The Nazi’s Best Weapon
Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race.
by M. E. Ashley Montagu.
With a foreword by Aldous Huxley. New York, Columbia University Press, 1945. 304 pp. $3.25.
Some clever mathematician once computed that, theoretically, every person now alive had one billion ancestors in the generation of the year 1000 A.D.; while each of the latter had a billion in the generation of Jesus Christ. The logical conclusion is simple: there exist no pure races. If mankind preferred to think logically, there would be no need for Professor Montagu’s book. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Realizing the impressiveness of the printed word, the professor puts the entirely unscientific term race between quotation marks whenever he uses it. Introduced—but only in its zoological sense—into scientific literature by the French naturalist Buffon as late as 1749, the term “race” received its pernicious political and social implications only in a much later era, during the struggle between slave-holders and abolitionists. The former, searching for arguments to combat their opponents, ushered in the concept of “superior” and “inferior” races, the latter being, of course, the Negro slaves imported from Africa. In the middle of the nineteenth century a reactionary Frenchman and pseudo-scientist, Gobineau, wrote a dubious story on L’inégalité des races humaines in order to combat the dogma of the French Revolution that all men are created equal.
From Gobineau the road leads directly to the Kaiser’s favorite “philosopher,” Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and to Hitler. The latter, incidentally, admitted to Rauschning that he actually considered racism plain nonsense: “I know perfectly well,” he said, “just as well as all these tremendously clever intellectuals, that in the scientific sense there is no such thing as race.” But: “with the conception of race, National Socialism will carry its revolution abroad and recast the world.”
Dr. Montagu concludes that there exist four more or less distinct divisions of mankind—Negroid or black, Archaic white or Australoid, Caucasoid or white, and Mongoloid. None of these great divisions is unmixed, nor is any of the countless ethnic subdivisions “pure.” In all likelihood, we all are derived from the same ancestral stock, and the so-called races simply constitute different kinds of temporary mixtures of the genetic materials common to all human beings.
It is, to a large extent, geographic and social barriers that make for the differences between ethnic groups; once these barriers are overcome the differences decrease as the influence of common environment and intermarriage increases. The author violently assails the notion of superior and inferior races. Not only skin color, even brain size has no inherent relation to intelligence. If the Negro’s brain is, in general, smaller than the white man’s, the cranial capacity of the uncouth Neanderthal man, on the other hand, was larger than that of any existing group of humans.
Dr. Montagu devotes a full chapter to the question, “Are the Jews a ‘Race’?” He answers in the negative. The Jews are a mixture of original Arab tribes with Canaanites, Amorites, Amalekites, Kenites, Egyptians and Hittites, not to mention the various modern nations with whom they mixed, at least to a certain degree, in the Diaspora. According to Montagu, it is “membership in Jewish culture” that makes a Jew a Jew. He does not agree with Huxley and Haddon, who called the Jews a “pseudo-national” group: “It would be better to call the Jews a quasi-national rather than a pseudo-national group, for there is nothing ‘pseudo’ about their nationalistic cultural traits, even though they may not be definitely recognized as a nation neatly delimited by definite geographic boundaries. It is by virtue of the traits of this quasi-Jewish national culture that a Jewish community may be said to exist and that any person exhibiting these traits may be recognized as a Jew, whether he is an adherent of the Jewish religion or not. Such traits are not inborn, but acquired, and they have nothing whatever to do with biological or so-called ‘racial’ conditions. They are conditioned by culture alone.”
But the term “quasi-national” group does not sound satisfactory either. This reviewer prefers Milton Steinberg’s division of the Jews into three stages of development: “A minority nationality in Central and Eastern Europe, an emerging nation in Palestine, and a religiocultural group in Western democratic lands.”
A practical question arises: what can be done to eradicate “race” hatred? Dr. Montagu traces it to economic and psychological factors. “Race” hatred acts as an outlet for the aggressiveness of the individual. Dr. Montagu suggests that every ethnic group within our democracy should be given “an equal opportunity, and it may be predicted that one will find between minds only such differences as now exist between individuals of the same ethnic group who have enjoyed equal cultural opportunities.” Education should stress the individual’s understanding of the simple fundamental facts of his own nature (“for to understand others it is first necessary to understand oneself”). Man must be furnished with outlets for his aggressiveness “which will result in benefits both to the individual and through him to society.” Above all, his inborn drive must be strengthened “toward social and cooperative behavior,” which the author considers “biologically the most important” drive within man.
The book, which now appears in a second, revised and enlarged edition, is written in clear, concise prose. It ought to be read, not only by fellow-scientists, but also by the layman, Jewish and non-Jewish, both in different degree targets and victims of “man’s most dangerous myth.”
