Why 'Jewish Achievement' Lists are Meaningless

[R. Bryant]

Karl Radl


I have written several articles now on the subject of different academic and intellectual awards and prizes. So before continuing to analyse them it is important to stop and consider something more fundamental about these lists than just the fact that jews and their supporters tend to massage and misrepresent the figures outrageously. That something is very simply the applicability or perhaps pointedly the fundamental utility of such lists as something more than a rhetorical device.

Said claim is commonly repeated by historians and popular writers on the subject of the jews and jewish history to the point where we are confronted by a narrative of jewish history dominated by three poles: the persecution of the jews, the innocence of the jews and the genius of the jews. These combine to form a modern belief system that has been of significant and lasting assistance to both the Zionist cause and jewish influence more broadly. The lay Catholic historian Paul Johnson summed up this view; which he himself professed, rather simply when he referred to jewish history as being written 'from the viewpoint of a learned and intelligent victim.' (1)

This view; as Johnson himself typifies, leads the current jews; in a parody of the biblical narrative about the sufferings of the Israelites, to the creation of Israel as a result of their alleged (Johnson uncritically assumes them to simply be 'real') sufferings, which he even goes so far as to suggest are part of a divine plan. (2) One of the basic problems in this narrative however is that it is almost totally a-historical and the only way it actually works is if you assume the jews are universally (or almost universally) innocent of anything negative with which they are charged. (3)

This assumption of (near) universal innocence of course is hardly intellectually tenable, (4) but this argument was never really intellectually convincing but rather is very emotionally convincing if one accepts the supposed universal persecution of the jews as necessarily unjust and if this be the case then the jews should accordingly have a 'home of their own'. Indeed if you combine this sense of (near) universal persecution with the accepted and ancestral belief among jews that they; as jews, have been chosen by Hashem (whether or not they actually believe in YHWH or not) then it is not difficult to see where this notion of all-consuming jewish achievement comes from.

To explain briefly: if you as a group believe that you have been subject to (near) universal persecution for the last two millennia by other groups for no good reason and further that you have been chosen by the omnipotent and omnipresent creator of the universe to be a special people then you will always view yourselves (consciously or unconsciously) as a cut above everyone else.

This will cause even the most desultory minds to pause and think as the odd intellectual inconsistency here. In that if the jews are (near) universally unjustly persecuted but yet are the specially favoured people of the omnipotent and omnipresent creator of the universe: then why is it that they are unjustly persecuted given that said all-powerful creator has chosen them?

The historical jewish answer to this question is very simply to assume that; as with the biblical Israelites, the jews are being punished for their sins and lack of correct Torah observance. The vehicle of this persecution are the peoples not chosen by this all-powerful creator god who are being guided in their hatred of the jews by his vengeful whim.

Now what happens when you take away this belief in the centrality of the cyclic nature of divine favour and punishment on; yet keeping the belief in the 'special nature' of, the jews?

What then occurs is the need to find some non-metaphysical reason for the (near) universal persecution of the jews by non-jews and what is simpler and more pleasing to such a view than to argue the centrality of your own people to the advancement of the world. (5) Thus suggesting that the reason that the jews were persecuted was not because they had done wrong or because YHWH was in a bad mood, but rather it being attributable to the fact that the jews were a people of genius who had out-competed, out-performed and out-stripped their non-jewish neighbours across a broad spectrum of activities leading to jealously. Thus leading to the intellectual rationalization of said jealously by use of theology, nationalism, economics and so on to create jew hatred and anti-Semitism. (6)

This belief; which predates the rise of modern anti-Semitism by-the-way, (7) is easily found expressed in the contradictory claims of the jewish academic historian Cecil Roth (whose arguments have actually been recently pointed out to be completely biased and hardly academic) (8) who claimed that he 'only sought to provide a representative selection of jews who had significantly contributed to the advancement of civilization'. (9) However the 'representative selection' was actually designed to claim that jews had a major hand in any development that Roth considered positive and suppressed any mention of a jewish hand in the things that would be perceived as negative that they had been involved with. (9)

Let us pause to consider just one example of Roth's dishonesty and deliberate distortion of the evidence to fit his thesis. In his work (still often read and cited to this day by jewish nationalists) 'The Jewish Contribution to Civilisation' Roth claims that the Radhanites (a jewish tribe) (11) were responsible for the introduction of everything from oranges and pears to slippers and mattresses to the non-jewish barbarians of the West. (12)

Whether these claims are true is irrelevant to us as Roth has knowingly left one particular commodity that the Radhanite merchants were especially involved in trading; according to the Arab writer Ibn-Kordadhbeh, in white slaves from Spain, Italy and France which were being trafficked to the lands of Islam. (13)

Roth's suppression of the negative parts of jewish history and his corresponding over-emphasis on the alleged jewish involvement in subjective historical positives obviously renders a lot of what he has to say suspect given his ironic habit (given his charges against critics of the jews) (14) of ripping sources from their context to make a claim he must have known was dubious at best.

This habit; as I have explored elsewhere in relation to the 'jewish achievement' lists, (15) has become commonplace among the jews and it is important for critics of the jews to realise that the power of these lists is only found in their rhetorical value for jews and their apologists and that they are not serious intellectual challenges to deconstruct or neutralize.

Now once we understand that the basis for compiling these 'jewish achievement' lists is as a kind of ersatz (i.e. substitute) rationalization for the historical persecution of the jews then we can begin to understand why these lists have been developed on an unstated maximalist methodology. In other words in order to prove jewish superiority; as I have remarked elsewhere, (16) the compilers of these 'jewish achievement' lists will invariably throw every man and his dog into a list as a jew in order to strength their case.

Now Roth in his 'The Jewish Contribution to Civilisation' claimed that he rejected biological definitions of jewishness as invalid and instead endorsed an explicitly religious one. (17) Indeed he goes as far as to assert that his 'use of the term “Jew”' denoted 'a person whose immediate ancestors [i.e. mother and father] professed the Jewish religion.' (18)

The problem here is very simply that Roth is using a religious definition of jewishness based on confession, but without telling his readership that this fundamentally contradicts how Judaism understands jewishness which is transmitted through (primarily maternal) ancestry down the generations and that a convert to Judaism (outside of the letter of the law of Reform Judaism) is not the equal of a born jew (i.e. an Israelite) but rather is counted as a pure (i.e. jewish) soul born into an impure (i.e. non-jewish) body.

This means that Roth is trying to use religious confession for a religion whose own definition of its followers is based on biological heritage as opposed to confession of faith all the while telling us that jews are not defined by biology.

The further absurdity of this is found in Roth's remark that a number; presuming it to be a large one as he does is unnecessary and somewhat unrealistic, of jews have converted to Christianity or Islam over the years due to the persecution of the jews (note the implicit assumption that jews would never turn away from Judaism if they had not been forced to) and many non-jews have converted to Judaism (note the implicit assumption of the superiority of Judaism to all other forms of religion) thus rending the jews a non-biological group. Thus the jews have; in Roth's view, mingled themselves with their host peoples making them a largely ethnically indistinct group. (19)

Now what Roth is doing here is to make the common jewish claim; when dealing with the criticisms of anti-Semites and writing primarily for a non-jewish audience, that Judaism bases itself on religious confession and has nothing to do with biology what-so-ever. (20) The reason for this is fairly simple in that jews are reacting to the claim that they are a subversive group by seeking to align themselves with the idea of freedom of religious confession (i.e. a historic and to a lesser extent current liberal hobby-horse) and thus invoke the idea; which anti-Semitism rose explicitly to counter, (21) that criticism of the jews was and is superstitious and based purely on fundamentally medieval attitudes towards the world. (22)

That this is incorrect is unquestionable given that the Torah, Mishnah and Gemara are all very clear on this point of biological lineage being key while still keeping conversion possible but only in the rare instances of jewish souls being born in gentile bodies. (23) Indeed we should note that Roth's idea that only those jews of religious ancestry be considered jews is fundamentally contradicted once again when we look at his claims in practice.

For example Roth cites Albert Abraham Michelson as being jewish (24) even though Roth could have easily found out that Michelson's father and mother had early in their lives rejected their religious traditions, that Michelson's mother's jewishness was and is contested (25) as well as further noting that Michelson himself was a professed agnostic. This should be enough; on Roth's definition of jewishness by religious confession, for him to reject Michelson as; at best, a borderline candidate.

This begs the question as to why Roth left Michelson in and further explicitly mentioned a borderline case when talking about jews and physics (as well as more or less innovating the modern jewish argument about their 'over-representation' among winners of the Nobel Prizes). (26)

The answer to this is not difficult to find as Roth; in spite of his explicit rejection of biological jewishness and criteria based on that, (27) is easily seen to be using just that when he talks about 'half-jews', 'part-jews' and so on when dealing with the Nobel Prizes. (28)

Further having done my own manual re-count on maximalist criteria relating to 'who is a jew': it is evident that Roth's numbers include such figures as Otto Wallach (whose father was a family of jewish converts to Christianity a generation removed from Wallach's father himself) and Adolf von Baeyer (whose mother was also from a family of jewish converts to Christianity a generation removed from herself). Both of whom should not be considered jewish even in Roth's claim that 'immediate ancestors' who professed Judaism should be considered jewish.

This means that as with the Jewish Virtual Library; who define jewishness similarly (29) but then do the same with their 'jewish achievement' claims, (30) Roth is engaging in conscious intellectual deception in relation to his claims in so far as he cannot assert that jewishness is defined purely by religious confession and then use jewishness defined by lineage as the basis for his claims.

J-Info; another major source of these lists, is at least honest when it defines jewishness by lineage and it even sometimes [although still in the minority of cases from what I have read] tells us when a jew is only a part-jew. (31)

Having once again pointed out the pointed intellectual dishonesty on the part of the 'jewish achievement' lists; and their compilers as well as those who use them as rhetorical tools in debates, we should proceed to think about the underlying rationale behind these lists.

The first point to consider is the issue of the part-jews. Now I am going to be rather heterodox here and ask you; my reader, to perform a little thought experiment: if; as the jews claim, a jew is defined as jewish by his or her maternal heritage then what about their other heritage?

What I am getting it is very simple in so far as we have to ask ourselves why; in the sense of achievement, an individual who has a jewish grandparent or a jewish mother should accordingly be listed as a jew as opposed to what the rest of his or her ancestry is in relation to that achievement.

Or put another way if the Nobel Prize winning physicist Otto Wallach had a biologically jewish father then why is his contribution to physics defined by that jewish father and not by his German mother? I am as a strict as they come on who is to be considered a jew (given that I work on purely biological definition of any known jewish heritage meaning a person is jewish), but what I am questioning is why we should automatically assume that in the case of part-jew: what they have contributed is as the result of their jewish heritage and not; in Wallach's case, their German heritage.

If we define a part-jew as being purely jewish then we necessarily inflate the jewish numbers unnecessarily by assigning the achievements of part-jews to the jews when they have to actually prove that a said individual's talent comes from their jewish heritage and not from their non-jewish heritage. By not questioning this point and by a blanket rejection of any positive contribution from part-jews we can see that we have only made the jewish argument stronger and the anti-jewish argument weaker.

That is not to say that part-jews are in any way better than full jews in any sense of the term, but rather that because they are mixed breed: they have at least two different biological backgrounds not one and it is self-defeating; not to mention unjust to our own intellectual position, to automatically assign their achievements to only one side of their background as the jews would like us to do because of our political and ideological rejection of that side of their jewish heritage.

It doesn't make the part-jew concerned politically or ideologically acceptable if they have contributed positively in some way (rather like how one wouldn't stop using antibiotics to fight bacterial infections just because humans have lots of bacteria in their gut), but rather it simply makes them a part-jew who contributed to civilization because he was only partly jewish as opposed to wholly jewish.

If we understand this then we can reasonably speculate that if we were to take out the part-jews from the 'jewish achievement' lists then that would leave those lists a good deal smaller than if we left them as if they were of purely jewish orign.

The second point to consider is the whole idea that jewish (or indeed any) contributions can be measured or proven to be disproportionate by listing inventors or inventions that were made by jews. The point I am making might not be readily apparent to some readers, but it can be easily explained by pointing out that an invention or innovation will always require a varying amount of prerequisites to be met before that invention or innovation becomes possible.

To explain lets take a simple every day innovation: the modern car. Now the modern car was innovated by Karl Benz, but yet in order to make that innovation possible then all the metallurgy had to be innovated, the individual engineering patents (gears, levers, fly-wheels and the like) had to be innovated, the mathematics and science behind those material innovations had to be developed and so on. In a modern vehicle we could expand this to all the electronics, tyres, interior trim, safety mechanisms ad infinitum.

So then how can we say that Karl Benz created the modern car?

Well he synthesized many different smaller innovations in order to create a big innovation and in that sense he is the innovator of the modern car. However we should not forget that the smaller innovations were necessary and played a key role in allowing Benz to make that bigger innovation. So if we; for example, credit Einstein with relativity then we should also bear in mind that his 'big innovation' was not made in isolation; as those who use Einstein as the be all and end all of jewish contribution to science necessarily claim, but rather was a novel synthesis of a lot of different innovative prerequisites made by other scientists.

That is the fundamental idea behind what is called priority in both academia and science. In so far as we need to recognise that a discovery is very rarely; if ever, made in isolation and as such there are other innovations which have; in a chain reaction if you like, created the possibility for that discovery to occur. We assign priority to the innovator, but the priority assigned to the innovator implicitly acknowledges that the innovator hasn't made that innovation entirely on their own and there are others deserving to be credited..

After all you wouldn't expect medieval doctors to discover viruses or bacteria, because the intellectual and physical tools for them to use to medically innovate based on those assumptions were not available. However had not medieval doctors been constantly seeking to improve upon their knowledge and build upon their successes; as well as their failures, then we would have not eventually discovered viruses or bacteria, because we would be missing a substantial part of the prerequisites necessary for that innovation to occur.

Once we understand this then we can see that citing big jewish innovators as an argument for the 'jewish contribution' to civilization is meaningless, because those jewish innovators did not innovate in a vacuum, but rather were able to innovate because prerequisites; both jewish and non-jewish in origin, had been met leading per se to the innovation itself. Thus the 'jewish achievement' lists are not following the concept of priority, because they are seeking to place the specific jewish innovators on a pedestal as if they came up with their ideas in an intellectual vacuum and that there were no non-jewish innovators who met the prerequisites that allowed them to do what they did.

The point here is very simple: for every Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr there has ever been. There are literally dozens of other innovators who created intellectual tools, investigated alternatives, fabricated material tools and performed experiments which allowed the specific empirical discovery to be made. If we; as the 'jewish achievement' lists do, just cite those who are best known as opposed to those who innovated all the things that a big innovation needed in order to occur then we are guilty of lacking intellectual rigour as we are not recognising the nature of science as a process of empirical discovery but rather suggesting that science is a static statement of fact.

Rather the jews; and their supporters, are using a tautological argument that claims that jews are wonderful because a couple of famous scientists were jewish, which is absurd because neither do those few scientists ever represent the sum contribution of the jews and nor will they ever represent the sum total of the innovations in their specific discipline.

Thus 'jewish achievement' lists can hardly be held to be valid given that they doesn't represent anything other than a rhetorical ploy on the part of the jews to; as before stated, prove the contention that jewish persecution has been brought about by so self-congratulatory a reason as simple jealousy about the supposed 'superiority of the jews' when compared to the gentiles.

Thus we can see that the 'jewish achievement' lists are simply meaningless.



References

(1) Paul Johnson, 1987, 'A History of the Jews', 1st Edition, Weidenfeld and Nicholson: London, p. 2
(2) Ibid, pp. 519-520
(3) An apt example is Wistrich's absurd claim that anti-jewish sentiment; by the early medieval era and even before, had nothing to do with the jews and was accordingly not a reaction to real jewish activities. Robert Wistrich, 1991, 'Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred', 1st Edition, Methuen: London, pp. xix-xxi; re-stated more recently by Walter Laqueur, 2006, 'The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, pp. 1-6
(4) Jews themselves have historically noticed this, but these more sensible voices have been drowned out by the less rational majority of their kin. A good example can be found be in Daniel de Leon, 1921, 'Anti-Semitism: Its Cause and Cure', 1st Edition, Socialist Labor Party: New York, pp. 14-16; also see Albert Lindemann, 1997, 'Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, p. 136
(5) Ibid, pp. xii-xviii
(6) For example Lacqueur, Op. Cit., pp. 79-82
(7) Lindemann, Op. Cit., pp. 140-141
(8) Elliot Horowitz, 2007, 'Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence', 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, p. 150
(9) Cecil Roth, 1956, 'The Jewish Contribution to Civilisation', 4th Edition, East and West Library: London, p. ix
(10) See Cecil Roth, 1943, 'A Short History of the Jewish People', 2nd Edition, East and West Library: Oxford, pp. 358-373 where he all but explicitly admits that this is what he is doing.
(11) Modern confirmation of this can be found in Moshe Gil, 1974, 'The Radhanite Merchants and the Land of Radhan', Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 17, pp. 299-328
(12) Roth, 'Contribution', Op. Cit., pp. 191-192
(13) David Ayalon, 1979, 'On the Eunuchs in Islam', Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. I, pp. 104-105
(14) Cecil Roth, 1935, 'The Ritual Murder Libel and the Jew', 1st Edition, The Woburn Press: London, pp. 16-17
(15) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.co ... ersus.html
(16) Ibid.
(17) Roth, 'Contribution', Op. Cit., pp. ix-xi
(18) Ibid, p. xi
(19) Ibid, pp. x-xi
(20) For example Morris Kertzer, Lawrence Hoffman, 1996, 'What is a Jew?', 6th Edition, Simon and Schuster: New York, pp. 7-9
(21) Moshe Zimmerman, 1986, 'Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Antisemitism' , 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, pp. 44-45
(22) Peter Pulzer, 1988, 'The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria', 2nd Edition, Peter Halban: London, pp. 48-50
(23) Implicitly stated for example in Maurice Lamm, 1991, 'Becoming a Jew', 1st Edition, Jonathan David: New York, pp. 240-243
(24) Roth, 'Contribution', Op. Cit., p. 151
(25) Dorothy Livingston, 1973, 'The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson', 1st Edition, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, p. 12
(26) Roth, 'Contribution', Op. Cit., p. 150; I have debunked the general numerical argument that Roth (as it is the same one used by jewish proponents to this day) in the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.co ... sus_5.html
(27) Roth, 'Contribution', Op. Cit., pp. ix-xi
(28) Ibid, p. 150
(29) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... ojew1.html
(30) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.co ... ersus.html
(31) http://www.jinfo.org/

Semitic Controversies

[Wade Hampton III]

More Einstein phoniness....

A good video about gravitational waves....EXCEPT...
the Jews have turned it into a propaganda piece
for their poster-boy Jewboy Einstein...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gravitationa ... 57181.html

...and just LOOK at this...At 1:13 the video purports the
black hole merger at 1.3 billion years ago. The joke is
on the Jews. There were NO dinos on this Earth at that time!
Better luck next time, Jews!
66332

Earth 1.3 Billion Years Ago

66332.jpg (67.48 KiB) Viewed 4198 times

Dinosaurs were on Earth for between 165 and 177 million years.
They first appeared between 243 and 231 million years ago,
during the Triassic period.

[Jim Mathias]

Jewish "achievement lists" aren't quite as meaningless as the author states, they serve the purpose of self-promotion akin to what snake-oil salesmen and other con artists seek to achieve: to bamboozle the slow, the unwary, and the gullible on as wide a scale as can be achieved. Conflating the meager (or invented as the case may be) achievements with Jewish "greatness" serves to acquire an image of authority so that people will buy into other frauds and nation-wrecking ideas they're also pushing. By linking to other Jewish "authorities" on other related scams, they build quite a bubble of confusion, destructive ideas, degeneracy, and other similarly notable spins that all add up to problem creation on a huge scale---when we permit them to do so!

And permit we have. But this need not go on forever.