Israel as One Man: A Theory of Jewish Power

[Patricia]

Israel as One Man: A Theory of Jewish Power
by Laurent Guyénot

“One outstanding characteristic of the Jewish race is its persistence. What it cannot attain this generation, it will attain next. Defeat it today, it does not remain defeated; its conquerors die, but Jewry goes on, never forgetting, never deviating from its ancient aim of world control in one form or another.”[1]

So wrote Henry Ford in The International Jew. Indeed, no other people has been capable of such perseverance toward an unwavering goal, pursued step by step over many generations—a hundred generations if we trace the Zionist project back to the period of the Babylonian Exile. Jews often find themselves divided on crucial issues and involved in radically opposed movements; yet in the end, even their antagonisms seem to synergically advance their common higher purpose. Many illustrations can be found of the extraordinary capacity of the Jewish elites to separate like a school of fish and then reunite.

Is the Hebrew Bible materialistic?

The American rabbi Harry Waton had a theory to explain the organic unity, persistence and progress of the Jews. He wrote in his Program for the Jews, published in 1939: “Hebrew religion, in fact, was intensely materialistic and it is precisely this that gave it persistent and effective reality.”

“Jehovah differs from all other gods. All other gods dwell in heaven. For this reason, all other religions are concerned about heaven, and they promise all reward in heaven after death. For this reason, all other religions negate the earth and the material world and are indifferent to the well-being and progress of mankind on this earth. But Jehovah comes down from heaven to dwell on this earth and to embody himself in mankind. For this reason, Judaism concerns itself only about this earth and promises all reward right here on this earth.”

“The Jews that have a deeper understanding of Judaism know that the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people. Each Jew continues to live in the Jewish people, and he will continue to live so long as the Jewish people will live.”

This, Waton explains, it grounded in the Hebrew Tanakh:

“The Bible speaks of an immortality right here on earth. In what consists this immortality? It consists in this: the soul continues to live and function through the children and grandchildren and the people descending from them. Hence, when a man dies, his soul is gathered to his people. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and all the rest continue to live in the Jewish people, and in due time they will live in the whole human race. This was the immortality of the Jewish people, and it was known to the Jews all the time.”[2]

This is close to saying that Jews have only one collective immortal soul. Significantly, Israel is the only nation who bears the name of one person (Jacob is given the name Israel in Genesis 32:29).

Is Waton’s understanding of biblical anthropology correct? And how far does it go toward explaining Jewish power? The answer to the first question is yes. Waton’s viewpoint was informed by the best scholarship of his days, which has not been contradicted since. It was and still is widely shared among educated Jews. In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, also published in 1939, Sigmund Freud correctly stressed that, on the question of individual immortality, the Egyptians and the Israelites were on the opposite end of the spectrum:

“No other people of antiquity [than the Egyptians] has done so much to deny death, has made such careful provision for an after-life […]. The early Jewish religion, on the other hand, had entirely relinquished immortality; the possibility of an existence after death was never mentioned in any place.”[3]

There is no expectation of an afterlife in the Torah. Instead, there is an implicit denial of it: “By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it. For dust you are and to dust you shall return,” says Yahweh to Adam (Genesis 3:19).[4] That is a logical consequence of the way “Yahweh God shaped man [adam] from the soil of the ground [adamah] and blew the breath of life [ruah] into his nostrils, and man became a living being [nephesh]” (2:7). The proximity between adam, “man”, and adamah, “earth” or “ground”, reinforces the idea. It has been said, by Cabbalists in particular, that nephesh and ruah are two terms to designate an immortal spirit. That is a misunderstanding originating from the Greek Septuagint translation: the Hebrew word nephesh is translated as psyche. But in reality it designates a “living being,” animal or human; it sometimes means simply “life” and is associated to blood in the ritual prescriptions of Leviticus 17. The Hebrew word ruah, translated as pneuma, means “breath,” and also designates life. Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures do these terms imply any form of individual afterlife.

This biblical anti-spiritualism is not to be explained as a “primitive” trait proving the Hebrew Bible’s great antiquity, as if the belief in an Otherworld of the dead was a late development in the history of religious ideas. On the contrary, the Hebrew denial of the afterlife was linked to the rejection of foreign cults, which universally included a concern for the afterlife. The Book of Genesis, whose anthropological materialism is the most explicit, betrays Mesopotamian and Persian influences that cannot be anterior to the Babylonian Exile. Significantly, it uses the Persian word Pardes to designate the “Garden” (of Eden), but turns its meaning upside down: whereas in Indo-European myths, Paradise is the happy world where the righteous dead become immortal by eating from the tree of life, in Genesis, it is a past lost forever for all mankind, and the stage of the drama that brought into the world the double scourge of death and labor; for death bears no promise, and work no spiritual reward.


Here is one illustration among others that I mention in my book From Yahweh to Zion: when, in Isaiah 38, the good King Hezekiah “fell ill and was at the point of death,” he expresses no hope of meeting his Creator or starting a new life in some Otherworld. Rather, he despairs at the prospect of not seeing Yahweh anymore. For, he tells him, “Sheol cannot praise you, nor Death celebrate you; those who go down to the pit can hope no longer in your constancy” (Isaiah 38:11-19). Sheol is simply “the pit”, and it is another common misunderstanding, stemming for its translation as Hades in the Septuagint, to think of it as a world where the dead live. There is no life in Sheol, it is a purely negative concept of death, as close as possible to the non-concept of nothingness. The term appears only five times anyway in the Pentateuch: four times in Genesis as a conventional name for death,[5] and once in Numbers 16, in a story about rebellious Jews who, by divine punishment, are suddenly swallowed alive by the earth with all their belongings.

In response to his prayer, Hezekiah only receives an extra fifteen years of earthly life. For Yahweh holds no other reward for the faithful than a long, fertile and wealthy life on earth. Like Hezekiah, Job expects no afterlife consolation for his enduring faith, but instead gets a 140-year extension on earth, numerous offspring, as well as “fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand she-donkeys” (Job 42:12). In any other culture, his exemplary loyalty to his god would be rewarded by a happy afterlife. But Yahweh does not care about the dead, whom he “remembers no more” (Psalms 88:6).


In fact, Yahweh can hardly be regarded as “a god” if we define a god as residing in some world beyond this one. Yahweh claims to rule over this world alone, because he is, literally, a king (melech, a title applied to him more than fifty times in the Hebrew Bible). Yahweh is a very special king indeed: invisible, omniscient and eternal—very practical for the hereditary clans of priests and prophets who speak in his name.

Jewishness as collective soul
A “materialistic religion” may sound like a contradiction in terms. Indeed, it is questionable if the concept of “religion”, as most people understand it today, applies to biblical Judaism. The evolution of Judaism for the last two thousand years is another story. In the Hellenistic period, Greco-Egyptian dualism infiltrated Jewish thought. The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek in Alexandria in the first century BCE, asserts that, “God created human beings to be immortal,” and criticizes those who “do not believe in a reward for blameless souls” (2:22-23). But such books never made it into the Jewish canon, as rabbinical Judaism vigorously rejected anything Greek. Moreover, even within Hellenistic Judaism, the materialist viewpoint prevailed. According to Ecclesiastes,

“the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same: as the one dies, so the other dies; […] everything comes from the dust, everything returns to the dust” (3:19–20).

“The living are at least aware that they are going to die, but the dead know nothing whatever. […] There is neither achievement, nor planning, nor science, nor wisdom in Sheol where you are going” (9:5-10).

Significantly, the most enduring legacy of Hellenistic Judaism is the idea of physical “resurrection,” a grossly materialistic adaptation of the Greek metaphor of life after death as anastasis (“rising up”). No immortal soul is needed in this Jewish apocalyptic fantasy. So even the biblical notion of resurrection demonstrates that materialism is part of the essence of Judaism.

More recently, under circumstances comparable to the Hellenistic context, Reformed Judaism has reinjected the immortal soul into Judaic anthropology. But it is significant that, when Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the father of the eighteenth-century Haskalah, decided to convince his fellow Jews to accept the creed of the immortality of the individual soul—a necessary condition for the elevation of humanity according to him—he did not rely on the Jewish tradition, but instead produced a Platonic dialogue titled Phaedo or the Immortality of the Soul.


Many Jewish intellectuals protested against the introduction of that foreign body into Jewish thought, and their reaction would become a central tenet of Zionism. According to Moses Hess (Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question, 1862), “Nothing is more foreign to the spirit of Judaism than the idea of the salvation of the individual which, according to the modern conception, is the cornerstone of religion.” For Hess, the essence of Judaism is “the vivid belief in the continuity of the spirit in human history,” because “the Jews are something more than mere ‘followers of a religion,’ namely, they are a race brotherhood, a nation.”[6]

Likewise, according to Zionist historian Benzion Netanyahu, former secretary of Zeev Jabotinsky and father of the current Israeli Prime Minister, defining Jewishness as religion rather than nationality “was the fruit of self-deception.” He defends a racial conception that amounts to considering that Jews are only immortal as a nation:

“Only by intermarriage can a person uproot himself from a nation, and then only in so far as his descendants are concerned. His individuality, which is an extract and an example of the qualities of his nation, may then be lost in future generations, dominated by qualities of other nations. Quitting a nation is, therefore, even from a biological point of view, an act of suicide.”[7]

Netanyahu is right: his concept of Jewishness is the only one consistent with the Bible. Jewish influential journalist Lucien Wolf tried to have it both ways by claiming that, “in Judaism the religion and the race are almost interchangeable terms,” which of course makes no sense within the commonly accepted notion of religion.[8] A religion welcomes converts, but not the “religion” of Israel. There are exceptions: mass forced conversions, on the one hand, and individual sons-in-law who bring added value to the gene pool or the financial pool, on the other, but no case is recorded in the Bible.

What about circumcision, you may ask. Is it not a rite of admission into the Jewish community? Not in the Bible. As the “sign of the covenant” imposed by Yahweh on Abraham, for “you and your descendants after you, generation after generation” (Genesis 17:9), circumcision actually reinforces the strictly genetic, even genital, nature of Jewishness. As a “mark in the flesh” passed on from father to son, it perfectly symbolizes the unspiritual nature of Yahwism.

There is in the Bible a strict equality between monotheism and racial purity: Yahweh forbids Jews to marry their children to non-Jews because “your son would be seduced from following me into serving other gods” (Deuteronomy 7:3-4). When some Israelites take wives among the Moabites (an Abrahamic people), what bothers Yahweh is that these women “invited them to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down before their gods” (Numbers 25:1-2). From the point of view of an evolutionary psychologist like Kevin MacDonald, the exclusive cult of the jealous god is just a religious pretext for a eugenic project based on strict endogamy, and Judaism is fundamentally a “group evolutionary strategy among peoples.”[9]


By depriving the Jews of any individual soul, and deifying instead their racial identity, the Torah programs Israel as the most holistic nation. The immortality that is denied the individual is reinvested entirely on the people as a whole (“I instituted an eternal people” Isaiah 44:7), as if the Jews were united by a single, national, genetic soul, personified by Yahweh. In an “Essay on the Jewish Soul” (1929), Isaac Kadmi-Cohen actually describes Judaism as “the spiritualization that deifies the race,” so that “divinity in Judaism is contained in the exaltation of the entity represented by the race.”[10] Israel is possessed by a unique destiny, and each Jew contributes to that destiny. Jewish apologist Maurice Samuel writes in You Gentiles (1924): “The feeling in the Jew, even in the free-thinking Jew like myself, is that to be one with his people is to be thereby admitted to the power of enjoying the infinite.”[11] And German Zionist Alfred Nossig wrote in 1922: “The Jewish community is more than a people in the modern political sense of the word. […] It forms an unconscious nucleus of our being, the common substance of our soul.”[12]

From a religious point of view, individual immortality appears to be missing in biblical anthropology. But the notion of collective immortality that replaces it is the source of the greatest strength of the Jewish people. An individual has only a few decades to accomplish his destiny, while a nation has centuries, even millennia. Jeremiah can reassure the exiles of Babylon that in seven generations they will return to Jerusalem (“Letter of Jeremiah,” in Baruch 6:2). Seven generations in the history of a people is not unlike seven years in the life of a man. While the Goy awaits for his time on the scale of a century, the chosen people see much further. The national orientation of the Jewish soul injects into any collective project a spiritual force and endurance with which no other national community can compete.


Israel operates with a totally different time scale than other nations. It defines itself by a parnoramic vision that scans millennia into the past and into the future. It keeps a vivid memory of its beginnings 3000 years ago, and it looks with anticipation to the fulfillment of its destiny at the end of times. It makes no difference if its memory is not accurate history. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi points out in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, “Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.”[13] This characteristic is certainly inherited from its nomadic past, for nomadic peoples are more intensely committed to collective memory and genealogy than sedentary people, who are also rooted in the land (the land keeps their memory). Memory is individuality, and Israel’s extraordinary memory makes it an individuality of extraordinary character.

The “national soul” paradigm, rooted in the biblical denial of individual immortality, combines with the “chosen people” paradigm, another fundamental aspect of the biblical matrix. For if the Jewish soul is somehow identifiable to Yahweh, and if Yahweh is God, it follows that the Jewish soul is God. This combination of biblical materialism and biblical ethnocentrism (or pseudo-universalism) is the simple equation, the E=mC2 that explains the “Jewish mind” (better, at least, than Raphael Patai’s book of the same title)[14].

The parasitic nation
The holistic principle rooted in biblical materialism is not a sufficient explanation for the Jews’ persistent effort toward world domination. To some degree, every nation was, until recently, organic. The word “nation” comes from the Latin for “birth” or “race”: a nation exists when people living in the same “Fatherland” (la Patrie, in French) feel “familiar”, recognize each other as brothers, sharing common ancestors. To understand how special is the Jewish nation, we need to define more precisely its organic character. Henry Ford has a suggestion:

“The Jewish problem in the United States is essentially a city problem. It is characteristic of the Jew to gather in numbers, not where land is open nor where raw materials are found, but where the greatest number of people abide. This is a noteworthy fact when considered alongside the Jews’ claim that the Gentiles have ostracized them; the Jews congregate in their greatest numbers in those places and among those people where they complain they are least wanted. The explanation most frequently given is this; the genius of the Jew is to live off people; not off land, nor off the production of commodities from raw material, but off people. Let other people till the soil; the Jew, if he can, will live off the tiller. Let other people toil at trades and manufacture; the Jew will exploit the fruits of their work. That is his peculiar genius. If this genius be described as parasitic, the term would seem to be justified by a certain fitness.”[15]

This national genius is rooted in the Bible. Yahweh has destined Israel to be, not just an organism like other nations, but a parasitic one. From the time of Moses, Yahweh has sworn to give his people a country “with great and prosperous cities you have not built, with houses full of good things you have not provided, with wells you have not dug, with vineyards and olive trees you have not planted” (Deuteronomy 6:10-11). The prophets encourage the parasitic destiny of Israel: “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (Isaiah 60:16); “Strangers will come forward to feed your flocks, foreigners will be your ploughmen and vinedressers; but you will be called ‘priests of Yahweh’ and be addressed as ‘ministers of our God’. You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (Isaiah 61:5-6); “the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be heaped together: gold, silver, clothing, in vast quantity” (Zechariah 14:14). “I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in, and I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold! Yahweh Sabaoth declares.” (Haggai 2:7-8).

Usury is the quintessential parasitizing, and as far as I know, the Yahwist priests were the first to conceive of enslaving entire nations through debt: “If Yahweh your God blesses you as he has promised, you will be creditors to many nations but debtors to none; you will rule over many nations, and be ruled by none” (Deuteronomy 15:6).

The archetypal parasitic hero is Joseph, son of Jacob. Having risen from the status of a slave to that of chancellor of Pharaoh, he favors his kinsmen and obtains for them “land holdings in Egypt, in the best part of the country.” Responsible for managing the national grain reserves, he stores large amounts during the years of plenty; and then, when famine strikes, he negotiates a high price for the monopolized grain and thus “accumulated all the money to be found in Egypt and Canaan.” The following year, having created a monetary shortage, he forces the peasants to relinquish their herds in exchange for grain: “Hand over your livestock and I shall issue you food in exchange for your livestock, if your money has come to an end.” One year later, the peasants have nothing left “except our bodies and our land,” and so are reduced to begging, then have to sell themselves in order to survive: “Take us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will become Pharaoh’s serfs; only give us seed, so that we can survive and not die and the land not revert to desert!” And so the Hebrews, after settling in Egypt, “acquired property there; they were fruitful and grew very numerous” (Genesis 47:11-27), a sure sign of God’s blessing. Lawrence Wills, who has compiled several Jewish legends of the Joseph type, writes: “As difficult as it may be for the modern reader to accept, we actually have before us hero legends concerning tax farmers, as if we were reading the Robin Hood legend told from the Sheriff of Nottingham’s perspective.”[16] A people armed with such a holy book has a huge advantage in the competition for the control of wealth.


Since the early 19th century Napoleonic wars, Israel’s parasitism has been demonstrated in war profiteering on a grand political scale, each European mass slaughter serving as a stepping stone for the Zionist World Order. This tradition has recently culminated with the complete control of America’s imperial policy, as Greg Felton, among others, have documented in The Host and the Parasite.[17]

Parasitizing the empire is another lesson drawn from the Bible, particularly from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. At that time, the imperial power was Persia. After the Persians had conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, with the help of the Judean exiles, the latter gained positions of influence in the new imperial administration, and used them to establish their theocratic tyranny over Palestine. Some 42,360 people with their 7,337 servants and 200 male and female singers (according to Ezra 2:64-67) returned to Jerusalem, after

“Yahweh roused the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia to issue a proclamation and to have it publicly displayed throughout his kingdom: ‘Cyrus king of Persia says this, Yahweh, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build him a temple in Jerusalem, in Judah.’” (Ezra 1:1-2).

No detail is given on the kind of pressure needed to “rouse the spirit of Cyrus,” whom, adds Isaiah, Yahweh “have grasped by his right hand,” and informed:

“It is for the sake of my servant Jacob and of Israel my chosen one, that I have called you by your name, have given you a title though you do not know me. […] Though you do not know me, I have armed you.” (Isaiah 45:1-5)

Conspiratorial networking
Let us not be carried away by our organic metaphors. The success of the Jewish elites in advancing their national goals is not to be explained merely by some spontaneous national instinct or group soul that unconsciously binds them deeply together despite their superficial divisions. It is true that the strength of modern Zionism rests on an organic rather than hierarchical link between Jews, as Gilad Atzmon stresses: “While the organism functions as a whole, the particular organ fulfills an elementary function without being aware of its specific role within the entire system.”[18] Nevertheless, as Atzmon also stresses, this organic unity is created, cultivated and used by cognitive elites who are very much aware of the power they can draw from it.


In other words, Israel is not just about blood, it is also about covenant. Religious Jews believe Jewishness goes back to a Mosaic covenant between God and the only people He really cares about. But most of the Jewish intellectual, cultural, financial, political or criminal elite—members of the B’nai B’rith (“Sons of the Covenant”) or the Alliance Israélite Universelle, for example—assume it is a covenant of Jews between themselves.

In practice, the mysterious capacity of Jewish movements to drive history is based on a practice of networking perfected through 2500 years. Ethnic networking means that, unbeknownst to the Gentile public, Jewish elites coordinate their effort on a particular issue so as to apply an irresistible pressure until a desired effect is obtained. It is performed in every field and for a great variety of purposes, including in the academic sphere, to create artificial consensus. Brenton Sanderson and Andrew Joyce,[19] both writing on Kevin MacDonald’s Occidental Observer, have brilliantly demonstrated how concerted efforts from the part of Jewish scholars over a few decades can transform any minor figure, such as Gustav Mahler or Baruch Spinoza, into personifications of the “Jewish genius”:

“Firstly, inflate the significance of a Jewish figure’s intellectual or artistic achievement to the point where it is held to be of ‘world changing’ magnitude. Secondly, accentuate the Jewish origins and affiliations of the figure so that his ‘world-changing’ achievement is held to be the natural expression of his Jewish origins and identity.”[20]

The process illustrates perfectly the connection between the “national soul” aspect of Jewishness and its practical application in networking: for committed Jews, every Jew’s achievement is a Jewish achievement, and a particular manifestation of the Jewish soul.

In the dark spheres of deep political power, elite Jews unite in conspiratorial circles to steer history in their desired direction. One of them was the Order of the Parushim, described by Sarah Schmidt, professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as “a secret underground guerilla force determined to influence the course of events in a quiet, anonymous way.” At the initiation ceremony, each new member received for instructions:

“Until our purpose shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life—dearer than that of family, of school, of nation. By entering this brotherhood, you become a self-dedicated soldier in the army of Zion.”

The initiate responded by vowing:

“Before this council, in the name of all that I hold dear and holy, I hereby vow myself, my life, my fortune, and my honor to the restoration of the Jewish nation. […] I pledge myself utterly to guard and to obey and to keep secret the laws and the labor of the fellowship, its existence and its aims. Amen.”[21]

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941), named at the Supreme Court by Woodrow Wilson, and his protégé and successor Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965), were members of this secret circle. “Working together over a period of 25 years, they placed a network of disciples in positions of influence, and labored diligently for the enactment of their desired programs,” writes Bruce Allen Murphy in The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection.[22] Brandeis’ mentor Samuel Untermeyer (1858-1940) who, as rumor has it, blackmailed Wilson into naming Brandeis, and who exercised an unparalleled influence on the White House until his death, was most probably a founding member of the Parushim.

The group of Leo Strauss’s intimate disciples, recipients of the master’s “esoteric” teaching, form another of those conspiratorial circles. Nothing is more revealing of their philosophy than Strauss’ understanding of Machiavelli. In his Thoughts on Machiavelli. Strauss defines Machiavelli as the patriot of the highest degree because he understood that only nations can be immortal, and that the best leaders are those who have no fear of damning their individual soul, since they have none. The true patriot sets no moral limit to what he can do for his country.[23] In an article in the Jewish World Review of June 7, 1999, Strauss’ disciple Michael Ledeen, founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), assumes that Machiavelli must have been a “secret Jew,” since “if you listen to his political philosophy you will hear Jewish music.”[24]

The Straussians formed the original core of the Neoconservatives. In two generations, this network of less than a hundred people have penetrated the nerve centers of the American state with the aim of seizing the levers of its foreign and military policies. The Neoconservatives’ transgenerational sustainability illustrates the organic background of Jewish networking: Irving Kristol was succeeded by his son William, Donald Kagan by his son Robert, Richard Pipes by his son Daniel, and Norman Podhoretz by his son John and his son-in-law Elliott Abrams.


Such networks of smart, tribal, Machiavellian, conspiratorial Jews are the key to the extraordinary unity of worldwide Jewry. We can compare the structure of the Jewish community to concentric orbital spheres in a gravitational field, with Yahweh’s ideology and prophecies at the core: in the inner spheres is the elite minority for whom Jewishness and Israel are permanent concerns; in the outer spheres are the “soft” Jews, who are only maintained in orbit by low gravity, and likely to break away. As fully assimilated Jews, they play an important role in public relations, and most of them can still be rallied when needed under the banner of the fight against anti-Semitism.[25]

So Jewishness is also a system of mind control of the Jewish masses by the Jewish elites. Whereas in European societies, the extremes tend to be marginalized, Kevin MacDonald points out that in the Jewish community, the opposite is true:

“At all the turning points, it is the more ethnocentric elements—one might term them the radicals—who have determined the direction of the Jewish community and eventually won the day. […] The radical movement begins among the more committed segments of the Jewish community, then spreads and eventually becomes mainstream within the Jewish community. […] Jews who fail to go along with what is now a mainstream position are pushed out of the community, labeled “self-hating Jews” or worse, and relegated to impotence.”[26]

This has been going on since the Babylonian exile, when Ezekiel’s obsession with purity of blood and of cult prevailed over Jeremiah’s tentative reform from sacerdotalism toward a more internal, moral and universal religion. As biblical scholar Karl Budde wrote: “the tendency toward the complete isolation of Israel from the heathen and the avoidance of every pollution, passed over from Ezekiel’s visions into the practical law-books,” making Ezekiel the true “father of Judaism.”[27] The same obsession is the central theme of the Book of Ezra. On learning that the Judeo-Babylonians already returned to Palestine had resorted to mixed marriages, and that “the holy race has been contaminated by the people of the country,” Ezra made them swear to “send away all the foreign wives and their children” (Ezra 9:2; 10:3). Three centuries later, in the same spirit, the Maccabees led a bloody civil war against the assimilationist Jews to establish their Hasmonean dynasty. The Book of Jubilees, from this period, proclaims:

“And if there is any man who wishes in Israel to give his daughter or his sister to any man who is of the seed of the Gentiles he shall surely die, and they shall stone him with stones; for he has wrought shame in Israel; and they shall burn the woman with fire, because she has dishonored the name of the house of her father, and she shall be rooted out of Israel” (30:7).

Thus the cohesion of the Jewish community is always maintained by the most committed Jews among the elites, through a paranoid terror of extermination combined with a complex of superiority. They may not all agree on “what is good for the Jews” at any particular time, but they are all absolutely committed to Israel’s grandiose destiny. And at critical times in history, they are capable of forcing world Jewry to act “as one man” (Judges 20:1). A good example is the campaign launched against Germany in March 1933, after Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, by a frontpage article in the British Daily Express entitled “Judea Declares War on Germany. Jews of All the World Unite,” and proclaiming: “The Israeli people around the world declare economic and financial war against Germany. Fourteen million Jews dispersed throughout the world have banded together as one man to declare war on the German persecutors of their co-religionists.” Samuel Untermeyer, who led the attack, called “traitors to their race” all Jews who refused to join in the German boycott.[28]

These eternal Levites who control the rest of the Jews are the most biblically-minded: like David Ben-Gurion in 1936, they say, “The Bible is our mandate.” They are also the most endogamous. Still today, within the Jewish community, endogamy is all the more intense as one moves up the social hierarchy. Of the 58 marriages contracted by the descendants of Mayer Rothschild, half were between cousins. In the space of a little more than a hundred years, they married 16 times between first cousins, while also admitting a few handpicked goyish aristocrats to the lineage.[29] The pattern, again, is biblical: endogamy is so highly valued in the Bible that it trumps the prohibition of incest as understood by most cultures. Abraham marries his half-sister Sarah. His son Isaac marries Rebecca, the daughter of his cousin Bethuel (whose mother, Milcah, had married his uncle Nahor). And Isaac’s son Jacob marries the two daughters of his maternal uncle Laban. Not to mention Judah, founder of the Judahites (later Jews), who conceives with his daughter-in-law Tamar.

The problem of Christian individualism
The message of the Gospel is the antithesis of Jewish materialism. Jesus’ teaching to “store up treasures for yourselves in heaven” (Matthew 6:20–21) contrasts with Yahweh’s greed for “the treasures of all the nations” (Haggai 2:7–8). Jesus’s emphasis on personal salvation also comes with a strong hostility to blood ties,[30] and Paul teaches that being reborn through Christ cancels ethnic solidarities, social hierarchies, and even gender identities:

“There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female—for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And simply by being Christ’s, you are that progeny of Abraham, the heirs named in the promise” (Galatians 3:28-29).

Israel’s religion is indistinguishable from a strong sense of racial unity. By contrast, Christianity is unfriendly, to say the least, to the concept of race. Catholic doctrine in particular has developed an atomistic, non-genetic and egalitarian conception of the human soul that cannot account for the multi-layered complexity of the human psyche, or the “invisible loyalties” that bind each one to his ancestors, to use a term from Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy.[31] Augustine, the major reference of medieval Catholicism, built a wall between the living and the dead, denouncing any give-and-take between the two worlds as the work of the devil. And so by eroding the ties of solidarity between the dead and the living, which are a major part of private and public cults in traditional societies, Catholicism has gradually transformed “solidary death” into “solitary death”, in the words of Philippe Ariès.[32]


For these reasons, it has been contended that Christianity laid the foundation for modern Western individualism—a collective frame of mind, ironically. Anthropologist Louis Dumont explains in his Essays on Individualism that traditional societies are holistic and hierarchical: they subordinate the individual to the community and assign to the individual a value that depends on his/her social role. Such societies admit that some individuals forsake their social existence to seek individual enlightenment, as long as these individuals do not challenge the social order and its holistic dynamic, remaining the exceptions that confirm the rule. Christianity, according to Dumont, has upset that civilisational balance by emphacizing that salvation from this world is everybody’s business. Every Christian is defined as a “self-in-relationship-to-God”, even if he doesn’t renounce the world as an ermite or a monk, and so he becomes an “individual-in-the-world.” By stages, “holism will have vanished from ideology,” and “the outworldly individual will have become the modern, inworldly individual.”[33]

The Church did provide a new holistic framework to replace old ones, by emphasizing that the community of Christians forms the “body of Christ.” But when this organic body started to disintegrate, all that was left was individualism and egalitarianism. That is when strange political theories arose, holding that man is not a social animal by nature but a selfish individual who engages in social contracts only by self-interest.[34] Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the first “social contract” theorist, taught that, in the state of nature, “man is a wolf for man” and only agrees to give up part of his individual freedom for fear of violent death. After Hobbes came Adam Smith (1723-1790), who likewise postulated that each human being is motivated exclusively by his own profit, yet wagered that in a society of free competition, the sum of individual selfishnesses will create a just society. We know the result: the rule of money has thoroughly desocialized Western man, with the smallest organic unit, the nuclear family, barely surviving.


There is certainly some truth the cause-effect relationship between Christianity and modern individualism. But the evidence has to be carefully weighed. We must take into account the fact that Western medieval society, though Christian, was strongly organic and holistic. Individualism is a modern phenomenon. The question can be put this way: was European civilization holistic thanks to Christianity, or despite Christianity? The second seems the case: feudalism, with its complex social fabric, was based on an ancient Indo-European ethos that was strongly disapproved by the Church. It emphasized ethnic solidarity, acknowledged that spirit is not independent from blood, and held vengeance of kinsmen as a sacred duty. Its core values were heroic, representing a delicate balance of holism and individualism. From ancient times, a hero is an exceptional individual who, having embodied the highest ideal of his community and/or sacrificed his life for it, continues to empower his community after death.[35] Although Christianity has partly incorporated heroic cults with the saints and their relics, it has considerably narrowed the concept: martyrdom is the only heroic path within Christianity.

Still, it may be an exaggeration to blame Western individualism entirely on Christianity, as does Dumont. It is even doubtful if “social contract” theories are of Christian inspiration. They emerged in the deeply Judaized England of Oliver Cromwell, and can be seen as Jewish attacks on the organic substance of Christian nations. Hobbes was a Puritan, but his religious ideas are so typically Jewish (“the Kingdom of God was first instituted by the ministry of Moses over the Jews,” he claims) that some have speculated about his possible Marrano origin.[36]

It is impossible, I think, to come to any simple conclusion about the merits and failures of Christianity, because we cannot objectively distinguish what belongs to Christianity and what doesn’t in any of Christendom’s achievements. No civilization can prosper without a public religion. Whether another religion could have done better for Christendom than Christianity is a futile question. What part Christianity played in the decline and fall of Christendom is equally meaningless. Yet the challenges faced by our civilization today require serious anthropological inquiries into Christianity’s legacy and deficiencies, and a quest for remedies.

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German holistic reaction
We should at least learn from recent history. A case in point is the way German culture has tried to resist the dissolving power of English mercantilism and the French Enlightenment. The German reaction is attached to the name of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), a disciple of Kant and a mentor to Hegel, Nietzsche, Goethe, and many others. In his essay, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91), Herder criticizes contractualist political theories, and replaces the individualistic anthropology of the Enlightenment, which postulates an invariable human nature, by a typology of nations. Nations are seen as collective beings having each a particular “genius” forged by race, geography and history. Against the French school, which held that a person’s nationality is accidental, Herder insisted that the essential qualities of an individual are determined by his nationality. He is the initiator of what is called the ethnic theory of nationalities. His notion of Volk is at the origin of a major current of Romanticism, and also influenced Shelling’s Idealism. Herder also influenced profoundly Hegel (1770-1831), whose philosophy of history represents the culmination of German nationalism, with his concept of the State as “the march of God on earth”, and his concept of the “world-historical man” unfolding history.

German nationalism bloomed without needing to reject Christianity. Perhaps that is because German Lutheranism had a strong national flavor, like Russian Orthodox Christianity today, but unlike French Catholicism, which has always required loyalty to a foreign, transnational power headquartered in Vatican. On the other hand, it would be hard to claim that Christianity played any significant role in 18th century Germanism.

Hitler was a product of this movement. “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer” is an expression of a thoroughgoing organic doctrine, and so is the Nazi catchword Volksgemeinschaft (“community of the people”). In Mein Kampf, Hitler praises the Aryan’s willingness to “put all his abilities at the service of the community.”[38] Interestingly, in 1939, Rabbi Harry Waton wrote the following about Hitler and Nazism:

“Nazism is an imitation of Judaism; Nazism adopted the principles and ideas of Judaism with which to destroy Judaism and the Jews.”

“The Nazi philosophy starts out with the postulate: The blood of a race determines the nature, course of evolution and the destiny of that race. […] whether consciously or not, the Nazis took this theory from the Bible itself.”

Waton further adds:

“Hitler’s declaration that the Jewish consciousness is poison to the Aryan races is the deepest insight that the Western world has yet achieved in its own nature; and his capacity to realize this is the proof of his genius as well as the secret of his power and of the curious fascination which his personality exerts. […] it is not the practical power or wealth of the Jews that he fears, but the character of the Jewish mind. […] It is the hidden penetration of the Jewish spirit into the Gentile mind that is the danger; and it is a danger because the ‘Aryan’ mind cannot resist it, but must succumb.”[39]

Waton was wrong about the source of Hitler’s views: they didn’t originate from the Hebrew Bible. Neither did they owe anything to the Gospel. They drew from the same cultural current as Herder, which had its main source in a pre-Christian heroic mentality. Beyond that, Hitler’s anthropological notions were based on universal principles that most Jewish intellectuals of the same period knew very well but preferred Gentiles not to know.

Interestingly, two of the most important founders of modern sociology and anthropology—the scientific study of societies as holistic systems that determine the behaviors and thought patterns of individuals—happen to be German Jews (though neither of them expressed sympathies for the Jews): Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838-1909). Here is a representative quote by Gumplowicz:

“The great error of individualistic psychology is the supposition that man thinks. […]. for it is not man himself who thinks but his social community. The source of his thoughts is in the social medium in which he lives, the social atmosphere which he breathes, and he cannot think anything else other than what the influences of his social environment concentrating upon his brain necessitate. […]. The individual simply plays the part of the prism which receives the rays, dissolves them according to fixed laws, and lets them pass out again in a predetermined direction and with a predetermined color.”[41]


Gumplowicz, professor of political science in Graz, has now fallen in disrepute because his theories show too much proximity with Hitler’s. In his major book, The Struggle of Races (1883), Gumplowicz formulates the natural law of “syngenism” (from the Greek syngenea, meaning kinship). Syngenism refers to a set of factors uniting members of the same race (“race” having then a rather lose meaning, not much different from “people” or “nation”). At the origin of the formation of the syngenic feeling, there is above all consanguinity, but also education, language, religion, custom, law, and way of life (down to cooking habits). In other words, syngenic feelings are based on both physical resemblance and intellectual resemblance.

Western nations are currently suffering from a pathological weakening of syngenic cohesion, resulting mainly—but not exclusively—from mass immigration. Kevin MacDonald refers to several independent studies showing that racial heterogeneity weakens the social fabric and reinforces individualism. Sociologist Robert Putnam, for example, shows that:

“immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”[42]

The Europeans’ willingness to welcome Third World migrants by the millions, in the name of universalistic moral principles inherited from Christianity, together with the criminalization of any expression of white pride, is therefore a form of “pathological altruism”.[43]

Christianity is not solely responsible for this state of affair. It did erode traditional ethnic syngenism, and in the long run, it has weakened our collective immune system by its cocktail of individualism and universalism. But the pathological agent itself is not endogenous to Christianity: as MacDonald has also documented,[44] Jewish elites have been the foremost promoters of mass immigration, and the manufacturers of public consent to these policies (watch “The Tactics of Immigration”). By doing so, they have debilitated the national organisms they seek to vampirize, while reinforcing the syngenic vitality of their own national parasitic organism.

Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D., is the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018, and JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014.

Notes

[1] Henry Ford, The International Jew (on archive.org), vol. 2, chap. 23, November 13, 1920, quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilizations, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, The Occidental Press, 2007, p. 240.

[2] Harry Waton, A Program for the Jews and Humanity. An Answer to All Anti-Semites, 1939 (archive.org), pp. 52, 125, 132.

[3] Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Hogarth Press, 1939 (archive.org), pp. 33-34.

[4] As usual, I quote the Bible from the Catholic New Jerusalem Bible edition , which has not altered the divine name YHWH into “the Lord,” as other English translations do for unscholarly reasons.

[5] Genesis 37:35; 42:38; 44:29; 44:31.

[6] Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, 1918 (archive.org), pp. 48, 64-65, 71, 98.

[7] Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism (1938), Balfour Books, 2012 , kindle ed., 157-66 and 2203–7.

[8] Lucien Wolf, “What Is Judaism? A Question of Today,” The Fortnightly Review XXXVI, (1884), pp. 237-256, on http://www.manchesterjewishstudies.org/wolf/

[9] Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, Praeger, 1994.

[10] Isaac Kadmi-Cohen, Nomades: Essai sur l’âme juive, Felix Alcan, 1929 (archive.org), pp. 98, 143.

[11] Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (archive.org), pp. 74–75.

[12] Alfred Nossig, Integrales Judentum, 1922, pp. 1-5 (on www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/ite ... QOFR3XSW22)

[13] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), University of Washington Press, 2011.

[14] Raphael Patai, The Jewish Mind, Wayne State University Press , 1977 (on books.google.fr).

[15] Henry Ford, The International Jew, vol. 2, chap. 23, op. cit.

[16] Lawrence Wills, Jew in the Court of the Foreign King: Ancient Jewish Court Legends, Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 189.

[17] Greg Felton, The Host and the Parasite: How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America, Bad Bear Press, 2012.

[18] Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, Zero Books, 2011, p. 21.

[19] Andrew Joyce, “Pariah to Messiah: The Engineered Apotheosis of Baruch Spinoza,” parts 1 to 3, The Occidental Observer, May 5, 2019.

[20] Brendon Sanderson, “Why Mahler? Norman Lebrecht and the Construction of Jewish Genius,” The Occidental Oberver, April 13, 2011.

[21] Sarah Schmidt, “The ‘Parushim’: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65, no. 2, December 1975, pp. 121–139, on ifamericansknew.org/history/parushim.html.

[22] Bruce Allen Murphy, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 10.

[23] Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 42.

[24] Michael Ledeen, “What Machiavelli (A Secret Jew?) Learned from Moses,” Jewish World Review, June 7, 1999, on www.jewishworldreview.com/0699/machiavelli1.asp.

[25] Daniel Elazar, Community and Polity: Organizational Dynamics of American Jewry, 1976, quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, k. 6668–91.

[26] Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections, op. cit., pp. 90-91.

[27] Karl Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile, Putnam’s Sons, 1899 (archive.org), pp. 206-207.

[28] Detail in my book, From Yahweh to Zion, 2018, pp. 260-261.

[29] Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, op. cit., k. 5044–53. Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013 , k. 3975–4004.

[30] Matthew 19:10-12, Matthew 19:29, Matthew 22:30, Matthew 24:19, Mark 13:17, Luke 14:26, Luke 21:23, Luke 23:29, 1Corinthians 7:1-8.

[31] Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, Invisible Loyalties: Reciprocity in Intergenerational Family Therapy, Harper & Row, 1973, p. 56.

[32] Philippe Ariès, L’Homme devant la mort, tome 1: Le Temps des gisants, Seuil, 1977.

[33] Louis Dumont, “The Christian Beginnings: From the Outworldly Individual to the Individual-in-the-world,” in Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 23-59.

[34] T. D. Weldon has usefully conceptualized the opposition between “organic” and “mechanical” political theories, in States and Morals: A Study in Political Conflicts, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1947 (on archive.org).

[35] Lewis Richard Farnell, Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality (1921) Adamant Media Co., 2005.

[36] Robert Kraynak, “The Idea of the Messiah in the Theology of Thomas Hobbes,” Jewish Political Studies Review, Fall 1992, on jcpa.org.

[37] Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 1843, on www.marxists.org/archive.

[38] Hitler, Mein Kampf, Complete and Unabridged, Raynal & Hitchcock, 1941 (archive.org), pp. 408-409.

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[39] Harry Waton, A Program for the Jews and an Answer to All Anti-Semites, 1939 (archive.org), pp. 54, 64–67, 200.

[40] Letter to Martin Bormann dated February 3, 1945, quoted in Gunnar Heinsohn, “What makes the Holocaust a uniquely unique genocide?,” Journal of Genocide Research, November 2000, pp. 411–413, on migs.concordia.ca.

[41] Ludwig Gumplowicz, Outlines of Sociology (1899), Transaction Books, 1980 (on books.google.com), pp. 240, 760.

[42] Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty‐first Century,” June 15, 2007, on https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs ... 07.00176.x

[43] The standard work on pathological altruism is: Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan and David Sloan Wilson (Eds.), Pathological Altruism, Oxford University Press, 2012.

[44] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, chapter 7, “Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy.”