Jewish Genetic Segregation

Review: Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, Part 1

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Jewish engagement with evolutionary theory is an important dimension of modern Jewish history and thought. While Jewish leaders and intellectuals have used the science of evolution to bolster notions of Jewish identity, they have also confronted and (often fiercely resisted) the use of evolutionary theory to conceptualize conflict between Jews and non-Jews. Published in 2006, Geoffrey Cantor’s Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism,  by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, explores the ways Jews – singly and communally – have engaged evolutionary thought in a variety of historical contexts, and the role it has played in modern Jewish history. A central focus of the book is exploring how evolutionary ideas have been deployed, by Jews and others, in the domains of race, anti-Semitism, and Zionism, and the recurrent use over the last century and a half of evolutionary ideas to characterize Jews.

Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) postulated natural selection as the driving force for biological evolution: that individuals in any species show a diversity of inherited characteristics and compete for the scarce resources needed to survive and reproduce. If certain characteristics benefit them in that competition, these are more likely to be passed on to the next generation and, consequently, the species will evolve over time. By the time Darwin’s book was published the transformation of species was a familiar theme, but Darwin was the first to publicly explicate the precise mechanism. While socialists and communists soon deployed Darwinian evolution in their antireligious polemics, it also attracted conservative and nationalistic thinkers. Darwin’s theory could, for example, be seen to justify unfettered capitalism. Indeed, the centrality of competition in the process of natural selection raised a host of moral issues for a Christian West. The advent of Darwinism also spawned a new way of conceptualizing race and racial competition. Read more

Israel bans book on affair between Israeli and Palestinian

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From the indispensable New Observer, “Israel Bans Interracial Marriage Book“:

Israel’s Education Ministry has formally banned a book about an interracial affair between a Jew and a Gentile because, the Jewish state’s government says, the book “threatens Jewish identity” and does not deal with the “significance of miscegenation” between “Jews and non-Jews.”

Haaretz-banned

 

This seems to be a recurring issue. As I noted in 2011 (“American Jews: We can be racialists in the Diaspora”):

Under pressure from American Jews, the Israeli government has withdrawn [link no longer works] TV ads urging Israelis to return to Israel to avoid being contaminated by intermarriage and non-Jewish culture. The ads emphasize a central motivation of Zionism: Jewish racial purity. That is, prominent early Zionists (most notably Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of the Likud faction that now dominates Israel) were deeply worried that Jews in the Diaspora in the West were succumbing to intermarriage.  Zionism  has always been first and foremost a tribal preservation project. As Jewish racial scientist Elias Auerbach phrased it, “Zionism would return Jews ‘back into the position they enjoyed before the nineteenth century—politically autonomous, culturally whole, and racially pure’” (see here, p. 158). …

The real sin of the Israeli government in the eyes of American Jews was that there was no distinction between marrying American Jews and American non-Jews.  The implicit message of the ADL and other Jews who objected to the ads is that Israeli endogamy is a wonderful thing, but it is an insult to American Jews to think that they can’t remain remain culturally separate and racially pure in the Diaspora.

I know that the Jewish double standard on endogamy is an old story around here, but it bears repeating again and again. Whites who are concerned about the future of their race and about retaining their culture are considered moral reprobates—psychiatric cases not fit to participate in civilized political discourse. But analogous Jewish concerns are absolutely mainstream, both in Israel and the Jewish Diaspora in the West.

Reflections on Jewish Intermarriage into Native Elites

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“I want to thank my Jewish daughter. I have a Jewish daughter. This wasn’t in the plan but I’m very glad it happened.”
Donald Trump, February 2015.

As discussion continues among White advocates over the Trump candidacy, I haven’t failed to notice that perhaps the most persistent criticism of Trump from our ranks has been his strong links to Jews, in particular his familial ties to Jewish blood. There’s certainly some substance to this. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, has adopted the Jewish religion as her own and has been married to Jewish real estate speculator Jared Kushner since 2009. Both of Donald Trump’s grandchildren are Jewish. Looking into the situation in more detail, I was intrigued to discover that Ivanka’s previous two significant relationships were also with Jews, Greg Hirsch and James Gubelmann. Of further note is Ivanka’s very close friendship with Chelsea Clinton, another progeny of the American power elite, who married the Jewish financier Marc Mezvinsky in 2010. The Trump and Clinton situations are excellent examples of the centuries-old practice of strategic Jewish intermarriage with native elites, and this phenomenon deserves some focussed attention.

Jewish intermarriage into non-Jewish power elites is a significant but under-researched aspect of Jewish strategies to maintain and expand influence. At first sight, of course, it appears paradoxical. A major part of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy is concerned with segregation of the gene pool and preventing high levels of genetic admixture from surrounding groups. Judaism has historically been replete with social and cultural controls designed to minimize contact with non-Jews, and therefore greatly inhibit admixture. Additionally, converts are dissuaded and scorned in Judaism in a manner quite without parallel in any other religious culture. However, as Kevin MacDonald has noted in A People That Shall Dwell Alone (2002, hereafter PTSDA), conversion and admixture were permissible, if not eagerly sought, when such an admixture was very small and offered significant net benefits to the group. Similarly, at the opposite end of the Jewish strategic ghetto, controls were also far from airtight — the most sincere Jewish apostates to Christianity tended to be overwhelmingly poor and obscure, and were little mourned by the group at large. The eugenic benefits of pursuing such a strategy are obvious. 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

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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Jews and Race: A Pre-Boasian Perspective, Part 1

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PART 1

Whether the Jews comprise a religion, a nation, an ethnic group, or a race (or a combination of these) has always been central to the Jewish Question. The recently published Jews & Race — Writings on Identity and Difference 1880–1940 (edited by Mitchell B. Hart) is an anthology of Jewish writing which offers a fascinating insight into Jewish racial thinking during a period when hierarchic social-Darwinian race theory was generally accepted throughout the West. Before the rise of Boasian anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s, Western anthropologists posited a direct correlation between external racial traits and internal psychological traits. Skin color was regarded as not just a physical attribute, but an external racial marker tied to a correlative set of intellectual, political, and cultural capabilities. Given the consistent results from over 90 years of IQ testing of different racial groups (as defined by external traits like skin color) and other race-based life history statistics, we know this methodology, long dismissed by those within the Judeo-Marxist intellectual establishment as “pseudoscience,” to be entirely valid.

The Jewish socialist writer Chaim Zhitlowsky expressed the orthodox view in 1939 when he noted that “it is understood that each Volk is endowed with certain characteristic traits, some bodily, some mental. Such traits are transmitted hereditarily from generation to generation, and determine how in fact a people receive the phenomena of the external world and how it reacts to these phenomena. On such traits depend the particular and specific national customs or manners, insofar as the blessed children of a people, the most gifted by nature, bring forth human cultural treasures.” The study of racial differences was held by Zhitlowsky to be necessary “in order to clarify the fundamental role of biology in human progress. Here the history of culture must be considered with racial descent in thinking about the creator of culture, and it is not a superfluous or meaningless thing to take [the biological] into account.” Read more

American Jews: “We can be racialists in the Diaspora”

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Under pressure from American Jews, the Israeli government has withdrawn TV ads urging Israelis to return to Israel to avoid being contaminated by intermarriage and non-Jewish culture. The ads emphasize a central motivation of Zionism: Jewish racial purity. That is, prominent early Zionists (most notably Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of the Likud faction that now dominates Israel) were deeply worried that Jews in the Diaspora in the West were succumbing to intermarriage.  Zionism  has always been first and foremost a tribal preservation project. As Jewish racial scientist Elias Auerbach phrased it, “Zionism would return Jews ‘back into the position they enjoyed before the nineteenth century—politically autonomous, culturally whole, and racially pure’” (see here, p. 158).

Responding to the ads, a Jeffrey Goldberg blog in The Atlantic was titled “Netanyahu Government Suggests Israelis Avoid Marrying American Jews.” Goldberg claimed that

the idea, communicated in these ads [is] that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel… The message is: Dear American Jews, thank you for lobbying for American defense aid (and what a great show you put on at the AIPAC convention every year!) but, please, stay away from our sons and daughters.

As Goldberg notes, the real sin of the Israeli government in the eyes of American Jews was that there was no distinction between marrying American Jews and American non-Jews.  The implicit message of the ADL and other Jews who objected to the ads is that Israeli endogamy is a wonderful thing, but it is an insult to American Jews to think that they can’t remain remain culturally separate and racially pure in the Diaspora.

I know that the Jewish double standard on endogamy is an old story around here, but it bears repeating again and again. Whites who are concerned about the future of their race and about retaining their culture are considered moral reprobates—psychiatric cases not fit to participate in civilized political discourse. But analogous Jewish concerns are absolutely mainstream, both in Israel and the Jewish Diaspora in the West.