3. European ‘science’ in the 19th century cast Jews as racially inferior and evil, paving the way for the Holocaust
De Bonald’s preposterous claims about physical racial differences between Jews and other races received scientific backing later in the 19th century. Racial science at the time shifted attention away from the perceived errors in Jewish religious practices and their guilt of deicide to genetic characteristics. This preposterous ‘scientific’ school of thought taught that ‘Semitic’ people would never be able to assimilate with Aryan and Indo-European societies because of their hereditary nature, which made them lazy, greedy, gifted in finance, and insular. This meant that Jews were a threat to Western Civilisation itself through intermarriage and interracial sexual intercourse.
The lack of scientific basis for any of the above (Jews aren’t even a race, they’re an ethno-religious group) meant that any Tom, Dick, or Harry could publish on the topic: all you needed was a thoroughly racist outlook. Thus Wilhelm Marr, a political agitator with no scientific training, published a popular book, Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (‘the victory of the Jewish spirit over the German spirit’) in 1879, which actually coined the term ‘antisemitism’. Does any of this ring a bell? That’s because outdated racial science formed the basis for Nazi eugenics and eventual genocide.