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.

• Published at thewhitenetwork-archive.com, June 2012 – April 2014
• Published at age-of-treason.com, May 2014 – present
• Interviews and Conversations with Others

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.

For a sullen Jew was guardian of the spot,
An animal that spurns at sound human food.
He charges our bill for the bushes disturbed, the sea weed,
Struck with our sticks, and clamours that his loss
Is grievous in the water that we drink.
We fling fit answer to the filthy race,
That upholds shameless circumcision —
They are a height of stupidity; cold sabbaths charm their heart;
And yet their heart is even colder than their creed,
Each seventh day to shameful sloth’s condemned,
An effeminate picture of a wearied god!
Their other wild fancies from a bazaar of lies
Not even a child in their sleep would believe.
Would that Judea ne’er had been subdued,
By Pompey’s wars and under Titus’ sway!
The plague’s contagion all the wider spreads;
The conquered presses on the conquering race.

From On His Return, by Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, 416 A.D.

I recently devoted some time to reading the entirety of Saint John Chrysostom’s eight homilies on the Jews, an experience I’m not inclined to recommend to anyone seeking a clinical exploration of Jewish influence. The homilies are masterworks of rhetoric and invective, but, like many pre-Enlightenment texts tackling problematic Jewish behavior, they are overwhelmingly dominated by Christian theology, and empirical analysis of the socio-economic relationship between Jews and Europeans is only hinted at. It would be redundant for me to labor these points here since the best exploration of Chrysostom’s hints and allusions to Jewish socio-economic misbehavior can be found in Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontents (pp.95-97, 116-118 in paperback), and in a 2015 TOO post by MacDonald that in turn reflects on an interesting article by Roger Pearse, a scholar of Christianity. I was, however, prompted by my reading of Chrysostom to search for ancient writers that did offer the kind of analysis or critique that met my expectations, and that hadn’t already been covered by MacDonald’s treatment of late Roman anti-Semitism in Separation and Its Discontents (pp. 109-139 in the paperback version)—at a time when anti-Jewish writing emphasized Jews enslaving Christians; and accusations of Jewish greed, wealth, love of luxury and of the pleasures of the table became common. I was also keen to move beyond some of the more familiar figures of the ancient world to whom anti-Jewish remarks have been attributed: Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, Horace, Quintilian, Dio Cassius, Celsus, Plutarch, and Strabo. It was while reading “Cultivated Pagans and Ancient Antisemitism,”^[1] a 1939 article from The Journal of Religion, that I finally encountered a substantial reference to the remarkable piece of poetry opening this essay. What follows is an effort to analyze the poem and place it in historical and cultural context.

Rutilius Claudius Namatianius was a high Roman functionary, aristocrat, and Imperial poet. He was a native of southern Gaul, having his origins somewhere near modern Toulouse. His long Imperial career saw him occupy influential roles at a time when Rome was in chaos, and Namatianus claimed to have personally witnessed the final sack of Rome in 410 and its aftermath. Around the year 415, Namatianus undertook a voyage home to Gaul, later penning a kind of travel memoir in epic poetic form titled On His Return. The poem, of which only the initial third has survived, offers unique insight into a period not normally associated with literary treasures (the early ‘Dark Ages’), as well as a singular example of late Pagan lament on civilizational decline and the characteristics and growing influence of the Jews.

The episode opening this essay occurs during Rutilius’s trip, after he passed the island of Elba and landed at the port of Falesia Portus. I have been unable to determine precisely where on a modern map this would be, but I assume it’s somewhere between modern Piombino and Livorno. At Falesia Portus, Rutilius and his travelling companions watched celebrations organized for the god Osiris, before exploring and enjoying their surroundings:

Landing, we seek the town and roam the wood;
The ponds delight us, sweet, with shoals begirt,
The waters, spread within the enclosed flood,
Allow the sportive fish amid the pools,
To dart and play.

This peaceful commune with nature offers some reprieve from the omnipresent signs of social and political collapse. Problems begin, however, when the group arrive at their lodgings, a villa and gardens whose conductor (the middleman who administrated the inn and its domain) is a Jew.

But he who leased the spot,
A harsher landlord than Antiphates,
Made this reposeful loveliness pay dear.

Antiphates, of course, was the king of the Laestrygonians, described in Homer’s Odyssey as a race of giants known for devouring foreigners. The comparison with Antiphates sets the stage for Namatianus’s poetic reflections on the misanthropic, anti-social, and exploitative nature of the Jews, both in the personal interaction with the Jewish innkeeper, and in the much broader clash between Jews and the late Roman Empire. It’s worth recalling that it was unusual for Jews to be found so far north in Italy during the 400s, because, in a preference that has remained almost constant to the present, Jews tended to cluster around seats of government and commerce. In the Italy of the 400s, this meant Jewish concentration around Rome, Milan, Ravenna, and Aquileia. More predictably, it’s notable that this Jew is not a rustic farmer, soldier, or craftsman, but a middleman.

The standard narrative of most apologetic histories of the Jews will earnestly feed readers the fairytale that Jews were sons of the soil, much like any other people, until Christians persecuted them, counter-productively it would seem, into powerful and exploitative financial positions. This is despite a clear record of evidence demonstrating that the special relationship between Jews and money preceded Christianity. Jews had settled among European host populations since ancient times, with the oldest communities located in the urban centers of the Mediterranean. A list of Jewish colonies in this area can be found in the First Book of Maccabees, and in the early Roman empire clusters of Jews could be found as far north as Lyon, Bonn and Cologne.^[2] The economic nature of these communities was uniform, and similar to those in the East. Even prior to the Talmudic era, c.300–500 A.D., Jews had developed a strong interest and aptitude in commerce and banking and, from its beginning, Jewish involvement in these spheres was regarded by host populations as malevolent and exploitative. In one of the earliest examples, a papyrus from the first half of the first century B.C., a man named Heracles writes to a friend in Hellenistic Egypt about some associates who “detest the Jews.”^[3] In another, dated to 41 A.D., an Alexandrian merchant warns a friend to “beware of the Jews.”^[4] During the fourth century, Alexandria witnessed a number of anti-Jewish riots, almost all of them provoked by accusations of economic exploitation. Under Tiberius, several Jewish middlemen in Rome were discovered to have been misappropriating silver and gold, prompting the expulsion of 4000 Jews to Sardinia in 19 A.D.^[5] In short, Namatianus’s Jewish innkeeper is not so much of an aberration as might first appear to those schooled only in mainstream apologetic scholarship.

It’s clear that Namatianus already has a pre-existing animus towards Jews, an aspect of his politics and worldview presumably shaped over decades as a Roman administrator. For Namatianus, this sullen innkeeper is primarily an anti-social “animal,” and a true example of his breed. Namatianus expresses no surprise at the character traits of the innkeeper, nor does he attempt to explain his complaints. He clearly expected his readers to understand and sympathize with what he has to say about Jews and Judaism. Namatianus rather nonchalantly sets the sullen Jew in the context of his tribe, pointing out before anything else that the innkeeper is part of an ethnically solipsistic race that sets itself apart even through diet by avoiding “sound human food” like seafood and pork (similar complaints were made by Juvenal in his Satires and Tacitus in his Histories). Roman hatred of Jewish separatism ran deep, with its origins at least as far back as Pompey’s siege of Jerusalem in 63 B.C. Jewish rebellion began almost immediately, and accelerated after the establishment of the province of Judea in 6 A.D. Roman officials were unanimous in attributing this rebellious behavior to Jewish ethnocentrism, the sense of Jewish uniqueness, and the Jewish belief that, as Tacitus expressed it, the East would be victorious and leaders from Judea would come to rule the world (Historiae, 5, 13: “ut valesceret Oriens profectique Iudeaea rerum potirentur”).

The sullen Jew encountered in Falesia Portus is money-driven. He “charges our bill for the bushes disturbed, the sea weed, Struck with our sticks, and clamours that his loss, Is grievous in the water that we drink.” Namatianus and his companions finish their enjoyment of the landscape only to find that their every move has been watched, and every broken branch accounted for. We might presume that this is a well-used process of exploitation for the innkeeper, regularly employed to milk ignorant travelers for more profits. Jews are thus not merely presented as a people apart, but unscrupulous, unreasonable, and untrustworthy in financial transactions of any type. In a scene almost comical, the Jewish innkeeper is so miserly and exploitative that he would even go so far as to demand money for water drunk from pools on his land, pleading that, by quenching their thirst, Namatianus and his men had caused him a “grievous” financial loss. Namatianus’s account of this stingy Jew, shamelessly hard in business, is a pointed rejoinder to those who claim that ‘tropes’ about Jewish financial misbehavior were a side-effect of the putatively accidental (!) entry of the Jews into highly lucrative moneylending niches during the Middle Ages.

Namatianus recounts that he responded to the innkeeper’s attempted exploitation with “fit answer to the filthy race,” by which we must assume that he responded with verbal abuse or aggression of some kind. The term “Jew” was itself a pejorative at the time, with even the Jewish Midrash containing a story about two Roman women who argue only to later reconcile apart from one outstanding issue — the insulted party could not forgive the other party for saying she “looked like a Jew” during the argument.^[6] Roman aversion to Jewishness was such that both Vespasian and Titus refused to accept the honorific ‘Judaicus’ after having suppressed the great revolt and their victory in Judea (unlike the very willing traditional adoption of titles such as “Britannicus,” “Germanicus” and “Africanus”).

In popular Roman culture, two aspects of Jewish identity were singled out for particular scorn and derision — circumcision and the sabbath. As with diet, both were viewed as symbols of Jewish separatism, but both also included further strata of meaning. Namatianus’s use of the term gens obscena, “filthy race,” is directly connected with the remark on circumcision, and it’s likely that Namatianus responded to the innkeeper not only by referring to his Jewishness, but also with some kind of reference to circumcision and perversion. In the Roman mind, both were linked, and accusations of hyper-sexuality or perversion among Jews are common in the literature of the period. At the more comedic end of the scale, Juvenal chuckled at the strangeness of Jews who “worship the sky” and “by and by, shed their foreskins,” (Satires, 14.99), while at the more serious end there were accusations from figures like Tacitus that Jews were addicted to lust. Sexual slander of competing groups was of course extremely common on all sides during the period. The Jewish literature, for example, depicted Romans as addicted to pederasty, and gentiles in general as prone to bestiality. In this regard, Tractate Avodah Zarah 22b, an entire chapter of the Talmud dedicated to the subject, has some truly remarkable allegations, including the stunningly improbable account of a Rabbi who says he witnessed a gentile engage in bestiality with a goose before roasting and eating it, and the claim that “The animal of a Jew is more appealing to gentiles that their own wives.”

Namatianus’s comments on the sabbath are equally interesting. The allusion to the “chilly” nature of the sabbath, and coldness more generally in the first instance, is a likely reference to the then frequently mocked fact Jews could not light fires on that day. But Namatianus immediately reflects on something deeper in the Jewish personality, implying that this “cold” concept of a day of rest “charms their heart” because “their heart is even colder than their creed.” For Namatianus, there is something fundamentally cold, sterile, and inhuman about the Jews and their religion, something hinted at first in the exploitative approach of the Jewish innkeeper, but now expanded upon as a primary racial characteristic. The philosophical background influencing many Roman aristocratic groups, to which Namatianus belonged, included a respect for humanitas—the ability of men to be sociable. The coldness of Jews is found in their lack of humanitas, which was an essential structuring aspect of higher Roman society. Being incapable of humanitas, Jews were inevitably seen as being themselves disruptive and undesirable within a society they were not prepared to co-operate with but merely exploit. Such perspectives are remarkably similar to complaints made about the social behavior of Jews in the early twentieth century, as they entered and ascended the Western middle class, upsetting many social conventions in the process.

As well as “coldness,” the sabbath is also linked to the idea that Jews are given over to a “shameful sloth,” dictated by a god apparently lassatus or “wearied” and therefore, in a Roman culture where masculinity was linked to motion and action, irredeemably mollis or “effeminate.” When not engaged in active rebellion or sedition, one of the primary perceptions of Jews among the Romans was of a people prone to, as Tacitus put it (Historiae, 4, 3), “the charms of indolence.” That the brief interaction with the sullen innkeeper at Falesia Portus would prompt a reflection on the sabbath may indicate Namatianus’s opinion that the innkeeper was slothful. The complaint that Jews are unique in their apparent dedication to avoiding physical work has been common in anti-Jewish writing for almost 2000 years, and the linkage here is difficult to side-step. For Namatianus, the sullen Jew is cold and lazy, preferring, like a spider, the passive exploitation of those who fall into his web rather than the active earning of his own daily bread. In the Roman aristocratic worldview, such an approach to life is not only lacking in morality and human warmth, but is fundamentally effeminate.

It’s especially interesting that Namatianus implies that Jews are not merely superstitious in holding to these traditions, but also prone to advancing falsehood. He situates Jewish religious customs, “wild fancies,” as originating from “a bazaar of lies, Not even a child in their sleep would believe.” The reference to the bazaar or marketplace (catasta—literally, the stage on which auctions take place), is a further association with Jews and merchant activity, but it also suggests a proliferation or abundance of falsehood for profit, and the idea that the Jews themselves are a fountain of lies and exaggerations.

The section’s final four lines are perhaps the most thoughtful and poignant. Namatianus regrets that Judea had been conquered by Pompey and Titus because these conquests facilitated the ingestion of that which could not be digested. The annexation of Jewish territories and the free movement of Jews within the empire brought into the Roman body a “plague’s contagion” that “all the wider spreads.” The sullen Jewish innkeeper, who, in his rejection of humanitas, is not prepared to co-operate with his guests but merely to exploit them, is therefore merely symbolic of the broader gens obscena who reject humanitas and thus live within the Roman Empire not to co-operate and take part in it but merely to exploit and destroy it. Through such an approach, inconceivable though it may have been to his contemporaries, Namatianus argues that “The conquered presses on the conquering race.” The term has close resonance with Seneca’s complaint of the Jews that “the vanquished have given laws to their victors,”^[7] as well as with some of the most famous and pessimistic anti-Jewish texts of the nineteenth century including Marr’s The Victory of Jewry over Germandom and Toussenel’s The Jews: Kings of the Epoch. Marie Roux comments, in her analysis of On His Return, that “The biological metaphor used by Rutilius forms part of his argumentation according to which Jews are and will remain pernicious enemies of Rome that had clearly taken advantage of Rome’s generosity. … Jews are presented as internal enemies that show the limits of Rome’s imperialist policy.”^[8]

By making such clear references to Jewish misanthropy, financial exploitation, social disruptiveness, and status as an “internal enemy,” this remarkable poem by Rutilius Namatianus offers a shocking riposte from the early fifth century to those keen to portray such concepts as simply the warped byproduct of Christianity or as the recent invention of bigots. One of the most surprising aspects of the poem is how fresh it appears in its concerns and complaints. One might imagine it written today, referring perhaps to a sullen slumlord in Brooklyn, or to Jewish influence in the declining American empire. It is this last element that I find especially haunting. Namatianus was a man writing at the twilight of his age, in almost total disbelief that the all-conquering European force to which he belonged had succumbed to something so outwardly pathetic and yet so inwardly fanatical, cold, and unmoving. For me, the poem speaks volumes.

^[1] N. W. Goldstein, “Cultivated Pagans and Ancient Antisemitism,” Journal of Religion, 19:4 (1939), pp.346-364.

^[2] P. Johnson, A History of the Jews (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p.171.

^[3] S. Almog (ed), Antisemitism Through the Ages (Jerusalem: Pergamon, 1988), p.16.

^[4] S. Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1976), p.22.

^[5] Almog, p.18.

^[6] Lamentations Rabbah, 1:11.

^[7] See St. Augustine, City of God, VI. 11.

^[8] Marie Roux: Rutilius Namatianus, On His Return I.377-398.

https://www.judaism-and-rome.org/rutilius-namatianus-his-return%C2%A0i377-398