Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi

October 12, 1859 (age 46)

Vienna, Austria

He spoke 18 languages (including Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese) and his postings included ones to Athens, Rio de Janeiro, Constantinople and Buenos Aires. They had 7 children including Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, best known for his role in establishing the Pan-European movement. In his youth, Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi had been an antisemite. He had expected to confirm his antipathy towards the Jews when he started work 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 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Jewish religious bigotry provoked opposition from the relatively tolerant Greco-Roman polytheists, eliciting their anti-Judaic reaction. Thus, Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi credited the Jews with originating religious intolerance, and condemned it as a violation of genuine religious principles. In spite of his opposition to simplistic racial theory, 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.

Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi

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Diplomat

Background

He was born in Vienna and died in Ronsberg, Western Bohemia (today Poběžovice in the Czechoslovakian Republic).

Career

He spoke 18 languages (including Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese) and his postings included ones to Athens, Rio de Janeiro, Constantinople and Buenos Aires. They had 7 children including Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, best known for his role in establishing the Pan-European movement. In his youth, Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi had been an antisemite.

He had expected to confirm his antipathy towards the Jews when he started work 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 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Jewish religious bigotry provoked opposition from the relatively tolerant Greco-Roman polytheists, eliciting their anti-Judaic reaction.

Thus, Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi credited the Jews with originating religious intolerance, and condemned it as a violation of genuine religious principles.

In spite of his opposition to simplistic racial theory, 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.

Views

He further sought to defend the Jews against bigoted charges of parasitic greed and cowardice with anecdotal counterexamples of Jewish industriousness and martial courage.

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