Towards ‘Kosher Nationalism’? (1): The Unstable Jewish-Gentile Dialectic

I have been somewhat puzzled by recent developments in the French media, namely, the emergence of the so-called “nouveaux réactionnaires” (new reactionaries) advocating restriction of (overwhelmingly African/Muslim) immigration and a defense of French identity. “None of the neo-reactionnaires – not even Camus – claims allegiance to the FN [French National Front],” the BBC helpfully notes. “Many of them are Jewish.”

That would be an understatement. Four of the five listed in the article are Jewish: Éric Zemmour, Alain Finkielkraut, Élisabeth Lévy and Gil Mihaely (an Israeli dual national), all of whom strongly identifying as Jews. The only non-Jew mentioned is Renaud Camus, who has been blackballed for years for criticizing Muslim immigration (he coined the term Grand Remplacement or “Great Displacement”) and for once noting that a radio show on France Culture was entirely run by Jews. All of this is a bit of a théâtre juif (Jewish theater) as Alain Soral might say.

We have this strange phenomenon where Jews are on television promoting FN talking points on Islam and immigration. Simultaneously, the FN is still informally excluded from making political alliances with mainstream parties. There has also been backlash from parts of the Jewish community against the new reactionaries, and in particular against Zemmour, who has lost one of three media jobs.

What is one to make of this? Are “nationalist” Jews overcoming the more traditional liberal Jews? Should European ethno-nationalists welcome Jewish support? Should they make “national-Zionist” alliances to stop Muslim immigration? What lies behind Jewish support for certain forms of Western nationalism? What comes after? What explains Jewish support for certain forms of genetic realism and human biodiversity (e.g. Richard Herrnstein, Steven Pinker)? Why are Jews so often the ones to take the lead on these issues in mainstream debates and why do Jews so passionately disagree on these issues? I hope this essay contributes some tentative answers.

The hypothesis is that Jews will support these ideologies insofar as they support Jewish interests, and thus will be likely to be promoted in mainstream media in the United States, France and elsewhere. I propose that Jews have an interest in multiculturalism, but they do not have an interest in completely destroying the nations of the West — the only civilization in which they have been able to prosper. Similarly, human biodiversity and race-realism will be supported insofar as they serve to justify Jews’ staggering over-representation in influential corporate, educational, media and other institutions. Jews will often be the “allowed” spokesmen for these ideas in the mainstream because they can usually be trusted to present them in a way compatible with Jewish interests.

A cultural shift in this limited sense however would require “nationalist” and race-realist Jews to confront and gradually topple the current liberal, individualist and multicultural ideological hegemony. This would reflect both a generational and geographical struggle: nationalist/race-realist Jews are likely to be those personally facing the problems multiculturalism poses for Jews, namely those with ties to Israel and possibly the younger generation. Indeed, ordinary Jews are leaving France by the thousands.

The current generation of liberal Jews, and particularly elite Jews who do not personally suffer the consequences of anti-Jewish attitudes, will likely stick to their guns and fight for their ideologies. But they may gradually be eclipsed by Jews who are pro-nationalist. Such a trend would likely be accelerated by the recent massacre of 12 people in and around the premises of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, apparently by Islamists returning from Syria. Nevertheless, if the liberals win, the “golem” of multicultural individualism will continue to be hegemonic, turning on its creators and undermining Jews worldwide, as Western Jews miscegenate, Israel is increasingly isolated and the West is destroyed through displacement-level immigration.

As Kevin MacDonald compellingly shows in the Culture of Critique trilogy, traditional Judaism can be understood as a group evolutionary strategy featuring:

• Self-segregation of the Jewish gene pool from gentiles.
• Systematic promotion of Jewish genes over gentile genes. (Go forth and multiply, exterminate the mixed-race, discriminate against the mixed-race and gentiles, promote the genetically pure, practice systematic moral particularism, etc.)
• Eugenics, or improvement of the Jewish gene pool.

In the final volume, Professor MacDonald argues that since the Enlightenment various secular Jewish intellectual movements in fact continued to promote Jewish ethnic interests, especially through cultural warfare. An ideology is an all-encompassing logical system entailing assumptions and values. When an ideology is successfully spread and policed, society internalizes its system of values, rules, taboos and so on, which represent a kind of a cultural programming which will strongly influence the society’s future course of development.

The theory does not imply a monolithic “hivemind” with which all Jews worldwide commune. The Jewish community is diverse. Jewish intellectual movements have been promulgated by Jewish elites in the academic and media worlds; a large percentage of ordinary Jews had nothing to do with this. There is pursuit of ethnic self-interest in the sense that Jewish elites, consciously and unconsciously, tend to pursue ideologies which at the time of their conception and from their subjective point of view are a rationalization of Jewish ethnic interests. Well-funded and well-organized explicitly Jewish organizations also overtly think and act to promote perceived Jewish interests. These elites and organizations are however not necessarily representative of the wider Jewish community nor is their leadership of that community necessarily effective (e.g., Jewish leaders may be concerned about miscegenation but their ability to stop young Jews from engaging in it is limited). It seems fair to add however, that more apolitical Jews (be he lawyer, journalist, banker, screenwriter, ordinary citizen, etc.) will tend to internalize the values and taboos of their elites on the issues most important to Jews (e.g., today that would be multiculturalism, liberalism, individualism, support for immigration, secularism, support for Israel).

This however begs the question: What exactly is the endgame of a group evolutionary strategy and in particular of a Jewish one?

One possible endgame of an evolutionary strategy would be to replace all other gene pools. The Tanakh’s Judaism promotes this agenda in Ancient Israel and Judah, notably with the exterminations recounted in the Pentateuch and the exclusion of miscegenators. The narrow Zionist project partly achieves this in a limited territory by achieving explicit Jewish supremacy in Israel. Then, presumably, intra-Jewish competition could start anew, with the top outcompeting the bottom, as happened frequently in Jewish history. To some extent this is already happening among Israeli Jews, with the Arab-like Sephardim and Mizrahim long complaining of the “racism” and hegemony of the part-European Ashkenazim.

Another endgame would be for a particular gene pool to fully occupy one particular ecological niche: A lion does not want to exterminate antelope, which would lead to its own destruction too via starvation, but rather to outcompete all rival big game predators. Talmudic Judaism, and especially Diaspora practice, seems to take this approach, with the elimination of rivals in the cultural and financial spheres.

Jewish evolutionary strategies appear inherently unstable and do not scale well. One problem is that it tends to make them victims of their own success. As detailed in MacDonald’s Separation and its Discontents, Jewish over-representation in various epochs eventually led to gentile counter-strategies such as the Spanish Inquisition and limpieza de sangre (blood purity) against conversos, and German National Socialism.

Historically, Jewish evolutionary strategies appear to never reach a stable equilibrium. Either the strategy turns on Jews (for example, totalitarian Communist regimes in the USSR and Poland eventually developed opposition to Jews) or gentile society eventually turns against Jewish success. The Jewish-gentile dialectic has, throughout history, proven inherently unstable. Judaism is a high-risk, high-reward strategy that has thus far invariably ended in tears.

Perhaps the best way of thinking about it is the goal of maximizing in-group power and the likelihood of in-group continuity. In these terms, Jews have been remarkably successful, despite the tears. Jewry invariably recovers from its travails and, lest we forget, has outlived the Ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, Christendom (contemporary Christianity, increasingly secular and non-European, is not much of a successor) or any other of their historic rivals and enemies. There is this stubbornly tenacious, “eternal” character rhapsodized by the medieval European myth of the Wandering Jew, as well as by writers like Leo Tolstoy and Léon Bloy.

Like it or not, Jews can claim far greater continuity of lineage, culture and consciousness than can Europeans — we are a much bigger, more mixed group, with little consciousness, Ice Age survivors mostly speaking the language of their Aryan conquerors, who have given up their ethnocentric Pagan folk religions for the universalist creed of an apostate Jewish rabbi, and are now forgetting that religion too in favor of an emotionally vapid secularism.

In this sense, Jews can understandably feel superior to the chaos, instability and lack of identity of the ‘stupid goyim’. But we would have to recall that as imperfect as we Europeans are, we have the more difficult and noble task of being a civilization (and the most civic, dynamic and scientific one at that), whereas Talmudic Judaism’s loftiest ambition, at least until the establishment of Israel, is merely to find a profitable niche within another’s civilization. In this sense, the original Zionist project’s ambition to “learn how to be a normal nation” perhaps makes it the most ethical Jewish ideology to date.

Purely in terms of multiplication, a recent study suggests that today’s 10 million or so Ashkenazim descend from a founder population of just 350 people between 1200–1400, meaning that despite the holocaust the population has increased by a factor 28,500 over 600–800 years. In contrast, in 1450 all of Europe is thought to have had perhaps 50 million people after the Black Death, where there are about 1 billion White people worldwide today, an increase by a factor of just 20. Traditional Judaism has been spectacularly successful as an evolutionary strategy in Christian and secular Europe, but this strategy does not seem to scale well, and inevitably leads to backlash. Indeed, it needs a pliant “host.”

Go to Part 2 of 4.