How Odd of God an Introduction to the Jews

(The following is an excerpt from the book, “How Odd of God-An Introduction to the Jews”, by Dr. Browne, to be brought out soon by MacMillan. Other excerpts from Dr. Browne’s new work will appear here from time to time.)

THE MYTH OF RACIALISM

The genesis of what the Nazis call “racial science” is notorious. It arose like a fungoid growth on certain theories which enjoyed a vogue in learned circles some two generations ago. At that time it was thought possible to sort out humanity as the zoologists had already sorted out the lower animals. It was imagined that the countless geographical and cultural groups cluttering the earth might be so many distinct “breeds”; and scientists set themselves the task of discovering objective criteria by which to demarkate these “breeds,” They made statistical studies of the prevailing color, height, headformation, hair-growth, and other physical traits in different localities. Also they studied the various religions, art-forms, and languages. And on the basis of such data they tried to resolve all humanity into its constituent hereditary elements.

It was a magnificent conception, and in the beginning it gave promise of yielding all sorts of new truths. But before long almost all the conclusions of the pioneer #legists became as obsolete as the theories # the alchemists. At the present time the very name “ethnology”is under a cloud. Reputable investigators in the field prefer to describe themselves as anthropologists, for it is on anthropos, “man,” not on ethnos, “race,” that they concentrate their duty. So far as racial classification is concerned, they are content to speak of certain generalized “ethnic types” such as the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans. Further than that they do not presume to go, for they have too little to point the way. What were originally taken to be objective and constant criteria of heredity are now seen to be either subjective or vaccillating-or both. Unclear text

Nor have the other physical traits proved much more dependable. Either they too are subject to environmental influence (in which case they point in the wrong direction) or else they are hopelessly scattered (in which case they point nowhere at all.) Even blood is no index to racial origin. Common folk may go on saying that “blood will tell”-but as yet the anthropologists have failed to make it do more than agglutinate. They have learnt from this agglutination (which is an exceedingly serious matter when it occurs in a transfusion) that there actually are four different types of human blood. But thus far they have been able to establish only the vaguest connection between these types and any racial groupings. Perhaps such a connection did exist at some very remote period in human history; but if it did, it has long since been destroyed. And this is quite understandadble, for the peoples of the earth have been moving about for countless thousands of years, and in their moving they have mingled and interbred. Within historic times there have been Mongoloid Huns ravaging in Central Europe, and Nordic Goths committing rapine in the Balkans and Spain. There are plain traces of Arab “blood” from Provence to Java, and of Frankish “blood” from Syria to the Klondike. What is happening in America before our very eyes has been happening all over the world for perhaps half a million years. For example, throughout North Africa there has been so much cross-breeding that it is now impossible to decide whether the inhabitants there are more Negroid or more Caucasian. And in a measure that is true almost everywhere else, for the whole earth has always been one vast “melting pot.” A single Phoenician trader who came to Cornwall to buy tin, and who remained there to rear a family, might conceivably be responsible for a Phoenician strain in the veins of every living Britisher. A solitary Nubian woman brought home as a slave by a Gerinan Crusader would have started a line which by now has “colored” the blood of all Central Europe. This may sound fantastic, but plain arithmetic proves it true. Reckon out the number of ancestors a thousand years ago–you must multiply by two at least forty times-and you will find that, allowing for inbreeding, the sum will equal the population of the entire world at that time!

That is why no sober anthropologists still races on earth. They realize the task is quite as futile as trying to count the angels on a needle-point. For there aren’t any clearly demarkated races. At most they are only vaguely differentiated racial blends. Terms like “Aryan” and “Semitic” have therefore been handed back to the philologists from whom they were borrowed-only to be discarded by these in turn, for philology, too, has outgrown its early passion for inventories. And labels like “Anglo-Saxon,” Teutonic,” and “Hebraic,” have been returned to the archeologists – and the orators. The scientists no longer have any use for such tags.

But unhappily those scientists could do no more than discard those tags; they could not possibly obliterate them. And knaves and fools (they are ever at the heels of the scientists) have since gathered them up and made a pseudo-science of them. Like scavengers they have retrieved the cast-off the ories on anthropology’s refuse-heap, and are now peddling them as fresh truths. And they find ready markets for the trash. The old theological pabulum has lost its savor for the populace. There is wide craving now for “scientific facts.” And the hucksters pander to that craving. It is not that these hucksters are consciously wicked men. In most instances they themselves believe the myths they retail, for, like the ill-educated folk to whom they cater, they, too, have no critical sense. They take the tentative suppositions of the nineteenth-century enthnologists as established truths; and with the help of their own recklessly inventive minds, they patch those suppositions together, expand and embroider them, and then pass them on as a definite gospel.

According to this gospel it is possible not merely to sort out all mankind into a multitude of distinct races, but also to arrange them in a precise qualitative order. At the bottom of the scale, are the races most resembling the apes, and at the top are those most unlike them. Accordingly the Negroes must represent the lowest type of human being, for they have the dark coloring,the round skull, the prognathous jaw, and the receding forehead of the simians.The highest by the same token must be the Nordics, for they are blond, blue-eyed, narrowskulled, and straight-jawed, Somewhere between these two extremes must come the Mongols, the Semites, Latins, and the rest of the races. Such is the neat arrangement worked out by these “racial experts,”and it appears so logical that it is readily accepted by most people-if they are Nordics.To the critical, however,its falsity is obvious, for the whole arrangement clearly depends upon the particular traits to which attention is called. If one selects other traits, then any number of other arragements become every whit as logical .For example, if one concentrates on the fact that apes are characteristically hairy, then the beardless Mongols are at the top of the human scale,the Negroes are not far below,and the whiskery Nordics are down at the bottom Similarly if one concentrates on the thin grayish lips of the simians,then the Negroes with their thick red lips are at the top, the Nordics are hardly half-way up, and this time the Mongols are at the bottom. Orgain,if heed is given to the flat and inconspicuous noses of almost all apes, then at least according to the caricaturists it is the Jews who come out on top!

It is utterly impossible-at least on the basis of our present very limited knowledge-to grade the various races of man. It is impossible even to separate them one from another. But the exponents of “racialism” fail to see this, Probably it is because they connot afford to see it, for they have a vested intreest in theri pseudo-science. They are themselves Nordics pandering to other Nordies-or at least “Aryans” pandering to other “Aryans”-and they feel that strict truth may well be dispended with if it spoils a proof of the superiority of their own kind. And those to whom they pander have neither wit nor will to disagree. After all, why look a red-herring in the mouth? Here is a thing such people have been awaiting for years, a “scientific” validation of their aversion to those who are unlike themselves. In earlier generatiosn they were able to jeer, “Heathen!” or “Indidel!” But the waning of religious zeal has robbed those names of their sting. How convenient therefore that a new vocabulary of projudice should have been created! Now they can call all aliens “racial inferiors.”…