MacDonald develops a theory of anti-Semitism based on an evolutionary interpretation of social identity theory--a major approach to group conflict in contemporary social psychology. Beginning in the ancient world, anti-Semitism has existed under a variety of religious and political regimes. MacDonald explores several theoretically important common themes of anti-Semitic writings such as Jewish clannishness and cultural separatism, economic and cultural domination of gentiles, and the issue of loyalty to the wider society.
Particular attention is paid to three major manifestations of Western anti-Semitism: the development of institutionalized anti-Semitism in the Roman Empire, the Iberian Inquisitions, and the phenomenon of Nazism. All of these movements exhibited a powerful gentile group cohesion in opposition to Judaism as a group strategy, and MacDonald argues that each may be analyzed as a reaction to the presence of Judaism as a highly successful group evolutionary strategy. Because of the repeated occurrence of anti-Semitism, Jews have developed a highly flexible array of strategies to minimize its effects. These include: crypsis during periods of persecution, controls on Jewish behavior likely to lead to anti-Semitism, and the manipulation of gentile attitudes toward Jews. This controversial work challenges prevailing views. Students and scholars involved with evolutionary approaches to human behavior and Jewish Studies will be interested, as will social scientists and historians in general.
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National Socialism as an Anti-Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy
The National Socialist movement in Germany from 1933–1945 is a departure from Western tendencies toward universalism and muted individualism in the direction of racial nationalism and cohesive collectivism. The evidence reviewed below indicates that National Socialism developed in the context of group conflict between Jews and gentiles, and I propose that it may be usefully conceptualized as a group evolutionary strategy that was characterized by several key features that mirrored Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.
Most basically, National Socialism aimed at developing a cohesive group. There was an emphasis on the inculcation of selfless behavior and within-group altruism combined with outgroup hostility (MacDonald 1988a, 298–300). These anti-individualist tendencies can be seen in the Hitler Youth movement (Koch 1976; Rempel 1989). After 1936, membership was compulsory for children after their tenth birthday. A primary emphasis was to mold children to accept a group strategy of within-group altruism combined with hostility and aggression toward outgroups, particularly Jews. Children were taught an ideology of nationalism, the organic unity of the state, blind faith in Hitler, and anti-Semitism. Physical courage, fighting skills, and a warlike mentality were encouraged, but the most important aspect of education was group loyalty: “Faithfulness and loyalty irrespective of the consequences were an article of faith shared among wide sections of Germany’s youth” (Koch 1976, 119).
Socialization for group competition was strongly stressed, “all the emphasis centering on obedience, duty to the group, and helping within the group” (Koch 1976, 128). The ideology of National Socialism viewed the entire society (excluding the Jews) as a large kinship group—a “Volksgemeinschaft transcending class and creed” (Rempel 1989, 5). A constant refrain of the literature of the Hitler Youth was the idea of the individual sacrificing himself for the leader:
the basic idea is…that of a group of heroes inseparably tied to one another by an oath of faithfulness who, surrounded by physically and numerically superior foes, stand their ground…Either the band of heroes is reduced to the last man, who is the leader himself defending the corpses of his followers—the grand finale of the Nibelungenlied—or through its unparalleled heroism brings about some favourable change in its fortune. (Koch 1976, 143)
The Hitler Youth was associated with the SS (Schutzstaffel, “protection echelon”)—an elite corps of highly committed and zealous soldiers. Rempel (1989, 256) estimates that 95 percent of German youth maintained their fidelity to the war effort even after the defeat at Stalingrad. Koch (1976) describes high levels of selfless behavior among Germans during the war both as soldiers and as support personnel in the war effort, and quotes from individual youth clearly indicate that the indoctrination of young people with National Socialist ideology was quite successful and often appears to have been causally responsible for self-sacrificing behavior.
Within-group egalitarianism is often an important facilitator of a group evolutionary strategy, because it cements the allegiance of lower-status individuals (see below and PTSDA, Ch. 1). While the National Socialist movement retained traditional hierarchical Western social structure, the internal cohesiveness and altruism characteristic of National Socialism may have been facilitated by a significant degree of egalitarianism. There were real attempts to increase the status and economic prospects of farmers in the Hitler Youth Land Service, and class divisions and social barriers were broken down within the Hitler Youth movement to some extent, with the result that lower and working-class children were able to move into positions of leadership. Moreover, the socialist element of National Socialism was more than merely a deceptive front (Pipes 1993, 260, 276–277). The economy was intensively regulated, and private property was subject to expropriation in order to achieve the goals of the community.
Here it is of interest that an important element of the National Socialist ideology and behavior as a group strategy involved discrimination against Jews as a group. Jewish group membership was defined by biological descent (see Dawidowicz 1976, 38ff). As in the case of the limpieza phenomenon of the Inquisition, this biological classification of Jews occurred in a context in which many of even the most overtly assimilated Jews—those who had officially converted to Christianity—continued Jewish associational and marriage patterns and had in effect become crypto-Jews (see below and Chapter 6). Thus, an act of September 1933 prohibited farmers from inheriting land if there was any trace of Jewish ancestry going back to 1800, and the act of April 11, 1933, dismissing Jews from the civil service applied to any individual with at least one Jewish grandparent. National Socialist extremists advocated the dissolution of mixed marriages and Jewish sterilization, and wanted to consider even individuals with one-eighth Jewish ancestry as full Jews.[110]
From the present perspective, Germany after 1933 was characterized by the presence of two antithetical group strategies. Jews were systematically driven from the German economy in gradual stages between 1933 and 1939. For example, shortly after the National Socialists assumed power, there were restrictions on employment in the civil service, the professions, schools and universities, and trade and professional associations—precisely the areas of the economy in which Jews were disproportionately represented—and there is evidence for widespread public support for these laws (Friedländer 1997; Krausnick 1968, 27ff). Quotas were established for attendance at universities and public schools. An act of September 1933 excluded Jews from faculties in the arts, literature, theater, and film. Eventually Jewish property was expropriated and taxed exorbitantly, and Jews were subjected to a variety of indignities (“No indignity seemed too trivial to legislate” [Gordon 1984, 125]), including prohibitions against owning pets.
As has happened so often in periods of relatively intense anti-Semitism, barriers were raised between the groups. Jews were required to wear identifying badges and were prohibited from restaurants and public parks. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prevented marriage and all sexual contact between the groups. The laws prohibited Jews from employing German women under the age of forty-five as domestic servants—presumably an attempt to prevent Jewish men in a superior position from having sexual contact with fertile gentile women. The National Socialist authorities were also very concerned about socializing and friendship between Jews and gentiles (Gordon 1984, 179; Krausnick 1968, 31)—a phenomenon that recalls the ancient Jewish wine taboo, intended to prevent Jews from socializing with gentiles.
Just as social controls on group members have been important to the Jewish group evolutionary strategy, especially in traditional societies, the National Socialist group strategy punished individuals who violated the various race laws enacted by the Third Reich, failed to cooperate in boycotts against Jewish businesses, or socialized with Jews. For example, there were approximately four hundred criminal cases per year for “race defilement” (i.e., sexual contact between Jews and gentiles) under the Nuremberg Laws. As in the case of Jewish social controls designed to ensure within-group conformity to group interests (see PTSDA, Chs. 4, 6), the National Socialists penalized not only the individual but the family as well: “Any decision to violate Nazi racial regulations, whether premeditated or impulsive, placed a stigma upon oneself and one’s family. Arrest or loss of Nazi party membership, for example, frequently meant loss of one’s job, retaliation against one’s spouse or children, and social exclusion (often compulsory)” (Gordon 1984, 302).
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National Socialism And Judaism As Mirror-Image Group Strategies
From the perspective developed here, the acceptance of the ideology of an anti-Semitic group strategy among the NSDAP elite may well have been caused or at least greatly facilitated by the presence of Judaism as a very salient and successful racially exclusive antithetical group strategy within German society. In 1905, well before the National Socialists came to power, the anti-Semitic racial theorist Curt Michaelis asserted a relationship between Jewish racial pride ( Rassenstolz) and anti-Semitism: “The Rassenstolz promoted race hatred in its sharpest form—the consequence of which is lasting race war…The Jewish people stands principally in battle against the whole world; naturally, therefore, the whole world [is] against the Jews” (in Efron 1994, 170).
There is an eerie sense in which National Socialist ideology was a mirror image of traditional Jewish ideology. As in the case of Judaism, there was a strong emphasis on racial purity and on the primacy of group ethnic interests rather than individual interests. Like the Jews, the National Socialists were greatly concerned with eugenics. Like the Jews, there was a powerful concern with socializing group members into accepting group goals and with the importance of within-group altruism and cooperation in attaining these goals.
Both groups had very powerful internal social controls that punished individuals who violated group goals or attempted to exploit the group by freeloading. The National Socialists enacted a broad range of measures against Jews as a group, including laws against intermarriage and sexual contact, as well as laws preventing socialization between groups and restricting the economic and political opportunities of Jews. These laws were analogous to the elaborate social controls within the Jewish community to prevent social contact with gentiles and to produce high levels of economic and political cooperation.
Corresponding to the religious obligation to reproduce and multiply enshrined in the Tanakh, the National Socialists placed a strong emphasis on fertility and enacted laws that restricted abortion and discouraged birth control. In a manner analogous to the traditional Jewish religious obligation to provide dowries for poor girls, the National Socialists enacted laws that enabled needy young couples to marry by providing them loans repayable by having children.
As in the society depicted in the Tanakh and throughout Jewish history, the National Socialists regarded people who could not prove the genetic purity of their ancestry as aliens with fewer rights than Germans, with the result that the position of Jews in National Socialist society was analogous to the position of the Nethinim or the Samaritans in ancient Israelite society, or converts in historical Jewish societies, or the Palestinians in contemporary Israel.[147] As with Israel, the state had become the embodiment of an exclusivist ethnic group.
Both groups had a well-developed ideology of historical struggle involving the group. Jewish resistance during the period “was founded on militant movements for Zionism, socialism, or Communism—movements that had always provided their members with a strong sense of historical struggle and an identification with group goals rather than individual satisfaction” (Kren & Rappaport 1980, 114)—clearly a statement that could apply not only to Zionism but to traditional Judaism as a whole. We have seen that the National Socialists had a similar ideology of historical struggle and self-sacrifice. Gordon (1984, 114) states that “it was clearly Hitler’s conception that he was working for group goals—those of the ‘Aryan people’ and that his individual fate mattered little.”
In this regard, Hitler’s attitude that death was the only honorable fate for himself and his followers was entirely similar to that of the Jewish resistors of the period (Gordon 1984, 115). Kren and Rappaport (1980, 217) describe a situation in which “the youth—the best, the most beautiful, the finest that the Jewish people possessed—spoke and thought only about an honorable death…befitting an ancient people with a history stretching back over several thousand years.”
Separation and Its DiscontentsToward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitismby
Kevin B. MacDonald
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