Evolving from the romantic perceptions of nationalism already discussed, and from the
new scientific notions of race, a new form of antisemitism rose in the second half of
the 19th century which is known as racial antisemitism.
This form would prove to be an especially lethal one, laying the groundwork for the
formulation of Nazi ideology, among others.
Modern racism and modern racist antisemitism derived from age-old prejudices that were
pushed forward and secularized by developments in science and in other scholarly research
in the 18th and 19th centuries.
First of all in philosophy - modern philosophy was a development of new ideas that were freed
from any kind of higher authority.
They were based on the Ratio - on human thinking rather than on God.
Developments of Enlightenment thinking - the ideas that all human beings are born equal
- similar ideas to the ancient Jewish and Christian ideas of all human beings created
in God's image - these ideas that posited the equality of all humanity together with
secular modern philosophy were advancing modernity, but at the same time created a kind of a pushback
from various societies.
We find that the influence of certain scientific advances in the study of linguistics and philology
-the study of the development of languages; in the study of anthropology - cultures, the
development of cultures and their biology, and their customs; and the study of biology
and evolution and genetics.
All of these had an influence both in advancing science, but also branches of these advances
developed into racist ideas.
In the sense of the study of languages, they developed a study of or an idea that there
were families of languages such as the Indo-European languages, and there were branches of that
study of linguistics and philology that argued that not only there were languages that had
connections to each other in their origins, but that certain languages reflected superiority
of development in how languages were written, and how languages were spoken, and how sophisticated
they were, and that these reflected higher cultures or lower cultures.
Developments in anthropology that viewed the various kinds of peoples in the world, particularly
what anthropologists found to be the quote unquote "primitive peoples," or "the savages"
as some called them.
And they would view these people and study their customs in Africa, or in the Pacific,
or in other places, and would posit that there were certain kinds of cultures and societies
that were more advanced, or less advanced that were superior or lesser than others.
Advances in biology from Darwin's theories of evolution and the development of species
over eons of time through natural selection were a lead-in for certain people to view
biology and evolution, and the new study of genetics that developed in the second half
of the 19th century as a way to try to discover who has superior traits, who has inferior traits
and so on.
Developing out of these ideas of evolution and genetics and heredity, a new field known
as Social Darwinism was developed in particular by Herbert Spencer - a physiologist, and anthropologist,
and sociologist in his own right - who argued that among the societies there were superior
beings and lesser beings, and the superior beings had the right to rule and they achieved
that right through a struggle and a survival of the fittest in a struggle in real time
among people in societies.
All of these ideas and more fed into what developed into a modern in the 19th century
idea about racism that argued that not only was race a physical feature - that is, that
there are darker-skinned and lighter-skinned people - but that race was also something
that you could see among the white races themselves, that there are different kinds of races and
within those races there's a hierarchy.
Some argued that the Aryan race - the Northern Europeans - were the superior race, the ones
who had advanced society the most.
And other races among the white people were lower down and races that were not white were
even lower in the hierarchy.
Clearly if there are superior people they have the right to rule, a natural right given
to them by the way nature developed.
Within all of this new ideas developed about the Jews.
The Jews were no longer viewed by the latter part of the 19th century as a religion or
as a nation but rather as a race like other races; and as such that meant that the Jews
and whatever qualities or features they had were immutable, their features were unchangeable
regardless of the language they spoke, the citizenship that they held, or the religion
that they adhered to or did not adhere to.
In the late 19th century, leading thinkers and figures across Europe began to approach
race and the struggle between races as something mystic, almost religious.
Racist and antisemitic theories were flourishing, with famous writers such as the French Joseph
Arthur de Gobineau writing about the inequality of races, claiming that the supposed contamination
of superior Aryan blood by inter-racial relations would lead to deterioration of all the achievements
made by the white-raced Europeans.
Another example for this way of thinking was the British-German philosopher Houston Stewart
Chamberlain.
He wrote extensively about how the so called Jewish race was foreign to the superior nature
of the North European Aryans, and how dangerous it was.
Chamberlain was related by marriage to the famous composer Richard Wagner, who also wrote
antisemitic treatises about the inferiority of the Jews and their incapability to create
music and culture in general.
Racial antisemitism saw the Jews as a destructive race that sabotaged the achievements of the
Aryans in Europe.
It was against the Jews integrating into the society in which they lived.
It was against the emancipated Jew.
It was not the old antisemitism that claimed that the Jews were different, they did not
belong, they did not share the same culture.
Now antisemitism was directed against the Jew that did everything to become part of
the society in which he lived.
And this movement proved to him that he is not wanted despite his doing all he can to
become part of that society.
It is exactly against this process that the modern antisemitism came about.
In addition to that, the fact that it was a racial antisemitism meant that whatever
the Jews did, they would be excluded from the society because it was not a question
of behavior, or culture or religion, but it was a deterministic element - the fact that
you were born to a so-called 'different race'.
Now there is no such thing as a 'Jewish race' - we know that - but the claim was the basis
for exclusion.