The Social Roots of Discrimination

The Case of the Jews

John W. Thibaut, Peretz Bernstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412808668
• eBook ISBN: 9781351473828
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Social Roots of Discrimination explains the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. In this classic volume, Peretz F. Bernstein looks for objective reasons why anti-Semitism flourished in European countries. Some civilized people would consider the notion of race uncivilized, but the existence of different races and the inequality of races with their specific race characteristics and on top of that the existence of superior and inferior human races was accepted as a fact of life and as a scientific truth long before the Nazis came to power. Although there is a marked difference in dealing with anti-Semitism in continental Europe in 1920 and the anti-Semitism in, for instance, the US in 2000, Berstein's ideas remain valuable.Starting from a concrete problem, anti-Semitism in Central Europe, Bernstein puts anti-Semitism in a general sociological theoretical framework. Far from limiting himself to fruitless elaborations on the common perceived unpleasant characteristics of Jews, he recognizes that the group is heterogeneous and that the usual arguments to justify anti-Semitism do not have any general validity, although they may hold for some specific individuals of the hated group, like individual members of any group may be less pleasant. Bernstein's ideas remain valuable.Bernstein tries to explain the hatred of Jews as the working of a more general mechanism--one that has nothing to do specifically with of Jews as a collective or as individuals. In doing so Bernstein attempts to sketch a general theory of social groups and conflicts between groups. The Social Roots of Discrimination gives an important message both for social scientists and for all intellectuals who are concerned with the strifes between nations, races, and social groups.

Introduction to the
Transaction Edition

Bernard M.S. van Praag

The classical serendipity dream is that you find unexpectedly along the road a gold treasure. For scientific researchers, the analogue is that you find a totally forgotten and overlooked publication that is of the highest quality. The Social Roots of Discrimination is just such a work. Written by the late Peretz Bernstein, it was first published as Der Antisemitismus als eine Gruppenerscheinung (1926) by Fritz Bernstein. The first English translation was titled Jew-Hate as a Sociological Problem (1951).

I will start with a few biographical facts. Then I will consider the experiences of the book from 1926 up to now. In the second section I will describe the contents of the book and in the third section I will try to place it in the world of today.

The Author

Fritz Bernstein was born in 1890 in the provincial Ger-man town of Meiningen. His family was a conservative but non-orthodox Jewish family. Although his parents planned for Bernstein to go to university like their older children, due to financial difficulties, Bernstein received only intermediate education in trade and commerce. Before his military service, he went to Rotterdam for an apprenticeship. After his military service, he returned to Holland in 1909 and got a job at a coffee trade firm in Rotterdam and, soon after, he became the son-in-law of the Jewish owner. Some years later he started a firm of his own in Rotterdam and became a friendly competitor of his father-in-law. Apparently, the market was sufficiently profitable for both of them to make a comfortable living. Bernstein then became quite active in the Dutch Zionist movement and was president of the Dutch Zionist Federation (DZF) for the period 1930-34. He was especially active in providing Zionist schooling to the youth and he was chief editor of the DZF's weekly. The DZF at that time had a membership of about 3000 members all over Holland. By 1936 Bernstein had become a wealthy man and could stop working. He went on alyah (emigration to Palestine). Soon he became chief editor of the Jewish daily Ha-Boker in Tel-Aviv and he became politically active in the non-socialist non-religious General Zionist party. In 1948 he was one of the 36 signatories to the Israeli Declaration of Independence and became a member of the first Israeli Parliament, the Knesset. He was minister of economic affairs in two cabinets and member of Parliament from 1949 until 1965. He died in Jerusalem in 1971 at the age of 81.

Fritz Bernstein must have been a remarkable person. Apart from his organizational activities, he wrote a large number of articles, the book we have before us, and several other tracts, partly in Dutch and in Hebrew, about aspects of the “Jewish problem.”

His most important book was certainly Der Antisemitismus als eine Gruppenerscheinung, with the sub-title Versuch einer Soziologie des Judenhasses. The English translation (1951) of the title read: Antisemitism as a Group Phenomenon, Attempt of a Sociology of Jew-Hate.

The book was completed in 1923, but Bernstein found it very difficult to find a publisher. He submitted the manuscript to the Jüdischer Verlag in Berlin, which was at that time the prominent publisher for modern Zionist authors like Buber, Bialik, Gordon, Chaim Weizmann, and numerous other celebrities. After much delay, Bernstein's book was accepted and published in 1926. The book got about twenty reviews in Jewish and non-Jewish dailies and weeklies in Germany and Holland, which were generally favorable. However, the problem was that the book was not reviewed in scientific journals to my knowledge, and that it consequently received no attention at all in academic circles. The only exception was Prof. Dr. Theodor Lessing, a famous German/Jewish philosopher and Nazi-fighter, who was killed by the Nazis in 1933 in Marienbad, Czechoslovakia. The reasons why the book received hardly any attention in German academic circles are not hard to guess. First, the author had no university education and consequently he had no academic title. He had lived outside Germany for about 16 years and consequently had no German academic network whatsoever. The discipline of sociology was young and scarcely represented at German universities. The title suggested that the main subject was anti-Semitism and since most German university professors at that time were not very Jew-friendly, to put it mildly, they were not interested in what a non-doctored Jew-ish businessman from Holland, publishing at an outspoken Jewish publishing house, could have to say about a subject that could only be interesting to those in Jewish/Zion-ist circles. Finally, the book itself was not written in the usual German academic style of the day. It did not contain the typically German half-page long sentences, it did not quote other authors, it did not contain the usual irrelevant footnotes and finally there were no references at all. In short, in our eyes it was an ideally readable and transparent book, both for academics and intellectuals at large, but in the 1920s it was far ahead of its time stylistically. The most important reason for the meager interest was perhaps the title of the book, which suggested a book on anti-Semitism. The main subject of the book is definitely not anti-Semitism, but a new theory on social groups, a great deal of which was developed by Bernstein himself. This newly developed theory is applied in the last chapter on the explanation of anti-Semitism as a special instance of the theory developed. From a marketing point of view the choice of the title was definitely a misnomer. Therefore, the present edition has been given a new and more appropriate title—The Social Roots of Discrimination: The Case of the Jews.

With hindsight and knowledge of the events to come in Germany (Hitler wrote his Mein Kampf at about the same time), it does not come as a surprise that the book was a complete failure in terms of sales. Of the 2000 copies printed, at most 500 were sold in the usual way. The only place where the book was read, known, and admired was in Dutch Zionist circles. In 1934 Bernstein bought the remaining copies and shipped them to Amsterdam, where a local bookseller kept them in stock. Even after World War II, the Jewish bookseller in Amsterdam was selling out a fair number of copies of the book. According to some autobiographical notes, Bernstein realized in about 1930 that his ambition for a sociological academic career had to be abandoned.

After World War II, Bernstein had become a very prominent member of the Zionist world movement and he became close¹ with Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, one of the American Zionist leaders in the 1940s and 1950s. Silver convinced Bernstein that his book deserved an American translation. The book was excellently translated by David Saraph, a son of Bernstein, and accepted by the Philosophical Library Inc. at New York in 1951. The original 1926 text was translated unchanged and a short prologue by Bernstein was added to the book. The prologue commemorated the events between 1926 and 1951, but did not add anything substantially new. Bernstein, who was a prominent Israeli politician at that time, apologized that he had had no time for revising the book. This text is now reprinted unabridged.

The Philosophical Library Inc., nowadays virtually unknown, was in the fifties a rather small and highly distinguished publishing house, which vanished somewhere in the seventies. The main editor was Dagobert D. Runes, a prolific and influential author on philosophy himself. Other authors, who were published in that time by The Philosophical Library, were, e.g., Karl Jaspers, Maeterlinck, Jacques Maritain, Sartre (probably the first American edition of Existentialism), Karl Barth, Albert Einstein, and Max Planck. We may say that most of the authors belonged to the fine fleur of European philosophy and literature, but whatever their prestige, were not real bestsellers in America in the fifties.

The book was sent for reviewing to various scientific journals, but it was not reviewed to my knowledge, except in 1956, after five years of delay, in an anonymous eight-line review in The Western Political Quarterly. The review said: “Although the psychology is schematic and incomplete, this is the most useful work in group theory for political scientists; it is an enormously significant book.”²

We may conclude that again the book failed. Although it was published by a very prestigious publisher, its marketing was not targeted at the relevant readership, consisting of social scientists and Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals in general. Bernstein might have found a bit of consolation in a letter in German that Runes received from a colleague. The letter (dated 28/1/1951) read in part: “[A]ccording to my conviction the book must be considered as a classical masterwork.… I can only congratulate you that you have acknowledged the value of this book.…” Runes’ colleague was Bernstein's fellow author at The Philosophical Library: Albert Einstein!

Still, the tale does not end here. After Bernstein's death in 1971, the book was translated into Hebrew in 1980. It was again reprinted in German in 1980 by the post-war successor of Jüdischer Verlag. This new printing contained a new short epilogue by the British scholar Henri Tajfel, who was one of the most prominent European social psychologists of the time. According to his epilogue, Tajfel was generally very fond of the book. He failed to notice, however, that the ideas of Bernstein were certainly relevant for his research and that of his contemporaries. From private correspondence, in which the German editor invites Tajfel to write an epilogue, it emerges that the initiative for the reprint came from the editor, but that Tajfel did know the original German book before and immediately accepted the invitation. Although the book is certainly relevant for modern social psychological research, it is striking that neither Tajfel nor anybody else from his school ever refers to Bernstein's book before or after 1980.

At the risk of becoming monotonous, I note that the book's reception in 1980 was again poor—I cannot find any reviews. Even a notable contemporary connoisseur of literature on anti-Semitism during the Weimar period confessed to me that he had never heard of the book.

The reader will agree that this story is highly unusual and that it can only imply that this must be a book that raises a reader's curiosity. Could it be a hidden pearl that should be brought into the open, or would it be best to leave it in the dark as one of the many scientific mediocrities? In the following pages I will try to summarize the book (of about 300 pages). I must warn the reader that this actually implies a mutilation, as the book is so full of content that it cannot be summarized without dropping much of its richness.

I will end by giving an evaluation of the book related to the time of its conception. Moreover, I will have to ask the question whether, if the book had become known, it would have had any impact on the development of social sciences. Finally, the question arises whether the book still has value in the twenty-first century.

An Introduction to the Content

Bernstein's stated objective was to explain the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. He therefore starts out looking for “objective” reasons, why anti-Semitism could flourish in Germany and other European countries in the 1920s, the time of the writing of his book. Although one cannot deny that anti-Semitism still exists in many parts of the world, there is a marked difference in dealing with anti-Semitism in continental Europe in 1920 and the anti-Semitism in, for instance, the United States in 2000. In the twenties there was no moral ban in Germany on being anti-Semitic and to speaking in such a manner. Many people today would consider it as uncivilized, but the existence of superior and inferior human races was accepted as a fact of life and as a scientific truth long before the Nazis came to power.

For German Jews, although legally emancipated since about 1860, many civil offices remained inaccessible in the 1920s. This held, for instance, for academia, for becoming a judge, and for getting jobs in private industry. There was no legal obstacle, but it was the result of a silent understanding between “true” Germans: Jews had to be excluded, just because they were Jews. Actually, Bernstein himself fell victim to this habit in about 1909, when he was refused an appointment as a Feldwebel (a very low officer rank) in the reserve army, after that he completed his military service. The officer said that he could only get the higher rank if he converted to the Christian faith. This was the immediate cause for his immigration to the Netherlands at the age of twenty. The result of this de facto exclusion from the German workforce was, as we know, that Jews overwhelmingly earned their incomes as independents, e.g., as lawyers, doctors, musicians, shopkeepers, by setting up their own firms or by working in firms owned by other Jews. In addition to that, the Jewish proletariat was massive. This does not deny that there have been exceptions to this rule. Since Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, and much earlier the “Court Jew” Jud Süss, there were rare Jews who succeeded in finding a place in German Gentile society. These Jews, however, almost always paid the price by assimilation, personal isolation, and mostly conversion—at least of their offspring.³

Apart from this widespread but informal anti-Semitism, there was a religious and a “scientific” anti-Semitism. The scientific branch tried to argue why Jews as a group were inferior, or at least that a good Gentile society should not have a Jewish minority in its midst. It was this current that made anti-Semitism respectable and paved the way for Nazi anti-Jewish philosophies. In other European countries anti-Semitism existed as well, but with gradual differences.

In chapter 2 Bernstein begins to look for the reasons behind the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. The first reason, which was the main driving force until the emancipation, was the religious one. Jews had killed Christ. However, as no Jew living almost 2000 years later could have had anything to do with that, and the fact that many Jews were non-believers or even baptized, the force of this argument was already weak in the time of Bernstein. For many devoted Catholics and Protestant farmers in Bavaria and elsewhere, however, it was still a popular notion. The second reason is “cultural parasitism.” Jews would not be creative but only imitate and reproduce Gentile culture. That reason is also untenable, unless (in Bernstein's words)

one helps oneself by the fiction that not the Jewish but the Dutch ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition