By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — In 1850, the German composer Richard Wagner wrote an article titled “Judaism in Music.” Thirty years after its publication Wagner’s article was followed by the publication of books representing a new anti-Jewish direction – racial. The term “antisemitism” itself was introduced by German journalist and politician Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the “German League of Antisemitism,” in his book The Victory of Judaism over Germanness, Viewed from a Non-Religious Perspective (1879).
Wagner became a pioneer of racial antisemitism. He wrote: “No matter how many good words are spoken about the just necessity of Jewish equality, in the real encounter with Jews, we have never ceased to feel the most sincere antipathy toward them; […] we have been perplexed by the inevitable necessity of freeing art from Jewish oppressive influence; […] the Jews’ capacity for meaningful contemplation has never been great enough for great artists to emerge from their midst.” For the first time in the history of Judeophobia, Wagner did not distinguish between baptized Jews like composer Mendelssohn and poet Heine, and Jews who did not change their faith, like banker Rothschild and composer Meyerbeer.
Nazi scientists also contributed to racial antisemitism. Nobel Prize winners in Physics Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, along with their supporters, divided physics into incorrect Jewish (theoretical) physics and correct Aryan (experimental) physics. Lenard wrote, “It is extremely important to review all discoveries in physics made by non-Aryans. For this, it’s best to turn to the discoveries of their most prominent representative, the pure-blooded Jew Albert Einstein. His theory of relativity was meant to change physics. In fact, this theory has completely failed. Moreover, it could never have been right.
Jewish physics is a perversion of the foundations of Aryan physics… You’ll ask – German physics? I could also call it Aryan physics or the physics of Nordic-type people, the physics of reality explorers, truth-seekers, the physics of those who founded natural science. In reality, science, like everything humans create, depends on race, on blood.” German mathematicians kept pace with their physicist colleagues.
Mathematics in Nazi Germany was regulated by racist Nazi policies, such as the Civil Service Act of 1933, which led to the dismissal of many Jewish mathematics professors and instructors from German universities. Jews faced discrimination in academic institutions before 1933, but before the Nazis came to power, some Jewish mathematicians, such as Hermann Minkowski, Edmund Landau and Richard Courant, were successful and even appointed to full professorships with the support of the famous German mathematician David Hilbert at the University of Göttingen.
After the Jews were fired from this university, the following incident involving Hilbert occurred there. Austrian Jewish journalist Robert Jungk wrote about this in his book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns about the history of the creation of the American atomic bomb (1958): “The scientists who remained in Göttingen, including outstanding researchers, were unable to continue their scientific work at the high level of the 1920s during the Third Reich. This decline was felt most acutely by the elderly mathematician Hilbert.
About a year after the “cleansing” in Göttingen, Hilbert was sitting in a place of honor next to the new Minister of Science, Education, and National Education, Bernhard Rust, at one of the official celebrations. Rust casually asked the old scholar, “Is it true, Professor, that your institute suffered greatly after the Jews left?” Sharp-tongued and as always frank, Hilbert replied, “Great harm? No harm was done to the institute, Mr. Minister, it simply no longer exists!”
Back in 1928, at the International Mathematical Congress in Bologna, Hilbert said: “Any framework, especially of a national nature, is contrary to the spirit of mathematics. Only by absolutely not understanding our science can differences be created between people and races, and the reasons for this are extremely insignificant. Mathematics does not know races… For mathematics, the entire cultural world is a single country.”
The Nazi ideology regarding mathematics dictated that “Aryan mathematics” would emphasize geometric mathematics and probability theory. Abstract axiomatics was condemned as “Franco-Jewish.” Berlin mathematician and antisemite Ludwig Bieberbach condemned the set theory of Jewish mathematician Georg Cantor and measure theory as un-German. He was the author of the concept of “Aryan” and “Jewish” mathematics. In a lecture given in the spring of 1934, Bieberbach approved the protests of Göttingen students against the work of Edmund Landau at their university. He said, “The behavior of the Göttingen students toward Edmund Landau is quite reasonable and justified, as the case of Landau clearly shows that there is German mathematics and there is Jewish mathematics – two worlds separated by an insurmountable chasm. The choice of scientific problems and the approach to them are dictated by the scientist himself and are therefore a product of his race. […] A nation that has found its own identity cannot tolerate such teachers and must reject foreign thought.”
In 1934, in the lecture “Personality structure and mathematical creativity” widely covered by the press, Bieberbach referred to the Nazi-sympathizing psychologist Erich Rudolf Jaensch, identifying the abstraction-seeking type S with Jews, and the type J, striving to comprehend reality in all its diversity, with Germans. Bieberbach said, “Abstract Jewish thinkers like S knew how to distort [Hilbert’s axioms] to use them as an intellectual vaudeville show. […] This is a typical example of how racially foreign influences and racially foreign temptations cut Germans off from the source of their own strength. […] There is no self-sufficient mathematical field independent of ideology and life; the current debate about foundations is actually a debate about race. […] Ultimately, this juggling of concepts and outright tricks are characteristic of the inorganic, hostile type S, especially Jewish mathematics.”
A stereotype has spread in Germany that Jewish intellect tends toward practice, relying on logic and calculations, while German intellect is more conceptual. The last stereotype was solidified by German psychologist and ardent Nazi, Jaensch, in 1937. The psychologist divided mathematicians into J-type and S-type. According to Jaensch, the “integrative” (Integrationstypus or J-type), meaning the Germanic mind, is conceptual and geometric. This is the ideal, northern, Aryan type, while the “decay type” (S-type or “Strahltypus”), the Jewish mind is simply logical. After the Nazis came to power, he added that although the political struggle was now over, the sharp spiritual struggle against “Eastern” Jews was just beginning. All negative characteristics were projected onto the S type. Type J was a tough, masculine, aggressive, and reliable member of the Nazi Party of Aryan descent. S-type sensory tendencies were more free-flowing, fragmented, emotional, and “liberal.”
In the concluding remarks of one of his lectures, Bieberbach noted: “However, if something is as deeply ingrained in a people as is the case with the style of mathematical creativity, and as is confirmed by the racially specific style of our great German mathematicians, then it is important for the development of our people to recognize and strengthen a specifically German style in mathematics. For this, we first need a clear definition of foreign style. After all, we are too easily inclined to lose sight of our own capabilities, admiring what is foreign. We will only get rid of this mistake when the teachers of our academic youth are themselves strong representatives of our people, with the will to cultivate the German style above all else… Thus, we have a better chance of proving ourselves among nations through our own efforts if we freely discard the borrowed feathers that don’t suit our style.”
Highly educated and scholarly people went to scientifically absurd theories to remove the hated Jews from science and eradicate their unextinguishable thirst for knowledge and science. Their pseudoscience was anti-Jewish antiscience.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 12 books.