Are Jews a Race?

[Beastly Boy]

6. Context is key

Last edited Tue Feb 1, 2022, 08:57 PM - Edit history (1)

The idea of race in Nazi Germany is very different from the idea of race in contemporary America. Clearly, Whoppi's remarks were informed by the latter, and those same remarks showed profound lack of awareness of the former.

In the US, race has been largely defined by one's skin color and anatomical features. There are reasons for this being the case, enslavement of people of color by European colonists being among the major ones. Without getting into further details of how race came to be defined in the US, I suspect that Whoopi's remarks were informed exclusively, or mostly, by her experiences as a black woman in the US. It is likely that she never came across the very different definition of race that was used in Nazi Germany, a definition that explains why Holocaust was all about race.

Unlike the US, race in Nazi Germany was defined in much more elaborate and much more confusing categories than the "one drop rule" being the American standard. To a Nazi, races were not defined exclusively by skin color and facial features, although the lowest race category in the Nazi hierarchy consisted exclusively of Africans, African Americans and aboriginal people of Australia and Oceania. Then things get really confusing for an average Nazi. I am not sure of the exact boundaries of the next lowest race category, but I think it included nearly all Asians, most inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, Slavs, Gypsies and Jews. Curiously, not the Japanese. Then came the Mediterranean race of the Southwestern Europe, and ruling over all of them was the Arian race of the Northern and north-western Europe, the Master Race of the nazi propaganda, which, curiously, also included the Japanese. Never mind that a Pole looks more like a German than a Brit and is whiter and more blue eyed than a Finn!

This Nazi hierarchy of races literally defines Jews as a race. It is a historical fact. A fact that unfortunately is being lost on many Americans, black and white. Perhaps even some Jews sprinkled in.