Jewish Journalism: A TOO Case File, Part 1

One of the favored tactics of our Hebrew friends at the ADL, the SPLC, and similar organizations is the ‘Intelligence Report,’ or ‘Case File,’ on a particular individual who engages in activities unconducive to Jewish aims and aspirations. These ‘Intelligence Reports’ are normally, in fact, far from intelligent, and usually consist of a mug-shot like photograph accompanied by several quotes taken out of context, clumsy clichés, and more than a little blatant falsehood. The aim, however, is fairly obvious — to mimic in every fashion the feel and style of a criminal case-file and thereby taint the reputation of even the most law-abiding citizen.

For some time now I have felt that something similar might be useful to have at TOO. At this site we have no shortage of excellent and well-informed commentary on the problems faced by Whites not just in the United States but also internationally. But what I’d like to contribute here is something just a little different from the usual — an illustrative but individual case file examining the work of a particular Jewish journalist. Other, similar, reports on other individuals will follow over time. Unlike the ADL or the SPLC, the aim of the report provided here is not to mimic a criminal case file, but instead to contextualize, explain and, most importantly, expose the aims and methods of certain Jewish activists. I also diverge from the path taken by the above-mentioned organizations in that I rely heavily on scholarly sources, checkable facts, and verifiable and contextualized quotations.

Jews and Journalism: Some Historical Context

In 1868 the Prussian romance writer Hermann Goedsche published a popular novel, Biarritz, under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe. The book related the tale of an occult meeting of representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel in a Prague cemetery, and has since become notorious as providing the template for the much-maligned Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In one of the novel’s more notable passages, a rabbi in charge of the meeting muses on Jewish ambitions for seizure and use of the press. The rabbi informs his co-conspirators:

If gold is the first power in this world, the second is undeniably the press. … Our people must become the editors of all daily newspapers in all countries. Our possession of gold, our skill in devising means of exploiting mercenary instincts, will make us the arbiters of public opinion and enable us to dominate the masses. … We shall dictate to the world what it is to have faith in, what it is to honor, and what it is to curse. … Once we are absolute masters of the press, we will be able to transform ideas about honor, about virtue, about uprightness of character, we will be able to deal a blow against the family, and we will be able to achieve its disintegration. … We shall declare open war on everything that people respect and venerate.[1]

Goedsche’s work has gone down in mainstream, Jewish-endorsed, history as the twisted imaginings of a borderline psychopath. Norman Cohn, for example, describes Biarritz as a “pathological fantasy.”[2] Receiving considerably less scholarly attention are the very real events which inspired Goedsche — the dramatic seizure of the European mass press in its infancy by Jews. Steven Beller, one of the few academics to devote serious attention to the activities of Jews in the press in mid-nineteenth century Central Europe writes that:

It is almost a cliché to say that the Viennese liberal press was very Jewish. The problem with anti-Semitic attacks on the ‘Jewish press’ was that, in Vienna at least, they were based on hard fact. All the major daily newspapers of the liberal press were either owned or edited by people of Jewish descent.[3]

Outside of ownership and editorship, the presence of Jews in the lower ranks of the press was also at an astonishing level. Beller analyzed the Festschrift of the journalists’ and writers’ society in Vienna, Concordia, which contains a list of all the members of the society from its inception in 1859 to the year 1909 — the year of the Festschrift’s publication. The results indicated that 51.5 per cent of members were indisputably Jews. Including just half of those with surnames that indicated they were ‘probably’ Jewish, the figure jumps to 63.2 per cent.[4] The figures are remarkable given that the Jewish population of Vienna never exceeded nine per cent of the city’s total during the same period.

In Germany, the situation was no different. Peter Pulzer writes that in Wilhelmine-era Germany “there was no profession that was more completely dominated by Jews than journalism.”[5] Crucially, many of these journalists departed from the practice of merely ‘reporting’ news, and became what the contemporary Jewish writer Karl Kraus described as “Creators,” or manipulators of the public mood and public tastes.[6]

Internationally, the Jewish Paul Reuter had founded the Reuter’s news agency and Jews more generally had assumed a dominant position in the telegraphic agencies. In the United States, Jewish dominance of the news media formed a major aspect of Henry Ford’s The International Jew, with Ford remarking:

The number of Jewish contributors to the Press of the United States makes another interesting statistical bit. It would be sheer prejudice to make objectionable mention of many Jewish journalists and writers, and they come within the scope of this study only as they have shown themselves to be the watchful agents and active servants of the System. This is what many of them are.

In England during the same period Joseph Moses Levy, owner of the Sunday Times, bought The Daily Telegraph. Levy’s acquisition of The Daily Telegraph was merely the start of a wider trend — the passing of the English press into the hands of Jewish, or Jewish-dominated financial syndicates. As one historian has noted:

Mrs Rachel Beer née Sassoon owned and edited the Sunday Times between 1893 and 1904 and had an interest in the Observer. We also know that Harry Oppenheim was a prominent shareholder and a member of the financial syndicate which ran the Liberal Daily News. … Harry Marks founded the Financial News in 1884 and edited it himself. … More significant to hostile critics interested in the role of Jews in Britain was the fact that the Levy-Lawson family ran the Daily Telegraph, that Sir Alfred Mond provided the finance for the Westminster Gazette and after 1910 controlled the English Review, and that Reuter’s news agency was the principal supplier of information on world events to the British press.[7]

England, too, had its share of “watchful agents and active servants of the System.” One of the most notable examples was the journalist Lucien Wolf (1857–1930). Wolf wrote for several British newspapers, often under pseudonyms, and styled himself as an expert on foreign affairs and diplomacy. It was Wolf, an arch journalistic illusionist, who brought an international cast of Jewish contacts into play in order to orchestrate the monumental magic trick of convincing the world that Jews were being massacred across the Russian empire. It was Wolf who wrote, from first word to last, the defamatory and fictitious pamphlet “Darkest Russia,” and who used his position at the London Times and in the international telegraph agencies to give his fabrication legitimacy and popularity among the gullible masses.[8] But, of course, although it has deep roots, the problem of “watchful agents and active servants of the System,” is not merely historical. It is contemporary. And we now turn our attention to one such agent, still plying his trade today.

Go to Part 2 of 2.


1 Quoted in S.J. Whitfield, American Space, Jewish Time: Essays in Modern Culture and Politics (M.E. Sharpe, 1996), p.131.

2 Quoted in L. Donskis, Forms of Hatred: The Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature (Value Inquiry Book, 2003), p.41.

3 S. Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.38.

4 Ibid, p.39.

5 P. Reitter, The Anti-Journalist:Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2008), p.61.

6 Ibid, p.59.

7 H.A. Strauss, Hostages of Modernization: Current Research on Antisemitism (Walter de Gruyter, 1992), p.335.

8 B. Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.47.

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