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The views of Rudolf Steiner on the subject of race and ethnicity are complex and, in recent years, some of these views have provoked controversy. Steiner's comments on race and ethnicity, and the related controversies, are summarized here.

The individual and the race

 * 1) Humanity is made up of independent, free individuals, each of which exists sui generis: as a unique being inexplicable on the basis of gender, race or ethnicity.
 * 2) Each individual passes through incarnations in various races and ethnic groups. Race and ethnicity are transient characteristics, not essential aspects of an individual.
 * 3) In a given lifetime, each individual seeks to transform the body he or she inherits – all that is inherited by being part of a family, ethnic group or race – into a more individuated form. Individualities who effect this transformation and individuation more completely and successfully are little determined by their genetic makeup. Those who are less able to effect it are more strongly determined by their genetic characteristics (including racial background).
 * 4) Races arise, develop and decline. “A race or nation stands so much the higher, the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal human type, the further they have worked their way from the physical and perishable to the supersensible and imperishable. The evolution of humanity through incarnations in ever higher national and religious forms is thus a process of liberation. The human being must finally appear in harmonious perfection.”
 * 5) Individuals who attach themselves too strongly to any particular race are inevitably caught in that race’s decline; those who free themselves from racial attachments pass from race to race as these develop. ‘Races would never become decadent, never decline, if there weren't souls that are unable to move up and unwilling to move up to a higher racial form.’
 * 6) All races are currently in decline. The “black race” once led humanity; the “red race” followed; the “yellow race” followed this; though the “white race” has led the progress of humanity most recently, it too is in decline and has the potential to descend to a lower level than any race hitherto.
 * 7) Humanity now has the task of progressively eliminating the significance of race altogether; "someone speaking today of the ideal of races and nations and of tribal affiliation speaks of decadent impulses of humanity....through nothing will humanity be brought more into decadence than if the ideals of race, nation and blood continue to hold sway. The future evolution of humanity depends upon this."  "Today, the idea of culture has superseded the idea of race." In particular, humanity has the task of freeing itself from an instinctive spirituality connected to one's racial and ethnic inheritance. This can be promoted when people of several races or ethnic groups inter-marry, for children who have a mixed ethnic or racial background can thus more easily find their way to a new, universally human spirituality.
 * 8) Remnants of race are still significant in our day; we have not yet overcome this completely. As races partly determine the genetic inheritance, they provide more ‘advanced’ or ‘backward’ bodies for souls’ incarnations. But: “No soul is bound to a backward body if it does not bind itself to it.” Nevertheless, racial differences present in the physical body are relatively unimportant; they are "mere trifles by comparison with differences in individual gifts and skills"; "We are equal as human beings" through our all bearing a human countenance and form.
 * 9) The Anthroposophical Society seeks to overcome racial differences: it "unites in a single spiritual impulse those who belong to the most various races and peoples...We try to gather together what was dispersed about the world, and members of the various nations embrace one another in brotherhood, become brothers in our fold."

Particular racial or ethnic groups
Many people find some of Steiner’s descriptions of particular races or ethnic groups troubling or problematic, and in some cases difficult to reconcile with his more general statements about the role race and ethnicity play in present-day humanity. Such descriptions include:

Races

 * Humanity, torn out of its traditional racial and ethnic groupings, must realize that race is losing all significance as an idea; all races will disappear into the melting pot of humanity. Whereas a common racial or ethnic background provided groups of people with their sense of identity in the past, spiritual wisdom will be required to bring humanity together in the future: "...the ancient connections of race and blood will be increasingly lost. Mankind becomes freer of physical ties in order to form groups from the aspect of the spirit."
 * He suggests that the white race provides a genetic makeup most helpful in the present age, because it supports a strong relationship to external sense impressions, but sees all races as being in decline from the height of their cultural evolution, sometimes using the term ‘decadent’. The white race is also presently in decline, though not so long.
 * At the beginning of 1915, shortly after the beginning of WWI, he suggested that eventual battles between the 'white' and ‘colored’ races "in many areas" would be inevitable in about 1,600 years because of the different relationship of the 'white' and 'colored' races to spiritual experience: the former experiencing spirit as something inward and subjective, the latter as something external and objective. Inner spiritual experience is something modern; experiencing spirit in the environment is an ancient faculty, preserved by Orientals, that will be again required for the future. After these battles, which are being prepared already today, the further cultural development of humanity will be increasingly based on an experience of spirit as objective reality, rather than as merely an inner experience.
 * He joined other Germans in protesting the French for the housing and deployment of black African soldiers in Europe. He states that this "cultural brutality" will work to the disadvantage of the French peoples, in particular weakening the French stock.
 * He states that "In spiritual culture Asians are today still ahead of Europeans." But he also states "It is often pointed out nowadays that their inherent qualities are bringing about significant progress in the Japanese. This is an illusion. They are not developing as a result of their own characteristics. Their victory in the last war [the 1905 war between Russia and Japan] was achieved by means of warships and guns invented by Europeans -- by exploiting an alien civilisation. Progressive development is only possible when a people can evolve by virtue of its own intrinsic nature. That is the crucial point."
 * He states that those who incarnate in the non-white races at present have tended to connect themselves with their racial background too closely, and are thus caught in that race’s decline. (Note that he emphasizes that every individual must be treated as a special case, however, and not treated according to their genetic heritage.)
 * He speaks of the tragic inevitability that the Native Americans, to whom he attributes an unusually highly developed spirituality, but one preserved through a hardening of the organism, would be extinguished or uprooted. He suggests that Native Americans, extirpated by the European population that colonized America, would be or already were being reborn as Europeans, and that the larger part of the West and Central European population at the beginning of the 20th century had lived in their previous lives as Native Americans.

Peoples

 * He speaks of the Mongolian and Japanese peoples having "not descended so deeply, nor have they entangled themselves so much in the physical plane nor done so much towards its conquest as the people of Europe." He connects this with their being a civilization, that had retained certain qualities from Atlantean (Cenozoic time), but remained stationary, and later degenerated. "
 * He speaks of Europe being in decline as a civilization, that it causes cultural damage, and that "everyone coming to Europe from Asia has reached the conclusion: These Europeans, they are really all barbarians."
 * He speaks of the peoples of the West being very good at physical, chemical and astronomical discoveries, but lacking real productive capacities.

Semitic peoples, Jewish people, Judaism

 * He describes the mission of the Semitic peoples (note that this includes both Arab and Jewish peoples, and thus Islam and Judaism) as bringing monotheismas a balance to polytheism. He connects this with the capacity for abstraction - seeing what is central and common to a range of particulars - and analytic consciousness generally, both of which he suggests are unusually well-developed in the Jewish people.
 * "Moses stands as founder of the new, intellectual understanding of the world, which in no way appears decadent, it will again teach humanity to bring their practical lives into harmony with nature, as Moses did."
 * But through their strict monotheism, "the Jews have always differentiated themselves from others and thereby - as anyone does who is different from others - often called forth dislike and antipathy....The Jews held culture together for centuries...in the future, it will be no longer be necessary to accomplish this in the same way; instead, robust spiritual understanding will replace it. The relationship between the single God and the many gods will become understood, will become conscious. It will no longer need to act at an unconscious level in a single people. Thus, from the beginning I have considered it a dubious thing that the Jews, as they no longer knew what to do, founded the Zionist movement....Such a movement is not appropriate today, for only something which any human being can join, without differences of race, nationality, class, etc., is suitable for our modern times....the Great War was caused through people wanting to separate themselves off into separate nations! So the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century came from this [desire for separateness], that the Jews also wish for..." Now that humanity has achieved generally what the Jews first brought, the monotheistic impulse, "so the Jews could actually do nothing better than to merge into or mix in with the rest of humanity, so that the Jews as a people would simply cease....Opposing this today are, still, many Jewish habits, but above all else other people's hate [of the Jews]. And this is exactly what has to be overcome." }}
 * He speaks of the greatest mission of the Jewish people having been to provide a body into which the Christ being (the Messiah) could incarnate, and &mdash; on one occasion &mdash; that this people's next contribution to world evolution would be to mingle itself with the rest of humanity. On another occasion, however, he speaks of the Jews having a second mission in relation to Christ: to spiritualize Christianity itself.
 * Steiner supported the complete assimilation of the Jews into general society:
 * "The Jews could do nothing better than to mingle into, to mix in with the rest of humanity, so that the Jewish people [as a separate people] would come to an end....Opposing this are many Jewish habits, but above all others' hate; this is exactly what must be overcome."
 * "It certainly cannot be denied that Jewry today still behaves as a closed totality, and as such it has frequently intervened in the development of our current state of affairs in a way that is anything but favorable to European ideas of culture. But Judaism itself has long since outlived its time; it has no more justification within the modern life of peoples, and the fact that it continues to exist is a mistake of world history whose consequences are unavoidable. We do not mean the forms of the Jewish religion alone, but above all the spirit of Jewry, the Jewish way of thinking."

Stance against anti-semitism
Seven articles by Steiner appeared in a journal devoted to combatting anti-Semitism (the Mitteilungen aus dem Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus). Many critique anti-Semitical authors and their works. He speaks here of
 * "the banal factionalists who invented the 'German man' in order to have as euphonious a phrase as possible to justify their anti-Semitism"....
 * "...the senseless prating of the anti-Semites."
 * "In Mr. Bartels' book, I find only anti-Semitical molehills. But I can't be surprised when these molehills grow to pretty impressive anti-Semitical mountains in many readers. I can't believe that such an effect would be wholly undesired by Mr. Bartels..."
 * "I don't experience Mr. Bartels' standpoint as 'German' or 'germanic', but I experience unscrupulous readings as definitively 'un-German'. Only the anti-Semites could experience unscrupulous reading as 'German'."
 * "One doesn't need to be very suspicious to come to believe, reading these two volumes, that the first was written in order to sling all imaginable unpleasantness onto the 'German Jew' Heine....It's just a pity that a collection that contains so much that is worthwhile includes these two volumes..."
 * "In the same moment when the Jews lost the 'native roots' of their old homeland, their rigid nationalism was struck to its heart, and, true to all human developmental and acclimational laws, the process of finding new roots began for them....Part of history is changing homelands....Our present mixture of Slavs and Germans [in Germany] is an approximate equivalent to the ethnological situation of the Jews in European, or other cultivated countries. If the process of assimilation had not been artificially held up, the Jews would certainly not suffer from more exclusivity than, say, the Slavs in German lands. The writer of the above-named anti-Semitical article is, I hope, familiar enough with the German laws through the middle of the nineteenth century to admit this to us. Even the century of 'Reason' and 'Humanity' framed legal measures in this regard that remind us of the circumstances of slavery." (Steiner goes on to compare the extensive German emigration with the situation of the Jews who have had to find a new homeland.)
 * "Anti-Semitism doesn't exactly have at its disposal a wide range of thoughts, or even of clever clichés or slogans. When the adherents of this 'view of life' express their hearts' dull feelings, one has to hear the same worn-out platitudes over and over."
 * "Those dull feelings out of which anti-Semitism, among other things, arise have the unique quality that they undermine all directness and plainness of judgement....Through anti-Semitism, logic is dethroned."
 * "Whoever keeps his eyes open today recognizes that it is untrue to say that that the sense of unity between the Jews themselves is greater than their sense of unity with modern culture. If it appeared to be so during the last few years, then anti-Semitism has contributed a significant part of this. Anyone who has, as I, seen with horror the devastation that anti-Semitism causes in the hearts and souls of noble Jews must come to this conviction."
 * "Anti-Semitism is not only a danger for the Jews, but also for the non-Jews. It comes out of an attitude that is not compatible with healthy, honest judgment. It encourages such an attitude."
 * [A writer, Kunowski] "shows how an idealistic human being must think about this 'question'. Namely, Kunowski rejects all anti-Semitism definitively....Kunowski formulates the concept of a 'people' so that every anti-Semitism is incompatible with his formulation.... Kunowski wishes to lead what is significant in all races into the civilization of the future: 'The morality of the Jews, the government of the Romans, the art of the Greeks, the pyramids of the Egyptians' must unite themselves in us....'On our altars rest cross, sickle and Ark, in our forests wander Zarathustra, Moses, Socrates, Dante, Rousseau, in our fields grow anew Jerusalem, Athens, Sparta, Florence and Paris.' Kunowski sets his own standpoint against the petty racial standpoint with these words: 'The goal...is to generate a new civilized human being, who is neither German, nor Roman, nor Semite.'"

Steiner also speaks out against anti-Semitism elsewhere, including:
 * "It really doesn't matter whether someone is a Jew or a German...That's so obvious, that one is almost dumb saying it. How dumb then must someone be who says the opposite!"
 * "There has never been a "Jewish question" for me....I have never been able to judge another person on anything but the person's own individual character traits, which I came to know in that person."

Call for the Assimilation of the Jews

 * "Thus the greatest tragedy of this 20th century [World War I] has come from what the Jews are also striving for. And one can say that since everything the Jews have done can now be done consciously by all people, the best thing that the Jews could do would be to disappear into the rest of humankind, to blend in with the rest of humankind, so that Jewry as a people would simply cease to exist. That is what would be ideal. This ideal is still opposed, even today, by many Jewish habits - and above all by the hatred of other people. That is what must be overcome."


 * "Today all aspects of the Jews are dominated by racial qualities. Above all they marry among themselves. They see the racial qualities, not the spiritual. And this is what must be said in reply to the question: has the Jewish people fulfilled its mission within the evolution of human knowledge? It has fulfilled it; for in earlier times one single people was needed to bring about a certain monotheism. But today spiritual insight itself is necessary. Therefore this mission has been fulfilled. And therefore this Jewish mission as such, as a Jewish mission, is no longer necessary in evolution; instead the only proper thing would be for the Jews to blend in with the other peoples and disappear into the other peoples."

Jehovah and Old Testament attitudes
After Steiner embraced Theosophy and began to develop Anthroposophy, he began to assert that all races and ethnic groups were losing their significance for mankind's evolution, including the Jewish people. In his 1910 lectures on "national souls" in Oslo, Steiner stressed that "racial continuity through the blood-stream was of particular importance to the Semitic-Hebrew people" (in the sense that the Jewish people did not intermarry with non-Jews). . He further explained that in the course of racial formation,
 * "...the Jahve forces from the moon sphere meet and cooperate with the Mars spirits and thus a special kind of modification arises, namely, the Semitic race. Here is the occult explanation for the origin of the Semites. The Semitic people are an example of a modification of collective humanity. Jahve or Jehovah shuts himself off from the other Elohim and invests this people with a special character by cooperating with the Mars spirits, in order to bring about a special modification of his people. You will now understand the peculiar character of the Semitic people and its mission."


 * "Now, the conceptions that were dominant in the Old Testament, that must be designated primarily as conceptions of Old Testament Judaism, and that took their worldly form in Romanism, which is in the worldly sphere the same thing as Judaism was in the spiritual sphere even though it is in opposition to Judaism, have come over into our own epoch by way of Romanism; they haunt our age in spectral forms. This Old Testament thinking, unpermeated by the Christ, must be found in its true origin within the human being. We must ask ourselves the question, ‘Upon what forces does such thinking as that of the Old Testament depend?’This thinking depends upon what can be inherited with the blood from generation to generation. The capacity to think in the manner characteristic of the Old Testament is inherited with the blood in the succession of human beings. What we inherit as capacities from our fathers through the simple fact that we are born as human beings, that we were embryonic human beings before our birth - what we inherit as the power of thinking, what lives in our blood, is Old Testament thinking. Our thinking is made up of two members, two parts. One part of our thinking consists in what we possess by reason of our development up to our birth, what we inherit from our forefathers or from our maternal ancestors. We are able to think in the Old Testament way because we have been embryos. This was the essential characteristic also of the ancient Jewish people that, in the world in which we live between birth and death, they did not wish to learn anything in addition to what the human being brings with him as a capacity because of the fact that he was an embryo up to the time of his birth. The only way that you can conceive of Old Testament thinking with real understanding is to say to yourself, ‘This is the kind of thinking that we possess by reason of the fact that we have been embryos.’The kind of thinking that has been added to this is what we have to acquire for ourselves in the course of our development beyond the embryonic period. For the purposes of certain external needs man acquires a variety of experiences, but he does not carry this process all the way to the transformation of his thinking. Thus, even today Old Testament thinking continues to exert its influence far more than is generally supposed."


 * "The instinct leading toward a mere Jehovah wisdom still extends into our age as a remnant, tending toward the wisdom that depended upon what was acquired during the embryonic life and is modified only by the unconscious breathing process. The Jehovah wisdom requires a revelation in order to enter our consciousness. This sufficed up to the time when the consciousness soul had not yet evolved to a certain degree. Now, since the consciousness soul has evolved to this degree, humanity cannot get along further with Jehovah wisdom that is adapted to the breathing, but it is invariably true that an effort is made to continue to get along with something that has become insufficient according to inner necessities. Since, for the life between birth and death, what is connected with the breathing remains unconscious, the Jewish culture was a folk culture, not an individualized culture of humanity. It was a folk culture in which everything is related to the descent from a common tribal father. Jewish revelation is, in its essential nature, a revelation adapted to the Jewish people, because it takes account of what is acquired during the embryonic life and is modified only through an unconscious element, the breathing process.What is the result of this fact in our critical times? The result is that those who will not become adherents of the Christ wisdom that brings into the human being the other element, acquired during the life between birth and death apart from the breathing process, wish to continue in their relationship to the Jehovah wisdom and to have humanity established only on the basis of folk cultures. The present clamor in favor of an organization consisting of individuals from mere peoples is a retarded ahrimanic demand for the establishment of such a culture, in which all the peoples represent only folk cultures, that is, Old Testament cultures. The peoples in all parts of the world are to become like the Jewish Old Testament people. This is the demand of Woodrow Wilson. We are here touching upon a most profound mystery, which will be unveiled in the greatest variety of forms. A social element that is antisocial as regards the whole of humanity and undertakes to base the social life upon individual peoples alone is striving to come to manifestation as an ahrimanic element. The cultural impulse of the Old Testament is to be maintained in an ahrimanic form."

Other

 * He states "But, gentlemen, we already today have come somewhat to a time of old age weakness of the Earth. Therefore all of humanity has become weaker with regard to the force that pushes nourishment through the body. Who must therefore [logically] first disappear from the Earth? The black [eyed and haired] ones have more stamina; they have a larger pushing force. The blond ones have a lesser pushing force, and [therefore] will perish earlier." "You see, when we really study science and history, we must conclude that if people become increasingly strong, they will also become increasingly stupid. If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense if men do not arrive at a form of intelligence that is independent of blondness. Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. ... It is indeed true that the more the fair individuals die out the more will the instinctive wisdom of humans vanish."

The significance of racial heterogeny
Steiner connects the very possibility of Christ's appearance on Earth with an inter-racial culture:
 * 'Christ could be born in Galilee just because members of many peoples from various parts of the world were assembled in one spot; there was far less blood relationship, and, above all, far less faith in this [i.e. these relationships] than in Judea, in the narrow circle of the Hebrew people. Galilee was a heterogeneous racial mixture....Christ's task was intimately connected with this mixing of blood.'

The bridge between individuality and race or ethnicity
In an early pre-Anthroposophy (1894) essay, Steiner defined his understanding of the relationship between the individual and his or her inherited characteristics as follows:

To bridge the span between Steiner's general opposition to race and ethnicity as factors in judging individuals and his statements about particular races and ethnic groups, Steiner's four-fold view of the human being can be helpful. According to Steiner, the human being is composed of:
 * a physical body, initially determined by the genetics of inheritance (and thus connected with the race) but transformed by the individual to a greater or lesser extent over the course of life;
 * an organization of life-processes and habits, initially formed by the language and traditions in which the individual is brought up (and thus connected with the ethnic group), later transformed and individualized to a greater or lesser extent by the person; Steiner often used the terms etheric body or life body to describe this organization;
 * a pattern of consciousness initially determined by the culture but transformed and individualized to a greater or lesser extent over the course of a person's life; Steiner often used the term astral body or sentient body to describe this pattern;
 * an ego or individuality, bringing from the spiritual world capacities and intentions unique to this person, and which are manifested and realized through the physique, life and consciousness of the human being.

Thus, racial, ethnic and cultural characteristics provide a starting point for the individual's development, but never adequately describe his or her living reality. Not only does each individual begin life with a unique constellation of determined characteristics from these sources, he or she also comes with completely unique characteristics - especially intentions and capacities - from previous lives manifesting through the ego itself. Thus, from the anthroposophical point of view,
 * "The true problem behind racism is modern materialism. An attitude that divides human beings according to bodily characteristics comes out of the conviction that the body is the most important, or even the essential aspect of a person. The final consequence of materialism is the identification of the human being with his or her physical existence. The result of this identification is racism, which takes all statements about a person's physical qualities as statements about the person as a whole."

Metamorphosis in Steiner's descriptions of races
Beginning in 1904, Steiner began to speak using an essentially theosophical vocabulary about "root races" and "sub races" of root races, that represented a human evolution that stretched back from far prehistoric, mythological times and refer to the stages of humanity during the development of our present solar system (Steiner speaks of Polarian, Hyperborean, Lemurian, and Atlantean ages preceding all historical records, closely following Blavatsky in this respect). The "sub races of Atlantis", that in Steiner's view reflect the development of mankind during Tertiary and Quaternary, (Cenozoic time), were referred to as "Rmoahals", "Tlavatli", "Original Toltecs", "Original Turanians", "Original Semites", "Original Akkadians" and "Original Mongoles".

By 1906, Steiner had begun to distance him from the use of "root races" and "sub races of root races" to describe this evolution, by 1907 he had ceased to make any more use of these terms, and by late 1909 he described this vocabulary as a "childhood illness of the theosophical movement", and stated that "The concept of race ceases to have any significance specifically in our time." He no longer used the term race to describe a chronological succession of cultures during post-glacial time. He began instead to speak about the "cultural epochs" of prehistorical and historical time, naming these after what he considered the dominant culture of each historical period: an original Indian epoch, an original Persian epoch, an Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonean cultural epoch, a Greco-Roman and modern epoch.

Steiner continued to speak about the "five races" present in modern times in various areas of the earth: the black race, the brown or Malay race, the yellow or Oriental race, the white or Caucasian race, and the red (Native American) race. While he considered the human forms, that developed as the "sub races of Atlantis" as a normal form of sequential "race" formation during "Atlantis" (Cenozoic time), he considered the formation of all of the "five main races of mankind" during the time to constitute an abnormal form of race formation, that increasingly will disappear during the coming 5,000 years.

Reception
Interpretations of Steiner's views on race range from one extreme, that he was "a racist", to the other, that sees in him "the true vanquisher of racism". This is due to the polarity between Steiner's general view of race as a transient and decliningly significant aspect of the true individuality - a reincarnating being of body, soul and spirit - and his often brisant descriptions of particular racial and ethnic characteristics and influences on not just physical, but psychological and spiritual development. (See the quotes below.)

The following views give a variety of interpretations on the subject:

Dutch Anthroposophical Commission
In 1996, the Dutch Anthroposophical Society created a commission of anthroposophical academics to investigate whether anthroposophy contains a racial doctrine, whether Steiner made comments that can be understood to be racially discriminatory, and whether works by Dutch authors on Waldorf education contain elements of racial discrimination This was in response to charges that some Dutch Waldorf schools were teaching racist material. The chair of the commission set up by the Dutch Anthroposophical Society to further investigate the issue was Ted A. van Baarda, director of the Humanitarian Law Consultancy in The Hague, who had studied international public law at Leyden State University and completed his thesis at the University of Twente in 1992 on the subject of colliding human rights, and at present teaches at the Military Staff College (Instituut Defensie Leergangen Ypenburg) near The Hague and, on an occasional basis, at the Netherlands Institute on International Relations. The commission investigated Rudolf Steiner's total published works, over 350 volumes (89,000 pages) of his writings, lectures and letters and documented all passages that related to the concept of race as it was understood at Steiner's time during the beginning of the 20th century. In their final report, they document 245 such passages (0.2% of the total works), and comment on them from the perspective of present day Dutch legislation on discrimination. Their conclusions follow:
 * The Commission emphasizes that Rudolf Steiner's concept of man is based on the equality of all individuals, and not on some supposed superiority of one race over another.


 * The conclusion of the Commission is that sixteen statements, if they were made in public (today) by a person on his or her own authority, could be a violation of the prohibition of racial discrimination under the Criminal Code of the Netherlands.


 * The Commission finds again that any suggestion that racism is an inherent part of Anthroposophy, or that conceptually Steiner helped prepare the way for the holocaust, has proven to be categorically wrong. As a matter of fact, the investigation of the Commission shows that, beginning in the year 1900, he clearly spoke and wrote against the dangers of anti-Semitism, including in the periodical of a then existing German association against anti-Semitism existing at that time.

In a widely-published event, the Commission announced on February 4, 1998, that from the perspective of Dutch legislation on discrimination, there was no ground for accusations that the work of Steiner contains a racial doctrine in the sense of a seemingly scientific theory whereby the superiority of one race is supposed to be legitimized at the expense of another. From the same legal perspective, the Commission also did not find any statements that stood out as having been made with the purpose of insulting persons or groups of people on the basis of their race. As to Waldorf education, the Commission concluded, in agreement with a prior judgment of Dutch Government Education Inspectors (Onderwijsinspectie), that racism does not exist in the Waldorf movement.

Zegers and Staudenmaier
The Dutch Commission of Anthroposophist's findings were discussed in an article by Peter Zegers and Peter Staudenmaier which claimed the following:

"The Dutch report simply asserts that those anthroposophists who have interpreted Steiner's teachings in a racist fashion have misunderstood Steiner — a convenient excuse which sheds no light whatsoever on the underlying reasons for the ongoing racism within organized anthroposophy. Aside from the irrelevant sections on contemporary discrimination law, the commission's methodology is purely esoteric, and its annotations of the quotes from Steiner demand of the reader a suspension of critical faculties. Steiner's supposed clairvoyance and his ideas about karma and reincarnation play an overwhelming part in their appraisal. This should come as no surprise, since all of the members of the commission belong to the Dutch Anthroposophical Society. What is more seriously troubling is the commission's insistence on purveying a race theory of their own. According to the Dutch final report there are different human races with different physical, mental, cultural and spiritual capacities. The authors posit "great differences between the human races" (p. 206) and state that "people of below average development" must incarnate in "lower races" (p. 207). They also claim, for example, that technology was developed by the "Caucasian race" (p. 210). Moreover, the commission declares more than once that non-anthroposophists and people who do not share a spiritual conception of reality ("materialists" in their vocabulary) are simply incapable of judging Steiner's work. This absurd stance obviously cancels whatever worth the study might have had for those outside the cult of Rudolf Steiner. The commission's own epistemological framework is astonishingly primitive, even by anthroposophist standards. In an effort to turn Steiner's frequent unintelligibility into a virtue, they inform us that when Steiner contradicted himself over and over again he was simply trying to get at the truth from different angles. This is a ludicrous pretext for the commission's failure to do any hermeneutic work of its own. A sympathetic reading of Steiner's work is one thing, willful ignorance quite another — especially in light of the commission's notorious 'argument' (really a mere assumption) that Steiner's scattered anti-racist comments both absolve and negate his much more numerous racist remarks. To make this implausible claim stick, they would need to advance some interpretive agenda, some explanatory model for making sense of Steiner's incoherence. But they never do so, leaving the Janus face entirely intact while simply avoiding one of its two sides."

Peter Normann Waage
In a response published in the same journal, Peter Normann Waage termed Staudenmaier's writing "polemical" and his accusations that Steiner was a racist "simple-minded, easily digestible and false". He questions, "Having read the allegations presented by Staudenmaier, who cares to hear that Hitler accused Steiner of 'destroying people's normal spiritual condition' because he repeatedly called nationalism decadent, that Steiner already in 1920 warned against 'the plague that goes on in Germany under the banner of the swastika'...[or] that Steiner was in fact subjected to an assassination attempt by the Nazi movement in 1922," and states that Staudenmaier's "other accusations are equally irresponsible." He sums up his evaluation of Steiner's attitude to race and racism as follows: "Rudolf Steiner's own fundamental attitude to racism, races and cultural diversity comes to expression when he repeatedly emphasizes how harmful it is for those who seek "knowledge of higher worlds" to harbor racial prejudices or to judge human beings on the basis of gender, race, etc....he writes that racial differences are in the process of being wiped out; in a not too distant future they will be completely irrelevant."

Response to Waage
As the debate raged on, Staudenmaier's response to Waage's claim was similarly direct:
 * "Anthroposophy and Ecofascism has sparked a debate within Scandinavian humanist circles, with some humanists like Peter Normann Waage lining up to defend Anthroposophy as a harmless variant of humanism. While we are encouraged by this long overdue debate, we are troubled by the degree of historical naiveté it has revealed. Waage's perspective seems to represent a view that is fairly widespread among educated and well-intentioned people. We hope that we can contribute to a more accurate view of the political implications of anthroposophy by correcting several of the misconceptions exemplified by Waage's reply. Although Waage has nothing to say about the article's main topic, the systematic collusion between organized anthroposophy and the so-called "green wing" of German fascism, he does raise several issues that lie at the core of that collusion. Waage would have us believe that Rudolf Steiner was a principled anti-racist, that he opposed private property, rejected militarism and nationalism, and was a staunch adversary of Nazism. These claims are not simply untrue; they betray a surprising unfamiliarity with Steiner's published work and a profound misunderstanding of anthroposophy's political history."


 * "But Waage is unconcerned with breathtaking passages such as this, which show that anthroposophy's racism is not a marginal afterthought but is intimately tied to its pretensions to "spiritual science." Blissful in his ignorance, Waage continues to pretend that the evidence of Steiner's racism is "thinner than air." Instead of grappling with these obviously racist elements of Steiner's doctrine himself, Waage attempts to shift the burden onto non-anthroposophists. For example, he takes us to task for failing to comment on the report of the Dutch anthroposophist commission on Steiner and racism. We did in fact devote two pages to this topic in our original rejoinder, but they were cut from the version printed in Humanist. We very much hope readers will consult the full version of our article for our views on this report and Waage's reliance on it. But since Waage seems quite fond of the Dutch commission's report, we are glad to comment further on its findings."

Ullmann and Rüsen
Independent reviewers of the Dutch Commission of Anthroposophist's report have affirmed its conclusions:
 * "I don't think this conclusion can be disputed seriously. Those who know Steiner's works not only through rumors or through the polemics perpetuated by his notorious opponents, won't be able to expect anything else either," writes religious science professor Wolfgang Ullmann. And history professor Jörn Rüsten adds: "Anthroposophy represents a view of the human being where the ethno-centric frontiers are superseded and humanism is developed as a concept of value." He points out that the report ought to put an end to the endeavors to place anthroposophy in the same basket as anti-modern, reactionary movements.

Hansson article
In 2004 Sven Ove Hansson published an article "The Racial Teachings of Rudolf Steiner". Hansson was cofounder in 1972 and long-time chair of the Swedish branch of the skeptical organization CSICOP, "Association Science and Education of the Public". The article, that in the main was a republication of an article he had written in 1988, was published in response to public criticism of the Association.

According to Hansson:


 * If you are a serious student of Steiner's writings, it quickly becomes obvious that the question of human races was not immaterial. Steiner returned again and again, and often in a quite detailed manner, to the origins and characteristics of human races. This is an important part of his writings on the progress and development of humanity.


 * The physiological characteristics which traditionally (but quite in conflict with modern biology) is called a human race are achieved through heritance. Steiner, who did not believe in biological Evolution, thought that it was only recent that the racial characteristics became hereditary. His spiritual science showed that "historically, the racial characteristics came from where people were born".


 * In a different context, he described the blacks as "the last remnants of the group of humans by which the intestines are hardened", and wrote further:
 * "But the people that didn't develop their id, that was too exposed to the influence of the sun, they were like plants: They produced far too much carbon under their skin - and became black. That is why the negroes are black."


 * The "race" which Steiner described in positive terms was - not surprisingly - the white one. When listing the different "races," he described how they were inflicted by "hardening" of different organs. The list ended with those people who "did not become hardened at all." They were found in "those areas that comprise of today's Europe and Asia."


 * Elsewhere, he stated that "the most mature characteristics are found in the European area. It is simply (a natural) law."


 * According to Steiner's teachings on soul travel, the same soul could assume different "races" in different lives. What race it would be depended on how you behaved in the previous life. "A soul can be incarnated in any race, but if this soul doesn't become evil, it doesn't need to be reincarnated in a descending race, it will reincarnate later in an ascending race."

He concludes that to remove the racial teaching from Anthroposophy is no easy task. "What is at stake is the very foundation of the movement, namely the belief in Rudolf Steiner's spirit visions as a source of knowledge."

Archiati: The transformation of materialism
Many anthroposophists understand Steiner in the way formulated by Pietro Archiati, Professor of Philosophy and Theology and anthroposophist himself, in his book on Overcoming Racism through Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Science. Archiati sees racism as rooted in the materialism that identifies a person with his or her bodily habitus: "The true problem of racism is modern materialism". So long as materialism is not overcome, the roots of unconscious or conscious racism must be present. Anthroposophy and the work of Steiner in particular put the body generally in a subsidiary position; any human body presents a combination of transient developmental helps and hindrances, but the soul and spirit are by far more important aspects of an individual's nature, already in our time and increasingly so into the future. In addition, the human spirit has the power to overcome any limitations presented by the past bodily development. Above and beyond this, the human being incarnates successively in all the races; thus we see in others what is part of ourselves, whatever their race or ethnicity.

Archiati thus sees in spiritual science the sole possible fundamental overcoming of racism; through the recognition of the human spirit as the true essence of the individuality, and the body as merely a tool of the individuality, race becomes an incidental character trait of a person's "tool set".


 * "Racial and ethnic affiliations are only felt to be important and causal for a person's own self-experience to the extent to which that person neglects the individual, free creativity which goes beyond racial and ethnic characteristics. Where this human third dimension, what is wholly individual and creative, is brought out, where true "ethical individualism" [a central term in Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom] is practiced, racial and ethnic characteristics cease to play a leading or fundamental role and are turned into servants of the human ego. When this occurs, differences between races and peoples play less of a role, because for individuals of all races and peoples they are made into the basis and prerequisite for creating what is individual and essentially free in a completely parallel way."

Archiati affirms Steiner's actual descriptions of particular races' and ethnic groups' influences on psychological and spiritual development with the clarification that individuals born within these groups are granted a natural (bodily) tendency, and thus achieve this development with the help of an unconscious element; those born outside these groups may achieve the same thing through conscious work towards it. Where others see in Steiner's indications that particular racial or ethnic groups have certain tendencies sharp racial or ethnic distinctions, Archiati suggests that these groups merely have natural aids to what others must achieve through enhanced conscious effort: "A person who, as it were 'from without', achieves what the times call for will bring to bear more forcefully his or her free and individual powers than someone who is 'included' from the start due to his or her bodily structure." Race becomes a bodily characteristic, like having shorter or longer legs, or keener or weaker vision, that provides certain natural advantages and disadvantages; the real essence of a human being lies in what he or she makes of the situation.

Media reports
Since the nineties Steiner and Anthroposophy have been sharply criticised as racist in several media reports in Germany.

Anthroposophical self-critique
The controversy over race issues has awakened self-criticism from within the Waldorf and anthroposophical movements. The general position among Anthroposohists has been that while these movements are in their essence above all racism, and even antagonistic to racist conceptions, some of Steiner's comments have been interpreted by individuals within these movements in ways that support or create prejudices against particular races or ethnic groups.