Chamberlain #

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927)
Chamberlain was a Englishman who developed Social Darwinist theories in a racist direction that would be directly adopted by the Nazis. He moved to Germany and married Wagner’s daughter. Hitler attended his funeral.

Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1900)

THE JEWISH QUESTION

Had I been writing a hundred years ago, I should hardly have felt compelled at this point to devote a special chapter to the entrance of the Jews into western history. Of course the share they had in the rise of Christianity, on account of the peculiar and absolutely un-Aryan spirit which they instilled into it, would have deserved our full attention, as well as also the economic part which they played in all Christian countries; but an occasional mention of these things would have sufficed; anything more would have been superfluous. Herder wrote at that time:

Jewish history takes up more room in our history and more attention than it probably deserves in itself. [note]


In the meantime, however, a great change has taken place: the Jews play in Europe, and wherever European influence extends, a different part today from that which they played a hundred years ago; as Viktor Hehn expresses it, we live today in a Jewish age; [note] we may think what we like about the past history of the Jews; their present history actually takes up so much room in our own history that we cannot possibly refuse to notice them. Herder, in spite of his outspoken humanism, had expressed the opinion that:

The Jewish people is and remains in Europe an Asiatic people alien to our part of the world, bound to that old law which it received in a distant climate, and which according to its own confession it cannot do away with. [note]


Quite correct. But this alien people, everlastingly alien, because -- as Herder well remarks -- it is indissolubly bound to an alien law that is hostile to all other peoples -- this alien people has become precisely in the course of the nineteenth century a disproportionately important and in many spheres actually dominant constituent of our life. Even a hundred years ago that same witness had sadly to confess that the ruder nations of Europe were willing slaves of Jewish usury, today he could say the same of by far the greatest part of the civilised world. The possession of money in itself is, however, of least account; our governments, our law, our science, our commerce, our literature, our art ..... practically all branches of our life have become more or less willing slaves of the Jews, and drag the feudal fetter if not yet on two, at least on one leg. In the meantime the alien element emphasised by Herder has become more and more prominent; a hundred years ago it was rather indistinctly and vaguely felt; now it has asserted and proved itself, and so forced itself on the attention of even the most inattentive. The Indo-European, moved by ideal motives, opened the gates in friendship: the Jew rushed in like an enemy, stormed all positions, and planted the flag of his, to us, alien nature -- I will not say on the ruins, but on the breaches of our genuine individuality.

Are we for that reason to revile the Jews? That would be as ignoble as it is unworthy and senseless. 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. Consider with what mastery they use the law of blood to extend their power: the principal stem remains spotless, not a drop of strange blood comes in; as it stands in the Torah:

A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the lord (Deuteronomy xxiii, 2).


In the meantime, however, thousands of side branches are cut off and employed to infect the Indo-Europeans with Jewish blood. If that were to go on for a few centuries, there would be in Europe only one single people of pure race, that of the Jews; all the rest would be a herd of pseudo-Hebraic bastards, a people beyond all doubt degenerate physically, mentally, and morally.


...While the mixture is taking place, the great chief stem of the pure unmixed Jews remains unimpaired. When Napoleon, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, dissatisfied that the Jews, in spite of their emancipation, should remain in proud isolation, angry with them for continuing to devour with their shameful usury the whole of his Alsace, although every career was now open to them, sent an ultimatum to the council of their elders demanding the unreserved fusion of the Jews with the rest of the nation -- the delegates of the French Jews adopted all the articles prescribed but one, namely, that which aimed at absolute freedom of marriage with Christians. Their daughters might marry outside the Israelite people, but not their sons; the dictator of Europe had to yield. [note] This is the admirable law by which real Judaism was founded. Indeed, the law in its strictest form forbids marriage altogether between Jews and non-Jews; in Deuteronomy vii, 3, we read:

Your daughter you shall not give unto his son, nor his daughter shall you take unto your son;


but, as a rule, emphasis is laid only on the last clause; for example, in Exodus xxxiv, 16, the sons alone are forbidden to take strange daughters, not the daughters to take strange sons, and in Nehemiah xiii, after both sides have been forbidden to marry outside the race, only the marriage of a son with a foreign wife is described as a sin against god. That is also a perfectly correct view. By the marriage of a daughter with a Goy, the purity of the Jewish stem is in no way altered, while this stem thereby gets a footing in the strange camp; on the other hand, the marriage of a son with a Goya:

Makes the holy seed common,


as the book of Ezra ix, 2, drastically expresses it. [note] The possible conversion of the Goya to Judaism would not help matters: the idea of such a conversion was rightly quite strange to the older law -- for the question is one of physical conditions of descent -- but the newer law says, with enviable discernment:

Proselytes are as injurious to Judaism as ulcers to a sound body. [note]

Thus was the Jewish race kept pure in the past and it is still kept so: daughters of the house of Rothschild have married barons, counts, dukes, princes, they submit to baptism without demur; no son has ever married a European; if he did so he would have to leave the house of his fathers and the community of his people. [note]

These details are somewhat premature; they really belong to a later portion of the book; but my object has been at once and by the shortest way to meet the objection -- which unfortunately is still to be expected from many sides -- that there is no Jewish question, from which would follow that the entrance of the Jews into our history had no significance. Others, again, talk of religion: it is a question, they say, of religious differences only. Whoever says this overlooks the fact that there would be no Jewish religion if there were no Jewish nation. But there is one. The Jewish nomocracy (that is, rule of the law) unites the Jews, no matter how scattered they may be over all the lands of the world, into a firm, uniform and absolutely political organism, in which community of blood testifies to a common past and gives a guarantee for a common future. Though it has many elements not purely Jewish in the narrower sense of the word, yet the power of this blood, united with the incomparable power of the Jewish idea, is so great that these alien elements have long ago been assimilated; for nearly two thousand years have passed since the time when the Jews gave up their temporary inclination to proselytising. Of course, I must, as I showed in the preceding chapter, distinguish between Jews of noble and of less noble birth; but what binds together the incompatible parts is (apart from gradual fusing) the tenacity of life which their national idea possesses. This national idea culminates in the unshakeable confidence in the universal empire of the Jews, which Jehovah promised. Simple people who have been born Christians (as Auerbach expresses it in his sketch of Spinoza's life) fancy that the Jews have given up that hope, but they are very wrong; for:

The existence of Judaism depends upon the clinging to the Messianic hope,


as one of the very moderate and liberal Jews lately wrote. [note] The whole Jewish religion is in fact founded on this hope. The Jewish faith in god, that which can and may be called religion in their case, for it has become since the source of a fine morality, is a part of this national idea, not VICE VERSA. To assert that there is a Jewish religion but no Jewish nation is simply nonsense. [note]

The entry of the Jews into the history of the west signifies therefore beyond doubt the entrance of a definite element, quite different from and in a way opposed to all European races, an element which remained essentially the same, while the nations of Europe went through the most various phases; in the course of a hard and often cruel history it never had the weakness to entertain proposals of fraternity, but, possessed as it was of its national idea, its national past, and its national future, felt and still feels all contact with others as a pollution; thanks also to the certainty of its instinct, which springs from strict uniformity of national feeling, it has always been able to exercise a powerful influence upon others, while the Jews themselves have been influenced but skin-deep by our intellectual and cultural development. To characterise this most peculiar situation from the standpoint of the European, we must repeat the words of Herder: The Jewish people is and remains alien to our part of the world; from the standpoint of the Jew, the same fact is formulated somewhat differently; we know from a former chapter how the great free-thinking philosopher Philo put it:

Only the Israelites are men in the true sense of the word. [note]


What the Jew here says in the intolerant tone of racial pride was more politely expressed by Goethe, when he disputed the community of descent of Jews and Indo-Europeans, no matter how far back the origin was put:

We will not dispute with the chosen people the honour of its descent from Adam. We others, however, have certainly had other ancestors as well...

...

WHAT IS THE JEW?

One word in conclusion. My reply to the question, Who is the Jew? has been, in the first place, to point out whence he came, what was his physical foundation; and secondly, to reveal the leading idea of Judaism in is origin and nature. I cannot do more; for the personality belongs to the single individual, and nothing is falser than the widespread procedure of judging a people by individuals. I have brought forward neither the good Jew nor the bad Jew; no one is good, said Jesus Christ, and when is a man so utterly despicable that we would be inclined to call him unconditionally bad? Before me are lying several criminal statistics; the one set tries to prove that the Jews are the most pious and lamb-like citizens of Europe, the others assert the opposite. How both conclusions are juggled out of the same figures beats me, but I am still more surprised that people should imagine that this is the way to deal with the psychology of nations.

...One does not need to have the authentic Hittite nose to be a Jew; the term Jew rather denotes a special way of thinking and feeling. A man can very soon become a Jew without being an Israelite; often it needs only to have frequent interaction with Jews, to read Jewish newspapers, to accustom himself to Jewish philosophy, literature and art. On the other hand, it is senseless to call an Israelite a Jew, though his descent is beyond question, if he has succeeded in throwing off the fetters of Ezra and Nehemiah, and if the law of Moses has no place in his brain, and contempt of others no place in his heart.

What a prospect it would be, cries Herder, to see the Jews purely humanised in their way of thinking! [note]


But a purely humanised Jew is no longer a Jew because, by renouncing the idea of Judaism, he IPSO FACTO has left that nationality, which is composed and held together by a complex of conceptions, by a faith. With the apostle Paul we must learn that:

He is not a Jew who is one outwardly, but he is a Jew who is one inwardly. [note]


THE ARYAN

Let us attempt a glance into the depths the soul. What are the specific intellectual and moral characteristics of this Germanic race? Certain anthropologists would fain teach us that all races are equally gifted; we point to history and answer: that is a lie! The races of mankind are markedly different in the nature and also in the extent of their gift, and the Germanic races belong to the most highly gifted group, the group usually termed Aryan. Is this human family united and uniform by bonds of blood? Do these stems really all spring from the same root? I do not know and I do not much care; no affinity binds more closely than elective affinity, and in this sense the Indo-European Aryans certainly form a family....

Physically and mentally the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right, as the Stagirite expresses it, the lords of the world. Aristotle puts the matter still more concisely when he says, "Some men are by nature free, others slaves"; this perfectly expresses the moral aspect. For freedom is by no means an abstract thing, to which every human being has fundamentally a claim; a right to freedom must evidently depend upon capacity for it, and this again presupposes physical and intellectual power. One may make the assertion, that even the mere conception of freedom is quite unknown to most men. Do we not see the homo syriacus develop just as well and as happily in the position of slave as of master? Do the Chinese not show us another example of the same nature? Do not all historians tell us that the Semites and half-Semites, in spite of their great intelligence, never succeeded in founding a State that lasted, and that because every one always endeavored to grasp all power for himself, thus showing that their capabilities were limited to despotism and anarchy, the two opposites of freedom?