Rejoinder to Professor Robert Richards’ Article: “Haeckel’S Alleged
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Rejoinder to Professor Robert Richards’ Article: “Haeckel’s Alleged Anti-Semitism and Contributions to Nazi Biology.” Daniel Gasman Professor of History John Jay College and the Graduate Center City University of New York [email protected] Professor Robert J. Richards of the University of Chicago has attempted in a number of venues to discredit the hypothesis that I have advanced for many years that the German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel, was instrumental in formulating the birth of Nazi and Fascist ideology and that he was committed to a virulent form of anti-Semitism.1 Richards’ recent endeavor in this regard is reflected in an article posted on the Internet and then in slightly altered form in the pages of Biological Theory.2 The article displays either an astonishing naiveté or the calculated omission of enormous segments of relevant material, its purported revelations disclosing multiple distortions and apparent falsehoods.3 Hardly a line of the essay fails to provoke the reader to question the scholarly judgment and intellectual intention of the author. Richards alleges that there are fundamental factual misrepresentations in my scholarship and in this way I have managed to hoodwink scores of prominent writers and historians throughout the world about Haeckel’s anti-Semitism and predilection for Nazi-like ideas. This is seen, he writes, when one analyzes the well-known interview conducted with Haeckel in 1894, on the subject of anti- Semitism, by the prominent art and literary critic and member of the Monist League, Hermann Bahr. Richards suggests that the encounter with Bahr clearly indicates that Haeckel was not anti-Semitic and that in 1 fact the opposite is true and that he was an outstanding friend of German Jewry.4 Richards can manufacture such claims of revisionist feats because he excludes from his analysis more than ninety percent of the actual discussion and the summary of the remaining content can only be described as fantastical. Richards introduces an idiosyncratic alchemy that transforms Haeckel’s hostile remarks into affirmations of philo- Semitism, and makes a case that the dialogue shows that Haeckel did not define the Jews in racial terms. The trouble is, none of this is true or even remotely indicative of Haeckel’s actual point of view. Contrary to the highly questionable allegations of Richards, for Haeckel, the forum made available by Bahr presented an opportunity for justifying and supporting the international anti-Semitic movement. Richards writes: “Haeckel mentioned …that he had many good friends among Jews, ‘admirable and excellent men,’ and that these acquaintances had rendered [sic!] him without this prejudice.”5 But, in the context of the entire discussion, Haeckel’s passing remark about being free of anti-Semitism was disingenuous in the extreme as well as self serving because Haeckel went on immediately to contradict himself and to disclose overwhelming support for hostility to the Jews and opposition to the continued presence of any Jewish identity in Germany – a crucial aspect of the story that is suppressed by Richards. Richards does not divulge that Haeckel told Bahr [in the extensive sections deleted], that far from decrying opposition to the Jews, he was supportive of and sympathized with the centuries old anti-Semitic movement, and that he believed that its continued existence was required because it performed the indispensable function of compelling the Jews to assimilate, in other words, to disappear – the ominous leitmotiv of Haeckel’s reflections on the Jews.6 It was 2 constructive because it served to make the Jews aware of their own condition and was therefore a healthy movement. “Anti-Semitism,” Haeckel stated, “is a justifiable idea because it [seeks to] free the Jews from their separatist behavior, and desires that they assimilate with us completely.” Only by vanishing as a separate group – including the Enlightened and assimilated Jews of Germany – could they validate their patriotism and at the same time contribute to the national interest of Germany. Far from exhibiting admiration for the Jews, Haeckel charged the Jews themselves with generating anti-Semitism. Shrugging off all responsibility on the part of the non-Jewish world, Haeckel explained to Bahr that the durability of anti-Semitism throughout history led one to the inescapable conclusion that the Jews were in fact the source of their own misfortune and were themselves to blame for the sentiments that were often expressed against them. “I cannot believe,” Haeckel said, “that such a powerful, enduring, and great movement could have been possible without adequate cause.” He found, rather, that anti-Semitism arose from an inner justification and was not to be considered the product of a pathological state of mind. Approvingly aware of its pervasiveness, Haeckel acknowledged the existence of anti-Semitic feelings among his students and this seemed to him completely normal and predictable. According to Richards, Haeckel attributed the Jewish problem to the rise of nationalism and not to the intrinsic manifestations of race. But Haeckel explicitly declared the reverse, that while the Jewish question had indeed become imperative because of the rise of nationalism, it remained, nonetheless, and above all a “racial question” and much less a “religious and social” one;7 and this racial position provided Haeckel with an opening to vent his full fury 3 against the policy of the State permitting an escalating influx of Russian Jews into Germany. Richards, though, is not dissuaded by such contradictory remarks and pursues his misleading case further, comforting us that Haeckel did not describe the Eastern European Jews in derogatory racial terms. “[Haeckel’s] tangential reservations about Eastern-Jewish immigration were not racial or biological, certainly not of the sort favored by the Nazis, but behavioral and attitudinal, more in keeping with the distaste of the German Mandarins for the lower classes of any sort.” Eastern European Jews were to be excluded from the Second Reich, according to Richards’ account, “not because they were Jews, but because they could not be assimilated.”8 But do such interpretations of what Haeckel actually said make any sense at all? To be sure, Haeckel was again disingenuous, when he qualified his remarks to say that he did not have the Russian Jews in mind because they were Jews. But his remarks were again self-serving and contradictory, an attempt to imply his own enlightenment and civilized tolerance for differences among people. But who were the other lower classes or national groups that Haeckel wanted to exclude from German society? He certainly did not name any, though he did spell out sympathy for American exclusionary acts against Chinese immigration, racial measures he equated with the specific need for excluding the Russian Jews!9 For Haeckel, Eastern European Jewry was clearly a distasteful and inferior racial conglomerate that was intrinsically incapable of imbibing German culture and he certainly does not indicate that he would treat them as he would any other lower class or group of people, as Richards suggests. “In this matter false humanitarianism,” Haeckel intoned, “can only be harmful and I think that we have to energetically protect ourselves from the Russian Jews.” In attitudes 4 that were very close to Hitler’s view of the same group of Jews whom he viewed so myopically in Vienna as a young man, Haeckel described them as a “filthy” people with an “outlandish” appearance. Indeed, the impression he conveyed to Bahr was that they could hardly be considered to be human at all, and he complimented England for its attempts to exclude the very same population from its shores. In any event, if Haeckel’s testimony about the racial character of the Jewish people in the Bahr interview was not sufficiently convincing for Richards he might have turned to the pages of Haeckel’s noted book, The Riddle of the Universe [1899], where Haeckel expanded upon his racial definitions of the Jews, when he denied the Jewish origin of Christ and confirmed his Aryan identity. Haeckel pointed out that Christ’s true father was not the Deity or Joseph, but rather a Greek Centurion of the Roman army who had seduced Mary. The proof of this was that Christ exhibited positive traits of personality which could not have been Jewish. As Haeckel noted: “The characteristics which distinguish [Christ’s] high and noble personality, and which give distinct impress to his religion, are certainly not Semitical; they are rather features of the higher Arian [sic!] race”10 – hardly a denial of Jewish racial identity on the part of Haeckel, or a position remote from Nazism. Richards never mentions The Riddle of the Universe in his article [except in the Bibliography], and this is a critical omission. In this work, not only are the Jews described in racial terms, but the major historical and theoretical formulation of Haeckel’s anti- Semitism is presented in extenso, a position that held the Jews to be at the root of the decline of European civilization, Europe being the victim of two thousand years of Judaic and Christian subversion – 5 Christianity itself being nothing more than a nefarious product of Judaic civilization. What Richards does not or will not admit is that Haeckel revealed himself as being deeply anti-Semitic when he postulated in The Riddle of the Universe that the Jews, as the creators of the monotheistic God, were invidiously responsible for the introduction of the religions of transcendental dualism into Western history and that they were especially culpable for the unfortunate invention of Christianity which had culminated in the accelerating decline of European society in modern times.11 Convinced of the advanced intellectual, moral, and physical decay of the European world, Haeckel held the Jews accountable for the dualistic errors that had weakened the fiber of society and disturbed the natural course of evolution.