The Jewish Origins of American Legal Pluralism
“Cohen realised that it was not enough to describe the state as being made up of many political groups. Such a statement did not justify opening American borders to strangers or protecting strangers’ interests. Only a normative argument about the importance of diversity in individual and social life could give the outsider a place in American society.”
Dalia Mitchell, Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism[1]
“Cohen’s life work revolved around what currently travels under the trendy buzzword diversity.”
Steve Russell, “Felix Cohen, Anti-Semitism, and American Indian Law.”[2]
Introduction
Contrary to Nathan Cofnas’s claim that modern multiculturalism can be attributed to the idea that “the West was on a liberal trajectory with or without Jews,” Jews have demonstrably been critical in the majority of significant legal developments in the advance of multiculturalism and cultural pluralism, both in Europe and in the United States. Brenton Sanderson has made an exceptionally strong case for the same to be said in relation to Australia. Absent detail of any kind, explaining the current ideological climate on race and immigration as the result of any kind of “trajectory” is really nothing more than a just-so story. It’s an untestable narrative explanation: “Things are the way they are, because that’s the way things were going.” To mention nothing from any period earlier than the twentieth century, this “liberal trajectory” has certainly been a highly anomalous one, featuring among other anti-liberal trends, the advent of radical conservatism, the rise of Fascism, the development of notions of a racial state, and the introduction of racially exclusionary immigration laws. That these laws were quite radically overturned in the United States, and in a very short span of time (1924–1965), would seem to represent a dramatic break from trajectory, rather than a natural flowing from one. What prompted this turn? Laws promoting multicultural understandings of citizenship were introduced from the 1960s, in the United States and elsewhere, which led to the gradual displacement of Whites in their own lands. One can prevaricate on how these destructive laws can be traced to the ideas of Rousseau, or any other Enlightenment philosophe, but it pays a greater scholarly dividend to focus instead on who exactly introduced these laws and what their immediate motivations may have been. These facts can be tested, often with reference to the unambiguous statements and explanations of the actors themselves. And these actors are often Jews.
One of the preoccupations in my writing for this website has been to issue warnings about changes in the law, particularly in relation to speech and censorship. I warned of the imminence of internet censorship, and the gross expansion of hate laws and the concept of terrorism, years before these things came finally to fruition. While I agree with most people that law is often downstream from culture, I find it undeniable that sometimes the two operate simultaneously and in tandem, with law driving and reinforcing cultural change, and sometimes preceding it entirely. Thus, whoever holds legal power influences culture, just as much as they who influence culture can manipulate the law. The group that holds both centers of power is powerful indeed.
The historical relationship of Jews with the legal apparatus of European and Western nations deserves close and special attention. There have been many successive legal as well as philosophical changes across the West over a number of centuries which have cumulatively resulted in the widening of the concept of citizenship, the end point of which has been the dominance of pluralistic understandings of citizenship in the bureaucratic state and the eventual permission of mass migration. The historical record is clear that in terms of these legal changes, Jews have been the dominant cause or instigators of modifications designed to introduce “tolerance” into the law, from the medieval charters establishing the tolerance of Jewish trading settlements in European cities[3] to Moshe Kantor’s contemporary “Secure Tolerance” project. This is to say nothing of overwhelming Jewish influence in the design and implementation of “hate laws” (see here and here) designed to uphold and strengthen the multicultural state.
Kevin MacDonald has explored Jewish activism in the period of White ethnic defense from around 1890 through the 1924 and 1952 immigration laws, and the intense Jewish opposition to those laws. The role of Jewish activism was critical in enacting the 1965 law which revolutionized American immigration legislation and permanently changed America’s demographic destiny. In the following essay I want to build upon MacDonald’s specific illustration of Jewish legal influence in the expansion of pluralistic concepts of citizenship and culture in America by using the example of the Jewish philosopher and lawyer Felix Solomon Cohen (1907–1953). The career of Cohen offers something of a prequel to the 1965 activism, with Cohen emerging as a subtle but important forerunner of many of the ideas and approaches used to create present-day multicultural America.
Networks and Nepotism
For most readers, Felix Cohen will be an unfamiliar personality. This is hardly surprising when even the scholar behind his most substantial biography argues that “for the most part his work was behind the scenes.”[4] And yet Cohen was as stubbornly influential as he was elusive, with the same author stressing that his activism “had a profound influence on the transformation of law in the first half of the twentieth century,”[5] and that his story “is the story of the origins of multiculturalism.”[6] Cohen was born in Manhattan in 1907 and grew up in Yonkers. His father, Morris Raphael Cohen, was a philosopher at the City College of New York and a member of the New School for Social Research. Morris Cohen was extremely keen to promote “a new ideal, a cosmopolitan Jewish identity,”[7] and with it to expand Jewish involvement in American life.
Felix Cohen absorbed many of his father’s ideas, as well as grievances. Morris often complained that he had found it difficult to get a job teaching philosophy because of anti-Semitism[8], an explanation for personal failure that Felix would also eventually employ. Felix Cohen possessed a keen intelligence. He attended the City College of New York, where he rose in 1925 to become editor of The Campus. His early activism provoked such a storm of complaint, including one reader’s letter suggesting that “ungrateful kikes should get the hell out of here and go back to Trotsky’s paradise,” that he was dismissed by the magazine’s board. He left CCNY and later received an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1927 and 1929, respectively. Cohen then entered Columbia Law School in 1928 and graduated in 1931. From his earliest days studying law, Cohen was destined to become a dedicated ethnic activist. Biographer Dalia Mitchell points out that Cohen’s generation of young Jewish lawyers “viewed the study of law as providing tool with which they could challenge the authority of the Anglo-Saxon elite in American life.”[9] For Cohen, this involved the “personal hope that American law could remedy wrongs against Jews, specifically forced exclusion.”[10] The primary weapon in this fight would be the promotion of pluralism within American law, both by expanding the concept of citizenship and weakening America’s borders.
Although beginning his career with a short stint at an average law firm, Cohen’s big break came thanks to FDR’s momentous decision to nominate Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court. Previously reluctant to hire Jews, the legal establishment in Washington was thereafter inundated thanks to a wave of ethnic nepotism ushered in by Frankfurter. Cohen biographer Alice Kehoe remarks that “Frankfurter unabashedly recommended young Jewish lawyers for federal positions to the point that newspapers wrote of the unprecedented number of Jews hired and of fears that a “Jewish cabal” was taking over America.”[11] Frankfurter was a close personal friend of Morris Cohen (the pair were also close friends with Horace Kallen), and when Frankfurter hired the family’s neighbour Nathan Margold to oversee the legal team at Department of the Interior, it was a foregone conclusion that Margold would in turn hire Felix Cohen to join the team. Like the Cohens, Nathan Margold, whose son would later become one of the first major porn barons in America, was an early activist for multiculturalism and author of the 1933 “Margold Report” which called for increased “civil rights” for Blacks.
Legal and Ethnic Warfare
Together at the Interior, Margold and Cohen initially decided to promote pluralism by focusing on the position of Indians/Native Americans in American law. The approach was thought particularly suitable because Cohen’s wife, Lucy Kramer, was an anthropologist working alongside Franz Boas (also a friend of Morris Cohen) at Columbia, where she focussed on promoting culturally relativistic understandings of Native American life. At one point, for example, Kramer wrote a manuscript titled Red Man’s Gifts to Modern America, which was so overblown and unrealistic that it was rejected by her editor with the comment: “Sounds too much as though ballyhooing. Something which she wants to believe.”[12]
Margold’s intention was to bring Cohen, whose ideology was shaped by his Jewish origins and “Franz Boas’s teaching of historical particularism and cultural relativism,”[13] into a leading position in Indian Affairs within the Interior, but the initial move to get Cohen appointed Associate Solicitor for Indian Affairs was complicated. Margold’s boss and Secretary of the Interior was the Anglo-Saxon Harold Ickes, who recorded in his private diary “I had decided not to appoint a Jew if I could avoid it.”[14] Ickes initially refused to hire Cohen, but made the mistake of explaining his reasons (suspicion of Jews) to someone else in the department. Legal historian Kevin Washburn comments “Ickes claims he was blackmailed into [hiring Cohen] when word got out that [anti-Semitism] was his reason.”[15] Cohen was thus appointed Associate Solicitor for Indian Affairs, and was set to work by Margold on a project that would transform the position of Indians/Native Americans in American law. One scholar has commented that, “though Cohen was still a young lawyer, he had highly sophisticated views of the law’s purpose and was working toward the development of a broader philosophy of cultural and legal pluralism. Indeed, his dissertation had addressed this theme, albeit in a broad theoretical manner.”[16] In one of the most prominent of Cohen’s legal changes in his new role, Indians/Native Americans automatically became United States citizens, whereas previously they could only become citizens via treaty.[17]
It’s interesting that Cohen’s Jewish biographers have been at pains to present Cohen as involving himself in the promotion of “Indian rights” for purely altruistic ends, whereas non-Jewish authors have been much more forthcoming in seeing Cohen as engaging in a kind of proxy legal war against White America and its racially exclusive approach to citizenship and immigration. University of Iowa’s Kevin Washburn has been particularly scathing of Jewish scholar Dalia Tsuk Mitchell’s glowing panegyric to Cohen, Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism, and has asked:
Was Cohen’s interest in Indian law and Indian people purely platonic, intellectual, and ideological, as Mitchell implicitly suggests, or was it driven in part or wholly by a sense of shared experience with other oppressed peoples? … Did Cohen’s Jewish identity — and his feelings of being an outsider to the then-ruling elite in the United States — affect his views about Indian tribes?[18]
Washburn is skeptical about Cohen’s selfless altruism to say the least. He points out that Cohen once wrote “The Indian plays much the same role in our American society that the Jews played in Germany.”[19] And while Cohen was, in Mitchell’s phrasing merely “impatient” with Anglo-Saxon America’s “particularism,” he was strident in his insistence that Jews should be able to continue their separate existence within the ‘Melting Pot,” viewing Jewish assimilation as “cultural death,”[20] and telling one colleague that he would “punch … in the nose” anyone who suggested Jews “ought to be beneficially assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon Protestant mainstream of American life.”[21] In Washburn’s view, there was a clear ethnic struggle, and Mitchell’s biography “fails to cast light on the darker aspects of Cohen’s personal experiences as a Jewish-American civil servant in mid-twentieth century America.”[22]
Immigration and Open Borders
The activities of Cohen, Margold, and other Jews within the Department of the Interior, both in relation to the expansion of Indian “rights,” and issues of immigration and citizenship more generally, eventually escalated to the stage where they prompted a reaction from the Anglo-Saxon establishment. In early 1939 Cohen began agitating for immigration reform within Interior, eventually latching onto the idea of “developing Alaska” by settling large numbers of European Jews in the state (the Alaska Development Bill—Kehoe states that the entire bill was written by Cohen[23]). In his Harvard-published FDR and the Jews (2013), Richard Breitman writes that in 1939 “Interior Department official Felix Cohen presented a report indicating that industrious immigrants would boost the Alaskan economy and an expanded population would bolster the nation’s defense.”[24] In a move of crypsis eerily prefiguring attempts to use John F. Kennedy as the face of propaganda intended to pave the way for the 1965 immigration act, Margold and Cohen chose a non-Jewish department figure to act as figurehead for the bill. Breitman writes:
Undersecretary of the Interior Henry Slattery became its official sponsor, rather than Nathan Margold or Cohen, its senior proponents in Interior: for domestic consumption, the “Slattery Plan” sounded better politically than the “Cohen Plan.”[25]
While working on the bill, Cohen also published a lengthy article in the National Lawyer’s Guild Quarterly that essentially made the case for opening America’s borders to immigrants of all backgrounds. Titled “Exclusionary Immigration Laws: Their Social and Economic Consequences,” the essay was a full-frontal attack on Anglo-Saxon nativism. The article, which I have read in full, opens with a list of America’s exclusionary immigration laws, beginning with the 1882 act targeting Chinese migrants. Cohen remarks:
Each of the foregoing statutes was based in part on economic or materialistic grounds, and in part upon theories of racial or cultural superiority. … Tolerance develops as a way of life when people realize that strange faces, strange accents, and strange ideas do not necessarily portend disaster. … The greatest danger to American institutions comes from those who could cut off the living stream [immigration] that has been the source of our national life. … The effect of such a cutting off of immigration as is proposed by various bills now pending in Congress would be to make the entire country more and more like those regions which have been untouched by immigration in the past century. Our standard of living would be lower, our illiteracy rates higher, our prejudice against minority races, minority creeds, and foreigners generally would be more intense. … The human rights of the citizen are safe only when the rights of the foreigner are protected.[26]
Cohen’s article was later published as a pamphlet by the American Jewish Committee, and was essentially the “skeleton” text upon which most of the propaganda for the 1965 Act was based, including “John F. Kennedy’s” (really, an ADL/AJC project) Nation of Immigrants. Cohen was also behind the AJC’s most prominent pro-immigration material. In his Princeton-published Jews and Liberalism, for example, Marc Dollinger points out that the American Jewish Committee’s March 1949 landmark statement on “Americanizing our Immigration Laws” had been written in full by Cohen.[27]
Despite the obvious self-interest of Jews like Cohen and Margold in advocating for such radical changes in American law, the pair maintained the charade even under intense questioning in Congress. David Wyman, in Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941, writes that during the hearings “witnesses for the bill repeatedly maintained its major objective was development of Alaska and that its refugee features were only incidental.”[28] The two primary objectors to the bill were Robert R. Reynolds (Dem.) of North Carolina and Homer T. Bone (Dem.) of Washington. The pair questioned the given rationale behind the bill and “pressed these witnesses to agree that the legislation was really aimed mainly at helping [Jewish] refugees.” Reynolds was notable for denouncing the bill as “just a smoke screen” for Jews “to get in the back door.”
Cohen was, however, reluctant to give ground and maintained the charade, with Wyman reporting that Cohen “denied that the primary aim of the measure was to help refugees and stated that the immigration features were simply an essential means for carrying out the fundamental purpose of the bill, settlement of Alaska.” He fooled no-one, and the bill was crushed.
The activities of Cohen, Margold, and other Jews within Interior had by the 1940s raised considerable consternation among the Anglo-Saxon establishment. Both Cohen and Margold had developed an “Indian New Deal” that “emphasized the state’s obligation to protect the rights of minority groups” and “advocated constitutional protection for group rights.”[29] The response was rapid, taking Cohen and his clique entirely by surprise. In early 1940, Cohen was removed from the Indian project in front of his own staff by Assistant Attorney General Norman Littell, who explained that Cohen’s ongoing work on Indian affairs was found to have been of “inferior quality.”[30] A few months later, Cohen, now more or less aimless within the department, wrote to a friend that he had in fact fallen victim to an anti-Semitic “purge,” pointing out that all other individuals who had been fired alongside him were also Jewish (Abraham Glasser, Bernard Levinson, Theodore Spector, and Jacob Wasserman).[31] Cohen wrote that the firing was designed “to humiliate me personally before my staff and later to attack my scholarship and my character.”[32] Kevin Washburn suggests that Cohen may not have been wrong in assuming that he was targeted as a Jew, but adds that Cohen’s own activism played a role. In Washburn’s words, “Cohen may have been too pro-Indian” and as a cosmopolitan Jew attempting to chip away at Anglo-Saxon “particularism.” “Cohen was simply ill-matched to the task” of being a cooperative cog in the Interior’s machine.[33] Most interesting of all is the fact that Littell had earlier expressed the opinion that anti-Semitism had some basis in genuine conflicts of interest, and had once highlighted Jews as stronger economic competitors than Anglo-Saxons.[34] In other words, the purge may well have been the retribution of WASPs suddenly aware of what Frankfurter’s “Jewish cabal” was doing. In 1948, the increasingly sidelined Cohen left the department and never returned to government.
All of Cohen’s subsequent work is described by Mitchell as involving attempts “to make the American legal system more inclusive,” and until his death he retained “a personal sense of failure at his inability to build a pluralist [multicultural] state.”[35] Despite his individual failure, however, Mitchell insists that Cohen was extremely influential, and that his legacy was taken up by later activists. In Mitchell’s words, “even failed attempts to devise formalistic legal structures to accomplish pluralistic goals create peripheries where pluralism might flourish.”[36] In Cohen’s case, these peripheries were his introduction of Indian legislation and citizenship clauses that undermined the increasingly strong notion of the United States as a state designed to fulfil the destiny of Whites in a new continent. In this sense, Cohen’s activism and “peripheries” reached fulfilment in the 1965 Immigration Act, and in the multicultural America we see today.
Conclusion
Many of the events and tactics from Cohen’s career clearly anticipate later Jewish activism around the 1965 Immigration Act, as well as contemporary Jewish activism promoting immigration and multiculturalism. Of particular interest is the fact Jews like Cohen and Margold appear to have obtained their positions primarily through nepotism, and even blackmail, rather than merit. Interestingly, the possibility that threatening to expose one as an “anti-Semite” for not hiring a Jew could result in severe repercussions even during the 1930s shows that Jews had already made substantial progress in their ascent to elite status. MacDonald discusses this shift in his review of Joseph Bendersky’s The Jewish Threat: ‘Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army:
It is remarkable that people like Lothrop Stoddard and Charles Lindbergh wrote numerous articles for the popular media, including Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest between World War I and World War II (p. 23). In 1920–1921, the Saturday Evening Post ran a series of 19 articles on Eastern European immigration emphasizing Jewish unassimilability and the Jewish association with Bolshevism. At the time, the Post was the most widely read magazine in the U.S., with a weekly readership of 2,000,000.
The tide against the world view of the officers turned with the election of Roosevelt. ” Jews served prominently in his administration,” (p. 244) including Felix Frankfurter who had long been under scrutiny by MID [Military Intelligence Division] as a “dangerous Jewish radical” (p. 244). Jews had also won the intellectual debate: “Nazi racial ideology was under attack in the press as pseudo‑science and fanatical bigotry.” (p. 244) Jews also had a powerful position in the media, including ownership of several large, influential newspapers (New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Record and Pittsburgh Post‑Gazette), radio networks (CBS, the dominant radio network, and NBC, headed by David Sarnoff), and all of the major Hollywood movie studios (see MacDonald 1998/2001).
It is remarkable that the word ‘Nordic’ disappeared by the 1930s although the restrictionists still had racialist views of Jews and themselves (p. 245). By 1938 eugenics was “shunned in public discourse of the day.” (p. 250) Whereas such ideas were commonplace in the mainstream media in the 1920s, General George van Horn Moseley’s 1938 talk on eugenics and its implications for immigration policy caused a furor when it was reported in the newspapers. Moseley was charged with anti‑Semitism although he denied referring to Jews in his talk. The incident blew over, but “henceforth, the military determined to protect itself against charges of anti‑Semitism that might sully its reputation or cause it political problems. … The army projected itself as an institution that would tolerate neither racism nor anti-Semitism” (p. 252‑253).
Moseley himself continued to attack the New Deal, saying it was manipulated by “the alien element in our midst” (p. 253) — obviously a coded reference to Jews. This time he was severely reprimanded and the press wouldn’t let it die. By early 1939, Moseley, who had retired from the army, became explicitly anti-Jewish, asserting that Jews wanted the U.S. to enter the proposed war in Europe and that the war would be waged for Jewish hegemony. He accused Jews of controlling the media and having a deep influence on the government. In 1939, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Jewish complicity in Communism and praised the Germans for dealing with the Jews properly (p. 256). But his testimony was beyond the pale by this time. As Bendersky notes, Moseley had only articulated the common Darwinian world view of the earlier generation, and he had asserted the common belief of an association of Jews with Communism. These views remained common in the army and elsewhere on the political right, but they were simply not stated publicly. And if they were, heads rolled and careers were ended.
The new climate can also be seen in the fact that Lothrop Stoddard stopped referring to Jews completely in his lectures to the Army War College in the late 1930s, but continued to advocate eugenics and was sympathetic to Nazism in the late 1930s because it took the race notion seriously. By 1940, the tables had turned. Anti-Jewish attitudes came to be seen as subversive by the government, and the FBI alerted military intelligence that Lothrop Stoddard should be investigated as a security risk in the event of war (p. 280).
Finally, it is also noteworthy that Cohen, Margold and their co-ethnics in government harbored a clear sense of ethnic grievance against Whites which was accompanied by entirely unconvincing denials of self-interest and flamboyant displays of superficial altruism in relation to other minority groups (Blacks for Margold; Indians for Cohen). Of primary importance to these activists was the need to boost the position of non-Whites within the American legal structure, either by manipulating what it meant to be a citizen (and what ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ that entailed), or by expanding who could become a citizen. These legal manipulations and reversals, and their occurrence in the context of what amounts to a very clear and often explicit clash of ethnic interests between dedicated Jewish activist lawyers and the WASP establishment, raise serious questions about whether America was really on a “liberal trajectory” in which the current multicultural status quo was an inevitability.
[1] D. Mitchell, Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism (Itchaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 5.
[2] S. Russell, “Review Essay: Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism,” Wacazo Sa Review, 23:2 (Fall 2008), 112-114 (113).
[3] J. Ray, “The Jew in the Text: What Christian Charters Tell Us About Medieval Jewish Society,” Medieval Encounters 16, 2-4 (2010): 243-267.
[4] Mitchell, 7.
[5] Ibid, 1.
[6] Ibid, 3.
[7] Ibid, 16.
[8] Ibid, 15.
[9] Ibid, 32.
[10] Ibid, 7.
[11] A. B. Kehoe, A Passion for the True and Just: Felix and Lucy Kramer Cohen and the Indian New Deal (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 46.
[12] Kehoe, 86-7.
[13] Ibid, 5.
[14] K. K. Washburn, “Felix Cohen, anti-Semitism, and American Indian Law,” American Indian Law Review, 33:2, 583-605 (603).
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid, 586.
[17] N. Pickus, Immigration and Citizenship in the 21st Century (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 55.
[18] Washburn, 600 & 603.
[19] Ibid, 604.
[20] Ibid, 587.
[21] Ibid, 604.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Kehoe, 5.
[24] R. Breitman, FDR and the Jews (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2013), 159.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Quotes taken from the reprint of the 1939 article which appeared in the Contemporary Jewish Record, 3:2, (March 1 1940), 141.
[27] M. Dollinger, Jews and Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 268.
[28] D. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (Plunkett Lake Press, 2019).
[29] Mitchell, 5.
[30] Washburn, 601.
[31] Ibid, 599 & 601.
[32] Ibid, 601.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid, 602.
[35] Mitchell, 5 & 6.
[36] Ibid, 8.
BUT… the liberal trajectory allowed felix cohen to even participate in the legal system in the first place. it seems to have been accelerated by jews. but without the structures of liberalism in place, jews would not have a chance to infiltrate the structure of western society.
The point is that Jewish activism was critical in this shift from the 1920s, when the national origins immigration law was passed and race science was in the respectable media, to the 1930s. The trajectory was firmly in the direction of keeping America White. And as AJ notes, there was also the rise of fascism in Europe during this period.
The rise of Hitler, Streicher and Goebbels intensified the Jewish reaction in the opposite direction.
But what you’re referring to is not a liberal trajectory. You’re referring to legislation/legal principles allowing Jews to participate as equal citizens. These (“Jewish emancipation” laws) are traceable to nothing more than earlier periods of activism and manipulation (see the lies and obfuscations of the Grand Sanhedrin convened by Napoleon for example).
“Jose” is arguing that Jewish emancipation laws themselves were an earlier node in the time trajectory of “liberalism,” the fruit of enlightenment.
Individualism, in combination with the project of Jewish Assimilation and homogenization initiated by European Enlightenment era thinkers was ultimately suicidal for European people’s across the world, a dead end to impending extinction. Like Neanderthals succumbed to Sapiens.
Jewish emancipation was a top-down affair unrelated to concepts of Liberalism. Most people objected to it, and even where it was supported (e.g. in the work of Thomas Babington Macaulay) the rationale was not liberalism but the idea that if Jews were permitted to enter the system it would make them more controllable and accountable rather than being free economic agents. In France, Jews weren’t automatically granted citizenship because most people objected to it, even after the Revolution. Napoleon granted them equal status by decree following a Grand Sanhedrin in which they stroked his ego. Even George Washington’s first address to the Jews (at Newport?) hints at their equal citizenship being conditional on their good behavior. Liberalism is nowhere in the story of Jewish emancipation.
And if we separate the event itself from ideology and regard it instead as a node in the timeline (a historical trajectory rather than an ideological trajectory) we are back at the just-so story – “things are the way they are because these events happened.” That has no explanatory value and subtracts Jews from an equation in which they in fact did have agency.
Dear Dr. Joyce:
Would you kindly make your readers aware of the Orthodox’s obligatory submission to DIN TORAH !?: their binding system, parallel to US Law.
A brief but concise comment here would enable anyone interested to follow up.
Dr. Joyce,
Could you point me to some relevant articles or books which deal with this aspect of Jewish history? I.e. the time period in which they were emancipated. I want to know more about what the general public thought about them and what national leaders and writers thought about them as well. I personally thought that Jewish emancipation was a direct consequence of Enlightenment ideology before your comment.
J. Katz “Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation” 1978.
Esther Benbassa, “The Jews of France” has an excellent section on the struggle to exclude Jews from citizenship after the Revolution.
Alfred D. Low, “Jews in the Eyes of the Germans: From the Enlightenment to Imperial Germany.”
Excellent primary sources for multiple countries can be found in Mendes-Flohr & Reinharz, “The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History.”
I discuss the English political emancipation in my TOO essay on the Anglo-Jewish Cousinhood, written almost a decade ago.
I discuss a lot of the primary sources in my TOO essay “The Jewish Question: Selected Readings with Commentary.”
These are good starting points, but most mainstream histories are fairly accurate when discussing this period. Any historian worth his salt would have a problem with the idea that Jewish emancipation proceeded directly from the Enlightenment.
In the words of Katz (p.30), “Not the Enlightenment, nor the message of 1789 were decisive for the emancipation of the Jews, but the numerous court Jewry…That court Jews, or better, their descendents or those that inherited their wealth and influence, pulled their weight in the negotiations that resulted in acts of legislation favourable to Jews cannot be denied.” In other words, we are dealing less with Enlightenment ideals than the machinations of extremely rich and influential Jews entangled with non-Jewish elites.
Isn’t top-down affair a feature of liberalism, instead of being separate or opposed to it?
To know an ideology is to know what are it’s effects on harnessing human nature toward human endeavors. And the effects of liberalism have always been the atomization of masses, which was then exploited skillfully by selfish elites in alliance with cohesive Judaism.
Thus Jewish emancipation cannot but be seen as one of the pivotal moments in the history of enlightenment and liberalism.
The first part of your comment would seem to be contradicted by the French Revolution. Top-down only seems applicable in more recent history.
I’ve provided my sources to another commenter above indicating strongly that Jewish emancipation was not a symptom of the Enlightenment and Liberalism. This isn’t to say that liberalism doesn’t have other problems, just that in this instance there is a different and more nuanced trajectory at work.
But was it liberalism? That is your assumption, besides missing the point. Apparently Jews were already powerful in media and of course, they are the money power, a fact that should never go without heeding. They had already taken over the central bank. I would like to know more specifically how Jews gained establishment foothold.
It is stupid for Westerners to attack to disavow liberalism. Liberalism is our achievement. The hijacking of the enlightenment is the feat of the Jews, only possible because the goyim allow them to print the money, thus controlling capital itself.
Anyway I just read ch 7 of Culture of Critique and I am finding this wholly enlightening. Thank you Mr. MacDonald.
Jews did everything to hide their control of money. How could goy “allow” this if they did not know?
“Give me control of a nation’s currency and I care not who makes the laws.” Mayer A. Rothschild
Old Jewish saying- “We succeed by not naming ourselves.” For example, buying companies while retaining the name and logo.
Keeping images of presidents on their Jewish currency, while sleepy Americans believe that it is issued by the US government. They should have pictures of famous Jews on the Federal Reserve Notes, but even the most blase might have some questions.
What’s up with this.
He clearly had the focus and the definition of “inclusion ” and “exclusion”, wording that was later used when the UN had the anti white laws promoting racemixing assumably most likely pushed by racemixed jews (jews mixed with arabs and subsaharians). The UN declarations against racism that followed after an reported rise in anti semitism in the 60’s. They use the wording to combat exclusion and to use force to get inclusion.
A wording now echoed by politicians in the EU and European countries. I though this provocatice manipulative wording to call forced desegregation and bussing and the like with one goal, racemixing, “inclusion” to very provocative.
But I guess the race mixed socalled jews have been experts in adoting fancu words often latin as such to forward their agenda:
“inclusion”
work against “exclusion”
“homosexuality” (which I don’t mind although I am 100 % straight)
“bisexual”
“transexual”
“multiculturalism” (initially used to describe white countries such as Switzerland with different parts of the country being dominated by different cultural groups / peoples and the like, the adopted by “jews” to push a sociatey with many races often hating each other on the averege with a huge amount of crimes against whites and other issues such as theft and more).
Like when jewsih newspapers call 19 year old group raping subsaharians or arabs “kids” and this is the standard. Of course it this kind of word bending is used to forward the agenda of race-mixing and anti white politics and so on.
Like when a jewish women tried to make more whites date non whites on dating apps (of course the goal is race mixing), and writing things like that would be sending a nice message to minority members and giving people a chance even if it is not instant love and then finally citing Ghandi “be the change…”
Yeah, the change to kill off the white race because othervise, remember, it is not inclusive and exclusion even ona private matter or area must be combatted…
Sexual perversion is a danger to children. Being unable to have kids of their own, they go after ours.
They infiltrated the Boy Scouts, are on YouTube (queers4kids), in our libraries (drag queen story hour), in grade school curricula, on cereal boxes and in kids cartoons.
Homosexuals are 11 times more likely than straights to be pedophiles (Clarke University, Toronto, Ontario Canada – published in ‘Journal of Sex Marital Therapy’ Spring 1992.)
Just several weeks back the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir sang their newest song entitled ‘We’re coming for your children’.
A people that does not protect its children has no future.
Yes sure, nut what you gonna do.
Yes one should protect children from homosexual propaganda which is everywhere and a way for jews and the other races to have less white children.
But if you force the gays back into the closet you may have more sexual abuse rapes of children intheir own families and outside I think.
Also, to be honest a lot of gays are braindamaged somehow or inbred or have been sexually abused by parents.
You want those homosexuals to have kids?
Another fancy jew word is “diversity” and the “diversity is our strength” phrase they throw around.
And they use their media and university control to spread these words as descriptions of things they want. Which I guess is standard propaganda in many ways and mos likely these wordings usage is decided at their annual conferences and then introduced on a global scale.
BUt I mean the nazis did the same thing with “kristallnacht” & “lebensraum” and “semite” and so on so in many ways the propaganda of many jews and nazism has this usage of wording and defenition in common. “Ludenpresse”.
The jews were gonna use the term “fake news” against the rising right and anti immigration movements and then Trump saw that and used it against liberala nti white media companies such as cnn. So the jews and Trump kinda battled over the meaning of the word…
The notion that liberal Western societies were on an inevitable trajectory toward what we see today is ridiculous. True, liberalism has several faults in its foundations (i.e. individualism, free market principles, and egalitarianism) but prior to the early 20th century, the West (America, especially) was on a completely different pathway. The inherent vulnerabilities of liberal philosophy were able to be exploited, rather corrupted, by those hostile to Western society. It took a heavy combination of time, resources, and activism based on the interests of a certain ethno-religious group to develop what we see today. There are no two ways about it.
Even sharper Jews (neither “observant” nor “secular” have to keep an eye out for Black violence, envy and
antisemitism; Muslim terrorism and antizionism; Latino ethnocentrism and religion; Chinese competiton and indifference. Maybe ditching the WASP & ethnically related groups as IQ allies for anti-Israel incomers might prove less productive than hitherto supposed. Jews can be stuck in the Hitler past; so can Antisemites. Learn from it, but don’t live in it. Matthew 10.16.
Dude, like Israel has a major deal with the chinese on exchange of intellectual property and the like. The idea being Israel contributes with innovation and then gets to make things cheap in China or similar.
Now jewish pharmaceutical companies are making their gene change drugs in China (against covid) in factories with connection to the chinese military. They are in on it, get it their media pushing the drugs and vaccine that makes whit e peoples thoughts controlled by 5G, no joke nano particles, graphene (lucefarian), DNA change.
And lotsa USA military in on it most generals being jewish…
The US military can put gene changes in a flu that takes out a gene that is more common with fundamentalist religious people and the flu thing takes away this gene, they wanna use it against fanatic muslims.
It’s all in the vaccine…
DNA change that will make whites no good slaves to their jewish and china masters. Veggies, controlled though, no opposition to the takeover ockupation of formerly white territory and it will be forever unless we can change back peoples DNA to normal somehow. No opposition against the genocide on whites. They will just control peoples thoughts and it divides peoples brain and nervl system into small parts controlled by them also kills WHITE creativity innovation and anger which they are threatened by. It is RACE war on a global scale and its biological gene change warfare.
It’s all non whites against whites or in this case the part gypsies, the chinese and the jews (of the racemixed kind) against whites, just like the election (chinese bough woting machines, latino commies started woting machine company, afro- “americans” did on the ground cheating and so on).
Many jews are jumping ship from the west to Israel and Asia. On of the google guys just set up his investment firm in Asia. And lotsa jews don’t even like the USA and they are into Asia for some reason I don’t know why. I mean Asia is cool and everything.
Elements in Israel sell out USA military technology to the Chinese already they are preparing for global race war and most jews being racially mixed will most likely not be on the sides of whites but instead on the side of everyone else against us. Also the massimmigration and race-mixing is killing of the western world and it’s losing it’s relevance due to it. Shre jews caused it but I’m not sure all jews know about that I don’t think so but anyways it has probably been a theme at their conferences and get togethers and within their like 100 organizations and the like…
I didn’t know that most US generals were Jews.
Israel makes money wherever it can, but many Jewish groups are hostile to China.
We live and learn (some of us).
Yes but Israel has a deal with them. They suck up to China, big time.
The media jews in the USA collaborated with them and the afro- “american” organizations and the latin commies in the election fraud.
There are lotsa factors and signs.
They jumping ship, many of them, just saying. And I don’t think this is a tendency with all jews in any way just a trend and we can see the result of these factors in the election fraud and gene change vaccines and more…
But the Chinese are kinda racist against jews I heard I think many Chinese are kinda racist against non yellow people in general…
But there are even jews who are saying they think Japan should be multicultural and have non asian immigrants… So theses particular jews already using the same old same old thing…. race-mixing…
Which jewish organization anywhere is critical against China?
I’m not talkinhg jewish individuals here I’m talking about jewish organizations and Israel (so the likes of ADL, b’nart b’nain or whatever they are called, the organization of jewish lawyers…). I have seen no such organization critisise China in any way shape or form.
I had to laugh when I read about the “Alaska Development Bill”. From Catherine the Great to the early Soviet Politburo, the idea of the Jewish farmer has made the search for Sasquatch look reasonable. The only place (voluntary) Jewish farmers have ever existed is in Israel. That would be in pre-Diaspora Israel and in post-1948 Israel (even the kibbutzim were collectivists, not independent yeoman farmers). By 1939, this was such common knowledge, that Cohen’s claim that these shtetl Jews from Eastern Europe were going to develop Alaska’s wild frontier economy can’t be taken seriously (i.e., he was lying). The fact that in 1939 some Americans still felt comfortable in calling Cohen out seems like a story from the 18th Century. Lindbergh’s public crucifixion after his 9/11/41 speech makes a good societal dividing line (9/11 — coincidence?). America’s pathetic elites failed their test, while, just to be objective about it, the German elites stepped up (notice that the Freikorps and German civilians were often involved with police and military in fighting Communists in local uprisings, 1918-33). I wonder if the reason that the only resistance today comes from Eastern Europe might be that they were protected from the agit-prop deluge from Hollywood for 50 years (and from US military occupation).
The “liberal trajectory” is bs…..the nation wrecking was/is a jewish affair.
There were no other groups demanding open borders but for the jews.
Like Kevin said, prior to the jewish takeover, whites had a racial sense and wanted to keep
western nations white.
That’s why the jews lied about the Immigration Act of 1965 and claimed it would not change the racial
demographics, when changing the racial demographics was the jewish goal all along. The jews knew very well
that whites WOULD object if they knew they were going to become a hated minority.
It’s really sick when you see what they have done…..absolutely evil and malevolent.
Is evil a form of sickness?
Cohen reminds me of Edward A. Ross’s (U of Wisconsin sociologist) statement, “The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains. (Ross 1914, 144–145)–as trued now as when he wrote it in 191 Quoted in CofC, ch. 7
You can read Edward A. Ross’s incredible break-down of the ethnic groups entering America around the turn of the last century on the brilliant Unz website. Unz has all these old politically incorrect books all stored, and set out in a user-friendly way.
Unz explains in his articles about how all these super famous names, the most read men at the start of the 20th century, have been totally memory-holed by the kosher culture that has ruled since WWII.
The Unz book collection is a real treasure trove, Edward A. Ross was a progressive of his time, but because he lived in an era before universal stupidity and lying became obligatory, he is a fantastic read.
Wow, this is a keeper. When I was a kid, in Europe, I did a lot of motorcycle riding. It was not only for pleasure, but also for exploring. I often spent times in villages and inevitably, over and over the topic of Z usury would come up and how the peasants were sucked dry unable to advance due to debt. Another fascinating thing is that America is not unique pertaining to the nemesis of mankind. As for their power and influence, I found the same, behind close door commentary, pertaining to them whether I was in East Germany, Minsk or Leningrad. What I have always found amazing is their networking and ability to castrate anyone who dared to expose their devious behavior. One of the key problems here is that EuroMan excessively engages in infighting.
I discovered at a young age, after losing jobs, that one has to be very diligent when referring to “the best of all people.’ Also, as fo our people, I often found myself engaged in necessary argumentation when referring to the 1930s and the Germans openly attacking Zs. My premise has always been that they should have eliminated them from government, journalism and education, but at the same time to protect their arse, they should have been giving them tin metals. Further, info can be elicited and then slammed with very weak disclaimers. Without diplomacy in the present field of culture there can be dire consequences.
Lastly, I would like to thank Dr. Joyce for his excellent piece. His labour here is indeed a keeper.
https://national-justice.com/nyc-jewish-activist-led-hate-crimes-task-force-gets-nypd-jail-woman-suffering-pneumonia-hate-speech Speaking of Jews!
The tide against the world view of the officers turned with the election of Roosevelt. ” Jews served prominently in his administration,” (p. 244)
That Roosevelt was a Freemason should cause great pause as this is a cult so thoroughly Z that it boggles/staggers the mind really.
I can only stress as I have so many times before DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE the power and influence of the Cult of Freemasonry.
I truly believe they were created to be a buffer between Christianity and themselves Z. They would never ever have gotten as far as they have if it wasn’t for these traitors of and within the Christian Church.
They remind me so well of Christs own words:
As the crowd pressed in upon him, he preached them this sermon: “These are evil times, with evil people. They keep asking for some strange happening in the skies to prove I am the Messiah, but the only proof I will give them is a miracle like that of Jonah, whose experiences proved to the people of Nineveh that God had sent him. My similar experience will prove that God has sent me to these people.
31 “And at the Judgment Day the queen of Sheba[j] shall arise and point her finger at this generation, condemning it, for she went on a long, hard journey to listen to the wisdom of Solomon; but one far greater than Solomon is here and few pay any attention.
Get it “a greater than Solomon” and who do the Freemasons think is the greater? Hiram Abiff the builder of Solomon’s Temple and are want and working towards the goal of seeing a new Solomon’s Temple built?
These people are deceived and they make up so much of our political class and indeed attach themselves to everything monarchical to boot. Strange business, strange business indeed!
Freemasons are satanists (think lucifer is really light).
They also think humans are a mix of like aliens and neanderthals.
Also they great each other “hi fellowe travelling man”. Traveller = gypsy.
But also the illumskis didn’t the founder loook like he was part jewish. But they are the travellers of light (traveller = gypsy), and say if only one person on earth, beggar or king, his choice. Beggars are mostly gypsies in Europe, founding place of the organization.
Documents of elders of zion, the elders wants everyone to obey Vishnu, the hindu god. That accidentally most gypsies obey, hence many of the elders were suprise gypsy jews (jews mixed with gypsies).
People who are part gypsies are probably like 16 % of the European population, one or two genes identifying them. Hence the largest racial threat to whites. Now 16 %, on or two generations, 30 %, 3 to four generations 60 %, then 100 %.
I don’t want any gypsy genetics of any kind or mixing with them in my family tree, do you?
Hence these sects are the racially mixed against whites.
Not really . Influential people , even American small – town, civic boosters , are not as gullible as you seem to be.
The cognoscenti regard Freemasonry as merely a social convention , i.e. , a cryptic Rotary Club , as do these organizations’ often overlapping members.
This is what you think.
I think all freemason organisations report to others and that there is top leadership same with illuminati and the like.
I do thinkFavos and world economic forum are the top yearly meeting for such societies. I think they all exchange information (these different sects) and that there is in effect top people seeing and knowing everything that goes on in all of these type of organizations be it orders, freemasons or whatever. I think the leadership is extremely racially mixed, like part jewish, part gypsy, part african and part arab and so on.
I think the leadership use the organizations to spy on it’s members. And to push an anti white agenda.
Are jrace-mixed people that are really jewish at the top. W#ould not surprise me one bit.
The founder of the illuminati urged his members to also join the freemasons. So already there we have interchange.
“This is what you think ” ?
What special critical acumen confers upon you the right to make that statement ?
Your post is full of illiteracies and unworthy of a website managed by Doctors of Philosophy.
Frequently, you hear the Globalist Elite using the phrase “our democracy” in reference to Western Governments; it’s been observed (rightly, I feel) that they’re talking about a system in which THEY have a say, whereas the rest of us clearly do not. They get a vote, and we get the bill.
“The greatest danger to American institutions comes from those who could cut off the living stream [immigration] that has been the source of our national life.”
What a quotation from Cohen! Certainly, in light of his “punch…in the nose” comment, if taken in proper context, this quote demonstrates that Cohen himself did not view himself as part of the American nation, and thusly, his statement is true, in that the “living stream” which is the source of HIS nation’s life was mass-immigration into this one.
A “nation” is its people, a “country” is merely a geographical region, and a “state” is merely a political entity which reigns over a given country, with a empires, federations, and confederacies being collections of nations or suzerains over states. The obfuscation of the obvious meanings of these words has clearly been a favorite tactic of a certain group for a very long time, as has linguistic inversion, used in the rest of the Cohen quote selected by Dr. Joyce:
“… The effect of such a cutting off of immigration as is proposed by various bills now pending in Congress would be to make the entire country more and more like those regions which have been untouched by immigration in the past century.”
Those terrible, backwards places that European Jews are so eager to move to?
“Our standard of living would be lower…”
Which “our” is he talking about? America’s, or the Jew’s?
“…our illiteracy rates higher, our prejudice against minority races, minority creeds, and foreigners generally would be more intense. … The human rights of the citizen are safe only when the rights of the foreigner are protected.”
The complete and total inversion of the reality of the situation then and now; the Natural Rights (Human Rights are a myth) of Americans have never been in greater peril than they are today, and it’s almost wholly thanks to the efforts of Jews like Cohen. I find it particularly shocking that they were able to do so much damage to our society and our culture before the Second World War even officially started. Significant numbers of these people hadn’t even arrived on this continent until 40-60 years earlier, and look how much damage they had already done!
Greetings.
I’m a longtime reader of Andrew Joyce. Are there any plans to release a book compilation of his work? My shekels await him.
…” DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE the power and influence of the Cult of Freemasonry.”
Cannot be overstated .
Another thisng is jews developed capitalism in Germany mainly.
Then they developed it in the states and their thinkers made it all about profits. Hence economists learned leading a company was ONLY about maximizing profits for the shareholder which means always chasing for the cheapest place to make the product hence this sped up the made in China and Asia boom.
Now we have the davos dude, word economic forum tranny schwooob(?) who probably has lotsa jewish heritage (isn’t some relative of that woman who worked with Epstein part of the Davos thing, who’s father was mossad and in the “UK media”…) that has a new economic theory that companies should benefit all of society, does he then mean in effect all of the world. The trend also after boas and all the mumbo jumbo about equal value of different races is a large influx of money from white rich people to places like Africa because like it’s cheaper to save lives and improve things there, more bang for the buck hence the overpopulation we see. So if this new capitalist theory is adopted I think it will be incorporated with universalism that is already there and that mean all companies should also try to improve lives and the such and where will they have most bang for the buck – yes africa. And also it means in multiracial genocide of whites countries, that companies should also help immigrants and non whites equally if they should help all of society which will again push the murder of the white race by moving money to non whites another trap in my opinion if this is the goal of the davos person I have no clue he may just be after doing good although I do think the transhumanism he pushes is extremely dangerous and the vaccine we see now may be an effect of these ideas as such which may not be his intention but regardless it happens and it becomes anti white and part of the genocide process.
The dangerous thing is that these ideas are EFFECTIVE they increase profits and generate moneys that is also printed en masse. Hence I do think we need new economic theories that generate great profit also… I have some ideas but I am not an economist… Some other time…
Thank you! Excellent information. BTW, Ron Unz has an insightful article on Joseph Bendersky called Secrets of Military Intelligence. https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-secrets-of-military-intelligence/?highlight=Bendersky
Exclusion at its root means “refusal to entertain.”. Like an annoying peddler, you “close your door” or plug your ears.
Exclusion of that kind is quite understandable when it comes to Jews. So it was turned into a political right.
Again, one of the primary factors in Jewish subversion is NORMALIZING THE ABNORMAL.
Dr Joyce’s reference to the French Revolution reminded me of a deliberate lacuna in European history , i.e., Sir Walter Scott’s placing much of the blame for the Revolution on Jewish financiers et al , mentioned in the Scottish novelist’s multi – volume history of that European disaster.
The volumes are sadly unavailable and here is Mark A Weinstein to tell us why.
https://www.proquest.com/openview/ea867d319a04d7fdd89b0c0709735b6a/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1818560
Dr DP Moynihan extrapolated your Capitalized blinding flash of the obvious in his magisterial work , ” Defining Deviancy Down”