Claudio Lomnitz - Anti-Científico Sentimiento

Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution
Author(s): Claudio Lomnitz

Source: Representations , Vol. 110, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 1-28
Published by: University of California Press
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CLAUDIO LOMNITZ
Anti-Semitism and the Ideology

of the Mexican Revolution
Introduction
One of the curious features of the Mexican Revolution is

the universal hatred the revolutionaries expressed toward the dictatorship’s
technocratic elite, the so-called científicos. “No one,” wrote Francisco Bulnes,
“not even those who have had only a superficial understanding of the Mexican
revolution, or a single one of the inhabitants of Mexico capable of holding
an opinion about public affairs, can ignore the fact that the origin of the
revolt that dethroned the dictator, General Porfirio Díaz, was hatred of the
científicos, revealed in the universal, prophetic cry, ‘Mueran los científicos!’
(Death to the científicos!) Even today, 1915, for the popular Mexican imagi-
nation científico means the sworn enemy of the people, more criminal than
the parricide, the murderer of innocent children, or the traitor.”1
The intensity of anti-científico sentiment calls to mind the people’s hatred
for the aristocracy in revolutionary France, and indeed hatred toward the
científicos has often been cast as class hatred.2 However, the true identity of
the científico is in fact quite slippery. In this paper, I argue that anti-científico
sentiment was cast in the mold of modern anti-Semitism. I go on to suggest
that anti-Semitism played a foundational role in the formation of nationalist
ideology under the new conditions of dependency.
From the mid-1870s to the outbreak of revolution in 1910, Mexican pro-
gress relied crucially on foreign investment. As a result, progress came hand-
in-hand with nationalist anxieties. By the early 1880s there was widespread
fear among Mexico’s reading public that a “peaceful conquest” of Mexico
was underway. So, for instance, Colombian envoy Federico Cornelio Aguilar,
a great admirer of Mexican progress who ardently desired his own country
to take a similar path, nevertheless noted,
A B S T R A C T This essay traces the development of the ideology that cast Mexico’s prerevolutionary
technocratic elite, the so-called científicos, as the masterminds of the country’s ruination. It shows that
anti-científico discourse took the shape of anti-Semitic ideology, even though there were no Jews in the group.
Anti-científico rhetoric was first created by applying anti-Semitic invective taken directly from the Dreyfus
Affair. The implications for Mexico’s revolutionary nationalism are explored in the conclusion. / R E P R E S E N -
TAT I O N S 110. Spring 2010 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN
1533–855X, pages 1–28. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce
article content to the University of California Press at http://www. ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.
DOI:10.1525/rep.2010.110.1.1. 1

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Meanwhile, the Yankees—who are the godparents and protectors of the Mexican
liberals, just as the French were the protectors of the conservatives—the Yankees
are little by little taking control of rural properties and mining, of commerce,
industry and the railroads. . . . The Yankees will finish the work that the Spanish
began on these poor descendents of the Aztecs, Chichimecs, Otomites, Tarascans,
Zapotecs and Mayas.3
Fear of U.S. conquest was tempered by the growing power of the Mexican
state, by the government’s careful balancing act in handing out plump con-
cessions to rival powers, and by the unimpeachable patriotic credentials of
the dictator, Porfirio Díaz. In such a context, however, the specter of trea-
son loomed in the background and was identified with finance capital and
cosmopolitanism. The image of the “traitor within” sprang from a mode of
economic development that generated fears as diffuse and widespread as
the support for capitalist development, stability, and progress. The traitor’s
association with cosmopolitanism and finance made anti-Semitic rhetoric
politically viable.
Forged in the furnace of the Dreyfus Affair, and at the time of the ascen-
dance of the United States as hegemon in Latin America, anti-científico
rhetoric adopted the Jew-fetishism that had been emerging in Europe since
the mid-nineteenth century and used it to rally a variety of constituencies. As
an example of modern anti-Semitism, anti-científico sentiment was unusual in
two respects: it targeted figurative, rather than literal, Jews; and it developed
in a context of growing economic dependency, rather than in the transition
from nationalism to imperialism, as was the case in France and Germany.
Indeed, early twentieth-century Mexican anti-Semitism helped shape an
authoritarian, hypermasculine, and dependent modality of revolutionary
nationalism. This essay is a contribution to the political history of revolution-
ary nationalism. On the way, it also provides methodological insights for the
analysis of other cases of anti-Semitism without Jews.4
Who Were the “Científicos”?
A key, but overlooked, property of anti-científico sentiment is the

instability of the referent. Emiliano Zapata, for instance, called all of the
state of Morelos’ landed gentry científicos.5 Luis Cabrera, on the other hand,
characterized the científicos as financiers and middlemen to foreign compa-
nies and contrasted them with the landowning class: “The neo-conservative
group is basically patriotic and anti–Anglo Saxon (antisajonista), whereas
the Científico is decidedly pro-Anglo, and he is better educated. Neo-Conser-
vative interests are based principally on large rural property, whereas the
científicos’ interests are in great industrial property and financial interests in
the stock of the new corporate monopolies.”6 For their part, elite factions
2 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S

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within the Díaz cabinet (notably the reyistas) consistently referred to the “Cien-
tífico Party,” defining membership according to political alliances, rather than
by way of a fixed class position.
These diverging views contrast with the avowed científicos’ own under-
standing of who they were. So, for instance, José Yves Limantour, Díaz’s
finance minister, described his participation in the group as follows:
There is a world of distance between the situation that I in fact occupied in the govern-
ment in relation to the group of the “científicos,” and what general opinion supposed.
Only a very few people noticed that my attitudes were sufficiently explained not by
active political ties, but rather by ties of an intellectual nature, which united me for
many years with a small group of men who shared the same education as I, and who
were formed by the same political and social doctrines.7
Time and again, Limantour denied that the group constituted a party, or
even a very active political block.
What are the grounds for the belief that I was the head, or one of the heads, of the
“científico” party? I will not prove here that the often-touted científico party never
existed, except in the imagination of those that wanted to invest a certain number of
individuals with the appearance of being a political body in order to turn them into
everyone’s target. . . . Instead I respond to the question simply by saying that the belief
in question was due only to the fact that I was the first amongst those who signed the
Manifesto of the Unión Liberal in April 1892—and who were subsequently satirized
with the nick-name of científicos—to form part of the [Díaz] cabinet.8
These lines were written from political exile for posthumous publica-
tion, years after Díaz’s death and the destruction of the científicos as an ideo-
logical force. There is no reason to suspect lack of sincerity on this point.
Other prominent científicos, such as Francisco Bulnes and Agustín Aragón,
also described the group as an intellectual aristocracy, rather than as a social
class or a political block.9 Moreover, avowed científicos like Bulnes and Sierra
were not even aligned with regard to their foreign predilections: Sierra (like
Limantour) was a Francophile and fervently anti-American, while Bulnes was
an Anglophile. Explaining the slippage in the referent is one of the keys to
understanding both the causes and the political productivity of anti-científico
sentiment.
Origins of the Epithet “Científico”
The year 1892 was the year of Porfirio Díaz’s third consecutive
reelection, and fourth presidential term. This was a delicate moment for
the president. Peace and prosperity were widely attributed to him, but there
had been world financial troubles affecting Mexico in 1890. Moreover, this
election was a nail in the coffin of Díaz’s own 1876 platform against Lerdo
Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 3

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de Tejada—Sufragio efectivo, no reelección (clean elections and no reelection).

A third consecutive reelection was generally understood as the confirma-
tion of dictatorship, a progressive dictatorship perhaps, but still counter to
the liberal credo on reelection, and to customary practice in the United
States. Student antireelection protesters in the capital and a string of small-
town rebellions in rural peripheries underscored this point.10
For these reasons, Díaz believed that organizing a popular demonstra-
tion in favor of reelection was warranted. Since the election itself would be a
relatively unconvincing sign of popular clamor, Díaz asked a group of tal-
ented young liberals, led by Justo Sierra, to organize something like an
American style primary election in order to launch his campaign. This Sierra
and a select group of friends did, with remarkable energy and success. They
organized a quasi-party structure, the Unión Liberal and a national conven-
tion with seventy delegates from every state in the republic and launched
Díaz’s candidacy with a manifesto written by Sierra.11 In that manifesto,
Sierra expressed the nation’s satisfaction with Porfirian progress, but he also
outlined its hopes for the near future. These claims centered principally on
education and economic growth, including a detailed concern with adminis-
trative reform. Thus, the manifesto claimed, the nation “desires that no quar-
ter be given in the effort to wrench our tax system from the purely empirical
era, providing it with the property surveys and statistics that are needed to put
it on sound scientific footing.”12
Mocking the pretense of establishing a scientific foundation for political
administration, the signatories of the proclamation of the Unión Liberal were
from that point forward lampooned as the “científicos.” However, the term
was ambiguous from the beginning, since it referred both to the tight group
of ideologues that had organized the Unión Liberal, and to the party they had
sought to build. For although the científicos supported Díaz’s reelection, they
also promoted reforms designed to move the dictatorship toward a modern
institutional system. These reforms included the establishment of an inde-
pendent judiciary, the creation of a vice presidency, and the formation of a
political party.
Díaz, for his part, adopted the ideological narrative crafted by Sierra and
put several members of the group in key offices but denied all three of the
provisions that set limits to his personal power. Thus, there was to be no
independent judiciary, no vice presidency, and no political party.13 Left with
no party base, the científicos were destined to remain a coterie, an intellectual
and technocratic elite.
Limantour summarized Díaz’s attitude thus:
General Díaz was wary that if the group were supported, it could acquire such influ-
ence in public policy that it might one day follow a course of action that was distinct
from the official line. This fear was based on the remarkable zeal that those young

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men had shown, not only in the organization of the “Unión Liberal,” but also in initi-
ating reforms to the spirit and system of government, reforms that went unachieved.14
Ideological Background
The científicos identified themselves as the cultural elite of their gen-

eration. They were among the first cohorts of graduates of a liberal institution
of higher learning. In 1867, after the execution of Maximilian von Hapsburg,
President Benito Juárez named Gabino Barreda, a student of August Comte,
Minister of Public Instruction and asked him to build Mexican higher edu-
cation. The University of Mexico, which was, together with that of Lima, the
oldest in the continent, had been closed because it was an arm of the Catholic
Church. Barreda, who became the ideologue of the triumphant liberals,
founded the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in its stead.
The most famous accomplishments of this cohort of positivists were to
be in institution building. Thus, one of the most prominent científicos, Justo
Sierra, became director of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and later, as
Díaz’s education minister, would refound the University of Mexico as a secular
and liberal institution, under the name of Universidad Nacional de México
(UNAM). The UNAM is still ranked the number one research university in
Latin America.
Other científicos were no less distinguished. Historian Friedrich Katz, who
sympathizes with Mexico’s popular revolutionaries, nevertheless describes José
Yves Limantour, another prominent científico, as “probably the greatest tech-
nocrat that Mexico ever produced.”15 Marxist political philosopher Arnaldo
Córdova conceded that this generation of positivists “had in its ranks some of
the most prominent and brilliant figures of the Mexican intelligentsia of **********
all times.”16 Indeed, there were prominent men of letters, of science and
medicine, of criminology and law among them, and a number of individual
científicos remained widely respected after the revolution, though the category
“científico” itself had become anathema.17
Extent of Científico Hatred

Among the Revolutionaries
Despite ambiguities in the referent, there is not a single Mexican

revolutionary who did not use the term científico with abhorrence, to such
an extent that it became a synonym of treason and corruption. The radical
groups of anarchists and socialists—found among both Magonistas and
Zapatistas—were perhaps the most vehement in this respect, framing the

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revolution as a whole as a justified rebellion against científico abuse: “The

people struggled without straying an inch from the road that was indicated
by the laws, exhausting all of its resources, and only after it had suffered
repercussions, calumnies, injuries, abuse, murder, etc. etc, only after it had
exhausted its patience did it make use of force, precipitated by the nefari-
ous científico party, and by all of the caciques and overlords of the Porfirian
administration.”18
By 1910 anti-científico sentiment was so widespread that even the mild-
mannered Francisco Madero, who would soon try to recruit a number of
these technocrats into his own government, was careful to express at least
some invective, lest he himself be portrayed as a científico: “Fellow citizens: I
call on you to take up arms and to overthrow the government of General
Díaz, not only because of his attempt against the recent elections, but in
order to save the nation from the somber future that awaits if it continues
under his dictatorship, and under the government of the nefarious científico
oligarchy that is absorbing and dilapidating our national resources in great
haste and with no scruples.”19
The principal constitutionalists, for their part, were adamant in their
rejection of the científicos and, indeed, justified some of their main articles
of legislation, such as agrarian reform, with references to científico abuses:
“Painfully we have experienced every time that we’ve had armed movements
in the Republic, that once they win, all of the rich, the científicos, the oppor-
tunists, have joined the leaders of those movements or those who are close
to them, in order to use them and so save and preserve for themselves the
lands that legitimately belong to the people.”20
Symptomatic of the political convenience of científico hatred is the fact
that invective toward the científicos was often more intense than negative senti-
ment toward the dictator himself. By focusing popular ire against the científi-
cos, revolutionary leaders who had occupied official posts under Díaz quietly
let themselves off the hook. So, for instance, before the outbreak of the revo-
lution, ideologue Luis Cabrera set Díaz apart from the científicos: “I accuse
Licenciado Ordí of having gravely insulted General Díaz as well as the sacred
memory of Juárez and of Ocampo, by calling them all científicos.”21 Immedi-
ately following Díaz’s downfall, journalist Heriberto Frías clamored for a
“great hanging” of those whom he called, alternately, the “Treasonous-Científico
League” and the “Científico-Jewish League.” For Frías, Porfirio Díaz and his
vice president, Ramón Corral, had been the científicos’ victims, and if they
were not exterminated now, they would pursue the triumphant revolution-
ary leader Francisco I. Madero.22
Even today, denouncing the científicos as the worst aspect of the Díaz dic-
tatorship is practically a Pavlovian reflex among Mexican historians, includ-
ing those who have called for a reappraisal of the Porfiriato. Thus, in an

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essay that sketched out the history of Mexican corruption, liberal historian
Enrique Krauze claimed that: “One can say a lot of things against Porfirio
Díaz, but one cannot accuse him of being corrupt. True that he gave conces-
sions to the científicos and that he fostered a barbarous accumulation and pil-
laging of lands. . . . But he did these things, at least in part for the same
ideological reasons that guided the liberals.”23
But the moral charge that the científicos were inordinately corrupt also has
plenty of exceptions. Finance Minister José Yves Limantour was accused of
cronyism in making concessions to foreign companies and fostering monop-
olies.24 However, it is also true that, contrary to common Latin American
practice, Limantour left 63 million pesos in the treasury when he handed it to
the agents of the new Madero government. Moreover, the wounds of even the
worst científico corruption sometimes appear to have been rather breezily set
aside after the revolution. So, for instance, Yucatecan hacienda owner Ole-
gario Molina, who had been exposed as a slave owner and an agent of Ameri-
can foreign interests, was rehabilitated upon his death in 1925 and brought
back from Cuba to a lavish public burial in Mérida.25
The dean of historians of the Porfiriato, Daniel Cosío Villegas, was him-
self somewhat contradictory on the question of científico corruption, assert-
ing, as he did, that “antipathy” toward the científicos was provoked by their
snobbish presumption of being the sole acolytes of scientific truth, but “in
much greater measure by the fact that a good number of them got rich in
government, using and abusing their official posts.”26 Nonetheless, Cosío
went on to admit that this charge applied neither to Sierra nor to Bulnes
and that, while governors Enrique Creel and Olegario Molina certainly were
corrupt, this was to some extent a phenomenon of the age.27 Moreover,
Cosío asserted that at the height of their power, in 1909, only three gover-
nors were científicos (Yucatán, Chihuahua, and Sinaloa) and that none of the
nation’s notoriously corrupt and hated jefes políticos and municipal presi-
dents were científicos.28 Thus for Cosío científico corruption, where it existed,
was mainly in concessions and commissions gained from the mediation
between government and foreign business concerns, an area that might
have been less routinely visible than the extortions of local caciques, most of
whom were not científicos.
In sum, when closely inspected the object of científico hatred becomes
surprisingly unstable. They were hated as a group but were often individually
respected; they could be very corrupt, but no more so than were other seg-
ments of the elite; their doctrines were decried but also embraced; they bro-
kered foreign investments, but so did every other national elite of the
period, including prominent members of the postrevolutionary elite. And
yet this chimera became the arch-villain, the true motive, the ultimate cause
of the revolution.

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Early Formation of Anti-Científico

Sentiment: The Dreyfus Affair and
the Spanish American War
Three factors are relevant for comprehending the consolidation of

anti-científico sentiment: tensions between the older generation of so-called
Jacobin liberals and the new generation of progressive positivists; intragovern-
mental competition for the Díaz succession; and the revival of “traditional”
rifts between Catholics and liberals. A fourth factor, class hatred, would play its
part only later.
The prestige of the young group of positivists was greatly enhanced in
the decade of the 1890s. This was due not only to the brilliance of its individ-
ual members but also to prestige accrued by the successes of Limantour as
finance minister. Under his leadership, Mexico paid its debts and gained inter-
national credit, eliminated its ancient system of state levies and taxes (alca-
balas), and built railroads at a fast clip while foreign investment boomed. By
1900 Justo Sierra published México: su evolución social, a richly illustrated three-
volume work that was a catalog of Porfirian progressivism, a phenomenon that
ranged from the modernization of transport to education, sanitation, polic-
ing, and prison reform.
Along with increased power and prestige, the ideological influence of the
group also grew. Organized initially in the late 1870s around Justo Sierra’s
paper, La Libertad, by the late 1890s the científicos came to dominate El Mundo,
El Siglo XIX, and El Imparcial and had substantial influence in several others.
The last of these papers, founded in 1896, was Mexico’s first commercial
daily, and it received a hefty government subsidy that allowed it to undersell a
number of competitors. As a result of the group’s successes, and also of the
undeniable connection between their competency and the rising prestige of
the Díaz presidency, tensions between the positivists, the older generation of
liberals, and rival power blocks within the dictatorship became chronic.
In addition, Porfirio Díaz himself sought to limit the group’s power and
to build up alternative factions. These political dialectics would belea-
guer the científicos for the remaining eighteen years of the dictatorship:
unauthorized to form a party, their independent power, based on technical
and intellectual achievement, political connections, and, in some cases, on
independent wealth, would keep them in high office but always also vulnera-
ble to ideological attacks from liberals and political attacks from alternative
Díaz favorites. Even after the 1904 election, when the need to make provi-
sions for Díaz’s possible death led to consolidation of a científico-led political
block around the figure of vice president Ramón Corral, there was no party
structure in place to provide the group with the means to protect its interests
effectively.29

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Curiously, however, the first faction to engage in sustained frontal public

invective against the científicos was neither a rival Díaz insider faction nor an
ideologically pure “Jacobin” group. Instead, early anti-científico vitriol was
generated in a skirmish between Catholics—who were in an ambiguous posi-
tion with regard to the Díaz regime—and liberals, the Catholics choosing
the “científicos” as a useful instrument for attacking governmental policy
while avoiding direct confrontation with the dictator. The context was the
Dreyfus Affair and the issue was the Spanish American War and Mexico’s
connection to Catholicism and a pan-Latin Catholic alliance. The charge
was led by the paper El Tiempo, whose director, Victoriano Agüeros, was a
critic of the politics of conciliation between the church and the Díaz regime,
but the charge was heeded in a less virulent tone by other organs of Catholic
opinion, including El País and El Correo Español.30
The Dreyfus Affair was an international media event. Having a personal
view on the matter, for or against Dreyfus, was in itself a mark of civilization.
As Justo Sierra put it to an aggrieved French friend: “We foreigners cannot
be blamed for being passionately interested in France’s affairs: that is a result
of the expansive and sympathetic communicative genius that the French are
so proud of; it is the result of our education; it is a result of the fact that
Latins have two fatherlands, the second of which is always France.”31 More-
over, Sierra added, “We everywhere had, here in Mexico, the same faculty
that French writers exert when they judge a Santa Anna, a Maximilian, a
Juárez or a General Díaz. Were we not within our rights to say: the honor of
France, justice and civilization demand that the trial be reexamined?”32
In the course of the affair, the most eloquent writers among the científicos—
especially Justo Sierra and Francisco Bulnes—came to take the Dreyfusard
side, and the científico-dominated papers, El Mundo and El Imparcial, also pre-
dominantly took the pro-Dreyfus line, which was also a position against the
church, against militarism, and against the Catholic “Latin” alliance fostered
by Pope Leo XIII.33
Thus, Bulnes argued that “the error of the French anti-Semites is that
they believe that the corruption of the Republic depends on Jewish manipu-
lation, which is entirely false.”34 The new anti-Semitism (and Bulnes recog-
nized its novelty) was a product of the very architecture of French political
society: its clericalism, its parliamentary rules, its penchant for anarchism and
mob rule. “In France clericalism is more powerful, anarchism is stronger and
more violent, and anti-Semitism is keener than anywhere else.” The trumped
up charge against Dreyfus was, for Bulnes, a sign not of Jewish conspiracy, but
rather of the agony of French civilization.35
The Catholic papers, for their part, used the Dreyfus Affair not only to
“defend France”—and, in passing, all “Latin nations”—against Jewish traitors
and their British and American allies but also to tar the científicos, and so the

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Porfirian press, with the Jewish brush. By defending the honor of the military,
they drove a wedge between the bourgeois civilian power of the científicos and
the military, represented by General Díaz, General Reyes, and others.
In France, the Affaire Dreyfus was primarily about the honor of the mili-
tary. In Mexico, the Catholic press used científico support for Dreyfus to further
separate that group from the army. As a social network, the original group of
científicos was the younger generation of a faction of liberal civilians who had
supported former president Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada or José María Iglesias
against Porfirio Díaz in 1876—a group that congregated around the figure
of Manuel Romero Rubio. The 1876 pro-Díaz group, known as the Tuxte-
pecanos, was predominantly composed of liberal army generals. After the rec-
onciliation of these two groups under Díaz, the generals became increasingly
jealous of Romero Rubio’s influence, and later of that of the científicos. By
Judaizing the científicos, the Catholic press was implicitly supporting the patrio-
tism and honor of the Mexican military—including Díaz himself—against the
liberal-civilian faction.
Catholic papers like El Tiempo presented the Dreyfus Affair with tradi-
tional anti-Semitic language, likening Dreyfus to a modern Judas Iscariot.
Thus, in January 1895 news items were littered with statements such as:
“The Judas Iscariot [Dreyfus] who, according to Coppée’s phrase, has tried
to sell his fatherland for thirty coins has not had the courage, says Mariano
de Cavia, to kill himself, and so be rid of so much shame.”36 Or, a couple of
weeks later, “The crime of the Jewish Captain is not one that can be par-
doned. . . . Of all crimes, the one that is the most cowardly and repugnant is
the crime of the traitor against his nation. He is everyone’s assassin.”37
Notices on this theme in Mexico’s principal Catholic papers of this early
period are generally in this tenor, and many are much worse. The Catholic
papers used the occasion to write pieces explicitly about Jewish hatred of
Christianity, about Jewish vengeance and treachery, about Jewish degenera-
tion, and so on.38
Once it was clear that the affair revolved around the most heinous form
of betrayal (national treason) perpetuated by a scion of the race of eternal
traitors (the Jews) for their usual motive (gold, and perpetrating their hatred
against Christianity), the papers went on to impute an alliance between Jew-
ish money, Protestants, and Freemasons, all of whom were jointly bent on
destroying France as the bulwark of Latin Catholic nations, in favor of Protes-
tant nations such as Germany, England, and the United States.
In Mexico, the argument around Dreyfus became relevant to the poli-
tics of position around the Spanish American War (1898). The Díaz govern-
ment remained neutral in that struggle, but the official press tended to side
with the Cuban nationalists, and so was vulnerable to accusations of favor-
ing the Americans. Against this position, the pro-Spanish El Correo Español

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and the Catholic papers used Dreyfus to paint the científicos—and their
papers—as Mexico’s Jews, who were selling the country off to a foreign power,
the United States, instead of siding with their own Latin blood and their own
Catholic religion.
So, for instance, referring to the Dreyfusard press in France, El Tiempo
complained that “in the matter of the Jewish traitor, the press—that social
lever—has in Paris played a very sad role: all its talk and its scribbling has
been the work of gold, of blackmail and of the corruption of a journalism
that has reached bottom.”39 Similarly, in Mexico, despite the progress of the
press, “praising Dreyfus shows the bad side of the press, shown by the fact, evi-
dent today, that it begs for government subsidies.”40 Indeed, the Catholic press
complained, Mexico’s government-subsidized (científico) papers all supported
Dreyfus and betrayed their Latin brothers in France and Spain: “El Imparcial
and its older brother El Mundo have lately been publishing articles that are
mostly hostile to Spain and entirely hostile to France.”41
In Mexico, El Tiempo warned, “there are no synagogues nor orthodox
Judaizers who congregate to celebrate their rituals, but they do hold sway
over money and the domain over Masonry is exerted by the innate and
impertinent enemies of the Crucified One.” Indeed, the paper went so far as
to claim that Mexico’s anticlerical tradition itself was funded by the Jews: “In
Mexico free-masonry was an element of anti-Catholic Judaism. The Reforma
and the persecution of the clergy both are rooted in pacts made in the anti-
Christian synagogue.”42
The científico press, like Dreyfus, was stabbing Mexico and Porfirio Díaz
in the back in a cowardly and selfish manner: “El Mundo and El Imparcial
have not been maintaining the upright attitude that characterized official
government papers in periods past. Why is this? It is due to numerous causes,
some visible and some occult.”43 Among the visible causes, the paper claimed,
were the científicos’ desire to imitate the United States (a penchant that in
Mexico was a an insult among nationalists) and their belief that all “intellec-
tuals” sided with Emile Zola. Indeed, Catholic papers identified the científicos
with that new social category, “the intellectual,” and lampooned its vanities
and pretensions. However, the paper clarified:
One is not an intellectual (i.e., intelligent) just because one wants to be, and
these subsidized sages judged that the time was right to throw themselves in the arms
of intellectualism.
The science of these sages is made up in part of their own petulance, and in
part of others’ ignorance: the intelligent public is beginning to realize that they
only know of Taine, Stuart Mill, Spencer or Max-Nordau—the authorities whom
they cite with neither rhyme nor reason—what any good-for-nothing who spends
his hours browsing bookstores, and who has read every other page of a book can
know, which is that they have been indigested.44

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And, finally, they tried to drive a wedge between Díaz and the científicos:
“The Mexican government has a perfectly established reputation and its
loyalty is beyond a doubt, but if anyone discovered that the treasury pays
mercenaries to insult France and Spain they could scarcely believe that the
nation’s coffer was being used to insult the two countries, both of which are
friends of Mexico.”45
La Voz de México and El Correo Español put the matter more succinctly. By sid-
ing with the United States against Spain, Mexican Jacobins were traitors to their
race and religion, which made them “our Dreyfuses”: “Our Dreyfuses betray
their country by helping its invader of the past, of the present and of the future
[the United States], and they betray their blood, declaring it to be odious, and
conspire in favor of the enemy of their country and of their race.”46
The Catholic right was the first to paint the científicos as traitors and
Judaizers. The specific injuries that were imputed to them were anti-Catholic
and anti-Spanish sentiment (treason to their race and religion); anti-French
sentiment (which Francisco Bulnes often expressed, though this was shared
by neither Sierra nor Limantour); pro-English or American sentiment;
receiving, favoring, and brokering U.S. (Judaized) capital; and undermin-
ing General Díaz’s honor and prestige while taking his money. In addition
to these accusations, there was the distinct anti-intellectual invective that is
characteristically anti-Semitic, the científicos standing accused of parroting
half-read books, of childish pretentiousness, and of false science. In this,
they were like their admired Emile Zola who, El Correo Español argued, was
himself a degenerate (see figs. 1 and 2).
Presidential Succession and

Consolidation of Anti-Científico
Sentiment (1900, 1904, 1910)
The basic grammar of anti-científico sentiment was laid down by the

Catholic right around the time of the Dreyfus Affair and the Spanish-Ameri-
can War. That ideological configuration was adopted by other groups in the
course of the following years. By the time of the revolution (1910), the cientí-
ficos had become the scapegoat of choice of Mexican nationalist sentiment.
The story of how this happened is almost as complex as its significance.
It begins in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American War, in the
months preceding the 1900 presidential election. Díaz had leaked the
notion that he had decided to retire from political life and that his successor
would be the alleged head of the “científico party,” finance minister José Yves
Limantour. The response from Limantour’s competitors came in the form
of newspaper attacks, fostered and financed by Minister of Justice Joaquín
Baranda, whose followers accused Limantour of being foreign born and of

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FIGURE 1. The cartoon reads: “Emile Zola in the light of Anthropometry. I.—
Lobeless ear, infallible sign of degeneracy.” Published in “Zola es un
degenerado,” El Correo Español, 24 August 1898.
favoring financial speculators from the time of the French intervention, and
so of being ineligible for the presidency.47
Personal attacks on Limantour were complemented by a histrionic defense
of national politics as a matter open only to Mexicans. The papers of the time
fostered discussions of whether foreigners were a threat to Mexico, and espe-
cially whether Americans were engaged in a “peaceful conquest” of Mex-
ico.48 In the period leading up to Díaz’s fifth consecutive reelection, political
rivalries between Barandistas and científicos were projected onto a debate
around the legitimacy of a November 23, 1899, rally, in which legations from
Mexico City’s foreign communities begged Porfirio Díaz to accept yet another
reelection.49 In this debate the científicos stood accused of opening the door to
foreign participation in Mexico’s internal affairs. I call nationalist indigna-
tion with foreign participation in the November 23 rally histrionic because it

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FIGURE 2. Zola’s hand connotes excess

animality and lack of artistry. Published
in “Zola es un degenerado,” El Correo
Español, 24 August 1898.
came from a faction that supported Díaz’s reelection as much as did the for-
eigners and the científicos. Yet this faction was interested in using this event to
tar the científicos as a fifth column for foreign interests while carefully sparing
Díaz himself of any comparable accusation.
The hint of treason in these anti-científico accusations resounded with
the claim that they were “Mexico’s Dreyfuses,” a form of innuendo that was

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met by El Imparcial with an attempt to turn the tables on the accusers of the
científicos. Thus, El Imparcial claimed, it was in fact the so-called Jacobin ele-
ment that was truly like the Jews: “How are we to interpret the fact that in
Mexico there is such a large number of liberals that sympathizes with Euro-
pean anti-Semites and publicly professes their hatred of Jews, even while
those very liberals think the same as any Pharisee regarding the interpreta-
tion and application of the law?”50
El Imparcial’s attempt to transfer the Jewish label to the accusers of the
científicos is revealing because it involuntarily underscores the newness of
modern anti-Semitism in Mexico: anti-científico rhetoric used distinctly mod-
ern anti-Semitic language (the Jew as cosmopolitan, as national traitor, as
multifaceted fetish of capital), and so had a political utility that was distinct
from that of the older image of the Jew as obtuse, narrow-minded, unforgiv-
ing, and legalistic. The científico as Jew was a traitor to the nation, El Impar-
cial’s attempt to counter with a portrayal of the Barandista as Jew branded
that faction as small-minded and miserly, certainly, but not as a subversive
agent. Not surprisingly, El Imparcial ’s attempt to Judaize its opponents failed
to neutralize the anti-Semitic language that was hurled against the científicos.
Worse yet, pressures on Díaz to make clear distinctions between a loyal
and disloyal elite were becoming the object of popular politics. Specifically,
the representation of the new and urbane bourgeoisie was increasingly lam-
pooned as effeminate by the penny press, and the dictatorship had to work
to distance itself from these representations by reasserting the manliness of
the state.51 Thus, on November 19, 1901, one year after the foreigner affair,
there was a great scandal around a police raid on an elite home, where “41
sodomites” were discovered in a transvestite ball, half of them dressed as
women, dancing with the others dressed as their usual dandy selves (lagartijos).
Rumors circulated claiming that one of these men was none other than
Profirio Díaz’s own son-in-law, Don Ignacio de la Torre, who was also, it is
worth noting, the owner of a Morelos hacienda and employer of future rev-
olutionary Emiliano Zapata.52
The government reacted by decisively disassociating itself from this
effeminate group—so decisively that writer Carlos Monsiváis argues that the
“scandal of the 41” was the moment when modern Mexican homosexuality
was “invented.”53 The police rounded up nineteen of the “homosexuals”—
managed to keep the names of all forty-one unpublished—and forced the
unfortunate prisoners to sweep the streets dressed up as women before a
jeering crowd (fig. 3); they were then packed off to Yucatán as forced con-
scripts, a measure that was probably a death sentence, despite the fact that
no laws were broken.
In such a climate, popular resentment against the upper classes could
easily be deflected away from the class as a whole and against a specific

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FIGURE 3. José Guadalupe Posada, “Elegant fans.” Posada’s biting irony refers here
to the brooms being used by these upper class transvestites, who have
been exposed to public scorn as a first step in their brutal degradation
and likely death. Reprinted from José Guadalupe Posada, Monografía:
las obras de José Guadalupe Posada, grabador mexicano, ed. Frances Toor,
Paul O’Higgins, and Blas Venegas Arroyo (Mexico City, 1991).
segment, particularly if that segment was prone to dandyism. Thus, poet and
dandy José Juan Tablada, who was married to Justo Sierra’s niece, explained
why personages like Don Ignacio de la Torre were veritable lightning rods
for envy:

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Nacho de la Torre was a magnet for envy because of the haughty way in which he
carried his head, and the seemingly universal disdain of his myopic gaze. Only
because of these gestures, or because of them more than any other thing, were per-
sonages like these made captives of democratic malevolence. But because these ges-
tures were an integral part of the Brummellesque philosophy of their owners, they
endured and defied the gossip, without even considering sacrificing their decora-
tive attitudes.54
Anti-Semitic invective against the científicos would only get harsher dur-
ing the subsequent electoral periods of 1904 and 1910, but this time by writ-
ers in the camp of Limantour’s new rival, General Bernardo Reyes. Reyista
slurs against the científicos combined rhetoric employed by Catholics during
the Spanish-American War with the antiforeign strategy devised by Baranda
and the feminizing strategy that was emerging as an expression of popular
resentment. To all of this they added yet another element, which was the
charge that the científicos had betrayed the honored principles of Mexican
liberalism.
From the beginning the científicos faced the hostility of an older genera-
tion of liberals who saw them as opportunistic and perhaps felt their own
obsolescence in the face of this modern generation. The discourse of these
old liberals was taken up, much more virulently, by a younger generation of
Jacobins who formed the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) in 1902. The radi-
cals of the PLM, and especially the Flores Magón brothers, loathed the cientí-
ficos and their loathing echoed certain aspects of the Catholic critique.
Obviously, the PLM did not blame the científicos for being anti-Catholic, or
anti-Spanish. The Magonistas did, however, accuse them of being tied to for-
eign gold, of betraying the true patriotic tradition, and of strangling the Mexi-
can people: “The científicos, who despise the Constitution, are only interested
in money, they have not one honest principle, and when they come together
to adulate a hero, they give themselves pompous titles like ‘Unión Liberal’ and
‘El Imparcial,’ which gets to call itself liberal in exchange for many thousands
of pesos and blocking Mexican mental development.”55
The volume of these criticisms was raised in 1904, when Francisco Bulnes,
who was the científicos’ most flamboyant polemicist, published El verdadero
Juárez, an attack on the Juárez myth. The publication of El verdadero Juárez fol-
lowed shortly on Bulnes’s speech launching Díaz’s reelection campaign in
1903. That speech had been a scandalous and ingenious piece of oratory that
combined panegyric with critique in which Bulnes had dared to suggest that
Díaz was a (benevolent) autocrat, that Mexico was not a democracy, and that
the land was not at peace. This speech opened the científicos to a barrage of
attacks from within the Díaz government, especially from the Reyistas, who
were the strongest alternative faction, while of course it failed to confer on
them the prestige of being in the opposition.

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The book against Juárez provided a political opportunity for the científicos’
rivals, since it touched the sacralized figure of the great hero of Mexico’s
“Second Independence,” Benito Juárez, rather than that of the dictator Díaz,
and so sparked a veritable feeding frenzy between Reyistas and Magonistas,
who vied amongst themselves for the honor of who was truer to the princi-
ples of Mexican liberalism. Thus, writing in El Colmillo Público, Ricardo Flores
Magón (“Anakreón”) claimed that “we liberals have watched the mystification
and hoax forged by Reyistas who wish to pass as liberals with supreme disgust,”
adding that “if there is one political tendency that has no right to protest
against Bulnes’ book, that is Reyismo.”56
The tussle for the mantle of legitimacy that Mexican liberalism and Benito
Juárez provided was such that a number of científicos, including Justo Sierra
himself, felt compelled to distance themselves from Bulnes. The anti-científico
sentiment that developed in this period in the Reyista camp became the
hegemonic mode of anti-científico rhetoric, and it laid the foundation for rev-
olutionary discourse on the subject. I draw examples from the writing of one
of the most virulent Reyista publicists, Pedro Didapp, who in many ways sets
the tone for the genre:
If we speak of banks, the científicos have all the concessions; if of railroads, they have
all the contracts; if of commercial agriculture, they don’t let anyone else into the
business. . . . The Mexican científico is the primordial type of the Jew. . . .
. . . In this country there has never been a worse social plague than the científico
community. The conservatives could be—some actually were—traitors to the
republic; the clerical faction was a highly noxious socio-political faction; but the
científicos, who are a mixture of both, are the extreme of everything that is punish-
able; they have speculation as their only aim, and they know not a single noble
sentiment. . . .
. . . The very nature of the científicos has been metalized (turned to money), just
like the conscience of the Jew. If we speak either of raw materials or of commercial
transactions, to the Jew the nation and any sensation that calls forth a Superior
Order, is subjected to a profit, to the científico, who is a descendent of the Jew, it is
just the same.57
On the eve of the outbreak of the revolution, the consensus on this mat-
ter was such that revolutionaries like Luis Cabrera had no compunction in
calling the científicos avatars of the eternal Jew. The científicos, he argued,
were of neither the conservative nor the reformist/liberal party. Rather, they
belonged to the cowardly and calculating group that sides opportunistically
with whomever is in power, in order to further their own financial interests:
This is the real Mephistopheles who conceived the foreign interventions that were
later carried out by one or another of our political parties. In France they are
known as émigrés and not traitors, because they have been sufficiently wily to elude
their responsibility for the treason that stains a people. In sum, this is the group of

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the Jews, because they have no fixed country. They come from Venice or Switzerland,
their grandparents were Spanish, their parents French, their grandchildren Ameri-
cans, and their great-grandchildren German; and the spelling of their last name
evolves in tandem with the changing power of the nations. They are admirers of
foreign customs and they educate their children in them, and they are favorable to
international tutelages for the conservation of the peace.58
Further along, Cabrera summarizes científico Judaizing in the following

terms: “The científicos have studied Sociology, and as a consequence of their
studies, they have begun to preach a dangerous cosmopolitanism, entirely
contrary to the national idea (la idea de la Patria).”59
In the face of the onslaught of anti-científico invective, Díaz did his utmost
to show his own independence. He was, after all, vulnerable to the taint him-
self, as was obvious in the affair of the forty-one sodomites, which had touched
his son-in-law. Limantour summarized the situation well: “Accosted by the
opposition who blamed him for letting himself be domineered by científico
bad faith, the President multiplied his efforts to prove, in both speech and
act, that the oft-reviled ‘científicos’ exerted no influence over him, all of
which only led to even sharper attacks against the científicos, which was a loss
to the Government, because as the científicos became discouraged, the Gov-
ernment lost one of its most loyal and firm supporters, without gaining in
exchange any of the parties that had been attacking it.” 60
Díaz’s Electoral Strategy, the

Consolidation of National Unity, and
the Long Shadow of Científico Hatred
Porfirio Díaz’s strategy of divide and conquer, and his desire to

remain Mexico’s strongman and president until his death, turned anti-cientí-
fico sentiment into a national resource. The victims of anti-científico rhetoric
extended far beyond the group of intellectuals and politicians that identi-
fied with one another as científicos. Thus, Emiliano Zapata accused Madero
of retaining an alliance with the old régime (which of course he did) and
used the term científico as the most potent and insulting way of pointing to
this continuity:
We declare the aforementioned Francisco I. Madero to be unable to fulfill the

promises of the revolution that he authored, because he betrayed the principles
with which he cheated the people’s faith and which he used to scale power. Madero
is incapable of governing because he has no respect for the law or for the justice of
the pueblos, and he is a traitor to the nation because he is forcefully humiliating
the people who want their freedoms in order to please the científicos, hacienda own-
ers and caciques who enslave us.61

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A few years later, after the fall of Madero, Francisco Villa relied on anti-
científico rhetoric to deligitimate Venustiano Carranza (who was, in his ori-
gins, a Reyista, and so no foreigner to anti-científico rhetoric himself). Thus, in
his Plan de Agua Prieta, Villa proclaimed that:
[U.S. recognition of Carranza’s government] does not guarantee Carranza’s vic-
tory, but instead sets the stage for his complete ruin and dishonor, because it is the
work of the científicos and the Jews, and especially because it is the de facto accep-
tance of a Yankee protectorate, and thereby a betrayal of the ideals of the Revolu-
tion that besmirches the national history that was made noble by Morelos, Juárez
and a hundred other titans.62
The Carrancistas, for their part, also relied on anti-científico sentiment,

long past the downfall of Díaz and the científicos. Thus, in the constitutional
congress of 1917 many positions were justified by claiming that a desired piece
of legislation was good because it was the opposite of científico practice.
So, for instance, on the sixteenth Ordinary Session around the discussion
of article 4 of the constitution, a proposal to prohibit the sale of alcoholic bev-
erages and to ban gambling, prostitution, bullfights, and cockfights, Deputy
Ibarra claimed that the científicos had fostered the degeneration and stupefi-
cation of the Mexican people by encouraging these habits, and therefore
they should be prohibited (never mind that Bulnes, Sierra, and others
shared the horror of alcoholism and blood sport that was common to liber-
als of the era).
On the sixteenth Ordinary Session (December 20, 1916), discussion of
article 7 on freedom of the press, the “científico Ramón Corral” was cited for
giving personal instructions to the warden of the Belen prison on how badly
to treat the various journalists (again, other científicos like Limantour, Sierra,
and Bulnes prided themselves on having defended the press against the
assassinations that had characterized the earlier Díaz presidencies); in dis-
cussions of this same article, the deputy Felix Palavicini, editor of El Univer-
sal, was himself accused of being a científico, and his paper of being a científico
paper.
In the discussion of article 9, on freedom of association, restrictions on
foreigners’ rights to free political association were legitimated with reference
to the científicos’ approval and tolerance of those practices. On the thirty-fifth
session, on the rules of residence required for eligibility for office, científico
practice was cited as the counter-example of the proposed legislation. On the
thirty-eighth session, arguments against retaining the office of the vice presi-
dent were made citing científico support for that office. On the forty-eighth
Session, on the antimonopoly law, the case of the científico Olegario Molina
was cited as a negative example in order to push proposed legislation
through. Arguments in other sessions that invoked alleged or real científico

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practice in order to strengthen the opposite position included proposed leg-

islation to eliminate the ministries of education and the interior. Finally, in
arguments made against giving Mexican citizenship to children of foreigners,
the cases of Limantour and of all científicos—who in the debate were consid-
ered false Mexicans—were mobilized to justify the proposed legislation.
In sum, the accusation of being a científico provided a readily available
method for discounting political opponents. Zapata used it against Madero,
Madero against Díaz, and Villa against Carranza, while the Carrancistas used
the figure consistently as a rhetorical resource with which to push through
various items of legislation as they forged the revolutionary constitution.
The Historical Significance

of Anti-Científico Rhetoric
There are two broad issues at stake. One narrowly concerns the
question of anti-Semitism in Mexico, the other speaks to the broader con-
nection between race and dependent nationalism. On the first issue, the
material that I have presented challenges the widely held belief that there
has been no modern anti-Semitism in Mexico or, to put this another way,
that Mexican anti-Semitism is archaic Catholic prejudice—in which the
Jews are cast as the mythical figures who killed Christ.
I have shown that anti-científico sentiment took the form of modern anti-
Semitism and, indeed, that it was forged in the same fire, the Dreyfus Affair,
and that it initially had a similar, though by no means identical, political
valence: intensified nationalism allied to a reactionary Catholicism that was
directed against Anglo-American and German power and alleged occult
internal allies. Like anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century France, anti-
científico sentiment was used to buttress the power of the army, the opposi-
tion press, and the mob.63 Like the Jew in Europe, the figure of the científico
was a fetish that concentrated all the negative value of capital.
The Mexican materials discussed here are congruent with the interpreta-
tion of modern anti-Semitism put forth by Moishe Postone who, prolonging
the conclusions of Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno,
argued not only that anti-Semitism in Europe “grew as the Jews, in their old
social roles, became historically superfluous” but also that Jews became a
biologized fetish of abstract capitalism. “The Jews,” argues Postone, “became
the personifications of the intangible, destructive, immensely powerful,
international domination of capital.” The choice of the Jews for this part was
not fortuitous, for, following their emancipation, the Jews “constituted the
only group in Europe that fulfilled the determination of citizenship as a
pure political abstraction. They were German or French citizens, but not
really considered Germans or Frenchmen.”64

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During the era of rising emancipatory dependent nationalisms—an era

that in Mexico begins in the 1880s—the Jew-fetish was imported to Mexico
as a convenient way to wrench a faction of the dominant class away from its
strong claims to nationality by associating it with the interests of foreign cap-
ital tout court while furthering a program of national regulation of a few
select domains, a stance that took the misleading but meaningful motto,
“México para los mexicanos.”
In such a context, the paucity of real live Jews among the científicos seems
to have mattered very little. The presence of Jews in Mexico at the time was
quite modest, though their actual number is difficult to calculate. Based on
Jewish-sounding last names, Corinne Krause has calculated that 140 Jews
were naturalized as Mexicans between 1877 and 1910, which is 5 percent of
the total number of foreigners who took Mexican nationality in the period.
The number of nonnaturalized Jews must have been considerably higher,
but numbers were probably quite low nonetheless.65 The first religious con-
gregation was established in Mexico City in 1908, more than ten years after
the Dreyfus scandal began.
Although Jewish historians list some of the financiers of the Porfiriato as
descendants of Alsacian Jews—a list that according to Corinne Krause
includes such prominent families as Scherer, Limantour, and Noetzlin—the
fact is that the científicos who descended from them neither were identified
as Jews nor did they identify themselves as such.66 Setting aside Limantour,
who was in any case the baptismal godson of Manuel Gutiérrez, father of
poet laureate Manuel Gutiérrez Najera, none of the other científicos have
been claimed as Jews even by Jewish historians—Sierra, Bulnes, Macedo,
Pineda, Casasús, and—if we extend the circle—Creel, Corral, Diez Gutiér-
rez, Molina. None of them were Jews. The lack of any material connection
between the científicos and actual Jews was such that Corinne Krause regis-
tered only minimal anti-Semitism in her review of the press in the period.
She makes no mention of the Dreyfus Affair as relevant to the situation of
Mexico’s Jews and fails to register the anti-Semitic tonalities of invective
against the científicos as having any relevance to the question.67 For their part,
the científicos too understood the Jewish charge against them to be meta-
phorical.
This does not imply that the anti-Semitism that was rallied against the
científicos was inconsequential for the fate of Mexico’s Jews. During the years
of the Mexican Reforma (mid-nineteenth century), Mexican liberals had
been sympathetic to the Jewish people; the former saw the latter as victims of
clerical prejudice and therefore as natural allies.68 After the anti-científico
push of the 1890s and 1900s, this was no longer the case. Thus, Jews were
classified as undesirable in the immigration laws of the 1920s and ’30s. Even
President Lázaro Cárdenas, who embraced Jewish political exiles from Europe,

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turned back “nonpolitical” Jewish refugees, who constituted the great majority
of asylum seekers, to Europe and to their deaths. Certainly this policy was
upheld because Mexico did not have an open immigration policy, but the
fact that Jews were still classified by Mexico’s Foreign Ministry as racially
undesirable did not help their case.69 For its part, Mexico’s radical right—
the synarchists of the ’30s and ’40s, and anticommunist student shock groups
like MURO (Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación) in the 1960s
retained the virulent anti-Semitic discourse that had first been put forth in
Mexican public life during the Dreyfus Affair by the aggressively nationalist
Catholic paper El Tiempo.70
The second set of implications for this story centers on the role anti-cientí-
fico sentiment played in revolutionary nationalism, for, although we have
established científico hatred as a modality of modern anti-Semitism, its con-
nection to state and nation differed from that of anti-Semitism’s European
counterparts.
Hannah Arendt argued that modern European anti-Semitism “proved the
most effective means of inspiring and organizing great masses of people for
imperialist expansion and destruction of the old forms of government.”71 Its
Mexican counterpart was used to cement a principle that became the most
fundamental and ambiguous precept of revolutionary politics: México para
los mexicanos. This formula claimed a monopoly over the political sphere for
Mexico’s governing classes while working to attract foreign capital whenever
possible.
As Marxist labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano argued back in
1926, Mexican revolutionary ideology claimed the role of independent medi-
ator for the state, which was supposed to be invested with sovereign authority
to accommodate various class interests according to its own criteria.72 The
revolutionary state, like its Porfirian predecessor, was an authoritarian
machine whose references to “popular sovereignty” were generally sublimi-
nal shorthand for the discretionary power of the government, and even of
the president. In that context, the repertoire of modern anti-Semitism—with
its obsession with betrayal, veiled foreign intrusion, and anti-intellectual-
ism—became a useful instrument for patrolling “state autonomy” from a
political society that relied on mass mobilization, and for purging rival gov-
erning factions from within.
In Europe the rise of modern anti-Semitism corresponded to the decline
of nation-states and the rise of empires. In Mexico it helped set the terms of ******
the nation’s passage from the uncertainties of postcolonial nationhood to
the political brokerage of progress in dependency. Playing the anti-científico
card was the ultimate ideological resource for rejecting an argument, a prac-
tice, or a person from the constitutional convention of 1917 and more
broadly from the political arena. At the most fundamental level, this suggests

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that anti-Semitism, with its appeal to emotion, irrational gesture, and the
sense of loss that is constitutive of the modern experience, was a key
resource in the formation of the authoritarian regimes that were built on the
Mexican revolution, all of which were intimately familiar with a form of
nationalist politics based on alliances between factions of the elite and mob
action.
Proper attention to anti-científico sentiment may also help to reframe the
study of anti-Chinese and anti-Mormon violence in the period, as well as
anti-Semitism in the 1930s and the complicated history of inclusion and
exclusion that marked the assimilation of exiles from Spain’s Civil War and,
later, of Chilean, Uruguayan, and Argentine exiles. Bluntly put, modern anti-
Semitism is a cornerstone in the edifice of Mexican revolutionary nationalism,
and attitudes and policies toward foreigners, cosmopolitanism, foreign influ-
ence, and corruption are all inflected by it.
Conclusion
During the final decade of Díaz’s dictatorship, anti-científico senti-

ment became a unifying discourse, much like hatred of the aristocracy in
revolutionary France, but that discourse was even more closely aligned to
Porfiriato nationalist usage of anti-Semitism in Europe. Like European anti-
Semitism, anti-científico sentiment was obsessed with national betrayal and
the erosion of national institutions. Unlike European anti-Semitism, how-
ever, the politics of anti-científico sentiment has not been subjected to critical
scrutiny until now.
The point of undertaking such an exercise is not to vindicate the honor
of the científicos, though such an effort may be meritorious in some cases.
The científicos were a mainstay of the Díaz regime, and the revolution’s great-
est accomplishments—agrarian reform, labor rights, regulation of foreign
investment—were gained in opposition to it. Vindicating the científicos’ role
in Mexican history would require an appraisal of the Porfiriato and the revo-
lution as a whole. Such an exercise cannot be attempted without a compara-
tive history of modernizing regimes in the period, and that is not my concern
here.
What interests me, instead, is that the politics of anti-científico sentiment
has also had deeply negative ramifications, even into the contemporary
period: the hyper-masculine authoritarianism of the Mexican left and right
has been routinely justified in nationalist terms, because the political sphere
has been claimed for “real Mexicans” who can be subjected to a “litmus test”
whose criteria is clearly anti-Semitic. The legitimacy of legally enforced xeno-
phobia under revolutionary nationalism went unquestioned for many decades.
The vulnerability of cosmopolitan intellectuals, and the related compulsion of

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favoring nationalist expressions for local scientific and cultural efforts, are still
relevant dimensions of public life, as, indeed, is the low visibility of racial dis-
crimination and political marginalization of foreigners.
The científicos were probably the most cosmopolitan technocratic elite
Mexico has ever had; it is interesting to note that in Mexican revolutionary
nationalism, they played the part of the Jews.
Notes
I wish to thank Friedrich Katz, Tom Laqueur, Elizabeth Povinelli, John Wom-
ack, and the editors of Representations for their comments. The usual disclaimer
applies.
1. Francisco Bulnes, The Whole Truth About Mexico: President Wilson’s Responsibility,
trans. Dora Scott (New York, 1916), 103.
2. Luis González, La ronda de las generaciones. Los protagonistas de la Reforma y de la
Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City, 1987), 50.
3. Federico Cornelio Aguilar, Ultimo año de residencia en México (1885; reprint,
Mexico City, 1995), 113.
4. See, for example, for Japan, David G. Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa, Jews
in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype (Lanham, MD,
2000); for Poland, see Marion Mushkat, Philo-Semitic and Anti-Jewish Attitudes in
Post-Holocaust Poland (Lewiston, NY, 1992); there are a number of journalistic
articles on anti-Semitism in Indonesia; on recent uses of anti-Semitism in con-
temporary Venezuela, see Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez, “United by
Hate,” Boston Review, July 2009.
5. See Emiliano Zapata, Leyes y decretos (Mexico City, 1987), passim.
6. Luis Cabrera, “El partido científico. Qué ha sido, qué es, qué sera, para qué
sirve la ‘ciencia,’” El Partido Democratico, México, 24 de Julio de 1909, in Pen-
samiento y acción, ed. Eugenia Meyer (Mexico City, 2002), 19.
7. José Yves Limantour, Apuntes sobre mi vida pública (Mexico City, 1965), 236.
8. Ibid., 235.
9. Bulnes, The Whole Truth About Mexico, 103; Agustín Aragón, introduction to Por-
firio Díaz: estudio histórico-filosófico (Mexico City, 1962).
10. See Leticia Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas en México, 1819–1906 (Mexico City,
1984); and Friedrich Katz and Jane-Dale Lloyd, Porfirio Díaz frente al descontento
popular regional (1891–1893): antología documental (Mexico City, 1986).
11. On the Unión Liberal, see Jacqueline Ann Rice, The Porfirian Political Elite: Life
Patterns of the Delegates to the 1892 Union Liberal Convention (PhD diss., University
of California, Los Angeles, 1979).
12. Justo Sierra, “Manifiesto de la Convención Nacional Liberal a favor de la reelec-
ción” (1892), in Fuentes para la historia de la Revolución Mexicana, vol. 4, Manifiestos
politicos (1892–1912), ed. Manuel González Ramírez (Mexico City, 1974), 4.
13. For a discussion of these initiatives, see Charles Hale, The Transformation of Lib-
eralism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, NJ, 1989), chaps. 2–4.
14. Limantour, Apuntes sobre mi vida pública, 95.

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15. Friedrich Katz, “Limantour and the Mexican Revolution,” unpublished

manuscript (2007), 1.
16. Arnaldo Córdova, La ideología de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City, 1973), 44–45.
17. For continuities between pre- and postrevolutionary positivism, see ibid., 26.
On Emilio Rabasa’s influence on Mexican revolutionary constitutionalism, see
Charles Hale, “The Civil Law Tradition and Constitutionalism in Twentieth-
Century Mexico: The Legacy of Emilio Rabasa,” Law and History Review 18, no.
2 (2000): 257–79. On Molina Enríquez’s social Darwinism and its influence on
the conceptualization of agrarian reform, see Emilio Kouri, “Interpreting the
Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands in Porfirian Mexico: The Unexamined
Legacies of Andrés Molina Enríquez,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82,
no. 1 (2002): 69–117; on the conservative character of the national university
during the revolution, see Javier Garcíadiego, Rudos contra científicos: la Univer-
sidad Nacional durante la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City, 1996).
18. El Amigo del Pueblo: por el Pueblo y para el Pueblo (Cuernavaca), July 9, 1911, in
Laura Espejel, Alicia Olivera, and Salvador Rueda, Emiliano Zapata. Antología
(Mexico City, 1988), 101–4.
19. Francisco I. Madero, San Luis Potosí, Octubre 5 de 1910, in Plan de San Luis. Doc-
umentos Facsimilares. Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Comisión Nacional
Editorial (Mexico City, 1976).
20. “Las Reivindicaciones Sociales y Nacionales en el Artículo 27, referentes a la
propiedad agraria. Discurso de Luis T. Navarro” (Querétaro, January 29, 1917),
in 50 discursos doctrinales en el Congreso constituyente de la Revolución Mexicana,
1916–1917 (Mexico City, 1969), no. 43, 219–32.
21. Cabrera, “El partido científico,” 7–28 (8).
22. Heriberto Frías, “Una bellísima Horca . . . para la liga científico-traidora,” La
Patria, May 31, 1911.
23. “México: el timón y la tormenta,” Vuelta 71, October 1982, 14–22 (18–19).
24. See Carmen Sáez Pueyo, Justo Sierra: Antecedentes del partido único en México
(Mexico, 2001), 165–67.
25. Gilbert Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States,
1880–1924 (Durham, NC, 1988), 54.
26. Daniel Cosío Villegas, Historia moderna de México. El Porfiriato. La vida política
interior. Segunda parte (Mexico City, 1972), 753.
27. Ibid., 846–47. 28. Ibid., 853–54.
29. In order to gain científico support and calm investor anxiety around his 1904
reelection—he was seventy-four then—Díaz finally agreed to create the office
of the vice presidency, which had been one of three científico demands back in
1892. He still rejected the creation of a party and of an independent judiciary.
30. On the internal conflict within Catholic opinion around the politics of recon-
ciliation with the Díaz regime, see Sáez Pueyó, Justo Sierra, 127–32.
31. Justo Sierra, Obras Completas (Mexico City, 1948), 7:93.
32. Ibid., 95.
33. For a review of Sierra’s position, see Nadda G. de Anhaldt, ¿Por qué Dreyfus? El
ensayo de un crimen (Mexico City, 2003).
34. Francisco Bulnes, El porvenir de las naciones latinoamericanas ante las recientes con-
quistas de Europa y norteamérica (estructura y evolución de un continente) (1899;
reprint, Mexico City, 1945), 120.
35. Ibid., 122–23.

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36. “El judas francés,” El Tiempo, 16 January 1895.

37. “París,” El Tiempo, 29 January 1895.
38. See, for instance, El Tiempo: 2 April, 1895, “La raza judía”; 4 January 1895,
“La Francia judía”; 18 de enero 1898, “El cancer del periodismo”; 22 January
1898, “Guerra a los judíos”; 1 March 1898, “Jesuitas y judíos”; 5 March 1898,
“Judíos, protestantes y franc-masones”; 14 September 1898, “De Fuera. Difi-
cultades para salvar al traidor. Miedo a los judaizantes”; 14 November 1900,
“La aristocracia y los judíos.” Other Catholic or pro-Catholic papers, such as
El País and El Correo Español, took a similarly anti-Semitic line, though usually
not in quite as aggressively consistent a manner as El Tiempo.
39. “El cancer del periodismo,” El Tiempo, 18 November 1898.
40. Ibid.
41. “Hostilidades,” El Tiempo, 1 March 1898.
42. “Guerra a los judíos,” El Tiempo, 22 January 1898.
43. “Un artículo notable de ‘Le Courrier du Mexique,’” El Tiempo, 4 March 1898.
44. Ibid. 45. Ibid.
46. “Dreyfus en Francia y Dreyfus en México,” El Correo Español, 17 March 1898.
47. For narratives of the events, see Limantour, Apuntes sobre mi vida pública,
126–28; Francisco Bulnes, El verdadero Díaz y la Revolución (1920; reprint, Mex-
ico City, 1960), makes the credible argument that Díaz authorized Joaquín
Baranda’s libel against Limantour, though Limantour himself does not believe
this (215). See also Steven C. Topic, “When Mexico Had the Blues: A Transat-
lantic Tale of Bonds, Bankers, and Nationalists, 1862–1910,” American Histori-
cal Review 105, no. 3 (2000): 714–38, on the ways in which the politics of
presidential succession affected Limantour’s ability to renegotiate the French
debt.
48. For example, El Imparcial: 20 July 1897, “Después del aniversario: extranjeros y
mexicanos,” and 27 August 1897, “La conquista pacífica.”
49. For the Barandista position, see La Patria, 11 January 1900, “El General Díaz en
la Presidencia”; El Universal, 28 November 1899, “Las colonias extranjeras en
asuntos politicos,” 30 November 1899, “Impúdicas declaraciones de ‘El Impar-
cial,’” and 2 December 1899, “El respeto a la ley es la base del orden, y los sub-
vencionados lo burlan!”; for the científico position see El Imparcial, 28
November 1899, “Los extranjeros en la manifestación del día 23.”
50. El Imparcial, 28 November 1899, “Los extranjeros en la manifestación del día 23.”
51. For a review of the use of images of penetration in the Mexico City penny press
of the period, see Robert Buffington, “Homophobia and the Mexican Working
Class, 1900–1910,” in Robert McKee Irwin, Edward McCaughan, and Michelle
Rocío Nasser, eds., The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901
(New York, 2003), 195–217.
52. Irwin, McCaughan, and Nasser, The Famous 41.
53. Carlos Monsiváis, “The 41 and the Gran Redada,” in ibid., 164.
54. José Juan Tablada, La feria de la vida (1937; reprint, Mexico City, 1991), 211.
55. “Las evoluciones de los nombres,” El Colmillo Público 2, no. 56 (2 October
1904).
56. Ricardo Flores Magón (“Anakreón”), “El lobo con piel de oveja,” El Colmillo
Público 2, no. 55 (25 September 1904).
57. Juan Pedro Didapp, Explotadores políticos de México: Bulnes y el partido científico
ante el derecho ajeno (Mexico City, 1904), 595–96.

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58. Cabrera, “El partido científico,” 15–16. Note that with this thinly veiled refer-
ence to Dreyfus, Cabrera reveals himself as an anti-Dreyfusard, thereby strength-
ening the hypothesis that one of the strands of Mexican revolutionary
nationalism followed a path that paralleled the totalitarian, anti-Semitic forms
of nationalism that were hatching in Europe. Seen in this light, the flirtation of
the Sonorenses with fascism appears as something more than “an adventure,”
as Arnaldo Córdova has called it, and perhaps as more organically connected
to one of the central ideological strands of the Mexican Revolution.
59. Ibid., 20.
60. Limantour, Apuntes sobre mi vida pública, 175.
61. Emiliano Zapata et al., Ayoxustla, Puebla, 28 de noviembre de 1911, in Planes
políticos, proclamas, manifiestos y otros documentos de la Independencia al México mod-
erno, 1812–1940, ed. Román Iglesias González (Mexico City, 1998), 630–34.
62. Francisco Villa, Plan de Agua Prieta, 5 November 1915, in Romance histórico villista,
ed. Antonio Delgado (Chihuahua City, n.d.), 164.
63. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1994), chap. 4.
64. Moishe Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century,”
in Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust in the Twentieth Century, ed. Moishe
Postone and Eric Santner (Chicago, 2003), 81–115. Quotations are from 86,
93, 94.
65. Corinne Krause, Los judíos en México: Una historia con énfasis especial en el periodo
de 1857 a 1930 (Mexico City, 1987), 104.
66. Ibid., 69–71. 67. Ibid., chap. 6.
68. Corinne Krause, “Positivist Liberalism in Mexico: The Career of Isidoro
Epstein, 1851–1894,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 18, no. 4
(August 1976): 475–94, 477.
69. See Daniela Gleizer Salzman, Exiliados incómodos: México y los refugiados judíos del
nazismo (1933–1945) (PhD diss., El Colegio de México, 2007).
70. For the anti-Semitism of Mexican fascists of the 1930s, see Alicia Gojman de
Backal, Camisas, escudos y desfiles militares: Los Dorados y el antisemitismo en México,
1934–1940 (Mexico, 2000).
71. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 10.
72. Cited in Córdova, La ideología de la Revolución, 13.

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Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution

Author(s): Claudio Lomnitz

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Anti-Semitism and the Ideology

One of the curious features of the Mexican Revolution is

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Who Were the “Científicos”?

A key, but overlooked, property of anti-científico sentiment is the

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Origins of the Epithet “Científico”

Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 3

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de Tejada—Sufragio efectivo, no reelección (clean elections and no reelection).

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The científicos identified themselves as the cultural elite of their gen-

Extent of Científico Hatred

Despite ambiguities in the referent, there is not a single Mexican

Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 5

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revolution as a whole as a justified rebellion against científico abuse: “The

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Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 7

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Early Formation of Anti-Científico

Three factors are relevant for comprehending the consolidation of

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Curiously, however, the first faction to engage in sustained frontal public

Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 9

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Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 11

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Presidential Succession and

The basic grammar of anti-científico sentiment was laid down by the

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Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 13

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FIGURE 2. Zola’s hand connotes excess

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Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 15

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Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 17

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Further along, Cabrera summarizes científico Judaizing in the following

Díaz’s Electoral Strategy, the

Porfirio Díaz’s strategy of divide and conquer, and his desire to

We declare the aforementioned Francisco I. Madero to be unable to fulfill the

Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 19

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The Carrancistas, for their part, also relied on anti-científico sentiment,

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practice in order to strengthen the opposite position included proposed leg-

The Historical Significance

Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 21

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During the era of rising emancipatory dependent nationalisms—an era

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Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution 23

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During the final decade of Díaz’s dictatorship, anti-científico senti-

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