JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

232 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 3:225
for existence in which only the cleverest and economically shrewd survived.
For this reason today’s Jews can, in a certain sense, be seen as a
particularly valuable human species. Other races may have other merits, but
as far as intellectual ability is concerned they can hardly outdo the Jews.” 15
Ruppin caused further embarrassment to liberal Zionists by claiming that
the Ashkenazim were superior “with regard to energy, intelligence and scientific
curiosity” to Jews from Yemen, Morocco, and the Caucasus. 16 He
asked whether such inferior material should be permitted to immigrate to
Palestine because “the intellectual and cultural level of these Jews is so low
that mass immigration of these elements would lower the average cultural
standards of the Jews in Palestine.” 17 Ruppin’s insistence that Jewishness
was due to ethnicity rather than religious affiliation or the result of shared
experience excited the interest of Hans F. K. Günther, a prominent Nazi
racial ideologue and expert in “racial hygiene,” who argued that Jews
should be forced to emigrate “to Palestine, or some other part of the world
suited to their hereditary traits.” 18
Hartner-Hnizdo saw all these efforts to strengthen a sense of Jewish
identity as particularly alarming in that they were, particularly in the case of
Arthur Ruppin, mirror images of the intellectual heritage of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain. Perhaps for this reason he hastily moved on to attack a
series of Austrian Jewish writers before focusing his full attention on Hugo
Bettauer.
First on the list was Arthur Schnitzler, whom he characterized, along
with Jakob Wassermann, as leading examples of the pernicious species of
assimilated Jew. 19 He was particularly incensed by Schnitzler’s frequent
attacks on the antisemites, which he found to be “narrow-minded, spiteful,
and pettily one-sided: now the Jew is awake and strikes back.” As a prime
example of this attitude, he pointed to Schnitzler’s sensitive treatment of
antisemitism in his play Professor Bernhardi. Hartner-Hnizdo dismissed the
rest of Schnitzler’s work as superficially witty and sex-obsessed, in which
the concept of public decency was mocked as prejudice, narrow-mindedness,
and intolerance. In spite of this diatribe, he was in danger of coming
under Schnitzler’s irresistible spell and grudgingly admitted that the object
15. Arthur Ruppin, Die Juden der Gegenwart, Berlin 1904, reprinted 1920,
p.191ff. Ruppin received the Haeckel Prize in 1903 for his social-Darwinist study
Darwinismus und Sozialwissenschaft.
16. Ruppin, Die Juden, 191.
17. Ruppin, Die Juden, 260.
18. Günther, the author of Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1922), was a
leading light in the pseudo science of “Racial Hygiene,” thereby earning the nicknames
“Rassen-Günther” and “Rassenpabst.”
19. Erotik und Rasse, 68-83.