Paul de Lagarde isn't a household name. If you brought him up among a hundred Germans......one might recall the name and simply note that he came out of the 1800s and had some strange connection to the Nazis, but was dead forty years prior to Hitler and the Nazis coming to power.
de Lagarde is a Berliner born in 1827.....and mostly destined for his life as an intellectural. He spent three years of time at Humboldt University (Berlin, 1844 to 1846) and two years at University of Halle-Wittenberg (Halle, 1846 through 1847). His field? Religious studies, philosophy and oddly enough.....Oriental languages.
All of this led de Lagarde to a self-appointed status as a Bible scholar and oriental languages expert. And.....to this odd field of expertise referred to as a polymath.
Naturally, you'd ask what a polymath is.....because you've never heard the title or word before.
Well....it's a Greek term that goes back centuries in terms of usage but mostly defined as a modern science or way of thinking in the 1700s.
Basically, a polymath is a guy or gal who has had a number of fields of study....beyond the normal university graduate.....so they "say" that they have "learned much" and can make better decisions over problems than the normal average guy with one single field of study. He can draw upon vast knowledge.....to answer complex questions unrelated to the general field of his expertise.
It's kinda like the guy who studies diesel mechanics, read all of Mark Twain's books, spent four years at a Bible college, and then spent eight months at some community college with intense studies into business operations......THEN he says that he's a big-time five-star expert on farming or professional baseball management.
So, le Lagarde comes out in 1875 with a book, and discusses the problem of German society integrating (you have to remember in 1800.....there were 300 different cultures, kingdoms, city-states, and empires existing in Germany). Prussia was roughly 70-odd years into integrating this massive structure into one country, and de Lagarde decided that the majority could make the integration move....BUT the Jews could never integrate.
In the logic that le Lagarde used......various Germanic peoples had the power and capability to blend into one society.....but the Jews were not of the Germanic people or culture.
All of this led le Lagarde to suggest at one point.....why not pressure or force the German Jews to move to a new land.....well.....like Madagascar (an island on the Indian Ocean side of Africa). Naturally, in the world of intellectural wisdom.....it all made sense. The fact that you were forcing in some way the event....the fact that Africans already inhabited Madagascar.....didn't really get mentioned. The fact that you'd have to take property and wealth from the Jews as you did this.....for redistribution purposes.....well, that was lost on le Lagarde as well.
Most historians who try to recount the real birth of Nazi-thinking.....end up in the 1875-era and looking over a highly published number of items from Paul de Lagarde. People read his essays and got attached to his way of thinking. Looking around for some mention in a college history class? No.....you won't find le Lagarde mentioned. In fact, if you took a basic class on German history.....it's a one-percent chance that le Lagarde will get mentioned even once. If you could find a history program splits German history up into six different classes and emphasized the events in each era......that's about the only way that you get a ten minute-introduction into the effect of one single guy on German history.
A self-absorbed intellectural who thought he knew the big picture? Yeah....that's the simplicity of this one single guy.
How many polymaths do we have around today? Hmmm.....that would be a curious question to pose.
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