What made the horror of Kittel's antisemitism is not just the words but from whence the words came. Kittel was no SA thug, he was an intelligent and serious scholar. When he, as an eminent scholar of religion and the Bible confidently spoke of the enduring 'wandering Jew' and racial inferiority from the German people made attention - Kittel became a mouthpiece of Nazi propaganda and, being an academic, his voice had a credence it would not have had otherwise.
Kittel is just one of hundreds of professors who used their position to further a politics of hate and created a climate where the Nazi's Final Solution became (for many) an intellectually defensible view; Studying the Jew offers many more such summaries if scholarly antisemitism, among those covered include Otmar von Verschuer, Hans Gunther, Karl Kuhn and Johannes Pohl. In the course of these portraits important questions (but, alas, no answers) are raised concerning the relation of academia and ideology.
Steinweis does offer an important survey of the study of the methods and some of the political implications of racialised study of the Jew but with its focus on biblical, historical and social scientific scholars the book is too narrow. The one name that invariably emerges in discussions of academia under Nazism is, of course, that of Heidegger. A summary of some of the controversy was set out in Thomas Sheehan's famous New York Review of Books article "The Normal Nazi" in 1993. Although the extent of Heidegger's culpability continues to exorcise minds given the field of study any antisemitism was of limited political consequence, the same cannot be said for Heidegger's contemporary, namely the legal and political philosopher Carl Schmitt (1888-1985).
Schmitt's Hobbesian denunciation of (liberal) democracy and support of the autocratic state was, as Raphael Gross has shown in Carl Schmitt and the Jews, very much founded on his antisemitic views. It is arguable that the characterisation of the 'Jew as enemy' to be expelled — along with from all other enemies — an act which for Schmitt is the apotheosis of "politics" - did create precisely the intellectual framework of an antisemitism of reason that Hitler felt necessary to legitimise Nazi barbarism (again, like Heidegger, there is a debate concerning the degree of Schmitt's antisemitism).
Likewise, although understandably focused on the scholars themselves it would, given the crossover with the propagandist work of the Nazi Party have been helpful to have seen a little more on how the authorities viewed the work of academia and sought to cultivate it for their own ends.
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