#max nordau

[problematic-faves-appreciation]

Degeneration

Oh look, the old school version of bad-fiction-corrupts-you, pro-censorship rhetoric used by the "fiction is reality" crowd. Why am I not surprised?

What's more, the hypodermic needle theory was disproven.

Stop using the word degenerate to mean horny challenge

[setewbro]

I was reading Madness in Civilization and came across the book Degeneration, by Max Nordau.

Degeneration was invoked to explain far more than insanity alone. All the pathologies of modern life were laid at its door: prostitution, crime, delinquency, alcoholism, suicide, epilepsy, hysteria, feeble-mindedness, the physical deformation of many of the lower classes (in reality a result of want and malnutrition) – what could not be attributed to its ravages? It was a narrative that fed into fin-de-siècle fears of national decay and decline that were particularly potent in France after the humiliation of its defeat by the Prussians in 1870–71, but felt everywhere, even in Germany itself, as Max Nordau’s book Entartung (Degeneration; 1892), vividly reflects and illustrates.37 (The book provoked much controversy – it was mocked by the Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James – and ironically, since Nordau was a Jew and a Zionist, its ideas were later borrowed by the Nazis.)

- Madness in Civilization by Andrew Scull

And this caught my attention, because it didn't surprise me at all considering the comparisons between Zionism and Nazism as ideologies. So I searched Max Nordau's name and apparently he was the Co-founder of the World Zionist Organization and also coined the term "Muscular Judaism". There's also a street called Nordau Boulevard in Tel Aviv (Occupied Palestine).

Anyways, the links between Zionism and Eugenics has been talked before by other people, so this is nothing new.

[anaratto]

Max Simon Nordau, 1901

[notaplaceofhonour]

Incredibly interesting how the anti-Zionists in my mentions can’t seem to criticize Zionism without Holocaust Revisionism & pogrom denialism, when even just a cursory glance at early Zionist writing shows how thoroughly they saw national independence as a means of self-defense against antisemitic violence that was widespread long before the Holocaust. Don’t take my word for it; read for yourself:

“Auto-Emancipation”, Leon Pinsker, 1882:

The events of the last few years in enlightened Germany, in Roumania, in Hungary, and especially in Russia, have effected what the far bloodiest persecutions of the Middle Ages could not. The national consciousness which until then had lain dormant in sterile martyrdom awoke the masses of the Russian and Roumanian Jews and took form in an irresistible movement toward Palestine. Mistaken as this movement has proved to be by its results, it was, nevertheless, a right instinct to strike out for home.

BILU Manifesto, 1882:

“If I do not help myself, who will help me?” Nearly two thousand years have passed since, in an evil hour, after an heroic struggle, the glory of our Temple vanished in fire and our kings and chieftains exchanged their crowns and diadems for the chains of exile. We lost our country where our beloved ancestors had lived. Into the Exile we took with us, of all our glories, only a spark of the fire by which our Temple, the abode of the Great One, was engirdled, and this little spark kept us alive while the towers of our enemies crumbled into dust, and this spark leapt into the celestial flame and illuminated the heroes of our race and inspired them to endure the horrors of the dance of death and the tortures of the autos-da fe. And this spark is again kindling and will shine for us, a true pillar of fire going before us on the road to Zion, while behind us is a pillar of cloud, the pillar of oppression threatening to destroy us. Are you asleep, O our nation? What have you been doing until 1882? Sleeping and dreaming the false dream of assimilation. Now thank God, you have awaked from your slothful slumber. The pogroms have awakened you from your charmed sleep. Your eyes are open to recognize the obscure and delusive hopes.

“The Jewish State”, Theodor Herzl, 1896:

No one can deny the gravity of the situation of the Jews. Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high positions, either in the army, or in any public or private capacity. And attempts are made to thrust them out of business also: "Don't buy from Jews!" Attacks in Parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the street, on journeys--for example, their exclusion from certain hotels--even in places of recreation, become daily more numerous. The forms of persecution varying according to the countries and social circles in which they occur. In Russia, imposts are levied on Jewish villages; in Rumania, a few persons are put to death; in Germany, they get a good beating occasionally; in Austria, Antisemites exercise terrorism over all public life; in Algeria, there are traveling agitators; in Paris, the Jews are shut out of the so-called best social circles and excluded from clubs. Shades of anti-Jewish feeling are innumerable.

Address at the First Zionist Congress, Max Nordau, 1897:

To Jewish distress no-one can remain indifferent, neither Christian nor Jew. It is a great sin to let a race to whom even their worst enemies do not deny ability, degenerate in intellectual and physical distress. It is a sin against them and against the work of civilization, in the interest of which Jews have not been useless co-workers. That Jewish distress cries for help. To find that help will be the great work of this Congress.

Address at the Sixth Zionist Congress, Max Nordau, 1903:

From the very beginning we boldly and distinctly said, "We are not contented; we regard our situation as a very bad one; we consider our treatment as discreditable and undeserved; we regard a fundamental change in our situation as a vital necessity; after the humiliating attempts we have made at assimilation with other peoples we have taken counsel with ourselves and we desire to live in our own way, in our own right, on our own soil."

Additionally, in the same year Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus (the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, that the quote “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses longing to breathe free” comes from), 1883, she also wrote The Jewish Problem and the final letters of An Epistle to the Hebrews, both of which called for the establishment of a Jewish state & emigration to Palestine to protect Eastern European Jews from the antisemitism they were facing.

TL;DR – The above quotes weren’t the first time Jews suggested national self-determination as a response to anti-Jewish violence—and certainly not the first to discuss a return to Zion—but they were from more than SIXTY YEARS before the end of the Holocaust. And not only does every single one of these quotes come from before the end of WWII, before the Holocaust, & before the Nazi party was even founded, but the latest of these quotes was an entire decade-and-a-half before the British were even in Palestine.

TL;DR TL;DR – To whatever extent guilt over the Holocaust motivated European goyim to finally aid Jews in their national project, Jews had been proposing a Jewish state to defend against antisemitism for a very very long time. To suggest otherwise is complete revisionist history.

It’s maddening to find out that the scholar who first developed the idea that “Zionism is Settler Colonialism”, Fayez Sayegh, was a member of the Syrian Nazi Party during and immediately after the Holocaust, was an active participant in the Red Scare, using it to demonize Israel as a manifestation of a Global Communist Threat™️ through the height of the Cold War (true to his Nazi roots, accusing Israel of Judeo-Bolshevism) before switching to a Colonialism narrative when Post-Colonialism came in vogue in the 60s. And yet, the people I hear parroting the talking points of this anti-Communist, Ultranationalist Fascist-turned-scholar are the people who are constantly talking about how Liberal Progressives aren’t Communist enough and actually enemies because “Liberals will always side with Fascists”. Maddening.

If you’ve ever noticed how the “Zionism = Settler Colonialism” narrative eerily shares the core components of the far right’s Replacement Theory (that there are 1. Jews 2. conspiring to invade a given place and 3. replace the population with Jews), this is why; it’s because the idea that Zionism is Settler Colonialism came from a literal Nazi.

It is very literally Nazi propaganda.

[sheliach]

Debate, Sábado 10 de Agosto de 2024.

[lakesbian]

Hey, I just saw your post about dumbass DNIs, can you clarify something for me? Is there a specific history with the word 'degens'? Your reaction was not what I expected given my own cultural context. (I'm a rural Canadian queer). Degens is a very lighthearted insult here, and not associated with any particular group and it's also not particularly common these days. So if there's context I'm missing i'd appreciate the info (Google was not helpful and started talking about crypto). Thanks!

The term Entartung (or "degeneracy") had gained currency in Germany by the late 19th century when the critic and author Max Nordau devised the theory presented in his 1892 book Degeneration. [3] Nordau drew upon the writings of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, whose The Criminal Man, published in 1876, attempted to prove that there were "born criminals" whose atavistic personality traits could be detected by scientifically measuring abnormal physical characteristics.

calling people or things degenerate is utilizing fascist terminology. 'degenerate' as in 'degenerated from human.' degenerate as in 'less than a person, because they do not fit my model for what a person is.' its normalization as an insult is bad, there's no removing or decontextualizing its obvious meaning and the horrible connotations it carries. the idea of degeneracy is a tool of dehumanization and genocide and should not be used as a casual insult by anyone

[transmutationisms]

the same way it drives me batshit when people think francis galton invented eugenics and adolphe quetelet started anthropometry i also feel about the idea of max nordau or anybody else 19th century as the progenitor of degeneracy theory... like it's better than when people straight up don't know it's a whole theory and act like it's a silly little insult but god i don't know. i think it's not great actually to act like these things sprang de novo from the head of like one evil dude in the 1800s like what if i told you this was always the flipside of enlightenment era meliorist discourses and the logical outgrowth of breeding horses and wheat and potatoes was buffon breeding the peasants who lived on his estates in the 18th century to see if he could create a superior human population to regenerate france by like crossbreeding cantons and stuff. i think it kind of matters actually to track this back past one cartoonish racist and place it in context. adorno and horkheimer be upon ye

[cannibalisticdespair]

Sees a post from a known anti upset about people reinventing phrenology and then when those people are called out for endorsing a concept believed by the Nazis they go "oh so I just gotta make sure it's not racist!" and it's like... you get soooo mad when people point out that you've just reinvented Max Nordau's social degeneration theory, which is a cornerstone of eugenics and was sponsored by the Nazis with their crusade against "degenerate art".

[grandhotelabyss]

Have any of these (probably white) men larping as classicist defenders of “culture” as an excuse to hate on Katherine Dee ever been to an opera or a ballet? Or is it just the next Tarantino film they feel is threatened by online culture?

Gioia has probably been to an opera, but it is funny that a jazz scholar has such a reaction. As your cinema reference shows, there seems to be a reliable modern trend by which pop culture (opera, the novel, jazz, rock, films, graphic novels, etc.) is assimilated into high culture after enough time goes by. I like how KD argued that TikTok was continuous with earlier forms of pop culture like vaudeville, but, to head off the classicist objection, I would have framed the online persona as continuous with earlier forms of elite culture, e.g., BAP deliberately modeling himself on Nietzsche, with Wilde and Emerson and other thinkers and belletrists also serving as precedents and inspirations. Similar to my cautious defense of Honor Levy as neo-modernist, in other words. Meanwhile, go back to the 1890s and see what Max Nordau was saying about Wilde and Nietzsche.

[fursasaida]

To be sure, their themes of chauvinist triumphalism aren’t so different from what we’re hearing from Israeli government ministers or Christian Zionist leaders. But unlike Benjamin Netanyahu or John Hagee, Bronze Age Zionists swim alongside (and sometimes argue with) literal neo-Nazis in the fetid, irony-drenched swamps of ultra-reactionary internet subculture. So what are nice Jewish boys like these doing on 4chan? Answering this question might offer insight, not only into the nature of contemporary Zionism but into the broader far-right.

Mimicking Bronze Age Pervert, the fascist manosphere author from whom I’ve forged their namesake, Bronze Age Zionists valorize the aesthetics of Jewish muscle, strength, virility, and warrior ethos with deliberately extravagant flair. Memes from this ecosystem show ripped, White Hebrew warriors roaring alongside a lion; wooing Roman women in some ancient marketplace; hanging their enemies, whether Nazi, Palestinian or leftist; or bullying a slovenly, pink-haired ‘soy boy’—a meme caricaturing liberal men as emasculated by consumer culture. By transforming themselves into muscle-Jews, these and other memes signal, they’ve become the Alphas of Jewish history.

This, anyway, is the ethos of 21st-century muskeljudentum or ‘muscular Judaism,’ as early Zionist theorist Max Nordau put it. And, in the wake of the humiliation of October 7, it comes laced with stone-cold retribution and an urgent need to reclaim masculine honor, glory, and pride. They share quotes from Netanyahu like “the weak crumble, are slaughtered and erased from history while the strong, for good or ill, survive.” Or they celebrate Israel as “a true Nietszchean country,” as one Bronze Age Zionist put it during Israel’s assault on Gaza in December, before indulging in a bit of Proud Boys-esque chest-thumping. “Leftoids can’t comprehend the strong willed in a world of weak men. They hate winners because they are LOSERS.” Much like Israel’s assault itself, the cruelty is the point. But amidst the unbridled Islamophobia, and celebration of “unfathomably based” Israeli soldiers mocking Gazans or issuing exterminationist orders in viral videos from the front lines, one detects the frenzied desperation of a cornered animal, lashing out at any target close at hand.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the seething contempt reserved for Jewish progressives, whom Bronze Age Zionists sometimes refer to as “Quislingsteins” or “shtetlibs.” The former term evokes an uber-nationalist siege mentality, with its obsessive contempt for perceived ‘traitors’ and fifth columnists. The latter castigates liberal Jews in the weak, defenseless and submissive mold of that imagined old-country shtetl of their East-European ancestors—the ‘ghetto Jew’ which, through guns, brawn and steel, these muscle-Jews boast of having willfully overcome.

[...]

To be sure, Bronze Age Zionists do not represent a mass Jewish movement in the Anglo world. The accounts surveyed here are perhaps a few dozen in total, many with only a few thousand followers or less. The majority of English-speaking Jews would recoil at their openly supremacist views, and find the prospect of a Magen David-Sonnenrad alliance despicable and revolting.

At the same time, these accounts reflect, in extreme form, broader trends in the political landscape. “Before Oct 7th, I was an average moderate conservative,” an account named “Kahane Disciple” explained. “Oct 7th changed everything. We saw what people really thought, and that’s when I pulled Kahane down from my book shelf.”

In their thirst for vengeance and dominance, they channel the id of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza as its terrible death toll continues to rise. Right-wing Israeli and American Jewish right-wing leaders eschew 4chan for a larger political stage—but they too seek alliances with White Christian nationalist leaders, denigrate liberal Jews, and celebrate an ethos of muscular Judaism. They have no need for a niche internet subculture, because they possess a state apparatus, and aligned institutions to propagate their ideology.

There are a lot more details on the article, including how these guys' attempts to ingratiate themselves with the neo-Nazis and Groypers are received (not well! It's pretty funny!). For a bit more of a look at the ~respectable, institutional side of this alluded to in this last quoted paragraph, and the common elements running through both scenes, Eli Valley wrote about the run-up to this a few years ago. His piece centered around how his art, which is deliberately grotesque and consciously in the tradition of what the Nazis called "degenerate art," was condoned as antisemitic and even Nazi by other Jews when he caricatured...Meghan McCain. He drew a connection there between Max Nordau's "Muscular Jew," an Israeli distaste for the diaspora, and aesthetics. This piece by Ben Lorber is the same phenomenon, just in the mode of 4chan rather than the mode of august blue checks (of yore) on Twitter: this time, the aesthetics in question lie in right-wing meme culture.

Every nationalism contains the potential for fascism, and this particular version is one that has both haunted and motivated the Israeli project from the beginning. In some ways it is obviously specific to the context of antisemitism and the Holocaust, and in other ways it's bog-standard: a similar reactionary need to prove masculinized dominance through violence has been perceived in the US Gulf War, for instance. But what is, I think, particular to this dynamic is the way it shapes relations between Israel and various parts of the diaspora - racially, institutionally, financially, geopolitically. The role of the muscular Jew psychology or construct in broader Israeli culture (including those who would never identify with it, much as white supremacy functions in the US) is not raised as often as it should be in discussions about Israel as a settler society, IMO.

[rubynyoro-n]

Incorporating Max Nordau's theory of degeneration into my everyday vocabulary but shaking my head the entire time so people know I don't agree with it

[zerogate]

It was 1893 when Max Nordau published Degeneration. England’s Great Depression had been dragging on for twenty years. The island kingdom that had led the world into brave new technologies at the turn of the nineteenth century was becoming a technological and industrial backwater. The English knew they were in trouble, but they didn’t know why. Then Max Nordau uncovered the real cause.

The culprits behind Britain’s fall were modern philosophy, modern art, and modern novels. As historian Barbara Tuchman puts it in The Proud Tower,

Through six hundred pages of mounting hysteria, he [Max Nordau] traced the decay lurking impartially in the realism of Zola, the symbolism of Mallarmé, the mysticism of Maeterlinck, in Wagner’s music, Ibsen’s dramas, Manet’s pictures, Tolstoy’s novels, Nietzsche’s philosophy, Dr. Jaeger’s woolen clothing, in Anarchism, Socialism, women’s dress, madness, suicide, nervous diseases, drug addiction, dancing, sexual license, all of which were combining to produce a society without self-control, discipline or shame which was “marching to its certain ruin because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks.”

-- Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle

[vernalloy]

Lenses to Modern Art

Mirror - I didn’t realize she had a rose behind her back. The plaques give context, the paintings a question. I was mad at the time.

Technique - Newman, Barnett. Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III. 1967. 224 x 544 cm. Completely smooth oil on canvas, save for the knife.

Aesthetic - Must I justify my love of the tactile?

Materials - Photographs of children from the Caribbean, rendered on black paper with sugar.

Accident - The sculpture was behind me. I assumed Eurydice was the blank wall.

Outsider - I want to draw like a kid again.

Degenerate - Degenerate art was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party to describe modern art. It was first described by Zionist leader Max Nordau in his 1892 book “Entartung,” in which he asserted that modern life corrupted artists into incoherence.

[fierceawakening]

This is definitely not in as much depth as I want, but... this is what I always thought Zionism was, and why it strikes me as odd when I read posts that phrase it in terms of indigenous sovereignty. Was that how Herzl phrased it back then, or is that a tumblr/progressive/hard left spin on the thing?

I've definitely read some things purportedly by Herzl that have given me pause, that really did sound colonialist, which no one defending that Zionism is super common and profoundly traditional seem to address or refute, and now hearing that Max Nordau, the guy who coined the whole idea of "degenerate art" that the Nazis later adopted (!!!!!), was one of Herzl's close followers in the movement leadership...

...I know people say a goy's doubts are worthless, but I still have them.

(Disclaimer, because I think some people will go wildly galloping off with what I said here and say stuff I don't think:

Some people think that "Zionist" means "anyone who does not think Israel should be forcibly conquered." I do not think Israel should be forcibly conquered or disbanded, so by THAT SPECIFIC and expansive definition, I guess I'd be a Zionist.

Regardless of Israel's history, it's a country NOW, and destroying a country would affect people who had nothing to do with its founding in horrific ways. When I say I question Israel's founding and why investment in it as founded is not thought of in the same way as other brands of nationalism, this does not mean "go kill people." That shouldn't need to be said but it does seem to be what some people read.

If I ever did come to the conclusion "Israel shouldn't exist now because its founding was problematic then," which I seriously doubt I would ever come to because that would mean the US shouldn't currently exist either and I have even less idea how people could possibly bring that about, I would mean something like "I hope over time that government peacefully dissolves itself in a way that facilitates and plans for a transition in a minimally disruptive way to anyone who was a citizen or legal resident of that country."

Which again, I don't think is a conclusion I ever WOULD come to anyway, for a whole host of reasons.)

[strangestcase]

From the first publication of Stevenson's novel, readers have noted the similarities between Lombroso's criminal and the atavistic Mr. Hyde. Less often noted is how snugly descriptions of criminal devi ance fit with longstanding discourses of class in Great Britain. Lom broso's work first reached a wide audience in England thanks to Havelock Ellis's The Criminal (1891); the combined influence of Ellis and Lombroso was in part due to the ease with which the new "s cientific" categories mapped onto older, more familiar accounts of the urban poor from Mayhew onward. Lombroso's theory was in part a discourse on class, and much of its "legitimacy" derived from the way it reproduced the class ideologies of the bourgeoisie. Equating the criminal with atavism, and both with the lower classes, was a familiar gesture by the 1880s, as was the claim that deviance expressed itself most markedly through physical deformity.

Steven son's middle-class readers would have had as little trouble deciphering the features of the "abnormal and misbegotten" Hyde, his "body an imprint of deformity and decay," as Stevenson's middle-class characters do. "God bless me," exclaims Utterson, "the man seems hardly human. Something troglodytic, shall we say? ... or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent?". Utterson's remark, moreover, nicely demonstrates how old and new paradigms can overlap. He at once draws on familiar Christian imagery—Hyde's foul soul transfiguring its clay continent—and a Lombrosan vocabulary of atavism, with Hyde-as-troglodyte reproducing in his person the infancy of the human species.

In considering degenerationism as a class discourse, however, we need to look up as well as down. Late-Victorian pathologists routinely argued that degeneration was as endemic to a decadent aristocracy as to a troglodytic proletariat. And, indeed, Hyde can be read as a figure of leisured dissipation. While his impulsiveness and savagery, his violent temper, and his appearance all mark Hyde as lower class and atavistic, his vices are clearly those of a monied gentleman.

This aspect of Hyde's portrayal has gone largely unnoticed by later critics, but for Stevenson's contemporaries the conflation of upper and lower classes into a single figure of degeneracy would not have seemed unusual. Lombroso's criminal may have been primitive in appearance, but his moral shortcomings—"excessive idleness, love of orgies, the irresponsible craving of evil"—make him a companion of Jean Floressas des Esseintes and Dorian Gray, not Vilella. In his highly influential Degeneration (1895), Max Nordau took pains to insist that the degenerate population "consists chiefly of rich educated people" who, with too much time and means at their disposal, succumb to decadence and depravity.

-The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson's "Jekyll and Hyde"

Steven Arata, 1995

[sheliach]