Readings in Jewish History: Jews and Race

It turns out I haven't done nearly as much writing this term for my Readings in Modern Jewish History course. Below is only the second writing assignment for this term and might be the last before I submit my term paper. That paper is due in the first week of May. In the meantime, I'll probably post my annotated bibliography.

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Elaborate on the connection between Jews and sexual activity according to Gillman. What is the significance of this connection in terms of the larger discourse on the Jewish body and the way in which it is viewed as sick, black etc. Muse on the way in which Gillman makes use of images. How do these images help to answer his question as to “how the representation of the Jewish body is shaped and, in turn, shapes the sense of Jewish identity.” (170)

Gilman's treatment of the connection between Jews and sexuality fits into the pattern already established in our course in the works of Hyman, Seidman, and Yerushalmi (when considering the topic vis-à-vis Freud's musings on the topic). Each of these authors has engaged the matter of the perception of Jewish men being in some way depraved, effeminate, or deranged. Seidman actually cites Gilman directly in this regard, writing that increasing visibility of homosexuality in Central Europe "coincided with the entry of Jews into the Central European bourgeoisie" (p. 97). However, whereas these authors' discussions of the intersection between Jews and sexuality remains muted and marginal to their primary exigeses, Gilman pushes these associations to their greatest extents. Remarkably, he does so without having to move the clock forward to the 1940s, demonstrating not only that the seeds of Nazi antisemitism's preoccupation with Jewish lechery began decades earlier but also that the overt association of Jews with sexually criminal behavior was already in circulation in the 1880s and well outside Central Europe.

Gilman accomplishes all this by pointing out how suspects in the Jack the Ripper case -- particularly "Leather Apron," an Eastern European Jew -- were characterized as Jewish in the public imagination. In this way, the Whitechapel murders become a synecdoche for the whole of Jewish perversion. The corpses mutilated by Jack the Ripper are likened to the phallus mutilated by circumcision and to the livestock butchered by the shochet, and the suspicion that the murderer was killing prostitutes as revenge for contracting a venereal disease is expanded to consider the common belief that Jews were carriers of syphilis. Finally, the association of Jews and prostitutes generally allows for the association of the sexually pathological to intersect with the far better established stereotype of the Jewish obsession with money. Thus, the sexualized image of "the Jew" does not replace earlier monetary or even religious motives for anti-Semitism; rather, it complements them and renders them more biological.

Arguably, the ability to communicate the visceral nature of these themes would be hampered without visual representations, which is perhaps why Gilman includes numerous plates providing examples in the chapter on the Ripper. It also becomes easier with these images -- as well as with those presented in the chapter "The Jewish Nose" -- to see the linkages between the popular art of late 19th century Europe and Der Stürmer. Moreover, Gilman uses the sexual othering of Jews to show how it coincides and intersects with racial othering. On the topic of syphilis, e.g., he writes, "It is marked upon his face as 'ethnic eczema.' It is a sign of sexual and racial corruption as surely as the composite photographs of the Jew made by Francis Galton at the time revealed the 'true face" of the Jew" (p. 125).

In this same section of the book, Gilman focuses on the internalization of these tropes by Marcel Proust, who wrestled with both his own Jewishness and his own homosexuality. The protagonist of À la recherche du temps perdu, created by a gay writer, is a Jew who marries a prostitute. Complicating these relationships further is Proust's French citizenship at a time when Jewish membership in the French nation felt tenuous but was not yet as publicly dispute as during the Dreyfus affair. In a way, how Proust negotiates his internalization of the complex relationships among sex, race, and nation is to externalize them in the form of Swann. In so doing, he creates an "arch-Jew" who is "visibly marked … as the heterosexual syphilitic, as that which Proust was not (at least in his fantasy about his own sexual identity)" (p. 126). Of course, Proust is only one example. Freud is another, but it is likely that neither of their cases was "typical." That said, the two men's conflicts of sexualized representations of Jews could indicate a larger phenomenon of self-loathing imposed by external anti-Semitism, regardless of how these conflicts are ultimately expressed or resolved.

Some Thoughts on the Genetic Fallacy and the Bell Curve

The title is something of a pun.

There's been a lot of virtual ink spilled of late on Charles Murray's book (with Richard Herrnstein) The Bell Curve, Sam Harris, and Ezra Klein, with contributions along the way by Richard Nisbett, Andrew Sullivan, and others. Of the people contributing points of view, Nisbett and especially Klein (the latter a non-expert, like myself) are closest to my own points of view. However, I don't want to specifically engage the "race-IQ controversy" here so much as comment on Murray's defense of his sources.

As I've commented before, I spent years debating Holocaust deniers, and it's probably unsurprising to most that the concentration of anti-Semites among Holocaust deniers is quite high -- the Venn diagram is essentially a perfect circle. Pointing this fact out to deniers while debating them tended to evoke a few stock responses: "you dirty Jew"; "I am not an anti-Semite, but if I were, here's why I would be"; and "facts can't be anti-Semitic."

I'd like to focus here on this third type of response. On the one hand, there is merit in pointing out that, generally speaking, it is not a fair way to dismiss someone's argument by pointing out that their sources are tainted in some way. Just because someone is an anti-Semite doesn't necessarily mean s/he is lying, with one exception -- when the topic of his/her statement is Jews. When that's the case, the charge of a genetic fallacy falls flat because, as a fallacy of irrelevance, it cannot be deployed when the topic is wholly relevant. I.e., on the topic of Jews, one's feelings about Jews are relevant.

In the same way, one's view of race is relevant when the topic is race; more specifically, if the topic is black people, then one's view of black people and their putative inferiority to whites is also relevant. That said, I don't know what Charles Murray thinks about black people -- I can guess, but it's actually neither here nor there. However, where his sources are concerned, there can be little doubt. Specifically, I want to discuss the Pioneer Fund.

Murray himself responds to concerns about the Pioneer Fund in his Afterword to The Bell Curve (I believe added for the first paperback edition, although I'm not positive), specifically Charles Lane's attack in the New York Review of Books. Murray writes, "Lane also discovered that we cite thirteen scholars who have received funding from the Pioneer Fund, founded and run (he alleged) by men who were Nazi sympathizers, eugenicists, and advocates of white racial superiority."[1] That Murray felt it necessary to insert the parenthetical comment that he did is suspect at best. It's not really in the realm of debate whether Lane's assessment of the Fund's founders and directors as Nazi sympathizers (some of them), white racial supremacists (many of them), or eugenicists (all of them -- it was the very purpose for the Fund's founding) is true.

He continues on the same page, "Never mind that the relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today’s Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to that between Henry Ford and today’s Ford Foundation."[2] This is a strange construction for Murray to use, considering that he's just cast doubt on whether the founders were as bad as Lane characterized them. Obviously, Henry Ford was a gutter anti-Semite -- the point to which Murray makes reference here -- while the Ford Foundation actually pursued civil rights goals in the 1960s and 1970s.

But Murray's comparison ultimately fails for a few reasons. First, the Ford Motor Company, which Ford founded, and the Ford Foundation, which he cofounded with son Edsel, are two separate entities. The Ford Foundation doesn't produce cars. In contrast, the Pioneer Fund is a single entity. More importantly, Murray suggests that there is no comparison between Wickliffe Draper, the Fund's founder, and its directors in 1994. This is a mostly true comparison -- Draper was openly racist and anti-Semitic and a keen admirer of Nazi eugenics; in 1994, the Fund's director was Marion Parrott, a North Carolina lawyer who maintained a low profile (although it's probably worth noting that among his closest political associates was Jesse Helms).

However, Murray's note about the Fund's directors is less important than the work that the Fund supported. Among the recipients of Pioneer Fund money under Draper was Nazi Germany's Office of Racial Policy, specifically for the production of films about Nazi eugenics. Under Parrott, among the Fund's most important beneficiaries was Roger Pearson.

Pearson is important for two reasons. First, he's important because he founded the Northern League in 1958. Have a look at some samples of their work online, such as this piece from their circular lionizing the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. See the ad in the lower left-hand corner? That's an ad for Right magazine, whose publisher was Willis Carto. To say Pearson is a fascist would be a wholly defensible statement.

Second, Pearson is important because he is cited in the Bell Curve. Not only is he cited in the Bell Curve, but in Murray's defense of basing his work on studies published in Mankind Quarterly, he never once mentions that Pearson is the journal's publisher.

The question to ask oneself at this point is not whether Murray is racist. Again, I don't know whether he is or not, although I can hypothesize on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Rather, the question to ask is why he wasn't honest about the Pioneer Fund, Mankind Quarterly, and Roger Pearson when he wrote his Afterword. Someone should ask him.

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[1] Richard J. Hernnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994), Ebook, p. A36.

[2] Ibid, pp. A36-A37.