by Primo Levi
On the other hand, if we look, for instance, at Nobel Prize winners, we find men of all races. I’m talking not about the Nobel literature prize, which is very contrived, but about the prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, and so on, which are something serious; we find precisely that no one race monopolizes the Nobel prizes, monopolizes scientific knowledge.
The most fallacious notion of racism concerns crossbreeding. An integral part of German racist theories was the belief that the product of crossbreeding was a half-breed, a hybrid, in other words a bastard (those were euphemisms for bastard), and that the product of two races contained the worst of both and was therefore inferior. The consequence was that there could not and should not be mixed marriages, and, indeed, they were forbidden by law.
The reality, which can be easily verified, is this: if anything can be learned from modern genetics it is that crossbreeding between different species—“species” in the exact meaning of the word—is not possible. It’s well-known that crossbreeding between a horse and a cow produces no offspring, unless the two species are very close species, but then the product, the mule, isn’t fertile. Encounters within a species are always fertile; the best evidence that the differences among human races are not differences of species is that all human races can breed with one another. Moreover, if anything can be learned from this, it is that the farther apart the areas of origin, the more successful the crossbreeding. This is a feature of natural selection, not just among animals but also among plants. All animals and all plants have dispersion mechanisms. For instance, the phenomenon studied by ethologists like Konrad Lorenz, of aggression within a species, whereby packs of wolves fight other packs, dog fights dog (normally not to death), stags compete with stags, birds sing (to chase away competitors), is directed toward dispersion, that is, covering the maximum possible territory in order to facilitate mating between distant members of the species; in other words, to avoid marriages between relatives. Thus, it’s nature itself that suggests, prescribes even, by means of natural selection, crossbreeding through dispersion over a very large area. This notion, this myth that crossbreeding is taboo, that it mustn’t happen, that it produces bastards, derives from ancient and mysterious archetypes of purity. There is a lot of talk about racial purity, and there was a lot of talk about racial purity, especially in Nazi Germany, as we’ll see later. As if it were a confirmed truth that the Indo-European race—as it was called at the time—was pure and, being pure, was good.
Well, in Nazi Germany it wasn’t pure, as there is no evidence of it—that any human race, any people was pure.
Here I must add an aside.
The very term “race,” which I am forced to use, was discredited after it became an instrument for one of the biggest massacres of this century. I am forced to use it, I use it, and I use it within quotation marks, so to speak, with the warning that, except for some obvious, crude subdivisions, it’s almost impossible to speak of human races in, say, Europe.
Precisely in regard to Europe, and Italy in particular, however little we know about recent history—not to mention ancient history—we do know that for two thousand years, from Rome onward, Italy was the stage of extremely complex historical events. There were invasions, occupations, migrations to and from Italy, and therefore to speak of an Italian or European race is totally meaningless, at least in the meaning intended by racists.
It’s obvious, Italians are generally white-skinned; but all other definitions are elusive. If we look for precise criteria on the basis of which to identify racial units in Italy or in Europe we don’t find any; or, rather, maybe only today are we finding something.
An extremely interesting and complicated branch of genetics is developing that can trace, with much precision and at a very high cost, a certain genetic characteristic. So far, this research has led to what we might have expected, that is, tremendous confusion, a remote, millenarian confusion. The result is that we see the same characteristic found here, in Ireland, in Finland. . . .
I was saying earlier that the racial myth considers it obvious, self-evident, that the white race is by definition the superior race.
From this assumption, a more restrictive concept arose, and it arose in Germany before Nazism. It was mostly thanks to German philologists who had noticed a striking analogy between the grammar and lexicon of the neo-Latin languages, the German and Slavic languages, and the Sanskrit of old Indian documents, certain variants of which are still spoken in India. From this finding they theorized, for two reasons, one manifest and one hidden, the existence of a very specific race, which they called Indo-Germanic. The manifest reason was that India and Germany were the two poles of a race that spoke a certain language and that had spread through, or had occupied, an area that went from India all the way to Germany. But, more deeply, this Indo-Germanic definition implied that Germany was India’s heir, that it was the heir to an Aryan civilization (improperly called “Aryan”) that in ancient times had left India, the cradle of humanity, and had chosen its new seat in Germany. Therefore Germany was a privileged country; it was the heir to a very old civilization.
Incidentally, the swastika, the symbol that sometimes still appears on walls, was a sacred symbol in India, and it was no accident that Hitler and the National Socialists chose it as the new symbol of Germany, heir to this ancient civilization. A civilization that was pure by definition: questioning why, precisely, it was the preeminent civilization was not allowed; that was it and enough said. The swastika emigrated from India to Berlin.
This brings us to the biggest, most terrible ideological mystification connected to the myth of race. It’s paradoxical that the deadliest racism of all historical racisms had practically no concrete basis, even less than what led to the destruction of the Brazilian Indians by the Portuguese. In fact, this racism was not generic, directed against one or more non-Indo European races; it was about a specific race, the Jewish race.
Hitler really needed the sort of fascination that he seems to have exercised over his audiences to be able to sell such a load of nonsense—that if a non-race race exists it is the Jewish race.
If we read the documentation that remains, that is, the Bible, the Old Testament, we see that the people called the Jewish people in the Biblical text were a shadowy people, assimilating other peoples, dividing into groups, occupying new land, mixing with other populations, sending offspring in all directions. In historical times there was a community in Egypt, another in Babylon; it’s hard to believe that at the time this race could have remained pure.
Certainly it was already a non-race; but three and a half millennia have passed since then, and this non-race race has become ever more contaminated.
There is the surprisingly little known story of the Khazar Empire, in Ukraine. Around the sixth century AD, it happened that a large kingdom within the borders of today’s Ukraine was converted to Judaism. The king was converted, and since at the time the principle “cuius regio, eius religio”—the religion of the master is the religion of the land—was in force, the entire Khazar population was converted to Judaism. It’s hard to say how big the population was, but undoubtedly several million; and it’s almost certain that the biggest nucleus of European Jews, Polish and Russian Jews, is in large measure descended from the Khazars; in other words, these Jews have nothing to do with the Palestinian Jews, not even if one resorts to the myth of blood. In spite of all this, it’s against this non-race race that a ferocious racial campaign was unleashed.
Even in this case, reasons are difficult to find. Certainly the ground was prepared, because there existed in Germany before Hitler an intense nationalism tied to German resurgence, and to the difficulties, resulting from the insecurity of the borders, both east and west, of German unification. In short, there existed a nationalism directed against everybody, erga omnes, and especially against the Jews, for many reasons, both evident and less evident. Certainly, there was the destiny of the Jewish people. When the Romans occupied Palestine, the Jews vigorously an
d tenaciously resisted, because the Romans wanted to assimilate them culturally and, especially, religiously, and the Jews didn’t like it. They had, and in part still have, an extremely rigid religious and traditional code that forbids the worship of idols; this precept, this taboo, this prohibition is very strict. Therefore they revolted repeatedly against the Romans, and many were killed and many forced into exile. They settled throughout the Mediterranean basin, preserving, however, a deep bond, in origin religious, between one another, between communities, and within each community. This made them truly foreigners. These communities, coherent with one another and within themselves, were connected by a religion—a very detailed, very precise ritual code—and by a tradition that made them completely different. So, continuously over the centuries, they were expelled from one country and thrown into another, where, once again, they were foreigners, even more foreign; what they had assimilated in a certain culture became useless and they had to acquire a new culture.
This is what happened to the Jews expelled from Spain in the sixteenth century, to the Jews expelled from England around the fourteenth century, and so on; and thus, in spite of their geographical dispersion, the Jews became a cohesive people, but nomadic, and at every expulsion newly declared foreign.
This is surely one of the reasons that nationalist and chauvinist Germany considered them foreigners; they were ideal scapegoats for the sins that the Germans didn’t want to bear themselves.
Against this background emerges the character of the furiously anti-Semitic political agitator Adolf Hitler.
Dozens of volumes have been written on the reasons that Hitler was an anti-Semite, and “such” an anti-Semite, which shows that this, too, is difficult to explain. Anti-Semitism was certainly a personal obsession of his; no one really knows why he had such an obsession, though all sorts of guesses have been made. . . .
Some have said that Hitler feared he had Jewish blood in his veins, because one of his grandmothers had become pregnant while working as a servant in a Jewish home. He lived with this fear his whole life, because, obsessed as he was with purity, he was afraid that he himself was not pure.
Other explanations come from the psychoanalysts, precisely those who claim to explain everything. They say, they have said, that Hitler projected his own paranoid, perverted traits onto the Jews to rid himself of them. This is an explanation that I pass on to you as I have read it and as I have understood it, which is not well. I don’t know the language of psychoanalysts, maybe someone could convey it better than I can; at any rate, it, too, is a rough draft of an explanation. And there are also economic explanations. There is no denying that at the beginning of this century the Jews belonged to the German bourgeoisie and held fairly influential positions in finance, the press, culture, the arts, cinema, and so on; so there was certainly jealousy.
But let’s go back to what I mentioned earlier, that is, to the inextricable confusion between a genuine or presumed racial motivation and other motivations.
It has been said that the racial war is the only war that Hitler won, and it’s true, he won it. Unleashed first against German Judaism and later against Judaism in all the countries occupied by Germany, it was a ruthless war, pursued with that talent for thoroughness, for carrying out any undertaking to completion, which characterizes Germans for good or ill. It led to the extermination—to the deaths—of six million Jews out of a world population of seventeen million, more than a third, and practically to the extinction of Jewish culture and civilization in countries like Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. And if this didn’t happen elsewhere it’s simply because the Germans didn’t get that far; the intention was there. It’s worth recalling that the will Hitler dictated when the Russians were eighty meters away, an hour before he committed suicide, concludes by saying: “Most of all, I entrust to you, my successors, the task of carrying to its conclusion the racial campaign, of exterminating the Jewish people, who are the carriers of all the evils of humankind.” This seems proof enough that this urge of Hitler the man to lay all possible blame on a scapegoat was irrational and unreasonable; and the scapegoat was all the Jews of Europe.
It wasn’t just a matter of killing them—and it seems to me that this, too, contributes to defining the feral nature, the beastly nature, of this sort of racial hatred.
Killing may be merciful; a condemned man is usually killed in a compassionate way, with mercy, and is allowed to express his last wishes. On the contrary, the slaughter of the European Jews, those from Eastern Europe in particular, was carried out in the most senselessly cruel way, with children killed before their mothers’ eyes, with unnecessary pain, humiliation, demoralization, deportation inflicted before death—and here I give you a personal testimony.
You have to imagine what it meant to be loaded onto a train, onto freight cars, fifty or sixty people, men, women, and children forced to travel for five, ten, fifteen days even, for the trains coming from Salonika and going to Auschwitz, with no food, no drink, with the indiscriminate mixing that you can imagine, without sleeping, with an intense cold in winter and an atrocious heat in the summer, in cars that were never opened, so that before death, in most cases in the concentration camps, or in the car itself, a process of brutalization would occur; in other words, there was a precise will to demolish humanity in those human beings even before killing them. And this I believe is truly unique in the history, however bloody, of humankind.
Another personal recollection. I was in a concentration camp, in Auschwitz, and worked in a factory that from time to time was bombed; and we were made to clear away the rubble.
We had been imprisoned for several months, almost a year in my case (others had been in prison for two years) and we weren’t a pleasant sight, we were unshaven, our clothes were ragged, our hair was shorn, we were dirty, many couldn’t speak German. Next to this bombed factory there was a camp for Hitler youth; they were fourteen-year-olds, equivalent to the Italian Fascist youth of the time; they belonged to different social classes and were at a sort of pre-military camp, sleeping in tents nearby.
They were taken on a tour to watch us shoveling the rubble; and what the instructors were telling them, with no effort to be discreet, to speak in a low voice, was this: “You see, we keep them in concentration camps and make them work, because they aren’t men, it’s quite obvious; they are unshaven, they don’t wash, they’re dirty and don’t even know how to talk, all they’re good for is handling a pick and shovel. So it’s clear that we are compelled to treat them this way, the way you treat a domestic animal.”
This substitution of cause for effect is very typical, because obviously those were the effects of imprisonment and not the cause; and it occurs in every corner of the world where there is racial prejudice. The “other” is persecuted and then it is said: “Of course we persecute him, don’t you see what he is? He’s a brute, he’s worth less than we are, he doesn’t have our culture; it’s natural to make him do the heavy work, the most unpleasant tasks. . . .”
I don’t want to draw comparisons, because the persecution of European Jews was much more thorough, terrible, far-reaching, and bloodier than all other racial persecutions; but for this reason, in a way, it serves as an example.
At this point, what to say about today?
That was yesterday, thirty, thirty-five years ago; is there still racial discrimination? Yes, obviously.
Italy is in some ways a privileged country, because it’s a country of mixed blood, very mixed blood, even in recent times.
We are so clearly aware here that there is no Italian race that we are not very sensitive to friction with other races; I believe that in this respect Italy is truly a privileged island in Europe. Also, for this and other, related reasons, Jews in Italy have suffered some moderate persecutions and humiliations in all eras, but blood was never, or almost never, shed, except during the German occupation.
I would add that racial intolerance in Italy is so slight because Italy is a skeptical country, in Italy fanaticism is
unlikely, it’s unlikely that we’ll believe in a “prophet”; even if another Mussolini-like prophet were to come to Italy today, we are so thoroughly vaccinated that I don’t think he would get much support.
However, Italy is not the only country in the world. Anyone who has seen on TV what has been happening recently in Iran realizes what persecution is like, racial and non-racial (as I said earlier, this confusion is permanent). There the issue is nominally religious, but the Kurds follow the same religion as the Iranians, yet they are persecuted. There are many Iranian Jews who are of the Jewish race, of Jewish origin, but of Muslim faith, and they are nevertheless persecuted.
Having said this, and having seen just in the past few days what’s happening in a country not so far from us, because, today, no country is far, I must say that to be totally optimistic would be, at best, imprudent.
Lecture given on the occasion of meetings organized by the Municipality of
Turin with the title “Turin Encyclopedia,” November 1979
1. Bobbio (1909–2004) was a legal and political philsopher best known for his work on the relationship between social equality and individual freedom.
Foreword to The Two Faces of Chemistry
by Luciano Caglioti
Twenty years ago, around 1960, Italy, Europe, and the world were going along in widespread euphoria, scarcely disturbed by the clouds that seemed to be gathering over some of the countries that had recently become independent. The prevailing view, or, rather, the unquestioned assumption, was that the end of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, the acceptance of the nuclear balance, and the détente between the two superpowers would overcome and eliminate the sinister inheritance of the Second World War. The world could set out with confidence toward a future of increasing production, consumption, and affluence. With the disappearance or, at least, waning of political threats, no other threats to humanity were perceived except, in a distant future, those connected with overpopulation.