Anti-Jewish Writing

Reflections on Hilaire Belloc’s “The Jews” (1922) [Part Two of Three]

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Part 1.

After discussing denial among non-Jews on the issue of the “Jewish problem,” Belloc moves in the third chapter to his thoughts on how that problem had manifested in his lifetime. He describes Jewry as a “political organism” which, like any independent organism, seeks after its own interests. The author writes (44):

It is objected of the Jew in finance, in industry, in commerce — where he is ubiquitous and powerful out of all proportion to his numbers — that he seeks, and has already reached, dominion. It is objected that he acts everywhere against the interests of his hosts; that these are being interfered with, guided, run against their will; that a power is present which acts either with indifference to what we love or in active opposition to what we love. Notably it is said to be indifferent to, or in active opposition against our national feelings, our religious traditions, and the general cultural and morals of Christendom which we have inherited and desire to preserve: that power is Israel.

Although these objections had, for the most part, merely simmered under the surface of Western liberal convention, Belloc argues that the Bolshevik revolution shocked Europeans. The leading role of Jews in the Russian catastrophe “struck both at the benevolent who would near no harm of the Jews, and those who had hitherto shielded or obeyed them as identified only with the interest of large Capital (45).” Although liberal convention on the Jews officially held the field, the Bolshevik menace “compelled attention. Bolshevism stated the Jewish problem with a violence and an insistence such that it could no longer be denied either by the blindest fanatic or the most resolute liar (46).” Read more

Reflections on Hilaire Belloc’s “The Jews” (1922) [Part One of Three]

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Belloc

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

How to Criticize Israel without being Anti-Semitic: The Unofficial Guide

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The news media have once again been ablaze with reports of Israel’s military attack on Gaza. The historic Israeli-Palestinian conflict has, consequently, returned as a subject of discussion at cafés, salons, and dinner tables.

The discussion, however, is not an easy one to have—unless, of course, you are foursquare behind Israel. Criticism of Israel very quickly lands the critic into trouble; accusations of anti-Semitism are fired back as if from an Uzi. What is more, these accusations can sometimes come accompanied by raised voices, red faces, bared teeth, waved fists, and even rude expletives. Sometimes, not even Jews can avoid them. So it is understandable that non-Jews desiring to avoid drama think it best to keep mum.

Noticing the problem, and apparently in the interest of free and open debate, a concerned Jewish blogger has recently made waves posting a 19-point guide on how to criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic. The Tumblr blog post has, at the time of writing, attracted 8485 notes. And the BBC deemed it so useful that they even reported it on their news website.

As TOO was created for purposes of free and open debate, including Jews and Israel, it seems pertinent that we examine the 19 points. Perhaps we will find in them the Philosopher’s Stone in our efforts to discuss important matters involving Jews without being accused of ignorance and moral turpitude. The points are meant to be considered in no particular order.

1. Don’t use the terms “bloodthirsty,” “lust for Palestinian blood,” or similar. Historically, Jews have been massacred in the belief that we use the blood of non-Jews (particularly of children) in our religious rituals. This belief still persists in large portions of the Arab world (largely because White Europeans deliberately spread the belief among Arabs) and even in parts of the Western world. Murderous, inhumane, cruel, vicious—fine. But blood…just don’t go there. Depicting Israel/Israelis/Israeli leaders eating children is also a no-no, for the same reason.

While one can understand the desire to avoid rehashings of the ancient blood libel, this seems a little paranoid in the case of “bloodthirsty”. Read more

Sergei Semanov and the “Russianists”

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semanovRecently 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

Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council, Part IV

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Go to Part II

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X: ISRAEL AND THE REVOLTS OF THE MIND[1] 

The Jewish antagonism has been manifested in a continuous—even if underhanded—manner in the two thousand year course of the Judeo-Christian clash. “The Jew—James Darmesteter tells us—was the champion of reason against the mythical mind; in the intellectual night of the Middle Ages, only in it did he think that he could find asylum. Provoked by the Church which wants to persuade him, after having tried in vain to convert him by force, he undermines with irony and perspicacity some of her controversies, and, like no one else, knows how to find the vulnerabilities of her doctrine. The understanding of the Sacred Books, and even more the terrible sagacity of the oppressed, are his means to discover those points. He is the doctor of the incredulous; all the revolts of the mind are presented to him in the shade or under an open sky. He worked in the immense forge of curses of the great Emperor Frederick and of the princes of Swabia or Aragon; he fashions together this deadly arsenal of reasoning and irony that he offered then to the skeptical of the Renaissance and the libertines of the Seventeenth Century. And the sarcasm of Voltaire is none other than the heavy echo of a word murmured six centuries earlier, in the shade of the ghetto, or, even earlier, (in the Counter-Gospel of the I and II Century) at the time of Celsus and Origen, and at the very origins of the religion of Christ.”[2]

For his part, Elie Faure (1873-1937), whose works were recently reprinted and highly publicized, talks about “this sarcastic snickering (Heine, Offenbach) towards all that is not Jewish […]. His ruthless analysis and his irresistible sarcasm acted as vitriol.” Following the course of our history, “it is easy to follow the trail, and although it is not possible to quantify the dissemination of Jewish thought, after its passage we can take note of its destructive power. Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust, Charlie Chaplin opened up to us, in all senses, the prodigious streets which demolish the narrow lanes of the Classic Greco-Latin and Catholic edifice in which for five or six centuries the burning doubt of the Jewish soul was waiting for opportunities to destroy it. For it is necessary to note that its [sc. that of the Jewish soul] own skeptical pole appears to emerge for the first time from the complete silence that surrounds the action of the Jewish mind in the Middle Ages, silence in the middle of which, from the Renaissance onwards, some voices burst forth, and which [sc. silence] today is annihilated by a great din.”

Yes, “is it possible to consider the Jew as anything other than a demolisher armed with corrosive doubts who, since the time of the Greeks, has always opposed Israel to the sentimental idealism of Europe? […] His historic mission is clearly defined, and perhaps forever. It will be the main factor of each apocalyptic period, as it was at the end of the ancient world, and as it will be at the end of the Christian world in which we live.”[3] Read more

Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council, Part III

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VII: JUDAISM’S STRUGGLE AGAINST THE CATHOLIC TRADITION

In fact, behind the appearance of an ecumenical search for a reconciliation between religions and other equally seductive words, it was a matter of demolishing the bulwark of Catholic Tradition, defined by Josué Jéhouda as “the ancient fortress of Christian obscurantism.” According to Jéhouda, there were three attempts at the “straightening out of Christianity,” which “sought to cleanse the Christian conscience of the miasmata of hatred”; three attempts at the straightening out of Christian theology which had become suffocating and paralyzing; “three open breaches in the old fortress of Christian obscurantism.” In fact, three important stages in the destruction of traditional Christianity:

– The Renaissance
– The Protestant Reformation
– The French Revolution

In these three major movements, Jéhouda perceives the wonderful work of dechristianization to which each of them, in various forms, has powerfully contributed. He does not tell us this so brutally, since he is very skillful at handling the artifices of language, but that bursts forth clearly from his writings, as we will show with some quotes extracted from his works:

“The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the French Revolution represent the three attempts at straightening out the Christian mentality to put it in tune with the progressive development of reason and science, and while dogmatic Christianity continued to make itself obscure, the Jews were gradually emancipating themselves.”

Speaking of the Renaissance, he maintains:

“We can affirm that if the Renaissance had not deviated from its original course in favor of the dualized Greek world, we would have had without a doubt a world unified by the creative thought and doctrine of the Kabbalah.”[1] Read more

Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council, Part II

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IV. Jules Isaac and the Church Fathers

In the second of these works—Genèse de l’antisémitisme—published in 1956, Jules Isaac strove to discredit the Fathers of the Church. It is impossible to summarize in a few words a volume of 350 pages. Let us limit ourselves to mentioning some of its most characteristic passages:

It is true that in the pagan world there was a strong current of anti-Semitism, much earlier than Christian anti-Semitism; it is equally true that this anti-Semitism has at times sparked bloody conflicts or ‘pogroms.’ Just as there was a pagan anti-Semitism, whose origin dates back to the divine commandment, in what would Christianity find its justification for having inherited it (after having been itself a victim of it for a long time), and even more, after having pushed to paroxysm its virulence, malignity, calumnies and mortal hatreds? Against Judaism and its followers, no weapon has been more fearful than the ‘teaching of contempt,’ especially inculcated by the Fathers of the Church of the fourth century; and in this teaching no thesis was more harmful than the ‘deicide people.’ The Christian mentality is still steeped in the depths of its subconscious. . . . To fail to recognize this and not to stress it is equivalent to ignoring or disguising the largest source of Christian anti-Semitism.”[1] . . .

The ‘teaching of contempt’ is a theological creation.[2]

The blind violence of the ignorant masses is intimately linked to the cold science of the theologians. A fundamental accusation to which is linked the theme of capital punishment, of the terrible curse that rests on the shoulders of Israel, explaining (and justifying in advance) its unfortunate fate, its most cruel trials, the worst violence committed against it, torrents of blood flowing continually from its open and living wounds. . . .

So that through a skilful manipulation, alternately, of doctrinal judgments and popular anger one makes fall back on God what, when viewed from the terrestrial sphere, is without doubt the result of human wickedness, this perversity, skillfully exploited in different ways from century to century, from generation to generation, and which culminated in Auschwitz, in the gas chambers and crematory ovens of Nazi Germany.[3] Read more