Part 1
Part 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

Of all the fallacies that one confronts when engaging with the theme of relations between Jews and Europeans, one of the most easily disproven is the idea that antagonism towards Jews is constantly changing. In the ‘mainstream’ reading of the history of European-Jewish interactions, the friction that exists between Jews and other elements of the society is argued to be linked solely to a Christianity-induced communal psychosis on the part of Europeans. This psychosis is said to undergo almost ceaseless metamorphoses.

The idea is so deep-rooted among organized Jewry that, even today, we are forced to listen to endless bleating about the emergence of a “new anti-Semitism”? This redundant cry resounds almost weekly even though, to the informed observer, it is clear that there isn’t, and has never been, any real change in the essence of the friction between Jews and Europeans. The ‘Jewish Problem,’ if one wishes to employ that archaic terminology, is seemingly as timeless and unchanging as the Jews themselves.

In my examination of Robert Wistrich’s Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, I pointed to that author’s typically contorted argument that a “virus” existed in Europe,  in which “pagan, pre-Christian anti-Semitism grafted on to the stem of medieval Christian stereotypes of the Jew which then passed over into the post-Christian rationalist anti-Judaism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Needless to say Wistrich’s phantasm, and similar poorly-fabricated ‘theories,’ are prejudiced at a very early stage by the employment of that fundamentally meaningless term: ‘anti-Semitism.’ By its very nature the term places the Jew or the ‘Semitism’ immediately in the passive position, thereby avoiding confrontation with the true essence of the problem — that there is a mutual friction between two essentially different entities, with divergent group interests and goals. Read more

Recently deceased Sergei Semanov (1934–2011), Russian writer and editor, was at times in his life a Stalinist, a critic of the post-Stalinist Soviet governments, an historian, and a public political commentator closely associated with the nationalist Russian political parties and the Russian Club, all of which peaked in popularity in the late 1960s under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. The Russian people generally approved of Brezhnev’s 18-year rule (1964–1982). Although known derisively in the West as a period of stagnation, it gave the people time finally to take stock of Russia’s postwar position in the world and plan for a future such as circumstances would permit.

However, even these early subdued expressions of the Russian people’s desire to influence the governance of their country ended abruptly when newly appointed Secretary General Yuri Andropov, an enemy of the nationalists whom he called “Russianists,” had Semanov arrested, interrogated in Lefortovo prison, removed from all his editorial and writing positions, and threatened with expulsion from the Party for the crime of propagating dangerous, possibly treasonous nationalist ideas.

Following the deaths of Stalin and Beria and the gradual disappearance of the military heroes of the Great Patriotic War, the USSR was obliged to choose new leaders to manage the affairs of the Russian State in the nuclear age. Unfortunately, because of the enormity of the wartime destruction and the dearth of energetic youthful Party leaders possessing even a fraction of the stature and authority of Stalin, the Soviet Union found itself lacking strong leadership. Although many native Russian intellectuals personally despised Communism, they nonetheless continued to support it as State doctrine for fear that many of the peripheral countries taken over hundreds of years by the Imperial Russian Empire would break away from Moscow if the combined centripetal forces of Moscow, the Party, and State security were not kept strongly in evidence. This façade of the all-powerful USSR was retained as a protective shield even though Russia was bereft of strong leadership, an effective economy, a reliable agricultural base, and a unified nation.

The enigmatic subtitle of Semanov’s posthumous The Russian Club: Why the Jews Will Not Win refers to a clandestine society of Russian intellectuals – members of the so-called Russian Club.[1] Semanov was one of the Club’s founding officers who met weekly from the 1960s to the early 1980s to discuss the existing state of native Russian cultural and political affairs, often critical of the official Marxist government positions. So influential had the Russian Club become by 1981 that it can take some credit for the collapse of Communism. Read more