Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

THREE Climax and Retreat
their birth. Another law prohibited marriage and sexual relations
between Jews and German citizens. American laws
against marriage between whites and people of color, then
on the books in a majority of the states, were the main
foreign precedents for such legislation. 42 (As we have seen,
South Africa did not begin to outlaw miscegenation until
1936.) It is of comparative interest, however, that the Nazi
definition of a Jew was never as stringent as “the one-drop
rule” that prevailed in the categorization of Negroes in the
race-purity laws of the American South. To be automatically
Jewish, one had to have three Jewish grandparents.
(Because many Jews, especially those with forebears who
had married Germans, lacked physical characteristics distinctive
enough to distinguish them from Aryans, religious
affiliation had to serve as a surrogate for biological race in
the probing of ancestry.) Those who were one-fourth or
even one-half Jewish in ancestry (Mischlinge) could be considered
German citizens if they did not practice Judaism or
marry Jews or other part-Jews. Allowing quarter-Jews to
marry full-blooded Germans, the Nazis concluded, would
not pollute the nation’s bloodstream to an intolerable degree.
But half-Jews were in practice allowed to marry only
Jews. 43 To this limited extent, therefore, German antisemitism
was less rigorous in its attitude toward “racial purity”
than was American white supremacy. It was, however,
more consistent in its abhorrence of miscegenation; unlike
the American states, it banned extramarital interracial sex
as well as intermarriage. The apartheid regime in South
Africa would follow the Nazi example with its Immorality
Act of 1949.
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