The Jewish Question

The argument that Jews have acquired excessive influence in a ‘host’ society has appeared in all the world’s continents, and has surfaced with frequency from Antiquity to ‘post-modernity.’ Of all social, political, and economic subjects, including race and gender, few have provoked more controversy, or conjured up a more powerful set of mental images and emotional responses, than the Jewish Question. The issue of Jewish influence is both powerful and elusive, profound and yet somehow obscure. In the course of its journey through the centuries, and travels across the oceans, approaches to the Jewish Question have at times acquired an esoteric and mystical character. Alternately, even in the depths of Antiquity we find analyses of this subject that are strikingly clinical and ‘modern’ in their sociological observations. At all times, however, and in all locations, a robust and insidious taboo has pushed back against such investigations, driving the subject to the periphery of acceptable discussion, or beyond. The Jewish Question is thus the proverbial anvil, having worn out a thousand hammers.

At time of this writing, the taboo remains strong. Today, no group of people on earth enjoys legal protection of its historical narrative to the extent enjoyed by the Jews. Publicly refusing to accept the claim that six million Jews were systematically executed during World War Two, a significant proportion of them via specially constructed gas chambers, is a criminal offence in more than fifteen European countries. An even stronger legal aspect of the taboo is the growth and spread of ‘hate speech’ legislation, versions of which have been adopted by almost every Western nation. These ‘group libel’ laws protect not only the Jewish historical narrative, but also the contemporary Jewish population, from critique. Moreover, Jews enjoy uniquely positive portrayals in the media, are uniformly and lavishly praised by the political establishment, and enjoy special police protection at many of their institutions. Along with legal intervention from the state, dissent from such patterns of praise is closely monitored and censored by a large number of international Jewish ‘anti-defamation’ bodies, some of which are explicitly Jewish and some of which strategically disguise their Jewish origins, leadership, or funding sources. The taboo can also be observed in the case of the State of Israel, which occupies one of the most incongruent and inexplicable positions in modern politics. Acting in every sense as an ethnostate, Israel nevertheless continues to enjoy the strenuous support of Western nations that have ritualized the disavowal of their own ethnic interests.

The Jewish Question, simply explained, consists of two enquiries: Do Jews possess an excessive influence in their host societies and, if so, what should be done about it? Most commentaries on the subject have focussed on the first question, leading the scholar John Klier to remark on one occasion that the assessment and critique of Jewish influence has throughout history been predominantly an intellectual pursuit. However, in pushing back against the taboo, even via the modest pursuit of research and the dissemination of one’s findings, one engages in activism of a sort. Indeed, one cannot expect to formulate a response to a problem if one cannot first convince others that a problem exists. The essence of the Jewish Question is therefore the argument that Jews do enjoy an excessive influence in their host societies, and that this excessive influence, for a large number of reasons, is highly problematic for those societies. These problems straddle all spheres of society — the cultural, the economic, and the political.

One might argue that a problem of a such a scale should be self-evident; that no taboo could conceivably veil an issue requiring pressing societal attention. A response would be that throughout history the problem was indeed self-evident, resulting in centuries of academic, cultural, and political discourse on the Jewish Question — a term that peaked in usage in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For a thousand years and more, the Jewish Question was not only self-evident, but urgently exigent. Populations clamored for action on it, the fate of economies rested on responses to it, and even kings couldn’t escape the implications of it. The slipping of the Jewish Question from public life is very recent, beginning in the 1950s. And the reasons for this slippage have not been that the issues of the past were resolved, but that sweeping changes in the nature of the Western nations have taken place. Chief among these changes was that the West stopped seeing external threats to its interests and began to see itself as a threat. Encouraged by parasitic and carefully constructed ideologies, the West turned inwards, issuing forms of rhetorical, cultural, and demographic violence upon itself. The Jewish Question became the ‘Whiteness Question.’ New values were adopted, and new ways of seeing. Among the latter was a new way of seeing the Jewish past. In a relentless wave of Western forgetfulness and mass self-recrimination, the Jews, long the villains of the European story, became its unblemished heroes. Europe, for the most part, is today a Zionist continent.

The taboo that masks the Jewish Question relies to a great extent on this new story, and the construction of the story has been monopolized in order to add to its strength and security. Jewish history produced in academia is dominated by Jewish scholars. The same applies to the history of anti-Semitism (rational hostility towards Jewish group behavior), and increasingly also to the scholarly discussion of ‘Whiteness’, race, ethnic identity, and immigration. The current dispensation provides a climate in which attempts by White scholars to investigate or publish on these themes would be viewed with suspicion, with these suspicions couched in claims of potential bias, or ‘unconscious prejudice.’ The real fear is that the status quo would be distorted, and that older narratives would resurface. Of course, no claims of bias can be made against Jews, who often boast of a uniquely objective perspective on society as both ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders.’ Similar patterns and boasts may be witnessed in media presentations on these subjects, and increasingly also in the development of legislation.

Europeans have for the most part already lost control of their own narrative, their own story. Having lost sight of their historical trajectory, they have lost sight of their interests. And having lost sight of their interests, they have lost sight of those acting against them. It is therefore imperative to start at the beginning, and to turn to the origins of the Jewish Question in Europe.

Europeans and Jews: An Historical Overview

Jews have settled among European host populations since ancient times. The oldest communities were in the urban centers of the Mediterranean, and a list of Jewish colonies in this area can be found in the First Book of Maccabees. In the early Roman empire clusters of Jews could be found as far north as Lyon, Bonn and Cologne.^[1] The economic nature of these communities was uniform, and similar to those in the East. Even prior to the Talmudic era, c.300–500 A.D., Jews had developed a strong interest and aptitude in commerce and banking. From its origins, the Jewish involvement in these spheres was regarded by host populations as malevolent and exploitative. In one of the earliest examples, a papyrus dated to 41 A.D., an Alexandrian merchant warns a friend to “beware of the Jews.”^[2] During the 4th century, Alexandria witnessed a number of anti-Jewish riots, nearly all of them provoked by accusations of economic exploitation.

While hostility towards Jews was common during the life of the Roman Empire, it was only later that the extent and nature of the Jewish Diaspora began to pose a ‘Jewish Question’ to the European people as a whole. Between the 5th and 10th centuries, Jewish trading posts took hold across Europe, from Cadiz and Toledo to the Baltic, Poland, and Ukraine. Crucially, this extensive network afforded the Jews a near total monopoly in the exchange of currency and information. Islamic and Christian civilizations during this period were bitterly opposed and traders from either faction were reluctant to carry goods into rival territory. Jews, enjoying relative tolerance from both civilizations, were able to carry goods from the Middle East into Europe, where Carolingian elites were particularly fond of purchasing luxury goods from Arab lands via Jewish merchants. Similarly, Jews were strategically positioned to overcome the legal obstacles of both civilizations to usury, an economic area they had refined to something of an art form in Babylon.

During the Carolingian Dynasty (c. 714–c.877), the Jewish population of Northwestern Europe evolved from a scattering of individual international traders to growing communities of local traders. The shift to local trade enabled the Jews to acquire an influential middleman role in European society, to which they added widespread engagement in credit operations. On this foundation of growing economic influence, the later Carolingian period also witnessed the development of the first symbiotic relationships between Jewish finance and European elites. This granted significant privileges and protections to Jews, who soon acquired elite status themselves. One of the first examples of such a relationship emerged in the 810s, when Agobard (c.779–840), the Archbishop of Lyon attempted to restrict the financial activities of Jews in his locality, and was confronted with royal power. Although many Jewish scholars have taken great pains to portray Agobard as a religious fanatic who agitated against Jews purely on the grounds they were not Christians, Jeremy Cohen concedes “Agobard objected to the privileged position that the Jews appeared to command in Frankish society.”^[3] Along with observations of supremacist attitudes among the Jews of Lyon, Agobard complained that the King of the Franks and co-Emperor with Charlemagne, Louis the Pious (778–840), had issued charters and appointed special officials to protect both Jews and their economic interests, and had turned a blind eye to the fact “the slave trade was run by Jews.”^[4] After repeated agitations on these grounds, Agobard and his priests were threatened by both Jews and royal officials in 826, with the result that some of the priests went into hiding. Agobard’s agitation, including his opposition to the policies of Louis the Pious, was ultimately a failure, resulting at one point in his personal exile. Perhaps even more so than when Muslims invaded Spain in 711, when “the Jews helped them overrun it,”^[5] the silencing of Agobard may be regarded as the birth of the Jews as a hostile elite in European society. Certainly it was the first major political victory for the taboo on Jewish influence.

Encouraged by the successes of financial-political pioneers like those in Lyon, significant numbers of Jews from southern Europe began a steady northern migration. Many gathered in the Rhine basin, forming the nucleus of what would later come to be known as ‘Ashkenazi’ Jewry. Expansion from there was rapid. A colony of Jewish financiers reached England in 1070, following on the heels of the Norman Conquest four years earlier. Although there is a lack of clear evidence, Jewish financiers enjoyed pre-existing relationships with Norman elites and Jewish money was very likely to have formed part of the invasion’s war chest. We have conclusive evidence that Strongbow’s later Norman conquest of Ireland, in 1170, was financed by a Jewish usurer named Josce, then based in the English town of Gloucester.^[6] Headquartered in London, the Jews of England mirrored their counterparts elsewhere on the continent in that they became “a tightly knit class of financiers. From the start they managed to associate closely with the kings in their operations, turning over to the royalty the notes of defaulting debtors in return for a share of the sums due. They were the ‘king’s men,’ vassals of a special kind, since they were the chief source of their suzerain’s revenues.”^[7] The foundation of the Jewish relationship with European elites was thus a general confluence of financial and political ambitions. The primary victims would be the European masses.

The Jewish penetration of European society was a risky venture, but one that Jewish populations evidently felt was worth the gamble. No Jews were ever forced to settle in a European country, but still they came and still they expanded. They were aware that as non-Christians and as masters of debt they would generate hostility. Indeed, these considerations formed an important aspect of their bargaining for charters — agreements drawn up between Jews and European elites that laid down the terms of residence, levels of protection, and financial rewards that would make it worthwhile for Jews to settle. For example, in 1084, Jews were given a defensive wall around their settlement quarter in the Rhineland town of Speyer in fulfilment of promises made in their charter.^[8] Some of the oldest houses still standing in England were originally built on the orders of Jews, their longevity owing to the fact that Jews possessed the wealth to build homes with a generous use of stone for security.^[9] The Jewish move into Europe was thus predicated upon an understanding that Jews would be hated but untouchable, reviled but rich, merciless but unaccountable.

Evidence from 13th century Perpignan in the south of France indicates that the peasantry and townsmen comprised around 95% of customers for Jewish moneylending colonies, a figure that should be regarded as broadly representative of patterns elsewhere in Europe.^[10] Even though these Jewish populations expanded via immigration and natural increase, occupational diversification was negligible. Paul Johnson remarks that the number of moneylenders merely multiplied, and that “lenders had very complex transactions among themselves, often forming syndicates.”^[11] These developments increased rates of interest, which in many cases were obscured in initial loan agreements. The true nature of a peasant’s debt was thus rarely apparent until he discovered, to his surprise and horror, that all his worldly possessions would be seized by the local court, with the Jewish usurer taking his share and moving on to the next victim. In some countries a special Exchequer of the Jews was established in order to process the sheer volume of such transactions.

Because royal elites stood to gain from property seizures based on Jewish-owned debt, and even more so from the defaults of the landed gentry, they were highly protective of their profitable alliance with Jewish usury colonies. In many cases Jews were granted a quasi-royal status, which meant that any instance of assault or disobedience against Jews would be treated as if it was an act against the king himself. Anti-Jewish hostility, occasionally intertwined with anger at the greed of the elite class, was thus legally restrained but culturally rampant. It was also at times helpfully displaced by legal means. Jews had very little interest in possessing and working land, so the prohibition on their owning it was ultimately a common but meaningless feature of the medieval European legal landscape. However, what the prohibition did achieve was to perform a legalistic sleight of hand whereby Jews and elites could conspire to defraud the lower orders, particularly the moderately wealthy lesser barons. In essence, it enabled Jewish moneylenders to engage in the risky game of playing one class of Europeans against another. For example, in thirteenth-century England, Jewish usury was a key point of contention, and even crisis, between the knightly class and the barons. Clause twenty-five of England’s Petition of the Barons (May 1258) complained that “Jews sometimes transfer their debts and lands pledged to them to magnates and other powerful persons in the kingdom, who thus enter the lands of lesser men.”^[12] Beneath the immediate competition for material interests, a deeper struggle raged. This was the contest between the lower orders and Jewish-involved elites, between the democratic impulse and corruption, between national/religious fidelity and betrayal. Nowhere was this struggle more evident than in England’s Magna Carta (1215), which had attempted, with moderate success, to check the power of both the king and the Jews.

Other than the combined force of an aggrieved barony, in medieval Europe there was only one force capable of undermining the royal protections bestowed upon the Jews and their practices. This was religion. The religious impulse of medieval Christendom was strong, it was emotional, and in many cases it possessed a political will and a political power of its own. A king could execute an economic rival with relative impunity, but it was significantly more difficult to execute someone who cultivated an appearance of utter Christian piety and thus enjoyed the support of the Church. For this reason, while the causes of anti-Semitism were almost exclusively rooted in material matters such as economic exploitation, religion and spirituality feature strongly as veneers for the period’s strongest anti-Jewish actions. In effect, religion became a safer and more useful pretext for anti-Jewish action than explicit economic grievances. Religious opposition to Jewish colonies thus became the superficial means to advance an agenda designed to reduce the material power and political influence of the Jews.

Two notable developments in medieval Europe are indicative of the pattern discussed above: anti-Jewish violence during the Crusades, and the evolution of the so-called ‘Blood Libel’ and associated folklore regarding Jews. I have come to term these events the “First European Reaction.” Prior to the Crusades there is some evidence that religious pretexts were used to mask material and political ambitions underlying actions against Jews. Between 1007 and 1012 a number of expulsions of Jews took place throughout Northwestern Europe, initiated first under the apparent direction of King Robert the Pious (972–1031) and his nobles, and then by the Holy Roman Emperor, King Henry II (973–1024). Although Robert framed his purges as a war on religious heresy, evidence suggests that he was more greatly concerned that Jews had developed autonomous political power based on growing financial influence —that “there is one people spread throughout the provinces, which does not obey us.”^[13] One interesting aspect of these actions against Jews is that they were later reversed by the intervention of Pope Alexander II. Norman Golb notes that by the eleventh century a group of some two hundred Jewish intellectuals had acquired influence in Rome, among them the Jewish scholar R. Yehiel who “enters and leaves the pope’s residence freely.”^[14] The period thus witnessed an escalation in the development of international elite influence, in which cross-border networks of influence entered into Jewish political life. Jewish influence in the German lands was also boosted by a population boom. Numbering approximately 5,000 Jews by the end of the tenth century, by the end of the eleventh they numbered between 20,000 and 25,000.^[15]

During the preaching of the First Crusade, beginning in 1095, a century of economic exploitation and competition rose to the surface, and the tumultuous and restless political atmosphere added opportunity to motive. Paul Johnson writes of a “breakdown in normal order.”^[16] This breakdown undermined the security and protections offered by the relationship between Jews and European elites, opening Jewish communities and their wealth to acts of retribution. Both tiers of the Crusade, both the tier of Crusading knights and that of the peasant army, sought provisions from their surroundings as they passed through Europe. This frequently involved settling scores with wealthy Jewish colonies, often in violation of elite orders from the political and religious authorities. Looting was common. In Mainz the Jews were keenly aware of the motivations of Christians who made their way into the Jewish quarter, buying time for escape by throwing money to Crusaders from their windows.^[17] Ultimately, however, the agitation was relatively short-lived. Following the destruction of Jewish debt rolls, and occasionally the reassertion of local elite power, violence dissipated rapidly. Assaults on the Jewish centers of Europe were “limited in scope and impact,” and “the bulk of northern European Jewry emerged from the crisis shaken but unscathed.”^[18]

Despite limited immediate impact, the Crusades had a lasting influence on Jewish and European mentalities. In some instances, Jews had been presented with the option of converting to Christianity or being executed. Whether the latter threat would have, or could have, been carried out is uncertain given that forcible conversion of the Jews had been effectively outlawed by papal decree. However, Jews reacted in such situations in a manner demonstrative of intense feelings of ethnocentrism and group loyalty — mass murder-suicide, along with instances of self-immolation, were not uncommon. The experience left an imprint on the Jewish mental landscape far out of proportion to the reality of the threat posed to Jewish colonies. Perhaps even more so that the ‘memory’ of the sojourn in Egypt recounted in the Book of Exodus, in the Jewish mind the Crusades marked the beginning of the ‘lachrymose’ trajectory of Jewish history; a seemingly endless persecution of blameless martyrs. Just as saliently, the sight of Jews engaging in an extremely violent mass repudiation of the Christian faith, and of their own individuality, brought about a transformation of the Jew in the European mind. Jews were no longer just exploitative, non-Christian aliens, but fundamentally different from European humanity. In some instances, Jews had reacted with such viciousness to the prospect of conversion that Europeans detected a demonic hatred for their creed. For example, in 1096 in Trier, two Jews urinated on a crucifix, having been handed it with an injunction to convert — an act that historian Elliott Horowitz believes was not uncommon.^[19]

After the Crusades, and directly as a result of behaviors like these, Jews entered into European folklore. Between the medieval and early modern periods, Jewish communities continued to expand in influence, as well as demographically and geographically. Folk stories about Jews were arguably developed as part of an attempt to embed admonitions against contact with Jews in European culture, and via culture, the European subconscious. One of the most potent folk legends regarding Jews was the ‘Blood Libel,’ the allegation that Jews kidnapped and murdered European children for quasi-satanic ritual purposes. A related accusation was that Jews abused Christian sacraments. Allegations like these should be read as attempts to provide the same unsettling of social and political norms offered during the Crusades. In essence, what we continue to see is the use of religion and religious fervor as a pretext to address underlying socio-economic grievances in a context in which Jews remained under the protection of elite political power.

Another theme of the early European-Jewish conflict, in which religion and socio-economic concerns overlapped, is that of the mass expulsion. It goes without saying that the very numerous Medieval expulsions of Jewish communities from a large number of European locations left an indelible imprint on the Jewish psyche. Adam and Gedaliah Afterman have written of the Medieval period as a time in which Jews cultivated a powerful theology/ideology of revenge for perceived wrongs perpetrated by host populations. One Medieval Ashkenazi tale, for example, portrays God as “listing on his garment” the names of all Jewish victims of Gentiles over the course of time so that in the future the deity would have a record of those to be avenged.^[20] And just as Medieval Jews perceived that they were the innocent victims of evil Gentiles, so Jewish historiography has overwhelmingly portrayed the expulsions as the result of “rumors, prejudices, and insinuating and irrational accusations.”^[21] Such understandings of the expulsions have only very recently come to be revised, most saliently in the work of Harvard historian Rowan W. Dorin, whose 2015 doctoral thesis and subsequent publications have for the first time helped fully contextualize the mass expulsions of Jews in Europe during the Medieval period, 1200–1450.^[22] Dorin points out that Jews were never specifically targeted for expulsion qua Jews, but as usurers, and notes that the vast majority of expulsions in the period targeted “Christians hailing from northern Italy.” Jews were expelled, like these Christian usurers, for their actions, choices, and behaviors.

What the period witnessed was not a wave of irrational anti-Jewish actions, but rather a widespread ecclesiastical reaction against the spread of moneylending among Christians that eventually absorbed Jews into its considerations for common sense reasons. A number of laws and statutes, for example Usuranum voraginem, were designed in order to provide a schedule of punishments for foreign/travelling Christian moneylenders. These laws contained provisions for excommunication and a prohibition on renting property in certain locales. The latter effectively prohibited such moneylenders from taking up residence in those locations, and compelled their expulsion in cases where they were already domiciled. It was only after these laws were in effect that some theologians and clerics began to question why they weren’t also applied to Jews who, in the words of historian Gavin Langmuir, were then “disproportionately engaged in moneylending in northern Europe by the late 12th century.”^[23] The Church had historically objected to the expulsion of Jews in the belief that their scattered presence fulfilled theological and eschatological functions. It was only via the broader, largely common sense, application of newly developed anti-usury laws that such obstructions to confrontations with Jews became theologically and ecclesiastically permissible, if not entirely desirable. And once this Rubicon had been crossed, it paved the way for a rapid series of expulsions of Jewish usury colonies from European towns and cities, a process that accelerated rapidly between the 13th and 15th centuries. These I call the “Second European Reaction.”

*   *   *

Weakened and unsettled following this sequence of expulsions, the nexus of European Jewry shifted eastwards from northern Europe towards what is now Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. As these communities put down their uneasy roots, and then commenced the process of building influence with elites in those countries, Sephardic Jews were ready to commence their rise in Spain. Regarded as the safest Latin territory for Jews, Spain had hosted a financial and administrative Jewish elite from the early Middle Ages. However, throughout the 13th century, Christians in Spain steadily developed their own financial and administrative elites, with the result that resource competition began to intensify rapidly. By the 14th century, a number of restrictive laws were imposed by the Christian majority in order to control and contain Jewish influence.

What made events in early modern Spain different from any previous period or location of settlement was the Jewish response. For the first time, rather than simply leaving, significant numbers of Jews — especially the ambitious — began to engage in insincere conversions to Christianity in order to stay and obtain, or retain, certain privileges and protections. The advent of the conversos was of course an unexpected theological challenge, even contradiction. The Church had for centuries been discussing the problem of Judaism in purely spiritual terms, as a matter of belief or unbelief. The natural remedy to unbelief was therefore always assumed to be the introduction of the Jews to Christian belief, to be followed by exposure to the transformative waters of baptism. Much to the shock and dismay of many Christians, it was gradually understood that even after baptism, entire communities of Jewish converts to Christianity continued in the same social and economic patterns as in their prior, Jewish lives. They retained a strong tendency to marry only among themselves. They tended to retain the same hold over certain positions within finance and political influence, and they frequently bolstered this hold via nepotism and in-group favoritism. Such behaviors not only led to the growing sense that the conversos were cheaters and hypocrites, but also that they were socially subversive, acting as disguised, harmful agents in culture and religion. It is this latter aspect of Jewish history, the idea of the Jew as cultural subversive, that separates the Jews from other ‘middle man minorities’ throughout history, and it is one of the most crucial elements in the history of the European-Jewish interaction.

The first wave of reactions against the conversos occurred in the early 15th century. Investigations were formally commenced by the Church in 1430, and the first anti-converso riots began in the 1440s in Toledo, sometimes lasting for as long as two weeks. As was the case in the anti-Jewish riots in England centuries before, all lists of debtors discovered by the rioters were destroyed, and most conversos sought refuge with sympathetic or allied elites.^[24] Much like the advent of the ‘Blood Libel,’ the intensification of resource competition and the presence of elites sympathetic to Jews led to a drift once more to religious authority. In this instance, there was a push for a new, special Spanish Inquisition that would be equipped to root out and confront the converso problem. The process was ruthlessly efficient, with the establishment of new systems of social segregation. Around 18,000 secret Jews were burned at the stake under the first five inquisitors-general.^[25] The completion of the Reconquista in the early 1490s brought renewed determination and confidence among Christians to deal conclusively with foreigners, culminating in the promulgation of an Edict of Expulsion in April 1492. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven from Spain, with around 100,000 making their way to Portugal, where a strikingly similar Edict of Expulsion would be promulgated four years later. Aside from a significant remnant that relocated to France and the Netherlands, Spanish Sephardic Jewry was essentially destroyed, being dispersed all over the Mediterranean and Muslim world.

Jerome Friedman has noted that “a New Christian [i.e., converso] problem affected not only Spain, but all of Europe,”^[26] and has suggested that the issue of Jewish conversion even played some role in provoking the Protestant Reformation.^[27] Such arguments are difficult to dismiss. After the expulsions of the various Ashkenazi colonies, and after being driven out of Spain, Sephardic New Christians established new networks in northern Europe. While in France they established themselves in commerce, causing officials in Bordeaux to remark in 1683 that “commerce is almost entirely in the hands of that sort of persons,”^[28] in Germany they presented themselves as scholars of Hebrew and quickly ingratiated themselves to the German church.^[29] Friedman, after consulting the relevant documents, has argued that “many, possibly all, early teachers of Hebrew at German and other north European universities during the early decades of the sixteenth century were in fact New Christians.”^[30] What these Jewish converts brought to their new roles was an interpretation of the Old Testament steeped in subtle critiques of Christianity that had long been part of a tradition of Jewish antichristian polemics.^[31] As a result, the early sixteenth century witnessed a flurry of interest in Hebrew and Hebrew texts in Germany, prompting the Catholic authorities to condemn this sudden trend as proto-Jewish and heresy. Despite these condemnations, interest in Jewish texts continued among the higher echelons of the German clergy, eventually boiling over in the years 1516–1520, when a Jewish convert named Johannes Pfefferkorn published a pamphlet, Der Judenspiegel, calling for the suppression of all Jewish texts and the burning of the Talmud. Pfefferkorn, who claimed these steps were the only way to deal with the Jews and force them to convert, and who may or may not have been sincere in his conversion, was opposed by the religious scholar Johann Reuchlin, who insisted the Talmud and kabbalistic texts be retained in order that they might be used to confirm the truths of Christianity. The Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn debate quickly exploded, consuming most of the major religious figures of the day, and even involving Emperor Maximilian.

*   *   *

One interested onlooker was Martin Luther, who had himself been subject to at least some New Christian teaching. Perhaps because of this indoctrination, Luther was initially very sympathetic to the idea that Jews should be allowed to keep their texts, and to the idea that they contained content that was worthwhile for Christians to study. He published a pamphlet, That Christ was Born a Jew, and certainly imbibed a Jewish hostility to “idolatry” that he subsequently incorporated into his critique of the Catholic hierarchy. In fact, the pamphlet makes it clear that he viewed himself as fashioning a form of philo-Semitic Christianity that would be more appealing to potential converts from Judaism. As such, after his formal break with Rome, Luther proceeded to launch his own missionary efforts to the Jews, during which he appears to have encountered the reality of Jewish-European interactions for the first time. The converts he expected never materialized. Luther then turned on the Calvinists, who had insisted that God’s Covenant with the Jews remained in place. For Luther, it had definitely and conclusively been revoked. What Jews remained were both cursed and a curse. By 1542, he was sufficiently angered by what he saw to write On the Jews and Their Lies, in the course of which he asserted:

No one wants them. The countryside and the roads are open to them; they may return to their country when they wish; we shall gladly give them presents to get rid of them, for they are a heavy burden on us, a scourge, a pestilence and misfortune for our country. This is proved by the fact that they have often been expelled by force: from France, where they had a downy nest; recently from Spain, their chosen roost, and even this year from Bohemia, where in Prague they had another cherished nest; finally, in my own lifetime, from Ratisbon, Magdeburg, and from many other places.

Faced with renewed anti-Jewish feeling from European religious powers, Jews turned to tried and tested strategies, in particular the cultivation of links with European elites. Ever since the first century Exilic period, Jewish political activities became increasingly uniform, with Amichai Cohen and Stuart Cohen noting of the new Diaspora: “Notwithstanding variations dictated by vast differences of location and situation, all Jewish communities developed and refined a remarkably similar set of broad [political] strategies.”^[32] Lacking a state, and insistent on remaining apart from their host nations, Diaspora Jewish populations developed an indirect and at times highly abstract style of politics in order to advance their interests. In Jewish sources it became known as shtadtlanut (“intercession” or “petitioning”), and represented a personal and highly involved form of diplomacy or statecraft that, in the words of the Cohens, “prioritized persuasion.”^[33] Prior to c.1815, when the era of Absolute monarchy began to rapidly decline, Jews often pursued their interests via a small number of very wealthy and “persuasive” individual shtadlans who would form personal relationships with a king, prince, or other powerful members of the European elite. This was most pronounced during the Early Modern period when Hofjuden, or Court Jews, negotiated privileges and protections for Jews with European monarchs. In the sixteenth century, Yosel of Rosheim (c. 1480 – March, 1554) became the pioneer of intensive Jewish relationships with non-Jewish elites in the modern period after he interceded with the Holy Roman Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V on behalf of German and Polish Jews, successfully blocking a number of planned expulsions, including one from Hungary and one from Bohemia. His interventions were fateful, setting the pattern and role for shtadlanut.

Court Jews acted as moneylenders, agents and emissaries of their patron, and in return would request, and obtain, broader privileges for themselves and their community. They in fact became the nucleus of a community that was essentially built around them. Agreements between patrons and Court Jews, known as charters, became increasingly common, setting out protections for Jews, but also, following a number of cases of Jewish exploitation, limiting their size, business activities, and movements. The 1750 charter of Frederick II of Prussia, for example, gave very precise allowances for the presence in Berlin of one rabbi, four judges, two cantors, six grave diggers, three butchers, three bakers, one communal scribe, and so on. That Jews had a history of circumventing such agreements is indicated by Clause V, which stipulates:

In order that in the future all fraud, cheating, and secret and forbidden increase of the number of families may be more carefully avoided, no Jew shall be allowed to marry, nor will he receive permission to settle, in any manner, nor will he be believed, until a careful investigation has been made by the War and Domains Offices together with the aid of the Treasury.

Perhaps the most consequential aspect of the charters was the very relaxed attitude they took to the indulgence of moneylending by Jews among all social classes. At the higher end of the Jewish communal structure, the Court Jews themselves, Jewish usury took the form of formal banking. The best example in this regard is Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), a Court Jew to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the Free City of Frankfurt. The rise of the major Jewish moneylenders also paved the way for a mercantilist mindset to take hold in the European governing class, and Jews used their new status and influence, as well as the appeals of mercantilism, to secure readmission to states from which they had previously been expelled, most notably England. Among the lower Jews, pawning and the sale of goods on credit became epidemic, with historian Jacob Katz remarking that “the peddling trade developed extensively” during the era of the Court Jew.^[34] Katz adds that the latter form of economic activity, more than the increasingly abstract methodologies of the Rothschilds and their cohorts, “brought Jews into close contact with non-Jews in such a way as to afford an opportunity for ethically dubious practices.”^[35] That Jews would take such opportunities, and on a scale that can only be described as massive, is one of the foundations of modern anti-Semitism.

*   *   *

As well as ushering in a new era in the nature of Jewish finance among Europeans, the later Court Jew period also witnessed a new era of Jewish activity in European culture that would become so pernicious as to throw the New Christian phenomenon into the shade. Beginning with the German Jew Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and a coterie of Jewish intellectuals known as the Maskilim, Jews began to demanded to be accommodated via changes in European culture. Mendelssohn, who is often held up as the first “assimilated” Jew, and the first real Jewish intellectual who wanted to be ‘part of German culture,’ advocated for “tolerance” and famously asked, “For how long, for how many millennia, must this distinction between the owners of the land and the stranger continue? Would it not be better for mankind and culture to obliterate this distinction?”^[36] The very first Jewish intrusion into Western culture was thus accompanied by a call for the obliteration of borders and the migration and settlement rights of “the stranger.” From the very beginning of Jewish activism in Western culture, it has been in the interest of Jews to undermine the position of the owners of the land and to promote “tolerance,” and it was Mendelssohn’s 1781 work, On the Civil Amelioration of the Condition of the Jews, that is said to have played a significant part in the rise of “tolerance” in Western culture. Although Mendelssohn and the Maskilim postured as Jews who wished to modernize Judaism, they were in fact the first Jewish intellectual movement and the earliest pioneers of what would become the Culture of Critique.

*   *   *

It wasn’t long before the cultural demands of Jewish intellectuals became political demands. Jews had always had political access via their relationship with elites under the system of shtadlanut, but the decline of the absolutist monarchies and the rise of democracy required new strategies, and new access to the levers of political power. Jews began obtaining direct political power during the French Revolution, after they were granted full citizenship despite many bitter complaints about their economic activities.^[37] There then followed a domino effect throughout Europe, though not without intense debate. Many contemporary political figures, misguided in retrospect, viewed the granting of political privileges to Jews as a means of ensuring control and accountability.

In England, for example, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), a famous historian and one of Britain’s leading men of letters, took up the cause of removing Jewish “civil disabilities” in Britain. In a succession of speeches, Macaulay was instrumental in pushing the case for permitting Jews to sit in the legislature, and his January 1831 article Civil Disabilities of the Jews had a “significant effect on public opinion.”^[38] But Macaulay was no supporter of Jews. A complete reading of his famous 1831 article on Civil Disabilities of the Jews reveals much about the extent and nature of Jewish power and influence in Britain at that time, and Macaulay viewed emancipation as a means of ‘keeping the Jews in check.’ He insisted that Jews already held great influence and added that “Jews are not now excluded from political power. They possess it; and as long as they are allowed to accumulate property, they must possess it. The distinction which is sometimes made between civil privileges and political power, is a distinction without a difference. Privileges are power.”^[39] Macaulay was also aware of the role of finance as the primary force of Jewish power in Britain. He asked: “What power in civilised society is so great as that of creditor over the debtor? If we take this away from the Jew, we take away from him the security of his property. If we leave it to him, we leave to him a power more despotic by far, than that of the King and all his cabinet.” Macaulay further responds to Christian claims that “it would be impious to let a Jew sit in Parliament” by stating bluntly that “a Jew may make money, and money may make members of Parliament. … [T]he Jew may govern the money market, and the money market may govern the world. … The scrawl of the Jew on the back of a piece of paper may be worth more than the word of three kings, or the national faith of three new American republics.”

Macaulay’s insights into the nature of Jewish power at that time, and his assertions that Jews had already accumulated political power without the aid of the statute books, are quite profound. Yet his reasoning — that permitting Jews into the legislature would somehow offset this power, or make it accountable — seems pitifully naive and poorly thought out. By 1871, with the unification of Germany, direct Jewish access to the political systems of Europe was essentially complete.

What followed was a period characterized by historians as Jewish “assimilation” into Western culture. The term implies an adaption to, blending with, or adoption of Western norms, and is far from appropriate or sufficient to explain what actually took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under democracy, Jews, remaining for the most part a culturally and genetically distinct group, advanced to elite positions in the press, government, academia, and the professions. From these positions, Jews protected their systems of economic dominance and advanced new forms of cultural power. They excelled as distributors of pornography, as purveyors of contraception, and, in their sarcastic scorn for patriotism, as the avant-garde for anti-national ideas. In Europe’s great East, they enjoyed a population boom funded by the mass exploitation of the serfs under the tavern system, pawning, and other forms of moneylending. In many of the great cities they pooled resources, developed monopolies, and everywhere extended their power and influence.

The European response to these developments has been deemed “the rise of modern anti-Semitism” by today’s ruling intellectuals. Distanced from religious interpretations that influenced Europe’s first great reaction (1095–1290) against Jewish influence in the Middle Ages, and transformed from the political contexts of the expulsions that characterized the Second Reaction (c.1290–1535), Europeans of what I have come to understand as the Third European Reaction (c.1870–1950) were highly focussed on the economic, social, and political impact of the Jews on European society. What began as opposition to Jewish political “emancipation” developed into a coherent political philosophy and ideology based on several key precepts:

• Jews are a separate and distinct race, inherently different in traits and characteristics from Europeans.
• Jews are incompatible with nationalism because they possess cultural and national aspirations of their own, cannot be integrated, and thus represent a state within a state.
• The modern state has become subject to an aggressive capitalism pioneered and in many cases operated by Jews.
• Jewish influence in public life is closely connected with the negative aspects of modernity and European racial decline.
• The excesses of Jewish influence in public life under democracy required the democratic mobilization of anti-Semitism under anti-Semitic parties, an anti-Semitic press, and the expansion of anti-Semitism in culture.

Jews had their own responses. In the West, they strengthened existing ties with friendly European elites and formed their first formal, secular defense committees, from which they agitated for speech laws and other oppressive legislation. In the East they had two primary strategies. In the first, they began one of the largest propaganda hoaxes ever conceived and, under the guise of mass pogroms purportedly instigated by Russian elites, mass migrated to the West, especially the United States, accompanied by waves of media-induced sympathy. In the second, they threw their demographic bulk and intellectual aggression into Communism, forming its vanguard and using its momentum to exact revenge on a Russian elite that they felt had failed to support their interests and an East European peasantry they viewed as little better than animals.^[40] In a final strategy, they developed Zionism, with Palestine postulated as a Jewish homeland but instead coming to represent a colonial halfway house, a safe haven from which to administer a growing and increasingly complex Diaspora, and a safe place to be utilized in the event of a Reaction. These strategies would be so successful that they would prompt historian Yuri Slezkine to describe the twentieth century as “The Jewish Century.”^[41]

The major event of that century was of course World War II, a conflagration that was more than a result of Germany’s expansionist war aims, or its ideological trajectory. In fact, World War II was a series of overlapping conflicts, one of which, the Third European Reaction against the Jews, unleashed decades, if not centuries, of suppressed inter-ethnic tensions throughout Europe. Jews were frequently active and violent participants during the war, meaning mass casualties were inevitable. The number of deaths on all sides was indeed significant. But honest, full, and unbiased accounts of why this inter-ethnic catastrophe occurred, and the true nature of its extent, remain absent from the mainstream, and extremely rare in scholarship. What instead emerged in the aftermath of the war was a “Holocaust Industry” that initiated an era of “White Guilt” that has, in turn, contributed heavily to the Western cultural paralysis and inertia of the present time.

This paralysis and inertia was furthered by growing Jewish influence in Hollywood, academia, and the press, and by the extraordinary growth in power of the Jewish defense leagues, most notably New York’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Buoyed by the financial support of wealthy donors from the worlds of international finance and the mass media, the ADL and similar organizations have assumed an importance in public life far out of proportion to the size of the population they exclusively serve. Their legacy has been the rapid expansion of speech legislation, the invention of so-called “hate crime” legislation, and the slow, steady creep of mass censorship. It is in this context, and against these odds, that we publish the website you are currently reading.

“Between Reactions”

It might be argued that we are presently “between Reactions.” Here, at the outset of the twenty-first century we are both in the uncomfortable, lingering aftermath of a prior Reaction against the Jews and at the beginning of a rise in tension that means a further Reaction is almost certainly inevitable. At the time of this writing, the tiny and objectively inconsequential state of Israel has come to consume an inordinate amount of U.S. funding and military support, as well as diplomatic and military support from most Western countries.^[42] These supports have been secured via an Israel Lobby that spans the Jewish Diaspora and beyond, and works closely with Diaspora Jewish defense leagues to monitor discourse on Jews and Israel and intervene vigorously against dissent. Opposition to Israel outside the Middle East is found mainly among the more extreme elements of the European Left, and much of the Student Left on campuses. These movements, however, have no sympathy with, connection to, or understanding of, the historical trajectory of European anti-Semitism, leaving their activism easy to caricature and, ultimately, easy to quash. Similar ineffectiveness can be found in contemporary responses to the exponential growth of globalist mass finance and consumer culture, a phenomenon with which the Jews are closely bound up.^[43] The last two decades have witnessed a series of mass riots and “Occupy” protests that ultimately lack direction and eventually dissipate into the familiar pattern of inertia and apathy. This is, in turn, analogous to the muted response to ongoing mass migration, a situation that if left unresolved will lead to the death of the West, the replacement of our people, and the extinguishing of our culture.

In a 2020 article for RT, “The trouble is not with Jews, but with my accusers,” the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek described one of our own writers, Andrew Joyce, as an example of “the true anti-Semites.”^[44] What is anti-Semitism, and who are the “true anti-Semites,” at the outset of this century? Anti-Semitism, to the extent that term may be used in a non-pejorative sense to describe attitudes antagonistic to the historical and contemporary expressions of negative Jewish influence, cannot be routinely or simplistically described as a phenomenon of the Right. In fact, more than any other subject, it is in the context of the Jewish Question that the conventional Left-Right political spectrum reveals itself as especially useless as an analytical tool. Anti-Semitism, if it is true in the nature and motivation of its antagonism, must derive itself not from existing political categories or assumptions, but from the same trajectory as prior anti-Semitic Reactions. In other words, true anti-Semitism is a cultural manifestation of already existing tensions around resource competition, the protection of culture, and the maintenance of the biological and political integrity of the state. To the extent that such a definition is accurate, one may find “true anti-Semites” in any location where Jews have threatened the established order.

In light of such definitions, it is important to remark that not everything that appears as “anti-Semitism” is in fact true anti-Semitism. Elements of the Western Left may berate Jews or Israel for actions undertaken in Palestine but, while there is an issue of resource competition present, the Left is not really concerned with the protection of Arab culture or with the biological and political integrity of any Arab State as such. And they are certainly not concerned with the preservation of the cultural, biological, and political integrity of their own nations. The Left has certain ulterior motives for their support of Palestinians, which include a Marxist attack on perceived Israeli/Western imperialism and the desire to help bring about the creation of a socialist state in the Palestinian territories. These muddy the ideological waters of this defiance against Jewish interests, and because anti-Semitism is ultimately an extremely straightforward position, what has been classed as “Leftist anti-Semitism” is in fact merely the confrontation of Marxism with Jewish nationalism, a contradiction that is more than a century old and possesses its own historical trajectory. This does not mean that one can’t find true anti-Semites on the Left (history is full of them), but it does mean that “Leftist anti-Semitism” doesn’t exist in itself.

Nor should it be assumed that expressions of negativity against Jews on the Right are necessarily evidence of “true” anti-Semitism or that there exists such a thing as “Rightist anti-Semitism.” There is only anti-Semitism. The early twenty-first century has witnessed a proliferation of varieties of anti-Semitism, not all of which are genuine or “true.” The 2010s, for example, witnessed the emergence of what might be termed an ironic anti-Semitism that focused heavily on flamboyant dark comedy. Many individuals, drawn heavily from the gaming community, who otherwise had little knowledge or direct experience of the Jewish Question, encountered anti-Semitism as little more than a genre of trolling. Blending with the incel sub-culture, and other corners of grievance within our decaying culture, these “anti-Semites for fun” interacted with anti-Semitism with their own ulterior motives and thus produced a sub-culture no more genuinely or traditionally anti-Semitic than that pursued by pro-Palestinian Leftists. Their very visible presence on social media, coupled with other forms of internet-based activism, led to an over-estimation of power and effectiveness, both on the part of the ethno-nationalist movement and on the part of Jews.

After it became apparent that the Trump presidency was going to be an anti-climax for both trolls and political dissidents, many of these “anti-Semites for fun” dissolved back into other movements or sub-cultures. They are often identifiable through a lingering online presence that decries a “focus on the Jews,” and reverts to a kind of ironic nihilism. In fact, once one subtracts these individuals, true anti-Semitism is extremely rare in the twenty-first century, and is entirely extinct from mainstream political life. When the influential Oxford Handbooks series published a print and online entry on “The Radical Right and Antisemitism,” the author remarked that:

Many scholars in the area of right-wing populism believe that antisemitism has practically vanished from the political arena and become a “dead prejudice” (Langenbacher and Schellenberg 2011; Beer 2011; Betz 2013; Botsch et al. 2010; Albrecht 2015; Rensmann 2013; Stögner 2012, 2014) or that anti-Muslim beliefs and Islamophobia have more or less completely replaced it (Bunzl 2007; Fine 2009, 2012; Kotzin 2013; Wodak 2015a, 2016) … The British sociologist Robert Fine critically observes, “Antisemitism is tucked away safely in Europe’s past, overcome by the defeat of fascism and the development of the European Union … Antisemitism is remembered, but only as a residual trauma or a museum piece” (Fine 2009, 463).

Some explanation for this state of affairs can be found in the disappearance of knowledge of Jews among the Western masses. Since the early 1950s, there has been the almost total transformation in what the mass of the public “knows” about Jews. This transformation has been a dramatic shift from objective to subjective knowledge. For example, ask a random member of the public today what they know about Jews, and they would very likely respond by regurgitating a series of media-derived tropes: Jews are good actors/directors/comedians; Jews are harmless and very smart/talented; Jews are a historically downtrodden and victimized group. This is essentially “junk” knowledge; entirely subjective, and more or less useless to forming a meaningful opinion on matters involving Jews — or worse, this “knowledge” is actually obstructive to forming a meaningful opinion on matters involving Jews. The contemporary situation contrasts sharply with the knowledge earlier generations possessed about Jews (derived from politics, journalism, and anti-Semitic discourse), and with the knowledge possessed by those today classed as true anti-Semites. This knowledge includes objective facts: population statistics of Jews and their relative wealth; the prevalence of actual positions of influence occupied by Jews, particularly in the media and in the political process (e.g., the Israel Lobby, donors to political candidates); the contents of Jewish intellectual efforts (from the Talmud to the Frankfurt School and beyond); the prevalence of Jews in White Collar crime; the reality of the Jewish relationship with moneylending/usury; the extent and nature of Jewish involvement in the pornography industry; and the manner in which Jews view non-Jews.

 

A challenge for ethno-nationalists of the twenty-first century will be to further a discourse in which this kind of objective knowledge concerning Jews is once again brought to bear on the mainstream. This would necessitate a new discourse orbiting an Identitarian form of anti-Jewish critique that is based on a sophisticated level of objective knowledge about Jews, underpinned by a traditional, coherent, and well-informed ideology opposing Semitism. Towards this end, there would appear to be an abundance of foundational texts, most obviously in Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique series, that elaborate upon the Jewish presence in harmful intellectual movements and the transformation of Western ethnic demography. The task remains, of course, to further the discourse in the face of overwhelming Jewish censorship. This is no easy task, but ethno-nationalists might benefit from seeing “the obstacle as the way” — by further drawing out our opponents and then incorporating Jewish censorship itself into the discourse. The extent to which this can be accomplished will determine precisely how the Jewish Question will proceed as one of the foundations of the twenty-first century.

---

^[1] P. Johnson, A History of the Jews (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p.171.

^[2] S. Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1976), p.22.

^[3] J. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p.126.

^[4] Johnson, A History of the Jews, p.176.

^[5] Ibid, p.177.

^[6] P. Skinner, The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), p.36.

^[7] L. Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, Volume 1: From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p.78.

^[8] Johnson, A History of the Jews, p.205.

^[9] Ibid, p.208.

^[10] Ibid, p.211.

^[11] Ibid, p.212.

^[12] Coss, P.R. ‘Sir Geoffrey de Langley and the Crisis of the Knightly Class in Thirteenth-Century England,’ in Aston, T.H. (ed.), Landlords, Peasants and Politics in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p.192.

^[13] R. Chazan (ed.), Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (Springfield: Behrman House, 1980), p.293.

^[14] N. Golb, The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.8.

^[15] D.P. Bell, Sacred Communities: Jewish and Christian Identities in Fifteenth-Century Germany (Boston: Brill, 2001), p.127.

^[16] Johnson, A History of the Jews, p.207.

^[17] J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and Idea of Crusading (London: Continuum, 2003), p.52.

^[18] R. Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p.63.

^[19] N. Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Medieval City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 73.

^[20] A. Afterman & G. Afterman, “Meir Kahane and Contemporary Jewish Theology of Revenge,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 98, No. 2, (2015), 192-217, (197).

^[21] Joseph Pérez, History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 60.

^[22] R. W. Dorin, Banishing Usury: The Expulsion of Foreign Moneylenders in Medieval Europe, 1200—1450 (Harvard PhD dissertation, 2015); R. W. Dorin, “Once the Jews have been Expelled,” Intent and Interpretation in Late Medieval Canon Law,” Law and History Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2016), 335-362.

^[23] G. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 304.

^[24] Johnson, A History of the Jews, p.225.

^[25] Ibid, p.226.

^[26] J. Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism,” The Sixteenth Century  Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, (1987), 3-30, (6).

^[27] J. Friedman, “The Reformation and Jewish Antichristian Polemics,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. 41, No. 1, (1979), 83-97, (83).

^[28] Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism,” 10.

^[29] Ibid., 23.

^[30] Ibid.

^[31] See Friedman, “The Reformation and Jewish Antichristian Polemics.”

^[32] A. Cohen & S. Cohen, Israel’s National Security Law: Political Dynamics and Historical Development (New York: Routledge, 2012), 31.

^[33] Ibid.

^[34] J. Katz, Exclusiveness & Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Schocken, 1961), 156.

^[35] Ibid.

^[36] M. Mendelssohn, “Anmerkung zu des Ritters Michaelis Beurtheilung des ersten Teils von Dohm, über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden,” (1783), Moses Mendelssohn gesammelte Schriften, ed. G. B. Mendelssohn (Leipzig, 1843), vol. 3, 367.

^[37] Z. Szajkowski, Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 (New York: Ktav Publishing, 1970), 505.

^[38] P. Mendes-Flohr (ed), The Jew in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 136.

^[39] T. Macaulay, “Civil Disabilities of the Jews” in M. Cross (ed) Selections from the Edinburgh Review (London: Longman, 1833), vol. 3, 667-75.

^[40] See Haim Nahman Bialik’s poem “The City of Slaughter,” a masochistic pogrom fantasy, which describes Ukrainian peasants as “wild ones of the wood, the beasts of the field.”

^[41] Y. Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

^[42] See J. Mearsheimer and S. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Penguin, 2007).

^[43] P. Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880-1940 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015)

^[44] https://www.rt.com/op-ed/475552-independent-jews-slavoj-zizek/