Ha'aretz: Zionists adopted Hitler's some of eugenic policies

[maz]

Lot's of good stuff in here.

Eugenics in Israel: Did Jews try to improve the human race too?

In 1944, psychiatrist Kurt Levinstein gave a lecture at a Tel Aviv conference, where he advocated preventing people with various mental and neurological disorders - such as alcoholism, manic depression and epilepsy - from bringing children into the world.

The means he proposed - prohibition of marriage, contraception, abortion and sterilization - were acceptable in Europe and the United States in the first decades of the 20th century, within the framework of eugenics: the science aimed at improving the human race.

In the 1930s, the Nazis used these same methods in the early stages of their plan to strengthen the Aryan race. Levinstein was aware, of course, of the dubious political connotations implicit in his recommendations, but believed the solid and salutary principles of eugenics could be isolated from their use by the Nazis.
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Recent research by historian Rakefet Zalashik on the history of psychiatry in Palestine during the Mandate period and following the founding of the state shows that Levinstein was far from a lone voice. Indeed, she claims in her 2008 book, "Ad Nefesh: Refugees, Immigrants, Newcomers and the Israeli Psychiatric Establishment" (Hakibbutz Hameuchad; in Hebrew), that the eugenics-based concept of "social engineering" was part of the psychiatric mainstream here from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Jewish psychiatrists in Israel were not the only ones who tried to distinguish between the science of eugenics, which they held to be useful, and the Nazis' application of it. What set the local experts apart was that they actually studied the foundations of the theory in Germany before immigrating to Palestine, directly from the scientists who supported using eugenics to forcibly sterilize mentally ill and physically disabled Germans - and subsequently to justify their murder. Within a few years, the German scientists were using the same justification for killing Jews.

Many of the Jewish psychiatrists subscribed to their German colleagues' conception of the Jews as a race, relying on the theory that was developed in Europe, says Zalashik. However, upon their arrival in Palestine, they encountered Jews of different types and began to distinguish between the race of European Jews, and that of the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern and North African origin).
Thus, for example, psychiatrist Avraham Rabinovich, who worked in the Ezrat Nashim facility in Jerusalem and later managed a mental institution in Bnei Brak, drew a distinction in his patient reports from 1921-1928 between the general population, and Jews of Bukharan, Georgian and Persian descent, whom he referred to as "primitive races."

In explaining why the latter were less affected by mental illness, he wrote: "Their consciousness, with its meager content, does not place any special demands on life, and it slavishly submits to the outward conditions, and for this reason, does not enter into confrontation and so gives rise to a relatively very small percentage of functional illnesses in the nervous system and in terms of mental illness in particular."

The views of these psychiatrists meshed with the goals of the Zionist movement, which at the time propounded a policy of selective immigration.

Zalashik maintains that such outlooks, as well as other false and harmful assumptions upon which Israeli psychiatry was based in its early years, led to the adoption of inappropriate and sometimes cruel forms of treatment, whose effects on the mental health system in the country are still being felt today.

In her new book, Zalashik chronicles the history of the psychiatric community, which began to take shape in the 1930s with the arrival of dozens of Jewish psychiatrists from German-speaking countries following the Nazis' rise to power. According to her research, at the end of 1933, there were only three psychiatrists working in this country; by the end of World War II, that number had grown to 70. These psychiatrists were influenced by the hypotheses and findings of extensive research conducted in the countries of their birth regarding mental disorders unique to Jews, which was part of the Germans' attempt to explain "the Jewish problem" in biological and medical terms.

"Both Jewish and non-Jewish doctors were wont to think that Jews had a greater tendency to develop mental illness than others," says Zalashik. "The debate was about whether this was because of race, or environmental factors: The Jews said that Jews suffer from mental illnesses because they endured hardship and pogroms, and live in cities where there is more stress and tension than in rural areas. The non-Jews reached the same conclusion, but based it on the argument that Jews were different biologically and genetically."

Zalashik contends that the question of whether the basic premise is accurate is irrelevant to historians. "What's relevant is that the Jewish minority, particularly in Germany, went from being considered a social problem to a medical problem."

Upon immigrating to Israel, the Jewish psychiatrists did not give up the theories in which they had been educated; instead, they adapted them to the newfound situation.

Zalashik: "If, in Europe, the tendency to develop mental illness was said to attest to the Jews' inferiority, then in Palestine it showed the superiority of the pioneers over the Jews from the Old Yishuv [pre-state community]: The psychiatrists said the pioneers came from civilization, and that civilized people suffer from more mental illness than people of the Old Yishuv who lived in a rural environment."

Continued