The Israel Lobby and
American Society
What
the Israel Lobby Really Is
How
It Hurts the USA
What to Do
About It
A Working Paper
Part II: The Genesis, Development and
Future of the Lobby
or
Accidental Empire
“The history of Israel without the
distraction of Israeli history”
Introduction: The Virtual Colonial
Motherland as Political Innovation
Jewish Capabilities and Resources
Ernest Renan: A Nation …
Presupposes a Past
Ashkenazim, Pogroms, and Persecution
Creating the Ethnicity and National
Consciousness of Judonia
Concretization of the Spiritual
Spiritual Exile Into Physical Exile
German Reform and Prussian Israel
Haskalah, the Russian
Draft and Odessa
Emancipation of Jews and Women
German Nazism, Zionism, and Ethnic Fundamentalism
Great Crash and Great Depression
High and Low Politics of Nascent
Judonia
Non-Crisis
Jewish Philanthropy
Political Meaning of
International Jewish Philanthropy
International
Jewish Philanthropy and the Media
Jewish
Philanthropic Politics in the USA
Zionist
Use of International Jewish Philanthropy
Defending
Judonia Inside Legal System
Judonia as Plaintiff and Defendant within the
American Legal System
Judonia in the US Federal and State Judiciary
Defending
Judonia Outside the Legal System
Pre-Zionist Gate Keeping and Facilitation
Publishing, Newspapers, and Entertainment
Jewish Political Diversity at the Fin de Siècle
(Nineteenth Century)
Implications
for the Jewish Financial Elite.
Aspects of US Jewish Communal
Organization
The
Strata of American Judaism
Eastern
European Ethnic Ashkenazim
Judonia, Balfour Declaration and Afterward
Expanding
Judonia to Include Non-Zionists.
Jabotinskians and the Partition Proposal
Shock and
Aftermath: Consolidating the Great Erasure (or Holoexaleipsis)
The Yids
Take Over: Nixon, Southern Strategy, Neoconservatives, and Neoliberals
Iran
Contra: The Marriage of Friedmanism and Neoconservatism
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
American
Gleichschaltung, Burning Arab Countries, Crashing the US Economy
Judonian
Law versus International Law
American
Gurkhas, Native Collaborators and American Kafiris
Creating
a New Permanent Islamophobic Consensus
The
Failure of Friedmanism and Bernanke’s Panic
The Context of Jewish Violence and Subversion
Preface
I have met John Brady Kiesling twice, once at Princeton and
once at Harvard. The USA lost an able diplomat when he resigned from the
Foreign Service[1], [i]
on February 24, 2003 in order to express his opposition to the impending attack
on Iraq. Despite his apparently increasing frustration, which in not a few
cases seems to related to the special relationship between the USA and the
State of Israel, [ii]
his book, entitled Diplomacy Lessons: Realism
for an Unloved Superpower[2] is
nothing if not diplomatic[iii]
in its attempt to analyze the American practice of diplomacy objectively and to
explain the logic of diplomacy for the world’s only superpower.
Some of his assessments require more justification than he provides. On p. 140, Kiesling writes:
One of the worst political deformations of Muslim elites, as of Greek elites until the 1990s, is the belief that unlimited American power absolves everyone else of moral responsibility. Few Muslims accept America’s legitimate argument that peace and justice in the Middle East depend first and foremost on the people who live there. America could have prevented Israel from colonizing the West Bank, but it did not. The CIA is an allegedly all-knowing intelligence service, so ignorance is no excuse. Therefore, America is an evil superpower, and evil must be resisted.
While the State of Israel and Zionism have caused some major
political deformations of Muslim and Western elites, confused ideas about blame
and responsibility hardly make the top ten among intellectual contortions.
Kiesling’s position is forgivable but harder to defend after the destruction of
Iraq because correct analysis of the real Middle East problem in the proper
context of US politics requires knowledge of Jewish and Zionist politics beyond
anything normally obtainable from academic studies in N. American, in European,
or in any university system in the world today.
Kiesling’s inaccurate description of Israel as “a vibrant
democracy” (p. 177) is excusable in a former student of the Classics and
archeology because resisting the effects of the Zionist effort to obscure the
true nature of the Israeli political system requires thorough familiarity with inter
bellum Eastern European formal democracies of the class to which the State
of Israel belongs.
Kiesling more than compensates for occasional questionable
assertions with his willingness to reevaluate long held opinions belied by
events. He confesses on pp. 107-108:
Most Greek bookstores carry Greek
translations of all the latest books by Noam Chomsky, an American intellectual
gifted at connecting all the dots of U.S. behavior into a tidy picture. In 2001
I assured Mr. Tegopoulos, the publisher of Athens’ most popular leftist
newspaper, that his favorite American philosopher was clinically insane.”
Chomsky, I said, had deduced a vast, invisible mechanism of systematic U.S.
oppression and exploitation, one that was not true to human nature and could
not have operated over decades without becoming visible to its employees. I
reassured Tegopoulos that the U.S. foreign policy apparatus could not conspire
its way effectively out of a paper bag.
I feel more charitably disposed
toward Chomsky now. The Iraq War proved that the United States does have a
small group of extremely intelligent, disciplined, highly competitive
individuals competent enough to mobilize the U.S. bureaucracy around a single
mission such as regime change in Iraq. Chomsky’s favorite conspirators, the
former Troskyites turned neoconservatives, might even have read Chomsky in their
youth. Certainly they made the same mistake he did. They confused mastery over
the U.S. bureaucratic system with U.S. power to triumph over the real world.
I can empathize. I used to be highly sympathetic both to the
American Jewish community and also to the State of Israel until Israeli
behavior in the Occupied Territories as well as the policies of the second Bush
administration forced me to reevaluate my original assumptions and to study
issues relating to the Middle East in more detail.
Despite Kiesling’s statement above, describing
Neoconservatives as Chomsky’s favorite conspirators is questionable. They do
not even figure Chomsky’s Fateful
Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians[3] with
the exception of Richard Perle, who receives brief mention on p. 450 of the
updated edition.
Just as Chomsky would probably criticize Kiesling’s apparent
belief in a well-defined objective US national interest, I have to criticize
Chomsky’s analysis of the relationship between the United States and the State
of Israel as well as common assumptions that Americans make about Jews and Israel.
For the record, I knew a good number of the current
generation of Neocons in their youth at Harvard and elsewhere, and I have to
laugh at the attempt to identify them or the previous generation with
Trotskyitism or Schachtmanism although I will concede that Leon Trotsky and
Vladimir Jabotinsky are rather similar[iv]
and that in general the first generation of Trotskyites and Revisionist
Jabotinskian Zionists tend to come from the same rather narrow range of
backgrounds.
Depiction of Neoconservatives as leftists turned right
represents a way of distracting from the true nature of Neoconservatism as an
ideology of Jewish special interest. (See The Real
Origins of Neocons[4]
and All in the Neocon Family.[5],
[v])
Yet, Kiesling’s resignation letter more than compensates for
some minor foibles in interpretation by posing a question that clarifies the
dilemma in the USA and the world finds itself:
Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our
model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the
name of a doomed status quo?
Zionism reached its final form in the late Czarist state and
imprinted on Russian imperialism as the normal behavior of a Great Power.
Neocons steeped in Zionist ideology and holding some of the most powerful
positions in the US government have almost reflexively proposed policy in
conformance with the belief that the normal behavior of a Superpower like the
USA must follow the example of the imaginary brutality of the Czarist Empire of
Zionist narrative.[vi]
Americans should be feel reassured that there exist US
diplomats with the knowledge base to make the connection between Neocon foreign
policy and the Romanovs. They should be distressed that one such diplomat felt
compelled as a man of integrity[vii]
to resign from the Foreign Service in the lead-up to the Second Iraq War
despite the habits of two decades of loyal service to the USA. Because of such
strength of character, I dedicate The Israel Lobby and American Society
to John Brady Kiesling.
Introduction: The Virtual Colonial Motherland as Political Innovation
When Uri Avnery spoke upon receiving[6] the Lev
Kopelev prize with Sari Nusseibeh in Cologne, Germany on November 22,
2003,[viii] he tried
to whitewash Zionism by joking:
What is a Zionist? A Jew who takes the money of a second Jew in order to send a third Jew to Palestine.
This quip has appeared in discussions of Zionism for about
75 years (including recently in the Mondoweiss blog[7]) and
hides the facts by putting them in plain view with a sarcastic description that
can apply to the colonial office of any imperial state that uses some portion
of tax revenue to send settlers to live in a foreign colony. In other words,
the goal of Zionism was not so much the establishment of a settlement or state
in Palestine as it was of creating an Empire. In the context of the last
decades of the nineteenth century, the idea was hardly unreasonable. The newly
consolidated German and Italian states felt cheated or left out and fairly
quickly sought to enhance their status, wealth and power by acquiring foreign
colonies. In the 1880s Eastern European
Jews outnumbered Danes, who already had their own colonial Empire. While the Dutch built their physical countryside as they
became wealthier and more powerful through enlargement and exploitation of
their imperial possessions, Zionists never bothered with a physical territory
but expanded and elaborated the organizational capabilities of their virtual
colonial motherland as they became richer and more influential in parallel with
the development of the Zionist settlement in Palestine.
Because discussing a colonial motherland in connection with Zionism seems oxymoronic by definition within the framework of Zionist ideology and possibly because mainstream academics simply do not take Jewish history and politics seriously enough, the development of this virtual state structure has escaped the attention of all historians and political scientists that have studied the history of Modern Israel and its relationship with the USA. Professors John Mearsheimer and Walt use the term Israel lobby but explain:
We use “Israel lobby” as a
convenient shorthand term for the loose coalition of individuals and
organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel
direction. (The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by
John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt,[8] p. 112.)
They add:
As with other special interest
groups, the boundaries of the Israel lobby cannot be identified precisely, and
there will always be some borderline individuals or organizations whose
position is hard to classify. (Ibid, p. 113.)
James Petras writes in The Power of Israel in the United States:[9]
C. Wright Mills once wrote that the US “power elite” ruled by denying it held power. The Zionist elite follows this formula, but defends itself by accusing its adversaries of being “anti-Semites” and pursuing retributive measures that would please former Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Zionist power configuration (ZPC) cannot be understood merely as the “Jewish Lobby” or even the AIPAC, as formidable as it is, with 150 full-time functionaries. The ZPC can best be understood as a complex network of interrelated formal and informal groupings, operating at the international, national, regional and local levels, and directly and systematically subordinated to the State of Israel, its power holders and key decision makers.” (p. 46.)
In some regards ZPC is better than Israel lobby, but Petras is incorrect in claiming that the ZPC is “subordinated to the State of Israel, its power holders and key decision makers.”
Neither of the two terms does justice to the history or
political economy of the Zionist virtual colonial motherland, which this
document names by combining combining Iud/aeus (Latin: Jew) with
Pol/onia.to create the term Judonia in order to emphasize the analogy with
the historical concept of Polonia during the time period when the Polish state
had ceased to exist.
Judonia’s leadership is unique among imperial governments, for it has no need to compromise with or compensate for the exigencies of ruling an actual physical nation-state. Because Judonia’s colonialism and imperialism function in particularly pure forms, they would long ago have become the subjects of immense scholarly inquiry if only mainstream historians and political scientists took Jewish history and internal politics seriously.
|
|
1800 |
1840 |
1880 |
1900 |
1914 |
1938 |
1948 |
|
Europe (Incl. Russia) |
1,500 |
3,950 |
6,858 |
8,900 |
9,100 |
9,500 |
3,700 |
|
Asia |
- |
300 |
370 |
510 |
500 |
1,000 |
1,300 |
|
Africa, Middle East |
1,000 |
198 |
250 |
375 |
400 |
600 |
700 |
|
North & South America |
- |
50 |
250 |
1,200 |
3,500 |
5,500 |
5,800 |
|
Australia |
- |
2 |
10 |
15 |
- |
- |
- |
|
TOTAL |
2,500 |
4,500 |
7,738 |
11,000 |
13,500 |
16,600 |
11,500 |
Table 1 A summary of the distribution of Jews throughout the world from 1800 to 1948 (1000s)
A Disenfranchised Elite
The Jews of Commonwealth Poland (Rzeczpospolita Polska, 1505-1795) had lived in the center of a powerful state and constituted an economic elite with easy access to the rulers. In partitioned Poland they were a disenfranchised frustrated transnational elite of a vanished state. Without any relocation whatsoever, the members of this elite now inhabited territories, far less politically and economically significant, at the periphery of the Prussian, Austrian and Russian empires. While on the whole Jewish income was higher than that of their non-Jewish neighbors, it was nowhere near the levels to which many Jews aspired and felt they could achieve if granted access to the central imperial territories. Jews were subjected to various forms of exclusion and discrimination in all three states, and they felt humiliated.
A typical Jewish intellectual harboring such feelings was
Peretz Smolenskin. He was a popular albeit not particularly successful writer.
He was ostensibly responding to the pogroms following the targeted
assassination of Czar Nicholas II by a Jewish-led terror squad (see Followup
(II): Origins of Modern Jewry[11])
with the essay “Let us search our Ways”
(1881):
To our shame and sorrow we must
admit that there is no peace and unity among us. We
were weak within — therefore our strength was little in the day of evil.
Would this have happened had we believed in our hearts that the ten million
Jewish souls belonged to one nation? Every person in his right senses would
reply: No! Why are we treated like this? Because we have sunk so low that our
self-respect has died – because we have come to like charity flung at us in
disgrace and contempt. (See The Zionist Idea, A Historical Analysis and Reader[12] by Arthur
Hertzberg, p. 150.)
Just
as the founders of the Dutch or Honorable (British) East India Companies had no
inkling that they were founding the Dutch and British Empires (as they were
experimenting with the new financial instrument of the joint-stock
corporation), Smolenskin shows no obvious consciousness of proposing an Empire
for Eastern European Jews as he identifies the territory, manpower, and resources
necessary to create a colony:
[English explorers] have
established that the [Land of Israel] is very good and that, if cultivated with
skill and diligence, it could support fourteen million people. Even if we
assume some exaggeration (though in truth there is none) and that there is room
for only half that number, Eretz Israel can nonetheless contain all those who
might wish to take refuge there. Not all Jews will go there — only those who
are destitute or persecuted will look for a place to which to emigrate. It
would be enough if only one million of our brethren would go, for it would be a
relief both to them and to those remaining in the lands of the dispersion. (Ibid,
p. 152.)
Our Jewish philanthropists should therefore not tarry, if they really want to help their less fortunate brethren. They should hasten to buy land and let Jews settle on it to begin a new life. We can be sure that money will not be lacking, if only men of sufficient vision can be found to initiate this project in the right spirit, with a desire to help their people. In all countries there exist such Jews, many more than we know of, who strive to help their people with all their might and main. Only one thing is lacking — a united purpose. As soon as we succeed in achieving unity for this great work, fruition will not be long in coming. (Ibid, p. 153.)
Because of exclusion from governmental or profession
employment by law or prejudice, Smolenskin and similar underemployed Jewish
intellectuals were available as a pool of organizers for all sorts of
political, reformist or radical politics. Members of the then numerically
insignificant[ix] Zionist
intelligentsia[x] developing
in the 1880s would eventually become the original bureaucracy as well as the
foreign and colonial office of Judonia that was coming into being. Like any
other colonial bureaucracy few seem to have ever had any intention of
relocating permanently to the Jewish settlement even if they publicly claimed
otherwise.
If Smolenskin and fellow early Zionists showed any conscious realization that wealthy Western Jews had sufficient wealth in aggregate to found a low-budget colonial empire that did not have to distract itself with the maintenance of a physical colonial motherhood, they would count as some of the most astute practical political thinkers of the nineteenth century, but they like most political actors seem to have been sleepwalking through history and could not come up with the right marketing gimmick to shake money out of the pockets of western Jews.
Jewish Capabilities and Resources
The early colonial effort was only feasible
· because of historical developments that changed how Jews (and also non-Jews) related to their history and to scripture,
· because of the existing or developing non-Zionist communal infrastructure among British, French, German and Eastern European Jews,
· because of the appearance of a reformist non-Zionist intelligentsia that appears in the Russian Empire during the 1850s, and
· because of increasing wealth among Western European and North American Jewish communities.
[See Followup
(II): Origins of Modern Jewry[13]
and Jewish,
Zionist War Against Salvation.[14]]
Ernest Renan: A Nation … Presupposes a Past[15]
Just as modern nations are imagined communities, modern empires are exploitive hierarchies ruled by a modern nation that dominates other national or population groups by means of force, various forms of compulsion, deceit and self-deception. (See Facts versus Delusions in Jewish History.[16])
Imperialism in the context of Zionism is unique and therefore worthy of study because of the exceptional levels of associated deceit and self-deception and because of the success of Zionists in piggybacking on or co-opting the force and power of the UK, the USA and France[xi] to defeat the native Palestinian and neighboring Arab populations.
Israelites and Judahites
The fundamental Zionist deceit and self-deception relates to
the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament.
Despite Zionist propaganda and ethnic Ashkenazi conceit,
modern Jewry has no ancestral connection to ancient Israelite or Judahite
populations. The Pentateuch (Torah, תּוֹרָה) is the
founding story in a surviving remnant theology[xii]
elaborated in literature that eventually became the canonical prophetic and
hagiographic books of the Bible (Neviim, נביאים, and
Ketuvim, כתובים). The
Persian period Jerusalem elite used this material both to justify its rule over
the native population and also to legitimize the status of the province of
Yehud within the Persian Empire. (See Historiography
of Pre-State Zionism.[17])
In The Bible and Colonialism:
A Moral Critique,[18]
Michael Prior describes in detail how modern Christian and Jewish groups have
used material from the Pentateuch in more recent forms of imperialism and
colonialism. The concept of the Covenant of Israel has proven at least as
efficacious as the sense imperial mission (or white man’s burden[xiii])
or the idea of mission civilatrice in creating the mindset of
domination.
Covenantal and dispensationalist ideas are most persuasive
to ignorant Christians and Jews, who have not read past the Pentateuch or who
have not understood the Covenantal logic that continues in operation to this
day.
Because of the spiritual failure of the Israelite,
Ephraimite and Judahite kingdoms, Israelites and their descendants are
forbidden from ever establishing an independent kingdom in the Land of Israel.
The establishment Yehud as a province of the Persian Empire was an expression
of God’s mercy of which the Persian Emperor Cyrus was the agent or anointed
messiah [Second Isaiah 45:1].
In this new religious political framework, the piety of the
host of Israel was no longer contingent on a primitive barter or exchange, and
the later Biblical prophets exhorted the remnants of the House of Israel to
serve God out of love and gratitude.
Zionism represents a fundamental rejection of this Biblical
Theology that is intrinsic to modern Judaism and Christianity.
Greco-Roman Judeans
The most important secondary Zionist deceit and
self-deception relates to the Christian Bible, extra-biblical Jewish scripture
and Greco-Roman literature.
Despite propaganda and ethnic Ashkenazi conceit, modern
Jewry has practically no ancestral connection to Judeans of the Greco-Roman
period.
In reality Zionist propaganda reinterprets and distorts the
religious legacy that resulted from the following modifications or actions that
the Hasmoneans, the Herodians and their successors undertook for their own
political and economic purposes in association with their stewardship over
Second Temple Judaism.
- They
created a concept of formal Judaization or conversion to Judaism. (See Followup
(II): Origins of Modern Jewry.[19])
- They
inspired intellectual and spiritual developments leading to several
proselytizing religious currents that ultimately crystallized into
Christianity, Islam, and Medieval Judaism. (See Connecting
Hanukkah, Christmas and `Idu-l-Adha.[20])
- They
fostered a wide-ranging network of European, North Africa, and Middle
Eastern communities that were Judean in a religious but not in an
ancestral sense. (See Yiddish
Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation[21] by Paul Kriwaczek.)
- They
left a history of noteworthy last stands that were later by used by
Zionists to manufacture a blood-and-soil (la terre et les morts)
consciousness of a non-religious ancestral connection between
European Jews and the territory of Palestine. (See Recovered
Roots, Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition[22] by Yael Zerubavel.[xiv])
Khazars and Medieval Judaism
Despite Zionist and general Jewish denial or ignorance, the Khazar Empire created Medieval and consequently Modern Judaism.
The interaction between post-Bar Kochba Judaism and the pagan
and then the Christian Roman Empire is complex. (See Imperialism
and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E.[23]
by Seth Schwartz.) Eventually the academies of the Geonim[24]
managed to claim a degree of disputed intellectual and religious authority over
Judean communities.
Developments within Judaism over the next three centuries
are obscure, but the rising Khazar Empire needed a religion, a legal system,
and a commercial organization in order to trade Slavic slaves with the
Byzantine, Carolingian and Islamic Empires. There is evidence that Khazar
funding gave the Geonic formulation of Judaism significant advantage over competing
variants. In return the Geonim created a form of Judaism
- that
fostered the development of an international Jewish legal and financial
system optimized for the high margin trade in Slavic slaves as well as
associated luxury commodities and
- that
develops into Medieval Rabbinic Judaism.
Not only do the developments within Judaism in this early
period have analogues with the Western legal and economic evolution described
by Nathan Rosenberg and Luther Earle Birdzell in How
the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World,[25]
but the Jewish trading framework constructed during the early Medieval period
was also an important input into the creation of the modern Western financial
system. (See Les
origines des juifs actuels[26]
and The
Origins of Modern Jewry.[27])
The internal Medieval Jewish legal, political,
economic system imposed a high degree of communal cohesiveness, provided
mechanisms for strong control of social deviance, and was generally harsher and
more coercive in its dealings with powerless non-Jews than with members of the
Jewish community. For example, Sefer haMitzvot of
Maimonides (twelfth century)[28]
identifies positive commands:
- to
lend to poor Jews without interest and
- to
lend to non-Jews with interest[xv]
among the 613 commandments on which Jewish law (Halakhah) is
based. (See Sefer
HaMitzvot leRambam.[29])
Modern Jewry inherited small but long lasting economic,
educational, and social organizational advantages as a legacy from the Khazars
and Medieval Judaism. In addition, Jews developed a tradition of employment in
professions associated with the Medieval Slave trade like medicine, banking,
tax farming and estate management while the mixed Slavo-Turkic, Balkan, and
Southern Russian population ruled by the Khazars survived the Empire’s demise
and eventually developed into the Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group. (See
How
to talk about Zionism, a new improved guide.[30])
Ashkenazim, Pogroms, and Persecution
Despite the popular depiction of Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi Jews as a poor oppressed population first of historic Poland and then of the Austrian, German, and Russian Empires, the advantages bequeathed by their Jewish forerunners made it possible for ethnic Ashkenazim to play a critical economic role within the Polish state and function as native collaborators within Austrian and German Poland. The Russian government had less use for ethnic Ashkenazim but recognized their economic value despite heavy ethnic Ashkenazi involvement in smuggling.
Ethnic Ashkenazim developed a sense of grievance as a result of the Chmielnicki Rebellion, and this feeling grew with the Russian Pogroms of 1881 and afterwards.
Chmielnicki
Lucy S. Dawidowicz describes the Chmielnicki Rebellion in The Golden Tradition, Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe[31] on p. 10.
The Ukraine had come under Polish
rule in 1569 and had been subjected to a harsh policy of Polonization and
Catholicization: the Eastern Orthodox Church was suppressed and the Ukrainian
peasants enserfed to the Polish nobility. The rise of towns on the steppe where
Cossack horsemen once rode wild horses and the increasingly powerful economic
role of urban Jews mediating between the Polish nobility and the Ukrainian
peasants compounded the political and religiocultural tensions. Bogdan
Chmielnitsky (1593-1657), hetman of Zaporogian Cossacks, led a Cossak uprising
to liberate the Ukraine from Poland. Chmielnitsky agitated against Poles and
Jews: “You know the wrongs done us by the Poles and Yids, their leaseholders
and beloved factors, the oppressions, the evil deeds and the impoverishment,
you know and you remember.”
Chmielnitsky did not succeed in
liberating the Ukraine, but in the subsequent decade of war and violence,
interrupted only by brief intervals of negotiations among the Poles, Russians,
Swedes, and Turks, the Cossacks with their murderous bands of peasants, called
Haidamaks, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews, sacking and destroying
hundreds of Jewish communities. That was the beginning of a series of blood-drenched
encounters between Jews and Ukrainians that were to endure in Jewish historic
memory. About one-tenth of the Jewish population remained in the Polish
Ukraine, Volhynia, and Podolia. The other survivors emigrated into Lithuania,
Poland proper, and to the Western European countries. In 1654, Chmielnitsky
accepted Moscow’s protection, and finally in 1667, the Truce of Andrusovo split
the Ukraine, with Kiev, its cultural center, and the left bank of the Dnieper
going to Russia, and the right bank remaining with Poland.
In
Yiddish Civilisation: The
Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation[32] (pp. 235-6), Paul Kriwaczek provides a very different
perspective on the role of Jews in sixteenth and seventeenth century Ukraine,
which was then part of Commonwealth Poland. (Please not that it is probably too
harsh on Polish nobles and too considerate of wealthy Jewish estate managers.)
This
Yiddish takeover of the wild and lawless Ukraine's economy could be expected to
have involved much exploitation and corrupt abuse of monopoly. Jews tried hard
to keep such businesses as the collection of customs dues and taxes to
themselves. Surviving customs records from the 1580s are written in a mixture
of Yiddish and Hebrew. The historian Shimon Dubnow quotes a resolution passed
by the Jewish Lithuanian Council, the Vaad Medina Litoh, ruling body of the
Jewish estate: "We have openly seen the great danger deriving from the
operation of customs in Gentile hands; for the customs to be in Jewish hands is
a pivot on which everything turns, since thereby Jews may exert
control."
...
The alliance between ruthless Polish nobles and insecure Yiddish frontiersmen proved dangerous and destructive. The Jews now held a position that nothing in their background or religious law had properly prepared them for. They had been placed in authority over another people, of another social order, another culture and another religion, a people whom the magnates, the Jews' masters, regarded as racially inferior and fair game for callous exploitation. Tragically, shaking off the restraining influence of wiser counsels of the West, the repeated warnings of the rabbis of metropolitan Cracow, Posen and Lublin, the Yiddish businessmen who flocked to the colony came to regard the peasantry in a similar light.
In some histories of the Chmielnicki Rebellion, Chmielnicki offered ordinary Jews safe passage out of cities about to be attacked, but they rejected it under the influence of a religious elite co-opted by the wealthy merchants allied with the Polish gentry. In any case, Dawidowicz makes ridiculous claims about Jewish casualties, which in the soundest estimates probably number between 10-20,000. (Some scholars – usually Ukrainian – put the number as low as 4,000.)
Pogroms and Persecution
[The following material comes from Followup
(II): Origins of Modern Jewry.[33]]
Despite the claims about the severity of Czarist
pogroms, the conscription crisis of 1850-4 probably represented the worst
period for Russian Jewry before WWI.
Not only did the Russian government
incorrectly conclude that the Jewish communities could supply more recruits,
but it levied fines well beyond the resources of communities to pay.
In 1854 when Czar Nicholas I finally realized
that the situation was intolerable, he abated both the fines and the levies of
conscripts.
While conditions for Russian Jewry came
nowhere near the persecution and oppression that Palestinians have suffered
since the creation of the State of Israel, by the death of Nicholas in 1855,
traditional Russian Jewish communal structures had shattered.
Michael Stanislawski summarizes the situation
in his book Tsar Nicholas I and the
Jews, The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1823-1855.[34]
Although the autonomous Jewish community persisted
in fact as well as in law, it lost much of its former elan as the
traditionalists and the enlightened, the rich and the poor, all increasingly
looked to new sources of allegiance, organization, and power. [p. 186]
Fairly quickly, Russian Jewish thinking divided into assimilationist, orthodox, Yiddishist, radical revolutionary, and Zionist intellectual currents. While there were some hybrid groups, the Jewish tendency to bind together in the face of common threats was severely weakened by the end of Nicholas' reign.[xvi]
After the police investigating the
assassination of Czar Nicholas II by Narodnaya Volya (Народная
Воля, Popular Will) arrested the
Russian Jewish revolutionary Gessya Gelfman (Hessya Helfman) as one of the
plotters, awareness of increasing Jewish radicalism in the Russian Empire
created a reaction of hostility and violence.
The 1883 capture, arrest and trial of Narodnaya Volya leader Vera Figner, who was also Jewish, created more anti-Jewish suspicions and hostiliy, to which Russian Jews responded with both increasing radicalism and also emigration.
Because the Czarist government viewed disorder and unorganized violence as a threat to itself, its reaction to the pogroms tended toward excessive brutality and probably caused more anti-Jewish hostility, which in turn created more Jewish radicalism.
The Czarist government became even more suspicious
of non-Russians including (or sometimes especially) the most Russianized, who
were often Jewish. Exclusion of Russianized Czarist subjects from positions of
authority within the government increased revolutionary tendencies among all
non-Russians within the empire.[xvii]
Stanislawski points out on p. 7 that “a
patrimonial state such as Imperial Russia, discrimination was the rule rather
than the exception and hence entirely relative. He also claims (p. 5): “By the
time of Nicholas II, treatment of the Jews was indeed unique and anomalous.”
The meaning is unclear. By the time of
Nicholas II, the government was aware of a dangerous radical faction among the
Jewish population. Within the Czarist framework the normal Czarist response
would probably have involved internal exile, expulsion from the Empire as the
Circassians suffered during the 1850s and 1860 (see Slavery
and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East[35]
by Ehud R. Toledano) or something worse, but Russian Jews were too valuable,
and Jewish groups had the ability to put pressure on the Czarist government.
While the Russian government was improvising,
Jews like probably most Imperial subjects felt victimized, and such feelings
probably helped provide an alternative basis for Russian Jewish solidarity as
the traditional autonomous Jewish religious communal structure broke down.
The situation was extremely volatile, and despite everything Russian Jews like practically all Jews throughout Europe had more money, better health, more education, and more effective communal organizations that the peoples among whom they lived. In the right (or better the wrong) situation, the combination of anger and resources could occasion a tremendous amount of harm.
Creating the Ethnicity and National Consciousness of Judonia
While this sense of grievance could increase Russian or Eastern European Jewish cohesiveness and possibly inspire short-term political action, creating a Jewish settlement in Palestine was a multigenerational effort requiring action by Jews outside of Eastern Europe. In another time period religion could perhaps have inspired the necessary long-term unity and focus, but traditional religion was breaking down throughout European Jews in general while the process of ethnicization – still continuing to this day – has become a mainstay of popular Jewish support of Zionist imperialism.
[See The Pity of It All, A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1943, by Amos Elon,[36] The Jewish Response to German Culture, From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg,[37] Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry,[38] and Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation.[39]]
Because the center of gravity for world Jewry from the sixteenth century onward was Eastern Europea, the Eastern European process that transformed Eastern European religion into confessionalism and then into ethnic nationalism had reverberations throughout practically all Jewish communities even though the changes were typically strongest in Eastern Europe.
Concretization of the Spiritual
Gershom Scholem discusses the pervasiveness of Zohar-based mysticism within Jewish communities in the seventeenth century in Schabbatai Zwi: Der mystische Messias[40] (Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676[41]) and numerous other works. (See also Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism[42] or Die jüdische Mystik in ihren Hauptströmungen[43]) The stresses of this time period led to a concretization of ideas that had been hitherto abstract or spiritual concepts for both Christians and Jews. John Freely recounts Nathan of Gaza’s attempt during a visit to Rome to bring Talmudic prophetic passages into contemporary political effect in order to start the Messianic redemption. (See The Lost Messiah, In Search of the Mystical Rabbi Sabbatai Sevi,[44] pp. 155-170.)
Spiritual Exile Into Physical Exile
With the collapse of the messianic movements of Shabbetai Tzvi and Jacob Frank during the slow disintegration of Commonwealth Poland, many ideas of European Jewish mysticism cross over from learned religious discourse into popular Jewish culture generally in a distorted or debased sense. Galut or exile, which for the most part had served as an abstract notion of deterritorialized Rabbinic Judaism to describe the alienation of man from God, became a palpable aspect of Jewish life even though prayers like the tenth benediction of the Amidah prayer refer not to the Medieval and Modern Jewish Diaspora (tәfutzah) but to the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles (galuyyot[eynu]).
Figure 1 Kibbutz Galuyyot: Blessing Ten of the Amidah[45]
As the Polish state slowly dissolved and Poland ceased to be
Poland any longer from the Jewish standpoint, ethnic Ashkenazim began to feel
that they were in exile in their Polish homeland without having relocated, and
they found it a lot easier to contemplate emigration to Western Europe, to the
Americas, to the Central Russian provinces or to Palestine. A similar feeling
probably facilitated the Greek Bulgarian Turkish population exchanges in the
aftermath of WW 1 as old imperial states were replaced by newer more ethnically
oriented states and traditional territories began to feel alien while new
ethnic centers exerted a pull on communities living outside the new boundaries.[xviii]
Because Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish leaders assumed that
leaving homes and villages was similarly easy for all populations, they dreamed
especially during the 1930s but even to this day of reaching some sort of final
agreement with Palestinians by settling them in some other Arab country.
Because the cultural and ethnic centers for Palestinians are
Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron but not Baghdad, Basra,
Najaf, Karbala, Ramadi, or Samara, Palestinians were never going to agree to
transfer to Iraq or some other Arabic territory. (See Baksheesh
Diplomacy, Secret Negotiations Between American Jewish Leaders and Arab
Officials on the Eve of world War II,[46]
by Rafael Medoff, pp. 61-62.)
Salvation and Racism
A lot of Jewish mystical ideas of the special nature of the
Jewish soul facilitated the development of racist ideas among Jewish
communities especially in Eastern and Central Europe. This type of
religion-inspired racism is not specific to Judaism and may represent the
influence of or a reaction to Christian belief that only Christian souls are
saved because the Sufi-influenced pre-Kabala mysticism of Arab Jews had far
different concerns (see The Treatise of the Pool:
al-Maqāla al-Ĥawđiyya[47] by
`Obadyāh Maimonides). The
Christian concept of salvation and its mystical ramifications have played a
major part in the development of European völkisch and color-based
racism.
Here is a description of fairly typical example of early
twentieth century Jewish racism from The
Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933[48]
by Amos Elon, p. 225:
If the position of Germany’s Jews was not perfect, it was certainly bearable – at least for the well-to-do – and even quite hopeful in the eyes of the intelligentsia. Intermarriage became common, increasing from 8.4 percent in 1901 to 29.86 percent in 1915. Felix Theilhaber, a Zionist doctor in Munich, hysterically warned in 1911 that intermarriage and sinking birthrates – the result of modern women’s uppityness, he lamented – would bring about the complete disappearance of German Jewry by 1950. According to Theilhaber, marriage among Jews had in the past been a “national-religious” institution, designed to “serve the preservation of the family and the nation”; now, however, it was increasingly “based purely on erotic attraction,” as among Gentiles. Theilhaber decried the recent decline of what he called “racial consciousness” among Jews. Philosophies could be abjured at will, he announced. “Blood” was more permanent.
Theilhaber traveled from one German Jewish community to another speaking out against “racial mixing” through intermarriage. Kafka attended a speech in which Theilhaber warned of the biological damage caused by racial mixing: children of mixed marriages were likely to be decadent or morally depraved, and they often ended up as the worst anti-Semites. However preposterous, Theilhaber’s stereotypes must be read in historical context. The vocabulary of sociobiology and “race” was then an integral part of civilized public discourse. More remarkable was the lack of response to Theilhaber’s tirades. Intermarriage continued to flourish. In Breslau, a less “multicultural” city than Berlin, intermarriage rose from 11 percent in 1890 to 52 percent during the First World War, suggesting that integration was even more advanced in the provinces than was commonly thought.
Despite Elon’s attempt to belittle the significance of Theilhaber’s
type of thinking among German Jews, such racism has persisted and expanded
among Jews. Theilhaber differs very little from Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse.
[See "Jews
and Power" versus "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"[49]
and Wisse
Kokht Kugl mit Khazershmaltz![50]]
Tikkun Olam and Progress
While the idea seems strange today, during the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, various progressive leaders and movements incorporated into their ideologies racist ideas very similar to those of people like Theilhaber and Wisse.
In addition, some probably more specifically Jewish kabalistic concepts
- of tikkun
olam (repairing the universe, תיקון
עולם)
- by
reuniting the kәlippot
(shards, קליפות)
resulting from shәvirah
(shattering, שבירה) of
the sәfirot
(circles or emanations, רותספי)
arising from the zimzum (contraction, צמצום) of
the Divine
facilitated the transfer of Jewish allegiance from
traditional religious observance to new political movements
- that
have often managed to maintain progressive credentials even into the
twentieth century[xix]
and
- that
were either internal to the Jewish community or
- that
joined Jews and non-Jews under a mostly Jewish leadership.
[See Jewish,
Zionist War Against Salvation[51]
and Followup
(II): Origins of Modern Jewry.[52]]
German Reform and Prussian Israel
Rabbi Yisroel
(Israel) ben Eliezer (רבי ישראל
בן אליעזר, the Baal Shem Tov or
Besht) in Eastern Europe and Moses Mendelssohn in Germany are two contemporary
early reformers, who were both apparently inwardly directed.
The Besht founded the Hassidic
movement. The conflicts between the Hassidim and their opponents contributed to
the breakdown of Rabbinic authority in Eastern Europe.
While Mendelssohn’s proposed
reforms of aspects of Jewish religious practice and education were quite minor,
he provided the important example of a German Jew fully engaged in the larger
German society as a German and possibly created the model of a national German
for Protestants and Catholics as well as for Jews. By treating gentile
scholarship as important as Jewish learning, Mendelssohn’s efforts undermined
Rabbinic authority albeit unintentially.
Although Mendelssohn is
considered both the father of the Haskalah
(השכלה, Jewish Enlightenment) and of the Reform
movement, he was personally fully observant. The earliest phases of the Eastern
European Haskalah were probably true to Mendelssohn’s vision In contrast the
German Reform movement attempted to make fundamental changes in Jewish
Religion.
Mendelssohn’s successors
reformed Jewish education by deemphasizing the Talmud, and consequentially,
treated the Book of Leviticus as relatively unimportant even though and perhaps
because traditional Jewish education focused on this Biblical text as an
introduction to Talmud. Jewish education reformers brough Jewish Bible study
more into conformity with the developing German concept of a Prussian Israel
that served as the model for the Hohenzollern kaisers.
This pattern of Jewish education
persists to this day in Israel. Jacob Lassner and S. Ilan Troen write in Jews
and Muslims in the Arab World, Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined,[53]
p. 262:
As in the
case of culling useful texts from the Talmud, the secular curriculum removed
portions dealing with rituals and ceremonies associated with religious worship.
Leviticus, a text that deals largely with the priestly code and rituals, was
thereby nearly excised from the curriculum. Secular schools retained only those
few sections that deal with celebrating the sabbatical and jubilee years and
similar topics that could be interpreted, by modern Israelis, as ethical
legislation protecting the rights of workers. The study of the Bible thereby
corresponded to that of the Talmud in which similar sections from the tractate
of civil jurisprudence were selected.
Haskalah, the Russian Draft and Odessa
As Haskalah moved East, a
complex interaction developed among Hassidim, their opponents the Mitnagdim,
and Russian governmental incoherence, incompetence and brutality. Often the
Hassidim and the Mitnagdim banded together against the Maskilim (Enlighteners),
and Professor Stanislawski provides evidence that at least one important
Eastern Europe traditional religious leader, Yizhak ben Haim of Volozhin was
not unsympathetic to the early phase of Haskalah.
As the severely troubled Russian Empire
tried to reform itself, a subset of Russian Jews, influenced by the “Germans”
tried to bring reform to the whole Russian Jewish population (see Jewish,
Zionist War Against Salvation[54]) while
at the same time the Russian government attempted to impose its own form
of reform on its Jewish population generally on the basis of some severe
misconceptions.
According to Michael Stanislawski in Tsar Nicholas I and the
Jews, The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1823-1855,[55]
(pp. 108-109),
By the beginning of the 1850s, therefore, the
new power of the maskilim was matched, for the first time, with the security of
numbers. From a handful of disjointed individuals clustered in tiny enclaves on
the borders of the Pale or in insulated anonymity in the largest cities, the
maskilim grew to a well-coordinated movement of several hundred adherents,
preaching their gospel to thousands of committed students throughout the [Jewish]
Pale [of settlement].
From this new coherence and potency there
emerged a new self-consciousness, or rather, a manifest reaffirmation of
self-perception. As one of their most articulate spokesmen explained, even the
youngest maskilim now sensed their mission. Every student in the state schools
regarded himself as no less than a future
reformer, a new Mendelssohn, and therefore, in the quiet worked out a plan of
action which he jealously guarded from his friends. [They]
were thoroughly convinced that they were going to bring about a complete
revolution in the world view of the Jewish people, and they impatiently awaited
their moment of action. They were like military commanders standing at the
ready for the approaching enemy attack, waiting only for the moment when they
will be able to display the wonders of their courage and to distinguish
themselves for their fatherland [i.e., the Russian Empire].
This new sense of
mission and power, this rejection of traditional society combined with a
dedication to its restructuring on a new basis, transformed the maskilim from
an amorphous set of intellectuals into a full-fledged intelligentsia. As Isaiah
Berlin has taught, there is a fundamental difference between the concept of an
intelligentsia and the notion of intellectuals. The former
thought of themselves as united by something more than mere interest in ideas; they conceived of themselves as being a dedicated order, almost a secular priesthood, devoted to the spreading of a specific attitude to life, something like a gospel.
Thus, we can date
the emergence of a coherent Russian-Jewish intelligentsia to the latter part of
the rule of Nicholas I, in large part as a response to the stimulus provided by
the Russian government itself.
Not only was the emerging intelligentsia a competitor to traditional Jewish scholarly and economic communal elites, but in the provinces of Chernigov and New Russia, which were only opened up to Jewish settlement in the late eighteenth century, there were no traditional Jewish elites of any importance and the Russian government relaxed restrictions on Jewish participation in the local government in order to make relocation more attractive and to compensate for a dearth of persons qualfied to be officials in the region. (See The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881,[56] by Steven J. Zipperstein.) As a result, internal and external pressures conspired to evolve the Russian Jewish religious community into an ethnic and even into a politically sophisticated ethno-national community albeit only in the Russian Empire, which ruled over many ethnic and ethno-national groups in various stages of development.
Emancipation of Jews and Women
In Western Europe the emancipation of Jews contributed to
the breakdown of Jewish religious identity despite the best efforts of Modern
Orthodox leaders like Samson Raphael Hirsch of Frankfurt, who founded the
movement for Torah im Derech Eretz (Hebrew[57]
תורה עם דרך
ארץ - Torah with "the way of the land") in order to
combat Reform Judaism, secularizing assimilation, and conversion to
Christianity. His movement may have made it easier for German Jews like Martin
Buber to combine the most extreme sorts of German blood and soil nationalism
with immersion in neo-Hassidic mysticism as he did at the beginning of WWI.
(While he later renounced the German nationalism, Buber’s obsession with blood
in the racial sense persisted and played a role in his thinking throughout his
life.)
Figure 2
Periodized Chart of Jewish Emancipation[58]
Martin Buber’s success in
introducing a sort of völkisch-oriented
Neo-Hassidic Zionism to German Jews may have resulted from the Ostjuden-ization
of Central and Western European Jews as Emancipation pulled Russian Jews
westward.
Shulamit Volkov discusses “The
Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews” in The Jewish Response to
German Culture, From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, edited by Jeuda
Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg[59]
(pp. 192-211). She writes on p. 211 about the creation of the development of an
inchoate transnational ethnic identity:
In a letter
to his parents in June 1916, Franz Rosenzweig wrote:
One does not write more illogically about the Ostjuden
than about the Westjuden; it is only that in the case of the Ostjuden
it all seems to come at once, but if one could conceive of the whole literature
about the Westjuden written – let’s say in the last twenty years, as
condensed into one single year, so that literature too would turn out to be, as
our Eastern-Jewish grand- and great-grandfathers would have called it, a nice Bilbul.
There is no Ostjudenfrage, there is only a Judenfrage – and even that
doesn’t really exist. By the way, imagine only that all that German fear of
the Ostjuden were to be directed not at the Ostjuden as such, but
at these same people as future Westjuden (well, your kind.)
A generation
of Jews who were relatively free from the anxiety of social climbing was
beginning to look inward. These were the years of Freud and the great Jewish
cultural critics, the time of the inflow of Jews into the membership and
leadership of the Social Democratic party, and of the emergence of Zionism. The
constant handling of the Ostjudenfrage – the confrontation with the parvenus
– served well the purposes of this reassessment. Recognizing the foreigners as
a reflection of oneself was essential for the entire process. It is not by
chance that the Viennese Jews took such an important part in it. After all,
Vienna was the real capital of Galicia, constantly refilled with new Eastern
immigrants.
As an aspect
of this process of reconsideration, Ostjuden were beginning to be looked
upon with a different eye – not by everyone, not everywhere, but surely by a
significant, articulate, and outspoken minority. “It is a fact that not only
I,” wrote Gershom Scholem in his memoirs, “but many, many of my contemporaries
felt this pull toward the Ostjuden.” This was to a large measure, no
doubt, a matter of a generational conflict, as Scholem indeed hastened to add,
but it may have also been something else: an expression of a new sense of self.
Jews were beginning to accept the heterogeneity of their communality and to
acknowledge the positive potential of this pluralism. It was for many of them a
matter of reaching the limits of assimilation and promptly halting at the
brink. From that point one could only turn backward and inward, seeking a new
definition for one’s identity, and often also a new self-respect.
By Central and Eastern European standards, ostjüdisch
culture differed strongly in terms of male-female relations from that of
neighboring non-Jewish populations as well as from historical norms among Jews
belonging to other ethnic groups. Eastern European Jews had a propensity for
early marriage followed by a sequence of divorce and fairly rapid remarriage.
Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians as well as non-Ashkenazi Jews tended to
view such behavior as promiscuous. (See Late Marriage [in Hebrew,
חתונה מאוחרת][60]).
In addition,
Eastern European Jewish women were often breadwinners and as a result of Jewish
educational reforms associated with the Haskalah often had superior knowledge
of gentile culture than Jewish men or non-Jewish women did. Gentiles and
assimilated Jews tended to view Jewish men – especially when Eastern European
Jewish – as less virile than gentile males.
Not
only did emancipation make far more non-Jews much more aware of the differences
between non-Jews and Ostjuden and thereby thwart one of the major goals
of emancipation by creating a stronger sense of otherness on both sides of the
Jewish-Gentile divide, but the enhanced perception of Jewish difference in
matters of gender mores also interacted with the ongoing process of the
emancipation of women to create a separate sexually-charged non-religious
identity for Jews in Central and Eastern Europe while at the very same time
internal Jewish conflicts over the unfair treatment of Jewish women tended to
weaken rabbinic authority.[xx]
In a sort of foreshadowing of contemporary criticism of Islam with
regard to women’s issues like the hijab, an “official declaration [from German
courts in the first decade of the twentieth century] to the effect that Jewish
law ran counter to good German morals sent tremors through both liberal and
Orthodox Jewry.”
[See Between Kant and Kabbalah,
An Introduction to Isaac Breuer's Philosophy of Judaism,[61]
by Alan L. Mittlemen,
p. 142,[xxi]
and The
Oppression of Orthodox Jewish Women[62]]
As the
legal controversy created doubt about Jewish religion among Jews, it
strengthened a sort of defensive Jewish identity when critics of Jewish law
showed evidence of anti-Semitism.
The dialogue between German Jews and German non-Jews about
Jewish sexuality probably reached its highpoint in 1903 with the publication of
Geschlecht und Charakter by the Austrian Jewish philosopher and culture
critic Otto Weininger, who committed suicide after presenting his analysis of
the feminine aspects of the character of the Jewish male and of the Jewish race
in Chapter XIII Das Judentum (Judaism or Jewry).[xxii]
[See Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence[63] by Sander L. Gilman for a succinct introduction to fin de siècle (i.e., nineteenth century) concepts of race and sexuality.]
As if to
underscore such perceptions of Jewish sexual ambiguity, Jewish women because of
cultural and educational advantages tended in the early twentieth century to
take leading roles perceived as masculine in general politics.
[See The
Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933[64]
by Amos Elon.]
Not only did the participation of Jewish women increase the
disproportionate size of the Jewish voice in Central and Eastern European
politics, but they also dominated the leadership of the feminist movement then
as they do now. (Note that Rosa Luxemburg is typical of a cohort of politically active Jewish women
at the beginning of the twentieth century.)
In parallel
with such general political activities, Jews have taken the leading role in a
homosexual regenderization program that has challenged traditional religion and
culture among Jews and non-Jews while it has served as a club to demonize
Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.
[See Jewish,
Zionist War Against Salvation,[65]
Feb.
11, Harvard: Joseph Massad,[66]
and Desiring
Arabs.[67], [xxiii]
by Joseph A. Massad.]
Not only has the increasing
prominence of the issue of sexuality associated with the emancipation of women
and concomitant regenderization activism sharpened the boundaries of Jewish
secular identity, but it also seems to have validated a sense of superior
secular Jewish ethics as a replacement for belief in God who made the Covenant
with Israel. A similar phenomenon also exists among Islamists, who like Sayed
Qutb disdain the West because of a perception of Western sexual license and
also among Orientalists of past generations, who associated Arabs and Muslims
with hedonism.
German Nazism, Zionism, and Ethnic Fundamentalism
In the post WWII period the organized American Jewish community, wealthy Jewish donors and the State of Israel have each for their own purposes fostered such feelings of Jewish uniqueness and superiority through the development of special Holocaust or Israel study materials at the pre-college level and of “scholarly” think tanks or academic institutes to study the Holocaust or the ME from a Zionist viewpoint.
Such institutions serve as the main source of knowledge
about Jews, Judaism, Zionism, the State of Israel, and the ME with resulting
distortion of American Jewish and non-Jewish discourse on
- the
history of the rise and fall of German Nazism,
- the
mass murder of Jews during WWII, and
- the nature and practices of Zionism.
(See USHMM:
National Thought Control.[68])
In addition to influencing American foreign
policy, this ongoing indoctrination effort has strongly affected American
Judaism. At this point, except for small groups of
religious anti-Zionists, Jewish religion in the USA barely exists in any living
form, for it has been cannibalized by an ethnic fundamentalist cult consisting
of:
·
Ethnic narcissism,
·
Holocaust obsession, and
·
Worship of the state of Israel.
All the remains of the traditional Jewish communal
consciousness is a very dangerous form of politicized ethnic fundamentalism, which
judges good and evil in all situations by benefit to “the Jews.” As a result, not only does Judonia – as it exists in America – suffer none
of the doubts that plagued the British Empire from the end of the nineteenth
century until the collapse after WWII, but by creating a system of Holocaust
commemoration and observance to play the role of a secular American religion,
Judonia has also inured Americans to the Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi and
Somali suffering that has resulted from Neoconservative policies.
Judonia selects worthy genocides on the basis of benefit to the Jewish people
as defined by Zionist ideology. (See Monsters:
Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power.[69])
The Economics of Judonia
Maintaining the
infrastructure of Holocaust memorials, Holocaust study programs, Zionist think
tanks, and Israel studies programs is fairly costly, but the organized Jewish
community is extremely wealthy. J. J. Goldberg, who is the son of Arthur
Goldberg (see USHMM:
National Thought Control[70]),
writes In Jewish
Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (1996),[71]
pp. 38-39:
As straightforward as the national
politics of America Jews may seem, the politics within the Jewish community are
something else again. The inner workings of the Jewish organizational world are
arcane, Byzantine, and convoluted, so much so that even seasoned insiders often
feel lost without a compass. The authoritative American
Jewish Year Book lists about three hundred national Jewish organizations and
close to two hundred local federations of Jewish charities. Their combined
budget – counting synagogue dues, Sunday school tuition, and Medicare payments
to Jewish hospitals – totals somewhere upwards of $6 billion per year.
That is more than the gross national product of half the members of the United
Nations. Indeed the precise total has never even been calculated.
Today, the budget
is even larger, and this figure does not include many organizations and private
individuals involved in Judonia activities separate from the organized Jewish
community.
The
assets of the 200 chief donors to Israel advocacy activities probably total
somewhere between $100 billion to $250 billion,[xxiv]
which is comparable to or larger than the GDP of the State of Israel. If the
megadonors are treated as constituting practically the entire economy of
Judonia, and if Judonia’s GDP (= consumption + gross investment + Judonia’s spending + [exports −
imports])
is calculated from the total resources they own or control, the size of
Judonia’s economy as measured by its GDP is probably an order of magnitude
larger at approximately $2 trillion dollars.
Judonia’s economic
power has developed over a long time period that starts in the pre-Judonia
period as early as the beginning of the Middle Ages when the Jewish involvement
in trading Slavic slaves and luxury goods gave the Jewish community small
economic advantages over other populations despite various religious
restrictions. Over time small advantages compound.
While the wars of
the Reformation impoverished a large section of German Jewry just as it ruined
many German Christians, the Jewish upper economic classes had been poised to
profiteer from financing both sides in the wars and in outfitting the soldiers.
In addition, the movement of German Jews Eastward meant that they extended
their economic activities into collapsing Poland, which remained a cash cow
even as it collapsed or because it was collapsing in a sort of foreshadowing of
disaster capitalism. (See The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism[72] by Naomi Klein.)
The Napoleonic
Wars and continuing dissolution of the Polish state created
- the foundation of the
Cousinhood of the wealthiest British Jews,
- the beginnings of the modern
French wealthy Jewish elite, and
- far closer connections between
the German aristocracy and moneyed German Jews (Geldjuden[xxv])
both financially and by marriage.
This
last development brought a pattern already existing in Poland for several
centuries westward to the German territories.
Not only did German and Austrian policy in their Polish territories (or more accurately Polish colonies) create tremendous opportunities for Polish Jews as native collaborators, but both states attempted to exclude all but the most economically useful Polish Jews from settling in central German-speaking territories while erratic government attempts to restrict Jewish family size and marriage among native German and Austrian Jews tended to drive younger sons or less wealthy German and Austrian Jews westward to France, the UK, and the USA. In all cases, these Jewish immigrants had tremendous advantages over most natives and other immigrants to these three countries because Jews often brought their own capital to their new homes and generally still connected into some sort of family or supra-family support network in the old country.
In the USA before the Civil War, German and Austrian Jewish
immigrants with some knowledge of European estate management and the Polish arenda
system[73] profited
immensely while they helped to make the economics of Southern Slavery
financially sound. While it is difficult to determine whether Yankee or NY
German Jewish investors were more significant to the Southern economy, the
foundations of NY Jewish investment and commercial banking lie in slavery.[xxvi]
Meanwhile, Eastern European Jewish immigrants brought
westward aforementioned much more aggressive Polish business practices than
those to which German Jews or Christians were accustomed. For example, Jewish
domination of the wholesale cattle trade and associated exploitive practices
often expressed themselves as middle market restraint of trade and angered
German Christian butchers to no end especially because Jewish butchers were
favored in various forms of vertical collusion. As a result, not only did Saxon
Christian butchers become important organizers of anti-Semitic political
activity in Germany, but in “On
the Jewish Question[74]” Marx simply
described the reality that the Saxon butchers and other non-Jewish German
interest groups faced because of the transformation of German and to a lesser
extent Austrian Jews into a highly aggressive entrepreneurial class as an
inadvertent consequence of state policy:
Let us consider the actual,
worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday
Jew.
Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular basis of
Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly
religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering
and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation
of our time.
An organization of society which
would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility
of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness
would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the
other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is
futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous
development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against
the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.
We recognize in Judaism,
therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time,
an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful
respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present
high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.
Modifications in German regulatory law could have controlled
or limited the offensive business practices, but the alliance of German
aristocratic political might and German Jewish economic clout conspired to
prevent change. Columbia Professor Fritz Stern describes this relationship at a
personal level in Gold and Iron: Bismarck,
Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire.[75] (The book
is disappointing because it focuses on personal relations and fails to discuss
the effect of ethnicity on the economics of German state.)
The marriage of the children of Bismarck and his Jewish
banker Bleichröder
personified the ultimate conjunction of money and power in Imperial German
political life.
[See The
Pity of It All, A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1943, by Amos Elon[76]
and "Jews
and Power" versus "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"[77].]
Political power and Jewish wealth established a pattern of
collaboration and mutual protection at the expense of the bourgeoisie that
persists today as the recent bailout of Bear Stearns shows. (See Fed's Bear
Stearns Move Breaks New Ground : NPR.[78])
Amos Elon describes similar special treatment on pp. 211-212 of The
Pity of It All:[79]
In October 1873, a stock market crash changed this state of affairs in one blow. The economy had heated to the boiling point, a result of billions in French war reparation payments. The crash affected the entire Continent and came in the wake of feverish speculation in several European countries by reckless promoters with close political connections. Although the various governments had been warned of these machinations, they had done little to restrain them. The bubble burst first in Austria. From there the panic spread to Germany and the rest of Europe. In Germany alone, tens of thousands of middle-class and aristocratic families lost everything. The crash provoked a wave of anti-Semitic agitation unlike anything Germany – or France – had seen since the Crusades or the Black Death. Jews were said to be “inferior” and “immoral”; their successes over the preceding two or three decades were due entirely to devious, even criminal manipulations. It was not an accident that so many stockbrokers happened to be Jews. At whose expense had they been enriching themselves?
Nine months earlier, in a sensational
speech in the Reichstag, the Jewish liberal Eduard Lasker had sounded a first
dire warning. Lasker exposed the ruthless activities of Bethel Henry
Strousberg, a Prussian railroad tycoon and converted Jew, revealing
Strousberg’s notorious system, of winning government concessions by lining the
pockets of parliamentarians and high officials. Strousberg had played a major
role in the German economy for years. “That fellow will one day soon be emperor
of Germany,” Engles had written Marx in September 1869. “Wherever you go,
everyone speaks only of Strousberg. His enormous industrial and railroad
holdings collapsed even before the general crash. For the sake of his
aristocratic partners – who included the Silesian dukes of Ujest and Ratibor,
the Prussian count Lehndorff-Steinort, and a Prince Wilhelm zu Putbus (soon
dubbed Kaputbus) – Bismarck, with Bleichröder’s assistance, made a last-minute
effort to stave off their bankruptcy with state funds. In his characteristic
style, Bismarck told the French ambassador:
2 dukes, 1 general, half a dozen
ladies in waiting, twice that many chamberlains, 100 owners of coffeehouses and
all the cabmen of Berlin found themselves totally ruined. The emperor took pity
on the dukes, thee aide de camp, the ladies in waiting and charged me with
pulling them out of trouble I appealed to Bleichröder, who on condition of
getting a title of nobility, which as a Jew he very much valued, agreed to
rescue the duke of Ujest and General Count Lehndorff. Two dukes & an aide
de camp saved – frankly this is worth the “von” we bestowed on the good
Bleichröder.
For all intents of purpose Judonia’s financial structures
and their relations to important external power brokers and power centers were
fully in place in the 1870s before the 1881 pogroms, from which the beginning
of the Zionist movement is usually dated.
Before the founding of the State of Israel there were two
important post-1881 developments in the economy of Judonia:
- the
Great Crash followed by the Great Depression and
- the
Great Liquidation of Jewish Assets in Germany and Austria under the
Haavarah Agreement.
Great Crash and Great Depression
While the New York German Jewish elite was important in the
1870s, it was nowhere near as exalted as the German Jewish elite and had competition
from the investment banks founded by older non-Jewish merchant elites of
Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. A sort of ethnic competition or warfare
divided the US investment banking industry. The conflict was particularly
strong in the 1920s until Goldman Sachs discovered leverage. At this point
determining how decisions were made is difficult. Top management could have
made the choices, but then as now informal networks of Jewish financiers worked
together to protect one another or share information and sometimes strategies.
In any case, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Jewish investment
banks managed through the use of leverage and derivatives to cause the Great
Crash while simultaneously they became disproportionately crash rich. Together
the banking community advised the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to pursue
of policy of contracting the money supply to transform the Great Crash into the
Great Depression. Little actual persuasion was necessary to convince the
Federal Reserve to pursue exactly the same policies it had followed
successfully in 1924 and 1927.
The ultimate scope of the economic downturn was probably not
anticipated. It lasted for the most part until the beginning of WWII in the USA
(or 1946 by some analysts) even though Germany managed to achieve recovery by
1936. During the Great Depression the Jewish and non-Jewish investment banks
acquired valuable equity and assets at fire sale prices, but Jewish
institutions did distinctly better.
In combination with the Great Liquidation this result made
the American sector dominant within the developing Judonian economy and made it
possible for American Jews to displace the traditional American WASP elite by
the twenty-first century.
Discussion or investigation in the USA about the reasons for
the Great Crash and the Great Depression has rarely gone beyond identifying
investment strategies that exacerbated the Crash and monetary policy that
lengthened the Depression. In any case, not only was the type of forensic statistical
analysis yet to be developed that could have helped elucidate the nature of the
Great Depression, but McCarthyism seized the public’s attention in the late
1940s, and no one was willing to address the ethnic aspect of the finance
industry after the mass killing of Jews during WWII became general knowledge.
Figure 3 1947 Anti-communist
Comic Book cover
Great Liquidation
Reich decree 55/33 and attached letters between
representatives of the German government and Zionist representatives
constituted the Haavarah or Transfer Agreement. It became official on August
10, 1933, ended the Jewish boycott of Germany, and facilitated Zionist economic
and infrastructure development in Palestine as well as the emigration of Jews
from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to Palestine. The agreement provided
the Zionist movement in Palestine with tremendous infusion of cash that went to
purchases from Germany. (See The
Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and
Jewish Palestine[80]
by Edwin Black, pp. 249-250.)
Because the German Jewish financial elite was in the
forefront of Jewish opposition to Zionism, the Liquidation removed an
impediment to Zionist goals and probably made other wealthy Jews less hostile
and more willing to work with Zionists and Zionist organizations. This effect
was particularly important in the USA.
During the Liquidation descendants of Bleichröder and
Bismarck made repeated application for Aryanization. Because the most important
German Nazis officials often came from the German and Austrian petite
bourgeoisie, which was often at least as hostile to the German aristocratic
elite as it was to the German Jewish money elite, with whom the aristocrats
were so entangled, refusal was practically reflex, and members of two of the
most powerful and influential families in German history had no choice but to
leave Germany for the USA and the UK.
High and Low Politics of Nascent Judonia
In the nineteenth and twentieth century Jewish
politics modernizes rapidly and develops a much more international apparently
philanthropic character while at the same time it begins to make far more
sophisticated use of the legal or political system. In other cases it begins to
take a grass roots and occasionally conspiratorial form.
Philanthropic Politics
Jewish communal philanthropy has deep roots in
the Bible and the Talmud.
Deuteronomy 22:4 commands the members of the
community to help one another:
Thou shalt
not see thy brother's
ass or his ox fall down
by the way
and hide
thyself from
them thou shalt surely help him to
lift them up again
οὐκ
ὄψῃ τὸν ὄνον
τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ σου
ἢ τὸν μόσχον
αὐτοῦ
πεπτωκότας ἐν
τῇ ὁδῷ μὴ ὑπερίδῃς
αὐτούς
ἀνιστῶν
ἀναστήσεις
μετ' αὐτοῦ
לא־תראה
את־חמור אחיך
או שורו נפלים
בדרך והתעלמת
מהם הקם תקים
עמו׃
Exodus 23:5 demands that such
assistance even be extended to enemies:
If thou see
the ass of him that
hateth thee lying
under his
burden and wouldest
forbear to help
him thou
shalt surely help with him
ἐὰν δὲ ἴδῃς τὸ ὑποζύγιον τοῦ ἐχθροῦ σου πεπτωκὸς ὑπὸ τὸν γόμον αὐτοῦ οὐ παρελεύσῃ αὐτό ἀλλὰ συνεγερεῖς αὐτὸ μετ' αὐτοῦ
כי־תראה
חמור שנאך רבץ
תחת משאו
וחדלת מעזב לו
עזב תעזב עמו׃
According to the Talmud (Bava Batra 8b)
redeeming captives is a “great commandment” (mitzvah rabbah) upon the community
to act upon its members.
In a particularly famous case during the Middle
Ages Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (Maharam) forbade Jewish communities from paying
a ransom for his freedom because he feared that rulers would take advantage of
the communal obligation.
The ransoming of captives is a sort of
proto-insurance system that was particularly important for a community, whose
income depended on long distance trade, and the Maharam acted to protect the
system just as an insurance executive would try to avoid paying claims based in
insurance fraud.
Jewish charity served Jewish business interests
and many other purposes including providing a social welfare network for the
community, providing a means of self-memorialization, influencing the
community, manipulating non-Jews and of course sincerely expressing devotion to
God.
As the Jewish financial elite became richer in
parallel with the spread of Enlightenment, the members became much more
involved in charity and social welfare as Jewish and Enlightenment ideals
merged in their minds.
From the 1840s onward Jewish philanthropy
becomes especially systematically international in addressing specifically
Jewish causes célèbres.
International Jewish Crises
The following cases of distressed Jewish
individuals and communities became important foci of international non-Zionist
Jewish activism that employed sophisticated fund-raising and media campaigns:
- Damascus blood libel (see The
Damascus Affair: "ritual Murder," Politics, and the Jews in 1840[81] by Jonathan Frankel),
- Edgardo Mortara (1858, see The Kidnapping of
Edgardo Mortara[82]
by David I. Kertzer),
- Albert Dreyfus (1894), and
- Mendel Beylis (1913, see Blood Accusation:
The Strange History of the Beiliss Case[83]
by Maurice Samuels[xxvii]).
There were a few others, but the above four all had the
same basic structure and gradually took on a sort of mythic meaning that has
little connection to reality. International Jewish philanthropic efforts
provided a regular international framework for some of the wealthiest Jews to
interact outside of business, and the philanthropists looked for non-emergency
situations, where their largesse and connections could be helpful.
Non-Crisis Jewish
Philanthropy
Southwestern University Professor Lisa Moses Leff discusses
the development of modern French Jewish philanthropy in her book Sacred
Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth Century
France.[84] It appears
to contain useful information but contains a chapter “The Myth of Jewish Power”
even though it generally makes more sense to discuss the myth of Jewish
powerlessness or is probably more correct to discuss the conditions under which
some Jews were able to exert a tremendous amount of financial or political
power during the time period in question.
Vice-President Adolphe Crémieux (Isaac
Moïse Crémieux) of Consistoire
Central des Israélites de France" (Central Consistory[85]
of the Jews of France) is a typical powerful well-connected French Jewish
politico of nineteenth century. As a Frog Prince,[xxviii]
he attempted to intervene with the French government on behalf of Damascus Jews
during 1840 and worked closely with the Cousinhood to pressure the Egyptian and
Ottoman governments.
Wikipedia[86]
describes one of his ongoing philanthropic efforts:
Alliance
Israélite Universelle is an
international Jewish organization based in France. It was founded in Paris in
1860 by Adolphe Crémieux, as a response to the Damascus affair, with the goal
to protect human rights of Jews as citizens of countries where they live. The
organization was created to combine the ideals of self-defense and
self-sufficiency through education and professional development among Jews
around the world.
In
addition, the organization operates a number of Jewish day schools, and is
responsible for the standardazation of the Ladino language.
In
1870, Charles Netter of the AIU received a tract of land from the Ottoman
Empire as a gift and started an agricultural school Mikveh Israel, the first
modern Jewish agricultural settlement which grew oranges.
During
the Pre-1948 period in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, the AIU
ran anti-missionary schools to teach young Jews French and Hebrew to help
create a more cohesive Jewish nation in Israel.
The AIU schools
constitute the first attempt to create a uniform international Jewish school
system. Because after 1900 many AIU teachers were Zionists, the AIU paid for
Zionist indoctrination of Arab, Persian, and Spanish Jewish students from North
Africa to Iran. In Farewell, Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish
Baghdad,[87]
author Naim Kattan mentioned his Zionist instructor at an AIU school in
Baghdad.
Later as a member
of the French government of national defense, Crémieux
opportunistically acting at least partially for Jewish special interest used
his position to manipulate France into an act of exceptional largess in the
1870 Décret Crémieux (Crémieux
Decree), which conferred French citizenship on European colons and Ibero-Berber
Jews in Algeria. In one fell swoop he turned Algerian Jews into native
colaborators in a situation comparable to that of ethnic Ashkenazi Jews in
Polish or Austrian Poland while at the same time Algeria as an integral part of
France suddenly began to look a lot like Ireland within the UK of the same time
period.
French Jewish philanthropy in Algeria ultimately created a French Algerian Jewish consciousness that benefited the State of Israel. During the Algerian War of Independence important French Algerian Jews whispered to French politicians that France and the State of Israel faced a common foe in Arab nationalism. Since Algerian Jews emigrated to France after Algerian independence, they have often served as a stealth pro-Judonia pressure group in French politics.
Political Meaning of International Jewish
Philanthropy
In the nineteenth century until Israeli statehood,
international Jewish philanthropy probably constitutes an important
international regime governing collaboration of organizations and individuals
from the Americas through the territories of the Czarist Empire. It should not
be surprising that the International Jewish Philanthropic Regime develops in
parallel with the International Telegraphic Union (ITU), which was founded in
1865 and whose regulated technology was so important in Jewish aid efforts.
Today, Jewish philanthropy serves as the social services sector of Judonia.
When modern American Jewish (Judonian) rescue efforts conflict with Israel
government desires or goals as has happened in the cases of Russian and
Ethiopian Jews, eventually the State of Israel has acquiesced to policies
defined by Judonia.
International Jewish
Philanthropy and the Media
The media campaigns associated with Jewish philanthropy
benefited from the disproportionate role that Jews played then as now in the
newspaper industry, which itself was an outgrowth of the publishing industry,
which had become so important to Jews because of the guaranteed market in
Jewish religious books.
[Here
are a selection of articles that discuss current journalistic biases that
result from disproportionate Jewish influence: NY
Times Panders Jewish Prejudice,[88]
Letter
to the Editor: What is Really Left Unsaid,[89]
Attack
Journalist Swiftboats Ron Paul,[90]
Ron
Paul Supporters Attack Islamophobe,[91]
Beware
of Jews Flinging Slurs,[92]
Bring
Back the Fairness Doctrine?,[93]
Harvard:
Jews Better Than Muslims,[94]
Followup:
Harvard -- Jews Better Than Muslims,[95]
Open Letter to the Globe Editorial Board,[96] Battle waged in Boston over new mosque,[97] Globe
Covers Academic Best-Seller,[98]
El
"problema" que tiene el Boston Globe con los musulmanes,[99]
Boston
Globe Islam-Bashing: Complain!,[100]
The
Boston Globe's Problem with Muslims,[101]
Falafel
and Better Jewish-Muslim Relations,[102]
Letter
to the Boston Globe: Dishonest American Genocide Discourse,[103]
The
"Sale" of the Boston Herald,[104]
Open
letter to the Boston Globe: A Lawsuit without Merit,[105]
Presidential
Evil Not Presidential Courage,[106]
Time
to interrogate Jacoby,[107]
and Public
letter to the Boston Globe.[108]]
Jewish Philanthropic
Politics in the USA
Philanthropic politics has also been successful for
manipulating non-Jewish politicians and groups especially when it has been applied
to non-Jewish groups like African Americans.
In this particular case, the interplay between Jewish
radicalism, the organized Jewish community and extremist Jabotinskian politics
on issues of civil rights for African Americans has been complex but has
nevertheless prevented the development of significant pro-Palestinian activism
within the American black community and has even provided a means to involve
African American community leaders in ongoing effort of Jewish Neoconservative
Jabotinskians to incinerate the Sudan in an act of anti-genocide philanthropy.
[See 5th
Question: Darfur,[109]
Israel-Incited
"Genocide" in Darfur?,[110]
Followup:
Israel-Incited "Genocide" in Darfur?,[111]
USHMM:
National Thought Control,[112]
Martin
Luther King, Jr. Day Service -- Today,[113]
Profiteering
from humanitarianism,[114] and African
Americans, Jews, and Islamophobia.[115]]
Zionist Use of International
Jewish Philanthropy
Philanthropic politics in the context of the
Dreyfus Affair proved to be the gimmick by which Eastern European Zionist
leaders managed to get access to Western Jewish
money. Professor Michael Stanislawski points out in Zionism
and the Fin de Siècle, Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to
Jabotinsky,[116]
p. 13-14, that Herzl and other contemporaries reinterpreted the Dreyfus Affair
to prove that West and East European Jews faced a common threat of
anti-Semitism only after they became Zionists:
In the face of the seeming dissolution of the
cosmopolitan dream, Herzl began to obsess over the future of the Jews.
Typically, of course, he is said to have come to Zionism as a result of the
Dreyfus Affair, a claim he himself made repeatedly in later years. But in an
important 1993 study, the historian Jacques Kornberg carefully analyzed Herzl's
reportage on the Dreyfus Affair from the beginning of the case to its end and
demonstrated that Herzl's reactions to the first stages of the Affair, well
into 1897, were entirely typical of those of other writers in Die Neue
Freie Presse or other liberal (and often Jewish-owned) newspapers, and
indeed of most Jews in France and else where. It was only after Herzl was a
convinced Zionist, and the case itself was transformed in the late 1890s into a
cause célèbre that he began to interpret it through Zionist lenses.
Nordau also went through exactly the same stages in Dreyfusardism, to the
extent that he, too, would later counterfactually insist that it was the
Dreyfus Affair that made him a Zionist.
Even though the French military
leadership was probably only interested in using anti-Jewish bigotry as a means
to avoid admitting error, early Zionist marketing among Western
Jews employed the Dreyfus Affair to create fear that they would soon
be subject to pogroms and that they could only escape the danger by creating a
Jewish settlement or state in Palestine (or possibly elsewhere -- see Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry[117]).
Linking humanitarianism to
self-interest is an exceptionally effective fund-raising technique and begins
to motivate individuals among the Western and Central Jewish financial elite to
give Judonia substance via
1. increasing funding of Zionist organizations,
2. British Jewish investments in Jewish settlement activities,
and
3. Zionist Jewish political contributions to political parties
to encourage pro-Zionist British foreign policy.
In other words, Judonia’s virtual
state consolidation began when the Zionist intelligentsia uses the Dreyfus
affair to unite themselves as a national bureaucracy with a subset of wealthy
Western Jews as a governing plutocracy and with a (potential) mass following on
the basis of Zionist nationalist politics. In fact, the development of
anti-nationalist and non-nationalist politics among other wealthy Western Jews
willing to fund their own political bureaucracies to serve their own
constituencies facilitated Judonia’s development even if it hindered Zionist
goals in Palestine, for the non- and anti-Zionists came to serve as a loyal
opposition within Judonia and not as outsiders trying to defeat Judonia.
The Balfour Declaration
represented the first major Zionist success. It took the form of a letter
addressed to Lord Rothschild[118]
(Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), who was a leader of the
Cousinhood.
Figure 4 Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild
Then, as fears of rising anti-Jewish feeling resulting from common gentile assumptions about the Jewish nature of the Bolshevism increased among the Cousinhood and among the German American Jewish elite (“Our Crowd”), the Cousinhood took direct charge of Zionist politics in the UK while philanthropy directed toward the Jewish settlement in Palestine became the hook to enmesh wealthy German American non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews in Zionist politics after the British government took charge of Mandatory Palestine.
During the 1930s this philanthropic politics evolved into refugeeism, which sought to aid German, Austrian, and Czech Jewish communities under threat from the German Nazis. (See Baksheesh Diplomacy, Secret Negotiations Between American Jewish Leaders and Arab Officials on the Eve of world War II.[119])
Various Jewish groups have applied refugeeist politics with varying degrees and kinds of legitimacy in order to justify bringing Ethiopian Jewish[xxix] communities to Israel while Neocons initially used the Russian Jewish Refusenik issue as a way of validating their Jewish credentials. (See The Real Origins of Neocons.[120])
Since the Holoexaleipsis (Nakba, Holoexaleipsis,
Holocaust, Holosphage and Holodomor[121])
Jewish philanthropic has served an additional purpose of distract from Zionist
crimes against Palestinians.
Defending Judonia Inside
Legal System
As aggressive anti-Semitic politics develops in nineteenth
Europe, Jewish philanthropic efforts begin to include an equally aggressive
legal component.
Judonia in Wilhelmine
Germany
The Downfall of the
Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany[122]
by R. S. Levy Describes in detail how German Jewish advocacy
organizations like the Zentralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen
Glaubens (Central Association of German citizens of Jewish faith) used the
legal system
- to force perceived enemies into bankruptcy,
- to attack members of the academic community believed
unfriendly,
- to ban books, or
- to force publishers to change offending passages.[xxx]
(See Updating
"The AJC attacks"[123]
or AJC
Attack on Progressive Jews.[124])
Levy argues that anti-Semitic politics was for
all intents and purposes defeated by the 1920s. He is supported by available
demographic statistics and by the behavior of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, German Nazi Party), which went out of its way not to
run as an anti-Semitic political party in 1932.
German Jews founded the Zentralverein (CV) in
1893, and German American Jews to some extent used it as the model for the
American Jewish Committee (AJCommittee), founded in 1906 “to
safeguard and strengthen Jews and Jewish life worldwide by promoting democratic
and pluralistic societies that respect the dignity of all peoples” according to
the AJC
website.[125]
Both organizations were initially anti-Zionist, but they are
early expressions of the materialization of Judonia as are the AJCommittee’s
sister defense organizations, which are the American Jewish Congress
(AJCongress) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Zionistische Vereinigung für
Deutschland[126]
founded 1897 was the original main German Zionist organization.
Judonia as Plaintiff and Defendant within the American Legal System
J.J. Goldberg attempts to contextualize the three official
American Jewish defense organizations within the framework of American Jewish
history in Jewish
Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment[127] on pp. 12-13:
Three main immigrant waves
created American Jewry: Portuguese marranos in the colonial era, German Jews in
the mid-nineteenth century, and Russian Jews in the early twentieth. Each wave
consisted of Jews who wanted to escape the world they knew. They were fleeing
both from the Jewish community and from the Gentile society surrounding it,
Hertzberg wrote. “[T]hese immigrant Jews … felt betrayed by the societies, the
governments, the rabbis, and the rich Jewish leaders who had cast them out, or,
at the very least, had failed to find room for them…. They would not allow the
very people who had betrayed them in Europe to exercise authority in America.”
To be
sure, these immigrants recreated a Jewish community in America. But it was a
Jewish community with a difference. This was a new world, where religion was
disestablished. Churches had no legal hold over believers; likewise, the Jewish
community had no hold over Jews. It was defanged. Over time, Jews developed a
new mythology of an organized American Jewish community led by well-meaning
bumblers.
No
one ever summed up the mythic image of inept Jewish leadership better than the
late author-activist Paul Jacobs. In his 1965 memoir Is Curly Jewish? He
offered an imaginary crisis that captured the layperson’s picture of the three
best-known Jewish agencies: the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL),
American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the American Jewish Congress.
“A fanciful way of
describing the work of these groups,” Jacobs wrote, “is that some guy walks
into the toilet of a ginmill on Third Avenue, New York, and while he’s standing
at the urinal, he notices that someone has written ‘Screw the Jews’ on the
toilet wall.” A quick phone call is made and “an ADL man rushes down to the
bar” to dust the wall for fingerprints. The ADL checks the prints against its
files of 2 million known anti-Semites, then publishes a photo of the wall in
its next bulletin, saying it shows anti-Semitism is on the rise and “everyone
should join B’nai B’rith.” Next to arrive would be the representative of the
American Jewish Committee, who would look around, the announce plans for a
major academic study of “anti-Semitic wall-writing since Pompeii.” AJC would
also publish a booklet proving that a Jew had invented the martini, to be
distributed in bars nationwide. Then the American Jewish Congress would arrive,
thow up a picket line outside the bar, and petition the Supreme Court to bar
the sale of liquor “to anyone making an anti-Semitic remark.”
The passage above contains several
misconceptions but is typical of the effort to make present Jewish “defense”
organizations specifically and Jews in general appear as harmless and
insignificant in order to assuage gentile concerns and fears. Such
self-camouflaging may be an historical practice
- that could have arisen in Commonwealth Poland because
Jews were so economically important and indispensable and
- that may have reappeared today because the behavior of
Jewish defense long ago crossed the boundary into intimidation and abuse
with ADL espionage and with accusations of anti-Semitism against private
individuals like the Quigleys in Colorado.
[See SPYING ON FNB,[128]
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case,[129]
Were the Spies Journalists?,[130]
01-1228 --
Quigley v. Rosenthal -- 04/22/2003,[131]
Defamation row.[132],
[xxxi]]
The public relations catastrophes associated
with the aggressive “defense” operations of these three official Jewish
communal organizations indicates that Judonia is hardly the most competent of
empires and can make severe misjudgments leading to diminishing returns,
disastrous outcomes, or blowback, but Judonia, as a sort of stealth virtual
empire, does not have the sort of competition that the UK faced from other
Great Powers during the nineteenth century, and the hyper-wealthy Jewish
plutocrats lightly directing Judonian bureaucrats have no problem with
abandoning one project or strategy in order to fund another with greater
promise of return.
Sometimes the wealthiest Judonian leaders even
sponsor public contests to find the best “philanthropic” causes, to wit, Charles
Bronfman’s[133] Competition for Jewish Communal Innovation.
(See The
Big Ideas Series: Introducing 13 Proposals for Jewish Communal Innovation [Phase One].[134], [xxxii]),
but most of the time political communal entrepreneurs like Charles Jacobs or
Roz Rothstein approach the mega-donors to Jewish causes with business plans in
order to obtain funding to back new organizations or projects.
As a result, a lot of the nastier Jewish defense
projects involving the court system have moved from the three traditional
defense organizations to Israel Advocacy organizations like the David Project
or StandWithUs while the ADL, AJCommittee, or AJCongress work on inciting
Islamophobia, Arabophobia, or the incineration of Arab and Muslim countries on
the basis of high-minded humanitarian anti-genocide principles.
[See Subjugating
American Muslims to Israel,[135]
Harvard
Supports Incinerating Arab Countries,[136]
Dissident
Veteran for Peace: Against Zionist Censorship,[137] Zionist
attack on Pluto Press,[138] Kovel
Pulls No Punches,[139]
and Zionism,
Penisism, and Joseph Massad.[140]]
The discovery evidence described in Subjugating
American Muslims to Israel[141]
was particularly striking for it indicated
- that the David Project from the start led the Boston
conspiracy against rights to marginalize American Muslim citizens via
scare-mongering against the Roxbury Mosque and
- that later the David Project made use of the New
England Israeli consulate as a subcontractor or supplier of resources and
personnel.
Likewise, when American Jews try to use the American legal
system for political harassment of the Palestinian resistance, the plaintiffs
appear to receive little support from the Israeli government while funding for
the lawsuits appears to come almost entirely from non-Israeli or former Israeli
Jewish “philanthropists.”
[See Palestinian
Authority's US assets are frozen - The Boston Globe,[142]
Sderot sues
Palestinian Authority for millions in rocket damages ...,[143]
BBC
NEWS | Americas | Palestinian assets in US frozen,[144]
ISRAEL:
ISRAELI FAMILY FILES LAWSUIT ON EU FOR PALESTINIAN ATTACK,[145]
State
Dept. considers caving to pressure in terror lawsuit,[146]
and NJ man gets
green light to pursue terror lawsuit | New Jersey ....[147]]
Judonia in the US Federal and State Judiciary
The US legal system is particularly friendly to anti-Muslim,
anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian legal action because of the disproportionate
role that Jews play in the US judiciary.
Brandeis and Frankfurter argued that Zionism would make American
Jews (particularly those of Eastern European origin) better citizens by
resolving the “Jewish Question,” and in the 50s the establishment of the State
of Israel may have encouraged the final abandonment of Yiddish identity with
the result that American Jews seeking authenticity began to find it only in
Israel while a whole plethora of marketing and publicity campaigns through
schools, universities and the mass media seems to have encouraged a majority of
American Jews to identify more strongly with the State of Israel than with
their fellow non-Jewish American citizens.
An American Jew serving in the US regulatory and legal system or
the IRS probably receives a continuous stream of hardcopy and email alerts
every month about the threat that Arabs and Muslims and especially Arab and
Muslim American citizens represents to the USA and to Jews.[xxxiii]
International Hillel Society fundraising letters routinely libel Arab and
Muslims Americans as terrorists or terrorism-supporters.
This constant din
must be having an effect because discussing USA legal discrimination in terms
of separate systems for Blacks and Whites is no longer adequate. Today American
Jews, American non-Muslim non-Arab non-Jews, and American Muslims or Arabs are
subject to very different justice systems with regard to the enforcement of
501(C) (3) IRS regulations, anti-terror laws, FEC rules, SEC rules, and OSI
law, and the situation is particularly egregious with regard to anti-terrorism
laws, for Zionists have been terrorizing the native population of Palestine for
over a century. Yet, no US government official ever suggests enforcing the US
legal code against Israeli Zionists or their supporters.
[See Jewish
Dominance Ohio, Subversion KSG,[148]
Set
Up for Another Holocaust,[149]
Zajanckauskas,
Henss, Selective Prosecution and Equal Protection,[150]
Followup:
Natalie Portman's Genocidal Racism ...,[151]
The Persecution of
Sami Al-Arian,[152]
Video
Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation,[153]
Public
letter to the Boston Globe,[154]
AIPAC Traitor Trial Begins Soon,[155] and Timeline of Zionist
Crimes.[156]]
As the primary loyalties of an ever increasing number of US government officials in the judiciary, the State Department, the Pentagon and elsewhere prove to lie with Judonia or the State of Israel, the current situation in the USA is rather reminiscent of the British practice of “lending” colonial official to serve in the Indian princely-states or the Emirate of Transjordan in order to make sure that their nominally independent governments served British interests properly.
Defending Judonia Outside
the Legal System
Because working strictly via the legal system is in general
too limited for the needs of empire, Judonia also uses forms of grass roots
mobilization and conspiratorial politics.
Early indoctrination in communal cohesiveness and control
of deviant thought may have made it possible for the elite members of the
Jewish community to mobilize a conspiracy against the interests of the majority
of the Jews of Lemberg in Austrian Galicia to murder Reform Rabbi Abraham Kohn
as Michael Stanislawski describes in A
Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History.[157]
Such mobilization (generally but not always without murder) by (often
self-defined) elite groups among Jews is fairly common in the nineteenth
century even before nascent Judonia to mobilize Central and Eastern European Jews
via extremist organic nationalist ideology associated with the political
Zionism of Theodor Herzl and his colleagues.
The
Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881[158]
by Steven J. Zipperstein p. 115, provides some interesting
information difficult to find in English about pre-Zionist conspiratorial
Jewish behavior in Belarus (see The
Origins of the Zionist Lobby[159]):
The faith of Russian Jewish intellectuals in
the prospect of improvement in the political and civic standing of the Jews had
already been challenged in the first part of Alexander II's reign, when in 1863
Polish rebellion led to increased hostility toward all non-Russian
nationalities. To the surprise of his Jewish admirers, even the eminent liberal
journalist, M. N. Katkov now began to air chauvinist sentiments. Suspicions of
the patriotism of Russia's Jews grew common in this tense atmosphere.
Therefore, when in 1868 the Christian convert Jacob Brafman charged that Jews
constituted a distinct state within a state, he struck a particularly sensitive
nerve in Jews and non-Jews alike.
Basing his observations on the minutes of the Kehillah
of Minsk, Brafman argued that the Kehillot, though officially disbanded by the
Russian authorities in 1844, still functioned as an invisible Jewish
government. This invisible yet pervasive body affiliated with the ORPME [The
Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among Jews, Russian acronym] based
in St. Petersburg, the English Brotherhood for the Assistance of Jewish
Emigrants, and the Alliance Israelite Universelle -- collected taxes, imposed
its own court system, and through seemingly innocuous fraternal organizations,
made its powerful will known in the everyday lives of Jews. Even rules about
clothing and food were determined by the ubiquitous and omnipotent organization.
Brafman argued that Jewish isolationism arose from the
"Talmudic municipal republic," or the Kehillah, rather than
from the teachings of the Talmud, as Russian antisemites had previously
assumed. Brafman thereby redirected Russian concerns
about the integration of the Jews from the religious to the political sphere.
The book's impact was profound. Within two years of its publication, the
governor-general of Kiev warned in his annual report to St. Petersburg that the
"cause of every last Jew is also the cause of the worldwide Jewish Kahal
... that powerful yet elusive association."
Gessen, Istoriia, 2:200-201; John D. Klier,
"Iakov Brafman's Book of the Kahal and Its Enemies," paper
presented at the Midwest Slavic Conference, May 4, 1980; Hans Rogger, "Government,
Jews, Peasants," p. 17.
While the official disbanding makes it hard to know for
sure, Stanislawski’s research indicates that despite Brafman’s claims the
traditional communal mechanisms of control of social deviance were considerably
weakened by the 1860s even if they did persist in secret. Over the next 100
years the power of such “grass roots” local organization probably waxed and
waned in power according to circumstances.
American (and
Russian) Jewish communities to this day will put a tremendous amount of energy
into suppressing critical views of Zionism and often organize through entities
within the Jewish Federation, which is at least partially a descendant of the
traditional Kahal.
[See Lobby
activities: It's just a fr*ggin' novel!,[160]
Seva Brodsky of Somerville comments on Steve
Grossman's letter,[161]
Ghada
Karmi's Boston College Talk,[162] and The Battle for Divestment
from Israeli Securities in Somerville ....[163]]
Even Jewish political activism, organizing and fundraising
unassociated with Israel or Zionism has become a tool for Judonia. Because
“progressive” Jews have become indispensable for left of center politics in the
USA,[xxxiv]
AIPAC and other Israel advocacy and mainstream groups within the organized
Jewish community (really Judonia) paralyzed anti-War activism by tainting
anti-war efforts with anti-Semitism or anti-Israelism.
[See Confronting War and
Discussing Peace on Campus,[164],
[xxxv]
The Banning of Rabbi
Lerner,[165] Anti-War:
1960s versus 2000s[166]
and How Anti-Iraq-War
Jews Licensed Neoconservatism.[167]]
Jack Nelson
proposes in Terror
in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews[168]
that a conspiracy between the leaders of the Meridian Mississippi Jewish
community and representatives of ADL to manipulate the FBI in committing
extra-judicial murder. He writes on p.
264:
Maria
Knowles, the secretary who typed up Scarbrough’s reports of meeting with the
informants and worried that she had participated in a murder plot, lives in
Meridian, where she serves as secretary of the Seventh-Day Adventist church and
as a teachers’ assistant at the church’s school.
He adds on p. 265:
Jim Ingram
retired from the FBI at age fifty in 1982 and succeeded Moore at the Deposit
Guaranty National Bank. He lives in Jackson. In 1992 he was appointed
Mississippi’s commissioner of public safety, the state’s top law enforcement
post.
Ingram disagrees with his close friend Moore about what
happened at Meridian. “It was an ambush, that’s what they meant to do,” Ingram
told me. “No question about that. They meant to kill them out there that
night.”
The techniques that the ADL learned in manipulating the US
government into violating the law may have later proved useful in manipulating
US government officials into facilitating conspiracy against the rights of Arab
and Muslim Americans. Agents of Judonia within the US government almost
certainly have aided this ongoing project.
Pre-Zionist Gate Keeping and
Facilitation
Jewish philanthropic, defense and other
political or public activities have benefited since the early nineteenth
century from extensive media gate keeping and facilitation in book publishing,
the newspaper industry, entertainment and academics.
Publishing, Newspapers, and Entertainment
Because Jews then as now constituted a
disproportionate component of the book buying public with specialized tastes,
Jewish firms represented the major part of the industry. As Jews developed a
taste for non-Jewish literature and as Jewish publisher branched out from
religious literature, Jewish publishers quickly became the major content
providers of nineteenth century Central and Eastern Europe and consequently
became major players in the related news and entertainment industries.
As a result certain Jewish themes probably received
disproportionate exposure in the media, but for most Europeans Jews were rather
exotic and such subjects did fairly well with the general public. (See Opera,
Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of
Halévy's La Juive.[169])
There was a
good deal of criticism of distortion in news coverage as well as discrimination
and favoritism in selecting writers, artists and performers, who were to
succeed, but there was a good deal more heterogeneity in opinion and politics
among the Jewish proprietors and investors in content-production before Judonia
became powerful enough to enforce the discipline that exists today in the
modern American media.
Academia
Pre-Zionist gate keeping and facilitation in academia is a
special case.
Higher levels of education and involvement in publishing, journalism, and entertainment predisposed large numbers of European Jews to seek academic employment, but there were such high barriers against admission to the professorate that Jewish academics could not practice the same sorts of gate keeping and facilitation:
- that
Jewish publishers, newspaper owners and investors made common in other
professions and
- that
Jewish academics and affiliated polemicists practice throughout schools
and colleges today.
[See The
Petition: Israel, Palestine, and a Tenure Battle at Barnard,[170]
<CORRECTION>
Said, Abowd, Kovel, Elahi Attacked,[171]
WSU:
Thought Control in Michigan,[172]
Fight
Zionist Thought Control,[173]
Zionism,
Penisism, and Joseph Massad,[174]
Jacob Lassner and Nadia Abu el Haj,[175]
Conspiracy
Against Rights in NYC,[176]
Boycotts
and Priniples of Academia,[177]
and Please
sign petition to support Nadia Abu El Haj.[178]]
When pre-Zionists Jewish academics sought to control
university discourse perceived as Judeophobic, they relied on the Zentralverein
and harassment by non-academic Jewish defense organizations.
Jewish professors and scholars responded to challenges to
traditional Jewish self-understanding like Higher Textual Criticism or to the
controversial proposals of Karaite scholar Abraham Firkovich with topic
filtering or by creating the orthodoxies that have today become the basis for
intellectual intimidation. At the same time wealthy Jewish philanthropists
began to found new Jewish institutions to host the new generation
Jewishly-correct researchers and academicians.
Figure 5 Karaite Scholar Abraham
ben Shmuel Firkovich
Topic Filtering
Anthony Grafton's article "In Bernays, Scaliger, and Others," which is found in