Jewish History (2007) 21: 413Y428

*

Springer 2007

DOI: 10.1007/s10835-007-9040-9

Biology and the Jewish question after the revolution: one Soviet approach to the productivization of Jewish labor ROBERT WEINBERG Department of History, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA E-mail: [email protected] Abstract. In the 1920s a group of health professionals and biologists in the Soviet Union embraced the nascent eugenics movement in order to justify the promotion of physical labor among Jews. Eugenics offered a scientific approach to solving the BJewish question^ through the productivization of Soviet Jewry. Drawing upon the work of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, this group linked the settlement of Jews on the land to the belief that the physiognomy of Jews engaged in physical labor would be genetically passed on to their offspring. The goal was to overcome the perceived debilitating psychological and physical traits of shtetl Jewry by mobilizing Soviet Jewry for the building of socialism. By the late 1920s, however, eugenics fell victim to the Kremlin_s materialist conception of human society that emphasized social engineering and voluntarism and excluded biological influences on the transformation of Soviet society.

To take a diverse set of examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking,...; that white men are very substantially under-represented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially under-represented in farming and in agriculture. ...I think it_s important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for under-representation (emphasis mine).1 Lawrence H. Summers, President of Harvard University, January 14, 2005 Lawrence Summers_s reference to the absence of Jews in agriculture brings to mind the longstanding debate regarding the capacity of Jews to engage in agriculture in particular and physical labor in general as part of the solution of the BJewish question^ in the modern era.2 The productivization of labor among Jews occupied a prominent position in critiques of European Jewry from the eighteenth to the twentieth

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centuries. One impulse behind the campaign to promote Jewish agricultural settlement is the time-worn belief that European Jewry_s involvement in trade, commerce, and finance led to an abnormal occupational profile in which Jews, engaged for the most part in work perceived as non-productive, exploited gentiles. BNormalizing^ the Jews_ occupational profile, essentially transforming Jewish shopkeepers and shmate dealers into hardworking, productive citizens involved in physical labor would help eliminate a root cause of European antisemitism, and strengthen the Jews_ case for civic emancipation in many parts of Europe.3 Many Jews and non-Jews accepted the premise of productivization and undertook efforts to settle Jews on the land through agricultural colonization. From Jewish chicken farmers in New Jersey and California to Jewish gauchos on the pampas of Argentina, from Jewish agricultural settlements in Crimea, southern Ukraine and Birobidzhan to kibbutzim in Palestine, all these endeavors testify to the commitment and vast sums of money and enormous effort expended to turn Jews into farmers. Yet as we know, the vast majority of Jews, except many of those who went to Palestine/Israel, did not take advantage of opportunities to engage in organized agricultural projects. This essay addresses efforts during the initial years of the Soviet Union to promote agricultural colonization by Jews. A little-known episode from the history of the Soviet medical and scientific communities in the 1920s offers a fruitful way to expand our understanding of the efforts to productivize Jews. An examination of certain developments in the field of biology during the 1920s indicates that some Soviet scientists, physicians, and health professionals posited a link between the productivization of Soviet Jewry and human heredity. In their search to reveal the interrelationship of environmental and biological determinants of human behavior, researchers worked to fashion a scientific rationale for the embrace of physical labor by Soviet Jews. Specifically, investigation of the nascent eugenics movement in the 1920s provides an unusual perspective from which to analyze the project of social engineering that underlay the campaign to settle Jews on the land. Like others interested in resolving the BJewish question,^ some Soviet eugenicists emphasized that Soviet Jews needed to overcome the debilitating psychological and physical impact of life under the tsars if they were to contribute to the building of socialism. They did not attribute the dearth of Jewish farmers to a set of intrinsic aptitudes and attributes that distinguish Jews from gentiles. Rather, they believed Jews were as capable as non-Jews of performing physical labor and asserted that development of a socialist economy and society

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and productivization of Soviet Jewry would occur in tandem, in a mutually reinforcing manner that would find expression in a genetically transformed Jew. Material for this essay is drawn from a three-volume publication entitled Problems of the Biology and Pathology of Jews (PBPJ) [Voprosy biologii i patologii evreev], published in Leningrad between 1926 and 1930 under the direction of several Jewish physicians and professors of medicine who had been studying the collective physiological and psychological attributes of Russian Jewry since before World War I. First published by the BPractical Medicine^ publishing house, the journal subsequently appeared under the sponsorship of the Jewish HistoricalYEthnographic Society. The first two volumes (1926 and 1928) provided abstracts of contents in German, an indication that the editors believed the publication would attract the attention of scholars outside the Soviet Union. The editorial board was continuing the work of the Society for the Study of the Social Biology and Psychophysiology of Jews, a group funded in 1923 and 1924 by the Society for the Preservation of the Health of Jews.4 In addition, the members of the editorial board were affiliated with the Commissariat of Health_s Russian Eugenics Society, which also established a commission devoted to studying the biological and genetic characteristics of Jews.5 Unfortunately, the lack of source material makes an in-depth examination of these organizations and the activities of their members virtually impossible.6 For example, we cannot ascertain their political beliefs and the extent to which they embraced the goals of the communist state. Nor can we explore their pre-1917 lives in an effort to discover how their pre-revolutionary activities may have influenced their work in the 1920s. Still, available information allows some inquiry into their thinking on the productivization of Jews, contributes to our understanding of early Soviet policies toward Jews, and adds to what other scholars have written about the Soviet eugenics movement in the 1920s. Mark Adams, Loren Graham, and A. E. Gaissinovitch have written valuable articles on the eugenics movement in the Soviet Union, but they do not examine the link between eugenics and Soviet desires to resolve the BJewish question^ in the Soviet Union.7 Soviet eugenicists in the 1920s were motivated by many of the same questions posed by GermanYJewish physicians-cum-anthropologists at the turn of the century, namely, do Jews possess unique and distinct characteristics and, if so, what are they? Are Jews more susceptible than gentiles to certain diseases, do Jews have certain immunities that non-Jews lack, and, if so, to what extent do genetic and environmental

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factors play a role?8 The editors of PBPJ tended to avoid referring to Jews as a race and preferred to label Jews a Bnational organism,^ BnationalYethnic unit,^ or Ba nation,^ though at times they called Jews Ba racial collective and organism.^ The editors used Bnation^ and Brace^ interchangeably when applied to Jews and never bothered to specify the identifying characteristics of Jews as a discrete group. Nonetheless, they believed that Jews comprised a group of people who shared a common Boverall physical constitution^ with Bits own characteristics and peculiarities.^9 More important than specifying these traits was uncovering the pathologies (physical and psychological) specific to Jews and ascertaining how to overcome them. The fact that Jews had a long history of living within the borders of the pre-Soviet Union permitted the study of disease and related factors over the long-term. Researchers grappled with the paradoxical biological nature of Soviet Jewry. On the one hand, they claimed that Jews from the shtetl suffered from physical degeneration and were subject to psychological illnesses such as nervous disorders. On the other hand, researchers knew from studies that Jews had a lower mortality rate and often enjoyed a stronger immune system than gentiles and frequently distinguished themselves in the realm of intellectual and cultural endeavor. As Deborah Yalen notes, the editors of PBPJ wondered whether the Jews_ Bhistorical experience as a people that was both geographically dispersed yet highly endogamous^ might account for these characteristics.10 The publication_s editors presented the results of studies carried out by researchers interested in exploring the physical, mental, demographic, and biological characteristics of discrete geographic communities of Soviet Jewry, though a few articles extended their range of cover beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. In this regard, they were continuing the pre-1914 research agenda that collected and compared data and measurements in the hope of ascertaining whether Jews possessed certain physiological, biological, and psychological traits that distinguished them from non-Jews.11 The goal was to collect raw data that would provide the foundation for drawing conclusions about not only the Bbiology and pathology^ of Jews but also about the prospects of productivizing them. The authors contextualized their research by comparing their findings about Soviet Jews with gentile populations in the Soviet Union. During the four years of PBPJ_s existence, the editors published a wide range of articles encompassing a variety of disciplines that explored whether or not Jews were biologically (physically and psycho-

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logically) suitable for productive labor. In particular, did Jews possess certain physical or psychological traits that prevented their involvement in certain kinds of activity? They were also interested in assessing the impact of social and environmental factors on the biological constitution of Jews. With few exceptions, the articles fell primarily into several categories: demography, health and sanitation, pathology and epidemiology, and anthropometry (the study of human body measurements). Birth and death rates, marriage and divorce statistics, age and sex profiles, literacy rates, heights and weights, and discussions of disease, immunity, nutrition, and housing, and personal hygiene filled the pages of PBPJ.12 The impetus for the publication stemmed from the editors_ belief that the development of socialism in the Soviet Union would alter the Bsocio-economic appearance^ of Soviet Jews. The building of socialism and the productivization of Jews through involvement in agricultural work would feed off each other, leading to the disappearance of the petty bourgeois Jew as a social and economic phenomenon.13 As the editors noted in the statement of purpose that introduced the first volume, Soviet Jews were experiencing changes in Btheir social and professional, as well as their biological composition^ because of productivization. Thus, the industrialization and agrarianization of Jewish labor would, according to the editors, Binevitably involve vast biological consequences^ that would capture the attention of eugenicists and geneticists.14 The editors described their task as studying the impact of these changes on Soviet Jews by asking such questions as BWhat effect will this tremendous change of professions have on their psychology and physiology? What are the positive and negative aspects of this transition? What means can be used to make this transition more painless.^15 Comprehension of the transition of Jews from mental or intellectual to physical labor, from the shop counter to the tractor, required utilizing the disciplines of Brace hygiene, eugenics, social biology, pathology.... In a word, the issue of the socio-biological reconstruction of the Jewish masses in Soviet Russia is a vital and urgent one.^16 The editors pointed to the involvement of non-Jewish Soviet physicians and biologists in this issue and noted that colleagues in Europe and the USA also supported the ambitious research agenda of the journal. The mention of eugenics (the application of genetics to improve human physical and mental characteristics through heredity) will come as no surprise to those familiar with scientific developments during the early decades of the twentieth century. Despite its tragic application in

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Nazi Germany and elsewhere in the twentieth century, eugenics in the 1920s was a legitimate field of study across Europe and in the Americas that tried to integrate the biological and social components of life. It shaped the research agendas of many reputable experimental biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and physicians interested in improving the human species through manipulation of heredity.17 It should be no surprise that scientists in the Soviet Union were part of the worldwide eugenics movement, with a legacy of Russian research in developmental biology and animal genetics prior to 1917. The eugenics movement in the first ten years or so after the establishment of the communist regime can illuminate aspects of the government_s campaign to productivize Soviet Jewry in general and settle Jews on the land in particular. As Mark Adams notes in his overview of eugenics in the Soviet Union, several strands of eugenics coexisted in the 1920s, all intended to improve the genetic make-up of humans. One strand focused on improving the human gene pool by eliminating the ability of those with substandard genetic characteristics to pass them on to future generations (through negative eugenics such as sterilization). Another strand emphasized a Bpositive^ approach, namely facilitating the opportunity of those persons with desirable traits to breed. A third approach to eugenics hoped to bring about desirable genetic changes through the application of techniques inspired by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, the eighteenth-century scientist who believed acquired physical characteristics could be passed on through heredity. Despite the rejection of Lamarck_s theory by most geneticists and eugenicists, a small group of Marxist biologists embraced the view that Bhereditarily desirable traits might be induced deliberately by appropriate environmental or social conditions.^18 In the context of the productivization of Jewish labor, these eugenicists suggested that changes in material circumstances could lead to genetic alterations in the thought and behavior of individuals. For a brief moment in the 1920s, some members of the Soviet scientific community promoted an environmental strategy that would result in a new Soviet Jew with not only a transformed physiological and biological make-up, but also an altered gene pool. In this approach, environmental forces interacted with those of genetics to shape human behavior and thinking, thereby making eugenics more or less compatible with Soviet communism_s activist effort to transform society and culture.19 Such thinking foreshadowed the theories of Trofim Lysenko, the charlatan agronomist whose belief in the inheritability of acquired

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characteristics crippled Soviet biology, plant science, and genetics starting in the late 1930s and lasting until the mid-1960s. But the connection between Lamarckian eugenics and Lysenkoism is not as direct as we might believe. For example, the former never explicated the mechanism by which environmental changes became imprinted in a human_s genetic make-up, and the latter, as is well known, limited the applicability of his ideas to plants. Soviet eugenicists remained silent regarding the threshold at which environmental changes might alter the genetic composition of a human being (or any animal for that matter). In volume one, M. M. Gran, a professor of medicine in Moscow, contributed an article in which he asserted that biological as well as physical characteristics should be considered when officials recruited candidates for Jewish agricultural settlement. Indeed, Gran noted that the biological makeup of Soviet Jews engaged in farming had already changed from what it had been when Jews lived in small towns and cities, thereby allowing researchers to address a host of questions associated with eugenics. Furthermore, eugenicists could observe the long-term effects of agrarianization for more than a century since Russian Jews had been establishing agricultural colonies since the first part of the nineteenth century. Gran argued that such an examination could illuminate the extent to which the Bphysical and biological appearance of Jews had changed as a result of moving from the city to the countryside.^ The abandonment of the shtetl way of life, which fostered Bnon-productive^ ways of earning a living and promoted poor physical, mental, and emotional health because of crowded, cramped, and unsanitary living quarters, for Bthe expansive green fields^ of rural life unquestionably led to improvements in the overall health and wellbeing of those Jews engaged in agricultural labor. According to Gran, it was the task of Soviet researchers to determine the nature of the physical and biological changes that affected Jews as a result of living and working on the land.20 Gran was not alone in holding such views. Foreign observers of Soviet Jewry offered similar opinions suggesting that alterations in environment could transform human biology. For example, Dr. Joseph Rosen, representative of the Joint Distribution Committee, offered the following opinion about Jewish agricultural colonists in the Crimea and southern Ukraine: BWe have large groups of people of a given psychological and biological essence that we are trying to adapt to a new environment, thereby changing their psycho-biological substance.^21 In his recently published book, Jonathan Dekel-Chen notes that BWestern eugenics in the first two decades of the twentieth

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century spoke of deep but gradual modification of the social environment, promoted largely through change in the professional orientation of the target group.^22 Rosen, a specialist in agronomy and economics, seems to have embraced the view that eugenics and productivization could work together to give rise to a new Soviet Jew who would leave behind the debilitating physical, psychological, and biological attributes of the shtetl world. In other words, Rosen suggested the feasibility of altering the genetic makeup of humans through environmental changes. Not everyone involved with this matter shared the view that new physical and psychological changes stemming from altered circumstances would lead to the transformation of one_s genetic makeup. For example, in 1934 Nikolai Semashko, former People_s Commissar of Health, referred to the physical transformation of Jewish farmers in an article entitled BA New Person is Being Born.^23 Semashko noted that he: would like to touch upon a question of biology. I would like to show the influence of productive labor, especially agricultural labor,... on the biological nature of Jewish laborers.... I have not been to Birobidzhan. But I have visited a number of Jewish agricultural colonies in the Crimea, and as a biologist24 I was interested in the deep changes that have occurred in the appearance of the Jew who is engaged in agricultural labor. Semashko went on to assert that Jews in agricultural colonies Bcompletely changed the way they speak: instead of the quick, nervous machine-gun speech peculiar to the Jews of tsarist Russia, they spoke with me in the confident, deliberate and clear voice of agricultural collective farmers....^ Semashko also noted that Jews involved in the agrarian way of life walked with self-confidence and self-assuredness, testifying to the healthful consequences of physical labor. Was Semashko simply noting that Jews who tilled the land had undergone an alteration in their style of walking, talking, and comporting themselves because changes in their life circumstances had given them a sense of pride and self-worth? Or was he alluding to a genetic transformation of these Jews? The reference to Bbeing born^ in the article_s title is ambiguous in terms of whether the author believed that the altered manner of talking and walking meant a genetic change. Nor did the phrase Ba question of biology^ necessarily embrace heredity or genetics. Semashko was not a biologist, let alone a eugenicist, though for a brief period of time in the 1920s he displayed sympathy for eugenics. 25 But by 1934, given the Kremlin_s suppression of eugenics

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(discussed below), Semashko would have been foolhardy to assert a role for heredity in the creation of the new Soviet Jew. It is unlikely that he would have argued that the gait, speech, and health of Jews working the land had a different genetic make-up from those still involved in traditional occupations deemed unproductive. No doubt the former People_s Commissar of Health believed that life on the land would strengthen the physical and mental constitutions of those individual Jews living on collective farms. But he did not think that Jews engaged in productive labor could pass on these changes to their children via heredity. A controversy on the pages of the second volume of PBPJ (1928) lends credence to this scenario. Gran found himself backpedaling as a result of criticism raised by Semashko speaking in his capacity as People_s Commissar of Health. In an article that appeared in another journal, Semashko had cautioned Gran and his collaborators about their methodology and implied that some of the articles in volume one resembled the Bbourgeois^ approaches of non-Soviet eugenicists who paid insufficient attention to environmental factors.26 By the late 1920s, Semashko had turned his back on eugenics. He hewed closely to the emerging party line on genetics and eugenics that insisted on the incompatibility of heredity with both the materialist foundations of Marxism and the effort to transform society and culture through voluntarism. Semashko stressed that only a Bmaterialist approach^ that focused primarily, though not exclusively, on the influence of socioeconomic determinants of human biology would prevent Soviet biologists from sharing the racism and antisemitism that characterized the study of heredity outside the Soviet Union. The Kremlin had clearly rejected what it believed to be the essence of fascist and bourgeois eugenics, namely the advocacy of Bdirect human intervention in biology to engineer a physical and behavioral transformation.^27 As mentioned previously, at first glance eugenics Y with its emphasis on how human intervention could enhance a person_s genetic characteristics Y would seem to dovetail nicely with Soviet Marxists_ insistence that human agency and voluntarism could transform the nature of human society. But the impending Brevolution from above^ in the late 1920s undercut the appeal of eugenics.28 Not only did an emphasis on heredity cast doubt on the Soviet communists_ program of immediate social and cultural transformation, but also reliance on eugenics required patience and a willingness to wait, two traits absent from Stalin and his supporters who were intent on crushing once and for all what they believed were the impediments to the building of socialism.

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From the Stalinist perspective, eugenicists_ belief that a Bnew Soviet man and woman^ depended on a makeover in the genetic composition of people cast doubt on whether socio-economic transformation and change in material circumstances would be sufficient to remake human society. Moreover, the connections of Soviet eugenicists with colleagues in the Bbourgeois West,^ especially German eugenicists with growing links to National Socialism, transformed eugenics into a politically dangerous endeavor. This reluctance to biologize29 the realm of human relations reflected the political and philosophical sensibilities of those academics and scientists responsible for implementing the velikii perelom (great change or break) of the first Five-Year Plan. The skepticism concerning genetics displayed by some communist ideologists and scientists signaled a turn away from the study of human heredity. Consequently, many eugenicists turned their attention to other fields such as medical genetics where they could put their expertise to work.30 In addition, the debate regarding the relative merits of Mendelian and Lamarckian genetics was transferred to the realm of plant science where Lysenko_s emphasis on the inheritance of acquired characteristics soon reigned supreme.31 Semashko_s warning highlights the desire of many in the realm of public health and biology to shift the emphasis from what was referred to as Brace hygiene^ to Bsocial hygiene.^ The former focused purely on heredity without consideration of social and economic realities, whereas the latter took into account various factors, socioeconomic as well as biological. The first approach was viewed as politically conservative and the preserve of non-Soviet scientists, particularly in Germany, while the second was regarded as progressive and appropriate for socialist societies and garnered the favor of the Kremlin. For example, in 1927 Semashko wrote that the resettlement of Jews on the land had a role to play in the Bsocial hygiene^ of Soviet Jewry by restoring the Bhealth of the Jewish laboring masses.^32 According to Semashko, shtetl life and the Bconstant fear^ of pogrom violence had given rise to all kinds of Bnervous and even mental diseases. B Nevertheless, he was confident that Bhealthy labor in fresh air^ would undo the cumulative ill effects on body and mind that had resulted from life in the shtetl. More importantly, restoring the physical and mental conditions of Soviet Jewry would put an end to the transmission of illness from one generation to the next.33 Semashko_s comments echoed the sentiments of others, including some involved in the eugenics movement. In 1925, Petr Tiutyshkin, a physician from Moscow, delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the

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Eugenics Research Association in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Tiutyshkin noted that social eugenics: as a study of the role of biological inheritance in mankind is inseparable from social euthenics34 as a study of the role of social environment. This mutually intimate connection of biogenetic and social elements is understood in the same way which we now understand physiology merging with psychology.35 Tiutyshkin argued that the Bbiogenetic factors of social life cannot be studied independently of its social-economic factors^ and concluded that social hygiene with its emphasis on the social and economic factors of Bsocial health^ works in tandem with eugenics and its focus on heredity to shape society. As a result of Semashko_s criticism, Gran and his co-editors toned down the emphasis on the importance of human biology and acknowledged the primacy of material circumstances as determinants of human behavior. In his published response to Semashko, Gran agreed that the journal_s approach had to underscore the direct impact of the social and political environment on the study of ethnic groups. Nevertheless, he continued to insist that the study of biological factors could yield insights that would complement those gleaned from the transformation of Soviet Jewry_s socio-economic profile.36 After 1928 the editors of PBPJ, following the cues provided by Semashko, began to drop the word Beugenics^ from their work, choosing to use Bsocial hygiene^ in its place. Despite this shift in language and emphasis, the editors of PBPJ continued to stress research that addressed the issue of Jewish productivization. The articles that appeared in the third volume of PBPJ emphasized how productivization would improve the physical and psychological health of Soviet Jews, but said little about how the changes in the kind of work Jews performed might affect their biological makeup. One theme common to many of the articles that appeared in all three volumes of PBPJ was the belief that centuries of life as an oppressed minority had given rise to the prototypical Jewish male who was sickly and suffered from a host of nervous disorders and physical ailments. The gendered aspect of this discussion bears noting: advocates of productivization feminized Jewish men when describing the frail and sickly prototypical shtetl Jewish male. Similarly, the image of the new Soviet Jew was one who was masculinized. The productivized Jew was clearly a man_s man, and not, in the inimitable phrasing of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Bgirlie man.^37 This was due in large measure to life

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as a member of an oppressed minority whose restricted social and economic opportunities forced Jewish men into certain occupations that had deleterious effects on their mental and physical well-being. Hence, contributors to PBPJ conducted studies to ascertain whether or not Soviet Jews were inclined to certain diseases. The investigators then complemented the identification of such ailments with an inquiry into their causes as part of the effort to ameliorate those socio-economic circumstances that gave rise to disease among Soviet Jews. S. R. Dikhtiar was one researcher motivated by a desire to investigate the relationship between Bsocial hygiene^ and productivization. In a study of declassed Minsk Jews (Jews who had no Bproductive economic function^ according to Dikhtiar) in the 1920s, the author examined the factors that accounted for the socio-economic and occupational profiles of Jews in tsarist and communist times. That is, he asked if the extent to which the paucity of Jews in what Dikhtiar believed to be productive labor was biologically determined or the result of broader social, economic, and political determinants in which Soviet Jewry (and tsarist Jewry prior to 1917) lived. Dikhtiar concluded that unproductive Jews did not possess a Bsocio-hygienic disinclination^ to engage in productive labor. In other words, no biological barrier existed to the transformation of Soviet Jewry_s occupational profile since social and economic factors accounted for the health problems experienced by the Minsk Jews in his study. Consequently, the productivization of Soviet Jewry could proceed apace so long as the government made a concerted effort to uproot Jews from non-physical labor. Keeping in line with the changing attitudes towards eugenics in particular and genetics in general, Dikhtiar asserted that current social and economic conditions accounted for the unproductive nature of Soviet Jewish work. The physical constitution of the Jews, he emphasized, was suited for industrial and agricultural employment. By investigating the social hygiene of Minsk Jewry and the relationship between labor productivity and public health, Dikhtiar concluded that Jews could play a positive role in the building of socialism.38 The Brevolution from above,^ which began in earnest in 1928Y29, was the death knell for eugenicists, who found their research agenda delegitimized, organizations shut down, and funding taken away by 1930. Researchers who explored the role of human heredity and biology in the building of socialism were silenced by the Kremlin_s assault on eugenics. The Bureau of Eugenics of the Academy of Sciences shifted its focus from humans to plants and animals, and the Russian Eugenics Society, which operated under the auspices of the People_s Commissariat

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of Health, had to close shop in 1930. As Loren Graham has noted, Bthe eugenics movement in the Soviet Union was finished^ by 1930 because those in power did not want to rely on heredity as the engine of socialist transformation.39 After all, Soviet Marxists never believed that communists could build a human utopia Bthrough the biological transformation of human beings,^ though they certainly accepted the existence of Bthe biological determinants of human history.^40 Even though eugenicists such as Dikhtiar concluded that genetic barriers to productivization of Soviet Jewry did not exist, they nonetheless did not entirely abandon the role of heredity in the shaping of human behavior. Consequently, all Soviet eugenicists, not only those who embraced a Lamarckian approach to the problem of productivization, found themselves out of step with a government whose outlook was shaped by a materialist conception of human society that had no room for the influence of heredity. From the perspective of the reigning faction in the Kremlin, altering the material circumstances in which Soviet Jews live and work, together with transforming the social and economic environment in which people live, would overcome the obstacles to the productivization of Soviet Jewry. Soviet Jews would have no difficulty taking up physically demanding work such as farming. In the end, socialist construction in general and productivization in particular would improve the overall mental and physical health of Soviet Jewry, thereby contributing to the emergence of a new Soviet Jew and and this Jew_s future generations.

Notes 1. The full text of Summers_ comments can be found at http://www.president.edu/ speeches/2005/nber.html. 2. In this speech Summers was primarily interested in exploring why women were underrepresented in the fields of engineering and the natural sciences. He suggested that innate intellectual disparities between men and women might account for this state of affairs. Regarding the disparities between men and women in what he terms Bhigh-end scientific professions,^ Summers ranked Bdifferent socialization and patterns of discrimination^ as less important than Bdifferent availability of aptitude at the high end.^ 3. On this issue see Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770Y1870 (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 60Y61 and 176Y190; Derek Penslar, Shylock_s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley, 2001), 39Y41, 105Y107, 116Y118, and 205Y216; and documents in Jehuda Reinharz and Paul Mendes-Flohr, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (2nd ed., New York, 1995), passim.

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4. Psychophysiology is the study of the interrelationship between the psychological and physiological aspects of behavior 5. Mikhail Beizer, Evrei leningrada, 1917Y1939: Natsional_nost_ i sovetizatsiia (Moscow and Jerusalem, 1999), 257, 314; Tsentral_nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga, fond 2555, opis_ 1, delo 909, l.17. 6. A search of archives and libraries in both St. Petersburg and Moscow uncovered little useful material. The holdings of the Jewish EthnographicYHistorical Society, while not entirely destroyed, did suffer from neglect and willful destruction. The same holds for the Society for the Preservation of the Health of Jews. On the fate of these documents, see Binyamin Lukin, BArchive of the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society: History and Present Condition, BJews in Eastern Europe 1(20): (1993), 45Y61; and, Valery Gessen, BThe Strange Fate of the Archives of the St. Petersburg Jewish Societies,^ Soviet Jewish Affairs 21:2 (1991): 55Y58. In addition, Russian specialists in the history of Soviet eugenics and genetics have told me that they have never encountered material on referring specifically to Jews. 7. Mark Adams, BEugenics in Russia, 1900Y1940,^ in Mark Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York, 1990), 153Y216; Loren Graham, BScience and Values: The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s,^ American Historical Review 82,:5 (December 1977): 1133Y1164; A. E. Gaissinovitch, BThe Origins of Soviet Genetics and the Struggle with Lamarckism, 1922Y1929,^ Journal of the History of Biology 13: 1 (Spring 1980); 1Y51. See also David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago, 1970), 259Y266. 8. For a discussion of the Jews_ distinctive collective characteristics in Germany, see John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Finde-Siecle Europe^ (New Haven, 1994). The following article offers a fascinating analysis of the link between eugenics and Zionist thought: Raphael Falk, BZionism and the Biology of the Jews,^ Science in Context 11:3Y4 (1998), 587Y607. See also Raphael Falk, Tsiunut ve-ha-biologiah shel ha-yehudim (Tel Aviv, 2006). 9. V. I. Binshtok, et al., BO zadachakh nauchnykh sbornikov ‘Voprosy biologii I patalogii evreev_,^ PBPJ, sbornik 1 (Leningrad, 1926), 3Y6 and M. M. Gran, BK voprosu o metodologii biologicheskogo izucheniia rasy i natsii,^ PBPJ, sbornik 2 (Leningrad, 1928), 5Y10. 10. Deborah Yalen, BBiologies, Pathologies, Environments: Scientific Research on Soviet Jews in the 1920s,^ Paper delivered at the 2005 annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. 11. Marina Mogil_ner, BEvreiskaia antropologiia v Rossii v kontekste evropeiskikh rasovykh issledovanii (XIXYXX vv.),^ Evreistva: novye istochniki, novye podkhody^ (Moscow, 2004), 116Y137. 12. The titles of the following articles give a flavor of what appeared in PBPJ: BDeath and Birth Rates among Jews in Vilna for the Five-Year Period (1921Y1925),^ BSome Data on the Blood Types of Slavs and Jews,^ BBlood Types among Karaites and Crimeans,^ BTuberculosis among School Children of Various Nationalities,^ and BMaterial on the Height and Weight of Jews and Non-Jews.^ 13. The editors did not ignore the value of factory work in terms of productivizing Jews, but in the 1920s, before the crash industrialization drive of the first Five-Year Plan, agrarianization took precedence over industrialization. Even when the Soviet Union began to promote rapid industrialization, agricultural settlement still retained importance, though industrial development soon overshadowed it.

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14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

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Binshtok, et al., 4. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5. Two excellent introductions to the subject are Mark Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York, 1990) and Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York, 1985). Mark Adams, BEugenics as Social Medicine in Revolutionary Russia: Prophets, Patrons, and the Dialectics of Discipline-Building^ in Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson, eds., Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, 1990), 213. In Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca:, 2003), 10 and 186, David Hoffmann notes that the Soviet state_s interventionist policies were characterized by elements of Lamarckism. But Hoffmann is mistaken when he posits that such policies Bwere distinguished by their rejection of eugenics and their emphasis on Lamarckism.^ Lamarckism and eugenics were compatible according to some Soviet scientists. M. M. Gran, BBlizhaishie zadachi nauchno-issledovatel_skikh rabot v sviazy s perekhodom evreev k zemledeliiu,^ PBPJ, sbornik 1 (1926), 95Y101. The quotes appear on page 97. Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Power in Soviet Russia, 1924Y41 (New Haven, 2005), 27. Ibid., 28. N. A. Semashko, BRozhdaetsia novyi chelovek,^ Tribuna evreiskoi sovetskoi obshchestvennosti, no 6 (1934), 8. Semashko was a physician. Interestingly, in the 1920s Semashko supported efforts to find the somatic basis of behavior deemed Bdeviant^ such as homosexuality. In particular, Semashko subscribed to the school of endocrinology connected to Magnus Hirschfeld_s Institute for Sex Research in Berlin. Many proponents of endocrinology experimented with testicle transplants and sex-gland implants in order to combat homosexuality and lesbianism. See Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sex and Gender Dissent (Chicago and London, 2001), 132Y134. Gran, BK voprosu o metodologii biologicheskogo izucheniia rasy i natsii,^ PBPJ, sbornik 2 (Leningrad, 1928), 5Y10. Dekel-Chen, 28. BRevolution from above^ refers to the policies adopted by the Soviet leadership to establish a socialist economy and society as quickly as possible. Collectivization of agriculture, industrialization at breakneck speed, and five-year plans were the hallmarks of the efforts of Stalin and his supporters to build socialism. According to Mark Adams, biologizirovat_ (to biologize) appeared as a pejorative term to underscore the proscription of linking the biological to the social. See Mark Adams, BThe Soviet Nature-Nurture Debate,^ in Loren Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 101. Medical genetics was essentially a revised eugenics program interested in improving the health of the proletariat and fighting the racialist biology of Nazism. Medical genetics fell victim to Lysenkosim in the late 1930s. See Mark Adams, BEugenics in

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32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

ROBERT WEINBERG

Russia,^ 188Y199 for a discussion of the fate of eugenics and genetics in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s. Gregor Mendel (1822Y1884) was an Augistinian monk from Moravia whose experiments with pea plants challenged the Lamarckian belief that environment determined heredity. Mendel argued that offspring inherited the traits of their parents who passed on their characteristics genetically. N. A. Semashko, BNa putiakh k ozdorovleniiu evreiskogo naroda,^ Tribuna sovetskoi evreiskoi obshchestvennosti, no. 1 (1927), 2. Ibid., 2 Euthenics refers to the impact of educational reform and environmental change on racial improvement. Social euthenics and social hygiene can be used interchangeably. An abstract of Tiutyshkin_s paper can be found in Eugenical News, X: 8 (1925), 115Y116. Gran, BK voprosu o metodologii biologicheskogo izucheniia rasy i natsii,^ 5-10. In the summer of 2004, during a controversy with the California state legislature, Governor Schwarzenegger referred to opponents of his policies as Bgirlie men^ because they lacked, in his view, political backbone. Viewers of American television know that Schwarzenegger took the phrase from the Hans and Franz skit that parodied him on Saturday Night Live. S. R. Dikhtiar, BDeklassironvannoe evreistvo g. Minska: opyt sotsial_no-gigiencheskogo issledovaniia,^ PBPJ, sbornik 3, vypusk 1 (Leningrad, 1930), 1Y59. Graham, BScience and Values: The Eugenics Movement,^ 1156. David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, 253.

Acknowledgement I want to thank the members of the Delaware Valley Seminar on Russian History for their useful suggestions and incisive comments on the paper. I also want to express my gratitude to Scott Gilbert, a developmental biologist who corrected several mistakes in my discussion of eugenics.