Tag Archives: tacitus

Race and Jews – Part 6

cicero_tacitus_strabo_pierce

The jews have infiltrated, manipulated, exploited and outlived every nation, empire and civilization in Europe and the Middle East for millennia. The jewish problem is an old problem. The racial character and nature of the jews is not something Europeans only first noticed in the 15th century with the Purity of Blood Statutes in Spain. We’ve previously addressed what contemporary twits have to say. This time we’ll review some observations of jewish racial character – the personality traits characteristic of the collective – which date back more than two thousands years into the past.

Cicero, a Roman statesman during the 1st century BC, remarked:

The Jews belong to a dark and repulsive force. One knows how numerous this clique is, how they stick together and what power they exercise through their unions. They are a nation of rascals and deceivers.

Tacitus was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire during the 1st century AD. In The Works of Tacitus, Volume 4, published in 1752, Thomas Gordon wrote:

Concerning the jews, he followed the tradition and accounts current amongst the Romans. He tells you what different relations there were, and neither adds any thing, nor misrepresents things maliciously. It was an obscure State; generally enslaved by some greater power; to the Assyrians, Egyptians, Grecians and then to the Romans, and condemned by all, as much as they themselves hated all. They had not common mercy or charity toward the Gentiles and uncircumcised; and being persuaded that the Almighty loved only themselves, they fancied that he abhorred, and therefore they abhorred, the whole human race besides : So that it was said by Tacitus too truly, “adversus omnes alios hostile odium.”

This is a well known phrase amongst scholars, and has appeared in many variations since. What Tacitus was saying was, “they hate and are hostile to all others”.

Notices of the Jews by the Classic Writers of Antiquity, published in 1870, John Gill notes that Tacitus had described the laws of the jews as “hostile to men, and calculated to inspire the jew with hatred and opposition to the rest of mankind”.

Strabo, a Greek geographer during the 1st century BC was another ancient observer who noticed the jews. I found Strabo’s wisdom embedded in a broader account provided by William Pierce in 1998, How It Fits Together:

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

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

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

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

I wish that our people had the same degree of racial consciousness the Jews do. The Jews understand the power of togetherness. Most of our people don’t. And this is largely the reason why we’re in the mess we’re in today.

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

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

With the sort of attitude and behavior the Jews had they were bound to be hated by everyone — and they reciprocated. The Jews regarded the hatred they had for their hosts as justified, just as they considered deceiving and exploiting their hosts to be justified; but their hosts’ hatred of the Jews they regarded as “bigotry” and “persecution.” Their history is a chronicle of one “persecution” after another, right down to modern times. During the Middle Ages they were kicked en masse out of every country in Europe, repeatedly. They pretend today that this supposed “persecution” was the result of religious bigotry on the part of their hosts, but in fact it was simply self-defense on the part of their hosts, the same sort of reaction to their presence that the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and everyone else in pre-Christian times had had. And it was this barrier of hatred between the Jews and the rest of the world which made it possible for them to maintain their identity and their sense of racial self-consciousness.

We return again to Eric Goldstein’s book, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. We left off last time in CHAPTER 4: “WHAT ARE WE?”: JEWISHNESS BETWEEN RACE AND RELIGION, page 110. Goldstein describes the private communications between jewish leaders in America. In 1909 these leaders feared that race scientists were close to declaring the jews a non-White race, and so they conspired to:

enlist the help of an anthropologist in order to get “a very strongly worded declaration as to the practical identity of the white race,” one that would presumably leave no doubt as to the whiteness of Jews.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Columbia University Processor Franz Boas was the best known anthropologist of Jewish origin in the United States. Boas shared the concern of the Jewish communal elite about racial nativism, but his preference to identify as a German American rather than as a Jew prevented him from engaging too directly in Jewish defense efforts during these years. Instead, Boas worked to discredit the centrality of race in evaluating human capabilities, arguing that differences between groups–including those between blacks and whites–were heavily influenced by environmental factors. Because these ideas contradicted the overwhelming consensus about the importance of racial differences in the United States, however, they offered little to Jewish leaders hoping to win acceptance for their group in white America. As a scholar who was well integrated into the non-Jewish world, Boas could freely advance such oppositional theories. But for Jews struggling to overcome their uncertain racial status, it was much harder to build their case for inclusion on ideas that undermined the basic assumptions of the larger society. To soothe white Americans’ doubts about the “Jewish race,” they would have to affirm the basic distinction between black and white.

The scientist who took up this challenge was Maurice Fishberg, one of the leading scholars of Jewish physical anthropology at the turn of the century, and the only American to devote himself significantly to such research.

I’ve examined Franz Boas in some detail previously. What Boas and his disciples did was adopt the mantle and authority as objective scientists while replacing research with outright fraud and just-so stories about culture.

Fishberg laid out his line of argument in a book titled, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment, published in 1911. The jews did not see it as good for the jews. Page 114:

In denying any far-reaching racial distinctiveness and identifying Jews with other American whites, Fishberg had provided a scientific basis for the claims of Jewish leaders. Unlike other Jewish spokesmen, however, he pursued his conclusions with a rigid scientific consistency that was unable to make room for any lingering attachment to the notion of a Jewish race. In fact, because he had made the argument for the temporary, artificial nature of Jewish difference so rigorously, he discounted not only the Jewish racial distinctiveness but almost every form of Jewish particularity.

By taking the denial of Jewish racial difference to its logical conclusion, Fishberg failed at satisfying the contradictory needs of American Jews, most of whom ultimately wanted to be accepted in white America without giving up their own distinctive racial identity. This failure was apparent in the almost universal condemnation the book received in Jewish circles.

Fishberg argued that the jews were not a “race, creed or nation” but simply a “social phenomenon”. Page 115:

Horace Wolf, a Reform rabbi in Chicago, scoffed at Fishberg’s argument that the term “Jewish race” was a scientific misnomer. “What do we care that the laboratory masters have dubbed us in error,” he asked, “so long as our lives reflect our implicit belief in the continued existence of the Jewish people?”

If Jews found that race was an increasing liability and threatened to lump them with nonwhites, they also found themselves unable to break the emotional commitment they had to a racial self-understanding. The result was a constant stuggle with these two powerful impulses for inclusion and distinctiveness, one that led many acculturated Jews to assert their status as a religious group in public while privately clinging to a much broader racial understanding of Jewishness. In 1910, addressing the question “What Are We?” for a Jewish reading audience, historian Max Margolis summed up the collective frustration of American Jews by concluding that the Jews were “a great anomaly which cannot be classified according to accepted rules of definition.” In finding satisfactory terms for Jewish self-definition, complained another Jewish writer the same year, “we succeed to about the same extent as the man who sets out to square the circle or to prove that twice two are five.”

These “two powerful impulses for inclusion and distinctiveness” are exactly what parasitism needs to succeed. The parasite must infiltrate, manipulate and exploit its host, while being mindful enough not to attack or destroy itself.

The jews see themselves as a racially related group. They always have and always will. The euphemism they use for race today is “peoplehood”.

When the reality of race was something everyone acknowledged the jews openly talked about themselves in those terms. But as scientists began to understand the deep, biological nature of race, thus threatening to expose the jews, the jews came up with a two-pronged plan to meet the challenge. Both prongs involved co-opting race science (infiltrating and manipulating it) to make their seemingly contradictory case for inclusion and distinctiveness.

In the end the jews settled on Boas’ path – hijacking and derailing race science – first to minimize the significance of race, and eventually to banish any understanding of race as rooted, relatively immutably, in biology.