Richard Nikolaus Von Coudenhove-Kalergi - Views On Race and Religion

Views On Race and Religion

In his attitudes towards race and religion, Coudenhove-Kalergi continued the work of his father. Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi was a Roman Catholic with no Jewish blood. In his youth, he was an antisemite. He had expected to confirm his antipathy towards the Jews when he started working on his treatise Das Wesen des Antisemitismus (The Essence of Antisemitism). But he came to a different conclusion by the time he published his book in 1901. Following an ironic critique of the new racial theories, he declared that the essence of antisemitism amounted to nothing more credible than fanatical religious hatred. He traced that fanaticism to religious bigotry that originated in the promulgation of Torah under Ezra. According to the elder Coudenhove-Kalergi, Jewish religious bigotry provoked opposition from the relatively tolerant Greco-Roman polytheists, eliciting their anti-Judaic reaction. Antisemitism came into existence when Christianity and Islam took over the intolerant fanaticism of Judaism, and turned it against the Jews. Thus Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi credited the Jews with originating religious intolerance, and condemned it as a violation of genuine religious principles. He branded every sort of anti-Judaism unchristian. He further urged liberal Christians and Jews to ally in protecting both of their religions, and religion as such, against the emerging menace of secularism.

In spite of his opposition to simplistic racial theory, Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi agreed that Jews are racially distinct. Although he pointed out that there is no Semitic race, because Semitic is a language family, he equivocated by also remarking that the charges that Semites were uncreative were belied by civilizations formed by the Assyrians and Babylonians, who spoke Semitic languages. He further sought to defend the Jews against bigoted charges of parasitic greed and cowardice with anecdotal counterexamples of Jewish industriousness and martial courage.

In 1932 Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi composed a preface for a new edition of his father's condemnation of antisemitism, reissued by his own publishing house. In 1933 he responded to the ascendance of National Socialism by collaborating with Heinrich Mann, Arthur Holitscher, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Max Brod in writing and publishing the pamphlet Gegen die Phrase vom jüdischen Schädling (Against the Phrase 'Jewish Parasite').

Coudenhove-Kalergi complemented his liberal views of the political role of the Jews with distinctive advocacy of race mixing. In his book Praktischer Idealismus (Practical Idealism) he wrote:

"The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals."

"Instead of destroying European Jewry, Europe, against its own will, refined and educated this people into a future leader-nation through this artificial selection process. No wonder that this people, that escaped Ghetto-Prison, developed into a spiritual nobility of Europe. Therefore a gracious Providence provided Europe with a new race of nobility by the Grace of Spirit. This happened at the moment when Europe’s feudal aristocracy became dilapidated, and thanks to Jewish emancipation."