an observation by Nazi scientist Otmar von Verschuer more than half a century ago. A year before the outbreak of the Second World War, he wrote, ‘Schizophrenia is strikingly more frequent among Jews. According to statistics from Polish insane asylums, among insane Jews schizophrenia is twice as common as among insane Poles.’ He went on: ‘Since it is a matter of a hereditary disease … the more frequent occurrence of the disease in Jews must be viewed as a racial characteristic.’ At that moment in time in that particular place, then, it wasn’t a black disease; it was a Jewish one.
