Charles Darwin (1809 – 82):
The [marked] variability of all the characteristic differences between the races [of man] indicates that these differences cannot be of much importance …
[For,] had they been important, they would long ago have been either:In this respect man resembles those forms, called by naturalists protean or polymorphic, which have remained extremely variable, owing … to their variations being of an indifferent nature, and consequently to their having escaped the action of natural selection.
- fixed and preserved, or
- eliminated.
(On the Races of Man, The Descent of Man, 1871)
David Wilson (1949) [Evolutionary Biologist]:
Jewish history is not as simple as a displaced people struggling to survive amidst hostile neighbors.
Jewish groups survived and even prospered through specific activities and relationships with different elements of their host nations. …
A common pattern was for Jews to form an alliance with one gentile segment of the host nation, usually the ruling elite, to exploit another gentile segment, such as the peasantry.
Far from being anti-Semitic, the ruling elite would attempt to protect the Jews from the rest of the resentful host population. …The non-Jew had no fear that the Jew would take a partisan stand in the struggle between the rulers and the ruled, who bore the economic yoke of the political privileges enjoyed by the rulers.The Jew’s outsider status was an advantage as far as the rulers were concerned.
(J Katz, Tradition and crisis: Jewish society at the end of the middle ages, 1961)
(Darwin's Cathedral, 2002)
Steven Grosby
Professor of Religion, Clemson University
During the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, there were those who thought that the divisions of humanity were ‘given’ in the sense that they were an unavoidable consequence of racial differences.
For example, the French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau (1816 – 82) argued:
- that humanity was divided into different races; and …
- that these races determined the distinctiveness of the culture of one civilization from that of another.
This view was subsequently extended by the anti-Semitic Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855 – 1927), who believed in the existence of a pure Aryan race.
The most hideous historical expression of these racialist views was the anti-Semitism of German Fascism, which asserted that the ‘blood’ of the Jews defiled the supposedly pure and superior Aryan race.
Such racialist views about the ‘natural’ divisions of humanity into permanent physical types have been shown to have no scientific basis whatsoever, as genetic variability may be greater within a race, than between races.
These views have, deservedly, been rejected today by all serious analysts.
(Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2005, p 99)
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