Duhring, Eugen

(1833–1921)

   German philosopher and economist whose anti-Semitic work, Die Judenfrage als Frage der Rassenschaedlichkeit (The Parties and the Jewish Question, 1881), foreshadowed the racist policies of the Third Reich. In his views on the Jewish question, Duhring contended that the Jews were “not a religion but a racial tribe,” whose true nature was “hidden to some extent by the admixture of religion.” He argued that the Jewish question would have existed even if “all Jews had turned their back on their religion and had gone over to one of the leading churches among us.” Duhring stated that baptized Jews used their conversion to enter into areas of public life that had been closed to them as Jews. The result was “the spread of racial Jewry through the seams and crevices of our national structures.” Sooner or later, he warned, there would be a backlash against Jews as Germans came to realize “how irreconcilable with our best impulses is the infusion of the qualities of the Jewish race into our national environment.” Historian Theodore S. Hamerow notes that “Half a century later, these views would serve as a justification for an official policy of racial extermination.”

   See also Aryan Paragraph.