From Richard Wagner's article (1850) and Wilhelm Marr's coining of the term "anti-Semitism" (1879), through Lennard and Stark's "German physics" and Bieberbach and Jansch's psychological engineering—to Hilbert's counter-reaction: "Mathematics has no races"
In 1850, the German composer Richard Wagner published an article called "Judaism in Music." Thirty years after Wagner's article, books were published by a new stream of Judaophobia - the racist one. The term "anti-Semitism" itself was coined by the German journalist and politician Wilhelm Marr, founder of the "German League for Anti-Semitism," in his book "The Triumph of Judaism over Germanism, from a Non-Religious Point of View" (1879). Wagner became the pioneer of racist anti-Semitism. He wrote: "No matter how many kind words are said about the just need for Jewish equality, in the real encounter with Jews, we never ceased to feel the most sincere antipathy towards them; […] we were embarrassed by the inevitable need to free art from the oppressive Jewish influence; […] the conscious capacity for observation in the Jews was never great enough for great artists to emerge from them." For the first time in the history of Judeophobia, Wagner did not distinguish between converted Jews, such as the composer Mendelssohn and the poet Heine, and Jews who did not convert, such as the banker Rothschild and the composer Meyerbeer.
Nazi scientists also contributed to racist anti-Semitism. Nobel Prize laureates in physics Philipp Lennard and Johannes Stark, together with their supporters, divided physics into incorrect Jewish (theoretical) physics and correct Aryan (experimental) physics. Lennard wrote: “It is extremely important to examine all the discoveries in physics made by non-Aryans. For this, it is best to turn to the discoveries of their most prominent representative, the pure Jew Albert Einstein. His theory of relativity was intended to change physics. In fact, this theory completely failed. Moreover, it could never have been correct. Jewish physics is a distortion of the foundations of Aryan physics… You ask – German physics? One can also call it Aryan physics or the physics of people of the Nordic type, the physics of reality seekers, seekers of truth, the physics of the founders of natural science. In fact, science, like everything that people create, depends on race, on blood.” German mathematicians did not lag behind their physicist colleagues.
Mathematics in Nazi Germany was dominated by racist Nazi policies, such as the Civil Service Law of 1933, which led to the dismissal of many Jewish professors and lecturers in mathematics from German universities. Jews had faced discrimination in academic institutions even before 1933, but before the Nazis came to power, several Jewish mathematicians, such as Hermann Minkowski, Edmund Landau, and Richard Courant, had succeeded and even been appointed full professors at the University of Göttingen with the support of the famous German mathematician David Hilbert.
After the expulsion of the Jews from this university, the next event involving Hilbert took place there. The Austrian Jewish journalist Robert Jonk wrote about this in his book "Seven Times Brighter" about the history of the creation of the American atomic bomb (1958): "The scientists who remained in Göttingen, including outstanding researchers, were unable to continue their scientific work at the high level of the 1920s under the rule of the Third Reich. This decline was felt most acutely by the elderly mathematician Hilbert. About a year after the 'purge' in Göttingen, Hilbert sat in a place of honor next to the new Minister of Science, Education and National Education, Bernhard Rost, at one of the official celebrations. Rost asked the old scholar in a casual tone: "Is it true, Professor, that your institution suffered greatly after the Jews left?" Hilbert, sharp-tongued and as usual outspoken, replied: "Great damage? No damage was done to the institute, Mr. Minister, it simply no longer exists!"
In 1928, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna, Hilbert said: "Any framework, especially a national framework, is contrary to the spirit of mathematics. Only out of a complete lack of understanding of our science can differences between people and races arise, and the reasons for this are absolutely minuscule. Mathematics has no races… For mathematics, the whole civilized world is one country."
The Nazi ideology regarding mathematics stipulated that "Aryan mathematics" would emphasize geometric mathematics and probability theory. Abstract axiomatics was denounced as "French-Jewish". The Berlin mathematician and anti-Semite Ludwig Bieberbach denounced the set theory of the Jewish mathematician Georg Cantor and measure theory as un-German. He was the author of the idea of "Aryan mathematics" and "Jewish mathematics". In his lecture "The Structure of Personality and Mathematical Creativity" in the spring of 1934, Bieberbach supported the protest of Göttingen students against the work of Edmund Landau at their university. He said: “The behavior of the Göttingen students towards Edmund Landau is certainly reasonable and justified, since Landau’s case clearly shows that there is German mathematics and there is Jewish mathematics – two worlds separated by an unbridgeable chasm. The choice of scientific problems and the approach to them are dictated by the scientist himself and are therefore a product of his race. […] A nation that has found its identity cannot tolerate such teachers and must reject foreign thought.”
In 1934, in a lecture widely covered in the German media, Bieberbach referred to the typology of the pro-Nazi psychologist Erich Rudolf Jahns, identifying the S type, who seeks abstraction, with the Jews, and the J type, who strives to grasp reality in all its shades, with the Germans. Bieberbach said: "Abstract Jewish thinkers like S knew how to distort [Hilbert's axioms] in order to use them as an intellectual vaudeville show. […] This is a typical example of how foreign racial influences and foreign racial temptations cut the Germans off from their own source of strength. […] There is no independent mathematical field that is detached from ideology and life; the current debate about the foundations of mathematics is in fact a debate about race. […] Ultimately, this play with concepts and overt trickery are characteristics of the inorganic and hostile S type, especially Jewish mathematics."
In Germany, there is a widespread stereotype that the Jewish mind is more practical, relying on logic and calculations, while the German mind is more conceptual. This stereotype was established by the German psychologist and ardent Nazi, Jansch, in 1937. The psychologist divided mathematicians into type J and type S. According to Jansch, the "integration type" (Integrationstypus or type J), that is, the German mind, is conceptual and geometric. This is the ideal, northern, Aryan type, while the "degeneration type" (type S or "Strahltypus"), the Jewish mind, is simply logical. After the Nazis came to power, he added that although the political struggle was over, the intense spiritual struggle against the "eastern" Jews was only just beginning. All the negative traits were cast on type S. Type J was a tough, masculine, aggressive, and reliable member of the Nazi party of Aryan origin. The sensory tendencies of type S were more fluid, fragmented, emotional, and "liberal."
In concluding one of his lectures, Bieberbach remarked: "However, if something is so deeply rooted in the people, as is the case with the style of mathematical creativity, and as is confirmed by the unique racial style of our great German mathematicians, then it is important for the development of our people to recognize and strengthen a uniquely German style in mathematics. To this end, we first need a clear definition of a foreign style. After all, we tend too easily to lose the ability to appreciate our own abilities, admiring what is foreign. Only when our academic youth teachers are themselves strong representatives of our people, willing to cultivate the German style above all else, will we get rid of this mistake... Thus, we have a better chance of proving ourselves among the nations through our own efforts, if we freely give up the borrowed feathers that do not suit our style."
These educated, knowledgeable people resorted to absurd scientific theories to distance the hated Jews from science and to quench their unquenchable thirst for knowledge and science. Their pseudo-science was anti-Jewish and anti-scientific.
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