Review: Julius Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, Part 2

Review: Julius Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, Part 1 – The Occidental Observer

The Cultural Aspect of the Jewish Problem

Evola opens his treatment of the cultural problem by arguing that Jews have not given up the “instinct for universal domination” contained within Judaism, but “it is just that this deep-rooted instinct disguised itself, assumed tortuous forms and became occult, subterranean activity.” The Jews “created, for the fulfilment of their ideal, an inner united front of deception and treason within all nations.” Two fundamental instruments were employed for this purpose: money and intelligence. Evola explains,

It is not through weapons, but rather through the power of gold on the one hand, and through everything that intelligence can do in terms of spiritual and ethical disintegration, of social and cultural myths generating a revolt against, and a subversion of, the traditional values and institutions of the Aryan peoples and against everything that is connected with the higher part of the human being.

Despite such a strong opening, Evola again pulls back from an ethnic focus. He concedes that the modern era has witnessed “the progressive rise of the Jew to the rank of supranational ruler of the West,” but he then adds that “it would be really superstitious to ascribe” this rise and associated cultural degradation “solely to the Jews.” Rather, argues Evola, “the struggle against the Jew often hides a struggle against general structures prevalent throughout modern civilization.” Jews are said to appear to be at the forefront of decay simply because they are vehicles for three non-personal factors Evola holds primarily accountable for the decline of the West — nomadism, rationalism, and materialism.

In the form of their spirit of nomads, of a scattered people, of stateless persons, the Jews would have introduced into the various peoples, starting with the Roman people, the virus of denationalisation, universalism and internationalism of culture. This is an incessant action of erosion of what is qualitative, differentiated, defined by the boundaries of a tradition and of a blood. This is what, in more recent times, we have seen focused mainly on the social plane, in the form of the lever of socialist revolutions of democratic-Masonic Judaised ideology and of their related humanitarian and internationalist myths.

Evola’s analysis again seems to contradict itself, on the one hand offering a very bloodless and bland view of Jews as passive carriers of culturally damaging trends, while on the other hand mentioning very specific and ethnically self-serving political and cultural movements in which Jews were key operators. Evola’s discussion of the Jewish relationship with rationalism is extremely brief and just as weak, with Evola offering only that Judaism was a “religion in which the relations between man and God were conceived as a self-interested and almost contractual regulation of profit and loss.” That may be so, but Evola doesn’t explain why, above many other worthy points of discussion not approached in this text, he feels this should be mentioned.

I found Evola’s treatment of Jews and materialism, and within that mammonism and pragmatism, one of the more interesting sections of the work. For Evola, the obsession with money, or the “deification of money and wealth” and the development of a “soulless economy and a stateless finance,” are bound up with

Everything that, in modern cultural, literature, art and science, owing to the Jews, distorts, mocks, shows as illusory or unfair what, for us, had an ideal value, bringing out, on the contrary, as if it were the sole reality, what is lower, sensual, and animal in nature.

An obsession with the material, and especially with wealth, is therefore in direct opposition to Aryan ideals. Any culture built around wealth acquisition, or which turns upon an axis of purely financial values (e.g., praising immigrants because they are “taxpayers”), is designed to “instil a sense of spiritual dismay that favors an abandonment to the lowest forces and, finally, gives way to the occult game of the Jew.”

One of the most significant developments of the early twentieth century, argues Evola, was the Judaisation of Western economic attitudes, particularly the development of consumerism and the further refinement of commercial capitalism. Evola clearly detests

Protestant-Puritan glorification of success and profit, the capitalist spirit in general, the evangelist-preacher-entrepeneur, the businessman and the usurer with the name of God on his lips, the humanitarian and pacifist ideology in the service of materialistic praxis. … There are strong grounds for thinking that, as stated by Sombart, America in all its aspects is a structurally Jewish country and that Americanism is nothing other than the Jewish spirit distilled.

Based on precedent within the text I expected Evola to take this cue to once more take the conversation away from an ethnic focus, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that he didn’t. I actually agree with Evola that certain Jewish “ways of seeing” have become endemic in the West, and that the values of our age have fallen a great height from the days of Aryan ideals. And yet the present state of affairs shouldn’t lead to confusion as to how we got here. Evola stresses the question posed to all serious thinkers about this problem:

It is the question of deciding to what extent the Jew can seriously be considered as the determining cause and as the necessary and sufficient element to explain all the disruptions mentioned above, and to what extent the Jew appears on the contrary only as one of the forces at work within a far vaster phenomenon which is impossible to reduce to mere racial relations.

Evola believes that general racial mixing owes more to “internationalism”, but concedes that “to a certain extent, even at the present time, most of the representatives of the internationalist tendency in the worst sense originate in Judaism in the field of culture and literature, and to that extent a general anti-Semitic attitude would be justified.” [emphasis added]

By the same token, while Evola points out that rationalism is not a Jewish phenomenon only (Socrates, medieval nominalists, Descartes, Galileo, Bacon et al., being some of the most important European examples), “one can still speak of a disintegrating Jewish spirit expressing itself through rationalism and calculation, ending up in a world of machines, things, money rather than of persons, traditions, lands.”

The Socio-Economic Aspect

Evola argues that it is in the economic and social planes that “the anti-Semitic argument is at its most legitimate.” Beginning with Jewish art, Evola claims it has a “dissolving effect,” since it manifests a “wish to degrade, to soil and to debase all that is considered great and noble.” He sees in Jewish artistic expression “a certain Jewish instinct to humiliate, degrade and dissolve.”

Evola’s use of the word “instinct” is important because his treatment of the socio-economic aspect is based upon the question of whether Jews “dissolve” the societies around them through their intrinsic nature and way of being in the world, or whether they do it through organized conspiracy. He argues that “motives for anti-Semitism in the political and economic field” follow one of two streams. The first stream he describes as extremist and general, in essence built upon a theory of conspiracy. The second stream he describes as practical and nationalist.

Evola was well-versed with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, having edited an Italian edition of the text, and he viewed it as the quintessential text of the “extremist and general” branch of thought. Evola doesn’t appear to believe in the authenticity of the Protocols as the discovered minutes of a meeting held by global Jewish leaders to plot world domination, but he does see value in the text as a creative exploration of Jewish methodologies for socio-political dominance. He stresses, for example, that “the first thing to be conceded is that the course of social and political history in modern Europe seems in fact to meet the objectives set out in the Protocols.” Evola believed there was “without question, a connection between the Jewish tradition and Freemasonry,” the latter having played a part in the French Revolution and “might very well have obeyed Jewish influences.” Marxism, and socialism in general are also “direct creatures of the Jews and the Jewish spirit.” Finally, adds Evola, “as to the active forms of Jewish subversive intervention, certain facts remain indisputable, such as the Jewish influence that has accompanied almost all modern revolutions.”

Evola was certainly aware of even more far-reaching claims within “Nordic anti-Semitism,” pointing out that

Hitler goes even further: he thinks that the Jews, recognizing the fundamental value of blood and race as creators of true civilization, have proceeded to a systematic project of biological contamination of the non-Jewish races, and particularly of the Aryan Germanic race, in order to dissipate the last strains of pure blood.

Keeping with his suspicion and disregard for “Nordic anti-Semitism,” Evola counters the idea of a “systematic project” by arguing that

The most likely hypothesis is that the action of the Jewish element in all the phenomena that have just been described may be more instinctive and almost unintentional, and thus uncoordinated, rather than being governed by a unitary idea in accordance with a plan and a well thought-out and predetermined technique.

Although he lacked the language to express this idea, I think Evola here is grasping at something approaching a social identity theory of the Jews, or possibly even coming alongside something like the idea of a group evolutionary strategy. In these latter cases, however, there is clearly room for both instinct and, at the smaller level, planning and coordination. In fact, one of the standard features of Jewish social, political, and economic activism is organizational clustering. This clustering may be instinctive, in the sense that Jews engage in ethnic nepotism and feel a strong kinship with one another, but once it has occurred then the planning and development of “systematic projects” becomes undeniable, whether in pursuit of legalistic speech restrictions, opening national borders, or other goals advantageous to Jews. An ethnic conspiracy organized at a global level, as seen in something like the Protocols, is hardly necessary when smaller conspiracies proliferate in a myriad of core issues and across multiple nations.

Evola bridges the gap between conspiracy and instinct when he moves to the “concrete and practical” stream of socio-economic anti-Semitism. He agrees that “there is a sense of solidarity among the Jews,” and adds that “there is a Jewish practice of lies, cunning, hypocrisy, exploitation, a skilfulness in gradually climbing into all the key positions.” The Jewish practice of dual ethics (i.e., having one set of morals for interacting with your own group, and another set for morals for dealing with outsiders) “give to the Jews not the features of a religious community, but a social conspiracy.” Evola believes that anti-Semitism is justified, and the Jewish practice of dual ethics demands that this anti-Semitism should entail some form of reduction in the ‘rights’ of Jews. Because Jews are ethnic freeloaders and do not play the game of life in the same sense as Aryans, “to set Jews free [via equal rights] would mean to dig our own graves. That is why the liberal democratic ideology is, for good reason, so dear to the Jews; it is the one that contributes best to their game.”

Evola pointed to the necessity of quotas, and other restrictions imposed on Jews in the early twentieth century, given the remarkable rise of Jews in leading positions in several nations. While Evola supported National Socialist legislation towards reversing this dominance, he was scathing of the general way in which restrictions on Jews were imposed. For example, Evola supported quotas and restrictions in certain political and cultural roles, but was very critical of Germany’s ban on Jewish doctors. For Evola, the decision was taken without any assessment of whether Jews were taking such positions for “the aims of domination of his race.” If it were not the case—if Germans were simply banning Jews from medicine in order to favor their own race in a competing ethnocentrism, then Evola claims that “the ban of Jews by National-Socialists would be devoid of any serious justification. … This is why we have called such a form of anti-Semitism practical: a spirit of solidarity is opposed in it to another spirit of solidarity.” Evola does not, however, explain why a spirit of solidarity is justified in removing Jews from government and leading positions in culture and education, but suddenly ceases to be justified in other areas. Setting aside the fact that medicine is a lucrative and socially influential field worth ‘taking over,’ it strikes me that ethnic solidarity is, by its nature, all or nothing. If an ethnic group or nation is going to compete with Jewish ethnocentrism and solidarity, then it makes sense that this would be all-encompassing. Evola thus again left me confused and feeling that his analysis is either poorly thought through, or badly and insufficiently expressed.

Evola continues to waver in this final section of this analysis. He writes that Judaism has played a role in a “monstrous omnipotent apparatus that sweeps away peoples and conditions destinies.” As such, and despite his previous critique of the ban on Jewish doctors, he feels that a universal and all-encompassing “struggle against the omnipotent Jew can be an effective symbol.” Almost immediately, however, he advises against waging war “against Judaism solely in a Jewish fashion, that is to say in the name of a racist and particularistic exclusivism modelled, unconsciously, on the racism of which Israel has given the most typical example in history.”

Evola here prefigures Kevin MacDonald’s analysis at the conclusion of the fifth chapter of Separation and Its Discontents (“National Socialism and Judaism as Mirror-Image Group Strategies”), but Evola fails to explain why such an approach is strategically bad. He merely hints that it is not in keeping with a system of Aryan ideals he never fully describes. Evola therefore presents his readers with an inescapable dilemma — to set the Jews free is to dig our own graves, but to restrict them is to act like Jews and sacrifice our Aryan spirit.

What, then, does Evola suggest in terms of a solution to the three aspects of the Jewish problem? He appeals to the memory of the Roman Empire, and writes

Only the restoration of such a Europe, to the point of a complete restoration of classical Roman forms, gives the right point of reference to those who want to oppose, not only the various concrete, partial, apparent aspects of the Jewish danger in the cultural, moral, economic and social fields, which are really conditioned by race, but also the larger phenomena of decay shown by modern civilization in general and originating in an ‘intelligence’ far more concrete than that to which, on the basis of obscure sensations and transposition, anti-Semitism has referred with its myth of the occult conspiracy of Israel.

In other words, after a lengthy text critiquing Nordic particularistic nationalism, Evola claims the solution to the Jewish problem is resurrecting the long dead empire that just so happened to be based in the city he was born, raised and, ultimately, would die in.

Conclusion

Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem is an interesting historical artefact from a point in time where Europe was convulsing in a general and widespread reaction against Jewish influence. The period witnessed the publication of many thousands of tracts, pamphlets and monographs purporting to explain and even solve the civilizational question posed by this Jewish influence. Evola’s work on the subject, however, hasn’t aged well, and is significantly weaker than other texts of the period such as Hillaire Belloc’s The Jews, or Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Evola’s work is unnecessarily esoteric and, to make matters worse, is proud of this clumsy esotericism, critiquing the works of others as on the one hand “thoughtless,” and on the other as exemplifying a scientific and rational outlook that is said to be anti-Aryan (!). Beyond echoing Evola’s own fantasies of a resurrected Roman Empire, there are no solutions offered here, and the analysis presented in the volume is almost invariably incomplete, self-contradictory, and over-wrought. It is peppered with a sneering and patronizing anti-Germanism. I came to the work already believing Evola to be a great over-estimated thinker, and I finished it more or less confirmed in that opinion.