SOURCE: "Weininger and Nazi Ideology," in Jews & Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, edited by Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams, Temple University Press, 1995, pp. 155-68.

In the following essay, Hyams explains how the theories in Sex and Character were eventually exploited by the Nazis.

Otto Weininger's popular scientific treatise of 1903, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), lent itself in many ways to exploitation by völkisch and, slightly later, Nazi ideologues. Weininger, an apostate Viennese Jew who converted to Protestantism the day he became a doctor of philosophy in June of 1902, had attempted to define Jewish character in a single chapter of a work otherwise dedicated to defining male and female character and to suggesting a solution to the alleged moral depravity of the era. By drawing negative parallels between male Jews and "Aryan" women, Weininger appeared to fall victim to his contempt for women, who in his...