Voss, according to von Gilsa, was still in Nalchik; I had to see him and went there at the first opportunity. In Malka, a thin layer of snow already covered the fields; by the time I reached Baksan, flurries were darkening the sky, great whirls of flakes projected into the light from the headlamps. The mountains, the fields, the trees, everything had disappeared; the vehicles coming from the opposite direction looked like roaring monsters, surging out of the wings hidden by the curtain of the storm. I had only a wool coat from the previous year; it was still sufficient, but wouldn’t be for long. I would have to think about getting some warm clothing, I said to myself. In Nalchik, I found Voss surrounded by his books at the Ortskommandantur, where he had set up his office; he took me to have some ersatz coffee at the mess, at a little beaten-up Formica table with a vase of plastic flowers on it. The coffee was revolting and I tried to drown it in milk; Voss didn’t seem to mind it. “You aren’t too disappointed by the failure of the offensive?” I asked him. “For your research, I mean.”—“A little, of course. But I have enough to keep me busy here.” He seemed distant, a little lost. “So General Köstring has asked you to take part in the commission to investigate the Bergjuden?”—“Yes. And I heard that you were going to represent the SS.” I laughed dryly: “More or less. Oberführer Bierkamp automatically promoted me to the rank of specialist in Caucasian affairs. That’s your fault, I think.” He laughed and drank some coffee. Soldiers and officers, some still coated with snow, were coming and going or talking in low voices at the other tables. “And what do you think about the problem?” I asked.—“What do I think? The way they’ve put it, it’s absurd. The only thing you can say about these people is that they speak an Iranian language, practice the Mosaic religion, and live according to the customs of the Caucasian mountain people. That’s it.”—“Yes, but they do have an origin.” He shrugged his shoulders: “Everyone has an origin, most of the time a dreamed one. We talked about that. For the Tats, it’s lost in time and legend. Even if they really were Jews who came from Babylonia—let’s even say one of the lost tribes—in the meantime they must have mingled with the peoples from here so much that it wouldn’t mean anything anymore. In Azerbaidjan, there are Muslim Tats. Are they Jews who accepted Islam? Or did these hypothetical Jews from elsewhere trade women with an Iranian, pagan tribe whose descendants converted later on to one or the other religion of the Book? It’s impossible to say.”—“But,” I insisted, “there must be scientific clues that would allow us to decide?”—“There are plenty, and you can make them say anything. Take their language. I’ve already talked with them and I can situate it pretty well. Especially since I found a book by Vsevolod Miller about it. It’s basically a western Iranian dialect, with Hebrew and Turkish contributions. The Hebrew contribution concerns mostly the religious vocabulary, but not systematically: they call the synagogue nimaz, Passover Nisanu, and Purim Homonu; those are all Persian names. Before Soviet power, they wrote their Persian language with Hebrew characters, but according to them, those books didn’t survive the reforms. Nowadays, Tat is written in Latinic characters: in Daghestan, they publish newspapers and educate their children in that language. Now, if they really were Chaldeans or Jews who came from Babylon after the destruction of the First Temple, as some people would like us to think, they should by all logic speak some dialect derived from Middle Iranian, close to the Pahlavi language of the Sassanid era. But this Tat language is a new Iranian dialect, posterior to the tenth century and hence close to Dari, Baluch, or Kurdish. Without stretching the facts, we could conclude that there was a relatively recent immigration, followed by a conversion. But if you want to prove the opposite, you could do that too. What I don’t understand is what connection any of this has with the security of our troops. Aren’t we capable of judging their attitude toward us objectively, based on fact?”—“It’s quite simply a racial problem,” I replied. “We know that racially inferior groups exist, including the Jews, who present marked characteristics that in turn predispose them to Bolshevik corruption, theft, murder, and all kinds of other harmful manifestations. Obviously, that is not the case for all members of the group. But in wartime, in a context of occupation, and with our limited resources, it is impossible for us to carry out individual investigations. So we are forced to consider the risk-bearing groups as a whole, and to react globally. That creates great injustices, but that’s because of the exceptional situation.” Voss gazed at his coffee with a bitter, sad look. “Doktor Aue. I have always thought of you as an intelligent, sensible man. Even if everything you’re telling me is true, explain to me, if you please, what you mean by ‘race.’ Because for me, that’s a concept that is scientifically indefinable and hence without any theoretical value.”—“But race exists, that’s a fact, our best researchers are studying it and writing about it. You know that very well. Our racial anthropologists are the best in the world.” Voss suddenly exploded: “They are clowns. They have no competition in serious countries because their discipline doesn’t exist and isn’t taught there. If it weren’t for politics, none of them would have a job or be published!”—“Doktor Voss, I respect your opinions very much, but you’re going a little far, aren’t you?” I said gently. Voss struck the table with the flat of his hand, causing the cups and the vase of fake flowers to jump; the noise and his outburst made some heads turn: “This philosophy of veterinarians, as Herder called it, has stolen all its ideas from linguistics, the only social science to this day that has a scientifically valid theoretical basis. Do you understand”—he had lowered his voice and was speaking quickly and furiously—“do you even understand what a scientific theory is? A theory is not a fact: it is a tool that allows one to make predictions and generate new hypotheses. We say a theory is good, first of all, if it is relatively simple and then if it allows us to make verifiable predictions. Newtonian physics allows us to calculate orbits: if you observe the position of Earth or Mars at several months’ intervals, they are always exactly where the theory predicts they should be. On the other hand, it has been noted that the orbit of Mercury has slight irregularities that deviate from the orbit predicted by Newtonian theory. Einstein’s theory of relativity predicts these deviations with precision: so it is a better theory than Newton’s. Now, in Germany, once the greatest scientific country in the world, Einstein’s theory is denounced as Jewish science and rejected without any other explanation. That is quite simply absurd, that’s what we reproach the Bolsheviks for, with their own pseudo-sciences in the service of the Party. It’s the same thing for linguistics as against so-called racial anthropology. In linguistics, for example, Indo-Germanic comparative grammar has allowed us to draw up a theory of phonological mutations that has an excellent predictive value. As early as 1820, Bopp derived Greek and Latin from Sanskrit. By starting with Middle Iranian and following the same fixed rules, we can find words in Gaelic. It works and it’s demonstrable. So it’s a good theory, although it’s constantly being elaborated, corrected, and perfected. Racial anthropology, by comparison, has no theory. It postulates races, without being able to define them, then posits hierarchies, without the slightest criteria. All the attempts to define races biologically have failed. Cranial anthropometry was a total flop: after decades of measurements and compilations of tables, based on the most farfetched indices or angles, we still can’t tell a Jewish skull from a German skull with any degree of certainty. As for Mendelian genetics, it gives good results for simple organisms, but aside from the Habsburg chin, we’re still far from being able to apply it to man. All this is so much the case that in order to write our famous racial laws, we were forced to use the grandparents’ religion as a basis! It was postulated that the Jews of the last century were racially pure, but that’s absolutely arbitrary. Even you have to see that. As for what constitutes a racially pure German, no one knows, whatever your Reichsführer-SS may say. So racial anthropology, incapable of defining anything, was simply built on the so much more demonstrable categories of linguistics. Schlegel, who was fascinated by the work of Humboldt and Bopp, deduced from the existence of a supposedly original Indo-Iranian language the idea of an equally original people, whom he baptized Aryan, taking the term from Herodotus. The same for the Jews: once the linguists had demonstrated the existence of a so-called Semitic group of languages, the racialists jumped on the idea, which they apply in a completely illogical way, since Germany wants to cultivate the Arabs and the Führer officially welcomes the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem! Language, as a vehicle of culture, can have an influence on thought and behavior. Humboldt had already understood that a long time ago. But language can be transmitted and so can culture, although much more slowly. In Chinese Turkestan, the Muslim Turkic speakers in Ürümqi or Kashgar have an appearance we’ll call Iranian: you might take them for Sicilians. Of course they are descendants of peoples who must have migrated from the West and who once spoke an Indo-Iranian language. Then they were invaded and assimilated by a Turkic people, the Uighurs, from whom they took their language and some of their customs. They now form a cultural group that is distinct, for example, from Turkic peoples like the Kazakhs or the Kirghiz, and also from the Islamicized Chinese called the Hui, or from Indo-Iranian Muslims such as the Tadjiks. But trying to define them other than by their language, their religion, their customs, their habitat, their economic usages, or their own sense of identity would make no sense. And all that is acquired, not innate. Blood transmits a propensity for heart diseases; if it also transmits a propensity for treason, no one has ever been able to prove it. In Germany, some idiots are studying cats with their tails cut off to try to prove that their kittens will be born without a tail; and because they wear a gold button they’re given a university chair! In the USSR, on the other hand, despite all the political pressure, the linguistic studies of Marr and his colleagues, at least on a theoretical level, are still excellent and objective, because”—he rapped sharply on the table with his knuckles—“like this table, it exists. As for people like Hans Günther or that Georges Montandon, in France, who’s also made a name for himself, I say they’re full of shit. And if it’s criteria like theirs that you use to decide whether people live or die, you’d do better to go shooting at random into a crowd, the result would be the same.” I hadn’t said anything during Voss’s whole long tirade. Finally I replied, rather slowly: “Doktor Voss, I didn’t know you were so passionate. Your theses are provocative, and I cannot agree with you on every point. I think you underestimate some of the idealistic notions that form our Weltanschauung and that are far from a philosophy of veterinarians, as you say. Nevertheless, this requires thought, and I wouldn’t want to answer you lightly. So I hope you will agree to resume this conversation in a few days, when I’ve had time to think about it.”—“Of course,” Voss said, suddenly calmer. “I’m sorry I got carried away. Only, when you hear so many stupid and inept things around you, it becomes difficult at a certain point to keep quiet. I’m not talking about you, of course, but about some of my colleagues. My only wish and my only hope would be that German science, when passions have calmed down, can recover the position it had acquired with so much difficulty thanks to the work of so many fine men, subtle, attentive, and humble before the things of this world.”