Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (review)

116 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, by John M. Efron. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. 255 pp. $30.00. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, the world of race science, or scientific racism, which had its heyday at the beginning of this century, appears to be a weird and horrible world. Revealed as a complete blind alley in the human sciences, its way of thinking nevertheless has fueled and continues to fuel racial discrimination around the world, including the United States. More than this, its errors contributed mightily to forming the climate of opinion which made the Holocaust possible. The shock value of John Efron's book rests on the fact that there were also Jews who partook of and contributed to the development of race science and accepted its basic contention that race was an important factor in categorizing and understanding human beings. What Efron wants to show, though, is that the Jewish theorists whom he has chosen to study were actually presaging current modes of minority resistance to majority discourse by attempting an "intellectual resistance" from within the majority discourse, to hoist the "gentile discourse" ofrace science on its own petard. According to him this meant that the Jewish scientists essentially escaped the trap of scientific racism by emphasizing the role of environment and culture, "nurture," over racial "nature" in determining racial qualities and by resisting the temptations of "racial chauvinism" or claims ofracial superiority. Jewish race science, from Efron's perspective, was a liberal, humanist, progressive sort of race science. Up to a certain point, the evidence Efron has amassed in this well researched and accessible book (accessible once one has mastered the vocabulary ofbrachycephalic, round-headed, and dolichocephalic, long-headed) supports this conclusion. In introductory chapters on Gennan and British race science Efron shows the state ofracial thought in the respective countries in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and just how different the status of "the Jew" as a racial Other was in them. In Britain, with some exceptions, physical anthropologists did not think of Jews as "the Other"; in Germany "the Jew" was the primary "Other." In Britain indeed it was a Jewish scientist, Joseph Jacobs, who did most at the end ofthe century to study the Jewish "race," albeit with the express aim ofproving that Jewish characteristics were much more the result of environment than "genn-plasm." Jacobs, with his theories ofJewish racial purity, is given a chapter to himself, as is the Russian Jew Samuel Weissenberg, with his theories ofJewish racial mixture-both theories depending on how one interpreted the sacrosanct measure ofracial science, the round- or long-headedness of a group. Weissenberg is a particularly interesting case, inasmuch as he saw East European Jewry as both the result of racial mixing and as the source ofJewish creativity, but he was so caught up in the search for "authentic" Jewish culture and race that he spent a large part of his life looking for the "Urjude," the Book Reviews 117 racially pure Jew, whom he claimed to have found in Yemen. Such apparent contradictions are, as Efron says, inherent in the whole enterprise ofracial science, and Efron does a very good job in tracing such pseudo-scientific casuistry not only in Weissenberg's case but also in that of the subject of his last and key chapter, Zionist racial scientists. His depiction ofthe logical illogic ofsomeone such as Elias Auerbach, in his endeavor to prove Jewish racial purity against a whole heap ofevidence, is almost amusing. It is with the Zionists, however, that the point is reached where Efron's objectivity becomes strained. At the outset of this chapter he quotes Karl Kautsky's attack on the Zionist racial scientists, where he accuses them ofadopting the following logic: "Ifthis theory permits Christian-Teutonic patriots to declare themselves demi-gods, why should Zionist patriots not use it in order to stamp the people chosen by God as a chosen race of nature, a noble race that must be carefully guarded from any deterioration and contamination by foreign elements?" (p. 124). Efron then...