Pariah to Messiah: The Engineered Apotheosis of Baruch Spinoza, Part 3 of 3

/in , /by

Go to Part 1.

The Apotheosis of Baruch Spinoza

Influenced by the sentiments of their own people, the majority of Jewish academics have long held and advanced a view of Spinoza strikingly at odds with that held by non-Jewish academics. Over time, however, the internal intellectual consistency and dedication of a core of Jewish academics has steadily worn away academic resistance to its objective of elevating Spinoza to a level of supreme importance, and the group is now closer than ever to achieving its goal of making Spinoza not merely a messianic figure for Jews, but a Jewish icon for non-Jews. Beginning in the 1930s with Harry Wolfson’s two-volume The Philosophy of Spinoza,[1] through the 1950s with Joseph Dunner’s Baruch Spinoza and Western Democracy[2] and Lewis Feuer’s Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism ,[3] the 1960s with Leon Roth’s Spinoza, Descartes, and Maimonides,[4] the 1970s with the many works of Richard Popkin,[5] the 1980s with Margaret Jacob’s The Radical Enlightenment  and Marjorie Glicksman Grene’s Spinoza and the Sciences,[6] and the early 2000s with Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life[7] and his Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind,[8] there has been a concerted and persistent Jewish effort to reframe Spinoza as a product of purely Jewish thought, and to raise him to the summit of Enlightenment significance. Maurice Mandelbaum, Professor of Philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University, wrote in 1975 that he hoped to one day see the recognition of Spinoza as a major Enlightenment figure “flourish in the English-speaking world.”[9]

More recently, the pace of the effort has quickened and has been pushed with even greater intensity, bringing Mandelbaum’s dream ever closer to fruition. In the past four years alone we have seen the publication of  Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750,[10] Michael Mack’s Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud,[11] Steven Nadler’s A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age,[12] and Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.[13] These books have been in addition to a huge number of academic articles. Nadler, Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been one of the most prolific activists in pushing Spinoza in scholarly journals.[14] There is a high level of consensus and intellectual consistency within this group, and its influence and success can be said to derive substantially from this solidarity and cohesion, the consistency of its message, the access the group has had to elite publishing outlets, and sympathetic reviews in influential journals and media channels. These are precisely the characteristics of all Jewish intellectual movements, including Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, radical political ideology, the Frankfurt School, the New York Intellectuals and neoconservatism.[15]
Read more

Pariah to Messiah: The Engineered Apotheosis of Baruch Spinoza, Part 2 of 3

/in , /by

Go to Part 1.

The Jewish Reclamation of Spinoza

To understand the shift in Jewish attitudes to Spinoza, one must take into account the birth of the concept of the ‘secular Jew,’ and the corresponding development of surrogate intellectual and cultural movements in which ‘Jewishness’ was divorced from Judaism and yet survived and thrived post partum. Prior to and throughout the Enlightenment, Jewry in the West remained separate and distinct in patterns of settlement, custom, language and dress. Judaism remained the only avenue for the expression of ‘Jewishness.’ Only at the end of the eighteenth century, as modernity began to encroach upon them, and “to remedy the inferiority of the Jews,” did Jewish intellectuals in Germany begin to make attempts to represent Judaism as an entirely rational belief system, and to justify the continued existence of Jews as a separate people.[1]

The earliest proponents of this attempt to reframe Judaism were a group of German Jewish intellectuals known as the maskilim, and they first began to rise to prominence, both inside and outside Jewry, in the 1780s. It is noteworthy that some of the earliest works produced by the maskilim, the most famous of whom was Moses Mendelssohn, were built around the reclamation of Spinoza. Mendelssohn was the author of Jerusalem (1783), probably the most important 18th-century text arguing the case for pluralism, and putting forth the contention that Judaism was compatible with the precepts of the Enlightenment.[2] Daniel Schwartz writes that Mendelssohn was also a “watershed figure”[3] in softening Spinoza’s image both for Jews and for non-Jews. He played a major role in overturning the prevailing apathy towards Spinoza’s works in the German Academy, and was pivotal in aiding Spinoza’s “integration into the canon of modern Western philosophy.”[4]

Although outwardly, Jewry appeared to be undergoing great change, at heart the real change it sought was in the non-Jewish world. Rather than adapt to modernity and wider society, Jewry sought a means of justifying its continued isolation. At first, the case that Judaism was inherently rational was argued by the maskilim, but it increasingly failed to convince non-Jewish intellectuals or the non-Jewish society as a whole. At the beginning of the 19th century, Jews were coming under intense scrutiny for their seeming unwillingness to enter the modern age. In the French Republic, Napoleon had halted moves towards the political emancipation of the Jews after hearing about extensive Jewish usury in the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Napoleon subsequently convened a ‘Grand Sanhedrin’ of notable Jews at Hotel de Ville in Paris in July 1806.[5] All of the twelve questions posed by Napoleon to the notables cut to the heart of Jewish group cohesion as being incompatible with the Enlightenment. They concerned, “Jewish clannishness, divided loyalties, intermarriage, and usury.”[6] Napoleon asked: “Has the law ordered that the Jews should only intermarry among themselves?” and “In the eyes of Jews are Frenchmen considered as brethren or strangers?”[7] Rather than tell the truth and abandon the push for political power for their group, the notables believed they could succeed through crypsis and resorted to evasion and lies, telling Napoleon among other things that “the law does not say that a Jewess cannot marry a Christian, nor a Jew a Christian woman; nor does it state that the Jews can only marry among themselves.”[8]

Napoleon took them at their word, even trusting the notables with the writing of reforms necessary to bring about the political emancipation of the Jews. As Esther Benbassa noted in her The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, while the notables were willing to tinker slightly with religious organization, they utterly refused to move “on the questions of usury and exogamous marriage.”[9] Emancipation proceeded regardless.

In Germany too, the pressure was increasing. Schwartz writes: “Within German Idealism, it was more or less a consensus that while a reformed Christianity could serve as a basis, or at least a vehicle, for a modern religion of reason, Judaism could not provide such a foundation. As the religion of a single people, it was seen as intractably chauvinist and exclusive, and with its strict legal character, it seemed totally at odds with a modern ethos stressing human autonomy.”[10] For Hegel and others, there was a belief that Jews could be granted civil rights, but there was real doubt about whether Jews could long survive an encounter with modernity. Read more

The Misplaced Minister: Ireland and Israel’s Alan Shatter

/2 Comments/in , /by

For the past two years Ireland’s immigration policy has been in the hands of Alan Shatter, a Jew and an outspoken partisan of Israel. Alan Shatter, born and bred in Dublin of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, has made it Irish policy to increase Third World immigration to the Emerald Isle. As Minister of Justice, Equality, and Defence, Shatter is exerting his considerable clout to skew the Republic’s Middle East policy, formerly supportive of the Palestinians and critical of Israel, toward Zionist aims. 

Before Shatter, the Irish government had taken steps to reduce non-European immigration, including abolishing automatic citizenship for children born to foreigners in Ireland and drastically reducing the admission of asylum seekers. Since taking office in early 2011, after his Fine Gael party ousted the ruling Fianna Fail amid Ireland’s continuing economic woes, Shatter has busied himself with increasing the numbers of Africans and Asians resident in Ireland.

Immigration to Ireland from outside Europe during 2011 was twice that of the previous year. Last year, the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service granted visas to 91 percent of the 88,000 non-Europeans who applied for them (citizens of the twenty-six other member states of the European Union can travel to Ireland without having to obtain a visa). An additional 115,000 migrants from outside Europe were given permission to remain in Ireland in 2012, with India, China, Nigeria, Turkey, and the Philippines among the top six countries of origin. To be sure, the number of permits to non-Europeans to reside in Ireland has declined over the previous two years—but only because Shatter’s ministry has been granting them citizenship, at several times the rate of the preceding years. Read more

Jonah Goldberg: The liberal media doesn’t have any influence

/in , /by

Jonah Goldberg recently wrote an op-ed emphasizing how powerful media influences are (“If speech can inspire good actions, it can inspire bad actions, too“). His point:

Liberals decry the toxic rhetoric of the right, conservatives blame the toxic rhetoric of the left.

When attacked – again heedless of ideology or consistency – the gladiators instantly trade weapons. The finger-pointers of five minutes ago suddenly wax righteous in their indignation that mere expression – rather, their expression – should be blamed. Many of the same liberals who pounded soapboxes into pulp at the very thought of labeling record albums with violent lyrics warnings, instantly insisted that Sarah Palin had Rep. Gabby Giffords’ blood on her hands. Many of the conservatives who spewed hot fire at the suggestion that they had any culpability in an abortion clinic bombing, gleefully insisted that Sen. Bernie Sanders is partially to blame for Rep. Steve Scalise’s fight with death. …

I have always thought it absurd to claim that expression cannot lead people to do bad things, precisely because it is so obvious that expression can lead people to do good things. According to legend, Abraham Lincoln told Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Should we mock Lincoln for saying something ridiculous?

As Irving Kristol once put it, “If you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book. You have to believe, in other words, that art is morally trivial and that education is morally irrelevant.”

If words don’t matter, then democracy is a joke, because democracy depends entirely on making arguments – not for killing, but for voting. But only a fool would argue that words can move people to vote, but not to kill.

 

 

Jonah Goldberg’s op-ed “Leave liberal Hollywood to the liberals” argues that despite the fact that Hollywood is “overwhelmingly, though not uniformly, liberal,” conservatives shouldn’t try to buy up media in order to get their messages out. Buying up media is a waste of time because “Hollywood influence is agonizingly hard to predict or dismiss as unthinkingly liberal.”

This strikes me as head-bangingly wrong, and not the least because the messages put out by Hollywood are quite designedly rather than unthinkingly liberal. A repeated message at  TOO  is that the world would change rather quickly and dramatically if there was one above-ground, widely available, well-funded, mainstream media outlet — a sensible version, say, of Fox  News or MSNBC, but with a perspective supporting the interests of European-Americans and Whites around the world.

But Goldberg’s advice is idiotic even for someone who styles himself a mainstream conservative. The media does have influence and the influence is generally in the direction intended by its creators.

Since I rather doubt that Goldberg is an idiot, I suspect there are some deep motivations going on here—including that Goldberg is not a conservative at all. As Peter Brimelow phrased it, with Goldberg assuming a prominent position at National Review, it had become a “once-conservative, now respected, magazine.”

And yes, I suspect that ultimately it has to do with Goldberg’s Jewish identity. Like other neocons, Goldberg has been an enthusiastic supporter of all of the fundamental positions of the organized Jewish community, including displacement-level non-White immigration and opposition to identity politics for White people (see above link). It’s revealing that Goldberg was not particularly upset by the recent election (“The right isn’t waving a white flag“), claiming that conservatism will come back, as it has before. Not one mention of the demographics of the vote or what that portends for the GOP or what the GOP ought to do about it. Goldberg is quite happy about the ethnic transformation that is making the Republicans, conservatism and indeed White people obsolete.

Goldberg also supported the firing of John Derbyshire from National Review. One wonders why he would care about firing Derbyshire if the media doesn’t have any influence anyway. Why not let Derbyshire continue to have a forum for race realism at National Review? One wonders why the media is so intensively policed to remove voices that conflict with the liberal world view—people like Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs. Why was Media Matters so upset when CNN quoted Brimelow and TOO’s James Edwards on immigration-related issues? Read more

Review: Anthony Julius’ “Trials of the Diaspora” [Part3]: “English Literary Anti-Semitism”

/in , /by
ILlustration from The Prioress's Tale

ILlustration from The Prioress’s Tale

We continue with our analysis of Anthony Julius’ Trials of the Diaspora, by turning our attention to one of the more expansive sections of the book — a chapter dealing with what Julius believes to be England’s uniquely hateful contribution to world literature. In the first part of this analysis we explored the background of the author, his history as a Jewish ethnic activist and also, through some of his statements and biographical information, aspects of his psychology. This psychological, and in a sense also political, outlook has already been demonstrated as influencing both Julius’ perception of the history of Jews in England, and his writing of that history. This is most apparent in the thread of victimhood which Julius crudely weaves throughout much of the book.

More insidiously, however, in the second part of the analysis we saw instances where Julius wilfully ignored evidence because it didn’t conform to what he believes to be the case, and also because it did not conform to what he wants others to believe. Julius has thus shown his hand as a propagandist contributing to the drumbeat that the West is evil. Read more

Yes, the end of the world has happened

/3 Comments/in , /by
Caspar David Friederich “The Abbey in the Oakwood (oil), 1810

Caspar David Friederich “The Abbey in the Oakwood (oil), 1810

(Translated from the French by Tom Sunic) 

The end of the world has indeed happened. It did not happen on a specific day, but has spread out over several decades. The world that disappeared was a world where most children knew how to read and write. A world where we admired the heroes rather than the victims. A world where political machines had not turned into the soul grinding machines. A world where we had more role models than rights. A world where one could understand what Pascal had meant when he wrote that entertainments distracted us from living a real human life. A world where the borders safeguarded those who lived their way of life and a life of their own.

Yes, that world had its flaws and sometimes it was a horrible world, but the daily life of great many people was at least regulated by an array of meanings provided by the landmarks. By way of memories, that was a world still familiar to many of us. Some regret its passing. But that world will never come back.

The new world is liquid. Space and time have been abolished. Stripped of its traditional mediation the society has become more and more fluid and more and more segmented, which only facilitates its reification. One lives in it by way of “zapping.” With the virtual disappearance of major collective projects, which were once the carriers of different worldviews, the religion of Self — a Self based on the unrestricted freedom of narcissistic desire, a Self self-generated out of nothing — has resulted in the across the board deterritorialization, which goes now hand in hand with the dissolution of all the landmarks and all the references, thus making the individual more and more malleable, more conditionable, more and more vulnerable, and more and more nomadic. Under the cover of emancipatory “modernization,” “for more than half a century the ideological osmosis has been taking place between the financial right and the multicultural left” (Mathieu Bock-Côté), meshing economic liberalism with societal liberalism, the market system with the fringe elements of culture, all of it due primarily to the mercantile recycling of the ideology of desire and capitalizing on the breakdown of the traditional social forms. The overall objective is the elimination of communities of meanings that refuse to operate according to the logic of the market. Read more

Those Irish-American racists

/1 Comment/in /by

NYT has a recent  article complaining about ethnic solidarity of Jewish communities in New York and their connections to Israel.

Complicating the current embrace from abroad is the gated community’s extreme insularity. Borough Park and Williamsburg are the most Jewish neighborhoods in the city, a demographic makeup that critics say illustrates the enclave’s entrenched xenophobia, a dark flip side, perhaps, to all that ethnic pride. The consul general of  Israel said he and others had made special efforts to avoid the impression of “the Jews looking after their own.”

Actually, I made some substitutions. The article is actually about Breezy Point, an Irish enclave in New York City receiving aid from Ireland following Hurricane Sandy. The article refers darkly to Breezy Point being “the whitest area of the city,” its “extreme insularity,” its “entrenched xenophobia,” and its ethnic pride.

The critics who are supposedly making these accusations are unnamed, but it’s noteworthy that the author of the artcle is Sarah Maslin Nir. Mondoweiss points out that Nir, has strong connections to the Israeli far right. 

She surely knows about the problems of ethnic solidarity. Her father went from being an Israeli to being American. As we reported a couple years ago:

Nir’s father Yehuda served in the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948 and after moving on to the U.S., sought to rejoin the Israeli army in ’67 and ’73. “I had to fight our enemies and rejoin the Israeli army,” he writes  of the second war in his autobiography. Huh; I wonder how Sarah Maslin Nir feels about Israel…

I bet Sarah Maslin Nir knows a lot about the xenophobia of ethnic pride, the racism inherent in trans-national ethnic claims. Maybe one day she’ll write about the American Jewish relationship to Israel. [See here.] 

Orthodox neighborhoods in New York are notoriously insular, ethnocentric, and strongly connected to Israel. JTA notes (“As N.Y. haredi Orthodox population surges, battles over city neighborhoods ensue“)  “the explosive growth of the Orthodox Jewish population in America’s most Jewish city,” bringing Jews into conflict with Blacks and Latinos as their neighborhoods expand.

The haredi migration can be tracked by the new construction, which often has specifically Orthodox amenities, such as staggered balconies that allow residents to build sukkahs during the fall harvest holiday with unobstructed views of the sky. … the Broadway Triangle Coalition — a group that includes blacks, Latinos and UJCare — is suing to block the plan, claiming that large apartments deliberately favor Jews over other groups that have, on average, smaller families. They also argue that haredi developers deliberately limit construction to eight stories because some Chasidic Jews will not ride in an elevator on the Sabbath. 

In the case of these Jewish neighborhoods, their insularity can even be seen in the architecture. But the point is that I rather doubt that Sarah Maslin Nir would find that the concentration of haredi Orthodox in particular neighborhoods, their ethnocentrism and their insularity to be worth nothing in a NYTimes article. And surely any critic of the insularity and ethnocentrism apparent in these neighborhoods would be labled a raving anti-Semite.

As noted many times on TOO, Whites are the only group whose ethnocentrism is a problem in the eyes of the elite media.