Jewish Ethnocentrism

Israeli Minister latest in long line of prominent Jews asserting the inferiority of non-Jews

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At TOO we have felt something of a duty to document instances where prominent, mainstream Jewish figures have publicly expressed the traditional Jewish view of a qualitative superiority of Jews to non-Jews. Previous examples include the late Lubavitcher leader, Menachem Schneerson of New York who was honored by President Reagan in 1983 (“The Gentile does not want anything. He waits to be told what the Jew wants!”; we have a case of . . . a totally different species. . . . The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world).

Another well-known example is Sephardic leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s statement that “Goyim were born only to serve us.” As the previous link shows, such statements are pervasive on the ethno-religious right in Israel, often by very prominent mainstream figures.

Mondoweiss provides another example, this time from Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan. Dahan, who has nine children and has lived in a West Bank settlement, recently stated that “Palestinians have to understand they won’t have a state & Israel will rule over them.”

So much for the farce of peace negotiations. But not too long ago, Dahan showed he is entirely on board with Schneerson, Yosef, et al.:

Ben-Dahan referred to Palestinians as animals in 2013, according to the Times of Israel:

“To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.”

Ben Dahan told Maariv that homosexual Jews were superior [to] gentiles — gay or straight.

“A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual,” he said.

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Netanyahu’s fanatic supporters

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Related to my recent article on the fanatics who support Netanyahu and the Right in Israel, Philip Weiss notes that Labor candidate Yitzhak Herzog did not raise the Palestinian issue in a meaningful way during the election campaign for fear of his life.

Why did Herzog fail? I believe he was afraid of his own people. A week ago I was in Rabin Square for a rally by the Netanyahu forces, and they were terrifying. The people I met in the street said racist and foolish things about Arabs, both Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett made religious statements bordering on lunacy about the Jewish right to the land, and they were preceded on the dais by Daniella Weiss, a settlement leader who has supported “pricetag attacks,” Jewish violence aimed at deterring the Israeli government from uprooting settlers. …

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The Pathetic Apologetics of Caroline Glick

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Editor’s note: As someone who has  written chapters on Jewish apologia and  self-deception, I have to say that Caroline Glick may be the most extreme case I have ever encountered. One struggles for words to describe her rabid ethnocentrism and how it blinds her to the most obvious realities. Jews are morally superior paragons of rationality, responsible for everything good in the world, including Western institutions of democracy and individual freedom. With only a few exceptions (non-Jews who accept the tutelage of Jews), non-Jews are, as Brenton Sanderson phrases it, “brutish and irrational embodiments of evil” while Jews are “reasoning, intelligent moral paragons.”

Truly breathtaking. It’s terrifying to think that such a person is a highly praised and powerful member not only of the Israeli political establishment but is also a well-established figure in neoconservative circles and the media in the US.

Caroline Glick is an American-born Israeli journalist and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. She is also the Senior Fellow for Middle East Affairs of the Washington DC-based neoconservative Center for Security Policy. A radical Zionist, Glick migrated to Israel in 1991 and served in the Israeli Defense Force before going on to serve as assistant foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Glick has been showered with awards and praise from Zionist and Jewish organizations. In 2003 the Israeli newspaper Maariv named her the most prominent woman in Israel. She was the 2005 recipient of the Zionist Organization of America’s Ben Hecht award for Outstanding Journalism (previous recipients included A. M. Rosenthal, Sidney Zion and Daniel Pipes). She has also been awarded the Abramowitz Prize for Media Criticism by Israel Media Watch. In 2009 she received the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv. In 2012 The David Horowitz Freedom Center announced the hiring of Glick as the Director of its “Israel Security Project.”

Inevitably, given the Jewish stranglehold over the American media, Glick is given a regular platform to espouse her Jewish supremacist views in The Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Times and many other newspapers and journals around the world. She is also a regular pundit on MSNBC and the Fox News channel. Given her wide exposure in the Jewish-controlled media, and the senior positions she holds within the neoconservative establishment (where she is touted as “a brilliant and outspoken Jewish academic”), one might expect Glick to possess a formidable intellect and have a knack for formulating intellectually sophisticated Jewish apologetics. Read more

Jews and Race: A Pre-Boasian Perspective, Part 2

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PRE-BOASIAN JEWISH DISCOURSE ON INTERMARRIAGE

The Zionist Elias Auerbach viewed Jewish intermarriage as not necessarily a problem providing the endogamous Jewish racial core population remained unpolluted by the taint of non-Jewish blood. The offspring of mixed marriages (Mischlinges) are, he noted, overwhelmingly lost to the Jewish community — leaving the “sacred chain” of Jewish heredity within that community intact. As Kevin MacDonald pointed out in A People that Shall Dwell Alone, this had the eugenic effect of selecting for high levels of ethnocentricity among the remnant Jewish community. Those with low levels of ethnocentricity (manifested in a propensity for intermarriage) were lost to the Jewish community — leaving a hyper-ethnocentric endogamous core behind. Accordingly, Auerbach writes that:

In Germany at present [1903], the rate of Jewish intermarriage is approximately one sixth of pure (rein) Jewish marriages. This number is so large that one would be forced to derive from it a total and imminent dissolution of German Jewry. A genuine intermixture, however, has only really taken place when the offspring of this intermarriage then introduce this foreign blood into the Jewish Volk. Now the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of these offspring of mixed marriages (Mischlinge) withdraw from Jewry both religiously and nationally, shutting themselves off thereby from any union through marriage with the Jewish nation (Stamme der Juden); thus, they remove themselves from the equation, for the most part, when it comes to [our analysis of] racial mixture. The Jewish human material (Menschenmaterial) that we are analyzing from an anthropological viewpoint and that is the foundation of the Jewish race in the progressive movement of history will consequently have altered very little and remains a homogeneous mass; they [the Jews] seldom lose elements to another people through dissolution. A careful and scrupulous authority on this issue, the statistician Arthur Ruppin, estimates the number of offspring of mixed marriages who remain within Jewry to be only 10 percent of all offspring produced by the mixture of Jews and non-Jews in Germany. As to actual mixing of blood, we would thus have to figure that at only 1/60 of the racial stock of German Jews. However, even this small, though nevertheless not infinitesimal, number is valid only for Germany and for a few other countries, in which altogether a very small percentage of the Jewish people (Stamm) live.

If one goes back just a few decades, the number of Jewish intermarriages declines precipitously in relation to the Jewish population overall. In Prussia the number of mixed marriage declines by half, if one goes back twenty years; for the Jewish population in general this occurs only when one goes back sixty years. Before this period, around the turn of the nineteenth century, the intermixing of the Jews [with other peoples] in Europe dwindles almost to the vanishing point. For the entirety of the Middle Ages — and for Jewish racial history, the term “Middle Ages” is valid up until the French Revolution — the number of intermarriages was so minute as to be negligible, the more so as barely any offspring of such marriages mingled their blood with that of Jews. The law of racial isolation of the Jews from the peoples around them in Europe held true for the entire Middle Ages. [Italics in the original] [i] 

Elias Auerbach

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Menachem Mendel Schneerson: The Expedient Messiah, Part 3

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“WE WANT MOSHIACH NOW”

When Schneerson assumed the leadership of Chabad, it was a numerically small group, anchored by geographic and cultural boundaries. Like other Hasidim it tried to preserve itself and its version of Judaism by ghettoizing itself, relying on Yiddish as its primary language, dressing in ways that made its members seem attached to another time and place, and sheltering its young in their communities, protected them from the melting pot of the non-Jewish and assimilated-defiled Jewish-American world. The various Hasidic sects proselytized among each other, competing for new followers. The general perception in the United States, as in Israel, was that this sort of Judaism was a relic of the past, destined to fade away in time.

For a cosmopolitan man who aspired to position and prominence, such limitations must have been constricting. Then in 1961, with the launching of John Kennedy’s Peace Corps, it occurred to Schneerson that he could establish a similar organization. Whereas most Hasidic groups remained in enclaves to survive, Schneerson decided to steer Chabad in a new direction: Lubavitch success would occur by engaging the world. A Jewish peace corps with Hasidic volunteers would be sent all over the world, not to serve the world’s poor, but to rehabilitate non-observant Jews. Lubavitchers would not compete with other Hasids for new followers; they would find them outside the Brooklyn Heights ghetto. This global outreach campaign became the hallmark of the Lubavitch sect and the reason for its tremendous success and Schneerson’s vast influence. Read more

Menachem Mendel Schneerson: The Expedient Messiah, Part 2

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MID-LIFE CRISIS AND CAREER CHANGE

Settled with and continuing his dependence on his father-in-law, Schneerson no doubt experienced some anxiety about what to do next. Job prospects for a 40-plus-year-old refugee engineer with poor English language skills were not good. A temporary place was soon found for him, however, serving as his father-in-law’s financial emissary to Hasidim in Europe for the next seven years. Sometime during that period it seems to have occurred to Schneerson that he could compete for the plum position of rebbe of Chabad, now that the reign of his ailing father-in-law appeared to be nearing its end. Either that or he underwent an opportunely timed Hasidic born again-experience. Whichever it was, he needed to reinvent himself, to acquire the lingo and gravitas to compete against his brother-in-law, Shmaryahu Gourary, who was Yosuf Yitzchok’s apparent successor. Incidentally, Schneerson’s change of heart from secular to religious, if such it was, is not unusual in middle age. It is a common Jewish experience to identify with secular modernity in one’s youth and return to Jewish collectivism and commitment in middle age.[11]

But first he had to evade the draft. As a legal immigrant resident Schneerson might very well have been conscripted during WWII. But Schneerson no more wanted to serve in the American army than Hasidic Jews in Russia had wanted to serve in the Czar’s or in the Bolshevik army. US law required all men between 18 and 65 to register, with those aged 18 to 45 to be immediately liable for induction. Though Chabad.org lists his date of birth as 1902, Schneerson reported 1895 as his birthdate on his draft card. He was therefore not subject to immediate conscription as he might have been.  Chabad.org also claims that he worked as a civilian engineer at the Brooklyn Naval Yard to avoid the accusation that he, in the habit of orthodox Jews, had evaded military service. No documents have been found to substantiate this claim.[12] Read more

Menachem Mendel Schneerson: The Expedient Messiah, Part 1

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It is the committed core — made up now especially of the highly influential Orthodox and Conservative  movements- which has always been the critical force for channeling Jewish behavior in the direction of genetic and cultural separatism. … It is the radicals who have reconstituted the Jewish community and have eventually won the day.

Kevin MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents[1]

Now that sixty years have passed since Menachem Mendel Schneerson assumed leadership of the fundamentalist Lubavitch Hasidic movement of Orthodox Judaism and seventeen years since his death, it is well worth giving the Rebbe and Lubavitch Hasidism a closer look. For years bumper stickers and billboards asserting that the coming of the Moschiach (messiah) is imminent, were exhibited everywhere. These are the people responsible for the huge models of Hanukkah menorahs that are still loudly displayed in the public square. Schneerson’s influence during his lifetime extended beyond his Hasidic sect; his legacy may hold broad implications for the future of Judaism.

The Hasidim or “pious ones” in Hebrew are a Jewish sect possessing an extremely ingrained sense of Jewish identity and practicing total ethnic separatism. Hasidism was at its height in the first half of the nineteenth century, and claimed the allegiance of millions in Eastern and Central Europe—perhaps a majority of East European Jews.[2) The present estimate for Orthodox Jews in North America is estimated to be 550–650 thousand. Many of the approximately 165,000 American Hasidim in New York City, the largest concentration, belong to three courts, the Satmar in Williamsburg, the Bobover in Boro Park, and the Lubavitchers in Crown Heights.[3] Many Hasidim distrust all lists and simply ignore the census forms because they consider it bad luck to count people. At the same time, secular Jews underestimate their numbers, because they don’t want the group to appear too influential. The Orthodox converse in Yiddish, and they preserve many of the traditions of pre-war styles of clothing and the religious traditions of Eastern European Jewry. Highly cohesive, collectivist, and authoritarian, they comprise an endogamous, genetically segregated kinship group and generally have very large families. A majority of American Jews are the descendants of East European Hasidim.

Chabad and Lubavitch are now used interchangeably to refer to the Hasidic dynasty   (founded in 1796 in the Russian town of Lubavitch) of which Schneerson became rebbe. Chabad is an acronym for the Hebrew words “Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge,” while Lyubavichi is the name of the Russian town where the sect was first located at the end of the 18th century. The idea of racial superiority, which has been an underlying constant in Jewish narration, appears early in the history of the seven generation dynasty of Schneerson (also spelled Schneersohn) rebbes. Since Chabad philosophy incorporates the teachings of the Kabbalah, the Tanakh, the Talmud and the Tanya (see below), messianic thought and belief in racial superiority are intrinsic to the sect’s dogma.

(A note about the difference between rabbi and rebbe: while a rabbi is hired or appointed by his community, a rebbe’s commission is by acclamation and his position powerful and lofty. He is considered to be an intermediary between the divine and his community; his position accords him an unprecedented role in his followers’ lives and his word about all matters is final.) Read more