Differences between the Eastern European immigrant community in the US and the older German-Jewish establishment — and their commonalities

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Eastern European Shtetl Jews; photos from “Rare Photographs and Images of Shtetl Life“

In his VDARE article of April 22, “Eastern European Jews And The Case Of the Marginalized Elite,” Paul Gottfried claims that I fail to make important distinctions among Jewish groups:

Though Kevin MacDonald argues his theory about Jewish group behavior ably, I believe it is unwarranted to generalize about the social behavior of all Jews simply because of the behavior of Eastern European Jews. …We are clearly dealing with a group that embraces all kinds of Leftist causes, most of which have a destabilizing effect on what remains of a traditional Christian society. Let me repeat: I don’t find anything about this behavior that has characterized all Jews at all times (unlike MacDonald).

This article summarizes some of my comments on different groups of Jews, some of which may have gotten a bit lost in the shuffle. In fact, beginning with my first two books on Judaism, I have repeatedly discussed differences among Jewish groups (e.g., IQ differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic groups in chapter 7 of A People That Shall Dwell Alone). This includes the important distinction between Eastern European Jews and Western European Jews, beginning with Chapter 6 of Separation and Its Discontents (1994) on Jewish strategies to minimize anti-Semitism.

It has often been critically important for Jews to be able to present a divided front to the gentile society, especially in situations where one segment of the Jewish community has adopted policies or attitudes that provoke anti-Semitism. This has happened repeatedly in the modern world. A particularly common pattern during the period from 1880 to 1940 was for Jewish organizations representing older, more established communities in Western Europe and the United States to oppose the activities and attitudes of more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe (see note 20). The Eastern European immigrants tended to be religiously orthodox, politically radical, and sympathetic to Zionism, and they tended to conceptualize themselves in racial and national terms—all qualities that provoked anti-Semitism. In the United States and England, Jewish organizations (such as the American Jewish Committee [AJCommittee]) attempted to minimize Jewish radicalism and gentile perceptions of the radicalism and Zionism of these immigrants (e.g., Cohen 1972; Alderman 1992, 237ff). Highly publicized opposition to these activities dilutes gentile perceptions of Jewish behavior, even in situations where, as occurred in both England and America, the recent immigrants far outnumbered the established Jewish community.

This difference between the Eastern European immigrant community and the German-Jewish establishment in the US is a central theme of “Jews, Blacks, and Race” (in Samuel Francis (Ed.), Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time [The Occidental Press, 2006]):

Anti-Jewish attitudes that had been common before [World War II) declined precipitously, and Jewish organizations assumed a much higher profile in influencing ethnic relations in the U.S., not only in the area of civil rights but also in immigration policy. Significantly this high Jewish profile was spearheaded by the American Jewish Congress and the ADL, both dominated by Jews who had immigrated from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 and their descendants. As indicated below, an understanding of the special character of this Jewish population is critical to understanding Jewish influence in the United States from 1945 to the present. The German-Jewish elite that had dominated Jewish community affairs via the American Jewish Committee earlier in the century, gave way to a new leadership made up of Eastern European immigrants and their descendants. Even the AJCommittee, the bastion of the German-Jewish elite, came to be headed by John Slawson [in 1943], who had immigrated at the age of 7 from the Ukraine.

The AJCongress, a creation of the Jewish immigrant community, was headed by Will Maslow, a socialist and a Zionist. Zionism and political radicalism typified the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. As an indication of the radicalism of the immigrant Jewish community, the 50,000- member Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order was an affiliate of the AJCongress and was listed as a subversive organization by the U.S. Attorney General. The JPFO was the financial and organizational “bulwark” of the Communist Party USA after World War II and also funded the Daily Worker, an organ of the [Communist Party USA], and the Morning Freiheit, a Yiddish communist newspaper. Although the AJCongress severed its ties with the JPFO and stated that communism was a threat, it was “at best a reluctant and unenthusiastic participant” in the Jewish effort to develop a public image of anti-communism—a position reflecting the sympathies of many among its predominantly second- and third-generation Eastern European immigrant membership. Concern that Jewish communists were involved in the civil rights movement centered around the activities of Stanley Levison, a key advisor to Martin Luther King, who had very close ties to the Communist Party (as well as the AJCongress) and may have been acting under communist discipline in his activities with King.

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The Laws: Plato’s Sacred Ethnostate, Part 4: Greek Unity and the Federation against Barbarians

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Greeks vs. Persians

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Greek Unity: Federation against Barbarians

Beyond the family and city-state, the third concentric circle of kinship and loyalty is that of the league of cities or indeed the Greek nation itself. In the Republic, Plato had argued that Greeks should be gentle with one another on account of their shared blood, limiting their engagement in all-out warfare and enslavement to conflicts with barbarians. In the Laws, Plato returns to this theme, praising the federation of Greek city-states against foreign invasion.

After the family, the collection of families, and the city-state “being founded in succession over a vast period,” finally “we discover this fourth state” (683a), the generally loose and fractious leagues or confederations of Greek city-states as a potentially even higher form of social organization.

Plato discusses the mythical history of three city-states founded by the descendants of Hercules — Sparta, Argos, and Messene — which had together formed the Dorian League. The confederation was meant to protect not just themselves but the Greek nation itself:

Well then, it’s pretty obvious that they intended the arrangements they made to protect adequately not only the Peloponnese but the Greeks in general against any possible attack by non-Greeks — as for example occurred when those who then lived in the territory of Ilium trusted to the power of the Assyrian empire, which Ninos had founded, and provoked the war against Troy by their arrogance. You see, a good deal of the splendor of the Assyrian empire still remained, and the dread of its united organization was the counterpart in that age of our fear of the Great King of Persia today. Troy, which was part of the Assyrian empire, had been captured a second time [as recounted in the Iliad]. To meet such dangers the Dorian army formed a single unified body, although at that period it was distributed among the three states under the command of the kings (who were brothers, being sons of Hercules). (685b–d)

Plato laments however that the Dorian League was short-lived, despite the fact that all three cities were ruled by brothers: “if they had done as they intended and had agreed a common policy, their power would have been irresistible, militarily speaking” (686b). Read more

The Laws: Plato’s Sacred Ethnostate, Part 3: The Sanctity of the Family and Procreation

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An ancient Greek family.

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Filial Piety: The Foundation of Social Order

The remainder of this article will show the central role of a kinship, both familial and ethnic, in Plato’s Magnesian regime. Plato cites Homer’s Cyclopes as a metaphor for the family being prehistoric humanity’s first society. In this family, the patriarch rightly rules on grounds of kinship:

The eldest member rules by virtue of having inherited power from his father or mother; the others follow his lead and make one flock like birds. The authority to which they bow is that of their patriarch: they are governed, in effect, by the most justifiable of all forms of kingship. (680e)[1]

Plato goes into lengthy detail on the honor children owe their parents as a sacred imperative, on “the worship of the gods and the services to be rendered to our ancestors” (723e). We frequently find such statements pairing blood and spirit: the highest moral imperatives are those to our kin and to the divine.

It is meet and right that a debtor should discharge his first and greatest obligation and pay the debt which comes before all others; he must consider that all he has and holds belongs to those who bore and bred him, and he is meant to use it in their service to the limit of his powers . . . [to] give to the old people what they desperately need in view of their age: repayment of all that anxious care and attention they lavished on him, the longstanding “loan” they made him as a child. Throughout his life the son must be very careful to watch his tongue in addressing his parents, because there is a very heavy penalty for careless and ill-considered language; Retribution, messenger of Justice, is the appointed overseer of these things. If his parents get angry, he must submit to them, and whether they satisfy their anger in speech or action, he must forgive them; after all, he must reflect, it’s natural enough for a father to get very angry if he thinks he’s being harmed by his own son. (717b–d)

Anyone whose parents live at home with them should venerate and care for them as “living shrines” (931e); care for them is more valuable than prayer to gods, because they might join our own prayers. Read more

The Laws: Plato’s Sacred Ethnostate, Part 2: Social Cohesion and Just Inegalitarianism

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Artist’s impression of Spartan wrestling.

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A Holistic Rule of Law Aiming at Inculcating Virtue and Social Cohesion

Plato’s main innovation in the Laws is to have pioneered the notion of the “rule of law.” He constrains the Magnesian regime in a complex system of laws and courts of appeal, guaranteed by the so-called Guardians of the Laws, by which all officials were liable for prosecution for misdeeds. In the Laws Plato asserts boldly: “any state without duly established courts simply ceases to be a state” (766d). Plato the “totalitarian” is also the forerunner of the very notion of the rule of law and checks and balances, which would prove so influential for Montesquieu and the American Founding Fathers.

Another innovation: the laws are to have preambles, meant to persuade the citizens by rational argument of the necessity of a given action, with coercion to be used only if that fails. Thus the laws use two methods: “compulsion and persuasion (subject to the limitations imposed by the uneducated masses)” (722b). The law, devised by reason, is to be a “golden and holy” cord, pulling upon the souls of the citizens, towards virtue. Plato advocates a reformative penology aiming to improve criminals rather than harm them (854a). He expects citizens to “exact the vengeance of his fatherland” against those who would subvert the laws (856b).

While aware of the disadvantages of an inflexible and overly general law, Plato hopes nonetheless to escape the rule of men and establish the rule of reason embodied in law. The Greek word nomos means both “custom” and “law,” and indeed Plato’s notion of law sometimes explicitly extends to a society’s culture and traditions as a whole. He observes, as many have since, that the constitution and laws ultimately depend on “unwritten customs” and “ancestral law,” which “are the bonds of the entire social framework, linking all written and established laws with those yet to be passed. They act in the same way as ancestral customs from time immemorial, by virtue of being soundly established and instinctively observed, shielding and protecting existing written law” (793b–c). For Plato, politics and lawmaking are not merely matters of administration or management, but of education and customs. This is to say that, for Plato, respecting traditional culture is at the center of the statesman’s work.

Plato’s high ambition is again evident: his Laws do not aim to create a perfect legal text, but rather to imagine a society whose traditions, customs, basic law, and regime are all working to make the citizens tend towards virtue. This notion of law and custom obviously rejects the modern notion of a “private sphere” supposedly outside the domain of politics. Plato points out that “the state’s general code of laws will never rest on a firm foundation as long as private life is badly regulated, and it’s silly to expect otherwise” (790b). In this, Plato is not being uniquely authoritarian, but shares a view in common with Aristotle and Greek legislators in general. Read more

The Laws: Plato’s Sacred Ethnostate, Part 1

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A version of this article will appear as a chapter in an upcoming book on ethnopolitical thought in ancient Greece. Constructive criticisms and comments are therefore most welcome.

Plato’s Republic is one of the most famous books in existence. So long as it has had readers, people have wondered whether the ideal state presented in that work, Callipolis, was meant as a serious political proposal. Or was it only meant as an intellectually-stimulating utopia, or even merely a symbolic analogy for the perfect soul? Personally I am surprised by the confusion; more important in the Republic, or any of Plato’s dialogues, than the specific provisions are the principles underpinning them. From this, we can be quite assured, for instance, that Plato was a fundamentally aristocratic thinker, seeing the recognition of inequality as the foundation of ethics, deeply concerned about ensuring a just hierarchy, good culture, and good breeding.

Furthermore, besides Republic, we have Plato’s longest yet less famous final work, also on politics: the Laws, which describes his “second-best city,” called Magnesia. Here we find our same Plato —the same uncompromising defense of altruism, the same paradoxical “totalitarianism” in service of the community, the same fear and loathing of egalitarianism and “pop culture,” the same meritocratic proto-feminism, the same quest for perfection. Most of what modern liberals find objectionable in the Republic can be found repeated, evidently meant seriously, in the Laws.

Actually, I believe the Laws merely explicitly spells out the implications in a particular concrete example of what one could reasonably infer from the Republic. At the eve of life, Plato apparently wished to cross all his T’s and dot all his I’s. Indeed the work sometimes goes into rather tedious detail, perhaps inevitable for a legal treatise. Furthermore, I would stress again that much of Plato’s authoritarianism was in fact not unique to him, but simply reflected the community-centered ethics and practice of citizenship of the ancient Greek polis. Glenn Morrow, the definitive interpreter of the Laws, writes that it has been “declared, with some exaggeration but with essential insight, that Plato’s Laws is a collection and codification of the whole of Greek law.”[1] This would explain why there is so much overlap between Plato’s Laws and Aristotle’s similarly-encyclopedic Politics (though the latter, as lecture notes, are far easier for a modern to read). It also suggests that the Laws must be read not as a philosopher’s pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but as synthesis of centuries of practical Greek political experience.

In the Republic, Plato is arguably radicalizing Socratic insights on self-discipline, the rule of expertise, and good breeding, and projecting them to the level of a polity. Similarly, in the Laws, Plato is systematizing and occasionally radicalizing many of the underlying assumptions of the practice of ancient Greek politics.[2] Whereas the Republic’s radically utopian aristocratic and eugenic principles can be summarized briefly, in the Laws Plato goes into considerable detail on specific measures to be taken.

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On the SPLC and Their Lies: The Harassment of Andrew Anglin

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“The Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you.”
Polish Proverb

In what is sure to be the biggest legal assault on free speech this year, news has emerged that the Southern Poverty Law Center is orchestrating a lawsuit against leading Alt-Right media figure Andrew Anglin. The text of the suit alleges that Anglin orchestrated a harassment campaign against Tanya Gersh, a Jewish realtor residing in Whitefish, Montana, that involved “invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and violation of Montana’s Anti-Intimidation Act.”

That the SPLC, of all organizations, should be pressing forward on such grounds is ironic to say the very least. Aside from scare-mongering among old, wealthy Jews in order to solicit donations and bequests, the SPLC’s entire modus operandi has for some time revolved around ‘exposés’ of Nationalist figures. Although these doxxings are dressed up as “Intelligence Reports” forming part of an overall “Hatewatch” strategy, in reality they are little more than grubby, sensationalized, and often libellous attempts at political intimidation. Indeed, the efforts of the SPLC in this regard are rooted in a desire to invade privacy and inflict emotional distress — precisely the kind of actions they are presently accusing Andrew Anglin of encouraging. Read more