The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  ‘Demic diffusion’ had gone even further in other empires, where settlers tended to be single men rather than whole families. In Brazil sexual relations between early Portuguese settlers, natives and African slaves were relatively uninhibited, even if largely confined to concubinage. The story was broadly the same in Spanish America. By 1605, when the Hispanic-Peruvian historian Garcilaso de la Vega sought to give a precise definition of the term ‘Creole’, he had to coin such terms as ‘Quarteron’ or ‘Quartratuo’ to convey the difference between Creoles proper (the offspring of Spanish and Indian parents) and the children produced by a Spaniard and a Creole. The Dutch too had little hesitation in taking native concubines when they settled in Asia (though the practice was less common among the Boers in South Africa). From Canada to Senegal to Madagascar, the métis were an almost universal by-product of French colonial settlement. One French colonial writer, Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, identified thirteen different hues of skin colour in his account of the island of Saint-Domingue, published in 1797.

  Yet by 1901 there had been a worldwide revulsion against ‘miscegenation’. As early as 1808, all ‘Eurasians’ had been excluded from the East India Company’s forces, and in 1835 intermarriage was formally banned in British India. In the aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny, attitudes towards interracial sex hardened as part of a general process of segregation, a phenomenon usually, though not quite justly, attributed to the increasing presence and influence of white women in India. As numerous stories by Kipling, Somerset Maugham and others testify,* interracial unions continued, but their progeny were viewed with undisguised disdain. In 1888 the official brothels that served the British army in India were abolished, while in 1919 the Crewe Circular expressly banned officials throughout the Empire from taking native mistresses. By this time, the idea that miscegenation implied degeneration, and that criminality was correlated to the ratio of native to white blood, had been generally accepted in expatriate circles. Throughout the Empire, there was also a growing (and largely fantastic) obsession with the sexual threat supposedly posed to white women by native men. The theme can be found in two of the most popular works of fiction produced by the British rule in India, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, and also gave rise to a bitter campaign to prevent Indian judges hearing cases involving white women. By 1901 racial segregation was the norm in most of the British Empire. It was most explicit in South Africa, however, where Dutch settlers had from an early stage banned marriage between burghers and blacks. Their descendants were the driving force behind subsequent legislation. In 1897 the Boer republic of the Transvaal prohibited white women from having extramarital intercourse with black men, and this became the template for legislation in the Cape Colony (1902), Natal and the Orange Free State (1903), as well as in neighbouring Rhodesia.

  In many ways, pseudo-science merely provided sophisticated rationales for such measures. Ideas like ‘Social Darwinism’, which erroneously inferred from Darwin’s theories a struggle for survival between the races, or ‘racial hygiene’, which argued that physical and mental degeneration would result from miscegenation, came some time after prohibitions had been enacted. This was especially obvious in Britain’s North American colonies and the United States. From the earliest phase of British settlement in North America there had been laws designed to discourage miscegenation and to circumscribe the rights of mulattos. Interracial marriage may have been a punishable offence in Virginia from as early as 1630 and was formally prohibited by legislation in 1662; the colony of Maryland had passed similar legislation a year earlier. Such laws were passed by five other North American colonies. In the century after the foundation of the United States, no fewer than thirty-eight states banned interracial marriages. In 1915, twenty-eight states retained such statutes; ten of them had gone so far as to make the prohibition on miscegenation constitutional. There was even an attempt, in December 1912, to amend the federal constitution so as to prohibit ‘forever… intermarriage between negros or persons of color and Caucasians… within the United States’. The language of the various statutes and constitutional articles certainly changed over time, as rationalizations for the ban on interracial sex evolved, and as new threats to racial purity emerged. Definitions of whiteness and blackness became more precise: in Virginia, for example, anyone with one or more ‘Negro’ grandparents was defined as a ‘Negro’, but it was possible to have one ‘Indian’ great-grandparent and still be white in the eyes of the law. Depending on patterns of immigration, a number of states extended their prohibitions to include ‘Mongolians’, ‘Asiatic Indians’, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos and Malays. Penalties also varied widely. Some laws simply declared interracial unions null and void, depriving couples of the legal privileges of marriage; others specified penalties of up to ten years in prison. Nevertheless, the underlying motivation seems remarkably consistent and enduring.

  Legal prohibitions could not prevent the emergence of a substantial mixed-race population in North America. Yet precisely this social reality appears to have heightened, if it did not actually create, anxieties about miscegenation, giving rise to a large body of more or less lurid literature on the subject. In The Races of Men, published in Philadelphia in 1850, Robert Knox emphatically repudiated the idea that any good could come of the ‘amalgamation of races’; the ‘mullato’ was ‘a monstrosity of nature’. Among the most influential opponents of miscegenation was the Swiss-American polygenist and Harvard professor Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz. In August 1863 he was asked by Samuel Gridley Howe, the head of Lincoln’s American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, whether ‘the African race… will be a persistent race in this country; or, will it be absorbed, diluted, & finally effaced by the white race’. The government, Agassiz replied, should ‘put every possible obstacle to the crossing of the races, and the increase of the half-breeds’:

  The production of half-breeds is as much a sin against nature, as incest in a civilized community is a sin against purity of character… Far from presenting to me a natural solution of our difficulties, the idea of amalgamation is most repugnant to my feelings, I hold it to be a perversion of every natural sentiment… No efforts should be spared to check that which is abhorrent to our better nature, and to the progress of the higher civilization and a purer morality… Conceive for a moment the difference it would make in future ages, for the prospect of republican institutions and our civilization generally, if instead of the manly population descended from cognate nations the United States should hereafter be inhabited by the effeminate progeny of mixed races, half indian, half negro, sprinkled with white blood… I shudder from the consequences… How shall we eradicate the stigma of a lower race when its blood has once been allowed to flow freely into that of our children?

  Within the broader debate over the abolition of slavery, argument raged as to the relative strength, morals and fecundity of mulattos, with some authorities asserting their ‘hybrid vigour’, while others – notably the physician and ‘niggerologist’ Josiah Nott – insisted on their degeneracy. In 1864 two anti-abolition journalists caused an outcry by publishing a satirical tract entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, which argued facetiously that interbreeding made the races more fertile, and that this was the key to the success of Southern arms in the Civil War. What most opponents of emancipation actually believed was that (in the words of the eminent palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist E. D. Cope) ‘the hybrid is not as good a race as the white, and in some respects it often falls below the black especially in the sturdy qualities that accompany vigorous physique.’ According to Nott, miscegenation would lead ultimately to extinction because the children of mixed marriages would be sterile themselves or would produce sterile progeny. The ‘half-caste’ was also suspected of posing a threat to social order. The sociologist Edward Byron Reuter argued that it was mulattos, a ‘discontented and psychologically unstable group’
, who were responsible for ‘the acute phases of the so-called race problem’. It is striking, too, that precursors of the story later told in Arthur Dinter’s notorious novel The Sin Against the Blood (see Chapter 7) can already be found in American novels like Robert Lee Durham’s Call of the South (1908), in which it is the daughter of the president himself who gives birth to a dark-skinned child.

  Thus, although slavery was abolished after the Civil War, the Southern states lost little time in erecting a system of segregation, in which prohibitions on intermarriage and intercourse played a central role. That said, the absence of formal prohibitions in the North by no means implied a toleration of interracial relationships. Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, was highly unusual in recommending intermarriage (albeit only ‘between white men and negro women’) as a way of reducing racial tensions. Few shared his vision. Indeed, as Gunnar Myrdal noted in An American Dilemma (1944), racial anxieties appeared to increase when formal barriers between the races were removed. Mixed-race couples were generally ostracized by white society and, as long as the Supreme Court upheld the legality of state bans on mixed marriages, such couples remained a very small minority. American anxieties about racial mingling were only increased by the new waves of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the fact that, at least in the first generation, the new immigrants practised quite strict endogamy. Yet it was not in the United States that the reaction against interracial marriage took its most extreme form. It was in Europe; most surprisingly, in Germany.

  THE JEWISH ‘QUESTION’

  It is at first sight odd that hostility to miscegenation should also have manifested itself as anti-Semitism. Of all ethnic groups, few exceeded the Jews in their commitment – in principle, at least – to endogamy. The Torah is quite explicit on this score:

  When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee… thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.

  Divine retribution would be swift and severe in cases of transgression. Daughters who dared to marry out of the faith were formally pronounced dead. Some, though not all, Jewish communities followed this injunction quite strictly. In Britain, for example, the small Jewish community that had re-established itself in the late seventeenth century saw very few marriages out before the 1830s, when the apostasy of Nathan Rothschild’s daughter and her marriage to Henry Fitzroy caused intense family distress and communal dismay. Indeed, the rate of intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles remained very low in Britain before 1901, despite the relatively small size of the Jewish community. It is not too much to say that in Victorian times opposition to mixed marriages was probably stronger among Jews than among non-Jews. Yet this did not prevent anxieties about the sexual appetites of Jews from surfacing in British literature. An early example is Farquhar’s play of 1702 The Twin Rivals, in which the licentious Mr Moabite, a rich Jew of Lombard Street, secretly conveys to his house a young lady about to give birth to his bastard child, whom he wishes to raise as a Jew. Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress, dramatized by Theophilus Cibber in 1733, further develops the theme of Jewish lasciviousness, and still more Jewish fornicators and lechers can be found in Fielding’s play Miss Lucy in Town, or in Smollett’s Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle. Where the eighteenth century satirized, the early nineteenth century romanticized. The ‘wandering Jew’ with his beautiful (and perhaps convertible) daughter were familiar figures in novels like Scott’s Ivanhoe and John Galt’s The Wandering Jew, not to mention George Eliot’s relatively benign Daniel Deronda. By the end of the nineteenth century, by contrast, Jews in English literature had become more closely associated with ‘white slavery’, a euphemism for prostitution.

  The German experience was different. Because they came so much later to overseas empire, Germans adopted ‘scientific’ racism at a relatively late date. There was no German translation of Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–5) until 1898. And, since so few Germans emigrated to tropical colonies, they were more likely to apply imported theories of Social Darwinism and ‘racial hygiene’ to Jews – the nearest identifiable ‘alien’ race – than to Africans or Asians. The composer Richard Wagner provides a good example of the way the race ‘meme’ spread to Germany. Wagner read Gobineau in the original French in 1880 and immediately adopted the idea of the declining racial purity of the German people, which he somewhat eccentrically dated back to the rape of German women by invading armies during the Thirty Years War of 1618–48. Especially detrimental, in Wagner’s view, was any mingling of German and Jewish blood. As early as 1873 – in other words, even before he had read Gobineau – Wagner had rejected the idea that mixed marriages were a ‘solution to the [Jewish] problem’, arguing that ‘then there would no longer be any Germans, since the blonde German blood is not strong enough to resist this leech. We can see how the Normans and Franks became French, and Jewish blood is much more corrosive than Roman.’ Others followed similar lines of reasoning. In The Jewish Question as a Question of Races, Customs and Culture (1881), the Berlin philosopher and economist Eugen Dühring, another follower of Gobineau, lamented the ‘implanting of the character traits of the Jewish race’ and called for a prohibition on mixed marriages to preserve the purity of German blood. Theodor Fritsch’s Anti-Semitic Catechism (1887) warned Germans to keep their blood ‘pure’ by avoiding contact of all kinds with Jews. His new version of the Ten Commandments included: ‘Regard it as a crime to contaminate the noble stuff of your people with Jewish matter. Know that Jewish blood is indestructible and forms body and soul in the Jewish way for all future generations.’ ‘Guard against the Jew within you,’ warned another, for no German could be certain that all his ancestors had resisted Jewish contamination. One of the defining works of German racial thought – The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) – was in fact written by an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had emigrated to Germany in his twenties and married one of Wagner’s daughters. Chamberlain too argued that Germany faced a choice between racial homogeneity or ‘chaos’. The leader of the Pan-German League, Hein-rich Class, was another who regarded ‘half-bloods’ as playing a malign role in German society.

  Some German anti-Semitic literature was crudely sensationalist. As in England, there were lurid allegations that Jews played a leading part in the organization of prostitution. In a tract entitled Brothel Jews, it was alleged that Jews considered ‘the corruption of our virgins, the trade in girls, the seduction of women as no sin, but a sacrifice that they make to their Jehovah; the same applies to the spread of degenerative diseases and plagues that they thereby facilitate’. In vain did German-Jewish feminists like Bertha Pappenheim point out that many of the victims of the ‘white slave trade’ were themselves Jewish girls from Eastern Europe. The stereotype of the lecherous Jew seducing or raping non-Jewish females also made its first appearances in German caricatures at around this time. Sensational in a rather different way were those works that sought to expose the Jewish ancestry of supposedly blue-blooded families. The authors of the volume known as the Semi-Gotha, a parody of the aristocratic handbook the Almanach de Gotha, alleged that there were more than a thousand old aristocratic and recently ennobled Gentile families now partly or wholly Jewish through marriage. Yet interwoven with such muckraking were more sinister intimations of radical ‘solutions’ to the so-called ‘Jewish question’. In Jews and Indo-Germans (1887), the Orientalist Paul de Lagarde characterized Jews as ‘bearers of decay’, comparing them with ‘trichinae and bacilli’. The best remedy in such cases was ‘annihilation’ by means of ‘surgical intervention and medication’. In a Reichstag debate in 1895, the anti-Semitic deputy Hermann Ahlwardt referred to Jews as ‘ch
olera bacilli’ and called for the authorities to ‘exterminate’ them as the British had exterminated the ‘Thugs’ in India. As early as 1899 the anti-Semitic German Social Reform Party called for a ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ to take the form of ‘complete separation and (if self-defence requires it) ultimately the annihilation of the Jewish people’. The racial hygienist Alfred Ploetz’s German Society for Racial Hygiene also called for the ‘extermination of less valuable elements from the population’.

  From such declarations it is all too tempting to draw a more or less straight line to Hitler’s death camps. It should nevertheless be stressed that there were also strong countervailing tendencies at the turn of the century. As has often been remarked, someone in 1901 trying to predict a future Holocaust would have been unlikely to pick Germany as the country responsible. Jews accounted for less than 1 per cent of the German population, and that proportion had been declining for two decades. In absolute and relative terms, there were far larger Jewish communities in the Western provinces of Russia (see Chapter 2) and the eastern parts of Austria-Hungary – notably Galicia, Bukovina and Hungary itself – to say nothing of Romania and, it should be noted, the United States, which already had the biggest Jewish population in the world. Of the fifty-eight European cities with Jewish populations in excess of 10,000 in around 1900, just three – Berlin, Posen and Breslau – were in Germany, and only in Posen did the Jewish community account for more than 5 per cent of the population. Moreover, the process of assimilation was much further advanced in Germany than in Russia and Austria. Legal obstacles to marriage between Jews and non-Jews were removed in 1875, bringing the Reich into line with Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, Switzerland and the United States. (Hungary followed only in 1895, while in Austria one party or the other was obliged to change religion, or both were obliged to register as ‘confessionless’. In the Russian Empire it remained illegal.) The results were striking. In 1876 around 5 per cent of Prussian Jews who married took non-Jews as their spouses. By 1900 the proportion had risen to 8.5 per cent. For the Reich as a whole, the percentage rose from 7.8 per cent in 1901 to 20.4 per cent in 1914. Such statistics must be used with caution, since the inherent probability of a mixed marriage must be a function of the relative sizes of the two populations concerned; other things being equal, such marriages were and are more likely to occur where Jewish communities are relatively small. However, contemporary researchers were struck by the fact that the intermarriage rates were highest in Germany in those places where the Jewish communities were largest, namely the big cities of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. By the early 1900s, around one in five Hamburg Jews who married took a non-Jew as his or her spouse; Berlin was not far behind (18 per cent), followed by Munich (15 per cent) and Frankfurt (11 per cent). There was also a discernible rise in intermarriage in Breslau. The figures were markedly lower in Austria-Hungary – even in Vienna, Prague and Budapest – while in Galicia and Bukovina there were virtually no mixed marriages. In the United States, too, there was much less intermarriage than in Germany at this time, reflecting the large proportion of Jews in the US who had migrated from less assimilationist Eastern Europe; indeed, it was not until the 1950s that American Jews began to marry out the way German Jews had done in the 1900s. Switzerland and the United Kingdom also lagged behind; only the Danish and Italian Jewish communities evinced comparable intermarriage rates. In the eyes of the Posen-born sociologist Arthur Ruppin, this trend ‘constitute[d] a serious menace to the continued existence’ of the Jewish communities of Berlin and Hamburg. On the other hand, he could not resist observing, the spread of intermarriage gave the lie to the claims of anti-Semites ‘that Jewish blood destroys the pure “Aryan” race and that physiological antipathy is such that marriage between the two races is unnatural… The parties who contract the marriage are surely the best judges as to whether there exists any physical antipathy!’