February 04, 2019

Studying the Gentile: Fanciful Pseudoscience in the Service of Pathologizing the Covington Boys



“One person questioning the truth of the Holocaust is one too many.”
     Karen Pollock, Holocaust Educational Trust, January 2019

In Studying the Jew (2006), Alan Steinweis’s slim, Harvard-published text on the scholarly study of Jews under the Third Reich, the author laments “the perversion of scholarship by politics and ideology” and its service in the goals of “exclusion and domination.” While some of the anecdotal material presented in the book is fascinating, especially its prosopographies of what one reviewer called the “clearly brilliant” German scholars who undertook such work, the overarching message of Studying the Jew is that one should, under no circumstances whatsoever, study the Jew. That Steinweis felt such a message was in any way necessary in 2006 is a testament to the same paranoia in which the fevered Jewish inability to let go of the past becomes the frantic injunction unto the Gentile to “Never Forget.” Steinweis’s limp appeals to contemporary relevancy aside, by 2006 the kind of patient and methodical Judenforschung produced by Édouard Drumont, Henry Ford, Hillaire Belloc, and the scholars of the 1930s, had indeed become a thing very much of the distant past — Kevin MacDonald’s remarkable 1990s trilogy being the exception that proves an otherwise solid rule. By the 1960s, Jews had effectively monopolized the study of their own history and sociology in the post-war, modern incarnation of “Jewish Studies,” and quickly followed a self-congratulating, navel-gazing, agenda-driven, victim-orientated trajectory in the same fashion as their later counterparts in Women’s Studies, Chicano Studies, and Black Studies. Serious critical study of the Jews vanished from academia and mainstream culture.

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