In Israel, state schools traditionally taught only the biblical account of the creation of man, with the theory of evolution reserved for advanced study in high school for students matriculating in biology. In 2014, however, evolution by natural selection began to be taught at the middle-school level in the secular state and state-religious schools but, primarily to deflect hostile challenges from religious leaders and the haredi sector, the alleged descent of man from animals is still not part of the curriculum.
Though the Turkish government in 2012 issued a series of books for schoolchildren describing Darwin as a hook-nosed Jew who kept “company” with monkeys, Darwin was baptized a Christian and became an Anglican clergyman who accepted whole the literal truth of the Bible. Nonetheless, he sought explanations in the laws of nature rather than in miracles; he ultimately concluded that natural selection was antithetical to the doctrine of intentional design and that science countenances no room for the existence of a creator. Origin of Species explains the existence of life without any reference to a deity or creator.
Although there is no evidence that Darwin himself was an anti-Semite, his “Darwinian godlessness” and evolutionary theories arguably played a significant role in the rise of eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, racial extermination, and the Holocaust.
After the 1880s, a eugenics movement developed based on ideas of biological determinism, and Darwinian theory was used for scientific justification of such ideas. “Negative eugenics” initiatives to remove the feebleminded became popular in America which, to the country’s everlasting shame, led to the introduction of compulsory sterilization laws.
Many people know about disgraceful Supreme Court decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld the constitutionality of segregation and the “separate but equal” doctrine, and Korematsu v. United States (1944), which ruled that the forced relocation of Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II, regardless of citizenship, was constitutional.
But among the elite pantheon of Supreme Court travesties is the lesser-known Buck v. Bell (1927) – which has never been formally overturned – in which the court held that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit (including the intellectually disabled) for the alleged protection and health of the state was constitutional. Not surprisingly, this decision was broadly viewed as an endorsement of negative eugenics and support for the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating “defectives” from the gene pool. Thus, well before the Nazis had commenced their euthanasia program – and, later, their “Final Solution” – some 16,000 Americans had been legally sterilized.
It wasn’t long before anti-Semites extended Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theories and adopted what came to be known as “social Darwinism,” arguing that the battle between Germans and their inferiors, which specifically included Jews, was identical to the battle for survival by various species in the animal kingdom. It began with Weimar leaders generously funding eugenics research and sterilization policies to weed out “inferiors,” as German eugenicists and politicians argued that such policies made great economic sense.
First, they said, keeping chronically ill people alive would strain the already severely depressed Germany economy; and, second, it was contrary to the public interest to facilitate the continued reproduction of these inferiors, who would only increase the drain on scarce and valuable national resources indefinitely into the future.
More than 400,000 people were sterilized beginning in 1933, when the German Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring went into effect. From there, it was no great leap to the Holocaust as, drawing on Darwin’s evolutionary theories, the Nazis maintained that Jews were an “inferior race” on the evolutionary scale; that Jews were responsible for the troubles of the world because of their race and genetics; and that, since the “Jewish problem” was inherently biological, it was immutable and therefore Jewish assimilation could not provide any solution.
