Reflections on Jewish Intermarriage into Native Elites

“I want to thank my Jewish daughter. I have a Jewish daughter. This wasn’t in the plan but I’m very glad it happened.”
Donald Trump, February 2015.

As discussion continues among White advocates over the Trump candidacy, I haven’t failed to notice that perhaps the most persistent criticism of Trump from our ranks has been his strong links to Jews, in particular his familial ties to Jewish blood. There’s certainly some substance to this. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, has adopted the Jewish religion as her own and has been married to Jewish real estate speculator Jared Kushner since 2009. Both of Donald Trump’s grandchildren are Jewish. Looking into the situation in more detail, I was intrigued to discover that Ivanka’s previous two significant relationships were also with Jews, Greg Hirsch and James Gubelmann. Of further note is Ivanka’s very close friendship with Chelsea Clinton, another progeny of the American power elite, who married the Jewish financier Marc Mezvinsky in 2010. The Trump and Clinton situations are excellent examples of the centuries-old practice of strategic Jewish intermarriage with native elites, and this phenomenon deserves some focussed attention.

Jewish intermarriage into non-Jewish power elites is a significant but under-researched aspect of Jewish strategies to maintain and expand influence. At first sight, of course, it appears paradoxical. A major part of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy is concerned with segregation of the gene pool and preventing high levels of genetic admixture from surrounding groups. Judaism has historically been replete with social and cultural controls designed to minimize contact with non-Jews, and therefore greatly inhibit admixture. Additionally, converts are dissuaded and scorned in Judaism in a manner quite without parallel in any other religious culture. However, as Kevin MacDonald has noted in A People That Shall Dwell Alone (2002, hereafter PTSDA), conversion and admixture were permissible, if not eagerly sought, when such an admixture was very small and offered significant net benefits to the group. Similarly, at the opposite end of the Jewish strategic ghetto, controls were also far from airtight — the most sincere Jewish apostates to Christianity tended to be overwhelmingly poor and obscure, and were little mourned by the group at large. The eugenic benefits of pursuing such a strategy are obvious.

Even in ancient times there is evidence that “some gentile-derived genes were being selected for their effects on resource-obtaining abilities within the Jewish community (PTSDA, 41).” By targeting the rich and powerful for intermarriage, Jews could obtain significant and immediate material resources, an improvement in social status, and also useful genetic material. Though very few in number, ancient converts, and their more celebrated modern counterparts, have been disproportionately intelligent and successful. MacDonald writes that

It is possible that even this relatively small genetic admixture from surrounding populations could be adaptive for a strategizing group because the group would benefit from new genetic combinations, e.g. intelligence, greater phenotypic similarity etc…Evidence in favor of this hypothesis would be that Jewish proselytism, while highly limited and restricted, has been more successful among wealthy, intelligent, and talented individuals and that this pattern was actively encouraged by the Jewish community (PTSDA, Chapter 2, 41).[1]

Earlier this year Princeton University Press published Todd Endelman’s Leaving the Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Endelman’s work purports to examine phenomena like intermarriage and conversion but, typically for mainstream Jewish scholarship, it neglects to engage in any real sense with aspects of these phenomena that reflect less favorably on Jewish culture, particularly the nature of elite-level intermarriage. However, there are a few useful snippets of information that offer substantiation for MacDonald’s observations. Those Jews who drifted into the non-Jewish gene pool were indeed, according to Endelman, “swindlers, drunkards, whores, schlemiels, schlemazels, nudniks, and no-goodniks” whose “social, cultural, and even moral level was low.”[2] By contrast, those non-Jews welcomed into the Jewish fold were from the very highest social levels, and the efforts taken to entice young princes, landowners, or heirs of industry to take Jewish wives were remarkable for their long-term, premeditated nature. Endelman remarks on census data from Berlin, covering the period 1770–1826, which indicates that elite Berlin Jews were utilizing baptism as “a long-term strategy to make their daughters eligible for eventual intermarriage.”[3]

Of course, the most significant barrier to Jewish attempts to intermarry with the non-Jewish elite were the religious aspects of marriage, and the requirement that Jews convert to Christianity before being permitted to take a Christian spouse. This barrier only began to weaken in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, beginning in the German-speaking lands where some of the aforementioned leading Jewish families began baptizing their daughters in long-term strategies for intermarriage with the Prussian elite, the Junkers. By the late 1700s many of the Junkers had fallen on hard times financially, due in large part to Jewish predation. The same period witnessed a boom in the wealth of Jewish bankers. Deborah Hertz writes in Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin that “discrete private loans to those who could afford the high interest rates was one way that the Jewish bankers increased the wealth they acquired in the Seven Year’s War.”[4] Indebted nobles began frequenting the homes of their Jewish creditors, either to make payments or plead for extensions. It was in these circumstances that the first fraternization began between the Prussian nobility and the daughters of the Jewish elite. There is even some suggestion that nobles were heavily pressured, via their debts, to take Jewish wives for easier terms. For example, Hannah Arendt argued that intermarriages between the Prussian nobility and Jewish women were simply “a continuation of the creditor-debtor exchanges of the earlier years.”[5] Eventually this mode of contact evolved into the “salon” culture, in which soirées were staged and hosted by Jewish financial magnates with the specific purpose of encouraging the mixing of the Prussia nobility and selected Jewesses.[6]

Civil marriage wasn’t introduced in Prussia until 1874. Until then there were a considerable number of insincere conversions that facilitated intermarriage but failed to disguise the fact that the Jewish wives of the Prussian nobility continued to carry on Jewish lives. Hertz describes the Jewish families as “socially opportunistic” strategizers who were motivated by “status-hungry desires” and “craved the higher positions possessed by Christians.”[7] The vast majority of Jewish women who married into the Junker class derived many of the social benefits now attached to their status in non-Jewish society, while retaining “strong ties to friends and relatives who remained Jewish.”[8] The flurry of Jewish intermarriages into the Prussian elite only began to ebb away around 1813, when Prussian society witnessed a backlash against the encroachment, and a number of “anti-Semitic” salons were established.[9] Many of the salon women were treated with scathing disdain by those members of the elite who resented the Jewish incursion. For example, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussia philosopher and diplomat, once described salon star Rahel Levin as a “monster.” And when Levin married Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, the cream of the Prussian elite, von Humboldt asked a friend whether “there was anything a Jew could not achieve.’”[10]

Jewish intermarriage to British aristocracy

Although the salons of Prussia and Paris facilitated the extension and deepening of Jewish influence, no nineteenth-century native elite was subjected to Jewish penetration as strongly as the British aristocracy. In 1936 England’s Arnold Leese, a former military veterinarian and leader of a small Fascist group, published a pamphlet titled Our Jewish Aristocracy: A Revelation. At the outset of the publication, Leese wrote that he wished to impress upon his fellow Britons that “their race is being displaced and replaced, and without notice to any individual.” Compared with our contemporary situation, Leese couldn’t even imagine what genuine displacement and replacement would actually look like. However, what Leese did manage to produce was a valuable, though imperfect, piece of research that made a convincing case for the argument that the British elite was being slowly displaced and replaced with Jewish genes. My careful re-examination of his lengthy list of British nobles with Jewish ancestry indicates that Leese made a handful of errors, but the majority of those listed were indeed related to Jews by blood or marriage.

In his classic work, The Jews (1922), Hilaire Belloc wrote that Jewish intermarriage into the British elite was more “subtle and penetrating” than even the Jewish acquisition of key positions in the institutions of the State. Belloc stated that:

Marriages began to take place, wholesale, between what had once been the aristocratic territorial families of this country and the Jewish commercial fortunes. After two generations of this, with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception. In nearly all of them was the strain more or less marked, in some of them so strong that though the name was still an English name and the traditions those of a purely English lineage of the long past, the physique and character had become wholly Jewish and the members of the family were taken for Jews whenever they travelled in countries where the gentry had not yet suffered or enjoyed this admixture (223).

The two main reasons for the more extensive Jewish penetration of the British aristocracy were the earlier introduction of civil marriage, and the admission of Jews to the hereditary peerage on a par with the native elite (beginning with Nathan Mayer Rothschild in 1884). Endelman writes that in Britain, “marriage without a religious ceremony became legal in 1837, and in 1839 Hannah de Rothschild (1815–1864), daughter of the founder of the English branch of the banking clan, married Henry FitzRoy, younger son of the second Lord Southampton, at St. George’s, Hanover Square, without first becoming a Christian.”[11] Although romantic historical renditions of the marriage portray it as a love affair between two people whose families objected to the pairing, the ensuing scale and extent of Jewish intermarriage into the peerage following the union suggest that the Rothschilds and the wider Anglo-Jewish Cousinhood were very keen on the development. In fact, within a century the scale of Jewish intermarriage with the British aristocracy was such that it led L.G. Pine, editor of Burke’s Peerage from 1949–1959, to write in 1956 that “the Jews have made themselves so closely connected with the British peerage that the two classes are unlikely to suffer loss which is not mutual.”

Pine’s astute comment bears some reflection because it cuts to the heart of Jewish intermarriage with native elites. Jews historically have tirelessly engaged in efforts to position themselves either in elite positions or in positions that place them between the elite and the great mass of people. Jews have sought these positions of power and influence in order to pursue their goals and interests — goals and interests which are very often at odds with the interests of native populations. This conflict of interests is the root cause of what has been termed “anti-Semitism,” and one of the main strategies Jews have employed against “anti-Semitism” is that of crypsis. Cryptic strategies have involved insincere conversions to Christianity and the abandonment of phenotypic characteristics that provoke hostility. The argument here is that Jewish intermarriage with native elites should be seen, partly, as a more extreme example of Jewish crypsis.  What better way for a foreign elite to occupy powerful positions in a society than to do so in a manner which gives the impression that the foreign elite is nothing more than the traditional, native elite? By inter-breeding so acutely with the native elites, and blending their interests so tightly, the strategy also places further distance between the native elite and the people it leads. As Pine suggests, the native elite can no longer act on behalf of the people and against foreign influence because intermarriage has ensured that any Jewish loss would in fact be “mutual.”

The Trump and Clinton intermarriages should be seen as part of this greater strategy of expanding power and influence cryptically, and “normalizing” or blurring the image of Jews at the top of our society. Also, in the same way that one injects small amounts of microbes in order to immunize oneself against a disease, by taking in small amount of the “best” genes or personalities Jewry “immunizes” itself against the threat of a reaction from the financially and politically powerful. To be clear, although it is clearly helpful, the argument here is not that intermarriage is any longer essential to the expansion of Jewish power and influence. It’s continuance in the present is in part merely a symptom of the geriatric, decayed, and increasingly alien nature of our existing elites. Our sick society has an elite composed of media types, corporate vultures, and opportunistic politicians. And when a society hands over the top positions of power and influence to the financially rich but morally and ideologically bankrupt, it will not be cream that rises to the top, but scum.

Jews no longer have to reach across a cultural Rubicon in order to penetrate an exalted native elite. They already occupy the same dubious space as it. In Diversity in the Power Elite: How It Happened, Why It Matters (2006) G. William Domhoff and Richard Zweigenhaft state that “Jews are overrepresented overall in the corporate elite. Jews are also now overrepresented in both the Senate and the House.”[12] The need for the salons has long since dissipated. The rotten elites, both foreign and domestic, can intermingle in their board rooms and political venues, their fates and interests, as Pine stated, now entwined. Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky, the son of an Iowa Congressman and a Philadelphia Congresswoman, met at a 1993 Democratic political retreat in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Ivanka Trump met Jared Kushner in a heavily-Jewish social milieu built around the upper echelon of corporate real estate. The social circles are mutual.

A couple of weeks ago, during a conversation with a White advocate of many years’ service, I was asked my opinion on the monarchies of Europe and their future. I replied that although I have a lingering respect for centuries of tradition, the time has come for the decrepit old elites to be swept away. In the course of the ongoing invasion of foreign peoples into Europe, the remaining aristocracies will not survive long anyway. The invaders will not respect the history, tradition or authority of people who are no more than relics of past European glories. The inbred, quasi-Jewish denizens of Europe’s crumbling manorial estates may lock the doors of their palatial residences, but if push came to shove, they would be no more spared the ravages of a racial conflict than the humblest member of society. Nor should we mourn the passing of these people and their toppling from power and influence. These older elites have had centuries to prove that they deserved their positions through service to the folk and concern for the collective material well-being. Time and again they failed. Their corporate and political successors are failing even more rapidly, and much more profoundly.

If it can be said that many White advocates are elitists in the sense that they reject the proposition that “all men are equal,” it must be made clear that this in no way suggests support or endorsement for the existing elite, or the qualifications by which this group claims elite status. Quite the opposite. We are thus both elitist and “anti-elite.” In the same way, we acknowledge the influence of genes and heredity on one’s personality, behavior, and abilities but reject the idea that heredity alone is a qualification for individual or familial power. One does not find hereditary elites in nature. A lion may rule a pride but none of his cubs, talented though they may be, are necessarily destined to take his place. In the long history of monarchy in Europe, Fate placed a crown upon a genius only once in centuries. The remainder of these ages witnessed Europe laboring under despots, the mediocre, the inept, the feeble, the cowardly and the venal.

One of the great lies fed to the masses is that we now live in an era of meritocracy, with access to elite status open to anyone who is “talented” enough. But the lie doesn’t bear up under closer scrutiny. Even if one adopts the position that successfully competing to get into a “meritocratic” institution like an elite university is an avenue towards eventual, wider, elite status, one is confronted with phenomena like Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities. The fact remains that we live in what a January 2015 article in The Economist described as a flawed “hereditary meritocracy.” The hereditary meritocrats who compose our modern elites benefit from social and ethnic networking in much the same way as the hereditary aristocrats did in earlier periods. There are gatekeepers controlling access to elite universities, elite media positions, and elite social functions. As has been stated, Jews are massively overrepresented across all indicators of elite power and influence. Meritocracy, like modern democracy, is an illusion.

This discussion is aimed primarily at moving us away from references to “our” elite, as opposed to the Jewish elite. If anything resembling the old WASP elite still exists in America, it is either moribund, corrupted, or beyond saving. The salvation of our people will not come from throwing our support behind an imagined non-Jewish group already possessing some wealth and power. As discussed above, interests and bloodlines have been intertwined enough for any such group to view a decline in Jewish power as a decline in its own. “Our” elite isn’t really “ours” at all. There is simply one, heavily-Jewish, elite, and we are in ideological, material, and spiritual opposition to it. How excited, then, should we really be about Donald Trump? For all his bluster, Trump is a creation and product of the bourgeois revolution and its materialistic liberal ideologies. We are teased and tantalized by the fantasy that Trump is a potential “man of the people.” But I cannot escape the impression that he is a utilitarian and primarily economic character, who seeks a social contract based on personal convenience and material interest. In his business and political history I see only the “distilled Jewish spirit.” In his family tree I see distilled Jewish blood. Time will tell how useful his “drawing attention to the immigration issue” will be. Time will also tell whether, if he is successful in reaching the White House, he would do anything to reverse the decline of White America.

I’d love to be proven wrong.


 

[1] A recent paper notes that this process is quite common in nature and may well have occurred in humans. The technical term for the spread of favorable genes from one population to another is “adaptive introgression.” It has been proposed that human populations settling in Eurasia acquired beneficial genes “‘for free’ at a frequency of a few percent” from Neanderthals and other groups which then spread rapidly. The same thing may have happened with Jewish populations in Europe, thus accounting for the superior IQ of Ashkenazi groups compared to other Jewish groups, especially Middle Eastern Jews.

Adaptation through the acquisition of new mutations is generally a slow process: it is rare for favourable alleles to appear, and these are often lost by chance when they first occur in a single individual or in very few individuals. By contrast, if favourable alleles have emerged in one group, they can spread to other groups relatively rapidly by gene flow. This process, called ‘adaptive introgression’, is well documented in bacteria and plants, and described in some cases in animals, but it has not previously been considered an important factor in human adaptation. However, because Neanderthals and Denisovans lived in Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, they presumably carried alleles that were favourable given the conditions where they lived. Through gene flow, modern humans spreading across Eurasia from Africa could then acquire these alleles ‘for free’ at a frequency of a few percent, thus ensuring that they were not lost and could be acted upon by positive selection. (Svante Pääbo, “The diverse origins of the human gene pool,” Nature Reviews—Genetics 16 (June, 2015), 313–314.

http://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/staff/paabo/pdf/Paabo_Diverse_NatRevGen_2015.pdf

[2] T. Endelman, Leaving the Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton University Press, 2015), 77.

[3] Ibid, 79.

[4] D. Hertz, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (Syracuse University Press, 2005), 214.

[5] Ibid, 215.

[6] Ibid, 207.

[7] Ibid, 210.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 258.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Endelman, Leaving the Fold, 79.

[12] G. W. Domhoff & R. Zweigenhaft, Diversity in the Power Elite: How It Happened, Why It Matters (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 38.

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