CofC: The Boasian School of Anthropology

reviewing Kevin MacDonald's claims about Franz Boas and his students

Oct 10, 2022

Preface

As far as I can tell, the existing discourse surrounding The Culture of Critique by Kevin MacDonald (documented here) has focused on scattered errors or uncertainties regarding the theory and its application. There’s yet to be a critical deep dive into the book and its claims. This is what I’m looking to provide, beginning with this article on the first part of chapter two, “The Boasian School Of Anthropology And The Decline Of Darwinism In The Social Sciences.” (I skip over chapter one because it deals with the theory itself, not examples of it in history.) Depending on how much time I’m able to devote to this, I plan on covering the second part of this chapter, as well as a few other chapters later on. When I feel I’ve assessed enough of the material he provides, I’ll review the theory of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy as a whole. In CofC, MacDonald stretches the scope of his research and analysis way past the domain of his specialty — evolutionary psychology — and uses history to apply and test his theory. Starting with a critical look at this process, then, will be useful in identifying any mistakes in the theory itself.

This article is organized into three parts, excluding this preface: Context & Summary, Textual Analysis, and Closing Thoughts. The first part provides context as well as a wholistic overview necessary for interpreting the information that follows; it probably will help to come back to this at the end, too. The second part goes passage-by-passage and analyzes just about every claim made in this area of the book. The third part wraps up by giving an impression of the chapter and considering the implications of my findings.

Credit is owed to Matt Cockerill for help with the proofreading of this article, as well as to The Problem Gene’s excellent video on MacDonald for turning my attention to the subject of Boas.

Context & Summary

In part one of this chapter, Kevin MacDonald portrays the Boasian school of anthropology, which typically downplayed genetics and Darwinian theories of evolution, as a Jewish movement aiming to advance the Jewish “Group Evolutionary Strategy” (henceforth GES). The school was very influential in removing racialist discourse from American academia and did involve a substantial number of Jewish contributors. MacDonald uses Boasianism as a vessel for assigning blame to Jews for the modern stigma against race.

But for this to be true, a few things must be proven. As MacDonald sets out to demonstrate, Boas and his students must be mostly Jewish and have a strong sense of Jewish identity. They must view their actions, consciously or subconsciously, as being attempts to further the continuity of the Jewish group, specifically by countering the antisemitism of the period which found its home, increasingly, in racialism. This must also be shown to be the driving force behind their actions, as opposed to just a small consideration. And he must prove, fundamentally, that it was Boasianism that brought about this liberal shift in academic and public thought. If we find that Boas and his students weren’t actually very Jewish or ethnocentric to that end, didn’t care much for antisemitism or the continuity of the Jews, were driven by other, unrelated factors, and that Boasianism was part of an organic trend of egalitarianism, then the GES thesis doesn’t hold water, here.

And it’s true: the Boasian school was a prominent part of an egalitarian trend that had already taken root in American scientific thought, and thus probably wasn’t the necessary ingredient in it. This trend, in large part, stemmed from the Enlightenment’s glorification of the primitive world and critique of developed Europe, and was beginning to show itself again right before Boas came on the scene:

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)

Boas was, in fact, in league with many gentile contemporaries who held similar views.

Regarding the man himself, we must deal with his background, or where he really got his views from, as well as his Jewishness which is MacDonald’s explanation for them. Boas was born immersed in the German liberal milieu of his family. He was educated and brought into the field in Germany by the prominent gentile anthropologists Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow, both ahead of their time for their proactive anti-racism. Adams (2016, 19ff) identifies many aspects of the Boasian school that are actually German in origin, expected since (gentile) Germans were at the forefront of the field. The emphasis on culture at the heart of Boasianism was totally borrowed from Germans like Gottfried Herder or the Kulturwissenschaft of the Baden School, cited by many Boasians as being influential, as well as the rejection of cultural evolution in favor of diffusion of Fritz Graebner or Wilhelm Schmidt.

In sum, the things that Boas and his students brought to anthropology from their German background were egalitarianism, a view of culture as the primary determinant in human behavior, a particularistic view that every culture was interesting and important in its own right, a tendency to idealize the cultures they studied, a preference for historical rather than evolutionary explanations for cultural development, with a special emphasis on diffusion, and a highly particularized, trait-list approach to ethnography.

The migration of the ‘48ers brought German liberals into the burgeoning center of American culture and, by extension, their ideas. They formed what was known as the Kleindeutschland, and many ended up joining arms with the Union while American Jews were torn. As one put it, referencing the Prussian aristocracy which MacDonald keeps attributing to Boas as evidence of Jewish subversion: “Much the same as it is in Germany, the free and industrious people of the North are fighting against the lazy and haughty Junker spirit of the South. Down with the aristocracy . . . and may industrious and free men revive the glorious soil of the South” (Long Island Wins). Franz Boas would have been part of the end of this migration.

It seems that any intelligent person in this setting would have performed very similarly to Boas, but is there an alternative, Jewish hypothesis that MacDonald can substantiate? MacDonald claims that Boas, and to a good extent his Jewish students with him, were “alienated from and hostile toward gentile culture,” and that he had a “strong Jewish identification and that he was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism.” But, as we will see, MacDonald’s evidence to these ends is incredibly weak or non-existent. Far from being hostile, Boas took pride in his German heritage and identified as a German far more than as a Jew. He was also exogamous, being married to a Catholic Austrian woman despite MacDonald’s claim to contrary, and on top of the fact that he didn’t express specific concern about antisemitism, he explicitly advocated for the end to Jewish group continuity via assimilation as its only answer. At one point, he actually declined a request to condemn antisemitism by writing “If you want a note in which I accuse at the same time the Jews for their anti-Negro attitude I will write it." Finally, Boas’ egalitarianism was universal, being applied to women and “the potential worth, the ultimate equality, of the retarded boy” (Goldschmidt 1959, 2), not exclusively race, and even then primarily concerned with civil rights for Blacks rather than with combatting racial antisemitism. It’s possible that he was simply being conscientious and deceitful, here, not wanting to give his ethnic motivations away, but as we see from his protestations toward American involvement against Germany in WWI, Boas was not a man who let anticipated repercussions get in the way of his values. As someone who self-identified and was identified by others as a German, he and those like him were viewed with intense suspicion — an analogue to suspicion toward Boas had he spent his career focused on antisemitism.

Regarding Boas’ students, the successful ones were about a third to half Jewish depending on how you count. This becomes much less surprising when one considers that 40% of Columbia’s student body was Jewish at the time. Among the Jewish students, very similar attitudes can be found: German identity, indifference to antisemitism and Jewish assimilation, etc. Some gentile students seemed to have actually been more radical than Boas or their Jewish peers, and two, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, were the most impactful 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 MacDonald explains this away by attributing their success to Boas, totally absent evidence. This serves as a prime example of the unfalsifiability of the CofC thesis.

Overall, we find that Boasian anthropology as a movement was not guided by Jewish interests, and was in all likelihood an inevitable occurrence that exacerbated existing trends finalized by WWII and the Holocaust and their associated stigma against race and biology. It’s almost certainly not true, nor is it argued here, that Jewish interests were entirely irrelevant to all this; they may have played a role in the minds of some Jewish anti-racists in academia. After all, the few Black scientists of the era, also coming from a community afflicted with racism, were uniformly anti-racist in their outlook because of ethnic and self-interest. While in most of the cases dealt with in this article, this can pretty much be ruled out entirely, the necessary question MacDonald fails to ask is whether the alleged Jewish concerns of an individual inspired the relevant outcome. It can’t reasonably be argued that the activism of a Jewish anti-racist is Jewish itself if there were other, stronger motivating forces at play, i.e., if they would’ve been an anti-racist even had they not even been Jewish. MacDonald is, however, comfortable providing in most cases not even evidence of Jewish interests but of a Jewish identification, or simply a Jewish upbringing and life experiences, in a person. As argued later, this is also insufficient proof:

While many of the leading Jewish Bolsheviks or revolutionaries had childhood experiences with pogroms that most likely contributed to their later political outlook, they were still almost uniformly universalists unconcerned with Jewish particularism. Any child experiencing the effects of discrimination may understandably see a greater appeal in universalist politics, but this doesn’t mean a deep care for the interests of the group on whose behalf they were being persecuted comes along for the ride. [More on this if I get around to reviewing Ch. 3: “Jews And The Left.”]

MacDonald classes all expressions of opposition to antisemitism as evidence of Jewish interests at work. He fails to demarcate instances where one opposes antisemitism as part of their opposition to racism — which would be expected for any opponent of racism, Jewish or not — or where they oppose antisemitism as it directly impacts them. If someone directly faces antisemitic persecution, then their opposition to it is self-interested, not necessarily group-interested, and thus can’t reasonably be used as evidence of ethnocentrism.

In this chapter, especially in its second part, MacDonald is at great pains to document the errors of individual Jewish anti-racist scholars. Most of the time, this isn’t necessary and becomes superfluous to the claim that said scholar is biased. The reason for this behavior is likely the same as why MacDonald includes this chapter — the Jewish-led attack on race and evolution — first: since he works in this field, MacDonald likely feels personally assailed by this Jewish menace. As one reads the chapter, this impression is easy to notice and something personal between MacDonald and the Jews he criticizes does appear at work.

Finally, one of the many flaws with Kevin MacDonald’s work is his insistence upon buttressing his arguments with heavily-speculative and little-evidenced remarks from other authors, despite these opinions themselves often being questionable or even contradicted by a thousand other authorities that could’ve been cited just as easily. In other words, instead of offering the primary sourcing and evidence for particular claims he’s looking to prove, he very frequently cites the second-hand opinion of someone else, lest his arguments be exposed for what they are: too heavily reliant on personal speculation. (“Hey, don’t take my word for it, take theirs!”) One should generally cite the evidence for the claim another author brings up rather than the claim itself along with an attribution to said author, which is nothing but an appeal to their authority; if they didn’t provide evidence, either, then you leave their claim alone. This is a pattern that will be seen throughout this chapter.

MacDonald relies on missing context and unfounded speculation to further his narrative, less so on outright lies. Of the lies and mistruths that can be found in chapter two, the following are most explicit:

(p. 23) That “Boas married within his ethnic group.”
(p. 23) That Boas ever stated “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?” Could the associated wrongful citation also have been a way to abate fact-checking?
(p. 25) That the majority of Boas’ students, and more specifically those who headed major universities, were Jewish.
(p. 27) That Alfred Kroeber described George A. Dorsey as “an American-born gentile and a Ph.D. from Harvard, [who] tried to gain admittance to the select group but failed.”

Textual Analysis

p. 20:

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. Lévi-Strauss interacted extensively with Boas and acknowledged his influence (Dosse 1997 I, 15, 16). In turn, Lévi-Strauss was very influential in France, Dosse (1997 I, xxi) describing him as “the common father” of Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. He had a strong Jewish identity and a deep concern with anti-Semitism (Cuddihy 1974, 151ff). . . .

MacDonald prefaces his faulty assertions about Boas’ Jewish identity and strategy with equally tenuous remarks about a pioneer of Structuralism (and structuralist anthropology to be specific), an intellectual movement dominated by French gentiles. His claim that Lévi-Strauss “had a strong Jewish identity and a deep concern with anti-Semitism” is not substantiated by his citation of Cuddihy’s pertinent chapter in Ordeal of Civility.

p. 21:

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)

But it is entirely beyond question that MacDonald knew exactly how Eribon posed this assertion to Lévi-Strauss. Although the full work from which this passage is taken is unavailable to me, I will quote from a secondary source which gives a much fuller picture than MacDonald does:

Didier Eribon: 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.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss: That doesn’t bother me. We’re not [of a] pure mind, and it seems natural for me, especially as an anthropologist, to size someone up by putting him in his context. . . . I admit that certain mental attitudes are perhaps more common among Jews than elsewhere.
D.E.: For example? . . .
(Frank 1997) [Note: MacDonald also cites Frank (1997), too, in this chapter many times.]

In other words, MacDonald knew that Lévi-Strauss did not claim a Jewish identity and, in fact, as was common in his milieu (more on this in the discussion about Boas), viewed assimilation as the answer to the Jewish question, being raised in a fairly assimilated, secular family himself. This much is argued independently by anthropologist Melvin Konner in his 2009 obituary “Lévi-Strauss: He Changed How We See Culture, but Ignored His Own”:

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. . . . From his youth, Lévi-Strauss identified first and foremost — perhaps solely — as a Frenchman. . . . In the early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss returned to France, where, in spite of everything, he felt he truly belonged. . . . All these social thinkers lived and wrote as if their Jewishness was something to ignore, evade or criticize. None seems to have considered himself and his work a manifestation of centuries-old patterns of Jewish argument refracted through the prism of modernity. . . . 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.

Similarly, David Damrosch (1995) opines that, while rejecting the alignment with European nationality of a Jew like Franz Boas, Lévi-Strauss was “deeply estranged from an ethnicity that the wider culture will never let him forget.”

But Lévi-Strauss was the grandson of the rabbi of Versailles with whom he lived for a time as a child (Cuddihy 1974, 158), and was even forced to leave France by the Nazis. (And these details aren’t at all deceptively hidden by Lévi-Strauss but are actually to be found at the start of his most famous work, Tristes Tropiques.) All this means is that such uniquely Jewish experiences likely did have an impact on him, to whatever extent, but this must not be confused with leaving an indelible mark of ethnocentrism or Jewish concern that would later infiltrate or inspire his anthropological work. While many of the leading Jewish Bolsheviks or revolutionaries had childhood experiences with pogroms that most likely contributed to their later political outlook, they were still almost uniformly universalists unconcerned with Jewish particularism. Any child experiencing the effects of discrimination may understandably see a greater appeal in universalist politics, but this doesn’t mean a deep care for the interests of the group on whose behalf they were being persecuted comes along for the ride. As Boas wrote: “My ideals have developed because I am what I am and have lived where I have lived” (Patterson 2020, 47). The same, by all meaningful evidence including that of MacDonald himself, is true for Claude Lévi-Strauss; in other words his relevant conclusions that Lévi-Strauss “had a strong Jewish identity and a deep concern with anti-Semitism” are left unfounded, the result of wishful albeit baseless thinking. If there’s still an argument to be had as to whether Lévi-Strauss had a connection to his Jewishness that included special concern for Jewish considerations, it’s entirely untrue that it was “strong” and “deep” and thus cannot be used to advance MacDonald’s thesis.

p. 21:

Like many Jewish intellectuals discussed here, Lévi-Strauss’s writings were 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. Like Boas, Lévi-Strauss rejected biological and evolutionary theories. He theorized that cultures, like languages, were arbitrary collections of symbols with no natural relationships to their referents. Lévi-Strauss rejected Western modernization theory in favor of the idea that there were no superior societies. The role of the anthropologist was to be a “natural subversive or convinced opponent of traditional usage” (in Cuddihy 1974, 155) in Western societies, while respecting and even romanticizing the virtues of non-Western societies (see Dosse 1997 II, 30). . . .

This second strain of evidence MacDonald seemingly takes as self-evident proof for Lévi-Strauss’ Jewishness is his work as an anthropologist. B does not follow from A unless you already assume what it is MacDonald is attempting to prove before he actually proves it.

To this end, he cites professor Mark Lilla:

Levi-Strauss’s most significant works were all published during the breakup of the French colonial empire and contributed enormously to the way it was understood by intellectuals... [H]is elegant writings worked an aesthetic transformation on his readers, who were subtly made to feel ashamed to be Europeans... [H]e evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference... [H]is writings would soon feed the suspicion among the new left... that all the universal ideas to which Europe claimed allegiance—reason, science, progress, liberal democracy—were culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference. (Lilla 1998, 37)

Here’s the quote sans omission, with strikethroughs added over the omitted portions:

Levi-Strauss's most significant works were all published during the breakup of the French colonial empire and contributed enormously to the way it was understood by intellectuals. Sartre was much engaged in anti-colonial politics and saw in Third World revolutions the birth of a "new man," as he put it in his passionate preface to Frantz Fanon's Les Damnees de la terre (1961). Levi-Strauss never engaged in polemics over decolonization or the Algerian War. Nonetheless, his elegant writings worked an aesthetic transformation on his readers, who were subtly made to feel ashamed to be European[s]. ~~Using the rhetorical gifts he learned from Rousseau,~~ he evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference. ~~And though Levi-Strauss may not have intended it,~~ his writings would soon feed the suspicion among the new left ~~that grew up in the Sixties~~ that all the universal ideas to which Europe claimed allegiance—reason, science, progress, liberal democracy—were culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference.

A few things to note. In spite of MacDonald’s misleading omission, Lilla clarifies that the effects of Lévi-Strauss’ writings on the French New Left can’t be chalked up to any intent or responsibility of his own. Furthermore, it’s telling that MacDonald felt the need to omit the few words describing Lévi-Strauss’ own gentile influence, the immensely impactful Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Enlightenment thought — this is a point we’ll come back to.

In the end, we can see a highly misleading portrait of the identity, motives, and beliefs of this first Jewish social scientist.

p. 22:

Degler (1991, 61) emphasizes the role of Franz Boas in the anti-Darwinian transformation of American social science: “Boas’ influence upon American social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated.” Boas engaged in a “life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups. He accomplished his mission largely through his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture” (p. 61). “Boas, almost single-handedly, developed in America the concept of culture, which, like a powerful solvent, would in time expunge race from the literature of social science” (p. 71).

This is accurate. This is what Degler says, and the picture is true if a bit sensational. The conclusions are yet to be proven or even laid out.

p. 22:

As Frank (1997, 731) points out, “The preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations has been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline.” Jewish identifications and the pursuit of perceived Jewish interests, particularly in advocating an ideology of cultural pluralism as a model for Western societies, has been the “invisible subject” of American anthropology—invisible because the ethnic identifications and ethnic interests of its advocates have been masked by a language of science in which such identifications and interests were publicly illegitimate.

Frankly, an “ordeal of civility” is to be expected, at least in terms of the “standard histories of the discipline,” although Frank chalks it up to a “tone of liberal humanism and cosmopolitanism” that permeates the field; concerns that dwelling on the matter could discredit the field due to the proclivity of antisemites to discrediting fields; and plain, old “indifference.” Frank does note that there hasn’t been total silence on the matter otherwise, but that, to the contrary, “[t]here has always been a lively, if sometimes hushed, in-house discourse about American anthropology's Jewish origins and their meaning.” Do note that MacDonald’s last observation does not come from Frank (who defines the “invisible subject” of the sciences in general as any of the ideological motivations that often stand behind them) and is instead the thesis MacDonald has yet to prove.

p. 23:

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).

Frank (1997) mentions nothing of the sort regarding Boas’ marriage, the single remark being “Boas married Marie Krackowizer, Ernst’s daughter, in 1887, the year he emigrated to America” (733). Frank mentions Ernst as a friend of a friend of Boas’ mother, and as a leader in the 1848 Austrian revolt. Not much has been written about Mary, but Darnell and Gleach (2019) attest otherwise: “He wed Marie Krackowizer, who was an Austrian Catholic, the daughter of a prominent Austrian physician” (62). It can also be confirmed that Ernst was a Catholic (Lewis 2014, 175) Austrian born in Spital am Pyhrn to a liberal imperial official (Jacobi 1875). It seems MacDonald may have assumed Krackowizer was a Jewish surname, but none of those who share it appear to be Jews. So as it turns out, Boas actually engaged in exogamy, at odds with usual displays of ethnocentrism.

The question of Boas’ attitudes toward antisemitism is somewhat trickier and should be understood in the context of the immediately following entry amid discussion of Boas’ self-identity. For now, I will comment on the evidence offered here by MacDonald, which 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 intriguing, and most unlike Boas. I checked the citation of Sorin (1997), which doesn’t even contain half as many pages as the cited page would suggest minimum, or even mention the word “Boas” on any of those pages. So I checked Sorin (1985), as well, seeing it in the bibliography and assuming a simple citing error: same deal. I then searched the quote verbatim on Google: nothing. It turns out that, upon searching in Google Books, there appears to be a single, totally different source for this quote: a footnote from Chase (1977, 632). This must be the correct source given the aligning page number and the fact it involves a personal account by the author. Here’s what it says:

Scholars familiar with the history of scientific racism have wondered why Jewish scientists, such as Boas and Myerson, ever had anything to do with the clearly anti-Semitic eugenics movement. Boas, as a matter of fact, had long since denounced the eugenics movement when he inserted a clause into his will in 1924 leaving his vast collection of anthropometric measurements, notes, and other data to the library of the Eugenics Record Office, headed by Davenport. This was because, with its own collection of height, weight, and other body measurements, the Eugenics Record Office was as of 1924 America's largest archive of the raw data of physical anthropology. Four years later, however, when Columbia University, where Boas was professor and chairman of the Department of Anthropology, started its own Department of Physical Anthropology, Boas informed Davenport that he had revoked the 1924 will and had now left his anthropometric data to Columbia University. Not long ago, I asked an aging American writer who is Jewish and, when younger, had known Boas how people like Boas and Myerson could have any dealings with anti-Semites such as Davenport and Osborn. He answered with a question of his own: "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?"

So then, not only is this quote not from Boas and therefore irrelevant, the context actually gives us an interesting piece of information: clearly Boas wasn’t so bothered by antisemites if he was actually working with them. Professor Herbert Lewis (2001) adds that “[h]e had earlier urged Charles B. Davenport to join him in an effort to get funding for a major study of U.S. army soldiers before they were discharged, in an effort to test questions of heredity versus environment” (457).

Indeed, any concern Boas may have had for antisemitism in his youth when it was directly and possibly violently affecting him as an individual was left behind as an adult. MacDonald cites White (1966), one of his favorite sources that we’ll examine later, for the claim that Boas was "intensely concerned with anti-Semitism from an early period.” White in turn cites “Kluckhohn and Prufer, 1959, p. 10 [and 11]”:

In this and in various other respects Boas was undoubtedly influenced by the position of Jews in 19th century Germany (cf. Dubnov 1929:38, ff., 325). 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 (cf. Lowie 1954: 107, 316). 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.

The authors are unfortunately not too specific, here, and the referenced letters aren’t accessible. What we do know is that apparently Boas was confronted with antisemitism in his youth. Again, reacting negatively toward something that negatively impacts you as an individual is not sufficient evidence of “intense” concern for the wellbeing of your group, let alone evidence of a GES. And White baselessly construes this as an ongoing concern, something which MacDonald picks up, casting transient, youthful experiences as concern stemming “from an early period,” rather than “at an early period.” As we will soon see, in his adult life Boas “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” (Adams 2016, 16).

Lewis (2001) provides a very insightful incident in which Boas rejected a request to condemn Father Coughlin from the pulpit of science and academe:

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." (459) [Interestingly enough, this was not the only perception that Jews were racist; e.g., see Cyril Darlington’s remarks on pages 23–4.]

Finally, Kroeber’s hearsay doesn’t challenge any of this. As quoted in full in Frank (1997), which is without a doubt where MacDonald got it:

He emerged from his four years with several deep facial scars from sabre cuts received in duelling. Later on he turned aside questions about these by referring to polar bear clawings in Baffinland. As of the “Mosaic confession," as his dissertation Vita phrases it, he would presumedly [sic] have been ineligible to the conservative Korps which were the German equivalent of American fraternities and practiced sabre fencing; though he was a member of a more liberal Burschenschaft, the Alemannia. One story which he is said to have revealed confidentially but which cannot be vouched for, is 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 later knew him in America.

MacDonald presents this anecdote as if Boas reacted violently just about any time he heard someone say something antisemitic. But he leaves out the fact that this was an insult on Boas’ character he was objecting to, antisemitic or not, and it’s likely his personal pride that Kroeber was referencing when he said “the tale absolutely fits the character of the man.” MacDonald also leaves out the reason why Kroeber brings up the story: he was discussing the young Boas’ and many other students’ affinity toward dueling. A duel isn’t such an inordinate response when you realize how commonplace it was:

Franz Boas fought his first duel in 1877, when he was nineteen. He was freshly arrived at the University of Heidelberg, where saber fencing over slights, known as Mensur, was ingrained in undergraduate culture. And the slight in question was, indeed, slight: Boas shared the rental payments on his piano with a classmate, who banged away for hours at a time. The students downstairs protested, Boas took offense. Words were exchanged, satisfaction demanded. Three weeks later, he and another student drew swords. The Mensur had its rules and conventions, which involved a stopwatch, a surgeon, an umpire, and, for the combatants, goggles and padded garments. You saved face by slashing at another’s. (This article also goes into greater detail.)

In the end we have three weak pieces of evidence, one nonexistent, to demonstrate Boas’ (specific) concern with antisemitism, which if extant was only so, the evidence points, during his younger years, before he’d developed any of his social science work. A final note from earlier should be reiterated:

All this means is that such uniquely Jewish experiences likely did have an impact on him, but this must not be confused with leaving an indelible mark of ethnocentrism or Jewish concern that would later infiltrate or inspire his anthropological work. While many of the leading Jewish Bolsheviks or revolutionaries had childhood experiences with pogroms that most likely contributed to their later political outlook, they were still almost uniformly universalists unconcerned with Jewish particularism. Any child experiencing the effects of discrimination may understandably see a greater appeal in universalist politics, but this doesn’t mean a deep care for the interests of the group on whose behalf they were being persecuted comes along for the ride. As Boas wrote: “My ideals have developed because I am what I am and have lived where I have lived” (Patterson 2020, 47).

p. 23:

I conclude that Boas had a strong Jewish identification and that he was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism. On the basis of the following, it is reasonable to suppose that his concern with anti-Semitism was a major influence in the development of American anthropology.

A crucial part of Boas’s beliefs remains conspicuously absent. To quote from Boas’ 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. . . .
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. [bold added]

In other words, Boas takes his conclusions about race and ethnic continuity and applies them consistently to his own ethnic group, Jews. The entire point of the GES propounded by MacDonald has been that it allows for the continuation of the group, that it engenders strong tendencies within the individuals of a group to care for the collective and its reproduction into the future — recall MacDonald just a moment ago unconvincingly remarking that Lévi-Strauss’ beliefs validate “the position of Judaism as a non-assimilating group.” And to quote the preface of The Culture of Critique when MacDonald gives his beliefs being applied to “Jewish” movements like Boasian anthropology:

An 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.

This is quite clearly not the case with Boas. Even if all the prior discussion about Boas’ (lack of) concern with antisemitism is thrown out, it would not matter in terms of MacDonald’s thesis if this is the only solution he sees for it.

However, better yet, we again know with certainty that MacDonald has deliberately omitted an inconvenient and utterly self-refuting detail due to the fact that this quotation of Boas’ appears in Leslie White’s article cited by MacDonald multiple times within this chapter and without: “The Social Organization of Ethnological Theory,” p. 17. The quote is, in fact, ubiquitous: see Glick (1982, 557), Degler (1989, 9), Degler (1991, 80), Morris-Reich (2008, 34), Anderson (2019, 60), e.g.

The likely reality of the situation is this illuminated by Glick (1982): throughout his life, Franz Boas was by identity primarily a German or German-American (who probably “never identified himself in his public writings as Jewish”) and “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 agreement is Damrosch (1995, 1), cited earlier.) 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.” Rather, he displayed considerable partiality to Germany:

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.

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.

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 its corresponding threat to Jewish individuals and community — or, as Boas would have it, its threat to “the old cultural values of Germany” (Stocking 1992, 107) — 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 most 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 cultures in which he grew up, despite its increasing antisemitism and hostility toward him as an individual and as a type. In 1933, even in such unprecedented events, 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 other words, when Boas referred to the disappearance of “the last vestige of the Jew as a Jew,” he was really referring to his own personal development. As was seen in “The Problem of the American Negro”:

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. (546)

The late anthropologist William Yewdale Adams (2016) is 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. (63)

Historian Douglas Cole in his biography of Boas agrees as well, saying that “[h]e was an 'ethnic' German, preserving and promoting German culture and values in America” (Cole 1999, 280).

Cole maintains that although Boas had youthful encounters with antisemitism, he refused to consider whether any of his professional difficulties were related to anti-Semitic attitudes: "while his early career coincided with a rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and America, his difficulties can all be explained by other factors. Significantly, Boas never attributed any of them to prejudice" (281). Boas insisted that there was never anti-Semitic bias among his colleagues. (Darnell and Gleach 2019, 62)

Clearly there’s not much Jewishness going on here, and certainly no disdain for “gentile culture” as MacDonald would have it. Only a very questionable reading of the sources could lead one to a conclusion so remote from the facts.

pp. 23–4:

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). When Margaret Mead wanted to persuade Boas to let her pursue her research in the South Sea islands, “She hit upon a sure way of getting him to change his mind. ‘I knew there was one thing that mattered more to Boas than the direction taken by anthropological research. This was that he should behave like a liberal, democratic, modern man, not like a Prussian autocrat.’ The ploy worked because she had indeed uncovered the heart of his personal values” (Degler 1991, 73). . . .
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).
Grant characterized Jewish immigrants as ruthlessly self-interested whereas American Nordics were committing racial suicide and allowing themselves to be “elbowed out” of their own land (1921, 16, 91). Grant also believed Jews were engaged in a campaign to discredit racial research: . . .

As we saw in the previous comments, Boas was not opposed to European or “gentile culture,” or German culture, at least. Degler (1991, 200) mentions nothing of the sort. Stocking (1968, 150) in fact contradicts the claim by emphasizing that, despite “considerable alienation from the Germany of his own day” (a statement which can be easily misconstrued if uninformed of the evidence given previously), Boas felt “a profound identification with classical German culture.” The sentence goes on to add “. . . and the revolutionary ideals of 1848,” and indeed Boas’ dislike of the “Prussian aristocracy” in particular was characteristic of all German liberals regardless of ethnicity or ethnic motivations. As mentioned before, Boas was reared in these values from infancy, so it’s understandable that they left an impression: “The background of my early thinking was a German home in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force” (“An Anthropologist’s Credo”).

For these reasons, 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’s alleged Jewish aims of subverting gentile social structures for group benefit. It’s not “difficult to avoid” MacDonald’s thesis when, as with Lévi-Strauss, MacDonald is simply using the beliefs of Boas, themselves skewed through a biased lens, as evidence for their own motivations. The question MacDonald is asking is what motivated Boas to hold his beliefs; it’s circular to then use his own beliefs to answer for his motives.

Likewise, his suspected opposition to Madison Grant, who also happened to oppose Jews and other racial foreigners, is no reason to prove that it’s “difficult to avoid the conclusion that ethnic conflict played a major role in the development of American anthropology.” If MacDonald’s at-length description of The Passing of the Great Race is rather an attempt to shock the reader at the fact that claims of Jewish anti-racism (which by themselves do not vindicate the GES thesis) were made so long ago, then it should be noted that Grant’s claims are anecdotal, and could just as easily have been swapped for Cyril Darlington’s remarks that he’s regarded as a racist by “everyone except the Jews, who are racist, and who utterly agree with my views” (Harman 2004, 260).

p. 24:

An important technique of the Boasian school was to cast doubt on general theories of human evolution, such as those implying developmental sequences, by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior, as well as the relativism of standards of cultural evaluation. The Boasians argued that general theories of cultural evolution must await a detailed cataloguing of cultural diversity, but in fact no general theories emerged from this body of research in the ensuing half century of its dominance of the profession (Stocking 1968, 210). Because of its rejection of fundamental scientific activities such as generalization and classification, Boasian anthropology may thus be characterized more as an anti-theory than a theory of human culture (White 1966, 15). Boas also opposed research on human genetics—what Derek Freeman (1991 [actually, 1990], 198) terms his “obscurantist antipathy to genetics.”

If Boas’ general opposition to the strand of science MacDonald prefers hasn’t been proven to, ultimately, be due to his Jewish origins — and in fact almost certainly was not — then what was its source? In other words, is there a known null hypothesis as to causes of Boas’ beliefs that MacDonald has failed to disprove in favor of his alternative? How would one ordinarily go about this, i.e., where might one look in general when trying to search for the origins of an academic’s general persuasion? The answer is obvious: their teachers. Boas did not develop these ideas in a vacuum as he was searching for an ethnocentric solution to Jewish issues (not that this is necessarily what MacDonald believes). If it can be shown that the teachers Boas happened to encounter at his time in German universities fostered the beliefs he came to have, then MacDonald truly has nothing to offer us on the matter.

And, perhaps not so shockingly, this is basically what we find. The intellectual milieu Boas was reared in was not (yet) a solidly Darwinian one. In Kluckhohn and Prufer’s (1959) “Influences during the Formative Years,” Boas’ academic and intellectual influences are exhaustively mapped. One of them, Adolf Bastian, was a critic of Darwinian evolution and “believed that there are no racial types which determine culture” (18–19). Bastian posited a “psychic unity of mankind” which held that humans all share the same basic mental makeup, regardless of race or origin. Rudolf Virchow was the only other influential mentor of Boas’ who happened to deal with anthropology, and “was the first eminent 19th-century German to argue for the intrinsic equality of races” (22). Although Kluckhohn and Prufer insist Virchow didn’t reject Darwinism as a theory but viewed it as unproven, he was known to have vehemently resisted it at every step, and was reported to have exclaimed “it is quite certain that man did not descend from the apes.” If it truly must be pointed out, both of these mentors were gentiles. According to Kluckhohn and Prufer, it’s to Virchow that Boas’ relevant beliefs may be traced:

A number of features of Boas’ scientific thinking may be traced to Virchow. We may instance his relative lack of interest in Darwinian evolution and his scepticism about Mendelian heredity. Dr. Cecil Yampolsky remembers conversations with his father-in-law in which their doubts of Mendel's theory were discussed and in which they agreed that LaMarck was still to be reckoned with.

When MacDonald earlier cited George Stocking (1968, 149) in describing Boas as “at once scientific and political,” he omitted the interjecting phrase, “as in the case of Rudolf Virchow.” In other words, here we have an influential and very prominent gentile committed to the very same ideals as Boas, and he, the elder, intellectually begot Boas. And, as it happens, Frank (1997, 733–4), one of MacDonald’s prime sources, must’ve let him know about all this:

Virchow, a non-Jew born in 1821 in Prussian-occupied Pomerania, had founded the new biomedical field of cellular pathology and also pioneered the progressive use of physical anthropology using measurements of bodily traits to disprove the racial premise of a single German volk (Nuland 1988). Boas studied physical anthropology with him from 1885 to 1886. “Although his physical anthropological training with Virchow was limited,” Stocking states, “Boas' later eulogy of Virchow and the character of his own physical anthropology leave no doubt of Virchow's influence”

But although there was certainly a “lack of interest” by Boas (which “probably emanated from Virchow”), this was not out of a wholesale rejection of Darwin, and MacDonald parrots a common misconception of his school of thought. (Note: while MacDonald doesn’t seem to come out explicitly and state that Boas was an anti-Darwinian, the implications throughout the chapter entitled “The Boasian School and the Decline of Darwinism” are obvious and worth clarifying.) Boas’ actual views on Darwinian evolution were most clearly revealed in 2018 with the emergence of an unpublished lecture, “The Relation of Darwin to Anthropology,” in which he largely approvingly appraises “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” (hisanthro.org).

Ironically, as notes Degler (1991), it was Boas’ gentile 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. (81) . . . 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.) (92) . . . Unlike Kroeber, however, 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." (148) . . . 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. "As long as people tend to move so quickly from concepts of diversity to concepts of superiority," her daughter reported her saying, "and as long as mental variation is treated in terms of such crude and culturally biased aggregate quantity as I.Q., this question cannot and should not be studied." Unlike Boas and Kroeber, Mead was even fearful of admitting a place for genetic endowment in individuals, though privately, according to her daughter, she "always remained convinced that her own uniqueness was partially genetic." Her daughter recalled, too, that Mead was always apprehensive that "any effort to deal with these matters would lead to distortions by those who evoke the old crude dichotomy of nature versus nurture and misuse biological explanations to justify social facts.” (135–6)

And from here we also know that Boas was decidedly less radical than even his two gentile teachers, in light of their aforementioned beliefs.

pp. 25, 28:

By 1915 the Boasians controlled the American Anthropological Association and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board (Stocking 1968, 285). 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. His protégé Melville Herskovits (1953, 23) noted that the four decades of the tenure of [Boas’s] professorship at Columbia gave a continuity to his teaching that permitted him to develop students who eventually made up the greater part of the significant professional core of American anthropologists, and who came to man and direct most of the major departments of anthropology in the United States. In their turn, they trained the students who...have continued the tradition in which their teachers were trained. [He doesn’t use quotes, or a block quote, or even a citation, here. In “Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy,” he cites Herskovits (1953, 91), but it doesn’t appear there, either, or apparently anywhere else in the work.] . . . “The profession as a whole was united within a single national organization of academically oriented anthropologists. By and large, they shared a common understanding of the fundamental significance of the historically conditioned variety of human cultures in the determination of human behavior” (Stocking 1968, 296). Research on racial differences ceased, and the profession completely excluded eugenicists and racial theorists like Madison Grant and Charles Davenport.

It’s true that for a generation or so the Boasian school of anthropology was predominant, and that it still has lasting effects on American anthropology, having laid its basic foundations. What’s ironic is that MacDonald (fairly enough) rationalizes the Boasianism of the students of the movement due to their academic upbringing, because when it comes to Boas’ time at university, there’s not a word. If there were, this would take away serious appeal from the idea that these ideas were developed and selected by Boas for ethnocentric purposes in favor of the more obvious facts that he happened to have been raised in a liberal environment and instructed by liberal teachers prior to the days when Darwinism, as it’s now known, was ubiquitous.

p. 25:

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).

Leslie White, on whom MacDonald relies for backing up a great deal of his personal speculations, was an anthropologist and president of the American Anthropological Association for the year 1964. I’ve already discussed the hazards of MacDonald’s citing habits in the preface; it’s best to review them, here. This is an example of such hazards.

Citing an expert’s opinion on a subject is fine when done intermittently and not figuring centrally to the evidence of your argument, but it seems fair to say that said expert must meet at least two criteria to be acceptable:

they must have expertise in the relevant area of inquiry, and
they must not have a dog in the fight that would reasonably impede their ability to report the facts.

Leslie White can certainly be said to meet the first criterion, but White was also known to have been a staunch, career-long opponent of Boasian anthropology and to have even seemingly viewed it as a foreign, German-Jewish effort largely in reaction to antisemitism. This document was mailed out in 1966 to all the fellows of the AAA in a polemical attempt to discredit Boasian anthropology. Anthropologist Morris Opler received a copy of White’s psychoanalysis of Boas and wrote back, on behalf of the complainant Dr. Charles S. Brant, a fairly detailed response on White’s errors and potential biases: totally unfounded speculation about gentiles being excluded on the basis of their non-Judaism; false remarks on Boas’ ignoring of pre-1900 American anthropology; reliance on brief, subjective remarks from a non-scholar regarding the Jews among Boas’ students (whose names couldn’t even be spelled correctly); etc. (Read the response linked above in full.) It seems highly dubious that one can rely on him for the most accurate (read: least subjective) commentary, let alone selection of Boas’ “most influential” students only to conclude that they were extremely Jewish (6/9 = ~67%), to which MacDonald arbitrarily and without rationale adds a whole host of other names specifically preselected to be Jewish, ostensibly for no other reason than to beef up the stats (11/14 = ~79%). One is reminded of those “every single time” memes (e.g.). As Opler asked of Leslie White’s source: “To whom is it so apparent that Goldenweiser, Lowie, and Radin were ‘easily’ the leaders in a field which at the time included Kroeber, Wissler, Linton, Benedict, Redfield, Parsons, Swanton, Kidder, and many others?” At no point does MacDonald attempt to rationally assess or quantify the Jewishness of the Boasian movement.

For another, perhaps more disinterested, look at Boas’ “most influential” students, we can note those discussed by Adams throughout his 2016 book, The Boasians: Founding Fathers and Mothers of American Anthropology. He gives us the following main figures along with some less influential “journeymen” and “handmaidens,” indicated if Jewish: Clark Wissler, A. L. Kroeber, Robert H. Lowie, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin, Melville J. Herskovits, Frank G. Speck, Alexander Goldenweiser, Fay-Cooper Cole, Leslie Spier, Melville Jacobs, Alexander Lesser, Elsie Clews Parsons, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Gladys Reichard, Erna Gunther, Esther Goldfrank, Ruth Bunzel, Gene Weltfish, Ruth Underhill, Marian W. Smith, and Zora Neal Hurston. From this list, we can tally 12 Jews among 23 of Boas’ most influential students (~52%); including only the most prominent of these, we find four Jews of nine total (~44%).

Other, independent, and moderately substantial listings of Boas’ students aren’t the easiest to come by, but natural sources of them would be websites whose goal is to compile these kinds of data. Wikipedia, for example, on its German page for Boas compiles a list of his “students who were also able to establish anthropological courses at the other larger US universities”:

From this list, we can identify Sapir, Goldenweiser, Radin, Goldfrank, Herskovits, and Greenberg as Jews, or six Jews of 17 total influential Boasians: ~35%. For the English “Boasian anthropology” article, 10 of 20 (50%) identified are Jewish. For the more complete list of students in “Students and influence” on the page “Franz Boas,” the portion appears to be 12 of 30, or 40%.

It’s supremely relevant to now return to one of MacDonald’s remarks in the immediately preceding entry:

By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish. [MacDonald has quoted this multiple times since, e.g., this 2009 book review]

The addition of “the majority of whom were Jewish” is what’s important, here — and it is an original addition on MacDonald’s part given that no such claim is made by his source, Stocking (1968, 296):

Indeed, there was at this point no “other real source of influence” besides Boas, whose students by 1926 headed every major department of anthropology in American universities.

MacDonald is relying on a claim made by Stocking which itself comes from a claim made by the (non-Jewish) Boasian, and close personal friend of Boas, Pliny E. Goddard. Instead of continuing to play this game of source-telephone, let’s view the original claim by Goddard 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. With a few exceptions, these teachers of anthropology were men and women who were studying at Columbia, came within the field of Professor Boas' attractions, and forsook all to follow him. [Department heads emboldened for ease]

Of these 13 individuals heading “every major department of anthropology in American universities,” it appears Edward Sapir, Robert H. Lowie, Leslie Spier, and A. A. Goldenweiser are the only Jews, or ~31%. So how did MacDonald come to claim that “the majority” of these were Jews despite this clearly not being the case?

Trouble arises when trying to establish the exact Jewish share of Boas’ students while limiting them to only the “most influential” or “prominent” ones — where do you draw that line? It’s a similar problem for establishing the proportion of Jewish wealth ownership in a country: you’ll arrive at very different answers depending on if you’re checking the top five wealthiest individuals, or the top 20, or 100, or 1,000. If we’re looking at the top two Boasian students “who achieved the greatest public renown,” then MacDonald is more than willing to admit, as we’ll see, that they’re the gentiles Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. If we go a bit further, as we’ve seen, and extend this to the top dozen or two students of Boas, the proportion is likely about half Jewish or less depending on how you gauge it. And if we’re to be the most lenient and analyze the Jews among all of Boas’ doctoral students in his decades-long professorship at Columbia, for which I lack the exact numbers, it’s undoubtedly somewhat less. In this instance, however, MacDonald seems to have grasped onto this second category, which he believes is majority-Jewish, and assumed it could be applied everywhere, including where it cannot as in this example.

After having established some estimates, we can ask the question MacDonald seemingly avoids of why there was such a high proportion of Jews in Boasian anthropology, even if it’s not as great as MacDonald may believe. One must first ask and understand a (or the) key piece of context: namely, what would you otherwise expect? What was the Jewish share of the contemporary student body at Columbia University, the origin of the Boasian movement from which Boas (professor from 1899–1936) attracted and taught his students? From what we have data for: “Before Columbia instituted restrictive quotas after World War I, it had a Jewish enrollment of 40 percent” (Steinberg 1974, 9). Quite astonishing. The enrollment of Jews after the anti-Jewish restrictions had been put in place (apparently around 1928, toward the close of Boas’ career) plummeted, but remained at around 22% (Steinberg 1974, 20), on par with the contemporary Jewish share of the NYC population. In other words, the proportion of Jews among Boas’ students, depending on how it’s counted, isn’t severely higher than the proportion of Jewish students at Columbia overall. Jewish-American immigrants, indeed, had been on the forefront of scientific and academic movements for some time, now, and American anthropology was no exception to the rule. Perhaps a proclivity toward these kinds of fields could also be expected given the verbal intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews.

p. 25:

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.

Here, MacDonald misleadingly and probably deliberately presents exceptions as the rule in order to falsely generalize Boas and his pupils (or specifically the pupils of his who happened to be Jewish in origin).

Regarding the early Boasians, Adams (2016, 5–6) writes:

Nearly all the early Boasians were Jews, as was Boas, but this was incidental. They were without exception non-practicing free-thinkers, as were most of their parents. 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 [discussed in Glick (1982, 553–4)]. 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 identified, in fact, is Edward Sapir, whom MacDonald chooses. Unusually, Sapir came from an Eastern-Jewish background, from a shtetl milieu afflicted by pogroms. Eastern Jewry was known to be far less assimilated for a variety of reasons than Western and to a lesser extent Central Jewry. However, even in Sapir is a much different picture than MacDonald lets on.

Adams (2016, 157–8):

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.

Regarding this change in his views upon the Nazi era (beginning in the mid-30s, that is), MacDonald’s source concurs, and qualifies:

Sapir's interest in Jewish topics early in his career was strictly scientific. Later, he became increasingly committed to Jewish activism, particularly to YIVO (Yidisher Visenshaftlikher Institut), an institute for advanced study in Yiddish located in Vilna, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania," an established seat of Jewish learning. David Mandelbaum, in 1941 [Sapir had died in 1939], summarized his teacher Sapir's changing attitudes toward Judaism and its relationship to his practice as an anthropologist: “For a long time Sapir's attitude toward Jewish problems was that of the anthropologist whose training admits him to a seat in the press box of the human universe. He saw Jewish matters steadily and saw them whole, as befits a scientific observer. During his latter years, however, he began to feel that a place at the observation post does not exclude from a share in the play on the field. He became more and more engrossed in and concerned with the problems of being a Jew and with the turmoil of modern events.” (Frank 1997, 735)

So we find in Sapir a dynamic attitude that graduates from antiseptic curiosity to genuine concern upon the rise of a violently antisemitic force in Europe. But that latter part does not interest us much, because the only reason Sapir is relevant in the first place is because of his relation to the Boasian school of anthropology.

Sapir earned his Ph.D. in 1909 and became a Boasian then and after (Adams 2016, 137ff), and from then until “the rise of Hitler” and Sapir’s “latter years,” we can see that his interest in Judaism and Jewish issues was superficial. In fact, Adams shows us that so familiar attitude once again: “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,” and, unlike many other Jews, he wasn’t so bothered by this belief to become even a Zionist. In other words, Sapir’s Jewishness has little if anything to do with his decision to join the Boasian school and practice anthropology, and Sapir cannot be regarded as evidence of Boasian anthropology being a tool of the Jewish GES if he like so many others was indifferent to an inevitable dissolution of Jewish identity altogether. (Sapir also engaged in exogamous relationships: Florence Delson and Jean Victoria McClenaghan were his successive wives. In between them, he also appears to have been involved with Mead and Benedict (Adams 2016, 157). Of these, only Delson appears to have had Jewish roots.)

And we find these same beliefs in the mentioned Goldenweiser, a German raised in the Ukraine (as well as deep assimilation and a love for Russian culture at 47:50):

However, he went much further, arguing that there was nothing wrong with the assimilation of the American Jews into the mainstream society. Similar to Boas, he asserted that the only way to eliminate antisemitism altogether was to have the Jews mix with the other ethnic groups of the country. Generally speaking, Goldenweiser was rather skeptical about any public campaigns against antisemitism, arguing that the best way to deal with it was to ignore it, and thus let it run its course. He did consider proper public education might help reduce its influence, but did not place much hope in that. Such views expressed by the distinguished Jewish professor from New York school, which was, uh, how the Emerich Speaker Bureau advertised him, indicate that he didn’t see much worth preserving in the Jewish religion or culture in America, be it Judaism, the Yiddish language, or specific ethnic customs or traditions. A highly assimilated Jew, Goldenweiser was equally dismissive of Zionist ideology. Thus in his review of a book, Extinction and Survival, by an American economist and publicist, Jewish publicist, Elisha Friedman, which had a strong Zionist message, Goldie referred to Hebrew culture as being dead in Palestine, and being “not Zion but a colonial enterprise on a small scale, the future which is still in doubt.” What worried this anarchist most was that if the Jews would acquire their own state in Palestine they might turn from the oppressed to the oppressors, of the Arabs. (35:48)

His views on Zionism are revealing of the consistency of his ideals — consistency being the best way of determining whether such beliefs were genuine or a deceptive medium for some buried ethnic particularism as MacDonald typically alleges.

From a 1924 piece entitled “Race and Culture in the Modern World”:

I want to digress for a moment to give you a recent illustration of the insidiousness of race prejudice. I refer to the Jews in Palestine. Here for once, the tables are reversed, and the Jew turns into a racial snob. The Jews, the eternally persecuted ones, who through tragic ages have learned the horrors of persecution, have felt the sting of racial hatred, have at least returned to their old home, Zion. They have established a community, they want to have a democratic government. 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. Of course, those enthusiastic about Palestine say that all of this will change in the future. The fact that Zion has been established, they claim, will stimulate a great many rich Jews all over the world to give money in order that others may go there, and then there will ultimately be more Jews in Palestine than Arabs, and a truly democratic rule will be established.
All this may be so, but meanwhile we have before us the little edifying picture of a state ruled by Jews, heretofore victims of race prejudice, over the heads of the majority of the local population.
Nor is this all. Some time ago I had a conversation with a gentleman who came from Palestine, where he had been an inspector of schools. As he was proceeding with his story, I noticed something strange in his attitude toward the Arabs. I asked: “You do not mean to say that you teach the children in your schools that the Arabs represent an inferior race?” “Oh, no,” he replied, “we do not have to tell them that. They can see it for themselves.” So there we are! 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.

The reasons Ruth Landes are brought up are so weak as to only be guessed at. If she hadn’t been Jewish, one could easily argue that Goldenweiser was actually attempting to simply recruit gentile frontmen.

Landes was a later Boasian, graduating in 1935 (the year before Boas’ retirement), at a time when Boas’ students were more female and less Jewish. Her main advisor was Ruth Benedict (Smithsonian), the gentile we’ll deal with shortly, and in fact MacDonald carefully omits that Frank (1997, 736) actually specifies that Goldenweiser “introduced her to Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, both of whom strongly encouraged her to consider graduate work in anthropology.” “Ethnic nexus”?

Her biography Ruth Landes by Sally Cooper Cole (2003) presents her as suffocating in and alienated by this Jewish subculture, identifying as an American and a cosmopolitan. One revealing passage:

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. Yet I am constrained to so label myself on Federal forms. Being "American," I can't let myself deny it. (230)

And this environment despised by Ruth the Boasian was also the reason her first marriage was endogamous, as demanded by her parents. She divorced after two years as a revolt from the role of a housewife and a desire to pursue (Boasian) anthropology (scielo.br). Her next marriage was with Ignacio Lutero Lopez (236), and in between “she had an open affair with black folklorist and journalist Edison Carneiro” (Frank 1997, 737).

Despite the overly simplistic and misleading descriptions proffered by MacDonald, the Jewish students of Boas by and large were not “strongly-identified Jews” and the reasons for their association with Boasian anthropology are far more nuanced with little to do with specifically Jewish concerns.

Among the more typical Boasians was Robert H. Lowie (graduated 1908) who, like Boas, was very proud to identify with German/gentile culture. According to Adams (2016), he “retained all his life a compelling sense of attachment to all things German” (112):

He recognized, as few of his fellows did, that Germany in the nineteenth century had been far ahead of the rest of the world in the development of ethnography, and he felt that German achievements, then and since, were not being adequately recognized. He attempted to rectify this to some extent, as we have seen, in his History of Ethnological Theory, with its considerable over-emphasis on German work. Throughout his life he made it his mission to review German works as they appeared, for the readers of American journals. In the doctoral program at Berkeley, a reading knowledge of German was an inflexible requirement, not an option. . . . And for leisure reading he always preferred the Germans, “I keep a copy of Faust on my bedside table, and dip into it when I cannot sleep. In my leisure reading I am still un-Americanized” (Lowie 1959, 170). 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. [Add him to the list with Boas, Lévi-Strauss, and Durkheim.] 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.” (131–2)

Lowie married Louella W. Cole, about which little is at this moment known, although “Cole” obviously isn’t a typical Jewish surname. Again, we don’t find alienation from gentile culture, but an embrace of it, and (probably) even marriage into it.

p. 26:

Ashley Montagu was another influential student of Boas (see Shipman 1994, 159ff). Montagu, whose original name was Israel Ehrenberg, was a highly visible crusader in the battle against the idea of racial differences in mental capacities. He was also highly conscious of being Jewish, stating on one occasion that “if you are brought up a Jew, you know that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic... I think it is a good working hypothesis” (in Shipman, 1994, 166). Montagu asserted that race is a socially constructed myth. Humans are innately cooperative (but not innately aggressive) and there is a universal brotherhood among humans—a highly problematic idea for many in the wake of World War II. Mention also should be made of Otto Klineberg, a professor of psychology at Columbia. Klineberg was “tireless” and “ingenious” in his arguments against the reality of racial differences. He came under the influence of Boas at Columbia and dedicated his 1935 book Race Differences to him. Klineberg “made it his business to do for psychology what his friend and colleague at Columbia [Boas] had done for anthropology: to rid his discipline of racial explanations for human social differences” (Degler 1991, 179). (25)

It’s totally possible Ashley Montagu was influenced by his Jewish background and antisemitic experiences — similar to how the anti-racial Black scientists of the day were — but it’s unclear to what extent.

The same is true for Klineberg (though I’m unsure if he can be called a Boasian, as a psychologist). However, in his own biographical sketch, the only time he mentions the Jews or his own Jewishness is when addressing this question:

My earliest research and my first publications dealt with the problem of alleged inborn psychological differences between races; this issue, together with the wider problem of racism (stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination), has remained with me all my life. I have often been asked what led me to this concern, and in particular whether my Jewish origins pushed me in that direction. (Klineberg 1973)

But he doesn’t confirm MacDonald’s implicit assumptions in his answer, instead referring to his encounters with new scientific evidence. Even if his Jewish origins did play a role in his scientific beliefs, which would naturally beget an according ideology, it would seem he was more of a Kroeber-type figure (passage given below), moved by evidence more so than conviction. When it came to activism, he, like Boas, dealt primarily with Blacks and showed genuine interest in their civil rights: “Otto Klineberg, like his Columbia teacher and colleague Franz Boas, made it his business to address black audiences to help them counter the arguments of those who described them as inferior” (Degler 1991, 190).

p. 25:

In contrast to the ideological and political basis of Boas’s motivation, Kroeber’s militant environmentalism and defense of the culture concept was “entirely theoretical and professional” (Degler 1991, 90). Neither his private nor his public writings reflect the attention to public policy questions regarding blacks or the general question of race in American life that are so conspicuous in Boas’s professional correspondence and publications. Kroeber rejected race as an analytical category as forthrightly and thoroughly as Boas, but he reached that position primarily through theory rather than ideology. Kroeber argued that “our business is to promote anthropology rather than to wage battles on behalf of tolerance in other fields” (in Stocking 1968, 286).

It should be kept in mind that, whatever the origins of Kroeber’s anti-racism, he was still a deeply committed German liberal throughout his life, and also more extreme in his beliefs than Boas himself.

Degler (1989, 2) offers an important remark:

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.

MacDonald also misleadingly quotes Kroeber to make it seem as though he was putting science above racial tolerance, when in fact this regarded an interpersonal dispute. But ultimately it does seem to be true, and is what Degler maintains, that Kroeber’s advocacy (e.g.) stemmed from science rather than ideology as it did with Boas. This certainly wasn’t the case with others of Boas’ students, like Mead and Benedict as we’ll see below.

p. 26:

It is interesting in this regard that the members of the Boasian school who achieved the greatest public renown were two gentiles, Benedict and Mead. As in several other prominent historical cases (see Chs. 3, 4; SAID, Ch. 6), gentiles became the publicly visible spokespersons for a movement dominated by Jews. Indeed, like Freud, Boas recruited gentiles into his movement out of concern “that his Jewishness would make his science appear partisan and thus compromised” (Efron 1994, 180).
Boas devised Margaret Mead’s classic study on adolescence in Samoa with an eye to its usefulness in the nature-nurture debate raging at the time (Freeman 1983, 60-61, 75). The result of this research was Coming of Age in Samoa—a book that revolutionized American anthropology in the direction of radical environmentalism. Its success stemmed ultimately from its promotion by Boas’s students in departments of anthropology at prominent American universities (Freeman 1991). This work and Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture were also widely influential among other social scientists, psychiatrists, and the public at large, so 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’” (Stocking 1968, 306).
Boas rarely cited works of people outside his group except to disparage them, whereas, as with Mead’s and Benedict’s work, he strenuously promoted and cited the work of people within the ingroup. The Boasian school of anthropology 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.

In this passage, MacDonald attempts to rationalize the profound impact of the gentile anthropologists who entirely dominated the movement after Boas by explaining them almost entirely away as manifestations of Jewish influence and, in doing so, attributing their far-reaching impact to Jews. This is a great example of the unfalsifiability of the CofC thesis, as it allows him to turn something that hurts his thesis, or at least hurts his overly simplistic narrative, into something that amplifies it, totally free of the usual burden of proof, as we’ll see.

Turning to Efron, review these words:

[O]ne of the many flaws with Kevin MacDonald’s work is his insistence upon buttressing his arguments with heavily-speculative and little-evidenced remarks from other authors, despite these opinions themselves often being questionable or even contradicted by a thousand other authorities that could’ve been cited just as easily. In other words, instead of offering the primary sourcing and evidence for particular claims he’s looking to prove, he very frequently cites the second-hand opinion of someone else, lest his arguments be exposed for what they are: too heavily reliant on personal speculation. (“Hey, don’t take my word for it, take theirs!”) One should generally cite the evidence for the claim another author brings up rather than the claim itself along with an attribution to said author, which is nothing but an appeal to their authority; if they didn’t provide evidence, either, then you leave their claim alone.

This is exactly what’s going on, here. Efron (1994, 180) provides no evidence for this claim, no citation, in a work that isn’t about Boas or anti-racist activism. Again, it shouldn’t, and doesn’t, matter who holds an opinion: what matters is why, what evidence they have for it. As The Problem Gene points out (6:14), the quote “was probably never intended to carry as much weight as Kevin places on it. It could have been [and almost certainly was] pure speculation for all we know.” TPG also insightfully observes that the context of which Efron speaks was during the Nazi rise to power, with their disparaging of practically every inconvenient thought as “Jewish science,” whereas Mead’s work was published well before then, in 1924. Finally, even accepting Efron’s claim that Boas was partially motivated by a desire to make his work seem less Jewish as true doesn’t substantiate MacDonald’s points regarding Boas’ convictions or the success of Mead and Benedict, only that he simply wished to allow his work greater impact like everyone else.

As an attempt to give his notion that Mead and Benedict were, after all, only so prominent because of self-interested Jewish support, MacDonald analogously claims that Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa was only successful because of “its promotion by Boas’s students” operating with presumably the same motive. However, Freeman (1991, 326–7), authored by one of Mead’s main critics in fact, 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.”

These are the people to whom Freeman pins the book’s success (although one probably can’t say for sure that without them its organic appeal wouldn’t have turned it into such an anthropological classic). Of the three figures identified, Boas is the only Jew. (Branisław Malinowski was a Polish gentile.) Freeman then goes on to describe “anthropologists who, in their professional publications, accepted and repeated Mead’s conclusions,” who did happen to mostly receive “their Ph.D. degrees in the 1920s and ‘30s as students of Boas or Benedict or Sapir or Kroeber and Lowie,” although MacDonald only mentions Boas. The anthropologists he goes on to identify are the following, in the order he presents them: Hallowell, Herskovits, Hoebel, Henry, Beals, Hoijer, Whiting, Child, Murdock, and Honigmann. Of these, I could only identify Herskovits as being Jewish, although perhaps one or two others also make the cut. This doesn’t at all seem indicative of Jewish networking and lends strikingly little support to the ideas MacDonald is pushing in these paragraphs.

Freeman also picks out three leading Boasians who had disagreements with Mead — all of them were Jewish: “Lowie, Sapir, and Radin”:

Sapir ended his review of Boas’ Anthropology and Modern Life, in which Boas had given prominence to Mead’s findings, with the judgment that Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa was “cheap and dull.” And Radin, in 1933, having described Mead (1966 [1933]:170) as “essentially a journalist in the best sense of the term,” proceeded to criticize her on a range of methodological grounds. (326)

Thus, Freeman (1991) actually works against MacDonald’s point.

MacDonald doesn’t even attempt to argue that Patterns of Culture’s success was due to Jewish shadiness, although it’s about this work which Degler (1991, 206) writes “No work spread the word of culture's triumph more broadly or effectively,” and “She [Benedict] made no secret of her ideological or moral purpose. At the outset she observed that ‘modern existence has thrown many civilizations in close contact, and at the moment,’ she regretted to report, ‘the overwhelming response to this situation is nationalism and racial snobbery.’” Together, MacDonald shows us that these gentile-authored works with gentile-argued, egalitarian conclusions were significant in leading to the near annihilation of racialist thought in the popular American mind. It can be assumed that he’s only so emphatic on their effects as a way to exaggerate the Jewish impact.

There’s no citation for this final paragraph, and no evidence given in support. To end this section with a relevant line from Cofnas (2018):

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.

p. 27:

As in the case of Freud (see Ch. 4), Boas was a patriarchal father figure, strongly supporting those who agreed with him and excluding those who did not: Alfred Kroeber regarded Boas as “a true patriarch” who “functioned as a powerful father figure, cherishing and supporting those with whom he identified in the degree that he felt they were genuinely identifying with him, but, as regards others, aloof and probably fundamentally indifferent, coldly hostile if the occasion demanded it” (in Stocking 1968, 305-306). “Boas has all the attributes of the head of a cult, a revered charismatic teacher and master, ‘literally worshipped’ by disciples whose ‘permanent loyalty’ has been ‘effectively established’” (White 1966, 25-26).

Yes, it appears Boas was a pretty strong-willed leader around whom a school of thought centered, but this is irrelevant if one knows the context: that this was true of all American anthropology including that of gentiles and of the time before any serious Jewish influence. In MacDonald’s source (in fact immediately before his citation a little earlier of Stocking (1968, 279–280)), it’s specified that “[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” (Stocking 1968, 277–8). (He goes on to name examples, all of whom appear to be gentiles: Daniel Garrison Brinton, John Wesley Powell, Frederic Ward Putnam.) Adams (2016, 27) writes that this was as much a German tradition, too.

p. 27:

Boasian anthropology, at least during Boas’s lifetime, also resembled traditional Judaism in another critical manner: It was highly authoritarian and intolerant of dissent. . . . As in the case of Freud, in the eyes of his disciples virtually everything Boas did was of monumental importance and justified placing him among the intellectual giants of all time. Like Freud, Boas did not tolerate theoretical or ideological differences with his students. Individuals who disagreed with the leader or had personality clashes with him, such as Clark Wissler and Ralph Linton, were simply excluded from the movement. White (1966, 26-27) represents the exclusion of Wissler and Linton as having ethnic overtones. Both were gentiles. White (1966, 26-27) also suggests that George A. Dorsey’s status as a gentile was relevant to his exclusion from the Boas group despite Dorsey’s intensive efforts to be a member. Kroeber (1956, 26) describes how George A. Dorsey, “an American-born gentile and a Ph.D. from Harvard, tried to gain admittance to the select group but failed.” As an aspect of this authoritarianism, Boas was instrumental in completely suppressing evolutionary theory in anthropology (Freeman 1990, 197).

MacDonald attempts to make parallels between Boasian anthropology and traditional Jewish social structures. It’s unclear what exactly the implication is, here. Why is it relevant if the Boasian school, which, as seen earlier, was premised on traditional social structures in anthropology, also happens to resemble traditional Judaism or not? This was an ancient, and perhaps an Eastern, artifact — entirely foreign to Boas — so how would this have been caused in the first place?

To recap the comments on White:

Anthropologist Morris Opler received a copy of White’s 1966 psychoanalysis of Boas and wrote back, on behalf of the complainant Dr. Charles S. Brant, a fairly detailed response on White’s errors, and potential biases: totally unfounded speculation about gentiles being excluded on the basis of their non-Judaism; false remarks on Boas’ ignoring of pre-1900 American anthropology; reliance on brief, subjective remarks from a non-scholar regarding the Jews among Boas’ students (whose names couldn’t even be spelled correctly); etc.

Regarding the first allegation which MacDonald rehashes, here, Opler (p. 744) calls into question why one would rely on White’s opinion at all when the only evidence he offers is that Wissler and Dorsey, hand-picked names, happened to be gentiles.

It was a novel experience to receive from a reputable university material in which scientists who are “American-born gentiles” are distinguished from those who are not. “George A. Dorsey, an American-born gentile” and, to make things even more suspicious, “a Ph.D. from Harvard,” felt that he was not admitted to the intimate circle around Boas. The choice of language implies that he was excluded because he was not Jewish and/or foreign. Yet neither Dorsey, who made the complaint, nor Kroeber, who recorded it, suggests that religion or national origin was involved. It might be noted that in passing along his remark, Kroeber describes Dorsey’s “energy, self-reliance, competitiveness, and hard-boiled man-of-business manner”—a word picture that suggests reasons other than religion why he didn’t become Boas’ intimate. Actually, Lowie, too, in spite of his “Jewish extraction” and German language competence, felt that Boas took little notice of him during his student days and that such “gentiles” as Kroeber, William Jones, Tozzer, and Benedict established a much closer relationship with Boas than he was able to achieve (Lowie 1956a:159). If religion and European roots were so important, Dr. White will have to explain to us why his friend and colleague at the University of Buffalo, Nathaniel Cantor, got along so badly with Boas and why Ruth Benedict managed so well, or why the “gentile” Cattell and Boas “remained life-long friends” (Kroeber 1956: 154).
Dr. White would have us believe that differences of religion and national origin were responsible for the cooling of relations between Wissler and Boas. I offer the opinion that, even if one had been a Buddhist and the other a Parsi, they would have drifted apart. It was Wissler’s increasing enchantment with biological determinism, eugenics, and the glorification of the Nordic that made the break inevitable. According to his son, Boas maintained a life-long and very warm friendship with P. E. Goddard, another American “gentile” whom he came to know during the same period when his relations with Wissler were deteriorating. Dr. White dips into “oral tradition” for the intelligence that Boas and Linton did not get along too well. I have heard this, too, hut never that it was due to religion or nationality. I would be interested to know, on the basis of “oral tradition,” whether Linton had any more friction with Boas than he did with Radcliffe-Brown, FayCooper Cole, or Ruth Benedict. A number of us still around could give personal testimony on this score. We might also like to know, if religion is involved, why Boas got along so much better with Quaker Goddard than with Quaker Linton. As an antidote to the skewed picture of the Jew Boas and his Jewish students isolating themselves and muttering to one another in German as they hatched their plot to subvert anthropology, it might be refreshing to read Lowie’s account of what they really did, of their contacts outside of anthropology with such “gentile” teachers as Dewey and Cattell, and of their interests in the views of Pearson, Mach, Ostwald, Poincaré, and William James (Lowie 1956b: 1012)

To repeat Opler:

Yet neither Dorsey, who made the complaint, nor Kroeber, who recorded it, suggests that religion or national origin was involved.

To repeat MacDonald:

Kroeber (1956, 26) describes how George A. Dorsey, “an American-born gentile and a Ph.D. from Harvard, tried to gain admittance to the select group but failed.”

But Kroeber, as Opler correctly states, did not at all use those words or make that connection. This quote comes from White as a preface to a blockquote by Kroeber in which the question of Jewishness is entirely absent. And why would Boas be biased against gentiles when his own wife was one, or when it was the gentile Ruth Benedict who became his “second-self,” closest of all to him, in the words of Margaret Mead (1959, 346ff)? Ah, all just Jewish “self-deception”! And if Dorsey had in fact managed to join up with the Boasians? MacDonald would parade this around as evidence of a deliberate attempt to make anthropology visibly less Jewish. There is, again, such ridiculously little evidence for any of this, that he’d be just as right to make that alternative claim.

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Boas was the quintessential skeptic and an ardent defender of methodological rigor when it came to theories of cultural evolution and genetic influences on individual differences, yet “the burden of proof rested lightly upon Boas’s own shoulders” (White 1966, 12). Although Boas (like Freud; see Ch. 4) made his conjectures in a very dogmatic manner, his “historical reconstructions are inferences, guesses, and unsupported assertions [ranging] from the possible to the preposterous. Almost none is verifiable” (White 1966, 13). An unrelenting foe of generalization and theory construction, Boas nevertheless completely accepted the “absolute generalization at which [Margaret] Mead had arrived after probing for a few months into adolescent behavior on Samoa,” even though Mead’s results were contrary to previous research in the area (Freeman 1983, 291). Moreover, Boas uncritically allowed Ruth Benedict to distort his own data on the Kwakiutl (see Torrey 1992, 83).

Once again, MacDonald resorts to the blind opinions of White (1966). Here, he sets out to establish Boas’ biases …by citing alleged errors of his two gentile students. In the same way that he effectively blames Boas for their rise to fame, he ignores that the people who made these mistakes in the first place were gentiles whom he doesn’t dare claim are actively partaking in the GES out of concern for antisemitism or anything else. The question is abundantly clear: if Mead and Benedict could, possibly out of bias, err in ways befitting the Boasian narrative free from Jewish intent, then how can we pin said intent onto Boas for doing the same? Even if White (1966) gives an impeccable description of Boas’ bias, how do we know this was a Jewish bias? The facts that these people furthered the Boasian cause, that this was an anti-racist cause, and that they were ideologically driven, do not at all mean that Boasian anthropology was a “Jewish movement” inspired by Jewish interests.

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Cultural critique was also an important aspect of the Boasian school. 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.

The fact that when bringing to light the “several prominent Boasians” that Stocking (1989) deals with, MacDonald chooses to keep in only the Jewish ones, is extremely revealing of bias:

The overlapping of anthropological discourse and the discourse of cultural criticism in the early 1920s is evidenced by the inclusion of two important Boasians among the thirty participants in the Stearns symposium: Robert Lowie, who offered Boas' "transvaluation of theoretical values in the study of cultural development" as the exemplar of modern anthropology contributions to contemporary science (Stearns 1922:154); and Elsie Clews Parsons, who attacked Puritan "attitudes of repression or deception" toward sex as an expression of "arrested development," in which women, classified "by men on an economic basis," were "depersonalized" as "creature[s] of sin" or "object[s] of chivalry" (310, 314-15 , 317).

MacDonald feels the inclusion of the gentile Elsie Clews Parsons wouldn’t have helped advance his argument, so he instead distorts what Stocking (1989) wrote in order to give an illusion of monopolistic Jewish influence.

Sapir is included for what Stocking views as a sense of romantic primitivism in “Culture, Genuine and Spurious.” It should be noted, though, that Sapir stood in sharp contrast to Parsons’ views on sex and sexuality:

However his relations with women, including both his mother and his first wife, could be tendentious, no doubt due in part to his 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). . . . During the interval between his two marriages he became intimate with Margaret Mead, and even proposed marriage to her, but any hope of a relationship was destroyed when he expressed the hope that she would “stay home and have babies”—the last way in the world to appeal to the head-strong, feminist Mead.

But, as Stocking (1989) demonstrates, all of this was in the midst of an underlying, organic progressive social era that grew in reaction to the horrors of WWI:

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. The "revolution in morals" has been associated with flappers, jazz, speakeasies, and the "lost generation" as a characteristic phenomenon of the 1920s itself (Leuchtenberg 1958). In contrast, the "end of American innocence" has been associated with the "scoffers" and "questioners" of the turn-of-the-century decades, and with the "innocent rebellion" of younger American intellectuals between 1912 and 1917 (May 1959). More recently, the development of an antimodernist "revolt against overcivilization" (which in fact promoted "new modes of accommodation to routinized work and bureaucratic 'rationality'") has been traced throughout the four decades prior to 1920 (Lears 1981:iv, 137). Against all this has been argued the persistence of the older values and the constructive role of a "nervous generation" of American intellectuals in reshaping them during the 1920s itself (Nash 1970). But even a staunchly self-proclaimed revisionist has acknowledged that a "moral earthquake" shook Western civilization in the years after World War I (ibid.: 110). 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).

This is a very well-documented phenomenon, and it’s a shame that MacDonald devotes not a word to it as context to the Boasian school’s development and influence. In his chapter devoted to the cause of the turning of American public life away from doctrines of racialism, evolutionism, and hereditarianism, Degler (1991, 187ff) insightfully mentions that

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."

And later in the chapter:

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.

There were also antecedents and contemporaries to Boas touting the same general line:

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." (81) . . .
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." Indeed, as early as 1904, he had publicly written that race prejudice was grounded only on differences in appearances and therefore should be considered "a superficial matter." . . . Thomas's role in convincing social scientists that race was an outmoded, or, more accurate, a misleading means of explain- ing differences in the behavior of social groups was both important and effective. (His influence was important, too, in the contemporary critique of sex differences, a subject to be addressed in the next chapter.) (89–90)

As Degler shows us, a trend toward egalitarianism had been present independent of Boas, and before he even arrived on the scene. As Cofnas (2018) points out, the theme of “romantic primitivism” MacDonald attributes to the Boasians stems from the European Enlightenment, particularly from Rousseau, who’s widely held to be one of the most impactful figures of the era. He 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.

Hence the reason why MacDonald omits “Using the rhetorical gifts he learned from Rousseau” from “he evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference” when describing Lévi-Strauss on page 21. The archetypal savage was cherished by many European intellectuals as a vessel of critique well before Jews came on the scene. (See “The Savage Critic” and the Wikipedia article on Primitivism for more.) Surely, this is just the “Western Liberal Tradition” identified as genetically-based by MacDonald in his latest book.

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Cultural criticism was a central feature of the two most prominent Boasian ethnographies, Coming of Age in Samoa and Patterns of Culture. These works are not only erroneous but systematically misrepresent key issues related to evolutionary perspectives on human behavior. For example, Benedict’s Zuni were described as being free of war, homicide, and concern with accumulation of wealth. Children were not disciplined. Sex was casual, with little concern for virginity, sexual possessiveness, or paternity confidence. Contemporary Western societies are, of course, the opposite of these idyllic paradises, and Benedict suggests that we should study such cultures in order “to pass judgment on the dominant traits of our own civilization” (Benedict 1934, 249). Mead’s similar portrayal of the Samoans ignored her own evidence contrary to her thesis (Orans 1996, 155). Negatively perceived behaviors of Mead’s Samoans, such as rape and concern for virginity, were attributed to Western influence (Stocking 1989, 245).
Both of these ethnographic accounts have been subjected to devastating criticisms. The picture of these societies that has emerged is far more compatible with evolutionary expectations than the societies depicted by Benedict and Mead (see Caton 1990; Freeman 1983; Orans 1996; Stocking 1989). In the controversy surrounding Mead’s work, some defenders of Mead have pointed to possible negative political implications of the demythologization of her work (see, e.g., the summary in Caton 1990, 226-227). The highly politicized context of the questions raised by this research thus continues unabated.

MacDonald goes on to demonstrate alleged errors in the works of Mead and Benedict, the gentiles. It’s unclear how this is relevant to CofC in any way that doesn’t directly harm its thesis.

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Indeed, 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 (Keegan 1993, 90-94). Warfare and warriors were ignored, and cultures were conceived as consisting of myth-makers and gift-givers. (Orans [1996, 120] shows that Mead systematically ignored cases of rape, violence, revolution, and competition in her account of Samoa.) Only five articles on the anthropology of war appeared during the 1950s. Revealingly, when Harry Turney-High published his volume Primitive Warfare in 1949 documenting the universality of warfare and its oftentimes awesome savagery, the book was completely ignored by the anthropological profession—another example of the exclusionary tactics used against dissenters among the Boasians and characteristic of the other intellectual movements reviewed in this volume as well. Turney-High’s massive data on non-Western peoples conflicted with the image of them favored by a highly politicized profession whose members simply excluded these data entirely from intellectual discourse. The result was a “pacified past” (Keeley 1996, 163ff) and an “attitude of self-reproach” (p. 179) in which the behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict.

The same comments as those preceding. It’s also important to note the context, which MacDonald omits: all this was in the wake of the deadliest war in human history, and its deadliest genocide as well. It’s perhaps understandable why people might be critical of European warfare or uninterested in warfare generally.

Closing Thoughts

My impression of all this should have been made obvious at this point. MacDonald fails to substantiate any of his key claims about Boasian anthropology, and almost totally ignores the troves of literature that have been published on this topic (pre- and post-1998). He does not seem to have relinquished any thoughts about Boas, which can be seen repeated, for example, in his replies to Eric Kaufmann (2009):

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.

and to Nathan Cofnas (2018):

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.

All of this has far reaching ramifications, too, because it’s safe to say that The Culture of Critique has become a standard text in the far right, nationalist corpus, accepted by many as practically infallible. Whether this chapter serves as characteristic of the others in Kevin MacDonald’s book is yet for me to decide.

Until then.

UPDATE: Follow-up articles may be found here and here.

Mark

Oct 11, 2022

This is the first serious and adequate rebuttal of Kevin's work. One of his chief complaints is that his work was simply ignored and not challenged/rebutted. Can you send this to Kevin so he can respond?

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1 reply by William

Galatia

Dec 20, 2022

Hi. I dont use tw but i saw comment and debate about holokost. You should use this author for argument.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Pressac

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CofC: The Boasian School of Anthropology

reviewing Kevin MacDonald's claims about Franz Boas and his students

Preface

Context & Summary

Textual Analysis

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Closing Thoughts

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