Criticism
Paulescu has been criticized for expressing antisemitic and anti-Masonic views in articles such as The Judeo-Masonic plot against the Romanian nation (expressed in his book, Philosophic Physiology: The Hospital, the Koran, the Talmud, the Kahal and Freemasonry). He was an associate of A. C. Cuza, and wrote extensively for the latter's newspaper Apărarea Națională.
In "Degenerarea rasei jidănești" (1928) (transl. Degeneration of the Jewish Race") Paulescu states that Jews are degenerate because their brains weigh much less than "Arian" brains. He singles out for their low brain weight the Nobel Prize laureates Anatole France, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson.
Following protests from several Jewish organizations, the inauguration of Professor Paulescu's bust at the Hôtel-Dieu State Hospital in Paris, scheduled for August 27, 2003, had to be cancelled.
"If the Nobel Committee in 1923 judged the entire persona of its laureate, then Hôtel Dieu in 2003 must do no less and conclude that Paulescu's brutal inhumanity nullifies any scientific merit" (Simon Wiesenthal Center letter to the French Minister of Health, Jean-François Mattéi, and the Romanian Ambassador in Paris).
Nicolae Cajal, a Romanian Jewish member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences and the President of the Jewish Communities' Federation of Romania from 1994 to 2004, defended recognition of Paulescu's scientific work, saying there is a need to distinguish between individuals' private views and their scientific merit and that his father, a student of Paulescu, had admired Paulescu for his scientific skills though he disagreed (as a Jew) with Paulescu's anti-Semitic views.
Read more about this topic: Nicolae Paulescu
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)