American Jewry and the Eugenics Movement

Henry Goddard, The Kallikaks: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, 1912

"No matter where we traced them, whether in the prosperous rural district, in the city slums to which some had drifted or in the more remote mountain regions...defectiveness was everywhere to be found, "If all the slum districts of our cities were removed tomorrow and model tenements built in their places, we would still have slums in a week's time, because we have these mentally defective people who can never be taught to live otherwise than as they have been living."

Israel Zangwill to David Bressler on Health Inspection of Jewish Immigrants Coming to the US, 1913

"I cannot help feeling...that your doctor has developed a morbid flair for hernia...I believe a doctor, like a patient, can find any disease he is looking for...Some cases deported for hernia did not even know they had it, so it could hardly be much of a disability in earning their livelihood...I do not believe, therefore, that inguinal hernia is the legitimate cause of exclusion at all."

Harry Laughlin, Eugenics Record Office, 1914 National Conference on Race Betterment

"Purify the breeding stock of the race at all costs."

Madison Grant to Charles Davenport, April 2, 1917

“It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes, and going to school and to church, does not transform a negro into a white man...We shall have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality, and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation."

Franz Boas, The Scientific Monthly, 1916

"The battlecry of the eugenists, ‘Nature not nurture,’ has been raised to the rank of a dogma, and the environmental conditions that make and unmake man, physically and mentally, have been relegated to the background.”

Current Opinion, September 1916

"Comparison of the ability of Jews with Gentiles confirms, apparently, the theory that the facial aspect of the Jew is due to race, that it is an anthropological fact and not a mere accident. Thus statistics indicate a preponderance of Jewish excellence as actors, doctors, financiers, philosophers, musicians, philologists, poets; a slight excess as antiquarians, in natural science and in political economy.

The Jews are below the highest standard in agriculture, novel writing, divinity, engraving, military and naval science, as sovereigns, statesmen and travelers. They are slightly below as painters, engineers and lawyers. They are about as good as Gentiles in the capacity of architects, scientists and sculptors."

Abraham Myerson, Mental Hygiene, 1922

“The reviewer must confess that a sense of incredulity is raised to the n-th power whenever he hears of the two lines of descendants of Martin Kallikak…Everywhere else one finds, instead, good people breeding bad people and bad people breeding good people.

Saints are descendants of prostitutes and prostitutes are sprung from the loins of saints, but not so with Martin Kallikak. By marrying into a respectable family, he had nothing but respectable descendants; by having illegitimate relationships with a feeble-minded girl (who made the diagnosis after a century had passed?) he had nothing but feebleminded and delinquents."

Carl Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence, 1923

"Our figures, then, would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent...The able Jew is popularly recognized not only because of his ability, but because he is able and a Jew."

Maurice R. Hexter and Abraham Myerson, Mental Hygiene, 1924

"One of the latest developments in psychology, the intelligence tests, has in America been overrated as a means of passing judgement upon the unfortunate subjects who are tested. But this is not so important as the danger that these tests might be used - and in fact are being used, we believe, by certain people - not to advance science or in the scientific spirit, but for race discrimination and in the spirit of propaganda."

Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924

"The annual quota of any nationality shall be 2 per centum of the number of foreign-born individuals of such nationality resident in continental United States as determined by the United States census of 1890..."

Madison Grant to Harry Laughlin, July 28, 1936

"I have your letter of the 22nd with its extremely interesting enclosure. I entirely agree with you, of course, that the use of the word "Caucasian" is better than that of "White". The Jews can and do claim that they are White, but they can hardly claim that they are "Caucasian", although, perhaps, they do claim it..."

Jewish Support for Eugenics

Rabbi Sidney Goldstein, Free Synagogue Pulpit, 1912

"We know from studies, the soundness and reliability of which are indisputable, that out of these defective groups and their offspring are recruited the greatest number of those unhappy creatures who fill our reformatories and prisons and asylums and our homes for the wayward and the vagrant...

...It is possible to prevent those who are defective from bringing forth abundantly and peopling the earth after their own kind...The birth-rate of the feeble-minded, the epileptic, many of the insane, and the criminal whose criminality is due to some deep-seated defect, should be controlled and cut off."

Rabbi Max Reichler, Jewish Eugenics, 1915

"The very founder of the Jewish race, the patriarch Abraham, recognized the importance of certain inherited qualities, and insisted that the wife of his "only beloved son" should not come from "the daughters of the Canaanites," but from the seed of a superior stock...

...This contention is eugenically correct. Davenport tells of a settlement worker of this city who made special inquiry concerning a certain unruly and criminally inclined section of his territory, and found that the offenders came from one village in Calabria, known as "the home of the brigands." Just as there is a home of the brigands, so there may be a "home of the pure bloods."

...Abraham's servant, Eliezer, so the Midrash states, desired to offer his own daughter to Isaac, but his master sternly rebuked him, saying: "Thou art cursed, and my son is blessed, and it does not behoove the cursed to mate with the blessed, and thus deteriorate the quality of the race."