Aryanism and Anti-Semitism: An Overview of Wyndham Lewis’s The Hitler Cult (1939) and The Jews, Are They Human? (1939)

Abstract

This paper examines Wyndham Lewis’s critical engagement with race politics in his 1939 polemical texts The Hitler Cult and The Jews, Are They Human?, with particular focus on the themes of Aryanism and anti-Semitism. Written at the height of Nazi influence, Lewis’s works reflect a complex interaction with the racial ideologies of the period. In The Hitler Cult, Lewis analyzes the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, shedding light on how the doctrine of Aryan supremacy was employed to legitimize a radical reordering of society and the conceptualization of a “new human.” In The Jews, Are They Human?, Lewis turns his attention to the pervasive anti-Semitism of the era, interrogating the prejudices that underpinned Nazi rhetoric and policy. This paper explores how Lewis, through irony and critical distance, exposes the contradictions and dangers embedded in fascist racial doctrines.