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Myth and the Russian Pogroms, Part 2: Inventing Atrocities

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Having grounded ourselves in the history of Russia’s Jewish Question, it is now time for us to turn our attention to the anti-Jewish riots of the 1880s. The following essay will first provide the reader with the standard narrative of these events advanced by Jewish contemporaries and the majority of Jewish historians — a narrative which has overwhelmingly prevailed in the public consciousness. The latter half of the essay will be devoted to dissecting one aspect of the Jewish narrative, and explaining how events really transpired. Other aspects of the Jewish narrative will be examined in later entries in this series. While a work like this can come in for heavy criticism from certain sections of the population who may denounce it as ‘revisionist,’ I can only say that ‘revisionism’ should be at the heart of every historical work. If we blindly accept the stories that are passed down to us, we are liable to fall victim to what amounts to little more than a glorified game of Chinese whispers. And, if we taboo the right of the historian to reinterpret history in light of new research and new discoveries, then we have become far removed from anything resembling true  scholarship.

The Jewish Narrative.

In 1881 the ‘Russo-Jewish Committee,’ (RJC) an arm of Britain’s Jewish elite, mass-produced a pamphlet entitled “The Persecution of the Jews in Russia,” and began disseminating it through the press, the churches, and numerous other channels. By 1899, it was embellished and published as a short book, and today digitized copies are freely available online.[1] By the early 20th century, the pamphlet had even spawned a four-page journal called Darkest Russia – A Weekly Record of the Struggle for Freedom, ensuring that the average British citizen did not go long without being reminded of the ‘horrors’ facing Russian Jews.[2] The fact that these publications were mass produced should provide an indication as to their purpose: It is clear that these publications represented one of the most ambitious propaganda campaign in Jewish history, and combined with similar efforts in the United States, they were aimed at gaining the attention of, and ‘educating,’ the Western nations and ensuring the primacy of the ‘Jewish side of the story.’ Implicit in this was not only a desire to provoke anti-Russian attitudes, but also copious amounts of sympathy for the victimized Jews — sympathy necessary to ensure that  mass Jewish chain migration to the West went on untroubled and unhindered by nativists. After all, wasn’t the bigoted nativist just a step removed from the rampaging Cossack? Read more

Revisiting the 19th-Century Russian Pogroms, Part 1: Russia’s Jewish Question

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The anti-Jewish riots, or “pogroms” of late 19th-century Russia represent one of the most decisive periods in modern Jewish, if not world, history. Most obviously, the riots had demographic implications for western countries – around 80% of today’s western Diaspora Jews are descendants of those Jews who left Russia and its environs during the period 1880–1910. But perhaps the most lasting legacy of the period was the enhancement of Jewish “national self-awareness,” and the accelerated development of “modern, international Jewish politics.”[1]

The pogroms themselves have consistently been portrayed by (mainly Jewish) historians as “irrational manifestations of hatred against Jews,”[2] where peasant mobs were the unwitting dupes of malevolent Russian officials. Other explanations are so lacking in evidence, and so devoid of logic that they stretch credulity to breaking point. For example, University of British Columbia Professor, Donald G. Dutton has asserted that the mobs were not motivated by “the sudden rapid increase of the Jewish urban population, the extraordinary economic success of Russian Jews, or the involvement of Jews in Russian revolutionary politics” but rather by the “blood libel.”[3]

Little or no historiography has been dedicated to peeling back the layers of “refugee” stories to uncover what really happened in the Russian Empire in the years before and during the riots. This lack of historical enquiry can be attributed at least in part to a great reluctance on the part of Jewish historians to investigate the pogroms in any manner beyond the merely superficial. In addition, historical enquiry by non-Jewish historians into the subject has been openly discouraged. For example, when Ukrainian historians discovered evidence proving that contemporary media reports of Jewish casualties in that nation were exaggerated, the Jewish genealogy website ‘JewishGen,’ responded by stating: “We believe that [these facts] are more than irrelevant because it redirects public attention from the major topic: the genocidal essence of pogroms.” Read more

Benzion Netanyahu: Jewish Activist and Intellectual Apologist

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Benzion Netanyahu, father of the current Israeli PM, has died at the age of 102. Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist, describes Netanyahu  fils  as “a Holocaust-obsessed fantasist, out of contact with reality, distrusting all Goyim, trying to follow in the footsteps of a rigid and extremist father – altogether a dangerous person to lead a nation in a real crisis.” Like father, like son.

Benzion Netanyahu was a prototypical Jewish activist, switching easily from his work as secretary for racial Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, to successfully lobbying for a pro-Zionist platform for the Republican Party in 1944 (which caused the Democrats to adopt a similar platform), to his work as a Jewish academic historian advancing Jewish interests in academia. His best-known book, The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain, was published in 1995 by Random House.

A commentary by Yossi Halevi Klein claims that the goal of Netanyahu’s scholarship was to

dissect the consequences of Jewish naivete. Benzion’s fascination with medieval Spain wasn’t based only on the behavior of the victimizers but of the victims. He not only drew a line connecting what he defined as the racial anti-Semitism of the Inquisition with Nazism, but implicitly drew a line between the Jews who saw medieval Spain as their golden land and the Jews who saw modern Germany as their new Zion. It is precisely that dread of Jewish self-deception that has defined the politics of Benzion’s son.

Similarly Jonathan S. Tobin, writing in Commentary,  claims that Netanyahu’s “understood that hatred and intolerance lay at the roots of the difficulties of the Jews then as now. As his son noted at his funeral …, the challenge is to “face reality head on” and “draw the necessary conclusions.” Read more

Keep the Beltane Fires Burning!

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Traditional Beltane Fire Festival celebrating the beginning of Summer, in Edinburgh. The procession, which celebrates the ending of winter, is a revival of the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane, the Gaelic name for the month of May

It appears sometimes that the Finns view a calendar year exclusively in terms of the important holidays. A man lives merely to celebrate one big holiday that doesn’t happen often. Once the celebration is over he simply waits for another one to come. For example, there is such a big event as Christmas. When it has passed, one patiently awaits the Vappu which is the first day of May. Followed by the Midsummer Eve (22/23d of June), and after that there are just six more months until Christmas and the New Year.

And so on.…The time in between is simply an insignificant period that separates one important milestone from another.

Of course, it’s an exaggeration but still, while living in Finland, one often hears something like ‘Oh! It is only eight weeks till the Vappu!’, or Christmas, or the Midsummer eve. To some extent the Finnish holidays might be regarded as a powerful example of traditional European holidays that have continued down through centuries. Vappu, for example, is a celebration of the beginning of Spring, a celebration of nature and the very essence of life and the power of fertility as it awakens from long winter sleep. Indeed, traditions to celebrate the Midsummer Eve, as well as Vappu go back to the pagan times. These and many other holidays celebrated throughout Europe all have the pagan roots (although, in such cases as Walpurgis night — and Vappu is pretty much like that – the issue of its origins, Christian and pagan alike, has grown more complex as time goes on). All in all, these celebrations have a long history in Europe, and they are inseparable from its roots and its culture. Read more

Synagogue of Satan? The Theological Significance of the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, Part 2

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Was the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple an Act of Divine Vengeance?

At least one mainstream scholar, GWH Lampe, acknowledges that the belief “that the fall of Jerusalem avenged Christ’s death became a commonplace of later Christian apologetic.”[1]  Most famously, Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) declared that “the Jews who slew Him, and would not believe in Him…were yet more miserably wasted by the Romans, and utterly rooted out from their kingdom” to be “dispersed through the lands” as “a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ.”  Augustine specifically rejects the notion that an “inseparable relationship” exists between Old Israel and the Christian church: “those Israelites who persist in being His enemies…shall forever remain in the separation which is here foretold.”[2]

The church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339 AD) was of a like mind; he thought it fitting that three million Jews thronged into Jersusalem, “as if to a prison” to “receive the destruction meted out by divine justice.”  He related some of the horrors of that tragedy “so that readers may learn how quickly God’s punishment followed their crime against Christ.”  Moreover, Eusebius, attributed to Josephus the belief that these “things happened to the Jews as retribution for James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus who was called Christ, for the Jews killed him despite his great righteousness.”[3]  Justin Martyr (100–165 AD) agreed that it was right and just that Jerusalem was destroyed for the Jews “killed the Righteous One and his prophets before him.”  Origen and Tertullian also shared that view.[4]  Melito of Sardis (died ca 180 AD) gave a compelling poetic expression to the view that the Jews had received their just deserts when “the Lord thundered out of heaven, and the Highest gave voice” to his vengeful wrath against Old Israel by dashing the Temple to the ground.[5] Read more

Synagogue of Satan? The Theological Significance of the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, Part 1

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Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Francesco Hayez

Introduction

Trudy Pert suggests that the crisis of modern Christianity deepened when mid-nineteenth century Protestant theologians embraced the higher criticism.  Especially in Germany, the traditional devotional approach to the Bible was replaced by the “objective” techniques of historical and literary criticism.  As a consequence, educated Christians turned their attention away from the “supernatural Christ” to the “historical Jesus.”  A new sort of Kulturprotestantismus, or cultural Christianity, was born: Jesus Christ became a teacher of ethics rather than the incarnation of the divine.  The crisis was real enough; it reflects a continuing failure by Christians to recognize the pivotal moment when the “supernatural Christ” burst back into human history to avenge both the crucifixion of the “historical Jesus” and the persecution of his faithful followers during their forty year mission to the ends of the earth.

In AD 70, Roman armies under Titus besieged Jerusalem to crush a long-running Jewish rebellion.  Their triumph was a bloody affair; not only was the city sacked and pillaged but, according to the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus, the dead, most of whom “were pure and holy” Jews, numbered over one million.[i]  The Romans also systematically destroyed the massive Temple complex.  In doing so, they ripped out the redemptive heart of Old Israel.  The massive Temple complex was the hub around which revolved the ritual observance of the Mosaic Law underlying Israel’s covenant with Yahweh.  For Jews and Romans, alike, the destruction of the Temple was an act of world-historical significance.  But the meaning of that cataclysmic event was not confined to the realm of secular history. Read more

Anti-White Hatred Is Mainstream in the Media and the Schools

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A while ago I commented on Lee Siegel’s horror about Mitt Romney being so egregiously White. I mean, his whole family is White; and there are lots of children. And they’re rich and good-looking. A veritable nightmare for a card carrying member of the hostile elite.

NYTimes caption from Siegel's blog: Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, with his extended family in 2007.

Now  another well-connected member of the hostile elite, Michael Tomasky, continues the theme.  According to Tomasky, Romney may try all he wants. He can choose a Latino VP candidate (likely to be Marco Rubio who, as Pat Buchanan phrases it, recently “took his final vows as the newest neoconservative”). He can change his tune on immigration. But he can’t overcome his fatal disability: “Romney is just sooooo white. Even whiter than the Osmonds.”

Whiter than the Osmonds!! The horror!

The Osmonds

Not only is Romney disgustingly White, Tomasky also accuses him of never having listened to Tito Puente. And then the clincher: “Has he ever known a Latino person, outside of those who clean his houses and trim his lawns? It’s quite possible that he does. But he sure doesn’t look like he does.”

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