Social Hygiene of the Jews

A physician by training, Felix Theilhaber was a pioneering sexologist and early sociologist and demographer of German Jewry. In books, pamphlets, and papers, he campaigned for sexual reform, especially the liberalization of abortion and the legalization of contraception. A Zionist and “race scientist,” in 1911 he published Der Untergang der deutschen Juden, a provocative demographic study of the decline and degeneration of German Jewry that pointed to a falling birth rate and rising rates of conversion and intermarriage to bolster its case. In his view, German Jewry had no future. In 1935, he left Germany for Palestine, where he founded a health insurance company and acted as its medical director.