For previous articles that cover the connections between Judaism and eugenics, please see here, here, here, here and here. See here for the connections between Judaism and Transhumanism, and here for the connections between Transhumanism and political control.
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The popular impression is that the eugenics movement was a racist, anti-Semitic Nazi ideology inspired by Anglo-American elites.
In point of fact, eugenics also managed to establish strong bridgeheads in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey.
Jews played a modest but active role in the early eugenics movement. In 1916, Rabbi Max Reichler published an article entitled “Jewish Eugenics,” in which he attempted to demonstrate that Jewish religious customs were eugenic in thrust.
A decade and a half later Ellsworth Huntington, in his book Tomorrow’s Children, which was published in conjunction with the directors of the American Eugenics Society, echoed Reichler’s arguments, praising the Jews as being of uniquely superior stock and explaining their achievements by a systematic adherence to the basic principles of Jewish religious law, which he also viewed as being fundamentally eugenic in nature. In the Weimar Republic many Jewish socialists actively campaigned for eugenics, using the Socialist newspaper Vorwärts as their chief tribune.
Max Levien, head of the first Munich Soviet, and Julius Moses, a member of the German Socialist Party, believed strongly in eugenics. A partial list of prominent German-Jewish eugenicists would include the geneticists Richard Goldschmidt, Heinrich Poll, and Curt Stern, the statistician Wilhelm Weinberg (coauthor of the Hardy-Weinberg Law), the mathematician Felix Bernstein, and the physicians Alfred Blaschko, Benno Chajes, Magnus Hirschfeld, Georg Löwenstein, Max Marcuse, Max Hirsch, and Albert Moll.
The German League for Improvement of the People and the Study of Heredity was even attacked by the Nazi publisher Julius F. Lehmann as targeted subversion on the part of Berlin Jews.
Löwenstein was a member of an underground resisting the National Socialist government, and Chajes, Goldschmidt, Hirschfeld, and Poll emigrated. In America, when the revolutionary anarchist editor of the American Journal of Eugenics, Moses Harman, died in 1910, Emma Goldman’s magazine Mother Earth took over distribution. In 1933, the eugenicist and University of California professor of zoology Samuel Jackson Holmes noted the significant number of Jews in the eugenics movement and praised their “native endowment of brains,” while at the same time lamenting the racial bias suffered by the Jews, which caused many of their intellectuals to be wary of nonegalitarian worldviews.
The American Eugenics Society itself counted Rabbi Louis Mann as one of its directors, in 1935.One of the most prominent eugenicists was the American Herman Muller, whose mother was Jewish and who received the Nobel Prize in medicine, in 1946, for his work on genetic mutation rates. A communist, Muller spent 1933-1937 as a senior geneticist at the University of Moscow, when he wrote a letter to Stalin proposing that the Soviet Union adopt eugenics as an official policy.
It was the eve of the Great Purges, and Stalin definitely disapproved of the idea, at which point Muller judged it wisest to leave for Scotland and then returned to the United States. It was in the middle of his Moscow sojourn that Muller’s eugenics treatise Out of the Night appeared in the United States. In 1932, Muller had spent a year in Germany and he was outraged by Nazi concepts and policies concerning race.
According to the National Library in Jerusalem, from the 1920s through the 1950s, some 200 Hebrew-language Parents’ manuals were published. These publications contained a coherent worldview, of which eugenics formed an integral part, subjecting Jewish mothers to an unremitting program of education, indoctrination, and regulation. During the British mandate, Jewish physicians in Palestine actively promoted eugenics. Dr. Joseph Meir, for whom the hospital in Kfar Sava is named, wrote in 1934:
Who should be allowed to raise children? Seeking the right answer to this question, eugenics is the science that tries to refine the human race and keep it from decaying. This science is still young, but it has enormous advantages…. Is it not our duty to insure that our children will be healthy, both physically and mentally? For us, eugenics in general, and mainly the careful prevention of hereditary illnesses, has a much higher value than in other nations. Doctors, athletes, and politicians should spread the idea widely: Do not have children unless you are sure that they will be healthy, both mentally and physically.
One researcher at Ben-Gurion University working on the topic “eugenicist Zionists,” came across a card file with notes written by the editors of a collection of Meir’s writings, published in Israel in the mid-1950s where the editors call the article “problematic and dangerous” and comment that “Now, after Nazi eugenics, it is dangerous to publish this article.”
In point of fact, knowledge of Jewish support for eugenics in pre-1948 Palestine was suppressed for many years. Dr. Max Nordau, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, was converted to Zionism by Theodore Herzl and became prominent in the movement. Nordau’s ideas, which including vigorously propagandizing eugenics, became so popular in the Jewish community that Nordau Clubs were created even in the United States.
Dr. Arthur Ruppin, the head of the World Zionist Organization office in Palestine, wrote in his book The Sociology of the Jews that “in order to preserve the purity of our race, such Jews [showing signs of genetic defects] must refrain from having children.”
In Israel today many eugenic practices have become widely accepted. According to Meira Weiss of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, In Israel, the Zionists’ eugenics turned into a selective prenatal policy backed by state-of-the-art genetic technology.
There are now more fertility clinics per capita there than in any other country in the world (four times the number per capita in the United States). Abortion is subsidized if the fetus is suspected to be physically or mentally malformed. In cases where the husband’s sperm is not viable, donors fill out extensive health histories. The State supplies the sperm, which is screened for Tay-Sachs.
Women over thirty-five routinely consent to amniocentesis tests and abort if genetic defects are discovered. Thus, the government is actively pursuing eugenics, although the chief motivation appears to be as least as much quantitative as qualitative. Surrogacy was legalized in 1996137, but only for married women. It too is paid for by the State.
Jewish religious law does not delegitimize the children of unmarried women, thus making it possible to combine Jewish legal principles with modern legal practices. In vitro fertilization and embryo transfer are preferred by some rabbis as a form of fertility treatment that does not violate the literal Halakhic precepts against adultery.
Curiously, some rabbis refuse to condemn the use of non-Jewish sperm, since masturbation by non-Jews is not of explicit rabbinic concern, and also because Jewishness is passed exclusively through the mother. Children born to different Jewish mothers using the same sperm donor may even marry, since “they share no substance.” Other rabbis, however, consider the use of non-Jewish sperm an abomination. 139
The Israeli attitude toward cloning differs considerably from that prevalent in most other countries. Although human reproductive cloning is currently not permitted because the technology is not yet considered safe, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel sees no inherent religious interdiction in reproductive cloning as a form of treatment for infertility and even sees an advantage over sperm donation, which by using anonymous donors might subsequently lead to a marriage between brother and sister.
In 1998, although more than eight decades had passed since the appearance of Reichler’s 1916 essay, Noam J. Zohar, a professor of philosophy at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, responded to Reichler. Noting that Reichler’s emphatically pro-eugenics views were “shared… by more than a few Judaic circles today,” Zohar wrote that A program of individualized eugenics… would seem to be consonant with an attitude that was, at the very least, tacitly endorsed by traditional Judaic teachings.
Should it make a difference if the means for producing fine offspring are no longer determined by moralized speculation but instead by evidence-based genetic science? It seems to me that, insofar as the goal itself is acceptable, the change in the means for its advancement need pose no obstacle to its pursuit.
This is so of course provided that the new means are not morally objectionable. To work out a Judaic response to the sort of new eugenics now looming on our horizon it will be necessary to evaluate the various specific means that might serve a modern individualized eugenics. I hope that some of the groundwork for that has been laid in this examination of traditional Judaic voices.
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