Amit Varshizky, The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview (Routledge, London, New York, 2025)

Given the inextricable racial foundations on which its ideological edifice was constructed, National-Socialism is often singled out as a unique iteration of inter-war era fascism.Numerous historical contributions approaching its Weltanschauung have placed the idea of race at its core, while more recent tendencies have integrated racism into a broader conception, avoiding the reduction of Germany's fascist experience to a singular determinant.Embracing the nuances of the latter perspective, Amit Varshizky manages to decipher, through his latest book, the nature of National-Socialist racial ideology by resorting to the philosophical, scientific and spiritual traditions that preceded and anticipated it.In The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview, which originated as a doctoral thesis at the University of Tel Aviv, the Israeli-German historian embarks on a meandering journey to unveil the biological, ethical, political, cultural and theological underpinnings of race in German culture.This ambitious undertaking is also a humane inquiry into the mechanics of annihilatory violence, an open pursuit to "fathom the inner world of the perpetrators," to extend the comprehension of the fascist project which derailed Germany into the cataclysm of war and genocide (xi).The operating premise of the analysis derives from a fundamental concern with revolutionary ideology, opening several epistemological avenues pertaining to the nature of science in high modernity and the dialectic of religion and secularisation.Varshizky advances from a cogent standpoint according to which, on the socio-political scene of the Weimar Republic, there was a growing anxiety inspired by "a vision of a mechanistic utilitarian society," juxtaposed to an equally intense fear of "a growing materialisation of life and the instrumentalization of values," determining a reaction under "the banner of organicism, holism and vitalism" as the salvific solutions to anomie (2-3).It is a valid premise, expanded upon by painstakingly following the processes through which Nazis confiscated the theological and philosophical traditions of old, spliced them with futural elements and moulded them into a racialised worldview.In the National-Socialist comprehension of the world, Varshizky recognises a "new conceptual nexus between the natural and the cultural, the physical and the spiritual," an uncanny synthesis of knowledge (Wissen) and faith (Glaube) (3).An introductory overview revisits major directions of German intellectual history, in anticipation of a three-pronged argument which navigates through the scientific, political and theological fields.The opening chapter contemplates the trajectory of racial notions in post -Enlightenment German culture, encapsulating a major ideological "shift from race to racism" (13).A thorough demonstration reveals the integration of the racial mindset by German