Professor Ken Gemes
The Biology of Evil: A Modern Blood Libel, Part 2

Professor Ken Gemes | The Biology of Evil A Modern Blood Libel, Part 2 | 08.04.21

- So it’s two minutes after the hour, Ken. So you know what? I’d like to just hand over to you and say thanks once again for joining us. And we are so looking forward to hearing about The Biology of Evil: A Modern Blood Libel, Part Two. Thank you.

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• Okay, hello, everybody. Just to lighten the mood, I’m going to begin with a joke. But it’s kind of relevant to what we’re going to talk about today. A few years ago, pre-COVID, I was with my family in New York, my American side of the family. And we’re sitting around having brunch, and then eventually and unfortunately, the conversation got onto Trump. I was not very pleased about this. And then blah, blah, blah, and then someone said, “You know, Trump is just like Hitler.” You know, and I just wanted to change the topic, so I said something quite strong. I said, “Look, Trump is nothing like Hitler. Hitler was an idealist. Hitler believed in things. Hitler believed in horrible things, but at least he believed in things. Trump is an opportunist. He doesn’t believe in anything.” That completely killed the conversation, and we moved on to something else, which suits me.

But I want to come back to that idea that Hitler was an idealist in the sense that he was a person moved by ideas, horrible ideas, but there were ideas there as opposed to a mere opportunist like Trump or like our prime minister, Boris Johnson. So because this is a second lecture, I’m going to repeat a little bit and rather quickly some of the stuff of the first lecture, some of which I did say very fast. So as you can see, I repeated that motif, “Universal history is perhaps the history of the different intonations given to a handful of metaphors,” ‘cause I’m talking about this metaphor of bad blood, contaminated ideas, ideas as an infection. And we see these metaphors are repeated, and they have a real historical resonance with actual events.

So it starts out as ideas and ends up as events in the real world. And that’s why I quote this wonderful sentence from Heine from 1834. Heinrich Heine, Germany’s greatest lyric poet, also Jewish, I might add. “Smile not at the fantasy that in the realm of reality there is to be expected the same revolution that has taken place in the realm of the mind. There will be played in Germany a drama which will make the French Revolution seem like an innocent idyll.” How unbelievably prophetic is that?

Okay, so now I’ll repeat some stuff, and I will be quick here. What I was trying to do last week and what I’m going to continue to do is contrast an enlightenment rhetoric of this notion of a cone of light that goes out, the cone of light of reason that takes in more and more of us, and that bit-by-bit eliminates error because error is seen as merely a species of a misapplication of the faculty of reason. We can be educated out of error, according to the enlightenment and even according to the, you know, the Christian version of things. Certain people might be stubborn in not accepting Christ as the messiah, but we can educate them.

But in the 19th century, a new biological model became more prominent, at least among a certain very influential minority. And on this model, evil is seen as a kind of infection. And what’s important about that is, you can’t educate an infection. You can’t give it ideas and ameliorate it that way. All you can do is isolate or destroy it. So if you think of evil as having wrong representation, you’re an optimist. If you think of evil as thinking wrongly, you just need to educate people. But if you think of evil as something’s wrong with our body as on the model of a virus, to use today’s notion that’s so popular, you have a different logic. You have the logic of isolation or elimination.

Okay, so last week, and this is just a repetition so I’ll be quick about it, I said a lot of people, in their rhetoric of degeneration, like Cesar Lombroso, the famous criminologist, didn’t like to use the word evil because they saw themselves as scientists, have got beyond religious dichotomies like good and evil. They tended to talk in pathological, medicalized terms such as sickness and health. But really, I think they’re just giving a secularised version of the old Christian good/evil distinction because they certainly think the degenerates are what needed to be eliminated. That is, they thought the degenerates ought not to exist.

And really, that’s a fundamental notion of evil, that which ought not to exist. So the degenerationists, I claim, are really just secularising the Christian notion of good and evil with these new medicalized terms of the healthy and the sick or the uncontaminated and the contaminated. Okay, and a bit more repetition. What’s really important for us is, there’s a convergence. The 19th century creates the idea that certain individuals or groups of individuals can be seen as a threat to public health, to the populace at large. They’re a source of infection, these so-called degenerates. And that logic of infection, as I said, demands elimination or isolation of the infectious elements.

Also in the 19th century, Jewishness gets identified with a mentality or a constellation of thought. But this is not seen as a kind of thought that’s at the level of consciousness. It’s below the level of consciousness. It’s like… It’s like now ideas are treated like an infection so that we can become infected with Judaism, Jewish ideas. The Germans use the word . It means Jew-ified. And it’s in the 20th century we see convergence of these ideas, leading to the idea that Jews as a people and Jewishness as a mode of thought constitute a source of infection. As I said, not just blood and race, but ideas themselves.

For instance, modernity are configured on the biological model of infection. So the crucial point is, both body and mind are located as sites of possible infection. And then remember, the logic of infection is isolation and elimination, not education. So this is something new I wanted to get. Duhring got in there early. Duhring was already in the 19th century, and he already put together the rhetoric of degeneration and the idea that the Jews could be seen as degenerate. Really, those ideas mainly converged in the 20th century, but he got there early. So I’ll just have some quotations from his 1881 book, “The Jewish Question as a Racial, Moral, and Cultural Question”. He talks about the unsuitable of this degenerate race. And he says… He talks about the evil of Jewification, in German, and Jewish rule.

And he says, “The Jews creep after the general corruption.” He talks about scenting it, scents somewhere. It’s amazing how much of the language is about smell and sight and has to do with notions of disgust in order to exploit it for his own sort of corruption. I’m just reading the highlighted stuff. He talks about the Jew as a parasite of corruption, at home in the flesh of people. It’s like the Jew is an infection that buries into the flesh. Okay, and I’ll just quote very quickly from this last one. “Where the race has been basically recognised, there one sets a further goal to which the way is to be paved not without the most powerful means. Think what happened in the 20th century. The Jew is an internal Carthage whose power the modern people must break in order not to suffer themselves.”

So just to remind you, Rome had these endless, well, three wars with Carthage. And at the end, all they could do is, they were so enraged at the people of Carthage. They burned the city. They killed practically all the people. And according to legend which was still prevailing in the 19th century , they sowed their fields with salt so that Carthage could never rise again. So that’s what Duhring has in mind. That’s what we have to do with the Jews because they are an internal Carthage. Think how much worse that is. Rome at least had Carthage over there. We have Carthage amongst us. It needs to be destroyed. And he was saying this as early as 1881.

Okay, so again, a bit of repetition. Some of the major figures in this notion of degeneration were Arthur de Gobineau, whose work, “The Inequality of the Human Races” is from 1854. And he says, “The word degenerate means that the people has no longer the… The people have no longer the same intrinsic value as it had before because it has no longer the same blood in its veins.” So they didn’t talk about germs then as we might do today. They talk about blood. But they often talked about certain races as contaminating our blood on the model of infection.

And another… What most of us who work on degeneration theory consider the founding document of degeneration is Morel, a Frenchman’s 1957 “Treatise on the Physical and Intellectual and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species and the Causes that Produce These Various Maladies”. And he talked about various things like alcoholism, like pollution of big cities, and he talked about how this kind of infects the body. And, in a very Lamarckian notion, he says that, once the body is infected by the environment, it’s passed on to subsequent generations. He thought, interestingly, that degeneration originally… Should ultimately lead to sterility, which means one should not be that scared of the degenerates 'cause they should die off.

But often, the logic of degeneration is very confused. It makes the degenerate into kind of an existential threat. And at the same time, it says they’re unfit, and they should die out. Another person that I mentioned briefly already, Lombroso, his famous book “The Male Offender” said a large percentage of the criminals were atavistic born criminals. The idea of atavism is the idea that certain people represent kind of a regress to a primitive, more primitive stage of human development. They’re throwbacks. And often, the Jews got seen as atavistic in various ways too. Interestingly, Cesare Lombroso himself was Jewish and was actually a campaigner against antisemitism. But a lot of his ideas were taken up by antisemites, especially the notion of the Jew as atavistic.

Okay, so I will repeat… This is the last… I hope it’s getting near what I’ll repeat. This is the Purple Passage, as I call it, from Darwin. And I’ll just read the last part. “Thus the weak members of civilised society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of the domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the races of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care or care wrongly directed leads to the degeneration of a domestic race. But excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

Now as I said last week or whenever I did the last lecture, don’t think of Darwin himself as a degenerationist. Think of him as a seed of degeneration theory because a lot of people, including his cousin, Galton, who coined the word eugenics, ran with this notion and said, “Yes, we’ve got to stop these weak and feeble people from breeding and over breeding and dominating the populace.” So they basically said, “We’ve got to stop our compassion,” where Darwin said, “No, I think things will sort themselves out. I’m an optimistic person. I think we should never try to rid ourselves of compassion.” But a lot of people who followed and were influenced by these Darwinian notions and the influence of people like the eugenicists such as Galton, they said, “No, compassion is what allows us to let the worst-off breed, and the worst-off will outbreed us and dominate society.”

Obviously a lot of this is middle class fear of the working class. But just to show you how these ideas are taken up, and I’m quoting now from “Mein Kampf”, from Hitler, “Man restricts the procreative faculty and strives obstinately to keep alive at any cost whatever has once been born. The natural struggle for existence which allows only healthy and strong individuals to survive is replaced by a sheer craze to save the feeble and even diseased creatures at any cost. And thus the seeds are sown for a human progeny which will become more and more miserable from one generation to another as long as nature’s will is scorned.”

And I have to say, that is not different than you read in people like the American eugenicist Hugh Laughlin, it’s not different than what you read in the English geneticist Galton. Hitler’s ideas, you know, had a history. Okay, so I do want to go over some of this. I mentioned some of this before, but I’m going to get to do a new twist 'cause I want to point out one of the dangers of being too obsessed with the murders of the Jews and the Holocaust 'cause it closes our eyes to certain things. Okay, following on the eugenicist notion that the populace has to be protected, we see this very famous decision, Buck versus Bell from 1927, where the progressive jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime…”

Think Lombroso and the born criminal. “Or to let them starve for their imbecilities, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations are enough.” This was the law that allowed states to give forced sterilisations to people who were considered morally unfit or morally feeble. And just to show you these ideas were not just held by people we don’t know so well, also Churchill. “The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and the insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic, and superior stock, constitutes a national race danger which is impossible to exaggerate.” And as I said, Churchill was a big, big supporter of the Mental Deficiency Act.

And he at one point thought we could actually separate all the degenerates from the population at large. So this is what I’m adding new. So we all know about the extermination of the Jews during the war and the antisemitic Nuremberg laws of 1935. But it’s really important to recall that the original persecutions weren’t of the Jews. They were of handicapped people, of deaf people, of blind people, beginning with the 1933 law for the prevention of diseased offspring. And this law was actually based on what’s called the Model Sterilisation Law of 1922, which was developed by Harry Laughlin.

In fact, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s commentary is on a case that was brought out because one state, I think it was Virginia, had implemented this Model Sterilisation Law and wanted to sterilise this allegedly enfeebled woman, mentally enfeebled woman. As I said, Laughlin published an influential summary of his work in 1929 in German. And by the repeal of the law in 1945 in Germany, over 400,000 people were sterilised. Why do I go on about this and say, you know, we have to separate this from the murder of the Jews? Because the Nuremberg trials which we all know about, you know, famous for trying various politicians, for various generals, famously for the doctors who were involved in war crimes, in those trials, there was no mention made of the word eugenics. Why?

Well, there was a famous scientist, Ernst Rudin. He was a framer of that 1933 law I mentioned, and he was also a student of the very eminent psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. And he was a teacher of the much-hated, horrible Mengele. But he was a mentor. He was like the brains behind the outfit. He was the one who was writing books on , racial hygiene. These were the ones who was, you know, created this constellation out of ideas that made the actual events possible. Okay? They wanted to persecute Rudin. But when they started to try to prosecute Rudin, he said, “But I was just doing normal science. Look, here’s all my correspondence with people from Stanford, from Oxford, from Harvard, from Cambridge.”

And they realised, “Oh, my god.” The prosecutors at Nuremberg realised, “If we go after the scientist behind eugenics, we’ll implicate a hell of a lot of our own people, of our own researchers.” And so the idea… It’s just amazing that, in the whole Nuremberg trial, not one mention of the word eugenics. And this is not without consequences. Interestingly, as I say here, in 1919, there was finally a mock trial of Rudin conducted by an Israel lawyer, Avi Omer. But the point I want to make is, because no mention was made of the eugenics, forced sterilisations continued in the world, in the US and elsewhere, I might add, well after 1945.

And though they were banned by the 1970s, they were still performed in California on the so-called morally feeble, feeble-minded, up until 2010. As I said, the vices these victims really suffered from were mainly belonging to minorities and being poor. So a little public Nuremberg attention to the topic of eugenics could have saved a lot of post-war needless suffering. Now this rhetoric of degeneration didn’t completely die with the second World War. We forgot a lot of it. But it continued on by certain researchers still interested in eugenics. They could still implement their policy 'cause they were given, you know, a free ride after the war.

Okay, I can’t quite read all of this. But it’s the hostile identification of Jews with modernity. Okay, so it’s important to see that part of the hostility to Jews came because modernity had led to the emancipation of Jews, but the Jews were then often seen as the beneficiaries of modernity. So a lot of people were dislocated by the financial changes, by the changes of going from the country to the big cities. They’d often target the Jews with their resentment towards modernity, okay? So this was, for instance, especially true of the leading French antisemite of the 19th century, Edouard Dumont.

In his two-volume diatribe “Jewish France”, he wrote, “The only one who benefited from the revolution was the Jew. Everything comes from the Jew. It all comes back to the Jews.” So this idea in the 19th century that we’re being dislocated, modernity throws us into a new world where we don’t have a clear place, but they, those people over there, those Jews, are benefiting. So a lot of the antisemitism of the 19th century, the secular antisemitism, was really kind of a rejection and a frustration with modernity. And what’s interesting is, the Dumont Jews are behind both the French Revolution and the Commune uprising, but he also saw them as behind capitalism.

That’s what’s really interesting. The Jews get identified with both communism and with capitalism. So the socialists Lassalle and Marx and the Rothschild banking family are among his targets. He was also an important figure in the Dreyfuss affair, but I won’t say much more. And I’ll quote from someone else who’s a very interesting antisemitic figure, Luis Ferdinand Celine, from something he wrote during the war. He says, “Only the Jew has many strings. He is Trotsky and then Rothschild, the two at the same time. He makes it fit every occasion. That’s what’s going to fuck the bourgeois.” If you want over the top record, you cannot go beyond Celine.

But look what Hitler says in his address to the 1945 Wehrmacht. “The Jewish-eastern Bolshevik reflects in its exterminationist tendencies the goals of the Jewish Western capitalism.” Interestingly, he, the exterminator, is projecting exterminationist into the Jews. But that was the idea. The Jews are at least trying to mentally exterminate us. And here, you get some of these motifs repeated. This is from a famous exhibition in Munich in 1937 called the , the Eternal Jew. So part of that is a reference. It’s a very clever reference.

But it’s a reference to an old Christian notion, the notion that there was this Jew who said to Christ when he was carrying the cross, “Hey, you’re in my way. Could you hurry up? You’re blocking the pavement.” And Christ says, “I shall go, but you shall remain.” And so this Jew is meant to be remaining here forever. So it’s kind of a metaphor for the Jews, that there are people who are dispersed through the world with no homeland, who are forced to wander forever in a deplorable state, allegedly until the second coming. This is the Jew Ahasverus.

Okay, so that’s why the Eternal Jew. But you also see he’s got gold coins signifying Jews as exploitive capitalists. It’s also probably a reference to Judas, though we’ve got gold rather than silver. But you’ll notice, on the right, the hammer and the sickle on a map of Russia, signifying Bolshevik communism. So the Jew is behind communism. But then the whip, signifying that we are under Jewish rule. So the gold represents capitalism. The hammer and the sickle on a map of Russia, communism. So the Jew is behind all that is exploiting and oppressing us.

Okay. And so Nordau wrote this famous book “Degeneration” in 1895. And he was one of the people that said degeneration isn’t just a matter of tainted blood because of blood poisoning, though he did mention that. He did follow Morel in talking about the aetiology of degeneration as poisoning, alcohol, tobacco, opium, hashish, residence in large towns. He also cited fatigue, the fatigue that comes with modernity, the invention of the train, the invention of the light bulb, etc.

He said, “This cause, fatigue, which according to Ferrer, who is a French psychologist, changes healthy men into hysterical. The whole civilised humanity has been exposed for half a century. All its condition of life have in this period of time experienced a revolution unexampled in the history of the world. In our times, on the contrary, steam and electricity have turned the customs of life of every member of the civilised nations upside down.”

So you get this sense that modernity has kind of made us into hysterics. That’s the term Nordau actually uses. Nordau himself famously of course was a Jew and a Zionist. And Hitler himself knew of Nordau but never mentioned him, not so much 'cause he was a Jew, but mainly because he was insulting about Wagner. He saw Wagner as one of these degenerates. So as Nordau sums up, “Many affectations of the nervous system already bear a name, which implies that they are direct consequences of certain influences of modern civilization.”

But what’s important for us is, Nordau said ideas can be a source of infection. He said people like Nietzsche, like Wagner, like Ibsen, like Zola, all these… Most of them were geniuses. He said they are infecting us with ideas that lead to our degeneration. So Nordau’s solution, “Proclaimed under the names of liberty and moral autonomy, debauchery and dissoluteness gain easy admission into the best circles when disguised as modernity.” I’m just going to jump into quotes. “The freedom and modernity, the progress and truth that these fellows…”

That’s degenerates like Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Wagner, Baudelaire, Zola, “Are not ours. They wish to drown the conscious in the unconscious.” And that is interesting because Jews, in a way, also get associated with the unconscious. That is, the Jews are something foreign. They’re something uncanny. They live amongst us, but they’re not us. There’s like this unknown disruptive… Unknowable disruptive force. So a lot of people who work in this area think, often, fears about our own unconsciousness, our own unconsciousness as an internal disruptor, are projected onto the Jews as an external stranger living amongst ourselves.

And he says, “The characterization of the leading degenerates as mentally diseased,” that’s what he thinks will be efficacious. “Cautioning the public against the lies of these parasites, their infectious ideas.” And funnily enough, in reference to Nietzsche, one of his degenerates, he says, “Get you gone from civilization. Rove far from us. Be a lusting beast of prey,” is the terminology Nietzsche used, “in the desert. There is no place amongst us for the lusting beast of prey.” So that’s isolation. Go to the desert. “And if you dare return to us, we will pitilessly beat you to death with clubs.”

In other words, he is proposing elimination. So I want to very quickly mention someone else, Otto Weininger. I want to check my time. Just bear with me one second. I’ll talk another 15 minutes, excellent. Okay, Otto Weininger wrote this. Also Jewish. Wrote this incredibly influential book. Actually, I got the date slightly wrong there. It’s 1903. And he says the Jew is a psychological type. It’s not a race or religion. “What I mean by Judaism, I mean neither a race nor a people nor a recognised creed. I think of it as a tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion only amongst the Jews.”

So the Jew now becomes a mental constellation that is prominent among Jews, and we can all become infected. We can all overnight wake up and find ourselves Jews. Think about how threatening that is to the identity. Besides, you know, seeing Jews as an infection, Weininger also famously thought women were infection. And in fact, he identified modernity with the feminine Jew. “Our age is not only the most Jewish,” says Weininger, “but the most feminine.” And this is a very common trope, that the idea is we somehow are becoming or fear we’re becoming effeminized. And that is quite, we’re becoming Jewish in a certain way.

What’s interesting about Weininger is, he claims that the hatred of Jews is based on projection. It’s a wonderful observation of his. “Whoever detests the Jewish disposition detests it first of all in himself. That he should persecute it in others is merely his endeavour to separate himself in this way from his Jewishness. He strives to shake it off and to localise it in his fellow creatures,” those guys over there, “and so for a moment to dream himself free of it.” Now what was Weininger’s solution to the woman Jewish problem?

He said, you know, “We’ve got to get rid of these infections.” He said, “Well we should just stop procreating. And in one generation, the Jew and the woman bodies will be gone. But men as souls will continue.” Now I know that sounds absolutely crazy. In his day, Weininger was more popular than Freud. This book was really read. Admittedly, his suicide helped the sales. But what I want to see is, yes, he had this fantasy of eliminating women and Jews, right? And that’s something, you know, the idea of eliminating women, it’s not completely unknown, but it’s usually confined to single fanatics.

The fantasy of eliminating all the Jews, you know, that lived on with a venerable and horrible history. And when you see these possibilities are there when you start denominating certain people as a site of infection. Okay, so I’m now going to talk a bit about degenerate art. Nordau talks about artists. He says that, “Degenerates lisp and stammer instead of speaking.” It’s amazing how many of the tropes of antisemitism and degeneration talk about some kind of disease within language. And I hope we’re able to get to that. I’ll just say, I’ll come to the last part. “They draw and paint like children with dirty tables and walls with mischievous hands.”

And he says, you know, this quality of theirs is atavistic. They represent a throwback. It’s one of the constant marks of degeneracy. So famously, you know, Hitler, who took up this notion of degeneration, , that’s the German word. , that means degenerate art. He did this exhibition in 1937. It is actually the most successful art exhibition in the history of art. They had long queues. People who had never been to an art exhibition, they would go to that in 1937, where you had various artists and saying, “Look, here are these degenerate artists. They don’t see straight. Their minds are warped by bad ideas.”

Here’s a picture of Hitler. That’s on the far right. And there’s Goebbels, visiting the degenerate art exhibition. And here’s one of the things that was on the wall, the pictures by Modigliani and Schmidt Rottluff on my left-hand side. I’m hoping it works for you too. On the right-hand side, the pictures of so-called degenerates. And this kind of is a repetition of what Lombroso did in his book on the criminal woman and the criminal man. He would have the pictures of these so-called degenerate women.

Also in 1938, it was the Degenerate Music Exhibition in Dusseldorf. And you’ll notice, of course, a lot of this is not just against Jews. It’s against Black people. Jazz was… Hitler nominated jazz as a degenerate form of music. And of course he’s got this Jewish Star of David. That’s meant to represent the impresario he’s promoting, making a financial advantage out of this degenerate music. Okay. So just to show you how these ideas get repeated in actual Hitler’s writings, this is an early point, early work of his, a 1920 25 programme of the National Socialist German Workers party.

I don’t like to use the word Nazi because that’s not the term they used for themselves. It’s a term that we use, and it became applied more after the war. Why don’t I like to use it? 'Cause I want to represent the notion Socialist German Workers party. I want you to see that these people saw themselves as progressive. They saw themselves as socialists. Nazis all that, that a lot of people who were behind eugenics were people who saw themselves with progress, working out scientific ideas, hidden by the word Nazis. No, we tend to think of, “Oh, the Nazis must be right-wing,” right? You know, we have these facile notions of left and right. But when you think socialist, is that a right-wing notion? We have to be careful about our simplifications.

So this is point four of this 25-point programme of the NSDAP. “Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence, no Jew can be a countryman.” So here’s the notion of contaminated blood, which degenerationist literature made so much about. If the Jews have this inferior blood, think back to the way Goughenhour early on talked about blood and saying the Jews can contaminate us unless we prevent them being our countrymen. But then, look what 24 does. It’s not talking about blood. It’s talking about ideas. “The party fights against the Jewish materialist spirit within and without.”

That is this thing that is in Wagner in his Judaism in music, that is in Marx on the Jewish question, that the Jew gets identified with modernity and materialism, and we have to fight this infection of ideas. So as I said, note four treats the Jews in terms of biology, blood, whereas 24 refers to the Jewish spirit. I’ve covered the last part of this. So I’m just going to quote very quickly from “Mein Kampf” just some of the ideas. “Culturally…” He’s talking about the Jew here. “Culturally, his activity consists in contaminating art, literature, and theatre.”

That was exactly the charge Nordau had, Nordau who was not an antisemite. He was a philosemite and one of the founders of Zionists. Nevertheless, he had this idea that certain ideas could be seen as a contamination on the model of an infection. Well, the degenerationists in the 20th century took this and applied this to art and literature. And saw the Jews as a site of this contamination.

“Dragging the people to the level of his own low mentality for as long as the people remain racially pure,” and now he’s back to the blood notion. “And are conscious of the treasure of their blood, they can never be overcome by the Jew. That is why the Jew systematically endeavours to lower the racial quality of the people by permanently poisoning the blood of the individuals who make up that people.”

And one more quote. And now he is again, there he is, talking about blood, though he’s talking about literature and theatre. And again, here he’s talking about the Jewish activities in the press, in art, in literature, in the theatre. “Here was a pestilence, a moral pestilence, with which the public was being infected. It was worse than the Black Plague of long ago. And in what mighty doses this poison was manufactured and distributed.” What I want you to see is, this metaphoric is not Hitler’s own creation. This started in the 19th century with the notion of degeneration.

When a lot of the people, for instance like Zola, who talks about the prostitute Nana as infecting the Second Empire and leading to its wreck and ruin, when they talk about her as an infection, it hovers between the literal and the metaphorical. With Hitler, it’s just plain literal. He literally saw the Jews as an infection. But the idea of the Jews as parasites, the idea that a people could be nominated as an infection and parasite, that didn’t come from nowhere. It had a venerable history from 19th century degeneration literature.

Okay, so I want to talk about some contradictions in this rhetoric. The Jews are atavistic. They’re mired in an outdated religion, incapable of revolution. This was a standard trope of the 19th century people who wedded degeneration theory to antisemitism. But at the same time, the very same authors would say the Jews are hyper modern. They represent, you know, vulture capitalism. They represent the new idea of communism. And I mentioned this last time I lectured, but I think it’s a wonderful idea, the survival of the unfittest. That is, the degenerationists have combined degeneration with antisemitism.

So the Jews are atavistic. They are parasites that should die off. And yet they know, and they made the same point. The Jews survive where all others perish. Okay, I think these quotes are taken from “Mein Kampf” again. Yes, they are. “There is probably no other people in the world who have so developed the instinct of self preservation as the so-called chosen people.” This is from “Mein Kampf”. “Where can another people be found that, in the course of the last 2,000 years, has undergone so few changes in mental outlook and character as the Jewish people?”

The Jews represent a throwback. They’re beyond evolution. They’re atavistic. But that implies they should die out. And you’ll see that here. Again, a quote from “Mein Kampf”. “But the final consequence is not merely that the people lose all their freedom under the domination of the Jews, but in the end these parasites themselves disappear.” From Nordau and Lombroso. And he deliberately makes Dracula into a feminine, semitic, Eastern kind of character because it’s really a commentary on the eastern Jews after various pogroms after the…

For instance, the assassination of Czar Alexander in 1881 kind of came to the east end 'cause Dracula comes to inhabit the east end. So Dracula represents fear of this kind of atavistic, feminised, eastern Jewish figure. Okay, well you know, Hitler uses the same tropes that were there available in Stoker and his “Dracula”. And the vampire in “Dracula” has to be eliminated. Okay, so now I’m going to go over to some quick psychological speculations. I have eight minutes left. Okay, so what I’ve been talking about is history and facts about what has been written.

Here is some attempts at explanation. And we already saw this with Weininger. So projection is a notion developed by Freud in particular. There’s a wonderful book of “The Language of Psychoanalysis” by Laplanche and Pontalis, and this is their entry. Projection: Operation whereby qualities, feelings, wishes, or even objects, which the subject refuses to recognise or rejects in himself are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing. Projection so understood is a very defence of a very primitive origin, which may be especially at work in paranoia. Think about the paranoia about the Jews.

Another notion that’s also very helpful is Freud’s notion of the unheimlich, that which is both disturbingly familiar and strange at the same time. So a lot of people feel that the Jews, for Europe, represented the uncanny. They’re familiar in a way. They’re living here amongst us. But they’re totally other. And putting the two together, a lot of people think part of our nature is uncanny, our unconscious desires. We often by unconscious desires we don’t understand. And that’s part of ourselves. It’s part of ourselves, but it’s not part of ourselves. It’s strange to ourselves. It’s uncanny. It’s both familiar and strange.

A lot of people feel we project this fear of our own unconscious onto the Jews. “So the Jewish religion seems to be downright uncanny to the Aryan mind,” says Hitler in “Mein Kampf”. So we have this wonderful notion, strangers to ourselves, an expression invented by Nietzsche, that we have an inchoate fear that we do not make a unified whole person. Now modernity especially threatens our sense of wholeness, and that we have hidden internal disruptors. So we project our fears onto easy target groups so we can fantasise them as external disruptors that we can master through force.

You know, it’s so disturbing to think, “I’m not a whole person. I don’t add up to something as a unit, as a unified entity.” So the idea is we project our fear of disillusion to some people over there because, that way, we can domesticate it, hope to control it. So there’s this theory, and it is speculation of course, like all psychological theory, that in the male European mind, Jews and women are both configured as something both familiar, they’re amongst us, and strange, so they become a locus for projection for fears of disruption.

It might explain some of the intensity of the paranoia towards Jews and often towards women, I might add. The last thing I want to quickly talk about 'cause it’ll tie in with some of the things I said is, it’s amazing how much… And I was talking about this with Trudy . But how much of antisemitic literature is scatological? I mean, Celine is wonderful for this. And how much of it’s centred on language? As if the Jews have done something to our language. 'Cause remember, language is where… We are people of the mind. You know, we’re not animals. We value our mind above all else. Well our mind is written in what? Expressed in what? Language.

And often, language is seen as a site of disruption, and the Jews are seen as a site of disrupting our language. I mean, the case of Luther is unbelievable 'cause he was originally pro-Jewish. He wrote a book, “Jesus Christ Was a Jew”, tried to dissuade the antisemites. But eventually, he had enough of the Jews because they refused to convert to his new religion. And then he became obsessed with the notion that the Jews have certain interpretive powers 'cause, remember, what’s special for Luther is, forget all the Catholic hierarchy. All that counts is this book. This book gives us this true meaning of our lives and the world.

And he was obsessed with the notion that the Jews, through kabbalistic rituals, through , have a secret reading so that the book he cares about that’s the basis of his identity is actually subverted by their secret interpretation. So he wrote this book on the ineffable name of God, “Shem HaMephorash”. He said, “Damned goy that I am, I cannot understand where they get such abilities, unless I must believe that, when Judas Iscariot hung himself, his intestines burst. And as happens to the hanged, his bladder burst. Perhaps the Jews had their servants there with gold and silver jugs and basins which caught the Judas piss, as it is called, together with the rest of the holy things,” meaning the shit. “Thereafter, they mixed it into the excrement and ate it amongst each other and drank it so that they developed such sharp eyes that they can see such comments in the scripture which neither Matthew nor Isaiah himself nor all the angels, let alone we damned Goyim can see.”

So it’s amazing how much fears about identity, disruption of identity, disruption of language is projected onto the Jews. Here’s from Christian Wagenseil, who was well known to Wagner. Wagner based some of his librettos and some of his readings on Wagenseil. From his “Instructions in the Jewish-German Manner of Reading and Writing”, “The Jews have dealt with no language as sinfully as one says as with our German language. They have given it a totally foreign intonation and pronunciation. They have mutilated the German words. They have tortured them.”

And that of course is a not-too-subtle reference to Christian notions of Jews doing host desecration, or stealing the wafers from a Catholic service, and then putting nails into it so that Christ could suffer more. Okay, and to go back to Richard Wagner from his 1850 “Of Judaism and Music”, “The Jews speak the language of a country in which he has lived from generation to generation, but he always speaks it as a foreigner. It consists, their activity consisted, in the appropriation of our ancient heritage. This applies before all to our language. A language, its expression and evolution, are not separate elements, but part of a historical community. But the Jew has stood apart from this community.”

So the Jew is atavistic. “Alone with his Jehovah in a dispersed and barren stock, incapable of real evolution. The Jewish music often produces in us a kind of effect we would derive from hearing a poem by Goethe translated in that Jewish jargon we call Yiddish. Who has not had bad feelings of repulsion, horror, and amusement on hearing the nonsensical gurgling, yodelling, and cackling which no attempt at caricature can render more absurd than it is?”

So the Jew becomes a locus of a fear that our language, they are perverting our language, that something is being done to our language, that something is being done to our identity. You see this in Hitler from “Mein Kampf”. “For him, the Jew, that is, a Jew, language is not an expression for his inner thought, but rather a means of cloaking them,” that with the Jew, language itself becomes disruptive and deceptive. There’s no better case of this than Celine. When Celine became an antisemite, people like and Sacre thought he was making fun of antisemites.

But actually, it was a natural continuation of his trajectory. He originally thought the French language was being destroyed by the French Academy, where French had become a formalised language. So he, in his book, tried to capture the of spoken French. It was one step from there to say, “Oh, and it’s the Jews who live amongst us are these internal subverters.” Okay, I’ve finished there. I know I said a lot. But what I want you to see is that Hitler had ideas, horrible ideas. But these ideas had a genesis.

And you know, we concentrate a lot on the years of the Holocaust, on the murder of the 6 million, on the murder of the Gipsies. But we need to do history to see that these… You know, to think of it as pure evil is a way of saying absolutely nothing. We have to see that there were thinkers who created a space of ideas that opened up certain possibilities. This rhetoric of degeneration, this rhetoric of infection, opened up a space of ideas which opened up possibilities, and those possibilities became horribly realised in the mid-20th century.

And I’ll finish there.

• Thanks, Ken. Sorry, Lauren, go on.

• [Lauren] Oh, did you want to take any questions from the Q and A, Ken? Q&A and Comment

• Yeah, how do I see the Q and A? I go to Q and A, aha.

Mitsy, you should say something about social Darwinism which changes the idea into blood. Well yeah, there are books written from Darwin to Hitler. You know, as I say, you shouldn’t be unfair to Darwin because Darwin was not himself a degenerationist. But his ideas fueled a lot of the degeneration that’s in the eugenics. And you know, they talked about blood. Now people talk about genes and looking for the genes for criminality or the genes for this or… You know, it’s a very dangerous rhetoric. And you know… Just as they wanted to say there are wrong blood types, there’s a tendency to want to say, “Oh, there might be a gene for criminality. And maybe we could find that out.” It’s a very dangerous rhetoric.

Ah, yeah, the section of Darwin’s “Descent” that you quoted could have been written by the present US Republican party. What’s interesting is, that’s the right wing. The people who originally took up the rhetoric were progressivists. They often saw themselves on the left. Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t quite a leftist, but he wasn’t for big business. You know, he was the one who did the anti-trust laws that broke up some of the big monopolies. So this rhetoric was often adopted by the left, but it’s also been adopted by the right. And yes, racists of all different stripes have taken up this rhetoric of degeneration about, you know, we’re being swamped by the feeble. You know, in America, we’re being swamped by the Hispanics. God, in England, we’re being swamped by Europeans. What’s so bad about that, I have no idea.

Oh, thank you, Jennifer. I think I covered way too much, but it’s nice to hear that. But what… Now, Wagner was not Jewish. That’s a rumour. There’s stuff about his adopted father and who his real father was. No, Wagner was not Jewish, though he himself had fears about his Jewish identity. And Nietzsche makes some funny jokes and preys… He actually makes some funny references to Wagner. Coming from an acting family, acting was associated with Jews, etc. But no, Wagner wasn’t Jewish. And Hitler loved Wagner. Hitler knew Wagner’s librettos oft by heart. He was an unbelievable… Not all of them, but unbelievable Wagner scholar. And undoubtedly, he read or heard about Judaism in music.

Oh, was Hitler… No. The interesting thing about Hitler… And I think I said this last time. I spent a year of my life trying to trace down all that Hitler read. He was a bloody magpie. He would read astrology, then he would read so-called scientific works. I would call them pseudo-scientific works on the , racial hygiene. There’s a very famous book by Baur-Fischer-Lenz on racial hygiene. It was considered science of its day. He’d read all kinds of stuff. He’d read astrology. But he’d put it into a big mish-mash.

In fact, he was absolutely notorious at the for, he would read until three o'clock in the morning. And then he would come down for breakfast and, you know, his retinue were absolutely in fear 'cause he would, you know, harangue them for three hours with his bowdlerised versions of what he just read. He had an unbelievable library. He read all over the place. But he just picked and chose what he wanted, and he was very indiscriminate. He read complete rubbish as well as allegedly scientific tracks. Antisemitism…

This is from Jennifer. Antisemitism blinded Germans to the contributions Jews made across Europe to the arts, music, science. Yeah, you know, Jews were disproportionate in various places, particularly in literature. Also, for instance, in the founding of department stores in Germany. Remember, that also made them a source of envy 'cause they were seen as… You know, just a century ago, you’d be in the ghetto. Now we have all these modern emancipation laws. We have all this, you know, change with the coming of materialism, consumerism, capitalism, if you will. And who’s benefiting, you people. So it was a cause of resentment. Their success was a cause of resentment because a lot of people were feeling, just like they say about the people in America, you know, who vote for Trump left the left behind.

Q: How do you explain the continuation of antisemitism? A: You know, the Jews are always a site of projection. You know, other people are getting it now too. Think of how Muslims are treated in lots of Europe. Think about how Hispanics are nominated in America. This is an old story. And you know, what part of the problem is, it’s a very easy story. One of the things Hitler said is, “Just give one message. If you can just say one enemy, that’s a very easy message for people to digest.” See, what I’m saying is, the causes of what happened are incredibly complex. That’s not an easy story to tell. But the story, “Oh, it’s all those people’s fault,” that’s really digestible for a lot of people. It’s a very easy answer. And it’s very hard to fight easy answers.

Yes, look, there’s… This is Roman. Yes, of course part of this was envy, envy at the Jews seen as being the winners in modernity. So that’s one of the many geneses of antisemitism. Ah, well, you know, Barry, nation states are a pretty new thing. Germany only came into existence as a unified state in 1871. You know, a lot of people thought… Were pan-Germanist and thought Austria, Germany, and parts of Czechoslovakia and part of Poland belonged to a real German. Actually, Hitler himself didn’t believe in nations. He thought what was really important was race. A lot of people shared those ideas. They thought, “What makes us German is our language.” So Austrians, Germans, eh, what’s the difference? Also some of the Swiss too.

Q: Why was Hitler accepted? A: You know, it’s not just about these ideas of finding an easy enemy. It’s not just the ideas of degeneration. A lot of ordinary people didn’t even know these ideas. It was more the intellectuals who had these ideas of degeneration and contamination. What really helped was of course the great depression and the great inflation. So there were economic determinants that helped Hitler be accepted 'cause, you know, Hitler said… Hitler also subscribed to Ludendorff’s , the stab in the back theory, that we lost the first World War because Jews like Rathenau, who was actually the minister for , so actually helped Germany stay in World War I as long as possible, he was Jewish. But people like Rathenau, industrialists, have betrayed us. So it’s complex reasons why Hitler was accepted. And remember, the majority of… He never had a majority. He just had a plurality. He won the most votes in the elections of '32 and '33, but he didn’t win the majority.

Q: Jennifer, was it due to the large number of intellectuals, scientists, political figures, or their ability to promulgate these virulent ideas, identity and antisemitism against Europe? A: Well that’s one of the points I want to make. There were real ideas here. Really bad ideas, but they were ideas. And you need ideas to make it conceptually allowable. How can you think of eliminating a whole people? You can figure them as an infection. That’s what you do with infections. That’s what we’ve got to do with COVID. We’ve got to isolate or eliminate it. Well it was the ideas people who created this logical conceptual space to think of Jews as the infection. The Christians never really thought of them. They thought of them as stubborn. They thought of them as atavistic. I’m talking about Christian antisemitism.

But if they would accept Jesus as the messiah, they could be brought into the fold. But once you see them as infection, it has a different logic. So yes, intellectuals, scientists, you know, Nordau is a… I don’t know what to call him, but a public intellectual. There were people like Zola who were novelists who furthered the idea of degeneration. Not to say Zola was an antisemite. Not to say Nordau was an antisemite. But these people put into the world the idea, this notion that ideas themselves can be seen as an infection and that particularly people represent particularly pernicious ideas. That paves the way. It’s a condition of possibility.

Q: Actually, did the Catholic church feed into these ideas? A: The Catholic church is a lot in antisemitism. But interestingly, the Catholic church was one of the points of resistance towards eugenics because it carried on with the idea that all life is sacred and needs to be preserved. So for instance, the Feeble Minded Act, well that’s what Chesterton, a Catholic, called the Mental Deficiency Act promoted by Churchill. He called it the Feeble Minded Act, saying it was promulgated by people like Churchill, the word feeble-minded. Chesterton, the writer, because of his Catholicism, actually opposed eugenics, the eugenics law. And this was very true in America. Some of the people who stood up the strongest against eugenics, also in Germany, were people from a Catholic, serious Catholic background. They were not progressives. Eugenicists saw themselves as progressives.

Miriam, the other thing is that language of peoples who are second-class citizens have often be cloaked as a dual identity, as Jews have often been excluded initially from land ownership.

Q: What do you think if some of the truth in this matter gets twisted into hatred and scapegoating? A: I’m not quite sure. I have to read the question again. Yes, well the Jews were second-class citizens. And you know, for so long, they were put in the ghetto. And you know, then Christians and people from even secular society could feel superior to the Jews who were in those ghettos. You know, they weren’t allowed to own land. There were various trades they weren’t allowed to be put in. Then as emancipation comes in the late 18th century in Germany, and then rockets in the 19th century, the Jews enter society, and the resentment of Jews grows. But also, the Jews are then seen as these foreigners who are really living amongst us, these people who are bowdlerising our language, who are destroying our identity. And yes, the Jews were… The identity of the Jews was problematic too. Are they really Germans? Or are they really Jews? You know, this was a question that was always thrown. There’s a big literature of, how can we emancipate Jews? And I talked about that last time. I said a lot of people turn it on its head, people like Nietzsche, Wagner, and Marx. They said, “Don’t worry "about how we can emancipate the Jews. "We have to worry about being emancipated from Jewishness. "We are being infected by Jewishness,” which is, Jewishness becomes a marker for materialism and modernity. So yes, the Jews had a dual nature, but it was often seen as a compromised nature. Not sure I’m completely answering what you’re getting at, Miriam.

Teddy, you should discuss the original evil blood libel, accusing Jews of kidnapping… Yeah, okay. Look, that was Christian antisemitism. But yes, the Jews… You can read this wonderful book, Trachtenberg, “The Devil and The Jews”, where it says the Jews would steal the host and put nails into it so Christ’s suffering could continue or how Jews… And think about how religious Jews really want to separate blood from everything else. It was this idea that the Jews need Christian blood to make their Matzah for various rituals, etc. This often led to horrible pogroms in both England and in Germany. The case in 1042, I think, William of Norwich, a boy who disappeared, and it was claimed the Jews took him to get his blood for certain rituals, etc. This led to various pogroms, and eventually a century later, the expulsion of the Jews. So there’s Christian antisemitism. But what’s different about Christian antisemitism, it says these Jews are these terrible, stubborn people. They could become like us if they’d accept the messiah, if they’d have the right ideas. But they don’t, they’re stubborn.

What’s particular about the 19th century is the worry that we will become Jews. See, the old Christians didn’t have that worry. What makes it really pathological and dangerous, what makes you want to eliminate them completely, is the idea that we can become infected. Christianity, Christian antisemitism, was by and large not full of this notion of us becoming Jews. In fact, it was a very foreign notion. The Jews were very so other that, in some sense, they couldn’t touch us in a certain way. They could exploit us in monetary ways and other ways, but there’s no worry that we ourselves become Jews. But once the rhetoric becomes that of blood and contamination and infection, it has a different logic. That is why I like to separate the antisemitism of the 19th century with degenerationist notions from Christian antisemitism.

Wasn’t it… Wasn’t it a book by Galsworthy, “The trouble with these Hebrews, they don’t get on so well.” Actually, I don’t know Galsworthy. I read a fair bit of that literature, but I just can’t comment on that.

Ah. My revered teacher Alexander Nehamas.

Q: How do you account for Nietzsche’s reference to eliminating the weak, and so on? Did he inherit the same ideas as Hitler, but apply them to a different group? Or should we try to understand them differently? A: I’m eventually on this lecture course going to give a lecture. Trudy and I were talking about Nietzsche and the Jews. But it’s really, really complicated because Nietzsche used the notion of degeneration, but he was very, very complicated. He has a very, very complicated notion of health. He actually says, if you’re healthy enough, you can take foreign bodies including the Jews. And he says this about the French and English. They were strong enough to be able to digest their Jews. Nietzsche says, if you’re strong enough, you take something that’s different, that’s foreign, and you incorporate it into a greater whole that makes you richer, that makes you more diverse, for he did not have this manichaeistic fantasy of, “There’s the good, there’s the bad. "We need to isolate the bad before they contaminate us.” His notion of health was not this manichaeistic notion of separating the good and the bad, but incorporating into a greater whole. But then Alexander Nehamas asks, but why does he talk about eliminating the weak? Because there are points where he says, “For those who are not like me, Nietzsche,” capable of what he calls the great health of incorporation, “For you, there’s a lesser health.” And that health might involve eliminating the sick, those you can’t digest. So Nietzsche was very, very complex. So I’m hoping, Alexander, you stay… You come to my next lecture. I’d love to have you in the audience.

But I’ll say more about that in the next lecture 'cause Nietzsche is so complicated. He has a passage called “Ennoblement Through Degeneration”. To the people of the 19th century, that would have made no sense. But Nietzsche had this alternative notion of hell, that it’s actually the point of degeneration that is the point for the possibility of progress. So he ran counter to the general rhetoric of degeneration. Yeah, he did have horrible passages about eliminating the sick and not having pity. And that’s the kind of stuff, the part of Nietzsche that the Nazis and others ran with. But if they would have read more deeply, they would have seen he has a notion of health which involves a notion of incorporation which was antithetical to their aims.

Gerald, please repeat your conversation of Trump and Hitler. Okay, so I was with my family three years ago, before COVID. We’re at a brunch table. And Trump came up very unpleasantly. I hate the topic. And they said, someone said, “Trump is like Hitler.” And I thought I could close down the conversation with the truth. I said, “No, Trump is nothing like Hitler. "Trump was an idealist. "Trump believed in ideas…” Sorry, “Hitler was an idealist. "He believed in ideas. "Horrible ideas, but they were ideas, whereas Trump believes in nothing, just himself. He’s an opportunist, as is Johnson.” There’s a difference between opportunists and idealists. And the frightening thing is, it’s often the idealists who do the most horrible things. Think about Pol Pot and the war on the intellectuals in Cambodia.

You should read “The War Against the Weak”. I read “The War Against the Weak”. In fact, I’m so obsessed, I bought two copies of it. Yeah, it’s a great book. Jennifer… That’s a non-explanation. These people were enabled by certain ideas. And these ideas are ideas we need to understand to really understand how we got from there, where it was in highness at the realm of ideas, to actual reality, a reality much worse than the French Revolution.

Okay, “Jewish Self Hatred” is an incredibly complicated book. If you want to read on that, there’s a book by Sander Gilman called “Jewish Self Hate”. It’s a really brilliant book. It’s Sander Gilman’s best book. It’s a brilliant book. But one thing you could think of is, there’s also a notion, besides the notion of projection, there’s also the notion of interjection. That is, if you’ve got an enemy outside, and you’re scared of him, sometimes you interject him, and you make his voice your own voice, as if to domesticate it. You might think that, just as the antisemites project their fears about their own identity and dislocations onto the Jews, a lot of Jews interjected the voice of these antisemites. That’s all I’ll say here. Better you go to Sander Gilman’s book called “Jewish Self Hatred”. Arlene Goldberg.

Q: Historically, countries are at their best when Jews are treated well. How does this get explained by antisemitic people? A: You know, I can’t always put myself in the mind of antisemites. I think generally, countries… Think about America. America can turn the tap on and let immigrants in, and it can turn the tap off. And it’s had periods where it turned the tap off, in the Johnson-Reed Exclusion Act of 1947, earlier acts against the Chinese. America is at its best when it lets people in and does what Nietzsche says, takes these disparate elements and welds them into a whole. Turning off the taps usually is not a good sign.

Nietzsche, I’m going to excuse myself. We’ll come to that with the next lecture.

• And would you please repeat the name of the author who wrote the book “Jewish Self Hatred”?

• Sander Gilman, S-A-N-D-A-R G-I… Ooh, is it one L or two? I’m really bad at spelling. I’m going to go with one L, but I’m really bad.

• [Wendy] Okay.

• G-I-L or L-L-M-A-N.

• Thank you.

• It’s a fantastic book. By the way, it has that famous quote from Luther that I did, about, “We damn Goyim "could never hope to see what they see.” It covers a lot. It doesn’t just capture Jewish self hatred. It captures other forms of antisemitism.

• Thanks.

• Okay. I mean, I’m happy to answer more questions. But if time’s up, time’s up. What are you thinking?

• No, no. No, no, you can answer them, thank you. Fascinating. We need you. Actually, we sort of rushed through this. And it’s not necessary, Ken. If you’re willing to give us your time, we are happy to take it with open arms and say thank you. It’s very complicated, and it’s very important to understand this, the psychology behind this.

• It is incredibly complicated. But you know, I was talking… Trudy Gold introduced me to Anita Wallfisch, who’s very famous as a survivor. And you know, Anita’s a very blunt person. You know, she says a lot of this emphasis on the Holocaust, to what point is it? And I’m sympathetic to that. It’s just talking about what happened in those years. For a lot of us, it’s just retraumatization. Does it really educate the others? I wonder. But for us to understand the genesis of what happened, I think is more important. And we don’t do that without doing serious historical work into a myriad of complicated, conditionaling causes. There were ideas. Ideas are important, as Heine said. There were economic factors. There were social factors. And we need to look at the whole picture.

But as I said, that’s part of the sadness. The picture is so incredibly complicated. It’s not a picture you’re going to make available to many people. It’s only going to be the very educated who are willing to tease out and see all these sources in this incredible conglomeration of causal strains. You know, the answers that, you know, the clever politicians, they come up with these incredibly simplistic answers. And the vast majority of people are going to be caught in their simple, simple, simple stories 'cause they’re digestible. The stories I want to tell are not easily digestible, as Wendy is pointing out.

• And also, Ken, I’d just like to add to that, especially today with social media and sound bytes, you know, one is just reducing things to one or two words, and this new generation, you know, the new kids on the block, you’re just thinking, what, you know, where’s this going? It’s very scary actually and-

• You’re absolutely right about that 'cause what people… I mean, I’m not on social media. That is, I don’t do Instagram, and I barely touch Facebook. But what people want is, they want hits. And you get hits from simple, extreme messages. I mean, you think about those people on Fox. Why do they do it? Why do they say, that Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, I think is the other guy? They do it because they say extreme things. They don’t care whether it’s true. We don’t even have to suppose they believe it. But because they’re interested in hits, because hits is what gets you ad revenue, though some people, advertisers, are refusing luckily to be associated with them. But it’s because they want hits. They go to simple, extreme ideas. So you’re absolutely right. I mean, Hitler already said this. You want… His mentor endorsed a big lie. That is actually historically not true. They were both . But he came out with the idea of a simple message. Social media only increases that exponentially with the -

• Absolutely, but I want to add… I want to add, it’s the left as well. It’s the extreme left and the extreme right. And we mustn’t lose sight of that because that is what we’re… I’m battling with the extreme left as well in terms of, you know, the cultural world. So it’s very, very important to recognise that it’s coming from both sides.

• Well that’s why I tried to cover in the lecture part of the history, that it’s so-

• Yeah.

• That’s why I don’t want… I don’t like the word Nazi 'cause they go, “Oh, that’s just the right wing. "We’re on the left.” But in fact, they were socialists. They didn’t think they were right wing. It’s important that nearly all the… Lombroso was a leftist. Nordau considered himself on the left. A lot of the people who put these eugenicist ideas out there were leftists. Put out the idea of the degenerationists, they were progressives. Right and left is way too simple a category to capture the complexity-

• [Wendy] Exactly.

• Of history.

• Exactly, 100%. I agree.

• Ooh, okay. Let me…

Q: Who was the professor you mentioned before you began lecturing who you thought was so wonderful? A: I don’t know that I… I don’t know who I mentioned. I quoted from Heinrich Heine. And I did mention my wonderful teacher, Alexander Nehamas. Read anything by him. It’s all brilliant. N-E-H-A-M-A-S. I once misspelt his name. He was really pissed off at me. So apologies, Alexander, for what I did as an undergraduate, or graduate student.

Valerie Cooper. BT, I don’t know what that means. Examining the past. How can we…

Q: How can we protect ourselves in the future? A: Yeah, you know, this is a $64,000 question. What we can do is, it’s really, really difficult partly because of this complexity issue. I think I’ll bet, you know, I hate to be old fashioned, but I’ll bet it’s to educate people. But that will take a long, long time. And god knows if we’ll be around a long time enough, whether we’ll be here long enough. Now I used to hope anyone who was university educated couldn’t fall into these simplistic ideas. But you know, education, university educations have been so utterly cheapened. It’s just, you know, producing cookie-cutter civil servant types, if you want. No, not people who actually think independently anymore, so that the universities could be a source of education that could, you know, work against, you know, the simplistic answers given by the Trumps and Johnsons. That’s gone. So you know, I don’t mean to be too pessimistic, but it’s very hard for complex truths to battle simple lies. Really, I think our best bet is if the economic conditions weren’t horrible. You know, if we could convince some of those bloody billionaires to look for a more equitable society. You know, I’ve just been thinking about that. Maybe that would be one answer because the idea of education, I’m really now suspicious, just like Anita Wallfisch is and Trudy is, that we can really educate people on such complex matters, whether we’re not just preaching to the converted. I think what we’ve got to hope is we don’t have dire economic conditions 'cause it’s a combination of dire economic conditions with these crummy ideas that can lead to disasters. Our best bet is to ward off dire economic conditions.

Christine Lopez. Shouldn’t we discriminate… Sorry.

Q: Shouldn’t we discriminate among ideas according to their effective function? A: Hitler’s ideas generated phantasmagoric effects, ghost-ifying, not a verb, I know, the Jews, and thus presenting them as threatening. Not all ideas have this effective function. Well that’s absolutely true. The reason I quoted you from Wagner is because that’s exactly what Wagner did. And by the way, Nietzsche was culpable on this score too. What Wagner and Nietzsche and Hitler do is, they want to create what the Germans called . They want to create nausea, disgust. One of the… Because, you remember, when something’s disgusting, you want to throw it away. You want to destroy it, etc. So they use incredibly overloaded language. The Jews as insects, the Jews as parasites, the Jews as worms. So they use this overloaded metaphoric in language because they want to invoke a visceral reaction because it’s that visceral reaction that can help empower them. And that can, you know, create a pathological hatred. But that’s not… Hitler did that rather effectively. I mean, I was just looking at the film, the famous film “Jude Suss”. In fact, I was talking to Christine about this. And you know, I think incredibly effective propaganda. It makes the Jew some kind of disgusting. But that language already was around. Yeah, you know, Lombroso didn’t deal in that. And Morel doesn’t. But people like Nordau want you to be disgusted at these degenerates. Not the Jews, 'cause Nordau was not antisemitic.

Q: Oh, Mel asking, what would your education include, be like? A: Well I think people should be educated into the effects of propaganda. They should be educated into the history of giving simplistic answers and how easily people can be manipulated. But all in all, I have to say, Mel, I’m more of a diagnostician than a solutions guy, unfortunately. I do think knowing… Well, one thing I do think is, I don’t think we should go on and on about 6 million Jews and the Holocaust and pure evil. I do think we should do stuff like this and look at the rhetoric of degeneration and look how Darwinism and eugenics led not just to the events of the Holocaust, but led to the sterilisation of hundreds of thousands of people in America and Europe throughout the 20th century. And then we can see that, you know, these ideas you know, have a really, really pernicious possible function. But yeah, you know, this is a big question. And everyone who’s involved in these kind of ideas says, you know, “Exactly how do we make people "aware of the possibility?”

Now I always feel so powerless against the Trumps of this world because I think there’s simple answers that just… There’s so many uneducated or ill-educated people out there desperate for an easy answer. And you know, the Trumps and that will always… I think just find it so much easier than these, you know, heavy-going, complicated analyses that people like me want to bring to the table. I think our best bet, as I say, is not so much education, but hope for good economic and fairer economic conditions. It’s when the distance between the wealthiest and the worst-off becomes gigantic. As it does, it fluctuates. You know, Pinkney has written a lot on this. That’s when things become dangerous. That’s when a lot of the economically and politically disenfranchised look for a scapegoat that these demagogues easily provide. And I don’t know if we can avoid that by education. I think the economic route is a safer route. But it’s a good question, exactly what education. I’d say more history and less hand-wringing, and less sanctimoniousness about the Holocaust. More historical analysis, not just looking to periods, you know, '30 to '45, but looking at the roots of the ideas and the economic situation that made that kind of thing possible.

Yeah, yeah. My wife, who studies Buddhism, constantly gives me information about what’s going on in the . Yeah, it’s another genocide. And you know, China is so powerful. What the hell do we do about it? Interestingly, that’s an idea-driven genocide too, about Hun Chinese nationalism. You know, they also did it in Tibet. You know, what do we do? You know, we don’t do much. And it’s very, very hard to interfere with. One thing I will say is, one of the things… One of the reasons a lot of us are so perturbed by what happened in the Holocaust is because it’s a challenge to our identity. What happens in China, what happens in Armenia, for instance, Armenian genocide, what happens in Cambodia, horrible, disgusting. But what’s particularly horrible about the Holocaust is not just who the victims were, but who the perpetrator was because so many of us had put our investment, our stakes, especially secular Jews. And I’m an atheist secular Jew.

We had put our identity in the enlightenment. Where does it happen? In the home of the enlightenment, in Germany. So that is why it is our identity that is put on the line. And by the way, that is why a lot of us are going through a kind of almost clinical depression now, because we thought enlightenment ideas were being realised now, that the post-world consensus was, you know, enlightened, liberal, democratic values. Now it turns out, we’re just back in 1930s Germany. The 75 years of a lull of peace in western Europe was the exception. Maybe the rule is, you know, irredentism, nationalism, parochialism, and we’re just like those German Jews who said, “Oh, we’re good Germans. We’re good people of the enlightenment. Germany stands for enlightenment values, which are our values.” That was a fantasy.

And why I think so many of us get clinically depressed about what’s happening now is, we have also hitched ourselves to enlightenment ideas. I used to say, the German-Jewish notion of assimilation came true… In America! Hey, look where America is now. So now, a lot of us find our identity is thrown up. So what happens in China is disgusting and horrible, but what’s different here is, what happened in Europe is an existential threat to our identity. What is happening now in America, what is happening now in England with Brexit and nationalism is an existential threat to our sense of our selves in a way that what’s happening in China is not. Yes, but what the hell are we doing about China? Damn little.

My wife says we should just stop taking imports from China and, you know, learn to manufacture ourselves and, you know, empower the working class with decent-paying jobs instead of exporting them all to China. You know, these are big questions. So where are we?

• [Lauren] I think we have one more at the very bottom. And then we can wrap.

• Rafael.

Q: When I grew up in the late '40s and '50s, it was commonplace to consider the left as pro-Jewish and the right as anti. Would you say the reverse is now true? A: Again, it’s bloody complicated. Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. Some of the people who have are most, well, not so much pro-Jewish, but pro-Israel are right-wing fundamentalist Christians 'cause they think… Trudy and I were joking. Trudy Gold and I were joking about this. And the biggest supporters of Israel are right-wing Christians, fundamentalist Christians, 'cause they think, before the messiah comes, the Jews have to all gather in Israel. And then once the Jews all gather in Israel, the messiah will come. And then the Jews will not accept him as the messiah, and then they’ll be sent to hell.

So there’s a case of the weird right-wing supporter of not so much Jews. Well actually, some of them are pro-Jews in a funny way, but they’re certainly pro-Israel. And yes, the left has become rather antisemitic. I mean, in England, the left for a long while was very pro-semitic, and the right less so. I meant the USA. The left was very pro-Israel. England has always been a mixed bag, partly because of the association between Jews and Zionism, and antisemitism very quickly morphs to anti-Zionism. That is, sorry, anti-Zionism very quickly morphs to antisemitism. So yeah, the left has… It’s a complicated story, and there are elements of the left that are exceptional. But the left, especially in England, and also somewhat in America, less so, I’d say, the left has become somewhat antisemitic through their anti-Zionism.

I mean, look, I don’t want to give you a Zionism story because I think it’s possible to be anti-Zionistic without being an antisemite. As a matter of fact, a hell of a lot of people use anti-Zionism as a fig leaf for antisemitism.

• Ken, I think we’re getting into very, very, very tricky water.

• Very, very tricky waters, yeah, and I’d rather not-

• And I have to say that we will be going… We will be going there. Don’t really want to get political, but it’s very difficult to paint with a broad brush.

• That’s exactly the point I was trying to make.

• Yeah, and people bring themselves and their own issues and their own experiences and project. You know, and it’s all about, does one believe in the state of Israel and the Jewish homeland for the Jewish people? I happen to. I do believe in it. So you know, people will come with a different viewpoint. Go on.

• I was just pointing out that there’s a certain element of the left who use anti-Zionism to disguise their antisemitism.

• Oh, very much so.

• And I also wanted to say, I also wanted to point out, anti-Zionism doesn’t automatically make you an antisemite. I am actually… I am pro-Israel, but I want to acknowledge that there are some anti-Zionist who are not antisemitic. But the vast majority of anti-Zionist people are often using it as a cloak for antisemitism. But as you say, these are complicated issues.

• You know, I’ll tell you something just before we sign off. I have many friends who always proclaim to be anti-Zionists, but of course not antisemitic. But I’ve noticed the pendulum swinging. And I was at a dinner party not long ago when one of my very close friends, somebody said something about Israel, and she jumped, and then she pointed to me, and she said, “She’s a Zionist, she’s a Zionist.” I was never a Zionist. But I’m becoming a Zionist because of all this antisemitism. So I see a lot of my friends now, their whole attitude swinging, you know. What is a Zionist? What is an anti-Zionist? What is, you know, what’s antisemitic? So I think it’s a huge, huge discussion. And probably this is not the right platform for it, probably not.

• Let me interject a little historical note 'cause it’s relevant. So I mentioned Nordau was a degenerationist and a Zionist. Interestingly, Nordau and Herzl, and especially Herzl, one of the founders of Zion, famously knew nothing about Jews, Jewish practise, because they were really secular Jews. But it was seeing the Dreyfuss affair that turned them into Zionists. That’s what convinced them, seeing that antisemitism, Captain Dreyfuss being drummed out of the French army. Said, “Damn, we Jews who thought we could be separationists have no place in Europe.” So it was that antisemitism that led to them becoming Zionists, even though they, both of them, knew very little about actual… Well, especially Herzl, about actual Jewish, practising Jews, religious Jews.

• Right.

• [Ken] Your stories are .

• We could go on and on. I’m so looking forward to meeting you when I come to London. You know, we’re going to have a lot of… I’m sure there are a lot of people here on this platform now, very . We apologise if we’ve offended you. This is really a platform, as we said before, of ideas, stimulating the narrative, and also forcing a discussion. It’s very, very important that we do have the discussion and that we share ideas and share our viewpoints. And at the end of it, we Jews need to really be hugging each other, not pulling each other apart. So Ken, a million thanks.

• Thanks so much.

• And Lauren, thank you so much. Very, very interesting presentation. Thank you.