ABSTRACT
The formation of social science as a means of enquiry in the late nineteenth century coincided with emergence of anti-Semitism. Its proponents referred to themselves as ‘anti-Semites’ to demonstrate they were not opposed to Jews as a matter of religion, but because of racial characteristics. In Germany and Austria, anti-Semitic political parties contested elections, and in France, the Dreyfus affair exposed a reservoir of anti-Jewish sentiment. In the United Kingdom and the United States, anti-Semitic rhetoric accompanied discussion over immigrants seeking to escape the pogroms in Russia and the growth of Jewish communities in leading cities. The combination of social-scientific analysis and anti-Jewish agitation produced a ‘scientific anti-Semitism’. A flurry of pamphlets, articles and books drew on an emerging race science which made Jewish characteristics the object of study. By the end of the First World War, there was enough anti-Semitic material to fill a small library. It was in one of these libraries in fact, at the National Socialist Institute in Munich, that Adolf Hitler read Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and Henry Ford's The International Jew (Ryback 2009, 50).
