Hermann Kantorowicz, Heidegger and the Nazis
On April 7, 1933, the German government enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. One of its sections said that “Civil servants not of Aryan origin are to retire.” University professors were considered civil servants, and therefore this law also applied to them. One of those who answered the questionnaire regarding their racial origins was Hermann Kantorowicz. Kantorowicz was a legal historian, author of the important work Studies in the Glossators of the Roman Law. E.E. Urbach in his Baalei ha-Tosafot refers to the research of Kantorowicz a number of times in his discussion of the Tosafot’s methodology (see pp. 20, 747 and 749). The following is Kantorwicz’s answer to the question regarding his racial origins.
Since there is no time to inquire as to which sense of the term “race” is being utilized, I shall limit myself to the following declarations: as all four of my grandparents died a long time ago and the necessary measurements, etc., were never made, I am unable to ascertain scientifically (anthropologically) what racial group they belonged to. Understood in its common significance, their race was German, as they all spoke German as their mother tongue, which means that it was Indo-European or Aryan. Their race in the sense of the first supplementary decree to the Law of April 7, 1933, section 2, paragraph 1, sentence 3 was the Jewish religion.
Saul Friedlander, in his book Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939
At the time, Martin Heidegger had recently become the rector of Freidburg University. In a response to Hannah Arendt as to his attitude towards Jewish students and colleagues, Heidegger wrote (this a paraphrase since the person who published their correspondence did not receive permission to quote Heidegger’s letters verbatum-see here and here for more),
To Jewish students…he generously gave of his time, disruptive though it was to his own work, getting them stipends and discussing their dissertations with them. Who comes to him in an emergency? A Jew. Who insists on urgently discussing his doctoral degree? A Jew. Who sends him voluminous work for urgent critique? A Jew. Who asks him for help in obtaining grants? Jews!! (Friedlander, p. 53)
Friedlander has written that “contradictions abound” regarding Heidigger’s attitude and relationship towards Nazism and Jewish colleagues and friends, with him even once declaring that “if Spinoza’s philosophy was Jewish, then all philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel was also Jewish.” (Friedlander, p. 54)