Una storia del razzismo, delle sue teorie, comportamenti, politiche, eccidi, in una nuova interpretazione, che permette forse per la prima volta di comprendere a fondo un pregiudizio ancora diffuso. Lontano da ogni condanna moralistica, Mosse ricerca le ragioni storiche e culturali per cui milioni di uomini hanno potuto e possono ancor oggi credere nella diversa dignità e nella distinzione delle razze : bianca o gialla o nera ; ariana o ebraica. E conclude che il razzismo non è una aberrazione mentale fondata sul Male, ma una articolata ideologia che ha trovato alimento nelle conquiste scientifiche del XVIII e XIX secolo, e si è venuta variamente intrecciando a tutti i movimenti politici di questi ultimi secoli ... , anche il socialismo, anche il marxismo. La persecuzione e l' olocausto di milioni di ebrei è stato il fenomeno che maggiormente ha scosso la coscienza degli uomini del XX secolo, ma ancor oggi in diverse parti del mondo si uccide e si muore in nome della razza. ( )

Individuate le radici del razzismo nell'ambiente culturale illuministico, nel naturalismo scientifico come nel pietismo religioso, Mosse ne segue il diramarsi nei vari movimenti letterari, scientifici, politici nell'Europa dell'Ottocento e del Novecento, fino a ricostruire le tappe e i modi in cui i nazisti arrivarono alle esecuzioni in massa degli ebrei. Mosse è stato uno storico del nazismo e del fascismo, di cui ha contribuito a rinnovare l'interpretazione. Ha insegnato nell'Università di Madison (Wisconsin) e nell'Università ebraica di Gerusalemme.

Mosse explores the development of racism in Europe in an attempt to answer the question of how the Holocaust could have happened. His history begins in the 18th century, when the Enlightenment swept Europe with its passion for ancient Greece, inter alia. The "classical beauty" of Greece and Rome became the new aesthetic standard. Combined, however, with a revival of historical consciousness in Germany, it became necessary to associate the Teutonic with the classical. This was accomplished through the valorization of the Aryan roots of the German language. German, Greek and Latin were said to have a common root in Sanskrit. (Later this theory was amended to accommodate the notion that the light-colored Aryans were not Indians at all, but the people who conquered the Indians, took their language, and departed for the north.)

The idea of German superiority required an "other" - for as Mosse explains, culture clashes are essential to the success of racial myths. The Jews, long the subject of Christian enmity anyway, easily filled this role with their different language, dress, and appearance. In an ironic role reversal, the Germans, or Volk, became the [real] Chosen People, who were deemed to have custody of the Holy Grail, and thus, by metaphorical extension, were the vessel of salvation. (Jesus was extracted from his semitic past by virtue of his timelessness and divinity; he became blond and blue-eyed not only to demonstrate this separation, but also to establish his association with the "Aryan" race.)

Darwinian theories such as "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" were "eagerly adopted by racial theoreticians" to bestow a scientific imprimatur on the already religiously-tinged notions of favored and degenerate races. As the pace of urbanism and population growth accelerated, "racial biology" (i.e., eugenics, racial heredity and racial "hygiene") took on new urgency. Other purportedly scientific theories, such as physiognomy (Johann Lavater) (kinky hair or a hooked nose portended an evil disposition), phrenology (Carl Gustav Carus) (skull proportions as well as coloring - the closer to classical Greek the better - indicated superior and inferior races), and criminology (Cesare Lombroso) (in which a degenerated state of mind was evinced by physical characteristics) contributed to the development and spread of racist ideas. As Mosse observes, "The importance of the emphasis upon the visual for racial thought cannot be overestimated." He suggests that because racial biology had always been a myth, it was particularly open to irrationalism of all kinds.

His tour of influential pseudo-intellectual thought also includes Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima, who stressed the superiority of the German blood strain, the Wagnerian disciple Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who called for a race war, and the self-hating Jew Otto Weininger, who annexed racism to sexual fears (and then killed himself).

As Mosse argues, in the political and economic upheavals at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jews were used as a foil by any number of interest groups seeking to rally support. They were accused of all manner of conspiracies, the most popular being promulgated in "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a polemic forged in France during the time of the Dreyfus Affair to link Dreyfus to a Jewish plot to take over the world. (The Protocols, it should be noted, is experiencing a renaissance in popularity in the Arab world today and has even been made into a television series.) Like the situation in the post-Civil War period in which southern whites endeavored mightily to convince northerners that blacks resembled their stereotypes (and thus whites were justified in enslaving them), Jews were isolated into crowded ghettos and impoverished until they too resembled the worst images conjured up by Europeans.

Mosse also contends that both Catholic and Protestant clergy, fearing "a rising tide of atheism, liberalism, and science" attempted to recapture their congregations by promulgating doctrines conveying an increase in hostility toward the Jews. The two world wars allowed theory to be transformed into practice. (As Tony Judt wrote in "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945," "After 1918... the violence of war did not abate. It metamorphosed instead into domestic affairs...") The massive casualties of World War I resulted in, according to Mosse, "a certain brutalization of conscience." Moreover, the Germans then experienced a devastating cycle of defeat, revolution, counter-revolution, and inflation that made them ripe for the communitarian appeal of mass movements, a longing for a return to the mythical halcyon Aryan past, the welcome relief of scapegoating, and the release of violence. As leftist parties became bogged down in internecine quarreling, the right, with its noncomplex black-and-white worldview and promises of a restoration to middle class morality was able to step into the breach.

Hitler, described by Mosse as "a superb politician," announced even before World War II that another war would mean the destruction of Jewry rather than of Europe, and under the cover of war proceeded to implement his "final solution of the Jewish question." However, as Mosse suggests, as much Hitler is now associated with the worst excesses of racism, it was not confined only to his thoughts and actions, nor, unfortunately, did it end with him. He holds: "We have seen the stereotypes of beauty or ugliness formed at the very beginning of the history of European racism. ... From the eighteenth century to its use by the Nazis in the holocaust, this stereotype never changed. The virile, Hellenistic type juxtaposed with the dark and misshapen villain, the Aryan of Greek proportions versus the ill-proporitoned Jew, made racism a visually centered ideology. And this stress on the visual, in turn, made it easy for people to understand the thrust of the ideology." He continues, "The holocaust has passed. ... But racism itself has survived. As many people as ever before think in racial categories. ... And if, under the shock of the holocaust, the postwar world proclaimed a temporary moratorium on anti-Semitism, the black on the whole remained locked into a racial posture which never varied much from the eighteenth century to our time." He contends that "The first step toward victory over this scourge of mankind is to understand what brought it about...." Mosse's book makes a valiant effort to accomplish just that. Well worth reading. (JAF)

Nota Bene:
According to "Ulysses Annotated" by Don Gifford, the terms "anti-Semitic" and anti-Semite" were first coined in Germany in 1879-80 by a pamphleteer of a screed against the Jews. His pamphlet, Gifford says, was a symptom rather than a cause of "the stridency and cruelty of anti-Jewish hysteria in late-nineteenth-century Germany and Europe." His analysis is significant:

"The shift in the 1880s from the term 'anti-Jewish' to the term 'anti-Semitic' was a foretaste of just how sinister this new wave of persecution was to become. The term 'Jewish' means a people with a specifically religious identity, if dispersed among many nations. The idea of religious commitment and belief thus implies the possibility of change and reform, including renewal of faith and new idealism. 'Semitic' (which refers to the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, and Phoenicians as well as Arabs and Jews) suggest instead a racial identity - complete with the nineteenth-century assumption that each race had biologically innate characteristics that dictated a predetermined racial superiority, mediocrity, or inferiority. The biology of race held that individuals could behave variously, but only in very limited ways because racial characteristics (what we would call stereotypes), while they could be controlled or held in check, could never be eradicated." ( )