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From: skyler@violet.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish,news.misc,news.groups
Subject: A Historical Point about Anti-Semitism
Message-ID: <17452@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 27 Nov 88 20:35:16 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: skyler@violet.berkeley.edu ()
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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Some have argued that the questionable joke should be taken very
seriously because attitudes like those expressed in the joke were
the cause of/same as those which resulted in/caused the Holocaust.
An interesting point, but not very well-founded.  Nazis believed
they had to remove certain kinds of dangerous genes from the gene
polls--genes which were supposedly associated with criminality.
Based on Spencer, Lombroso, and other "Darwinists" (their reading
of Darwin was, I would argue, questionable) they argued that crime
resulted from atavism.  Negroes, Jews, Gypsies, and other carried
these atavistic genes.  Hence, the way to wipe out crime was to wipe
out those genes.

In short, if that joke should worry anyone, it's the Scots, since
it presents the Scot as the murderer.

Pogroms were carried out in Eastern Europe on the basis of the idea
that Jews had murdered Jesus, sacrificed Christian boys at Passoch,
and other basically religious/superstitious notions.

The Western Europe equivalent of pogroms happened when royalty owed
too much money to Jewish bankers and was usually justified on 
religious grounds--usury is banned by the Bible.  Proponents also
used the standard relgious myths when handy.

The Nazis found the stereotype of Jews as powerful, rich, and immoral
useful in their programs.  But it was not simply that Jews were
supposed to be cheap, but that they were wealthy, and they were 
using their wealth for criminal ends--they had a conspiracy going.

I think that the history of racism is fascinating--and that people
should be well aware of it.  _The MIsmeasure of Man_ is good, but
about the only recent work on Lombroso--otherwise you have to read
the primaries.  

-Trish
skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu