Volume II – The Seeds of Hate
Chapter 6 – The Pseudoscience of Race
By the closing decades of the 19th century, Europe wore the mask of progress. Factories hummed, telegraphs clicked, and railroads tied nations together in iron embrace. Science, it was said, had replaced superstition. The age of reason had triumphed.
But reason was not immune to prejudice. In laboratories, lecture halls, and journals, a new form of hatred took shape, one that clothed itself in the language of science. The Jew was no longer merely the killer of Christ, no longer only the betrayer of nations. Now he was said to be biologically alien, a race apart, a permanent threat inscribed in blood and bone.
Darwin and Distortion
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) shook Europe with its vision of evolution. But where Darwin saw natural selection, others saw justification for hierarchy. Thinkers twisted his ideas into Social Darwinism: the belief that races and nations, like species, struggled for survival, and that the strong were destined to dominate the weak.
Anthropologists began measuring skulls, noses, and foreheads, cataloguing supposed differences between peoples. Charts and diagrams ranked "Aryan" above "Semite," "Germanic" above "Jewish." In universities, professors lectured that Jews were biologically incapable of loyalty to any nation but their own.
For the Keller family in Bavaria, these ideas were confirmation of what priests had preached. Johann Keller, now middle-aged, read pamphlets eagerly. "See?" he told his son Karl. "Even science proves what the Church has always taught. The Jew is not like us. He cannot be like us."
The Jewish Covenant and Resistance to Assimilation
Yet while the world accused them of separateness, Jews themselves understood it differently. Their refusal to disappear into the societies around them was not a defect—it was faithfulness to a covenant older than nations.
From the time of Abraham, they believed, God had bound them to Himself and to each other. Circumcision, Sabbath, Passover, the study of Torah; all these marked them as chosen. To abandon them was to sever not just tradition, but destiny.
This covenantal identity explained why, even after centuries in exile, Jews remained distinct. In Berlin, young Isaac Abramovich explained it to his children: "We are not a people because Europe says so. We are a people because God has said so, from Abraham to Moses to us. They call us outsiders. We call ourselves a nation of promise."
For Christians like Johann Keller, this steadfastness was proof of Jewish arrogance. "They refuse to be part of us," he sneered. "Always their own ways, their own laws. How can such people ever belong to Germany?" What Johann saw as stubbornness was, in truth, faithfulness.
Vienna: A City of Contradictions
Nowhere was the clash sharper than Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jews there filled universities, cafés, and concert halls. They became doctors, journalists, musicians. Their names adorned symphonies and newspapers. Yet the more visible they became, the more ferocious the backlash.
Karl Lueger, Vienna's powerful mayor, blended Catholicism with "scientific" antisemitism. He thundered from the Rathaus that Jews were an alien race, corrupting Austrian culture. When accused of befriending certain wealthy Jews, he laughed: "I decide who is a Jew."
Among those who listened to his speeches in the 1890s was a poor, restless youth named Adolf Hitler. From the gallery of city politics, he watched how hatred could be weaponized, how science and faith could be fused into a weapon sharper than any sword.
The Rothschilds and the Myth of Conspiracy
The Rothschild family, financiers of empires, became the target of a new kind of slander. No longer merely "Christ-killers," they were now depicted as masterminds of global conspiracy. Newspapers claimed they controlled wars, economies, and governments through hidden hands.
Pamphlets carried crude diagrams of a Jewish octopus stretching its tentacles over Europe. Science lent it a false legitimacy: Jews were said to possess a racial instinct for domination.
In Munich, young Karl Keller pinned one such cartoon to the wall above his workbench. "Look," he told his friends. "They do not even hide it. Their blood drives them to rule us." His son Friedrich, a child of barely five, looked up at the picture with wide eyes, absorbing more than he understood.
Jewish Intellectual Response
Faced with this new assault, Jewish thinkers fought back. Some argued for complete assimilation: abandon the old ways, dress and live as Germans, and prejudice might fade. Others insisted the covenant could not be broken. To dissolve into the nations was to betray the God of Abraham.
The fictional Yasha Asimov, now an aging teacher in Warsaw, told his students: "The nations want us to vanish. Some of us think if we become like them, they will accept us. But children—remember the covenant. We are Jews not because they permit it, but because God has called us so."
Zionism, too, began to stir. Theodor Herzl, witnessing antisemitic fury in Vienna and the Dreyfus Affair in France, concluded that assimilation was a dead end. Only in their own land, he argued, could Jews be safe. His words struck chords in young Jews across Europe, torn between the lure of belonging and the call of identity.
Science Hardened into Hatred
By the end of the 19th century, racial "science" had hardened into dogma. Jewish emancipation seemed, to nationalists, a mistake. If Jews were biologically distinct, then no law, no baptism, no declaration of loyalty could change them.
This thinking poisoned not just taverns and pulpits, but classrooms and courts. Judges cited racial theories when ruling against Jews. Teachers presented "Jewish skulls" beside Aryan ones. Even children in schools repeated lessons that the Jew was marked by nature itself.
For the Keller family, this was liberation of another kind. They no longer needed to justify their hatred with scripture alone. Now science, progress, and nationalism all agreed: the Jew could never be German.
Thus, in the twilight of the century, antisemitism had transformed. What had begun as theological prejudice was reborn as racial certainty. The Jew was now an outsider not by choice or religion, but by blood.
But beneath this lie stood a truth the world refused to see: Jews did not fail to assimilate because they were incapable, but because they were bound by covenant, by memory, by faith. The same force that kept them apart was the force that had preserved them through millennia of exile.
For the Keller family, that difference was a threat. For Jewish families across Europe, it was survival.
In this clash of covenant and race, of faithfulness and fear, the stage was set. And in a young boy in Austria, listening to Vienna's orators and staring at hateful cartoons, the seeds of a future catastrophe were quietly, steadily taking root.