Anti-Jewish Writing

Paul de Lagarde on Jews and Indo-Europeans, Part 1 of 3: German Opposition to Judaism and Its Relation to Christianity

Paul de Lagarde on Jews and Indo-Europeans; [extract from Ch. 13: “Juden und Indogermanen” (“Jews and Indo-Europeans”) of Mittheilungen (Cummunications), II (1887).]

Translated by Alexander Jacob

Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) was a distinguished Orientalist and Biblical scholar who was appointed Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Göttingen in 1869. He was a prolific author, and many of his books remain in print. Lagarde (who was born Paul Bötticher but adopted Lagarde from his great-aunt’s surname) also contributed to the development of the ideology of the Conservative Party of Prussia, especially in the essays collected in his Deutsche Schriften (1878).[1] As a theologian, he was in favour of a return to an original Christianity that predated the established Church, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, and he encouraged the development of a new religion that would be fully nationalist in form and feeling. His anti-Semitism, displayed in many of his essays, was based on the fact that the Jews always constituted a nation within a nation and one that was deleterious to the host nation. The arguments he presents in this last section of Chapter 13 of his 1887 work, Mittheilungen II, are consequently pivoted on the primary mistake of Jewish emancipation and on the rapid social depredations that Jewry was enabled to undertake as a result of this unfortunate event.

*   *   *

I find that the term ‘anti-Semitism’ requires explanation.

Europe suffers from some peoples who belong to an earlier human epoch and remain from the latter, incapable of development as nations—the gypsies, the Basques, the Irish, the Jews.

Of these, the gypsies can remain outside consideration. They are acknowledged to be a burden on Europe but a burden that can be borne.

The Basques make life difficult for the Spanish: for the Carlists[2] would be impossible if they did not repeatedly find in the Basques the point from which they could plunge the Iberian Peninsula into a civil war.

What the Irish are for Great Britain and—through their influence on the politics of Great Britain incapacitated by them—directly for all of Europe is known to everybody.

That the Jews groan under the hatred, the contempt, the aversion of the people of Europe is a fact so obvious that the Jews themselves will not deny it quite easily; that, however, the people of Europe have more than sufficient reason for those feelings follows naturally from the fact admitted by the Jews.

I speak here of the Basques, the Irish, the Jews as nations, for individual Basques, Irishmen and Jews have at all times been accepted in their midst happily and cordially by the Europeans.

These four nations raise the claim to live in the Europe of the nineteenth century under conditions which this Europe is not in a position to grant. They wish to be foreigners and citizens at the same time, nourish views of long-lost centuries and nevertheless be allowed the full possession of all the rights of modern men.

As a consequence, they are not only foreign to us but also abhorrent. They act on us like antipathetic guests with whom one cannot come to any understanding because one wishes always that they would go away.

We Germans know that we are of Indo-Germanic, Aryan origin. But we do not feel as Indo-Germans or Aryans but as Germans separate from the Romans and Slavs—who likewise belong to the Indo-Germanic family—and separate from even the non-German Teutons.

If we all together, with the exception of the strictly progressive people, reject the Jews not as Jews but as Semites or, in rarer cases, as Phoenicians, there is in this expression at the same time the reason why we do it: the instinct of the people has, without knowing what is happening to it, stamped the term, and the view underlying the term is therefore also right: it has emerged from the psyche of the nation. I recall an expression of similar import: ‘reptile’.[3] We are anti-Semites because Jewry living among us in the nineteenth century and in Germany represent views, customs, and claims that date back to the times after the division of the races close to the time of the Flood and, because they do, seem as strange to us as flint knives and nephrite arrowheads. We are anti-Semites, not anti-Jewish, because in the middle of a Christian world the Jews are Asiatic heathens. Circumcision and the dietary laws of the Jews are atavisms. The monotheism of the Jews stands on the same level as the report of a petty officer commanded to the commissariat who announces the existence of only one copy of any object: one God, two tables, three fathers, four mothers, and the 2307 Passover foods to be found in nature. The belief in the chosenness or, as it is now called, the “world-historical mission” of Israel then crowns the absurdity: a people who through the centuries have not produced anything for history—name one if it really does exist—are able to shout in the face of the Indo-Germans—who have indeed developed everything on which we live—that they are the favourite people of God.

Thousands of Israelites were accepted into the German nation—I limit my observation to it—before 1830, have amalgamated into it and the descendants of those who were first converted have already no inkling any more that they originate from Israelites. This amalgamation, however, proceeded so felicitously only because the people accepting made no bones about the fact that they were the ones giving, the ones drawing others up. Even the Jews leaving the old racial community without clear knowledge knew fully, at that time, that they were improved by the conversion, that they had escaped a fully unsustainable condition, a “heathen religion,” as Goethe had told them in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahren 2,1, that they had been permitted into a nation that could not be mentioned in the same breath as the Jewish nation, one of the earliest in history, that they were able to become men first through the conversion to us. We Germans were, and are, obliged to give individual Jews our best; but it is a betrayal of our best, it is a gross ignorance of our property and our life, if we call this Asiatic famed for intellectual gifts that are not existent equal to ours. We enjoy now the fruits of the tree planted by our liberal and humane grandfathers and fathers. The first condition of achieving peace with the Jews, of benefiting the Jews as well as ourselves, is that of returning—even after the unfortunately declared emancipation—to the standpoint of the time before the emancipation. The Jews will become Germans only if they always hear from us that they are not yet that, and that they, as Jews, present to us nothing but a burden that is for us odious and useless for history by continuing to carry that upon which we squander strength that can be better employed.

But, after the emancipation, the Jews are rather worse than what they were before. We told them that they are equal to us, had the same rights as us: in thanks the Jews tell us that they are better than us and we have to learn from them.

Anyone who matters knows that the modern education of Germany, insofar as there is one, is based on the Germanic character of the people, of which also their monarchical sensibility is a part, next, on the Church, and third on the effect of the spirit of the Greeks. Anybody who matters knows that we Germans are a historic people.

Since they were emancipated, the Jews have done more than just begin to deny all of that, to speak to us about their Asiatic rubbish as our salvation; they are also so insolent as to expect a rejection of our history. In political life they always stand on the side of the progressives standing in the way of all progress who demand that we build a house without foundation, who call it freedom not to become free and tolerance to act like apes.

Mr. Kaufmann explains on p. 45: “I shall not be silent for the sake of Zion.” He speaks in the manner of Deutero-Isaiah 62.1.7,[4] That had been done before him already by K. Lippe, M.D., and Mr. Lippe appears as a protector of our sacred sites, of our immortal ancestral heritage, of the humane law-giving of Zion and the pure civilisation of Jerusalem.

What do Zion and Jerusalem have to do with the fellow countrymen of Siegfried and Hermann? Mr. Delitzsch,[5] as a Protestant and Jew, Mr. Kaufmann and Mr. Lippe, as Jews, are not at all in a position to understand what the circumstance means that Luther has changed—and how!—the ancient Church forms of the names of the Old Testament in his contrary wisdom. HEBREW and HEBREW= Zion and Jerusalem are suitable only for the Jews, and for the Jews as Jews; the Church became acquainted with, and named, those places not through the Jews but through the mediation of the Greek-speaking synagogue and with the sense that these Hellenistic synagogues imparted to the place names translated into Greek; the Church then further placed its interpretation in the tradition dating therefrom, and that is why the Church speaks of Zion and Jerusalem and considers the people speaking of Zion and Jerusalem as ἐθvιxoí [ethnikoi], as heathens. The Church sings the best Psalms, those expressing most fully the regular religious service of the ancient synagogue, the cantica graduum (119–133=120–134),[6] according to the synagogue, but it sings these in its own sense. Zion and Jerusalem are, for Germans who have not sunk into Liberalism and Protestantism, nothing at all, for the Jews as important as the Forum in Rome for the Italians, the Kaaba for the Mohammedans. But even the German born after the heartless and mindless Reformation, still full of the ancient faith, sighs

Jerusalem, thou lofty city,
God will that I were there.

And the theologian who has studied his subject knows very well how he has to deal with the passages in the Letters to the Hebrews, which my readers may wish to consult 12,22,13,14. Zion (rather, Çiyyón), Jerusalem, Ezekiel=Kaskel=Yeḥezqeél, Yirmeyohu or the Jeremiah of Ewald[7] and his five-penny pupils are, for sensitive men all over Europe, not at all existent. One who praises them to us—quickly over the border with them! Our “Lord” arose from the Adonai of the ancient synagogue read as Yahweh; the new synagogue, which has become Jewry, that is, ἔθνος [ethnos], understands neither Adonai nor Yahweh; it must throw aside the significance of these names—which became apparent first to me—for Yahweh and Adonai lead to the Lord of the Church, whom the Protestants do not recognise and the Jews ridicule and malign.

Related to the explanations of Mr. Kaufmann and Mr. Lippe is the answer that Goethe gave in Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre 3, 11:

We tolerate no Jew among us; for, how can we grant him a share in the highest culture, whose origin and convention he denies?

Here nobody objects that Goethe was in his old age a man of a past age who had become childish—one hears now many things. I cite from the Vossische Zeitung, certainly a paper that is not suspicious, from 19 April 1884, the approval of the “golden sentence that should be pondered on” that Alfred Christian Kalischer, a baptised Jew, ventured in a volume on Spinoza published by Franz von Holtzendorff:

It cannot be in the long run acceptable to want to constantly sustain a nationality at the cost of the eternal eradication of that spirit of this nationality that all epochs of creative cultured peoples praise and respect as their most excellent divine spirit.

Much is to be objected to in Kalischer’s sentence: One must acknowledge that the merely reactionary aspect of Jewry, these cinders of an age that has long been burnt out, is judged by him clearly enough.

The view expressed here would long ago have been the universal one if Protestantism had not stood in its way, itself a cinder like Judaism. Mr. Moritz Lazarus[8] has, in his writings to the German Jews, 10,11, cited the statement of a man of “famed Christian piety,” the Privy Church Counsellor, Franz Delitzsch:

On the part of the Christians there enters into the anti-Semitic movement an un-Christian racial hatred that cries out to the heavens and, since the roots of Christianity are the same as those of the Old Testament religion, represents the disgusting conduct of a bird that dirties its own nest

Mr. Delitzsch would perhaps have come out better from this affair since he himself is of Jewish origin, thus an interested party. If that which is propounded in the sentence just quoted, which is ill-considered beyond pardon, should be taken as Protestant theology this theology no longer deserves to be considered as a subdivision of Christian theology.[9]

The Church does not recognise any Judaism and any Christianity but the Old Testament and the New Testament: the form of the latter is the Church. The Church teaches that Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, and rejects through these formulae every connection of the head of the Church, and therewith of the Church, with Judaism. The Church calls Jesus the Christ, that is, it sees in him the fulfiller not of the old expectations of Judaism but of the old promises of God. The Church calls Jesus Christ the Lord, that is, it finds in him the Yahweh of the Old Testament, not the one belonging to the Semites or one of their race, but to the theologians of Israel, the ones who called forth the promises of God into being. It is not true that the Jews living today adhere to the “religion” of the Old Testament, for one who speaks of the Old Testament recognises therewith a New Testament. It is not true that the canon of the synagogue has been the central point of the life of any Jew after Christ for, although it modelled its expressions after this canon, the synagogue further matured through the Mishna and the Gemara to the Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages transmitted by the Arabs to the Jews and, thereafter, through the Deism of the English to Mendelssohn,[10] Geiger,[11] Holdheim,[12] Graetz,[13] Lazarus, Lasker,[14] Sonnemann,[15] Sabor[16] and Singer.[17] In the course of this development, whose direction will not be unclear to anybody, the race remained identical, only the clothes with which the race covered—and covers—its shameful nakedness have changed. But the fourth Gospel [according to John], the most anti-Jewish book of the New Testament, maintains in 1:13 against the Jews that the children of God are not produced by the blood (of Jewish patriarchs) and not out of the flesh and the will of man but by God; this Gospel  recognises, in 4:22,23, that salvation derives from the Jews but it sets the genuine worship of God in spirit and truth in opposition to the Jewish worship; this Gospel announces straightforwardly, in 3:5, that one who is not born from above cannot see the kingdom of God; it therefore denies that which the Bible-believing Royal Saxon Privy Church Counsellor teaches, that a Christian dirties his own nest when he sets forth against the unashamed claims of a nation that once, through its prophets and pious men, stood closer to the Church than the other heathens, through their sibyls and prophets, from which however the light and warmth has disappeared because they were foolish enough to consider the revealed and gifted wealth as the fruit of their own natural development.

Go to Part 2.


[1] For my translation of part of this work, see Alexander Jacob, Europa: German Conservative Foreign Policy 1870–1940 (University Press of America, 2002).

[2] Carlism is a legitimist movement that began in Spain around 1830 and sought to establish the dynasty of Don Carlos (1788–1855) on the Spanish throne. It lasted until the Spanish Civil War, when the Carlists allied with General Franco. The movement found regular support in the Basque territories and among the Basque nationalists.

[3] Lagarde: See my Deutsche Schriften, in Vollständige Werke (Complete Works), 448ff.

[4] “For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.”

[5] Franz Delitzsch (1813–1890) was a Protestant Hebraist who was assumed by many to be of Jewish descent. He attacked both the anti-Semitic movement in Germany and the attacks on Christianity in the Jewish press.

[6] Bartolomeo Botta’s edition of Psalms, the Cantica graduum was published in Milan in 1563.

[7] Heinrich Ewald (1803–1875) was a German orientalist and Protestant theologian.

[8] Moritz Lazarus (1824–1923) was a German-Jewish philosopher who established “Völkerpsychologie” (national psychology) as a branch of philosophical studies.

[9] LaGarde: Cf. the Complete Edition of my [Lagarde’s]  Deutsche Schriften, 292, 293.

[10] Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was a philosopher and theologian of the “Haskalah” or Jewish Enlightenment.

[11] Lazarus Geiger (1829–1870) was a philologist and philosopher.

[12] Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860) was a rabbi and a leader of early Reform Judaism.

[13] Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) was a Jewish historian and apologist who wrote a 11-volume Geschichte der Juden (History of the Jews) (1853–1875).

[14] Eduard Lasker (1829–1884) was a Liberal politician.

[15] Leopold Sonnemann (1831–1909) was editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung and a founding member of the Liberal “Deutsche Volkspartei.”

[16] Adolf Sabor (1841–1907) was a Social Democratic member of the Reichstag.

[17] Paul Singer (1844–1911) was a founding member of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD).

Introduction to Two Treatises on Jews and Freemasonry: Édouard Drumont and Nicolae Paulescu

Jewish Freemasonry: Two Treatises by Éduard Frumont & Nicholae Paulescu
with an Introduction by Alexander Jacob

Contents

Introduction  — Alexander Jacob

I. “The Freemasons” (Jewish France, Book VI, Chapter 1) — Édouard Drumont

II. “Freemasonry,” from The Hospital, the Qur’an, the Talmud, the Kahal, and Freemasonry, Ch. V – Nicolae Paulescu

Introduction

Freemasonry and its goals have been the subject of innumerable studies seeking to investigate, or expose, this secretive and powerful organisation.  The Jesuit priest Abbé Augustin Barruel’s magisterial work Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme (1798), for instance, attempted to uncover the anti-Christian character of  Freemasonry by detailing the conspiratorial role played by the Enlightenment philosophes and the Freemasons and the Illuminati in the genesis and conduct  of the French Revolution.  The aims of the Revolution, according to Barruel, were primarily anti-Christian, anti-monarchical and Anarchical.  Barruel did not focus on the Jews in this work though his curiosity was aroused when he received a letter in 1806 from a certain  Giovanni-Battista Simonini who claimed to have infiltrated the Piedmont Jewish community and learnt from them about the Jewish origins of both  the Freemasons and the Illuminati.[1]

The two extracts presented in this edition shed more light on the Jewish origins and ambitions of the Freemasonic organization. More importantly, both authors place an emphasis on the remarkable contrast between the Jewish character of the Masonic ethos and the social doctrines of  the Catholic Church which it seeks to replace as the prime mover of politics in the West.  Whereas the Catholic Church has an avowed commitment to Christian charity and social harmony, Freemasonry is marked by a contempt of poverty and a singular desire to establish the supremacy of Israel in the world.

Édouard Drumont: “The Freemasons”

Of the two authors presented here, Édouard Drumont (1844–1917) was indeed one of the first to insist that the entire Masonic enterprise was Jewish  in origin even though he based his conviction on Masonic texts that had been available in France from the late eighteenth century. [2] Drumont was a French journalist who wrote many works on the Jews including La France juive: Essai d’histoire contemporain, 2 volumes (1886), Testament d’un antisémite (1891), Les Juifs et l’affaire Dreyfus (1899), La Tyrannie maçonnique (1899), Les Juifs contre la France (1899) and Le Peuple juif (1900).  Drumont also ran a newspaper La libre parole, which was markedly anti-Semitic. In 1899 he founded the ‘Ligue antisémitique de France’ and argued for the exclusion of Jews from society.

The last book of Drumont’s Jewish France contains three chapters devoted to the three Judeocentric groups portrayed to be persecuting Catholic France, the first chapter on the Freemasons, the second on the Protestants and the third on the Jews.  Drumont begins his chapter on Freemasonry by pointing out the peculiarly Jewish nature of Freemasonry.  Freemasonry is not a variety of Freethought since freethinkers like Lord Byron and Delacroix at least “do not attack our citizenship rights, our human rights, and our rights as Frenchmen. “ Rather, it is an essentially Jewish institution and imbued with a specially Jewish character.

The Jewish origin and constitution of the Masonic organization are evident from the various rituals it employs in its meetings and particularly in the dramatic  reenactments of Old Testament scenes depicting the revenge taken by Jews on their oppressors, such as that of Judith on Holofernes.  These rituals are all intended to impress on the candidates and members the principal goal of Masonry, which is to reunite the tribes of  Israel as a nation after their dispersal at the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, a destruction that must also be avenged.  The particular focus of the Masonic revenge is Christianity since the great crime of the Christ in the view of the Jews is his usurpation of the supremacy of Jehovah.  The essence of Masonry therefore is, as Drumont puts it, “Sympathy and tenderness for Jerusalem and its representatives; hatred for Christ and Christians: all of Masonry is contained in this.”

The means whereby Masonry seeks to overthrow the Europeans is always a

politics of dissolution: whether it is a matter of financial companies or of secret societies, they are able to give an appearance of order and seriousness to appetites, to collective bad instincts.

The growing influence of Masonry on European politics has resulted in a steady dissolution of traditional European society.  Thus Republicanism is, in the nineteenth century, the culmination of the French Revolution with Napoleon and Bismarck contributing to the process of Jewish bourgeois supremacy.

In their enormous and far-sighted political task, the Jewish Masons have been aided through the centuries by ambitious mediocrities from among the European peoples who were the hosts of the Jews during the diaspora.  The second part of Drumont’s essay on Freemasonry includes several detailed examples of public figures in French Republican life who have duped the public through various nefarious dealings that have been disguised by the false honors that have been bestowed upon them by the Third Republic. [3] The entire Republican ethos is indeed marked not by a desire to liberate the oppressed French populace but rather by a hatred of society.  In fact, one particularly odious characteristic of Freemasonry is its contempt and hatred for the poor, which is in marked contrast to  the importance of charity in the Catholic Church.  And if the Masons seem occasionally to tolerate the social status quo, it is only because they wish to focus their mind more sharply on their inveterate religious enemy, the Christian Church:

Thus, many in Masonry are pseudo-scholars, pseudo-orators, they hate society with a hatred that is not at all the courageous revolt of Spartacus, the bitter anger of Vindex, but like  a venomous envy that smells of the[4] ante-chamber and the office; they do not intend to destroy the social edifice completely because they hope to make a place there through more or less correct procedures, but they attack the Church because it can give them only noble instructions, counsels of respect and devotion that they do not want.

Nicolae Paulescu: Freemasonry

The Jewish nature of Freemasonry and its hatred of Christianity are reinforced in the work of Nicolae Paulescu (1869–1931). His chapter on Masonry in his work Philosophic Physiology: The Hospital, the Koran, the Talmud, the Kahal and Freemasonry pivots on the same contrast between the Christian concept of charity — exemplified in Paulescu’s own medical profession by ‘the hospital’ included in the title — and the sheer avarice for material possession and political domination of the Jews who conduct the Masonic organizations.

Paulescu was a Romanian physiologist and professor of medicine, as  well as a political activist.   In 1897 Paulescu graduated with a Doctor of Medicine degree from a medical school in Paris. He was appointed assistant surgeon at the Notre-Dame du Perpetuel-Secours Hospital but in 1900 he returned to Romania, where he remained until his death as Head of the Physiology Department of the University of Bucharest Medical School, as well as Professor of Clinical Medicine at the St Vincent de Paul Hospital in Bucharest. He is well-known for his work in extracting insulin for the treatment of diabetes and petitioned the Nobel Prize committee to object to the award given to two Canadian scientists. From Wikipedia:

Professor Ian Murray was particularly active in working to correct “the historical wrong” against Paulescu. Murray was a professor of physiology at the Anderson College of Medicine in Glasgow, Scotland, the head of the department of Metabolic Diseases at a leading Glasgow hospital, vice-president of the British Association of Diabetes, and a founding member of the International Diabetes Federation. In an article for a 1971 issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Murray wrote:

Insufficient recognition has been given to Paulesco, the distinguished Roumanian scientist, who at the time when the Toronto team were commencing their research had already succeeded in extracting the antidiabetic hormone of the pancreas and proving its efficacy in reducing the hyperglycaemia in diabetic dogs.

In a recent private communication Professor Tiselius, head of the Nobel Institute [and a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1948], has expressed his personal opinion that Paulesco was equally worthy of the award in 1923.

Paulescu was also involved in Romanian political movements and influenced Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the Iron Guard. In 1922, he partnered with Codreanu’s anti-Semitic friend, Prof. A.C. Cuza, to create a political group called the National Christian Union. In 1925, Paulescu joined Cuza’s later organization, the National Christian Defense League as well.

Nicolae Paulescu’s sociological writings include Philosophical Physiology: Instincts Social — Passions and Conflicts — Moral Remedies (1910), which advocated the regeneration of the population through Christian education.  Paulescu’s most famous book was the second volume of “philosophical physiology” which was entitled Philosophical Physiology: Hospital, Quran, Talmud, Cahal, Franc-Masonry (1913).  He later wrote more works on the Jewish Problem, including Philosophical Physiology: The Synagogue and the Church to the Pacification of Mankind, 2 vols, 1923; The Judeo-Masonic Plot against the Romanian People, 1924; The Degeneration of the Jewish Race, 1928, Jewish Debauchery, 1928; and Interpretation of Revelation, the future fate of the Jews, 1941.

In The Hospital, the Koran, the Talmud, the Kahal and Freemasonry, Paulescu first explains the duties of doctors and relates hospitals to the notion of Christian charity: “Hospitals are an inspiration of Christian charity.”  He then considers the two other religions that claim to cure the illnesses of mankind, Islam and Judaism, both of which he considers as opposed to Christian morality. Islam and Judaism are both characterised by a cruel desire for possessions and dominion but the Muslim Arabs are superior to the Jews in that they possess a real valor whereas the Jews “manifest themselves only through cowardice.”

Paulescu begins his study of Judaism with the principal legal text of the Jews, the Talmud, which uses usury, fraud and perjury to rob and enslave the Gentiles.  The development of the Jewish political ambition is accomplished through the “Kahal,” the Jewish governing body typical of Jewish communities well into the twentieth century. The Kahal conceives of the Jewish nation as one based on “the Talmudic dogma of the chosen people, a doctrine according to which the Jews must not merge with other nations, because God has promised them to possess the whole earth and to rule the world.” He demonstrates the financial and social depredations wrought by Jewish immigration into European lands and discusses Freemasonry too within the context of the resolute war that the Jews have been conducting against Christianity through the ages by means of the various religious heresies and political revolutions that they have fostered in Europe.

Paulescu’s section on Freemasonry, which constitutes the final chapter of his book, relies considerably on Drumont’s work but it is rather more comprehensive than it.  Paulescu here reveals the hatred that informs all of the Jewish involvement in European intellectual and political history.  The source of this hatred is evident most clearly in the Talmud but its enduring effects are manifest in the various Jewish-sponsored heretical movements that have sought to distort Christianity and Catholicism through the ages, beginning with the Ebionites in the first century A.D. and passing through Protestantism to Freemasonry.  The purported goal of the Freemasons to rebuild the Temple of Solomon is, according to Paulescu,  only a watchword that indicates the ambition of Israel to dominate the world.  Regarding the organization of Freemasonry, Paulescu points out that, in spite of its proclaimed philanthropy, the secretive nature of the  whole is a clear indication of its suspect character: “And to think that no one wonders why this society is hidden, when it has purposes  as sublime as the search for the truth.

More carefully than Drumont, Paulescu — relying on the work of Paul Copin-Albancell’s Le drame maçonnique: le pouvoir occulte contre la France  (“The Masonic Drama: The Occult Power against France” ( 1908) — details the hierarchy within the Masonic organization where the lower degrees of Masons are mostly blindfolded followers of an uppermost elite that  is constituted of Jews alone. And the bizarre rituals that mark a Mason’s progress through the organization are all marked by sentiments of hatred and revenge for those responsible for the destruction of the Temple.  Among the various targets of the Masons’ hatred, the chief are undoubtedly the Christians.  Quoting Copin-Albancelli, Paulescu points out that Masons are instructed to the effect that “Freemasonry has one enemy – Christianity, and Catholicism in particular — that you need to hate and fight.”[5]

Further, Masonry constantly spawns various sub-groups that carry out its agenda,  as Copin-Albancelli had noted:

Examples of such tentacles are the Freethinking (Libre-Pensée) Leagues, those of human and civil rights, those of education, houses of schools, studying clubs, library societies, of conferences, of Popular Universities … even of unions.[6]

During the times of the French Revolution, the Masons were aided particularly by the Masonic sub-group that called itself the “Jacobins.”  Of the political effects that resulted from these several organizations, the French Revolution aimed simultaneously at emancipating the Jews and at persecuting the Christians.  Among the Catholics, the chief targets of the Masons are the Jesuits, whom they fear above all Christian orders.  The monasteries of the Jesuits were attacked in Portugal, Spain, France and Austria and the campaign against Jesuitry continued with constant vilifications of Jesuits among  the public so that the common people gradually came to believe that the term Jesuit could be used as a synonym for scoundrel.

According to Paulescu, The Jewish support of the revolutionaries was intended to bolster the third estate of the bourgeoisie, which at first supported Napoleon in spite of his imperialistic ambitions.  When the Masons found that Napoleon’s tyranny was becoming dangerous to their plans, they worked to bring him down.  All through this period they benefited from their gradual emancipation in several European states.  But their ultimate aim of total revolution was not manifest until the Revolution of 1848, which sought to impose bourgeois capitalist Liberalism as a major political movement that would lead to the institution of a socialist republic.  The latter goal was achieved after the Paris Commune of 1871 when the Third Republic was established, and French society was henceforth marked by the separation of Church and State.

The real aims of all Masonic republics were to destroy monarchies, abolish Christianity from the education of the public, and to convert the people into a proletariat that could easily be made to serve the ambitions of Judah.  Based on Bernard Lazare’s work L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes (Anti-Semitism: Its History and Its Causes) (1894), the religious subversion of the Masons is related by Paulescu also to the  Kulturkampf that Bismarck conducted against the Roman Catholic Church between 1872 and 1878 and to the Jules Ferry laws of 1882 that mandated secular education in France.

At the same time, Paulescu claims that “Jewish Socialism” works towards the dispossession of private property by a state that is essentially Jewish in its composition  and interests.  These false socialist movements were crystallized in the doctrines of the Jew Karl Marx. And they were bolstered in their subversive agenda by the Anarchists, who constituted the more murderous and iconoclastic elements of the several revolutions that sprang up in Europe from 1848 onwards.

Paulescu then goes on to examine the subversive socialist role of Masonry in various European countries such as their support of the Templars in Romania and the Young Turks in Turkey.  In France, they focused on the destruction of Christianity in the nation by eliminating it from public education and the military establishment.  This anti-clericalism was especially strong in the regime of the Jew Léon Gambetta, President of the Council of Ministers[7] between 1881 and 1882, who declared “Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennem” (Clericalism is the  enemy).  Thus the attacks on the clergy were regularized and Christian education was replaced by a secular education which was made free and compulsory in the nation.  This in turn fostered atheistic doctrines, such as those of Darwin, and a general contempt for the Christian Church.  Even  the Latin language was deposed as a language of learning since it had been the language of the Church.

By positing a world constituted of matter and energy alone the Masonic-Marxist revolutions succeeded in repudiating the notions of the soul and of God on which Christian civilization had been based. As Drumont had already pointed out, whereas Christianity stresses love and charity, Masonry has a distinctive contempt for, and hatred of, poverty.  Thus, Paulescu is arguing that by steadily obliterating the Christian doctrines of compassion and charity and enlarging the worldly possessions and power of the Jews, Masonry has finally accomplished in post-Revolutionary Europe what the Talmud has striven to achieve from the very first centuries of the Christian era.


[1] See, for example, C. Oberhauser, ‘Simonini’s Letter or the Roots of the Alleged Jewish-Masonic World Conspiracy’, Jews in Central Europe, 2012, pp. 10-17.

[2] For instance, in pointing to the Judaic character of the Masonic rituals, he quotes from  The Most mysterious mysteries of the high ranks of Masonry revealed or the true Rosicrucian, which was published in 1766.

[3] He cites particularly the example of the shallow Charles Cousin (1822–1894), who was the administrator of the Northern Railway and president of the Council of the Grand Orient of France until 1885.

[4] The Gaulish leader who led a revolt against the Roman Emperor Nero in 68 A.D. He was defeated by the military legate Lucius Rufus and committed suicide.

[5] CherryAlbancelli, The drama maçonnique, I. p. 3132.

[6] Ibid., II, 195.

[7] Léon Gambetta was thus the Prime Minister.

“The Jews — The Kings of Our Age,” by Dr. Otto Böckel

“The Jews — The Kings of Our Age”[1]
Dr. Otto Böckel
Translated by Alexander Jacob

Otto Böckel (1859–1923) was a German anti-Semitic politician who was moved by the plight of the German peasants of Hesse to enter politics in 1887 as an independent member of the Reichstag. Like Eugen Dühring — who published a seminal work on the Jewish Question in 1881, Die Judenfrage[2] — Böckel was against all exploitative groups, Jewish or Junker and championed the peasants against their capitalist oppressors. Like Dühring too, Böckel considered the Jews distinct from the Germans in race rather than in religion and maintained that the Jewish Question was an existential question on which hinged the survival of one or the other race.  In the nineties, he formed an anti-Semitic party called Antisemitische Volkspartei, which later merged with Oswald Zimmerman’s Deutsche Reformpartei, in 1893. However, opposition from other anti-Semitic factions, including that of the Lutheran theologian Adolf Stoecker and his Christlich-soziale Partei, led to a weakening of his parliamentary position and he eventually left politics in 1912.

*   *   *

Respected attendees!

In my last talk, which I held on 28 December of last year here in the Bockbrauerei, I explained that the Jewish Question is an existential question for the German nation, that it was about whether the German nation would remain free, prosperous and happy in the future or whether Jewry would, bit by bit, in a slow but certain progression, undermine our national welfare and therewith the foundational pillars of our national existence. The Jewish Question stands above the political parties; it is a national question which affects every German regardless of religion or party affiliation. Whether conservative, liberal, progressive or ultramontane, all are threatened by the Jews. It was a great mistake of the anti-Semitic movement that it allowed itself to be dragged down to the swamp of parties; the decline of the anti-Semitic movement — so often stressed by the Jews — dates from the day that anti-Semitism got roped in by the Conservatives. This mistake we should rectify today, we must preach anti-Semitism free of any party orientation; every German has an interest in the Jewish Question, and only through the cooperation of men of all parties can it be solved in a legitimate manner.

How a solution of the Jewish Question is to be imagined has been the subject of much debate. Of course, such burning questions are not solved in one stroke. But the way to the solution is, nevertheless, quite discoverable. Every solution of the Jewish Question must begin with the fact that it should be recognised legally in the constitution that:

There are in Germany two different nations: Germans and Jews. The former are the masters of the land, the latter are guests, who may indeed possess a right to hospitality but never a right to be masters.

Who then made Germany arable, who cleared the primeval forests, who drove out the bears and wolves? Did our forefathers, the ancient Germans, not do that? If the Jews had had to cut down the primeval forests and shoot the wolves, the primeval forests would still have been standing in Germany and the wolves would have still dwelt in packs in our forests.

What our people developed through the sweat of their brow should also remain their own and no foreign tribe may drive the German from his native soil. Germany for the Germans, that is the slogan of anti-Semitism. We do not want any hatred of Jews but protection of Germans; never should the property of the Germans be expropriated by Jews, never should entire streets, entire cities and villages fall victim to the Jews, as is the case, for example, in Hesse, Alsace, and even here in Berlin. If the land registers — these silent proofs of Jewish power — could speak, they would utter a loud declaration of the Judaization of German land. The exploitation of our rural people has already reached a fabulous height.

Some examples: In the district courts of Gelnhausen and Meerholz, 227 forced auctions of housing properties were pending from 1 January 1880 to the present date. If one adds to this also the public auctions of the district courts of Wächtersbach, Birstein, Bieber and Orb, there must have been, in the Gelnhausen district alone, in this time-period, the really hair-raising number of 450 public auctions. The prosecuting party consisted 99% of Jews, while 1% was made up of public commercial treasuries and German money-lenders. Furthermore, in the Frankenberg district in Hesse, from 1877 to 1882, in 17 communities, 36 auctions have been noted. Of the auctioneers 17 were Jews and only 3 Germans. In addition, it must be observed that, given such a progress of property butchering, in around 15 years in the Frankenberg district there will be only a very small number of peasants left who are not financial slaves of the Jewish butchering of property. So, we have come so far already in the highly civilized nineteenth century that slavery — which has been repealed in Africa and America with streams of blood — can be quite freely introduced again into the middle of the German fatherland by Jews. Is that not a slap in the face of our much-praised civilization? When will the Germans have some of the tolerance that they have had twelve times for the foreign Jews for their own flesh and blood, for the German peasant class ruined by the Jews?

But do not think that it looks pathetic only In Hesse. It looks more or less similar everywhere in Germany. None other than the officious Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung wrote the following in 1880 about the Jews in Posen:

Just as in a factory, the public auction machine works throughout the year allocating the personal possessions of the rural folk to the Jews.

Yes, such an admission on the part of a newspaper that in its time made a stand against the anti-Semites is doubly valuable. In Upper Silesia, the Jews, according to the report of the liberal Kölnische Zeitung of May 1886, rule the entire trade to such an extent that in some places it is very difficult to do any shopping on Saturdays. The Jews have all the liquor bars in their hands there. Under such circumstances one can well understand that hunger typhus and delirium tremens is rampant in Upper Silesia. The Jews are also to blame for the hunger typhus and the misery that are to be found in Spessart, as Father Frank publicly proclaimed in the Bavarian chamber in 1880. How great the debt has grown in the Saar emerges from the well-established fact that a single Jewish firm, the H. Brothers in Saarlouis, as a consequence of the law “On the sale and mortgaging of property within the Rhine law,” in the period from 1 July 1885 to the present date in 1886, earned over 2,000,000 marks purchase price privileges. Consider, gentlemen, that that was done by a single ordinary Jewish firm, and now calculate the debt of our peasant class in relation to thousands of similar Jewish firms!

In the area around Trier, the Jews have already become exuberant to such an extent that they could openly boast that they were killing the Peasants’ Union founded for the protection of the peasants. In West Prussia, the Jews are, as the Secretary General Dr. Demmler testifies, already prevalent, extraordinarily strong, and have become the “fundamental malady of the peasant class.” Faced with such conditions, who does not recall the saying of Prince Bismarck, who in 1847 said in the state parliament during the discussion of the Jewish emancipation:

I know a place where the Jewish population is very numerous in the country, where there are peasants who call nothing on their entire property their own; from their bed to their oven-fork all furniture belongs to the Jew and the peasant pays a daily rent for every single thing. The corn in the field and in the barn belongs to the Jew and the Jew sells bread, seeds, and fodder to the peasant with razor sharpness. Of a similar Christian usury I have never heard, at least in my experience.

Another example, of how it is in southern Germany. In 1835, the Jews in Hohenzollern petitioned for their civil rights. The provincial deputies deliberated on it. In the course of the debate a speaker expressed the following: “The haggling business of the Jews weighs in a corrupting manner on the province. In the village, in the huts of the poor and the simple folk, the work-instrument and cow, the field and the pasture, the pan and the pot, the hood and the jacket, often belong to the Jew and he does not stop making the peasant with his house and field, harrow and plough, wife and child subject to him through interest.” If the Jews are emancipated, said another speaker, “then in a short time the entire princely house of the Hohenzollerns would belong to the Chosen People and the poor goyim be their slaves.” These are sad images of the Judaization of land in Germany.

Where will it end if it continues in this way? From where will the defense troops come to defend the fatherland when our peasant sinks more and more into a day-labourer or emigrates in order to escape from the Jew? The peasantry are the foundational pillar of a healthy state structure; woe to the state that leaves its peasants defenceless to exploitation by the Jews! It is infuriating when one must watch how the Jew, who just 20 years ago peddled goatskins as a poor panhandler, today, as a rich haggler, holds on a Sunday morning a day of hearing for his indebted peasants in order to inform them whether he will just auction them off or whether he will still be merciful. It is infuriating when such scenes occur in the middle of the German fatherland!

Yes, gentlemen, if you would see how the poor victims of the Jew come to the day of hearing of this person, how they bow down their heads, how the Jew shouts at them, how many of them depart therefrom in tears, then your heart will beat in shame and rage at how deep already the German people have sunk into misery. If you wish to study the Jewish Question, you must go to the court house into which the Jew leads his peasants; how often I have seen the poor victims creep to the local court with lowered head next to the grimacing Jew.

Yes, gentlemen, this sight made me an anti-Semite, I then said to myself: ‘How low, how low indeed, our people have fallen! Is there then nobody, nobody who has the courage to intervene on behalf of the poor people who have fallen to the Jew?’ I looked around myself and saw nobody. Some perhaps made fists in their pockets, but the Jews are too powerful, they are feared. Cowardice is a widespread vice.

Then I jumped into the movement, without any consideration of career or future. It was in autumn 1883 when I became acquainted, in a really drastic case, with the misery that the Jews bring upon our people. A formerly well-off peasant was fully impoverished by a Jew; a few days after the auctioning of the peasant’s possessions, the Jew was found murdered. The peasant was brought before the jury in Marburg but acquitted. The proceedings uncovered a frightful image of Jewish usury. I followed the trial with great excitement; on the day on which the verdict was uttered I too was among the expectant crowd. I shall never forget the moment when the acquitted victim of the Jew emerged from the door of the court building. A hundred “Bravos” shook the air, the mass of people were beside themselves with joy. Then, in this thrilling hour, I swore to myself: “This cannot go on further; you must intervene against the activities of the Jews with your whole life. The people are panting for a liberator:” From this moment onwards I have been an anti-Semitic agitator, the image of the poor peasant robbed by the Jew impels me forward; whether the enemy be numerous, whether the dirt and the hatred be so great, I must fight and will fight to the last drop of my blood, to my last breath.

We want to fight, but only on an honest, legal path; we abjure every brutal violence and dissociate ourselves expressly from anyone who undertakes to solve the Jewish Question in an illegal manner. We know only too well that nothing hurts our cause more than illegal riots. That is precisely what the Jews want so that they may obtain a certain semblance of truth for the old meaningless phrase “Jew baiting.” Who knows how many of those abhorrent riots against the possessions of the Jews originated directly or indirectly from paid agents provocateurs of the Jews themselves. We cannot emphasize too often the legality of our agitation.

Equally as often must we emphasize that we seek to solve the Jewish Question totally only as a racial question, never as a religious question. The Jewish Question has nothing to do with the religion of the Jews; what the Jew believes is a matter of indifference; whether he is a Reform Jew, Orthodox or baptised Jew, that is a matter of complete indifference for us anti-Semites. The Jews are a tenacious, ancient race distant from ours that cannot be extirpated from the world either through baptism or miscegenation. Baptism is for the Jew only a passport to enter into the higher classes in order to be able to work so much more energetically for the interests of his race. Through baptism the Jew becomes only more dangerous.

What the Jews themselves think of baptism they express very openly; so, for example, the Jew Singer in Vienna clearly says in his work Should the Jews become Christians?,[3] “The Jew who lets himself be converted is a hypocrite.” More characteristically does the orthodox Israelit appearing in Mainz illustrate the view of the Jews regarding baptism: At the time of the Napoleonic campaign a German Jew came as a soldier to Spain; now, there are in Spain, where the Jewish religion is not tolerated in public, many secret Jews (they are called novos christianos)[4] who say outwardly that they are Christian but secretly celebrate the Jewish rituals, are circumcised, etc. Our Jewish soldier now came accidentally to such a secret Jew in his cantonment. The host was very ill and was dying. They called for a priest. Suddenly, when the priest entered the barrack room with a raised crucifix, the dying man cried out: “Stay away, I am a Jew.” The priest then threw the cross onto the ground and cried out: “I am also a Jew.”  And the Jewish German soldier embraced both his racial comrades and cried out: “I am also a Jew.” And the three Jews (two dishonest and one honest) embraced one another and were glad that they had found one another in such a miraculous way.

That is a little piece that may show us what one may think of the baptism of the Jews. Woe to the people who think that they can get rid of the Jewish Question through baptism; it can then easily happen as in Portugal, where the entire national character has been corrupted and enervated by the creeping Jewry. The Portuguese, once a warlike and seafaring nation, have, in the judgement of competent travellers like Willkomm,[5] etc., become roguish and Jewish, their national character has been corrupted by the admixed Jewry. How far things have gone in Portugal is demonstrated by an anecdote that the elder D’Israeli, [6] the English Jew, narrates in his work Geist des Judenthums (Stuttgart, 1836, 218): The Portuguese nation is seventy five percent made up of Jews. Under the government of Pombal,[7] King Joseph was persuaded to renew that badge of the Jews, the yellow hat, to designate the many novos christianos among his subjects. The edict was prepared; the next morning the minister appeared before His Majesty with three yellow hats, one he offered to the king, the second he gave the Great Inquisitor and the third he intended for his own head. “I follow the orders of His Majesty,” he said, “and give this badge to those whose blood has been stained with Jewish blood.”

That is what happens in countries where one deals with the Jewish Question from a religious standpoint. The Jews are a race, and indeed a very ancient one. On the Egyptian pyramids we find portrayed, among other labourers, also some Jews (the Jews, as is well-known, had to work as laborers in Egypt) and these Jews on the thousand-year old pyramids look exactly like our present-day Jews in Germany. That is perhaps the best proof of the persistence of the Jewish race.

It is a fact recognised by many medical authorities that the bodily structure of the Jews is different from that of the Germans. Dr. G. Schulz, curator of the anatomical museum in St. Petersburg, compiled a report on the measurements of individuals from different nations for the determination of the proportions of the human body. In St. Petersburg, the focal point of the most extensive monarchy on earth, he had excellent opportunity for comparative bodily measurements: he accurately measured Russians, Jews, Circassians,[8] Latvians, negroes and Chuvashians.[9] The result showed, that among these different nations, the Jews represented not just a deviation and distinctiveness in individual proportions, but that they stand at the extreme limit in the chief proportions of height and width, the proportion of the trunk to the limbs, of the head and neck to the rest of the body, and represented an exceptional distinctiveness. Even Professor Virchow,[10] the famous natural scientific researcher, spoke at the grave of Ludwig Löwe of a Jewish race and therewith provided the most valuable endorsement for us anti-Semites.

The key to the Jewish Question lies in the circumstance that the Jews are a foreign race that thinks differently, feels differently, acts differently than us and consequently must quite naturally be placed in another legal category. We cannot confound the concept of race with “humanity”: blood is not water, nations and statesmen who do not deal with the racial conditions rooted in Nature are destroyed by this failure of understanding.

One such failure of understanding was the Jewish emancipation. People thought that they would be able to silently assume that a Jew was, or could become, a German. Statesmanly cleverness and foresight were subordinated to more general observations and created in this way pathetic conditions which a clever politician could have foreseen. Even the very free-thinking tribune Hecker[11] was an opponent of Jewish emancipation and he called it nonsense! Today we have to suffer badly on account of the mistake of the Jewish emancipation. The consequence of that liberal enthusiasm for the Jews plagues the German nation like a rheumatism and it is high time to take care that it does not become a gout. The number of Jews increases in a really abnormal manner. In 1774, in Berlin, there were altogether 3953 Jews, in 1813 there existed there still only 2825, in 1858 there were already 15,491 and in the census of 1 December 1880, 53,949 Jews were counted, that is, 4.81 percent. Today, in 1886, we may suppose around 60,000. The number of Jews has thus increased roughly seventeen times from 1780 to 1880. Consider that, if the present-day Berlin Jewry increases again seventeen times in a century, this would give, in Berlin alone, for 1980, the total sum of 923,132 Jews, thus almost one million Jews in Berlin in 1980. In Köln there were, according to an article of the liberal Kölner Zeitung, in 1833, 60,000 Germans and 356 Jews; fifty years later, in 1882, the civilian population of Köln amounted to 138,614 Germans and Jews; the Christians thus increased in 50 years around twofold, the Jews around fifteen times. We may calculate further on the basis of these figures. If Köln increases further under the same conditions, its population will amount in 50 years to 300,000 Germans and 80,000 Jews and, 50 years after, to 700,000 Germans and 1,200,000 Jews.

Do you perhaps understand now that the Jewish Question is an existential question for us Germans? The Kölner Volkszeitung recently wrote the following: “I am not an anti-Semite and would gladly let every Jew live; but if the influence of the Jews increases in the same way as in the last ninety years, I don’t know what will become of Köln.”

In Hesse there are cities and towns which have 10–20 percent Jews, for example, Niedenstein (Fritzlar district) with 21.71 percent Jews, Felsberg (Melsungen district) with 17.50 percent Jews, Schlüchtern with 13.98 percent Jews, etc. As striking is the multiplicative capacity of the Jews abroad. Thus the Jewish population of Vienna has, in comparison to the Christian, increased similarly strongly, 7 times in eleven years, and in Prague 8 times. In Bucharest, the Romanian population was represented in terms of births up to 20 percent, the Catholic up to 16 percent, and the Jewish 47 percent.

Parallel to the capacity of physical multiplication of the Jews runs the rapid growth of Jewish wealth. So we have, for example, according to the official tax registers in Frankfurt am Rhein, a city in which, among 150,000 inhabitants there are around 16,000 Jews, altogether 53 Jewish millionaires and only 48 German millionaires.

In the hands of the Jewish millionaires there are 235 million marks, whereas the Germans represent only 88 million. Given such figures, perhaps nobody asks any more, “Where has our money gone?” but “Whence do those Jewish millions come if not from the sweat of the German people?” They were not earned by the sweat of the hands, no Jewish millionaire saved his millions as a manual labourer or acquired them as a peasant with a plough; all this infinite wealth was taken from the mouths of the working German people. Everybody knows about the wealth of Rothschild. Rothschild possesses in Bohemia alone seven times as much land as the entire imperial family. All sixty aristocratic families of Bohemia taken together have only four times as much land in Bohemia as Rothschild alone, and all that only since 37 years ago. If one adds to that the possessions of Rothschild in Lower Austria, Moravia, Silesia, Hungary, etc., and, further, those in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, America, etc., then one must ask oneself: “Are the Jew not the kings of our age?”

The Ferrières Castle in France, which belongs to Rothschild, and excels in splendour and opulence all royal castles in the world, is surrounded by a complex of 100,000 joch, all of which belongs to Rothschild. The entire lands belonging to this single castle of Rothschild are twice as much as the entire land possessions of all the religious orders of all of France. But, apart from Rothschild, there are further, in France, a number of Jewish bankers each of whom possesses more than 50,000 joch of land. Similarly, all the significant vineyards of France belong to Rothschild. Alongside Rothschild, Baron Hirsch, especially, shines in Paris as a financial magnate. This financier became a millionaire especially through the lotteries. The high society of Paris frequent this Croesus. When Baron Hirsch once stood at the top of his famous stairway and saw the counts, princes and marquis climbing up, he said to his son: “Look at all these people, in twenty years they will all be our sons-in-law, or our gatekeepers.”

The wealth of the Jews constantly increases. In Hungary, where not a single Jew possessed land before 1862, half of the Nyitra County belongs to the Jew Popper, and the former owners of this land have mostly emigrated. This Popper, who began as a poor Jew, died as the patron of 54 Catholic churches. Recently, a Jew called Deutsch bought near Fünfkirchen an estate of 200,000 joch. The other big Jews, Königswarter, Wodianer, Springer, Tedesko, etc., have in the 27 years in which they have been allowed to acquire landed property, bought up so much land in Hungary that they have a quarter of the electorate in their lands. In Galicia, 80 percent of the entire land, thus 4/5, belongs to the Jews and only a fifth to the local people. In Romania, 2/3 of the land is in debt to the Jews; the Jews there are just waiting for their emancipation to take possession of the entire land in a short time. So far have they already come, the poor “persecuted Jews.” Informed people claim that the wealth of the Rothschild house is 20,000 million [marks]; at 5 percent interest this produces in interest in one year of 1,000,000,000 guilders, in one day more than 2,500,000 guilders. So, if Rothschild wishes to consume just the interests, he has every day 2,500,000 guilders to spend.

A bureaucrat who has a yearly salary of 1000 florins must therefore live and work 2500 years long if he wished to earn as much salary as the Rothschild house has to consume daily just in interest. The wealth of the Rothschilds grows rapidly. Each of the two Frankfurt Rothschilds has a yearly income of around 10 million; of this each spends 11/2 million and sets aside thus 81/2 million again as capital. Where should such a hoarding of Jewish millions lead? Shouldn’t universal impoverishment be the natural consequence?

The financial power of the Rotschilds is assertive. When, recently, bankrupt Egypt took a loan from Rothschild, 6 great powers had to vouch for bankrupt Egypt; among these powers was also Germany! Out of this Egyptian loan the Rothschild house soon, as may be proven, earned within a short time 6,100,000 marks, thus a net gain of at least 3 million marks. The power of this Jewish international house already makes itself felt in world history. The Parisian Rothschilds are, as is well-known, the closest friends of the Orléans; the Baroness Alphonse de Rothschild held as recently as 2 July 1886 a glamorous dinner in honour of the Duke of Chartres. It is an open secret that the Parisian Rothschild protects the Orléans. But the Orléans are, for Germany, war. But there are Rothschilds not only in Paris, they have seats also in London and Vienna. The imperial Austrian state is in debt to the Rothschild house. Now imagine the political constellations in the case of a war between France and Russia on the one side and Germany and Austria on the other. The result is therefore very simple; the Finanz und Handelsblatt, certainly a competent, non-partisan organ, describes the consequences in this way:

Supposing the case that France were to find that the time had come to declare war against Germany, then it lies in the powerful hands of the Rothschilds to drive the Austrian state allied with us immediately into bankruptcy and to destroy it financially if it did not comply with the political dictates of the Rothschilds. Nothing else is required for such a catastrophe than to quickly place on the market the Rothschilds’ possession of Austrian credit stocks, bring them down from 500 to half or less, and add to it a couple of hundred million Austrian and Hungarian annuities. Now imagine the effect of such an operation, which is simple in itself. For, even the unpaid billions in other annuities and other funds, industrial shares, bonds, etc. follow forthwith thereupon, and the howling and the fury of the all-shattering countermine will take care of the rest. This business with these credit shares and their all-powerful influence has already been allowed to go too far. We have already long ago pointed to this quite uniquely forged Rothschild weapon and it is apparent, rather late, to everybody’s eyes upon what a dangerous mine Europe stands and who has the fuse for its ignition in his hands.

Now, who has the fuse in his hands? The Jew Rothschild has in his hands the fuse for the ignition of the mine dug under the ground of Europe by the stock-exchange Jews!

Yes, gentlemen, that is how serious the Jewish Question is. These innocent persecuted Jews vilely hounded by us anti-Semites, they rule world-history, they have the fate of entire nations already in their hands. Is it not touching when these Jews who have entire states in their hands play out the old farce of Tolerance against anti-Semitism? We poor anti-Semites “hound” the Jewish people, to whom it is a matter of indifference to smash entire states through stock-exchange manoeuvres. If it should come to war with France and Russia and Germany is isolated through the Rothschilds’ maneuver and squeezed between two buffers, then we will indeed see if the Berlin stock-exchange Jews will be as patriotic as in 1870 when they received the North German war loan with contemptuous laughter. Then perhaps the damage that the Jewish foundations have effected on our national well-being will make itself felt and only then will the German people notice what a hole the Jewish butchers have made in their defensive power.

In 1862, the French Jew Crémieux[12] — the same man who set a price on the head of the German Kaiser in 1870 and whose death was honoured by the Jews of Berlin in the big synagogue — issued an appeal for the founding of the Alliance Israélite.[13] In this appeal it says:

Our nationality is the religion of our fathers; we recognize no other.
The Jewish doctrine must one day fill the entire world.
The work is great and sacred, success is certain.
Catholicism, our hundred-year old enemy, is defeated, struck on the head.
The net that Israel throws over the earth will extend every day and the sublime prophecies of our holy books will be fulfilled.
The day approaches when Jerusalem will become the house of prayer for our united peoples, where the flag of Jewish monotheism blows on the most distance coasts.
Let us use all opportunities. Our power is great, let us learn to use it. What do we have to fear? The day is not far off when the wealth of the earth will belong exclusively to the Jews.

This Jewish union, which was founded with this appeal, numbers today 30,000 members, it has at its disposal every year over hundred thousand marks. Here in Berlin walk thousands of members of that union that seeks to use every opportunity. Yes, we have thrown out the Jesuits, but the Jewish Jesuits, who are thousand times worse, they grow and prosper among us like sands on the shore. Where should that lead to if a stop is not put to it finally? If I go through the most populated streets of Berlin, for example, Friedrichstraße, Leipzigstraße, etc., where almost 90% of all houses have fallen to the Jews, if I see entire stretches of land and villages in the province in bondage to the Jews, if I glance at our influential press, our literature, under the Jewish influence, if I see our grammar schools overflowing with Jews, if I consider the enormous influence of Jewish money on the stock-exchange, I can say only one thing: Germany is to be saved from the Jews either today or never. Consider, Germans, that you stand in the eleventh hour; confronted with the Jewish Question, all party discord must cease. Men of all parties must coalesce into a large German national party, as we have done in Hesse, especially in order to enter parliament.

In parliament, the Jewish Question must be discussed repeatedly until the German people learn to view the repeal of the Jewish emancipation no longer as “intolerance,” as “persecution delirium,” but as a pressing necessity for our own rescue. We in Hesse will show the way, in the parliamentary elections of autumn 1887 we will place pure and genuine anti-Semites in seven electoral districts. We must, and shall, break through in some districts. Support us in Berlin in this difficult battle for the whole of Germany. When we have won in Hesse, then the liberation of Berlin from the Jewish yoke will follow. In conclusion, let me shout out to you the assurance that we will not falter in Hesse and will hold the flag high. You too must stand united in Berlin, our cause is not yet lost, just be united, united, united!


[1] Talk held at the public meeting of the German Anti-Semitic Union in the Bockbrauerei, Berlin, on 4 October 1886.

[2] See my English edition of this work, Eugen Dühring, The Jewish Question as a racial, moral and cultural question, with a world-historical answer, London: Ostara Publications, 2017.

[3] Isidore Singer, Sollen die Juden Christen werden? (Hansebooks, 2016; orig. pub.: 1884). [All footnotes are by the translator.]

[4] New Christians

[5] Heinz Moritz Willkomm (1821–1895) was a German botanist who wrote a work on his travels in Iberia, Zwei Jahre in Spanien und Portugal, 1847.

[6] Isaac D’Israeli (1766–1848) was a writer and father of Benjamin Disraeli. His book Genius of Judaism was published in 1833.

[7] Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marquis of Pombal (1699–1782) was a Portuguese liberal statesman who served as the powerful chief minister of King Joseph I.

[8] People of the region of Circassia, in the North Caucasus.

[9] A Turkic ethnic group of Russia.

[10] Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) was a celebrated German physician and pathologist.

[11] Friedrich Hecker (1811–1881) was a German lawyer and one of the principal Liberal agitators during the 1848 Revolution.

[12] Adolphe Crémieux (1796–1880) was a French Jewish lawyer and politician who served as Minister of Justice during the Second Republic and the Third Republic. He was a Freemason and fervent defender of the Jews. He served as president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle from 1863 to 1867 and from 1868 to 1880.

[13] The Alliance Israélite Universelle was established in Paris in 1860 as an international organization for the promotion of the rights and welfare of Jews around the world.

Degas and the Jews

Edgar Degas: Self Portrait 1865-66

It is customary in our political circles to link cultural modernism (and its negative social consequences) to Jewish influence. While there are strong grounds for this stance, things are sometimes more complicated than this narrative would suggest. Take, for instance, the group of painters who made up the French Impressionist movement of the late nineteenth century. Considered to be the first avant-garde movement of the Modernist period, Impressionism served as a springboard for many artistic movements of the twentieth century, including Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Yet among the leaders of the Impressionist movement were artists, like Cezanne, Renoir and Degas, who were notable for their antipathy to Jews.

Of this trio of leading Impressionists, the one who evinced the keenest aversion to Jews was Edgar Degas (1834—1917) who was described by Jewish artist Camille Pissarro as “that ferocious anti-Semite.” Though Degas is regarded as one of the cornerstone founders of Impressionism, he disliked the name and, indeed, many of the artists who made up the movement. He thought of himself as a realist and “pragmatist” painter first and foremost. But this did not stop him from leading the collective and co-organizing their ground-breaking exhibitions from 1874—86.

The label “impressionist’ was coined by a critic who said their paintings looked unfinished, as if they were “impressions” of a scene rather than finished paintings. While many of Degas’ paintings do look spontaneous, they involved intensive planning. He would study his subjects obsessively, making numerous sketches before starting a painting. He once observed: “I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.” He seldom considered a painting complete, always striving to improve it. Degas combined the classical methods he mastered as a youth with Impressionistic sensibilities: he liked to experiment with light, angles, and focus. Sometimes subjects would have their backs to the viewer or be cut off by the edge of the canvas. He would paint them doing mundane things like ironing clothes.

Unlike other leading impressionist artists, Degas shunned landscape painting — the result of personal preference and the visual ailments that plagued him from middle age. Retinal problems led to his having trouble recognizing colors and made it hard for him to see in brilliant light. He therefore appreciated the low light of the theater and developed a strong preference for working there. From the 1870s, Degas explored the subject of dance which accounts for a large portion of his work. He is most famous for his paintings of ballerinas at work, in rehearsal, or at rest. He depicted them from various angles in hundreds of different positions. His failing vision doubtless affected his work, prompting more extensive strokes, bolder colors, and experimentation in a wide assortment of media, including pastels, photography, and printmaking. In his last years, Degas had to wear dark glasses outdoors and quit working altogether in 1912. He died in 1917 at the age of 83.

Despite Degas’s reputation as a reactionary bourgeois, for most of his long life he was a democrat and a republican. Degas mostly kept his politics — and his opinions about Jews — out of his art. Despite this, some critics insist that anti-Semitism “pollutes his pictures, seeping in to them in some ineffable way and changing their meaning, their every existence as signifying systems.” Jewish subjects appear recurrently in Degas’ canvases. Particularly noteworthy is his 1871 oil portrait of Rabbi Astruc, a leading figure in the Jewish world who helped establish the Alliance Israelite Universelle before his appointment as chief rabbi of Belgium in 1866. Regarding Degas’ portrait of Astruc, the Rabbi’s son never forgave the artist for “making a wreck of his splendid subject, replacing his tiny mouth with thin, sensual lips and changing his tender, loving regard into a look of greed.” For him, the portrait was “not a work of art — it is a pogrom.”[i] Degas painted Astruc rapidly, accentuating in his subject what “he though were the traits of his race.” Degas was intrigued by physiognomy: the act of judging individuals from their appearance. Some critics contend that this interest is manifest in Degas’ allegedly unflattering depiction of his Jewish subjects.

Portrait or pogrom? Portrait of Rabbi Astruc (left) by Edgar Degas (1871)

Degas also depicted Jews in a series of paintings of Parisian brothels and their customers. These brothel scenes include clients whose facial features are recognisably Jewish. Callen argues that, in doing so, and by implicitly constituting Jews as a “racially impure ‘other,’” Degas was attempting to absolve himself and his audience of any potential charge of voyeurism.[ii]

L’Absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker) (1876) by Edgar Degas

Degas’ most famous painting, L’Absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker) from 1876, is considered a masterful representation of social isolation in Paris during a period of rapid industrial growth. This painting was censured as ugly and disgusting and shut away from viewers for a long time until it was introduced again in 1892. Numerous French nationalists (on the left and right) ascribed the immorality and degeneration of French social life encapsulated in this painting to Jewish influence. Jews were seen as “agents of social change; they were symbols of confusion and alteration. Against them, to be safe from the threat they posed, anti-Semites affirmed and invoked a stable social order, stable moral values, immutable and absolute categories.”[iii]

Widely cited by those eager to prove Degas’ anti-Semitic bona fides is his 1879 painting At the Bourse. It depicts the Jewish banker, speculator, and patron of the arts, Ernest May, on the steps of the stock exchange in the company of a certain Monsieur Bolatre.

At the Bourse by Edgar Degas (1879)

Regarding this painting, Brown insists “there is a nasty, if subtle, suggestion of anti-Semitism in the depiction of May’s physiognomic traits,”[iv] while for Armstrong, Degas’ “dark slovenly depiction of moneylenders might certainly be inflected with anti-Semitic racism.”[v] Jewish art critic Linda Nochlin claims this painting depicts Jewishness in an “unflattering, if relatively subtle way,” and “draws from the same polluted source of available visual stereotypes.”

It is not so much May’s Semitic features, but rather the gesture that I find disturbing — what might be called the “confidential touching” — that and the rather strange, close-up angle of vision from which the artist chose to record it, as though to suggest that the spectator is spying on rather than merely looking at the transaction taking place. … What is “revealed” here, perhaps unconsciously, through May’s gesture, as well as the unseemly, inelegant closeness of the two central figures and the demeanor of the vaguely adumbrated cast of characters, like the odd couple, one with a “Semitic nose,” pressed as tightly as lovers into the narrow space at the left-hand margin of the picture, is a whole mythology of Jewish financial conspiracy.

That gesture — the half-hidden head tilted to afford greater intimacy, the plump white hand on the slightly raised shoulder, the stiff turn of May’s head, the somewhat emphasized ear picking up the tip — all this, in the context of the half-precise, half-merely adumbrated background, suggests “insider” information to which “they,” are privy, from which “we,” the spectators (understood to be gentile) are excluded. This is, in effect, the representation of a conspiracy. It is not too farfetched to think of the traditional gesture of Judas betraying Christ in this connection, except that here, both figures function to signify Judas; Christ, of course, is the French public, betrayed by Jewish financial machinations.[vi]

This kind of speculative analysis of Degas’ work to establish his anti-Semitism is ultimately superfluous given the artist’s catalogue of statements critical of Jews. Toward the end of his life, Degas, for instance, declared without equivocation: “I detest them, those Jews! An abominable race that ought to be shut up in ghettos. Or even totally eradicated!” Ostensibly unable to conceive of the existence of rational and valid criticisms of Jews, Nochlin insists that “although Degas was indeed an extraordinary artist, a brilliant innovator, and one of the most important figures in the artistic vanguard of the 19th century, he was a perfectly ordinary anti-Semite. As such, he must have been capable of amazing feats of both irrationality and rationalization, able to keep different parts of his inner and outer life in separate compartments.”[vii]

Nochlin draws on the (now venerable) Jewish apologetic trope of characterizing anti-Jewish sentiment as akin to a virus. The fact that Degas, “stubbornly nationalistic, and blinded by fanaticism,” produced ‘At the Bourse’ while still friends with the Jewish author and playwright Ludovic Halévy, suggests, she claims, that this “virus was in a state of extreme latency, visible only in the nuances of a few works of art and intermittently at that. Or perhaps one might say that before the period of the Dreyfus affair, Degas … was anti-Jewish only in terms of a certain representation of the Jew or of particular ‘Jewish traits,’ but his attitude did not yet manifest itself in overt hostility toward actual Jewish people, nor did it yet take the form of a coherent ideology of anti-Semitism.”[viii]

It was the Dreyfus Affair and the writings of Eduard Drumont that supposedly crystalized Degas’ nascent anti-Semitism into a fully delineated ideology. Through such influences, the “virus” of anti-Semitism “mutated” in the 1880s and 1890s from “stereotyped prejudices diffused all over Europe” into an organized movement and ideology (accompanied by the emergence of anti-Semitic literature, leagues and groups). By 1895 the artist was, “in addition to being a violent nationalist and uncritical supporter of the army, an outspoken anti-Semite.”[ix] According to some accounts, he had his maid read aloud from Drumont’s La Libre Parole and Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant. It was these publications that, according to Kleeblatt, “constructed the anti-Semitic identity of men like Degas.”[x]

Despite the conclusion to the Dreyfus affair, there are no signs, according to a biographer, “that he ever thought he had taken the wrong side in the great clash of the two Frances.”[xi] Chrisci-Richardson ascribes his anti-Semitism to his economic vulnerability — as an “inexcusable symptom of his life-long struggle for money and his uncertain social position.”[xii] Born into a well-off family, Degas suddenly experienced financial difficulties in 1874 with the death of his father and the closure of his brother’s business. He was forced to sell his home and started living with the subjects he was painting, offering his paintings as payment. According to Nochlin:

There was a specific aspect of Degas’ situation in the world that might have made him particularly susceptible to the anti-Semitic ideology of his time: what might be called his “status anxiety.” According to Stephen Wilson: “The French anti-Semites’ attacks on social mobility, and their ideal of a fixed social hierarchy, suggest that such an interpretation applies to them, particularly when these ideological features are set beside the marginal situation of many of the movement’s supporters.” Degas was precisely such a “marginal” figure in the social world of the late 19th century and had ample reason, by the decade of the ’90s, to be worried about his status.[xiii]

Degas was adversely affected by the crash of the Union Générale Bank in 1882. This event was widely interpreted as “the result of deliberate action against the Catholic finance house by its Jewish rivals, led by Rothschild.” The crash of the Bank was only one of the financial and business scandals attributed to Jews in France. Others included to Panama scandal (1892), and the failures of Comptoir des Metaux and the Comptoir d’Escomptes. In the aftermath of these scandals, Jewish financiers like the Halevys, the Hasses, the Schlumbergers, the Camondos, the Ephrussis and the Rothschilds, were “viewed with suspicion and thought to be working for the ruin of France.”[xiv]

For Chrisci-Richardson, as well as being a response to “Jewish capitalists monopolizing the wealth of France” and “Jewish workers taking the jobs from French workers,” Degas’ anti-Jewish outlook was also a response to his vision of Jewish immigrants as “carriers of revolution.”[xv] By the 1880s various Jewish revolutionaries had established themselves in Paris, forming revolutionary circles, whether anarchist, anarcho-communist, or, later Bolshevik. Thousands of politically-radical Jews migrated to France, particularly to Paris, between 1880 and 1925. At the time of the Dreyfus trial, 40,000 of the 75,000 Jews in France were concentrated in Paris.

Fellow impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir also denounced Jews as vectors of political radicalism. According to Nochlin, Renoir was “openly anti-Semitic, a position obviously linked to his deep political conservatism and fear of anarchism.”[xvi] Capps laments that Renoir was an artist “who appeared to embrace the methods of early modernism but none of its revolutionary goals.”[xvii] Renoir maintained there was a good reason for Jews having been repeatedly expelled from countries throughout history, and warned “they shouldn’t be allowed to become so important in France.” He observed that “the peculiarity of the Jews is to cause disintegration.”[xviii]

In her diaries, Renoir’s daughter Julie regularly records her father expressing a variety of anti-Jewish views. In January 1898, during a discussion of the Dreyfus Affair, she quotes Renoir as saying. “[The Jews] come to France to earn money, but if there is any fighting to be done they hide behind a tree. … There are a lot of them in the army, because the Jew likes to walk about wearing a uniform.” Renoir also “let fly on the subject of Pissarro, ‘a Jew,’ whose sons are natives of no country and who do their military service nowhere.” Renoir goes on, “It’s tenacious[,] the Jewish race. Pissarro’s wife isn’t one, yet all the children are, even more so than their father.”[xix]

Renoir’s famous 1880–81 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party, features more than a dozen figures and a dog. One of these figures, a man wearing a hat with his back turned to the viewer, is Charles Ephrussi, a Jewish art critic and collector. From a wealthy Jewish banking family, Ephrussi, the stereotype of the wealthy Jewish banker exemplified by the Rothschilds, played a key role in Renoir’s career. Ephrussi rubbed elbows with the Parisian elite and was an unrelenting networker and social climber. The writer Edmond de Goncourt once observed that “Ephrussi the Jew went to six or seven parties a night, so that he could climb to a position in the Ministry of Fine Arts.”[xx]

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Ephrussi helped Renoir find buyers in the French Jewish community — where he gained popularity as a portraitist. Degas was particularly disappointed with what he saw as Renoir’s transformation into a Jewish-society portraitist. In 1880, he wrote: “Monsieur Renoir, you have no integrity. It is unacceptable that you paint to order. I gather you now work for financiers, that you do the rounds with Charles Ephrussi.” Shortly after Degas’ missive, Renoir ended his activity as a society portraitist. Aside from Degas’ chastisement, Renoir became exasperated with his Jewish patrons — especially the Cahen d’Anvers family. Writing to a fellow artist, he protested: “As for the 1,500 francs from Cahens, I must tell you that I find it hard to swallow. The family is so stingy; I am washing my hands of the Jews.” Over the following year, Renoir penned a succession of letters expressing his disdain for Jewish patrons, and severed all ties with the Ephrussi patronage circle. Melanson notes that:

As he renounced his Jewish patrons, and his anti-Semitic remarks became more frequent, Renoir’s wrath was directed at the artist most commonly associated with Jewish high society. [Léon] Bonnat painted almost every member of the salons juifs, including Albert and Louilia Cahen d’Anvers, Charles Ephrussi, Marie and Edouard Kann, Louise Cahen d’Anvers, Mme Leopold Stern, Mme Bischoffsheim, Countess Potocka, Joseph Reinach, Abraham de Camondo, and Henri Cernuschi. Like many society portraitists, Bonnat and his wife became members of high society, particularly the world of the salons juifs.

In the twentieth century, Jacques-Emile Blanche recalled the affinity of “wealthy Jewish financiers” for Bonnat. Blanche was correct in asserting that it was Bonnat, and not Renoir, who was truly the portraitist of Jewish high society. Blanche explained that Renoir’s Jewish patrons were “not at all convinced of [Renoir’s] talent” but were promised by Ephrussi “enormous returns on the sale of Impressionist pictures.” Accusing Jewish art patrons of speculation was a common trope of anti-Semitic discourse, and Blanche’s tone was demeaning when he described Ephrussi’s circle as “rather proud of their audacity” in commissioning portraits from Renoir that ultimately “ended up in the laundry room or were given away to former governesses.”[xxi]

Despite their anti-Jewish views, Jewish patrons and art dealers avidly bought up the work of Degas and Renoir. While Jewish artists of the first rank were few and far between (Pissarro perhaps excepted), Jews still dominated the art scene in Paris in the late nineteenth century as publishers, collector-patrons and dealers. They were, moreover, absolutely committed to the modernist movement, even to the point of making excuses for artists who, like Degas, Renoir and Cezanne, were anti-Dreyfusards and even openly anti-Semitic. Laufer notes that:

At the end of the long nineteenth century, the [non-Jewish owned] Parisian press often described French Jews as greedy, cosmopolitan, materialistic traitors — and avid collectors of modern art. While several of these characterisations are mere anti-Semitic stereotypes, French Jews did make up a disproportionately large number of the supporters of modern artists (particularly of the Impressionists and the Symbolists).[xxii]

In his exposition of the political significance of the widespread Jewish involvement in cultural modernism, the Jewish historian Norman Cantor noted that: “Something more profound and structural was involved in the Jewish role in the modernist revolution than this sociological phenomenon of the supersession of marginality. There was an ideological drive at work.”[xxiii] This ideological drive was the urge to subject Western civilization (deemed a “soft authoritarianism” hostile to Jews) to intensive criticism. The late Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj concurred with this assessment, equating anti-Semitism with anti-modernism. “Jewish brilliance”, he said, “made the modern world.” Jews were agents of change, architects of human unease.[xxiv]

Degas’ status as a Modernist master therefore sits incongruously, for today’s establishment critics, alongside his political conservatism and anti-Semitism. For Brody, the problem of Degas’ legacy “isn’t a matter of anti-Semitism or bigotry per se, but of a bilious repudiation of the world as it runs, or, in a word, modernity.” Echoing Jewish responses to Richard Wagner, critics have, in recent decades, confronted the “problem” of Degas’ legacy by character assassination — recent articles about the artist abound with epithets like “cruel,” “misanthropic,” “misogynist,” and “embittered man as well as a bigot.” Criticism inevitably centers on his adherence to a “virulent belief system” which, it is argued, is unredeemed by the sublimity of his art.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here and here.


[i] Gabriel Astruc, La pavillon des fantomes: souvenirs (Paris, D. Grasset, 1929), 98.

[ii] Anthea Callen quoted in: Washton-Long, Baigel & Heyd (Eds.) Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Anti-Semitism, Assimilation, Affirmation, (Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 166.

[iii] Roberta Crisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 31.

[iv] Marilyn R. Brown, Degas and the Business of Art (University Park: Penn State Press, 1994), 130.

[v] Carol M. Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Getty Research Institute, 2003), 282.

[vi] Linda Nochlin in: Maurice Berger (Ed.) Modern Art And Society: An Anthology Of Social And Multicultural Readings (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 30.

[vii] Linda Nochlin, “Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A portrait of the artist as anti-Semite,” Tablet, January 4, 2019. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/degas-and-the-dreyfus-affair

[viii] Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 35.

[ix] Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society (Taylor & Francis, 2018),

[x] Norman Kleeblatt, “The Dreyfus Affair: Art Truth and Justice,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 5: New Research, New Views (United Kingdom: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008) 425.

[xi] Roy McMullen, Degas: his life, times, and work (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), 444.

[xii] Roberta Chrisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) (United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 12.

[xiii] Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 39.

[xiv] Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Anti-Semitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (United Kingdom: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1982), 170.

[xv] Chrisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas, 297.

[xvi] Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 25.

[xvii] Kristin Capps, “Why Absolutely Everyone Hates Renoir,” The Atlantic, October 15, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/why-everyone-hates-renoir/410335/

[xviii] Manet, Julie, Growing up with the Impressionists: the diary of Julie Manet (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987), 129.

[xix] Ibid., 124.

[xx] Menachem Wecker, “Was Renoir Anti-Semitic?,” National Review, November 18, 2017, https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/11/renoir-and-friends-exhibit-phillips-collection-was-renoir-anti-semitic/

[xxi] Elizabeth Melanson, “The Influence of Jewish Patrons on Renoir’s Stylistic Transformation in the Mid-1880s,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 12(2), 2013.

https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn13/melanson-on-renoir-and-the-influence-of-jewish-patrons

[xxii] Mia Laufer, Jewish Taste: Modern Art Collecting, Identity, and Antisemitism in Paris, 1870-1914 (St Louis: Washington University Open Scholarship Institutional Repository, 2019), Abstract. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1814/

[xxiii] Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (New York, HarperCollins, 1994), 303.

15 Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 155-6.

TANSTAAFL and Rational Discussion of Jews

The purpose of this essay is to discuss one of the last decade’s most intelligent Internet activists dealing squarely with the JQ — and in my view he falls completely on the side of men crafting old-school rational discussion. For me, he is a rational counter-Semite par excellence.

He goes by the moniker “Tanstaafl,” which may, in this case, be an acronym for “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Here Tanstaafl claims that he liked the Heinlein novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is where he first encountered the term. In any case, this is the moniker he uses.

Before describing him and his work more thoroughly, I have to offer a heartfelt apology for completing most of this essay four years ago, then inexplicably putting it aside, despite never forgetting it. Possibly this is because much of the steam in Tanstaafl’s own activism had fizzled out by then, but I still don’t accept that as an excuse for my own failure. I still strongly stand by his integrity, his arguments, and his efforts to blend rational discussion of the JQ with Internet forums. It is to be much admired.

Now here is his own description of what he does:

Tanstaafl began Age of Treason in September 2005, writing first at age-of-treason.blogspot.com. Age of Treason Radio is an extension of this work into audio, which began as part of the White network in June 2012. Since May 2014, both have been brought together here at age-of-treason.com. Email: tanstaafl at age-of-treason dot com.

I likely first heard Tanstaafl when he appeared on the broadcast  “An Interview with Robert Stark” (Jan. 20, 2012). A few years later, I heard him on one of the more exciting Internet outlets, Red Ice Radio. I believe this must be the interview: Race, Biology & Modus Operandi of Jewish Extremists (Oct. 14, 2015). Host Henrik Palmgren provided us with this introduction:

Tanstaafl is a pseudonymous racialist blogger and podcaster at Age-of-Treason.com. He covers a general interest of science, history, psychology, and language, with a specific focus on Jewish influence.

Tanstaafl first describes his personal evolution of unraveling the mainstream, politically correct discourse that has propagandized the origin of Europeans and reduced Whiteness to a nonexistent social construct. We look into how the fundamental European understanding of the science of human origins has been politicized and weaponized during the 20th century. Tanstaafl explains how the past science of race, which was based in rationalism and objectivity, has been psychopathologized, demonized and derailed.

We discuss the Jewish saga of expulsion from societies across Europe since antiquity, and we evaluate the claim of oppression. Tanstaafl illustrates how Jews use mental word games to psychologically attack and intimidate any intelligent person who dares to question the Jewish parasitism that has crept into all facets of the government, corporate media and academia. Then we focus on the 40,000 years of genetically homogeneous European civilization that has been marginalized by a politically correct shift from physical to cultural anthropology, resulting in the insertion of racial animosity and huge handicaps for scientists who wish to connect the past with the present.

In the members’ segment (try this link), we explore more on the different origins of humans and understanding how the science of racial differences has been politicized. We consider where the manufactured problems of multiculturalism have created blinding ethnocentrism within Europe and opened the door for a dehumanizing transformation of the White European collective. We look at what it will take for Europeans to reach a critical mass of racial awareness and take actions to combat monsters like Barbara Spectre, who unapologetically advocates the destruction of ethnic European societies.

Then Tanstaafl specifies how Hollywood blockbuster movies are infused with psychological warfare designed to divide nations and move homogeneous cultures away from a kinship or biologically related mindset. Later, we examine why Scandinavia, and Sweden in particular, keeps getting pushed to accept more and more refugees, and how the beautiful, blonde-haired, blue-eyed sub-race of Nordics seems to be specifically targeted for replacement. We conclude with some thoughts on Ann Coulter’s calling out of official Jew numbers, and how top cuck Donald Trump is shaping up to be just another pawn in the globalist war game.

Personally, I found Tanstaafl to be one of the premier voices in today’s White Nationalist movement, though I may be biased because I share the “rational counter-Semite” approach. He is intellectually well grounded and provides a myriad of insights made in clear, compelling arguments. He has read and understood his Kevin MacDonald and expands on these themes to take us into new territory. Further, he has an excellent voice for podcasts, so listening is a highly positive experience.

One may approach Tanstaafl’s body of work as a post-textbook form of taking a university class. As a rational counter-Semite, Tanstaafl is methodical in addressing his subjects and arranges them in a highly accessible way. Let’s, then, take a look at Tan’s vast library of podcasts to get an idea of what he’s done. These links give you access to a brilliant array of podcasts.

A small sampling of his oeuvre includes the following topics:

  • Who’s White? (four parts)
  • Race and Genetics (five parts)
  • Jews and Organ Transplants (three parts)
  • Jewish Crypsis (fifteen parts)
  • Race and Jews (seven parts)

As I go back and revisit these links, I see that many of the podcasts come with associated text, but over the last decade, I have been familiar with Tans overwhelmingly through his podcasts, so I’ll try to highlight those.

If memory serves, the first time I heard Tan talk, he made an admission similar to this one:

My wife’s father was an ashkenazi jew. He died when she was young but was by all accounts a loving, intelligent, and productive man who was not involved in stereotypically jewish politics or activism. My wife was not raised as a jew, though she is of course genetically 1/2 ashkenazi, and thus our children are, on average, genetically 1/4 ashkenazi.

I distinctly remember that I was cross-country skiing when I heard this admission and stopped to rewind the podcast a bit to hear if he’d really said what I thought he said. He had. While I didn’t think then (or now) that it was a big deal, it still caught me off guard given his counter-Semitic stridency. I guess life is just messy.

Because I skied so much — and solo cross-country skiing is a sublime way to benefit from podcasts, as soft new snow is utterly silent — I listened to many different podcasts about Jews (or their extended phenotype such as the U.S. government, Wall Street, Hollywood, etc.), and a fair share of those podcasts were from Tan. For example, for a while he either co-hosted a program with Carolyn Yeager or regularly appeared on her show. Personally, I enjoyed their conversations but recall that somehow there was a falling out. Still, that didn’t affect me because I could still find new material from Tan, and three representative topics stood out because I had not understood them well until Tan unpacked them

The first is the assertion that “Jews Are Not White.” While it seems obvious now, at the time I had not realized how important it was to divide Jews and White Europeans so starkly. To be sure, I understood that Jews absolutely considered themselves in opposition to White European Christians and our diaspora, but we Whites ourselves are far less attuned to this reality. Until relatively recently in America, there has been little discussion from the Gentile side that Jews are not White. And because they are cautious not to blow their cover, Jews typically are not publicly explicit that they are not White but they sure do talk incessantly about their oppositional nature vis-à-vis White Christians. Non-stop. My recent Christmas review of Santa Inc. illustrates this in spades.

To see, hear or just imbibe this, be open to Jewish discussions on Jewish identity. Jews have written reams on this topic, as I can attest: I once got roped into spending a year reading and writing about Jewish identity, a wild goose chase if ever there was one, but ultimately it was a priceless experience. To give you a sense of their perception of being “the Other,” all I need do is amble over to my bookshelves and review the titles:

  • People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, edited by Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Sally Fisher Fishkin
  • Members of the Tribe: On the Road in Jewish America by Ze’ev Chafets
  • In Search of American Jewish Culture and American Space, Jewish Time: Essays in Modern Culture and Politics by Stephen J. Whitfield (the latter book is a gem, I can promise you)
  • Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot by Michael Rogin
  • How Jews Became White Folks by Karen Brodkin
  • Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, which led me to . . .
  • Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz
  • Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left, edited by Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro
  • Jews and the Left by Arthur Liebman
  • Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and The New Left by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter
  • Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties by Stuart Svonkin

As far back as 2012, Tanstaafl exposed us to the Jewish critique that “the neutral citizen of liberal theory was in fact the bearer of an identity coded white, male, bourgeois, able-bodied, and heterosexual. … This implicit ontology in part explained the persistent historical failure of liberal democracies to achieve anything more than token inclusion in power structures for members of marginalized groups.” In his conclusion, he makes the important remark that Jews play a leading role in attacking White identity:

The take-away for Whites: “Identity politics,” as such, is a jewish, cultural-marxist, anti-White construct. It is wrapped in dishonest universalist-sounding rhetoric, but is in fact defined and deployed solely in opposition to Whites. The essence of its notion of identity is victimization – with Whites portrayed, in a variety of ways, as oppressors, and non-Whites portrayed as oppressed.

(I would add that the ur-narrative of Whites as oppressors is that of the Holocaust, a narrative that continues to be under strain in our day, as Thomas Dalton has shown repeatedly on TOO and elsewhere — here and here, for example).

Soon, however, Tanstaafl expanded his inquiry into White, Jewish and other identities, providing detailed analyses into genetics, organ transplants, crypsis, Francis Yockey’s views on Liberalism, etc. There’s a treasure trove of easily accessible files.

In the first of four podcasts on “Race and Genetics,” for example, he importantly noted that this attempt to erase the concept of race can be laid at the feet of Jewish activists, going all the way back to WWII. Here he argued that “in the 1940s the Boasian/jewish/commie anthropologists behind The Races of Mankind said race and race mixing don’t matter, and ‘science’ proved it? They were lying. Organ transplant incompatibility, most obvious in the case of bone marrow, is an undeniable, biological down-side of race mixing.”

“They were lying.” This is one of the most fundamental realities Whites must learn: Jews use deception endlessly and in highly sophisticated and successful ways. That’s why today we have the absurd beliefs that “Race is a social construct” and “Gender is a social construct, too.”

The Second Area: Blame

In this March 2020 blog Tanstaafl asks us, “How can jews blame goyim for what jews do?” That’s a very fair question, and Tan has devoted considered attention to it. For instance, in “Pathology and Pathogen” (Feb 2015) he writes that Jews “also tend to project their negative thinking onto the Other. Whites, in contrast, are relatively individualist and universalist, with a higher regard for objectivity. In the White mind rationalism trumps emotionalism. Whites tend to project our positive thinking onto the Other.”

Tan sees this as partially genetic, partially cultural, where Jews “inculcate their own [members] with an unapologetic preference for their own kind and distaste for the Other. Jews inculcate most Whites too, but with exactly the opposite moral standards.” Herein lies the problem, as “This kind of lopsidedness, or asymmetry, is characteristic of the entire history and nature of the conflict between Whites and jews. Jews have continuously aggressed against Whites. Whites, for the most part, have been oblivious of this. As [TOO writer Andrew] Joyce observes, jews unabashedly distort reality and invert the conflict, placing 100% of the blame for it on Whites.”

After reflecting on this and looking for further evidence for years, I have concluded Tan is right. To a great degree, Jews like Howard Zinn have transferred Jewish sins onto an oblivious White patsy, and reigning ideological trends like Critical Race Theory to a shocking degree blame Whites for what Jews themselves have so often done. (The complicated history of slavery in America comes to mind. See also Tan’s view that the “British” Empire was in fact Jewish, with its attacks on China, India, and, I would add, Boer South Africa. (Andrew Joyce, for example, wrote that, “Because of the obvious shared ethnic heritage of the mine owners and the diplomats who trod the path to war, ‘the view that the war was a Jewish war was commonplace among its opponents.’”) In fact, Whites have often tried to ameliorate the pains Jews have inflicted on others, so being held responsible is adding insult to White injury. Of course one of the ways Jews pull off this switcheroo is by using crypsis to convince others that they are “White.”

A small example of Tan’s unique ability to add depth and nuance to the JQ comes in his correcting the translation of a fairly well-known Jewish phrase, in this case “shanda fur die goyim.” This phrase, he writes, “is misunderstood as embarrassment. It is a reflection of jewish sensitivity to collective exposure/responsibility/vulnerability. It is an alarm, a call for the making of excuses and transferring of blame elsewhere.” One of the most common tactics is for Jews to point the finger at “Gentile anti-Semitism” rather than acknowledge actual Jewish behavior. Once one learns to recognize this ploy, along with projecting Jewish guilt onto others more generally, it is surprising to discover how routinely it is done. But how do we teach the right Gentiles to truly learn how to see this? I confess I’m at a loss.

(While I’m praising Tan for his parsing of Yiddish phrases, I’ll also note his explanation of how they translate “their cabalist term ‘tikkun olam’ as ‘social justice’. It means: ‘help us dismantle the [non-jew] system and build a better world [for jews].’” Tanstaafl’s podcasts and writing are full of these insights.)

The Third Area: “White Pathology”

The third important area Tan has expanded upon is the biological concept that Jews act as parasites on their host cultures, a familiar theme in European thought but less well known in The New World. Typical is this 2015 interview with John Friend. About an hour in, they talked about Jews as parasites, but what is fascinating is how Tan segues to the related area of “pathogen,” which leads to the common claim that Whites somehow suffer from “pathological altruism.”

Acknowledging that this is a claim made by Kevin MacDonald — and we ourselves can deduce that it’s related to the “critique” in Culture of Critique and subsequent writings — Tan distills it to its essence: “Some say the West is committing suicide due to some white pathology. But if there’s a pathology, then there’s a pathogen. My conclusion is that the pathogen is Jews.” [1]

I won’t get further into these topics because Tan’s podcasts deserve to tell these important stories, so I’ll move on to his July 2018 blog defending Greg Cochran’s views on Jewish attacks as another way Tan has unpacked what is going on under the surface. The link begins with this insightful cartoon:

Cochran, you may remember, is co-author of the 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, whose final chapter “sets out to explain why Ashkenazi Jews have a mean IQ so much higher than that of the population in general, as well as a higher rate of some genetic disorders such as Tay-Sachs disease.” This argument joins those of Richard Lynn, Nicholas Wade and others who have tried to employ the results of modern science to break the taboo on discussing the existence of race, racial differences, and of course the claim of higher Jewish intelligence. No doubt most readers already know about the last category because it is so central to Kevin MacDonald’s thesis about Jews and their group evolutionary strategy. Not surprisingly, the Wiki article on Cochran blames our editor for Cochran’s views, citing old friends in Alabama: “According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, these claims were based on the work of discredited psychologist and antisemitic conspiracy theorist Kevin MacDonald.”

In the Cochran piece, Tanstaafl follows Cochran’s exploration of the existence and origins of the Aryan people, though he offers that “[William] Pierce’s Who We Are is more detailed, and a better investment in time. Cochran adds the recent genetic corroboration of the story. He knows well that jews are genetically and mentally distinct from the Europeans whose pre-historic roots he describes.” Becoming even more politically incorrect, Tan further argues that:

Yes, the national socialists were mostly correct about race and the pre-history of Europeans. They are demonized today exactly because they were also right about the jews. They correctly saw the jews not merely as non-Aryan but as an existential threat. The jews, especially the more sciency jews, understand this perfectly well. That’s why they’re in crisis mode. They understand these genetic revelations are damning, and potentially explosive, exposing the anti-”racist”/anti-”nazi” narrative jews have perpetrated for the better part of the past century as a fraud, as an excuse for their own racial animus and ongoing war on Whites. The consensus among jews, including alt-jews, is that this fraud has been good for the jews. In their view it is the potential collapse of this fraud, or worse, potential reprisals for it, which might be bad for the jews, and therefore must now be averted at all costs. They agree the goyim must never ever be permitted to freely discuss race or the harm caused by all this jewing, then or now, or the proverbial jig is up, all over again.

In short, Tan concludes, Jewish deception is controlling the narrative on both race and Aryan history. “Cochran calls out the lying, but won’t explicitly identify it as jewing.” I agree that Cochran knows he’s talking about Jews and lying since he consistently calls individual Jews such as Lewontin, Gould, Montagu, et al. liars when it comes to these topics. And who can blame him for not taking this to its logical conclusion? Most people hate to be destroyed.

As mentioned, Tan mostly rounded out his “Age-of-Treason” series in the fall of 2015 but has continued with interviews, a blog and a collection of related audio files from others. It’s vast and highly informative. The research and choices are top notch, so those new to the JQ could benefit (and save time), partially informed individuals could as well, and even highly seasoned researchers could learn much, especially when non-reading moments are available, such as when driving, doing chores, etc. I’m not really aware of a collection as extensive, accessible, or timely as “Age of Treason.” We’re fortunate it is still available online.

Conclusion

By this point, most readers have likely noticed a few writing anomalies in Tan’s prose, beginning with his refusal to capitalize the group he’s focusing on, Jews. Obviously, this is impossible to detect in his podcasts, and up through about 2016 he was generally dispassionate in his examination of the JQ. After five or so years of intense focus on this abiding topic, however, he began to appear more exasperated, so in his shorter blogs that came after this period, he has become more irritable.

In other cases, I might find this immature, but having gone through similar experiences of peeling back more and more layers of the onion known as the JQ and finding how objectionable much Jewish behavior toward goyim truly is, I’ve responded at times in the same way Tan has: by using a lower-case spelling. Further, I feel justified because I do it only in private writing and consider it to be a minuscule expression of the rage I sometimes feel at the harm done to me and other Whites. I know we are the oppressed and powerless ones in this fight, so it’s the least I can do to vent that righteous anger.

Tanstaafl employs other kinds of language to harmlessly express his own sense of impotent outrage, such as calling highly emotional Jewish descriptions of their situation “screeching” and their talmudic twisting of the narrative to “jewsplain.” On the whole, he now thinks of public Jewish discourse as “jewspeak” and nearly at the end of his rope in observing a certain instance of such discourse, he labeled it as “peak jewing.” Last October he addressed actor and director Rob Reiner’s attack on Trump and White Republicans as “The Screeching Will Continue Until Democracy is Saved” and observed that “Every day the jewsmedia narrative gets insaner in its attempt to either distract from or jewsplain the totally jewed regime’s latest violation of its own previous political, medical, economic, financial, social, and legal norms.” In this podcast, he even coined the word “chutzpathically,” as in “jews chutzpathically assert” this or that. Not really a bad way to vent your frustration, all things considered.

My impression now is that Tanstaafl has greatly retreated from his efforts at rational counter-Semitic education, so this essay may not be as timely as hoped for. Still, his body of work is as valuable as ever, so I’ve shared what I’ve learned from it. Further, I sympathize with him if a sense of burn-out has crept in. Counter-Semitic activism is noble but hard work.

Here is one last point that I’m well advised to bring up: Tanstaafl has explicitly named the Jew and given immense amounts of his time and energy to making rational, cogent, compelling arguments, still readily available in podcast form to the post-reading generation. In contrast, I say don’t trust those who don’t name the Jew. The late Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Alex Jones, Revolver News and so on either do not defend Whites explicitly, or they do so only obliquely and in round-about ways. Worse — much worse — they refuse to talk openly about the Jewish Problem. God bless Tanstaafl for being far more courageous.

In a better world, Tanstaafl would now be a tenured professor of rational counter-Semitism at a top university, cooly teaching undergraduate and graduate students alike the crucial story of Jews among the Nations. But we don’t live in a good world, and much of the reason for that is because of Jewish behavior that is so harmful to the rest of us. I sure don’t see Jews unilaterally changing that behavior, so we need to educate ourselves as best we can and gird for the exceedingly hard times to come. There is much work to be done. Thanks to the selfless devotion to duty Tanstaafl has exhibited, we still have access to superb materials for understanding our bleak situation. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the man.

NOTES

[1]Tanstaafl expands on his arguments in Pathology and Pathogen:

Jews clearly see that there is a conflict of interests, first and foremost with Whites. Whites are now so deracinated and enervated that they are afraid to see any conflict whatsoever, because that would make them “racists”. Jews hate Whites. Whites worship jews. Whatever anyone thinks caused this situation, this lopsided Stockholm Syndrome relationship with jews, it’s clear that to the extent most Whites even see it as a problem, they blame jews for approximately none of it. Instead, the popular explanation is the jewish explanation: Whites are to blame for all of it….

Among the benefits of calling a parasite a parasite is parasitology – an existing body of understanding based on true science, which offers practical insights and potential solutions no amount of “white pathology” navel-gazing ever will. Another benefit: Rather than misdirecting White resentment toward ourselves, it is directed at the cause, where it belongs – the detestable, whiny, self-obsessed, manipulative, exploitative jews. Without jews Whites would still have problems – but these “anti-semitism”/”white pathology” bugbears wouldn’t be among them.

A Response to Francis M. Naumann

My attention was recently drawn to a critical review of two of the essays that appear in my book Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism (which, probably not coincidentally, was recently banned by Amazon). This review was penned by art writer and dealer Francis M. Naumann in the online and print journal The Brooklyn Rail. This website and publication claim to “provide an independent forum for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and far beyond.” The ideological tenor of The Brooklyn Rail is captured in the banner across the top of the website’s homepage which declares “Black Lives Matter. We stand in solidarity with those affected by generations of structural violence.” Readers will be shocked to learn that individuals with common Jewish names feature very prominently among the contributors to this journal.

Naumann, who is not Jewish, offers a review replete with ad hominem and straw man arguments, and nit-picking, inconsequential argumentation. Unable to debunk the central thesis of either essay, he resorts to ascribing malign motives and psychological imbalances to myself and Professor MacDonald. In his review, Naumann deploys the standard rhetorical devices arrayed against those critical of Jewish influence, or who just stand up for White interests: the tendentious terms “white supremacist” and “conspiracy” featuring prominently. He claims Kevin MacDonald is “accurately described” in his Wikipedia entry as “an American anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist” and “white supremacist.” Naumann, who doubtless has never actually read any of MacDonald’s academic work, claims this description is validated by MacDonald’s simple statement of fact in his foreword to Battle Lines that: “We simply can’t avoid discussing the Jews. Honest discussions of Jewish influence are absolutely necessary if White people are going to have a future.”

Naumann’s apparent a priori assumption is that Jewish influence on Western societies and culture is necessarily benevolent, and that, consequently, any criticism of this influence is inherently invalid and reflects negatively on the psychological health of the critic (hence the title of his review, “Pure Meshuggah: Anti-Semitism Invades Art History” with “Meshuggah” being the Yiddish word for crazy). This kind of illogic and intellectual dishonesty spills over into his discussion of my work.

Francis M. Naumann

In my essay entitled “Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada,” I argue that the Jewish origins and identities of prominent figures in the Dada movement (c. 1916–1924), and particularly of its founder, Tristan Tzara (born Samuel Rosenstock), were critical in shaping its intellectual tenor as a movement arrayed against every cultural tradition of the European past, including rationality itself. I describe Dada’s destructive influence in feeding into the conceptual art that has blighted Western art since the 1960s. I also note the conceptual parallels between Dada and the deconstruction of the Jewish poststructuralist intellectual Jacques Derrida. Both attempted to foster subjective individualism to disconnect Europeans from their familial, religious and ethnic bonds—reducing the salience of Jews as an outgroup and, consequently, the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Western societies.

Offering no real counter-arguments (or critical analysis of my sources), Naumann summarily dismisses this as a “conspiracy theory,” claiming that “Sanderson casts aside logic and reasoning in order to convince us that what he is saying is true.” While a prominent Israeli art historian admitted my essay “is well written and excellently researched” and from an “academic research viewpoint it is without reproach,” Naumann eschews any pretensions to objective analysis and resorts to amateur psychoanalysis. He proposes that my thesis reflects “Sanderson’s fear of the intellectual achievement of these Jewish writers; for like Hitler before him, the exceptional intelligence and success of so many Jews in all professions clearly terrifies him and threatens to undermine his painfully flawed illusion of white supremacy.” Naumann here unintentionally confesses to an ideologically-problematic (for him) strain of race realism: accepting that certain ethnic groups possess “exceptional intelligence” and thus achieve more than others. He is, however, unable to cite a single sentence from Battle Lines that demonstrates my alleged belief in “white supremacy.”

Appalled that anyone would draw negative conclusions about the influence of Dada, which he calls “a playful movement,” or of the Jews who dominated the movement, Naumann insists that “The revolutionary spirit that fueled Dada and abstract art has continued to affect the course of contemporary art, to the good fortune of all reasonable and sentient people.” In addition to being neither reasonable nor sentient, this author is also, according to Naumann, a contaminant. He sanctimoniously claims to never have “imagined that racist politics and white supremacist viewpoints could contaminate my profession.” His self-righteous indignation at the very existence of my work is compounded, moreover, by the fact that Battle Lines had “been awarded five stars from Amazon’s customer reviews.” Naumann sees my work as a “threat to civility and justice” that, left unchallenged, will “grow and fester like an unattended wound. And if we have learned anything from history, that is too dangerous a course of action to follow.”

While leaving the actual thesis of my Dada essay unchallenged, Naumann constructs a straw man from a passing reference I make to Lenin. I note that “living across the street from the Cabaret Voltaire [a Dadaist venue] in Zurich [in 1916] were Lenin, Karl Radek and Gregory Zinoviev who were preparing for the Bolshevik Revolution.” Naumann cavils at the supposed geographical imprecision of this statement (despite its ubiquity in the literature), and falsely claims my objective here is “to implicate Dadaists as Communists whose influence was felt in Russia, and later in Western Europe and America.” I never claim Dadaists were important political actors in the interwar period, but I do stress their destructive artistic and intellectual legacy. That Tzara and the other leading Dadaists were communists or radical leftists is, however, incontrovertible, and is illustrated by their own actions and statements (which are cited at length in my essay). Even the Wikipedia entry for “Dada” states plainly that the Dadaists “maintained political affinities with radical left-wing and far-left politics.”

Tzara joined the French Communist Party and interpreted both Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public.[1] The leading Dadaists in Germany were self-declared communists: Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann affirmed that Dada “is German Bolshevism”[2] and that “Dadaism demands: the international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis of radical Communism.”[3] Robert Short notes that, among the German Dadaists, were those for whom: “Dada was a political weapon and those for whom communism was a Dadaistical weapon.”[4]

Dada leader Tristan Tzara

Naumann insists it is “now well known” in the literature on Dada that “Lenin was a frequent visitor to the Cabaret Voltaire, where he went to see if what was going on there could contribute to his political aspirations.” Actually, this notion is widely disputed in the literature. Huelsenbeck stated that Lenin once visited the Café Voltaire, and Marcel Janko later made a similar claim. The veracity of these accounts is, however, strongly doubted. Jones, for example, questions “the wistful reminiscing on Richard Huelsenbeck’s part to suggest that Lenin actually visited the Cabaret Voltaire; similarly, Marcel Janko’s distant and apocryphal retrospection of the cabaret room, thick with smoke, ‘where some sudden apparition would loom up every now and then, like the impressive Mongol features of Lenin.’”[5] Rappaport is similarly unconvinced, wondering if “the subversive nature of Dada as performance” was enough to arouse “Lenin’s curiosity enough to prompt him to cross the road and take a look.”[6] The official website of the city of Zurich is similarly skeptical, noting: “Whether Lenin visited the Cabaret Voltaire, the birthplace of Dadaism, is still unknown but has fueled speculation as to whether Lenin was a secret Dadaist.”

Naumann falsely alleges that I claim that Lenin influenced Dada and abstract art, and, correcting a point I don’t make, declares: “But in reality, Lenin had no effect whatsoever on Dada or abstract art. In fact, he and the other Bolsheviks were against abstract art, since its emphasis on individualism was diametrically opposed to Communist ideals.” The first statement is correct, but things are more complicated than Naumann’s second point would suggest. The new Soviet state led by Lenin that emerged after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 initially adopted a policy in favor of radical experimentation. As Christine Lindey notes:

Initially, most avant-garde artists welcomed the revolution because Lenin’s idea of a political avant-garde as an agent for social change legitimised their own calls for radical action to combat conservative attitudes to art and society. For Marxists like [the Russian painter Vladimir] Tatlin, here was an opportunity to make real and meaningful change. … Others, like Kandinsky, were not sympathetic to Bolshevik politics, but welcomed the artistic freedom which it brought, while aesthetically or/and politically conservative artists feared a loss of private patronage and critical status. Contrary to western propaganda, no artist was sent to the salt mines: Lenin and Lunacharsky, (Commissar of Enlightenment 1917–1929) pursued a pluralist arts policy.

With Stalin’s rise in power the avant-garde artists who flourished under Lenin were silenced. All avant-garde movements were forced out of the Soviet Union (or forced underground) until Stalin’s death in 1953. Locke observes that “Stalin squashed the entire evolution of avant-garde ingenuity in Russia and replaced it with his own brand of art, Soviet Realism.”

Naumann quibbles at the supposed chronological imprecision of my assertion that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf as Dada peaked in Paris. Hitler’s comments on Dada were written (or at least dictated to Rudolf Hess) in 1923 and Paris Dada was officially ended in 1924. Naumann insists that “Hitler knew virtually nothing about Dada, which he lumped together with Cubism and called an ‘artistic aberration.’” I make no assessment of Hitler’s knowledge of the movement in the essay besides quoting his brief statements about it in Mein Kampf. Naumann does make a single valid (though inconsequential) criticism: the American art collector Walter Arensberg is incorrectly identified as Jewish. This is something I will amend in future editions of Battle Lines.

In my essay I draw parallels between the ideas underpinning Dada and those of poststructuralist Jewish intellectual and founder of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida. Naumann takes issue with my description of Derrida as a “crypto-Jew intensely preoccupied with his own Jewish identity and the evils of European anti-Semitism.” He claims “By crypto-Jew, he implies that Derrida hid his Jewish identity.” Some basic research by Naumann would have revealed that my epithet is correct, and while Derrida posed as a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist, he descended from a long line of crypto-Jews, and explicitly identified himself as such: “I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.”[7]

Derrida was born into a Sephardic Jewish family that immigrated to Algeria from Spain in the nineteenth century. His family were crypto-Jews who retained their Jewish identity for 400 years in Spain during the period of the Inquisition. Derrida changed his first name to the French Christian sounding ‘Jacques’ in order better blend into the French scene. Furthermore, he took his crypto-Judaism to the grave:

When Derrida was buried, his elder brother, René, wore a tallit at the suburban French cemetery and recited the Kaddish to himself inwardly, since Jacques had asked for no public prayers. This discreet, highly personal, yet emotionally and spiritually meaningful approach to recognizing Derrida’s Judaism seems emblematic of this complex, imperfect, yet valuably nuanced thinker.

Derrida was a crypto-Jew until the end, even instructing his family to participate in the charade. Kevin MacDonald notes the obvious reason: “Intellectually one wonders how one could be a postmodernist and a committed Jew at the same time. Intellectual consistency would seem to require that all personal identifications be subjected to the same deconstructing logic, unless, of course, personal identity itself involves deep ambiguities, deception, and self-deception.”[8]

In his notebooks, Derrida underscores the centrality of Jewish issues in his writing: “Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.” His experience of anti-Semitism during World War II in Algeria was traumatic and resulted in a deep consciousness of his own Jewishness. He was expelled from school at age 13 under the Vichy government because of official caps on the number of Jewish students, describing himself as a “little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it, to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason, neither his parents nor his friends.”[9] Later, in France, his “suffering subsided. I naively thought that anti-Semitism had disappeared. … But during adolescence, it was the tragedy, it was present in everything else.” These experiences led Derrida to develop “an exhausting aptitude to detect signs of racism, in its most discreet configurations or its noisiest disavowals.”[10] Caputo notes how Jewish ethnic activism underpins Derrida’s deconstruction:

The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue. … The idea is to disarm the bombs… of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants, … all of whom… are wholly other. Contrary to the claims of Derrida’s more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida’s democracy is a radically pluralistic polity that resists the terror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual unity, of the natural, native bonds of the nation (natus, natio), which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus (Geschlecht). He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativist closure, of a community without identity, of a non-identical community that cannot say I or we, for, after all, the very idea of a community is to fortify (munis, muneris) ourselves in common against the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, of the spirit of the “we” of “Christian Europe,” or of a “Christian politics,” lethal compounds that spell death of Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other. The heaving and sighing of this Christian European spirit is a lethal air for Jews and Arabs, for all les juifs [i.e., Jews as prototypical others], even if they go back to father Abraham, a way of gassing them according to both the letter and the spirit.[11]

Derrida’s sociological preoccupations (and suggested solutions) replicated those of Tristan Tzara. Sandqvist links Tzara’s profound revolt against European social constraints directly to his Jewish identity, and his anger at the persistence of anti-Semitism. For Sandqvist, the treatment of Jews in Romania fueled the Dada leader’s revolt against Western civilization. Bodenheimer notes that:

As a Jew, Tzara had many reasons to call into question the so-called disastrous truths and rationalizations of European thinking, one result of which was the First World War — with the discrimination of Jews for centuries being another. … He came from a background in which jingoistic and anti-Semitic arguments had long reproached Jews for using impure, falsified language, from early examples in the sixteenth century … all the way to the arguments of the Romanian intellectuals in Tzara’s time, who attacked Jews as “foreigners” importing “diseased ideas” into Romanian literature and culture.

[Tzara consequently] seeks to unmask language itself as a construction that draws its value, and sometimes its claim to superiority, from an equally constructed concept of identities and values. In themselves, all languages are equal, but equal in their differences. This claim to the right of equality while upholding difference is the basic Jewish claim to a secular society. But the European peoples, be it first for religious or later for nationalist reasons, have never managed to actually understand this right, let alone grant it to minority societies.

Both the Dadaists and Derrida attacked the notion that the world really is as our concepts describe it (i.e., philosophical realism), and used nominalism (the view that concepts are nothing more than human artifacts that have no relation to the real world) to deconstruct and subvert Western realism. Both thought the idea of objective truth was dangerous because of the possibility that truth could be deployed against the “other.” For the Dadaists, the principles of Western rationality “were held to be highly problematic, because of its instrumental connections to social repressions and domination.”[12] The Jewish Dadaist Hans Richter declared that the abstract language of the Dadaists would be “beyond all national language frontiers,” and saw in Dadaist abstraction a new kind of communication “free from all kinds of nationalistic alliances.”[13] Like the Dadaists, Derrida decided, if you dislike the prevailing power, then strive to ruin its concepts. Dada used nonsense and absurdity to achieve this goal, while Derrida developed and deployed his methodology of deconstruction.

Jacques Derrida

When the Frankfurt School established itself in the United States, it made a conscious effort to give its Jewish intellectual activism a “scientific” veneer by gathering “empirical data” (such as that which formed the basis for The Authoritarian Personality) in order to challenge existing ideas seen as inimical to Jewish interests (such as Darwinian anthropology). Derrida and the poststructuralists instead sought (like the Jews within Dada) to discredit threatening ideas by undermining the notion of objective truth that underpinned all Western knowledge production.

Despite the difference of critical approach, a common Jewish ethno-political thread runs through Tzara’s Dada, Derrida’s deconstruction, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Each attempted to foster subjective individualism to disconnect the masses from their familial, religious and ethnic bonds in order to lessen the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Western societies. Like the other movements chronicled by Kevin MacDonald in Culture of Critique, these movements were preoccupied with undermining the evolutionarily adaptive precepts and practices that had historically dominated Western societies (e.g., social homogeneity via immigration control, the nuclear family based on ties of love and affection, ethnocentrism, the drawing of clear ingroup and outgroup distinctions, sexual restraint), with the implicit goal being to render White Europeans less effective competitors to Jews for access to resources and reproductive success and less able to develop a cohesive, ethnically homogeneous movement in opposition to Judaism.

I am far from alone in noting the conceptual parallels between Dada and Derrida’s deconstruction. Wicks observes how strongly Dada resonates “with the definitively poststructuralist conception of deconstruction advanced by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s.”[14] Pegrum likewise notes the “strong link between Dada and postmodern artistic theory, the most obvious point of contact being with the work of Derrida.”[15] The literary critic Frank Kermode also traces deconstruction back to Dada influences, while Richard Sheppard regards the poststructuralists “as more introverted, less politicized, and less carnivalesque descendants of their Dada daddies.”[16]

Yet, for Naumann, my thesis is just a “conspiracy theory.” But why wouldn’t Jews (as a highly ethnocentric group) use their high levels of intellectual and cultural influence to advance their group interests at the expense of a group they perceive as an immemorial and existential threat?

Switching attention to my essay on Mark Rothko and Abstract Expressionism, a key theme of which is this artist’s political radicalism and Jewish ethnocentrism (and that of his entire social milieu), Naumann asks: “If Jews were such great supporters of Communism in the 1940s—as both Sanderson and MacDonald posit (and to a certain degree they are right)—then why did they not support the efforts of Regionalist painters (Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry) and the Social Realists (Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera)?” I address this point at length in my essay — which makes me wonder if he actually bothered to read it to the end. Jewish artists like Rothko regarded Regionalism as exactly the kind of American painting they most despised: scenic, provincial, anecdotal, and conservative. They associated rural America with nativism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and fascism as well as with anti-intellectualism and provincialism.

Jewish gallery owners like Sam Kootz decried the “nationalist” art of the Regionalists and promoted the internationalist art of a rising generation of expressionist, surrealist and abstract artists. “America’s more important artists are consistently shying away from Regionalism and exploring the virtues of internationalism,” he commented in 1943. “This is the painting equivalent of our newly found political and social internationalism.”[17] Incensed by the awarding of an art prize to John Steuart Curry in 1942, Jewish abstract artist Barnett Newman denounced Regionialism as “isolationism” and as akin to National Socialism, declaring: “Isolationist painting, which they named the American Renaissance, is founded on politics and on an even worse aesthetic. Using the traditional chauvinism, isolationist brand of patriotism, and playing on the natural desire of American artists to have their own art, they succeeded in pushing across a false aesthetic that is inhibiting the production of any true art in this country. … Isolationism, we have learned by now, is Hitlerism.”[18]

The Homestead by John Steuart Curry

The hostility of Jewish artists and intellectuals to Regionalism is no great mystery. A subset of Jews did support the work of the Social Realists, but this changed with the failure of socialism to take hold in North America in the 1940s. As I explain in the essay:

For Jewish writer Alain Rogier, it seems “hardly a coincidence that Jews made up a large percentage of the leading Abstract Expressionists.”[19] It was an art movement where the culture of critique of Jewish artists, frustrated that the post-war American prosperity prevented the coming of international socialism, turned inward and instead “proposed individualistic modes of liberation.” This mirrored the ideological shift that occurred among the New York Intellectuals generally who “gradually evolved away from advocacy of socialist revolution toward a shared commitment to anti-nationalism and cosmopolitanism [i.e., the multicultural project], ‘a broad and inclusive culture’ in which cultural differences were esteemed.”[20] Doss notes how this ideological shift manifested itself among the artists who became the Abstract Expressionists:

As full employment returned, New Deal programs were terminated — including federal support for the arts — the reformist spirit that had flourished in the 1930s dissipated. Corporate liberalism triumphed: together, big government and big business forged a planned economy and engineered a new social contract based on free market expansion. … With New Deal dreams of reform in ruins, and the better “tomorrow” prophesied at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair having seemingly led only to the carnage of World War II, it is not surprising that post-war artists largely abandoned the art styles and political cultures associated with the Great Depression.[21]

The avant-garde artists of the New York School instead embraced an “inherently ambiguous and unresolved, an open-ended modern art … which encouraged liberation through personal, autonomous acts of expression.” The works of the Abstract Expressionists were “revolutionary attempts” to liberate the larger American culture “from the alienating conformity and pathological fears [especially of communism] that permeated the post-war era.”[22] Rothko claimed that “after the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb you couldn’t paint figures without mutilating them.” His friend and fellow artist Adolph Gottlieb, declared that: “Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind … abstraction is not abstraction at all. … It is the realism of our time.”[23]

At the heart of Abstract Expressionism lay a vision of the artist as alienated from mainstream society, a figure morally compelled to create a new type of art which would confront an irrational, absurd world — a mentality completely in accord with that of the alienated Jewish artists and intellectuals at the heart of the movement who viewed the White Christian society around them with hostility. MacDonald notes that the New York Intellectuals “conceived themselves as alienated, marginalized figures — a modern version of traditional Jewish separateness and alienation from gentile culture. …” Norman Podhoretz was asked in the 1950s “whether there was a special typewriter at Partisan Review with the word ‘alienation’ on a single key.”[24]

During the 1950s, Jewish artists and intellectuals chafed against the social controls enforced by political conservatives and religious and cultural traditionalists who limited Jewish influence on the culture, “much to the chagrin of the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals who prided themselves in their alienation from that very culture.” This all ended, together with Abstract Expressionism as an art movement embodying the alienation of the New York Intellectuals, with the triumph of the culture of critique in the 1960s, when Jews and their gentile allies usurped the old WASP establishment, and thus had far less reason to engage in the types of cultural criticism so apparent in the writings of the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals. Hollywood and the rest of the American media were unleashed.

Naumann has no actual response to any of this. However, in assessing the Jewish domination of Abstract Expressionism, he claims that I envision “the whole enterprise as nothing short of a Jewish conspiracy, whereby Jews placed themselves in a position to be viewed by the intellectual establishment of the time as ‘self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture.’” A major theme of my essay on Rothko and Abstract Expressionism is the power of Jewish ethnic networking and nepotism — which is abundantly demonstrated in Mark Rothko’s rise to fame on the New York art scene. Rothko biographer Annie Cohen-Solal emphasizes the role of Jewish ethnic networking in Rothko’s rise from obscurity to artistic celebrity. More broadly, Jewish artists (Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman), critics (Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Thomas B. Hess), curators (Katherine Kuh, Peter Selz, Henry Geldzahler) and art dealers (Sidney Janis, Peggy Guggenheim, Samuel Kootz), were instrumental in the rise of Abstract Expressionism. Such an overwhelming representation from a group that comprised less than two percent of the American population is utterly remarkable and testament to the power of Jewish ethnic networking and nepotism.

Naumann falsely claims I “invent” a Jewish connection to the non-Jewish artist Willem de Kooning when I note that he had to ingratiate himself with the Jewish critics and intellectuals clustered around the leftist journal Partisan Review. It was hardly necessary for me to “invent” a connection between de Kooning and Jews. His wife, Elaine de Kooning, was half-Jewish (born Elaine Fried), and de Kooning shamelessly pimped her out to leading Jewish art critics like Harold Rosenberg and Thomas B. Hess, who, in return, helped further his career.[25] Hess, the editor of Art News, the oldest and most widely-circulated fine arts journal in the world, was hugely influential in promoting Abstract Expressionism. Mentored and promoted by the magazine’s editor in chief, Alfred Frankfurter (also Jewish), Hess was part of the triumvirate of Jews (with Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg) who “were instrumental in championing Abstract Expressionism in the early stages of the movement.” Hess’s Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (1951) was the first book on the movement to be published, and the critic and art historian Barbara E. Rose (also Jewish) described him as running a “propaganda vehicle for launching the New York School internationally.” While Hess’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention his ethnic background, a quick internet search reveals that his mother was buried at the Mount Zion Temple Cemetery in Minnesota.

Naumann claims that in pointing out the prominence of Jews in the art world I give “proof of how important and influential Jews were in shaping the culture of our times. If you were to remove the names of everyone who was Jewish from the roster of twentieth-century artists, writers, critics, collectors, and art dealers, you would find that very little of that history would exist.” Indeed.

He claims to be deeply offended by my custom of placing the word “Holocaust” in quotation marks – which I do to highlight the absurdity (not to say impossibility) of much of the official narrative, and also to protest its use as a tool of psychological warfare against White people. Naumann insists that, rather than Jews engaging in competitive victimhood (as I discuss in a recent article), it is “Sanderson and MacDonald [who] envision themselves as the ultimate victims … since they have found themselves ostracized from mainstream academia.” In all of the writing I have done for The Occidental Observer going back over a decade I have never described or presented myself as a victim.

Naumann concludes his review in the same vein in which he starts it — eschewing rational arguments in favor of baseless speculation about the mental health of yours truly and Professor MacDonald: “It does not take a trained psychiatrist to determine that the biased and racist rants of most white supremacists are the product of an innate psychiatric disorder, one that causes them to hate all people who are not like them.” Naumann’s total reliance on these kind of personal attacks reminds one of how little things have changed since the nineteenth century when Richard Wagner was declared to be suffering from a psychiatric disorder for daring to criticize Jewish influence. No doubt Naumann would lump Wagner in with his “many notable psychotics in history” whose criticisms of Jews he attributes to psychopathology. In the final analysis, none of this name-calling amounts to actual arguments, and only serves to highlight the weakness of his position.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here.


[1] Irina Livezeanu, “From Dada to Gaga: The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism,” Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu & Lucia Dragomir (Eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique (Bucharest: Paralela 45, 2005), 245-6.

[2] Bernard Blisténe, A History of Twentieth Century Art (Paris: Fammarion, 2001), 62.

[3] Dawn Ades, “Dada and Surrealism,” David Britt (Ed.) Modern Art – Impressionism to Post-Modernism, (London, Thames & Hudson, 1974), 222.

[4] Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Laurence King Publishing, 1994), 42.

[5] Daffyd Jones, Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (Liverpool University Press, 2014), 176.

[6] Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (Basic Books; 2012), 256.

[7] Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” In Jacques Derrida, Ed. G. Bennington & Jacques Derrida, Trans. G. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 170.

[8] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library, 2001), 198.

[9] Derrida, “Circumfession,” op. cit., 58)

[10] Jacques Derrida, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, Trans. P. Kamuf et al (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 120–21.

[11] J.D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 231–2.

[12] Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin, (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 154.

[13] Hockensmith, “Artists’ Biographies,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada (Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, 2005), 482.

[14] Robert J. Wicks, Modern French Philosophy: From Existentialism to Postmodernism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 11.

[15] Mark A. Pegrum, Challenging Modernity: Dada between Modern and Postmodern (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 269.

[16] Richard Sheppard, Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1999), 365.

[17] Annie Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, Toward the Light in the Chapel (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 90.

[18] Ibid., 88.

[19] Alain Rogier, “Jewish Artist Mark Rothko: An Outsider in Life and Death,” ReformJudaism.org, April 26, 2016. https://reformjudaism.org/blog/2016/04/26/jewish-artist-mark-rothko-outsider-life-and-death

[20] Ibid., 212.

[21] Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 124.

[22] Ibid., 130-1.

[23] Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, 128.

[24] MacDonald, Culture of Critique, 212.

[25] See: Lee Hall, Elaine and Bill: Portrait of a Marriage (HarperCollins, 1993).

Vampire Cartoons

Andrew Joyce’s recent essay (“On Jews and vampires”) features two notorious anti-Jewish cartoons from the National Socialist periodical “Der Stürmer.”  They were drawn by the talented cartoonist Philipp “Fips” Rupprecht, who produced hundreds of such images between 1925 and 1945.  Recently, a skilled digital artist named Robert Penman has recovered, restored, and colorized 200 such cartoons.  These are compiled in the new book Pan-Judah!, edited by myself (available at www.clemensandblair.com).  Below are the colorized versions of two of the cartoons featured in Joyce’s article:

Penman has done a spectacular job; the colorized images are bright and vivid, and virtually leap off the page.  We can now view Fips’ cartoons as they have never been seen before.  Pan-Judah! is available in three formats: 6 x 9 paperback, 6 x 9 hardcover, and deluxe 8.5 x 11 hard cover coffee-table edition.  See the publisher’s website for purchase details.