Amos Morris-Reich

Anthropology, standardization and measurement: Rudolf Martin and anthropometric photography

Recent scholarship on the history of German anthropology has tended to describe its trajectory between 1900 and the Nazi period as characterized by a paradigmatic shift from the liberal to the anti-humanistic. This article reconstructs key moments in the history of anthropometric photography between 1900 and 1925, paying particular attention to the role of the influential liberal anthropologist Rudolf Martin (1864–1925) in the standardization of anthropological method and technique. It is shown that Rudolf Martins primary significance was social and institutional. The article reconstructs key stages in Martins writing on and uses of photography and analyses the peculiar form of scientific debate surrounding the development of anthropometric photography, which centred on local and practical questions. Against the political backdrop of German colonialism in Africa and studies of prisoners of war during the First World War, two key tensions in this history surface: between anthropological method and its politicization, and between the international scientific ethos and nationalist impulses. By adopting a practical–epistemic perspective, the article also destabilizes the conventional differentiation between the German liberal and anti-humanist anthropological traditions. Finally, the article suggests that there is a certain historical irony in the fact that the liberal Martin was central in the process that endowed physical anthropology with prestige precisely in the period when major parts of German society increasingly came to view ‘race’ as offering powerful, scientific answers to social and political questions.

Race, ideas, and ideals: A comparison of Franz Boas and Hans F.K. Günther

This article compares two radically opposed views concerning “race” in the first half of the 20th century: the one of Franz Boas (1858–1942), the founder of American cultural anthropology, and the other of Hans F.K. Günther (1889–1968), the most widely read theoretician of race in Nazi Germany. Opposite as their views were, both derived from a similar non-evolutionist German anthropological matrix. The article reconstructs their definitions of racial objects and studies their analyses of racial intermixture. Although both believed that contemporary peoples were racially deeply mixed, Boas moved towards an antiracist conception of race-as-population, whereas Günther moved towards a racist conception of homogenous races in mixed peoples. The comparison shows that the major difference between them concerns their ideals or guiding principles. Their respective ideals seeped into their versions of science and transformed the nature and the significance of their respective ideas.

Ruppin and the peculiarities of race : A response to Etan Bloom

Etan Bloom’s ‘‘What ‘The Father’ had in mind? Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943), cultural identity, weltanschauung and action’’ provides a provocative account of one of the most prominent leaders of the Zionist movement in its pre-state phase. The crux of Bloom’s article is found in its last paragraph, where Bloom suggests that Ruppin, and hence Zionism, were embedded in the intellectual traditions of Nazism. To reach this conclusion, Bloom builds a sequence of arguments commencing with his construction of Ruppin’s cultural identity, then his Weltanschauung, and finally his activity as the central figure in the Zionist land-acquisition and settlement-planning before the establishment of the State of Israel. The following interdependent arguments can be extracted from Bloom’s article: Bloom first argues that Ruppin’s Zionist identity was created primarily as a young person, who was rejected by the German, non-Jewish environment (332–333). Second, he claims that Ruppin’s Weltanschauung integrated racist, anti-Semitic influences into his Zionist outlook (334–335). Third, he claims that Ruppin implemented a social-Darwinist settlement activity (345–347). Fourth, ‘‘the modern Hebrew identity models’’ are claimed to be derived from Ruppin (348). Finally, he postulates that the ideological sources of Ruppin and Nazi racial thought were one and the same (347–349). Bloom’s arguments clearly transcend the particular historical figure of Arthur Ruppin to something much bigger, the ‘‘essence’’ of the Zionist project. Ruppin is described as both the historical root and a synecdoche of the Zionist enterprise, its philosophical, ideological outlook as well as its practical, political practices. The force of Bloom’s article is that it provides the reader with an articulate straightforward narrative, a narrative that only insinuates its main arguments, and avoids discussing their possible objections. This narrative involves a complex set of arguments, moving between historical and methodological registers—from the formation of Ruppin’s identity by anti-Semitic strains of thought, to his settlement activity as a Zionist leader, to Hebrew models of identity, and finally to Nazi strains of thought. As each of his arguments is dependent on the preceding one, the argument as a whole is dependent on the sequence. Some of the most prominent students of Ruppin (including his biographer Yaacov Goren and the prominent Jewish demographer Sergio DellaPergola) view Ruppin’s ideas on race as a mere residue of the discourse of his time, inessential for understanding his sociological model or political activity.

From autonomous subject to free individual in Simmel and Lacan

This article reads Simmels and Lacans respective theories of subject and object with regard to their understandings of alienation as a constant human feature. It demonstrates a gradual shift in their work from a conception of humans as autonomous subjects to humans as free individuals. It argues that this shift is best understood with regard to their respective contentions with alienation and in relation of transgression.

The Israeli Paradigm of Territory

Against the governing tendency of analyzing the production of space in Israel in purely political terms, the article demonstrates that the cultural dimension is critical for understanding the Israeli paradigm of territory. Extensive and intensive analysis of the key Israeli expression for concreteness and the term designating the territories occupied by Israel since 1967 (which both stem from the same root), thereby bringing together cultural, linguistic, historical, and political perspectives across several registers, reveals the Israeli paradigm of territory as a core part of a thick Israeli cultural ideology. The article concludes by pointing out how and why, under the weight of the present occupation, this paradigm is in the process of breaking up.

Elements of Controversy: Responses to Anti-Semitism in Nascent German Social Science

Employing Marcelo Dascal’s theory and typology of controversies, this chapter attempts to pull together certain elements of the writing of Georg Simmel (1858–1918), the founder of formal sociology; Franz Boas (1858–1942), the founder of cultural anthropology; and Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943), the founder of Jewish sociology and demography, and interpret them with regard to the then contemporary social, political, or scientific anti-Semitism. Through a comparison of their writing, the chapter argues that Ruppin was engaged in a discussion with anti-Semitic writers, as the object of disagreement, anti-Semitic reaction to Jewish difference, was treated as being well circumscribed. Simmel was engaged in a dispute, the source of disagreement rooted in differences of attitude, feelings, or preferences, transcending Jews as a specified object. Boas approached a controversy, revolving around specific objects and problems but spreading to broader methodological issues. The chapter points to the fact that none of these discourses meet Dascal’s minimal definition of a controversy, because of the absence of a structured sequence of polemic exchanges (POPO). The chapter attempts to answer why this is so.

Science and “Race” In Solomon Yudovin’s Photographic Documentation of Russian Jewry, 1912–1914*

AbstractFrom the perspective of Central European developments in scientific photography, this article studies the photographs taken by Solomon Yudovin as part of S. An-sky’s ethnographic expedition to the Pale of Settlement between 1912 and 1914. The first part of the article argues that the scientific goals of the expedition demanded the introduction of photography less out of an inherent interest in the medium than out of the desire to employ advanced scientific techniques. The second part identifies various strains of scientific photography in Yudovin’s photographic practice. It shows that his photographs encompass both of what later came to be contrasted as racial photography and social documentation. Employing a comparative approach, and touching particularly on questions of Jewish visibility at the time and after the Holocaust, the third part of the article points to the specificity of photography as an indexical medium in this history.