to die for their
> cause is proved by example after example" (Sanders 1992, 239). Jewish
> political activity against the Romans often included threats of martyrdom
> if external signs of Roman domination were not removed from Jerusalem and
> the Temple (Crossan 1991, 103ff). In recent times, the members of the
> Zionist Stern Gang who fought the British for control of Palestine
> "conceived of the final battle with the British as an apocalyptic
> catharsis out of which they could expect only death" (Biale 1982, 101).
> It should also be noted that Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox groups
> (haredim) are a prominent and increasingly powerful force within
> contemporary Judaism, amounting to at least 650,000 Jews worldwide (see
> Landau 1993, xxi) and representing 23 percent of the Israeli electorate in
> the 1996 elections. Historically, the type of social organization
> represented by these groups has been far more the norm than the exception,
> so that even in late-19th-century Poland the great majority of Jews were
> organized in ultra-Orthodox Hasidic congregations dominated by their
> rebbes (e.g. Litman 1984, 6). These groups are extremely collectivist in
> Triandis's (1990, 1991) sense. They rigidly adhere to traditional
> exclusivist practices, such as dietary and purity laws, and have very
> negative views of outsiders, including more liberally inclined Jews. The
> authoritarian nature of these groups is particularly striking: "A haredi .
> . . will consult his rabbi or hasidic rebbe on every aspect of his life,
> and will obey the advice he receives as though it were an halachic ruling"
> (Landau 1993, 47). "The haredim's blind obeisance to rabbis is one of the
> most striking characteristics of haredism in the eyes of the outside
> world, both Jewish and Gentile" (Landau 1993, 45). Famous rebbes are
> revered in an almost god-like manner (tzaddikism, or cult of personality),
> and indeed there was a recent controversy over whether the Lubavitcher
> Rebbe Schneerson claimed to be the Messiah. Many of his followers believed
> that he was; Mintz (1992, 348ff) points out that it is common for Hasidic
> Jews to view their rebbe as the Messiah.
> As an example of the intensity of group feeling among traditional Eastern
> European Jews, Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin (1971, 69) recounts his visit
> to a synagogue in Galicia (Poland) in 1903:
>
> There were no benches, and several thousand Jews were standing closely
> packed together, swaying in prayer like the corn in the wind. When the
> rabbi appeared the service began. Everybody tried to get as close to him
> as possible. The rabbi led the prayers in a thin, weeping voice. It seemed
> to arouse a sort of ecstasy in the listeners. They closed their eyes,
> violently swaying. The loud praying sounded like a gale. Anyone seeing
> these Jews in prayer would have concluded that they were the most
> religious people on earth.
>
> Later those closest to the rabbi were intensely eager to eat any food
> touched by the rabbi, and the fish bones were preserved by his followers
> as relics.
> Another measure of collectivism is community control over individual
> behavior. Controls over individual behavior are a highly salient feature
> of mainstream Judaism, apparent throughout PTSDA. Shaw (1991, 65) provides
> a particularly well-described example from Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The
> community very precisely regulated every aspect of life, including the
> shape and length of beards, all aspects of dress in public and private,
> the amount of charity required of members, numbers of people at social
> gatherings, the appearance of graves and gravestones, precise behavior on
> the Sabbath, the precise form of conversations, the order of precedence at
> all social gatherings, etc.  The rules were enforced "with a kind of
> police surveillance," and failure to abide by the rules could result in
> imprisonment or, at the extreme, in excommunication.
> The suggestion is that Jews tend toward hyper-collectivism. Moreover, the
> reputation of Jews as willingly suffering martyrdom rather than deserting
> the group suggests that among Jews there is a significant critical mass
> for whom desertion is not an option no matter what the consequences to the
> individual. Consider, for example, the response of groups of Ashkenazi
> Jews to demands to convert during the pogroms surrounding the First
> Crusade in Germany in 1096. Behavior in this instance was truly
> remarkable.  When given the choice of conversion or death, a contemporary
> Jewish chronicler noted, that Jews "stretched forth their necks, so that
> their heads might be cut off in the Name of their Creator. . . . Indeed
> fathers also fell with their children, for they were slaughtered together.
> They slaughtered brethren, relatives, wives, and children. Bridegrooms
> [slaughtered] their intended and merciful mothers their only children" (in
> Chazan 1987, 245).
> It is very difficult to suppose that such people have an algorithm that
> calculates individual fitness payoffs by balancing the tendency to desert
> the group with anticipated benefits of continued group membership. The
> obvious interpretation of such a phenomenon is that these people are
> obligated to remain in the group no matter what-even to the point of
> killing their own family members to prevent the possibility of becoming a
> member of the outgroup. Such examples suggest that there are no
> conceivable circumstances that would cause such people to abandon the
> group, go their own way, and become assimilated to the outgroup.
> I do not suppose that such an extreme level of self-sacrifice is a
> pan-human psychological adaptation.  However, it may well be the case that
> a significant proportion of Jews are extremely prone to collectivism, to
> the point that they do not calculate individual payoffs of group
> membership. The proposed model is that over historical time, average group
> standing on the trait of collectivism increases among Jews, because
> individuals low on this trait (in this case, individuals who do not
> conform to expected standards of group behavior) are more likely to defect
> voluntarily from the group or be forcibly excluded from it (see PTSDA,
> Chs. 7 and 8).
> Given the importance of conformity to group norms for Judaism, it would be
> expected that individuals who are low on collectivism would be
> disproportionately inclined to abandon Judaism, while successful Jews who
> are the pillars of the community and thus epitomize the group ethic of
> Judaism would be disproportionately likely to be high on group conformity
> and also likely to be reproductively successful. For example, Jordan
> (1989, 138) notes that Jews who defected during the Middle Ages (and then
> sometimes persecuted their former coreligionists) tended to be people who
> were "unable to sustain the demands of [the] elders for conformity."  This
> trend may well have accelerated since the Enlightenment, because the costs
> of defection then became lower. Israel (1985, 254) notes that after the
> Enlightenment defections from Judaism, due ultimately to negative
> attitudes regarding the restrictive Jewish community life, were common
> enough to have a negative demographic effect on the Jewish community.
> There has probably always been a selective process, such that people who
> have difficulty submerging their interests to those of the group are
> disproportionately likely to defect from Judaism. Such individuals would
> have chaffed at the myriad regulations that governed every aspect of life
> in traditional Jewish society. In Triandis's (1990, 55) terms, these
> individuals are "idiocentric" people living in a collectivist culture;
> i.e., they are people who are less group oriented and less willing to put
> group interests above their own. It has often been observed among
> historians of Judaism that the most committed members of the group have
> determined the direction of the group (e.g., Sacks 1993, ix-x); such
> individuals are also likely to receive a disproportionate amount of the
> rewards of group membership. It is likely therefore that there has been
> within-group selection among Jews for genes predisposing people to be
> extremely predisposed to collectivism, to the point that a significant
> proportion is simply incapable of calculating individual payoffs of group
> membership.
> This hypothesis is highly compatible with the finding that Jews have been
> overrepresented among non-Jewish religious cults (Marciano 1981; Schwartz
> 1978). Recently there has developed a fairly large literature on religious
> cults having characteristics that illustrate the importance of social
> identity processes and clearly place them on the extreme collectivist end
> of the individualism/collectivism dimension. These charismatic groups are
> highly cohesive, collectivist, and authoritarian (e.g., Galanter 1989a,b;
> Levine 1989; Deutsch 1989). Within the group there is a great deal of
> harmony and positive regard for group members, combined with negative
> perceptions of outsiders. Psychological well-being increases when the
> person joins the group, and individuals experiencing dis-affiliation
> undergo psychological distress. Galanter (1989a) finds that individuals
> who join cults experience a sense of relief-a finding that I would
> interpret as resulting from the fact that cult membership often satisfies
> a very deep emotional need.
> This emotional motivation may be increased by personal feelings of threat
> prior to joining the cult. Many individuals who join cults are not
> satisfied with their lives and feel personally threatened (Clark et al.
> 1981)-a finding that I interpret as resulting from the triggering of
> collectivist mechanisms in a facultative manner as a response to external
> threat. These perceptions of external threat may be nothing more than
> subjective feelings of "not doing well" in life. Galanter found that the
> individuals who experienced the greatest relief upon joining cults were
> those who were most distressed prior to joining, and case study material
> indicates that many of these individuals were experiencing economic,
> social, and/or psychological stresses (e.g., change of residence, being
> fired from a job, illness of relatives [Galanter 1989a, 92]). Sirkin and
> Grellong (1988) found similar associations in their sample of cult members
> from Jewish families.
> Galanter (1989a, 23) finds that 21 percent of the Divine Light commune
> (organized by Maharaj Ji) were Jewish, despite the fact that Jews
> represented only approximately 2.5 percent of the U.S. population.
> Moreover, 8 percent of Galanter's sample of members of the Unification
> Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon were Jewish. This finding is compatible
> with the proposal that Jews have a stronger tendency toward collectivism
> in general. In addition, a very large percentage of Jews are involved in
> specifically Jewish groups having many of the features ascribed to these
> religious cults, including, I would suppose, the haredim, Orthodox Jews,
> Conservative Jews, and Zionist groups in the contemporary world. In
> traditional societies, of course, all Jews were Orthodox.
> Further, Sirkin and Grellong (1988) found that cult members from Jewish
> families had a greater number of highly religious relatives than contrast
> Jewish families. This occurred despite the fact that the contrast Jewish
> families were actually more religiously observant than the families of
> cult members. These findings are highly compatible with the hypothesis
> that cult membership is influenced by genetic variation: cult members come
> disproportionately from relatively unobservant families who nevertheless
> have a strong familial predisposition toward membership in highly
> collectivist groups. The relative lack of religious observance among these
> cult-involved families may have resulted from their greater tendency
> toward intellectual, cultural, and political activities that were seen as
> incompatible with traditional religious observance. However, these
> cultural activities failed to provide the psychological sense of intense
> group involvement desired by the children, with the result that the
> children were prone to joining religious cults.
> Social identity processes, ethnocentrism, and the tendency toward
> collectivism are clearly central to Judaism as a group evolutionary
> strategy, but they have also been of critical importance in the phenomenon
> of anti-Semitism. In Chapters 3-5 I will argue that several historically
> important examples of anti-Semitic movements have given rise to highly
> collectivist gentile movements that were, in certain critical ways, mirror
> images of Judaism.
>
>
And why is it forbidden to deliver a female animal to a heathen woman?
Because all heathen women are suspected of whoredom, and when her paramour
comes to lie with her, it is possible that he will not find her at home and
will lie with the animal instead. Indeed, even if he does find her, he may
still lie with the animal. (The Code of Maimonides, Book V: The Book of
Holiness, XXII, 142)






> 5
> National Socialism as an Anti-Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy
> The National Socialist movement in Germany from 1933-1945 is a departure
> from Western tendencies toward universalism and muted individualism in the
> direction of racial nationalism and cohesive collectivism. The evidence
> reviewed below indicates that National Socialism developed in the context
> of group conflict between Jews and gentiles, and I propose that it may be
> usefully conceptualized as a group evolutionary strategy that was
> characterized by several key features that mirrored Judaism as a group
> evolutionary strategy.
> Most basically, National Socialism aimed at developing a cohesive group.
> There was an emphasis on the inculcation of selfless behavior and
> within-group altruism combined with outgroup hostility (MacDonald 1988a,
> 298-300). These anti-individualist tendencies can be seen in the Hitler
> Youth movement (Koch 1976; Rempel 1989). After 1936, membership was
> compulsory for children after their tenth birthday. A primary emphasis was
> to mold children to accept a group strategy of within-group altruism
> combined with hostility and aggression toward outgroups, particularly
> Jews. Children were taught an ideology of nationalism, the organic unity
> of the state, blind faith in Hitler, and anti-Semitism. Physical courage,
> fighting skills, and a warlike mentality were encouraged, but the most
> important aspect of education was group loyalty: "Faithfulness and loyalty
> irrespective of the consequences were an article of faith shared among
> wide sections of Germany's youth" (Koch 1976, 119).
> Socialization for group competition was strongly stressed, "all the
> emphasis centering on obedience, duty to the group, and helping within the
> group" (Koch 1976, 128). The ideology of National Socialism viewed the
> entire society (excluding the Jews) as a large kinship group-a
> "Volksgemeinschaft transcending class and creed" (Rempel 1989, 5). A
> constant refrain of the literature of the Hitler Youth was the idea of the
> individual sacrificing himself for the leader:
> the basic idea is . . . that of a group of heroes inseparably tied to one
> another by an oath of faithfulness who, surrounded by physically and
> numerically superior foes, stand their ground. . . . Either the band of
> heroes is reduced to the last man, who is the leader himself defending the
> corpses of his followers-the grand finale of the Nibelungenlied-or through
> its unparalleled heroism brings about some favourable change in its
> fortune. (Koch 1976, 143)
>
> The Hitler Youth was associated with the SS (Schutzstaffel, "protection
> echelon")-an elite corps of highly committed and zealous soldiers. Rempel
> (1989, 256) estimates that 95 percent of German youth maintained their
> fidelity to the war effort even after the defeat at Stalingrad. Koch
> (1976) describes high levels of selfless behavior among Germans during the
> war both as soldiers and as support personnel in the war effort, and
> quotes from individual youth clearly indicate that the indoctrination of
> young people with National Socialist ideology was quite successful and
> often appears to have been causally responsible for self-sacrificing
> behavior.
> Within-group egalitarianism is often an important facilitator of a group
> evolutionary strategy, because it cements the allegiance of lower-status
> individuals (see below and PTSDA, Ch. 1). While the National Socialist
> movement retained traditional hierarchical Western social structure, the
> internal cohesiveness and altruism characteristic of National Socialism
> may have been facilitated by a significant degree of egalitarianism. There
> were real attempts to increase the status and economic prospects of
> farmers in the Hitler Youth Land Service, and class divisions and social
> barriers were broken down within the Hitler Youth movement to some extent,
> with the result that lower and working-class children were able to move
> into positions of leadership. Moreover, the socialist element of National
> Socialism was more than merely a deceptive front (Pipes 1993, 260,
> 276-277). The economy was intensively regulated, and private property was
> subject to expropriation in order to achieve the goals of the community.
> Here it is of interest that an important element of the National Socialist
> ideology and behavior as a group strategy involved discrimination against
> Jews as a group. Jewish group membership was defined by biological descent
> (see Dawidowicz 1976, 38ff). As in the case of the limpieza phenomenon of
> the Inquisition, this biological classification of Jews occurred in a
> context in which many of even the most overtly assimilated Jews-those who
> had officially converted to Christianity-continued Jewish associational
> and marriage patterns and had in effect become crypto-Jews (see below and
> Chapter 6). Thus, an act of September 1933 prohibited farmers from
> inheriting land if there was any trace of Jewish ancestry going back to
> 1800, and the act of April 11, 1933, dismissing Jews from the civil
> service applied to any individual with at least one Jewish grandparent.
> National Socialist extremists advocated the dissolution of mixed marriages
> and Jewish sterilization, and wanted to consider even individuals with
> one-eighth Jewish ancestry as full Jews.
> From the present perspective, Germany after 1933 was characterized by the
> presence of two antithetical group strategies. Jews were systematically
> driven from the German economy in gradual stages between 1933 and 1939.
> For example, shortly after the National Socialists assumed power, there
> were restrictions on employment in the civil service, the professions,
> schools and universities, and trade and professional
> associations-precisely the areas of the economy in which Jews were
> disproportionately represented-and there is evidence for widespread public
> support for these laws (Friedländer 1997; Krausnick 1968, 27ff). Quotas
> were established for attendance at universities and public schools. An act
> of September 1933 excluded Jews from faculties in the arts, literature,
> theater, and film. Eventually Jewish property was expropriated and taxed
> exorbitantly, and Jews were subjected to a variety of indignities ("No
> indignity seemed too trivial to legislate" [Gordon 1984, 125]), including
> prohibitions against owning pets.
> As has happened so often in periods of relatively intense anti-Semitism,
> barriers were raised between the groups. Jews were required to wear
> identifying badges and were prohibited from restaurants and public parks.
> The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prevented marriage and all sexual contact
> between the groups. The laws prohibited Jews from employing German women
> under the age of forty-five as domestic servants-presumably an attempt to
> prevent Jewish men in a superior position from having sexual contact with
> fertile gentile women. The National Socialist authorities were also very
> concerned about socializing and friendship between Jews and gentiles
> (Gordon 1984, 179; Krausnick 1968, 31)-a phenomenon that recalls the
> ancient Jewish wine taboo, intended to prevent Jews from socializing with
> gentiles.
> Just as social controls on group members have been important to the Jewish
> group evolutionary strategy, especially in traditional societies, the
> National Socialist group strategy punished individuals who violated the
> various race laws enacted by the Third Reich, failed to cooperate in
> boycotts against Jewish businesses, or socialized with Jews. For example,
> there were approximately four hundred criminal cases per year for "race
> defilement" (i.e., sexual contact between Jews and gentiles) under the
> Nuremberg Laws. As in the case of Jewish social controls designed to
> ensure within-group conformity to group interests (see PTSDA, Chs. 4, 6),
> the National Socialists penalized not only the individual but the family
> as well: "Any decision to violate Nazi racial regulations, whether
> premeditated or impulsive, placed a stigma upon oneself and one's family.
> Arrest or loss of Nazi party membership, for example, frequently meant
> loss of one's job, retaliation against one's spouse or children, and
> social exclusion (often compulsory)" (Gordon 1984, 302).
> GERMAN ANTI-SEMITIC IDEOLOGIES AS IDEOLOGIES OF GROUP COMPETITION
> "Let us not forget whence we spring. No more talk of 'German,' or of
> 'Portuguese' Jews. Though scattered over the earth we are nevertheless a
> single people"-Rabbi Salomon Lipmann-Cerfberr in the opening speech
> delivered on July 26, 1806, at the meeting preparatory to the Sanhedrin of
> 1807, convened by Napoleon. (Epigraph from Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
> [1899, I, 329] Foundations of the Nineteenth Century at the beginning of
> the chapter entitled "The Entrance of the Jews into the History of the
> West")
> While popular German anti-Semitism appears to have been largely autonomous
> and based on real conflicts of interest rather than the result of the
> manipulation by an exploitative or demagogic elite (Hagen 1996; Harris
> 1994, 225-227; Pulzer 1988, xviii, 321),  the intense anti-Semitism
> characteristic of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party)
> leadership was not shared by the majority of the population (see Field
> 1981, 457; Friedländer 1997, 4).  If indeed German anti-Semitism was to a
> considerable extent a "top-down" phenomenon in which the NSDAP and
> government played an indispensable leadership role, it becomes crucial to
> probe the beliefs of these National Socialist leaders, and in particular
> of Hitler himself, for whom anti-Semitism was at the very center of his
> world view (Dawidowicz 1975; Friedländer 1997, 102; Gordon 1984, 312;
> Johnson 1988, 489). The point here will be that Hitler viewed both Judaism
> and National Socialism as group evolutionary strategies.
> However, the perception of group conflict between Jews and gentiles as a
> central feature of German society long predates Hitler. The literature on
> 19th-century German anti-Semitism indicates a perception among gentiles
> that Jews and gentiles were engaged in group conflict. There are also
> detailed proposals for gentile group strategies in opposition to Judaism.
> German anti-Semitism in the course of the 19th century shifted from
> demands for Jewish assimilation by intellectuals such as Kant and the
> young Hegelians in the early part of the century, to an increasing
> emphasis on the ethnic divide separating Germans and Jews (Wistrich 1990,
> 35ff). Throughout this period the consistent belief of German liberals
> combating anti-Semitism was that Judaism would eventually disappear as a
> result of assimilation and that emancipation would "hasten the trip to the
> baptismal font" and result in national unity (Schorsch 1972, 99).
> The predominant attitude among German intellectuals at the beginning of
> the century was that granting Jews civil rights was contingent on complete
> Jewish assimilation. Jews would cooperate in becoming completely
> assimilated in exchange for their political and economic emancipation. In
> the minds of their early 19th-century critics, Jews constituted a
> nation-an atypical nation to be sure, since it was not confined to a
> particular territory and its criterion of citizenship was birth by a
> Jewish mother. But it was a nation nonetheless, and such a
> conceptualization was entirely congruent with Jewish self-conceptions at
> least since the Middle Ages and widespread among Zionists later in the
> century (Katz 1979, 48). Jews would have to give up this condition in
> order to be Germans.
> In the event, however, many Germans believed that Jews had not lived up to
> their end of the bargain, and eventually it became common among
> anti-Semites to believe that Jews were "by nature incapable of honoring
> the contract, of becoming good Germans" (Levy 1975, 22). For example, the
> anti-Semite Paul Förster stated that "emancipation in the true sense of
> the word means full assimilation into the foreign body politic. Have the
> Jews really done this? Have they changed from Jews into Germans?" (in Levy
> 1975, 22).
> On the other hand, for Jews the main concern was the continued existence
> of Jewish identity (Schorsch 1972, 100). Concerns about the continuation
> of Jewish identity became more common later in the century. As Katz (1985)
> notes, the 19th century began with the official blessing of the Jewish
> assimilationists at the Parisian Sanhedrin convened by Napoleon in 1807
> and ended with the first Zionist Congress in Zurich in 1897.
> Assimilation did not occur at any level of the Jewish community, including
> the movement of Reform Judaism, and it was never intended by any
> significant segment of the Jewish community (PTSDA, Ch. 4).
>
> The predicament of emancipated Jewry, and ultimately the cause of its
> tragic end, was rooted not in one or another ideology but in the fact that
> Jewish Emancipation had been tacitly tied to an illusory expectation-the
> disappearance of the Jewish community of its own volition. When this
> failed to happen, and the Jews, despite Emancipation and acculturation,
> continued to be conspicuously evident, a certain uneasiness, not to say a
> sense of outright scandal, was experienced by Gentiles. . . . If gaining
> civil rights meant an enormous improvement in Jewish prospects, at the
> same time it carried with it a precariously ill-defined status which was
> bound to elicit antagonism from the Gentile world. (Katz 1983, 43)
>
> In addition to a very visible group of Orthodox immigrants from Eastern
> Europe, Reform Jews generally opposed intermarriage, and secular Jews
> developed a wide range of institutions that effectively cut them off from
> socializing with gentiles. "What secular Jews remained attached to was not
> easy to define, but neither, for the Jews involved, was it easy to let go
> of: there were family ties, economic interests, and perhaps above all
> sentiments and habits of mind which could not be measured and could not be
> eradicated" (Katz 1996, 33). Moreover, a substantial minority of German
> Jews, especially in rural areas and in certain geographical regions
> (especially Bavaria) remained Orthodox well into the 20th century
> (Lowenstein 1992, 18). Vestiges of traditional separatist practices, such
> as Yiddish words, continued throughout this period.
> Intermarriage between Jews and Germans was negligible in the 19th century.
> Even though intermarriage increased later, these individuals and their
> children "almost always" were lost to the Jewish community (Katz 1985, 86;
> see also Levenson 1989, 321n). "Opposition to intermarriage did constitute
> the bottom line of Jewish assimilation" (G. Mosse 1985, 9). These patterns
> of endogamy and within-group association constituted the most obvious
> signs of continued Jewish group separatism in German society for the
> entire period prior to the rise of National Socialism. Levenson (1989,
> 321) notes that Jewish defenses of endogamy during this period "invariably
> appeared to hostile non-Jews as being misanthropic and ungrateful,"
> another indication that Jewish endogamy was an important ingredient of the
> anti-Semitism of the period.
> Moreover, Jewish converts would typically marry other Jewish converts and
> continue to live among and associate with Jews (Levenson 1989, 321n), in
> effect behaving as crypto-Jews. The importance of genealogy rather than
> surface religion can also be seen in that, while baptized Jews of the
> haute bourgeoisie were viewed as acceptable marriage partners by the
> Jewish haute bourgeoisie, gentiles of the haute bourgeoisie were not
> (Mosse 1989, 335). These patterns may well have fed into the perception
> among Germans that even overt signs of assimilation were little more than
> window dressing masking a strong sense of Jewish ethnic identity and a
> desire for endogamy. Indeed, the general pattern was that complete loss of
> Jewishness was confined to females from a "handful" of families who had
> married into the gentile aristocracy (Mosse 1989, 181).
> Although there were ups and downs in the intensity of anti-Semitism, the
> general trend over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries was
> that calls for assimilation were increasingly replaced by calls for
> cohesive, collectivist gentile groups that would enable Germans to compete
> with Jews and even exclude them entirely from German economic and social
> life. Reflecting social identity processes, anti-Semitic beliefs became
> increasingly important as a means of self-identification among Germans:
>
> Professing anti-Semitism became a sign of cultural identity, of one's
> belonging to a specific cultural camp. It was a way of communicating an
> acceptance of a particular set of ideas, and a preference for specific
> social, political, and moral norms. Contemporaries living and acting in
> Imperial Germany learned to decode the message. It became part of their
> language, a familiar and convenient symbol. (Volkov 1978, 34-35)
>
> Anti-Semitic rhetoric increasingly emphasized the desirability of a
> unified German political entity that was above political and religious
> differences and which would exclude Jews. This is essentially a
> prescription for a specifically German group strategy in opposition to
> Judaism, that is, the development of "a united front against the alleged
> domination of an 'alien race' " (Wistrich 1990, 38). As Dawidowicz (1975,
> 47) notes (derisively), "The Germans were in search of a mysterious
> wholeness that would restore them to primeval happiness." Commenting on
> attitudes in the period 1900-1914, Field (1981, 313) describes pervasive
> complaints of a lack of "shared ideals" and dissatisfaction with an
> intellectual life that was "chaotic, spinning off in all directions at
> once and lacking a common ideological focus." Even German liberals who
> actively opposed anti-Semitism desired a society centered around the
> Christian religion: "Though they repudiated the Conservative's notion of
> the Christian state and fought for a separation of church and state, they
> had every intention of strengthening the exclusively Christian character
> of Germany" (Schorsch 1972, 100).
> The influential anti-Semitic historian and political activist Heinrich von
> Treitschke viewed Germany's self-conception as a Christian civilization as
> a critical component of his overarching goal of producing a politically
> and culturally unified Germany. Treitschke stated that although many
> Germans had ceased being active Christians, "the time will come, and is
> perhaps not so far off, when necessity will teach us once more to pray. .
> . . The German Jewish Question will not come to rest . . . before our
> Hebrew fellow-citizens have become convinced, by our attitude, that we are
> a Christian people and want to remain one" (in Pulzer 1988, 242). Unity
> was perceived as necessary for a militarily strong Germany able to compete
> as a world power with other Western powers-clearly a conception that
> Germany must develop a cohesive group strategy vis-à-vis other societies.
> Treitschke therefore strongly opposed what he perceived as "alien" Jewish
> cultural influence on German life, because of Jewish tendencies to mock
> and belittle German nationalistic aspirations.
> Christianity as a unifying force was also central to another important
> late- 19th-century anti-Semitic leader, Adolf Stoecker:
>
> National unification was a component of the "Volkische" intellectual
> tradition. Rather than accepting the pan-national, universalist ideology
> that characterized the Christian Middle Ages, the Volkische ideal of
> social cohesion was often combined with nationalistic versions of a
> peculiarly Germanic form of Christianity, as in the writings of
> Treitschke, Paul de LaGarde, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Thus for
> Chamberlain, "Christianity was an indispensable cohesive force in a
> class-torn nation; religious rebirth alone . . . could renew the spiritual
> basis of society, reaffirming the principles of monarchy, social
> hierarchy, loyalty, discipline, and race. . . . [R]eligion, not politics,
> was the basis of a new Germany" (Field 1981, 302).
> This tradition idealized the Middle Ages as a period of Volksgemeinschaft,
> a sense of social cohesion, organic unity, cooperation, and hierarchical
> harmony among all social classes. This tradition can be traced to Johann
> Gottfried Herder (1744-1803; see Herder 1774, 189ff), and it attracted the
> majority of German intellectuals during the period spanning the 19th
> century to the rise of National Socialism (Mosse 1970, 8). This tradition
> is exemplified by Richard Wagner's comment that "the particular atmosphere
> which my Lohengrin should produce is that here we see before us an ancient
> German kingdom in its finest, most ideal aspect. . . . Here there is no
> despotic pomp with its bodyguards pushing back the people to make way for
> the high nobility. Simple boys make up the escort for the young woman, and
> to them everyone yields gladly and quite voluntarily" (in Rose 1992, 28;
> italics in text).
> While Volkische ideology could easily be fused with racialist or
> exclusionary thinking regarding minority groups within the society, there
> was only gradual development in this direction, and it was not until the
> end of the 19th century that such linkages became common among
> anti-Semites. The gradual shift in Volkische ideology from an ideology of
> assimilation of the entire society into a cohesive group to an ideology of
> racism and exclusion thus paralleled the general shift from
> assimilationism toward separatism as a solution to the Jewish question.
> However, even during the Weimar period some Volkische thinkers-by then a
> distinct minority-advocated the complete assimilation of Jews within
> German society.
>
> This ideal of "hierarchic harmony" and group cohesion apparent among these
> intellectuals therefore did not originate as an aspect of group conflict
> between Germans and Jews but predated the escalation of this conflict in
> the late 19th century.  In The Culture of Critique I suggest that the
> ideals of hierarchic harmony and muted individualism are primitive
> features of prototypical Western social organization.  This Western ideal
> of hierarchic harmony can be and often has been a powerful force favoring
> assimilation, and intellectuals advocating hierarchic harmony could also
> be advocates of Jewish assimilation. For example, Treitschke proposed that
> Jews become completely assimilated to Germany and that Germany itself be
> organized as a harmonious hierarchy led by an aristocratic elite (Dorpalen
> 1967, 242-243). Nevertheless, Volkisch ideology can easily be transformed
> into an ideology of intergroup conflict in the event that parts of the
> society remain unassimilable.
>
> It is noteworthy that German anti-Semitism in no way depended at any time
> on racial theory (Katz 1983, 41-42). For example, the National Socialists
> regarded Paul de LaGarde as an important forerunner despite the complete
> absence of race in his theorizing. Moreover, the National Socialists'
> opposition to Jews went well beyond their denigration of other races and
> their attempts to dominate other racial groups. They focused on the same
> alleged Jewish traits ("moral insensitivity, acquisitiveness, xenophobia,
> and the like") that had been characteristic of anti-Semitic attitudes
> since the beginnings of the diaspora, the only difference being that the
> traits were now attributed to racial differences. "It could therefore be
> argued that the notion of race, far from being the source of
> anti-Semitism, only acquired its force as a political weapon through
> contact with an already existing anti-Semitic tradition" (Katz 1983,
> 42-43).
> In the event, Jews remained as an unassimilated outgroup, and certain real
> differences between Jews and gentiles developed into a variety of negative
> stereotypes expected on the basis of social identity theory. Indeed,
> anti-Semitism based on these issues was a broad regional phenomenon,
> occurring throughout much of Eastern Europe, Austria, and France
> (Friedländer 1997; Hagen 1996). Jews not only continued as an ethnically
> unassimilated group but were, "in their majority, not carried away by the
> 'hurrah patriotism' of the exuberant nationalists. They inclined, their
> devotion to Germany notwithstanding, to humanism, reasonableness,
> moderation, and a measure of internationalism, influenced also by the fact
> of Jewish dispersion across national frontiers" (Mosse 1989, 43-44). Jews
> were thus less enthusiastic about creating a highly cohesive, unitary
> German society than were gentile Germans, and this general tendency among
> Jews would, in the minds of gentiles, be exacerbated by such salient
> examples as Jewish-owned publishing companies that were opposed to German
> nationalism. The disproportionate, high-profile involvement of Jews in
> leftist, anti-nationalist revolutionary movements in Germany, Hungary, the
> Soviet Union, and Poland (e.g., Friedländer 1997, 91-93) would also feed
> into these stereotypes. The presence of an increasingly prominent movement
> of Jewish nationalism (i.e., Zionism) would have similar effects, as would
> the presence of a significant number of foreign-looking Jewish immigrants
> from Eastern Europe. On the basis of social identity theory, given the
> salience of Jewish-gentile group membership during this period these real
> group differences would become exaggerated. Gentile Germans would come to
> define their ingroup as patriotic and loyal, while Jews would be
> stereotyped as the opposite.
> Also tending to exacerbate these social identity processes was the
> heightened level of resource competition between Germans and Jews as
> Jewish upward mobility, especially in the period after 1870, resulted in
> very large Jewish overrepresentation in all of the markers of economic and
> professional success as well as in the production of culture, the latter
> viewed as a highly deleterious influence (see Chapter 2; PTSDA, Ch. 5).
> Indeed, an important component of anti-Semitism in the late 19th century
> appears to have been the desire of many Germans to participate in a
> cohesive group in order to compete with Jews economically and socially
> (Massing 1949, 79). Interestingly, the powerful cohesion of the Jews was
> viewed as their "most sinister" attribute (Massing 1949, 79; see also
> Pulzer 1979, 78), a comment that suggests that anti-Semitism was partly a
> reaction to the perception that the Jews constituted a highly cohesive
> group-"a political, social and business alliance for the purpose of
> exploiting and subjugating the non-Jewish peoples" (from a 19th-century
> anti-Semitic publication; in Massing [1949, 79]).
>
> Many anti-Semitic leaders envisaged uniting the German people in an
> effective group strategy against the Jews. For example, the Catholic
> newspaper Germania combined advocacy of economic cooperation among
> gentiles and gentile credit institutions with admonitions against buying
> or borrowing from Jews. Theodor Fritsch's "Ten German Commandments of
> Lawful Self-Defense" (reprinted in Massing 1949, 306) combined
> exhortations to ethnic pride and within-group cooperation with a program
> of economic and social boycott of Jews: "Be proud of being a German and
> strive earnestly and steadily to practice the inherited virtues of our
> people, courage, faithfulness and veracity." "Thou shalt be helpful to thy
> fellow German and further him in all matters not counter to the German
> conscience, the more so if he be pressed by the Jew" (in Massing 1949,
> 306-307).
> Massing
>
> The perception that Jews themselves were greatly concerned with racial
> purity was recognized as early as the 1840s by Jews attempting to combat
> anti-Semitism (Schorsch 1972, 8). The racial anti-Semites of the post-1880
> period were greatly concerned with racial purity. Fritsch's third
> commandment was "Thou must keep thy blood pure. Consider it a crime to
> soil the noble Aryan breed of thy people by mingling it with the Jewish
> breed. For thou must know that Jewish blood is everlasting, putting the
> Jewish stamp on body and soul unto the farthest generations." Similarly,
> Wilhelm Marr's Der Judenspiegel (published in 1862) conceptualized Judaism
> as a racially pure group. Marr emphasized the racial gulf between Germans
> and Jews and advocated intermarriage as a way of assimilating Germans and
> Jews (Zimmerman 1986, 47).
> This concern with group competition and racial purity is also evident
> among racialist thinkers who based their ideas on evolutionary thinking.
> There is evidence for the development in Germany during this period of a
> conceptualization of human evolution as fundamentally involving group
> rather than individual competition. Some of the most strident anti-Semites
> in the twenty years prior to World War I were ultra-nationalist groups
> "preaching a racially-based integral nationalism and a Social Darwinist
> view of the world" (Pulzer 1988, xx; Gordon 1984, 25-26). From the present
> perspective, the important point is the idea that the races were in
> competition with each other and that they should remain separate in order
> to maintain racial purity.
> Houston Stewart Chamberlain is of particular interest in this regard, both
> because he was a prime influence on Hitler  and because of his
> interpretation of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Indeed,
> Chamberlain, and especially his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
> (1899), was highly influential among German educated classes generally
> (Field 1981, 225ff). Chamberlain notes that this "alien people has become
> precisely in the course of the nineteenth century disproportionately
> important and in many spheres actually dominant constituent of our life"
> (Chamberlain 1899, I, 330). Clearly Chamberlain believed that Jews and
> gentiles were in competition in Germany.
> Chamberlain exhibits a strong concern with the importance of racial
> purity, but it is important to note that his exemplar of racial purity is
> the Jews, and especially the Sephardic Jews. Chamberlain regarded the Jews
> as having preserved their racial purity over the millennia-a point of view
> that had been expressed originally by Benjamin Disraeli (see below) and
> later by the French Count Arthur de Gobineau. His reaction to observing
> Sephardic Jews is nothing less than ecstatic: "This is nobility in the
> fullest sense of the word, genuine nobility of race. Beautiful figures,
> noble heads, dignity in speech and bearing" (I, 273). "The Jews deserve
> admiration, for they have acted with absolute consistency according to the
> logic and truth of their own individuality, and never for a moment have
> they allowed themselves to forget the sacredness of physical laws because
> of foolish humanitarian day-dreams which they shared only when such a
> policy was to their advantage" (I, 331).
> Chamberlain was thus one of many anti-Semites for whom "the perception
> that Jews maintained their cohesiveness and sense of identity under all
> conceivable circumstances was a source of both fear and envy. Indeed, for
> many antisemites this racial perseverance and historical continuity
> provided a kind of mirror-image model worthy of emulation" (Aschheim 1985,
> 239). The attitudes of the anti-Semites on racial purity are therefore
> mirror-images of previously occurring Jewish practices. Evidence in this
> chapter (see also Chapter 4 and PTSDA, Chs. 2-4) indicates that there is
> far more than a grain of truth to the idea that the Jews have been
> concerned to prevent significant influx of gentile genes into the Jewish
> gene pool.
> Traditional Jewish law traces descent through the mother, not the father.
> Thus the offspring of a Jewish male and a gentile female would not be
> considered Jews and would be lost to the Jewish gene pool. However, the
> offspring of a Jewish female married into the gentile nobility might be
> technically eligible to be Jews, but if their children then married into
> the gentile gene pool, as would normally be the case, they too would be
> lost to the Jewish gene pool. "Jewish women . . . who married Gentiles
> would join Gentile lines and, Talmudic law notwithstanding, would normally
> produce 'Gentile' offspring. A Jewish woman 'marrying out' would almost
> invariably abandon her formal Jewish identity" (Mosse 1989, 334).
> This functional interpretation of tracing Jewish descent through the
> mother can also be seen in Jewish religious writings. Epstein (1942, 166)
> notes that Ezra's racialist motivation can be seen by his exclusive
> concern with Israelite men marrying foreign women because the children of
> unions with Israelite men would be brought up in the Israelite community
> while those of an Israelite female marrying a foreigner would be lost to
> the community. Moreover, as indicated by The Code of Maimonides (see
> PTSDA, Ch. 4), despite the concentration on investigating female relatives
> to assure family purity, the goal was to maintain the purity of the male
> line, and especially so in the case of priests. Females could marry men of
> invalid descent, but men could not. This emphasis on the purity of the
> male line combined with tracing Jewish descent through the mother would
> then function in practice as Chamberlain suggests: Jewish stem families
> could remain "racially pure," while the gene pool of the gentile
> aristocracy would contain some Jewish admixture.
> Although not mentioned by Chamberlain, consanguineous marriages among
> highly visible and immensely wealthy Jewish families may also, via social
> identity processes, have sharpened gentile perceptions of Jews as highly
> concerned with racial purity. There was a relatively high level of
> consanguineous marriage among Jews generally (see PTSDA, Ch. 4, 6, 8), and
> the highly visible Rothschild family practiced consanguineous marriage
> even more intensively than Jewish families generally during the period,
> including a highly visible example of uncle-niece marriage and a great
> many first cousin marriages: "No other family was to practise it
> [consanguinity] to the same extent as the Rothschilds" (Derek Wilson 1988,
> 81). Consanguineous marriages  continued to be a prominent trend among the
> Jewish haute bourgeoisie throughout the 19th century and into the 20th
> (Mosse 1989, 161ff).
> Chamberlain (as well as other racialist "Social Darwinist" thinkers-see
> Krausnick 1968) developed the view that competition between racial groups
> rather than between individuals was central to human evolution: "The
> struggle which means destruction of the weak race steels the strong; the
> same struggle, moreover, by eliminating the weaker elements, tends still
> further to strengthen the strong" (1899, I, 276). Chamberlain (1899, I,
> 277) also proposed that the Jews had engaged in artificial selection
> within their gene pool in order to produce a more competitive group,
> suggesting that Chamberlain recognized the importance of eugenic practices
> among Jews.
> The emphasis on group competition in these writings is striking.
> Interestingly, Darwin (1874) himself believed that altruism and the social
> emotions, such as sympathy and conscientiousness, were restricted to one's
> own group and were quite compatible with hostility directed toward
> outsiders, indicating that he had a keen sense of the importance of
> intergroup competition in human evolution. However, for Darwin this
> intergroup competition was not necessarily competition between ethnic
> groups, much less races. Instead, Darwin's perspective appears to be much
> more compatible with the social identity perspective developed in Chapter
> 1, that hostility is directed at other groups, whatever their origin, and
> typically these other groups will be neighboring tribes and therefore of
> similar racial/ethnic composition.
> The belief that competition between groups is an important aspect of human
> evolution has therefore a long history in evolutionary thought. In the
> hands of these German racial theorists, this thought was transformed in
> two fundamental ways. First, the competition was conceptualized as
> occurring between well-defined, genetically segregated racial/ethnic
> groups; second, the racial/ethnic purity of a group became a critical
> factor in the success of the group. Both of these points, particularly the
> latter, are foreign to mainstream Darwinism, and indeed seem to have
> originated with these thinkers.
> One might speculate that these German thinkers emphasized these ideas
> because intrasocietal group-level resource competition between Jews and
> gentiles was so salient to them, and in addition because the Jews
> themselves were highly concerned about racial purity. In the
> British-American tradition, where this divisive intrasocietal form of
> ethnically based resource competition and concern with ethnic purity by
> sub-groups were far less salient, the dominant theoretical tradition
> ultimately rejected entirely the notion of group selection.
> It is interesting in this regard that while in Germany eugenic ideas
> tended to be bound up with Volkische nationalism and strong currents of
> anti-individualism (see Gasman 1971), eugenic beliefs in Britain were much
> less associated with racialist views, were more often held by social
> radicals with utopian visions,  and were more often motivated by
> individualistic concern that dysgenic practices would result in increasing
> burdens to society (Kevles 1985, 76, 85).  Similarly, while racial science
> in Germany was deeply concerned with developing ideas on differences
> between Germans and Jews as distinct races, British race scientists
> devoted only a "passing and exemplary discussions" to Jews, a phenomenon
> that "mirrored in some respects the unobtrusive character of Anglo-Jewry
> as a whole and the somewhat lackadaisical English attitude towards the
> country's Jewish subjects" (Efron 1994, 45).
> Jews did not represent a competitive threat in England during this period.
> Israel (1985, 242) notes that Jews played a remarkably small role in the
> economic development of England-amounting to little more than dominating
> the diamond and coral trades. They also represented only a minute
> percentage of the population, 0.01 percent in the nineteenth century
> (Sorkin 1987, 175). Throughout this period England remained an ethnically
> homogeneous society, without ethnically-based resource conflict. However,
> even in England there was anti-Semitism, directed both at the "cousinhood"
> of wealthy Jewish families and, later in the century, Orthodox immigrants
> from Eastern Europe (Bermant 1971).
> Such a relativist perspective on the nature of scientific theory
> development is highly compatible with Gould's (1992) perspective on
> extra-scientific influences on the development of evolutionary theory: He
> proposes that evolutionary theory is influenced by the beliefs and
> interests of its practitioners. This, of course, does not imply that these
> beliefs were not based on reality; in the present case there is in fact
> evidence that Jews were concerned about racial purity, and also for
> group-based resource competition between Jews and gentiles.
> Chamberlain is viewed as a major influence on Hitler, and indeed it would
> appear that Hitler's basic beliefs about Jews are almost exact replicas of
> Chamberlain's. Hitler viewed himself as a unique combination of
> intellectual and politician-a politician with a Weltanschauung (Jäckel
> 1972, 13). Many historians have dismissed the view that Hitler had a
> consistent ideology, but I agree with Jäckel (1972), Gordon (1984), and
> others that in fact Hitler was extraordinarily consistent in his beliefs
> and in his behavior in pursuit of those beliefs. Anti-Semitism was "the
> center of both his personal and his political career" (Jäckel 1972, 53);
> "[T]he Jewish question [was] the central motivating force of his political
> mission" (p. 53). The centrality of Jewish issues for Hitler is apparent
> throughout his career up to the very end (see Maser 1974). The sections of
> Mein Kampf relevant to anti-Semitism are entirely straightforward and are
> consistent with an evolutionary perspective in which group strategies are
> a central notion.
> Hitler believed that races, including the Jews, are in a struggle for
> world domination, and he had a very great respect for the ability of Jews
> to carry on their struggle. In Mein Kampf (1943) he writes that he
> sometimes asked himself "whether inscrutable Destiny . . . did not with
> eternal and immutable resolve, desire the final victory of this little
> nation" (p. 64); later he characterizes Jews as "the mightiest counterpart
> to the Aryan" (p. 300).
>
>
> While he seems to overflow with "enlightenment," "progress," "freedom,"
> "humanity," etc., he himself practices the severest segregation of his
> race. To be sure, he sometimes palms off his women on influential
> Christians, but as a matter of principle he always keeps his male line
> pure. He poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own. The Jew
> almost never marries a Christian woman; it is the Christian who marries a
> Jewess. . . . Especially a part of the high nobility degenerates
> completely. The Jew . . . systematically carries on this mode of
> "disarming" the intellectual leader class of his racial adversaries. In
> order to mask his activity and lull his victims, however, he talks more
> and more of the equality of all men without regard to race and color. The
> fools begin to believe him. (pp. 315-316)
>       His ultimate goal is the denationalization, the promiscuous
> bastardization of other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of the
> highest peoples as well as the domination of this racial mishmash through
> the extirpation of the folkish intelligentsia and its replacement by
> members of its own people. (p. 84)
>
>
>
> An important thesis of Chapters 3-5 is that anti-Semitic movements and
> their enemies come to resemble each other in important ways, so that, for
> example, in the case of German racial anti-Semitism, a Western
> anti-Semitic movement developed a strong concern with endogamy,
> anti-individualism, and racial purity despite general Western tendencies
> toward exogamy, individualism, and assimilation. In the following, I will
> explore from this perspective Jewish involvement in Volkische ideologies
> and attitudes of racial superiority. Like their mirror-image enemies,
> there is evidence that many Jewish intellectuals in the pre-National
> Socialist period had a strong racial conceptualization of the Jewish
> people and believed in the superiority of the Jewish "race."
> Such ideologies and attitudes are also important because social identity
> theory predicts that even a few examples of well-known Jewish theorists
> who viewed Jews as a superior race would be likely to be very influential
> in shaping gentile attitudes on how Jews perceived themselves. Given the
> context of between-group conflict that characterized the period under
> discussion (roughly 1850 to 1933), gentiles would be likely to suppose
> that attitudes of Jewish superiority characterized the Jewish community as
> a whole, either overtly or covertly. It is also easy to see that because
> of the salience of this type of racialist rhetoric, gentiles would attempt
> to avoid making a Type II error even if in fact the great majority of Jews
> refrained from an openly stated racialism: If one knows that a prominent
> subset of Jews conceptualizes Judaism as a race and places a high value on
> racial purity, and even views Jews as a racially superior group, the best
> strategy is to assume the worst about most Jews. Gentiles should prevent
> the error of rejecting the proposition "Jews are an ethnic group and view
> themselves as an ethnic group, not a religion; they are intent on
> retaining their racial purity and dominating gentiles by virtue of their
> superior intellectual abilities," when it could be true. Therefore, a
> gentile would assume it is true.
> These attitudes of gentiles would also be facilitated by the fact that
> these beliefs were highly compatible with contemporary scientific
> perspectives on race-the modern arbiter of intellectual respectability.
> Moreover, we shall see that racialist comments occurred throughout the
> spectrum of Jewish identification, from liberal Reform Jews to Zionists,
> and that as time went on, there was an increasing rapprochement between
> liberal Jews and Zionists among whom racialist ideas were quite common.
> This rapprochement may well have contributed to gentiles perceiving
> Zionist attitudes on Jewish racial separateness and racial superiority as
> well within the Jewish mainstream. Zionism was highly salient to the
> National Socialists and other anti-Semites, many of whom agreed with the
> Zionists' racial interpretations of Judaism and with their desire for Jews
> to leave Germany and build a community in Palestine. (Niewyk [1980, 142]
> points out that Zionists did not expect all Jews to go to Palestine but
> aimed rather at preparing Jews to live as an unassimilated minority in
> Germany.)
>
>
> In support of this argument, Katz (1979, 50) notes that in Eastern Europe
> Jewish nationalism emerged concurrently with the secularization of society
> and was in no way dependent on the processes of emancipation and cultural
> assimilation characteristic of the German situation. Eastern European
> Jewish nationalism, complete with ideological and literary expressions,
> appeared long before the anti-Semitic pogroms of the 1880s.
> Important Jewish intellectuals developed Volkische ideologies as well as
> racialist, exclusivist views, which, like those of their adversaries, were
> no longer phrased in religious terms but rather in a primitive language of
> evolutionary biology. These intellectuals had a very clear conception of
> themselves as racially distinct and as a superior race (intellectually and
> especially morally), one that had a redemptive mission to the German
> people and other gentiles. As expected by social identity theory, while
> the Germans tended to emphasize negative traits of the Jewish outgroup,
> the Jewish intellectuals often conceptualized their continued separatism
> in moral and altruistic terms. As indicated in Chapter 7, Jewish
> self-conceptualizations as a moral and altruistic group with a redemptive
> mission to gentiles have been the pre-eminent pose of Jewish intellectuals
> in the post-Enlightenment intellectual world.
> The result was that anti-Semites and zealous Jews, including Zionists,
> often had very similar racialist, nationalist views of Judaism toward the
> end of the 19th century and thereafter (Katz 1986b, 144). Zionism and
> anti-Semitism were mirror-images: "in the course of their histories up to
> the present day it has looked as if they might not only be reacting to one
> another but be capable of evolving identical objectives and even
> cooperating in their realization" (Katz 1979, 51). Nicosia (1985) provides
> a long list of German intellectuals and anti-Semitic leaders from the
> early 19th century through the Weimar period who accepted Zionism as a
> possible solution to the Jewish question in Germany, including Johann
> Gottleib Fichte, Konstantin Frantz, Wilhelm Marr, Adolf Stoecker. All
> conceptualized Judaism as a nation apart and as a separate "race."
> Efron (1994, 126) notes that the idea of essential racial differences
> between groups pervaded the cultural landscape of fin de siècle Europe,
> and Jews, including especially the Zionist racial scientists, were no
> exception to this trend. While the anti-Semites stressed the moral
> inferiority of Jews, the Jewish racial scientists stressed Jewish
> contributions to civilization and looked forward to a national rebirth of
> Jewish culture in a Zionist state.
> The influential proto-Zionist Moses Hess (1862) whose major work, Rome and
> Jerusalem, was published in 1862, had well-developed racialist ideas about
> Jews. Although his book was published prior to the intensification of
> anti-Semitism consequent to complete Jewish emancipation in 1870, it has
> strong overtones of racial superiority. Hess believed that the different
> races had enduring psychological and physiological traits, and that the
> Indo-European traits (embodied by the ancient Greeks) were fundamentally
> opposed to the Semitic traits (embodied by the ancient Israelites). Like
> Disraeli and Chamberlain, Hess believed that history is primarily a
> struggle between races, not social classes, and like these thinkers, Hess
> (p. 27) believed that a Jew is a Jew "by virtue of his racial origin, even
> though his ancestors may have become apostates." Judaism in that view, is
> at its essence the nationalistic aspirations of the Jewish "race," but
> while other races attempt to gain territory, the role of the Jews is to
> function as a moral beacon to the rest of humanity. Hess states that
> Jewish racial characteristics predominate over Indo-Germanic
> characteristics in intermarriage and that they have survived intact since
> the sojourn in Egypt (p. 60).  The racial type comes through even in
> individuals whose ancestors became apostates (p. 98), and even converted
> Jews retain interest in Jewish affairs and have strong beliefs in the
> importance of Jewish nationality (p. 98).
> According to Hess, Jews have what Rose (1990, 332) terms a "primal-racial
> mission" to the rest of humanity:  "It is through Judaism that the history
> of mankind has become a sacred history. I mean by that, that process of
> unified organic development which has its origin in the love of the family
> and which will not be completed until the whole of humanity becomes one
> family" (Hess 1862, 120).
> However, this single family of mankind does not imply assimilation. At the
> end of history, all of the different races will "live on in friendly
> fashion with one another, but live each for the other, preserving, at the
> same time, their particular identity" (p. 121; italics in text). Jewish
> particularism is thus transformed into a genetically mediated messianic
> universalism in which Judaism will persist as a racial type in a utopian
> world it has altruistically led to universal harmony. In this future
> world, the German is faulted for desiring to possess their "fatherlands
> and dominions for himself. He lacks the primary condition of every
> chemical assimilative process, namely warmth" (p. 78). Hess also
> castigated the Reform Jew because of "the beautiful phrases about humanity
> and enlightenment which he employs as a cloak to hide his treason, his
> fear of being identified with his unfortunate brethren" (p. 75)-an
> indication that he viewed Reform Jews as attempting to deceive Germans
> into believing that they had no interest in Jewish nationalism or the fate
> of Jews in other countries.
> There were also parallels between the views of the anti-Semite Richard
> Wagner and the Zionist Ahad Ha-Am (pseudonym of Asher Ginsberg) (Katz
> 1986b).  Both developed the idea that Jews could not have their own
> artistic spirit because they failed to identify completely with the
> surrounding culture. In an essay originally published in 1889, Ha-Am
> (1922, 3) claimed Judaism was not merely a religion but a nation bound
> together with deeply felt emotional bonds. Like many anti-Semites, Ha-Am
> also had a well-developed anti-individualist perspective, in which Jews
> must view themselves as a part of the larger corporate group and sacrifice
> their personal interests for the good of the group: "For the people is one
> people throughout all its generations, and the individuals who come and go
> in each generation are but as those minute parts of the living body which
> change every day, without affecting in any degree the character of that
> organic unity which is the whole body" (p. 8).
> Racialist views were especially common among what Ragins (1980, 132ff)
> terms the second generation of Zionists, many of whom came to maturity in
> the 1890s.  The Zionist journal Die Welt published several articles with a
> racialist, Volkische ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A
> writer argued that the Jews were a race with distinctive physical features
> and had retained their racial purity over four thousand years. Another
> contributor argued that this racial distinctiveness precluded
> assimilation: "Those who demand assimilation of us either do not yet know
> that a man cannot get out of his skin . . . or else they know this and
> then expect of us shameful, daily humiliation, which consists in feigning
> Aryanism, suppressing our instincts, and squeezing into the skin of the
> Aryan, which does not fit us at all" (in Ragins 1980, 150). Another author
> agreed with the racialist writings of Gobineau, who emphasized the high
> level of racial purity among the Jews and the incompatibility of Jews with
> other races (Ragins 1980, 151).
> All of the Zionist racial scientists studied by Efron (1994; see also
> Endelman 1991, 196), including Elias Auerbach, Aron Sandler, Felix
> Theilhaber, and Ignaz Zollschan, were motivated by a perceived need to end
> Jewish intermarriage and preserve Jewish racial purity.  Only by creating
> a Jewish homeland and leaving the assimilatory influences of the diaspora
> could Jews preserve their unique racial heritage.
> Thus, for Auerbach, Zionism would return Jews "back into the position they
> enjoyed before the nineteenth century-politically autonomous, culturally
> whole, and racially pure" (Efron 1994, 136). Zollschan, whose book on "the
> Jewish racial question" went through five editions and was well known to
> both Jewish and gentile anthropologists (Efron 1994, 155), praised Houston
> Stewart Chamberlain and advocated Zionism as the only way to retain Jewish
> racial purity from the threat of mixed marriages and assimilation (Gilman
> 1993, 109; Nicosia 1985, 18).  Zollschan's description of the phenotypic,
> and by implication genetic commonality of Jews around the world is
> striking. He notes that the same Jewish faces can be seen throughout the
> Jewish world among Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Oriental Jews. He also
> remarked on the same mix of body types, head shapes, skin, and hair and
> eye pigmentation in these widely separated groups (see Efron 1994, 158).
> Arthur Ruppin, the German Zionist and demographer, was an important
> historical figure who "represented and symbolized the second era in
> Zionism" (Bein 1971, xix) and whose writings were sufficiently well known
> to merit comment by American leaders of the Reform movement (Levenson
> 1989, 327). (Werner Sombart [1913, 285] cited Ruppin and Elias Auerbach to
> support his impression that "to-day, so far as I can make out, the . . .
> view prevails that from the days of Ezra to these the Jews have kept
> strictly apart" and that as a result they constituted a distinct racial
> group.) Ruppin consistently advocated the view that there was an ethical
> imperative to retain Jewish racial purity. Ruppin had a clear conception
> of the importance of Jewish "racial types" as central to historical
> Judaism.  In an argument reminiscent of the long history of
> conceptualizing Judaism as a "light unto the nations," Ruppin (1913, 218)
> stressed that the Jewish intellectual ability was utilized for humanity as
> a whole, "for the common good." In Ruppin's view, Jews have had an immense
> positive influence on civilization, one that has benefited all humans. But
> racial admixture would destroy the unique Jewish contribution to
> civilization-an argument which, apart from its assertion of Jewish ethical
> altruism vis-à-vis the gentiles, is reminiscent of those presented by many
> theorists of Aryan racial superiority.
>
> We can thus accept the high intellectuality of the Jews without reserve,
> and are justified in desiring to preserve this high human type . . . as a
> separate entity, unmixed, because this is the only possible way to
> preserve and develop the race-character. Any highly cultivated race
> deteriorates rapidly when its members mate with a less cultivated race,
> and the Jew naturally finds his equal and match most easily within the
> Jewish people. We cannot absolutely assert that the mixture of Jews with
> other races invariably produces a degenerate posterity. . . . It is
> certain, however, that by intermarriage the race-character is lost, and
> the descendants of a mixed marriage are not likely to have any remarkable
> gifts. . . . Intermarriage being clearly detrimental to the preservation
> of the high qualities of the race, it follows that it is necessary to try
> to prevent it and to preserve Jewish separatism. (Ruppin 1913, 227-228)
>
> Another noteworthy Jewish racialist thinker was Martin Buber, the
> prominent Zionist and theologian, who wrote of the Jewish Volkgeist and
> advocated greater pride in the distinctive Jewish racial features: "A Volk
> is held together by primary elements: blood, fate-insofar, as it rests
> upon the development of blood-and culturally creative power-insofar as it
> is conditioned by the individuality which arises from the blood" (in
> Ragins 1980, 157). Buber idealized the hyper-collectivist Jewish Hasidim
> as a basis for contemporary Judaism because of their intensely emotional
> commitment to the group and their mystical love for the Volk (Mosse 1970,
> 85). "Just as the Germans attempted to root this mystical tradition in
> their national mystique, so Buber eventually attempted to embody this
> Mythos in the Jewish Volk, exemplified by the Hasidim" (Mosse 1970, 87).
> As a result of Buber's influence, Zionist publications during the Weimar
> years "were replete with favorable references to 'the mysticism of blood,'
> 'racial genius,' and the 'Jewish people's soul' " (Niewyk 1980, 131).
> This Volkisch idea of a membership in a highly cohesive group was pursued
> by a great many Jewish youth who, by World War I and thereafter, "found an
> answer to their Jewishness through a deepening of the experience that
> bound them together, with their own age and kind, in a meaningful
> community" by joining the Jewish Bund (Mosse 1970, 98-99). The concurrent
> German Youth Movement satisfied similar desires for membership in cohesive
> groups among gentile Germans. Although the German Youth Movement tended to
> not fuse Volkische thinking with racism and exclusivism even into the
> Weimar period (Mosse 1970, 20), many Jewish and gentile German youth were
> in fact members of mirror-image, emotionally compelling, cohesive groups:
> "Once again one is struck by the common strivings of Jewish and German
> youth" (Mosse 1970, 99).
> Interestingly, Franz Oppenheimer decried the racialist tendencies of some
> of his fellow Zionists, noting that "a racial pride swaggered which was
> nothing other than the photographic negative of anti-Semitism" (in Ragins
> 1980, 124)-a comment that reinforces the "mirror-image" theme of this
> chapter and indicates that for many Jewish Zionists, Jewish racialism went
> beyond merely asserting and shoring up the ethnic basis of Judaism, to
> embrace the idea of racial superiority. Consistent with the
> anti-assimilationist thrust of Zionism, very few Zionists intermarried,
> and those who did, such as Martin Buber, found that their marriages were
> problematic within the wider Zionist community (Norden 1995). In 1929 the
> Zionist leaders of the Berlin Jewish community condemned intermarriage as
> a threat to the "racial purity of stock" and asserted its belief that
> "consanguinity of the flesh and solidarity of the soul" were essential for
> developing a Jewish nation, as was the "will to establish a closed
> brotherhood over against all other communities on earth" (in Niewyk 1980,
> 129-130).
> Jewish assertions of racial superiority may have been tempered somewhat by
> the anti-Semitic climate of Central Europe. For example, Ignaz Zollschan
> argued that Jewish intellectual superiority was the result of heredity
> resulting from eugenic practices within the Jewish community-a view for
> which there is ample empirical support (PTSDA, Ch. 7): Jews who were not
> adept at religious study lost out in the "struggle for existence" (see
> Efron 1994, 106). However, Zollschan's lauding of Jewish achievements and
> Jewish racial superiority had a "defensive" ring that Efron (1994, 162)
> attributes to the anti-Semitic climate surrounding him. On the other hand,
> Joseph Jacobs, writing in a much less anti-Semitic England, could freely
> discuss his views on the intellectual and moral superiority of Jews in the
> most respectable academic circles, including those frequented by his
> mentor, Sir Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin and the founder of biometrical
> genetics and the eugenics movement).
> Assertions of Zionist racialism continued into the National Socialist
> period, where they dovetailed with National Socialist attitudes. Joachim
> Prinz, a German Jew who later became the head of the American Jewish
> Congress, celebrated Hitler's ascent to power because it signaled the end
> of the Enlightenment values which had resulted in assimilation and mixed
> marriage among Jews:
> We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of
> belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built upon the
> principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honoured and
> respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. . . . For
> only he who honours his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude
> of honour towards the national will of other nations. (From J. Prinz, Wir
> Juden [We Jews] [1934]; in Shahak 1994, 71-72; italics in text)
>
> In 1938, Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress and
> the World Jewish Congress, stated that "I am not an American citizen of
> the Jewish faith, I am a Jew. . . . Hitler was right in one thing. He
> calls the Jewish people a race and we are a race."
> The common ground of the racial Zionists and their gentile counterparts
> included the exclusion of Jews from the German Volksgemeinschaft (Nicosia
> 1985, 19). Indeed, shortly after Hitler came to power, the Zionist
> Federation of Germany submitted a memorandum to the German government
> outlining a solution to the Jewish question and containing the following
> remarkable statement. The Federation declared that the Enlightenment view
> that Jews should be absorbed into the nation state
>
> discerned only the individual, the single human being freely suspended in
> space, without regarding the ties of blood and history or spiritual
> distinctiveness. Accordingly, the liberal state demanded of the Jews
> assimilation [via baptism and mixed marriage] into the non-Jewish
> environment. . . . Thus it happened that innumerable persons of Jewish
> origin had the chance to occupy important positions and to come forward as
> representatives of German culture and German life, without having their
> belonging to Jewry become visible. Thus arose a state of affairs which in
> political discussion today is termed "debasement of Germandom," or
> "Jewification." . . . Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the
> Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational
> pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted
> in one's own tradition. (In Dawidowicz 1976, 150-152)
>
> Most Jews did not openly espouse racialist views in the period we are
> discussing-at least partly because they were aware of the ultimate danger
> of racialist thinking to Judaism (Ragins 1980, 137). Racialist rhetoric by
> Jews was publicly condemned by some Jewish leaders because of fears of
> anti-Semitism (Ragins 1980, 137). Recognizing this danger, a major focus
> of the Zentralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central
> Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith)-the main self-defense
> organ of German liberal Judaism-was to combat what it termed "racial
> Semitism" (Levy 1975, 156).
> However, it is quite possible that racialist views were more often
> expressed privately than publicly. Lindemann (1997, 91) notes that "even
> within those universalistic convictions were nuances with racist
> undertones" and cites the French-Jewish writer Julian Benda who observed
> that there "were certain magnates, financiers rather than literary men,
> with whom the belief in the superiority of their race and in the natural
> subjection of those who did not belong to it, was visibly sovereign." A
> number of Jewish leftist politicians in France "harbored a sense of their
> special merit or destiny as Jews to be political leaders, what they
> considered their "right to rule.' " There is considerable evidence that
> German Jews during this period were engaged in deception and
> self-deception regarding their behavior and motivations (see Chapters
> 6-8), so it would not be at all surprising to find Jews who sincerely
> believed Judaism had no ethnic connotations and nevertheless opposed
> intermarriage and conversion, as well as others who believed it privately
> but denied it publicly for political reasons.
> Ragins (1980, 85) notes the tension between the statements of liberal Jews
> that Judaism was nothing more than a religion and their recognition that
> traditional Judaism had been far more than that. The claim that Judaism
> was nothing more than a religion conflicted with the reality that "there
> was a sense of relatedness and cohesiveness among Jews which seemed to
> extend beyond the lines drawn by religious factions, uniting Orthodox and
> Reform" (Ragins 1980, 85). Recognizing this, the Zentralverein at times
> acknowledged that Judaism was more than simply a religion and should be
> defined by a "consciousness of common descent [Abstammung]" (Ragins 1980,
> 85), or race (p. 86). Thus in 1928 the director of the Zentralverein
> asserted that Jews had been a race since biblical times and concluded that
> "extraction remains, that is, the racial characteristics are still
> present, albeit diminished by the centuries; they are still present in
> external as well as mental features" (in Friedländer 1997, 119).
> The vacillation and ambivalence surrounding racial conceptualizations of
> Judaism were also present in American Reform circles in the late 19th
> century:
>
> It was not uncommon for a rabbi to make bold pronouncements about his
> desire for a universalistic society and then, in moments of frustration or
> doubt, revert to a racial understanding of the Jews. . . . While willing
> to stretch the definition of Judaism to its limits, it was clear that most
> Reformers were not willing to break the historical continuity of the
> Jewish "race." Even Solomon Schindler, . . . one of the most radical of
> Reform rabbis, felt compelled to acknowledge the racial aspect of Jewish
> identity. Despite the high universal task of Judaism, wrote Schindler, "it
> remains a fact that we spring from a different branch of humanity, that
> different blood flows in our veins, that our temperament, our tastes, our
> humor is different from yours; that, in a word, we differ in our views and
> in our mode of thinking in many cases as much as we differ in our
> features." (Goldstein 1997, 50-51)
>
> Besides the Zionists and a vacillating body of liberal Jewish opinion,
> there are several other important Jewish intellectuals who are not
> associated with Zionism but nevertheless had strongly racialist views.
> Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891), the prominent historian of Judaism, was
> enthusiastic about the proto-Zionist ideas of Moses Hess, whose work, as
> we have seen, has strong overtones of attitudes of racial superiority.
> Graetz believed that Jews could solve the world's problems and "sometimes
> seemed to think Jews would provide actual world leadership. At others it
> was to be merely an ethical example. But in either event he presented the
> Jews as a superior people" (Johnson 1988, 331). Graetz's sense of Jewish
> racial superiority was repulsive to gentiles, and there was an exchange
> with Heinrich von Treitschke in which the latter characterized Graetz as
> an exemplar of the "boasting spirit which, he alleged, was in the
> ascendant in Jewish circles and was to be regarded as a menace to the
> German empire" (in Bloch 1898, 77). Graetz's work provoked a negative
> reaction not only in Treitschke but the German academic establishment as a
> whole (Levenson 1989, 329). While intellectuals like Treitschke saw
> Christianity as a unifying force for the German nation, Graetz wrote to
> his friend Moses Hess that Christianity was a "religion of death," and
> Hess wrote to Graetz of his delight in "scourging Germans." Graetz
> perceived Jews as battling to destroy Christian culture: "we must above
> all work to shatter Christianity" (in Lindemann 1997, 91). These attitudes
> among prominent Jewish intellectuals exemplify the theme of cultural
> conflict between Jews and gentiles as a theme of anti-Semitism (p. 50ff).
> There is a sense of Jewish racial superiority in Graetz's writings as well
> as hints that he believed in the importance of racial purity.
>
> There were but two nations of creative mind who originated [high] culture
> and raised humanity from the slough of barbarity and savagery. These two
> were the Hellenic and the Israelite people. There was no third race of
> coadjutors. . . . If the modern Roman, German, and Sclavonic nations, both
> on this side and on the other side of the ocean, could be despoiled of
> what they received from the Greeks and the Israelites, they would be
> utterly destitute. (Graetz 1898, VI, 706)
>
> However, the Jews have continued as a creative race into the present,
> while the Greeks gradually merged with the barbarians and lost their
> distinctiveness-a point remarkably similar to Houston Stewart
> Chamberlain's "chaos of peoples" idea described above, in which the
> decline of the ancient world is attributed to loss of racial purity:
>
> [The Greeks] despaired of their bright Olympus, and at best only retained
> sufficient courage to resort to suicide. The Greeks were not gifted with
> the power of living down their evil fortune, or of remaining true to
> themselves when dispossessed of their territories; and whether in a
> foreign country or in their own land they lost their mental balance, and
> became merged in the medley of barbaric nations.
>
> The psychoanalytic movement was also characterized by ideas of Jewish
> intellectual superiority, racial consciousness, national pride, and Jewish
> solidarity (Klein 1981, 143).  Freud and his colleagues felt a sense of
> "racial kinship" with their Jewish colleagues and a "racial strangeness"
> to others (Klein 1981, 142; see also Gilman 1993, 12ff, and The Culture of
> Critique, Ch. 4). Commenting on Ernest Jones, one of his disciples, Freud
> wrote that "the racial mixture in our band is very interesting to me. He
> [Jones] is a Celt and hence not quite accessible to us, the Teuton [i.e.,
> C. G. Jung] and the Mediterranean man [himself as a Jew]" (in Gay 1988,
> 186).
> Perhaps the clearest indication of Freud's racialist thinking is his
> comment to a Jewish woman who had previously intended to have a child by
> C. G. Jung in order to reconcile the Aryan/Jewish split in psychoanalysis
> at the time. Freud observed "I must confess . . . that your fantasy about
> the birth of the Savior to a mixed union did not appeal to me at all. The
> Lord, in that anti-Jewish period, had him born from the superior Jewish
> race. But I know these are my prejudices" (in Yerushalmi 1991, 45).
> A year later after the woman had given birth to a child by a Jewish
> father, Freud wrote,
>
> I am, as you know, cured of the last shred of my predilection for the
> Aryan cause, and would like to take it that if the child turned out to be
> a boy he will develop into a stalwart Zionist. He or she must be dark in
> any case, no more towheads. Let us banish all these will-o'-the-wisps!
>       I shall not present my compliments to Jung in Munich. . . . We are
> and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand
> and appreciate us. (In Yerushalmi 1991, 45)
>
> In the following passage from Moses and Monotheism, the Jews are proposed
> to have fashioned themselves to become a morally and intellectually
> superior people:
>
> The preference which through two thousand years the Jews have given to
> spiritual endeavour has, of course, had its effect; it has helped to build
> a dike against brutality and the inclination to violence which are usually
> found where athletic development becomes the ideal of the people. The
> harmonious development of spiritual and bodily activity, as achieved by
> the Greeks, was denied to the Jews. In this conflict their decision was at
> least made in favour of what is culturally the more important. (Freud
> 1939, 147)
>
> Freud's attitudes were fully mirrored by non-Jewish theorists (Gilman
> 1993, 12ff).  Jung's ideas on racial archetypes differ from Freud's views
> only in the type of traits emphasized as characteristic of the two groups.
> While Freud emphasized the brutality, violence, and enslavement to the
> senses of the gentiles versus the spirituality, intellectuality, and moral
> superiority of the Jews, Jung held the view that the advantage of the
> "Aryans" was in their energy and untapped potential resulting from their
> relatively recent rise from barbarism. On the other hand, Jews, required
> to exist as a minority in a host society, could create no genuine culture
> of their own. After the National Socialists assumed power, Jung became a
> prominent spokesman for the view that there were differences between
> Jewish and Aryan psychology.  In a 1934 article Jung emphasized that
> psychoanalysis had developed a very negative conception of the German
> character:
>
> In my opinion it has been a grave error in medical psychology up till now
> to apply Jewish categories . . . indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic
> Christendom. Because of this the most precious secret of the Germanic
> peoples-their creative and intuitive depth of soul-has been explained by a
> morass of banal infantilism, while my own warning voice has for decades
> been suspected of anti-Semitism. (In Yerushalmi 1991, 48-49)
> Indeed, as elaborated in The Culture of Critique, a central function of
> Freud's Totem and Taboo appears to have been to combat "everything that is
> Aryan-religious" (in Gay 1988, 331), a comment that illustrates the extent
> to which Freud, like Hess and Graetz, viewed his work as an aspect of
> competition between ethnic groups. The early psychoanalytic movement
> self-consciously perceived itself as representing a Jewish intellectual
> offensive against "Aryan-Christian" culture in which religion and race
> overlapped entirely.
> Even in the absence of an explicitly racialist conceptualization of the
> differences between Germans and Jews, there was a feeling of estrangement
> and of being different peoples on both sides of the ethnic divide. Such
> attitudes were common in anti-Semitic writings throughout the 19th century
> (Rose 1990) and continued in the 20th century. In the correspondence of
> the early 1930s between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Arendt fails to
> identify with Max Weber's "imposing patriotism." "For me Germany means my
> mother tongue, philosophy, and literature" (in Kohler & Saner 1992).
> Jaspers replies, "I find it odd that you as a Jew want to set yourself
> apart from what is German. . . . When you speak of mother tongue,
> philosophy, and literature, all you need add is historical-political
> destiny, and there is no difference left at all" (in Kohler & Saner 1992).
> Arendt, however, self-consciously rejects being part of this destiny of
> the German people. The concept of a "historico-political destiny of a
> people" clearly conceptualizes separate "peoples," but in Weber's view
> membership in the German people is open to Jews. Arendt is rejecting such
> membership and implicitly accepting the idea of a single culture but two
> separate peoples.
> General feelings of peoplehood and thinking in terms of racial essences
> and racial differences were thus part of the Zeitgeist of the
> period-characteristic of Jewish as well as gentile intellectuals.
>
> The breakdown of the liberal order during the closing decades of the
> nineteenth century [in Austria] brought back to the surface the opposing
> assumptions about social integration that had distinguished the Jewish
> from the non-Jewish sensibility. Annoyed by the parochial attachments of
> other people, and unreceptive to the idea of a pluralistic state, many
> non-Jews interpreted the Jewish assertion of pride as a subversion of the
> "enlightened" or egalitarian state. The Jewish stress on national or
> racial pride reinforced the non-Jewish perception of the Jew as a
> disruptive social force. (Klein 1981, 146)
> CONCLUSION
> National Socialism and Judaism as Mirror-Image Group Strategies
> From the perspective developed here, the acceptance of the ideology of an
> anti-Semitic group strategy among the NSDAP elite may well have been
> caused or at least greatly facilitated by the presence of Judaism as a
> very salient and successful racially exclusive antithetical group strategy
> within German society. In 1905, well before the National Socialists came
> to power, the anti-Semitic racial theorist Curt Michaelis asserted a
> relationship between Jewish racial pride (Rassenstolz) and anti-Semitism:
> "The Rassenstolz promoted race hatred in its sharpest form-the consequence
> of which is lasting race war. . . . The Jewish people stands principally
> in battle against the whole world; naturally, therefore, the whole world
> [is] against the Jews" (in Efron 1994, 170).
> There is an eerie sense in which National Socialist ideology was a mirror
> image of traditional Jewish ideology. As in the case of Judaism, there was
> a strong emphasis on racial purity and on the primacy of group ethnic
> interests rather than individual interests. Like the Jews, the National
> Socialists were greatly concerned with eugenics. Like the Jews, there was
> a powerful concern with socializing group members into accepting group
> goals and with the importance of within-group altruism and cooperation in
> attaining these goals.
> Both groups had very powerful internal social controls that punished
> individuals who violated group goals or attempted to exploit the group by
> freeloading. The National Socialists enacted a broad range of measures
> against Jews as a group, including laws against intermarriage and sexual
> contact, as well as laws preventing socialization between groups and
> restricting the economic and political opportunities of Jews. These laws
> were analogous to the elaborate social controls within the Jewish
> community to prevent social contact with gentiles and to produce high
> levels of economic and political cooperation.
> Corresponding to the religious obligation to reproduce and multiply
> enshrined in the Tanakh, the National Socialists placed a strong emphasis
> on fertility and enacted laws that restricted abortion and discouraged
> birth control. In a manner analogous to the traditional Jewish religious
> obligation to provide dowries for poor girls, the National Socialists
> enacted laws that enabled needy young couples to marry by providing them
> loans repayable by having children.
> As in the society depicted in the Tanakh and throughout Jewish history,
> the National Socialists regarded people who could not prove the genetic
> purity of their ancestry as aliens with fewer rights than Germans, with
> the result that the position of Jews in National Socialist society was
> analogous to the position of the Nethinim or the Samaritans in ancient
> Israelite society, or converts in historical Jewish societies, or the
> Palestinians in contemporary Israel.  As with Israel, the state had become
> the embodiment of an exclusivist ethnic group.
> Both groups had a well-developed ideology of historical struggle involving
> the group. Jewish resistance during the period "was founded on militant
> movements for Zionism, socialism, or Communism-movements that had always
> provided their members with a strong sense of historical struggle and an
> identification with group goals rather than individual satisfaction" (Kren
> & Rappaport 1980, 114)-clearly a statement that could apply not only to
> Zionism but to traditional Judaism as a whole. We have seen that the
> National Socialists had a similar ideology of historical struggle and
> self-sacrifice. Gordon (1984, 114) states that "it was clearly Hitler's
> conception that he was working for group goals-those of the 'Aryan people'
> and that his individual fate mattered little."
> In this regard, Hitler's attitude that death was the only honorable fate
> for himself and his followers was entirely similar to that of the Jewish
> resistors of the period (Gordon 1984, 115). Kren and Rappaport (1980, 217)
> describe a situation in which "the youth-the best, the most beautiful, the
> finest that the Jewish people possessed-spoke and thought only about an
> honorable death . . . befitting an ancient people with a history
> stretching back over several thousand years."
>
> While intra-societal conflict between Jews and gentiles tends to be
> associated with the development of anti-individualist Western societies,
> the absence of conflict between powerful and impermeable ethnic groups may
> be a necessary condition for the development of the relatively
> individualistic Western societies of the post-Enlightenment world. This
> proposal is highly congruent with the social identity perspective of group
> conflict: as societies become structured around competing groups, people
> form strong group allegiances incompatible with individualism. Such a
> society is incompatible with the notion of individual rights because group
> interests become paramount: Within the ingroup, individual rights and
> interests must be sharply curtailed in the interests of group cohesion and
> the attainment of group interests. The context of between-group
> competition results in group membership rather than individual behavior or
> merit becoming the most important criterion of personal assessment. A
> Manichean morality of ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility develops
> that is completely incompatible with individualism.
>
> This hypothesis is consistent with the fact that the Enlightenment and the
> reemergence of individualism in Western Europe occurred most prominently
> in England and France, from which Jews had been almost completely
> excluded, while "the basic fact about German history since the eighteenth
> century has been the failure of the Enlightenment to take root" (Mosse
> 1964, 21-22).
> It was a failure that was undoubtedly made the more likely by the fact
> that throughout the entire era, liberal political views were strongly
> supported by Jews and were perceived as benefiting Jews-a fact that the
> opponents of these ideas never failed to emphasize. Indeed, a social
> identity perspective would expect that initially minor differences between
> the groups (e.g., Jews tending toward liberal internationalism, gentiles
> toward conservative nationalism) would become increasingly polarized as
> group conflict escalated. Personal identity would eventually become
> increasingly demarcated not only by ethnicity but also by political
> attitudes, with the result that the political beliefs of the opposition
> become an important, negatively evaluated marker of outgroup membership.
> For a German, to be a liberal would eventually be tantamount to favoring a
> negatively perceived outgroup.
> Political liberalism was the antithesis of the strong desire of many
> Germans to develop a powerful, highly cohesive nation. For many
> anti-Semites, most notably the anti-Semitic Volkische intellectuals, such
> as Paul de LaGarde, negative attitudes toward Jews were intimately
> intertwined with a loathing of liberalism and unrestrained, irresponsible
> capitalism, combined with a strong desire for a powerful sense of
> community (Stern 1961, 64, 66).  Indeed, late-19th-century Zionists
> commonly believed that an important source of opposition to liberalism
> among gentiles stemmed from the perception that liberalism benefited Jews
> in competition with gentiles; thus Theodor Herzl believed that
> "emancipation had placed an intolerably heavy strain on Austrian liberals,
> who had to defend an economic system that eased the way for recent
> outsiders into positions of prominence" (Kornberg 1993, 180).
> The hypothesis that individualism is incompatible with group-based
> conflict is also consistent with Américo Castro's (1954, 497; see also
> Castro 1971) perspective that the Enlightenment could not develop in a
> Spain fraught with competition between ethnic groups: "From such premises
> it was impossible that there should be derived any kind of modern state,
> the sequel, after all, of the Middle Ages' hierarchic harmony." Similarly,
> Grayzel (1933, 83) comments that the exclusion of Jews from Christian
> society, which was the focus of ecclesiastical policy in the 13th century,
> might have occurred even in the absence of the Church's actions; another
> factor besides religious difference that he argues might have led to
> exclusion was racial: "The Jews persistently refused to mingle their blood
> with that of their gentile neighbors at a time when racial intermingling
> was laying the foundations of the modern national state."
> The implication is that the Western tradition of muted individualism and
> its concomitant democratic and republican political institutions are
> unlikely to survive the escalation of intrasocietal group-based
> competition for resources that is such a prominent theme of contemporary
> American society. I have previously quoted Pulzer's (1964, 327) comment,
> "The Jew could flourish only in the sort of classical Liberal society that
> existed in Western Europe and that the late nineteenth century had
> introduced to Central Europe." While Judaism flourishes in a classical
> liberal, individualist society, ultimately Judaism is incompatible with
> such a society, since it unleashes powerful group-based competition for
> resources within the society, which in turn lead to highly collectivist
> gentile movements incompatible with individualism. It is also noteworthy
> that the 19th-century liberal critics of Judaism typically assumed that it
> would disappear as a result of complete cultural and genetic
> assimilation-a sort of tacit understanding that a liberal society required
> a fairly high degree of cultural uniformity.
> My view, which I elaborate in The Culture of Critique, is that Western
> societies have a tendency to seek an equilibrium state of hierarchic
> harmony among the social classes in which there are powerful controls on
> extreme individualism among the elite classes. This tendency toward
> hierarchic harmony-a paradigmatic feature of the Christian Middle
> Ages-combined with assimilationism and individualism has been a powerful
> force in breaking down barriers within society. The difficulty for a group
> strategy like Judaism is that, if assimilation fails, the Western
> tendencies toward universalism and individualism are abandoned. From this
> perspective, it is no accident that the National Socialist theorist Alfred
> Rosenberg regarded the Western concepts of universalism and individualism
> as anathema: Both concepts were incompatible with National Socialism as a
> closed ethnic group strategy. It is in this sense that the individualist,
> universalist strands of Western culture are indeed incompatible with
> Judaism.
> Finally, given the Western tendency toward "muted individualism" and
> hierarchic harmony, there is the suggestion that in the absence of a hated
> and feared outgroup such as the Jews, there would be a tendency toward
> decomposition of collectivist, authoritarian social structures in the
> West. From this perspective, the apparently primitive Western tendency
> toward a significant degree of individualism, possibly deriving ultimately
> from a unique ancestral environment (see PTSDA, Ch. 8), results in an
> inertial tendency toward assimilatory, reproductively egalitarian, and
> moderately individualistic societies. However, these tendencies may be
> altered in the direction of authoritarian collectivism under conditions of
> perceived intrasocietal group-based competition, as discussed throughout
> this and the previous two chapters.
> Egalitarianism and Western Group Strategies
> It has been noted that National Socialism was characterized by a
> significant degree of within-group egalitarianism. This tendency toward
> within-group egalitarianism can also be seen in the conscious attempt to
> portray Hitler as an idealistic, ascetic hero who tirelessly pursued group
> interests rather than his own interests. This portrayal of Hitler had some
> basis in reality well before he came to power, and it later became a
> prominent feature of National Socialist propaganda (Bracher 1970, 66).
> Clearly, a fundamental feature of National Socialism was the belief that
> within the group there would be significant reciprocity, cooperation, even
> altruism, and that differences in rank would not be closely tied to
> variation in the markers of reproductive success.
> From an evolutionary perspective under conditions of exogamy, the appeal
> of a group strategy is likely to be increased by the belief that other
> members of the group, and especially the leaders, are personally ascetic.
> In a despotic situation, lower-status males are more likely to perceive
> themselves as exploited by upper-status males and as benefiting little
> from cooperation or altruism. Self-sacrifice and voluntary cooperation in
> such a situation are expected to be minimal because the benefits of such
> behavior are more likely to accrue to the despot while the costs are borne
> by the lower-status males. At the extreme, if the lower-status male is a
> slave, cooperation and self-sacrifice are expected to only occur as the
> result of coercion (see also PTSDA, Ch. 1).
> The appeal of asceticism among leaders would be expected to increase
> dramatically in a situation where the group as a whole has relatively
> little genetic cohesiveness. I propose that because of the low degree of
> genetic relatedness within the society, cohesive and anti-individualistic
> Western group strategies tend to be characterized by leaders who accept
> asceticism, celibacy, or in general do not have relatively high
> reproductive success compared to the others in the movement. As indicated
> in PTSDA (Chs. 6, 8), the high levels of endogamy and consanguinity of
> Jewish groups are an important aspect of Judaism as a group evolutionary
> strategy, because they result in individual fitness being correlated with
> group success. Individual Jews are therefore expected to be much more
> tolerant of large differences in resources and reproductive success within
> the Jewish community and more tolerant of the authoritarian political
> structure of the traditional Jewish community; this is the case not only
> because they benefit from Jewish charity, but also because they benefit
> genetically to a considerable extent when other Jews succeed.
> However, in an exogamous, assimilative Western society, lower-status
> individuals benefit less from the success of upper status individuals. A
> significant degree of personal asceticism in leaders may therefore be
> necessary in order to obtain the allegiance of the lower orders. The
> suggestion, then, is that ultimately exogamy and genetic assimilationism
> are the reasons that reproductive egalitarianism tends to be
> characteristic of Western collectivist movements. As reviewed in MacDonald
> (1995b), there has indeed been a strong trend toward reproductive leveling
> in Western societies beginning in the Middle Ages. The Franciscan and
> Dominican friars who spearheaded the anti-Semitism and collectivist
> tendencies of the medieval period also led ascetic lives despite their
> origins in the middle and upper-middle classes. Their activities appear to
> have been critical to the development of the intense religious fervor and
> commitment characteristic of all levels of medieval society-an integral
> component of the societas Christiana. For example, Lawrence (1994, 126)
> notes that "the voluntary poverty and self-imposed destitution that
> identified the early Mendicants with the humblest and most deprived
> sections of the population, in loud contrast to the careerism and
> ostentation of the secular clergy and the corporate wealth and
> exclusiveness of the monasteries, moved the conscience and touched the
> generosity of commercial communities."
> St. Francis and St. Dominic . . . gave to the Church a new form of
> religious life, which had an immense and permanent appeal, and one which
> both attracted a new type of recruit and in its turn inspired an
> apostalate to the laity, to the heretic and to the heathen. Not only did
> the appearance of the friars rescue the western church from its drift
> toward heresy and schism, but the new warmth of devotional life, the
> preaching, the confessing and the daily counsel of the friars gave a new
> strength to the lower level of Christian society and indirectly acted as a
> powerful agent of spiritual growth and social union, thus inevitably
> compensating for the growing power of legalism and political motives at
> the higher levels of church life. (Knowles & Obolensky 1968, 345)
>
> Moreover, while Western medieval reproductive altruism occurred as an
> aspect of commitment to a collectivist group, reproductive leveling
> continued after the collapse of the medieval church (MacDonald 1995b) and
> continues in contemporary individualistic and democratic Western
> societies. Thus the sex lives of the presidents of the United States are
> closely scrutinized for suggestions that they have not been monogamous.
> And even if public figures engage in non-monogamous sex, they do it
> clandestinely, since it would be political suicide to publicize the fact
> and take pride in it.
> As in the case of Judaism, therefore, but for somewhat different reasons,
> the group must be viewed as an important level of adaptation in
> conceptualizing historical Western societies.
> The foregoing suggests a theoretical association between exogamy and
> egalitarianism that transcends the individualism/collectivism dichotomy
> which has been central to my treatment. Political coalition building in
> exogamous societies tends to result in attempts at egalitarian social
> controls on the leadership, because lower-status males have a powerful
> interest in controlling the reproductive behavior of the elite. Such
> attempts may not succeed, so that a despotism is always a possibility.
> Nevertheless, exogamy implies that lower-status individuals do not benefit
> from the reproductive success of the elite, and as a result popular
> support of either individualist or collectivist political entities is
> facilitated by reproductive egalitarianism.
> NOTES

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