Since at least the first half of the 1930s Hitler justified his plans to isolate and segregate German Jews with the same rhetoric that the Catholic Church had used to maintain the European ghettos (7.6, 7.8, 7.9). In his own words:

I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc. because it recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented.¹

It was with good reason that the Führer called himself “the most conservative revolutionary in the world.” And although his plan was rooted in centuries of Catholic practice, there was something certainly revolutionary in his approach: for the Nazis the contamination coming from the Jews was not spiritual as in the case of the Catholic Church (7.6, 7.7), it was biological, and it entailed, according to Nazi pseudo-science, the degeneration of a supposedly superior race. The key point here, as Agamben has noted, is the conclusiveness of this form of discrimination, for although the church sometimes allowed and encouraged the conversion of Jews to Catholicism (7.8), the biological fact of being Jewish (or of any other race) is inescapable. No one can renounce his race or his color of skin. While the ghettos of early modernity emphasized the otherness of the Jews living in Christian Europe, the Nazi ghettos pointed to an entirely modern matter: total segregation on the basis of genetics. It is in this fixation with biological fact that Agamben finds the foundation of the bare life that permeates the totality of contemporary biopolitics (0.10, 0.14).

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1. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 47. Quoted by Duneier iin Ghetto, 32-33. ↩︎