Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism

First published in 1978 and reissued here with a new introductory essay, George L. Mosse's study of European racism and anti-Semitism is a classic of its kind. Starting in the Age of Enlightenment and following the evolution of anti-Semitism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mosse disentangles the broad scientific, ideological, and political currents that fed the growth of European racism and tragically culminated in the Holocaust. The result is a revealing perspective that shows anti-Semitism for what it is - an integral part of a long European cultural tradition — and that will prove essential reading for political scientists, historians, social scientists, and anyone interested in Jewish studies or the complex roots of a modern disease.

"With (this) book, George L Mosse claims once again his place in modern historiography as the foremost explicator and demythologizer of ideas which have inflamed and energized men's minds and worked ir-reversible evil in human history... In his exposition of the etiology of racism and its dynamic, if aberrant, progression, Mosse has produced a strikingly original work whose conceptual brilliance and analytic keenness will surely make it the indispensable work on European racism."
—Lucy S. Dawidowicz,
in Commentary

"Historian Mosse has written an important book on the emergence and development of the European racism that undergirded the thinking and actions of those who participated in... Hitler's 'Final Solution.'"
—Raymond Hall,
in Contemporary Sociology

"Mosse... knows all that there is to know about volkisch and anti-Semi¬tic ideologies. He has given us an... encapsulated history of the racial idea, of its ideological cousinage, of it relations with rival or related movements and ideas."
—Eugen Weber,
in the American Historical Review

Cover design: Mike Jaynes