Contra CofC on the Boasian School of Anthropology

a thorough critique of Kevin MacDonald’s portrayal of Franz Boas and his students

I had originally written two follow-ups to this piece — one posted at the end of 2022 and the other at the beginning of 2023 — but I think it’s best to simply highlight the updates here:

• On Oct. 10 I notified MacDonald of this critique on Twitter and he said he’d eventually reply.

• On Oct. 14 he published “Jewish Assimilation?,” albeit not formally in response, which reiterated many of the claims I’d already addressed below, merely qualifying that he “can be forgiven for pouncing on relatively small indications of Jewish identity and interests” because of ethnic self-awareness among Jews and that Boas’ liberal beliefs themselves should be circularly seen as evidence enough for their motives, though the article betrays much less certainty in its conclusions than the book. Also contra MacDonald’s readings, Degler (1991, 80) claims Boas was in no sense a multiculturalist or cultural relativist.

• On Jan. 6 Cofnas published his “magnum opus on the Jewish question and my final reply to” MacDonald, citing my below analysis in its section on Boas. A few days later MacDonald tweets notice of his revision of “the first part of Chapter 2 of Culture of Critique” and that he was “trying to get a new edition in 2023.” This revision was totally unsatisfactory, maintaining all the same conclusions with an even more polemical spin, and I pointed this out in a reply. Sometime later MacDonald DMed me a newer version, but where all this stands as of now I can’t say.

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As far as I can tell, the existing debate surrounding Kevin MacDonald’s “Culture of Critique” trilogy has focused on the thesis in the abstract or scattered errors made throughout the work. There is yet to be a detailed critique of the books themselves and their claims to see if the evidence MacDonald assembles actually stands up to scrutiny. This is what I seek to accomplish here, starting for now with the discussion of Boasian anthropology in The Culture of Critique in the first part of the second chapter, “The Boasian School Of Anthropology And The Decline Of Darwinism In The Social Sciences,” the first historical subject he analyzes. Eventually I hope to cover other areas of interest throughout the book, including immigration and leftism, as well as to weigh in on the theory of the Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy as a whole.

The present article is mainly organized into two parts: a summary of the issues I have with MacDonald’s portrayal of Boasian anthropology followed by a more detailed assessment of the individual claims made in the text in order. Credit is certainly owed to The Problem Gene’s discussion of MacDonald for turning my attention to the subject of Franz Boas.

The Argument

Kevin MacDonald portrays the Boasian school of anthropology, which generally downplayed Darwinian evolution and the role of genetics in behavior, as a thoroughly Jewish movement aiming to advance the supposed Jewish “Group Evolutionary Strategy” (henceforth GES). The school was very influential in helping remove racialist discourse from American academia over the 20th century and did indeed involve a substantial number of Jewish contributors. MacDonald thus points to Boas to assign responsibility to Jews for the modern taboo against race differences.

But for this line of reasoning to be true, a few things must first be established. As MacDonald sets out to demonstrate, Boas and his students must be mostly Jewish, have a strong sense of Jewish identity, and view their actions, consciously or subconsciously, as attempts to further the continuity of the Jewish group, specifically by countering the racialized antisemitism of the period. And MacDonald must prove, ultimately, that it was the influence of Boas that brought about this liberal paradigm shift in academic and public thought. If we find, however, that Boas and his students were not all that Jewish or ethnocentric, did not care much for antisemitism or Jewish group continuity, were driven mostly by other, independent factors, and that Boasian anthropology was part of a broader trend of egalitarian thought already in the works, then the GES theory simply doesn’t hold water here and MacDonald has failed to prove his contention.

And all of this appears to be true. Rather than a “necessary condition” the Boasian school was one part of a greater trend that had already taken root in American social science; Boas found himself in league with many gentile contemporaries. As one of MacDonald’s sources writes:

Biological or hereditarian explanations for the differences in human group behavior, or, more precisely, assertions of differences in mental capacity between groups, were largely on the defensive for a good part of the period. From the nineteenth century onward, many American social scientists were predisposed to favor change and progress, social improvement and reform, an outlook that came to shape their response to explanations for human behavior. When given a choice between explanations that facilitated or permitted social change and improvement and those that fixed the status quo or lengthened the time required to bring about social changes, American social scientists generally found the former more persuasive and more congenial. The natural tendency of their world-view was to prefer an environmental or cultural explanation. Human nature was not divided; the well-recognized diversity among human groups derived not from race but from different histories and environments. (Degler 1991, 192)

Franz Boas himself was born into a liberal German milieu and first acquainted with anthropology by prominent non-Jewish professors known for their emphasis on non-racial explanations like Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow. The late anthropologist William Yewdale Adams (2016, 19ff) identifies several tendencies of the Boasian school including its egalitarianism with German predecessors like Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm Schmidt, or the Kulturwissenschaft of the Baden School cherished by Boasians. The migration of the ‘48ers and later Germans like Boas, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, imported these liberal German ideas into American academe.

In almost a microcosm of the anthropological debate, MacDonald neglects to consider the importance of this German cultural environment while emphasizing the Jewishness of Boas. He claims that Boas was “alienated from and hostile toward gentile culture,” that he had a “strong Jewish identification and that he was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism.” As we’ll see, the evidence for this is incredibly weak or nonexistent. Far from hostile, Boas took pride in his German heritage first and married a Catholic Austrian woman; rather than fixated on antisemitism through his ideological development, he at one point declined a request to even condemn it publicly, objecting “If you want a note in which I accuse at the same time the Jews for their anti-Negro attitude I will write it.” Contra MacDonald, Jewish particularism was not something Boas was much interested in, and he explicitly advocated an end to Jewish group continuity as the solution to antisemitism. Far more than the ethnic weapon MacDonald portrays it as, Boas’ egalitarianism was a universal social ideal; where it was racial Boas was primarily concerned with civil rights for blacks rather than combatting antisemitism.

Regarding his students and followers, the successful ones were about a third to half Jewish depending on how one counts, albeit this becomes less surprising when considering that Columbia itself was 40% Jewish at the time. Among many of his Jewish students one also finds a strong German identity and indifference to antisemitism and assimilation. Non-Jewish students were among the most radical, and two, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, were ultimately the most influential of all. According to MacDonald himself, it was because of their work that “by the middle of the twentieth century, it was a commonplace for educated Americans to refer to human differences in cultural terms, and to say that ‘modern science has shown that all human races are equal.’” Yet as Cofnas points out, MacDonald waves this fact away by treating them as pawns of Boas lacking agency of their own.

Boasian anthropology is thus not shown to be a movement guided by Jewish interests, fails to meet MacDonald’s criteria for the GES, and was in all likelihood something that simply exacerbated existing trends finalized in the post-War era. It is not true, nor is it argued here, that Jewish interests are totally unrelated to these developments. But when it comes to the Boasian school, the relevant question is whether they were actually what motivated individual Jewish Boasians or the movement at large; people act on many psychological impulses, some of which only loosely complement the deeper forces that really motivate them. MacDonald is too comfortable simply noting a Jewish background and assuming the rest, something he’s done with figures like Richard Herrnstein and even Cofnas himself.

Another persistent flaw in MacDonald’s scholarship is his tendency to buttress a crucial argument not with actual evidence but with the isolated opinions of other authors, even if highly speculative or even contradicted by the others he cites. (As such, I rely heavily on MacDonald’s own sources in the following.) This, along with the omission of important contexts, is mostly how he reaches ultimately mistaken conclusions that defy more straightforward readings of the sources. Flatly erroneous claims include that “Boas married within his ethnic group,” that he remarked about all gentiles being antisemitic, and that the majority of his students who headed major universities were Jewish.

The Text

This chapter will emphasize the ethnopolitical agenda of Franz Boas, but it is worth mentioning the work of Franco-Jewish structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss because he appears to be similarly motivated, although the French structuralist movement as a whole cannot be viewed as a Jewish intellectual movement. … In response to an assertion that he was “the very picture of a Jewish intellectual,” Lévi-Strauss stated, “[C]ertain mental attitudes are perhaps more common among Jews than elsewhere.… Attitudes that come from the profound feeling of belonging to a national community, all the while knowing that in the midst of this community there are people—fewer and fewer of them I admit—who reject you. One keeps one’s sensitivity attuned, accompanied by the irrational feeling that in all circumstances one has to do a bit more than other people to disarm potential critics.” (Lévi-Strauss & Eribon 1991, 155-156)

This is the evidence cited to support the assertion Lévi-Strauss “had a strong Jewish identity and a deep concern with anti-Semitism,” but the comment LS was responding to is quite relevant: “You have always been a partisan of ‘assimilation’ and you have never asserted a Jewish ‘identity.’ But you know Metraux’s phrase about you, from his journal, ‘He’s the very picture of a Jewish intellectual.’...” Rather than claiming a concern for Jewish interests, what LS was actually saying was that he was wasn’t left unaffected by the antisemitism of his surroundings — this distinction is far from semantic. Many leading Jewish Bolsheviks, for example, were undoubtedly pushed along the path to leftist universalism by the violent, anti-Jewish intolerance they’d experienced in their upbringings; one would be hard-pressed, however, to argue someone like Lazar Kaganovich was pursuing a Jewish GES. In Boas’ words, “My ideals have developed because I am what I am and have lived where I have lived.”

As Damrosch (1995) put it, LS was “deeply estranged from an ethnicity that the wider culture will never let him forget.” A lack of Jewish identity actually seems to be the common view, here. Anthropologist Melvin Konner titled the piece he wrote after LS’s death “Lévi-Strauss: He Changed How We See Culture, but Ignored His Own,” writing,

Like Emile Durkheim, the great sociologist whose mantle he picked up and wore very comfortably, Lévi-Strauss was a Jew. But in neither case, nor in those of many other Jewish social thinkers, is it easy to find explicit Jewish references in their lives or work. … Lévi-Strauss, like Durkheim, wanted to be thoroughly French. As Durkheim saw the Dreyfus Affair as an aberration, so Lévi-Strauss saw the Vichy years as something that had little to do with his homeland.

Did Jewish interests motivate LS to join what MacDonald himself said “cannot be viewed as a Jewish intellectual movement,” or was he affected by similar intellectual motivations as those of the many other gentiles who held the same beliefs, his Jewish experiences merely being another influence? MacDonald’s conclusions are at least unjustified. He then explores LS’s egalitarian beliefs themselves, arguing they “aimed at enshrining cultural differences and subverting the universalism of the West, a position that validates the position of Judaism as a non-assimilating group.” It might be noteworthy that he omits the “rhetorical gifts he learned from Rousseau” from Mark Lilla’s characterization in view of the comments of Cofnas (2018), but otherwise this seems accurate. Claude Lévi-Strauss was quite thoroughly a lib. MacDonald promptly turns the discussion to Franz Boas.

Boas was reared in a “Jewish-liberal” family in which the revolutionary ideals of 1848 remained influential. He developed a “left-liberal posture which... is at once scientific and political” (Stocking 1968, 149). Boas married within his ethnic group (Frank 1997, 733) and was intensely concerned with anti-Semitism from an early period in his life (White 1966, 16). Alfred Kroeber (1943, 8) recounted a story “which [Boas] is said to have revealed confidentially but which cannot be vouched for,... that on hearing an anti-Semitic insult in a public cafe, he threw the speaker out of doors, and was challenged. Next morning his adversary offered to apologize; but Boas insisted that the duel be gone through with. Apocryphal or not, the tale absolutely fits the character of the man as we know him in America.” In a comment that says much about Boas’s Jewish identification as well as his view of gentiles, Boas stated in response to a question regarding how he could have professional dealings with anti-Semites such as Charles Davenport, “If we Jews had to choose to work only with Gentiles certified to be a hundred percent free of anti-Semitism, who could we ever really work with?” (in Sorin 1997, 632n9).

But Frank (1997) mentions nothing of the sort regarding Boas’ marriage, simply that “Boas married Marie Krackowizer, Ernst’s daughter, in 1887, the year he emigrated to America” (733), Ernst being a friend of Boas’ mother and a leader in the 1848 Austrian revolt. According to Darnell and Gleach (2019, 62), Boas “wed Marie Krackowizer, who was an Austrian Catholic.” Her father was a Catholic Austrian born in Spital am Pyrhn to a liberal imperial official. MacDonald probably assumed Krackowizer was a Jewish surname, though this doesn’t appear to be the case. Boas, in fact, was exogamous, at odds with MacDonald’s conception of Jewish ethnocentrism.

Boas’ attitude toward antisemitism will be discussed further below. The evidence here for an “intense concern,” however, is exceptionally weak. The line “If we Jews had to choose to work only with Gentiles certified to be a hundred percent free of anti-Semitism, who could we ever really work with?” stuck out to me as most unlike Boas. MacDonald’s citation, Sorin (1997), doesn’t have 632 pages or mention “Boas”; nor does Sorin (1985) which he also cites. The origin of the quote is actually Chase (1977, 632), who attributes it not to Franz Boas but to “an aging American writer who is Jewish” and whom the author had asked concerning why Franz Boas himself was known to work with “anti-Semites such as Davenport and Osborn.” If anything this works against the idea of Boas as fanatically anti-antisemite.

As for the (potentially apocryphal) anecdote related by Boas’ non-Jewish student, Alfred Kroeber, the fuller quote makes it clear this was presented as an example of Boas’ university life — “where saber fencing over slights, known as Mensur, was ingrained in undergraduate culture” — not of any tendency to freak out over antisemitism. But this isn’t to suggest antisemitism had never been a problem for Boas. MacDonald cites White (1966) who in turn cites Kluckhohn and Prufer (1959, 10):

In this and in various other respects Boas was undoubtedly influenced by the position of Jews in 19th century Germany. The conservatives were the bulwark of the discrimination against Jews in academic and other circles. It seems evident that one of the many things that made Virchow as much of an “idol” as Boas ever permitted himself was Virchow's stalwart opposition to all forms of anti-Semitism. The correspondence repeatedly shows how central this problem was in Boas' formative years. A letter of October 6, 1870, records a poignant incident. The letters from Kiel are particularly full of accounts of unpleasant activities among the student body, and of gross personal behavior.

But I don’t think it’s justified to extrapolate an ongoing fixation on antisemitism from youthful experiences of it, if only for reasons mentioned earlier. Indeed, Lewis (2001) mentions a curious incident in which Boas rejected a request from a Jewish publication to condemn Father Coughlin:

On April 4, 1942, the managing editor of The Jewish Survey asked for a short article from him condemning the "Jew-baiting" of Father Coughlin, and calling for the banning of his magazine, Social Justice. Boas replied, “In my opinion the only kind of protest that means anything is to attack the whole attitude of races toward one another. If you want a note in which I accuse at the same time the Jews for their anti-Negro attitude I will write it.”

Nonetheless, from this MacDonald “conclude[s] that Boas had a strong Jewish identification and that he was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism,” and thus “it is reasonable to suppose that his concern with anti-Semitism was a major influence in the development of American anthropology.” These are not in fact reasonable conclusions.

Boas the German, Boas the Jew

In the preface to The Culture of Critique, MacDonald writes that “[a]n important thesis is that all of these movements may be seen as attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would end anti-Semitism and provide for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner.” The continuity is what’s important here; the entire point of the GES is, as MacDonald remarked with respect to Claude Lévi-Strauss, to validate “the position of Judaism as a non-assimilating group.” This is obviously something Jewish activists chanting “am yisrael chai” care deeply about — but did Boas? Consider his 1921 article, “The Problem of the American Negro”:

[T]here is no great hope that the negro problem will find even a half-way satisfactory solution in our day. … But the greatest hope for the immediate future lies in a lessening of the contrast between negroes and whites which will bring about a lessening of class consciousness. As I have already pointed out, under present conditions a penetration of the white race by the negro does not occur, while the effects of intermixture in which the fathers are white and the mothers negro will lead in all probability to an increase of the amount of white blood in the negro population. This should allay the fears of those who believe that the white race might deteriorate by race mixture. On the other hand, intermixture will decrease the contrast between the extreme racial forms, and in the course of time, this will lead to a lessening of the consciousness of race distinction. If conditions were ever such that it could be doubtful whether a person were of negro descent or not, the consciousness of race would necessarily be much weakened. In a race of octoroons, living among whites, the color question would probably disappear.

This is the kind of thing one hears among liberals, even many conservatives, today: racism will only be solved when racial distinctions disappear, in that future world where everyone’s the same coffee-colored shade. He continues:

Thus it would seem that man being what he is, the Negro problem will not disappear in America until Negro blood has been so much diluted that it will no longer be recognized just as anti-Semitism will not disappear until the last vestige of the Jew as a Jew has disappeared. [italics mine]

Does this suggest a commitment to the preservation of the Jewish identity and genetic stock? Hardly. Boas takes his conclusions about race and applies them consistently to his own ethnic group, the Jews, something his half-Jewish children stand as a testament to. He thus cannot be said to fulfill the role MacDonald assigns to him, the ethnic activist “intensely concerned with anti-Semitism” and “deeply alienated from and hostile toward gentile culture.” As MacDonald writes elsewhere in the book, “The best evidence that individuals have really ceased to have a Jewish identity is if they choose a political option that they perceive as clearly not in the interests of Jews as a group.” MacDonald was also undoubtedly aware of this quote when writing the chapter, despite choosing to leave it out — it appears in several of his own sources, including White (1966). The quote is in fact ubiquitous in the scholarship on Boas.

A better understanding of Franz Boas is illuminated by Glick’s “Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation.” Throughout his life, Boas identified primarily as a German or German-American and probably “never identified himself in his public writings as Jewish.” He “recognized the right, indeed the duty, of Germans in America to maintain pride in their national origins and cultural heritage, but advocated assimilation to the point of literal disappearance for Jews.” In fact, “in common with many other Jews, particularly German Jews and others of a strongly assimilationist bent, he did not acknowledge the existence of a specifically Jewish cultural or ethnic identity.” There’s no denying the German patriotism of Boas that MacDonald completely neglects. The scholarship is in agreement about these things, and a few passages are worth quoting:

In all the years preceding the emergence of Nazism, he consistently maintained pride in his German-American identity, and indeed, until it became impossible, he was more than ready to defend the homeland, even to the potential detriment of his own career. Thus in 1916 we find him writing a letter to the editor of the New York Times protesting American hostility toward Germany, as manifested in what he interpreted as selective application of international law and unwarranted criticism of a nation that should not be expected to follow the same course of political development as that of the United States, desirable though such a course might be; although reluctant to speak out on political matters, he says, he was moved in his case “to express concisely what I, and I believe with me many other German-Americans, feel and think” (Stocking 1974:331). Standing with other German-Americans in defense of the homeland was essential, then, even if this meant defending a political system to which one was opposed in principle.

Lewis (2001, 456–7):

Although he was in an exposed position as an immigrant German and a Jew in a time of xenophobia, from 1914 until American entry into the war in 1917 he wrote numerous articles and gave speeches against American involvement (Boas 1945). Once the United States entered the war he stopped his public pronouncements, but he remained deeply involved in the causes of people who had been punished for speaking out. [Lewis goes on to give two examples of this] … These don't exhaust Boas's wartime activities by any means. Among other things, he campaigned on behalf of European scholars who were adversely affected by the war, especially for German and Austrian anthropologists who had been caught on the wrong side of the lines and were interned. And after the war he led efforts to support art and science in Germany and Austria, which included collecting books for libraries in those countries and getting food relief to Vienna. At first he worked through the Germanistic Society, of which he was the founder, and then he helped establish the Emergency Society in Aid of European Science and Art.

The following is the mission statement of this Germanistic Society Boas helped found:

Degler (1989, 2):

Boas, for his part, helped to found a German cultural society in New York City and served as its secretary for a number of years. In that capacity, he exerted considerable effort in luring German professors to the United States and in raising funds for their visits. He himself traveled back to Germany more than a dozen times after his emigration; on one of those visits he donated a part of his library to Kiel University, where he had earned his doctorate. His last visit was in 1931. A trivial and yet revealing sign of Boas's continuing connection with his former Vaterland was his request in 1906 to President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University that Butler send congratulations to Kaiser Wilhelm II on the occasion of the latter's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that during the First World War Boas was sufficiently pro-German to be in danger of losing his post at Columbia University.

[Alfred] Kroeber parted from Boas on the question of the German state. During the war Kroeber was so hostile to Germany that he found it difficult to use the term “culture” because of the negative connotation then surrounding the German equivalent, Kultur. Much as he loved the language of Germany, “he never felt at ease there,” his wife remembered. Boas, in contrast, remained so much a part of German culture that, as late as April 1933, he carefully distinguished between what he described as the "ruffianism" of the new Hitler government and the Germany to which he was still deeply attached.

Franz Kerkhof, a contemporary of Boas, recalled once visiting him:

The following Sunday I visited Boas at his house and was deeply impressed, how he – who had emigrated to the USA many years ago – had kept the German tradition alive in house. Almost every year he travelled to Germany by ship. … From Germany he brought German children’s books and German records for his grandchildren and sang German songs with them. Boas was above all a German (Weiler 2008, 7)

Even with the rise of Nazism in Germany and an emerging threat to those of Jewish background — or, as Boas would have it, its threat to “the old cultural values of Germany” — Boas seems to have taken the route of “Durkheim [who] saw the Dreyfus Affair as an aberration,” or “Lévi-Strauss [who] saw the Vichy years as something that had little to do with his homeland.” Like many German American Jews, Boas was “loyal to the Germany that one wanted to remember and dismiss unpleasant matters as transient aberrations or unavoidable lapses” — that is, loyal to the gentile out-group culture in which he grew up, despite its increasing antisemitism and hostility toward him as an individual and a type. In 1933, upon the Nazis taking power, Boas clarified his beliefs on the matter:

I am of Jewish descent, but in my feelings and my thoughts I am German. What do I owe to my parents’ home? A sense of duty, loyalty, and the urge to honestly search the truth. If this makes you an unworthy German, if bawdiness, baseness, intolerance, injustice, lie are today considered German, who would really then want to be German? I have always been proud to call myself German, but today the point has almost been reached when I have to say that I am ashamed of being German. Do you really believe that I can respect a flag that personally offends me, and that tries to besmirch me and my parents. And despite all this I cannot give up the hope that these events are fever symptoms of a sick nation which, though deeply wounded, will recover and that a time will come when the Germany that I know and that I love will rise again. I hope the day of recovery will come soon (Weiler 2008, 5)

In a sense, when Boas was referring to the disappearance of “the last vestige of the Jew as a Jew” he was really referring to his personal development.

Boas was in many respects a typical representative of that segment of late 19th-century German Jewry who had in effect abandoned the struggle to integrate Jewish identity with German nationality and had opted for an all-out effort to assimilate themselves out of existence. Some solved the problem—or tried to—by converting to Christianity. For Boas (and others like him) that tactic was clearly out of the question; he turned instead to a personal philosophy compounded of rationalism, cultural relativism, and ethical humanism, and identified himself as an enlightened universalist who had transcended both ethnic provincialism and supernatural religion. (Glick 1982)

Darnell and Gleach (2019, 62) agree with Cole’s (1998) assessment that “although Boas had youthful encounters with antisemitism, he refused to consider whether any of his professional difficulties were related to anti-Semitic attitudes.” Adams (2016, 63) was also in agreement:

[T]here is nothing in the early writings of Boas to indicate that his opposition to racism was rooted in his Jewish identity. The identity that emerges most strongly is a German, not a Jewish one. He never spoke out against anti-Semitism until after the rise of Hitler, and even then his condemnation was addressed to Nazism in general rather than to anti-Semitism more specifically.

All of this shows just how absurd it is when MacDonald continues as follows:

Moreover, as has been common among Jewish intellectuals in several historical eras, Boas was deeply alienated from and hostile toward gentile culture, particularly the cultural ideal of the Prussian aristocracy (Degler 1991, 200; Stocking 1968, 150).

Paying attention to the citations here, Degler (1991, 200) mentions nothing of the sort. Regarding Stocking (1968, 150), the relevant remark about Boas feeling “considerable alienation from the Germany of his own day,” given its political situation, is preceded by mention of Boas’ “profound identification with classical German culture and the revolutionary ideals of 1848.” MacDonald is being blatantly dishonest here. To him Boas’ disdain for the Junkers overrides his “profound identification with classical German culture” in reflecting his true attitudes, despite the fact that the former was purely a result of “the revolutionary ideals of 1848” — all German liberals hated Prussian aristocrats! Boas again: “The background of my early thinking was a German home in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force.” MacDonald continues:

Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that ethnic conflict played a major role in the development of American anthropology. Boas’s views conflicted with the then prevalent idea that cultures had evolved in a series of developmental stages labeled savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The stages were associated with racial differences, and modern European culture (and most especially, I suppose, the hated Prussian aristocracy) was at the highest level of this gradation. Wolf (1990, 168) describes the attack of the Boasians as calling into question “the moral and political monopoly of a [gentile] elite which had justified its rule with the claim that their superior virtue was the outcome of the evolutionary process.” Boas’s theories were also meant to counter the racialist theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (see SAID, Ch. 5) and American eugenicists like Madison Grant, whose book, The Passing of the Great Race (1921, 17), was highly critical of Boas’s research on environmental influences on skull size. The result was that “in message and purpose, [Boas’s anthropology] was an explicitly antiracist science” (Frank 1997, 741).

There’s nothing here to legitimize the insertion of “gentile” into Wolf’s quote and with it the implication that this had anything to do with Boas’ alleged goal of subverting gentile social structures for group benefit. This is simply bad scholarship.

Teachers and Students

When MacDonald earlier cited Stocking (1968, 149) for Boas’ “left-liberal posture which... is at once scientific and political,” implying a Jewish motive, he chose to omit the interjecting phrase, “as in the case of Rudolf Virchow.” The non-Jewish Professor Virchow, “the first eminent 19th-century German to argue for the intrinsic equality of races,” was significant in Boas’ intellectual development. This is a fact documented in Kluckhohn’s and Prufer’s (1959) mapping of Boas’ formative influences, which notes that a “number of features of Boas’ scientific thinking may be traced to Virchow” such as “his relative lack of interest in Darwinian evolution and his scepticism about Mendelian heredity.” With respect to anthropology, the authors mention one other influence in the person of Adolf Bastian, another critic of Darwinian evolution who “believed that there are no racial types which determine culture,” positing a “psychic unity of mankind” instead. The existence of such similar beliefs among Boas’ non-Jewish mentors calls into question just how confidently one can point to Boas’ Jewishness as the source for his eventual anthropological views, especially when MacDonald has no problem attributing the beliefs of Boas’ students to their teacher.

It’s also worth noting that while Boas matured at a time when Darwinism was still quite novel and expressed a “relative lack of interest” in it, he did not actually reject the theory outright, a common misconception MacDonald seems to hold to. Boas’ actual views of Darwinian evolution were most directly revealed in 2018 with the emergence of an unpublished lecture of his titled “The Relation of Darwin to Anthropology,” which largely approves of “the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time.” Ironically, notes Degler (1991, 135–6), it was Boas’ non-Jewish students who took things to the extreme:

Boas's emphasis upon the role of heredity in the individual should make crystal clear that at no time was he an extreme environmentalist. ... Kroeber, however, did not require a biological basis for his assumption that all human beings were equal in potentialities. As with Boas, that was the basic assumption with which he began. Unlike Boas, however, Kroeber frankly recognized that it was unproved assumption. (Boas took the more conservative or safer line: those who believed in race had made an unproved assumption.) … Boas also repeated his long-held view that, for the individual, as opposed to the social group, “physical and mental characteristics are hereditary,” as the eugenicists maintained, and that by proper selection “certain strains might be selected that have admirable qualities, while others might be suppressed that are not so favored.” ... Bateson had suggested that, given the physical diversity of peoples in the world, the possibility occurred to him that they differed in cognitive abilities as well. Mead would have nothing to do with the idea. … Unlike Boas and Kroeber, Mead was even fearful of admitting a place for genetic endowment in individuals

Regarding the influence of Boas’ students and followers, MacDonald continues:

In 1919 Boas could state that “most of the anthropological work done at the present time in the United States” was done by his students at Columbia (in Stocking 1968, 296). By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish. … Research on racial differences ceased, and the profession completely excluded eugenicists and racial theorists like Madison Grant and Charles Davenport. … According to Leslie White (1966, 26), Boas’s most influential students were Ruth Benedict, Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, and Leslie Spier. All of this “small, compact group of scholars... gathered about their leader” (White 1966, 26) were Jews with the exception of Kroeber, Benedict, and Mead. Frank (1997, 732) also mentions several other prominent first-generation Jewish students of Boas (Alexander Lesser, Ruth Bunzel, Gene [Regina] Weltfish, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, and Ruth Landes).

It should be noted that anthropologist Leslie White, on whom MacDonald again draws, was a career-long opponent of the Boasians, the source itself being a polemic he mailed out in 1966 as an attempt to discredit them; one recipient, Morris Opler, wrote back a biting critique. Aside from adding Jewish names to White’s list, MacDonald does not appear to actually attempt to quantify the Jewishness of Boas’ students in any rigorous way. Adams (2016) provides an alternative list of the “most influential students” — Clark Wissler, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin, Melville Herskovits, Elsie Parsons, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead — along with still-important figures he calls “journeymen” and “handmaidens” — Frank Speck, Alexander Goldenweiser, Fay-Cooper Cole, Leslie Spier, Melville Jacobs, Alexander Lesser, Gladys Reichard, Erna Gunther, Esther Goldfrank, Ruth Bunzel, Gene Weltfish, Ruth Underhill, Marian Smith, and Zora Neal Hurston. Among these, 12 of the 23 (52%) are Jewish, including four of the nine most prominent (44%). We can also defer to the German Wikipedia page for Boas, which has compiled a list of his “students who were also able to establish anthropological courses at the other larger US universities,” of whom six of 17 were Jewish at least at the time of writing (35%). For the (English-language) Boasian anthropology article, 10 of 20 are Jewish (50%). For the more complete list of students on Franz Boas’ page, the figure is 12 of 30 (40%). The students “who achieved the greatest public renown” in MacDonald’s estimation, however, were both non-Jewish as we’ll soon see.

Regarding MacDonald’s sentence, “By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish,” its source, Stocking (1968, 296), does not include the second clause. Stocking himself cites the (non-Jewish) Boasian Pliny E. Goddard, writing in The American Mercury Vol. VII, 1926, p. 316:

Among his pupils are the following: Professors Roland B. Dixon and Alfred M. Tozzer of Harvard; Professor Frank G. Speck and Dr. A. Irving Hallowell of the University of Pennsylvania; Professors Fay Cooper Cole and Edward Sapir of Chicago; Professors A. L. Kroeber and Robert H. Lowie of the University of California; Dr. Leslie Spier of the University of Washington; Dr. Truman Michelson of George Washington University; Dr. Gladys A. Reichard of Barnard College; Dr. Ruth F. Benedict of Columbia, and Dr. A. A. Goldenweiser of the New School for Social Research.

Of these 13 individuals who headed “every major department of anthropology in American universities,” it appears Sapir, Lowie, Spier, Goldenweiser were the only Jews (31%). The Jewishness of Boas’ students was clearly substantial, but then again so was the student body at Columbia University during Boas’ tenure; Steinberg (1974, 9) relates how before “Columbia instituted restrictive quotas after World War I, it had a Jewish enrollment of 40 percent” before declining to around 22% after said quotas, a figure on par with the contemporary Jewish share of New York City. It is a fact that however Jewish Boas’ movement could be said to have been, it wasn’t significantly more Jewish than could reasonably have been expected.

MacDonald then misleadingly presents the Jewishness of individual students of Boas:

Sapir’s family fled the pogroms in Russia for New York, where Yiddish was his first language. Although not religious, he took an increasing interest in Jewish topics early in his career and later became engaged in Jewish activism, particularly in establishing a prominent center for Jewish learning in Lithuania (Frank 1997, 735). Ruth Landes’s background also shows the ethnic nexus of the Boasian movement. Her family was prominent in the Jewish leftist subculture of Brooklyn, and she was introduced to Boas by Alexander Goldenweiser, a close friend of her father and another of Boas’s prominent students.

The characterization provided by Adams (2016, 5–6), however, is quite different:

Their sense of identity was strongly German, not Jewish, and they had left Europe partly in order to leave Jewishness behind. Middle class and mostly comfortably off, they felt no sense of kinship with the ill-educated, Yiddish-speaking east European Jews. The rise of Hitler brought out belatedly a sense of Jewishness in some, but by no means all of them. It is noteworthy that at least three of the Jewish Boasians married gentiles, while A. L. Kroeber, one of the few gentiles among them, married a Jew the first time around.

The lone exception, put first by MacDonald, is Edward Sapir, the Eastern European Jew of the bunch. Yet Adams (157–8) contradicts MacDonald’s interpretation here, too:

Always somewhat interested Jewish affairs, he was not a Zionist. On the contrary he felt that Jews in America over time would become as fully assimilated as all other immigrant groups, and would lose altogether their sense of separate identity. The rise of Hitler however caused him to modify his views and to begin speaking out against Naziism, and he helped to organize both a Conference on Jewish Relations and an Inter-University Committee on Jewish Social Science.

MacDonald’s own source concurs that “Sapir's interest in Jewish topics early in his career was strictly scientific” and only later under the exceptional condition of Nazism did he become “committed to Jewish activism.” Sapir also appears to have been mostly exogamous. These things were certainly more true for Alexander Goldenweiser who, according to his biography, A Maverick Boasian,

argued that there was nothing wrong with the assimilation of American Jews into mainstream society and asserted that the only way to eliminate anti-­Semitism altogether was to have the Jews mix with the other ethnic groups. … Goldenweiser did not see much worth in preserving Jewish religion or culture in America, be it Judaism, the Yiddish language, or specific ethnic customs and traditions from the Old World. A highly assimilated Jew, Goldenweiser was equally dismissive of Zionist ideology. (121–2)

Goldenweiser once opined on the situation of Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine in a way that can only be described as the kind of principled consistency MacDonald should be looking for in his search for the true psychological motivations of these people:

Here for once, the tables are reversed, and the Jew turns into a racial snob. … There are a certain number of Jews there, and ten times as many Arabs. The proportion is about that of the Negro to the white in this country, the Jews standing for the Negro. What would we think of a situation in the United States in which the white population would have to submit to government dominated by the Negro? Now look at Palestine! In the “democratic” organization of the new Jewish state, the Arab is outvoted and ruled against his will by the Jewish people with the assistance of foreign British police. This is the situation in Palestine. … Those same Arabs who centuries ago brought many elements of what is now our civilization with them to Spain, the very same Arabs, because today they are in a state of decay, because they are dirty, etc., etc., are regarded by the Jews as inferior, as a primitive race.

Why MacDonald brings up Ruth Landes is anyone’s guess. Landes was a later Boasian, graduating one year before Boas’ retirement in 1936 with Ruth Benedict as her main advisor; MacDonald in fact carefully omits that Frank (1997, 736) actually specifies Goldenweiser “introduced her to Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, both of whom strongly encouraged her to consider graduate work in anthropology.” I’m not sure where the “ethnic nexus” is. The biography of Ruth Landes is similarly problematic for MacDonald’s argument, presenting her as alienated by her Jewish upbringing. She initially married a Jewish man, as demanded by her parents, but divorced after two years as part of her revolt, initiating relationships with people like Ignacio Lutero Lopez and Edison Carneiro. A characteristic remark of Landes:

I was brought up so neutrally and in the last few years lived without “segregation” as a Jew — especially in Brazil and Louisiana. Nobody knew or cared, and I didn't either. I felt AMERICAN. Returning north to New York suddenly plunged me into a world that seemed fevered actually over these distractions. I was shocked. I was shocked to hear people use “race” widely here with what strikes me are the fixed ranked meanings in Nazi usage. And Jews are now calling themselves a “race”! To me, and I should think to all other Jews, America is such a generous, continuing experience that it goes “against nature” to particularize as Jewish or not.

I would not say even these Jewish students handpicked by MacDonald were “strongly-identified Jews.” Among the more typical Boasians was Robert H. Lowie — again apparently exogamous — who graduated in 1908 and, like Boas, strongly identified with German culture. According to Adams (112, 131–2) Lowie “retained all his life a compelling sense of attachment to all things German” and “felt that German achievements, then and since, were not being adequately recognized.”

The rise of Nazism created a painful dilemma for Lowie, a Jew who never lost his love for Germany; at least for German culture. Like so many Jews in Germany itself, he desperately wanted to believe that Nazism was a hideous aberration not representative of the true German character. He lamented Nazism not only for its atrocities (which until after World War II were not fully perceived on this side of the Atlantic), but equally because it placed Germany in such a bad light. Perhaps because of internal conflict, he never spoke out against Nazism until after World War II, even while Boas and others were expressing themselves vociferously. And even after the war he wrote Toward Understanding Germany (1954b) at least to try and soften the image created by Nazism; he continued to insist until his dying day that it was not truly representative of the German character. His only acknowledgment of his Jewish ancestry came in his defense of that book, “Some have even gone so far as to accuse me of having written an apology for the Germans; this notion is absurd, if for no other reason than that the Nazi regime liquidated almost all my German relatives.”

When MacDonald gets to the Boasians “who achieved the greatest public renown,” Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, his strategy is to cast them merely as the non-Jewish “spokespersons for a movement dominated by Jews,” citing the blind speculation of Efron (1994, 180) to claim Boas deliberately recruited them for this reason. He then acknowledges it was due to the influence of Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa and Benedict’s Patterns of Culture that “by the middle of the twentieth century, it was a commonplace for educated Americans to refer to human differences in cultural terms, and to say that ‘modern science has shown that all human races are equal.’” But this work only took off, so MacDonald says, because of “its promotion by Boas’s students” and the fact that, “as with Mead’s and Benedict’s work, he strenuously promoted and cited the work of people within the ingroup.” “The Boasian school,” he concludes, “thus came to resemble in a microcosm key features of Judaism as a highly collectivist group evolutionary strategy: a high level of ingroup identification, exclusionary policies, and cohesiveness in pursuit of common interests.”

Regarding the promotion of Mead’s work by Boasians, however, MacDonald’s source, Freeman (1991, 326–7), identifies by name the people he’s referring to:

With the backing of Boas and Malinowski, the leading anthropologists of the day, and with the assurance, as by Frederick O’Brien (author of Mystic Isles of the South Seas), that it was “an extraordinary accomplishment” in “the domain of erotics,” Coming of Age in Samoa, as Thomas (1980:358) has recorded, became “both a scholarly and a popular success.”

Boas is the only Jew here. Freeman then lists the “anthropologists who, in their professional publications, accepted and repeated Mead’s conclusions”: Hallowell, Herskovits, Hoebel, Henry, Beals, Hoijer, Whiting, Child, Murdock, and Honigmann. Herskovits is the only Jew I could at least identify. Yet among the three Boasians Freeman identifies as having had disagreements with Mead, Lowie, Sapir, and Radin were all Jewish. MacDonald’s source thus does not seem to justify his claims of ethnic networking being responsible for the success of the most influential popular works of Boasian anthropology. MacDonald doesn’t attempt to attribute Benedict’s success to this reason, however, despite Degler (1991, 206) writing “[n]o work spread the word of culture's triumph more broadly or effectively” and Benedict “made no secret of her ideological or moral purpose” against nationalism and “racial snobbery.” These are only the most blatant examples of non-Jewish activities being cast as examples of Jewish influence by MacDonald. As Cofnas (2018) summed up: “Although MacDonald sees them as puppets of Boas, another possibility is that Benedict, Mead, and Boas were leaders of a somewhat misguided scientific movement, with Boas being technically the ‘teacher’ because he happened to be a few years older, and Mead being the most influential.”

In portraying Boasian anthropology as part of “a highly collectivist group evolutionary strategy,” MacDonald stresses the movement’s apparent “authoritarianism” that other instances of the GES seem to have, Boas being “a patriarchal father figure.” This may be true, but it’s probably relevant that Stocking (1968) specifies this was commonplace: “[t]he organizational locus of anthropological activity was primarily in local institutions … In each of these, there was a dominant figure whose specific research interests, theoretical orientation, and institutional activities were important in shaping future developments.” Adams (2016, 27) claims this was a German tradition in anthropology as well.

“Boasian anthropology,” MacDonald writes, “also resembled traditional Judaism in another critical manner: It was highly authoritarian and intolerant of dissent.” He goes on to cite White (1966, 26–27) in arguing the separate breakings-away of Clark Wissler, Ralph Linton, and George Dorsey had to do with their being non-Jewish. To this end, he cites Kroeber (1956, 26) in describing how Dorsey, “an American-born gentile and a Ph.D. from Harvard, tried to gain admittance to the select group but failed.” But this is White’s quote, not Kroeber’s! Opler, whose critique of White I cited previously, rightly points out that “neither Dorsey, who made the complaint, nor Kroeber, who recorded it, suggests that religion or national origin was involved.” This is purely the speculation of disgruntled social scientists like White and MacDonald who feel personally menaced by Jewish ideologists. As for Wissler, it was his “increasing enchantment with biological determinism, eugenics, and the glorification of the Nordic that made the break inevitable”; apparently it’s not even clear there was such a break between Boas and Linton. Why Boas would be so biased against gentiles when it was Ruth Benedict who became his “second-self,” in the words of Mead Mead (1959, 346ff), and Marie Krackowizer who became his wife — entirely unclear. Perhaps MacDonaldian “self-deception” is to blame.

MacDonald then discusses the “cultural critique” of the Boasians:

Stocking (1989, 215-216) shows that several prominent Boasians, including Robert Lowie and Edward Sapir, were involved in the cultural criticism of the 1920s which centered around the perception of American culture as overly homogeneous, hypocritical, and emotionally and esthetically repressive (especially with regard to sexuality). Central to this program was creating ethnographies of idyllic cultures that were free of the negatively perceived traits that were attributed to Western culture. Among these Boasians, cultural criticism crystallized as an ideology of “romantic primitivism” in which certain non-Western cultures epitomized the approved characteristics Western societies should emulate.

Discussing the “discourse of cultural criticism in the early 1920s,” however, Stocking examples Robert Lowie and the non-Jewish Elsie Parsons whom MacDonald omits; Sapir promoted a view of romantic primitivism but stood in sharp contrast to Parsons in terms of sexual liberation, harboring “old-fashioned (Jewish?) ideas about ‘a woman’s place.’ (He wrote a couple of letters to the papers lamenting that the liberation of women was undermining the traditional fabric of society).” Stocking goes on to provide context for these organic progressive social trends of the era:

By 1920, many intellectuals had begun to question both these values and the idea of civilization in which they were embodied. The timing, extent, and thoroughness of this intellectual rebellion has been a matter of historiographical debate. … Whatever questioning of Victorian values had taken place prior to the war's outbreak, it was the horrible spectacle of the civilized nations of the West engaged in the mutual slaughter of their youth that forced many intellectuals to wonder if there were not some alternative to the values of what Ezra Pound called “a botched civilization” (1915).

Degler (1991, 187ff) further notes how

Prominent among the forces operating upon the psychologists, as among the anthropologists earlier, was the ideology of equality, the belief that an acceptance of racial differences denied equality of opportunity. And again, as with the anthropologists, the psychologists and others were moved by a feeling of guilt about the treatment and status accorded blacks and other racial minorities in their America. … The predisposition of social scientists—and Americans in general for that matter—to resist biological explanations for behavior was ruefully recognized as early as 1911 by the eugenicist Charles Davenport. He noted even then one of the prominent objections to eugenics was that people did not want to believe in the importance of heredity “on the ground that it is a pessimistic and fatalistic doctrine.” … Biological or hereditarian explanations for the differences in human group behavior, or, more precisely, assertions of differences in mental capacity between groups, were largely on the defensive for a good part of the period. From the nineteenth century onward, many American social scientists were predisposed to favor change and progress, social improvement and reform, an outlook that came to shape their response to explanations for human behavior. … The natural tendency of their world-view was to prefer an environmental or cultural explanation.

Relative to some of his contemporaries, Boas was not an extremist:

Boas's emphasis upon the role of heredity in the individual should make crystal clear that at no time was he an extreme environmentalist. Certainly not of the variety exemplified by his contemporary, behavioralist psychologist John Watson, who boasted that, if given a dozen healthy infants, he would “guarantee to take anyone at random and train him” to be able to enter any occupation regardless “of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.” … William I. Thomas, a rising sociologist at the University of Chicago, for example, does not seem ever to have held strong racist views about people of color. He claimed in a letter to Boas in 1907, for instance, that for the previous ten years he had been teaching a course “on the mental traits of the lower races” in which he had been arguing that “differences in mind are environmental in origin rather than innate.” … Thomas's role in convincing social scientists that race was an outmoded, or, more accurate, a misleading means of explaining differences in the behavior of social groups was both important and effective.

Of course this is very much in line with the argument of Cofnas, who points out that the theme of “romantic primitivism” MacDonald attributes to the Boasians has a deep history in the European Enlightenment. Cofnas quotes Rousseau:

The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state [of primitive life] was the least subject to upheavals and the best for man, and that he must have left it only by virtue of some fatal chance happening that, for the common good, ought never have happened. The example of savages, almost all of whom have been found in this state, seems to confirm that the human race had been made to remain in it always.

It’s unfortunate how not a word of MacDonald’s is devoted to these egalitarian social contexts, but we can probably guess why.

Finally, he finishes the section with discussion of the errors of Mead and Benedict and the folly of the idealization of primitive societies for their egalitarianism, libertinism, and, most controversially, relative lack of belligerence: “one consequence of the triumph of the Boasians was that there was almost no research on warfare and violence among the peoples studied by anthropologists.” From the perspective that emerges from Boasian-influenced research, “it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict.” In the modern West we’re by now mostly disabused of these obviously reductionist fantasies, but the missing context of the recency of the deadliest war in human history provides additional insights into why this belief may have had such broad appeal.

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In the final analysis, MacDonald fails to substantiate any of his key claims about Boasian anthropology and peddles highly distorted readings of the sources that betray serious ideological biases of his own. And yet despite more recent scholarship on Boas and his movement that should make the point abundantly clear, he does not seem to have relinquished any of his aforementioned positions. He repeats them, for example, in his replies to Eric Kaufmann:

It was a major objective of Jewish intellectual and political movements, particularly Boasian anthropology. By 1915 the Boasians controlled the American Anthropological Association and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board. By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas's students, the majority of whom were Jewish.

As well as in reply to Nathan Cofnas’ 2018 critique:

Cofnas does not dispute my evidence that Boas was a strongly identified Jew who saw his work as combatting anti-Semitism and that he was motivate by his hatred for the Prussian aristocracy.

However, whether this chapter was anomalously disingenuous or rather characteristic of the others in the book and series is yet for me to decide. Until then.