Anti-Jewish Writing

Culture of Critique Expanded and Updated

/20 Comments/in , , , , , , , , , /by

The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, 3rd edition
Kevin MacDonald
Antelope Hill Publishing, 2025 (recently banned on Amazon)
666+c pages, $39.89 paperback

In the later half of the twentieth century, the United States of America—hitherto the world’s most powerful and prosperous country—opened its borders to hostile foreign multitudes, lost its will to enforce civilized standards of behavior upon blacks and other “minority groups,” began enforcing novel “antidiscrimination” laws in a manner clearly discriminatory against its own founding European stock, repurposed its institutions of higher education for the inculcation of radical politics and maladaptive behavior upon the young, and submitted its foreign and military policy to the interests of a belligerent little country half way around the world. In the process, we destroyed our inherited republican institutions, wasted vast amounts of blood and treasure, and left a trail of blighted lives in a country which had formerly taken for granted that each rising generation would be better off than the last. One-quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, the continued existence of anything deserving the name “United States of America” would seem very much in doubt. What on earth happened?

While there is plenty of blame to go around, including some that rightfully belongs with America’s own founding stock, the full story cannot be honestly told without paying considerable attention to the rise of Eastern European Jews to elite status.

This population is characterized by a number of positive traits, including high verbal intelligence and an overall average IQ of 111. They typically have stable marriages, practice high-investment parenting, and enjoy high levels of social trust within their own community. In their European homelands they lived for many centuries in shtetls, closed townships composed exclusively of Jews, carefully maintaining social and (especially) genetic separation from the surrounding, usually Slavic population. This was in accord with an ancient Jewish custom going back at least to the Biblical Book of Numbers, in which the prophet Balaam tells the children of Israel “you shall be a people that shall dwell alone.”

If one wants to preserve social and genetic separation, few methods are more reliable than the cultivation of negative affect toward outsiders. This is what was done in such traditional, religiously organized Jewish communities: gentiles were considered treif, or ritually unclean, and Jewish children were encouraged to think of them as violent drunkards best avoided apart from occasional self-interested economic transactions.

Following the enlightenment and the French Revolution, Jews were “emancipated” from previous legal disabilities, but ancient habits of mind are not changed as easily as laws. One consequence was the attraction of many newly-emancipated Jews to radical politics. Radicals by definition believe there is something fundamentally wrong and unjust about the societies in which they live, which disposes them to form small, tightly-knit groups of like-minded comrades united in opposition to an outside world conceived as both hostile and morally inferior. In other words, radicalism fosters a social and mental environment similar to a shtetl. It is not really such a big step as first appears from rejecting a society because its members are ritually unclean and putative idolaters to rejecting it for being exploitative, capitalist, racist, and anti-Semitic. Jews themselves have often been conscious of this congruence between radicalism and traditional Jewish life: the late American neoconservative David Horowitz, e.g., wrote in his memoir Radical Son: “What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Eastern European Jewish population had grown beyond the capacity of traditional forms of Jewish economic activity to support it, resulting in widespread and sometimes dire poverty. Many turned to fanatical messianic movements of a religious or political character. Then, beginning in the 1890s, an increasing number of these impoverished and disaffected Jews started migrating to the United States. Contrary to a widespread legend, the great majority were not “fleeing pogroms”—they were looking for economic opportunity.

Even so, many Jews brought their radicalism and hostility to gentile society with them to their new homeland, and these persisted even in the absence of legal restrictions upon them and long after they had overcome their initial poverty. Jewish sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset has written colorfully of the countless wealthy and successful American Jewish “families which around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.”

Over the course of the twentieth century, these smart, ambitious, and ethnically well-networked Eastern European Jews rose to elite status in the academy, the communications media, law, business, and politics. By the 1960s, they had succeeded in replacing the old Protestant ruling class with an alliance between themselves, other “minorities” with grudges against the American majority, and a sizeable dose of loyalty-free White sociopaths on the make. Unlike the old elite it replaced, the new rulers were at best suspicious of—and often actually hostile toward—the people they came to govern, and we have already enumerated some of the most disastrous consequences of their rule in our opening paragraph.

Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique describes several influential movements created and promoted by Jews during the twentieth century in the course of their rise. It is the best book you will find on the Jewish role in America’s decline. First published by Praeger in 1998, a second paperback edition augmented with a new Preface appeared in 2002. Now, twenty-three years later, he has brought out a third edition of the work through Antelope Hill Publishing. In addition to expanding the earlier editions’ accounts of Boasian Anthropology, Freudian Psychoanalysis, various Marxist or quasi-Marxist forms of radicalism, and Jewish immigration activism, he has added an entirely new chapter on neoconservatism. As he explains:

I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity and upward mobility. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues.

This edition is fully 40 percent longer than its predecessor, yet a detailed table of contents makes it easier for readers to navigate.

*   *   *

We shall have a detailed look at the chapter on “The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences,” since it is both representative of the work as a whole and significantly augmented over the version in previous editions.

Anthropology was still a relatively new discipline in America at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, but it enjoyed a promising theoretical foundation in Darwinian natural selection and the rapidly developing science of genetics. Darwinists and Mendelians, however, were opposed by Lamarckians who believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited: e.g., that if a man spent every day practicing the piano and then fathered a son, his son might have an inborn advantage in learning the piano. This idea was scientifically discredited by the 1930s, but long remained popular among Jewish intellectuals for nonscientific reasons, as a writer cited by MacDonald testifies:

Lenz cites an “extremely characteristic” statement of a Jewish intellectual: “The denial of the racial importance of acquired characters favours race hatred.” The obvious interpretation of such sentiments is that Jewish intellectuals opposed the theory of natural selection because of its negative political implications.

In one famous case a Jewish researcher committed suicide when the fraudulent nature of his study in support of Lamarckism was exposed.

Franz Boas was among the Jewish intellectuals to cling to Lamarckism long after its discrediting. He had what Derek Freeman describes as an “obscurantist antipathy to genetics” that extended even to opposing genetic research. This attitude was bound up with what Carl Degler called his “life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups.” He did not arrive at this position as a result of disinterested scientific inquiry. Rather, as Degler explains, he thought racial explanations “undesirable for society” and had “a persistent interest in pressing his social values upon the profession and the public.”

Boas appeared to wear his Jewishness lightly; MacDonald remarks that he “sought to be identified foremost as a German and as little as possible as a Jew.”  Anthropologist and historian Leonard B. Glick wrote:

He did not acknowledge a specifically Jewish cultural or ethnic identity. . . . To the extent that Jews were possessed of a culture, it was . . . strictly a matter of religious adherence. . . . He was determined . . . not to be classified as a member of any group.

Yet such surface appearances can be misleading. From a very early age, Boas was deeply concerned with anti-Semitism and felt alienated from the Germany of his time. These appear to have been the motives for his emigration to America. He also maintained close associations with the Jewish activist community in his new homeland. Especially in his early years at Columbia, most of his students were Jewish, and of the nine whom Leslie White singles out as his most important protegés, six were Jews. According to David S. Koffman: “these Jews tended to marry other Jews, be buried in Jewish cemeteries, and socialize with fellow Jews, all core features of Jewish ethnicity, though they conceived of themselves as agents of science and enlightenment, not Jewish activists.”

Boas was also dependent on Jewish patronage. In the 1930s, for instance, he worked to set up a research program to “attack the racial craze” (as he put it). The resulting Council of Research of the Social Sciences was, as Elazar Barkan acknowledges in The Retreat of Scientific Racism (1993) “largely a façade for the work of Boas and his students.” Financial support was principally Jewish, since others declined solicitations. Yet Boas was aware of the desirability of disguising Jewish motivations and involvement publicly, writing to Felix Warburg: “it seemed important to show the general applicability of the results to all races both from the scientific point of view and in order to avoid the impression that this is a purely Jewish undertaking.”

One of Boas’s Jewish students remarked that young Jews of her generation felt they had only three choices in life—go live in Paris, hawk communist newspapers on street corners, or study anthropology at Columbia. The latter option was clearly perceived as a distinctively “Jewish” thing to do. Why is this?

Many Jews have supplemented Jewish advocacy with activism on behalf of “pluralism” and other ethnic “minority groups.” Boas himself, for example, maintained close connections with the NAACP and the Urban League. David S. Lewis has described such activities as an effort to “fight anti-Semitism by remote control.” And anthropology itself as conceived by Boas was not merely a scholarly discipline but an extension of these same concerns.

Much of the actual fieldwork conducted by Boas and his students focused on the American Indian. In a passage new to this edition, MacDonald quotes from David S. Koffman’s The Jews’ Indian (2019) on the Jewish motivations that frequently lay behind their work:

Jewishness shaped the profession’s engagement with its practical object of study, the American Indian. Jews’ efforts—presented as the efforts of science itself—to salvage, collect, and preserve disappearing American Indian culture was a form of ventriloquism. [Yet they] assumed their own Jewishness would remain an invisible and insignificant force in shaping the ideas they would use to shape ideas about others.

Boasian anthropologists did not draw any sharp distinction between their professional and their political concerns:

Political action formed a part of many anthropologists’ sense of the intellectual mission of the field. Their findings, and the framing of distinct cultures, each worthy of careful attention in its own right, mattered to social existence in the United States. Their scholarship on Native American cultures developed alongside their personal and political work on behalf of Jewish causes.

Koffman highlights the case of Boas’s protegé Edward Sapir:

Sapir’s Jewish background continuously influenced and intersected with his scholarship on American Indians. Sapir’s biography shows a fascinating parallel preoccupation with both Native and Jewish social issues. These tracks run side by side, concerned as both were with parallel questions about ethnic survival, adaptability, dignity, cultural autonomy, and ethnicity.

Some Jews from Boas’s circle of influence even went to work for the US government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, where they “consistently linked Indian uplift with an articulation of minority rights and cultural pluralism.” In this way, writes Koffman, “Jewish enlightened self-interest impacted the course of American Indian life in the middle of the twentieth century.”

Boas had a number of gentile students as well, of course, especially in the later part of his career. Yet some observers have commented upon differences in the thinking and motivations of his Jewish and gentile followers. While the rejection of racial explanations was a moral crusade for many of the Jews, as it was for Boas himself, his gentile students were more inclined to view the matter simply as a theoretical issue. Alfred Kroeber, for example, once impatiently remarked that “our business is to promote anthropology rather than to wage battles on behalf of tolerance.”

Two of Boas’s best known gentile disciples were Margeret Meade and Ruth Benedict, and it may not be an accident that both of these women were lesbians. As Sarich and Miele write in Race: The Reality of Human Difference (2004): “Their sexual preferences are relevant because developing a critique of traditional American values was as much a part of the Boasian program in anthropology as was their attacks on eugenics and nativism.” More generally, they note, “the Boasians felt deeply estranged from American society and the male WASP elites they were displacing in anthropology.” Jewish or not, they saw themselves as a morally superior ingroup engaged in a struggle against a numerically superior outgroup. In this respect, they formed a historical link between the radical cells and shtetls of the old world and the hostile elite ruling America today.

Boas posed as a skeptic and champion of methodological rigor when confronted with theories of cultural evolution or genetic influence on human differences, but as the evolutionary anthropologist Leslie White pointed out, the burden of proof rested lightly on Boas’s own shoulders: his “historical reconstructions are inferences, guesses, and unsupported assertions [ranging] from the possible to the preposterous. Almost none is verifiable.”

MacDonald writes:

An important technique of the Boasian school was to cast doubt on general theories of human evolution . . . by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior, as well as the relativism of standards of evaluation. The Boasians argued that general theories of cultural evolution must await a detailed cataloguing of cultural diversity, but in fact no general theories emerged from this body of research in the ensuing half-century of its dominance of the profession. Leslie White, an evolutionary anthropologist whose professional opportunities were limited because of his theoretical orientation, noted that because of its rejection of fundamental scientific activities such as generalization and classification, Boasian anthropology should be classed more as an anti-theory than a theory of human culture.

Boas brooked no dissent from his followers:

Individuals who disagreed with the leader, such as Clark Wissler, were simply excluded from the movement. Wissler was a member of the Galton society, which promoted eugenics, and accepted the theory that there is a gradation of cultures from lowest to highest, with Western civilization at the top.

Among Boas’s most egregious sins against the scientific spirit was a study he produced at the request of the US Immigration Commission called into being by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. This was eventually published as Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants. It maintained the extremely implausible thesis that the skulls of the children of immigrants to the US differed significantly from those of their parents—in spite of the influence of heredity, and due entirely to growing up in America. The paper came to be cited countless times by writers of textbooks and anyone who wished to deprecate the importance of heredity or stress that of environment.

Ninety years later, anthropologists Corey S. Sparks and Richard L. Janz reanalyzed Boas’s original data. While they stop short of accusing him of deliberate fraud, they did find that his data fail to support his conclusions. In MacDonald’s words:

Boas made inflated claims about the results: very minor changes in cranial index were described as changes of “type” so that Boas was claiming that within one generation immigrants developed the long-headed type characteristic of northwest Europeans. Several modern studies show that cranial shape is under strong genetic influence. [Sparks and Janz’s] reanalysis of Boas’s data indicated that no more than one percent of the variation between groups could be ascribed to the environmental effects of immigration.

In short, Boas’s study was not disinterested science but propaganda in a political battle over immigration. At a minimum, he was guilty of sloppy work inspired by wishful thinking.

Boas’s actual anthropological studies, such as those on the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island, contributed little to human knowledge. But this was not where his talent lay: his true achievement was in the realm of academic politics. He built a movement that served as an extension of himself long after his death, capturing and jealously controlling anthropological institutions and publications, and making it difficult for those who dissented from his scientifically groundless views to achieve professional success. As MacDonald writes:

By 1915 his followers controlled the American Anthropological Association and held a two-thirds majority on its executive board. In 1919 Boas could state that “most of the anthropological work done at the present time in the United States” was done by his students at Columbia. By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish.

Boas strenuously promoted the work of his disciples, but rarely cited works of people outside his group except to disparage them. A section new to this third edition explains how his influential student Melville Herskovits also blocked from publication and research funding those not indebted to him or not supporting his positions. Margaret Meade’s fairy tale of a sexually liberated Samoa, on the other hand, became the bestselling anthropological work of all time due almost entirely to zealous promotion by her fellow Boasians at prominent American universities.

Among the more obvious biases of anthropological work carried out by Boas’s disciples was a nearly complete ignoring of warfare and violence among the peoples they studied. Their ethnographic studies, such as Ruth Benedict’s account of the Zuni Indians in Patterns of Culture (1934), promoted romantic primitivism as a means of critiquing modern Western civilization. Works like Primitive War (1949) by Harry Holbert Turney-High, which documented the universality and savagery of war, were simply ignored. As MacDonald explains:

The behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict.

Leslie White wrote that “Boas has all the attributes of the head of a cult, a revered charismatic teacher and master, literally worshiped by disciples whose permanent loyalty has been effectively established.” MacDonald describes his position as closer to that of a Hasidic Rebbe among his followers than to the leader of a genuinely scientific research program—the results of which can never be known in advance.

Due to the success of Boas’s mostly Jewish disciples in gaining control of institutional anthropology, by the middle of the twentieth century it became commonplace for well-read American laymen to refer to human differences in cultural terms. Western Civilization was merely different from, not better than, the ways of headhunters and cannibals. A vague impression was successfully propagated to the public that “science had proven” the equality of the races; few indeed understood that the “proof” consisted in the scientists who thought otherwise having been driven into unemployment. Objective research into race and racial differences largely ceased, and an intellectual atmosphere was created in which many imagined that the opening of America’s borders to the world would make little practical difference.

*   *   *

Space precludes us from looking in similar detail at all the book’s chapters, but we must give the reader an idea of the material new to this third edition. Some of the most important is found in an 85-page Preface, and concerns the rise of Jews in the American academic world. Boasian anthropology may be seen in hindsight as an early episode in this rise, but Boas died in 1942 and our main story here concerns the postwar period. As MacDonald writes:

The transformation of the faculty was well under way in the 1950s and by the late 1960s was largely complete. It was during this period that the image of the radical leftist professor replaced the image of the ivory tower professor—the unworldly person at home with his books, pipe, and tweed jacket, totally immersed in discussions of Renaissance poetry.

The old academic elite had been better educated than the public at large, of course, but saw themselves as trustees of the same Christian European civilization, and did not desire radical changes to the society in which they lived. Today’s representative professor “almost instinctively loathes the traditional institutions of European-American culture: its religion, customs, manners, and sexual attitudes.”

This matters, because the academy is a crucial locus of moral and intellectual authority:

Contemporary views on issues like race, gender, immigration are manufactured in the academy (especially elite universities), disseminated throughout the media and the lower levels of the educational system, and ultimately consumed by the educated and not-so-educated public. Newspaper articles and television programs on these issues routinely include quotes from academic experts.

By 1968 Jews, who made up less than three percent of the US population, constituted 20 percent of the faculty of elite American colleges and universities, with overrepresentation most pronounced among younger faculty. Studies found Jewish faculty well to the left of other academics, more supportive of student radicals, and more likely to approve relaxing standards in order to recruit non-White faculty and students. By 1974, a study of articles published in the top twenty academic journals found that Jews made up 56 percent of the social scientists and 61 percent of the humanities scholars.

A possibly extreme but telling example of left-wing bias is Jonathan Haidt’s informal 2011 survey at a convention of social psychologists, reputedly the most left-leaning area of academic psychology. Haidt found only three participants out of 1000 willing publicly to label themselves “conservative.” He acknowledges that this discipline has evolved into a “tribal moral community” that shuns and ostracizes political conservatives, with the result that research conflicting with its core political attitudes is either not performed or is likely to be excluded from peer-reviewed journals.

MacDonald devotes considerable attention to a widely discussed 2012 paper “Why Are Professors Liberal?” by Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse. The authors argue that academics are more liberal than the population at large for three reasons. First and most importantly, due to the higher proportion of academics with advanced educational credentials, an effect they consider independent of the role IQ plays in helping obtain such credentials. MacDonald remarks that this liberal shift may be due either to socialization and conditioning in the graduate school environment or to perceived self-interest in adopting liberal views and/or identifying with an officially sanctioned victim group.

Second, Gross and Fosse believe liberalism results from academic’s greater tolerance for controversial ideas. MacDonald is dismissive of this proposal, writing that in his observation such tolerance does not exist outside the professoriate’s self-conception.

Third, they find that liberalism corelates with the larger fraction of the religiously unaffiliated in the academy. MacDonald points out that many of the religiously unaffiliated are probably Jews, and remarks that the study would have been more informative if race and Jewish ethnic background had been included as variables alongside religious affiliation.

Gross and Fosse acknowledge that their data can be interpreted in a number of ways, but their own argument is that

the liberalism of professors . . . is a function . . . of the systematic sorting of young adults who are already liberally—or conservatively—inclined into and out of the academic profession, respectively. We argue that the professoriate, along with a number of other knowledge work fields, has been “politically typed” as appropriate for and welcoming of people with broadly liberal political sensibilities, and as inappropriate for conservatives.

In other words, academic liberalism is the product of a natural sorting process similar to that which has resulted in a career such as nursing being typecast as appropriate for women. It should be emphasized, however, that much of this sorting is done by the academy itself, not by prospective academics: many professors unhesitatingly acknowledge their willingness to discriminate against conservative job candidates.

The Gross and Fosse study also fails to explore the way the meaning of being liberal or left wing has changed over the years. The academy was already considered left-leaning when the White Protestant ascendency was still intact. But in those days being liberal meant supporting labor unions and other institutions aimed at improving the lot of the (predominantly White) working class.

The New Left abandoned the White working class because it was insufficiently radical, desiring incremental improvements of its own situation rather than communist revolution. The large Jewish component of the New Left, typified by the Frankfurt School, was also shaken by Hitler’s success in gaining the support of German labor. So they abandoned orthodox Marxism in a search for aggrieved groups more likely to demand radical change. These they found in ethnic and sexual minority groups such as Blacks, feminists, and homosexuals. They also advocated for massive non-White immigration to dilute the power of the White majority, leave Jews less conspicuous, and recruit new ethnic groups easily persuadable to cultivate grievances against the dwindling White majority.

Today’s academy is a product of the New Left of the 1960s. While it is more “liberal” (in the American sense) than the general public on economic issues, what makes it truly distinctive is its attitudes on social issues: sexual liberation (including homosexuality and abortion), moral relativism, religion, church-state separation, the replacement of patriotism by cosmopolitan ideals, and the whole range of what has been called “expressive individualism.”

Sorting can explain how an existing ideological hegemony within the academy maintains itself, but not how it could have arisen in the first place. To account for the rise of today’s academic left, Gross and Fosse propose a conflict theory of successful intellectual movements. In particular, they cite sociological research indicating that such movements have three key ingredients: 1) they originate with people with high-status positions having complaints against the current environment, resulting in conflict with the status quo; 2) these intellectuals form cohesive and cooperative networks; and 3) this network has access to prestigious institutions and publication outlets.

This fits Kevin MacDonald’s theory of Jewish intellectual movements to a T. Indeed, since the academic left is so heavily Jewish, we are in part dealing with the same subject matter. Even Gross and Fosse show some awareness of this, as MacDonald writes:

Gross and Fosse are at least somewhat cognizant of the importance of Jewish influence. They deem it relevant to point out that Jews entered the academic world in large numbers after World War II and became overrepresented among professors, especially in elite academic departments in the social sciences.

So let us apply the Gross and Fosse three-part scheme to radical Jewish academics. First, Jews do indeed have a complaint against the environment in which they live, or rather two related complaints: the long history of anti-Semitism and the predominance of White Christian culture.

As MacDonald notes, “it is common for Jews to hate all manifestations of Christianity.” In his book Why Are Jews Liberals? (2009), Norman Podhoretz formulates this Jewish complaint as follows:

[The Jews] emerged from the Middle Ages knowing for a certainty that—individual exceptions duly noted—the worst enemy they had in the world was Christianity: the churches in which it was embodied—whether Roman Catholic or Russian Orthodox or Protestant—and the people who prayed in and were shaped by them.

Anti-Jewish attitudes, however, by no means depend on Christian belief. In the nineteenth century Jews began to be criticized as an economically successful alien race intent on subverting national cultures. Accordingly, the complaint of many Jews today is no longer merely Christianity but the entire civilization created by Europeans in both its religious and its secular aspects.

From this point it is a very short step to locating the source of anti-Semitism in the nature of European-descended people themselves. The Frankfurt School took this step, and the insurgent Jewish academic left followed them. MacDonald writes:

This explicit or implicit sense that Europeans themselves are the problem is the crux of the Jewish complaint. [It] has resonated powerfully among Jewish intellectuals. Hostility to the people and culture of the West was characteristic of all the Jewish intellectual movements of the left that came to be ensconced in the academic world of the United States and other Western societies.

The second item in Gross and Fosse’s list of the traits of successful intellectual movements is that their partisans form cohesive, cooperative networks. All the Jewish movements studied by Kevin MacDonald have done this, as he has been at pains to emphasize. Group strategies outcompete individualist strategies in the intellectual and academic world just as they do in politics and the broader society. It does not matter that Western science is an individualistic enterprise in which people can defect from any group consensus easily in response to new discoveries or more plausible theories. The Jewish intellectual movements studied by MacDonald are not scientific research programs at all, but “hermeneutic exercise[s] in which any and all events can be interpreted within the context of the theory.” These authoritarian movements thus represent a corruption of the Western scientific ideal, yet that does nothing to prevent them from being effective in the context of academic politics.

Finally, Gross and Fosse note that the most successful intellectual movements are those with access to prestigious institutions and publication outlets. This has clearly been true of the Jewish movements Kevin MacDonald has studied, as he himself notes:

The New York Intellectuals developed ties with elite universities, particularly Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the University of California-Berkeley, while psychoanalysis and Boasian anthropology became entrenched throughout academia. The Frankfurt School intellectuals were associated with Columbia and the University of California-Berkeley, and their intellectual descendants are dispersed through the academic world. The neoconservatives are mainly associated with the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University, and they were able to get their material published by the academic presses at these universities as well as Cornell University.

The academic world is a top-down system in which the highest levels are rigorously policed to ensure that dissenting ideas cannot benefit from institutional prestige. The panic produced by occasional leaks in the system, as when the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer teamed up with Harvard’s Stephen Walt to offer some cautious criticisms of the Israel lobby, demonstrate the importance of obtaining and monopolizing academic prestige.

Moreover, once an institution has been captured by the partisans of a particular intellectual perspective, informal scholarly networks become de facto gatekeeping mechanisms, creating enormous inertia. As MacDonald writes: “there is tremendous psychological pressure to adopt the fundamental assumptions at the center of the power hierarchy of the discipline. It is not surprising that people [are] attracted to these movements because of the prestige associated with them.”

What MacDonald calls the final step in the transformation of the university into a bastion of the anti-White left is the creation since the 1970s of whole programs of study revolving around aggrieved groups:

My former university is typical of academia generally in having departments or programs in American Indian Studies, Africana Studies (formerly Black Studies), American Studies (whose subject matter emphasizes “How do diverse groups within the Americas imagine their identities and their relation to the United States?”), Asian and Asian-American Studies, Chicano and Latino Studies, Jewish Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. All of these departments and programs are politically committed to advancing their special grievances against Whites and their culture.

Although it is difficult to specify the exact linkage, the academic triumph of Jewish radicals was followed in short order by the establishment of these other pillars of the cultural left within the university.

As MacDonald notes, women make up an important component of the grievance coalition in academia, and not only in the area of “Women’s Studies.” They make up around 60 percent of PhDs and 80 percent of bachelor’s degrees in ethnic, gender and cultural studies.

Overall, compared to men, women are more in favor of leftist programs to end free speech and censor speech they disagree with. They are more inclined toward activism, and less inclined toward dispassionate inquiry; they are more likely to agree that hate speech is violence, that it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker, that controversial scientific findings should be censored, and that it should be illegal to say offensive things about minorities.

Such differences are likely due to women’s evolutionary selection for empathy and fear. No amount of bravado about “smashing the patriarchy” can conceal women’s tendency to timid conformism, and that is precisely what leads to success in academic grievance studies.

Although MacDonald does not consider feminism a fundamentally Jewish movement, many Jewish women have unquestionably played a prominent role within it, and it is marked by the same disregard of biological realities we observed in Boasian anthropology. The new Preface accordingly offers some brief remarks on Jewish lesbian and academic gender theorist Judith Butler. One of her leading ideas is that gender identity is “performative,” and unconstrained by genetic or hormonal influences. This leaves us free to rebel against the patriarchy by engaging in “subversive performances of various kinds.” Obviously, the contemporary transgender movement would count as an example of such a performance.

Jews have been greatly overrepresented in the student bodies of elite American universities for several decades, to a degree that their intelligence and academic qualifications cannot begin to account for:

Any sign that the enrollment of Jews at elite universities is less than about 20 percent is seen as indicative of anti-Semitism. A 2009 article in The Daily Princetonian cited data from Hillel [a Jewish campus organization] indicating that, with the exception of Princeton and Dartmouth, on average Jews made up 24 percent of Ivy League undergraduates. Princeton had only 13 percent Jews, leading to much anxiety and a drive to recruit more Jewish students. The result was extensive national coverage, including articles in The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The rabbi leading the campaign said she “would love 20 percent”—an increase from over six times the Jewish percentage in the population to around ten times.

According to Ron Unz:

These articles included denunciations of Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.

The Preface to this new edition of The Culture of Critique also contains additions on the psychology of media influence and Jewish efforts to censor the internet, along with an updating of information on Jewish ownership and control of major communications media.

Chapter Three on “Jews and the Left” includes a new sixteen-page section “Jews as Elite in the USSR,” as well as shorter additions on Jews and McCarthyism, and even the author’s own reminiscences of Jewish participation in the New Left at the University of Wisconsin in his youth. The additions incorporate material from important works published since the second edition, including Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together (2002), Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century (2004), and Philip Mendes’s Jews and the Left (2014).

Chapter Four on “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement” is new to this edition, although its core has already appeared in the author’s previous book Cultural Insurrections (2007) and elsewhere. MacDonald’s account of how the neocons maintained a self-image as a beleaguered and embattled minority even as they determined the destiny of the world’s most powerful country is an impressive testament to the unchanging nature of the Jewish shtetl mindset.

Chapter Five on “Jewish Involvement in the Psychoanalytic Movement” has been expanded with material on Freud’s Hungarian-Jewish disciple Sándor Ferenczi and the Budapest school of psychoanalysis.

Chapter Six on “The Frankfurt School of Social Research and the Pathologization of Gentile Group Allegiances” includes new biographical sketches of the major figures and cites extensively from the recently published private correspondences of Horkheimer and Adorno. A new section on Samuel H. Flowerman (based on the research of Andrew Joyce) throws light on the nexus between the Frankfurt School and influential Jews in the communications media. There is also expanded coverage of Jaques Derrida and the Dada movement.

Chapter Eight on “Jewish Shaping of US Immigration Policy” has been updated and corroborated using more recent scholarship by Daniel Okrent Daniel Tichenor, and Otis Graham, as well as Harry Richardson and Frank Salter’s Anglophobia (2023) on Jewish pro-immigration activism in Australia. MacDonald makes clear that Jewish pro-immigration activism was motivated by fear of an anti-Jewish movement among a homogeneous White Christian society, as occurred in Germany from 1933–1945) Moreover:

Nevertheless, despite its clear importance to the activist Jewish community [and its eventual tranformative effects], the most prominent sponsors of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,

did their best to downplay the law’s importance in public discourse. National policymakers were well aware that the general public was opposed to increases in either the volume or diversity of immigration to the United States. . . . [However,] in truth the policy departures of the mid-1960s dramatically recast immigration patterns and concomitantly the nation. Annual admissions increased sharply in the years after the law’s passage. (Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America, Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 218)

The Conclusion, “Whither Judaism and the West?” is heavily updated from the previous version. MacDonald speculates on the possible rise of a new non-Jewish elite that might challenge Jewish hegemony in three key areas: the media, political funding, and the academy. He sees Elon Musk, with his support for Donald Trump’s populism and (relatively) free speech, as a possible harbinger of such an elite. Musk has commented explicitly on Jewish hostility to Whites and taken heat for it.

Regarding the media, MacDonald writes:

If the 2024 election shows anything, it’s that the legacy mainstream media is distrusted more than ever and has been effectively replaced among wide swaths of voters, especially young voters, by alternative media, particularly podcasts and social media. […] The influence of the legacy media, a main power base of the mainstream liberal-left Jewish community, appears to be in terminal decline.

A recent sign of the times was the eviction of the New York Times, National Public Radio, NBC and Politico from their Pentagon offices to make room for outlets such as One America News Network and Breitbart.

Jewish financial clout is still in place, but may be of diminishing importance as well. As of August 2024, twenty-two of the twenty-six top donors to the Trump campaign were gentiles, and only one Jew—Miriam Adelson at $100 million—made the top ten. (Musk eventually contributed around $300 million. The author quotes a description of all the wealthy people in attendance at Trump’s second inaugural, and only one of the six men named was Jewish. MacDonald notes that “most of these tycoons were likely just trying to ingratiate themselves with the new administration, but this is a huge change from the 2017 and suggests that they are quite comfortable with at least some of the sea changes Trump is pursuing.”

The university is the most difficult pillar of Jewish power to challenge, as MacDonald notes, “because hiring is rigorously policed to make sure new faculty and administrators are on the left.” There has recently been a challenge to Jewish interests in the academy by students protesting—or attempting to protest—Israeli actions in the Gaza strip. But Ron Unz vividly describes what can happen to such students:

At UCLA an encampment of peaceful protestors was violently attacked and beaten by a mob of pro-Israel thugs having no university connection but armed with bars, clubs, and fireworks, resulting in some serious injuries. Police stood aside while UCLA students were attacked by outsiders, then arrested some 200 of the former. Most of these students were absolutely stunned. For decades, they had freely protested on a wide range of political causes without ever encountering a sliver of such vicious retaliation. Some student organizations were immediately banned and the future careers of the protestors were harshly threatened.

Protesting Israel is not treated like protesting “heteronormativity.” Two Ivy League presidents were quickly forced to resign for allowing students to express themselves.

Despite this awesome display of continuing Jewish power, anti-White “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” policies are now under serious attack at American universities. MacDonald also notes that the academy is a less important a power base than either the media or political funding.

The Conclusion has also been updated with a consideration of whether multiculturalism may be backfiring on its Jewish creators as some members of the anti-White coalition turn to anti-Semitism.

It should be acknowledged that the insertion of new material into this updated edition required the deletion of a certain amount of the old. I was sorry to note, e.g., the removal of the table contrasting European and Jewish cultural forms, found on page xxxi of the second edition. So while everyone concerned with the question of Jewish influence should promptly procure this new third edition, I am not ready to part with my copy of the second.

Gottfried Feder on a German state built on national and socialist foundations[1]

/5 Comments/in , , /by

The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation

Gottfried Feder

 

Translated and with a Preface by Alexander Jacob

 

Sanctuary Press, 2019

Gottfried Feder was  born in 1883 in Würzburg and studied engineering at the Technical Universities in Munich, Berlin and Zurich. After the completion of his studies, he set up a construction company in 1908 under the aegis of Ackermann and Co. and undertook several projects in Bulgaria. From 1917 onwards he taught himself economics and political economy, and in late 1918, not long after the proclamation of the Weimar Republic by Philipp Scheidemann in November of that year, Feder wrote a manifesto on usury[2] and sent it to the Kurt Eisner government, though he obtained no response. The Treaty of Versailles signed in June 1919 which determined Germany as solely responsible for the war and liable to reparations caused Feder to fear that Germany was now firmly in the hands of the international financiers. In September of that year, Feder established a militant league (Kampfbund) with a program of ending interest slavery and nationalising the state bank. His anti-capitalism was bound also to racialism insofar as the international financiers were considered to be mostly Jews.

Feder’s nationalist efforts drew him into a close alliance with the anti-Communist activist Anton Drexler (1884-1942) and Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923), the editor of the anti-Semitic journal Auf gut deutsch and later, of the National Socialist organ, Völkischer Beobachter. The three together formed, in January 1919, the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP).[3] Adolf Hitler joined the DAP in late September 1919 and soon emerged as the leader of the party, which he renamed the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). Hitler had, even before his joining the party, attended Feder’s lectures on economic subjects and wrote later in his Mein Kampf (1925/6):

For the first time in my life I heard a discussion which dealt with the principles of stock-exchange capital and capital which was used for loan activities. …The absolute separation of stock-exchange capital from the economic life of the nation would make it possible to oppose the process of internationalization in German business without at the same time attacking capital as such, for to do this would jeopardize the foundations of our national independence. I clearly saw what was developing in Germany and I realized then that the stiffest fight we would have to wage would not be against the enemy nations but against international capital.[4]

In the Foreword to the original 1923 edition of Feder’s work, Der deutsche Staat, Hitler wrote that in this work the National Socialist movement had indeed acquired its “catechism”.

In 1920, Hitler, along with Feder and Drexler, composed the ’25-point Programme’ of the NSDAP. This programme rejected the Treaty of Versailles and called for a reunification of German peoples along with an exclusion of aliens, especially Jews, from national life. In February 1920, Hitler held a rally in which he presented the programme to the German people. Later, in 1927, Feder published a comprehensive version of the programme entitled Das Programm der NSDAP and seine weltanschaulichen Grundlagen.[5] In 1923, Feder offered a further elaboration of his national economic views in the present work, Der deutsche Staat auf nationaler und sozialer Grundlage, which was re-issued in 1932 in the “Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek” series[6]

Feder took part in Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch against the Bavarian government in 1923 but was only fined 50 marks for unlawful assumption of authority since he had acted, for a day, as the new “finance minister”. In 1924, he was elected a representative to the parliament. In parliament, he demanded the confiscation of Jewish property and the freezing of interest-rates. which were key elements of the anti-capitalist programme of the party. In 1926 Hitler entrusted Feder with the editorial direction of a series of books on National Socialist ideology under the title “Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek” (National Socialist Library). In 1931, Feder was appointed chairman of the economic council of the NSDAP. But gradually, under pressure from big industrialists like Gustav Krupp, Fritz Thyssen and Emil Kirdorf, Hitler decided to distance himself from Feder’s socialist ideas.[7] With Hitler’s strategic alliance with big industrialists and capital, even foreign capital, for his intended war on Bolshevism, Feder lost most of his influence on the party, since foreign banks especially would not have supported Feder’s plans for a nationalised interest-free banking system. The loss of interest in Feder’s economic policies among the party members is evidenced in Hans Reupke’s book Der Nationalsozialismus und die Wirtschaft (!931), where the author stated that it was no longer necessary to deal with the “breaking of interest slavery” in “the extreme form in which it first emerged”.[8]

Thus, when Hitler assumed power in 1933, Feder was not named Economics Minister but rather only State Secretary in the Economics Ministry. However, in 1933 Feder published a collection of his essays entitled Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz as well as a book on the Jews called Die Juden. In 1934, the influential banker Hjalmar Schact was made Economics Minister since his contacts with the big industrialists made him more useful to Hitler in his rearmament aims than Feder with his stark anti-capitalist doctrines. Feder’s subordination to Hjalmar Schacht was indeed a concrete sign of his fall from grace.  After the Knight of the Long Knives in 1934, when left-wing nationalists like Gregor Strasser were assassinated, Feder withdrew from the government. In 1936, he was given a new job as professor at the Technical University in Berlin which he maintained until his death in 1941.

*   *   *

Feder’s Deutsche Staat is indeed one of the most important treatises on National Socialist economics.[9] However, it has a precedent in the Austro-Hungarian Bohemian German, Rudolf Jung’s work, Der Nationale Sozialismus (1919). Rudolf Jung (1882-1945) was a civil engineer from Jihlava (in the current Czech Republic and former Austro-Hungarian Empire) who joined the Bohemian Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP) in 1909. The DAP was founded in 1903 in Aussig (now Ústí nad Labem in the Czech Republic) by Germans threatened by the increasing Jewish and Czech influence in the empire. It was renamed Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiter Partei (DNSAP) in 1918. Jung’s work Der Nationale Sozialismus: seine Grundlagen, sein Werdegang und seine Ziele (1919) was intended as a German nationalist answer to Marx’s Das Kapital.[10] The work is divided into two parts, the first dealing with ‘The Foundations of National Socialism’ and the second with ‘The Development and Goals of National Socialism’. Jung’s nationalism focusses on social and economic questions and, exactly like Feder, Jung stresses the difference between income derived from real work and that arising from interest.[11] His strong socialist and anti-Jewish viewpoint is  evident throughout this work: 

All non-socialist parties are based in the main on “individualism”, i.e. the demand for the greatest possible freedom and lack of constraint of the individual. Economically it is expressed in Manchester liberalism and, further, in Mammonism. The ruthless ruler who is tormented by no pang of conscience is the goal, the weaker man falls thereby under the wheels. Now, since the Jew is the most ruthless, he can fare best thereby. Thus all non-socialist anti-Jewish orientations unwillingly support the rise of Jewry to world-rulership.[12]

Further, democracy itself is the vehicle of Jewish international capitalism:

If we were to sum up, we might say that the entire international democracy whose alleged ideals the major press and parties represent and on whose flag they swear, is nothing but the political crystallisation of the Jewish spirit and, in the final analysis, serves no other goal but the establishment of the world-rule of Jewry.[13]

Another writer who contributed to the exact identification of the Jewish constitution of international high finance was Heinrich Pudor (1865-1943), who also wrote under the pseudonym Heinrich Scham (the German translation of the Latin “pudor”). Pudor was a vegetarian and naturist who, from 1912, published several anti-Semitic pamphlets and books including an extensive series on the international connections between the various Jewish high financiers.[14] Feder refers sympathetically to Pudor in the present work. However, Pudor’s magazine Swastika was banned in 1933 by the National Socialists for its criticisms of the National Socialist leadership and the regime’s surprising toleration of Jews. Further, five issues of the series on Jewish high finance were banned including no.13, Neues über Br. Roosevelt und seine jüdischen und Kommunistischen Verbindungen (News about Brother Roosevelt and His Communist Connections) and no. 49, Judendãmmerung. “Juden unerwünscht” Keine jüdischen Rechtsanwälte mehr. Ende der Judenfinanz in Deutschland ((Judendãmmerung. “Jews Unwanted.” No more Jewish lawyers. End of Jewish finance in Germany). The pamphlets were banned on account of what a state official, Raymund Schmidt, described as Pudor’s “no longer opportune polemical methods” which were indeed exploited by the English for the purpose of counter-propaganda.[15]

*   *   *

Feder’s treatise on national economy, like Rudolf Jung’s, is remarkable for its strong moral foundation and its formulation of National Socialism as a movement for social justice as well as for national regeneration. Unlike capitalism with its “soul-destroying materialistic spirit of egoism and avarice with all its concomitant corrupting manifestations in all fields of our public, economic and cultural life” (p.31)[16] and unlike Marxism, which insists that everything should belong to the One, which might be either the State or Mammon controlling it, National Socialism wishes to revert to the mediaeval and Prussian dictum of “suum cuique”, ‘to each his own’, whereby each person will earn as much as he deserves according to his performance of work, with the fullest possible responsibility, as a duty. Economically, this moral doctrine is translated into the doctrine of serving “the public interest” before self-interest. Not profitability but fulfilment of demand is the National Socialistic basis of the economy.

Unlike Marxism, National Socialism will not prohibit private property but respect it as the privilege of the creative and productive Aryan man. On the other hand, the mobile Jewish mind has no deep connection with the land but rather exploits the production and property of the natives financially through all sorts of legal claims, bonds and mortgages, whereby “property” is turned into a profitable “possession” (p.14). In order to counter these avaricious strategies of the Jews, the National Socialist state will enforce limitations on the right to property, personal or commercial, so that in all cases the welfare of the whole, the nation, rather than of individuals will be first served. In Feder’s discussion of the party’s programme in Part II, we note that, since the social policy is “the welfare of the whole”, the financial policy of the National Socialist state is accordingly directed against those financial powers who tend to develop “a state within the state” (p.29). As he puts it:

In the last and deepest analysis, it is a matter of the battle of two worldviews that are expressed through two fundamentally different intellectual structures — the productive and creative spirit and the mobile avaricious spirit. The creative spirit rooted in the soil and yet again overcoming the world in metaphysical experience finds its principal representatives in Aryan man — the avaricious, rootless commercial and materialistic spirit directed purely to the this-worldly finds its principal representative in the Jew (p. 31).

The strength of Germany before the war was due to its unity under Bismarck and its efficient industrial sector. This advantage was undermined by the dependence of the economy on the credit system of the banks and “the inventors and bearers of the modern credit system” are the Jews (p. 36). The mediaeval system of credit was based on the belief (“credo”) of the creditor that his money could be used to greater economic advantage by the debtor whereby the debtor, if successful in his enterprise, may return a share of his profits in gratitude to the creditor. Standardised interest, on the other hand, was forbidden by the Church as usury (p. 45). Feder advocates a return to the conception of money as a token of “performed work” or of a product so that money cannot, independently of any work, be hoarded for the purpose of being lent out later at interest.

Feder further points out that it is the stock-market that lies at the basis of the alienation of capital from work:

Anonymisation — the depersonalisation of our economy through the stock-marketable form of the public limited company — has to a certain degree separated capital from work, the shareholder knows in the rarest instances something of his factory, he has only the one-sided interest in the profitability of his money when he has invested it in the form of shares (p.36)

Apart from the indifference of the shareholder to the quality of the goods produced by the company in which he invests, the market in general has diverted production from its legitimate task of fulfilling real needs to that of stirring up — through the Jewish market-crier’s technique of advertising — artificial needs among the public that will bring in greater profits. This fundamental transformation of national economics has been supported in academic circles by Jewish scholars who restrict their economic analyses to descriptions of the current economic system rather than investigating its social and political legitimacy. This sort of intellectual subversion is further continued by the Jewish intelligentsia in the fields of art, entertainment and the press.

The major source of the current distress of Germany is indeed the interest owed to large loan capital. The burden of interest has indebted entire nations to international high finance and forced them to become interest-collectors for the latter which they do by taxing the working people ever harder. Feder calls this false economic process an “international fraud” (p. 53). The power of international finance has however grown so great that it was able to encircle Germany as soon as it perceived that its currency was rising in strength and independence. Once they succeeded in militarily defeating Germany, the international financial powers then enforced further enormous debt burdens on it through the Treaty of Versailles. Feder therefore proposes the cancellation of the payment of the interest on these debts to the Allies (p. 97). Indeed, the remedy to the interest burdens of all nations to international finance is the legal abolition of interest (p. 94). And this is simultaneously the solution to the Jewish question itself:

The solution of the interest problem is the solution of the Jewish question. The solution of the interest problem in the sense of our explanations is the breaking of the Jewish world-rule, because it smashes the power of world Jewry — its financial power.

The fullest representation of the socio-economic interests of a nation should be the state, and its industries should be models of efficiency and commercial success. One example of such an industry in Germany is indeed the transport industry and especially the German railways. Unlike Bolshevism, which seeks to control all production, the National Socialist state will, through the establishment of storage and distribution cooperatives under state supervision (p. 917), remove only the avaricious interference of private commerce between production and consumption. As the means of exchange necessary for the exchange of goods, money will be under the control of the state through a nationalised state bank.

Instead of borrowing money from private banks, the state should, in the case of all large public works projects, finance the latter though the issuance of interest-free notes of its own. The Reichsbank’s sovereignty of issuing notes must be regained through nationalisation (p. 72). Freed of interest-burdens to banks, the state will ultimately be able to operate in a mostly tax-free manner (Ch. 22, ‘The state without taxes’). Taxes will be restricted to the coverage of non-productive tasks such as the administration of justice, the police system, medical and educational systems, if the commercial enterprises of the state such as the railways, post and telegraph, mining and forestry do not present surpluses wherewith to pay for these tasks (p. 92). International transactions should be conducted through a clearing system rather like that of the international postal union “without the international finance benefiting two or three times in all these simple mercantile operations and becoming big and fat at the cost of the productive nations” (p. 77).

But the state must be powerful if it is to effect any reforms. Unfortunately, the Weimar Republic has abjectly accepted the monstrous burden of guilt after the war with the result that “the members of the Chosen People can, on these reparations, forever lead a glamorous work-free life in all the countries of the world at the cost of German work.” (p. 19). The crisis faced by Germany after the war was facilitated by parliamentarianism and Mammonism. The “great democratic lie of the capacity of the people for self-government” is to be combated along with the real capitalistic rulers of democracies. Marxism likewise is a sham socialist system that employs the dissatisfaction of those exploited by Mammonism for the benefit of the “handlers for international capital” in order to “divert from themselves the hatred of the exploited” (p. 25).

The majority of the principal Marxists as well as Mammonists are Jews, and so “The Jewish question is becoming a world-question on whose solution the welfare and woe of the nations will be dependent” (p. 26). The solution of this question cannot be through violence since “indeed one cannot kill the plague bacillus individually, one can only eradicate it by cutting off its life necessities from it” (p. 26). A suggestion of what might be done to reduce their ill-earned gains is contained in point 17 of the party’s programme which envisages

creation of legal possibilities of confiscating if necessary land that was acquired in an illegal way or not administered according to the viewpoint of the welfare of the people. This is directed thus mainly against the Jewish land speculation companies. (p. 47)

Further, removal of Jews from all public positions will cause no difficulty to the nation since “the real vitally important productive activity in industry and agriculture, in the professions and administration, is almost entirely free of Jews” (p. 38). Concomitant with the removal of Jews from the “national body” is the enforcement of new citizenship laws whereby the citizenship rights will be “acquired” by the citizens and not merely granted to them. Thus only those who pledge themselves to the German community and culture and do not continue an adherence to another nation can obtain these rights (p. 39).

The National Socialist state will be a strong state that includes all the German tribes, and its power will be concentrated in a strong leader, or autocrat, who embodies “the highest responsibility” (p. 22)[17] since the German people have traditionally wanted a strong leader, and monarchs are not always to be relied upon. The leader of the National Socialist state, on the other hand, is not envisaged as a permanent ruler but one chosen only for the re-establishment of order and the prosperity of a debilitated nation. After he has accomplished his goals, he may step aside to let other rulers take his place under the constitution. Indeed, the National Socialist state may be characterised as a constitutional autocracy (p. 31). The constitutional aspect of the state will be used especially to ensure an effective labour law and social insurance (p. 23). Obviously, in a German national state, no members of foreign races can assume the leadership of state affairs (p. 22).

Feder is aware of the adverse reaction of the international financiers to such autarkic measures, but he believes that a transformation of interest-bearing bonds into interest-free bank assets or postal cheque accounts (p. 96) whereby foreign creditors can be paid will avert the wrath of the latter. He also suggests that boycotts can be overcome through transactions with neutral countries. As for military action, he believes that it is not likely to be pursued by the foreign creditor nations since

if the German people saw the French or Jewish tax collector sitting in every tax- and pension office, and if the best cows were taken from the stalls of the farmers by these foreign oppressors — then the anger and indignation would perhaps become soon so strong that one night would sweep the foreign spectre away with a bloody broom and free Germany. (p. 97)

*   *   *

We see that, in spite of the lucidity of his economic doctrines, Feder rather underestimated the unforgiving nature of the Mammon that he was striving against. In keeping with Feder’s doctrines, the Nationalist Socialist state officially cancelled the war debt to the Allied nations and sought, from 1933 on, to combat the cumulative deflation by the creation of money and work.[18] Work was created by increasing public works activity, such as notably the building of superhighways, and other construction and agricultural projects. These projects were financed, as Feder had recommended, by the issuance of government bills.[19] The production of armaments especially was spurred by the use of the so-called ‘Mefo’ bills — named after Schacht’s Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft (Mefo), which served as a government holding company.[20] These bills were used by government contractors for payment of their needs and were valid as a form of currency. As Overy notes, as a result of these economic strategies, “the banks increasingly became mere intermediaries, holding government stock and helping in the job of keeping bills circulating in the way that the government wanted.”[21] Tax levels were simultaneously reduced for farmers, small businesses and heavy industry through the “remission of taxes already paid”.[22] However, Hitler was also dependent in his ambitious rearmament plans on foreign finance, which certainly would not have accepted Feder’s insistence on an abolition of interest.[23]

The National Socialist economy was an increasingly state-controlled one that sought to avoid inflation by controlling prices and wages and foreign trade. Autarkic restrictions on imports were offset by bilateral barter agreements. Whether the war that began two years after the 1937 edition of Feder’s work was, as Feder’s view of the role of international finance in the first World War would suggest, another effort to punish Germany’s financial independence under National Socialism or whether it was indeed secretly willed by the international financiers for their own geopolitical ends, the increasing losses suffered by Germany in the course of it certainly provoked Hitler into attempting to “sweep the foreign spectre away with a bloody broom”, as Feder had predicted.

But neither Feder nor Hitler may have foreseen the severity of the revenge — more cruel since more lasting than that after the First World War — that the international Jewish interests would take on Germany after its defeat in 1945. While Feder hoped that other nations of the world will also eventually follow the German example and  “mankind, freed of the Jewish oppression, will experience an age of unprecedented prosperity — and, above all, Germany — the heart of the world”, the opposite of that indeed has occurred, since most of Europe has been turned into “a slave, fellaheen, bondman and servant of the all-Jewish world-power” (p. 35). And the heart of Germany itself, drained by a tyrannical psychological control of its population, has virtually stopped beating.

[1] This article is taken from the Preface to my edition of Gottfried Feder, The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation, Sanctuary Press, 2019.

[2] Manifest zur Brechung des Zinsknechtschaft des Geldes, Diessen vor München: Joseph C. Huber, 1919; cf. The Manifesto for the Breaking of the Financial Slavery to Interest, tr. Alexander Jacob, History Review Press, 2012; Sanctuary Press, 2019.

[3] Another major early member was Karl Harrer (1890-1926), who joined the party in March of 1919. Harrer, like Drexler, was a member of the occultist Thule society in Munich, which was an off-shoot of the Germanen Order founded in 1912 by Theodor Fritsch. Eckart too was influenced by the doctrines of the Thule society.

[4] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, tr. James Murphy, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939, pp.168,171.

[5] This work was translated by E.T.S. Dugdale as The Programme of the NSDAP and its general conceptions, Munich, 1932.

[6] I have for my translation used the 1932 edition, vol.35 of the “Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek” series.

[7] For the part played by big industries in Hitler’s rise to power see G. Hallgarten, “Adolf Hitler and German heavy industry 1931-1933”, Journal of Economic History, 12 (1952).

[8] H. Reupke, Der Nationalsozialismus und die Wirtschaft, Berlin, 1931, pp.29ff.

[9] The closest to National Socialist economics is the Social Credit movement founded in Britain by C.H. Douglas (1879-1952), whose work Economic Democracy was published in 1920 (see F. Hutchison and B. Burkitt, The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism, London: Routledge, 1997). Douglas influenced Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the thirties (see Kerry Bolton, “Breaking the bondage of interest, part 2”, Counter-Currents, August 11, 2011, http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/breaking-the-bondage-of-interesta-right-answer-to-usury-part-2/

[10] It was on his suggestion that Hitler changed the name of the German branch of the DAP in 1920 to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP).

[11] Feder’s manifesto on interest-slavery was interestingly published in the same year as Jung’s work on National Socialism.

[12] Rudolf Jung, Der Nationale Sozialismus, Munich, 1922, p.187f.

[13] Ibid., 53f.

[14] The pamphlets that he self-published (in Leipzig) in this series, “Die internationalen verwandtschaftlichen Beziehungen der jüdischen Hochfinanz” (The international kindred relationships of Jewish high finance’), between 1933 and 1940 present short historical accounts of the different branches of Jewry in various countries of Europe as well as in America. For instance, the first pamphlet is on Das Haus Rothschild, numbers two to four on Ginsberg und Günsberg und Asher Ginzberg, five to eight on Jakob Schiff und die Warburgs und das New Yorker Bankhaus Kuhn, Loeb & Co., nine to ten on Amsterdamer und Oppenheimer Juden, eleven on Französische Finanzjuden, twelve on Tschechoslowakische Finanzjuden, fourteen on Rumänische Finanzjuden, fifteen on Lessing und Moses Mendelssohn und das Bankhaus Mendelssohn & Co., seventeen on Polnische Finanzjuden, eighteen on Schwedische Finanzjuden, nineteen on Holländische und belgische Finanzjuden, twenty on Frankfurter Finanzjuden und die I.G. Farben, twenty-one to twenty-three on Englische Finanzjuden, thirty-four to thirty-eight and forty-three to forty-four on Tshechische Finanzjuden and thirty-nine to forty-two on Ungarische Finanzjuden. In addition, he published, in Halle, a similar work on Amerikanische Finanzjuden (1936).

[15] “nicht mehr zeitgemäßen Kampfmethoden, die sogar von den Engländern in jüngster Zeit zum Zwecke der Gegenpropaganda ausgeschlachtet wurden” (see Gerd Simon, “Chronologie, Pudor, Heinrich“, http://homepages.uni-tuebingen.de/gerd.simon/ChrPudor.pdf, p.19f.)

[16] All page-references are to my edition.

[17] The “Führer principle” was championed also by Rudolf Jung in his Nationale Sozialismus, p.177f.

[18] See G. Senft, “Anti-Kapitalismus von Rechts? – Eine Abrechnung mit Gottfried Feders ‘Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft’”, Zeitschrift für Sozialökonomie, 106 (1995), pp.18-32.

[19] According to Henry Liu: “through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began” (Henry C.K. Liu, “Nazism and the German economic miracle,” Asia Times Online, 24 May 2005, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GE24Dj01.html).

[20] Hitler’s eagerness to rearm Germany is not surprising in the light of the eastern expansionist and anti-Bolshevist foreign political aims outlined by him already in Mein Kampf, Vol.II, Ch.14.

[21] R.J. Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932-1938, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.43.

[22] Ibid., p.38.

[23]See the web-log by “Scanners”, “Gottfried Feder und das zinslose Geld”, http://www.utopia.de/blog/umweltpolitik/gottfried-feder-und-das-zinslose.The western financial powers may have partly supported Hitler’s effort to check the westward spread of Bolshevism. For American involvement in National Socialist finance, for example, see Anthony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the rise of Hitler, Sudbury: Bloomfield Books, 1976.

Esau’s Tears

/5 Comments/in , , /by

 

2794 Words

Many of the great works of counter-Semitism from the past fifty years are splendid attacking books. They lay out their cases against Jewish power and subversion and let the reader decide how to respond. Some of the most famous of these, of course, are Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together, Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion, and Igor Shafarevich’s Russophobia. Less common are defensive works of counter-Semitism, ones that exonerate White gentiles from the demonization often found in Jewish historiography. Albert Lindemann’s 1997 book Esau’s Tears is once such work since it shields European peoples from the collective guilt with which leftist historians—many of whom are Jews—continually smear them. Lindemann also humanizes many notable anti-Semites from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thus clearing their names and the names of the people who followed them.

This is not to say that Lindemann champions anti-Semitism or makes apologies for it; rather, he strives to make two major points. One, that many ideas and episodes from history which today would be labeled anti-Semitic were in fact perfectly reasonable, based in truth, and the result of demonstrably bad Jewish behavior. Lindemann never fails to present Jews of the past feeling this way as well, thereby qualifying them as anti-Semites by today’s utopian standards. And two, that such pushback against the Jews did not and does not inexorably lead to mass murder. This is the thesis which many leftist historians wish us to swallow, and Lindemann strikes out against it:

How we interpret history is always powerfully influenced by the concerns and values of our own age, but it is finally misleading and unjust to single out and indignantly describe, for example, the racism of nineteenth-century Germans (“proto-Nazis”) without recognizing how much beliefs in ethnic or racial determinism were the norm in most countries and were to be found among oppressed minorities, Jews included, as much as oppressive majorities – how they were, in short, part of a shared intellectual world, a zeitgeist – but did not lead to mass murder in every country.

Jewish historian Salo Baron coined the term “lachrymose theory” to describe “the eternal self-pity characteristic of Jewish historiography.” In German, this is known as Leidensgeschichte (“suffering history”), and is often employed not to present a balanced, disinterested narrative of past events but to prevent future suffering by ignoring Jewish culpability and vilifying gentiles. This “denunciatory theory” of Jewish historiography could easily walk hand-in-hand with Baron’s “lachrymose theory,” since it brands gentiles with the stigma of eternal guilt (the absolution of which can only be achieved of course through philo-Semitism). Resisting both theories is the hill upon which Lindemann makes his stand. In his sights are three popular volumes of Jewish history from three Jewish polemicists—The War Against the Jews by Lucy Dawidowcz (1975), Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (1991) by Robert Wistrich, and Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) by Daniel Goldhagen. These works, as Lindemann rather politely puts it, have “a tendency to a colorful and indignant narrative, accompanied by weak, sometimes tendentious analysis.” In dispelling the blatant anti-gentilism of these authors, however, Lindemann never wishes to exclude Jews from his readership. He never explicitly ceases to strive for rapprochement. A major theme in Esau’s Tears emerges which warns Jews that a hostile, polemical, and frankly dishonest approach to history will only give real anti-Semites more ammunition to hurl at Jews.

Lindemann’s central conceit springs from the Book of Genesis. Twin brothers Esau and Jacob vie for their father Isaac’s affections, which Jacob—the younger of the pair—deceitfully swindles from Esau. Enraged and heartbroken, Esau forces Jacob to flee into Mesopotamia, where he gives rise to the Jewish people. Esau, on the other hand, gives rise to gentiles. It is said that anti-Semitism will cease only when Esau’s tears stop flowing. I don’t think Lindemann—who himself is not Jewish—could have selected a better title for a work which counteracts the “lachrymose theory” of Jewish historiography. Gentiles have tears too, and as with their innocent Old Testament forebear, they often spring not from fantasies or psychoses, but from the palpable misdeeds of Jews. An eye for an eye, a tear for a tear.

Lindemann proceeds by disclosing one inconvenient fact after another to underscore his point. Jews in history were not relegated to ghettos; they lived there on their own accord to keep apart from gentiles. Jews in history were not forced into usury, liquor trades, and criminal activity because no other vocations were open to them; they did such things because they wanted to and didn’t care so much about the harm they caused peasant gentiles. And yes, even in Russia, they were able to own land, they just chose not to work the soil themselves. Often, Jews in history were poor because the overwhelming majority of gentiles around them were also poor. And the ancient and medieval ones were not so innocent. Lindemann gives us examples of ancient Jewish oppression of Christians and pagans, as well as some frankly hateful language from the Talmud (for example, “The best among the gentiles should be slain”). The Book of Deuteronomy, Lindemann points out, can reasonably be seen as sanctioning genocide, and many Jewish thinkers throughout history expressed views which today would seem racist, supremacist, or chauvinistic. In comparison, Jews were treated better in official Church doctrine than were Muslims or heretics. Lindemann never lets gentiles off the hook for their bad behavior, but simultaneously never ceases to remind the reader of the many long periods during which Jews and gentiles got along reasonably well.

Esau’s Tears offers a brief history of the Enlightenment, which, due to the premium it placed on egalitarianism and fraternity, got the ball rolling for Jewish emancipation in Europe. Not surprisingly, many Enlightenment thinkers, most famously Voltaire, were irked by Jewish intolerance and separatism. That the Ashkenazi Jews in France were rude and lacked manners didn’t help (the Sephardim, on the other hand, were much better behaved and so faced fewer obstacles to citizenship). Also not surprisingly, those Frenchmen who had the most experience with Jews—such as the National Assembly delegates from Alsace—were the ones most bitterly opposed to granting them equal rights. In an ironic twist, Lindemann reports that after the Jews won their equality . . .

[m]any Alsatians insisted that Jewish vices, far from disappearing under the new laws, had actually gotten worse in their province. Jews had not taken the opportunity to assume honest physical labor but had pursued with even greater success their old ways of usury and exploitation.

In another ironic twist, Sephardic leaders in France often staunchly resisted equal rights for the Ashkenazim “due to their low moral character.” This is one of many instances in Esau’s Tears of Jews behaving anti-Semitically and having good reason to do so. Most commonly, it sprang from the embarrassment and discomfiture many assimilated Jews in Western Europe felt when confronted with their Eastern European brethren whose morality, hygiene, and manners left much to be desired.

In eastern Europe things were much worse due to the millions of Jews that had recently become subjects of the Tsar by the mid-nineteenth century. These teeming Ostjuden (eastern Jews) comprised by far the largest concentration of Jews in the world and put Russia in a state of crisis almost right away with their exploitive relationships with the peasants. Lindemann pre-dates John Klier in exonerating the Tsarist government regarding the pogroms of the early 1880s. And when discussing the more violent pogroms which occurred in places like Kishinev in the early twentieth century, Lindemann mordantly recalls that Jewish revolutionaries had been disproportionately responsible for the assassination of leading Russian officials and police officers leading up to those events, including that of Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Russian Minister of the Interior. Lindemann touches on the Jewish tendency to exaggerate atrocity, such as when Ukrainian insurrectionist Bogdan Chmielnicki rose up against the Poles in 1648, and targeted not only Jews, but Polish nobility and the Catholic Church. Jewish Leidensgeschichte has it that at least 100,000 Jews were massacred, but modern historians, including Paul Johnson in The History of the Jews (1987), seriously doubt this. Lindemann also points out that while this was going on, Europe was embroiled in equally brutal wars, and it “is open to serious question if Jews suffered in substantially larger numbers than others caught up in the raging battles.” And in a drily humorous moment, for those who complain about Jews being cooped up in the Russian Pale of Settlement during this time, Lindemann reminds us that the Pale was forty times larger than the modern state of Israel.

No review of Esau’s Tears would be complete without addressing the mileage Lindemann gets out of Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish novelist and British Prime Minister from the late nineteenth century. The zeitgeist of the age was, in effect, race- or ethnic-realism. Very few people—least of all Jews—denied that different peoples had differing ingrained capabilities and temperaments, both negative and positive. (Linemann thankfully does not deny it either.) Anyone who offers nineteenth-century racial determinism as exhibit A in favor of the inevitability of Nazism will have to come to grips with Disraeli, whom Lindemann describes as “the most influential propagator of the concept of race in the nineteenth century”:

In his novel Coningsby, Disraeli depicted a vast and secret power of Jews, bent on dominating the world. His noble Jewish character, Sidonia (whom Disraeli let it be known was based on Lionel Rothschild), describes race as a supremely important determinant (“all is race; there is no other truth”). Race, he argued, had always been a central factor in the rise of civilization, and western civilization could not have flourished without the Jewish race.

Lindemann even quotes a Rothschild who in private correspondence flatly blamed anti-Semitism on Jewish “arrogance, vanity, and unspeakable insolence.” A paragon of such insolence is nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz who despised Germany despite living there. He once claimed that Jews who convert to Christianity are “like combatants who, putting on the uniform of the enemy, can all the more easily strike and annihilate him.” Lindemann makes it plain that such destructive attitudes were not terribly unusual among prominent Jews and that the oft-exaggerated notion of Jews as culture destroyers “reflected an undeniable reality.” Lindemann reports how Jews often weaponized the press against Christians or goyim in general while taking great umbrage at even the slightest criticism of Jews. And then there’s all the scams and boondoggles Jews have been involved in, epitomized by the Panama Canal scandal which occupied French headlines in the 1880s and early 1890s.

Investigation into the activities of the Panama Company revealed widespread bribery of parliamentary officials to assure support of loans to continue work on the Panama Canal—work that had been slowed by endless technical and administrative difficulties. Here was a modern project that involved large sums of French capital and threatened national prestige. The intermediaries between the Panama Company and parliament were almost exclusively Jews, with German names and backgrounds, some of whom tried to blackmail one another.

The fiasco caused thousands of small investors to lose their fortunes, to say nothing of the 5,000 Frenchmen and 20,000 Afro-Caribbean laborers who lost their lives in the tropical heat for nothing.

So, the anti-Semites were often correct, or at least were not thrashing about in fantasies, when they accused Jews of clandestine misdeeds or bad behavior. And the more Ostjuden there were in a particular region, the more misdeeds and bad behavior there were to complain about—usually. The bulk of Esau’s Tears covers these as well as the anti-Semites who used their powers of analysis and pattern recognition to call attention to them. Most importantly, Lindemann humanizes these individuals, warts and all, and in almost all cases exonerates them from the blood guilt with which the denunciatory school of Jewish history wishes to stamp them. For a history of anti-Semitism from 1870 to 1939, one can do no better than Esau’s Tears.

Lindemann goes high and low, and far and wide, in his assessment of anti-Semitism. In the 18th century, Johann Gottfried von Herder established the idea of volkgeist, or, spirit of the people, which famed composer Richard Wagner made use of in the next century when discussing Jews in music. French researcher, Paul Broca was a man of the Left whose data forced him to conclude that racial differences exist, quite against his intentions. Where zealots such as Wilhelm Marr—the man who coined the term anti-Semitism—and Georg Ritter von Schönerer saw Jews through a racial lens, religious men such as Adolf Stoekel and Baron Karl von Vogelsang saw the behavior of Jews as a threat to Christianity. Otto Böckel, a popular demagogue known as “the peasant king,” tirelessly spoke out on behalf of the German lower classes, who often suffered as a result of Jewish predations. Meanwhile, anti-capitalist theoretician Eugen Dühring wrote about the “cosmic evil” in Jews. Above them all were top-flight intellects such as Heinrich von Treitschke and Houston Stewart Chamberlain who lent great credibility to anti-Semitism and were respected by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Then of course there was Karl Lueger, the immensely popular anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna prior to the First World War. Lindemann refuses to defend Lueger on all accounts, but points out that his anti-Semitism was often little more than red meat for his base and may not have been entirely genuine. Vienna’s Jews were not materially harmed during his tenure and in fact thrived when this supposed enemy of the Jews ruled the roost—as did many others. The only notable anti-Semite that Lindemann discredits is Edouard Drumont whose popular writings he dismisses as “inconsistent scribblings.” Still, Lindemann credits Drumont as the muck raking journalist who exposed the Jewish role in the Panama Canal scandal.

Lindemann concedes that the historical record is filled with vulgar no-accounts and charlatans who climbed aboard the anti-Semitism bandwagon after failing in other endeavors. But for over a century, the anti-Semites with talent, energy, convictions, and discipline had reacted rationally to real problems and were by no means drawing a straight line to the Nazis. Indeed, Lindemann points out how the diversity of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism makes drawing such a line very difficult. After all, there were plenty of racists who were not anti-Semitic, and quite a few anti-racists who were. And what to make of anti-Semites who assailed Jews from the standpoint of religion or socialism or conservatism? Furthermore, Lindemann demonstrates that despite the breathtaking variety anti-Semitic thought and policy prior to the Nazi era, there were two aspects in which there was almost no diversity at all. One, from the leadership of all anti-Semitic movements outside of Russia or Romania, there were no calls to violence against Jews. And two, all of them, with the possible exception of Lueger, rarely succeeded in making anti-Semitism stick with the people. Before the First World War, anti-Semitism never gained much of a foothold in Western or Southern Europe, or in Hungary. Yes, its presence was stronger in Germany and Austria due to their larger Jewish populations. But even in these places it never enjoyed prolonged mainstream popularity. It was only in Romania and Russia where it was so common that it did not need demagogues or ideologues to prop it up. According to my reading of Lindemann, the tepid success of anti-Semitism resulted not only from European forbearance, but also because assimilated Jews and the Sephardim were in general better behaved and more respectful of their gentile hosts than were the pushy, ill-mannered Ashkenazic Ostjuden who often ruthlessly pursued money or revolution.

In his first chapter, Lindemann suggests that “the notion of the anti-Semite as underdog is one that needs to be given serious analysis.” This is because the highly influential historians of the Jewish denunciatory school continually dehumanize and demonize the anti-Semites of history as if framing a case of first-degree murder in a court of law, with the victim, of course, being the martyred six million. Exculpatory evidence is downplayed or ignored, and goals other than the impartial search for the truth are pursued. In the latter chapters of Esau’s Tears Lindemann condemns Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, of course, but still humanizes the man. He points out what so many of us know today—that Hitler and the Nazis were in large part a reaction to the widespread atrocities of the Soviets, a people that the denunciatory school of Jewish history rarely smears with the same vigor it exerts when smearing the Nazis and their innocent anti-Semitic predecessors. Perhaps this is because a highly disproportionate number of these Soviet criminals were Jews themselves.

If Esau’s Tears tells us anything, it’s that nothing good can come out of this, except for perhaps more anti-Semitism.

Ernst von Wolzogen, “Principles, and personal experience, of the Jewish Question”1 (1933)

/12 Comments/in , /by
Translated by Alexander JacobErnst von Wolzogen (1855-1934) was an Austrian nobleman who wrote several humorous novels as well as the libretto for Richard Strauss’ second opera, Feuersnot (1901). He was also one of the founders of cabaret in Germany. In the following essay published in 1933, Wolzogen summarises the causes of anti-Semitism as being due to the natural aversion that Aryans feel for Jews, the opposition of Christianity to Judaism, and the commercial appropriation of German culture by the Jews for their profit and mastery over German society. He also recounts the personal distress that he suffered at the hands of the Jewish press and artistic managements of his day. Wolzogen’s personal experiences of the Jews in German artistic circles a century ago indeed possess more than a passing relevance to contemporary Western cultural sociology.

 *   *   *

The former General Superintendent2 Dr. Ketzler called attention in 1930 to quite forgotten late Roman evidence regarding the aversion of the Western world to the Jews. A contemporary of Stilicho,3 the Roman senator Claudius Rutilius Namatianus,4 still a pagan, undertook a coastal voyage in 416 to Galilee in order to ascertain if his landed property there had suffered damage through the invasion of the Gothic troops of Alarich.5 He described this voyage in verse under the title De reditu suo and the manuscript has been preserved in some Roman archive. This Namatianus had leased one of his properties to a Jew. And he describes, partly with moral indignation, partly with malicious scorn, how he was received and treated by this lessee. The orthodox Pharisee did not let him take part in a kosher meal but had a meal cooked really badly specially for him and handed a steep bill to him for this hospitality. Besides this, he raised a loud racket about the improper water usage of the senator and his travel companions. And on the Sabbath he did not deign to do any service for his guest. Namatianus laughs thoroughly at the Jewish god who, after the strenuous work of creation of six days, is himself exhausted and must therefore rest for a day. He traces the cold-heartedness that struck him in all Jews to the senselessly strict prescriptions of the Sabbath holiday. He writes that the Jew treated him and his companions as cattle whereas the ridiculous arrogance and the blind obedience to prescriptions of religious law that had long become senseless appeared to him and the Romans as unworthy of human beings. At the end of his observations he breaks into the complaint,

Oh, if only Judaea had never been subjugated by the wars of Pompeius6 and the military force of Titus!7 Now from out of the broken breeding ground of pestilence creeps the contagion so much more widely and the conquered nation burdens their conquerors.

This groan of Namantianus relates to the fact that already in his time the Jews were felt to be blood-suckers in the dying Roman Empire. They had taken control everywhere of the financial business and brokerage, they constituted a state within the state and transferred their taxes to the secret leaders in Jerusalem more punctually than the state taxes to the Roman financial ministry. The former financial wealth of Rome had flowed mostly into their pockets. And Jerusalem was, along with Alexandria, the biggest stock-exchange of the world of that time. We see therefore from this eloquent document that, already at the time of Alarich, the aversion of the Aryan world to Jewry was the same as that today and had the same reasons. What has appeared recently is only the disastrous influence that they have exercised through the press for some hundred years.

Of course, whether Europe would have been preserved from the Jewish pestilence if Titus had not destroyed Jerusalem and had driven the inhabitants out may justifiably be doubted. The Jews tend even today to maintain that only with the diaspora were they forced to the exclusive occupation with trade and usury because the cruel hard-heartedness of their host nations had denied them the acquisition of land, naturalization in the cities, and equality in mechanical and intellectual activities. But in reality the entire history of Jewry, even that written by themselves, shows that, from the most ancient times, they were only exploiters of the work of others, parasites, vexatious appropriators of foreign cultural works, traders and speculators. Under the late Roman emperors they enjoyed the greatest freedom, indeed even privilege. They had ample opportunity to develop their intellectual gifts in creative activities in the centuries up to the Christianisation under Constantine, if they were inclined to do so. But they preferred the predatory business activities. They had a second favourable opportunity to live freely in mediaeval Spain, especially under the Moorish rule. And there they succeeded in crystallising out of themselves a sort of noble race, the so-called Sephardim. Their scientifically disposed minds showed a special preference for medicine, mathematics, philosophy and, later, also for poetry and music.8 We may gladly grant them the fame that in these fields they have accomplished competent works, in individual cases even outstanding ones, and for some centuries offered to the West perhaps the best doctors. But it would have indeed been a wonder if affluence and peace had not brought forth scholars and artists even in an intellectually active nation of traders. Art and science flourish always in times of peace and affluence. If the original nomad and desert bandit develops, once he becomes sedentary, into traders and usurers and finally, under careful greenhouse cultivation, also brings forth forms alien to their nature such as philosophers and poets that is not more surprising than if the descendants of long series of generations of farmers, soldiers, handicraftsmen and tradesmen in peaceful times also strike out of their mould and begin to engage in arts and sciences. That the Jews in all circumstances, even if their state had not been destroyed, would have spread over the world as traders is due to the fact that to them even today sedentary life is little valued. They indeed gather in a mass where there is a good business to be made and leave the place as soon as they have plundered it. One may just recall the mass immigration of Galician Jews into Vienna at the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire and the mass emigration of the same Jews to Berlin and Paris when the German inflation and the collapse of the French frank offered new shining opportunities to fish in troubled waters. Where there is no business to be made the average Jew will not stay long – nor even the most enthusiastic Zionist in the praised land of their ancestors newly gifted by the grace of England.

The reasons for the aversion of almost all peoples of the entire world against Jewry are of different sorts. Among the Aryan peoples it is based primarily in a blood hostility. The most recent scientific research has indeed demonstrated that the Aryan and Jewish corpuscles repel one another in a polarized way. From this perhaps is the inborn repugnance in all Aryans who are still racially conscious to some degree, which however is not expressed against all members of the Semitic race but only against the specifically Jewish type with a negroid element as is especially frequent among the Ashkenazim, the eastern Jews. This racial instinct can therefore perhaps be fully inactive with regard to such Jews who have already for generations willingly accepted Western intellectual culture and as a result of that have more or less obliterated the external stamp of the Jewish soul.

The aversion to Jewry for religious reasons, which operated in a very essential manner in the Jewish persecutions of the Middle Ages, is today hardly of significance. The Christian churches themselves have indeed taken care to see that the consciousness of the essential difference between the Jewish tribal god Jehova and the creator of Nature and the loving father of all human children taught by Jesus became increasingly weak. The acknowledgement of the Old Testament as ‘Holy Scripture’ even for the Christians, the opinion that Jesus was the Messiah promised by the Israelite prophets finally produced the sheer grotesque belief that we had to see in the Jews the worthy fathers of Christianity. Inwardly we regretted the obduracy not only of the contemporary members of the chosen people who did not wish to be redeemed by their divinely chosen Saviour; we became, and are still, eager Jewish missionaries who believe that we can change the Jewish spirit through baptism and win them over to our character!

This false belief operated totally catastrophically in English Puritanism. The English Puritans returned in sinister enthusiasm to the ‘old covenant’, worshipped Jehova and considered it the highest honour to be the descendants of the two tribes of Israel that had disappeared without a trace that, according to the legend, were cast away on the British Isles. They felt themselves also conveniently obliged to fulfil the command of Jehova which meant they had to ‘devour’ all the nations and exercise loyalty and faith, justice and love of one’s neighbour only with regard to one’s own religious comrades. Only in recent times has the knowledge become the property of all mankind that Jesus the Galilean – whether he was pure Jewish blood or not – stood from the start in his entire thought and feeling in sheerest opposition to Judaism. Indeed, he is, according to a rabbinical legend, the son of a Jewish hairdresser in Jerusalem and a Roman, therefore perhaps Aryan, officer who later became a captain in Capernaum. (This would explain the friendship between Jesus and the house of this captain evidenced by the evangelists.)

The same rabbinical legend emphasizes most strongly that the hatred of the orthodox against the young rabbi Jeshua ben Jusuf, who, during his long sojourn in Egypt, sat at the feet of the Jewish religious philosopher Philo of Alexandria9 and there filled his mind with Platonic ideas, and therefore records that this renegade half-Jew had defiantly set himself beyond the strict prescriptions that strictly forbade the entry of bastards into the inner sanctuary of the Temple. What the raging hatred of the Pharisees conceived against the bold Galilean – who called them the children of the Devil – seems to me to have greater probability than the desperate efforts of our modern wild Aryans who would like make Galileans Gauls and cannot imagine the carpenter’s son from Nazareth other than as blue-eyed and with blond locks. Then necessarily even Gautama Buddha, who raged against the Indian pantheon, must have been a descendant of the Atlanteans! I mean that one can proceed very well without such violent constructions, by simply explaining the personality of Jesus as a good fortune or as a divine act of mercy that granted to the Jewish people a religious genius. It cannot at all appear as a wonder that a race that brought forth so many passionate and even poetically gifted preachers of atonement and prophets finally gave birth to a religious revolutionary.

As such, Jesus had naturally to come to the understanding that the Pharisaic orthodoxy had nothing to do with real religion. Even the knowledge that the pure teaching of Jesus was disastrously falsified by Paul, and especially through his smuggling in of the Jewish concept of sin, has become the common possession of all thinking and perceptive Christians only in recent times. Even if now the most ingenuous church-going Christians hardly hate Jewry because their forefathers killed the Saviour on the cross, all really religious men, no matter if they belong to a church or not, must reject the Yahweh religion for the simple reason that it educates its adherents to the exploitation and destruction of all other nations.

The present-day liberal Jews declare with great decisiveness, and presumably also through sincere conviction, that in their conscience they no longer feel bound to the Mosaic law and its Talmudic interpretation. That may indeed be believed of them; the cultivated Reform Jew of today has in fact not read the Schulchan Aruch and the Talmud, and perhaps does not even understand Hebrew any longer. But unknown to himself his thought and feeling move even today on the tracks that were laid out to their forefathers. It is still only a few Jews who have lived with our Aryan concept of honour, especially our entire attitude to God and our fellowmen, to such a degree that it has become as natural to them as to us.

We always shake our head in uncomprehending astonishment when even Jews who are intellectually and morally superior Jews and who, as doubtlessly honourable men, enjoy the respect of their host peoples, take into their protection Jewish criminals of the worst sort and confront our justified moral indignation with the accusation of anti-Semitic persecution.

The crudest cases of this sort are indeed still in recent memory so that one does not need to go into them in greater detail. We were told that we should take as a model this unconditional support of blood brothers ‘through thick and thin’. But we are fully incapable of doing that. Our conception of honour and justice forbids us to turn black into white in order to help a racial comrade out of difficulty. And when a criminal of our blood receives his punishment we say with satisfaction that he deserved it. We are just to the point of weakness, for we have, for example, let the Aryan Social Democrat Crispien10 declare in the German parliament that he does not recognize any fatherland that is called Germany without throwing him out of the window! One may evaluate our concept of honour, our conception of noble humanity, our categorical imperative, in whatever way one wishes but it is essentially different from the Jewish conception, in most cases even directly opposed to it.

A third reason – in present-day Germany decidedly the most important – for the rejection of the Jews is their presumption of bringing not only the economy but also the entire cultural affairs of our nation under its sway. Anti-Semitism has simply become a defensive weapon. Ever since press freedom was declared to nr constitutional, the Jewish intelligentsia rushed to the newspaper industry and their money enabled them to establish daily newspapers, weekly and monthly journals and to provide a circulation for these that exceeded by far the circulation figures of the German publications. From that time on, thus for the last two decades of the previous century, the influence of the Jewish spirit has become considerable. The mass of harmless German readers did not notice anything. They believed what was written and allowed themselves to be blinded and dazed by the skilled presentation. They learned to laugh at what they had once respected. They became ever more unsure in their natural instincts. Indeed, they learned even to think, to a certain degree, in a Jewish manner! Only a few Germans had worried thoughts about the fact that increasingly more teaching positions in sciences were occupied by Jewish lecturers, increasingly more stages directed by Jews, the commercial mediation between artists and the public, the publishing houses, the art trade increasingly fell into Jewish hands. The innocent people shrugged their shoulders: ‘Well, why not! They are an intelligent people, they present much to minds occupied with the sciences, excellent musicians, actors, singers, directors, conductors, and even very remarkable poets and brilliant writers. And if they take part in the competition with German gifts only sheer envy could deny them their success.’ The speculation on the inborn German love of justice succeeded brilliantly: Already in 1906 a Dr. [Moritz] Goldstein declared, in a questionnaire in Kunstwart11 that intellectual Jewry felt called to take over the administration of German cultural matters.12 That meant therefore: the tame Germans may write poetry, compose, paint, sculpt, think and invent as much as they want, but insofar as there is a business to be made of their intellectual products the Jew would make it. That is indeed his right for the German does not understand anything about business. And with this decision at least the entire German readership happily gave itself up to the Jewish and Jewish-influenced newspapers.

I may perhaps bring in, for example, my personal experiences in this context. I came from Weimar to Berlin at the beginning of the eighties unsuspectingly, that is, from the incense-filled church of classical tradition and from the magical circle of the living personality of Liszt.12 But hardly had I achieved my first modest successes as a humorous writer and dramatist than I saw myself trapped by the Jewish cultural administrators ruling even at that time. I soon moved in almost exclusively Jewish circles. I was not seldom the sole Gentile in the company of prominent oriental persons. I did not think there was anything bad in that. Only, I thought afterwards that I did not wish in any case to enter into a friendly relationship with any of these many witty and amiable foreign men. Then, in 1901, I unfortunately allowed myself to be tempted to realise in Germany the idea of the small stage, of the artistic music hall, brought by Aryans, the French cabaretists, the Dane Holder Drachmann,13 the Swede Sven Scholander14 and the Germans Bierbaum15 and Wedekind.16 In 1920 I had acquired the necessary distance from the miserable experiences of 1901-1905 to be able to represent them in my memoirs not only truthfully but already with the wistful smile of self-irony. These memoirs appeared under the title ‘How I killed myself’ in Westermann’s monthly journal. But since they lasted until the Überbrettl cabaret period, delegates of the Jewish cultural community demanded of the publisher the immediate stop of further publication and intensified this demand with the threat that in case of refusal to do so all Jewish subscribers would stop subscribing to the monthly journal. The publisher did not allow himself to be intimidated and the monthly journals prosper today more strongly than ever before. But henceforth almost all German stages remained closed to me – and indeed not only those managed by Jews. Naturally also all my other artistic undertakings as well as my books were maliciously criticized or fully ignored by the entire Jewish-influenced press. And why was that? Because I had made clear in the case of the establishment of my own theatres how well Jewry is able to lay their cuckoo eggs in our German nest. The first Jew that I employed in my undertaking soon brought a racial comrade with him and, before I knew it, my secretary and my office assistant were the sole Aryans in the entire undertaking! So long as a large crowd of Jews earned highly from my affairs the Jewish press trumpeted my fame full-throatedly all over the country. The few German artists that I dared to employ, to save face, were thrashed or at best tolerated with a shrug of the shoulders. Before the end of a year my playwrights were no longer called Dehmel,17 Liliencron,18 Bierbaum, Falke,19 Thoma,20 Wedekind but Leipziger, Krakauer, Warschauer and so on. How that could happen, how they paralysed my will and demeaned my name as a signpost for a purely Jewish business, one may read in my memoirs, which later appeared as the first volume of a five-volume edition of selections of my works at Westermann Publishers in Braunschweig. But I had, already before the composition of the memoirs, tried to shape my experiences with the Jewish cultural politics in a literary form, but then left the work lie because I did not find any artistically satisfactory conclusion. Only in 1923 did I take up the manuscript again and attempted to salvage those successful humorous-satirical chapters that dealt with my experiences by appending them to a newly invented story with a political background. That was not a happy idea, for the secret league of the valuable opposition of the German aristocracy against Wilhelm II with allusions to the Eulenburg affair21 (whose real background was at that time still unknown to me) did not agree with the playful cockiness from my cabaret period. The book appeared under the title Sem, der Mitbürger at the Brunnen Publishing House in Berlin. The editor of the Central Verein Zeitung newspaper for defence against anti-Semitism, Fritz Engel, went into a frenzy about that. He referred me urgently to the public prosecutor, and if he were to refuse, to a psychiatrist.

I may interpret this paroxysm as a sure proof of the fact that I had hit the mark with my mockery of the Jewish character, which was nevertheless good-humored and strictly truthful. As is well-known, only Jews may permit themselves to mock Jews. And I had indeed gone too far in representing a prominent Jew as rather dim-witted. Consequently I was punished with death. The German literary historian Soergel22 took over almost word for word Engel’s judgement, without knowing the work, and recorded it forever in his Deutsche Literaturgeschichte.23

Thereafter the boycott screw was tightened even further. The director of a south German city theatre, who had accepted a new play of mine, was quite publicly threatened that the press would ruin him if he dared to perform my play. All booksellers were forbidden to place my books in their windows. And it was even reported to me by an acquaintance that he had asked for a book of mine in a German shop, whereupon the owner sharply winked at him and only when the other customers had left the shop did he confess to him in whispers that he indeed wished to sell him the book but had to request him not to speak of it to anybody else because otherwise his competitor on the same street would certainly report him to the Jews and would ruin his business. When I report these things to respectable Jews they shake their heads in disbelief and assure me that they know nothing of such machinations. Maybe. But one who has any relationship with the Chawrusse24 or the great Cabal, knows about it precisely – no matter whether he dwells in Berlin between Koch Street and Jerusalem Street or in New York or in Jaffa. – It is entirely the same in the case of politics: one must just ask which one of our people our enemies hate the most – it is the men who have understood them most deeply and who are therefore most to be feared. If the street boys shout Hep! Hep!, if wild Teutonicists declare without any hesitation that every man that they dislike is a Jew, and narrow-minded racial fanatics reject completely all Jewish accomplishments, that does not disturb their sleep; but woe to the incautious person who, through his own sharp observation, has recognized the true visage of Jewry and who attempts to use his knowledge to enlighten people!

I think that such a personal experience – and all who have dared to associate with our culture-administering Jews will have similar things to report – illustrates more glaringly the impossible situation than the most detailed observations could. We simply cannot tolerate any longer the presumption of these foreigners, who make up hardly one percent of our population, this violation of our mind. In the meantime, most of the Germans capable of thought have, thank God, perceived how remarkably stupid the phrase was that anti-Semitism is a cultural shame. The young Germany of today, with its new ideals and its fervent capacity for enthusiasm, will certainly proceed beyond this condition of self-defence and move to attack. Only when the Jew will never be a German citizen of Jewish faith but only a foreigner tolerated in a friendly manner would the poison fangs of anti-Semitism be broken, then one can let the guests of a foreign race ply their trades peacefully and utilize their many-sided gifts.

For, if they then misuse their freedom to harm our economy through usury and cut-throat competition or morally undermine our intellectual disposition, then we would know how to make them harmless through expulsion. Those among them who no longer make a good business in the new conditions will soon look for other places of refuge, and that will perhaps include the worst and most dangerous elements among them. With a sifted Jewry there will perhaps be a rather middling income. It is possible that the German Jews will then develop into a better variety, such as the Sephardim once were in Spain, and that then the intellectual Germanisation would succeed more often than hitherto. In any case, the indispensable precondition for the solution of the Jewish Question remains that we stop feeling like besieged people in our own house threatened with starvation and gas poisoning, that we learn once again to exercise our proprietary rights as proud free people.

  1. ‘Grundsätzliches und Persönliches zur Judenfrage’, published in the collection of essays, Das neue Deutschland und die Judenfrage, Lepizig: Rüdiger Verlag, 1933.

  2. A church administrator.

  3. Stilicho (ca.359-408) was a military commander in the Roman army who rose to political prominence in the Western Roman Empire.

  4. Namatianus was a Roman poet of Gallic origin who composed a poem De reditu suo in two books, of which only about seven hundred lines are still extant.

  5. Alarich I (ca.370-411) was the first king of the Visigoths

  6. Pompeius magnus (106-48 B.C.) was a Roman general – and rival of Julius Caesar – who annexed Syria in 64 B.C. and made Judaea a client kingdom shortly after.

  7. Titus Vespianus (39-81) was a Roman Emperor who captured Jerusalem in 70 and destroyed the Second Temple.

  8. Wolzogen is referring to the so-called ‘Golden Age of Jewish culture’ in Muslim Spain in the 10th and 11th centuries.

  9. Philo Judaeus (ca 20 B.C.-50) was a Jewish philosopher in Alexandria who attempted to interpret Judaism in the light of Platonic philosophy.

  10. Arthur Crispien (1875-1946) was a Social Democratic member of parliament.

  11. From Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 8:  Jewish cultural domination was a theme of anti-Semitism, but in 1912 when Zionist author [Moritz] Goldstein made his famous comment that Jews should contemplate the implications of the fact that the German cultural heritage was now largely in Jewish hands, the reaction was self-deception:  The unexpected frankness with which a Jew who eschewed self-delusion thus broke a taboo which otherwise had only been violated by anti-Semites with malicious tendencies, illuminated with lightning clarity the prevailing socio-political tensions. And perhaps more illuminating was the embittered reaction of most of the Jewish participants . . . who repudiated the thesis as such, declared the ventilation of the question to be improper, and tried with all their might to efface the divisions thus exposed. (Scholem 1979, 30)  Goldstein was a Zionist, and his essay was greeted with hostility by liberal Jewish organizations who assailed the “excessive nationalism” and “racial semitism” of the Zionists (see Field 1981, 248). As Field (1981, 248) points out, another aspect of Jewish self-deception revealed by this incident was that these liberal Jewish critics never confronted the central problem raised by Goldstein when he noted that anti-Semites such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain were “the best spirits, clever, truth-loving men who, however, as soon as they speak of Jews, fall into a blind, almost rabid hatred.” The credibility of the anti-Semites, not Moritz Goldstein, was the fundamental problem for German Jews.

  12. Liszt was the famous composer and pianist Kunstwart was a German arts periodical that was published from 1887 to 1937.

  13. Holder Drachmann (1846-1908) was a Danish poet and dramatist.

  14. Sven Scholander (1860-1936) was a Swedish musician and sculptor.

  15. Otto Bierbaum (1865-1910) was a journalist and writer whose novel Stilpe inspired Wolzogen to establish the first cabaret, the ‘Überbrettl’, in Berlin in 1901.

  16. Franklin Wedekind (1864-1918) was a German playwright who contributed to the formation of the Communistic ‘epic theatre’ of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht.

  17. Richard Dehmel (1863-1920) was a German poet whose poems were set to music by numerous composers including Strauss and Schoenberg.

  18. Detlev von Liliencron (1844-1909) was a German poet and novelist.

  19. Gustav Falke (1853-1916) was a German poet based in Hamburg.

  20. Ludwig Thoma (1867-1921) was a German author and publisher whose novels satirise Bavarian rural life.

  21. The Eulenburg affair was a scandal involving Kaiser Wilhelm II’s court. It began when the Jewish journalist Maximilian Harden accused Philip, Prince of Eulenburg, in 1907, of having a homosexual affair with General Kuno von Moltke.

  22. Albert Soergel (1880-1958) was a German literary historian:

  23. Soergel’s literary history, Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit, eine Schilderung der deutschen Literatur der letzten Jahrzehnte, was published in 1911.

  24. A term for the Jewish mafia of Berlin.

Excerpt from William Gayley Simpson’s, “Which Way Western Man?” (1978)

/18 Comments/in , , /by

Editor’s note: An interesting, heterodox take on the typical mainstream narrative of post-World War II Soviet anti-Semitism. This is Appendix 4 of Which Way Western Man (1978).

Previously on TOO: Robert S. Griffin’s “William Gayley Simpson on Christianity and the West.” Griffin gives a an account of  Simpson’s life and his relationship with William Pierce.

Appendix 4

‘Alleged Soviet Anti-Semitism’

Much has been made of a “Soviet anti-Semitism” that is alleged to have been initiated by Stalin. Those who hold to this view call attention to the Czech purge of 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, in which nine of the eleven men executed were Jews. In reply to this, and further, as a background for what I want to say about the years that have followed, I can hardly do better than to quote some comments from competent observers of that period. The first are taken from Gothic Ripples, Nos. 96, 97, and 98 of the year 1953, by Mr. Arnold S. Leese, whom I have found an exceedingly exact and reliable investigator. (Gothic Ripples has been defunct since Mr. Leese’s death, but I have a complete file of it.) In No. 96 he wrote:

“Recently in Czechoslovakia there has been a drastic purge of officials anxious to be their own bosses, like Tito in Jugoslavia. Now, you can’t purge Bolshevists without purging Jews; in Stalin’s great purges in Russia (1935-8) the victims were nearly all Jews, but there were always plenty of Jews left to carry on Bolshevism. To the alarm of world Jewry, it could not be hidden from the public that in this new Czechoslovakian purge, the officials arrested were nearly all Jews. Actually, we know for certain that twelve out of the fourteen were Jews. . .”

And then he lists the posts that these Jews held. One is struck at once by the fact that they were anything but Jewish nonentities. On the contrary, they included Rudolph Slansky, Vice-Premier of Czechoslovakia and Secretary-General of the Communist Party; and also the Deputy Secretary-General, numerous deputy Ministers (of Finance, National Defense, Foreign Trade and Foreign Affairs), a local secretary of the Communist Party, and a member of the editorial staff of Rude Pravo, the official organ of the Communist Party.

“In these facts,” resumes Mr. Leese, “not in the fact of their sentences, you have the proof that Bolshevism is Jewish in Czechoslovakia. But the most significant fact of all is that the Minister of Justice who ordered the execution of the condemned eleven men (of whom nine were Jews) was Stefan Reis, recognized by the Jewish Chronicle [one of the leading Jewish periodicals of England] of 5th May, 1950, as a Jew himself!”

How can anyone conceive that so many Jews could have attained posts of such eminence and influence in a Communist country and in the Communist Party if there had been any mounting feeling against Jews on the part of the Government?

In the next issue of Gothic Ripples (No. 97), Mr. Leese comments on the readiness with which gentiles the world over had swallowed the Jewish brainwash of Soviet anti-Semitism. “Let us just remind everyone that Stalin married a Jewess, whilst his daughter married in 1951 a Jew; that in the recent Czechoslovakian purge the Minister of Justice was the Jew, S. Reis; that two Jews, E. Pollak and Jaroslav Simon, have just been decorated in Soviet Russia for agricultural services; . . . while at the Jewish Board of Deputies meeting on the same date [1.18.53], a far-sighted Jew, A. Wolffe, who knew this lie of anti-Semitism in Russia would come back on the Jews like a boomerang, said to his fellow tribesmen, ‘You know, as I know, that there is no anti-semitism in Eastern Europe.’ The whole idea is puerile. Even in Rumania, the Jewess Anna Pauker has been replaced by another Jew, A. Bughici.”

And Gothic Ripples No. 98 records that the Jewish Chronicle, 2.13.53, had reported that Vol. 15 of the Soviet Encyclopaedia published that month, had declared that “the Jewish problem does not exist in the Soviet Union, where today Jews find the doors open to all professions.” It adds, after pointing to the Jewishness of the Government in Hungary, “you can only purge a Jewish Government by purging Jews from it.” A succinct note in Time magazine, March 2, 1953, confirmed this. In regard to the expected purge of Jews in Communist Hungary, it sifted down the reports to mean “that a Russian purge tribunal has gone to Hungary to root out ‘suspected Zionists’ from the strongly Jewish (90% in the top echelons) government of Communist Premier Matyas Rakosi, who is himself a Jew.”

Free Britain for March 15, 1953 (No. 135) brought out another side of the matter:

“For thirty-five years the Russian people have been exploited and pillaged by the Soviet Government

“Never has it been allowed to occur to the Russian masses that they have a Jewish Government, although this is known to be the case.” [With this compare Americans’ unawareness of the Jewishness of our Government for the past 50 years!]

“If once the Russian people were to awake to the fact they had been ruled for all these years by the one people whom they detest most of all, the Soviet Government would be faced with a domestic upheaval that might end the regime.

“The Russians have always detested the Jews, and the main reason for all the secrecy behind the Iron Curtain, for the secret police, for the censorship of the Press and for the concentration camps is to prevent the Russians learning that their country is ruled by Jews.

“That is why two years ago Free Britain pointed out that ‘the soft underbelly of the Soviet Monster is the Jewish Question.’

“Now in spite of all precautions the Russian people are beginning to learn the truth, and it has become an urgent matter for their Jewish masters to throw dust in their eyes. They have found it necessary to sacrifice some of their own people, as of old, and to give the widest publicity, in an effort to make their actions appear anti-Jewish.

“By its actions the Soviet Government has shown beyond any shadow of doubt the one thing it fears above everything else is that its Jewishness should become known to the Russian people.”

But there are those who claim that no matter what may have been the official Soviet attitude toward Jews 15 or 20 years ago, mounting evidence for the past decade has conclusively proved this to be hostile. In reply to this, I would submit such indications as the following:

1. On Sept. 30, 1960, the B’nai B’rith Messenger, official organ of one of the most powerful Jewish institutions in the world, published this “exclusive United Nations WUP report”:

“A.I. Mikoyan has officially denied that any form of anti-Semitism exists today in the Soviet Union, a Soviet Embassy revealed this week

“Take, for example, the list of members of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. How many Jews are on it? There are most likely relatively more of them than representatives of other nationalities.

“My brother is an aircraft designer and he works with Gurevitch, a Jew by nationality. Their plan is called ‘MIG,’ that is, Mikoyan and Gurevich. I don’t consider this an instance of anti-Semitism.

“There are many Jews among the artists. . . . Talented Jews have wide opportunities for the development of their gifts. There are many Jews among the film directors, artists, screen players, composers, musicians, writers, and also in offices, in ministries, in the Army. They hold high posts. We have, for example, General of the Army Kreiser, a very respected man, a Jew by nationality. I know him personally.

“Engineer Dymshitz is likewise a Jew. He is minister in charge of all capital construction in the Soviet Union.”

  1. Mr. A.K. Chesterton, who has made it part of his business to be informed about all matters vitally pertaining to Jews, in a personal letter to me dated June 11, 1973, wrote:

 “The Soviet Union has always been anti-Zionist, and nonetheless so because it procured tens of thousands of Polish Jews for export to Palestine in 1946. . .

“Heaven knows that I am no champion of the Soviet regime, but it does have my sympathy in recognizing that dual loyalty in the eyes of Zionist Jews is a deceptive phrase to cover up single-minded loyalty to Israel. As far as I am aware, Russian Jews have no specific complaint against the regime except its discouragement of emigration.” [Emphasis added.]

Please note that this brings us up to a few months ago.

  1. The South African Observer (Box 2401, Pretoria, South Africa), in its issue for February 1973, had a significant note about the activities of Walter B. Kissinger, a brother of Henry Kissinger. Walter is a millionaire American industrialist, who is also the head of a West German firm, the Rohe Company, “which is negotiating a contract involving over $125 million with the Soviet Union to build and equip five hundred gasoline stations in and around Moscow.” This hardly supports the idea that Jews have any deep grievance against the Soviet Government.
  2. But to my mind what completely silences the idea that the Russian Government has done anything that has seriously alienated Jewish affections and support, is the well-established fact that, although the United States and all the other major nations of the West has been under steadily increasing Jewish control for the past fifty years, every one of them, and the U.S. most of all, has consistently done whatever was necessary to prevent Russian collapse. What organized Jewry can do, and leaps to do, when it really feels itself confronted by an enemy, was made fearfully plain by the vengeance it heaped upon Hitler and Germany. Beside this, any resentment Jews may feel toward Russia looks pretty pallid. And if at first one be disturbed by noticing, for instance, that the New York Times “every day seems to run a scheduled attack on the Russian Government,” one needs to remember that the Jews stand out in history as the great masters of deception. With their undisputed control of the mass media they are in a position to fabricate whatever reports they will, as a smokescreen to cover up their real designs: they can make us think they are about to move in one direction, when in fact they intend to move in the opposite. Above all, there is the fact, behind which Dr. Antony Sutton has put such mountains of indisputable evidence (as already detailed in my text), that since Stalin as much as before him, it has been the Jew-controlled U.S.A. that is chiefly responsible for having built up the Russian regime, prevented its collapse, and maintained it in power. Most recently, “when the last Soviet famine threatened as the result of yet another failure of collectivized agriculture, Dr. Kissinger [himself a Jew born abroad], whose power base is the international financial groups whose interests he has faithfully served, rushed to Moscow . . . to offer the necessary credits to enable American wheat to be shipped to the Soviet Union. 700 million dollars were provided.”[1] Russia got the wheat by American taxpayers’ having to go short of wheat for themselves. They got it without actually paying a cent for it. They got it “on the cuff,” by a mere promise to pay for it, a promise on which they may be counted to renege, as they reneged on their obligation to pay off their debt to the U.S. of 11 billion dollars for Lend Lease.

All this shows actual favoritism toward Communist Soviet Russia, and is inconceivable on the part of a Jew-controlled U.S. Government, except as the Soviet Union not only had the approval of American Jewry but enjoyed its active support.

This favoritism, as revealed in the apparent attitude of the U.S. Government to a recent Russian military move, was commented on in the London Financial Times of April 22, 1974:

“No one without access to the inner councils of the Kremlin can say, of course, that Russia would not have mounted this considerable new military effort if the U.S. had not been willing to act as its extremely indulgent international banker. But what cannot be denied is that, by granting the Soviet greatly extended access to American money and resources, President Nixon’s detente has made it very much easier than it would otherwise have been for Russia to cope with the additional stresses its intensified military effort must be imposing on the country’s external payments and domestic economic situation.”

And as a final observation bearing on the alleged anti-Semitism of the Russian Government, I must add a note about the so-called Dartmouth Conferences. Eight of these have been held since the first in 1960, half in the U.S., half in Russia. They have all been held in secret under extreme security precautions. Money to cover the expenses incurred has almost always been supplied by the large American tax-exempt foundations, notably the Ford Foundation. The delegates are exclusively from the U.S. and Russia. They are persons of very great power and influence in the worlds of finance, politics, science, education, and all the means for shaping the public mind. They manifestly work, like the Bilderberger Group, in close liaison with the Council on Foreign Relations, all of which further the same ends. They are obviously an instrument for bringing together in particular the U.S. and Russia, to combine their forces for the destruction of national sovereignties and to create a homogenized world most advantageous to money-making and favorable to the dominion of the Earth by bankers.

But the point of particular importance here is that a large number of the names of the Russian delegates to the Dartmouth Conferences have been Jewish. This, it would seem, makes it undeniable that “racial Jews still have great power and influence in the Soviet totalitarian dictatorship.” See Youth Action News, August 1974, at the bottom of page 7. (Box 312, Alexandria, Virginia 22313.)

I readily allow that there may be indications that do not fit in with the view that I have presented here. And perhaps I could not answer every such contrary indication. But I must heed my very painful awareness both of the fearful importance of our not being taken in, and of the Jews’ need of deception for the accomplishment of their ends, and of their genius for it. Our very existence as a nation, and as a people, may depend on our discerning clearly, beneath all appearances to the contrary, what is really going on. But let it be my final word that the danger, as I see it, is not so much from what apparently emanates from Russia, as from the Jewish International Money Power that works partly behind and through it, and always for the destruction of the White man everywhere—in the United States, in Russia, in Britain, in Europe, throughout Africa, in Australia, and in New Zealand. And nowhere has it ever been truer that if we don’t hang together, all of us White men, we shall certainly hang separately. And the hangman will be the Jew.

Part C, Section 38: ‘The Solution of the Jewish Problem’

I now set before my readers the conclusions to which twenty-five years of investigation and reflection have forced me. If there is anything about these conclusions that is unsupported by facts, or contrary to the spirit of fair play and justice, I shall be glad to have it pointed out to me how and where.

  1. The Jewish people, taken as a whole, are never to be trusted. It has been born in them, and drilled into them too deeply, that first of all and above all else they are Jews, and therefore their first loyalty is to Jewry, to their own kind anywhere and everywhere. That means loyalty to Zionism, to Israel or to any other center to which Jews can rally and which is working for their advancement as a people. There are, of course, exceptions, striking and moving exceptions, and they may be more numerous than I realize, but it is never possible to tell in advance which ones are going to be loyal to the country of their adoption, and which will not. In any case, it does not make sense to base a policy on what, it has to be admitted, is the exception.
  2. They will never be assimilated, never, anywhere. They have proved themselves to be very adaptable almost everywhere. But not assimilable. Their identity, and therefore their existence as a people, depends upon their never mixing their genes with those of another race. That individual Jews will do so does not alter the fact that to the Jewish community as a whole this must ever seem betrayal and treason, and that if most Jews followed suit, Jewry as a separate people would disappear.
  3. Even if they were ready for assimilation, we should reject it, and condemn and punish those of our people who marry Jews even as we should condemn and punish intermarriage of our people with Negroes. Admittedly, the potentialities of the Jews are, on the average, vastly superior to those of Blacks. Nevertheless, both are essentially alien to us. Most gentiles, with their easygoing tolerance, may not recognize this or may wish to ignore it. But Jews recognize it plainly enough. Let any gentile who doubts it spend half an hour looking through You Gentiles by Maurice Samuel, from which, in a note at the end of this chapter, I quote a few passages.[2] And if we are ever to attain that homogeneity and solidarity upon which our greatest cultural potency certainly depends, and even, ultimately, perhaps our survival, we must burn into our consciousness and forever heed that admonition of Goethe’s, “The alien element, we must not tolerate.”
  4. The Jews hate us, and they have long sought and waited for their chance to destroy us. And, as I have plainly enough indicated in these pages, they mean to do it so thoroughly, by racial mixture with Negroes and any and every sort of people who are genetically alien or inferior to us, and by inducing a dysgenic differential birthrate among us, that recovery may forever be impossible. Where does this leave us? Perhaps we can get a clue to the course that wisdom would dictate to us in the advice that Benjamin Franklin is said to have given to the Constitutional Convention in May 1787:

“In whatever country Jews have settled in any great numbers, they have lowered its moral tone, depreciated its commercial integrity, have segregated themselves and have not been assimilated, have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion, have built up a state within a state, and have, when opposed, tried to strangle that country to death financially.

If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be working in their fields to furnish the substance while they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves. Jews, gentlemen, are Asiatics; they will never be otherwise.”[3]

These words have been declared a sheer fabrication, though I have some reason to believe them to be genuine, but for my present purpose it does not greatly matter whether Franklin ever uttered them or not. Let that be as it may, in the light of my knowledge of the Jew and the injury he has inflicted on our people, it is undeniable that an incalculable amount of suffering, humiliation, degeneration, frustration and perversion would have been avoided if the course that these words laid down had been consistently followed from 1787 until this present hour. But at least, beginning now, we can take the words to heart. This, as I see it, would mean:

First. That all Jewish citizenship should be cancelled. Jews should be given protection against physical injury, and a reasonable amount of time should be allowed them to settle their affairs and get out. If the question came up about where they should go, it would doubtless be recalled that many years ago it was urged that some such piece of the Earth as Madagascar should be acquired by international action and by purchase, for Jewish settlement.

Second. Recognizing the suicidal folly of allowing Jews to hold any positions of public trust, responsibility or substantial influence anywhere in our country, they should in the future be admitted to our shores only on temporary visas.

[1] Eric Butler—“The Plotters Behind the World Crisis,” Spearhead, June 1974, p. 13.

[2] Simpson here quotes several passages from You Gentiles by Maurice Samuel, Harcourt, 1924:

[3] The full text of this may be seen in The New York Times for March 9, 1937, under the caption: “Nazis Say Franklin Urged Ban on Jews.” The case for the validity of this speech is more than I can take the space to present here.

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

/7 Comments/in , /by

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.

Review: Julius Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, Part 1

/8 Comments/in , /by


“As far as we are concerned, we believe that anti-Semitism has every right to exist.”
Julius Evola

Prompted by the rapid rise of the Jews in the West, the early twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of publications intended to expose, explain, or solve ‘the Jewish Problem’ — the acquiring by Jews of excessive influence in host societies and their use of this influence in the pursuit of selfish and destructive goals. Some of these works, such as Henry Ford’s The International Jew, caused an international storm on publication and continue to be well-known. Others, such as Hillaire Belloc’s The Jews (1922), quickly fell into relative obscurity despite representing, in some cases, superior works. One of these more obscure, but thought-provoking contributions, is Julius Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem (Tre aspetti del problema ebraico), first published in Rome in 1936.

Although not considered a primary thinker in matters relating to the Jews, Evola took the Jewish Question seriously and often referred to it in his works, including a chapter of his 1937 The Myth of the Blood. His references to the publications and speeches of others on the subject would suggest that he read widely and deeply in available contemporary sources, and Evola is known to have edited an Italian edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. His tackling of the Jewish Question has remained relatively unexplored by mainstream scholarship, despite the fact Evola’s thought has been rising in prominence since the 1970s, when he was especially influential on the French New Right. Some of the notable texts from that period include Julius Evola le visionnaire foudroyé, (Julius Evola, the Devastating Visionary) (Michel Angebert and Robert de Herte, 1977), Julius Evola e l’affermazione assoluta, (Philippe Baillet, 1978), La Terre de lumière. Le Nord et l’origine (The Earth of Light: The North and the Origin) (Christophe Levalois, 1985), L’Empire Intérieur (The Inner Empire) (Alain de Benoist, 1995), and Enquête sur la Tradition aujourd’hui (Research on the Tradition Today) (Arnaud Guyot-Jeannin, 1996).

This attention from the New Right provoked attention from leftist academics, as evidenced in particular in the work of Thomas Sheehan,[1] Elisabetta Cassina Wolff,[2] Stéphane François,[3] and Franco Ferraresi. Ferraresi described Evola in 1987 as “possibly the most important intellectual figure for the Radical Right in contemporary Europe.”[4] It should probably be added that media hysteria concerning Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election focused for some time on Steve Bannon’s stated admiration for the Italian philosopher. Perhaps surprisingly, with the exception of Wolff, who accused Evola of a “ferocious and destructive anti-Jewish racism,” Evola’s attitudes towards Jews are never raised in these works. My own search of works published in the last two decades shows only one serious journal publication on the subject, Peter Stuadenmaier’s 2020 article in the Journal of Contemporary History, “Racial Ideology between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Julius Evola and the Aryan Myth, 1933–43.”[5] Stuadenmaier sees Evola as committed to a campaign “to cultivate a closer rapport between Italian and German variants of racism as part of a campaign by committed antisemites to strengthen the bonds uniting the fascist and Nazi cause.”

Was Evola a “committed antisemite”? And what exactly were his views on Jews and the Jewish problem?

Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem

The three aspects of the Jewish problem identified by Evola are spiritual, cultural, and economic/social. Evola opens by first explaining that

In Italy there is little awareness of the Jewish problem. … The latest laws recently inspired by Göring in Germany, which state that not only marriages between Jews and non-Jews are forbidden, but also cohabitation with Jews, and that Jews or those who are already married to Jews are banned from any organization in the National-Socialist state, indicate the extremely high level of these tensions.

Although Italy was not so obviously subject to the same tensions, Evola reminded his readers that such tensions were universal and that “anti-Semitism is a motif that has appeared in almost every stage of Western history.” Evola claimed that Italy’s less strained and direct tensions with Jews presented an opportunity for a more complete and successful attempt to address the Jewish problem. He writes that

The fact that the special circumstances which have caused the most direct and thoughtless forms of anti-Semitism in some countries are not present in Italy allows us to consider the problem with greater calm and greater objectivity.

Such an approach is necessary, argued Evola, because anti-Semitism elsewhere in Europe, is said to lack “a truly general standpoint,” in addition to lacking “the doctrinal and historical premises which are necessary to really justify, through a deductive procedure, any practical, that is to say, social and political, anti-Semitic policies.”

Evola believed in the development and imposition of anti-Semitic policies. He asserts early in the text that he believes “anti-Semitism has every right to exist.” He also, however, believes that the arguments of many contemporary anti-Semites bear the hallmarks of “weakness and confusion” and are hindered further by a “violent partisan spirit.” He worried that this approach would lead impartial observers to think that “it can all be reduced to one-sided and arbitrary attitudes dictated less by sound principles than by practical contingent interests.”

Evola begins from certain premises, namely that

There is at the present time a Jewish peril, particularly perceptible in the financial field and in the economic sphere in general, there is also a Jewish peril in the area of ethics. Finally, as far as spirituality, religion, and a world-outlook are concerned, everything that is connected with Semitism, and above all with Jews, appears as particularly repulsive to the various peoples of the White race.

Readers familiar with Evola’s other works, in particular Revolt Against the Modern World, will not be surprised to find that the spiritual element takes up the majority of Evola’s attention in this work, and it is this element that begins his study.

The Spiritual Aspect of the Jewish Problem

Evola begins by asking if there is, in general, “a typical Jewish world-outlook or view on life and the sacred.” He argues that it is wrong to view the Jews as having a specific outlook, but rather that the Jewish world-outlook is better defined as part of the broader “Semitic” sense of the spiritual. In his words:

We will be deliberately using [‘Semitic’] here because we believe that the ‘Jewish’ element cannot be, purely and simply, separated from the general type of civilization that formerly spread throughout the whole Eastern Mediterranean area from Asia Minor to the borders of Arabia, noteworthy though the differences between Semitic peoples may be.

Evola thus promises, instead of a study of the spiritual problem of the Jews, an “overall study of the Semitic spirit.”

In my view this entire premise has aged poorly, and I almost gave up reading the text at this point given how fundamentally flawed it is. With advances in modern genetic studies since the days of Evola, we now know categorically, for example, that Ashkenazi Jews in particular represent a very distinct ethnic group that has become progressively more homogenous over the last seven centuries, with “Ashkenazim the world over carrying essentially the same collection of DNA sequences.” Studies have also shown that Jews are more genetically similar to groups such as Kurds, Turks, and Armenians than they are to their Semitic language-speaking Arab neighbors. Which prompts the question: On what basis is Evola positing a “Semitic spirit?”

Unencumbered by such important questions, Evola departs into overwrought theorizing on the clash between a “solar” Aryan spirit, and a “lunar” Semitic spirit. Although this will be explained below, it struck me that Evola seemed almost entirely ignorant of the history of the very real and very material antagonism of the Jews against Europeans in the realm of spirituality and religion. In How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500, soon to be published by Princeton University Press by Yale’s Ivan Marcus, it’s very clear that Jews have been very singular and deliberate actors in Western history. Marcus writes that “Jews were capable of doing exactly what infuriated Christian officials.” He explains:

Medieval Jewish historians have recently revised earlier narratives that saw the Jews as the victims of the Christian majority’s enmity and harmful policies. … General historians of medieval Europe who do not work on Jewish history still tend to see the Jews as isolated in ghettos and passive victims of persecution. … Contrary to the widely accepted picture of Jewish history, medieval Jews were assertive agents. The Jews of the Middle Ages were convinced of their chosenness, and Christian rulers inadvertently reinforced Jewish solidarity by recognizing Jews as legal, self-governing communities. … Jews were assertive, not passive, even without having the option of coercive force. … Jews went out of their way, when safe, to insult Christian sancta by making offensive wordplays, … Jews denigrated Christian sancta by engaging in private and public gestures of contempt such as placing Christian images or statues in their latrines.[6]

Rather than tackle this clear ethno-religious hostility, Evola informs us that “Aryan” is a “vague racialist foundation.” We apparently need “to define ‘Aryanity’ as a positive universal idea,” rather than look at direct Jewish spiritual hostility. All of which struck me as mystical nonsense.

In order not to do Evola a great injustice, I will at least summarize his approach to the spiritual problem as he sees it. For Evola, the Aryan spirit is solar and virile, whereas Semitic spirituality is lunar and feminine. The Aryan of ancient times had an “affirmative attitude towards the divine.” Ancient Aryans not only believed in the real existence of super-humanity, of a race of immortals and of divine heroes, but also often attributed to that race a superiority and an irresistible power over the supernatural forces themselves. Aryan spirituality was more royal than sacerdotal; more aristocratic than priestly. It valued heroes over saints, since it was the heroes who accessed the highest and most privileged places of immortality, for example, the Nordic Valhalla. Whereas the Biblical Adam is cursed and damned for having attempted to eat from the divine tree, Aryan myths depict  immortal heroes like Hercules, Jason, Mithras, and Sigurd.

True Aryan spirituality is characterised by the emblem of unchanging light, as opposed to the cycles of death and rebirth often seen in Semitic legends. As regards the corresponding ethnical principles, “what is characteristically Aryan is the principle of freedom and personality on the one hand, of loyalty and honor on the other hand.” The Aryan

enjoys independence and difference and dislikes submergence in a heterogeneous mass, which does not prevent him, however, from obeying in a virile way, acknowledging a leader and being proud to serve him according to a bond that is freely established, his nature being warlike and irreducible to any interest than can be bought and sold or in general expressed in terms of money.

By contrast, what characterises the Semitic spirituality is “the destruction of the Aryan synthesis of spirituality and virility.” Semitic spirituality is “coarsely material, sensual or uncouth … an emasculated spirituality.” It is burdened by “the pathos of sin and expiation,” and beholden to “an impure and uneasy romanticism.” For Evola, “the pathos of the confession of sins distorts the calm purity and the ‘Olympian’ superiority of the Aryan aristocratic ideal.” Judaism was steeped in ‘prophetism,’ and whereas the prophet type had previously been seen as a sick man, he was substituted for the ‘clairvoyant’ type. The spiritual centre shifts to him and his apocalypses.

For Evola, the characteristics of the Jewish instinct in general are deceit, servile hypocrisy, and “devious, persistent, disintegrating infiltration.” He praises the National Socialist philosopher Alfred Rosenberg for his assessment of the Jewish spirit, but also disparages Rosenberg for employing Christian morality or notions of Germanic religion as a method of criticising Judaism. Evola asserts that it is wrong to focus on the immorality contained in Judaism given “dubious morals exhibited by the Germanic gods.” He believes that critiques of the spiritual contents of Judaism contain little more than a “pot-pourri in which pertinent points are intermingled with rather strange ideas.”

Evola is rather unfriendly towards Germanic paganism and towards Protestantism, and although he was far from a devout Catholic, a defensive tone is detectable here. I do agree with his statement that “it is hard to find an anti-Semite more philosemite than [Martin] Luther,” and his argument that many Protestants, like Luther, critiqued Catholicism via the Jews rather than critiquing the Jews more directly. Yet Evola possesses his own biases, promoting a vision of European spirituality that is more Roman than Germanic, more imperial than independent. One sees this in his statement that

The hidden source of Nordic anti-Semitism gives itself away in its anti-universalist and anti-Roman controversialist, in its confusion between universalism as a supranational idea and the universalism which only means this active ferment of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition.

“Nordic anti-Semitism” is therefore presented as something confused, ignorant, somewhat infantile, and definitely inferior to a more Roman, more Catholic, more “supranational” anti-Semitism. “Nordic anti-Semitism” is said to reveal a “mere particularism” which he says is ironically in a Jewish style, for example, “our god, our morals” etc. In other words, Evola is opposed to an anti-Semitism which aims to fight Jewish ethnocentrism with a European ethnocentrism on a continental or national basis. Evola, however, offers no serious argument for why a European ethnocentrism is spiritually or strategically bad, beyond the claim that it is, in his view, “narrow-minded and particularistic.” He claims that to be focussed on “the blood,” in other words to be protective of one’s race, is to adopt a “naturalistic” worldview more suited to the Jews. Evola calls for the adoption of a new Aryan worldview that remains “free from ethnic prejudice” and free from “parochialism.” In other words, Evola seems to assert the opinion that to be an Aryan is something very little connected to matters of biological heritage. He explains

Values must be evoked once again which can seriously be called ‘Aryan,’ and not merely on the basis of vague and one-sided concepts suffused with a sort of biological materialism: values of a solar Olympian spirituality, of a classicism of clarity and controlled force, of a new love for difference and free personality, and, at the same time, for hierarchy and universality.

At the same time, Evola stresses that the “subterranean spirit of obscure incessant agitation, of deep contamination and sudden revolt, is Semitic.”

This section on the spiritual aspect of the Jewish problem then suddenly ends, without any coherent summary or explanation about the relevance of heredity or suggestion for action beyond the adoption of a “solar Olympian spirituality.” Perhaps it’s my Anglo-Scandinavian heritage stunting my appreciation of this kind of philosophizing, but I felt that Evola’s entire discussion of the spiritual element of the Jewish problem was colored by his Italian background (Catholic upbringing; enthusiasm for the Roman Empire) and his resultant antipathy towards any kind of Nordic racialism or national patriotism. Somewhere in the muddle of concepts I do discern the idea of a multi-national Europe embracing a more virile idea of spirituality and world-outlook more naturally hostile to Jews than the Protestant-Capitalist world-outlook he seemed to perceive as dominant. Unfortunately, his definition of the Jewish element of the problem is so loose and poorly thought out that it’s hard to take any of it seriously. Further, Evola’s idea that anti-Semitism shouldn’t be based on a competing ethnocentrism, and his implicit suggestion that Europeans shouldn’t be focused on ‘blood,’ has aged extremely poorly in the context of Jewish involvement in mass non-White migration in White nations, and the demographic crisis facing European-descended peoples more generally. I was therefore glad to move on to what held the potential to be a more interesting treatment — the cultural aspect of the Jewish problem.

Review: Julius Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, Part 2 – The Occidental Observer

[1] Thomas Sheehan, “Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist,” Social Research, Vol. 48, No. 1, (Spring 1981), 45-73.

[2] Elisabetta Cassina Wolff, “Apolitìa and Tradition in Julius Evola as Reaction to Nihilism,” European Review, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Ma/y 2014), 258 – 273; and “Evola’s interpretation of fascism and moral responsibility,” Patterns of Prejudice, 50:4-5, 478-494.

[3] Stéphane François, “The Nouvelle Droite and “Tradition””, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 2014), 87-106.

[4] Franco Ferraresi, “Julius Evola : tradition, reaction, and the Radical Right,” European Journal of Sociology, Vol. 28:1 (May 1987), 107 – 151.

[5] Staudenmaier, Peter, “Racial Ideology between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Julius Evola and the Aryan Myth, 1933–43,” Journal of Contemporary History, 55(3) (2020), 473-491.

[6] I. Marcus, How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800-1500 (Princeton University Press, 2024), pp.2-18.