The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (5 page)

Of considerably less importance is the relative size of an ethnic minority. There are, indeed, cases when a majority population was the victim of violent persecution by a minority, counter-intuitive though that may be. As the people of predominantly Jewish cities in the Pale of Settlement
†
discovered repeatedly in the first half of the
twentieth century, numbers do not always mean safety. Also relatively insignificant as a predictor of ethnic conflict is the degree of assimilation between two populations. It might be thought that a high level of social integration would discourage conflict, if only because of the difficulty of identifying and isolating a highly assimilated minority. Paradoxically, however, a sharp rise in assimilation (measured, for example, by rates of intermarriage) may actually be the prelude to ethnic conflict.

Assimilation, to give perhaps the most important of all examples, was in fact quite far advanced in Central and Eastern Europe by the 1920s. In many places of mixed settlement, rates of intermarriage across ethnic barriers rose to unprecedented heights. By the later 1920s, nearly one in every three marriages involving a German Jew was to a Gentile. The rate rose as high as one in two in some big cities. The trend was similar, with only minor degrees of variation, in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, parts of Poland, Romania and Russia (see
Table I.1
). This could, of course, be interpreted as an indicator of successful assimilation and integration. Yet it was in precisely these places that some of the worst ethnic violence occurred in the 1940s. One hypothesis explored below is that there was some kind of backlash against assimilation, and particularly against miscegenation, in the mid-twentieth century.

This possibility should disturb but not surprise us. We have, after all, seen instances of such backlashes in our own time. Horrific violence between Tutsis and Hutus occurred in Rwanda in the 1990s, even though intermarriage between Tutsi men and Hutu women used to be quite common. Ethnic conflict also exploded in Bosnia, despite high rates of inter-ethnic marriage in previous decades. These episodes also serve to remind us that there is no linear spectrum of inter-ethnic behaviour, with peaceful mingling at one end and bloody genocide at the other. The most murderous racial violence can have a sexual dimension to it, as in 1992, when Serbian forces were accused of a systematic campaign of rape directed against Bosnian Muslim women, with the aim of forcing them to conceive and give birth to ‘Little Ĉetniks’. Was this merely one of many forms of violence designed to terrorize Muslim families into fleeing from their homes? Or was it perhaps a manifestation of the primitive impulse described above – to eradicate ‘the Other’ by impregnating females as well as murdering males? It would certainly be simplistic to regard raping women as a form of violence indistinguishable in its intent from shooting men. Sexual violence directed against members of ethnic minorities has often been inspired by erotic, albeit sadistic, fantasies as much as by ‘eliminationist’ racism. The key point to grasp from the outset is that
the ‘hatred’ so often blamed for ethnic conflict is not a straightforward emotion. Rather, we encounter time and again that volatile ambivalence, that mixture of aversion and attraction, which has for so long characterized relations between white Americans and African-Americans. In calling the period from 1904 to 1953 the Age of Hatred, I hope to draw attention to the very complexity of that most dangerous of human emotions.

Table I.1. Mixed marriages as a percentage of all marriages involving one or two Jewish partners, selected European countries, regions and cities in the 1920s

Note: All data are for the period 1926 to 1929 or 1930 except Trieste (1921–1927), Poland (1927), Lemberg/Lwów (1922–1925), Soviet Union (1924–1926), Russia (1926), Leningrad (1919–1920), Kirovograd (1921–1924), Ukraine (1926), Byelorussia (1926), Lithuania (1928–1930), Estonia (1923) and Vilna (1929–1931).

If it can plausibly be argued that ‘race’ is not a genetically meaningful concept, the question the historian must address is why it has nevertheless been such a powerful and violent preoccupation of modern times. An answer that suggests itself – also, as it happens, from the literature on evolutionary biology – is that racism, in the sense of a strongly articulated sense of racial differentiation, is one of those ‘memes’ characterized by Richard Dawkins as behaving in the realm of ideas the way genes behave in the natural world. The
idea
of biologically distinct races, ironically, has been able to reproduce itself and retain its integrity far more successfully than the races it claims to identify.

In the ancient and medieval worlds, no identity was wholly indelible. It was possible to become a Roman citizen, even if one had been born a Gaul. It was possible to become a Christian, even – at first especially – if one had been born a Jew. At the same time, blood feuds could run for years, even centuries, between ethnically indistinguishable but irreconcilably hostile clans. The notion of immutable racial identity came late to human history. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was very unusual in defining Jewishness according to blood rather than belief. Even in the eighteenth-century Portuguese Empire, it was possible for a mulatto to acquire the legal rights and privileges of a white through the payment of a standard fee to the crown. As is well known, the first ostensibly scientific attempt to subdivide the human species into biologically distinct races was by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné). In his
Systema Naturae
(1758), he identified four races:
Homo sapiens americanus, Homo sapiens asiaticus, Homo sapiens afer
and
Homo sapiens europaeus
.
Linnaeus, like all his many imitators, ranked the various races according to their appearance, temperament and intelligence, putting European man at the top of the evolutionary tree, followed (in Lin-naeus’s case) by American man (‘ill-tempered… obstinate, contented, free’), Asian man (‘severe, haughty, desirous’) and – invariably at the bottom – African man (‘crafty, slow, foolish’). Whereas European man was ‘ruled by customs’, Linnaeus argued, African man was ruled by ‘caprice’. Already by the time of the American Revolution, this way of thinking was astonishingly widespread; the only real debate was whether racial differences reflected gradual divergence from a common origin or, as polygenists insisted, the lack of such a common origin. By the end of the nineteenth century, racial theorists had devised more elaborate methods of categorization, most commonly based on skull size and shape, but the basic ranking never changed. In his
Hereditary Genius
(1869), the English polymath Francis Galton devised a sixteen-point scale of racial intelligence, which put ancient Athenians at the top and the Australian aborigines at the bottom.

This was a profound transformation in the way people thought. Previously, men had tended to believe that it was power, privilege and property that were inheritable, as well, no doubt, as the social obligations that went with them. The royal dynasties who still ruled so much of the world in 1900 were the embodiments of this principle. Even the republics that occasionally arose in the modern period – in the Netherlands, North America and France – tended to retain the hereditary principle with respect to wealth, if not to office and status. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries new political doctrines arose. One theory asserted that power should not be a hereditary attribute, and that leaders should be selected by popular acclamation. Another called for the demolition of the edifice of inherited privilege; all men should instead be equal before the law. A third argued that property should not be monopolized by an elite of wealthy families, but should be redistributed according to individual needs. Yet even as democrats, liberals and socialists advanced these arguments, racists asserted that the hereditary principle should nevertheless apply in every other field of human activity. Racial theorists claimed that not only colour and physiognomy but also intelligence, aptitude, character
and even morals and criminality were passed on in the blood from generation to generation. This was another central paradox of the modern era. Even as the hereditary principle ceased to govern the allocation of office and ownership, so it gained ground as a presumed determinant of capability and conduct. Men ceased to be able to inherit their father’s jobs; in some countries during the twentieth century they even ceased to be able to inherit their estates. But they could inherit their traits, as legacies of their parents’ racial origins.

The crucial normative question, however, was how far the manifest ability of the different races to interbreed ought to be tolerated. To some, ‘miscegenation’ seemed simply to be inevitable. A number of thinkers even came to regard it as desirable – that, at any rate, was a strong implication of early anthropological theories about ‘exogamy’, as well as the developing understanding of hereditary illness and the somewhat exaggerated perils of cousin-marriage. However, an increasingly frequent reaction to the phenomenon was condemnation. In his
History of Jamaica
(1774), for example, Edward Long found ‘the Europeans [there]… too easily led aside to give a loose to every kind of sensual delight: on this account some black or yellow
quasheba
is sought for, by whom a tawney [
sic
] breed is produced’. Arthur, comte de Gobineau, in his
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
(1853–55), echoed Linnaeus in identifying three archetypal races, of which the Aryan (white) was supreme and, as usual, responsible for all the great achievements of history. But Gobineau introducedanew idea: that the decline of a civilization tended to come when its Aryan blood had been diluted by intermarriage. He, too, regarded the fusion of the intellectually superior white race and more emotional dark and yellow races as inevitable, since the former was essentially masculine, the latter essentiallyfeminine. Yet that did not make miscegenation any less repellent to him: ‘The more this product reproduces itself and crosses its blood, the more the confusion increases. It reaches infinity, when the people is too numerous for any equilibrium to have a chance of being established… Such a people is merely an awful example of racial anarchy.’

In its most extreme forms, hostility to ‘racial anarchy’ produced discrimination, segregation, persecution, expulsion and, ultimately, attempted annihilation. For many years it seemed to be incumbent
on historians to deny the existence of such a continuum of racial discrimination and to treat one particular event – the National Socialist ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’ – as
sui generis
, a unique ‘Holocaust’, without precedent or parallel. A central hypothesis of this present book, however, is that German anti-Semitism in the mid-twentieth century was an extreme case of a general (though by no means universal) phenomenon. In claiming that Jews were systematically trying to ‘pollute the blood’ of the German
Volk
, Hitler and the other National Socialist ideologues were, as we shall see, saying nothing novel. Nor was it unique that such ideas became the basis not just for segregation and expulsion but ultimately for systematic genocide. The principal distinguishing feature of what became known as the Holocaust was not its goal of racial annihilation but the fact that it was carried out by a regime which had at its disposal all the resources of an industrialized economy and an educated society.