Jewish Eugenics.
Lynn, Richard
Jewish Eugenics
John Glad
Wooden Shore Publishers, 2011
This is a book by an ardent eugenicist who seeks to dispel the myth
that eugenics is and ever was anti-Semitic. Indeed, in it he marshals
the evidence to demonstrate that not only have a number of Jewish
scholars been supporters of eugenics, but also claims that contemporary
Jews owe their high average level of intelligence to the importance that
Jewish culture has historically placed on learning and the importance of
breeding from intelligent stock.
The central paradox explored by John Glad is that Jews have
practiced eugenics for many centuries and this has contributed to their
high average IQ and socioeconomic success, yet from the 1960s a number
of Jews were prominent in condemning eugenics. He writes that "for
all its excesses, eugenics has been an astounding success, indeed an
existential success for Jews, molding them into a uniquely resourceful
and intelligent people, and the current assault on eugenics by an
understandably emotion-driven minority Jewish faction represents a
frontal assault on the very essence of Judaism" (p. 11).
Glad follows Francis Galton, who coined the word in 1883, by
defining eugenics as "a social and scientific movement that seeks
to replace natural selection with scientific selection," and
explains that "Eugenics is all about healthy, intelligent children
and parental responsibility to future generations." He not only
argues that Jews have practiced eugenics since ancient times, but
suggests that while largely practicing inbreeding, they have from time
to time admitted the genes of successful and scholarly non-Jews into
their breeding pool. This would have introduced desirable genes.
Although Jews historically resisted breeding with non-Jews, an exception
was often made in the case of marriage with successful and influential
local families where that could be achieved. Over the course of
centuries, the result has been a substantial replacement of the original
gene pool in most Jewish communities, so that many modern Jews are
genetically interrelated to the populations amongst which they have
lived over the centuries.
Glad is not the first to have suggested that the Jewry from early
times had favored eugenic practices. In 1989, Nathaniel Weyl wrote that
"The selective character of the Captivity and the Return was
perpetuated by eugenic practices, based on learning and scholarship,
which would persist for centuries of Jewish history. The distinguished
Jewish historian Salo Baron wrote: "Family purity tended to direct
natural selection into intellectual channels," With the Jewish
respect for learning, the survival of the fittest also meant of the best
educated. Thus the Tannaim directed: "One should always sell all
one possesses in order to marry the daughter of a scholar." Under
no circumstances should one marry "the daughter of the illiterate
people of the land." This self-serving demand, since the authors of
the Tannaim were, of course, scholars, exemplifies the eugenic aspect of
at least a thousand years of the history of the Jews in Europe. That
history has sometimes been considered as a vast experiment, in which
status was based on an intellect-serving religion, in which
intellectuals were commanded not to be chaste, but to be fertile, in
which the rich and successful sought brilliant rabbinical scholars as
husbands for their daughters, and in which family prestige was measured
by pedigrees of scholarship (Weyl, 1989, p 136).
Although Glad proposes a different theory, he follows Weyl in
suggesting that eugenic practices explain the higher average Jewish IQ,
which I have calculated at approximately 110 for Ashkenazi Jews. The IQ
of Oriental Jews is considerably lower, at approximately 91 (Lynn,
2011).
For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, eugenics was not
a controversial topic. Societies for the promotion of eugenics were
established throughout the economically developed world. Glad gives many
examples of Jews who were prominent in these, such as the radical
activist Emma Goldman who was arrested on a morals charge for
distributing a 4-page pamphlet in English and Yiddish entitled "Why
and How the Poor Should Not Have So Many Children" which strongly
advocated negative eugenics (p. 162). The resistance to Goldman's
activity was not so much related to reactionary Creationist ideology as
it was to the Victorian love of children, reluctance to interfere with
the family, and to any discussion of matters relating to sex.
As late as 1977, the Jewish writer Izzy Siev asserted that
"Social Eugenics will accomplish the following: It will reduce
future welfare rolls. It will reduce our prison population. It will
reduce future crimes. It will consist of a simple three-point plan....
First, the Aid to Dependent Children should be phased out.... Second ...
Persons on Welfare who consent to sterilization should receive a one
thousand dollar cash bonus.... Third, all prison inmates should be given
a three-year reduction in their prison sentences if they consent to
sterilization (p. 286). Even today, while eugenics is a concept shunned
in Germany, Israel continues to be a leader in eugenic practices ...
while avoiding the word 'eugenics.'
It therefore seems anachronistic that secular Jewish scholars were
predominant amongst the academics who led the post-World War II attack
on eugenics. Indeed, Glad points out that Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose,
Leon Kamin and Stephen Jay Gould attacked the genetic science of the
high heritability of intelligence and personality qualities on which
eugenics was based. Glad notes that Jewish scholars also led the attacks
on Edward Wilson after the publication of his Sociobiology in 1975. He
writes that "Wilson's attackers were not Bible-belt
fundamentalist preachers with eighth grade educations, but his
sophisticated secular Jewish colleagues at Harvard--Stephen Jay Gould
and Richard Lewontin--precisely those who logically could have been
expected to be his most enthusiastic supporters.... Wilson's
opponents were soon emulated by a largely cottage industry of
anti-Darwinian scholars and activists who reviewed each other's
books and appointed each other to academic positions" (p. 77). Glad
blames this on a Jewish reaction against the popularity of eugenics in
Hitler's Germany and an important misunderstanding about the cause
of the Holocaust.
One of the most powerful weapons deployed in the attacks on
eugenics, Glad argues, has been the assertion that Hitler ordered the
destruction of the Jews for eugenic reasons. This is a misreading of
history, he claims. Far from believing that the Jews were intellectually
inferior, Hitler had great respect for their abilities. Hitler made
clear in Mein Kampf that he regarded the Jews and what he called the
"Aryans" as the two pre-eminently creative peoples, and that
there would be an inevitable struggle between them for control of the
world. Despite this, the deaths of Jews in German prison camps during
World War II, which was politically rather than scientifically
motivated, has been repeatedly advanced as evidence to support the false
accusation that eugenics inevitably leads to genocide.
It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify a
field of wider inter-disciplinary importance than eugenics, or one that
has been more politicized. We are indebted to John Glad for putting the
record straight on this and many related issues. The time has come for a
great rethinking.
References
Lynn, R. (2011) The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence
and Achievement. Augusta, GA: Washington Summit Publishers.
Weyl, N. (1989) The Geography of American Achievement. Washington,
DC: Scott-Townsend Publishers.
