Professor Paul Root Wolpe writes that “By claiming to be a people, the Jews set themselves up for a bad thing when anti-Semitic eugenics dawned in Nazi Germany.” (“People of the Genome,” Mayrav Saar, PostScript, June 13).
When the European Enlightenment promised all people political rights in exchange for abandoning their ethnicity, many Jews did just that.
Jew-haters invented the concept of Semite, defining the Jews as a racial group unable to assimilate, and stopped admitting to being Jew-haters, which seemed crude.
They preferred the term “anti-Semite,” which had a scientific ring — the science that led to Auschwitz.
Joseph Koenig, Manhattan