Ashkenazi Eugenics and Attitudes of Racial Superiority

The current TOO video is a compelling account of how thousands of North African Jews died  as a result of a bizarre treatment for ringworm during the 1950s (see also here). The ideology underlying this treatment was the racial inferiority of these Jews. The video notes, as also discussed in my review of John Glad’s book on Jewish eugenics, that attitudes of racial superiority and eugenics in the sense of racial purification were common among the Ashkenazim who created Israel.

A correspondent who watched the video informed me that Hannah Arendt, the well-known Jewish intellectual and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, had similar views on Middle Eastern Jews as well as an attitude of superiority toward Eastern European Jews. Such attitudes were common among German Jews, especially in the early decades of the 20th century. For example, it is well known that the German Jewish establishment in America centered around the American Jewish Committee looked down on the Eastern European Jews immigrating to the US. (Nevertheless they were quite successful in keeping the gates open until the 1924 Immigration Restriction Law.)

The Wikipedia page for Eichmann in Jerusalem provides these quotes from historian David Cesarani’s Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a “Desk Murderer”:

Most controversially, Cesarani suggests that Arendt’s own prejudices influenced the opinions she expressed during the trial. He claims that like many Jews of German origin, she held Ostjuden (Jews from Eastern Europe) in great disdain. This led her to attack the conduct and efficacy of the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, who was of Polish origin. In a letter to the noted German philosopher Karl Jaspers she stated that Hausner was “a typical Galician Jew. . . constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who doesn’t know any language.”^[3] Her dislike of Zionism also influenced her view of the trial. Cesarani claims that some of her opinions of Jews of Middle Eastern origin verged on racism. She described the Israeli crowds as an “Oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country.”^[4] The Israeli police force, she states, “gives me the creeps, speaks onlyHebrew and looks Arabic.”^[5]