Jews as An Elite

Joe Sobran was Right on Jewish Media Power

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In my post on Joe Sobran’s passing, I included this quote from Joe:

Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism. (Sobran 1996a, 3)

A current example that illustrates exactly this is the firing of Rick Sanchez from CNN for saying the following about Jews as victims:

Very powerless people… [snickers] He’s such a minority, I mean, you know [sarcastically]… Please, what are you kidding? … I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah. [sarcastically]

This is the offending section of the  interview:

So the scenario is exactly as Joe Sobran described it. Deep down you must be fully aware of Jewish power, but public utterances must pledge allegiance to the idea that Jews are powerless victims. Don’t mention the fact that “a lot of people who run [CNN and] all the other networks are a lot like [Jon] Stewart” — that they are Jews with immense power, able to shape public discourse on everything of importance. Never mention the obvious fact that Jews are a very large component of the elite in the US and throughout the West. And if you don’t go along with the “Jews as powerless victims” idea, then Jews will destroy you.

Powerless victims with the power to destroy their enemies.  And that’s exactly what happened.

Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

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Joe Sobran will be much missed. I met him only once, but I am a great admirer of his writing. The American Conservative wrote this:

The 20th century produced many great conservative writers, but none brought together wit, erudition, and humanity on a single page so well as Joseph Sobran.

At VDARE.com, Steve Fulford included this very appropriate quote from Joe:

Most prejudices aren’t created by official doctrines; they result from popular experience and the slow spreading of a group’s reputation. The first gypsy I ever met — on a street in Rome — grabbed a wad of money out of my hand. I’d been too naive to be wary of her, though my companions had warned me against her.

(Editor’s note: Readers of this post have posted many other wonderful quotes from Sobran in the comments section. Well worth reading. Joe clearly understood exactly what was going on and who our enemies are.) My own favorite quotes, culled from Chapter 2 of Separation and Its Discontents, include the following:

In comments reminiscent of those of Heinrich von Treitschke, columnist Joseph Sobran has also raised the issue of Jewish media control and how it shapes discussion of Jewish interests versus those of the Christian Right:

The full story of [Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential] campaign is impossible to tell as long as it’s taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. Talking about American politics without mentioning the Jews is a little like talking about the NBA without mentioning the Chicago Bulls. Not that the Jews are all-powerful, let alone all bad. But they are successful, and therefore powerful enough: and their power is unique in being off-limits to normal criticism even when it’s highly visible. They themselves behave as if their success were a guilty secret, and they panic, and resort to accusations, as soon as the subject is raised. Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism. (Sobran 1996a, 3)

This quote ended with the following footnote:

In another column, Sobran (1996b) quoted an essay, reprinted in the May 27th issue of the New York Times, by Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist describing his feelings on the killings of a hundred civilians in a military skirmish in southern Lebanon. Shavit wrote, “We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own.” Sobran comments that “in a single phrase—‘in our hands’—Shavit has lighted up the American political landscape like a flash of lightning. Notice that Shavit assumes as an obvious fact what we Americans can say publicly only at our own risk.” Sobran lost his position with National Review because of his views on the influence of American Jews on U. S. policy toward Israel.

As indicated in the last line, Sobran paid for his honesty about the Israel Lobby. His departure marked the rise of neocon domination at the Buckley’s execrable National Review and the equally execrable Republican Party. It was a huge loss for conservative thought in America.

The following may be called  Joe Sobran’s Dictionary. These are quotes attributed to Joe. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of these, except for the definition of an anti-Semite (which has become a classic). But they certainly fit his character. A particularly insightful comment, not included in the dictionary, is the  following — very appropriate in an age where the courts routinely overturn popular referenda, such as the recent Arizona immigration law: “Our constitution has never been an impediment to those who rule us.” The same thing happened to California’s Proposition 187. As Sam Dickson notes, the American legal system is a fraud.

Joe Sobran’s Dictionary

anti-Semite: a person who’s hated by Jews

association, freedom of: discrimination

bigot: one who practices sociology without a license

bribe: an irregular transaction through which the citizen may get his money’s worth of service from the government

civil rights: government power used in behalf of large groups

guilt: the deepest vested interest

isolationist: an American who thinks America should behave like other countries

opinion polls: clever devices to make the hostages think they control their captors

political correctness: the felt pressure of enlightened public opinion, under which we sense that certain thoughts, though technically legal now, are already destined to become taboo.

psychoanalysis: a form of aggression for humorless people

public opinion: what everyone thinks everyone else thinks

rich: politicians’ nickname for “other people” (as in “tax the rich”)

rights: authorizations for new areas of government control

rogue nation: a country that behaves like America

voting: trying to say something with a gag in your mouth

Rest in Peace.

Kevin MacDonald: Solzhenitsyn's "During the Civil War" — Chapter 16 of 200 Years Together

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Chapter 16 of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together is available here. Again, donations are of critical importance for finishing this important project. This immensely interesting and important chapter is the topic of the current TOO article. I solicit comments here.

Another Attempt to Control Historical Writing on the Role of Jews in the USSR

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Apropos the recent series on chapters from Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (especially Chapter 18), a new textbook for university students in Russia emphasizes the elite status of Jews in the early decades of the USSR. (JTA, August 8, 2010:  “Russian Textbook Seen as Anti-Semitic“) The Foreword states, “For the greater part of its 70-year history, the USSR was ruled by people of non-Russian nationality.” The book also states that, “By the 1930s, the Jewish nation was the leader among those represented in the Communist party and the state machinery, in Science and Art.”

At this point, the elite status of Soviet Jews during this period is common knowledge among scholars (e.g., Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century), but that doesn’t mean that scholars are free to draw attention to ethnicity in textbooks intended for university students. Predictably, any such effort is regarded as “anti-Semitic”: “some are calling [the book] anti-Semitic because it counts the number of Jews in Soviet governments.” As in the US, Jews are the elite that “cannot tell its name.”

Jewish activist organizations go ballistic over any mention that Jews are a disproportionate portion of American elites–truth is irrelevant. Those who stray into this forbidden territory soon learn that their lives have just gotten a lot more complicated. The result is that people behave like well-conditioned rats in a psychology experiment and keep their mouths shut no matter how obvious Jewish overrepresentation is. (“The New Elite Doesn’t Officially Exist“

The theme of the textbook is that the Russians were ruled by non-Russians. Rule by outsiders had predictably disastrous results for those without power: it was during this period that the most horrific mass murders of Russians occurred. The common sense of it is that Russians would not have murdered huge numbers of their own people in the name of international socialism.  (It takes Puritans to do that.) This leads to an often-repeated theme on this website: It is the ultimate folly to allow non-Whites — especially non-Whites with powerful historic grudges — to become a majority and develop the power to rule over Whites.

Also predictably, the article uses guilt-by-association arguments. An author of the textbook was the advisor to a student who is now on trial for murdering two anti-fascists, and the university where the text is used is “tainted by anti-Semitism” because it invited a Holocaust dissident to speak.

Okay. But does that show that the USSR was not ruled by non-Russians during this period or that Jews  were not an elite during the worst excesses of the  Soviet regime? The same can be said about the comment from the Jewish apologist attacking the idea that deportation of the Crimean Tatars was caused by the necessity of clearing the territory for the proposed Jewish republic. Even if true, it doesn’t go to the heart of the matter. Here’s what Solzhenitsyn says in Chapter 18:

The settlement of the Jews in the Crimea provoked the hostility of the Tatars (“Are they giving Crimea to the Jews?”) and dissatisfaction of local landless peasants. Larin writes “evil and false rumors are circulating throughout the country about removal of land from non-Jews, the expulsion of non-Jews and the particularly strong support the authorities have given to the Jewish settlers”. It went so far that the chairman of the CIK of the Crimean ASSR, Veli Ibraimov published an interview in the Simferopol paper Red Crimea (Sept 26, 1926) which Larin does not quote from, but which he claims was a manifestation of “evil bourgeois chauvinism” and a call for a pogrom.

Solzhenitsyn seems to agree that the Jews were treated very well by the government (with the help of foreign Jewish organizations), and he amply documents the resentments this caused among non-Jews. But he does not state that the Tatars were expelled because of Jewish settlement.

Of course, for all I know, the textbook doesn’t say that either. The Tatars weren’t deported until 1944, long after the project for Jewish settlement had fizzled.

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Oliver Stone

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The only movie by Oliver Stone  I remember is Natural Born Killers which I thought was horrifyingly ugly–a crude attempt to shock people, much like his recent comments. Stone always struck me as mainly a controversialist, and his comments on Hitler and Jewish media domination are no exception. I suppose he thought it would be a great way to promote his soon-to-be-released documentary. “Any publicity is good publicity.” But it’s hard to believe he doesn’t now think that this was an unwise move. Even if you are half Jewish, you just can’t say such things. And of course now he has apologized–under a great deal of pressure.

But the apology isn’t enough. Jewish superpatriot Haim Saban called it “soooo transparently fake” and is trying to get Showtime to cancel an upcoming TV series of Stone’s by talking to Leslie Moonves, the President and CEO of CBS which is scheduled to air the series on its cable channel Showtime. Moonves is Jewish, as is Sumner Redstone who is the largest shareholder of CBS and Chairman of the Board. Ari Emanual, the Jewish superpatriot and premier Hollywood agent who has taken the lead in going after Mel Gibson, also made a call trying to get the series cancelled.

What Jewish media power? Obviously, Stone is way out of line. Even Jewish publications acknowledge the  Jews run Hollywood.

The ADL’s statement is pure Orwell:

Oliver Stone’s apology stops short and is therefore insufficient. While he now admits that Jews do not control Hollywood, the media and other industries, he ignores his assertion that Jews are ‘…the most powerful lobby in Washington’ and that ‘Israel has (expletive) up United States foreign policy.’ This is another conspiratorial anti-Semitic canard that Mr. Stone needs to repudiate.

And while he’s at it, he should declare that Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman should get the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe that would be enough to get Stone back in the graces of Hollywood media elite.

Nah.

As if it couldn’t get any more Orwellian, Andy Nowicki’s curent TOO article describes an encounter between the ADL’s Abe Foxman and a delegation from the Ukraine eager to suck up to the ADL on Holocaust-related issues. (Foxman insists that the genocide of 7 to 10 million Ukrainians supervised and advocated by Lazar Kaganovich does not rise to the level of a Holocaust, a term that should be exclusively reserved for what the Germans did to the Jews.) The Ukranians act as if Foxman has some power which means, of course, that they are anti-Semites:

Following the meeting, Shamir asks Foxman why, if anti-Semitism is so potent a force in the world today, people care so much about pleasing the ADL and its sister organizations. Dishonest Abe then shows his flair at sophistry: it’s anti-Semitic in itself, he maintains, to even think that the Jews are so powerful as to be feared, so the fact that people like this pitiful delegation of yes-men are so eager to do his bidding just shows how anti-Semitic the world has become! Once more, Shamir dryly acknowledges this “logic,” letting its absurdity speak for itself.

The whole thing reminds me of Joe Sobran’s comment on Jewish media power:

Not that the Jews are all-powerful, let alone all bad. But they are successful, and therefore powerful enough: and their power is unique in being off-limits to normal criticism even when it’s highly visible. They themselves behave as if their success were a guilty secret, and they panic, and resort to accusations, as soon as the subject is raised. Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism. (The Buchanan frenzy. Sobran’s (March):3–4.)

Sobran’s punch line is applicable here: “A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you.” Powerless people can’t destroy anyone. But Oliver Stone will soon enough find out that Jews are very powerful indeed.

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Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?

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The current TOO article by John Graham and me, “Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?,” reviews 8 books on the Bernie Madoff scandal. From the beginning, there was a pronounced Jewish angle to the media coverage of the scandal—mainly emphasizing that Madoff was a Jew who stole from other Jews. However, this review (for which the lion’s share of the credit goes to Mr. Graham), explores the far greater depth of Jewishness apparent in the incident. Here I review several important themes.

Contrary to the image in the media, the scandal in fact was a large scale transfer of wealth from non-Jews to Jews. The big money that entered the fund beginning in the 1990s was predominantly from non-Jews, and especially from Europe. In the end, according to whistle blower Henry Markopolos,the European losses were “substantially more than losses in the United States.” We suggest that the attraction of wealthy, aristocratic Europeans may have been an example of the “court Jew” phenomenon: “For centuries it was customary for aristocratic landowners, particularly in Eastern Europe, to delegate the task of managing the businesses operations on their estates to Jews, sometimes using the same families for generations.”

Madoff succeeded for so long because he had become a classic Jewish rabbi/guru who was idolized as God-like by the Jewish community. The Jewish community “regarded Bernie like a messiah. He was spoken of as if godlike.” This is a common feature of Jewish social structure generally—and much emphasized in The Culture of Critique. Just as people who questioned the Oedipal Complex were expelled from psychoanalytic societies and labeled as having various character flaws, an Israeli woman who questioned Madoff’s genius was called an “anti-Semite.”

Interestingly, quite a few of Madoff’s Jewish clients seem to have believed that it was a fraud or at least based on illegal activity such as “front-running” (trading ahead of client orders). “Many Madoff accounts thought they were safely benefitting from illegal activity — and did not care.” They seem to have thought of themselves as benefiting from Jewish ethnic networking where there has been a long tradition of failing to report illegal activities of other Jews— an offence known as Mesirah (informing).

Perhaps most explosively, we suggest that Madoff was protected because of the power of the Jewish community:

The Bernard Madoff matter was one about which a significant segment of Jewish America cared very much — some for financial reasons, others, perhaps, because of community pride and loyalty. Challenging this group was well known to be extremely dangerous. As in other matters, they awarded themselves a veto, and they used it — as it happened in this case, to their cost. All in all, the Madoff affair and the cover-up is another indication of Jewish power in America.

 

For example, Henry Markopolos, in his aptly titled No One Would Listen, comments

 

In my mind, at least, I was convinced that someone high up at the [Wall Street] Journal had decided it was too dangerous to go after Bernie Madoff. … I was finally beginning to consider the possibility that Bernie Madoff was untouchable — that he was simply too powerful to be brought down.

 

Madoff was investigated eight times by the SEC, but each investigation was inexplicably stopped. Sen. Charles Schumer seems to have been part of the power structure protecting Madoff. Madoff and his sons maxed out their contributions to Schumer. Schumer phoned the SEC on Madoff’s  behalf,  and he treated Markopolos with incredible rudeness during Senate hearings — not exactly the expected treatment toward someone who was right all along.

What has been portrayed as SEC incompetence now looks quite a bit like corruption. “We submit that the SEC failed to stop Madoff not because it was incompetent, but because it was afraid — of the Jewish Establishment.” It seems likely that even greater corruption was involved in the financial collapse that has been such an ongoing disaster for the country. The fact that Goldman Sachs managed to settle its involvement in one particular deal with a slap on the wrist.

Consistent  with the corruption thesis, it appears that Madoff’s accomplices will get off easy. Amazingly, an article that appeared too late to include in the print version questioned whether anyone will be criminally charged with being an accomplice to the fraud. Bernie is taking the fall all by himself, but it wouldn’t be too surprising if there’s lots of money stashed for his family members.

Perhaps in the back of Madoff’s mind was the idea — possibly the instinct — that after a few years, perhaps in a different country, maybe speaking a different language, his family would live on, possibly with a new name (surname changes are under way among the Madoff kin) and perhaps with some portion of the loot.

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Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together: “From the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”

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The English translation of Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together (“From the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”) is now available. (See here; donations are needed to complete the project.)

The main theme is the post-WWII purging of Jews from many of the powerful positions they held as an elite in Soviet society. Solzhenitsyn’s account is similar to other mainstream accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. When Jewish intellectual activists write about the role of the Jews in the USSR, they generally focus on this period—Jews as the victims of anti-Jewish actions—rather than the status and role of Jews in previous decades. The following quote from a historian sums up the situation:

“‘Pushing’ Jews out of prestigious occupations that were crucial for the ruling elite in the spheres of manufacturing, administration, cultural and ideological activities, as well as limiting or completely barring the entrance of Jews into certain institutions of higher education gained enormous momentum in 1948-1953. … Positions of any importance in KGB, party apparatus, and military were closed to the Jews, and quotas were in place for admission into certain educational institutions and cultural and scientific establishments.”

Solzhenitsyn pointedly notes that Jews who had benefited from their nationality because they were officially classified as an oppressed minority under the Czar were now targeted on the basis of nationality:

Through its “fifth item” [i.e., the question about nationality] Soviet Jews were oppressed by the very same method used in the Proletarian Questionnaire, other items of which were so instrumental in crushing the Russian nobility, clergy, intellectuals and all the rest of the “former people” since the 1920’s.

Nevertheless, Jews were by no means eliminated from prestigious occupations. A historian comments that “Although the highest echelon of Jewish political elite suffered from administrative perturbations; but surprisingly it was not as bad as it seemed. … The main blow fell on the middle and the most numerous stratum of the Jewish elite — officials… and also journalists, professors and other members of creative intelligentsia.”

Anti-Jewish attitudes remained strong, fueled in large part because of the role of Jews as agents of oppression during the pre-war decades. For example, Solzhenitsyn notes that there were negative attitudes toward Jews returning to areas that the Germans had evacuated, particularly Ukraine.  Anti-Jewish attitudes combined both traditional ideas (Jews as wealthy: demanding restoration of prime residential property they owned before the war) as well as the role of Jews as government officials during the pre-war Soviet oppression.  A Jewish observer who claimed that Nikita Khrushchev had said, “In the past, the Jews committed many sins against the Ukrainian people. People hate them for that. We don’t need Jews in our Ukraine. It would be better if they didn’t return here.”

Jews complained about these attitudes as well as the fact that other groups were indifferent to Jewish suffering, but Solzhenitsyn notes the irony, quoting another Jewish observer who stated “that in the years of our terrible disasters, the Jewish intellectuals did not raise their voices in defense of the deported nations of Crimea and the Caucasus.” The example is a testimony to Jewish ethnocentrism–focused on their own suffering but never seeing, much less acknowledging, their indifference to the suffering of others or their role in causing it during the height  of their power.

There was a similar scene throughout Eastern Europe as Jews returned from exile after the war.

A great overrepresentation of Jews occurred in the post-war puppet Polish government, among managerial elites and in the Polish KGB, which would again result in miserable consequences for the Jews of Poland. After the war, other countries of Eastern Europe saw similar conflicts: “the Jews had played a huge role in economic life of all these countries,” and though they lost their possessions under Hitler, after the war, when “the restitution laws were introduced…  (they) affected very large numbers of new owners.” Upon their return Jews demanded the restoration of their property and enterprises that were not nationalized by Communists and this created a new wave of hostility towards them (22).)

Toward the end of Stalin’s life, he intensified the campaign against Jews, possibly resulting in his death in 1953. The main source of his hostility toward Jews was the age-old concern about loyalty: Jewish ties with Jews in other countries — in this case, Israel and the United States. During the Cold War there was a fear that Jewish sympathies would lie with Israel and the US as Israel’s main source of support. One result was that Stalin crushed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (EAK), a Jewish organization that had been created to court support for the USSR among American Jews during WWII. During the Cold War, the ties between Soviet Jews and American Jews became a liability in the eyes of Soviet regime.

An indication of Jewish power is that the campaign against the EAK in 1952 was carried out “slowly and with great caution” because Stalin was “very well aware what kind of international storm would be triggered by using force.” It’s striking that the mass murders and deportations of the 1920s and 1930s were carried out without any international outcry, but the campaign against a rather small Jewish group was done very cautiously.  Thirteen Jews were executed.

This is similar to what happened when Stalin ordered the murder of two Jewish leaders of the international socialist movement, Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter in 1942. These murders of two Jewish leftist activists created an international incident, and there were protests by leftists around the world — the same people who had previously ignored or rationalized mass murder during the 1920s and 1930s. Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt made appeals to Stalin, and American Jewish leaders, such as Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), helped quell the uproar over the incident and shore up positive views of the Soviet Union among American Jews.

Another manifestation of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign was the trial of Rudolf Slansky, the Jewish First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The trial was “openly anti-Jewish with naming ‘world leading’ Jews such as Ben Gurion and Morgenthau, and putting them into the same harness with American leaders Truman and Acheson.”

Stalin also arrested a large number of Jewish doctors —the  “Doctors’ plot” — and “prominent Soviet Jews were forced to sign a letter to Pravda with the most severe condemnation of the wiles of the Jewish ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and their approval of Stalin’s government.” (The letter was preceded by an article in Pravda published on January 13, 1953 claiming “”The majority of the participants of the terrorist group… were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence — the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called ” Joint” [i.e., the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]. The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed.”)

In February, the Soviet Embassy in Tel Aviv was bombed. Solzhenitsyn accepts the idea that the “international anger” resulting from the Doctors’ plot  “could possibly” have motivated “internal forces” to murder Stalin:

And then Stalin went wrong, and not for the first time, right? He did not understand how the thickening of the plot could threaten him personally, even within the secure quarters of his inaccessible political Olympus. The explosion of international anger coincided with the rapid action of internal forces, which could possibly have done away with Stalin. It could have happened through Beria (for example, according to [Abdurakhman] Avtorhanov’s version (66).)

The trimming of Jewish power in the USSR is important not just as a facet of Jewish history in the USSR but also because it had a major role in influencing some components of the American Jewish community to become less enamored with the left—notably Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives. Strauss believed that liberal, individualistic Western societies were best for Judaism. National Socialism was obviously bad for Jews, and Communism had become so. Despite their elite status, the events of 1948-1953 showed that Jews were vulnerable when the attitudes of an autocrat like Stalin turned against them.  Liberal societies were best, but they had to be controlled against populist tendencies. After all, the working class had eventually opted to join the  National Socialists.

Stephen Holmes describes Strauss’s solution to the Jewish dilemma as follows:  “The good society … consists of the sedated masses, the gentlemen rulers, the promising puppies, and the philosophers who pursue knowledge, manipulate the gentlemen, anesthetize the people, and housebreak the most talented young” — a comment that sounds to me like an alarmingly accurate description of the present situation in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world. Given Strauss’s central concern that an acceptable political order be compatible with Jewish survival in the Diaspora and with the tendency for Jews to become an elite, it is reasonable to assume that Strauss believed that Jews would be a prominent part of the aristocracy and that the arrangement would serve Jewish interests–as indeed the current regime does.

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