Eugen Dühring: Elimination of All Judaic Elements, Chapter Four
Ausscheidung alles Judäerthums, Kapitel Vier
Source Material: German Scan | German Corrected
Translator / Editor’s Introduction
Dr. Eugen Dühring was brought to my attention by Joseph Jordan and Warren Balogh, when they discussed his work on episode 83 of WarStrike.
The Jewish Question, published in 1881, appears to be one of the few, if not the only, of his antisemitic works available in English, and this was translated in 1997 by Alexander Jacob. After a brief search, I found that many of his writings were extant, scanned, and out of copyright; this meant PDFs are available on sites like Archive.org and Google Books. With the help of modern technology, these poor scans can be rescued, and the voice of this intriguing scholar can be revived and brought to bear in the 21st century against the same enemies he identified in the 19th.
Born in Berlin in 1833 to a Prussian middle-class family, Eugen Karl Dühring came of age amid the tumultuous ideological ferment of the Vormärz era. As a teenager, he witnessed the liberal revolutions of 1848, and entered adulthood during the repressive Reaktionära, as Frederick William IV’s regime systematically restored conservative authoritarianism. At 23, he embarked on legal studies at the University of Berlin, but a degenerative eye condition forced him to abandon his career in law by 26. By his early 30s, he was fully blind, relying on assistants and his wife, Emilie, whom he had married at 29, to transcribe his prolific dictated works. Dühring’s academic journey began as a lecturer at the University of Berlin, where he taught philosophy and political economy.
A polymath by 32, he published Natural Dialectics in 1865, and Capital and Labor, also in 1865, blending critiques of Marxism with a nationalist socialism inspired by Friedrich List and H C Carey. Published in 1873, his treatise Course on National and Social Economy, attracted followers in the nascent Social Democratic Party, the SPD. In 1874, at 41, he lost his teaching license after publicly denouncing academic orthodoxy and faculty members. In the following years, Friedrich Engels’ work, Anti-Dühring, attacked his ideas, attempting to marginalize him within socialist circles.
In 1881, he expounded on racial antisemitism in his essay, The Jewish Question, aligning with Wilhelm Marr’s contemporaneous coining of the term. Two years later, the first edition of Elimination of all Judaic Elements was released, advocating replacement of Christianity and Marxism with a secular Germanic ethos.
In 1891, Karl Kautsky and August Bebel drafted the SPD’s Erfurt Program, whereby the party codified Marxist orthodoxy and explicitly rejected nationalism and antisemitism as incompatible with socialist unity. Instead, over the next decade following the release of Elimination of all Judaic Elements, Dühring’s ideas thrived in far-right circles. Antisemitic parties surged in the 1893 Reichstag elections, mirroring his influence.
In 1897, he revised the work Elimination of all Judaic Elements, amplifying its antisemitic rhetoric; This is the edition now under translation. By 1899, his journal The Personalist and Emancipator, co-founded with his disciples, propagated his fusion of nationalism, socialism, and antisemitism.
Retiring 30km outside of Berlin in 1900, Dühring continued to dictate until his death in 1921 at 88. His legacy endured: the formation of the Dühring-Bund in 1924 declared his doctrines a blueprint for German renewal. Although his journal, edited after his death by his son Ulrich, ceased in 1929, his ideas permeated National Socialist ideology into the 1930s and 40s.
The replacement of religion with something more perfect and the elimination of all Judaic elements by the modern spirit of nations.
By Dr. E. Dühring.
Second revised edition. Berlin. Published by P. Kufahl, Koch-Straße 10. 1897.
Fourth Chapter: Incompatibility of the Jewish mindset with the modern spirit of nations.
First point: Jewish embodiment of selfishness in religious documentation. The Ten Commandments as testimony to Jewish traits.
Second Point: Emergence of the monopoly god. Racial sense of the idea of the old and new covenants. Thoroughly Jewish elements in the New Testament.
Third Point: National religion in a bad and good sense. Fundamental German characteristics.
Fourth Point: Religion-related character traits of the ancient Germans, distinguished from the Celtic tribes and in contrast to the Jews. Meaning of the original absence of priests.
Fifth Point: Mode of conception in Nordic divine stories. Moral advantages of the German worldview as expressed in religion. Incompatibility with the corresponding conceptions of Judaism and Israeli Christianity.
Sixth Point: National sense of the Gothic in ecclesiastical architecture. Corresponding sublimity of the Germanic over the nature of the chief Christian commandment. Lack of a concept of the good in the Jewish race, confirmed by Spinoza’s teachings.
Seventh Point: Heightened emergence of the full inhumanity of Jewish impulses with the retreat of crude superstition. Economic and literary Judaization. Role of a creative self-awareness of modern peoples.