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in South Africa from 1948 until 1993. In Nazi Germany, however, racism was rooted in biological, and therefore quasi-scientific, assumptions. Biologically based racial theories, as opposed to those that are linked to culture or religion, are particularly militant and radical because they make claims about the essential and inescapable nature of a people that are supposedly backed up by the certainty and objectivity of scientific belief. Nazi race theories Nazi ideology was fashioned out of a combination of racial anti-Semitism and social Darwinism. Anti-Semitism had been a force in European politics, especially in Eastern Europe, since the dawn of the Christian era. Its origins were largely theological: the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, and in refusing to convert to Christianity they were both denying the divinity of Jesus and endangering their own immortal souls. The association between the Jews and evil was therefore not a creation of the Nazis, but dated back to the Christian Middle Ages, a period when the Jews were first confined in ghettoes and excluded from respectable society. However, anti-Semitism intensified in the late nineteenth century. As nationalism and imperialism spread throughout Europe, Jews were subjected to increasing persecution in many countries. In France, this led to the celebrated Dreyfus affair, 1894–1906 (in which the Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was falsely charged with delivering defence secrets to the Germans) and, in Russia, it was reflected in a series of pogroms carried out against the Jews by the government of Alexander III. The character of anti-Semitism also changed during the nineteenth century. The growth of a ‘science of race’, which applied pseudo-scientific ideas to social and political issues, led to Jewish people being thought of as a race rather than a religious, economic or cultural group. Thereafter, they were defined inescapably by biological factors such as hair colour, facial characteristics and blood. Anti-Semitism was therefore elaborated into a racial theory, which assigned to the Jewish people a pernicious and degrading racial stereotype. The first attempt to develop a scientific theory of racismwas undertaken by Joseph-Arthur Gobineau. Gobineau argued that there is a hierarchy of races, with very different qualities and characteristics. The most developed and creative race is the ‘white peoples’, whose highest element Gobineau referred to as the ‘Aryans’. Jewish people, on the other hand, were thought to be fundamentally uncreative. Unlike the Nazis, however, Gobineau was a pessimistic racist, believing that, by his day, intermarriage had progressed so far that the glorious civilization built by the Aryans had already been corrupted beyond repair.
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JOSEPH ARTHUR GOBINEAU (1816–82) A French social theorist, Gobineau is widely viewed as the architect of modern racial theory. In his major work, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races ([1853– 55] 1970), Gobineau advanced a ‘science of history’ in which the strength of civilizations was seen to be determined by their racial composition. In this, ‘white’ people – and particularly the ‘Aryans’ (the Germanic peoples) – were superior to ‘black’, ‘brown’ and ‘yellow’ people, and miscegenation (racial mixing) was viewed as a source of corruption and civilizational decline.
Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
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