Comments on: Jewish success, Islamic stagnation

By: Charles Copeland

Charles Copeland — Sun, 26 Oct 2003 15:31:16 +0000

Jews have been practising eugenics avant la lettre for at least 3000 years. It’s as simple or as complicated as that. When you select for brain, you get brain. When you select for brawn, you get brawn. The books to read are Kevin MacDonald’s three volumes on judaism from an evolutionary perspective. See http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/books.htm“>here.

By: Still Amazed

Still Amazed — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 15:17:14 +0000

john c. halasz – “As I hinted in my first post, I am not interested in “who is a Jew” type arguments” But if we are going to talk about why Jews seems sucessful, it is essential that we start from a position of who is a Jew. You can’t just claim to be uninterested in that and still debate the question of the so-called Jewish success. It is important. Once you spread the net wide enough, that allows anti-semites to base their ridiculous claims of Jewish power and their difference based on such prominent figures. My point is that I don’t really believe that Jews are more successful than other groups (in the larger scheme of things). When someone has Jewish ancestry it is automatically brought up. That feeds into two horrible notions. One that being Jewish is some kind of (psuedo) scientific racial distinction that you could never divest yourself of and two that the Jewish part is more important than other factors like the intellectual enviroment of the period. Austria was teeming with brilliant minds at this time. I don’t know why. Maybe it was something in the water. You can see a Jewish gloss in Wittgenstien but that doesn’t make him Jewish. I see a Buddhist gloss, but I don’t claim he was Buddhist. Being a Jew, I would love to claim Wittgenstien as a native son. But he’s not. “Wittgenstein was a peculiar man- the fact that he saw his allowing for a misimpression about his jewishness as sinful and in need of rectification speaks to his sense of needing to take ownership of an aspect of his sense of self, though shame at his families immense wealth also played a part” Wittgenstien was raised in a deeply antisemtic country where converts (such as his family) did their best to make others forget they had Jewish heritage in the interest of forwarding the social and business status. As I said before, I doubt his grandparents converted because of crises of faith. They converted to assimilate. It is hardly suprising with such a background that a man as rigidly devoted to the concept of honesty would feel it dishonest to hide (or even not tell others about) his heritage. He assumed it mattered as it might have in Austria. I don’t think those on the other end of his famed confession cared as much. It was important because an antisemetic culture made it so. None of this makes him Jewish. It merely makes him devoutly honest.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 15:01:42 +0000

John C. Halasz: I am not interested in “who is a Jew” type arguments Neither am I particularly but in this context what is being debated is how LW perceived his Jewishness, more specifically your erroneous view that it was unproblmatically a matter of pride for him. Some sort of working definition is necessary if these questions are to be engaged in any sensible fashion. though in the interests of disclosure I am not of Jewish provenance. I don’t quite see why this should be relevant; neither am I in anycase. Nor am I interested in turning over endless pedantic niceties. Er, you have read the tractatus and you don’t place any importance in pedantic niceties, in a work that deals with them at some length. This is a first. That said, I did not bring up Weininger and I don’t know what a consideration of that bizarre book, a succes de scandale in Vienna at the time, amounts to as evidence. Okay, of course you didn’t bring up the book I did (why you should think or bother saying otherwise is beyond me). The reason why it is relevant is because it does betray an important way in how assimilated and non-assimilated Jews reacted to the prevalent attitudes of anti-Semitism of the time which COMPLETELY pervaded many European circles at the time, including that of fin-de-siecle Vienna. I suggest you may want to look at the recent work on Popper-Wittgenstein if you want to understand how a book like Weininger’s could characterise the environs of the time. I also suggest that the rather intricate and bizarre theories of race-pride and masculinity that form the bedrock of Weininger’s book indicate more than just passing weakness which is how those who want to ‘rescue’ LW from any possible opprobrium try to excuse his fascination for the work. This kind of thinking was popular in many circles, including some ostensibly assimilated Jewish ones as well as ‘progressive’ groups and it informed much of the debate on the topic (though there was resistance to it as well); anybody who read, admired and subscribed to a fair amount of what the book said could not conceivably be said to be proud of his Jewish origins whatever they might be. And as for the very peculiar “confessions” episode- though L. Wittgenstein was a peculiar man- the fact that he saw his allowing for a misimpression about his jewishness as sinful and in need of rectification speaks to his sense of needing to take ownership of an aspect of his sense of self, though shame at his families immense wealth also played a part Actually, this is again not quite correct. Since you have read the Monk biography you should remember that the remarks he published on Jewishness in 1931 repeated many of the same stereotypes and tropes used by European anti-Semites to characterise the Jews as the internal Other and perennial Outsider; Monk does note the LW moved away from this kind of thinking later on but he records that the imagery and descriptions used by LW, most notably in the episode of the Versagt dream sequence, were the same as those used by the Nazis after the Ancschluss. He also recounts that although LW was not interested in ostentation or displays of wealth, he did nothing to correct the impression that he was related/descended from German princely aristocracy (which he was not) and in fact took some pleasure in displaying his aristocratic bearing and style in the environs of Cambridge. At least one of the women he was close to and possibly in love with, Marguerite was most likely a typical European of her period and criticised his one of his friends at the time Paul Englemann as being the “wrong sort of Jew” after which the friendship between the latter and LW cooled and disappeared. It was a highly secular- and very musical- family milieu. I used the word “proud” with respect to their awareness of their jewish provenance, when “unembarassed” would have perhaps been better, though in an environment rife with populist anti-semitism, this amounts to a verbal quibble. Mate, are you drunk? The grandfather, as Monk recounts, was a firm anti-Semite and forbade his children from marrying Jews, cut himself off entirely from the Jewish community and added ‘Christian’ as his middle name to remove himself from his Jewishness. The family was raised in an entirely Germanic cultural milieu and as part of the Austrian elite, so much so that when one of the aunts of LW asked her brother Louis, whether it was true that they had any Jewish background to their ancestry he replied “pur sang, Milly, pur sang”. This example (along with several others) can be found on p.5 of Monk’s biography. It suggests to me an attitude very different from the “unembarrassed” attitude you seem to believe existed. My guess is that L.W. was not wholely aware of this issue, though he certainly was not an anti-semite, Nobody here is claiming that LW is an anti-Semite, simply that his attitude and that of his family towards their partial Jewish heritage was very different from what you are suggesting. That Wittgenstein, though assimilated, was of jewish provenance, and that, in his later philosophizing, using Levinas work as a model for distinctively jewish thinking, some residue of such thinking comes into play This was not your original claim; nobody here is denying LW’s Jewish background, what is at dispute here is his attitude towards it (and that of his family); which you have substantially misinterpreted. As for the link with Levinas, I am confused you seem to be saying two different things in a mixed and unclear manner: (a) LW read Levinas, later in he career and was partly infleunced by him in wirting his last pieces of work and (b) there are intriguing similarities between LW’s work and Levinas’s though the former had no or little knowledge of the latter. There is as far as I know, little evidence for (a) and the timing is all wrong since I think most of Levinas’s work became well-known only by the 1950s; while (b) strikes me as more pluasible, I haven’t heard it made by any LW specialist and I don’t know enough about Levinas’s work to make an informed comment either way.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 01:54:37 +0000

still amazed and Conrad Barwa: As I hinted in my first post, I am not interested in “who is a Jew” type arguments, though in the interests of disclosure I am not of Jewish provenance. Nor am I interested in turning over endless pedantic niceties. That said, I did not bring up Weininger and I don’t know what a consideration of that bizarre book, a succes de scandale in Vienna at the time, amounts to as evidence. And as for the very peculiar “confessions” episode- though L. Wittgenstein was a peculiar man- the fact that he saw his allowing for a misimpression about his jewishness as sinful and in need of rectification speaks to his sense of needing to take ownership of an aspect of his sense of self, though shame at his families immense wealth also played a part. (One of his involutary confessors was Fania Pascal, his Russian tutor in the 1930’s when he was considering moving to Russia, and did actually visit there, which paid put to his plan; in the 1920’s, he was engaged in his disasterous career as a primary school teacher in Austria- I think an experiential source of some of his later philosophizing.) There is no doubt that L. Wittgenstein thought of himself primarily as an Austrian and was nominally Catholic, though, while a person of religious sensibilities in his rather tortured make-up, particularly influenced by Tolstoy, he was not a religious believer. And that his grandparents were Lutheran converts- (I accidentally press post rather than preview there)- certainly was due to mercantile motives: they were a prosperous middle-class family of property managers. The “Wittgenstein” name was actually come by honestly: his great grandfather was a manager on a von Wittgenstein estate when Jews were ordered by law to adopt surnames. It was a highly secular- and very musical- family milieu. I used the word “proud” with respect to their awareness of their jewish provenance, when “unembarassed” would have perhaps been better, though in an environment rife with populist anti-semitism, this amounts to a verbal quibble. Nor does such self-acceptance imply jewish self-identification. The only question of minor interest here is whether there still remains some transmission or imprint of a jewish cultural heritage by other routes after three generations of secularization. There are scattered remarks about jewishness in L.W.’s nachlass and they seem to indicate some perplexity on the matter. For example, there is the remark about how jewish Rousseau really is. My guess is that L.W. was not wholely aware of this issue, though he certainly was not an anti-semite, just as he was not aware of any influence from Gramsci, though Sraffa must certainly have been feeding him some Gramscian lines of thinking. The comparison with the French/Lithuanian jewish phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas is certainly not arbitrary, but would make for an excellent academic dissertaion topic. The emphasis on the modal-relation dimension of meaning constitution, which Levinas traces as the source of the ethical and its primacy, is certainly there in “Philosophical Investigations” and, though it was John Austin who coined the term “illocutionary force”, the phenomenon itself is clearly delineated in some paragraphs there, though L.W. continued to hold to the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown, and, strictly speaking, this dimension can not be directly said as such. As for comparison with Hume, surely the core insight of L.W.’s later work is that philosophical skepticism is an impossibility, a product of confusion or obfuscation only, and this is why philosophical problem that defend against such skepticism- and in doing so, lead astray- can and must be “dissolved”. A similar take on skepticism is to be found in Levinas and a similarly post-epistemological orientation. Humean skepticism, itself devolved from the Cartesian turn in modern philosophy, is precisely not to the point- this was the misunderstanding at the basis of Saul Kripke’s book on L.W. There is an excellent essay in Cora Diamand’s “In a Realistic Spirit” comparing Frank Ramsey’s neo-humean approach to L.W.’s: so close, yet so far away. And as for Buddhism? Does this refer to the “Tractatus” and Schopenhauer? Else I do not get the point, nor the evidence for it. No, I stand by my original claim. That Wittgenstein, though assimilated, was of jewish provenance, and that, in his later philosophizing, using Levinas work as a model for distinctively jewish thinking, some residue of such thinking comes into play.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 20:26:06 +0000

John C Halosz, Otto Weininger was himself a Jew And this is a problem how? Weininger’s self hatred and internalisation of racial ideas was integral to his thought – his suicide was a logical progression about his rather extreme ideas about the Jew being a parasitic and debilitating influence on Western muscular/masculine civilisation; as was his ideas about the feminine as a corrupting influence on manly values. I think his homosexuality was also on par with his Jewishness as a reason behind his suicide. Internalisation of racist attitudes towards Jews was hardly confined to Gentiles alone, it was prevalent amongst mischlinge and some Jews; Heinrich Heine’s “Man of Straw” is an excellent work that explores this kind of antipathy in post WWI Germany. As Hitler is meant to have remarked – “I only knew one good Jew, Weininger and he killed himself”. though Ludwig Wittgenstein’s fascination with this text is perplexing, Not really, Weininger’s work was quite influential in the Viennese circles of his time; it was a staple addition to many libraries – including that of Wittengstein’s arch rival Popper, who recounts his father reading Weininger’s book as part of his personal library. he was ashamed of having left the impression of belonging to such a lineage and thus of having denied his own Jewish provenance, precisely at a time when he became aware of the Nazi threat to Austria and thus his suddenly Jewish status. If you go back and read Monk’s biography; this is not the reason given for the denial; in fact Monk makes it pretty clear that only fear of social stigma made Wittgenstein ashamed of his Jewish heritage (unsurprisingly given the attitude towards Jews in elite circles such as Cambridge) not any fear of the Nazi threat in Germany. For God’s sake he spent a good chunk of the 1920s trying to go to Soviet Russia to become a manual labourer –hardly the ideal place for someone that would be proud of their Jewish heritage. That his sisters saw no difference between being proud Austrians and proud of their Jewish provenance speaks to the point. I am sorry to say this is complete nonsense; LW’s sister’s refused to believe they could be at threat by the Nazis and despite several warnings by friends and opportunities they did not flee Austria when they could. Their reasons for doing so was not because thety had any faith in the Nazi’s good intentions but because they thought that their position in Viennese society would insulate them from any nastiness towards those clearly identified as Jews and less fortunate than themselves. I agree with ‘still amazed’ who has made the points I would have done; I should also add that LW was very interested in Eastern philosophy and writers, during his time in Vienna before he left for England I believe Tagore was one his favourite authors.

By: Still Amazed

Still Amazed — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 15:26:02 +0000

john c. halasz – “As for Wittgenstein, 3 out of his 4 grandparents were Jews who converted to Lutherism and the 4th was Roman Catholic, so, of course, he was brought up nominally Catholic. But both he and is family were fully aware and even proud of their Jewish origins.” If you are proud of your origins, you don’t convert. I doubt the Wittgenstiens converted because of a crisis of faith. They most likely converted to better assimilate. Wittgenstien wasn’t raised Jewish and he didn’t consider himself Jewish. (Which I think is very important) And I don’t understand the eagerness to connect him with the faith considering he expressed far more interest in Catholicism. “And if you read Wittgenstein with Levanasian glasses on, it is surprising how much of a Jewish caste of mind there is in his later thought, inspite of his near total ignorance of Jewish tradition. For example, the emphasis on the relational dimension of language, the insistence on the primacy of the ethical and the insistence on the necessity of community in a shared form of life.” Actually I see far more of a Buddhist style of thought in Wittgenstien’s work. It can often be a fusion in Eastern and Western styles of thought. Putting particular glasses on pre-empts the whole evaluation. I’m sure I could read it with a Maimonedian gloss and then I could turn around and view it with a Humean one. Personally I find great similarities between Hume and Wittgenstien’s later work. Hume was every bit the genius that Spinoza was. Zizka – “Wittgenstein was borderline Jewish by Nazi standards. The family had great difficulties coming from this, but was tremendously wealthy and survived.” The hell if I am going to allow Nazis to define who is Jewish and who is not. Jews are a people and a share a faith and certain traditions, but we are not a race. Not in the way the Nazis thought. To call Jews a race is to use that term in an oldfashioned way. In the way the French may be called a race. The Nazis ascribed to it psuedo scientific terms. The oldfashioned terminology is not nearly as loaded. Wittgenstien’s family – ie some of his grandparents – may have been Jewish. He was not. Wittengstien expressed little to no interest in and no affection for the Jewish faith or traditions. I think he may have had feelings about his heritage. That would not be surprising coming from a deeply anti-jewish culture that could never allow his family to fully divest themselves of that stain (no matter what their wealth). It is that horrible construction of Jews that allowed the Nazi regime to stir up hatred and rise to power. None of this makes Wittgenstien Jewish. It allows the oppressors to define who is Jewish. I cannot countance that.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 08:10:06 +0000

Carl Barwa: Otto Weininger was himself a Jew and, though Ludwig Wittgenstein’s fascination with this text is perplexing, it’s claim that “logic and ethics are one”, difficult as that may be to construe, is probably the source, though Weininger was also a homosexual and an early suicide. As to Wittgenstein’s peculiar confessions to his friends in the 1930’s, the Wittgenstein name was that of a prominent aristocratic family in Austria, if one adds a “von”, and, though Wittgenstein came from a nuclear family of immense wealth, he was ashamed of having left the impression of belonging to such a lineage and thus of having denied his own Jewish provenance, precisely at a time when he became aware of the Nazi threat to Austria and thus his suddenly Jewish status. That his sisters saw no difference between being proud Austrians and proud of their Jewish provenance speaks to the point. (I’m relying on my memory of having read the Ray Monk biography.)

By: David Foster

David Foster — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 00:23:37 +0000

Are we really so sure that there wasn’t a great deal of Jewish accomplishment during the first 1800 years of the time period? Creative work during the Middle Ages tended to be relatively anonymous.

By: Tripp

Tripp — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 20:23:52 +0000

Former Belgian, I’m not sure if preventing offspring from the most intelligent, say, 10% of the males in a population will have much affect over, say, 20 generations. But I’m willing to hear otherwise.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 19:34:10 +0000

Wittgenstein was borderline Jewish by Nazi standards. The family had great difficulties coming from this, but was tremendously wealthy and survived. Austria was the center of an empire so a lot of people probably counted as Austrians who weren’t. And Poles made considerable contributions, as I understand, to logic, math, music, and literature, with a few scientists too. It is striking to me, though, how many presently influential writers, etc., were “Austro-Hungarian”: Freud et al, Wittgenstein, Popper et al, Rilke, Kafka, Hayek et al, Schoenberg et al, Bartok, and others I’ve forgotten. I think that Jewish insecurity is a lot of the answer. Not psychological, but real. No Jew has ever really been able to have the kind of feeling of entitlement that rooted people like aristocrats and peasants get. “My forefathers have been here, living according to our age-old customs, for thousands of years and we have a right to this land”. Conversados (converted Jews) made great contributions to Islamic and Hispanic culture. St. John of the Cross, as I understand, was one—a great devotional poet. Along with the (nagging) Jewish/Chinese mother is the two-or-three-generation family plan, where parents make big sacrifices for their kids in the understanding that the kids will do as expected (well). Families who send kids out into the world to make it on theiur own do less well. Someone who has little interest in or respect for pre-modern culture is not likely to have much awareness or understanding of the Jewish contributions to that culture.

By: Joshua W. Burton

Joshua W. Burton — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 15:25:40 +0000

Well, since Aquinas certainly didn’t share this alleged widespread ignorance of Maimonides, and since he in fact almost certainly read Averroes in the Latin translation of (the Paduan Jew) Bonacosa, I imagine there’s room for a middle ground. Speaking professionally as a theoretical physicist, I’ll hazard a guess that, with fifteen minutes of Google-cribbing, most of us (of you?) can have a clearer idea of what Shmuel ha-Nagid did for medieval poetry, or Tudelo for medieval geography, than you are ever likely to have about Einstein’s or Feynman’s contributions to Western civ.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:39:26 +0000

Trouble is, Joshua, that most of us have no idea of the merits of the people on that list. Einstein, Mahler, Wittgenstein are great figures who happen to be Jewish. Those guys might feature as great Jewish figures of the pre-modern era, but that doesn’t make them great simpliciter. (Though they may be). How do they stack up against, say, Aquinas or Augustine or Averroes? There are a number of paintings in my local art gallerly by Rolinda Sharples (late 18th century). She was NOT a great painter (trust me). But I’ve seen her featured in feminist lists of great women painters of the past.

By: Joshua W. Burton

Joshua W. Burton — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:14:47 +0000

Chris writes: “Magee asks two linked questions: First, why in the modern era did Jews produce scarcely any creative work of the first rank until only the last century? Second, why was there then this amazing harvest of achievement?” I’m surprised that no one has had more of a whack at doubting the prior here, especially since the “great Muslim civilisation, respected and powerful” of which Mahathir Mohamad speaks was itself at LEAST as disproportionately Jewish a creative flame as the recent Western blaze. Maimonides. Nachmanides. Shmuel ha-Nagid. Benjamin Tudelo. Ibn Shaprut. Abulafia. Judah ha-Levi. Abravanel. Ibn Tibbon. Moses de Leon. Chasdai Crescas. Joseph ibn Migash. Jonah Gerondi. Abraham bar Chiyya. Jacob ben Asher, the Ba’al Tur. Isaac Abalia. Ibn Gabirol. Isaac Alfasi. Dunash ben Labrat. Ibn Ezra. I’ll go on until you tell me to stop…. When the First and Fourth Crusades were fresh horrors in civilized memory from one end of the Med to the other, it was the Christian end that could rightly ask “What went wrong?” And the answer, of course, was that it was nothing they couldn’t put right by expelling the Insidious Jooz from England and Spain. There is not any new thing under the sun, as some philosopher-king somewhere once remarked.

By: Iain J Coleman

Iain J Coleman — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:04:34 +0000

Einstein didn’t have much to do with quantum mechanics Well, apart from the photoelectric effect – you know, the thing he got the Nobel prize for.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 10:58:25 +0000

Actually it is very inaccurate to say that Wittgenstein was “proud” of his Jewish heritage. He was deeply infleunced by the anti-Semitic tract of Otto Weninger and on his list of ‘sins’ which he insisted on confessing to unsuspecting close friends and colleagues it included lying/downplaying his Jewish background. His sisters would have positively bridled at considering themselves Jews, they thought of themselves as part of the Austrian, very non-Jewish, elite. Most details of this can e found in any of the biographies on Wittgenstein, AC Grayling’s being the most recent.