Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (review)

In this critical study, Alan Steinweis traces how German scholars—particularly racial theorists, social scientists, and theologians—provided the Third Reich with academic legitimacy and knowledge, and in some cases contributed directly to the radicalization of anti-Jewish policies. The Nazi nadir in German scholarship will not come as a surprise to readers familiar with the pioneering postwar studies of Max Weinreich and George Mosse, but the specific manner in which scholars manipulated their findings and the various forces that eroded the standards and integrity of scholarship are significant details that Steinweis uncovers and analyzes. His exploration of Nazi-era research on Jewish history and Judaism yields new insights about the "perversion of scholarship by politics and ideology" (p. 1).

An authority on the Third Reich's cultural and intellectual history, Steinweis is well equipped to track the transformation of Jewish studies from a field that was largely dominated by Jewish scholars prior to the 1930s to one taken over by Nazi academics with antisemitic agendas. He offers a rich survey of the careers and publications of Hans F. K. Günther, Wilhelm Grau, Karl Alexander von Müller, Gerhard Kittel, Karl Georg Kuhn, Eugen Fischer, Peter-Heinz Seraphim and their emerging academic progeny, Walter Dornfeldt, Alexander Paul, and Klaus Schickert, to name a few. But ultimately it is in Seraphim, a leading "Jew expert" of the Reich, that Steinweis finds the embodiment of all the major trends: "the quest for scientific legitimacy; the pretense of intellectual objectivity; the self-distancing from cruder forms of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda; the desire to make the knowledge produced by scholarship usable by the makers of policy; and, perhaps most salient, the eagerness to exploit Jewish self-knowledge" (p. 143).

Given the centrality of antisemitism and the significance of the "Final Solution" in the Third Reich, one might wonder why little has been published on Jewish studies. Steinweis explains that the distinction between Nazi pseudo-science and "real" science or "serious" scholarship is one of hindsight. All too often Nazi scholars of Judaism have been dismissed as a bunch of charlatans and misguided careerists. Yet these scholars considered their own work path-breaking, correct, scientific, urgent, and necessary; and, as Steinweis ably shows, many of them continued their careers after the war and mentored another generation of researchers. Steinweis asks whether "Nazi Jewish research, or at least some of it, could be considered legitimate scholarship, despite its repugnant ideological bias" (p. 3).

In the pre-Nazi era one of the initial challenges of German völkisch scholars was to develop a new generation of experts on Jewry who were German, not Jewish, and therefore, in their eyes, would provide a true perspective on the history of the Jewish people as a separate race, culture, and religion. By the early 1940s, the field had expanded considerably, bolstered by state funding that resulted in more professorships, courses, and dissertations across faculties in the Greater German Reich. But, as Steinweis elucidates, the nazification of the universities was not necessary for the furthering of research on the "Jewish Question" because government and Party leaders patronized scholars such as Walter Frank and Wilhelm Grau, establishing for them their own "extrauniversity" institutes such as the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life (established in 1939 by the Protestant theologian Walter Grundmann).

Steinweis argues that these scholars wrote for one another, not for government officials per se, and not for the public. Their work would "trickle down" (pp. 15–16) and end up in the hands of policy makers or propagandists. For example, the ideas of Wilhelm Grau appeared in cruder form in the mainstream press, and even the Nazi Party newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter reported regularly on academic lectures and programs that dealt with the "Jewish Question." Though the "lowbrow" German press may have provided more coverage of "highbrow" events, it is not clear in Steinweis's work how the...