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Intellectual anti-Semitism was the special prerogative of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who, in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, concretised the fantasies of Count Arthur de Gobineau, which had penetrated to Bayreuth. He translated them from the language of harmless snobbery into that of a modernized, seductive mysticism... Contemporary anti-Semitic literature, insofar as it is not simple, crude Jew-baiting, in so far as it claims intellectual consideration, is satisfied to postulate an imposing Teutonism which, examined critically dissolves into thin air like a beautiful Epicurean god. The word blood plays a large part in its phraseology. Blood, the immutable substance, determines the fate of nations and men. Because of the secret laws of blood, Germans and Jews will never be able to mix, must be mutually antagonistic until doomsday. This is romantic, but hardly deep. No real science of nationalities can be based on such flimsy premises. For German and Jewish are not fixed categories established once and for all in some mystic prehistoric age, but rather flexible concepts which change their content with spiritual and economic changes dependent on the general dynamics of history.
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