Jews, Israel, and South Africa

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An article in the Forward describes a new book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky on Israel’s relationship with apartheid South Africa (“Writer Takes Controversial Look at Israel-South Africa Ties“). It’s long been known that Israel had a warm relationship with South Africa. This book describes just how close they were. They engaged in “extended cooperation” on nuclear issues, with SA providing uranium and both countries cooperating in building and testing missiles.

More importantly, it claims that some important Israelis went beyond purely practical support to approving apartheid itself: “For at least some on the Israeli side, … it became a bond of two allies who understood and sympathized with each other’s existential struggles. He sees similarities between Afrikanner nationalism and the revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his ideological heirs.”

The latter claim especially is distasteful to Jews who want to believe that applied liberalism is a timeless moral imperative in Judaism — that is, the vast majority of American Jews. But the reality is, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs,” and Israel is routinely referred to as an apartheid state.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (left). A photo of Vladimir Jabotinsky (right) loomed over former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as he spoke at the Likud Party convention in August, 2004.

Polakow-Suransky’s parents left South Africa in 1973 because his mother faced the prospect of arrest for her anti-apartheid work. The parents were high-profile opponents of apartheid–an aspect of Jewish involvement in the left that has been such an important influence in the US and elsewhere. The Forward article quotes Gideon Shimoni, a prominent Israeli historian who is rather negative about the book because it presents Shimon Peres as a hypocrite “who spoke out against apartheid in public but fostered the relationship in secret.”

But hypocrisy among Jews about apartheid-related issues is utterly commonplace, and I can’t see any reason why Peres should be an exception. This is particularly an affliction of Jews in Western societies who simultaneously support a Jewish apartheid ethnostate in Israel and vigorously and effectively oppose any sign of ethnic/racial consciousness among Whites in the US.

Shimoni’s book on Jews in South Africa during apartheid presents a nuanced picture. This is my summary (see here, p. 338):

The great majority of Jews in South Africa cooperated with the apartheid system. Between 1948 and 1970, most Jews gave their political allegiance to the United Party which “was quite as committed to white supremacy as were the Afrikaner nationalists.” By the 1970s Jews were turning more to the Progressive Party which advocated a gradual dismantling of apartheid, but “there appeared to be a grain of truth in the then current cynical quip that most Jews spoke like Progressives, voted for the United Party, and hoped that the Nationalist Party would remain in power.”

However, the most striking feature of Jewish political behavior under apartheid was that Jews were vastly overrepresented among those banned by the government because of their opposition to apartheid. For example, Jews represented more than half the whites arrested in the Treason Trial of 1956 and almost half of whites suspected of being members of the Communist Party in 1962; in the public mind therefore, “Jews were inordinately prominent in the ranks of those who were attempting to subvert the state.” The best predictor of Jewish participation in radical politics in South Africa was exposure to the political radicalism of the Eastern European Jewish subculture as a child. As indicated below, it is the special character of this Jewish group that has been so critical to the revolution in race relations in the U.S. since WWII. (Shimoni, G. (2003; Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa.)

This is similar to the American South prior to 1965. Jews generally went along with segregation. There is nothing in Judaism per se that is inconsistent with apartheid-style social systems. Indeed, ethnic separation is essential to Judaism, and Jews have often made alliances with oppressive elites.  It was the politically radical Eastern European Jews who changed the world by promoting political radicalism — often in conjunction with Zionism. Leftist radicalism and Zionism are the two great movements of Jews in the last 100 years. (See also Caryl Johnston’s current TOO article on Douglas Reed.)

The contradictions between leftist radicalism as a Jewish Diaspora strategy (aimed at displacing non-Jewish elites–often with a mask of universalism) and Zionism (aimed at establishing a Jewish ethnonationalist state) remain with us. Abe Foxman and his ilk are still trying to have their cake and eat it too by promoting the leftist anti-White agenda in the Diaspora in Western Societies while also supporting the most extreme manifestations of ethnonationalism among the Israelis. But their rhetoric is getting quite threadbare as Israel’s apartheid nature is becoming apparent to all. At least people like Sharon and Peres understood the reality that in the end Israel would have to be an apartheid state — even though they had to be hypocrites in public.

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Shocker! Abe Foxman is a hypocrite.

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Israel has long had  policies where people can be stopped and asked for identification; racial profiling is the norm. But Jewish organizations in America are vehemently and pretty much unanimously opposed to the Arizona law that does the same thing.

Now an article in Haaretz discusses the fact that it’s not just about suspicious-looking Palestinians (“Reminders of Israel in the Arizona immigration debate“). Prime Minister Ariel Sharon instituted a policy to cleanse Israel of foreign workers in 2002, and “by the end of 2005 about 145,000 ‘illegal residents’, as they were called, were expelled or ‘left willingly.'” There were objections to the policy, but everyone got over it pretty easily.

Fast forward to 2010 and the Arizona law. A group of Reform rabbis sent a letter to Arizona Governor Brewer expressing their outrage at the (U.S.) law, calling it, “inhumane and retrogressive”; “an affront to American values of justice and our historic status as a nation of immigrants”; a slippery slope, to say the least….. This bill moves us in the wrong direction, violating the principles of justice on which our nation was founded. We should, instead, focus our energy on comprehensive reform of our immigration system.”

Abe Foxman called it “biased, bigoted and unconstitutional.” When asked about how to reconcile this with Israel’s successful policy, Foxman doesn’t see a problem: “Well, in terms of size and dimension [??] Israel is nowhere near the U.S.”

So you see, size is everything. If you are small, you don’t have any obligation to have a government based on “principles of justice.” (For the record, the percentage of illegals in the US [probably more than 4% if there are 12 million] is much higher than illegal Israelis [~2.4%].) You can be as “inhumane and retrogressive” as you want. Big countries, on the other hand, have a moral obligation to uphold the highest standards of justice by letting in anyone who manages to get here–legal or not.

This “argument” isn’t worth bothering with. About the only thing it shows is the inexhaustible depths that an obsessively ethnocentric person can descend to. There are no contradictions; no hypocrisy; no double standards. It’s inconceivable that what’s good for Jews could possibly depart from the loftiest of principles.

White advocates tend to have a much harder time reconciling interests with principles: We are quite aware that the proposition nation isn’t working for us–that ethnic activists like Foxman and the Reform rabbis love to invoke high-minded principles to advocate policies that are against the interests of White Americans (while ignoring those principles in judging what is going on in Israel). That’s a big part of our problem because so many Americans–especially White Americans — are addicted to these principles. They are deeply embedded throughout the school system and are suffused with patriotic sentiments. Our wars are framed as having been fought for these principles.

Getting White Americans to think about their ethnic interests first and foremost is a tough sell indeed, but I think it will happen as Whites realize that their principles can’t save them from being submerged and displaced.  The first step is to get Whites to realize that explicit expressions of White ethnic identity and interests are legitimate–morally legitimate.

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Learning from the Left: Douglas Hyde’s Dedication and Leadership

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White Nationalism is at present confined largely to the political right, i.e., the people who have been on a losing streak since Stalingrad. European rightists do, of course, have much practical wisdom to impart, even if they failed in the end.

But American rightists have not even managed to learn what they can from the losers, much less take an interest in learning from the winners: the left, which has now established ideological hegemony up and down the political spectrum, defining the Limbaughs and libertarians of the “respectable” (viz., ineffectual) opposition as surely as the liberals they huff and puff about.

For those rightists who want to learn from the winners, Douglas Hyde’s Dedication and Leadership (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966) is a good place to begin. Hyde was a 20 year veteran of Communist activism, serving as news editor of the Communist London Daily Worker, until 1948, when he resigned, renounced Communism, and announced his conversion to Catholicism.

Although Hyde rejected the ideals and aims of Communism, he thought that the party’s highly effective organizational techniques should be emulated by those who wish to change the world for the better. Dedication and Leadership is a 150-page distillation of his experiences and insights.

Communism has killed more than 100 million people world-wide and is still racking up victims. Thus it is hard to think of Communism as anything but evil. But even evil is an accomplishment, and prodigious evil is a prodigious accomplishment.

How did tiny minorities of Communists accomplish so much? Because they worked harder and smarter than their opponents. They were particularly effective in mobilizing important moral qualities: idealism, dedication, and self-sacrifice. (One tends to feel licensed to kill for causes that one is willing to die for oneself.)

The fact that these moral qualities were bent toward evil ends does not make them any less praiseworthy.

How does one find and mobilize idealism, dedication, and sacrifice? Hyde advises the following.

First, recruit people who are already idealistic.

Young people tend to be idealistic, so special efforts should be focused on recruiting them.

Second, if you want to get a lot from people, demand a lot from them.

Communists inspired tremendous efforts simply because they asked for them. Communists were taught not to ask what they party can do for them, but what they can do for the party. The Marine Corps has no shortage of recruits for the same reason: their recruitment propaganda emphasizes sacrifice and discipline, not the perks of membership.

I was particularly impressed by one example of the dedication and self-sacrifice that was routine in Communist circles. Hyde and his fellow party employees took 8/14 of their income—more than 50%—and tithed it back to the party. They did this every payday, not just on special occasions.

How many White Nationalists are willing to tithe any percentage of their income to the cause they claim is sacred to them?

There are legions of professional Jews and Blacks. But there are fewer than ten full-time White Nationalists in the entire United States, and most of them make so little from the cause that it would be inconceivable that they could tithe anything back to it. Poverty is their sacrifice.

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It is not that money is lacking. There are individual White Nationalists whose wealth runs not just into tens, but hundreds of millions of dollars. Something else is lacking: the qualities of character that give rise to real, effective idealism, dedication, and sacrifice.

The truth is on our side. But truth is not enough to win if it remains locked in our hearts and heads, without consequences in the real world. When the first White Nationalist pledges 8/14 of his income to securing the existence of our people and a future for White children, I’ll believe that we will win.

But beyond asking for 8/14 of an employee’s income, Communism asked for 100% of each member, body and soul. And they got it.

Yes, demanding heroic dedication did make some hesitate before joining the party, but when they did, they were prepared to give their all. It also kept out lukewarm sympathizers and fellow travelers. But the party still had ways of utilizing the talents and resources of those who were unready or unable to take the plunge.  

Third, aim high.

If one is going to ask for everything, one has to have a good reason. The Communists asked everything of their activists because they had a world to win. Grandiose aims are only a problem if there is nothing concrete one can do in the here and now to realize them. But if one can forge that link, then even the humblest drudgery suddenly takes on a deeper and higher meaning.

I once asked an audience at a meeting on White community organizing why they were there. There were many answers: meeting new people, networking, seeing old friends, even learning about White community organizing. All of these were good enough reasons to get people there.

But then I offered a better reason: to save the world. Make no mistake, White nationalists are not just struggling to save the White race, since the welfare of the whole world depends upon our triumph. If we perish, the other races will breed recklessly and despoil the planet unchecked, and the one place in the universe where we know there is life will end up nothing but a burnt out cinder in the vastness of space.

So the next time you attend a White Nationalist gathering, remind yourself that you are saving the world. It will make the commute a little easier, parking less of a hassle.

The Communists realized that demanding heroic dedication to a higher cause does not drain people but energizes them. It does not hollow out their personalities but deepens them. Those who live for themselves alone have less meaningful lives than those who dedicate themselves to a higher cause.

Fourth, be the best.

The Communists taught that there is no contradiction between being a good Communist and being good in every other area of one’s life. The same should be true of White Nationalists. If you are going to be a good White Nationalist, you also have to be a good student, worker, employer, artist, spouse, parent, and neighbor.

One is a more credible and effective advocate for White Nationalism if one is well-regarded in other areas of one’s life. The Communists found that personal relationships with exemplary individuals were more important than ideology in recruiting new people to the cause.

Also, if one finds that one’s political commitments are interfering with excellence in other areas of one’s life, then one needs to scale back and regain balance. This prevents activists from burning out and keeps them in the fight.

Fifth, activism is essential.

Most individuals who joined the Communist party were immediately required to engage in some form of public activism. (A few with important social connections were trained as Communist secret agents.)

Public activism came before ideological instruction. By acting publicly as a Communist, one makes one’s commitment open and irreversible. By acting before one receives ideological instruction, one learns in a very personal and sometimes painful fashion the necessity of such instruction. Such activism also helps one weed out people who lack moral and physical courage before anything is invested in indoctrinating them.

Activism has a twofold purpose: to change the world and to change the activists. Since the party must act until the world changes, it must be organized for perpetual activism. Campaigns should be designed to (a) demonstrate that the party cares about its constituency, (b) to heighten the conflicts between the system and the party’s constituency, and (c) by building character, skills, and camaraderie among activists.

Hyde illustrates these and many other points with vivid anecdotes. His discussion of Communist cadre indoctrination techniques deserves an article of its own. I have not read many books that pack as much food for thought into so few pages.

Some White Nationalists might find Dedication and Leadership a depressing read, since it highlights the truly primitive, pathetic, unserious nature of the movement today. But that is the wrong way to look at it.

One does not need to read Douglas Hyde to see that White Nationalism in America today is full of kooks, losers, and dilettantes. One needs Hyde and authors like him if one is serious about creating a movement that can win.

Greg Johnson is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. He can be reached at editor@counter-currents.com.

James Edwards’ "Racism Schmacism: How Liberals Use the ‘R’ Word to Push the Obama Agenda"

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James Edwards is becoming a very important force in the movement for White advocacy. He hosts the The Political Cesspool, a weekly 3-hour radio show where he interviews a range of personalities on their ideas (including me on more than one occasion). And he has become a director of the American Third Position, a political party that aims makes an explicit appeal to White identity and White interests.

James is exactly the kind of young person who is making a big difference for our cause. He is articulate and well-informed.

Now James has come out with Racism, Schmacism, an important book cataloging the ways that White people are intimidated by the charge of racism. This fear makes people like John McCain rather lose an election than be called a racist for bringing up unpleasant things about Obama:

John McCain lost, and he lost badly, because he decided it was better to lose the election than to be called a racist, no matter how unfounded the charges. So he went around denouncing people associated with his campaign who dared refer to Barack Hussein Obama by his legal name, and he denounced an ad run by a state GOP group that featured Jeremiah Wright screaming “God damn America!” And what good did it do him? Not a bit. All the cowardice he displayed in a desperate attempt to avoid being called the “R-word” was for nothing.

As you can see from this passage, Racism Schmacism is well-written. Very entertaining. But also very fact-based. There are numerous references to news events and articles if readers are interested in further information.

The book recounts a series of incidents that collectively show that White Americans have become cowering fools, terrified of being labeled a racist. There’s Keith Sampson, “one of the most vicious and despicable racists in the United States. In fact, Keith Sampson is so filled with vile racism that he couldn’t keep it to himself, but had to shove his hate down the throats of his black co-workers” by reading a scholarly book on how the University of Notre Dame defeated the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.

There are also hilarious accounts of Whites caving in to political correctness — hilarious if they didn’t show the depths to which White people have sunk in their abject, craven cowardliness. The federal “hate crime” investigation into the kid who ate a ham sandwich in school. The mayor who prohibited White police officers from eating bananas on duty.

But this fear of offending aggrieved minorities and other darlings of political correctness has very real consequences. It is the ultimate weapon of the left, and Edwards shows that it is being used to shut down free speech. Organizations like the $PLC and the ADL use the ‘r’ word very liberally to prevent the expression of ideas they don’t like. As he notes, “an ever-increasing number of articles in law reviews and academic journals make the argument that the First Amendment doesn’t protect ‘hate speech.’”

In the end, you are racist just by being White—it really doesn’t matter what you say or do:

Folks, you will never be able to understand politics and culture in today’s America unless you grasp this fundamental truth at the root of more and more political and cultural battles in this country: A racist is a white person.

Racist equals white person, and white person equals racist.

All white people are racist, and they’re always racist, and they will always be racist.

Period.

Write that down in your day planner, make a note of it on your Blackberry or iPhone, put little sticky notes all over your house, or whatever you have to do until this message sinks in. Because until you grasp this, less and less of what’s going on in this country will make any sense at all, and you’ll be at the mercy of the liberal mainstream media, aggressive and hostile racial pressure groups, and white liberals (who are deluding themselves by thinking they’re not racists.)

This book, while entertainingly written, has a deadly point. White people will be utterly defeated unless they can summon the courage to adopt an explicit identity as White people and an explicit concern about White interests.  We have to get over being terrified of being called a racist.

The fact is that everyone has ethnic interests — including people of European descent. A great many other identifiable groups in multicultural America have a strong sense of ethnic identity and interest. Only White people cower in fear of asserting their racial identity and interests.

Jewish groups have been very positive about the recent study showing that Judaism is much more than a religion but that Jews constitute a biological descent group. An article in the Forward crows “We Are One Genetically.” And, as everyone knows, Jews have a strong sense of their interests in maintaining an ethnostate. But Jewish activist organizations have been very effective in repulsing attempts to label Jews as racists. And Jews are completely unperturbed by being called racists. All this while at the same time leading the charge against White America.

We have to be able to do stand up proudly and explicitly assert our White identity and White interests. James Edwards’ book is definitely a step in the right direction. Information on the book can be obtained by clicking on this link, or click here to buy directly.


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Charles Krauthammer’s "Those Troublesome Jews"

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Charles Krauthammer has always been extreme even by neocon standards. He was among the first to recommend that America seize the opportunity created by the fall of the Soviet Union to remake the entire Arab world in the interests of “democratic globalism.”

Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition—to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries.

America as a country with no biological identity should go to war so that Israel can achieve its ethnic interests. Americans are wonderfully principled people who have no ethnic identity. So he pitches eternal war as a moral crusade for righteousness that America must be committed to because that’s just how Americans are: Principled people who must be reminded once in a while that they need to wage holy war to uphold their lofty principles.

America is committed not to blood but to supporting democracy and freedom. America must defeat “the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.”

He’s probably had to rethink the rationale for war against the Arab and Islamic world since Hamas won the largest number of votes and parliamentary seats in democratic elections held in 2006.

Moral posturing is absolutely central to Krauthammer’s modus operandi.  While the rest of the world remains horrified at the behavior of the Israeli military, his column on the 2009 Gaza invasion was titled “Moral clarity in Gaza“:  “Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.”

Krauthammer always knows who the good guys are and he knows Americans are suckers for arguments framed as moral imperatives.

So it’s not surprising that he sees Israel as the hapless victim in the flotilla incident, condemned for simply “defending” itself. Andrew Sullivan is correct that to read Krauthammer is to enter into an alternate universe where aggressors are victims and where “forward defense” means invasion and murder of civilians. Krauthammer is the foremost exponent of the Israeli Derangement Syndrome: “This is a form of derangement, or of such a passionate commitment to a foreign country that any and all normal moral rules or even basic fairness are jettisoned.”

What’s different about Krauthammer is his willingness to play the anti-Semitism card — combined with the usual trademarked dose of moral posturing. His column on the flotilla is titled “Those Troublesome Jews” — troublesome in his view because Jews insist on defending themselves:

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

Israel’s problems don’t stem from push back resulting from its aggressive ethnonationalism. They stem from the fact that the world–the entire world–wants another Holocaust, including “the supine Europeans who’ve had quite enough of the Jewish problem.” While the rest of the world hates Jews because of Third Worldism, the Europeans hate Jews just as they have for the last millennium. They’re all basically Nazis at heart.

This is not an exaggeration. His 2002 article “Please excuse the Jews for living” had the same logic. He recited the many sins of France, including the fact that Jean Marie LePen — “the modern incarnation of European fascism” — had enough votes to be a run-off candidate for president.

I don’t recall Krauthammer condemning the many signs of fascism in Israel — particularly the present Israeli government and, most famously, its foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. It’s clear that Krauthammer thinks that European countries are proposition countries too. For Europeans, nationalism is a morally reprehensible reminder of National Socialism; for Israelis, it’s simply Jews being assertive.

And what accounts for the fact that European governments join in the chorus of condemnation of Israel? Plain old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Europeans just don’t like assertive Jews.

The explanation is not that difficult to find. What we are seeing is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release – with Israel as the trigger – of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history.

What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today, but its relative absence during the last half-century. That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.

This time, however, it is more sophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, even accepted, but they must know their place. Jews are fine so long as they are powerless, passive and picturesque.

What is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness, the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood. And nothing so embodies that as the Jewish state. What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back. That Jew has been demonized in the European press as never before since, well … since the ’30s. …

Just when Europe had reconciled itself to tolerance for the passive Jew – the Holocaust survivor who could be pitied, lionized, perhaps awarded the occasional literary prize – along comes the Jewish state, crude and vital and above all unwilling to apologize for its own existence.

It’s a clever argument of the sort that appeals to those morally principled Westerners. Israeli nationalism and aggressiveness are good, and if you don’t think so, you’re an anti-Semite. Europeans have always hated Jews. In another column, Krauthammer writes of “a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands.”

One wonders if there are any examples of Israeli aggression that he would see as morally reprehensible. Probably not. He has rationalized every example of Israeli aggression to date and has denounced the Oslo Accords as  “the most catastrophic and self- inflicted wound by any state in modern history.”

The existence of fanatical Jews like Krauthammer isn’t a surprise given what we know about the massive ethnocentrism at the heart of Jewish identity. What is truly depressing is that he is published in the Washington Post and syndicated in over 200 other newspapers and websites, such as Townhall. He is a regular commentator on Fox News and Inside Washington.

The result is that Americans are continually subjected to pro-Israel chauvinism, towering Jewish ethnocentrism, and anti-European hatred in the most prestigious and popular media outlets. We internalize the double standard in which Krauthammer rationalizes Israeli racialism and apartheid but promotes and exploits the idea that America and European countries exist for the purpose of defending abstractions like “freedom” and “democracy”; any signs of White identity and sense of White interests are morally repugnant.

We come to take these ideas for granted–to the point that Krauthammer is eminently respectable, especially among conservatives. Other commentators, like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, seem to have internalized this mindset as well. Accepting people like Krauthammer is what it means to be a mainstream conservative.

It’s a major part of the sickness we face.

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Ted Sallis on Jewish genetics

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Ted Sallis’s current TOO article makes a number of important points.

First, the fact that Jews are most closely related to Northern Italians does not imply that this was due to conversion in the ancient world. He points out that “the relatively greater similarity of Jews to southern rather than central/eastern Europeans may also to some extent reflect the greater Neolithic ancestry in the southern European groups that is shared by various Jewish groups as one component of their ancestry.”

In other words, the similarity may be due to simple geographic closeness. The similarity may be due to similarities that long pre-date the Jewish Diaspora in the Greco-Roman world of antiquity. This then suggests that my doubts about large-scale conversions to Judaism in the ancient world may be well-founded after all.

Further, the fact that there is very little similarity between Ashkenazi Jews and Eastern and Central Europeans indicates that Ashkenazi Jews remained separate from these populations for hundreds of years.

Sallis also points out that there are technical problems with the PCA analysis — the analysis with the pretty picture showing genetic distances. Such pictures are beguiling and doubtless represent the take-home message for most people. The picture suggests that Ashkenazi Jews (ASH) are more closely related to Northern Italians than to Iranian or Iraqi Jews. But this is not actually the case. In fact, Gil Atzmon explicitly denies it here.

But the IBD (Identical By Descent) analysis provides a very clear picture indicating very close relatedness among Jewish groups. IBD analysis compares gene sequences that are similar or completely identical because they descend from a common ancestor.

As Sallis notes, “this is a strong demonstration of the common origins and very close genetic connections among these groups.” Indeed, twelve of the thirteen comparisons with the highest degree of sharing are between Jewish groups. (The red bars in Part A of the figure represent comparisons of  Jews with other Jewish groups.) This analysis shows that Ashkenazi Jews (ASH in the figure) are substantially more closely related to all other Jewish groups than to any non-Jewish group, including the Northern Italians.

Finally, Sallis makes the important point that

when it comes to Jewish populations and the relatively small genetic distance separating Jews from both Europeans and Middle Easterners, “academics” (particularly Jewish scientists) and the media (as well as Jewish ethnic organizations) have no problem in stressing the genetic uniqueness of Jews and that this uniqueness stamps them as a separate and distinct biological/ethnic entity.However, when it comes to the objectively larger genetic gulf that separates Europeans from, say, Africans or Asians, why, that’s only an “illusion,” there is “no biological basis for race,” “we are all the same,” and “there is more genetic variation within groups than between them.”The contrast in attitude could not be greater.

Indeed, the Forward has an editorial based on the Atzmon et al. article titled “We are one genetically.” They clearly see the data as a wake-up call for Jews to preserve their genetic heritage:

In an age when exclusivity is frowned upon and multiculturalism prized, some Jews may celebrate if the genetic distinctions fade away and are replaced by a more pluralistic definition of who we are — or at least, who our genes say we are. But breaking down the cultural and religious isolation that has characterized Jewish life since ancient times also contains risks. Science tells us that we have, indeed, been one people. Will we remain so?

Well, the only people whose exclusivity is frowned on are White Europeans. But the sad reality is that Jews will continue to attempt to have their cake and eat it too on the issue of concern for genetic continuity as they have on all the other issues related to multiculturalism and Israel: Support for massive non-White immigration and opposition to White identity and interests in America and other Western societies while supporting an ethnonationalist, apartheid state in Israel and taking steps to ensure Jewish genetic continuity in the Diaspora.

Again, it’s worth remembering that a major motivation of the Jabotinsky faction of racial Zionists that now rules Israel was to prevent genetic assimilation that they saw going on the Diaspora. (See Ch. 5 of Separation and Its Discontents, p. 152ff.) They succeeded in their aims.

The ethnonationalist aspirations of Europeans are no less legitimate.

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A new study on Jewish genetics

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Kevin MacDonald:  Gil Atzmon and colleagues have come out with the largest study yet comparing Jewish and non-Jewish populations. (See here and here.) Ted Sallis will be coming out with a longer summary for TOO, but I thought I would highlight a couple points.

The study is remarkable for the number of genetic loci studied (3904 SNPs) and the number of people sampled (273 Jews from 7 different Jewish groups (Ashkenazi, Iranian, Syrian, Iraqi, Italian; Greek; Turkish) and 418 people from 16 non-Jewish groups).  As in previous studies, the main message is that Jewish populations do cluster together and are different from the populations they have lived among for hundreds of years.  The 7 Jewish populations divided into a European/Syrian group with a relatively high degree of genetic admixture with European non-Jews (30-60%) and a Middle Eastern group (Iraqi and Iranian Jews). The estimate of 60% overlap between Ashkenazi populations and Europeans indicates that Ashkenazi Jews are an intermediary population with genetic interests that overlap significantly with Europeans.

The new findings were seen as support for the idea that there was significant admixture with non-Jews in Greco-Roman times. This is based on the clustering of the European/Syrian Jews  and the fact that these groups have been separated since ancient times. The authors argue that the data are consistent  with historical accounts of proselytism and large-scale conversions to Judaism in ancient times.  When I reviewed the historical data in A People That Shall Dwell Alone (Ch. 4, pp. 62-78), I ended up rejecting this theory, coming down on the side of historians who doubted how important conversion really was. One thing that convinced me was that there was a lot of evidence for biases against converts. For example, once they converted they were regarded as very undesirable marriage partners and that a pure Jewish genealogy was a very big asset in the marriage market. Families keep their genealogies for generations, and there is a lot of evidence for hostility toward converts. Contrary to Atzmon et al., conversion is not required to explain the large numbers of Jews in the ancient world.

There was also a very pronounced apologetic tone to Jewish advocates of high levels of prosetlytism. But now it looks like they may have been right because the greatest admixture among the European/Syrian groups comes from the Mediterranean area: French, Northern Italian, and Sardinians. It’s hard to see how that could have happened without the admixture occurring in the ancient world. It’s also worth noting that, once again, the data are not compatible with a major role for the Khazars.

In any case, there certainly were elaborate cultural barriers against intermarriage throughout very long stretches of Jewish history, resulting in genetically different populations with substantially different genetic interests. That’s the point of the group evolutionary strategy idea: Admixture would have been much higher without barriers.

And of course, genetic overlap is not the same thing as a psychological sense of common interest. Following John Murray Cuddihy, I have often stressed the hostility and sense of historical grievance that Jews have had toward the Europeans they have lived among for centuries. Psychological attitudes do not necessarily match up one-to-one with genetic distance. Attitudes are affected not only by genetic similarity but are at least partly affected by ingroup/outgroup psychology which is known to be fairly insensitive to genetic distance: People can develop great hatreds toward the fans of different football teams.

The point is that it’s quite possible that Jewish hostility toward Europeans and their culture is not really warranted by the recent findings on genetic distance–an intriguing possibility to say the least.

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