Understanding Jewish Influence:

Background Traits for Jewish Activism

Kevin MacDonald

Abstract

Beginning in the ancient world, Jewish populations have repeatedly attained a position of power and influence within Western societies. I will discuss Jewish background traits conducive to influence: ethnocentrism, intelligence and wealth, psychological intensity, aggressiveness, with most of the focus on ethnocentrism. I discuss Jewish ethnocentrism in its historical, anthropological, and evolutionary context and in its relation to three critical psychological processes: moral particularism, self-deception, and the powerful Jewish tendency to coalesce into exclusionary, authoritarian groups under conditions of perceived threat.

Jewish populations have always had enormous effects on the societies in which they reside because of several qualities that are central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: First and foremost, Jews are ethnocentric and able to cooperate in highly organized, cohesive, and effective groups. Also important is high intelligence, including the usefulness of intelligence in attaining wealth, prominence in the media, and eminence in the academic world and the legal profession. I will also discuss two other qualities that have received less attention: psychological intensity and aggressiveness.

The four background traits of ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness result in Jews being able to produce formidable, effective groups—groups able to have powerful, transformative effects on the peoples they live among. In the modern world, these traits influence the academic world and the world of mainstream and elite media, thus amplifying Jewish effectiveness compared with traditional societies. However, Jews have repeatedly become an elite and powerful group in societies in which they reside in sufficient numbers. It is remarkable that Jews, usually as a tiny minority, have been central to a long list of historical events. Jews were much on the mind of the Church Fathers in the fourth century during the formative years of Christian dominance in the West. Indeed, I have proposed that the powerful anti-Jewish attitudes and legislation of the fourth-century Church must be understood as a defensive reaction against Jewish economic power and enslavement of non-Jews.¹ Jews who had nominally converted to Christianity but maintained their ethnic ties in marriage and commerce were the focus of the 250-year Inquisition in Spain, Portugal, and the Spanish colonies in the New World. Fundamentally, the Inquisition should be seen as a defensive reaction to the economic and political domination of these “New Christians.”²

Jews have also been central to all the important events of the twentieth century. Jews were a necessary component of the Bolshevik revolution that created the Soviet Union, and they remained an elite group in the Soviet Union until at least the post-World War II era. They were an important focus of National Socialism in Germany, and they have been prime movers of the post-1965 cultural and ethnic revolution in the United States, including the encouragement of massive non-white immigration to countries of European origins.³ In the contemporary world, organized American Jewish lobbying groups and deeply committed Jews in the Bush administration and the media are behind the pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy that is leading to war against virtually the entire Arab world.

How can such a tiny minority have such huge effects on the history of the West? This article is the first of a three-part series on Jewish influence which seeks to answer that question. This first paper in the series provides an introduction to Jewish ethnocentrism and other background traits that influence Jewish success. The second article discusses Zionism as the quintessential example of twentieth-century Jewish ethnocentrism and as an example of a highly influential Jewish intellectual/political movement. A broader aim will be to discuss a generalization about Jewish history: that in the long run the more extreme elements of the Jewish community win out and determine the direction of the entire group. As Jonathan Sacks points out, it is the committed core—made up now especially of highly influential and vigorous Jewish activist organizations in the United States and hypernationalist elements in Israel—that determines the future direction of the community.⁴ The third and final article will discuss neoconservatism as a Jewish intellectual and political movement. Although I touched on neoconservatism in my trilogy on Jews,⁵ the present influence of this movement on U.S. foreign policy necessitates a much fuller treatment.

Figure 1 provides an overview of the sources of Jewish influence. The four background traits—discussed in more detail below—are ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness. These traits are seen as underlying Jewish success in producing focused, effective groups able to influence the political process and the wider culture. In the modern world, Jewish influence on politics and culture is channeled through the media and through elite academic institutions into an almost bewildering array of areas—far too many to consider here.

I. Jews are Hyperethnocentric

Elsewhere I have argued that Jewish hyperethnocentrism can be traced back to their Middle Eastern origins.⁶ Traditional Jewish culture has a number of features identifying Jews with the ancestral cultures of the area. The most important of these is that Jews and other Middle Eastern cultures evolved under circumstances that favored large groups dominated by males.⁷ These groups were basically extended families with high levels of endogamy (i.e., marriage within the kinship group) and consanguineous marriage (i.e., marriage to blood relatives), including the uncle-niece marriage sanctioned in the Old Testament. These features are exactly the opposite of Western European tendencies (See Table 1).⁸

Table 1: Contrasts between European and Jewish Cultural Forms.

Whereas Western societies tend toward individualism, the basic Jewish cultural form is collectivism, in which there is a strong sense of group identity and group boundaries. Middle Eastern societies are characterized by anthropologists as “segmentary societies” organized into relatively impermeable, kinship-based groups.⁹ Group boundaries are often reinforced through external markers such as hair style or clothing, as Jews have often done throughout their history. Different groups settle in different areas where they retain their homogeneity alongside other homogeneous groups, as illustrated by the following account from Carleton Coon:

There the ideal was to emphasize not the uniformity of the citizens of a country as a whole but a uniformity within each special segment, and the greatest possible contrast between segments. The members of each ethnic unit feel the need to identify themselves by some configuration of symbols. If by virtue of their history they possess some racial peculiarity, this they will enhance by special haircuts and the like; in any case they will wear distinctive garments and behave in a distinctive fashion.¹⁰

These societies are by no means blissful paradises of multiculturalism. Between-group conflict often lurks just beneath the surface. For example, in nineteenth-century Turkey, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in a sort of superficial harmony, and even inhabited the same areas, “but the slightest spark sufficed to ignite the fuse.”¹¹

Jews are at the extreme of this Middle Eastern tendency toward hypercollectivism and hyperethnocentrism. I give many examples of Jewish hyperethnocentrism in my trilogy on Judaism and have suggested in several places that Jewish hyperethnocentrism is biologically based.¹² Middle Eastern ethnocentrism and fanaticism has struck a good many people as extreme, including William Hamilton, perhaps the most important evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century. Hamilton writes:

I am sure I am not the first to have wondered what it is about that part of the world that feeds such diverse and intense senses of rectitude as has created three of the worlds’ most persuasive and yet most divisive and mutually incompatible religions. It is hard to discern the root in the place where I usually look for roots of our strong emotions, the part deepest in us, our biology and evolution.¹³

Referring to my first two books on Judaism, Hamilton then notes that “even a recent treatise on this subject, much as I agree with its general theme, seems to me hardly to reach to this point of the discussion.” If I failed to go far enough in describing or analyzing Jewish ethnocentrism, it is perhaps because the subject seems almost mind-bogglingly deep, with psychological ramifications everywhere. As a pan-humanist, Hamilton was acutely aware of the ramifications of human ethnocentrism and especially of the Jewish variety. Likening Judaism to the creation of a new human species, Hamilton noted that

from a humanist point of view, were those "species" the Martian thought to see in the towns and villages a millennium or so ago a good thing? Should we have let their crystals grow; do we retrospectively approve them? As by growth in numbers by land annexation, by the heroizing of a recent mass murderer of Arabs [i.e., Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Arabs, including children, at the Patriarch’s Cave in Hebron in 1994], and by the honorific burial accorded to a publishing magnate [Robert Maxwell], who had enriched Israel partly by his swindling of his employees, most of them certainly not Jews, some Israelis seem to favour a "racewise" and unrestrained competition, just as did the ancient Israelites and Nazi Germans. In proportion to the size of the country and the degree to which the eyes of the world are watching, the acts themselves that betray this trend of reversion from panhumanism may seem small as yet, but the spirit behind them, to this observer, seems virtually identical to trends that have long predated them both in humans and animals.¹⁴

A good start for thinking about Jewish ethnocentrism is the work of Israel Shahak, most notably his co-authored Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel.¹⁵ Present-day fundamentalists attempt to re-create the life of Jewish communities before the Enlightenment (i.e., prior to about 1750). During this period the great majority of Jews believed in Cabbala—Jewish mysticism. Influential Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem ignored the obvious racialist, exclusivist material in the Cabbala by using words like “men,” “human beings,” and “cosmic” to suggest the Cabbala has a universalist message. The actual text says salvation is only for Jews, while non-Jews have “Satanic souls.”¹⁶

The ethnocentrism apparent in such statements was not only the norm in traditional Jewish society, but remains a powerful current of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism, with important implications for Israeli politics. For example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, describing the difference between Jews and non-Jews:

We do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of…a totally different species…. The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world…. The difference of the inner quality [of the body]…is so great that the bodies would be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews]: “their bodies are in vain”…. An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.¹⁷

This claim of Jewish uniqueness echoes Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel’s claim that “everything about us is different.” Jews are “ontologically” exceptional.¹⁸

The Gush Emunim and other Jewish fundamentalist sects described by Shahak and Mezvinsky are thus part of a long mainstream Jewish tradition which considers Jews and non-Jews completely different species, with Jews absolutely superior to non-Jews and subject to a radically different moral code. Moral universalism is thus antithetical to the Jewish tradition in which the survival and interests of the Jewish people are the most important ethical goal:

Many Jews, especially religious Jews today in Israel and their supporters abroad, continue to adhere to traditional Jewish ethics that other Jews would like to ignore or explain away. For example, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus/Shechem, after several of his students were remanded on suspicion of murdering a teenage Arab girl: “Jewish blood is not the same as the blood of a goy.” Rabbi Ido Elba: “According to the Torah, we are in a situation of pikuah nefesh (saving a life) in time of war, and in such a situation one may kill any Gentile.” Rabbi Yisrael Ariel writes in 1982 that “Beirut is part of the Land of Israel. [This is a reference to the boundaries of Israel as stated in the Covenant between God and Abraham in Genesis 15: 18–20 and Joshua 1 3–4]…our leaders should have entered Lebanon and Beirut without hesitation, and killed every single one of them. Not a memory should have remained.” It is usually yeshiva students who chant “Death to the Arabs” on CNN. The stealing and corruption by religious leaders that has recently been documented in trials in Israel and abroad continues to raise the question of the relationship between Judaism and ethics.¹⁹

Moral particularism in its most aggressive form can be seen among the ultranationalists, such as the Gush Emunim, who hold that

Jews are not, and cannot be a normal people. The eternal uniqueness of the Jews is the result of the Covenant made between God and the Jewish people at Mount Sinai…. The implication is that the transcendent imperatives for Jews effectively nullify moral laws that bind the behavior of normal nations. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of Gush Emunim’s most prolific ideologues, argues that the divine commandments to the Jewish people “transcend the human notions of national rights.” He explains that while God requires other nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness, such laws do not apply to Jews.²⁰

As argued in the second paper in this series, it is the most extreme elements within the Jewish community that ultimately give direction to the community as a whole. These fundamentalist and ultranationalist groups are not tiny fringe groups, mere relics of traditional Jewish culture. They are widely respected by the Israeli public and by many Jews in the Diaspora. They have a great deal of influence on the Israeli government, especially the Likud governments and the recent government of national unity headed by Ariel Sharon. The members of Gush Emunim constitute a significant percentage of the elite units of the Israeli army, and, as expected on the hypothesis that they are extremely ethnocentric, they are much more willing to treat the Palestinians in a savage and brutal manner than are other Israeli soldiers. All together, the religious parties represent about 25% of the Israeli electorate²¹—a percentage that is sure to increase because of the high fertility of religious Jews and because intensified troubles with the Palestinians tend to make other Israelis more sympathetic to their cause. Given the fractionated state of Israeli politics and the increasing numbers of the religious groups, it is unlikely that future governments can be formed without their participation. Peace in the Middle East therefore appears unlikely absent the complete capitulation or expulsion of the Palestinians.

A good discussion of Jewish moral particularism can be found in a recent article in Tikkun—probably the only remaining liberal Jewish publication. Kim Chernin wonders why so many Jews “have trouble being critical of Israel.”²² She finds several obstacles to criticism of Israel:

1. A conviction that Jews are always in danger, always have been, and therefore are in danger now. Which leads to: 2. The insistence that a criticism is an attack and will lead to our destruction. Which is rooted in: 3. The supposition that any negativity towards Jews (or Israel) is a sign of anti-Semitism and will (again, inevitably) lead to our destruction…. 6. An even more hidden belief that a sufficient amount of suffering confers the right to violence…. 7. The conviction that our beliefs, our ideology (or theology), matter more than the lives of other human beings.

Chernin presents the Jewish psychology of moral particularism:

We keep a watchful eye out, we read the signs, we detect innuendo, we summon evidence, we become, as we imagine it, the ever-vigilant guardians of our people’s survival. Endangered as we imagine ourselves to be; endangered as we insist we are, any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own, takes on exaggerated dimensions; we come to perceive such criticism as a life-threatening attack. The path to fear is clear. But our proclivity for this perception is itself one of our unrecognized dangers. Bit by bit, as we gather evidence to establish our perilous position in the world, we are brought to a selective perception of that world. With our attention focused on ourselves as the endangered species, it seems to follow that we ourselves can do no harm…. When I lived in Israel I practiced selective perception. I was elated by our little kibbutz on the Lebanese border until I recognized that we were living on land that had belonged to our Arab neighbors. When I didn’t ask how we had come to acquire that land, I practiced blindness…

The profound depths of Jewish ethnocentrism are intimately tied up with a sense of historical persecution. Jewish memory is a memory of persecution and impending doom, a memory that justifies any response because ultimately it is Jewish survival that is at stake:

Wherever we look, we see nothing but impending Jewish destruction…. I was walking across the beautiful square in Nuremberg a couple of years ago and stopped to read a public sign. It told this story: During the Middle Ages, the town governing body, wishing to clear space for a square, burned out, burned down, and burned up the Jews who had formerly filled up the space. End of story. After that, I felt very uneasy walking through the square and I eventually stopped doing it. I felt endangered, of course, a woman going about through Germany wearing a star of David. But more than that, I experienced a conspicuous and dreadful self-reproach at being so alive, so happily on vacation, now that I had come to think about the murder of my people hundreds of years before. After reading that plaque I stopped enjoying myself and began to look for other signs and traces of the mistreatment of the former Jewish community. If I had stayed longer in Nuremberg, if I had gone further in this direction, I might soon have come to believe that I, personally, and my people, currently, were threatened by the contemporary Germans eating ice cream in an outdoor cafe in the square. How much more potent this tendency for alarm must be in the Middle East, in the middle of a war zone!…

Notice the powerful sense of history here. Jews have a very long historical memory. Events that happened centuries ago color their current perceptions.

This powerful sense of group endangerment and historical grievance is associated with a hyperbolic style of Jewish thought that runs repeatedly through Jewish rhetoric. Chernin’s comment that “any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own, takes on exaggerated dimensions” is particularly important. In the Jewish mind, all criticism must be suppressed because not to do so would be to risk another Holocaust: “There is no such thing as overreaction to an anti-Semitic incident, no such thing as exaggerating the omnipresent danger. Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society hadn’t learned ‘the lesson of the Holocaust.’ ”²³ Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, a premier neoconservative journal published by the American Jewish Committee, provides an example:

My own view is that what had befallen the Jews of Europe inculcated a subliminal lesson…. The lesson was that anti-Semitism, even the relatively harmless genteel variety that enforced quotas against Jewish students or kept their parents from joining fashionable clubs or getting jobs in prestigious Wall Street law firms, could end in mass murder.²⁴

This is a “slippery slope” argument with a vengeance. The schema is as follows: Criticism of Jews indicates dislike of Jews; this leads to hostility toward Jews, which leads to Hitler and eventually to mass murder. Therefore all criticism of Jews must be suppressed. With this sort of logic, it is easy to dismiss arguments about Palestinian rights on the West Bank and Gaza because “the survival of Israel” is at stake. Consider, for example, the following advertisement distributed by neoconservative publicist David Horowitz:

The Middle East struggle is not about right versus right. It is about a fifty-year effort by the Arabs to destroy the Jewish state, and the refusal of the Arab states in general and the Palestinian Arabs in particular to accept Israel’s existence…. The Middle East conflict is not about Israel’s occupation of the territories; it is about the refusal of the Arabs to make peace with Israel, which is an expression of their desire to destroy the Jewish state.²⁵

“Survival of Israel” arguments thus trump concerns about allocation of scarce resources like water, the seizure of Palestinian land, collective punishment, torture, and the complete degradation of Palestinian communities into isolated, military-occupied, Bantustan-type enclaves. The logic implies that critics of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza also favor the destruction of Israel and hence the mass murder of millions of Jews.

Similarly, during the debate over selling military hardware to Saudi Arabia in the Carter administration, “the Israeli lobby pulled out all the stops,” including circulating books to Congress based on the TV series The Holocaust. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main Jewish lobbying group in Congress, included a note stating, “This chilling account of the extermination of six million Jews underscores Israel’s concerns during the current negotiations for security without reliance on outside guarantees.”²⁶ In other words, selling AWACS reconnaissance planes to Saudi Arabia, a backward kingdom with little military capability, is tantamount to collusion in the extermination of millions of Jews.

Jewish thinking about immigration into the U.S. shows the same logic. Lawrence Auster, a Jewish conservative, describes the logic as follows:

The liberal notion that “all bigotry is indivisible” [advocated by Norman Podhoretz] implies that all manifestations of ingroup/outgroup feeling are essentially the same—and equally wrong. It denies the obvious fact that some outgroups are more different from the ingroup, and hence less assimilable, and hence more legitimately excluded, than other outgroups. It means, for example, that wanting to exclude Muslim immigrants from America is as blameworthy as wanting to exclude Catholics or Jews.

Now when Jews put together the idea that “all social prejudice and exclusion leads potentially to Auschwitz” with the idea that “all bigotry is indivisible,” they must reach the conclusion that any exclusion of any group, no matter how alien it may be to the host society, is a potential Auschwitz.

So there it is. We have identified the core Jewish conviction that makes Jews keep pushing relentlessly for mass immigration, even the mass immigration of their deadliest enemies. In the thought-process of Jews, to keep Jew-hating Muslims out of America would be tantamount to preparing the way to another Jewish Holocaust.²⁷

The idea that any sort of exclusionary thinking on the part of Americans—and especially European Americans as a majority group—leads inexorably to a Holocaust for Jews is not the only reason why Jewish organizations still favor mass immigration. I have identified two others as well: the belief that greater diversity makes Jews safer and an intense sense of historical grievance against the traditional peoples and culture of the United States and Europe.²⁸ These two sentiments also illustrate Jewish moral particularism because they fail to consider the ethnic interests of other peoples in thinking about immigration policy. Recently the “diversity-as-safety” argument was made by Leonard S. Glickman, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish group that has advocated open immigration to the United States for over a century. Glickman stated, “The more diverse American society is the safer [Jews] are.”²⁹ At the present time, the HIAS is deeply involved in recruiting refugees from Africa to emigrate to the U.S.

The diversity as safety argument and its linkage to historical grievances against European civilization is implicit in a recent statement of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) in response to former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Muslim Turkey has no place in the European Union:

Ironically, in the fifteenth century, when European monarchs expelled the Jews, it was Moslem Turkey that provided them a welcome…. During the Holocaust, when Europe was slaughtering its Jews, it was Turkish consuls who extended protection to fugitives from Vichy France and other Nazi allies…. Today’s European neo-Nazis and skinheads focus upon Turkish victims while, Mr. President, you are reported to be considering the Pope’s plea that your Convention emphasize Europe’s Christian heritage. [The Center suggested that Giscard’s new Constitution] underline the pluralism of a multi-faith and multi-ethnic Europe, in which the participation of Moslem Turkey might bolster the continent’s Moslem communities—and, indeed, Turkey itself—against the menaces of extremism, hate and fundamentalism. A European Turkey can only be beneficial for stability in Europe and the Middle East.³⁰

Here we see Jewish moral particularism combined with a profound sense of historical grievance—hatred by any other name—against European civilization and a desire for the end of Europe as a Christian civilization with its traditional ethnic base. According to the SWC, the menaces of “extremism, hate and fundamentalism”—prototypically against Jews—can only be repaired by jettisoning the traditional cultural and ethnic basis of European civilization. Events that happened five hundred years ago are still fresh in the minds of Jewish activists—a phenomenon that should give pause to everyone in an age when Israel has control of nuclear weapons and long-range delivery systems.³¹

Indeed, a recent article on Assyrians in the U.S. shows that many Jews have not forgiven or forgotten events of 2,700 years ago, when the Northern Israelite kingdom was forcibly relocated to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh: “Some Assyrians say Jews are one group of people who seem to be more familiar with them. But because the Hebrew Bible describes Assyrians as cruel and ruthless conquerors, people such as the Rev. William Nissan say he is invariably challenged by Jewish rabbis and scholars about the misdeeds of his ancestors.”³²

The SWC inveighs against hate but fails to confront the issue of hatred as a normative aspect of Judaism. Jewish hatred toward non-Jews emerges as a consistent theme throughout the ages, beginning in the ancient world.³³ The Roman historian Tacitus noted that “Among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies.³⁴ The eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon was struck by the fanatical hatred of Jews in the ancient world:

From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives; and we are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but of human kind.³⁵

The nineteenth-century Spanish historian José Amador de los Rios wrote of the Spanish Jews who assisted the Muslim conquest of Spain that “without any love for the soil where they lived, without any of those affections that ennoble a people, and finally without sentiments of generosity, they aspired only to feed their avarice and to accomplish the ruin of the Goths; taking the opportunity to manifest their rancor, and boasting of the hatreds that they had hoarded up so many centuries.”³⁶ In 1913, economist Werner Sombart, in his classic Jews and Modern Capitalism, summarized Judaism as “a group by themselves and therefore separate and apart—this from the earliest antiquity. All nations were struck by their hatred of others.”³⁷

A recent article by Meir Y. Soloveichik, aptly titled “The virtue of hate,” amplifies this theme of normative Jewish fanatical hatred.³⁸ “Judaism believes that while forgiveness is often a virtue, hate can be virtuous when one is dealing with the frightfully wicked. Rather than forgive, we can wish ill; rather than hope for repentance, we can instead hope that our enemies experience the wrath of God.” Soloveichik notes that the Old Testament is replete with descriptions of horribly violent deaths inflicted on the enemies of the Israelites—the desire not only for revenge but for revenge in the bloodiest, most degrading manner imaginable: “The Hebrew prophets not only hated their enemies, but rather reveled in their suffering, finding in it a fitting justice.” In the Book of Esther, after the Jews kill the ten sons of Haman, their persecutor, Esther asks that they be hanged on a gallows.

This normative fanatical hatred in Judaism can be seen by the common use among Orthodox Jews of the phrase yemach shemo, meaning, may his name be erased. This phrase is used “whenever a great enemy of the Jewish nation, of the past or present, is mentioned. For instance, one might very well say casually, in the course of conversation, ‘Thank God, my grandparents left Germany before Hitler, yemach shemo, came to power.’ Or: ‘My parents were murdered by the Nazis, yemach shemam.’ ”³⁹ Again we see that the powerful consciousness of past suffering leads to present-day intense hatred:

Another danger inherent in hate is that we may misdirect our odium at institutions in the present because of their past misdeeds. For instance, some of my coreligionists reserve special abhorrence for anything German, even though Germany is currently one of the most pro-Israel countries in Europe. Similarly, after centuries of suffering, many Jews have, in my own experience, continued to despise religious Christians, even though it is secularists and Islamists who threaten them today, and Christians should really be seen as their natural allies. Many Jewish intellectuals and others of influence still take every assertion of the truth of Christianity as an anti-Semitic attack. After the Catholic Church beatified Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Christianity, some prominent Jews asserted that the Church was attempting to cover up its role in causing the Holocaust. And then there is the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who essentially has asserted that any attempt by the Catholic Church to maintain that Christianity is the one true faith marks a continuation of the crimes of the Church in the past. Burning hatred, once kindled, is difficult to extinguish.

Soloveichik could also have included Jewish hatred toward the traditional peoples and culture of the United States. This hatred stems from Jewish memory of the immigration law of 1924, which is seen as having resulted in a greater number of Jews dying in the Holocaust because it restricted Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Jews are also acutely aware of widespread anti-Jewish attitudes in the U.S. prior to World War II. The hatred continues despite the virtual disappearance of anti-Jewish attitudes in the U.S. after World War II and despite the powerful ties between the United States and Israel.⁴⁰

Given the transparently faulty logic and obvious self-interest involved in arguments made by Jewish activists, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Jews are often engaged in self-deception. In fact, self-deception is a very important component of Jewish moral particularism. I wrote an entire chapter on Jewish self-deception in Separation and Its Discontents⁴¹ but it was nowhere near enough. Again, Kim Chernin:

Our sense of victimization as a people works in a dangerous and seditious way against our capacity to know, to recognize, to name and to remember. Since we have adopted ourselves as victims we cannot correctly read our own history let alone our present circumstances. Even where the story of our violence is set down in a sacred text that we pore over again and again, we cannot see it. Our self-election as the people most likely to be victimized obscures rather than clarifies our own tradition. I can’t count the number of times I read the story of Joshua as a tale of our people coming into their rightful possession of their promised land without stopping to say to myself, “but this is a history of rape, plunder, slaughter, invasion and destruction of other peoples.” As such, it bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to the behavior of Israeli settlers and the Israeli army of today, a behavior we also cannot see for what it is. We are tracing the serpentine path of our own psychology. We find it organized around a persuasion of victimization, which leads to a sense of entitlement to enact violence, which brings about an inevitable distortion in the way we perceive both our Jewish identity and the world, and involves us finally in a tricky relationship to language.

Political columnist Joe Sobran—who has suffered professionally for expressing his opinions about Israel—exposes the moral particularism of Norman Podhoretz, one of the chorus of influential Jewish voices who advocate restructuring the entire Middle East in the interests of Israel:

Podhoretz has unconsciously exposed the Manichaean fantasy world of so many of those who are now calling for war with Iraq. The United States and Israel are “good”; the Arab-Muslim states are “evil”; and those opposed to this war represent “moral relativism,” ostensibly neutral but virtually on the side of “evil.” This is simply deranged. The ability to see evil only in one’s enemies isn’t “moral clarity.” It’s the essence of fanaticism. We are now being counseled to fight one kind of fanaticism with another. [My emphasis]

As Sobran notes, the moral particularism is unconscious—an example of self-deception. The world is cut up into two parts, the good and the evil—ingroup-outgroup—as it has been, for Jews, for well over two thousand years. Recently Jared Taylor and David Horowitz got into a discussion which touched on Jewish issues. Taylor writes:

Mr. Horowitz deplores the idea that “we are all prisoners of identity politics,” implying that race and ethnicity are trivial matters we must work to overcome. But if that is so, why does the home page of FrontPageMag carry a perpetual appeal for contributions to “David’s Defense of Israel Campaign”? Why Israel rather than, say, Kurdistan or Tibet or Euskadi or Chechnya? Because Mr. Horowitz is Jewish. His commitment to Israel is an expression of precisely the kind of particularist identity he would deny to me and to other racially-conscious whites. He passionately supports a self-consciously Jewish state but calls it “surrendering to the multicultural miasma” when I work to return to a self-consciously white America. He supports an explicitly ethnic identity for Israel but says American must not be allowed to have one… If he supports a Jewish Israel, he should support a white America.⁴²

Taylor is suggesting that Horowitz is self-deceived or inconsistent. It is interesting that Horowitz was acutely aware of his own parents’ self-deception. Horowitz’s description of his parents shows the strong ethnocentrism that lurked beneath the noisy universalism of Jewish communists in mid-twentieth century America. In his book, Radical Son, Horowitz describes the world of his parents who had joined a “shul” (i.e., a synagogue) run by the Communist Party in which Jewish holidays were given a political interpretation. Psychologically these people might as well have been in eighteenth-century Poland, but they were completely unaware of any Jewish identity. Horowitz writes:

What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto. There was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe, the same dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of moral superiority toward the stronger and more numerous goyim outside. And there was the same fear of expulsion for heretical thoughts, which was the fear that riveted the chosen to the faith.⁴³

Jews recreate Jewish social structure wherever they are, even when they are completely unaware they are doing so. When asked about their Jewish commitments, these communists denied having any.⁴⁴ Nor were they consciously aware of having chosen ethnically Jewish spouses, although they all married other Jews. This denial has been useful for Jewish organizations and Jewish intellectual apologists attempting to de-emphasize the role of Jews on the radical left in the twentieth century. For example, a common tactic of the ADL beginning in the Red Scare era of the 1920s right up through the Cold War era was to claim that Jewish radicals were no longer Jews because they had no Jewish religious commitments.⁴⁵

Non-Jews run the risk of failing to truly understand how powerful these Jewish traits of moral particularism and self-deception really are. When confronted with his own rabid support for Israel, Horowitz simply denies that ethnicity has much to do with it; he supports Israel as a matter of principle—his commitment to universalist moral principles—and he highlights the relationship between Israel and the West: “Israel is under attack by the same enemy that has attacked the United States. Israel is the point of origin for the culture of the West.”⁴⁶ This ignores the reality that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is a major part of the reason why the United States was attacked and is hated throughout the Arab world. It also ignores the fact that Western culture and its strong strain of individualism are the antithesis of Judaism, and that Israel’s Western veneer overlays the deep structure of Israel as an apartheid, ethnically based state.

It’s difficult to argue with people who cannot see or at least won’t acknowledge the depths of their own ethnic commitments and continue to act in ways that compromise the ethnic interests of others. People like Horowitz (and his parents) can’t see their ethnic commitments even when they are obvious to everyone else. One could perhaps say the same of Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and the legion of prominent Jews who collectively dominate the perception of Israel presented by the U.S. media. Not surprisingly, Horowitz pictures the U.S. as a set of universal principles, with no ethnic content. This idea originated with Jewish intellectuals, particularly Horace Kallen, almost a century ago at a time when there was a strong conception that the United States was a European civilization whose characteristics were racially/ethnically based.⁴⁷ As we all know, this world and its intellectual infrastructure have vanished, and I have tried to show that the prime force opposing a European racial/ethnic conception of the U.S. was a set of Jewish intellectual and political movements that collectively pathologized any sense of European ethnicity or European ethnic interests.⁴⁸

Given that extreme ethnocentrism continues to pervade all segments of the organized Jewish community, the advocacy of the de-ethnicization of Europeans—a common sentiment in the movements I discuss in The Culture of Critique—is best seen as a strategic move against peoples regarded as historical enemies. In Chapter 8 of CofC, I call attention to a long list of similar double standards, especially with regard to the policies pursued by Israel versus the policies Jewish organizations have pursued in the U.S. These policies include church-state separation, attitudes toward multiculturalism, and immigration policies favoring the dominant ethnic group. This double standard is fairly pervasive. As noted throughout CofC, Jewish advocates addressing Western audiences have promoted policies that satisfy Jewish (particularist) interests in terms of the morally universalist language that is a central feature of Western moral and intellectual discourse; obviously David Horowitz’s rationalization of his commitment to Israel is a prime example of this.

A principal theme of CofC is that Jewish organizations played a decisive role in opposing the idea that the United States ought to be a European nation. Nevertheless, these organizations have been strong supporters of Israel as a nation of the Jewish people. Consider, for example, a press release of May 28, 1999, by the ADL:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today lauded the passage of sweeping changes in Germany’s immigration law, saying the easing of the nation’s once rigorous naturalization requirements “will provide a climate for diversity and acceptance. It is encouraging to see pluralism taking root in a society that, despite its strong democracy, had for decades maintained an unyielding policy of citizenship by blood or descent only,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “The easing of immigration requirements is especially significant in light of Germany’s history of the Holocaust and persecution of Jews and other minority groups. The new law will provide a climate for diversity and acceptance in a nation with an onerous legacy of xenophobia, where the concept of ‘us versus them’ will be replaced by a principle of citizenship for all.”⁴⁹

There is no mention of analogous laws in place in Israel restricting immigration to Jews, or of the long-standing policy of rejecting the possibility of repatriation for Palestinian refugees wishing to return to Israel or the occupied territories. The prospective change in the “us versus them” attitude alleged to be characteristic of Germany is applauded, while the “us versus them” attitude characteristic of Israel and Jewish culture throughout history is unmentioned. Recently, the Israeli Ministry of Interior ruled that new immigrants who have converted to Judaism will no longer be able to bring non-Jewish family members into the country. The decision is expected to cut by half the number of eligible immigrants to Israel. Nevertheless, Jewish organizations continue to be strong proponents of multiethnic immigration to the United States while maintaining unquestioning support for Israel. This pervasive double standard was noticed by writer Vincent Sheean in his observations of Zionists in Palestine in 1930: “how idealism goes hand in hand with the most terrific cynicism; . . . how they are Fascists in their own affairs, with regard to Palestine, and internationalists in everything else.”⁵⁰ The right hand does not know what the left is doing—self-deception writ large.

Jewish ethnocentrism is well founded in the sense that scientific studies supporting the genetic cohesiveness of Jewish groups continue to appear. Most notable of the recent studies is that of Michael Hammer and colleagues.⁵¹ Based on Y-chromosome data, Hammer et al. conclude that 1 in 200 matings within Jewish communities were with non-Jews over a 2000-year period.

Because of their intense ethnocentrism, Jews tend to have great rapport with each other—an important ingredient in producing effective groups. One way to understand this powerful attraction for fellow ethnic group members is J. Philippe Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory.⁵² According to GST, people are attracted to others who are genetically similar to themselves. One of the basic ideas of evolutionary biology is that people are expected to help relatives because they share similar genes. When a father helps a child or an uncle helps a nephew, he is really also helping himself because of their close genetic relationship. (Parents share half their genes with their children; uncles share one-fourth of their genes with nieces and nephews.⁵³) GST extends this concept to non-relatives by arguing that people benefit when they favor others who are genetically similar to them even if they are not relatives.

GST has some important implications for understanding cooperation and cohesiveness among Jews. It predicts that people will be friendlier to other people who are genetically more similar to themselves. In the case of Jews and non-Jews, it predicts that Jews would be more likely to make friends and alliances with other Jews, and that there would be high levels of rapport and psychological satisfaction within these relationships.

GST explains the extraordinary rapport and cohesiveness among Jews. Since the vast majority of Jews are closely related genetically, GST predicts that they will be very attracted to other Jews and may even be able to recognize them in the absence of distinctive clothing and hair styles. There is anecdotal evidence for this statement. Theologian Eugene Borowitz writes that Jews seek each other out in social situations and feel “far more at home” after they have discovered who is Jewish.⁵⁴ “Most Jews claim to be equipped with an interpersonal friend-or-foe sensing device that enables them to detect the presence of another Jew, despite heavy camouflage.” Another Jewish writer comments on the incredible sense of oneness he has with other Jews and his ability to recognize other Jews in public places, a talent some Jews call “J-dar.”⁵⁵ While dining with his non-Jewish fiancée, he is immediately recognized as Jewish by some other Jews, and there is an immediate “bond of brotherhood” between them that excludes his non-Jewish companion.

Robert Reich, Clinton administration Secretary of Labor, wrote that in his first face-to-face meeting with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, “We have never met before, but I instantly know him. One look, one phrase, and I know where he grew up, how he grew up, where he got his drive and his sense of humor. He is New York. He is Jewish. He looks like my uncle Louis, his voice is my uncle Sam. I feel we’ve been together at countless weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals. I know his genetic structure. I’m certain that within the last five hundred years—perhaps even more recently—we shared the same ancestor.”⁵⁶ Reich is almost certainly correct: He and Greenspan do indeed have a recent common ancestor, and this genetic affinity causes them to have an almost supernatural attraction to each other. Or consider Sigmund Freud, who wrote that he found “the attraction of Judaism and of Jews so irresistible, many dark emotional powers, all the mightier the less they let themselves be grasped in words, as well as the clear consciousness of inner identity, the secrecy of the same mental construction.”⁵⁷

Any discussion of Judaism has to start and probably end with this incredibly strong bond that Jews have among each other—a bond that is created by their close genetic relationship and by the intensification of the psychological mechanisms underlying group cohesion. This powerful rapport among Jews translates into a heightened ability to cooperate in highly focused groups.

To conclude this section: In general, the contemporary organized Jewish community is characterized by high levels of Jewish identification and ethnocentrism. Jewish activist organizations like the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and the neoconservative think tanks are not creations of the fundamentalist and Orthodox, but represent the broad Jewish community, including non-religious Jews and Reform Jews. In general, the more actively people are involved in the Jewish community, the more committed they are to preventing intermarriage and retaining Jewish ethnic cohesion. And despite a considerable level of intermarriage among less committed Jews, the leadership of the Jewish community in the U.S. is at present not made up of the offspring of intermarried people to any significant extent.

Jewish ethnocentrism is ultimately simple traditional human ethnocentrism, although it is certainly among the more extreme varieties. But what is so fascinating is the cloak of intellectual support for Jewish ethnocentrism, the complexity and intellectual sophistication of the rationalizations for it—some of which are reviewed in Separation and Its Discontents⁵⁸ and the rather awesome hypocrisy (or cold-blooded deception) of it, given Jewish opposition to ethnocentrism among Europeans.

II. Jews Are Intelligent (and Wealthy)

The vast majority of U.S. Jews are Ashkenazi Jews. This is a very intelligent group, with an average IQ of approximately 115 and verbal IQ considerably higher.⁵⁹ Since verbal IQ is the best predictor of occupational success and upward mobility in contemporary societies,⁶⁰ it is not surprising that Jews are an elite group in the United States. Frank Salter has showed that on issues of concern to the Jewish community (Israel, immigration, ethnic policy in general), Jewish groups have four times the influence of European Americans despite representing approximately 2.5% of the population.⁶¹ Recent data indicate that Jewish per capita income in the U.S. is almost double that of non-Jews, a bigger difference than the black-white income gap.⁶² Although Jews make up less than 3% of the population, they constitute more than a quarter of the people on the Forbes list of the richest four hundred Americans. Jews constitute 45% of the top forty of the Forbes 400 richest Americans. Fully one-third of all American multimillionaires are Jewish. The percentage of Jewish households with income greater than $50,000 is double that of non-Jews; on the other hand, the percentage of Jewish households with income less than $20,000 is half that of non-Jews. Twenty percent of professors at leading universities are Jewish, and 40% of partners in leading New York and Washington D.C. law firms are Jewish.⁶³

In 1996, there were approximately three hundres national Jewish organizations in the United States, with a combined budget estimated in the range of $6 billion—a sum greater than the gross national product of half the members of the United Nations.⁶⁴ For example, in 2001 the ADL claimed an annual budget of over $50,000,000.⁶⁵ There is also a critical mass of very wealthy Jews who are actively involved in funding Jewish causes. Irving Moskowitz funds the settler movement in Israel and pro-Israeli, neoconservative think tanks in Washington DC, while Charles Bronfman, Ronald Lauder, and the notorious Marc Rich fund Birthright Israel, a program that aims to increase ethnic consciousness among Jews by bringing 20,000 young Jews to Israel every year. George Soros finances liberal immigration policy throughout the Western world and also funds Noel Ignatiev and his “Race Traitor” website dedicated to the abolition of the white race. So far as I know, there are no major sources of funding aimed at increasing ethnic consciousness among Europeans or at promoting European ethnic interests.⁶⁶ Certainly the major sources of conservative funding in the U.S., such as the Bradley and Olin Foundations, are not aimed at this sort of thing. Indeed, the Bradley Foundation has been a major source of funding for the largely Jewish neoconservative movement and for pro-Israel think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy.⁶⁷

Paul Findley⁶⁸ provides numerous examples of Jews using their financial clout to support political candidates with positions that are to the liking of AIPAC and other pro-Israel activist groups in the U.S. This very large financial support for pro-Israel candidates continues into the present—the most recent examples being the campaigns to unseat Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard from Congress in 2002. Because of their predominantly Jewish funding base,⁶⁹ Democratic candidates are particularly vulnerable, but all candidates experience this pressure because Jewish support will be funneled to their opponents if there is any hint of disagreement with the pro-Israel lobby.

Intelligence is also important in providing access to the entire range of influential positions, from the academic world, to the media, to business, politics, and the legal profession. In CofC I describe several influential Jewish intellectual movements developed by networks of Jews who were motivated to advance Jewish causes and interests. These movements were the backbone of the intellectual left in the twentieth century, and their influence continues into the present. Collectively, they call into question the fundamental moral, political, and economic foundations of Western society. These movements have been advocated with great intellectual passion and moral fervor and with a very high level of theoretical sophistication. As with the neoconservative movement, discussed in the third article in this series, all of these movements had ready access to prestigious mainstream media sources, at least partly because of the high representation of Jews as owners and producers of mainstream media.⁷⁰ All of these movements were strongly represented at prestigious universities, and their work was published by prestigious mainstream academic and commercial publishers.

Intelligence is also evident in Jewish activism. Jewish activism is like a full court press in basketball: intense pressure from every possible angle. But in addition to the intensity, Jewish efforts are very well organized, well funded, and backed up by sophisticated, scholarly intellectual defenses. A good example is the long and ultimately successful attempt to alter U.S. immigration policy.⁷¹ The main Jewish activist organization influencing immigration policy, the American Jewish Committee, was characterized by “strong leadership, internal cohesion, well-funded programs, sophisticated lobbying techniques, well-chosen non-Jewish allies, and good timing.”⁷² The most visible Jewish activists, such as Louis Marshall, were intellectually brilliant and enormously energetic and resourceful in their crusades on behalf of immigration and other Jewish causes. When restrictionist arguments appeared in the media, the American Jewish Committee made sophisticated replies based on at least the appearance of scholarly data, and typically couched in universalist terms as benefiting the whole society. Articles favorable to immigration were published in national magazines, and letters to the editor were published in newspapers. Talented lawyers initiated legal proceedings aimed at preventing the deportation of aliens.

The pro-immigration lobby was also very well organized. Immigration opponents, such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and organizations like the Immigration Restriction League were kept under close scrutiny and pressured by lobbyists. Lobbyists in Washington also kept a daily scorecard of voting tendencies as immigration bills wended their way through Congress, and they engaged in intense and successful efforts to convince Presidents Taft and Wilson to veto restrictive immigration legislation. Catholic prelates were recruited to protest the effects of restrictionist legislation on immigration from Italy and Hungary. There were well-organized efforts to minimize the negative perceptions of immigration by distributing Jewish immigrants around the country and by getting Jewish aliens off public support. Highly visible and noisy mass protest meetings were organized.⁷³

Intelligence and organization are also apparent in contemporary Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel. Les Janka, a U.S. Defense Department official, noted that, “On all kinds of foreign policy issues the American people just don’t make their voices heard. Jewish groups are the exceptions. They are prepared, superbly briefed. They have their act together. It is hard for bureaucrats not to respond.”⁷⁴

Morton A. Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), is typical of the highly intelligent, competent, and dedicated Jewish activist. The ZOA website states that Klein had a distinguished career as a biostatistician in academe and in government service in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. He has received accolades as one of the leading Jewish activists in the U.S., especially by media that are closely associated with Likud policies in Israel. For example, the Wall Street Journal called the ZOA “heroic and the most credible advocate for Israel on the American Jewish scene today” and added that we should “snap a salute to those who were right about Oslo and Arafat all along,… including Morton Klein who was wise, brave and unflinchingly honest…. [W]hen the history of the American Jewish struggle in these years is written, Mr. Klein will emerge as an outsized figure.” The website boasts of Klein’s success “against anti-Israel bias” in textbooks, travel guides, universities, churches, and the media, as well as his work on Capitol Hill.” Klein has led successful efforts to block the appointment of Joe Zogby, an Arab American, to the State Department and the appointment of Strobe Talbott, Clinton nominee for Deputy Secretary of State. Klein’s pro-Israel articles have appeared in a wide range of mainstream and Jewish media: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, New Yorker, Commentary, Near East Report, Reform Judaism, Moment, Forward, Jerusalem Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Ha’aretz (Jerusalem), Maariv (Jerusalem), and the Israeli-Russian paper Vesti.

Klein’s activism highlights the importance of access to the major media enjoyed by Jewish activists and organizations—a phenomenon that is traceable ultimately to Jewish intelligence. Jews have a very large presence in the media as owners, writers, producers, and editors—far larger than any other identifiable group.⁷⁵ In the contemporary world, this presence is especially important with respect to perceptions of Israel. Media coverage of Israel in the U.S. is dominated by a pro-Israel bias, whereas in most of the world the predominant view is that the Palestinians are a dispossessed people under siege.⁷⁶ A critical source of support for Israel is the army of professional pundits “who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.”⁷⁷ Perhaps the most egregious example of pro-Israel bias resulting from Jewish media control is the Asper family, owners of CanWest, a company that controls over 33% of the English-language newspapers in Canada. CanWest inaugurated an editorial policy in which all editorials had to be approved by the main office. As the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression notes, “the Asper family staunchly supports Israel in its conflicts with Palestinians, and coverage of the Middle East appears to be a particularly sensitive area.”⁷⁸ CanWest has exercised control over the content of articles related to Israel by editing and spiking articles with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli views. Journalists who have failed to adopt CanWest positions have been reprimanded or dismissed.

III. Jews Are Psychologically Intense

I have compared Jewish activism to a full court press—relentlessly intense and covering every possible angle. There is considerable evidence that Jews are higher than average on emotional intensity.⁷⁹ Emotionally intense people are prone to intense emotional experience of both positive and negative emotions.⁸⁰ Emotionality may be thought of as a behavioral intensifier—an energizer. Individuals high on affect intensity have more complex social networks and more complex lives, including multiple and even conflicting goals. Their goals are intensely sought after.

In the case of Jews, this affects the tone and intensity of their efforts at activism. Among Jews there is a critical mass that is intensely committed to Jewish causes—a sort of 24/7, “pull out all the stops” commitment that produces instant, massive responses on Jewish issues. Jewish activism has a relentless, never-say-die quality. This intensity goes hand in hand with the “slippery slope” style of arguing described above: Jewish activism is an intense response because even the most trivial manifestation of anti-Jewish attitudes or behavior is seen as inevitably leading to mass murder of Jews if allowed to continue.

Besides its ability to direct Jewish money to its preferred candidates, a large part of AIPAC’s effectiveness lies in its ability to rapidly mobilize its 60,000 members. “In virtually every congressional district…AIPAC has a group of prominent citizens it can mobilize if an individual senator or representative needs stroking.”⁸¹ When Senator Charles Percy suggested that Israel negotiate with the PLO and be willing to trade land for peace, he was inundated with 2200 telegrams and 4000 letters, 95% against, and mainly from the Jewish community in Chicago.⁸² The other side is seldom able to muster a response that competes with the intensity of the Jewish response. When President Eisenhower—the last president to stand up to the pro-Israel lobby—pressured Israel into withdrawing from the Sinai in 1957, almost all the mail opposed his decision. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles complained, “It is impossible to hold the line because we get no support from the Protestant elements in the country. All we get is a battering from the Jews.”⁸³ This pales in comparison to the avalanche of 150,000 letters to President Johnson urging support for Israel when Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran in May 1967. This was just prior to the “Six-Day War,” during which the U.S. provided a great deal of military assistance and actively cooperated in the cover-up of the assault on the USS Liberty. Jews had learned from their defeat at the hands of Eisenhower and had redoubled their lobbying efforts, creating by all accounts the most effective lobby in Washington.

Pressure on officials in the State and Defense departments is relentless and intense. In the words of one official, “One has to keep in mind the constant character of this pressure. The public affairs staff of the Near East Bureau in the State Department figures it will spend about 75 percent of its time dealing with Jewish groups. Hundreds of such groups get appointments in the executive branch each year.”⁸⁴

Psychological intensity is also typical of Israelis. For example, the Israelis are remarkably persistent in their attempts to obtain U.S. military hardware. The following comment illustrates not only the relentless, intense pressure, but also the aggressiveness of Jewish pursuit of their interests: “They would never take no for an answer. They never gave up. These emissaries of a foreign government always had a shopping list of wanted military items, some of them high technology that no other nation possessed, some of it secret devices that gave the United States an edge over any adversary.”⁸⁵ Even though small in number, the effects are enormous. “They never seem to sleep, guarding Israel’s interests around the clock.”⁸⁶ Henry Kissinger made the following comment on Israeli negotiating tactics. “In the combination of single-minded persistence and convoluted tactics the Israelis preserve in the interlocutor only those last vestiges of sanity and coherence needed to sign the final document.”⁸⁷

IV. Jews Are Aggressive

Being aggressive and “pushy” is part of the stereotype of Jews in Western societies. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of scientific studies on this aspect of Jewish personality. Hans Eysenck, renowned for his research on personality, claims that Jews are indeed rated more aggressive by people who know them well.⁸⁸

Jews have always behaved aggressively toward those they have lived among, and they have been perceived as aggressive by their critics. What strikes the reader of Henry Ford’s The International Jew (TIJ), written in the early 1920s, is its portrayal of Jewish intensity and aggressiveness in asserting their interests.⁸⁹ As TIJ notes, from Biblical times Jews have endeavored to enslave and dominate other peoples, even in disobedience of divine command, quoting the Old Testament, “And it came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute, and did not utterly drive them out." In the Old Testament the relationship between Israel and foreigners is one of domination: For example, “They shall go after thee, in chains they shall come over; And they shall fall down unto thee. They shall make supplication unto thee” (Isa. 45:14); “They shall bow down to thee with their face to the earth, And lick the dust of thy feet” (49:23). Similar sentiments appear in Trito-Isaiah (60:14, 61:5–6), Ezekiel (e.g., 39:10), and Ecclesiasticus (36:9). The apotheosis of Jewish attitudes of conquest can be seen in the Book of Jubilees, where world domination and great reproductive success are promised to the seed of Abraham:

I am the God who created heaven and earth. I shall increase you, and multiply you exceedingly; and kings shall come from you and shall rule wherever the foot of the sons of man has trodden. I shall give to your seed all the earth which is under heaven, and they shall rule over all the nations according to their desire; and afterwards they shall draw the whole earth to themselves and shall inherit it for ever (Jub. 32:18‑19).

Elsewhere I have noted that a major theme of anti-Jewish attitudes throughout the ages has been Jewish economic domination.⁹⁰ The following petition from the citizens of the German town of Hirschau opposed allowing Jews to live there because Jews were seen as aggressive competitors who ultimately dominate the people they live among:

If only a few Jewish families settle here, all small shops, tanneries, hardware stores, and so on, which, as things stand, provide their proprietors with nothing but the scantiest of livelihoods, will in no time at all be superseded and completely crushed by these [Jews] such that at least twelve local families will be reduced to beggary, and our poor relief fund, already in utter extremity, will be fully exhausted within one year. The Jews come into possession in the shortest possible time of all cash money by getting involved in every business; they rapidly become the only possessors of money, and their Christian neighbors become their debtors.⁹¹

Late nineteenth-century Zionists such as Theodor Herzl were quite aware that a prime source of modern anti-Jewish attitudes was that emancipation had brought Jews into direct economic competition with the non-Jewish middle classes, a competition that Jews typically won. Herzl “insisted that one could not expect a majority to ‘let themselves be subjugated’ by formerly scorned outsiders whom they had just released from the ghetto.”⁹² The theme of economic domination has often been combined with the view that Jews are personally aggressive. In the Middle Ages Jews were seen as “pitiless creditors.”⁹³ The philosopher Immanuel Kant stated that Jews were “a nation of usurers . . . outwitting the people amongst whom they find shelter.... They make the slogan ‘let the buyer beware’ their highest principle in dealing with us.”⁹⁴

In early twentieth-century America, the sociologist Edward A. Ross commented on a greater tendency among Jewish immigrants to maximize their advantage in all transactions, ranging from Jewish students badgering teachers for higher grades to Jewish poor attempting to get more than the usual charitable allotment. “No other immigrants are so noisy, pushing and disdainful of the rights of others as the Hebrews.”⁹⁵

The authorities complain that the East European Hebrews feel no reverence for law as such and are willing to break any ordinance they find in their way…. The insurance companies scan a Jewish fire risk more closely than any other. Credit men say the Jewish merchant is often “slippery” and will “fail” in order to get rid of his debts. For lying the immigrant has a very bad reputation. In the North End of Boston “the readiness of the Jews to commit perjury has passed into a proverb.”⁹⁶

These characteristics have at times been noted by Jews themselves. In a survey commissioned by the American Jewish Committee’s study of the Jews of Baltimore in 1962, “two-thirds of the respondents admitted to believing that other Jews are pushy, hostile, vulgar, materialistic, and the cause of anti-Semitism. And those were only the ones who were willing to admit it.”⁹⁷

Jews were unique as an American immigrant group in their hostility toward American Christian culture and in their energetic, aggressive efforts to change that culture.⁹⁸ From the perspective of Ford’s TIJ, the United States had imported around 3,500,000 mainly Yiddish-speaking, intensely Jewish immigrants over the previous forty years. In that very short period, Jews had had enormous effect on American society, particularly in their attempts to remove expressions of Christianity from public life beginning with an attempt in 1899–1900 to remove the word “Christian” from the Virginia Bill of Rights: “The Jews’ determination to wipe out of public life every sign of the predominant Christian character of the U.S. is the only active form of religious intolerance in the country today.”⁹⁹

A prototypical example of Jewish aggressiveness toward American culture has been Jewish advocacy of liberal immigration policies which have had a transformative effect on the U.S.:

In undertaking to sway immigration policy in a liberal direction, Jewish spokespersons and organizations demonstrated a degree of energy unsurpassed by any other interested pressure group. Immigration had constituted a prime object of concern for practically every major Jewish defense and community relations organization. Over the years, their spokespersons had assiduously attended congressional hearings, and the Jewish effort was of the utmost importance in establishing and financing such non-sectarian groups as the National Liberal Immigration League and the Citizens Committee for Displaced Persons.¹⁰⁰

Jewish aggressiveness and their role in the media, in the creation of culture and information in the social sciences and humanities, and in the political process in the United States contrasts with the role of Overseas Chinese.¹⁰¹ The Chinese have not formed a hostile cultural elite in Southeast Asian countries motivated by historical grievances against the people and culture of their hosts. For example, despite their economic dominance, the Chinese have not been concerned with restrictions on their citizenship rights, which have been common in Southeast Asia.¹⁰² Whereas the Chinese have reacted rather passively to such restrictions, Jews have reacted to any manifestation of anti-Jewish attitudes or behavior with an all-out effort at eradication. Indeed, we have seen that the mainstream Jewish attitude is that even trivial manifestations of anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior must not be ignored because they can and will lead to mass murder. Not only have the Chinese not attempted to remove public displays of symbols of Indonesian nationalism and religion, they have not seriously attempted to change laws in place since the 1960s mandating that there be no public displays of Chinese culture.¹⁰³

Besides the normal sorts of lobbying typical of the political process in the U.S., perhaps the clearest examples of Jewish aggressiveness are the many examples of intimidation of their opponents—loss of job, death threats, constant harassment, economic losses such as loss of advertising revenue for media businesses, and charges of anti-Semitism—the last being perhaps the greatest sin against the post-World War II political order that can be imagined. When Adlai Stevenson III was running for governor of Illinois, his record in opposition to Israeli settlement policy and his statement that the PLO was a legitimate voice of the Palestinian people resulted in a whisper campaign that he was an anti-Semite. Stevenson commented:

There is an intimidating, activist minority of American Jews that supports the decisions of the Israeli government, right or wrong. They do so very vocally and very aggressively in ways that intimidate others so that it’s their voice—even though it is a minority—that is heard in American politics. But it still is much louder in the United States than in Israel. In other words, you have a much stronger, more vocal dissent in Israel than within the Jewish community in the United States. The prime minister of Israel has far more influence over American foreign policy in the Middle East than over the policies of his own government generally.¹⁰⁴

A common tactic has been to charge that critics of Israel are anti-Semites. Indeed, George Ball, a perceptive critic of Israel and its U.S. constituency, maintains that the charge of anti-Semitism and guilt over the Holocaust is the Israeli lobby’s most effective weapon—outstripping its financial clout.¹⁰⁵ The utility of these psychological weapons in turn derives from the very large Jewish influence on the U.S. media. Historian Peter Novick notes regarding the importance of the Holocaust in contemporary American life:

We [i.e., Jews] are not just “the people of the book,” but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large.¹⁰⁶

And, of course, the appeal to the Holocaust is especially compelling for American Jews. When the Mossad wants to recruit U.S. Jews for help in its espionage work, in the words of a CIA agent “the appeal is a simple one: ‘When the call went out and no one heeded it, the Holocaust resulted.’ “¹⁰⁷

Charges of anti-Semitism and guilt over the Holocaust are not the only instruments of Jewish aggressiveness on Israeli issues. Jewish groups intimidate their enemies by a variety of means. People who oppose policies on Israel advocated by Jewish activist organizations have been fired from their jobs, harassed with letters, subjected to intrusive surveillance, and threatened with death. Although there is a great deal of self-censorship in the media on Israel as a result of the major role of Jews in the ownership and production of the media, gaps in this armor are aggressively closed. There are “threats to editors and advertising departments, orchestrated boycotts, slanders, campaigns of character assassination, and personal vendettas.”¹⁰⁸ Other examples recounted by Findley include pressure on the Federal Communications Commission to stop broadcast licenses, demands for submission to an oversight committee prior to publication, and the stationing of a Jewish activist in the newsroom of the Washington Post in order to monitor the process.

The result of all this intense, well-organized aggression is that

Those who criticize Israeli policy in any sustained way invite painful and relentless retaliation, and even loss of their livelihood by pressure from one or more parts of Israel’s lobby. Presidents fear it. Congress does its bidding. Prestigious universities shun academic programs and buckle under its pressure. Instead of having their arguments and opinions judged on merit, critics of Israel suddenly find their motivations, their integrity, and basic moral values called into question. No matter how moderate their criticism, they may be characterized as pawns of the oil lobby, apologists for Arabs, or even anti-Semitic.¹⁰⁹

The following quote from Henry Kissinger sums up the aggressive Israeli attitudes toward U.S. aid:

Yitzak [Rabin] had many extraordinary qualities, but the gift of human relations was not one of them. If he had been handed the entire “United States Strategic Air Command” as a free gift he would have (a) affected the attitude that at last Israel was getting its due, and (b) found some technical shortcoming in the airplanes that made his accepting them a reluctant concession to us.¹¹⁰

But of course by far the most important examples of Israeli aggressiveness have been toward their neighbors in the Middle East. This aggression has been there from the beginning, as Israel has consistently put pressure on border areas with incursions, including the Kibya massacre of 1953 led by Ariel Sharon.¹¹¹ The personal aggressiveness of Israeli society has long been a topic of commentators. Israel is known for its arrogance, insolence (chutzpah), coldness, roughness, rudeness, and lack of civility. For example, B. Z. Sobel, an Israeli sociologist at the University of Haifa, found that among the motivations for emigrating from Israel was that “there is indeed an edginess [in Israeli society]; tempers flare, and verbal violence is rampant”¹¹²

Conclusion

The current situation in the United States is the result of an awesome deployment of Jewish power and influence. One must contemplate the fact that American Jews have managed to maintain unquestioned support for Israel over the last thirty-five years despite Israel’s seizing land and engaging in a brutal occupation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories—an occupation that will most likely end with expulsion or complete subjugation, degradation, and apartheid. During this same period Jewish organizations in America have been a principal force—in my view the main force—for erecting a state dedicated to suppressing ethnic identification among Europeans, for encouraging massive multi-ethnic immigration into the U.S., and for erecting a legal system and cultural ideology that is obsessively sensitive to the complaints and interests of ethnic minorities: the culture of the Holocaust.¹¹³

American Judaism is well organized and lavishly funded. It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been successful in achieving its interests.¹¹⁴ One of the great myths often promulgated by Jewish apologists is that Jews have no consensus and therefore cannot wield any real power. Yet there is in fact a great deal of consensus on broad Jewish issues, particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties.¹¹⁵ Massive changes in public policy on these issues, beginning with the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, coincide with the period of increasing Jewish power and influence in the United States. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find any significant area where public policy conflicts with the attitudes of mainstream Jewish organizations.

Later papers in this series will discuss concrete examples of Jewish activism: The history of Zionism as a radical Jewish movement and the presently influential Jewish neoconservative movement.

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Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology, California State University -‑ Long Beach, and the author of author of a trilogy on Judaism as an evolutionary strategy: A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998), all published by Praeger 1994-1998. A revised edition of The Culture of Critique (2002), with an expanded introduction, is available in a quality soft cover edition from www.1stBooks.com or www.amazon.com.

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End Notes

Jewish Character Traits in Israel

JTR

Like any nation, the modern state of Israel has a discernible collective psychological attitude: a communal "personality." It is formed at its core by the conviction that Israel is a Jewish island, a people under constant siege by hostile goyim. A key ingredient of the Israeli public persona, much championed, is that Jews are tough, emotionally hardened, and ruthless, a self-image epitomized in the "sabra" (literally meaning a cactus fruit, but colloquially meaning a Jew born in Israel). In popular Israeli folklore, the Jews of Israel are "thorny and tough on the outside, but soft inside."

The sabra image also has deep psychological sources in the nationalist "lessons" learned from the Holocaust, a situation where a perceived lack of Jewish physical force and power in the diaspora (galut) throughout the world inevitably must -- sooner or later -- lead to disaster at the hands of Gentiles.

Zionism, in whatever form, has invariably dovetailed with some of the central tenets of classical religious Judaism, including the old "people apart" syndrome: Jewish alienation from all other peoples. "The civil religion [of Israel]," notes Charles Liebman and Eliezer Dov-Yehiya, "has been most forceful in asserting that Israel is an isolated nation confronting a hostile world ... The growing importance of traditional Judaism and Jewishness is associated with the centrality of the Holocaust as the primary political myth of Israeli society, the symbol of Israel's present condition and the one which provides Israel with legitimacy ... The Holocaust to a great extent fashions 'our national consciousness' and the memory is omnipresent in Israeli society."

"Israeli political culture," says Israeli professor Myron Aronoff, "reflects not only the general theme of the few against the many, but a growing emphasis of 'them against us' ... The traditional concept of Esau hates Jacob [Gentiles hate Jews] and a nation that dwells alone became explanations of reality and legitimization of Israeli policy." As former lobbyist for Israel Doug Bloomfield once noted, some Israelis tend to have a "You owe us" and "Screw the world" attitudes. Zev Chafets remembers an Israeli concert he attended in 1969, two years after he moved to Israel from America: "As the show drew to a close, the group swung into an up-temp number. 'Ha'olam Ku'lo heg'denu,' they sang. 'The whole world is against us.' The audience knew the song and joined in on the chorus ... [:] 'The whole world is against us; never mind, we'll get by; we don't give a damn about them anyway.'"

Jewish scholar Daniel Niewyk describes the racist dimension of this Zionist ideology of alienation from others, especially as it developed in Germany:

At the heart of the Zionist critique of liberal assimilation lay the conviction that Jews constitute a unique race. It was the belief in insurmountable racial differences that made the inevitability of anti-Semitism credible, just as it rationalizes the view that every effort to assimilate must go aground on the barrier reef of biological determinism ... The maintenance of that [racial] purity was essential to German Zionism, for it acknowledged the essential prerequisite for nationhood to be [in the 1922 words of Zionist Fritz Kahn] "consanguinity of the flesh and solidarity of the soul" together with the "will to establish a closer [Jewish] brotherhood over [and] against all other communities on earth."

Amnon Rubenstein notes the disturbing irony expressed in this world view of the Israeli people: "The establishment of Israel was an attempt to make Jews like everybody else. They would now have a state. It has not worked out that way. Israel has made Jews more, not less, exceptional. The pariah people, it seems, have simply succeeded in creating a pariah state." Perhaps, however, this situation is inevitable. Unmentioned by Rubenstein is the religiously-based "nation apart" self-concept always so deeply embedded in Jewish mass psychology, a self-understanding and communal choice that apparently cannot be shaken, even in a secular nation-state context.

Jewish Stranger Anxiety I give many examples of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in my trilogy [on Judaism] and have suggested in several places that Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism is biologically based. It was noted above that individualist European cultures tend to be more open to strangers than collectivist cultures such as Judaism. In this regard, it is interesting that developmental psychologists have found unusually intense fear reactions among Israeli infants in response to strangers, while the opposite pattern is found for infants from North Germany. The Israeli infants were much more likely to become "inconsolably upset" in reaction to strangers, whereas the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers. The Israeli babies therefore tended to have an unusual degree of stranger anxiety, while the North German babies were the opposite -- findings that fit with the hypothesis that Europeans and Jews are on opposite ends of scales of xenophobia and ethnocentrism. From Prof. Kevin MacDonald's Preface to the paperback edition of his Culture of Critique, online at his website.

Non-Jewish scholar Virginia Dominguez, who spent long periods of time in Israel in later years doing research, noted the traditional Jewish narcissism and interest in pedigrees of identity expressed by the Israelis she met:

"What do you mean you say you are not Jewish?" I was asked on several occasions. "That you're not religious? That your mother wasn't Jewish? That 'we the Jews' wouldn't count you as a Jew because you had some Jewish ancestry but not the right ones, according to Halacha?" I was incredulous at first. I had no way then to anticipate this reaction. Everything else seemed to point to the importance of Jewishness, and to controlling both the content and limits of Jewishness.

The omnipresent stresses of a predominantly military state, the emphatic "we versus them" paradigm of traditional Jewish identity, the glorification of power and aggression, millennia-old disdain for non-Jews, and the emotional powder keg of Holocaust death camps as a motivational tool have invariably led to the noxious Israeli collective persona that is so much remarked upon by non-Israelis (often even Israelis themselves) who spend much time in Israel. Common traits of this "national character" are arrogance, insolence (chutzpah), coldness, roughness, and rudeness, to begin a long list of unpleasant "uncivil" attributes.

Many Diaspora Jews, in describing this Israeli character, tend to romanticize it. "There is a coldness," notes Jewish scholar Norman Cantor, "a mystery, a distance from humanity about [Israelis] that anyone from another country who lives and works in Israel for a half a year will be impressed by." "Israelis have a reputation for bad manners," notes Jewish American immigrant to Israel Charles Liebman, "to the extent this reputation is deserved it stems from the sense of familiarity that Israelis feel towards one another." Adam Garfinkle adds that "Israelis are sometimes rude to an extent that it even bothers other Israelis." "The behavior of young Israelis," Israeli Jay Gonen writes, "... is characterized by a high degree of chutzpah or gall; it is direct, blatant, unruly, clever, humorous, and indicates a certain lack of sensitivity to social requirements ... [It has a] disregard for rules, regulations, social norms, and good manners." Melford Spiro, in his study of the kibbutzim, discusses "insolence" as an "outstanding characteristic of the sabras" (native-born Israelis).

Herbert Russcol -- a Jewish American emigrant to Israel -- and his sabra wife Margarit Banai described the Israeli national character this way:

"Horror stories" about the chutzpah -- of the sabra-men, women, and children alike -- are notorious. What appears to be (and often is) their cheek, their insolence, has shocked and enraged everyone who has met them. Sabras freely admit their chutzpah as a people, but are rarely aware of being chutzpadik themselves. They will tell you, "Oh, we're terrible. It's a national vice. I am not so bad, but I have some very rude friends" ... Chutzpah is alarmingly close to chauvinism, and it must be admitted that the sabra is usually passionately chaunvinistic in an era when no gospel has been more discredited in the West than blind, excessive patriotism.

"The deliberate and unadorned frankness [of Israelis]," notes Zionist historian Melvin Urofsky, "so highly prized by Israelis, scornful of Westernized and 'assimilated' manners, struck [Jewish] Americans [who sought to live in Israel], accustomed to some courtesies in life, as downright rude. (As late as 1965, a study of bureaucratic behavior in one large Israeli enterprise disclosed that 60 per cent of officials in contact with the public did not believe in greeting a visitor, nor would they reply to his greeting; an even higher percentage would not offer him a chair, simply letting him stand during the interview.)

Such attributes, it may be recalled, are among those that Jews have been noted for across the centuries. Leon Poliakov rhetorically remarks on the inevitable echo here in the European Jewish past: "Are the Jews congenitally unsociable and rude, or are they this way as a result of having been segregated in ghettos? Such was the form of the question in which arguments raged [among non-Jewish intellectuals] in the 18th century on the eve of Emancipation."

As Joyce Starr notes: "Among Americans who have had extensive dealings with Israelis, whether in government, business, or Jewish circles, the first adjectives that comes to their lips are arrogant, willful, and sometimes infuriating." Ms. Starr, who is also Jewish, notes the interchange she had with a man called J.R., "a high-ranking Israeli intelligence officer":

"Most Americans I interviewed in the government sphere -- the State Department, Defense Department -- use certain words when they describe Israelis."

"Arrogant," J. R. replied.

"Yes, arrogant is a word that comes up frequently."

"By the way, I think it's true. It applies to most Israelis. American fairness and Israeli fairness are different."

"What is Israeli fairness?"

"Israeli fairness is 'You give me 75 percent and leave 25 percent.'"

"Do they know they do it?"

"Most of them do not. I think most of them believe that by some divine decree, they deserve to get everything."

"What is divine decree?"

"It comes from God." He saw me laughing. "It"s not funny, Joyce."

"To the brief tourist," wrote Leonard Wolf, a Jewish resident of Israel in 1970, "[Israelis] are a rude, unsympathetic people, intent on themselves, irresponsive to nuances of feeling. Americans, who are instantly, if not profoundly, genial, are apt to find the slow pace of Israeli friendliness cold, comparing the Jewish hotelkeepers and tourist guides they meet unfavorably with the extraordinarily warm Arabs."

In 2001, a Jewish ethnic newspaper, the Forward, noted that the national Israeli propensity to be cheats and hustlers (always evasive of the law) probably had roots in Jewish history in other lands:

[There is] universal awareness that something is definitely rotten in the state of Israel. This is, after all, a country in which bending the rules is said to be a national pasttime, cutting corners a way of life and cheating the authorities the proof of merit ... Sticklers for the law are ridiculed and abused, where anyone who works by the book is branded a sap, a "freier," the worst insult in modern Israeli lexicon ... Many people believe Israeli laxity, which borders on anarchy, is a national personality trait that cannot be eradicated by laws alone. Some trace the trait all the way back to the historical Jewish Diaspora, where Jews often found solace in bending the rules imposed by the often anti-Semitic authorities.

In 1986, B. Z. Sobel, an Israeli sociologist at the University of Haifa, discussed his research into reasons why so many Israelis emigrate from Israel to other lands. Among the motivations for leaving, he noted that "there is indeed an edginess [in Israeli society]; tempers flare, and verbal violence is rampant ... A large proportion of those [Israelis] interviewed for my study ... have been abroad [overseas] or were born or raised abroad, and in almost all cases reference is made to the fact that 'people are nice in chutz la'aretz.' Strangers wish you a good day as they make change or pass you in the street, whereas at home [Israel] you can consider yourself fortunate to receive minimally civil treatment."

"Americans are much more polite, I would say," remarked Israeli journalist Ze'ev Schiff, "while we are rude and have no patience ... You can see it when some of us are waiting in a queue in a bank or waiting for a bus ... This is the way we deal with each other, with the Egyptians, the Europeans, whoever." As Joyce Starr adds: "The tension [in Israel] spills out in sudden eruptions of rudeness. You can be standing in line in a gas station, and suddenly there will be an outbreak of shouts and terrible cursing for no apparent reason except that people explode in Israel."

Moshe Shokeid notes the comments of an Israeli identified as "Eli," and his perceptions of the Israelis he met in New York City: "When I looked at the crowd, I subconsciously saw myself in the mirror. When you see other Israelis screaming in Hebrew, you realize that you possibly look the same. Unfortunately, I rediscovered the ugly Israeli."

In the 1980s, Virginia Dominguez, a Cuban American sociologist, fluent in Hebrew and a Fulbright scholar in Israel, worried that obnoxious Israeli behavior and Jewish self-obsession threatened to push her into the camp of the anti-Semites:

Has my obsessive, long-term encounter with Israeli society over the past six years turned me into the anti-Semite I never was? I find myself sharply intolerant of the noisy, brash behavior of most Israeli children. I coin terms of description that are even explicitly judgmental. I get exasperated with the perennial references in the [Hebrew] media to the Jewishness of well-known public figures abroad.

Wendy Orange, a Jewish American, a new immigrant to Israel, noted with irritation the commentary of a group of Christian visitors she overheard in Jerusalem restaurant:

I overheard one Ghanaian woman say, "Just ghastly, these people!" She's talking to a pregnant Irish woman, who responded wholeheartedly: "I never imagined they'd be so crude ... so rude." The Ghanaian, tall and dignified, her hair wrapped high in a colorful African sash, became more emphatic: "No manners ... They drive like madmen." She paused. "They are far more barbarian than I was warned. And I was warned, my dear, many times."

In 2001, Great Britain's online Telegraph newspaper noted

Israelis -- who take pride in being blunt and outspoken -- are to teach children good manners in an attempt to cut the nation's tendency towards violence. From the next school year, 12-year-olds will be taught how to behave politely, which knife and fork to use at table, and how to resolve arguments without shouting or coming to blows. Ronit Tirosh, director-general of the Education Ministry said: "We are a brutal and impatient society, and the delicacy learned through these lessons may reduce our society's violent tendencies." Israelis are proud not to say thank you and relish the informality of life ... Israeli life is a bruising contest of one-upmanship. The deepest fear is to be thought a "sucker" who obeys the rules. Brusqueness has been cultivated by native-born Israelis as a reaction against the manners of Europe's Diaspora Jews, who were seen as cringing and subservient ... Educationalists have become worried about the level of playground violence.

Traditional Jewish chutzpah is of course an integral part of the Israeli identity. "To a large degree," says Israeli professor Jay Gonen, "... Herzl's impact [on Jewish nationalism] was due to a quality of chutzpah, or unmitigated gall, which became an integral part of Zionism and was subsequently elevated almost to an art form by native-born Israelis, or sabras." An example of how far this chutzpah can go was evidenced in an incident during the Palestinian uprising -- known as the Intifada -- that began in 1987 against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Of the hundreds of Palestinians shot and killed or wounded by Israeli troops in the Intifada's first year, one young Arab teenager, Nasir Hawwash, was shot in the head and lay in a hospital, irrecoverably brain dead. One day Nasir's brother received a telephone call from a Jewish Israeli citizen, an emissary for the family of a fellow middle-aged Israeli in the hospital with a serious heart condition. The stranger on the phone asked that the Hawwash family donate Nasir's heart to save the Jewish man in the hospital who needed it.

"Nasir's older brother," notes Glenn Frankel, "was appalled that an Israeli would ask such a thing. She told him, 'This is how we'll make peace between Arabs and Jews.' He was not buying it. 'How can you make peace when you shoot someone and then you take the heart to give life to another Israeli?' he told her."

As the story for the heart request made the Israeli news, one Palestinian "radical" noted that "If we give the Israelis this heart, soon they'll be shooting us for our organs."

The Arab boy's father was eventually offered "more money than [his] family would have seen in a lifetime" for his son's heart, but he told the Israeli pleaders no. "What did they want from me?" he asked. "This was my son. They took him away, then they wanted his body. This I could not give."

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The preceding text is excerpted from When Victims Rule, online at Jewish Tribal Review. The title is editorial; JTR's in-text citations have been removed. I have added the excerpt from Kevin MacDonald.

Gibson, Jesus, and the Jews

Irmin

Gibson Capitulates Mel Gibson is passionately angry at critics of his upcoming film about the death of Jesus Christ. In remarks quoted in the New Yorker magazine, he denied "The Passion" is anti-Semitic and accused some of those leading the chorus against the film of being "anti-Christian." Gibson said he personally has been the target of "vehement anti-Christian sentiment." [...] As proof of his desire to avoid confrontation, Gibson cited his decision to cut a scene in which Caiaphas says "his blood be on us and on our children" soon after Pontius Pilate washes his hands of the captive Christ. "I wanted it in," he said. "My brother said I was wimping out if I didn't include it. But, man, if I included that in there, they'd be coming after me at my house. They'd come to kill me." WorldNetDaily, September 9, 2003

The WorldNetDaily story excerpted above is entitled "A passionate Mel Gibson strikes back against critics," but it actually details Gibson's reluctant capitulation to Jewish power. The script of The Passion, his upcoming film about Christ's Crucifixion, was initially intended to be a scrupulously faithful adaptation of the gospels; it has now been revised in an attempt to silence vociferous Jewish objections. Gibson is, as his brother suspected, "wimping out," putting his fear of Jewish anger above his professed religious beliefs.

The scene that Gibson cut itself represented a concession to Jewish sensitivities. According to the New Testament, "his blood be upon us and upon our children" was shouted by a Jewish mob ("the whole people" in the Catholic Douay-Rheims translation), not simply by Caiaphas, a high priest in the Jerusalem Temple (Matthew 27.25; cf. 1 Thessalonians 2.14-16). That major concession -- removing the verse from a Jewish mob and assigning it to a single Jewish priest -- was nevertheless unacceptable to organized Jewry, so Gibson has now excised the entire scene, fearing Jewish retaliation. "Fear of the Jews" (ton phobon tôn Ioudaiôn) is, incidentally, a New Testament phrase (e.g. John 7.13).

Conservative Christians believe that all sacred scripture is inspired by God (2 Timothy 3.16). The operative theological term is theopneustos in the Greek New Testament, divinitus inspirata in the Latin Vulgate, the preferred translation for traditionalist Catholics like Gibson. Sacred scripture is of divine origin, a longstanding Christian belief that was proclaimed as irrevocable dogma at the Council of Trent, the Church council that forms the basis for Gibson's brand of Catholicism.

In simpler terms, the events reported in the New Testament are present in the text because God wants them to be there. Not all details pertaining to Christ's Crucifixion are recorded in the various New Testament accounts, but those that were recorded express almighty God's intentions. They are historical facts that God wants mankind to know, which is why he inspired the four evangelists to write them down. If God were the director of Gibson's film, "his blood be upon us and upon our children" would appear in the script, just as it appears in the New Testament.

The orchestrated Jewish campaign against The Passion left Gibson with a choice between placating Jews and accurately dramatizing what he regards as the inspired Word of God, and he chose the former. To his credit, he stood up to Jewish pressure longer than most Christians would have, but the final result is the same as if he had capitulated on the first day. Jewish organizations have successfully asserted their right to oversee Christian depictions of the central event of the Christian religion. No film of Christ's death can be shown in American theaters without a Jewish imprimatur. The New Testament is anti-Semitic hate-speech.

For those of us who are not Christians, Gibson's capitulation confirms our suspicion of modern Christianity's weakness, despite its numerical strength in the United States. It would be impossible to envisage the fathers of the Catholic Church or the heroes of the Protestant Reformation acknowledging, as Gibson has, the right of anti-Christian Jews to act as censors of Christian sacred scripture. If you believe, as Gibson does, that the Christian God inspired the New Testament, you shouldn't listen to the exegetical opinions of Abraham Foxman, who (after all) doesn't believe in the Christian God and doesn't accept his New Testament. Pious Jews believe, on the contrary, that Jesus suffers five deaths a day in Hell, one in boiling excrement.

We should also note an historical irony. Jews oppose any faithful dramatization of the Christian account of Christ's death because it would suggest Jewish responsibility for deicide. As the ADL's Foxman complained, "the [unrevised] film unambiguously portrays Jewish authorities and the Jewish mob as the ones responsible for the decision to crucify Jesus." Yet on this subject the Christian New Testament and the Jewish Talmud are in complete agreement, a fact which the Jewish organizations attacking Gibson would never freely admit:

According to the Talmud, Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt of rabbinical authority. All classical Jewish sources which mention his execution are quite happy to take responsibility for it; in the talmudic account the Romans are not even mentioned.

The more popular accounts -- which were nevertheless taken quite seriously -- such as the notorious Toldot Yeshu are even worse, for in addition to the above crimes they accuse him of witchcraft. The very name "Jesus" was for Jews a symbol of all that is abominable, and this popular tradition still persists.

Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (London: Pluto Press, 1994), 97-98.

In other words, a faithful Talmudic version of Christ's Crucifixion would not, on the contentious issue of Jewish responsibility, be any different from the film that Mel Gibson planned to make, before "fear of the Jews" convinced him to revise God's inspired script.

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For anyone willing to wade through the Jewish Talmud, Carol Valentine has assembled a professional presentation of the text, along with commentary, at her come-and-hear website.

How It Fits Together

Dr. William Pierce

We've talked about many subjects on these American Dissident Voices programs, but one theme which has appeared in nearly every program has been the role of the Jews, either in our history or in our lives today. To a certain extent that's been unavoidable, because of the influence they have over current events through their control of the mass media and because of their historical role in communism. But it's more than that. [Image: William Pierce.]

What I've said, in one way or another on several programs, is that the Jewish role in our lives goes far beyond the fact that their control of the news and entertainment media gives them a big influence on popular culture and on the political process. Today I want to talk again about this Jewish role. I want to try to give you an overview of it first. There are about 14 million Jews in the world today, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbook for 1997. Nearly half of those -- about six million -- are now in North America, where they make up just over two per cent of the population but wield far more influence than any other group.

The world's 14 million Jews think and act like one big family -- even though, like most families, they do a lot of arguing and squabbling among themselves. They go to different synagogues -- Orthodox and Conservative and Reform -- or to no synagogue at all. There are atheist Jews, and there are Jews who have converted to Christianity. There are capitalist Jews and communist Jews, homosexual Jews and heterosexual Jews. There are rich Jews and middle-class Jews and even a few poor Jews, but despite this apparent diversity they do a better job of cooperating with each other and looking out for their common interests than any other ethnic group in the world.

Why is this? Why are Jews more racially conscious than anyone else? Why are they so much more ready to collaborate with each other than members of other groups? Part of the reason is in their religion. It is an ethnocentric religion, a racist religion. Whereas Christianity and Islam, for example, are universalist religions, religions for anyone who chooses to believe in them, Judaism is not. Judaism is a religion only for the Chosen People, only for the circumcised sons of Abraham. Jews are defined in terms of their bloodline, not in terms of their faith, which is why non-religious Jews like Freud or Trotsky or even Marx, the father of atheistic communism, are considered just as much Jews as the most pious synagogue-goer, with sidelocks and yarmulke. The non-religious Jews don't believe the hocus-pocus in their Torah, or Old Testament, but they nevertheless are steeped in the folklore and traditions of Judaism. They are as familiar as their religious cousins are with the claims that Jews are a Chosen People, destined to own all of the world's wealth and be waited on hand and foot by non-Jews. And they are familiar with the tales of persecution, from the time of the pharaohs until the time of Hitler: with the tradition of being universally hated by all the other peoples of the world -- which is why they believe they are justified in avenging themselves on non-Jews whenever they have the opportunity.

I'll not spend any time quoting Bible verses to you today, but if you doubt what I've just told you about the religious basis for Jewish ethnocentrism, just read the Old Testament: especially the five books of Moses and the book of Isaiah. Study them carefully. Even the bowdlerized King James translation is pretty clear. If you really want to rub your nose in this subject, do some browsing in the Talmud -- or for a solid scientific treatment, read the books recently written by a real expert on the subject, California State University psychology professor Dr. Kevin MacDonald. All three of his books are available from National Vanguard Books, the sponsor of this program. Those books are subtitled "Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism," and "An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements." Pretty heavy reading, but very convincing, very thorough.

This tendency of the Jews to stick together, always to favor their fellow Jews over non-Jews, and to work for the interests of their tribe instead of just for their individual interests is a fact: a very enviable fact. It is the primary reason for their extraordinary level of wealth and power through the ages.

You know, there are clubby little groups of White men who cooperate with each other to advance their interests. But those interests are personal and individual, not racial or even tribal. And virtually all of the really influential groups of this sort -- the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, or groups of very rich and powerful men, corporate bosses or bankers, are in fact heavily larded with Jews. They're not racial groups at all, even if they don't have any Blacks or Chinamen in them. They're simply special-interest groups, whereas the 14 million Jews of the world form a huge, self-conscious racial-interest group. They really are unique in this regard.

I wish that our people had the same degree of racial consciousness the Jews do. The Jews understand the power of togetherness. Most of our people don't. And this is largely the reason why we're in the mess we're in today. I'll come back to this point in a few minutes.

The second thing for us to understand about the Jews is their very unusual mode of existence, living nearly everywhere as a small minority among other peoples. If one looks at their history in the Biblical period, they were at most times a people on the move, living as strangers and aliens among other peoples, getting kicked out of one place after another, always on terms of enmity with the Gentile host population. Only for a little over 400 years, from approximately the time of King David until the Babylonian conquest, did they really have a national existence in the ordinary sense of the word, with geographical borders.

When the Babylonians dispersed the Jews throughout the Middle Eastern and the Mediterranean world in the middle of the sixth century BC, the Jews adapted amazingly well to being a minority everywhere and a majority nowhere. Five hundred years later, in the first century BC, the Greek writer Strabo commented: "The Jews have penetrated every country, so that it is difficult to find any place in the world where their tribe has not entered and become dominant." Note those words: "There is no place where they have not become dominant." The great geographer and historian Strabo was not the only scholar of the ancient world to make that observation about the Jews. The Jews became dominant by accumulating a substantial portion of the wealth of every country that they infiltrated. And they accumulated their wealth by collaborating with each other and preying on the host population. Their collaboration was based on their racial consciousness, on their conviction that they were a distinct and unique people, superior to the people among whom they lived and deserving of whatever they could take away from their hosts. The Jews in Rome did not think of themselves as Romans who happened to believe in Judaism, but as Jews who happened to live in Rome. And the same for every other country where they lived.

With the sort of attitude and behavior the Jews had they were bound to be hated by everyone -- and they reciprocated. The Jews regarded the hatred they had for their hosts as justified, just as they considered deceiving and exploiting their hosts to be justified; but their hosts' hatred of the Jews they regarded as "bigotry" and "persecution." Their history is a chronicle of one "persecution" after another, right down to modern times. During the Middle Ages they were kicked en masse out of every country in Europe, repeatedly. They pretend today that this supposed "persecution" was the result of religious bigotry on the part of their hosts, but in fact it was simply self-defense on the part of their hosts, the same sort of reaction to their presence that the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and everyone else in pre-Christian times had had. And it was this barrier of hatred between the Jews and the rest of the world which made it possible for them to maintain their identity and their sense of racial self-consciousness. If you want to study some of these details of Jewish history for yourself, there are many good books available. One I have read and found valuable is A History of the Jews by Abram Sachar. Sachar was the president of Brandeis University, and of course, he looks at history very subjectively and from a very Jewish point of view. But his history is revealing, and you can find it in most large libraries.

Now, this peculiar mode of existence of the Jews I have described changed to a certain extent shortly after the Second World War, with the theft of Palestine and the establishment of the new state of Israel on Palestinian territory. Today one-third of the world's Jews live in Israel, but this is only made possible because the other two-thirds are continuing their existence as parasitic minorities among Gentile hosts. Without a constant supply of money extorted from Germany, the United States, and other countries, Israel could not continue to exist. Israel would have gone under half-a-dozen times in its warfare with its neighbors during the past 50 years if the United States had not provided massive military and diplomatic support. If all of the Jews in America and Europe sold their television networks and newspapers and film studios and moved to Israel, that flow of blood from their hosts would be cut off, and Israel soon would cease to exist.

The third thing we must understand about the Jews is the way in which they maintain their status as the dominant minority among us today. In Strabo's day it was through their accumulated wealth. They were able to buy influence and special privileges for themselves. It remained that way pretty much for the next 1900 years. Throughout the Middle Ages they made themselves useful as sources of money to kings and popes and emperors. They would suck the wealth from the host population, and then give or lend some of it to the rulers in return for being allowed to keep their privileges. Although they usually were tolerated for their usefulness by the rulers, they were hated intensely by the general population. The Jews bought the tolerance of the rulers, but of course, they couldn't afford to buy the tolerance of the people.

And so until quite recently the Jews maintained a separate existence among the host population, often living in ghettos, not mixing socially with their hosts, generally not engaging in the same occupations, and regarded with disdain if not revulsion by everyone. The great advantage for our people of this mode of existence was that the damage done by the Jews was mostly economic, although they also caused political mischief when it suited their needs. But they had almost no cultural influence on our people. They didn't write books or plays, they didn't paint or compose music, they didn't clog up our universities, they didn't run for public office, and of course, they didn't have television studios or newspapers or advertising agencies. And so to a large extent they lived their lives, and we lived ours.

That began changing drastically approximately 200 years ago, with the advent of the mass media and mass democracy, and the change accelerated greatly during this century. Jews understood immediately the potential that newspapers and other media gave them for extending their influence from the rulers to the whole population, and democracy made this extension of their influence relevant; democracy provided the tool for transforming influence into power. I've described on other programs the way in which the Jews acquired control of our mass media and, through the media, control of the political process, and I won't repeat that story today. There's an up-to-date summary of Jewish media control in the National Vanguard Books catalog, which is available from the sponsor of this program.

But I do want to emphasize this very important point: the way in which the Jews maintain their position as the dominant minority in our society has changed. It used to be moneylending and bribes, and the pressure was exerted only at the top, on the political leaders of our society; today it's control of the mass media of news and entertainment, and the pressure is exerted at every level of society. Some people still talk darkly about international Jewish bankers -- and of course, there are such animals today, just as there also are international bankers who are not Jews -- but the control of the media is the key to Jewish power today, not control of banking. The most important Jews today no longer are the Rothschilds and Warburgs and Hambros and Sassoons, but instead are the Eisners and Levins and Newhouses and Redstones and Bronfmans and Sulzbergers: the Jewish media bosses.

So now let's look at the details of the Jewish application of influence through media control. Most people have a very limited range of real life experiences. Television and films and glossy magazine advertisements provide an enormous expansion of experience for the average person, by substituting artificial experiences for real experiences. On the television screen viewers experience artificial social relationships, artificial romances, artificial conflicts, artificial life. In advertisements they are given artificial ideals of beauty and fashion, artificial life-styles to which they can aspire. And in their newspapers and newsmagazines they are given a carefully filtered, a carefully slanted, view of what is happening in the world.

And unfortunately most people do not have sufficient powers of discrimination to distinguish the artificial world of the media from the real world of everyday experience. The two worlds merge in their minds, and they can't tell them apart. What people see on the television screen is not just entertainment; it is a collection of artificial experiences which merges with their collection of real experiences and gives them a new and largely artificial basis for evaluating things and making decisions. Cleverly designed advertisements don't just show potential customers what is available and give them the information they need to choose what they want; clever advertising actually creates new wants, new desires, that didn't exist before. The advertisements manipulate people's desires and motivations. In a similar way television entertainment manipulates viewers psychologically. It changes their values and attitudes. It strongly affects the way they see things -- including political issues and political candidates.

Well, I hardly have to tell you that the modern mass media give enormous power, unprecedented power, to whoever controls them -- especially in a democracy. And really, no knowledgeable person who is honest will dispute my conclusion here. There are many people, who are not knowledgeable, who believe that they can watch television without being affected by it, who believe that they make up their minds independently without relying on the artificial reality supplied by television, but most of these people are mistaken, and the experts will agree with me on this. The mass media do shape public opinion, and in a democracy they do control the political process.

So now the only question which remains is this: To what end do the Jews who control the media use their control? What is their aim? What do they want? Now, the Politically Correct answer is that all the Jewish media bosses want is what any other businessman wants. The media bosses are simply businessmen, and their aim is simply to run their businesses at a profit.

Well, I'm sorry, but that simply isn't true. It simply is not a coincidence that everywhere you look in the mass media you see Jews in control. It's not a coincidence that a group making up only a little over two per cent of the population has virtually complete control over the mass media. The unanimity of the mass media on virtually every major issue of our time simply is not a coincidence. It is simply not a coincidence that the media bosses all just happen to have adopted the policy of hushing up Black-on-White crime and publicizing as widely as possible any White-on-Black crime. All of these things are planned and deliberate. They are the consequence of conscious collaboration. Only a fool can believe that it's all just coincidence.

The Jewish media bosses know what they want. It is control -- not just of the media, but of us: of everything. They want to own us and, to the extent that they cannot own us, to destroy us. Unfortunately, I cannot play for you a secret recording of one of their summit meetings, where they discuss their goals and their strategy, a la the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I can only offer you the historical record and common sense. The record, for those who have eyes to see and an open mind, is pretty clear, beginning with the account in the book of Genesis of the takeover of Egypt by Joseph and his brothers so that they could all "eat the fat of the land" [Genesis 45.18], on through the ages to the Marxist takeover of Russia early in this century and the attempted takeover in many other countries.

You know the Germans didn't begin throwing the Jews out of Germany in the 1930s because of Christian bigotry. It was because they wanted their country back. The Germans wanted to run their own universities and schools, their own newspapers and films, their own legal and medical professions.

If you want to understand the historical record, you must study it. I can't go through all of that for you in a half-hour program. I can only point the way. And as for the commonsense aspect of understanding what the Jewish media bosses are up to, we just need to clear the cobwebs out of our heads and realize that every racially conscious group strives for mastery, for domination, not just the Jews. That's Nature's way. That's the way it is in every barnyard and every schoolyard.

And that is why the media propaganda takes the deliberate slant it does: trying to make us feel guilty, trying to kill our sense of racial consciousness while the Jews keep theirs, trying to persuade us to give up our arms, trying to silence all our dissident voices. Their aim is for us to be racially unconscious, for us to be ashamed of our nature and our traditions, for us to be afraid to organize for our common good, afraid of being thought racists. The deliberate aim of the Jewish media propaganda is to disarm us morally, to make us rootless and defenseless, and then to destroy us. That is what is happening now.

Think about it, and you'll see how it all fits together.

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ADV broadcast of December 12, 1998. For documentation of Jewish media dominance, see the NA's Who Rules America? Also see Prof. Kevin MacDonald's homepage.

Jewish Intolerance

Savitri Devi

Jewish "racism" has been much discussed. And the doctrine of the "chosen people" is often regarded as an expression of this "racism." Yet in reality the Jews of Antiquity (I mean, of course, orthodox Jews) believed that membership in their race, that is, in the "family of Abraham," had value only if it were combined with exclusive service to the "jealous God" Jehovah, Israel's exclusive protector. According to the Bible, Moabites and Ammonites, though enemies of Israel, were closely connected racially to the Jews. Did not the former descend from Moab, son of Lot and his eldest daughter, and the latter from Ben-Ammi, son of Lot and his youngest daughter? (Genesis 19.36-38) Now, Lot, son of Haran, was the nephew of Abraham (Genesis 11.27). Evidently genealogical kinship did not facilitate relations between these peoples and the children of Israel. If blood joined them together, their respective cults nevertheless separated them. Chemosh, god of Moabites, and Milcom, god of the Ammonites, were in the eyes of the Jews "abominations" -- as were all the gods of the earth, save their own God -- and their worshippers, enemies to be exterminated. [Image: Savitri in India, ca. 1935.]

Jewish racism, independent of religion -- the attitude which consists in accepting as a Jew and treating accordingly anyone born Jewish, whatever his religious beliefs might be -- is apparently a much more recent phenomenon, dating at the earliest from the eighteenth or the seventeenth century, that is, from the time when masonic lodges of Israelite inspiration began to play a role in determining the politics of Western nations. It was perhaps a product of the influence of Western rationalism on the Jews -- in spite of themselves. It found its most striking expression at the end of the nineteenth century and during the twentieth in Zionism, which could be called an innovative, avant-garde Jewish nationalism. The Zionist movement does respect, certainly, the religious tradition of the Talmud and the Bible, but without in any way being identified with it. Its political faith is "national," but could not be compared with that of modern Greece, since the latter is so inseparable from the official state religion. But I shall call Zionism a nationalism rather than a "racism," because it implies the exaltation of the Jewish people as such, without any enthusiastic consciousness of a blood solidarity uniting all the various desert peoples customarily called "Semitic."

Although modern in its expression, this Jewish nationalism is not in its essence different from the solidarity which, after the introduction of the Mosaic law, existed among all the children of Israel from the thirteenth century before the Christian era. The religion of Jehovah played a paramount role then. But its role consisted precisely in forming a feeling in all Jews, from the most powerful to the most humble, that they were the chosen people, the privileged people, different from other people, including those closest to them in blood, and exalted above them all. The Jews have felt that more and more in modern times, without the aid of a national religion; hence the decreasing importance of this religion among them, except in a few permanent centers of Jewish orthodoxy.

Intolerance on the Occupied West Bank (Hebron, August 2001): A Palestinian mother is kicked by a Jewish boy while a Jewish woman rips off her Islamic headscarf.

In other words, the Jews, who for centuries had been an unimportant Middle Eastern tribe among so many others, a tribe quite close to others in language and religion before Abraham and especially before the Mosaic reform, gradually became, under the influence of Moses and his successors, Joshua and Caleb, and then under the influence of the prophets, a people completely filled with the self-image they had manufactured; having nothing but contempt for men of the same race who surrounded them and, with greater reason, for people of other races; seeing only "abominations" in all their gods; even repudiating, as the prophet Ezra commanded after they returned from their long Babylonian captivity, those of their kinsmen who, having remained in Palestine, had married Canaanite women, under the pretext that the latter would loosen the link that bound them and their families to Jehovah and thus weaken their consciousness that they were a "chosen people," a people unlike others.

They could have remained so indefinitely, isolated from the rest of the world by a national pride as incommensurable as it was unjustified, for even in Antiquity they were already rather mixed-race hybrids, if only because of their prolonged sojourn in Egypt. Had the Jews remained in their self-imposed isolation, the world would certainly have suffered no great loss -- quite the contrary. But they did not, because the idea of a "single, living God" -- the "true" God, in contrast to "false" gods, to local gods whose power was limited to other peoples -- could only imply, sooner or later, the idea of universal truth and human community. A God who alone "lives," while all others are merely insensate matter, at most inhabited by impure forces, can only be, logically, the true God of all possible worshippers, that is, of all men. To refuse to admit it would have required that they ascribe life, truth and benevolence to other peoples' gods as well, in other words, that they cease seeing them only as "abominations." And that the Jews refused to accept, after the sermons and threats of their prophets. The One God could indeed prefer a single people. But it was necessary that he be, by necessity, the God of all peoples -- the one whom they, in their insane folly, were unaware of, whereas the "chosen people" alone paid him homage.

The first attitude of the Jews, as conquerors of Palestine, toward peoples who worshipped gods other than Jehovah was to hate and exterminate them. Their second attitude -- after Canaanite resistance in Palestine had long ended, and especially after the Jews had lost most of what little international significance they had ever possessed, being reduced to mere subjects of Greek kings, Alexander's successors, and later of Roman emperors -- was to throw into the spiritual pasture of a declining world not only the idea of the futile emptiness of all gods (except their own), but also the false concept of "man," independent of and distinct from peoples; of "man," a nationless citizen of the world (and "created in the image of God") whom Israel, the chosen people, the people of Revelation, had the mission of instructing and guiding to true "happiness." This was the attitude of those Jews, more or less conspicuously daubed with Hellenism, who from the fourth century AD until the Arab conquest in the seventh century formed an increasingly influential proportion of the population in Alexandria, as well as in all capitals of the Hellenistic world, which would later become the Roman world. It is also the attitude of the Jews of our own era -- an attitude which, precisely, makes them a people unlike others, a dangerous people: the "ferment of decomposition" of other peoples.

It is worth tracing the history of this attitude.

Its seeds, as I have suggested, already existed in the fanaticism of the servants and prophets of the "sole" and "living God," from Samuel to the redactors of the Cabala. An important fact that should not be forgotten, if one wants to try to understand it, is that the "sole God" of the Jews is a transcendent god, but not immanent. He is outside of Nature, which he created from nothingness by an act of will, and in his essence is different from it, different not only from its sensible manifestations, but also from everything that could, in a permanent way, underlie them. He is not that Soul of the Universe in which the Greeks and all other Indo-European peoples believed, and in which Brahmanism still sees the supreme Reality. He made the world as an artisan manufactures a marvelous machine: from the outside. And he imposed upon it whatever laws he wanted, laws that could have been different, if he had wanted them different. He gave man dominion over all other creatures. And he "chose" the Jewish people from among other men not for their intrinsic value -- that is clearly specified in the Bible -- but arbitrarily, because of a promise made once and for all to Abraham.

From this metaphysical perspective, it was impossible to consider the gods of other peoples as "aspects" or "expressions" of the sole God, and all the less so since these gods represented, for the most part, natural forces or celestial bodies. It was also impossible to emphasize less the indeterminate variety of men and the irrefutable inequality that has always existed among the various human races and even among people more or less of the same race. "Man," whatever that might be, had to possess, alone of created beings, an immense intrinsic value, since the Creator had formed him "in his own image" and had placed him, for that very reason, above all other living creatures. The Cabala states the matter clearly: "There exists the uncreated Being, who creates: God; the created being, who creates: man; and ... the remainder: the entirety of created beings -- animals, plants, minerals -- which do not create." This is the most absolute anthropocentrism, and a false philosophy from the outset, since it is obvious that "all men" are not creators (far from it!) and that some animals can in fact be creators.

But that is not all. From this new humanist perspective, not only did Jewry maintain its position as the "chosen people" -- the "holy nation," as the Bible says -- destined to bear unique Revelation to the world, but everything that other peoples had produced or thought had value only insofar as it was consistent with this Revelation, or insofar as it could be interpreted in that sense. Unable to deny the enormous Greek contributions to science and philosophy, the Jews of Alexandria, Greek in culture (and sometimes with Greek names, like Aristobulus in the third century BC), did not hesitate to write that all of the most substantial products of Greek thought -- the works of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Aristotle -- were only due, in the final analysis, to the influence of Jewish thought, having their source in Moses and the prophets! Others, such as the famous Philo of Alexandria, whose influence on Christian apologetics was considerable, did not dare deny the obvious originality of Hellenic genius, but only retained, of the ideas they elaborated, those which they could, by altering or even by deforming them completely, bring into "concord" with the Mosaic conception of "God" and the world. Their work is that hybrid product which in the history of ideas bears the name "Judeo-Alexandrian philosophy" -- an ingenious collection of interrelated concepts drawn more or less directly from Plato, though not always in the spirit of Plato, mixed together with old Jewish ideas like the transcendence of the sole God and the creation of man "in his image." All of this was undoubtedly a superfluous scaffolding in the eyes of orthodox Jews, for whom the Mosaic Law was sufficient, but it was a marvelous instrument for seizing spiritual control over the Gentiles, in the service of Jews (orthodox or not) eager to wrest from other peoples the direction of Western (and later, global) thought.

Judeo-Alexandrian philosophy and religion, increasingly permeated with the symbolism of Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and so forth, and professed by the ever more racially debased people of the Hellenistic world, constitute the backdrop against which Christian orthodoxy gradually emerged in the writings of Paul of Tarsus and the first Christian apologists, eventually taking shape during a succession of Church Councils. As Gilbert Murray remarks of the latter: "it is a strange experience ... to study these obscure assemblies, whose members, proletarians of the Levant, superstitious, dominated by charlatans and desperately ignorant, still believed that God can procreate children in the womb of mortal mothers, misunderstood 'Word,' 'Spirit' and 'divine Wisdom' as persons bearing those names, and transformed the notion of the soul's immortality into the 'resurrection of the dead,' and then to think that it was these men who followed the main road, leading to the greatest religion of the Western world."

In this Christianity of the first centuries, preached in Greek (the international language of the Near East) by Jewish and later by Greek missionaries to raceless urban masses -- so inferior, from any point of view, to the free men of the ancient Hellenic polis -- there were undoubtedly more non-Jewish elements than Jewish. What dominated was a common religious subject I dare not call "Greek" but rather "Aegean" or "Mediterranean pre-Hellenic" -- or even Near Eastern pre-Hellenic, for the people of Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia all more or less exemplified it in their primeval cults. It was the myth of the young god cruelly put to death -- Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz, Attis, Dionysus -- whose flesh (wheat) and blood (grape juice) became food and drink for men, and who came back to life in glory every year in Spring. This subject had never ceased to be present in the mysteries of Greece, as much in the classical era as before. Transfigured and "spiritualized" by the allegorical meanings attached to the most primitive rites, it manifested itself in the international "salvation" religions, namely in the cults of Mithra and of Cybele and Attis, Christianity's rivals in the Roman Empire. As Nietzsche saw so clearly, the genius of Paul of Tarsus consisted in "giving a new meaning to the ancient mysteries," taking hold of the old prehistoric myth, revivifying it, interpreting it in such way that, in perpetuity, all those who accepted his interpretation would also accept Jewry's prophetic role and its status as "chosen people," bearer of unique revelation.

Historically next to nothing is known about the person of Jesus of Nazareth, so little about his origins and the first thirty years of his life that some serious authors have even doubted his existence. According to the canonical gospels, he was raised in the Jewish religion. But was he Jewish by blood? Several scriptural passages tend to make one believe that he was not. It has been said, moreover, that the Galileans formed a small island of Indo-European population within Palestine. At any rate, what is important, as the source of the historical turning point that Christianity represents, is that, Jewish or not, Jesus was presented as such, and what is more, was presented as the Jewish people's expected Messiah, by Paul of Tarsus, the true founder of Christianity, and by all the Christian apologists who followed over the centuries. What is important is that he was, thanks to them, integrated into the Jewish tradition, forming the link between it and the old Mediterranean myth of the young vegetation god who died and rose again, a myth the Jews had never accepted. He became the Messiah, acquiring the essential attributes of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus and all the other dead gods who triumphed over Death, pushing them all into the shade for his own profit, and that of his people, with an intransigence that none of them knew, the typically Jewish intransigence of Paul of Tarsus, his teacher Gamaliel, and all the servants of the "jealous God," Jehovah. Not only was "new meaning" given to the ancient mysteries, but this meaning was proclaimed the sole good and the sole truth, the rites and the myths of pagan antiquity, from the most remote times, having only "prepared" and "prefigured" it, just as ancient philosophy had only sensitized souls to receive the supreme revelation. And this revelation was, for Paul as for the Jews of the Judeo-Alexandrian school before him, and for all the Christian apologists that followed -- Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Ireneus, Origen -- given to the Jews by the God "of all mankind."

Jewish intolerance, until then confined to a single people (and to a despised people, whom no one dreamed of imitating) extended itself, with Christianity and later with Islam -- that reaction against the Hellenisation of Christian theology -- to half the globe. And, moreover, it is that very intolerance that accounts for the success of the religions linked with the tradition of Israel.

I have mentioned the salvation religions, in particular the cults of Mithra and of Cybele and her lover Attis, which flourished in the Roman Empire when Christianity was still young. At first sight, each of them had as much chance of attracting to itself the restless masses for whom Roman order was not sufficient, or was no longer sufficient, and who, increasingly bastardized, felt alienated from any national cult, whatever it might be. Each of them offered to the average individual all that the religion of crucified Jesus promised, and with rites all the more able to assure his adhesion, since they were more barbarous.

In the third century AD, the worship of Mithra -- the old Indo-European solar god, contemplated through the thousand deforming mirrors that the races and traditions of his new worshippers represented -- seemed destined to become dominant ... provided that no decisive factor should intervene in favor of one of his rivals. The god was popular among Roman legionaries and their officers. Emperors had believed it worthwhile to receive initiation into his mysteries, under a shower of the Bull's hot, redemptive blood. A growing number of common people followed the movement. One can say with complete confidence that the world dominated by Rome just barely failed to become Mithraic, instead of Christian, for some twenty centuries. One can say with no less certainty that, though it did not become Mithraic, this failure was due neither to any "superiority" of the Christian doctrine of salvation over the teachings of the priests of Mithra, nor to the absence of sanguinary rites among Christians, but rather to the protection granted to the religion of the Crucified by the emperor Constantine, and not to any other factor. Indeed it was Christianity's very intolerance -- especially, perhaps even exclusively -- that procured the preference of the master of the Roman world. [Image: Mithras Tauroctonos ("Mithra the Bull-Slayer").]

What the emperor wanted above all was to give to this immense world, populated by people of diverse traditions and ethnicities, the most solid unity possible, without which it would be difficult to resist for long the external pressures of the so-called barbarians. Unity of worship was certainly the only kind of unity that he could hope to impose on his empire, on condition that it could be achieved quickly. Among the popular religions of salvation, Mithraism undoubtedly counted the greatest number of faithful. But it did not seem capable of being spread rapidly enough, first and foremost because it did not claim to be the only Way and the only Truth. It risked allowing its rivals to survive, and the unity that Constantine so much desired would therefore not be accomplished -- or would take centuries -- whereas the interest of the empire demanded that it be done within a few decades.

One could say as much of the old cult of Cybele and Attis: its priests did not proclaim, following the example of the Jews, that they alone possessed the truth; on the contrary, they believed, as did all men of Antiquity (except the Jews), that truth has innumerable facets, and that each cult helps its faithful grasp an aspect of it. They, too, would have allowed rival religions to flourish in complete liberty.

Fourth-century Christianity, although penetrated with ideas and symbols borrowed from neo-Platonism, or from the old Aegean mystical substrate, or from still more remote forms of the eternal Tradition, had itself inherited the spirit of intolerance from Judaism. Even its most enlightened apologists, the most richly nurtured in traditional Greek culture -- such as a St. Clement of Alexandria or an Origen who, far from rejecting ancient wisdom, regarded it as a preparation for that of the gospels -- did not put the two wisdoms on the same plane. There was, they believed, "progress" from the former to the latter, and the Jewish "revelation" retained its priority over the distant echo of the sole God's voice which one could detect in the pagan philosophers. As for the great mass of Christians, they dismissed as "abominations" -- or "demons" -- all the gods of the earth, except that One who had been revealed to men of all races through the Old Testament prophets -- Jewish prophets -- and through Jesus and his posthumous disciple, Paul of Tarsus, the latter entirely Jewish, the former regarded by the Church as a Jew, a "son of David," though in fact his true origins are unknown and even his historicity could be questioned.

The profound link that attaches Christianity (and in particular the "Holy Sacrifice of the Mass") to the ancient mysteries ensured its survival down to our own era. And it was, for Paul of Tarsus, a stroke of (political) genius to have given to the oldest myths of the Mediterranean world an interpretation that ensured to his own people an indefinite spiritual domination over that world and over all the peoples it was destined to influence during the centuries that followed. It was, for the emperor Constantine, a stroke of genius (also political), to have chosen to encourage a religion which would, by its rapid diffusion, give to the ethnic chaos that the Roman world then represented the only unity to which it could still aspire. And it was, for the German tribal chief Clodwig, known in French history as Clovis, again a stroke of genius (political, in his case also) to have felt that nothing would better ensure him permanent domination over his rivals, other German leaders, than his own adhesion (and that of his warriors) to Christianity, in a world then already three-quarters Christian, where bishops represented a power to be sought out as allies. Political genius, not religious -- and still less philosophical -- because in each case it aimed at power, personal or national, at material stability, at success, but not at truth in the full sense of the word, that is, accord with the Eternal. It involved mundane human ambitions, not a thirst for knowledge of the Laws of Being, nor a thirst for union with the Essence of all things -- the Soul, at once transcendent and immanent, of the Cosmos.

For if it had been different, there would have been no reason for the religion of the Nazarene to have triumphed for so many centuries: its rivals were its equals. Christianity had only one practical "advantage" over them: its fanaticism, its infantile intolerance inherited from the Jews -- a fanaticism, an intolerance, which, during the early days of the Church, cultivated Romans or Greeks could only find laughable, and which Germans, nurtured in their own beautiful religion, simultaneously cosmic and warlike, could rightly find absurd, but which would give to Christianity a militant character, which it alone possessed, since orthodox Judaism remained -- and would remain -- the faith of a single people.

Christianity could henceforth be combated only by another religion with equally universal pretensions, just as intolerant as it. And it is a fact that, until now, it has lost ground on a significant scale only when confronted by Islam and, in our era, by the false religion which is Communism.

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The preceding text is from Chapter III of Savitri Devi's Souvenirs et réflexions d'une Aryenne (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1976). Trans. Irmin Vinson. Savitri's footnotes have been omitted; the title is editorial. The original French text is also available.