Driven out of Germany, Hess moved to France. The failure of the revolutions in Europe caused him, he said, to retire temporarily from politics and to concentrate on natural science. His intense pseudoscientific reading introduced him to the racist theories that began to simmer in the 1850s.
It was in 1850 that the Scotsman Robert Knox published his well-known book The Races of Man; two years later, James W. Redfield’s book Comparative Physiognomy, or, Resemblances between Men and Animals, appeared in the United States. In 1853 Carl Gustav Carus’s Symbolism of the Human Form appeared in Germany, as well as the first volume of the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.2 These works were followed by other “scientific” books, and some of the leading thinkers in the second half of the nineteenth century began to paddle happily in the swamp of racist and Orientalist conventions. The fashion spread, gathering support among both the political left and prominent academics. Thinkers from Karl Marx to Ernest Renan published prejudiced writings about Jews, Africans or the peoples of the Orient, which very quickly became the norm.
To account for the popularity of race theory in the centers of Western culture, we must consider the European sense of superiority based on rapid industrial and technological development in the West and center of the Continent, and how this was interpreted as reflecting biological and moral ascendancy. Furthermore, the progress made in the developmental sciences gave rise to comparative fantasies linking the life sciences with social studies and history. Racial theory came to be almost unquestioned and unchallenged until the 1880s.
Hess devoured the new literature, and his sharp senses—which had previously made him a communist, perhaps the first in Germany—now led him to a new conclusion: “that behind the problems of nationality and freedom there is a still deeper problem which cannot be solved by mere phrases, namely, the race question, which is as old as history itself and which must be solved before attempting the solution of the political and social problems.”27
Past history consisted entirely of continuing stories of racial conflicts and class wars, but racial conflicts predominated. Until these bloody struggles come to an end, contends Hess, the Jews—at least those in Eastern Europe—should return to their place of origin, meaning the Holy Land. Hess concluded that the reason Jews were in conflict with gentiles was that they had always been a distinct racial group. The beginning of this ancient and persistent race could be found in Egypt. The murals in the tombs of the pharaohs depicted, among the builders of the temples and palaces, human types whose physiognomy was identical with that of modern Jews. “The Jewish race is one of the primary races of mankind that has retained its integrity,” writes Hess, “in spite of the continual change of its climatic environment, and the Jewish type has conserved its purity through the centuries.” He continues: “Jews and Jewesses endeavor, in vain, to obliterate their descent through conversion or intermarriage with the Indo-Germanic and Mongolian races, for the Jewish type is indestructible.”28
What accounts for the marvelous longevity of this nation? Hess reiterates throughout the book that the answer is, above all, its religion and faith. He disdains the reformists as much as he mocks the followers of emancipation in Germany. The Jewish religion is a national tradition that prevented the assimilation of the Jewish people. Assimilation was impossible to begin with, however. Make no mistake—for all its importance, religion was not alone in preserving the Jewish identity:
Thus it is not theory that forms life, but race; and likewise, it is not doctrine that made the Biblical-patriarchal life, which is the source of Jewish cult, but it is the patriarchal life of the Jewish ancestors that is the creative basis of the religion of the Bible, which is nothing else but a national historical cult developed out of family traditions.29
Much of this basic position about “national origin-religion” is implied in the foreword to the first volume of Graetz’s History of the Jews. Whereas Graetz’s concept of history had until then tended to be dualistic, wavering between the spiritual and the material, Hess’s racial “materialism” helped shift it to a still harder essentialist and nationalist position. By 1860 and the fifth (early) volume, which Hess praised in Rome and Jerusalem, Graetz depicted Jewish history before and even after the exile as made up of two essential elements. On the one hand, the apparently immortal Jewish tribe was the body, while the Jewish religion, no less eternal, was the soul. But from the late 1860s onward, Graetz’s history presented the body as more decisive in the definition of the Jews, although divine Providence continued to hover over them through history.
Graetz read Rome and Jerusalem before meeting its author. That meeting began their close friendship and extensive correspondence, which went on till Hess’s death in 1875. The two even planned to journey together to the old “ancestral land,” but eventually the historian traveled there on his own. A year after the appearance of Hess’s book, Graetz published a fascinating essay of his own, entitled “The Rejuvenation of the Jewish Race.”30 This is largely an unstated dialogue with Hess, and though it suggests some doubts and hesitations, it also reveals a partial acceptance of the ideological breakthrough of which Hess was one of the catalysts. The “Rejuvenation” reveals not only the means by which the Jewish people are invented in Graetz’s writing, but also the historian’s acute consciousness of the nationality issue roiling many circles of European intelligentsia.
What gives a human community the right to present itself as a nation, Graetz wonders, and replies that it is not a racial origin, because sometimes different racial types join up to form one people. Nor is language necessarily the common denominator, as shown by Switzerland, for instance. Even a unified territory is not enough for a national formation. Do historical memories unify peoples, asks Graetz, and responds with a sharp and prescient historical observation—that until the modern era the peoples did not take part in political history, but passively viewed the deeds of leaders and rulers. Was it, then, high culture that provided the basis for a nationality? No, because it, too, is new, and has not yet been acquired by the entire people. The existence of nations is a mystery, and there seems to be no single way to account for them.
As Graetz puts it, there have obviously been mortal peoples that vanished in history and others that are immortal. Nothing is left of the Hellenic and Latin races, which have dissolved into other human divisions. By contrast, the Jewish race has succeeded in preserving itself and surviving, and is about to renew its marvelous biblical youth. Its revival after the Babylonian exile and the return to Zion revealed its potential for renewal. us, the people are an organic body with a miraculous capacity for rebirth, which distinguishes them from ordinary biological organisms. The existence of the Jewish race had been unique from the start, which is why its history is a marvel. It is, in fact, a “messianic people” that will eventually save all of mankind. For Graetz, the teleology of the chosen people is more moral than political, retaining some dusty remnants of a crumbling traditional belief.
Like all nation-fostering historians in the nineteenth century, Graetz assumed that the history of his nation was sublime and not to be compared with any other national history. We shall come across echoes of this (admittedly unoriginal) thesis in the final parts of the History of the Jews, written in the second half of the 1860s and early 1870s. The national aspect is especially prominent in the volume devoted to Jewish history in modern times (up to the 1848 revolutions) and even more so, as noted earlier, in the final two volumes of the work, in which the historian sought to reconstruct the biblical genealogy of the Jews. The conceited tone of these volumes provoked the ire of another historian.
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