Books

The point Paul Radin seeks to indent in his readers’ minds is implicit in the title he has chosen for his little treatise, “The Racial Myth,” just brought out by Whittlesey House. “It is in an attempt to state how it has come about that race and nationality lend themselves so easily to misinterpretation and abuse that the following book has been written,” Dr. Radin tells us in his prefatory note, which he closes with the clear statement that “all specific racial pretensions to superiority are both illusory and unjustified.”

“The Racial Myth” is interesting and valuable for much more than its demolishment of the large-scale wishful thinking that determines so much of racial and national beliefs. It is a compression of historical and anthropological knowledge. It is scholarly and animated at the same time, as well as modern and realistic. That it will be read chiefly by those who are all ready to accept its conclusions is an unfortunate fact which proves merely that Dr. Radin is scholar rather than propagandist.

Dr. Radin traces the wishful thinking which is responsible for myth-making to the first man who achieved an upright posture and who had to have an explanation for the world. The Greeks had no word for the myth of race superiority because, for them, other people didn’t exist. It was the parvenues among the Greeks, the Macedonians, who gave expression to the idea of Greek superiority.

It might be tedious to sum up the early parts of Dr. Radin’s book, but I cannot refrain from underlining a phrase which comes surprisingly from the pen of a Jew I believe Dr. Radin is a Jew especially when we consider that in the phrase is implicit the Belloc Chesterton justification for the Roman Catholic Church in its antagonism against the forces of nationalism in medieval Europe. Dr. Radin writes that “even the drastic and ferocious treatment it meted out to nonbelievers can almost be condoned in view of the Church’s universal character and the fact that for so many years it held in check the wild forces of nationalism.”

In the chapter wherein he discusses the Nordic myth, Dr. Radin gives us a little bit of ancient tribal history to indicate the code by which the early Teutons were governed and the traits they exhibited against their enemies and in their tribe-life, as against the pretty picture of Nordic virility and honor and integrity to which the race conscious German today appeals. Dr. Radin goes to their own literature as the basis for their condemnation and makes the anthropological point that the German tribes exhibited exactly those traits, and perhaps in a worse form, which any other people in any other part of the world exhibited on the same level of development. He links those Germanic tribes with the Crow Indians and the Malays. The whole business of Aryanism, he declares, is the rationalization of a compensation dream to justify inferiority, or, rather, to explain it away. There is no Aryan race, the word itself denoting, as other anthropologists have pointed out, a language group, and there is no set of physical characteristics which has at all times marked out the German as against other people, the German being the result of as extended an intermixture of peoples as any other “race.” The Germans can claim no more for themselves than can any other people, far less, in fact but of course the way their professors have got around that is by claiming as German the great men of every other nation, including Shakespeare and Da Vinci. There is no pure race, and that applies to the Jews as well, and there is no body of achievement which can be fenced off as the exclusive property of any people, for nothing grows except by development, by the contribution of one people enriching the contribution of an other.

This is the light in which Dr. Radin sees the Hitlerian upsurge of nationalism:

“There never was an Aryan race; the Germans are not, to any extent, Nordic; the old system of law in which they have taken refuge for their new code was not to any appreciable degree Germanic; the small businessman class which they wish to resurrect and reenforce is unmistakably dead, and so on, ad infinitum. This atmosphere of the madhouse can not possibly represent the mood of 65,000,000 people who have always been known for their middle of the road sanity; it cannot represent the permanent mood of madmen. The only conceivable interpretation is that this semblance of madness, this intensification of the old Teutonic virtue, the berserker rage, conceals something else the last wild attempt to stave off the impending transformation of an economic system.”