Sven Hedin – the famous late nineteenth and early twentieth century Swedish explorer and member of the Nobel Prize committee – is not often thought of as someone who might have had jewish ancestry, but when I was reading a contemporary work to Hedin’s – Arnold Zweig’s ‘Insulted and Exiled’ – I was surprised to read that:
‘To-day, however, it is has perhaps become important to insist that Sven Hedin, the explorer of Tibet, is a Jew.’ (1)
My first tendency was to dismiss this as ludicrous as this would seem decidedly odd, but I quickly worked out there was actually some legs to Zweig’s statement here albeit Zweig’s claim that Hedin was simply ‘a jew’ is inaccurate and also extremely dishonest as well as self-serving in trying to make Hedin out to be something he really wasn’t.
Now the historical truth that underlies Zweig’s claim that Hedin was a jew is the ‘revelation’ in 1935 that Hedin was of partial jewish ancestry.
As JTA wrote on 22nd October 1935:
‘Asked whether he is of Jewish origin, Dr. Sven Hedin, noted Swedish explorer of Tibet, in an interview on his arrived here today stated that his great grandfather was a Jew named Brod who emigrated from Sweden to Germany, changed his name to Berlin and later to Hedin.
His recent visit to Hitler, Dr. Hedin stated, was not political in character.’ (2)
Hedin’s part-jewish – albeit distant – origin was well-known to the Swedish press as early as the 1910s which used his ‘distant jewish roots’ to attack and make fun of his ‘conservative, antidemocratic, as well as anti-Bolshevist’ views as well as his support for ‘racist and antisemitic ideas’. (3)
The ‘distant jewish roots’ were in fact:
‘On his mother’s side the line runs back to a German Jewish rabbi who immigrated to Sweden in 1770.’ (4)
The ‘Sven Hedin Foundation’ at the ‘Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ is far more explicit:
‘On his mother’s side the line can be traced back to a Jewish immigrant in the late 18th century, who was, though, promptly christened and could see his descendants becoming well established in Swedish society. Sven Hedin’s maternal grandfather was the dean of a Southern Swedish parish and among other positions represented the priestly stand in the parliament of those days. Hedin calculated that a 16th part of him through that line was Jewish, something he often proclaimed to be proud of. Even though this in no way would identify him as Jewish in Nazi Germany, it was a fact that was well known there as elsewhere. Hedin was a favourite object of caricatures and they virtually always exaggerated what was deemed to be his “oriental and Jewish traits”. Anti-Semitism was widespread in Swedish comic press of the early 20th century carrying jokes and caricatures, and far from unknown in media later on.’ (5)
So, then Hedin’s maternal great-grandmother was the daughter of a rabbi – probably from Germany – who had immigrated to Sweden circa 1770 then converted to (Protestant) Christianity and therefore Hedin was 1/16th jewish.
Now in terms of the Nuremberg Laws Hedin would have been considered suitably Aryan because the jewishness was sufficiently distant and small in nature, while Adolf Hitler’s admiration for Hedin was based on Hitler’s love for Hedin’s travelogues as a boy and which predate his political conversion and subsequent understanding of the jewish question. (6)
Unlike Hitler’s early friend and chauffeur Emil Maurice; however, (7) Hedin was well-aware – and also proud to be – part-jewish, which makes sense of Hedin’s refusal to adopt the racial anti-Semitism of the Third Reich in his otherwise pro-Hitler 1937 book ‘Germany and World Peace’. (8)
This in essence gives us the key to understanding – which the Third Reich really did not – that while Hedin wasn’t jewish in any meaningful biological sense according to the science of the time (and even to an extent now); his identification of jewishness in his ancestry led to Hedin’s subversive anti-racial views on the jewish question, because he realised that – as a part jew – racial anti-Semitism also somewhat targeted himself as well as other actual jews.
In much the same way as British Prime Ministers of recent decades like David Cameron (9) and Boris Johnson – who both identified as part-jewish and also heavily overidentified with their jewish ancestry – (10) the tiny amount of jewish ancestry that after awareness of it is gained resulted in subversive activity and pro-jewish sentiment was also seen in the case of senior ‘Jobbik’ party member Csanad Szegedi who discovered he was of part-jewish origin and then promptly became an ardent public jew as well as pro-Israel apologist (11) while ‘Jobbik’ suddenly also got a jewish leader a few years later in the form of Peter Jakab. (12)
It just goes to show that while Hedin was a great Swedish explorer; his discovery of his distant jewish ancestry caused him – like it did the British writer and journalist Christopher Hitchins – to warp his political views to fit his personal situation and mixed-race ancestry.
Thus we can see that Sven Hedin was technically distantly jewish and not the full-blooded jew Zweig claims he was, but also that Hedin’s jewishness influenced and moderated his opinions to become somewhat subversive.
This is a good example of why we cannot accept part-jews in the future not because they are bad people per se, but because in knowing they are partially of another race: they become subversive influences in our midst.
References
(1) Arnold Zweig, 1937, ‘Insulted and Exiled: The Truth about the German Jews’, 1st Edition, John Miles: London, p. 144
(2) https://www.jta.org/archive/hedin-famed-explorer-admits-jewish-origin
(3) Pontus Rudberg, 2023, ‘“May God have mercy on his black soul”: Consul General Olof Lamm’s Private Diplomatic Efforts to Save Jews from Nazi Persecution’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2, p. 255
(4) https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hedin-sven/
(5) https://svenhedinfoundation.org/biography/sven-hedin-biography/
(6) Rudberg, Op. Cit., pp. 255-256
(7) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/adolf-hitler-and-emil-maurice
(8) Rudberg, Op. Cit, pp. 255-256; https://www.jta.org/archive/sven-hedin-praises-nazi-regime-but-rejects-race-theory
(9) https://www.thejc.com/news/david-cameron-his-jewish-roots-ryklrl1t
(10) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/boris-johnson-london-and-the-jews
(11) https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/08/14/158773637/leader-of-anti-semitic-party-in-hungary-discovers-hes-jewish
(12) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/12/electing-leader-jewish-roots-jobbik-changed-hungary-shift