Pre-Zionists and eugenics

The eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s was widespread and eagerly supported, not only by the Nazis, who made obvious what could happen when taken to extremes, but by scientific communities throughout Europe and North America. A recent study by Sachlav Stoler-Liss shows that the pre-state Jewish community--the Yishuv--was no less interested in this movement.

As an article in Haaretz makes clear, "there was a great deal of enthusiasm here for the improvement of the hereditary characteristics of a particular race (eugenics)."

A shocking new study reveals how key figures in the pre-state Zionist establishment proposed castrating the mentally ill, sterilizing the poor and doing everything possible to ensure reproduction only among the `best of people.'

Castrating the mentally ill, encouraging reproduction among families "numbered among the intelligentsia" and limiting the size of "families of Eastern origin" and "preventing ... lives that are lacking in purpose" - these proposals are not from some program of the Third Reich but rather were brought up by key figures in the Zionist establishment of the Land of Israel during the period of the British Mandate.

Most of this support for eugenics came during the 1930s, but as Stoler-Liss points out, "Supporters of [eugenics] were key figures in the emerging medical establishment in Palestine; the people who managed and created the Israeli health system."

In the mid-30s, Dr. Joseph Meir, a well-known doctor involved in establishing this system, called for the castration of the mentally ill. After eugenics had been discredited, eugenics organizations and journals distanced themselves from the "science," changing their names overnight. But Meir continued throughout his professional life, even into the 1960s, to support the principles of eugenics.

Other Zionist thinkers felt that eugenics had a role to play in the settlement of the new Jewish state:

According to studies by Dr. Rapahel Falk, a geneticist and historian of science and medicine at Hebrew University, other major Zionist thinkers - among them Dr. Max Nordau, Theodor Herzl's colleague, a doctor and a publicist, and Dr. Arthur Ruppin, the head of the World Zionist Organization office in the Land of Israel - presented the ideas of eugenics as one of the aims of the Jewish movement for national renewal and the settlement of the land.

Prof. Meira Weiss, an anthropologist of medicine at Hebrew University, describes in her book "The Chosen Body" how the settlement of the land and work on the land were perceived by these Zionist thinkers as the "cure" that would restore the health of the Jewish body that had degenerated in the Diaspora. In Nordau's terms, a "Judaism of muscle" would replace "the Jew of the coffee house: the pale, skinny, Diaspora Jew. "

Understandably, Israelis have long denied the existence of such lines of thought within the Zionist movement. It must be remembered, however, that for a time eugenics was a respectable science, one that influenced the laws of many nations, including the United States, where at one time thousands of people were forcibly sterilized--the "insane," the "feeble-minded," immigrants, members of ethnic minorities and people with low IQs.

When such a movement as eugenics is coupled with nationalism, the results, as all of us know, can be genocidal. That is why I was so taken aback to read that some pre-Zionists and Zionist thinkers urged that eugenic theory be applied. As Stoler-Liss remarks, "It is interesting to note that both in Germany and in Israel a link was made between eugenics, health and nationalism." That recognition is a chilling one.