Thread by @mischrev

🧵My impression—you’ve deleted the most explicit falsehoods and prefaced everything else w the self-fulfilling idea that there’s little evidence Boas was ethnocentric only bc he was ethnocentric, trying to abate gentile suspicion.
As I'll show, you offer no evidence to that end:

Your grappling with Boas’ desire for J assimilation is untenable. It's not "simply an allegation of fact": you emphasize Boas’ entire career was ideological, devoted to allaying racism, so of course this is prescriptive: “the greatest hope for the immediate future,” in fact. ...

This is why such is the opinion of even the scholars you rely on throughout the section.
Even Leslie White (pic 2) is in agreement:

Although you go on to argue the opposite, Degler 1991 concurs:
1. Boas was an *assimilationist*, not a pluralist as you claim;
2. Boas was hardly “aimed at promoting the idea that all cultures are equal.”
If anything, that is a description of his gentile contemporaries.
Read:

This was just one way Boas’ beliefs were incongruent with organized Jewish activists.
Separately, one of the only direct interactions with such people I know of saw Boas at once refusing their request for a written denunciation of Father Coughlin, and portraying Jews as racists.

And no, Boas was not "hostile toward gentile culture."
You focus on a single item of my evidence and baselessly construe it through the lens of a Jewish agenda.
If Boas was *solely* supportive of the German cause in WWI (“in 1916”), as you imply, then okay. But that’s false.

Boas co-founded and was active for years in the Germanistic Society (starting in 1904, i.e., *well prior* to WWI) for “the advancement of the study and knowledge of German civilization.”

Even after moving to US for career opportunities, Boas still visited the country he was allegedly "hostile toward" many times. He was also fond of the Kaiser.
Degler (1989) offers a better picture.

The cultural Germanism of Boas’ private life was also depicted by a German contemporary. “Hostility”?

And ofc: you use Herskovits’ endogamy as evidence of Jewishness, so the inverse works too. Despite your original claim, Boas married a gentile German. This is especially perplexing since you portray Boas as excluding gentiles (except as frontmen) and hostile toward their culture.

Clearly your speculation that Boas’ defense of Germany was really, secretly, Jewish is unsupported by the relevant evidence, not that you bothered to provide any for that conclusion yourself.
Why make such unsubstantiated claims?

I also notice you've pasted the TOO article “Jewish Assimilation?” from back in October in your revised chapter, bc I’ve already responded to it on my blog.
I haven’t even listed all the evidence, but Boas’ heavily German private life and disinterest in Jewish affairs are clear.

This general image of Boas is also the working consensus of the relevant biographers. Quoting the brief opinions of one or two minor exceptions, as you tend to do to buttress a point, unless accompanied by novel evidence, is pointless.

Similar beliefs are also to be found among many of Boas’ Jewish students. Unlike with some of the other movements you identify in CofC, Jewish identification did not play a prominent role in the Boasian school of anthropology.

Some helpful words to review from The Culture of Critique:

The movement was initially heavily Jewish primarily due to the waves of Jewish immigration to NYC and influx into Columbia’s student body at the time. However the ideas it promoted were already in development organically, and were taken the furthest among the gentile Boasians.

W/o evidence, you repeat your claim that Mead’s and Benedict’s success were due to J promoting as gentile frontmen. Your own source contradicts this: great majority of those Freeman notes for support of their books were gentiles while ALL of those noted for criticizing it were Js

This is a point that's been raised since Cofnas’ 2018 paper, and I’m not sure why you refuse to let it go.
Regardless, even according to your writings, these two gentiles did the most for anthropological blank slatism.

There are other errors, more minor but blatant, that you’ve still not corrected.
Some examples follow...

The majority of the Boasians heading anthropology departments referred to by your source weren't actually Jewish as you suggest.
(Also note that Columbia U's student body was 40% Jewish in the early 1900s but dropped to over 20% toward the end of Boas' career.)

These words are incorrectly attributed to Kroeber, who never insinuated Jewishness had anything to do with this. They come from White who provides zero evidence in his polemics and was pretty persuasively refuted at the time.

There are plenty more objections one could raise with this attempt at revision, and I don’t wish to exhaust them, here, but I’ve touched on the main ones and my thoughts should be clear.

The entire section is deceptive, and while it’s good you’ve deleted the false quote attributed to Boas and the claim he married another Jew, those are just the most obvious/unavoidable examples. Everything you weren’t absolutely forced to concede, you’ve kept in without reason.

For all these reasons, for the sake of honesty, it would be best to omit the whole section from the chapter. There’s no getting around it.
—
Links:
vivare.substack.com/p/cofc-the-boa…
vivare.substack.com/p/checking-in-…

I'd forgotten to address one more historical point included in a screenshot: opposing Prussian aristocracy does not betray a hostility to gentile culture. Boas was a proud German but an 1848 liberal, and the Junkers were opposed by all German liberals, Jewish and gentile alike.