Anti-Jewish Writing
There is a project to publish (long-overdue) translations of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together. So far, they have posted Chapters 2, 3, 6, and 7, with more on the way. The website is: https://twohundredyearstogether.wordpress.com/ The translation reads very smoothly and seems quite professional.
Nietzsche and Wagner
Was Nietzsche bold or stupid? As stated above, I don’t think he quite fully grasped the scale of the ethnic conflict subtly playing out in Germany at that time, or the sheer power already enjoyed by Jews. For someone of his (then lowly) position, his 1872 lecture appears to me as a step too soon. Wagner had of course taken even further steps against Jewish influence — but the older man possessed significantly more stature and legitimacy. Nietzsche sent his lecture notes to Wagner on February 4, and the composer replied cautiously. Wagner, who was fully aware of the damage that could be wrought by Jews on lone targets like himself, responded: “I say to you: that’s the way it is. … But I am concerned about you, and wish with my entire heart that you don’t ruin yourself.” Cosima, Wagner’s wife, also wrote to Nietzsche expressing concern. Starting by citing Goethe (‘Everything significant is uncomfortable’), she said that his ‘boldness’ and ‘bluntness’ surprised her. In a later letter she makes her concerns more explicit, stating that she wanted him to take some “maternal” advice so that he should “avoid stirring up a hornet’s nest” :
Do you really understand me? Don’t mention the Jews, and especially not en passant; later, when you want to take up this gruesome fight, in the name of God, but not at the very outset, so that on your path you won’t have all this confusion and upheaval. I hope you don’t misunderstand me: you know that in the depths of my soul I agree with your utterance. But not now and not in this way.
According to Cosima’s diaries, Nietzsche was summoned to a meeting with her and Wagner on February 12 to discuss the lecture. We can only speculate at what precisely was said, but Nietzsche dropped the Jewish reference from the published version of his lecture and nothing similar to it would ever again appear in his speeches or published writings. He would continue to attack the evils of the press, newspapers, financial affairs, the stock exchange, modernity, urban life, and cosmopolitanism — but he would never again mention them in conjunction with Jews or Judaism. Holub argues that the episode taught Nietzsche that he should not mention the Jews by name and certainly not attack them in print. He would thereafter adopt the same ‘cultural code’ that many anti-Jewish intellectuals were forced to utilize as a means of fighting the culture war without being labelled ‘anti-Semitic.’ Read more
‘Wagner himself asserts about Nietzsche that a flower could have come from this bulb. Now only the bulb remains, really a loathsome thing.’
Cosima Wagner, 1878.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s puzzling stance on Jews and Judaism has perplexed me for the better part of a decade, so I was intrigued and optimistic about Princeton University Press’s 2015 publication of Robert Holub’s Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism. Broadly speaking, I’m sympathetic to certain elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy, particularly its rejection of equality and the concept of the ‘will to power.’ However, I can’t say I ever came close to describing myself as a ‘Nietzschean’ in the same way that the late Jonathan Bowden was fond of doing. One of the reasons for my hesitation in claiming affinity with Nietzsche’s worldview was that I couldn’t escape the impression that its nihilism was often destructive ‘for the sake of it,’ a quality that has endeared it to the Left, past and present. Then there was Nietzsche’s, to my mind unforgivable, habit of lauding the Hebrew over the German. More importantly though, I couldn’t perceive any true coherence or solidity in Nietzsche’s writing beyond his celebrated aphorisms. Taken as a whole, the philosophy of Nietzsche was apt to strike me as too intentionally fluid; too deliberately open to interpretation. Nowhere was this non-committal stance more apparent than in Nietzsche’s sparse, vague, contradictory and often quite opportunistic references to Jews and Judaism.
As one might expect of a philosopher as enigmatic as Nietzsche, his work has been approached awkwardly and suspiciously by scholars and ideologues alike. His attitudes towards Jews, in particular, have been debated, discussed and fought over from the very beginning of his public career. Nowhere, and at no time, was a consensus ever reached. During the Third Reich he was both ‘recruited for the cause’ by some, and rejected outright by others. His foundational place in the National Socialist philosophical canon was thus never assured, primarily because of his nihilism, his hostility towards Nationalism, and his ambivalence regarding Jews. Confusion still reigns. Modern scholarship has been divided between those who condemn Nietzsche outright as a ‘racist’ reactionary and a proto-Fascist, and those who highlight his vocal opposition to political anti-Semitism as thus seek his social exoneration and academic rehabilitation. As noted above, elements of Nietzsche remain strongly attractive to the Left. Therefore, where total exoneration of anti-Semitism has been found difficult, blame for ‘corrupting’ Nietzsche and shaping him as an ‘anti-Semite’ has been attributed variously to his one-time guru, Richard Wagner, or his sister Elisabeth, who married Bernhard Förster, perhaps the leading figure in nineteenth-century political anti-Semitism. The result of these battles has not been a clarification of the historical record, but an ever-thickening web of biased interpretations, white-washing, and pseudo-history. Read more
French President François Mitterrand spoke of “a powerful and harmful Jewish lobby”
There are few things as difficult to talk about as Jewish elites and Jewish ethnocentrism (which, translated into left-wing parlance, could be termed “Jewish privilege” and “Jewish racism”). For the French case, Paul-Éric Blanrue (see my previous article on his work) usefully documents the numerous cases in which various prominent figures and journalists have spoken of Jewish ethnocentrism or “the Jewish lobby.”
Jewish influence is typically remarked upon by bragging activist Jews, by senior politicians near death, by uncritical commentators, or by critical commentators who, being swiftly punished, usually learn to keep quiet. The penalty for criticism – universal ostracism – is such that Blanrue speaks of “the-lobby-that-doesn’t-exist”: the lobby that everyone knows about and everyone knows must never be spoken about (lest they find themselves in the dock with Alain Soral and Dieudonné M’bala M’bala).
But prominent figures, even at the highest levels of the state, have spoken of Jewish power in France despite this threat. In 1995, President François Mitterrand, near the end of his life and on his last day in office, referred in private to “the powerful and harmful influence of the Jewish lobby in France.”[1] Mitterrand was specifically referring to the constant politico-media pressure that has made the Shoah “the official religion of the French Republic” (in the words of Jewish pundit Éric Zemmour[2]). Read more
Body of St. John Chrysostom (Chapel of the Choir – Basilica of St. Peter – Vatican City)
A correspondent just notified me of a blog post from 2010 on St. John Chrysostom by Roger Pearse, a scholar of Christianity in the ancient world (“Some remarks about John Chrysostom’s homilies against the Jews“). Pearse quotes from a 1935 summary of Chrysostom’s writings whose author, A. L. Williams, notes that Chrysostom was motivated by the fact that many Christians were
frequenting Jewish synagogues, were attracted to the synagogal Fasts and Feasts, sometimes by the claims to superior sanctity made by the followers of the earlier religion, so that an oath taken in a synagogue was more binding than in a church, and sometimes by the offer of charms and amulets in which Jews of the lower class dealt freely.
Williams concluded:
We gather from these Homilies that the Jews were a great social, and even a great religious, power in Antioch.
Exactly. As discussed in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents, the phenomenon of Judaizing Christians in the ancient world is a marker of Jewish power at the time. For example, the rather limited anti-Jewish actions of the government during the 150 years following the Edict of Toleration of 313, which included many attempts to ban the common practice of Jews enslaving non-Jews, are interpreted by historian Bernard S. Bachrach “as attempts to protect Christians from a vigorous, powerful, and often aggressive Jewish gens.” Jews as a powerful group were looked up to and emulated by many non-Jews, just as today we see the same phenomenon, not only 
among many Evangelical Christians, but also Hollywood celebrities who dabble in kabbalah and pretty much the entire non-Jewish political class which we see making pilgrimages to Israel and proudly wearing yarmulkes and displaying menorahs during photo-ops. Read more
We all have our guilty pleasures. One of mine is that I occasionally love reading the often crazy and convoluted theories of Jews who wrestle with the question: why have Jewish populations attracted so much animosity through the centuries? Whether the authors call it anti-Semitism, Judeophobia, Jew-hatred or any other label which is fashionable these days, the theories, abstractions, emotions, obfuscations and intellectual blindness in their works rarely fails to shock or amuse me. The productions of the psychoanalysts are among the most dependable for raising a chuckle. Clearing out a bookshelf recently, I found an old favorite tucked away and decided to give it one last read before consigning it to its rightful home — the trashcan. And before it began its fateful final journey, I took some notes in the hope of putting together an article through which I might share with you some of its choice pieces of dubious wisdom.
Although written in 2009, Ted Rubin’s Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind,[1] is in several respects a relic of a by-gone era in that it is a classic work of old-school Freudianism and psychoanalysis. Kevin MacDonald has noted in The Culture of Critique that:
One way in which psychoanalysis has served specific Jewish interests is the development of theories of anti-Semitism that bear the mantle of science by deemphasizing the importance of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles. Although these theories very greatly in detail — and, as typical of psychoanalytic theories generally, there is no way to empirically decide among them — within this body of theory anti-Semitism is viewed as a form of gentile psychopathology resulting from projections, repressions, and reaction formations stemming ultimately from a pathology-inducing society.[2]
As Belloc moves into the second half of his book, I personally feel that the work becomes weaker. His characteristic style remains powerful, but it is in the second half of the book that Belloc’s attempt to come across as balanced goes too far. The sixth chapter examines “The Causes of Friction upon Our Side.” Here Belloc neglects to concede that the great mass of Europeans has never urged the Jews to settle among them, that they have never held them captive, and certainly never sought out conflict with them. As Martin Luther once so insightfully pointed out:
Now behold what a nice, thick, fat lie it is when they complain about being captives among us. … [W]e do not know to this day which Devil brought them into our country. We did not fetch them from Jerusalem! On top of that, no-one is holding them now. Land and highways are open to them; they may move to their country whenever they wish to do so.
This is a fundamental issue in the history of Jewish-European relations that Belloc fails to recognize. Purposeful or not, the presence of a powerful but separate foreign, political entity exerting influence to its own ends in the elite strata of a given society amounts to one thing and one thing only: colonialism. In such a scenario, one would be hard-pressed to find fault with the colonized. Jews have remained in European society out of choice and with purpose and goals; not out of captivity. There are no passive partners. We are not locked into a fateful and unceasing struggle with all exits blocked. But instead Belloc strains to keep a balance which loses touch with the reality of the situation. He argues that “it is certain that we play a part ourselves in this quarrel between us and the Jews (124).” While certain actions on our part may escalate tensions, I would argue you that no fully accurate assessment of the situation can be made without having as a foundation an acknowledgement of the scenario I have just outlined. Read more
