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Jonathan Schorsch, Tudor Parfitt, Hybrid Hate: Conflations of Antisemitism and Anti-Black Racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich, Social History of Medicine, Volume 35, Issue 3, August 2022, Pages 1043–1045, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkab061
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Extract
Parfitt has marshalled an incredible amount of material on European views of Black and Jewish difference—smelliness, ugliness, animality, monstrosity, inferiority, unworthiness, dangerousness and separate biological origins, among other alleged negative characteristics. Despite the title, the strength of the book lies in the treatment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century matters, culminating, not surprisingly, with Nazism. Proceeding chronologically, Parfitt delineates scientific racism afresh, describing the debates between climatic and biological explanations for human diversity, the trajectory of the theory of human polygenesis as a means of fixing innate ‘racial’ differences, medical efforts to understand the cause of ‘black’ skin, the central role of the ‘sciences’ of physiognomy, craniology and the like. The book offers a timely and sobering reminder of how many of the West’s leading thinkers, medical experts and scientists followed their knowledge production to denigrating, hateful, supremacist, segregationist, oppressive and murderous ends.
For readers unfamiliar with this material, the book will be informative and eye-opening. Unfortunately, Parfitt’s approach is narrow, unsystematic and mostly descriptive. He offers no real explanation of why Jews and Blacks were linked together in the European imagination, little theorizing as to the motivations, purposes or consequences of this linkage, nor any discussion of how their discursive and socio-political construction related to that of other ‘non-European’ peoples. Though the book traces the changes within the cluster of relevant discourses its author seems attached to a rather ahistorical, almost timeless version of a conflated Jewish-Black hatred or Othering, going so far as to dismiss the hypotheses of scholars seeking to explain the nuances of the shifting discourse precisely in conjunction with changing scientific and political tectonics. Chapter 8 offers some few attempts at theorizing the material treated, almost exclusively borrowed from the work of other scholars.
