Bishop Richard Williamson

On April 16th, 2010, Bishop Richard Williamson, is scheduled to go on trial in Regensburg, Germany for the hate crime of Holocaust denial. While Bishop Williamson had expressed doubts about the Holocaust since the late 1980’s it was not until November, 2008, during comments he made on a Swedish television interview that he was charged with the crime of Holocaust denial. Because he refused to pay the fine of $16,000 he has been ordered to stand trial. If he decides to go to Germany, he can be convicted for the crime of “Volksverhetzung,” (incitement of hatred for a people), as was Ernst Zündel.

Bishop Williamson is a member of the Society of St. Pius X, a traditionalist order founded in 1970 in protest to the liberalizing effects of Vatican II. The SSPX has sought to preserve the timeless beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church amidst the alterations to belief and ritual that were introduced in the middle of the last century by Vatican II.  The Society has 510 priests working in 31 countries, and 2 million members. Bishop Williamson, British born and Cambridge educated, is one of four bishops consecrated in 1988 by SSPX founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. He is an academic, fluent in French, German, and Spanish. Until he was appointed rector of the South American seminary in La Reja, Argentina, in 2003, he was rector of the North American seminary in Winona, Minnesota for many years. Because of his statements on the Holocaust, he has been relieved of his position and silenced by the Church.

If you are non-Jewish and are of European descent, then you are affiliated with the Catholic Church. No matter what your current beliefs, your family, at least for a thousand years, until the Reformation, was Catholic. The Catholic Church unified, and civilized your ancestors and permitted the art, science, economy, and morality of Europe to flourish.  In addition to protecting their souls, the Catholic Church defended your ancestors from non-European aliens:  from invading Moslems, and from Jewish influence on culture. In the U.S., Catholicism is still the largest single religious denomination with 70 million believers. In Western Europe the number is 211,466 million, 55% of the population. However, instead of guarding its members, as it did in the past, the Church has now joined their historic adversary.

In his book, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Kevin MacDonald devotes considerable space(short version) to an analysis of the Catholic Church’s relationship with the Jews, beginning in Roman times and continuing to the National Socialist era. He shows that early anti-Semitism by the Church Fathers was a defensive response to Jewish economic domination and enslavement of non-Jews in the 4th century.

Catholic institutional anti-Semitism, he implies, grew out of both theology and ethnic conflict. The Church asserted as doctrine that by rejecting Jesus as the Messiah, the Jews had rejected God and had forfeited their status as God’s Chosen People. The official Church doctrine was that Jews should be tolerated in a subservient, powerless role because of their usefulness as testimony to the truth of Christianity.

By adopting this theology, the Church had erected a powerful theological rationale for protecting and civilizing the European peoples. The traditionalist view is that these definitive beliefs about Jews cannot be altered. They are forever part of Church dogma. It would therefore not be surprising to find that traditionalist Catholics like Bishop Williamson may have negative attitudes about Jews or about Jewish influence on the Catholic Church since World War II.

Wearing a dog collar and flanked by police, Bishop Williamson was escorted out of Heathrow Airport following his flight from Argentina in February, 2009.

The reason that the fundamental, dogmatic teachings of the Church did not change over time is because the Catholic Church believed them to be Divine Revelation. However, directives and writings of the Council of Vatican II (1962–65) often contradict the eternal teachings of the Church. Especially problematic are those publications re-defining the Church’s position toward the Jews.

Before Vatican II, the Catholic doctrine was that the Scriptures were infallible because they were dictated by the Holy Ghost  Beginning in the 19th Century,however, the interpretive method of “historicism” began to apply new criteria to the study of the sacred texts. In interpreting Scripture, historicism took into account archeology, the natural sciences, and contemporary social and psychological theories that proposed to explain the behavior of society and individuals.  One of the theologians who defended the relativistic method of istoricism at Vatican II was Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

In 2001, the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC), an official part of the Congregation for the Faith in the Vatican, published the book, The Hebrew People and its Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible. The book succinctly describes the radical changes in the Church’s position toward the Jews during and after Vatican II.  Cardinal Ratzinger was the president of the PBC. Everything in the book, therefore, was written under his personal direction. His Prefacerepresents an extra seal of endorsement and support.

Pope Benedict II under shadow of menorah at the Cologne Synagogue, Aug 18, 2005

The introduction to The Hebrew People and its Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible defends the idea that because of the imprisonment and death of so many Jews in the Nazi concentration camps in WW II, it is essential to re-examine the spiritual relations between Christians and Jews.  The book’s aim is to “advance the dialogue between Christians and Jews” by interpreting the Bible in a relativistic manner pleasing to Jewish sensibilities.

The result is a new conception for relations of the Church with the Jews. Actually, with respect to the Jews, a new perspective had already been suggested by the Austrian Catholic theologian, Johann Baptist Metz. (Incidentally, Father Metz was considered a “Catholic spokesman” for the Frankfurt School.) Not only did he assume the relativism and the deconstructive methods of the Frankfurt School, he also placed the Holocaust, using the synonym “Auschwitz,” into the center of history. According to Metz, Scripture required reinterpretation and revitalization after the Holocaust. This coincides with the thinking of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

Benedict XVI receives a framed scroll for Israel chief rabbis on May, 12, 2009 at the center for the Jewish Heritage in Jerusalem

The Pontifical Biblical Commission denies both the Old and New Testament as sources of Revelation. “The change caused by the extermination of the Jews has stimulated all the Churches to completely re-think their relations with Judaism and, as a consequence, to reconsider their interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. Some have asked themselves whether Christians should repent for their appropriation of the Hebrew Bible and a (Christian) interpretation that no Jew could accept. Should Christians, then, read the Bible with the Hebrews in order to respect its Jewish origin?” (pp 54-5) Should the events of World War II change the bi-millennial interpretation of the Church about Revelation? One would think that what was true before the catastrophe would remain true afterward.  But the answer of the PBC is implicitly in the affirmative: Jews are to be the final authority in Biblical interpretation.

Not only do the authors of, The Hebrew People and its Holy Scriptures In The Christian Church, give Jews the final authority on Biblical interpretation, they make a number of assertions totally at odds with traditional Catholic teaching. They allege that the present-day Jewish religion is the true heir of the divine promise of the Old Testament. For example, the Pontifical Biblical Commission states, “Far from replacing Israel, the [Catholic] Church remains in solidarity with it.” (p. 152).

The Catholic Church has always taught that according to Revelation, the Old Covenant was revoked with the coming of Christ, and that the true heir of the Old Covenant is the Catholic Church.

Elio Toaff, chief Rabbi of Rome, welcoming Pope John Paul II to a service at the Roman Synagogue, 1986

In advancing this thesis, the PBC does not distinguish between what is religion and what is race in Judaism. Instead it tries to make the Hebrew people, in the racial sense, coincide with the elect people, in the religious sense. If the Old Covenant is still valid, then it is a small step to the conclusion that the Holocaust was a heinous crime against God’s Chosen.

In addition to corrupting the Catholic teaching about the Old and New Covenant, the PBC has perverted Catholic teaching regarding the crime of Deicide.  It is perennial Catholic teaching that the guilt and the penalty of certain crimes against God are, by their very nature, transferred to future generations — for example, Original Sin and the sin of the Tower if Babel. Such also was the sin of Deicide. The traditional teaching of the Church was that the guilt and the punishment demanded by justice for the murder of Jesus were assumed voluntarily by the Jews and were laid upon their future generations. This was the constant interpretation of the Catholic Church until Vatican Council II.

The PBC, however, offers an opinion which is the very opposite of this Catholic teaching. That is, it alleges that the Gospels were not written objectively and cannot be considered a part of Divine Revelation. Accordingly there was no crime of Deicide, no such crime was committed by the Jews as a people, and the guilt and punishment of that crime did not fall upon the future generations of the Jews. So keen are they to seek the pardon and approval of Jews that relativist Catholic theologians seem ready to accept the notion of Deicide not by, but of the Jews.  The religion of the Holocaust is spreading from the Synagogue to the Cathedral.  And Holocaust denial is its gravest sin.

John Paul II at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, March, 2000

The reflections and actions of John Paul II and Benedict XVI concerning the Jews are condemned by the binding words of the Third Ecumenical Lateran Council, (1179), which pronounced an anathema on those who, preferring the Jews to the Christians, would receive the testimony of Jews against Christians and not that of Christians against Jews.

Speaking about Bishop Richard Williamson, His Holiness, Bishop of Rome and Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, Pope Benedict XVI stated in U.S. News and World Report, February 12, 2009:

“The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity,” Benedict told the visiting leaders, using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust. “This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy Scriptures.”

“It is beyond question that any denial or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable and altogether unacceptable,” he said during the meeting in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.

Jewish leaders applauded his comments, saying the crisis with the church that had been sparked by Bishop Richard Williamson’s comments was over.

Abraham Foxman, a Holocaust survivor and the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the Vatican should excommunicate Williamson again because of his remarks.

Further reading:

By Atila Sinke Guimaraes:

In the Murky Waters of Vatican II, 1997

Animus Delendi I, 2000

Animus Delendi, II, 2002

Will He Find the Faith, 2007?

The Biblical Commission on the Jews: Changes in Doctrine and the New Anathema, 2003

By Bro. Michael Dimond and Bro. Peter Dimond:

The Truth about What Really Happened to the Catholic Church after Vatican II, undated)

Trudie Pert is a pen name.  Email her.

We Westerners really do live in a Jewish world. Jewish control of the media is undeniable, as I’ve written about for years. One area that remains under-treated is the one most people still associate with Jews—and not always kindly: financial matters. Whether a Jewish group evolutionary strategy is responsible for their outsized success with money, whether it is because Jews are “the synagogue of Satan,” as St. John’s gospel famously quoted Jesus as saying, or whether it is some other factor, at the end of the day Jewish temporal power comes down to money. And Jews have a lot of it.

I wrote about this in February in my blog Jews & Money. That has a lot of good background information, so I recommend that readers have a look.

Today I’ll expand on that theme, adding a few updates.

Let’s start with Rolling Stones reporter Matt Taibbi’s excellent introduction to his essay The Great American Bubble Machine:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Taibbi knows how to turn a phrase, as he shows elsewhere in his writing on the economic crisis we’re facing:

It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far.

Folks, I have to insist: An awful lot of this massive theft and fraud has been done by Jews. And now that Jewish control is so pervasive, Jews can openly joke about their perfidy—and get away with it. Consider this skit from the heavily Jewish program Saturday Night Live. The skit makes fun of the prominent role Jews played in the financial meltdown, spoofing Herbert and Marion Sandler, Congressman Barney Frank, and even George Soros. Here’s the unadulterated original version. It’s a keeper.

Consider now the recent European crisis centered on Greece. The venerableNew York Times, in the article “Wall St. Helped to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis”, as much as confirms this Jewish role in the destabilization of Greece, including how Greece’s future airport revenue and lottery proceeds were squandered in order to keep current spending off the books.

As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created byGoldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels. . . .

The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.

Financial crime is deeply embedded in Jewish culture. M. Raphael Johnson wrote an expose of the Judeo-Russian Mafia based on Robert I. Friedman’s book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. Friedman stated that the entire “Russian” mafia is Jewish, without exception. Johnson also reported that

Friedman is also not afraid to admit that Jewish organizations throughout the world, led by the Anti-Defamation League, are the beneficiaries of largesse coming from organized crime, and that the organizations in question are aware of it. In other words, Jewish organized crime is considered an acceptable part of Jewish life, and that Jewish organizations have actually lobbied law enforcement to stop investigations into this phenomenon, almost always with success.”

Sadly, Friedman died young from a rare “tropical disease.”

I’m also happy to see that renegade scholar E. Michael Jones, author of the 1,200-page The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, is now at work on a new book about Jews and Capitalism. He has excerpted parts of the book in the February and March issues of his journalCulture Wars.

The basis of his March essay is a new book by Josh Kosman called The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Will Cause the Next Great Credit Crisis. There Kosman tells us that “the rapacious leveraged-buyout kings of the 1980s were still around. They had just adopted a new name, now calling themselves private-equity investors.” And their tactics remain the same. Just like Taibbi’s metaphor of the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” leveraged buyout “artists” and private-equity (PE) investors suck the money and lifeblood out of otherwise healthy companies.

Jones and Kosman describe the process: PE investors buy a company, starve them of cash and human capital to generate short-term profits, then use the profits as a basis to borrow more money. The new loans are then piled on top of the original debt taken on to finance the LBO. All this new money is then used to issue a big fat dividend for the PE folks so that the money from the loans goes straight into their pockets.

Now they have moved into acquiring hospitals and nursing homes. Companies and health-care organizations so acquired by PE end up with “crippling debt, loss of reputation, the lay-off of skilled workers, and in many cases bankruptcy.” PE is “another word for looting. The companies which got taken over were plundered for their resources.”

Employing his skills as a historian, Jones notes the obvious fact that “the history of Jewish predatory lending practices, [is] something which antedates the leveraged buy-outs of the ‘80s by centuries.” He then argues that “The concentration of the nation’s wealth in the hands of a few avaricious Jews has led to corruption of both discourse and culture, which is subsidized to serve the Mammonites that feed it.”

The ancient Jewish practice of usury will be the death of the American economy as well. Usury, Jones claims, “knows no limits. It has no telos. It grows like cancer and only stops growing when it brings about the death of its host.” America (and parts of Europe) are approaching that end, for economic activity bereft of morality “becomes usurious, which is to say, cancerous, which is to say bound to bring about the death of the national economy which is its host organism.”

Again, Jones, Kosman and I are not talking about anything new. It’s long been a stereotype of Western folklore that Jews are deceitful, particularly when it comes to money. Now they seem not to bother with strenuous efforts to disguise it — although explicit assertions that these patterns have anything to do with Jewishness will be met with an outpouring of outrage and charges of anti-Semitism by the ADL. Over the previous few decades, they’ve pushed the envelope, and — I hope to even their own surprise — we goyim have barely reacted. Is their well-known contempt for us deserved, then?

There may well be contempt, but prudently there is also wariness of the riled goy. Observers have long noted that Jews are exquisitely sensitive to the mood of the far larger non-Jewish masses that surround them. There is no doubt that Jews have developed a fine-tuned radar for when things might turn sour.

Kevin MacDonald just wrote about this with respect to Jewish NYTimescolumnist Frank Rich. No doubt mindful of the prominent role his fellow tribe members have been playing in the financial crisis, in the placement of the first non-White in the White House, and in the more general multicultural program of White dispossession, Rich fears the “mass hysteria” that might reasonably accompany such a dispossession.  Rich wrote the following about soon-to-be minority Whites:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory [of White rage]. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.

Rich’s sharing of Jewish thinking is useful, but the fact is Rich is a grouch. Far more fun to read is blogger James Howard Kunstler, who more and more in his weekly Monday blogs has been showing his own hysteria about what might happen should the fleeced goyim ever wake up.

In his recent blog Our Turn?, he begins with a familiar Jewish obsession:

Nations go crazy. It’s terrifying when it happens, especially to a major nation with the ability to project its craziness outward. We look back on the psychotic break of Germany in 1933 and still wonder how the then-best-educated population in Europe could fall under the sway of a sociopathic political program. We behold the carnage and devastation left in the wake of that episode, and decades later you still can do little more than shake your head in bewilderment.

Kunstler is talking about “a genuine descent into madness, with the very high probability of persecution, violence, murder, and mayhem — all more or less sponsored by various authorities and institutions.”

Working himself up into a lather, he continues, “One day soon, somebody with a gun or an explosive device, someone with a very sketchy sense-of-self, and perhaps a recent record of personal failure and humiliation, is going to sacrifice himself to become the Tea Party’s first martyr by shooting up a shopping mall in some blue district.”

Readers of Kunstler’s blogs will know of his fear and contempt for Americans who do not live in big cities and who are not reflexively liberal in their politics. These are the infamous “cornporn Nazis” of Kunstler’s nightmares. “The guerilla forces of the radical right will not know whether they are fighting for WalMart, or the Financial Services arm of General Electric, or against abortions, or for bigger and better freeways, or the rights of thoracic surgeons to drive families into bankruptcy, or against the idea of climate change, or evolution, or Jews-in-the-media, or their neighbors having something they feel envious about.”

In other words, in Kunstler’s views, these people are idiots, but they are dangerous idiots. As I say, there is some perverse fun to be had in reading Kunstler’s description of us Whites in flyover America, people who strive “so desperately to turn the United States into a high-definition Jesus tele-theocracy of Perpetual NASCAR.” The contempt is palpable.

What is to be done? Kunstler, like many other Jews, would like to see the heavy hand of state employed. “I hope Mr. Obama can discipline these maniacs. I would like to see him start by instructing his attorney general to look into the connection between Republican officials (including staff members) and the threats of violence and murder that were made last week around the country.”

Oh, I see it’s already started — sort of. CNN has been reporting on a “Christian warriors” militia that was supposedly on the verge of starting a massacre of Michigan law enforcement officials. Judging by the faces CNN is showing, Kunstler and other haters of “cornporn Nazis” are going to have a public relations field day.

You might want to take a look at the equipment employed by the state of Michigan—NOT the military—to respond to this threat. More and more, our civilian police forces resemble the military—and they’re not shy about aggressively attacking citizens either — Sam Francis’s anarcho-tyranny in action.

In any case, we need more scholarly treatments of Jews and money, something along the lines of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique applied to the financial world. It could show how Jewish economic behavior is a deeply ingrained aspect of Judaism as group strategy. It could further explore how economic behavior is related to activism in the media, politics, the legal system, academia, etc. As it stands now, that mountain of money in Jewish hands is at the disposal of a hostile elite (see here, and here . . . and here) that fears and mostly dislikes us— people like Frank Rich, William Howard Kunstler, and thousands of other antsy Jews like them. What will happen to us if such Jews feel so at risk that they preemptively seek to neutralize the “threatening” ones among us?

In Homo Americanus, as I’ve noted numerous times, Croatian savant Tomislav Sunic envisions such a scenario for any group in America that might be targeted: “Thus, in order for the proper functioning of future Americanized society, the removal of millions of surplus citizens must become a social and possibly also an ecological necessity.” In his VDARE review Stalin’s Willing Executioners?, MacDonald made a similar observation, identifying what sectors might be targeted “and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union — the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow.” They are the European-derived Whites populating vast areas of the American nation, particularly in the so-called “red states.”

The noose is tightening around our necks. We’ve all seen it — hundreds of examples of the “anarcho-tyranny” that Sam Francis described. A prank at a Wal-Mart asking black shoppers to leave sends the mass media into moral panic mode and the police are fast to react. Yet Blacks murdering Whites is not news. Thugs close down a perfectly legal conference by the White Nationalist group American Renaissance by making death threats against hotel workers, and the police, the FBI and the mainstream media are uninterested.

Some readers might smirk when viewing mug shots of the Christian militia group “Hutaree” above or photos of the trailer homes in which they live, but these things have a way of escalating.  It is we Whites, worried about our rapid dispossession, who should be anxious, not the well-remunerated Jews who are the dynamic force of our hostile elite.  Truly we live in an inverted world.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.

Johannes Stark (1874-1947): Leader of the German Physics Movement

After the Napoleonic Wars the Jews began for the first time to enjoy the benefits of full citizenship in the countries of Europe. By virtue of their innate talents, pent-up energy, drive, and ambition, they quickly climbed the social ladder, becoming especially prominent in the first instance in commercial pursuits and later in financial, professional, cultural, and scientific circles. Generally, the leaders in the countries in which they lived, recognizing the talents of the new comers, quickly embraced and employed them as tax collectors, bankers, and investment advisors in order to protect and increase their own wealth and position.

With the Jewish rise to prominence, even dominance in some areas, Jewish thought and teachings have transformed Western society — even the sciences. The ascendancy of the Jews in society in general may be seen in microcosm in the competition for the laurels awarded to the most distinguished researchers in the physical sciences by the Nobel Prize selection board.

Although an imperfect measure, the number of Nobel Prize winners is a handy gauge of outstanding achievement in the sciences. Some consider the measure unreliable because they question the impartiality of the selection board. Others would prefer emphasizing the ethnicity of the laureate rather than the country he happens to reside in, believing that ethnicity is a more significant criterion than citizen ship in a particular nation state. Without a homeland of their own, ethnic Jewish scientists have always carried out their research in diverse countries and have won their Nobel Prizes as citizens of those “host” countries. Some Jewish groups, motivated by pride, have taken to identifying and publicizing the Nobel Prize laureates who are Jewish. Ethnic identification is made according to strict Halachic definition based on the interpretation of Hebrew Scriptures, stipulating that to be a Jew requires being born to a Jewish mother (adherence to the Jewish Volk is inherited down the female line in the same manner as mitochondrial DNA) or undergoing formal conversion to Judaism. In other words, a Jew by that definition can be either one who adheres to the religion of Judaism or a non-believer whose mother happened to be Jewish even if she was not practicing her religion.

To avoid ethnic chauvinism, the Nobel Prize committee itself does not take the ethnicity or the heredity of a laureate into account. The Nobel Committee does not choose the winning Laureate as exemplars of a specific racial group but as citizens of the county in which they reside.

On the basis of the Nobel committee’s official criteria, in the overall compilation of winners (in all fields: physics, chemistry, bio medicine, economics, literature, peace) Ger many, without reference to race or religion of its citizens, has had a total of about a hundred laureates. On the other hand, the Jewish world community, using its own Halachic identification criteria, proudly claims today that the number of Jewish laureates to date in all fields has already far surpassed that number, which is to say that approximately 25% of all Nobel laureates to date have been Jews. Using the Halachic method of counting, many American Nobel laureates are of course scored as Jewish.

Based on the citizenship of the country in which they reside, the United States is the grand master with over 160 winners in all fields, repre senting one-third of all Nobel laureates. Before World War II the Ger mans held the overall lead, but have fallen behind owing to the human and territorial losses in World War II as well as the postwar emigration (voluntarily or forcible) of scientists to the United States, Great Britain, Soviet Russia, and elsewhere. In addition, the reorganization and democratization of the German school system by the Allies after the war also lowered standards.

Both peoples, German and Jews, have unquestionably contributed more than their share to the advances made in the various fields of scientific endeavor and especi ally in the natural sciences, as exemplified by physics since about 1900. In the specific field of physics, Germany has produced 26 winners 5 of which were Jews, or roughly 20%. By Halachic definition, Jews worldwide have earned some 44 laureates in physics alone. An educated guess, if not by actual count, suggests that an even greater per centage of U.S. laureates, perhaps 25–30 %, were also Jewish. Four of 6 Russian winners in physics, i.e., two-thirds, were Jewish. Roughly the same numbers and percentages would pertain to chemistry and medicine as well.

The high number of winners for the United States and ethnic Jews since about 1950 can partially be attributed to the fact that increasingly multiple (2–3 or more) scientists may be awarded the laureate for the same accomplishment, i.e., a team of researchers may share the award. Another factor at work affecting the high number of U.S. and Jewish laureates is the high costs involved in modern research that favor the rich countries and put the smaller countries at a disadvantage. Also, the personal wealth of a significant number of U.S. Jewish laureates permitted them to study at the best universities in the world, which, in turn, helps to explain their remarkable success. Moreover, the gifted and affluent ethnic Jewish laureates were able to use and build upon the scientific infrastructure (labs, universities, scholarship, traditions, preexisting and accumulated achievements of earlier, indigenous scholars, etc.) of the advanced Western countries in which they resided.

Intelligence tests have consistently shown that Ashkenazi Jews score higher on average than Whites and Asians.  And among the Jews themselves, the Ashkenazi group rates somewhat higher than the Sephardim. However, IQ is apoor explanation of Jewish success in being Nobel laureates because non-Jews greatly outnumber Jews. For example, if we take an IQ of 145 as a cutoff for genius and assume that Jews were around 3.4% of the White US population in 1950, there were nearly 4 times more non-Jewish White geniuses in the US than Jewish geniuses. And there would have been a much greater disparity in pre-World War II Germany where Jews were around 1% of the population.

Ethnic Competition in Physics

Nationalism in the first half of the 20^th century, especially in Europe, was so strong that many thought the sciences themselves were pervaded with the spirit of the people who developed them. It was in this age and atmosphere that Zionism too (secular Jewish nationalism) was aborning. To a considerable extent it is true that each nation has its own specific approach or style of research, but can the results of research be colored by the ethnicity of the researcher? The following is based mainly on Johannes Stark‘s Jüdische und deutsche Physik(Jewish and German Physics, originally published in 1941). Stark was a leader of the German Physics movement during the National Socialist period.

No one has ever accused the Jews or the Germans of being underachievers in matters intellectual. If anything, it is precisely because both peoples are notorious overachievers that they have incurred the suspicion and dislike of the less ambitious who often claim to find the manners of Jews and Germans offensive. Compounding the situation, Jews and Germans often find each other’s behavior objectionable, most probably because they are in competition with each other. Like two magnets of the same strength, they can attract each other in one configuration or they can repel each other in another. We have seen both configurations, though admittedly more of the latter.

Both Germans and Jews are proud peoples and have earned the right to be so.

Unfortunately, competition, driven by national pride, has in the past provoked discord and even scandalous contention among Nobel laureates. In Germany, decades before the rise of the National Socialists, a bitter dispute arose between German and Jewish physicists, clearly reflecting group cultural differences. At the center of the storm was Albert Einstein.

A small but important group of German physicists (Wilhelm Wien, Philipp Lenard, Johannes Stark), all early Nobel laureates and suffused with the spirit of German nationalism, resented the fact that natural phenomena discovered by German scientists were quickly appropriated by the British and assigned English names (e.g., Röntgen rays were called X-rays). Even more irritating to the German nationalists was the fact that a number of Jews, domestic and foreign, who studied in Germany, were soon getting an exorbitant amount of publicity and credit for research that had been pioneered earlier by Germans and others.

Philipp Lenard (1862-1947)

This animosity toward the British, like so much of the anger that propelled the rise of the National Socialists, stemmed from World War I propaganda that painted the Germans in the worst possible light, culminating in declaring Germany solely guilty for the war. To counter this propaganda, the Germans, with Wien and other physicists in the lead, joined in the so-called Krieg der Geister (War of Minds) in which leading figures in German society fought a paper war with the French and British to set the record right.

Wilhelm Wien (1864-1928)

The prominence and celebrity accorded to Einstein and “his” Theory of Relativity was, in German eyes of that day, the main provocation and the straw that broke the back of the German nationalists. Several important German physicists believed, for example, that Friedrich Hasenöhrl, a German almost unknown today because his work was not publicized, deserved much of the credit and certainly at least some credit for developing the theory. Hasenöhrl, for example, was the first to postulate the fundamental idea of the equivalence of energy and mass. Underlying the surface dispute of assigning proper credit for the development of the relativity theory was an even more sinister concern. Einstein’s relativity was, in the minds of many, equated with moral relativity, a trait that Germans and others associated with Jews. Even the famous E = mc² formula had been introduced earlier (1903), albeit for a different purpose, by the Italian Olinto De Pretto and published by the Veneto Royal Science Institute in the scientific journal Atte.

Friedrich Hasenöhrl (1874-1915)

In actual fact, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the Theory of Relativity, but for his work in theoretical physics in general and his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Nonetheless, Einstein was faulted by German and other physicists for failing to give proper credit to the many scientists upon whose studies he based his own. Stark, among others, asserted that Einstein gave no credit, not even in footnotes, to researchers like Hendrik Lorentz, Jules Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and Stark himself, all of whom had contributed much in the field. Not even the German astronomer and geodesist J. G. Soldner, who lived decades before Einstein and who was the first to describe the bending of light in the gravita tional field of the Sun, was mentioned by Einstein.

Methodically, these disgruntled German physicists proceeded to define how German physics differed from Jewish physics. The essential difference, accord­ing to the Germans, resides in each group’s fundamental approach to the study of physics. The traditional approach to the study of physics in Germany has been classical, pragmatic, empirical, and experimental. Jewish physics, on the other hand, was considered dogmatic, intuitive, overly abstract and theoretical. Generally speaking, Jewish scientists tended to rely on mathematical rather than observed physical laws, on inductive leaps rather than on the laborious accumulation of empirical evidence. The two divergent schools of research, many thought, reflected the innate ethnic attributes of the physicists.

In 1941 Stark, who was by then a member of the National Socialist Party, condemned the dogmatic approach as practiced by Einstein and other Jewish physicists:

The dogmatic approach seeks to extract scientific knowledge from the human mind. It builds thought systems based on human concepts of the outside world and sees in these only manifestations of their own thoughts and formulas. Our pragmatic approach draws its knowledge from careful observations and planned targeted experiments. Our own imagination is used only as a means of planning the experiment. If the plan does not confirm the experiment, then it is replaced by another concept that better corresponds to reality. The dogmatic approach believes that new knowledge can be obtained by means of desktop mathematical operations. The dogmatists then spin out their formulas into great theories and propagate them in books and on the lecture circuit. A prime example of this is the worldwide aggressive propagandizing of Einstein’s theories of relativity. The pragmatic approach seeks to understand reality in patient, often yearlong laboratory work and limits itself to the publication of the results so obtained.

Because the pragmatic German physicists rely chiefly on careful, instrument-based, direct observations of experimental data, their approach is occasionally referred to as “brass machine physics” because of the many tools and instruments employed in their investigations. The dogmatists, on the other hand, chose to derive their knowledge of the laws of physics through mathematical operations and formulas that then formed the basis of the grand theories spun by Einstein and other members of that school of physics. Further irritating the Germans was the disproportionately approbative publicity accorded such dogmatic theories by the print and electronic media, which the Germans believed was managed and promoted by fellow Jews.

By the 1930s extreme elements of the National Socialist Party were even labeling ethnic German researchers like Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, and Arnold Sommerfeld “White Jews” for sometimes adhering to the Einsteinian theoretical mathematical approach. Even when Heisenberg postulated his Uncertainty Principle, which challenged Einstein’s belief in a causal, predictable universe, many German physicists opposed him. These scientists rejected quantum physics on the grounds that all unified field theories, including Heisenberg’s, viewed space-time in Einstein’s terms.

Some racially minded individuals further opined that perhaps Jewish dogmatism even harkened back genetically to their Semitic ancestors in the age when Jewish prophets and lawgivers abounded. In a more critical vein some critics accused Jews of using their inherent analytical talent for the destruction of their host society’s existing absolutes and replacing them with a value system of their own creation (i. e., the thesis of The Culture of Critique).  The talent of the Germans on the other hand, was attributed by some to their adeptness in synthesizing proven components into a viable whole (analysis vs. synthesis).

With regard to the employment of Jewish scientists in Nazi Germany, a certain flexibility prevailed. It is said, for example, that that Herman Göring, when once asked to dismiss a valued colleague (Field Marshal Erhard Milch) who was Jewish, told the investigators that “I [Göring] will decide who is a Jew.”  When it suited them, or expediency demanded it, the Nazi Party was even prepared to declare certain Jews “honorary Aryans.” In the field of nuclear physics, for example, Fritz Houtermans was a Communist and the son of a Jewish mother. He was therefore considered Jewish both by according to Jewish law and National Socialist law. Houtermans worked with his German colleagues throughout the war. The higher political echelons of the Party were obviously taking a very prudent approach, preferring not to foolishly alienate modern physicists who might be needed or who might even be correct.

As James Wyllie has shown in his book The Warlord and the Renegade this political flexibility on the part of the Göring family and the Nazi Party was also evident in the field of psychotherapy, in the German Institute for Psychogenic Research and Psychotherapy in Berlin, directed by Matthias Heinrich Göring, a cousin of Herman. Although Matthias Göring himself and the Party favored Adlerian psychoanalysis, his staff included practitioners in the three major fields of psychotherapy as developed by Freud, Adler, and Jung. The Nazi Party, which saw religion and culture as the main determinants of mental processes and behavior, referred to psychotherapy as Seelenheilkunde, literally “soul therapy.” So successful was Herman Göring in reconciling the Institute’s practices with Hitler and the Party that after the war many of his staff were permitted by the Occupation to continue their work.

The renowned psychologist Carl J. Jung remarked of Hitler:

He belongs in the category of authentic wizards. … He has in his eyes the expression of a prophet. His power is not absolutely political; it is magical. Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is well led. The idea is confirmed in the word Mahdi, the Islamic Messiah, which translates to ‘He who is well led.’

Adler and Freud described him quite differently.

Thus, German and Jewish scientists can and have worked successfully together, even under the worst possible conditions. Even if the extreme nationalists on both sides have to bite their lips, their scientists were able to cooperate in both the best and worst of times. Indeed, their different approaches to research may actually complement each other.

Postscript: After the war in 1947 Nobel laureate Johannes Stark, who had been actively concerned with ridding the German university system of all Jewish influence, was declared a “major offender” and sentenced to four years imprisonment by a denazification court. Philipp Lenard died in 1947 before the courts could convict him.

Daniel W. Michaels, a native New Yorker, received his BS in geography from Columbia University in 1954. Following five years in the Army (three of which stationed in Germany) and a Fulbright grant for studies in Tuebingen University, Mr. Michaels worked in the Defense Department until his retirement in 1993. He continues to contribute articles to various journals on World War II and Cold War matters. (Email him.)