Professor Ken Gemes
The Biology of Evil: A Modern Blood Libel, Part 1

Professor Ken Gemes | The Biology of Evil A Modern Blood Libel, Part 1 | 07.12.21

- Welcome back, everybody. Good afternoon, Good evening to all of you, and a very, very warm welcome for Professor Ken Gemes, who will be talking to us today about the biology of evil, a modern blood libel. Before I hand over to you, I just want to tell our audience that Professor Gemes received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1990. He came to Birkbeck in 2000, having taught for 10 years at Yale University. Ken’s interests range from technical issues concerning logical content and confirmation to Nietzsche’s account of how philosophy is merely the last manifestation of the ascetic ideal.

So today, we are very privileged to have you with us, and I am so looking forward to hearing what you have to say. And I’m very much looking forward to meeting you when I’m next in London, so thanks a lot, and I’m going to now hand over to you. Privileged to have you with us.

• Thanks very much, Wendy. And also, thanks to Lauren and Wendy for organising this. I hope you can all hear me, and I hope you can all see my screen.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

Should have a big title: “The Biology of Evil: A Modern Blood Libel.” I’m trying to sum a course that I’ve taught for over 25 years, starting in Yale, and now I teach it at Birkbeck College, University of London, called “The Biology of Evil.” And I think you see, by the punchline, where I’m headed. It’s try to show a certain background, a certain kind of rhetoric that was started in 19 centuries and opened up certain horrible possibilities that were realise in the 20th century, so I’d like to start with the quotation from Borges, which says, “Universal history is perhaps the history of the different intonations given to a handful of metaphors.”

Now, actually, I’ve got a lot to cover in this lecture, and I talked to Lauren about this. And I’m just going to stop after 40 minutes. And then, we’ll do question, and if there’s more of the lecture to be done, we’ll just do it a different time ‘cause I don’t want to have to rush all this 'cause I’ve got a lot of slides. Okay, here’s the basic background. In the Enlightenment, the rhetoric developed by philosophers such as Descartes and Kant, evil is typically configured as a species of error, a kind of a matter of faulty representations, a misapplication of the faculty of reason, but as such, evil is treatable. It’s amenable to cures. Indeed, it might ultimately be eradicated through the ever-widening influence of education in the light of reason.

Descartes and Kant, in this famous essay “What is Enlightenment,” had this metaphor of a cone of light which spreads out and takes in more and more of us till, eventually, ideally, it should encompass all mankind, so it’s a very, very optimistic rhetoric. And basically, Kant could say, “Look, maybe there are certain people. Maybe there are Jews. Maybe they’re women. They’re a bit stubborn. It’s hard to get the switch on, but once the switch is on, it’s on, and there’s no fear of retrogression, of going backwards.” But in the 19th century, a new medical biological model of evil became prominent. I don’t say it became dominant, but it became prominent.

And on this model, evil is seen as some kind of bodily infection which needs to be isolated and destroyed before it further infects the greater populace. If someone has the wrong representation, ya can correct it through education, but if you see the evil as a kind of infection… Well, infections can’t be educated. You can’t educate a germ. You isolate or eliminate it, and what’s interesting, especially with regard to anti-Semitism, is both the religious world and the secular Enlightenment world have this hope of education 'cause even the religious people can say, “Well, the Jews, they don’t accept Christ, the Messiah, but they can be educated. They can accept Christ and be brought into the fold.”

Well, the Enlightenment said, “Certain people don’t reason, but we can educate them to use reason, and they can be brought into the fold,” but when you think, “Oh, something’s wrong with these people 'cause of their blood,” no education amelioration is possible, okay. First of all, I want to put something on board, because I talked about the biology of evil but a lot of these people actually don’t use the word evil. Degenerationists, as we’ll call them, for instance, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, he didn’t tend to use words such as good and evil in their work; why? Because they associated such terms with a moral, religious framework that they thought they were getting beyond.

They thought themselves as introducing a new, scientific, non-moralized framework. There dribs and drabs of them using the word evil, but by and large, they try to avoid it 'cause it has this religious connotation to them. But nevertheless, despite their self-conceptualizations, I think they’re really in a secularised version of the good-evil distinction. Why do I say that? Because an essential component of the good-evil distinction is a normative, or what we might call moral, conception that good is what ought to be and evil is what ought not to be. But that’s exactly the distinction that is carried over into degeneration as conception of the health-sickness dichotomy.

Rather than talking about good and evil, they tend to talk about who is healthy, who is sick, but they clearly regarded health as that which ought to be and sickness, which is that which we ought to strive to eliminate as much as possible, okay. So really, what this course and this lecture is about, a kind of fatal convergence I’m calling it for the purpose of this lecture. In the 19th century, degeneration theory creates the idea that certain individuals or certain groups of individuals can be seen as kind of a public health threat to the populace. They can be viewed as a source of infection.

We’re very big on infection today in the times of COVID, and the logic of infections demands different solutions. If there are certain people who are, in themselves, an infection, you limit their reproductive ability or you isolate or eliminate the infectious element in the extreme. And in the 19th century, Jewishness gets identified with a mentality or a constellation of thought that is seen as an infection, so I’m going to talk both about infection as something at the level of blood… They didn’t talk about genes in 19th century, but also, ideas get characterised as infections, not something you fight by reason but something you fight by isolation and elimination.

And it’s mainly in the 20th century that there’s a convergence of these ideas because the degenerationists in the 19th century, except for one or two exceptions, were not particularly concerned with the so-called Jewish problem but, in the 20th century, we see the conversion of these ideas of this problem of degeneration, of us going backwards, being infected, and the idea of the Jews, at least in their mentality or, if not, in their bodies, being an infection. And that had horrible consequences.

By the way, none of this is to say that what happened the 20th century, the Holocaust, had to happen, that it’s a inevitable consequence of degeneration theory. What I want you to see is that degeneration theory opened up a new conceptual space which allowed possibilities. Now, a lot depends on various other circumstances, economic circumstances, political circumstances, that, in the end, are part of the story about why these possibilities arise, but without this kind of rhetoric of degeneration, you don’t have this space of possibilities, this possibility of seeing people as an infection, arising.

So I’m going to go through, very quickly, some of the background. In the course, I spend a lot more time on this, but I’ve got 10 weeks. One of the people who was important for degeneration theory is Arthur de Gobineau. I won’t give you his dates, but his 1854 work was “The Inequality of the Human Races,” and it’s often cited as a founding document of modern race theory. And it has a chapter entitled “The Meaning of the Word Degeneration.” I will not read the whole quotation.

I will just read part of it: “The word degeneration, when applied to a people, means, as it ought to mean, that the people has no longer the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins. Continual adulterations have gradually affected the quality of that blood.” “In fact, the man of a decadent time, the degenerate man properly so called, is a different being, from the racial point of view, from the heroes of the ages.” And by the way, in the 19th century, they didn’t have such a clear notion of species as we do, so some writers even spoke about degenerates as belonging to a different species.

Okay, now, Benedict Morel, in his very famous 1857 “Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species and the Causes That Produce These Various Maladies”… He’s often presented by people who work in degeneration theory as… This is a founding document of the degeneration literature. Morel was a physician. He was in the town of Rouen, and he was very concerned with… With industrialization, you have these big population concentrations. Certain mental diseases become more apparent just through the mere numbers. He was dealing with what he called cretinism; often, people considered insane; lot of cases that we would consider as cerebral palsy, and he was a director of this asylum in Rouen, in this large industrial town with a large section of urban poor.

And later on, you’ll see a lot of the degeneration literature is really expressing middle-class fears about the urban poor. In the “Treatise,” Morel attributed cretinism and schizophrenia to both hereditary factors; certain organic disposition, to use his phrase; obviously, he’s a Frenchman, so I’m translating; and environmental and social factors, including soil quality, slums, alcoholism. He was not a Darwinist. He was a fervent Catholic, and he believed in the fixity of the species, as in God created all the original species, but he believed in a process of degenerations, especially in families over time, that starts with neurosis/anxiety, progressing to imbecility and eventually to sterility. And one of the weirdest things about degeneration theory is it keeps saying how these degenerates are inferior and how they tend towards sterility and yet it’s full of fears about “we are being swamped by the degenerates.”

And you get these weird contradictions in degeneration theory: “The degenerates should be weak and naturally die out, and yet, they’re going to swamp us.” Okay, another person who’s important in degeneration theory, who is cited very favourably by Darwin, is Karl Vogt, whose “Lectures in Man” were published in 1863. Darwin, when he did the “Origin of the Species,” was very careful, in 1859, not to apply it to man, 'cause he thought, “This is going to get me in enough trouble. If I explicitly apply it to humans, the religious backlash is going to be terrible.” But Vogt got there early and, in 1863, was already applying Darwin’s ideas to man, but he advanced a theory that Darwin totally rejected, the polygenist thesis, that different races are descended from different species of apes.

There was this fight between the monogenist, who thinks we all come from the same background… Gobineau was a monogenist for religious reasons. He was still a Christian and thought we all came from Adam, but anyhow, the nonreligious, scientific groups had fights between those who thought we have commons ancestry or different races have different ancestries. And Vogt is very important because he used data about the measurements of crania to argue for a certain hierarchy of races and this because a very big… I would call it a pseudoscience today. It’s a kind of argument that is now taken up, especially in the U.S., to legitimise certain race theories that he was measuring crania.

He was measuring skull size, brain capacity, brain size and making various very suspect inferences. As I said, we might think of this as a precursor of 20th-century debates about race and IQ. I thought I’d show you this. This is from his book “Lectures on Man.” You’ll notice the English are doing very well at 33; Germans, not bad at 31. Australians are very poor. They’re the worst. They had the smaller skulls. I hate to tell you you’re being lectured by an Australian, but I think he had a different kind of Australian in mind when he was doing this. Okay, I have to introduce an idea that is very important to degeneration theory, and that is the notion of atavism.

Atavism is sometimes called reversion, and it’s the idea, popularised by Lombroso, who was a great criminologist, part of the degenerationist literature, who wrote this famous book “The Male Offender.” And they said certain members of the populace represent a reversion to a primitive form of development. Atavism is the idea that certain individuals of groups of individuals do not reach the full natural development of the kind and hence represent throwbacks to an earlier period of the species. I’ve got a little quote from Lankester’s 1880 “Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism.”

I think I’ll just say, “With regard to ourself, the white races of Europe, the possibility of degeneration seems to be worth some consideration.” I can’t read the last quote, 'cause I have all your names there, but “on the other hand, it’s well to remember that we are subject to the general laws of evolution”; oops, I did not mean to do that; “and are likely to degenerate as to progress.”

• I’m sorry to interrupt. Do you mind slowing down just a bit?

• Oh yes, I tend to talk very fast, thanks.

• [Lauren] Yes, it’s just a lot of great information, and we need a little bit of time to absorb all of it. Thank you so much.

• Well, as I tell my students, when someone tells me that, I slow down for 10 seconds and then go back to my natural speed, but I’ll see what I can do. Okay, Cesare Lombroso was this very influential criminologist. He’s Italian, father of modern penology. Mind out he’s Jewish. He was a progressive and on the political left, and that’s actually one of the points, that a lot of the degenerationists were on the left, 'cause we have the easy division between left and right and when ya do this kind of work on degeneration theories, you see it’s muddy waters. Here, like Galton… Galton was a first cousin of Darwin.

He’s the one who coined the word eugenics and was the brains behind this big eugenics movement in the England and the U.S. about trying to weed out the so-called degenerate, inferior types. Lombroso famously coined the term the born criminal and argued that a large class of criminal were atavistic. He said, “It’s a prevalent delusion of our times that we’re always progressing. We picture progress to ourselves as an endless line leading straight up to Heaven without any turnings. But a little calm observation quickly shows how great this illusion is. An attentive consideration reveals the fact that, even amongst the most privileged peoples, the line of movement, far from being vertical, is always describing reactionary curves and winding ways, is varied by backward movements. Just as in the case of individuals, we meet points of recurrence of atavism.”

One of the things I want to get you to see is, as opposed to the Enlightenment’s optimism, with degeneration theory, you get this worry: “Don’t worry about bringing the others up to our speed. Worry about them dragging us down to theirs.” There’s this incredible fear of regression, and really, the biggest impetus to all of this is Darwin as we’ll come to see.

Okay, so I’m going to talk a bit about Darwin on degeneration theory, but I want something to be very clear to you: Darwin is not a degenerationist. Darwin gave unbelievable momentum to degeneration theory. As I say, Galton really ran with Darwin and from Darwin to a certain extent, or ran with Darwin’s ideas. Here he is. This is from a book called “Descent of Man,” published in 1871: “In regard to the moral qualities, some elimination of the worst disposition is always in progress, even in the most civilised nations. This especially holds good with injurious characters, which tend to reappear through reversion; that’s atavism; such as blackness in sheep. And with mankind, some of the worst dispositions, which occasionally, without any assignable case, make their appearance in families, may perhaps be reversion to a savage state from which we are not removed by many generations.”

We often call this the purple passage, the real degenerationist passage that was unbelievably influential in Darwin’s “Descent of Man,” so I’m going to read the whole thing. This introduces a famous farming analogy: “With savages, the weak in mind and body are soon eliminated, and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick. We institute poor laws, and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is no reason to believe; there is no reason not to believe” I guess that would been; “vaccination has preserved thousands whom, from a weak constitution, would formerly have succumbed to smallpox; thus, the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.”

Crucial part coming up: “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care or care wrongly directed leads to the degeneration of a domestic race, but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” So you see what the idea is. The idea is that, because of our new poor laws because of our sympathy towards the worst off, we are preserving them, allowing them to breed, and they will swamp us. A lot of this represents middle-class fears. A lot of the degeneration are seeing big cities, like London, seeing the urban poor, thinking, “They breed like flies,” and there’s part of this is Darwin’s “Descent of Man.” I just didn’t want to quote it, and that they are going to swamp us.

Here “The Inferior May Swamp the Populace, Leading to Regression,” that’s my title, but this is a quotation, again from “Descent of Man”: “If the various checks”; he’s mentioned certain checks on breeding; “do not prevent the reckless, the vicious, and the otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule. It is very difficult to say why one civilised nation rises, becomes more powerful, and spreads more widely than another or why the same nation progresses more quickly at one time than other point. We can only say that it depends on an increase in the actual numbers of the population, on the number of men endowed with a high intellectual and moral faculties, as well as their standard of excellent.”

By the way, part of the backdrop here is Gibbons’s “Decline of the Roman Empire,” which had been published in the 18th century, which was musing on why this great empire of Rome fell. Gibbons actually says, “Rome didn’t fall because of the invasions and predations of outsiders: the Huns and the barbarians. It really fell because the Romans themselves had become degenerate,” and that became a model and a reference point for a lot of people who thought about these things in the 19th century. Okay, before I read this slide, let me say something. Why is Darwin not a… Darwin gave an incredible impetus to degeneration theory. After Darwin, this fear that we could backwards, that there’s not an inevitable teleology, that it’s not God’s plan or it’s not the plan of the light of reason that’s being realised, that we’re just the result of a series of accidents, and we could well as go backwards as forward, it became a very strong, almost pathological fear among certain social theorist, certain people of populace generally. But Darwin himself was not a degenerationist. Why?

Because all the degenerationists emphasised we have to stop having too much compassion: “We have too much compassion for the worst off, and that means we do things which allow them to breed, and that means we instigate the means for them to swamp us, the better members of society,” whereas Darwin, in the end, in “Descent of Man,” is very clear that he said, “Compassion is intrinsic to who we are, to what makes us human, to our morality, and we’d be better off keeping our compassion than doing away with it,” putting it very simply. But I just want to show you how incredibly influential Darwin’s analogy between animal breed and human breeding was and how it became very important so some examples, and this is historically something a lot of people don’t know about, but in 1924, the U.S. government passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which served to severely restrict the entry of Eastern and Southern Europeans and Jews, among others.

And by the way, this was enforced until the end of the Second World War. Roosevelt refused to get rid of it. Truman got rid of it, but expert witness backing the bill came from Harry Laughlin, one of the most influential eugenicists of the 20th century. In fact, his model eugenics law allowing for the sterilisation of various undesirable was adopted by 32 states and also by Hitler’s Germany. It’s incredible how much of the eugenicist movement in Germany actually started and came from America. I won’t read the whole… Well, I’ll read some of it: “We in this country have been so imbued with the idea of democracy, or the equality of all men, that we have left out a consideration in matter of blood or natural, inborn, hereditary mental and moral differences. No man who breeds pedigreed plants and animals can afford to neglect this thing, as you know, but in adding to our human breeding stock by immigration, this is what we do.”

So it’s an echo of the Darwin point about breeding, and this is from a letter. I’ve got to move your names. Okay, I put it up in the corner. This is from a letter from Theodore Roosevelt. By the time he wrote it, in 1913, he was an ex-president: “I agree with you.” This is a letter to Charles Davenport, Laughlin’s mentor and employer. Davenport and Laughlin are the most important and influential American eugenicists in the 20th century. “I agree with you,” Charles Davenport,“ if you mean, as I suppose you do, that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stockbreeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed,” and I can’t read that now, 'cause there’s writing there: “and let the increase come from the worst stock would be treated as fit inmates from an asylum.”

And it’s all echoing what I call Darwin’s famous purple passage. And here is Churchill. This is to do with the backing of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. He writes to Ivor Guest in 1899, “The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life,” and to Asquith, in 1910; I’m reading all this to show you that very important people shared these ideas that we think of as abhorrent; “The unnatural increasing rapidity of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled, as it is, with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic, and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.”

I might say that Churchill, who was helping draw up the Mental Deficiency Act, actually, at one point, was thinking of proposing these so-called mental defectives should be isolated from the rest of the population, and in fact, Churchill was the vice president of the first International Eugenics Conference, which was held in London in 1912. The president was Darwin’s son, Leonard Darwin, and the congress was dedicated to Galton, Darwin’s first cousin, founder of eugenics, who had died the previous year, and the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 was backed by Churchill. The writer Chesterton called it the Feeble-Minded Act because he was saying those who back it are feeble-minded, and the reason I mention this is because he was from a Catholic background and it’s interesting that, across the board, generally, there was a Catholic constituency that really opposed the talk of degeneracy.

Okay, I can’t read the title to this slide, 'cause I’ve got some… Oh, “Buck versus Bell,” yeah, I want to talk about this 'cause it’s kind of important. It’s important because it’s still the law of the land today. In 1927, there was a very famous U.S. court decision that allowed that U.S. could enforce sterilisation for the so-called feeble-minded and other categories of persons. There was also people called moral delinquents, and the very famous allegedly liberal jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to Carrie Bucks and Bucks’ mother and daughter, and he said famously in his judgement , “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” And this allowed for the forced sterilisation of thousands. I mean tens of thousands.

In fact, these forced sterilisations of so-called feeble-minded… The last ones were performed in the early 21st century, if you can believe it, and Buck versus Bell is still the law of the land. It’s interesting for us in COVID times that the president set for this decision that was cited in the 1927 decision was the 1905 Supreme Court decision which established the rights of the state to enforce immunisation against smallpox, Jacobson versus Massachusetts, 1905. A lot of Americans don’t know this today, but states could actually mandate COVID vaccination, if possible. Course, they wouldn’t try it now, given what America is like, but anyhow, what’s interesting for us is this implied analogy between smallpox virus and Carrie Buck as an agent of social infection and feeble-mindedness.

There’s a great book on this, Paul Lombard’s “Three Generations, No Imbeciles.” The reason he says, “no imbeciles,” is ‘cause we’ve had actual records, school records, of Carrie Buck’s daughter, and it turned out, she was in the top part of her class. She was no imbecile at all. What they were was they were poor people, but I won’t go into that further. It’s interesting for us that Hitler actually was very influenced by American eugenicists. Again, a lot of people are not aware of that, and German eugenicists worked very closely with American and English, their counterparts. Indeed, in the '20s and '30s, they complained. A lot of Germans complained about how much more advanced the Americans were in eugenicist ideals.

Madison Grant wrote this very important book, which was also important for the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of '24. There was a great influence behind it, called “The Passing of the Great Race.” He basically divided Europe into the Nordic type, the best, these Scandinavian countries, Northern Germany; then there’s the middle types: Southern Germany, Switzerland, Austria; they’re called the Alpine; and the Mediterraneans, well, you know who they are; and included the Jews. And they were the worst, and he was saying that America used to be of Nordic stock, good stock, but now it’s being swamped by these Mediterraneans. And Hitler wrote to Madison Grant quite early; I think it was in the '20s; and wrote and said your book is my Bible.

But Grant, as I say, like Laughlin, was a major influence behind the Johnson-Reed Exclusion Act of 1924. Also very influential was Henry Ford’s “The International Jew,” which recapitulated a lot of material from the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and what I want you to notice is the kind of languages he uses: “A Jewish American is a mere amateur Gentile, doomed to be a parasite”; the word parasite I want you to hold on to; “forever.” This is Henry Ford of Ford Motors, the founder of Ford Motors. He says, “These,” meaning the members of the Jewish race, “are the true parasites of the Wall Street environment,” and he goes on to say in this “International Jew”; this was done as a series of newspaper articles in the editorial in “The Dearborn Independent”

“You have noticed with alarm that the Jewish element provides the driving forces of both communism and capitalism for the material, as well as the spiritual ruin, of the world.” And one thing that’s interesting about a lot of anti-Semitism is that the Jews get blamed both for communism and for capitalism, polar opposites, but part of this is, and I can’t go into the full story of it now, that the Jews get identified in the 19th century, by certain elements, with modernism because things are changing. There’s rapid change, rapid industrial change, and the Jews are seen as someone who benefits from these change, so a lot of hostility to modern change, to new ideas, like communism or like laissez-faire capitalism, gets associated with the Jews because they’re often seen as the ones who are gaining in modernity.

And the theme that Jews are responsible for both communism and profiteering capitalism is taken up in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” as is the language of the Jews as parasite. 'Kay, I want to say a bit about something. It’s a problem I call the survival of the fittest, and I’ve already hinted at it, about atavism. Remember I said that degenerates are meant to be weak and inferior and meant to tend towards sterility but then people are worried about them swamping. So how do these unfittest survive? Well, this is particularly applicable to the Jews. And there’s interesting ways how 19th-century and 20th-century anti-Semitism connected to religious anti-Semitism, and I might be able to mention a few of them with some later slides.

Religious anti-Semitism says, “Look, the Jews are atavistic. They’re primitive because they refuse to accept this new dispensation, the truth of Jesus, this New Testament.” Modern anti-Semitism says, “Jews are atavistic because they remain with a primitive religion and superstition” or “because they have failed to evolve from crass materialism.” We’ll see Marx and Wagner saying that later on, but this gives this problem. That’s the problem I call the survival of the unfittest. If the Jews are atavistic and primitive and backward, how come these atavistic people have survived where all the others have perished?

Romans have come. Greeks have come and gone. The Babylonians have come and gone. The Assyrians, the Egyptians, they’re all gone, and the Jews survive, and yet, these people are meant to be inferior. It’s unbelievable how much was written in 19th century, and it’s still being written by serious and, actually, good scholars today. No one has really answered this question about why the Jews have survived. The religious, at least, have one good answer. I’m thinking about the Christian religious. They can say, “Look, they remain by order of God as a benighted suffered people. They remain as an example of what happens to people who refuse to recognise Christ as our Saviour.”

You can think of this figure of the wandering Jew Ahasuerus, who’s doomed because, when Christ is going by him on the way to Golgotha to put up the cross, Ahasuerus says to Jesus, “Look, I’m in a hurry. You’re blocking the road. Could you get a move on?” And Christ says to him, “I shall go, but you shall stay.” The seculars have no real answer to this question of why the Jews survive when everyone else goes. I’ve talked about this biological notion of degeneration, this idea that certain people, individuals, or groups of people, have bad blood that can contaminate us, but I also want to say that, in the 19th century, there was this idea that ideas can be a contamination.

So I want to contrast rejecting Judaism as a religion versus rejecting Jewishness and rejecting Jews, so I’m going to quote from a book by a chap called Fries, called “Over the Danger to the Well-Being and Character of the Germans through the Jews”: “We declare war not against the Jews, our brothers, but against Judaism. Should one we love be stricken by the plague”; notice the use of the word the plague, a disease; “is it not proper that we wish him deliverance from it? Should we abuse those who, stricken by the plague, lament its horrors and conjecture how to free themselves from it? In fact, improving the conditions of the Jews in society means rooting out Judaism.” Okay, so this is about a question that was very big, especially in Germany in the 19th century, about Jewish emancipation; that is, how’re we going to emancipate the Jews and bring them into Christian civil society?

But what we’ll see is later writers become less interested in saving the Jews from this plague and rather more concerned with stopping the plague, typically identified as materialism, from infecting the rest of the population. Basically, there’s a rhetoric in Germany which we call the rhetoric of , the Jewification, and basically, what that rhetoric says is… There were these people, like Jakob Boehme and others, who were concerned about “how do we emancipate the Jews? How do we bring them into civilization?” And the counter-rhetoric was “don’t worry about bringing the Jews into civilization. Worry about them making us Jews, that they’re going to infect us with our ideas.”

Okay, and here, you’ll see Eugen Duehring, who did write in the 19th century, was a degenerationist, and was a raving anti-Semite, and he’s one of the first to combine this degeneration rhetoric with anti-Semitic rhetoric. So he’s talking about the Jews: “They transformed economic freedom into a freedom of the proprietied class, but the Jews have not yet come to the end of their desires with this degeneration. They wish to see basically a freedom of the Jews, that is, a Jewish monopoly made out of freedom.” So here you see the worry that the Jews, with their crass materialism, are leading to a degeneration of our society.

As I say down the bottom that, Duehring aside, we should note that the term degeneration was explicitly applied to Jews more in the 20th century by German eugenicists, for instance, Hans Guenther, and also by Baur, Fischer, Lenz in the famous book on racial hygiene, a book that Hitler read and was very influenced by. I want to go and trace a bit this idea of how the Jews in the 19th century are seen as an infection, as a mental and spiritual infection. I’m going to go through just two sources. I cover many more in the course, but I want to concentrate on this brief period. One is Wagner’s notorious essay “Judaism in Music” because one of the things he emphasises is the Jew is an outsider of our community who lives within it and corrupts it, and he has all these tropes about how he shows no ability to evolve, which is a transposition of a certain kind of Christian anti-Semitism 'cause they say, “The Jews are atavistic.

They refuse to accept Christ. They are stubborn. They refuse to evolve. They remain backward in history.” Wagner has the same theme. He also has this theme that is very common to 19th-century anti-Semitism that Jews are incapable of originality, and now you’ve got all your counterexamples in mind, and it’s obvious. I’m just telling you what the rhetoric was, and a lot of the rhetoric will say, “Oh, it’s because they had this romantic notion that the genius comes from the land and from the language.” They say, “The Jews don’t have a land anymore, and they don’t really have a language,” 'cause, remember, Jews of those days didn’t really speak Hebrew. They spoke Yiddish, or what was often called , which was seen as a debased German, a non-language.

And Wagner’s very obsessed with the language of the Jews, or the non-language of the Jews, as is a lot of anti-Semitism, and actually, Luther, in his anti-Semitism, has similar worries, but I can’t go into that now. He says, “A language, its expression, and its evolution are not separate elements but part of a historical community, but the Jew has stood quite apart from this community, alone with his Jehovah in a dispersed and barren stock, incapable of real evolution. Our entire European history and art remain foreign to the Jew; for he’s taken no part in the evolution of either. In this language, this art, the Jew can only imitate. He can create neither poem nor work of art.”

This was a big thing about how the Jews imitate but never create something original, so in much of this literature, Wagner takes a line that, as an atavism, the Jew must naturally perish. This was part of Morel’s general thesis about degenerates, as I’ve emphasised. In speaking of the singing Jew at the Jewish synagogue service, Wagner says, “For thousands of years, it has not continued to evolve naturally. Like everything connected with Judaism, it has retained a fixed form,” so Jews are not in history.

They don’t evolve: “A form which is not subject to continual renewal must finally disintegrate. An expression whose content has long since ceased to be animated by living feeling becomes senseless and distorted.” So again, you get more of this rhetoric about how it will be natural for the Jews to die off because they’re atavistic, but of course, they remain, and here’s more of this rhetoric. I want to bring this to you to show how visceral the language is, because part of what Wagner and a lot of these anti-Semites do is they use this rhetoric of infection, or parasites, to create an affective state of disgust.

It says, “As long as the spirit of music possessed a really organic need for life, up until the time of Mozart and Beethoven, there were not Jewish composers to be found. It was impossible for an element completely foreign to the living organism to take part in its growth. Only when a body’s inner death is evident can outside elements gain entry and, only then, destroy it. The flesh is transformed into a swarming colony of worms. Only in true life, we, too, can find the spirit of art again, not within the worm-infested corpse,” so he uses this incredibly visceral language. And it’s really interesting that he contrasts the alive spirit and the dead corpse, because that resonates with old religious versions of anti-Semitisms, which said, “Christianity deals with the spirit of the law, but the Jews are archaic, are anachronistic, and they only deal with the letter, the body, of the law.”

Another central article in this rhetoric of is Marx, himself a Jew; of course, a secular Jew; his 1884 essay “On the Jewish Question.” He says, “Look, we’ve got to separate this question of emancipation, this theological conception of emancipation, that people like Bruno Bauer are putting forward, and we have to start dealing with the problem of how we get emancipated.” Basically, he wants say, “We need to be emancipated from our Jewishness,” but what he means by our Jewishness… He means really a materialism.

He says, “Let us look for the secret of the Jew not in his religion, but let us look for the secret of the religion in the actual Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money. Well then, emancipation from haggling and money, from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our age. We recognise in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which, through historical development, to which, in this harmful respect, the Jews have been zealously contributing, have been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner not only because he has acquired financial power but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.” This is a core notion of . By the way, a philosopher who I’m a bit of an expert on, Friedrich Nietzsche, indulged very much in this rhetoric of , saying that we have become Jewified; that is, through crass materialism, if you like, consumerism, we have become, in some sense, converts of the Jews: “We are the new Jews of the modern era.”

And I’ll say a bit about Marx on this survival of the unfittest problem, and this is a little more about the Jews being outside of history, too: “Judaism has maintained itself not in spite of history but because of history. From its own bowels, civil society constantly begets Jews. What is the implicit and explicit basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.” There’s this line that’s often done among the anti-Semites that the Jews are somehow egoistic and they can’t partake of a genuine communal spirit. And I know again a lot of you will think, “How strange that must be.” The tenacity of the Jew as surviving is simply a demonstration of his shallow egoism as he says a few pages on: “We explain the tenacity of the Jew not by his religion but by the human basis of his religion, practical need, egoism.”

But of course, it’s no real explanation. Greeks, Romans presumably could’ve had the same egoism, but they didn’t survive. Maybe he thinks the Jews have some kind of super egoism. It’s a bit of a non-starter, and Marx rehashes a lot of Christian anti-Semitic tropes. There’s a quote from Luther, but I’m not going to go into that now. This slide was taken from the course. But you’ll notice he says, “The monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is, in reality, the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object divine law.” There’s a lot of the scatological elements in anti-Semitism the 19th century and in Christian anti-Semitism.

I think I’ll skip this, but he runs a line that the Jews are soulless, that they have the mere letter of the law while denying its spirit. He also denies that Jews can be genuinely creative. Oh, I will stop in a couple of minutes. Okay, Nordau’s book, 1895, was a very important book in the history of this rhetoric of degeneration. In fact, it helped bring it into disrepute because he names every man and his dog as a degenerate. Nietzsche’s there. Wagner’s there. Tolstoy’s there. Ibsen’s there. Nordau was very influential, but he was also very controversial.

In fact, Shaw wrote an article, George Bernard Shaw, against Nordau, called “The Sanity of Art,” but with Nordau, what’s important for us is he dedicates his book to Lombroso. He knows the work of Morel. He knows about the biological work, if you like, the scientific work, on degeneration theory, but he explicitly applies it to ideas. He said certain ideas represent degeneracy. Now, of course, Nordau himself was a Jew, ironically enough, and an incredible Zionist, and in fact, when Hitler and others took up the notions of degeneracy, there are two reasons why they didn’t mention Nordau: A, because he was Jewish and, B, because; this was very important for Hitler; Nordau had a whole chapter on Wagner as a degenerate and Hitler was a big, big Wagner fan.

I’m going to stop here. I’ve only got… I don’t know how many. I had 36 slides, but we agreed before that I shouldn’t talk on and on and we should open the floor to question, but I hope you see where this is leading to. In the second part of this talk, it’ll become more clear that there’s this idea of degeneration as an infection and this fear that we could retrograde, we could go back in time, so to speak. And then, there’s also this idea of certain ideas as infection, and they get melded together in the 20th century. And one of the points I’m going to make is one of the things about Hitler is, if you read “Mein Kampf,” there is nothing original. He talks about degeneration. He talks about Bacillus, a bacteria. He talks about infections. He talks about parasites. All of this rhetoric was made available in 19th-century degeneration theory. He just took it literally.

In the 19th century when they talked about certain people as parasites, oh, certain ideas as like a parasite on us, they hovered between the literal and the metaphor. What Hitler is he literalized those metaphors, but I want to stop now and open the floor to questions, and I’ll continue the talk when we schedule the next session of this.

Q&A and Comments

Q: Okay, “how does psychoanalytic thinking inform?” A: It’s incredibly complicated question. Actually, in my course, I do two lectures on Freud. One is to say Freud claimed himself not to be a degenerationist. Why? Because he says the hysteric is like us, only more so. He said, “The hysteric isn’t different from us in kind. He’s not a different species. He’s just an exaggerated form from us,” because Freud tells universalistic stories because he says, “Look, we all go through the Oedipal, and we become more or less narky, depending on how badly we handle the Oedipal.”

So Freud knew about degenerationist theory and explicitly claimed he was rejecting it, but if you look at his texts, especially “Three Essays of Sexuality,” it’s amazing how many times he says… He tries to answer this question: “Why do certain people become neurotic under certain circumstances and other people under the same circumstances don’t?” And he actually refers to an organic predisposition, and he actually mentions there favourably certain degenerationist thinking. So that’s one way in which psychoanalysts is relevant to it; that is, psychoanalyst see themselves as rejecting degenerationist theory because they say, “Oh, it’s not a matter of blood. It’s a matter of development, and we all go through the same development. We just negotiate it more or less poorly, differentially, amongst us.”

The other thing I use from Freud in the course is the notion of the uncanny. I couldn’t cover it in this lecture, but Freud has this wonderful essay called “The Uncanny.” The uncanny, very basically, and I’m really simplifizing, is that which is both familiar and strange. The German word is , and is the word for home, and of course, for Freud, home is what’s both familiar and strange. It’s familiar 'cause, hey, home is where we’re safe, but home is strange because that’s where we have our Oedipal trauma that we repress. Well, one of the things I say in the course is… I also talk about women in the course, but I’m just dealing with the Jew here. The Jew is uncanny 'cause the Jew is someone who’s familiar. He lives amongst us. But he’s also strange, and we project a lot of our fears onto the Jew. I’ll have more to say about that next week.

Q: “How can Morel’s treaty be in 1857 when he was not alive in the 19th century?” A: 1857 is in the 19th century, and he was alive in the 19th century. I’m just going to miss that.

Q: “How is it that some religions do not accept evolution, much of science?” A: It’s too big a question, and it’s a bit too far away from us. But obviously, the idea that we descended from apes can’t be reconciled with the religious story about the creation of Adam and Eve, so it’s going to be a problem. But I won’t dwell on that.

Q: “How do Catholics and churches have so much gold and art when only Jews are materialistic?” A: Complex thing to say. What I will say about that is, in fact, the Jews actually have various rules forbidding the use of silver and gold, et cetera, but there’s a difference between… What I was talking about is 19th-century anti-Semitism. It’s 19th-century anti-Semitism that sees the Jews as materialistic. Religious anti-Semitism was not so strongly that way inclined. It was to see the Jews… They were materialistic in a different way, not in that they had gold. It’s that they were concerned with the letter of the law; that is, they were concerned with mere materiality, not spirituality. So what you get is you get a interesting transposition from the religious anti-Semitism: “Oh, the Jews do not partake of the Spirit. They only concern the letter, the mere materiality, the very words in the book. The Jews with the gematria, et cetera, obsessed with the literal words.” So that’s their being obsessed with materiality. That gets transformed in the 19th and 20th century to “oh, the Jews are obsessed with money,” so that’s their new materialism.

“Will these sources that Professor Gemes”… Yeah, I guess I guess I can make them available to you. I put my email… I did an email, Jess, for this course. Maybe I’ll set up a website with some bibliography, et cetera. I don’t think you want to know the subject of my doctorate. My subject of my doctorate was the notion of logical content and probability theory. My background is actually in philosophy of science, not relevant to this.

Eh, yes, there was an awareness that there was a high rate of education among Jews. The degenerationist didn’t have much to say about that. Look, first of all, the degeneration of the 19th century, as I said before, except for Duehring, they were not particularly concentrated on the Jews. They were concentrated a lot on the urban poor, on people with what we would now call cerebral palsy, et cetera. They were worried about being swamped, so in the 19th century, except for Duehring, there wasn’t much combination of degeneration and anti-Semitism. It really became big in the 20th century, especially in Germany, though some of the Americans, like Henry Ford, combined fears of degeneracy and anti-Semitism, too.

Q: “How do the haters of Jews explain how Jews were Nobel Prize-winner?” A: Yeah, this is an old thing. Look, I’m just trying to give you the history of the ideas 'cause what I want you to see is it’s so easy to talk about the Holocaust as pure evil, as an anomaly, but you’ve got to see these ideas didn’t come from nowhere. They were ideas that started in the 19th century, and they created what I’ve called conditions of possibility. A lot of these ideas, the stuff about skull size, et cetera, it’s all pseudoscience, but they were incredibly influential. And yes, there are all these brilliant Jews, et cetera, so this idea that the Jews can’t be creative is very hard to accept on the base of the empirical evidence. But a lot of this theory is… Some of it is driven by hatred. Some of it is driven to ideology and not always so open to empirical evidence. Well, look, to Robert…

Q: “How does Marx explain his own Jewishness? Was he the exception to the rule?” A: Remember Marx represents a kind of transition point, that is, this transition where… He thinks Jews actually partake of what he calls Jewishness, but the real problem is not Jews for him. It’s Jewishness, and Jewishness is really a marker for him for crass materialism. He says, “Capitalism alienates us from our true nature, a nature as communal beings, and turns us into individualistic atoms, desirous beings, beings who just want to consume, have material possessions, et cetera.” So he says, “Capitalism perverts us,” but he starts identifying this materialism with Jewishness. It’s a very, very fatal connection, but Jewishness represents for him the idea of materialism, which he says are particularly exemplified by Jews. But he thinks he, as a Jew, can get beyond it. Any individual can get beyond it with the right ideology.

Q: Mark Hauser, I think: “Today’s prejudices are covered in a veneer of universal values. How can these been countered?” A: It’s a very, very big question, but look, one of the reasons I teach this course is these ideas don’t die. You find this… You have populist people who are willing to nominate foreigners as an infection, and in America, the Hispanics can now be nominate as an infection. And it’s the same rhetoric. You see the columnist Katie Hopkins referring to refugees as rats. They’re nominate as an infection. This rhetoric is very, very powerful. It’s very, very hard to combat. A lot of us still have… Mark is referring to universal values. Well, yeah, the Enlightenment had universal values. Kant, who himself was probably an anti-Semite and also a misogynist, was a universalist 'cause he said, “All humans have to be seen as members of the kingdoms of ends. Each human is a locus of respect.”

Now, Christianity, in its doctrinal form, not necessarily in its practised form, has the same idea. Says each of us has a God-given soul of infinite value. Kant secularised it. He says each human has a faculty of reason which makes us a locus of value and respect, and I think those universal ideas are very salutary. They might be a bit simplistic, but they’re very healthy, and they protect those who need protection if we think that each human has a core of value that is deserving of respect.

Q: Harriet: “Canada’s national newspaper this week carried an article: 'Does Racism Cause Schizophrenia?’ Could you comment on the relationship with the concept of degeneration?” A: Eh, hard to say. One of the class of people that Morel dealt with as a chief doctor in an asylum was… He did deal with degenerates… He did deal with schizophrenics, and he did think, and so did subsequent writers for a long while, schizophrenics as a class of degenerate. But generally, people who had what were considered socially serious mental anomalies were considered degenerates.

Q: Christine Lopez: “You said that the Holocaust was not inevitable, but all that you presented seems to point to the opposite direction. What is wrong with seeing the inevitability here?” A: Well, look, I haven’t talked anything about the economic circumstances. Without the Great Depression, without the Great Inflation, without the First World War and the terrible peace imposed on Germany, it’s not clear that a populist demagogue like Hitler could’ve made it there. It takes huge economic dislocation. But I also do this talk called “Nietzsche, Trump, and Brexit” ‘cause I’m influenced by various ideas of Nietzsche, and one of things I point out is now we have Trump. People say, “Oh, how could the Germans be like that?” But now you see the Americans elect Trump, and I am an American citizen, by the way, as well as an Australian. And I say; we had the crash of 2008; “Imagine if we’d gone through what Germany went through with the Great Depression and the Great Inflation. Who do ya think we’d vote in?”

So yes, it’s a possibility, but why I say it’s not inevitable is the mere rhetoric of generation allows you to nominate certain people as an infection, but whether that’s going to become a widespread idea and whether it’s going to be implemented in actual politics depends on a lot of circumstances, a lot of economic and political circumstances. So that’s why I say you don’t go straight from the rhetoric of degeneration, which allows you to nominate certain people as an infection, to actual policies trying to destroy this infectious element.

Q: Carol Cutner: “Were the ideas of Jews being degenerate and a plague taught in university?” A: Ooh, a difficult question. Sure, in the 20th century, they were taught in German universities. Certainly, they weren’t taught in universities in the 19th century. Duehring had a university position, and he wrote books which were wildly anti-Semitic and mentioned the Jews and degeneration in the same breath, but in the 19th century, no, there was not teaching about the Jews being degenerate and a plague, particularly in the 19th century. It’s more a 20th-century phenomena, and it wasn’t so much taught in universities. Ford wasn’t working in a university. It did come to be taught in German universities in the '30s.

Q: “Have Jews been targeted by anarcho-nihilism?” A: I actually write quite a bit on nihilism but from a Nietzschean perspective, but I don’t know what anarcho-nihilism is. I’ll just fess up. So I’m going to move on.

Q: “Is there a way to access the course you are teaching at university?” A: I really want to put it online. I want to put the whole course online because we had to do the whole course online this term because of COVID and I don’t like the idea of the university keeping my property. So I’m trying to figure out a way of putting it online, so maybe that’ll come to that.

Q: “What about envy as a motivation?” A: Well, yeah, there’s some envy, but I would rather you think of envy… I would rather think it was fear, because it’s a really important point that the Jews got identified with modernity in the 19th century and it was a fear. Yes, they were envious of a small class of rich Jews. Believe me, there were plenty of poor Jews to go around, but what it is, the Jew gets identified as the one who’s benefiting modernity. They’re the ones who are being emancipated. They’re the ones who are being allowed out of the ghetto. They’re the ones who are finally being allowed in civilised society. For the first time, they’re allowed to become involved in jurisprudence. They’re the benefiters of modernity, so a lot of people were reacting to the incredible changes of modernity, especially those that came with the advent of the big towns, of massive dislocation, of industrialization. The Jews are seen as the recipients of the benefits of modernity. And so, a lot of the hostility towards modernity is projected onto the Jews so fear as much as envy.

“Simon May,” I wonder who he is.

Q: “Is there a longer history of Jews, going back further than the 19th century, seen as parasites bringing infection and obsessed with money and extortion so the conditions of possibility of the flowering of this ideology existed earlier? A brilliant talk.” A: Well, that means something coming from the esteemed Simon May. Okay, look, there a lot of parallels between religious anti-Semitism and the degeneration theory. There was already talk about Jews as parasites, talk about Jews as infections, et cetera. That’s true. Obsession with money. A lot of the tropes are there. They get secularised and turned in a certain way in the 20th century, but what is really important is that, basically, the Christian world is confident of its position. The Jews are this unpleasant reminder and this unpleasant minority, but they’re not really worried about being swamped by the Jews. What’s really important about degeneration theory is it introduces a pathological fear that something is being done to us. At this literal level, our blood is being contaminated by the degenerates. At the spiritual level, there are these ideas that’re infecting us through things like capitalism that’re below the level of consciousness, that we’re not even consciously aware of, that we are being turned into Jews. See, the Christians were not fundamentally fearful of being turned into Jews. So the Jews were this little minority that reminded them of their superiority if anything but, with the rhetoric of degeneration, especially when combined with anti-Semitism, becomes this pathological fear that we are going to be infected: “We are going to be turned into Jews.” And that whats makes this possibility of elimination and isolation seem so real: “We have to stop the infections.” The Christian anti-Semitism was not so obsessed with this. There are points where it does. If you ever read Luther’s famous “Vom Schem Hamphoras,” which I might quote, for interest’s sake, next week, you’ll see this point.

Q: “Can you explain anti-Semitism in the terms of biology of evil?” A: The point about my course is to say that, with this rhetoric of degeneration, when it’s wedded to anti-Semitism, it makes it unbelievably virulent. As I say, there have been plenty of Christian anti-Semites, but when you wed it to the talk of degeneration, you get this overwhelming pathological fear that we are all going to be infected: "We are all somehow going to become Jews, so we have to stop this infection now. We have to stop them breeding. We have to isolate them. We have to eliminate them.” It’s because of this rhetoric of degeneration, which has been lost to us partially because of what happened in the Second World War. I’m trying to make you aware of it to see that, when it’s wed to anti-Semitism, we get a pathological constellation of ideas.

Should I stop now, Trudy?

• One more, but two of the questions are fascinating. You remember we talked about you giving your lecture on Nietzsche. We’ve had two requests already, Ken, so I’m just telling you. Don’t answer the Nietzsche questions. Let’s discuss it. One more question, go on.

• George’s iPad: “Do you involve Alfred Adler and his ideas of superiority, inferiority, and the accompanying feelings of glory and humiliation?” Unfortunately, Trudy, that turns out to be a Nietzsche question.

• [Trudy] I know.

• Adler was very influenced by Nietzsche, and he said, “We should get away from all this sexuality so emphasised by Freud, and we should go back to the will to power.” But yes, you’re right about… I didn’t actually think of his notions of superior and inferiority, but next week, I’ll talk a lot about the notion of projection. I’ve already hinted at it, that a lot of fears, fears about one’s own nature, about the fact that one doesn’t constitute a whole, are projected onto the Jews because the Jews are people who live amongst us but are somehow different of us and sometimes we can have a sense of our own inferiority of not constituting a whole. And we project this fear of being multiple different parts that don’t add up onto the Jews as if the Jews are the ones who are preventing us being a whole. And I’ll stop there.

• Ken, that was absolutely superb. You keep on saying next week as though you’re at the course, but I would like to invite you back. If you don’t mind, shall we try a lecture on Nietzsche if you’re prepared to?

• What? Wait, wait, wait, I haven’t finished… I’ve got through half my slides.

• Okay, so what you saying: the next time you come back, you then do the next half, and then, we do a Nietzsche lecture?

• Yeah, I can do a couple of lectures for you. I’m fine with that.

• Okay, we’re probably have to wait now till after Yom Tovim, but in October, it will be such a great honour if you will come back.

• Okay, and I’ll finish-

• I second that. Thank you.

• Oh, is Wendy there now?

• [Ken] Sorry for racing through the first part.

• Hi, Wendy, didn’t realise you were there. Okay, that was superb, wasn’t it?

• Brilliant, thank you very much.

• And it worked. It means that we have an appetite for philosophy, so we can’t be that degenerate.

• Lauren was right. I was speaking too fast at the first part. I sometimes do that, but I had so much material. I’ve still got a tonne to go. I just wanted to get to a point where things would at least meld. They meld more later on.

• And also, Ken I think, if you did a bit more on Nordau because he’s come up so often in the “Jewish History” course… There’s lots of threads that you’ve pulled out that we could pull back in again, I think, if you don’t mind. We’ll talk.

• The next part of my lecture includes stuff on degenerate art, including what Nordau said about degenerate art. And then, I go to Hitler’s “Degenerate Art” exhibition.

• That’ll be fantastic, yeah. Wendy?

• Go on, Trudy.

• All right, I just wanted to say thank you, and I think, from both Wendy and I, it’s absolutely wonderful to have you with us. And you actually heard one of our lectures, and you found this thing interesting. So Wendy, I think we should remember it’s making a big impact. Over to you on that, and well done.

• Okay, and I just want to thank you also for a brilliant presentation, and it’ll be such a great pleasure to have you back with us and hopefully before the Yom Tovim. We’ll have a look at our programme, Ken. If you’ve got the time, maybe in a couple of weeks. It would be an honour and a pleasure. And I look forward to meeting you when I’m in London in September.

• Okay, well, whenever you want me to do the second half of the lecture, just let me know. I’m ready to talk whenever.

• Okay, Ken.

• Great, it’ll be sooner rather than later. Thank you very, very much. Thank you, Lauren. Thank you, Trudy. Thank you, Ken. Thank you, everybody, for joining us.

• [Ken] Thank you all for.