Offhand, I don’t recall a member of Congress in my lifetime saying anything so grotesquely at odds with American ideals about ethnic relations and for that matter basic human rights. Will the Anti-Defamation League denounce Walsh? Will the American Jewish Committee? Will AIPAC have anything to say about the congressman whose strongly pro-Israel views its newsletter approvingly highlighted? If not, why not? (“Congressman endorses ethnic cleansing, apartheid for Palestinians“; The Atlantic)

Walsh’s proposal contravenes the entire zeitgeist of Jewish intellectual and political activism in the West. It dovetails nicely with Newt Gingrich’s statement during the Republican primaries that the Palestinians already have a state: Jordan. Except that Gingrich apparently would like the Palestinians to be expelled.

The mere fact that Walsh could propose such a thing is a telling sign of Jewish power. There is no other group in the entire world whose permanent subordination could be advocated by a US politician.

But there will be no outrage by Jewish activist organizations, even though they are a major support for utopian multiculturalism in the US and even though they routinely act as arbiter on statements related to Israel by US politicians. The Jabotinskyists are in charge in Israel, and, given Israeli demographic trends favoring the religious and secular ethnonationalists, there is no going back. The Israel Lobby will support whatever Israel does.

Walsh’s statement is a trial balloon—an attempt to get us used to the idea that such a move would be acceptable to the US political establishment, if not the rest of the world. Ideas like this have a great future. In a way, Walsh is simply being realistic. It’s really hard to see any other outcome that would please Israel and its fifth column in the US. Might as well get used to it.

And when the Palestinian question is solved by expulsion, or by voluntarily leaving for Jordan and becoming permanent second-class citizens in Israel, the organized Jewish community must square the circle by continuing to enforce obeisance by US politicians combined with a silenced media.

But that is definitely doable. Here’s another example from a recent article by Christopher Ketcham who convincingly argues that there was huge pressure to prevent media coverage of the Israeli Mossad agents who were caught high-fiving in the immediate aftermath of  1/11 (“What did Israel know in advance of the 9/11 attacks?“).

Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were “high-level negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials”, a settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that by the last week of October 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified ”prominent New York congressmen” were lobbying heavily for their release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report, high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.) And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

What’s incendiary is the idea – supported, though not proven, by several pieces of evidence – that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11 in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a Congressional investigation. …

Yet none of this information found its way into Congress’s joint committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission’s final report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of  The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. “There weren’t even stories saying it was bull***”, says The Forward’s Perelman. “Honestly, I was surprised”. Instead, the story disappeared into the welter of  anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.

So a credible aspect of a very serious attack on the US and an eventual motive for the Iraq war (massively promoted by the Israel Lobby—no wonder the Israelis were happy!) simply disappears from public consciousness, relegated to one of those theories that only crazy anti-Semites believe.

I take it that these two recent examples are quite persuasive that Jews do indeed have quite a bit of power. And, of course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. But the ADL continues to put out surveys where public attitudes that Jews have too much power (e.g., here, on Europe) are simply labeled as “anti-Semitic”—no attempt deal with the factual basis of such attitudes. Another recent report on anti-Semitism “defines anti-Semitism as social prejudice directed against Jews simply because they are Jews,” but then goes on to note that anti-Semitism includes perceptions that Jews have too much power. Again, there is no assessment of how much power Jews actually have.

A group that can effectively silence any public discussion of credible evidence of Israeli foreknowledge of 9/11—with all the ramifications such a discussion would have for evaluating the war in Iraq and the diplomatic and military support the US gives to Israel—is powerful indeed. The same goes for their ability to be a pillar of utopian multiculturalism in the West while also being able to rally support for an ethnonationalist, expansionist Israel dedicated to apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Anyone who doesn’t realize that is simply not paying attention.

This is of course far from the truth, but the prevalence of this ‘victim paradigm’ plays two significant roles. Firstly, Jewish historiography is saturated with allusions to the “unique” status of Jews, who have suffered a “unique” hatred at the hands of successive generations of Europeans. In essence, it is the notion that Jews stand alone in the world as the quintessential “blameless victim.” To allow for any sense of Jewish agency — any argument that Jews may have in some way contributed to anti-Jewish sentiment — is to harm the perpetuation of this paradigm. In this sense, the ‘victim paradigm’ also contributes heavily to the claim for Jewish uniqueness and, as Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, one can clearly see in many examples of Jewish historiography the tendency to focus not so much on the “suffering of Jews” but rather on the simple fact that “Jews suffered.”[1] As a result, the paradigm offers no place to non-Jewish suffering. Simply put, the ‘victim paradigm’ is a form of secular “chosenness.” This aspect of the narrative is seen, quite rightly, as a useful tool in the here and now. There is perhaps no race on earth which uses its history to justify its actions in the present quite like the Jewish people. From seeking reparations to establishing nation states, Jewish history is one of the foundation stones propping up Jewish international politics in the present. As such, Jewish history is carefully constructed and fiercely defended. The interplay between Jewish history and contemporary Jewish politics  is plain to see — I need only make reference to the terms “revisionist” and “denier” to conjure up images of puppet trials and prison cells.

Secondly, the omission of the Jewish contribution to the development of anti-Semitism (be it in a village setting or a national setting), leaves the spotlight burning all the more ferociously on the ‘aggressor.’ Within this context, the blameless victim is free to make the most ghastly accusations, basking in the assurance that his own role, and by extension his own character, is unimpeachable. The word of this untainted, unique, blameless victim is taken as fact — to doubt his account is to be in league with the ‘aggressor.’ In Part Two we explored the manner in which the RJC took full advantage of this construct to purvey appalling, and unfounded, atrocity stories. More generally, exaggerated tales of brutality by non-Jews are commonplace in Jewish literature and historiography, and go hand in hand with images of dove-like Jews. For example, Finkelstein has pointed to Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, a work now widely acknowledged as “the first major Holocaust hoax,” as an example of this “pornography of violence.”[2] The twin concepts of Jewish blamelessness and extreme Gentile brutality are inextricably bound up together, and supporters of one strand of the ‘victim paradigm’ are invariably supporters of the other. Take for example that high priest of Jewish chosenness, Elie Wiesel, who praised Kosinki’s pastiche of sadomasochistic fantasies as “written with deep sincerity and sensitivity.”[3]   

Having clarified this theoretical framework, we now turn our attention to deconstructing the second strand of the pogrom ‘victim paradigm.’ To deal most effectively with the question of Jewish culpability in the souring of relations between Jews and non-Jews, we will need to probe deeper, and with more focus, than we endeavored to do in Part One. This essay will focus on specific examples of anti-Jewish disturbance in the Russian Empire prior to 1880, with a particular focus on Jewish economic practices preceding these events.

Anti-Jewish Riots in the Russian Empire Before 1880

For the reasons discussed above, the majority of Jewish historians have long displayed an aversion to the idea that Jewish economic practices have played a significant role historically in provoking anti-Semitism. For example, Leon Poliakov in The History of anti-Semitism: From Voltaire to Wagner, argues that the idea of economic anti-Semitism is “devoid of real explanatory value.”[4] Similarly, Jonathan Freedman has stated that, in explaining anti-Jewish attitudes, economic anti-Semitism should play only a very “small explanatory role.”[5] Both of these historians posit that theology, and by extension Christianity (and therefore Western culture) is the fount and origin of anti-Semitism. Robert Weinberg, in his 1998 article on Visualizing Pogroms in Russian History, explains anti-Semitic outbreaks of violence in Eastern Europe by stating that they were the product of “the frustrations of Russian and Ukrainian peasants, workers and town dwellers who, for the most part, spontaneously took out their frustrations on a time-honored scapegoat, the Jews.”[6] Weinberg refrains from stating where precisely these ‘frustrations’ emerge from, but note again the extremely passive Jewish role in his analysis.

Conversely, those historians who have accepted that economic issues have played a role in provoking anti-Semitism fail to engage in actual case studies of economically provoked anti-Jewish actions, preferring instead to probe “images” or stereotypes which allegedly infuse the consciousness of non-Jews. For example Professor of Israel Studies at Oxford University, Derek J. Penslar, has stated that economic anti-Semitism is nothing more than “a double helix of intersecting paradigms, the first associating the Jew with paupers and savages and the second conceiving of Jews as conspirators, leaders of a financial cabal seeking global domination.”[7] By choosing to discuss “images” and concepts rather than say, an actual incident such as the Limerick Anti-Jewish Riots, Penslar engages in a practice equally duplicitous to that engaged in by Poliakov and Freedman. Penslar’s thesis only superficially acknowledges the economic role, while really lending more weight to the argument that European society has suffered some kind of neurosis in relation to its Jews. Penslar deftly offers us an argument in which Jews and economics play a role in the development of an anti-Semitic “image,” without placing the Jew in anything but a passive role. Penslar’s “images” are also devoid of gradation — Europeans, if they hold to economically motivated anti-Semitism, either view Jews as pauper savages or global financiers. This despite the case that most European peasants simply didn’t need to have these extreme conceptions of Jews, and probably didn’t. Exploitative economic practices by local Jewish capitalists, the existence of local Jewish monopolies on such items as alcohol, and the Jewish practice of in-group/out-group ethics would be more than sufficient to provoke anti-Jewish resentment.

But references to this motivation for anti-Jewish action is entirely absent from Jewish historiography on the causes of anti-Semitism, most likely because it comes extremely close to demolishing the ‘victim paradigm.’ This essay, which focuses on actual case studies (in particular the city of Odessa), will argue that the anti-Jewish riots of the 1880s, like many riots before them, were motivated by economic anti-Semitism, and that this economic anti-Semitism had its origins not in the European psyche, but in the day to day economic interactions of Jews had with the non-Jews of Odessa. It attempts to rediscover the Jewish role, and to place it front and centre.

The first disturbance involving Jews to occur in the Russian Empire, and which left sufficient documentation, was the 1821 Odessa pogrom. Weinberg has painted a picture of Odessa as being some kind of multicultural heaven at this time. He states that the city “benefited from the presence of German, Italian, French, Greek, and English residents whose cultural and intellectual tastes influenced local life.”[8] By the 1820s street signs were written in Russian and Italian, the city’s first newspaper appeared in French. Odessa, according to Weinberg, had a thriving art scene, particularly in relation to theatre, music, and opera.

However, Klier paints a radically different picture of the city, stressing in particular the ethnic tension created by increasing Jewish settlement in the city. Klier states that by 1821, Odessa was “a hotbed of ethnic, religious, and economic rivalries” and was, quite significantly, “a distinctly non-Russian city.”[9] Weinberg explains that “the number of Jews arriving from other parts of the Russian Empire and Galicia in the Austrian Empire skyrocketed.” In Odessa, Jews were entirely free from “legal burdens and residency restrictions.”[10]

Violence erupted in 1821 when, during the Greek War of Independence, a group of Muslims and Jews murdered and then mutilated Gregory V, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul. In the aftermath, many Greeks fled with Gregory’s remains from Istanbul to Odessa, where his funeral procession was held. Surviving documents suggest that violence broke out when a large contingent of Odessa’s Jewish population showed open disrespect for the procession.[11]

In describing this and subsequent outbreaks of violence in Odessa, I must urge readers to divest themselves of the preconception that the Jewish contingent of the city was a tiny minority. Jewish historians are often quick to allude to minority status without providing definitive numbers. John Doyle Klier, however, informs us that by the middle of the nineteenth century Jews constituted “almost one-third of the total population” in Odessa.[12] Given the huge population of Greeks and other nationalities, it was the Russians who composed the “tiny minority.” Economic supremacy in the city until the middle of the nineteenth century was the preserve of the Greek population, which had fended off the attempts of numerous other ethnic groups to “secure or maintain a favored economic position.”[13]

When a huge influx of Jews occurred in the 1850s, the struggle for economic supremacy between Jew and Greek, added to historical religiopolitical grievances, contributed to increased inter-ethnic tension in the city. Greek historian Evridiki Sifneos informs us that earlier co-existence had “not been based on mutual toleration. On the contrary, economic recession in the second half of the nineteenth century accelerated ethnic distinctions, and resentment was provoked by the ascension of social or ethnic groups [primarily Jewish], which led to the redistribution of resources.”[14] Until the mid-1850s, the Greeks had control of grain exports, but with the disruption of trade routes as a result of the Crimean War, some local Greek business owners were forced into bankruptcy. The city’s Jews, who had earlier occupied mainly middleman roles, pooled resources and eagerly bought up these businesses at extremely low prices. A letter from one Greek contemporary reads: “When I first came to Odessa in 1864, I became a purchaser of grain on behalf of our house, 14 at Moldovanka. The majority were Greeks, with a few Russian middlemen. Now there are no Russians, and as for the Greeks they are counted on the fingers of one hand. Jews are the ones who have taken over the market.”[15] According to Sifneos, Jews took advantage of the placement of their taverns in the villages to establish themselves as middlemen in the collection of grain from the surrounding countryside, and in addition “they worked more tightly within their ethnic network.”[16]

Weinberg further states that when “Jewish employers followed the practice of only hiring their own, many Greek dockworkers now found themselves in the ranks of the unemployed.”[17] When it became apparent that Jews had wrested economic supremacy from the Greeks in 1858, incidences of inter-ethnic violence began to escalate in frequency. In 1858 there were attacks on Greek and Jewish property, and numerous “Greek-Jewish brawls” in the city, and in 1859 a quarrel between Greek and Jewish children again escalated into full-scale inter-ethnic conflict. Violence was ended thanks only to the intervention of Russian police and Cossacks.[18] A major bout of Greek-Jewish violence occurred again in 1869.

How do we describe such events? In light of the context of these disturbances, does the term “pogrom” or “anti-Jewish riot” withstand scrutiny? Certainly not. Note my use of the terms “inter-ethnic violence” and “disturbance involving Jews.” These terms do not feature in Jewish historiography on these events. “Anti-Jewish riot” or “pogrom” is merely part of the lexicon of the ‘victim paradigm,’ bequeathing passive status even through word use. To express it flippantly, when Tom and Bill have a fight in the street, one does not describe it as “anti-Tom violence.” This automatically imparts passive, victim status to Tom, despite the fact that he may have started the fight, and certainly threw as many punches. Weinberg, for example, describes the 1859 disturbance as “anti-Jewish activity,” but states that both “Jewish and gentile youths engaged in bloody brawls.”[19] This is an obvious contradiction in terms.

It is only in 1871, during a particularly severe bout of disturbances, that we see the first Russian involvement in Odessa’s inter-ethnic violence. The late John Doyle Klier, formerly Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University, informs us categorically that Russian involvement in the 1871 Odessa ethnic conflict had its roots in real, tangible economic grievances. Klier states that Russian participation was the result of “bitterness born of the exploitation of their work by Jews and the ability of the latter to enrich themselves and manipulate all manner of trade and commercial activity.”[20] Similarly, Weinberg concedes that by 1871, there were “many others besides Greeks who perceived Jews as an economic threat.”[21]

The roots of the 1871 disturbance are quite tangible, and there is a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting it was the result of real socio-economic grievances, rather than “images,” “stereotypes,” or any of the other usual suspects wheeled out in Jewish historiography. Brian Horowitz, Chair of Jewish Studies at Tulane University argues that by 1870 Jewish economic and social cohesiveness had been further enhanced in Odessa by founding of a branch of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment, an organization dedicated to in-group philanthropy as well as “alternative politics” whereby members “did not contact the government as an intercessor.”[22] In this respect, it was the kahal-lite, and it had a significant positive impact on the wealth of Odessa Jewry. Klier states that under this organisation, the Jewish grip on the economic life of the city grew stronger, and that Russian government reports from 1871 attribute the disturbance above all to the fact that “the economic domination of the Jews in the area produced abnormal relations between Christians and Jews.”[23] By 1871, Jewish economic domination had moved beyond grain exports. A US consular report from that year reveals the extent of Jewish control over Odessa’s economic life. It reports that Jews in the city “occupy themselves with trade and favoring their own class or sect, that is that their combinations, in a great many instances, amount almost to monopolies. The common remark, therefore, is that ‘everything is in the hands of the Jews.’ To sell or buy a house, a horse, a carriage, to rent a lodging or contract for a loan, to engage a governess, and sometimes even to marry a wife the Jew gets his percent as a “go between.” The poor laborer, the hungry soldier, the land proprietor, the money capitalist, and in fact every producer and every consumer is obliged in one way or another to pay tribute to the Jew.”[24]

Impoverished Greeks, Russians and Ukrainians looked on at increasingly ostentatious displays of Jewish wealth. In fact, Sifneos states that contemporary correspondence reveals that during the disturbances, many of Odessa’s Jews attributed the trouble “to the widespread resentment against the growing prosperity of their community.”[25] Sifneos also informs us that demographic shifts in the city were of extreme importance in creating unease among non-Jewish populations. In line with increasing wealth, the 1897 census revealed that during the preceding two decades Odessa Jewry was undergoing an extremely rapid demographic explosion, and that Odessa was “rapidly becoming a predominantly Jewish city.”[26] To put this into some kind of perspective, the 1897 Odessa census reveals that by that date there were 5,086 Greek speakers, 10,248 German speakers, 1,137 French speakers, and 124,520 Yiddish speakers. The census further revealed that while almost all of the Greek and French speakers were predominantly residing in the inner city slum areas, a huge 54% of Odessa’s Jews were living in the middle-class suburbs of Petropavlovsky, Mikhailovsky, and Peresipsky.[27]

To conclude, when inter-ethnic violence broke out in 1871, it was not rooted in irrationality, but was quite obviously, as Sifneos argues, a desperate attempt to “weaken the economic power of the Jews.”[28] In this context, we see the Jews of Odessa emerge from their passive role in the shadows of Jewish historiography, and how they truly appear in the cold light of day.

[28] Ibid.

The Jewish Narrative.

In 1881 the ‘Russo-Jewish Committee,’ (RJC) an arm of Britain’s Jewish elite, mass-produced a pamphlet entitled “The Persecution of the Jews in Russia,” and began disseminating it through the press, the churches, and numerous other channels. By 1899, it was embellished and published as a short book, and today digitized copies are freely available online.[1] By the early 20th century, the pamphlet had even spawned a four-page journal called Darkest Russia – A Weekly Record of the Struggle for Freedom, ensuring that the average British citizen did not go long without being reminded of the ‘horrors’ facing Russian Jews.[2] The fact that these publications were mass produced should provide an indication as to their purpose: It is clear that these publications represented one of the most ambitious propaganda campaign in Jewish history, and combined with similar efforts in the United States, they were aimed at gaining the attention of, and ‘educating,’ the Western nations and ensuring the primacy of the ‘Jewish side of the story.’ Implicit in this was not only a desire to provoke anti-Russian attitudes, but also copious amounts of sympathy for the victimized Jews — sympathy necessary to ensure that  mass Jewish chain migration to the West went on untroubled and unhindered by nativists. After all, wasn’t the bigoted nativist just a step removed from the rampaging Cossack?

The first element of the narrative advanced by the RJC is essentially a manipulation of the history of Russian-Jewish relations. It holds that the Jews of Eastern Europe have been oppressed for centuries, their whole lives “hampered, from cradle to grave, by restrictive laws.”[3] It was claimed that the Russians  had an unwritten law: “That no Russian Jew shall earn a living.”[4] Russian Jews, according to the Russo-Jewish Committee, have wanted nothing more than to participate in Russian society, but have been rebuffed time and again as “heretics and aliens.” The Pale is an impenetrable fortress, where every Jew “must live and die.” Implicit in this interpretation of the history of Russian-Jewish relations in the belief that  “the fount and origin of all the ills that assail Russian Jewry” has nothing to do with the Jews themselves, but everything to do with the Church, the State, and the Pale. In essence, the plight of the Jews was the result of nothing more than irrational hatred. Jews adopt a meek and passive role in this narrative, having committed no wrong-doing other than being Jews. They are also presented as the only victims of Russian violence. There is no acknowledgement of failed Russian efforts to break down the Jewish walls of exclusivity and claim the Jews as brothers. In fact, there is no reference at all to the walls of exclusivity. The pogroms themselves, according to the Jewish narrative, broke out following the assassination of Alexander II, when shock, anger and a desire for revenge brought this irrational, rootless hatred to the surface.

The second element of the Jewish narrative is that the government and petty officialdom had some role to play in organizing and directing the pogroms. Much disdain is heaped on the government, and petty officialdom, which was said to have been afflicted with “a chronic anti-Semitic outlook.” It was claimed that when the riots began, the government was “not altogether sorry to let the excitement of the people vent itself on the Jews.”[5] In reference to the restrictive May Laws, the authors were forced to concede they had never really been enforced, but maintained that “whether moderately or rigorously applied, the May Laws still remained on the Russian Statute Book.”[6]

The third element of the Jewish narrative is that the pogroms were genocidal, and that they had been organized and perpetrated by groups seeking the extermination of the Jews. The 1899 edition of “The Persecution of the Jews in Russia” included a copy of a lengthy letter written to the London Times by Nathan Joseph, Secretary of the RJC, dated November 5th, 1890. In the letter, Joseph claimed that in the present circumstances “hundreds of thousands could be exterminated,”[7] and that Russian legislation in relation to Jews represented “an instrument of torture and persecution.” In sum, the Jews of Russia were claimed to be living under “a sentence of death,” and it was further claimed that “the executions are proceeding.” The letter ends with an appeal to “Civilized Europe” to intervene, chastise Russia, and aid the victimized Jews.[8]

The fourth key element of the Jewish narrative is that the pogroms were extremely violent in nature. Contemporary media reports especially were the source of most of the atrocity stories, reportedly gleaned from newly-arrived ‘refugees’ who had given statements to the Russo-Jewish Committee about the pogroms they had fled. In these reports, which were carried very regularly by both the New York Times and the London Times, Russians were charged with having committed the most fiendish atrocities on the most enormous scale. Every Jew in the Russian Empire was under threat. Men had been ruthlessly murdered, tender infants had been dashed on the stones or roasted alive in their own homes. During a British parliamentary consultation on the pogroms in 1905, a Rabbi Michelson claimed that “the atrocities had been so fiendish that they could find no parallel even in the most barbarous annals of the most barbarous peoples.”[9] The New York Times reported that during the 1903 Kishinev pogrom “babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob.”[10]

A common theme in most contemporary atrocity stories was the brutal rape of Jewish women, with most reports including mention of breasts being hacked off. There are literally thousands of carbon-copy reports in which it is claimed that mothers were raped alongside their daughters. There is simply not enough space to cite extensively from these articles, but they number in their thousands and are available to anyone with access to the digitized archives of any major newspaper, or the microfilm facilities at major libraries. In addition, these articles claim that whole streets inhabited by Jews had been razed, and the Jewish quarters of towns had been systematically fired.

The ‘atrocity’ aspect of the narrative has continued to be advanced by Jewish historians. For example Anita Shapira, in her Stanford-published, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948, claims that “each series of new riots was worse than the one preceding, as if every bloodbath provided a permit for an even worse massacre.”[11] Shapira further hints that the murder of Jewish babies was common during the pogroms, stating that a common worry of Russian Jews was “Will they take pity on the small babies, who do not even know yet that they are Jews?”[12] She concludes one particular section on pogrom violence by stating, without referencing any evidence, that there were “numerous acts of rape,” and that “many were massacred — men, women, and children. The cruelty that marked these killings added a special dimension to the feeling of terror and shock that spread in their wake.”[13] Joseph Brandes, in his 2009 Immigrants to Freedom alleges, without citing evidence, that mobs “threw women and children out of the windows” of their homes, and that “heads were battered with hammers, nails were driven into bodies, eyes were gouged out … and petroleum was poured over the sick found hiding in cellars and they were burned to death.”[14]

Another crucial element to the Jewish narrative is that Russia is barbaric, ignorant, and uncivilized compared to the Jewish citizens of the country. Russia is said to be lingering in the “medieval stage of development,”[15] and in comparison to the “ignorant and superstitious peasantry,”[16] Russia’s Jews are presented as an outpost of Western civilization — they are urban, and “intellectual.” The RJC publication argued that university quotas allowing 5% of the student body to be made up of Jews were insufficient for “an intellectual race.” Astonishingly, it is claimed that “the root of the whole matter is racial arrogance,”[17] though this arrogance of course is said to emanate from the Russians.

The RJC charged the government with criminal sympathy, the local authorities generally with criminal inaction, and some of the troops with active participation. The situation, they argued, was simply so hopeless and the possibility of extermination was so great, that the only way out was for the civilized nations of the West to throw open their doors and let in these poor ‘Hebrews’.

And to a great extent this is exactly what the churches, the politicians, and the media agreed to. This capitulation to manipulated conscience ushered in the greatest migration in Jewish history, with profound consequences for us all. But there was just one small problem — the vast majority of this narrative was a calculated, designed, and expertly promoted fraud, furthered by the willing participation of Russian-Jewish emigrants who wished to ease their own access to the West and obtain “relief money from Western Europe and America.”[18] 

The ‘Atrocities’

Let us first turn our attention to the atrocity stories. Prior to any major reports of violence, the British public was already being primed to hate the Russian government and accept the Jewish narrative. John Doyle Klier points out that the Daily Telegraph was at that time Jewish-owned, and was particularly “severe” in its reports on Russian treatment of Jews prior to 1881.[19] In the pages of this publication, it was stated that “these Russian atrocities are only the beginning. … [T]he Russian officials themselves countenance these barbarities.”[20] Around this time in Continental Europe, Prussian Rabbi Yizhak Rülf established himself as an “intermediary” between Eastern Jewry and the West, and, according to Klier, one of his specialities was the spreading of “sensationalized accounts of mass rape.”[21]

Other major sources of pogrom atrocity stories were the New York Times, the London Times, and the Jewish World. It would be the Jewish World which furnished the majority of these tales, having sent a reporter “to visit areas that had suffered pogroms.”[22] Most of the other papers simply reprinted what the Jewish World reporter sent them. The atrocity stories carried by these newspapers provoked global outrage. There were large-scale public protests against Russia in Paris, Brussels, London, Vienna, and even in Melbourne, Australia. However, “it was in the United States that public indignation reached its height.” Historian Edward Judge states that the American public was spurred on by reports of “brutal beatings, multiple rapes, dismemberment of corpses, senseless slaughter, painful suffering and unbearable grief.”[23]

However, as John Klier states, the reports of the Jewish World’s “Special Correspondent,” “raise intriguing problems for the historian.”[24] While his itinerary of travel is described as “plausible,” most of his accounts are “flatly contradicted by the archival record.”[25] His claim that twenty rioters were killed during a pogrom in Kishinev in 1881 has been proven to be a fabrication by records which show that in that city, at that time, “there were no significant pogroms and no fatalities.”[26] Other claims that he witnessed shootings of peasants on his travels have been entirely discredited due to the vast number of minor inaccuracies in those accounts.

Furthermore, Klier states that the atrocity stories compiled by the Jewish World correspondent, which went on to be so influential in manipulating Western perceptions of the events, must be treated with “extreme caution.”[27] The reporter “portrayed the pogroms dramatically, as great in scale and inhuman in their brutality. He reported numerous accounts where Jews were burned alive in their homes while the authorities looked on.”[28] There are hundreds of instances where he references the murder of children, the mutilation of women, and the biting off of fingers.

Klier states that “the author’s most influential accounts, given their effect on world opinion, were his accounts of the rape and torture of girls as young as ten or twelve.”[29] In 1881 he reported 25 rapes in Kiev, of which five were said to have resulted in fatalities, in Odessa he claimed 11, and in Elizavetgrad he claimed 30.[30] Rape featured prominently in the reports, not because rapes were common, but because rape “even more than murder and looting” was known to “generate particular outrage abroad.” Klier states that “Jewish intermediaries who were channelling pogrom reports abroad were well aware of the impact of reports of rape, and it featured prominently in their accounts.”[31] The two most dramatic and gruesome accounts came from Berezovka and Borispol. In fact, as the year neared its end, the reports became more and more gruesome and brutal in the details they conveyed.

There is, of course, a reason for this. As the non-Jewish public began to tire of the reports and switched their minds to the coming Christmas festivities, Klier states that records show the RJC made a conscious and calculated decision to “keep Russian Jewry before the eyes of the public.”[32] A key component of this strategy was to take the accounts of the Special Correspondent and publish them in a more widely circulated and respected newspaper. They settled on the London Times, which was already predisposed to “critical editorial faulting of the Russian government.”  Klier further states that these evidently false reports “garnished with the prestige of The Times and devoid of any attribution, subsequently published as a separate pamphlet, and translated into a variety of European languages … became the definitive Western version of the pogroms.”[33]

As increasingly lurid atrocity tales again captured the attention of the Gentile public, the British Government found itself under pressure to intervene. The British Government, however, adopted a more cautious approach and undertook its own independent investigations into events in the Russian Empire. Its findings, published as a “Blue Book,” “presented an account of events at great variance with that offered by The Times.”[34] The most notable aspect of the independent inquiry is the outright denial of mass rape. In January 1882, Consul-General Stanley objected to all of the details contained within reports published by The Times, mentioning in particular the unfounded “accounts of the violation of women.”[35] He further stated that his own investigations revealed that there had been no incidences of rape during the Berezovka pogrom, that violence was rare, and that much of the disturbance was restricted to property damage. In relation to property damage in Odessa, Stanley estimated it to be around 20,000 rubles, and rejected outright the Jewish claim that damage amounted to over one million rubles.

Vice-Consul Law, another independent investigator, reported that he had visited Kiev and Odessa, and could only conclude that “I should be disinclined to believe in any stories of women having been outraged in those towns.”[36] Another investigator, Colonel Francis Maude, visited Warsaw and said that he could “not attach any importance” to atrocity reports emanating from that city.[37] At Elizavetgrad, instead of whole streets being razed to the ground, it was discovered that a small hut had lost its roof. It was further discovered that very few Jews, if any, had been intentionally killed, though some died of injuries received in the riots. These were mainly the result of conflicts between groups of Jews who defended their taverns and rioters seeking alcohol. The small number of Jews who had been intentionally killed had fallen victim to unstable individuals who had been drunk on Jewish liquor — accusations of murderous intent among the masses were simply unfounded and unsubstantiated by the evidence.

When these reports were made public, states Klier, they represented “a serious setback for the protest and aid activities of the RJC.”[38] The Times was forced to backtrack, but responded spitefully (and bizarrely) by stating that the indignation of the country was still justified even if the atrocities were “the creations of popular fancy.”[39] (Reminiscent of the JewishGen response to Ukrainian discoveries mentioned in Part 1 of this series?!)

The revelations came at a bad time for the RJC, which was at that time attempting to move the British Government to “act in some way on behalf of persecuted Russian Jewry.”[40] It resorted to republishing (in the Times) its pamphlet on persecution in Russia twice in one month, presumably in the belief that blunt repetition would suffice to overcome tangible evidence. Klier states that the pieces were examples of “masterful” propaganda, as they attempted to undermine the credibility of the Government consuls, while sycophantically appealing to “the wise and noble people of England,” who “will know what weight should be attached to such denials and refutations.”[41] The RJC offered its own “corroborative evidence of the most undeniable kind,” though of course the exact source of this evidence was not specified beyond “persons occupying high official positions in the Jewish community” and “Jewish refugees.”

In essence, the people of western nations were being asked to trust an anonymous Rabbi on the other side of the world rather than identifiable representatives of their own government. The pieces, states Klier, “painted the familiar picture of murder and rape,” and despite the debunking statements of the consuls, “a number of mother/daughter rapes, which had already done so much to outrage British public opinion, were again repeated.”[42] Although the move for British government intervention failed, in the battle for public opinion “the RJC clearly won the day,” and the Times and the RJC remained good bedfellows.

The Consuls were outraged. Stanley reiterated the fact that his intensive investigations, which he carried out at great personal cost with a serious leg injury, illustrated that “The Times’ accounts of what took place at each of those places contains the greatest exaggerations, and that the account of what took place at some of those places is absolutely untrue.”[43] He related the fact that a Rabbi in Odessa had “not heard of any outrages on women there,” and that the object of almost every pogrom he had investigated was simple “plunder.”[44] Enraged by the lies circulating in Britain and America, Stanley “went right to the top,” interviewing state rabbis and asking for evidence and touring pogrom sites. In Odessa, where a wealth of atrocity stories had originated, he was able to confirm “one death, but no looting of synagogues or victims set alight.” There was no evidence that a single rape had taken place. One state Rabbi admitted that he had not heard of any outrages of women in Berezovka and further assured Stanley that he “could with a clear conscience positively deny that any deaths or any violations had occurred there during the disturbances of last year.”[45] He again sent this report to his superior in London, with a note saying “This is in accordance with all the information I have received and forwarded to your Lordship, and which I think more credible than anonymous letters in The Times.”[46]

Despite Stanley’s best efforts the Jewish narrative advanced by the RJC, imbued with atrocity tales, has remained unalterably attached in Western perceptions of the pogroms. The Blue Book was smothered by the more visible, and oft-repeated, tales of the RJC and organisations like it around the globe. Only with the decade-long research of John Klier has some revision of this narrative, grounded in scholarship and archival evidence, been possible. In light of this evidence, one can only conclude that stories of rape, murder and mutilation were “more legendary than factual.”[47] However, the task remains to further dismantle and analyse other aspects of the Jewish narrative, and to seek the true motives behind its creation.

Go to Part 3

The pogroms themselves have consistently been portrayed by (mainly Jewish) historians as “irrational manifestations of hatred against Jews,”[2] where peasant mobs were the unwitting dupes of malevolent Russian officials. Other explanations are so lacking in evidence, and so devoid of logic that they stretch credulity to breaking point. For example, University of British Columbia Professor, Donald G. Dutton has asserted that the mobs were not motivated by “the sudden rapid increase of the Jewish urban population, the extraordinary economic success of Russian Jews, or the involvement of Jews in Russian revolutionary politics” but rather by the “blood libel.”[3]

Little or no historiography has been dedicated to peeling back the layers of “refugee” stories to uncover what really happened in the Russian Empire in the years before and during the riots. This lack of historical enquiry can be attributed at least in part to a great reluctance on the part of Jewish historians to investigate the pogroms in any manner beyond the merely superficial. In addition, historical enquiry by non-Jewish historians into the subject has been openly discouraged. For example, when Ukrainian historians discovered evidence proving that contemporary media reports of Jewish casualties in that nation were exaggerated, the Jewish genealogy website ‘JewishGen,’ responded by stating: “We believe that [these facts] are more than irrelevant because it redirects public attention from the major topic: the genocidal essence of pogroms.”

It should suffice to state here that this response contravenes the very essence of historical enquiry – to uncover history as it actually happened, irrespective of the uncomfortable truths which may lie therein. The statement could be translated as “Let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good story.” Also, as this paper will show, the tendency to portray the riots as “genocidal” is completely lacking in foundation. University of California Los Angeles Professor of Sociology, Michael Mann, has provided substantial evidence indicating that “most perpetrators did not conceive of removing Jews altogether.”[4]

JewishGen’s allusion to genocide should also be seen as part of a broader problem in modern Jewish historiography. Rather than seeing the pogroms as products of specific local circumstances, in which Jews would play at least an implicit role, there has been a tendency to use them for comparative purposes. John Klier states that when used in a comparative sense, “examples are drawn almost exclusively from the 20th century, and these events are then read back into the earlier period of 1881–2,” making any objective historical enquiry difficult, and implying the presence of some non-existent ‘pan-European’ malaise in anti-Jewish actions.

Nonetheless, this series of essays will seek to peel back the myths, to tease a few threads of truth from the veil which covers these events. Encouragingly, some work has already begun in this respect. I.M. Aronson’s assertion that the pogroms were “planned or encouraged to one degree or another, by elements within the government itself,”[5] has been dealt a death blow in recent years through the concerted work of a small number of non-Jewish historians, mostly notably, University College London’s Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, John Doyle Klier. In his 2005 work, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–2, Klier asserts that “contemporary research has dispelled the myth that Russian officials were responsible for instigating, permitting, or approving the pogroms.”[6]

This series of essays will attempt to move further, adhering to the belief that the facts of the events remain paramount to historical enquiry rather than being a ‘distracting’ irrelevance. The series will begin with an explanation of the origins of Russia’s “Jewish Question.” Subsequent articles will concern the pogroms themselves and how myth and exaggeration have plagued our conception of them. Finally, I will examine why these myths were developed, and the broader implications of the prevalence of myth in Jewish ‘history.’

Part One: Russia’s Jewish Question.

In 1772 the Russian Empire orchestrated the first partition of Poland, “erasing from the geopolitical map of Europe a large kingdom, which in the seventeenth century had extended over broad areas between Prussia and southern Ukraine.”[7] Significantly, in doing so, the Russian Empire also oversaw “the dissolution of the largest Jewish collective in the world.”[8] Polish Jewry was divided into three parts – those in Posen came under the sovereignty of Prussia, those in Galicia came under the sovereignty of Austria, and those in Poland proper came under the sovereignty of the Russian Empire.[9]  In Poland proper, the Polish public turned in on itself, searching frantically for the reasons for the ruin of the nation, and in doing so, states Israel Friedlander, “the Jewish problem could not but force itself on its attention.”[10]

Investigations carried out by special committees discovered that in the decades prior to partition, Polish Jewry had enjoyed a demographic explosion, with Jews now representing almost 20% of the entire population. In addition, it was discovered that Jews controlled a full 75% of Polish exports, and that many were now spilling out of over-populated urban centres into the countryside, making a living by monopolising the sale of liquor to peasants.[11] By 1774, complaints were reaching Russian officials from non-Jewish merchants who argued that Jewish ethnic networking was propping up the monopoly of exports, and that this monopoly would shortly have dire implications for the consumer.[12] These revelations were the key motivating factors in the decision to expel Warsaw’s Jews in 1775, and until the early 19^th century there was a kind of stand-off between Poles and Jews.[13] Napoleon’s establishment of the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 did little to alter the situation, as Napoleon acceded to local sentiment which held that Jews should not feel the benefit of the new constitution until they had “eradicated their peculiar characteristics.”[14] In 1813, the government of the Duchy moved to break the Jewish monopoly on liquor, banning all Jews from selling alcohol in the villages, bringing an end to the activity of “tens of thousands” of Jewish liquor merchants in the provinces. Not surprisingly, when the Duchy was dissolved in 1815 following Napoleon’s failed attempt to invade Russia, Polish Jewry shed no tears.

In late 1815, the Congress of Vienna was held. The aim of the congress was to give its assent to the formation of a new autonomous Polish kingdom under the sovereignty of Russia. Although the bulk of Polish Jewry remained within the newly established kingdom, tens of thousands also poured forth into other areas of the Russian Empire, ushering in an uncomfortable age of fraught Russian-Jewish relations. The immediate reaction of the Russian government to the acquisition of such large, and unwanted, Jewish populations was to prevent the penetration of these populations from intrusion into the old Russian territories, and the solution reached was one of containment. A new kind of settlement was created in provinces along the western frontier,            and it became known as the “Pale of Settlement.” Although a large amount of negative connotations have been attributed to the Pale, it was not an impermeable fortress. Certain Jews were permitted to reside outside these provinces, they could visit trade fairs, and Jews were even permitted to study at Russian universities provided they did not exceed quotas. By 1860, more than half of world Jewry resided in the Pale.

Following the Congress of Vienna, wherever Jews resided in the Russian Empire, they overwhelmingly “served in a variety of middleman roles.” In some cities, “the Jewish mercantile element was numerically superior to the Christian,” and there was a gradual move towards the reacquisition of the liquor trade.[15] According to Klier, by 1830 Belorussian Jews were found to be “totally dominating trade” in that country.[16] It was largely Klier’s work in the late 1980s which began to truly shed light on the origins of Russian-Jewish relations prior to 1914. Klier, born into a Catholic family in Kansas, “rejected what might be called the Fiddler on the Roof pieties and simplifications. In book after book, he emphasised that what the tsars and their ministers wanted, above all else, was for the Jewish settlements to be orderly and productive.”[17] Klier further stressed that the much-maligned Pale of Settlement was simply the only response that the Russian administration could come up with, faced as they were with the “baffling question” of how to deal with the “fanaticism of ultra-Orthodox Jewry” which was thoroughly “unassimilable to official purposes.”[18]

In 1841, investigations were carried out into Russia’s Jewish communities, and the subsequent reports pointed to three significant problems. The first was persistent Jewish difference in dress, language, and religious and communal organization. The idea underpinning this aloofness from non-Jewish society, the ‘Chosen’ status of the Jews and an accompanying ethnic chauvinism, was said to be particularly harmful to Jewish-Gentile relations, particularly when it was reinforced through “a system of male education that was thought to inculcate anti-Christian interpretations of the Talmud.”[19] The second, related, problem was that Jewish economic practices were also rooted in this aloofness. The Talmud “encouraged and justified unreserved economic exploitation based on cheating and exploiting the non-Jews,”[20] in a validation of Max Weber’s theory of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ ethics, whereby “members of a cohesive social unit observe different moral standards among themselves compared with those observed in relation to strangers.”[21] The third aspect of the Russian ‘Jewish Question,’ was the issue of Jewish loyalty. The Jews of the Russian Empire had evidently retained the kahal of pre-partition Polish Jewry. The kahal was a formal system of Jewish communal leadership and government, entirely separate from the Russian state. Although tacitly tolerated by the state for its tax collection capabilities, Jewish loyalty to the kahal was absolute, going beyond the merely fiscal. Almost all Jews continued to resort to Jewish courts.

John Klier states that following these revelations, “state and society shared a consensus that Jews could be – and must be – reformed and transformed into good subjects of the realm.”[22] Under Emperor Alexander I (1801–25) there had been attempts to encourage Jews to pursue more productive economic activities. Generous concessions were made to Jews in the hope that they would abandon their middleman roles, as well as the distilleries and taverns of the provinces, and take up work in agricultural colonies. Klier states that the “embeddedness of the Jews in the economic and social life of the imperial borderlands ensured that despite legislative initiatives, Jewish economic life remained largely unchanged.”[23]

In 1844, under Nicholas I, the Russian government began a program of reforms and legislation designed to break down Jewish exclusivity and incorporate the nation’s Jews more fully into Russian society. Not surprisingly, the government first took aim at the kahal, banning it as “an illegal underground structure.”[24] The significance of the banning of the kahal went beyond tackling the issue of Jewish loyalty. The mutual assistance offered by the kahal was felt to have had economic implications – “it was the mutual support provided by the kahal that ensured that Jews were more than a match for any competitor, even the arch-exploiter of the Russian village, the kulak.”[25] The civil rights of any “Jews who were perceived to be engaged in productive undertakings” were extended, though there were few takers. Nicholas I even conceived of, and supported, the establishment of state-financed Jewish schools, in the hope that such establishments would lead to the development of a more progressive and integrative Russian Jewry. Unfortunately for Nicholas, what his system produced was a cadre of Jewish intellectuals profoundly hostile to the state.

Emperor Alexander II continued the efforts of Mother Russia to gather in her Jews. He abolished serfdom in 1861. He relaxed efforts to change the economic profile of Russian Jewry, extending the rights of educated Jews and large-scale merchants. His was a program aimed at reconciliation, an abandonment of the stick in favour of the carrot. Education was made fully open to Jews, and Jews could sit on the juries of Russian courts. Conditions on settlement and mobility in the Pale were relaxed further. Klier states that “Jews even became the subject of sympathetic concern for the leaders of public opinion. Proposals for the complete emancipation of the Jews were widely mooted in the press.”[26]

These measures, however, were also accompanied by a growing uneasiness with the way the Jews of Russia took advantage of them. There was little in the way of gratitude, and the measures did not bring about the great changes that had been hoped for. The nationalist revolt of the Poles in 1863, and the fact that a large number of wealthy Jews were found to have funded some of the rebels cast new doubts on Jewish loyalty. Having emancipated the peasantry and adopted a paternalistic concern for the former serfs, the government also viewed with alarm the rapidity with which the “Jews were exploiting the unsophisticated and ignorant rural inhabitants, reducing them to a Jewish serfdom.”[27] It also quickly became apparent that despite new military legislation, Jews were noticeable in their overwhelming avoidance of military service. In retaliation, the government clamped down on rural tavern ownership, and introduced more stringent recruitment procedures specifically for Jews. It has been claimed that Jews were also banned from land ownership at this time, but Klier provides evidence that Jews were still able to buy any peasant properties sold at auction for tax arrears, as well as any property within the Pale not owned by Russian gentry.[28]

By the end of Alexander II’s reign, disillusionment with the government’s policy at handling the Jewish Question was widespread. The vast majority of Jews had stubbornly persisted in the unproductive trades, continued in their antipathy to Russian culture, and refused to make any meaningful contribution to Russian society. An air of resignation swept the country. Some newspapers even advocated abolishing the Pale, if only to alleviate that region from bearing the burden of the Jews alone. Other papers opposed this “fearing for the welfare of the peasantry at a time when the cultural level of the peasantry made them an easy target for exploitation.”[29] Meanwhile Jews were beginning to swamp higher education establishments. In Odessa, there were reports that in school after school, Jews were “driving Christians from the school benches,” and “filling up the schools.”[30]

On the eve of the assassination of Alexander II, Russia’s Jewish Question remained unanswered. Decades of legislation had done little to change the nature of Russian Jewry, which remained ethnically, politically, and culturally homogenous. The new Jewish intelligentsia had turned on the hand that fed it, failing to encourage the adaptation of their fellow Jews, moving instead to defend them and advocate for their interests. In terms of educational and social opportunities, Jews had been given an inch and taken a mile. They had swamped the schools, and added to a group of emergent Jewish capitalists. In 1879 Russian authorities were being lobbied by a Rabbinic Commission for full emancipation, an ominous prospect for those concerned about the well-being of Russian peasantry.

The breaking point, when it came, did not emerge from the ether, but from this historical background. In part two we will examine the more immediate origins of the anti-Jewish riots and how the riots proceeded. We will do away with petty distractions, dispelling myths with facts; and as we venture into the Pale, we now do so with a more complete view of the Jew we find there.

 Go to Part 2.

The Victory of Humanism: The Psychology of Humanist Art, Modernism, and “Race”
Thomas Martin
Palm Coast, FL: Backintyme, 2011; 177 pages

There can be little doubt that in historical perspective, perhaps the most important upheaval in Western culture has been the decline of aristocratic culture. This is apparent, for example, in two recent books that have influenced my thinking, Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization and Andrew Fraser’s The WASP Question (my review will appear in the first issue (June) of Radix, a new magazine edited by Alex Kurtagic and Richard Spencer). For Duchesne, aristocratic individualism is the key to understanding the uniqueness and creativity of the West. Fraser laments the decline of Indo-European aristocratic culture, beginning with the Puritan revolution of the 17th century and carried to its logical conclusion in America with the defeat of the South in the Civil War.

Thomas Martin’s The Victory of Humanism focuses on the decline of aristocratic culture in Western art. Following the “perfection of antiquity,” the breakthrough occurred in the Renaissance with the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, and Michalangelo.

A critical observation by Vasari is that those artists achieved perfection by only portraying the beautiful. They did this by using the most beautiful examples of the human body or nature. In this way, they achieved the idealization or perfection of both body and nature.  In fact, Vasari goes so far as to say that Michelangelo was so wedded to the idea of perfection that he had a policy of never doing a portrait of a living person.This would have been descending away form the ideal in the “mind of God” or the human mind, and losing himself in the particular of the empirical.

Martin correctly points out that this sense of ideal human form is an innate part of human psychology. Evolutionary psychologists have shown that the faces that humans find attractive are generalized. That is, faces that are produced by averaging dozens of real photos are judged attractive. Martin expands on this by suggesting that “there is a certain nobility in the generalized face, which helps create the sense that it is ideal. Seeing the face that is in the mind takes the viewer above or out of this world and into the mind, the most powerful and noble part of our bodies.”

Martin then describes the decline of the ideal and the rise of egalitarianism, particularlity, and vulgarity in art. This did not happen all at once. In the 17th and 18th centuries, artists “took a dim view of raw nature”; Frederick Art, a historian, notes that “in the age of the Baroque, they evidently wanted to smooth and regulate all nature and make, as it were, domestic pets of the rivers and mountains.” Not until the end of the 19th century did the crudeness of nature become an artistic ideal. Martin notes that “Nature per se was viewed as vulgar and disgusting, while refined culture was viewed as beautiful and a relief from vulgar, oppressive and confining nature.”

The culture of the anti-ideal: Lucien Freud:'s "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping"

Whereas nature was seen as confining and oppressive, in the long run “high art formalism” came to be seen as oppressive. Aesthetics was “displaced to oppose the confining upper class during the French Revolution”; already in the 19th century, “artists were beginning to find beauty and greatness themselves to be confining, and sought escape into the chaos and irregularities of nature and personal experience. This defines relativism, particularism and the decline of standards.”

Ultimately, this trend derives from egalitarian political philosophies emphasizing the natural rights of the individual and hostile to traditional social hierarchies that, as both Duchesne and Fraser note, are Indo-European in origin. Classical Western culture emphasized reason controlling emotion and political dominance by a natural aristocracy. “The ideal of modernism was that instead of reason and the upper class controlling the appetites and the lower class, respectively, the reverse should be the case.” As exemplifying this trend toward egalitarianism, Martin quotes an article by eugenicist John Glad who found that most people disagreed the idea that people with high intelligence should have more children.

These trends might be termed “egalitarian individualism,” as opposed to the aristocratic individualism described by Duchesne (see above) that has been so central to classical Western art. For Martin, modernism fundamentally reflects aspirations for “a deified and unlimited individualism.” This can be seen in everything from political thinking to advertising campaigns that appeal to people’s uniqueness and individuality—the “culture of narcissism” and the glorification of individual suffering at the hand of an oppressive social order. More and more art was designed to appeal to low and vulgar tastes, the aristocracy seen as corrupt and morally debased. “Over the last two centuries, evil was displaced from the body, from sexuality, and from the lower class, to the upper class, their art and proper morals or etiquette.” This was then extended to the bourgeois upper classes, as in the film Titanic. Whereas “classicists emphasize limits on behavior and intelligence, and the need for social control on native inclinations to evil, hostility or crime,” modernists  ”experience limits as claustrophobic imposition from the group. So they rebel against anything limiting, such as conceptions of class, sex, ‘race’, and native intelligence.” [Note that the word 'race' is in quotation marks, as it is in the subtitle. This suggests that Martin does not believe in the reality of race, but Martin informs me that it was because of the publisher's insistence.]

Although ‘race’ appears in quotation marks, Martin notes at African-Americans and the non-West have benefited greatly from the general trends of modernism. Blacks now sit in judgment of White culture and are routinely deified in the media—literally, as with all those films where Morgan Freeman is portrayed as America’s “spiritual presence-in-chief)  ”Modernists today become worthy when they hate their own civilization, or feel unworthy in the face of non-Westerners. To consider oneself unworthy is a sure sign of social virtue today.”

As with Andrew Fraser in The WASP Question, Martin yearns for the classical world of hierarchy and the primacy of reason “able to suppress the worst of human nature.” He realizes that this world cannot be revived, but nevertheless hopes that we could “somehow return to rejecting our animal aspect.”

There is a lot to like about this book. Martin moves adeptly (but at times incongruously) between a wide range of genres, from high art and opera plots, to Hollywood films and television. The general thrust of the book certainly fits with the decline of aristocratic culture that is so central to the modern age. On the negative side, there is no mention of ethnic competition over the construction of culture, as emphasized in discussions of Jewish influence on this site (e.g., Edmund Connelly, Lasha Darkmoon and Michael Colhaze). My view is that we must understand both the ethnic roots of the egalitarian trends of Western culture stemming ultimately from evolution as northern hunter-gatherers, but also realize that the the rise of Jews as a hostile elite has been an important aspect of the debasement of Western culture in the direction of vulgarity and hedonic individualism since at least the beginning of the 20th century. Certainly, several of the movements discussed by Martin (the 1960s counter-cultural revolution, the rise of Blacks to the status of moral paragons, and the ideology of multiculturalism and hostility toward the people and culture of the West) cannot be understood without a consideration of Jewish influence.

Martin is correct that we can’t go back to earlier Western social forms which were based on a hereditary aristocracy that achieved their position as a result of the military accomplishments of ancestors. I do think, however, that  in the early 20th century the West was headed in the direction of developing a natural aristocracy based on intelligence, moral probity, and the possibility of upward and downward social mobility.  This was the heyday of eugenics as a belief system common among Western elites, both liberals and conservatives. An important component of this worldview included an understanding of the genetic basis of intelligence and behavior (see, e.g., Lothrop Stoddard’s Revolt of the Underman, republished by Alex Kurtagic’s Wermod & Wermod).

This world was shattered; ultimately it was a victim of  the outcome of World War II, even though eugenics was not expunged from polite society until the 1960s as a result of an energetic campaign by Holocaust-haunted intellectuals bent on striking a blow against their ethnic competitors. If that vision of society had prevailed, and, correlatively,  if the West had rejected the model of multiculturalism fueled by massive non-White immigration promoted by Jewish intellectual and political activism, it is quite reasonable to suppose that it would have had a very large and positive influence on the world of art.

Benzion Netanyahu, father of the current Israeli PM, has died at the age of 102. Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist, describes Netanyahu  fils  as “a Holocaust-obsessed fantasist, out of contact with reality, distrusting all Goyim, trying to follow in the footsteps of a rigid and extremist father – altogether a dangerous person to lead a nation in a real crisis.” Like father, like son.

Benzion Netanyahu was a prototypical Jewish activist, switching easily from his work as secretary for racial Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, to successfully lobbying for a pro-Zionist platform for the Republican Party in 1944 (which caused the Democrats to adopt a similar platform), to his work as a Jewish academic historian advancing Jewish interests in academia. His best-known book, The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain, was published in 1995 by Random House.

A commentary by Yossi Halevi Klein claims that the goal of Netanyahu’s scholarship was to

dissect the consequences of Jewish naivete. Benzion’s fascination with medieval Spain wasn’t based only on the behavior of the victimizers but of the victims. He not only drew a line connecting what he defined as the racial anti-Semitism of the Inquisition with Nazism, but implicitly drew a line between the Jews who saw medieval Spain as their golden land and the Jews who saw modern Germany as their new Zion. It is precisely that dread of Jewish self-deception that has defined the politics of Benzion’s son.

Similarly Jonathan S. Tobin, writing in Commentary,  claims that Netanyahu’s “understood that hatred and intolerance lay at the roots of the difficulties of the Jews then as now. As his son noted at his funeral …, the challenge is to “face reality head on” and “draw the necessary conclusions.”

But did Netanyahu really believe that traditional Jews were naive? That they failed to face reality? A passage that stood out for me in The Origins of the Inquisition is the following:

It was primarily because of the functions of the Jews as the king’s revenue gatherers in the urban areas that the cities saw the Jews as the monarch’s agents, who treated them as objects of massive exploitation. By serving as they did the interests of the kings, the Jews seemed to be working against the interests of the cities; and thus we touch again on the phenomenon we have referred to: the fundamental conflict between the kings and their people—a conflict not limited to financial matters, but one that embraced all spheres of government that had a bearing on the people’s life. It was in part thanks to this conflict of interests that the Jews could survive the harsh climate of the Middle Ages, and it is hard to believe that they did not discern it when they came to resettle in Christian Europe. Indeed, their requests, since the days of the Carolingians, for assurances of protection before they settled in a place show (a) that they realized that the kings’ positions on many issues differed from those of the common people and (b) that the kings were prepared, for the sake of their interests, to make common cause with the “alien” Jews against the clear wishes of their Christian subjects. In a sense, therefore, the Jews’ agreements with the kings in the Middle Ages resembled the understandings they had reached with foreign conquerors in the ancient world. (Netanyahu 1995, 71–72)

Netanyahu is saying quite clearly that Jews were not naively trusting but rather realized that in making alliances with exploitative elites, they would incur the wrath of the people and thus require princely assurances of protection. The Jewish alliance with exploitative elites was an important theme of historical anti-Semitism from the ancient world into the modern era throughout Europe and elsewhere. Medieval Spain was typical.

Since the role of Jews as tax farmers (as well as all of their other roles in traditional societies) was dependent on the non-Jewish elite, anti-Jewish writers have often condemned the aristocracy for allowing Jews to exploit the lower orders of society. A petition to King Enrique of the Cortes of Toro (Castile) in 1371 complained that because of the power given to Jews by the King and the nobles, Jews controlled the cities and even the persons of the Spaniards (Netanyahu 1995, 118). In the following century, Fray Alonso de Espina, the Fransican friar who was instrumental in establishing the Inquisition, condemned the “detested avarice of the Christian princes” and “the temporal gains which they get from the Jews” (in Netanyahu 1995, 731). On the other hand, Espina praised King Philip Augustus, who “burned with the zeal of God” when he despoiled the Jews and expelled them from France in opposition to the pleas of the nobility and prelates and offers of bribes from the Jews (in Netanyahu 1995, 831). (Separation and Its Discontenst, Ch. 2)

Netanyahu was therefore quite aware that Jews in medieval Spain were willing exploiters of the Spaniards in alliance with a corrupt Spanish aristocracy. I can’t resist pointing out the parallel to our current situation—that our new American elite is substantially composed of ethnically conscious Jews with a heavy sprinkling of corrupt Whites with no allegiance or loyalty to their own people—exactly the Jewish formula for success in traditional societies. These corrupt Whites are often very well compensated for their treason. Indeed, losing any sense of loyalty to one’s own people has become the ticket for success for Whites in America and throughout the West.

One would think on the basis of his portrayal of Jews as willing and self-conscious agents of massive exploitation in alliance with corrupt  non-Jewish elites that Netanyahu would realize the rationality of traditional anti-Jewish attitudes. However, there is little evidence of that, and certainly his treatment of the motives behind the Inquisition strongly suggest that he thinks Jewish behavior is irrelevant to anti-Semitism.

Indeed, the above passage can be read as saying that the Jews had to be exploiters in order to survive the Middle Ages. Survival comes first before any compunction about exploiting non-Jews. (Jewish exploitation of non-Jews was greatly facilitated by Jewish religious attitudes that non-Jews are exploitable outgroups—an ideology that is enshrined in all the founding Jewish religious documents, from the Old Testament to the Talmud.)

This view that the behavior of Jews is irrelevant to hatred directed against them is an incredibly important part of the Jewish self-concept. A recent review of a book on the history of British attitudes on Jews begins, “What is important about anti-Semitism—a fairly modern term for an ancient clutch of ideas—is that it has less to tell us about the Jews themselves than about their enemies” (“Inverted targets,” David Vital’s review of Anthony Julius’s Trials of the Diaspora, TLS, July 23, 2010).

Despite some rather clear-eyed passages, in general Netanyahu’s book is a masterpiece of propaganda and apologia. (The NYTimes  puts it rather mildly, stating that “Though praised for its insights, the book was also criticized as having ignored standard sources and interpretations. Not a few reviewers noted that it seemed to look at long-ago cases of anti-Semitism through the rear-view mirror of the Holocaust.” It is certainly not surprising that Netanyahu’s strong Jewish identification would color his scholarship.

Netanyahu’s obvious blind spots combined with some strikingly clear-eyed insights  intrigued me, with the result that I devoted a rather long discussion to his work in Chapter 7 of Separation and Its Discontents (“Rationalization and Apologia: The Intellectual Construction of Judaism,” p. 21ff and the Appendix).  Netanyahu’s basic thesis is that the vast majority of Jews who claimed to convert to Christianity (called ‘New Christians’, ‘Conversos’, or the pejorative ‘Marranos’) were sincere in their Christian beliefs. Therefore, the Inquisition was not really about religious insincerity but about racial anti-Semitism. The Inquisition should be seen as a forerunner of National Socialism (and current Israeli immigration policies) where Jews were defined on the basis of biological ancestry rather than surface beliefs.

One of the more fascinating aspects of Netanyahu’s argument is that he shows that New Christian  intellectuals were adept at coming up with arguments to defend Jewish racial exclusivity after their supposed conversion to Christianity. These intellectuals presented Jews as a genetically separate religious group composed of morally superior individuals and distinguished by a superior genetic heritage. On this basis, the New Christians argued that they were therefore worthy of being the progenitors of Christ who was born a Jew. (This appeals to Christians who naturally want to believe that Jesus came from a superior genetic stock.)  The basic strategy was to realize that Christianity could serve as a perfectly viable ideology in which Christian Jews could retain their ethnic solidarity, but with a Christian religious veneer.

I agree with Netanyahu that the Inquisition was indeed a race war, but I try to show that the Jews who converted to Catholicism were the real racialists, since, whatever their religious beliefs (and Netanyahu is doubtless right that at least some may have become sincere Christians), they continued to marry among themselves and constituted a separate ethnic group in competition with the Old Christians for positions of prestige and power within Spanish society. (This view was previously proposed by historian Américo Castro; see p. 232 in above link). Since I accept the primacy of race and ethnicity in human affairs, for me the behavior of the Inquisitors is entirely understandable, although searching around for deviant religious beliefs is at best an inefficient way of sniffing out ethnic competitors.

Not that this would have deterred the Converso intellectuals. Their basic point was that if you really believe in a universalist Christianity where nothing matters except religious belief, then you shouldn’t be upset if a subset of former Jews continues to marry among themselves and retains its ethnic coherence, as long as their beliefs are sincere. (Hence Netanyahu’s attempt, rejected by most scholars, to prove the Christian religious orthodoxy of the New Christians.) These Jewish intellectuals are basically saying to the Old Christians, “Live up to your Christian beliefs and ideals that ethnicity doesn’t matter. We Jews wish to preserve our superior genetic lineage and continue to marry among ourselves. But that should be of no concern to you.”

The same sort of strategy was used by Horace Kallen and other Jewish intellectuals to argue for the “proposition nation” concept for America in the 20th century (see here, pp. 238ff). That is, if one takes Enlightenment universalism seriously, there is no basis for arguing that the United States can be defined in terms of any particular ethnic group. In a nutshell, they were saying, “Take your ideals seriously. America is nothing more than a set of principles having to do with democracy and human rights. We, on the other hand, reject universalism in favor of Jewish particularism and are therefore intent on establishing Israel as a Jewish ethnostate.”

It’s obvious that a mindless allegiance to Western universalism (whether religious or secular) ultimately spells death to the West as an ethnic entity. And, in my view, it would also spell the end of Western culture generally, since  there is no reason whatever to suppose that the deluge of non-Europeans now invading the territories traditionally dominated by Europeans will do anything to preserve Western culture once its founding population loses political power and becomes a minority. Indeed, a theme of TOO has been the hatred against the people and cultures of the West that is entirely mainstream among the hostile elite and the emerging anti-White coalition that is on the verge of becoming an electoral majority in American politics. Similar processes are occurring throughout the West.

In the end, religion has to be kept on an ethnically informed leash. If not, it becomes a weapon against legitimate White interests. Western universalism and Christianity will be the first casualties of the rise of the anti-White coalition. From the arguments of the New Christian intellectuals to the promotion of Christian Zionism in the 21st, Jewish intellectuals have shown that they are quite adept at exploiting Western universalism to achieve their particularist interests.

Traditional Beltane Fire Festival celebrating the beginning of Summer, in Edinburgh. The procession, which celebrates the ending of winter, is a revival of the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane, the Gaelic name for the month of May

It appears sometimes that the Finns view a calendar year exclusively in terms of the important holidays. A man lives merely to celebrate one big holiday that doesn’t happen often. Once the celebration is over he simply waits for another one to come. For example, there is such a big event as Christmas. When it has passed, one patiently awaits the Vappu which is the first day of May. Followed by the Midsummer Eve (22/23d of June), and after that there are just six more months until Christmas and the New Year.

And so on.…The time in between is simply an insignificant period that separates one important milestone from another.

Of course, it’s an exaggeration but still, while living in Finland, one often hears something like ‘Oh! It is only eight weeks till the Vappu!’, or Christmas, or the Midsummer eve. To some extent the Finnish holidays might be regarded as a powerful example of traditional European holidays that have continued down through centuries. Vappu, for example, is a celebration of the beginning of Spring, a celebration of nature and the very essence of life and the power of fertility as it awakens from long winter sleep. Indeed, traditions to celebrate the Midsummer Eve, as well as Vappu go back to the pagan times. These and many other holidays celebrated throughout Europe all have the pagan roots (although, in such cases as Walpurgis night — and Vappu is pretty much like that – the issue of its origins, Christian and pagan alike, has grown more complex as time goes on). All in all, these celebrations have a long history in Europe, and they are inseparable from its roots and its culture.

These days, traditional celebrations are especially important for the preservation of European cultures and identities which are under attack in all nations of the West. And beyond particular European cultures, such as Finnish culture, there must be something that manifests itself through our common perception of the world and unites us as White Europeans and makes us distinct group. In this regard, holidays or the very idea of traditional holidays and celebration is something that we all more or less share.

It is not surprising however that modern totalitarian liberalism and all the agents of multiculturalism have taken such pains trying to destroy all the major elements of traditional White culture – its family institutions and its traditions. Its very roots. It is easy to manipulate a nation when its constituent ethnic group has had its sense of history diluted with pseudo-historical accounts designed to undermine its collective confidence—its collective cultural memory distorted or erased altogether.  It is indeed an easy job to influence a man whose sense of belonging and national identity have been damaged beyond repair.

It is not only a lack of knowledge of his history and cultural heritage or a silly belief in their irrelevance that plagues modern Western man, but the very sense of his cultural worthlessness that turns him into a spiritual Frankenstein – a creature concocted out of bits of worthless, artificial and dead matter. After being constantly fed with the mind-numbing propaganda of multiculturalism, we are forced to conclude that our heritage and our national culture is a true handicap because it prevents us from appreciating and consequently assimilating ourselves within a crazy mash of different cultures.

Thus, a strong sense of one’s own cultural heritage is the only real and workable antidote to the poisonous influence of multiculturalism.

Still, one must acknowledge the stubbornness of some White Europeans in keeping their heritage and culture. In fact, people try to deal with onslaught of totalitarian internationalism in many different ways and they often succeed. The Czechs and their national traditions are just one such example. Even though they suffered from Marxism-Leninism and everything that ideology could bring them, the Czechs proved to be stubborn enough to withstand the ‘deconstruction’ of their national character and traditions.

Here, I am talking about holidays and celebrations in particular. Along with every other country of the former communist Eastern Europe, they had been forced to hail the first day of May as the “Day of Internationalism and Worker’s Unity.” I cannot say how they had played their ‘official’ part in bygone days but they eventually came up with quite different celebration. Nowadays, the first May bears quite a different connotation. It continues the tradition in which young couples gather under blossoming apple or cherry trees. The idea is to sit under the blossoms, kissing and exchanging vows, a tradition influenced by a famous 19th-century Czech romantic poet, Karel Hynek Mácha. Thus, a commemoration of the poet and his work gradually became a tradition that exists in its own right.) These days, the first day of May has become a folk tradition of renewal of the promise of love.

This is how traditions are being renewed or even created from scratch.  In addition, I would like to mention another, perhaps less striking but even more important Czech tradition and integral part of their culture — beer.

Beer drinking has been a part of Czech culture through the centuries, and in the Czech Republic a drinking beer is not simply an alcoholic beverage — it is an institution. Beer gardens and pubs — with their original atmosphere, their excellent beer and accompanying traditions, such as special food and drinking songs with their intense camaraderie, not to mention the way the Czechs consume beer — survived the Soviet invasion and nearly a half century of communism. Traditional pubs managed to survive.

Socializing with beer, in Prague

(Sadly enough, this honorable Czech institution surrounding beer is undergoing yet another assault – this time by those who decided to ‘multiculturalize’ it or to  submerge it in the fast food culture imported from America. There are fewer traditional pubs than five years ago, and there is a growing tendency emanating from some official quarters to treat beer drinking as a dangerous dependency that leads to alcoholism).

Speaking of the latter, it is yet another sad sign of our times. Unlike drugs (which had been virtually unknown in Europe prior to their export from Asia and Americas), alcohol, especially wine (a gift to humanity from the gods, as the Ancient Greeks put it) has been an essentially European tradition. Whereas drug consumption is basically alien to the European temperament and constitution, alcohol has been a natural and integral part of Western culture that has always agreed with any normal, well-balanced man.

All the assaults on it are relatively recent inventions. It is no wonder that modern cultural Marxist-Internationalists attack it with such force, since wine is a common aspect of traditional socializing in European societies. Unlike drugs, wine as an aspect of traditional socializing doesn’t destroy people, turn them into wrecks, or lead to the deaths of thousands of young people. Unlike the illicit trade in cocaine and other narcotics, fantastic riches cannot be made on wine. The wine drinker (or beer drinker, for that matter) is not a type of person who would go and ‘start a revolution’ for a sake of minorities or internationalism. Quite the opposite.

You cannot influence him easily for he is basically a happy fellow who is content with himself, who loves his food and his leisure, who values good old traditions and who definitely prefers the company of his friends to that of some stoned ‘comrades’. He is not easily cajoled or steered into revolutionary action—possibly a defect in an age when revolution against regnant multiculturalism is definitely in order. Brought up to appreciate and handle good drink correctly, he is neither prone to poisoning nor to madness. That is why teaching one’s own child how to handle alcohol has become a crime punishable  by law. Don’t teach your kids any traditions!

There is another aspect of traditional values that become extremely vague and distorted these days. I am talking about traditions of European charity.

I guess, not many people nowadays realize that the very concept of charitable action towards stranger originates in Northern Europe. It had been a good tradition for centuries to let a stranger sleep in your house (or at least in your barn). You simply could not turn a stranger away in wintertime for you knew that by doing so you were signing his death warrant. Thus, a tradition of letting a stranger spend a night under your roof had been common in all the regions of Scandinavia and Northern Russia.

Of course, the present day rationalized explanation of every cultural phenomenon tells us that this tradition was largely an adaptation to the harsh climate and that factor supposedly helped to shape such an outlook. But I think that the roots of this practice are much deeper than that. Harsh climate or indeed harsh living conditions are not limited to the Northern hemisphere, but the idea of a charitable obligation toward strangers is very much unique to the West. It is interesting to note that despite multiculturalism with its social alienation and mutual mistrust, a certain feeling of responsibility for welfare of a stranger is still alive in the mind of the Western man. Unfortunately, Western traditions of communal welfare that had resulted in creation of the welfare state societies also brought into existence horrendous abuses and further disenchantment with traditional ideas of charity and mutual help.

Here, I must add that the very idea of the welfare society, no matter how it had been envisioned originally, did not escape later onslaught of Marxism ideology. A new brand of ‘enlightened’ or ‘humane’ socialism began to create new type of Western man — a man without a sense of traditions or responsibility. ‘Why bother with charity if the State already takes care of the poor?’ ‘It is the responsibility of the State, not mine.’

This type of thinking now common in all present day Social Welfare states in the West. Nevertheless, it might be still considered pretty mild compared to the outlook found under true totalitarian regimes. The former Soviet Union with its heterogeneous and artificially created multicultural population managed to destroy nearly all folk traditions and national roots. And those it had not succeeded in destroying completely it turned into mongrelized commercial version of the original.

To conclude, I would like to return again to the Finnish tradition of celebrating Vappu and Midsummer. As I noted, these holidays still retain their pagan roots. I find this fact very significant. It would be plainly näive to proselytize a New Paganism or indeed anything resembling a spiritual revival of the old days. In my mind, these traditions have always been intertwined with folk epics, folk tales and legends that carry much of cultural heritage. Take an ancient Karelian epic ‘Kalevala’ or Nordic legends, or even later simple folk tales. The world, born out of the Golden Egg, affairs of Aryan Gods, heroes and explorers of ancient times… not to mention the fact that these tales speak of the mysteries of our Aryan world creation. They portray true heroes, men of action and honor. What a sharp contrast with the Arabic folk tales for example, such as stories of Hodja Nasreddin that celebrate the wit of a con artist, or thousands of Chinese folk ghost stories. But in our present day Western societies, parents do not tell their children folk tales at bedtime because they don’t know them and they hardly care.

On the other hand, there is indeed something that lies at the very core of the Western man that is still alive and active and which manifests itself through a variety of ways and traditions. How is it that we find a fire so fascinating? There is a continued fascination with personal heroism, honor, and altruism; with sense of fairness, with deep belief in what is right and what is wrong, and also a deep belief in personal merit.

These feelings, beliefs and convictions haven’t been lost to us or erased in us completely despite all attempts to do otherwise. It is indeed like Beltane festivals that keep springing up. Well then, let us keep our Beltane fires burning!

There is nothing wrong with the people themselves. Most AIPAC people are not ideological. They don’t see themselves as right wing. They’re mostly moderate Democrats. They just want to do something for Israel. They want to feel connected to Israel. They go to their synagogue dinner, they go to the Federation dinner, and they go to the AIPAC dinner. (Haaretz, “Is archliberal Peter Beinart good for the Jews?“)

A recurrent theme at TOO is that Diaspora Jews are engaged in hypocrisy—supporting apartheid Israel bent on ethnic cleansing and oppression of Palestinians, with a Jews-only immigration policy, while supporting America as  a proposition nation with no ethnic identity, massive non-White immigration, and vilifying any manifestations of ethnic/racial identity by Whites. My image of AIPAC supporters was that they are conscious gung-ho supporters of settlers, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid—the technical term is ‘neocon’. But Beinart seems  to be saying that American Jews simply have a blind spot. The hypocrisy fails to register with them. They are good liberals who will vote for Obama and just want to support Israel; they don’t pay much attention to what Israel does, or their attitudes are shaped by the AIPAC propaganda machine. In a rather gentle way, Beinart is trying to get them to see their hypocrisy, probably to no avail.

So these liberal Democrats go to an AIPAC conference and get to experience some real power, as pretty much the entire American political class comes on bended knee to

tell you how great you are, and to tell you what you want to hear. For WASPs, it wouldn’t be such a powerful experience. For Jews, especially older Jews, it’s a very powerful experience, especially when you tell people that you’re using this power to save the Jewish people in the way that your parents and grandparents couldn’t in the 1940s.

Hmmm. WASP power is far more apparent than real, since they have been displaced in pretty much all the elite positions in America. Hence the title of Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.  On the other hand, AIPAC is an awesome display of power by the new elite. And with power goes the prerogative of making war, as we have become all too aware of in the last 20 years.

Beinart’s basic proposal that American Jews are tuning out of supporting Israel as it heads down the path of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. But that is at least questionable. Isi Liebler, a prominent Australian Zionist now living in Israel, begs to differ. Liebler, who labels Netanyahu a “centrist,” writes that “a recent poll conducted by supporters of President Obama designed to understate the role of Israel as a factor determining how American Jews vote. But even this poll recognized that 73% of all Jews – not merely the committed ones – considered that Netanyahu, the bête noir of left liberals, represented ‘true Jewish values’” (“Most Israelis and Jews are under no illusions”).

I won’t comment on what this says about Jewish values, but it should be noted that there is a history where Diaspora Jews rally around the (Israeli) flag in a crisis. For example, many Jews who seemed indifferent to Israel suddenly became obsessed with the fate of Israel during the wars of 1967 and 1973. And while Liebler describes Netanyahu as a centrist, Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist, describes him (more accurately) as “a Holocaust-obsessed fantasist, out of contact with reality, distrusting all Goyim, trying to follow in the footsteps of a rigid and extremist father [Benzion Netanyahu]– altogether a dangerous person to lead a nation in a real crisis.”

Dangerous for the entire world. Just recently Israel took possession of its fourth nuclear-capable submarine from Germany—a development that should scare pretty much everyone. Without doubt, the fanatics are now in control in Israel and, given Israeli demographics ,this will only get worse.

Was the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple an Act of Divine Vengeance?

At least one mainstream scholar, GWH Lampe, acknowledges that the belief “that the fall of Jerusalem avenged Christ’s death became a commonplace of later Christian apologetic.”[1]  Most famously, Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) declared that “the Jews who slew Him, and would not believe in Him…were yet more miserably wasted by the Romans, and utterly rooted out from their kingdom” to be “dispersed through the lands” as “a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ.”  Augustine specifically rejects the notion that an “inseparable relationship” exists between Old Israel and the Christian church: “those Israelites who persist in being His enemies…shall forever remain in the separation which is here foretold.”[2]

The church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339 AD) was of a like mind; he thought it fitting that three million Jews thronged into Jersusalem, “as if to a prison” to “receive the destruction meted out by divine justice.”  He related some of the horrors of that tragedy “so that readers may learn how quickly God’s punishment followed their crime against Christ.”  Moreover, Eusebius, attributed to Josephus the belief that these “things happened to the Jews as retribution for James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus who was called Christ, for the Jews killed him despite his great righteousness.”[3]  Justin Martyr (100–165 AD) agreed that it was right and just that Jerusalem was destroyed for the Jews “killed the Righteous One and his prophets before him.”  Origen and Tertullian also shared that view.[4]  Melito of Sardis (died ca 180 AD) gave a compelling poetic expression to the view that the Jews had received their just deserts when “the Lord thundered out of heaven, and the Highest gave voice” to his vengeful wrath against Old Israel by dashing the Temple to the ground.[5]

Perhaps out of concern “that the sentiments” he reports might “be taken as they stand as a record of a present-day Christian’s views,” Lampe downplays the impact of the Temple’s destruction upon early Christian communities.  He points out that “the literature of the Christian movement contains relatively few allusions to the fall of Jerusalem.”[6]   At the same time, however, Lampe implies that such retrospective uninterest followed from the fact that well before AD 70 Christians had come to regard the eventual destruction of the Temple “as a foregone conclusion.”[7]  For Christians in the Gentile world, “as indeed for Jewish Christians as well, the decisive event which vindicated Jesus as the Christ…was not the destruction of his enemies but his resurrection from the dead and his exaltation to God’s right hand.”  Paul’s teaching had already established the congregation of the Christian people as the holy temple of God.  The Jerusalem Temple was replaced “by a spiritual or heavenly temple ‘not made with hands.’”  After the turn of the first century, the events of the year 70 were soon viewed “as a prelude to the even more final and crushing judgement of God executed in 135 AD against the revolutionaries who waged a Second Jewish War against Rome.  After that tumultuous series of events, the emphasis of the early church necessarily turned away from the Jewish Question to the more pressing problems associated with the social construction of the new people of God.[8]

In the altered circumstances of the second century, the meaning of AD 70 had more to do with defining the unique character of the Christian people than with divine vengeance on rebellious Jews.

2. Did the destruction of the Temple inaugurate a New Covenant Creation?

On the dubious assumption that the gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem, Lampe believes that New Testament prophecies of the doom of the Temple were most likely vaticinia post eventum (ie a passage in the form of a prediction of an event already in the author’s past).  But he does concede that within three or four decades after AD 70 “the separation of the Jewish Christians from Judaism became complete.”[9]  Indeed, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas (ca 100 AD) casts doubt on the idea that God ever made a binding covenant with Old Israel.  According to this document, the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ annulled the Law of Moses “that the new law…being free from the yoke of constraint, might have its oblation not made by human hands.”  God had offered a covenant to the people of Old Israel “but they themselves were not found worthy to receive it by reason of their sins.”  The new “spiritual temple built up to the Lord” required a new people.  “Before we believed on God,” the old temple “built by hands…was full of idolatry and was a house of demons.”  Because the people of Israel were terminally corrupt and weak, their worldly Temple “was pulled down by their enemies.”[10]  Tertullian was yet another patristic writer holding that the destruction of the Temple was the fulfilment of biblical prophesies of a new spiritual Israel.[11]  But Eusebius of Caesarea provided the most comprehensive account of how the fall ofJerusalem signalled the supersession of the Old Covenant by Christ’s New Covenant creation.

In his Proof of the Gospels, Eusebius demonstrated that the Mosaic covenant was destined from its inception to be superseded by a new covenant that “could be applicable to all nations and to men in the uttermost parts of the earth.”  Because the Mosaic Law prescribed a particular place inaccessible to anyone living far away from Judea as the venue for the ritual worship of God, it can only be “applicable to the Jews, but not to all of them, and certainly not to the dispersed (among the Gentiles), only in fact to the inhabitants of Palestine.”  The “ideal of the new covenant” was intended to “be helpful to the life of all nations.”  Eusebius contends that Moses expected the Jews “to receive the new covenant announced by Christ.”  Those who refused fell under Moses’ curse.  In “due course Christ sojourned in this life, and the teaching of the new covenant was borne to all nations, and at once the Romans besieged Jerusalem, and destroyed it and the Temple there.”  At that moment, according to Eusebius, “the whole of the Mosaic Law was abolished, with all that remained of the old covenant, and the curse passed over to the lawbreakers, because they obeyed Moses’ law when its time had gone by.”[12]

It is clear for Eusebius that “the Advent of Christ and the call of the Gentiles would be accompanied by the total collapse and ruin of the whole Jewish race.”  Gentiles to the farthest end of the earth would become a new people living under a new covenant.[13]  But yet another issue arises out of the biblical prophecies discussed by Eusebius:

3. Did Christ come on ‘clouds of heaven’—the Parousia—to oversee the destruction of the Temple?

In his Church History, Eusebius tells the story of how James, the brother of Jesus, died at the hands of the scribes and Pharisees.  He quotes from an account of James’ interrogation written by Hegessipus in which James is reported to have said that the Son of Man “is sitting in heaven at the right hand of the Great Power, and he will come on the clouds of heaven.”[14] Such language immediately calls to mind New Testament assurances (e.g., Revelation 22:7) that the time of Christ’s Second Coming was near.  In his Proof of the Gospel, Eusebius suggests that the coming of Christ had occurred before his own time at the fall of theTemple.  It must be noted, however, that Eusebius treats the entire period from the advent of Christ to the destruction of theTemple in AD 70 as a single unified episode identified as the “coming.”

Indeed, Eusebius links the coming of Christ with a much wider process of world-historical “synchronization” in which the entire world of classical antiquity was unified under Roman rule.  The creation of the Roman Empire extending to the ends of the earth was the essential historical precondition for the call to all the Gentile nations of the oikumene.  It was not by “human accident that the greater part of the nations of the world” were gathered together in one empire just as God arranged “the beginning of teaching about our Saviour.”  The rulers of the Jewish people were destined “to be shaken by the Descent of the Lord from heaven.”  The “Descent of the Word” is related to “the impiety of the Jews and the destruction falling upon them.”  Whether Eusebius believed in another as yet future parousia is unclear since he refers to such an event in another context not obviously related to the fall of Jerusalem.  But he certainly associates the sufferings of the Jews during the siege with “the days of the Lord.”  He cites a prophecy that the Lord will stand in that day on the Mount of Olives which he takes to be a reference to the church “established by God after the fall of Jerusalem.”  After “the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ” the city of the Jews, “Jerusalem itself and the whole system and institutions of the Mosaic worship were destroyed.”[15]

It seems clear, therefore, that Eusebius connects “fire and chariots with the coming of Christ at the siege of Jerusalem.”[16]  There remains another question, however; namely:

4. Did some or all of the patristic writers embrace the full preterist belief in fulfilled eschatology?

There was no consensus among the patristic writers on eschatological issues.  Very early on, Barnabas advanced a putatively precise, futurist vision of the millennium, declaring “that in six thousand years [beginning with the Genesis creation story] the Lord shall bring all things to an end.”[17]  Other prominent patristic writers also declined to associate the fall of Jerusalem with the Second Coming of Christ.  Irenaeus and Justin Martyr were among those who favoured a futurist eschatology.  On the other hand, Eusebius gives his readers the strong impression that the biblical hope of Israel was fulfilled completely in the forty years from the passion of Christ to the final doom of the Jerusalem Temple.  It was only after “the period of the Romans, in whose time the Jewish Temple was burnt for the second time” that the Lord became “King of all the earth;” it was then that “His Name encircle[d] the whole earth and the wilderness.”  We must agree, Eusebius concluded, “that the King who was prophesied, the Christ of God, has come, since the signs of His coming have been…clearly fulfilled.”[18]

Conclusion

Using the patristic writers as a benchmark of Christian orthodoxy, it is difficult to sustain the charge that contemporary preterism is heretical.  To the extent that both the patristic writers and preterism lend support to supersessionism, it is those who deny the complete theological separation of Christianity from the revolutionary Jews who reject Christ who have departed from Christian orthodoxy.  Remarkably enough, no shame attaches to this contemporary brand of heresy.  On the contrary, anti-supersessionists such as R. Kendall Soulen freely acknowledge that “the standard canonical narrative” established by patristic writers such as Justin and Irenaeus “makes it appear self-evident that the true Israel of God is a spiritual rather than a carnal community.”[19]

Soulen argues that, precisely because “supersessionism has shaped the narrative and doctrinal structure of classical Christian theology in fundamental and systematic ways,” it has become necessary to reevaluate “the whole body of classical Christian divinity.”[20]  As might be expected, however, Soulen simply ignores the events of AD 70.  Only by scrubbing the historical record clean of the burning of the Temple and its utter desolation can contemporary Christians be persuaded to embrace “the synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9) as the eternally blameless victim of tyranny and oppression at the hands of the Church down through the ages.  For far too long now, Anglo-Saxon Protestants have dismissed the teachings of the patristic writers on the Jewish Question as an expression of unthinking prejudice.  It is now well past time to rethink the apocalyptic meaning of the fall of Jerusalem in the first century.  Neither the First nor the Second Holocaust (of the Second World War) should be closed off any longer to historical investigation and theological reflection simply “for fear of the Jews” (John 7:13).

Andrew Fraser is a former law teacher and the author of The WASP Question: An Essay on the Biocultural Evolution, Present Predicament, and Future Prospects of the Invisible Race (Arktos Media, 2011)

Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Francesco Hayez

Introduction

Trudy Pert suggests that the crisis of modern Christianity deepened when mid-nineteenth century Protestant theologians embraced the higher criticism.  Especially in Germany, the traditional devotional approach to the Bible was replaced by the “objective” techniques of historical and literary criticism.  As a consequence, educated Christians turned their attention away from the “supernatural Christ” to the “historical Jesus.”  A new sort of Kulturprotestantismus, or cultural Christianity, was born: Jesus Christ became a teacher of ethics rather than the incarnation of the divine.  The crisis was real enough; it reflects a continuing failure by Christians to recognize the pivotal moment when the “supernatural Christ” burst back into human history to avenge both the crucifixion of the “historical Jesus” and the persecution of his faithful followers during their forty year mission to the ends of the earth.

In AD 70, Roman armies under Titus besieged Jerusalem to crush a long-running Jewish rebellion.  Their triumph was a bloody affair; not only was the city sacked and pillaged but, according to the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus, the dead, most of whom “were pure and holy” Jews, numbered over one million.[i]  The Romans also systematically destroyed the massive Temple complex.  In doing so, they ripped out the redemptive heart of Old Israel.  The massive Temple complex was the hub around which revolved the ritual observance of the Mosaic Law underlying Israel’s covenant with Yahweh.  For Jews and Romans, alike, the destruction of the Temple was an act of world-historical significance.  But the meaning of that cataclysmic event was not confined to the realm of secular history.

Divine providence played a leading role in the fall of Jerusalem.  Certainly, the disaster that befell the Jews came as no surprise to first century Christians.  Forty years earlier, standing outside the Temple with his disciples, Christ had foreseen that “not one stone here will be left on another” when he came again at the “end of the age.  The Day of the Lord’s return was not to occur in some far distant future, perhaps thousands of years later.  Christ assured the crowds who heard him that “this generation will certainly not pass away until these things have happened.”(Matthew 24:2-3, 34)  In the period between the advent of Christ and his return in AD 70, one of the most important things to happen to Old Israel was the profound transformation in what it meant to be a Jew.

During Christ’s ministry it was already becoming clear that the only truly righteous Jews, the saving remnant of Israel, were those faithful to the risen Christ.  On the eve of the destruction of the Temple, Christ tells John of Patmos that those “who claim to be Jews though they are not, but are liars” are in reality the “synagogue of Satan.” (Revelation 3:9)  As E. Michael Jones observes, the “Jews” who rejected Christ effectively redefined themselves; they transformed Judaism into a false religion in which carnal Israel became its own Messiah.[ii]

Prior to the Vatican II Council in the Sixties, Roman Catholic tradition held that God was through with Israel at the Cross and “that Jews were collectively cursed for all time because of the crucifixion.”  The crucifixion, therefore, was seen as the central event in the redemptive history of mankind.  The problem with this interpretation is that the Mosaic Law remained in force until the destruction of the Temple.  Jewish Christians were still circumcised in the flesh as well as in the heart.  Indeed, Christ had made it clear that not one jot or one tittle of the Law would be disturbed until the end of the age when all of God’s promises to Israel were to have been fulfilled (Matthew 5:18). The preordained end of Old Israel came when God used the Roman armies to demolish the Temple; only then did the Law cease to bind the New Israel.  It was at that historical moment—not in our still distant future—that Christ came again in the glory of the Father.  This was the parousia (the Second Coming in modern parlance) prophesied by the inspired writers of the New Testament.

The Last Judgement

It was at the parousia that Christ rendered his final judgement on Old Israel.  It was then that the Lord avenged, fully and completely, the Jewish crime of deicide and the subsequent persecution of the early church.  The end of the Old Covenant left the widely-scattered Jewish diaspora high and dry.  Those who refused to accept the New Covenant were compelled to re-invent Judaism as a highly particularistic ethno-religion younger than and set in opposition to Christianity.

The Talmud became “the defining document” of those who insisted that the advent of Christ had changed nothing and that the Old Covenant remained valid.  Two versions of those rabbinical writings developed over several centuries; the one reached its final form in fifth century Palestine, the other was completed in Babylon in the seventh century AD.  Modern Judaism, whether it flatly rejects the Messiah or seeks instead to reclaim a merely mortal, “kosher Jesus,” remains in a permanent state of denial, refusing to accept that God was finished with Old Israel in AD 70.  For Christians, of course, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple marked the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.  After the demolition of the Temple, the gospel found a new spiritual home in the Christian nations which became the true, spiritual, seed of Abraham.

In fact, the destruction of the Temple was the consummation of the historical/redemptive process that began with the advent of Christ, his ministry, death and resurrection and was continued by the apostles after down to the end of the Old Covenant age in AD 70.  These were the last days (Greek: eschaton) of the Jewish age foreseen by the Old Testament prophets; they marked the fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel.  Salvation was indeed from the Jews (John 4:22) but those who rejected Jesus the Christ were no longer the faithful seed of Abraham; instead, Christ declared, they belonged to their “father, the devil.”  Not surprisingly, therefore, they carried out their father’s desire by killing Jesus (John 8:44).  But the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ or even the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2) did not in themselves secure the final victory of Christ over the synagogue of Satan.

Only in AD 70 when the gospel of the kingdom had been preached to the whole world (Greek: oikumene) did the time and the season become ripe for the fateful intersection of secular and redemptive history which inaugurated the Christian age.  In the New Jerusalem that arose out of the ashes of the Old, the leaves of the tree of life were for the healing of all nations not just carnal Israel.  Anchored in the hearts of Christ’s faithful followers, the early church (ie the spiritual Body of Christ) burst into history as a temple not made with hands.

Unfortunately, few Christian theologians now attach more than a merely “local” importance to the first-century destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.  Jews, of course, continue to deny the apocalyptic significance and divine provenance of what can be called the First Holocaust.  Any suggestion that the Roman armies which laid waste to Jerusalem were the providential instrument of divine vengeance designed to punish the Jews for the crime of deicide is automatically labelled anti-Semitic.

Most liberal Protestants and post-Vatican II Catholics hew to the philo-Semitic party line, denouncing “the doctrine of supersession” for teaching (falsely they say) that Jews have been rightly punished for the sin of rejecting their Messiah.  Theology texts routinely decry the examples of “this teaching and its terrible consequences” that “can be found in all periods of church history.”[iii]  Most Christians prefer to shut their eyes to the theological meaning of the terrible events of AD 70.

Progressive theologians, in particular, dare not acknowledge that the destruction of the Temple amounted to a decisive victory of the early church over the synagogue of Satan—the historical moment when Yahweh’s Old Covenant with ethnic Israel was superseded by the New Covenant creation of Christ’s spiritual kingdom.  Ignoring the fiery holocaust which consumed the Temple, mainline Protestant intellectuals piously affirm the allegedly “deep and inseparable relationship of Israel and the church.”[iv]  This postmodern, “Judeo-Christian” ideology finds little support either in the Bible or in the writings of the early church fathers.

Preterism versus Futurism

For much of the postwar era, the ruling liberal consensus successfully relegated the events of AD 70 to the status of a historical footnote.  In recent years, however, a Bible studies movement known as “preterism” (from the Latin, preter meaning “past”) has presented a serious challenge to academic orthodoxy.  For preterists, the cataclysmic collapse of ancient Judaism in AD 70 was the preordained fulfilment of biblical prophecies promising the creation of a new heaven and new earth.  In particular, they interpret the Book of Revelation as a prophecy of the disaster that was to befall Old Jerusalem in the then very near future.  Revelation thus brings to a close the biblical story of the old heaven and the old earth which began with the creation of the cosmic temple in the Book of Genesis.  AD 70 marks the end of the transition from the Old to the New Covenant, the moment when the Kingdom of Christ overturns, once and for all, the racially exclusive Law of Moses by opening its doors not just to Jews but to all nations.[v]

Because preterists consign Old Covenant Israel to the dustbin of history, their “fulfilled eschatology” has been denounced as heretical, especially by evangelical Protestants and Christian Zionists who cling to an apocalyptic vision of the end times associated with a still future Second Coming of Christ.  Pre-millenial dispensationalists interpret the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 as a sign that the Christian age will end with the imminent return of Jesus to rule from a physical throne in a rebuilt Temple in Old Jerusalem.  Preterists, on the other hand, flatly deny that the Jews are still God’s chosen people.  Not only does modern Israel not possess a divinely-ordained title to Palestine, but the Kingdom of God established in AD 70 has no end.

The Bible, therefore, is the story of how the Kingdom was born into a world without end as well as a warrant authorizing the church to extend its spiritual dominion over all the nations of the earth.  But the world will not end tomorrow or even in the next century.  In fact, it is likely to endure for millions more years; there is, therefore, no urgent need to establish the universal dominion of the Kingdom any time soon.  Indeed, that goal is now utterly beyond reach, given the weakened condition of modern Christianity.  The spiritual enfeeblement of Christendom is in large part the consequence of the futurist eschatology that most Christians now profess.  Western Christians look to the church mainly for an assurance of personal salvation in a hopelessly sinful and unrepentant world.

Churches have become private, voluntary associations; the Old Faith has been pushed out of the public square and religious experience is confined to the private, inner life of individuals.  The Bible, accordingly, has ceased to be the sacred charter of an ecclesiastical authority presiding over a way of life, a communion, and faith practiced in public and in private by all manner of men and women.  For mainline Protestants, the Bible is merely the man-made medium through which we hear human witnesses to the Word of God, the otherwise inaccessible divine Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ.  Liberal theology no longer views the Bible as a warrant to baptize all the nations so as to expand the spiritual dominion of Christendom to the ends of the earth.  Those who look to Christ’s Second Coming sometime in our future are unable to make coherent sense out of either Genesis or the Book of Revelation which deal, respectively, with the beginning and the end of Old Israel.  Nor can they account for the time-texts elsewhere in the New Testament suggesting that Christ would return on a cloud of glory before the present generation of those listening to him had passed away.

In recent decades, the preterist tradition has helped Christians to rediscover the full meaning of the Word of God.  Clearly, if the eschatological prophecies concerning the last days of Israel and the coming of the Kingdom were fulfilled with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, Christians must think more deeply about the future.  For preterists, the Kingdom of God is a presently existing reality in a world without end.  Within the preterist tradition, therefore, the Bible is recovering its former status as the foundation charter of the new covenant creation, not as a fossilized text, but as the seedbed for the renewed spiritual dominion of Christendom.

The dominion theology implicit in preterism not only provides a warrant for the eventual conversion of the Jews; it mandates “nothing less than the complete conversion of our planet through the gospel of Jesus Christ.”  The restoration of Christendom cannot be limited to the quest for mere personal salvation or a quick religious “fix” for depressed and downtrodden individuals.  It offers healing to the nations.  For almost two thousand years, those who call themselves Jews have resisted and denied the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  Of all peoples, therefore, Jews have the greatest need for the healing power of his saving grace.

Needless to say, contemporary Jews condemn campaigns to convert them as an intolerable recrudescence of Christian anti-Semitism.  In an effort to ward off such accusations from Jews and the inevitable charges of heresy coming from their fellow Christians, some preterist writers seek support for their interpretations of the events of AD 70, not just in the Bible, but in the writings of the early church fathers.[vi]  The remainder of this essay assesses whether patristic writings do lend weight to the preterist tradition.  We will seek answers to four questions that arise out of preterist interpretations of the fall of Jerusalem.

Go to Part 2.