30th September

Insurrection needs on object. The masses will rise against tyrannical and unbearable conditions, but concrete revolution requires thinking about who the oppressor is.

Social revolutions in the 19th century had given the masses new ways to think. While romanticism gave nurture to an individualistic forest of sensations, the masses could convert those rare moment alone to something to be talked about. Sacrifice the emotion and gain a value system. Something that “we” are, something to protect against those, whose very language divulge their lack of roots.

A hypothesis like that may explain prejudice but not violence, not Holocaust.

1st October

What is a Jew? One can follow the descriptions of the antisemites:

He is not necessarily rich. Poor Jews are of the same ilk and desire the same thing.

He is ready to deal in economic speculation to gain control over his life.

He aspires to increase his wealth through speculation, not through innovation of productivity.

Let me paraphrase: When I talk with my accountant about the optimal way to reorganise my loan, I am a Jew. When you talk with colleagues about when to purchase and sell a car to minimise loss through depreciation, you are a Jew. When I consider means to gain economic security through insurance and I vote in favour of political change towards that end, I am a Jew.

Following that logic, the entire middle-class today are Jews. We would have been gassed. Why? Because a few of us would elevate our expertise in economical thinking to the international sphere thus triggering the ultimate panic reaction amongst the oligarchy of industrial power.

2nd October

Theodor Herzl is a strange invention. As I read A Jewish State, I gain an insight into a devotedly pragmatic resolve to make the project of inventing a Jewish state a success.

Sometimes I look at his proposed methods and think to myself “that can’t be kosher”. But writing in 1896, he had a very good idea of the future of Jews in various countries.

Except for the accusation of being unfit for farm work and manual labour, which Herzl rejects outright, he is very forthcoming about trade being in the character of Jews.

In some ways, I would say he is more European than Jewish. He seems to adopt several attitudes that are oddly out of place.

Example:

Jewish, Christians and “the barbaric people”

Of importance is that the following comes in a context where he explains why a Jewish state would flip the sign on European attitude towards Jews. He is writing to fellow Jews, and he works under the assumption that antisemitism is a given. After all, the document is not written for us.

THEODOR HERZL - A JEWISH STATE, p.12 - PALESTINE OR ARGENTINA?

Supposing His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return pledge ourselves to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.

As a prediction though, it comes across as a smash hit. America fully embraces Israel as their partner in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, it bears witness to a suspicion that Herzl is more aligned with the contemporary ideas of fellow countrymen than anything that would necessitate the label “Jewish” mentality. Or to put in another way, the Zionist project is akin to all other nation building projects and in no way particular to Jews. Only the circumstances were particular.

3rd October

There are some issues that are mere flip-sides of the same coin. One party says “this is who we are”, the other says “yes, that is what you are”. One defensive, one accusing. Same ground truth.

I will get to several of these cases soon. To me, it suggests something worth studying: The mixture of emotional antagonism towards a certain group and ad hoc rationalisations based on ideas that can lend credibility to theories.

4th October

Everybody today accuses everybody else of being a nazi. It is a very flexible term, being put to handy use in a plethora of circumstances. Very useful.

I need to tighten the concept down a bit more than that.

It is striking that TIJ in the opening lines complains about accusations of being antisemitic for merely mentioning the theory of Jews in international control.

THE INTERNATIONAL JEW p. 6 - PREFACE

But the motive of prejudice or any form of antagonism is hardly strong enough to support such an investigation as this [!].

[…]

The International Jew and his satellites, as the conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization, are not spared, nor is that unthinking mass which defends anything that a Jew does, simply because it has been taught to believe that what Jewish leaders do is Jewish.

And later

THE INTERNATIONAL JEW p. 9 - CH1. THE JEW IN CHARACTER AND BUSINESS

In simple words, the question of the Jews has come to the fore, but like other questions which lend themselves to prejudice, efforts will be made to hush it up as impolitic for open discussion. If, however, experience has taught us anything it is that questions thus suppressed will sooner or later break out in undesirable and unprofitable forms.

So even in 1920 one could become unpopular by accusing Jews.

At the very least it means that antisemitism appears not to be mainstream. If you want to accuse Jews for something, you’d better be prepared to answer questions.

Worth emphasising, because the gap that must be closed is the one between Hitlers massive political support and the antisemitism that was central to several political movements, but may have been less popular amongst the masses.

TIJ - Ch. 1 - The Jew In Character And Business

● Jews somehow provoke antisemitism everywhere. ● Coupling of Jewish culture with their rise in controlling capital. ● Jubilee & Law of the Stranger - Weak by materialist thinking rather than strong through spiritual thinking.

The story TIJ brews together feels less than watertight. The moral of the back history is that the Jew is of a weak character. How so? The line of reasoning is somewhat unclear:

• Initially in biblical times the recipe worked. Thanks to the Jubilee every 50th year, they built a competitive environment but avoided oligarchical amassment of fortunes.
• The purpose of Israel is moral enlightenment of the world [sic]. But being more interested in being businessmen, they failed to live of to the [suspiciously Christian] goal. They saw the value of slaves, and being a tribe of warriors, enslaving the Canaanites.
• When the Diaspora began, the Jews retained the “Law of the Stranger” allowing them to function as banks towards the Gentiles and turning a profit. In this phase, they are still “a country”, their internal coherence is great. They are basically a nation without a land. The usury law drove them into business.
• They grand program, God’s plan, is still to return to Palestine and erect a moral centre of the world [written in 1920].

Jews are well aware that they are forced to work in business being driven out or barred from many trades. This is one case of how the facts can easily be shared between a prejudicial group and the one group holding those prejudices. The two just don’t mean the same thing.

THEODOR HERZL - A JEWISH STATE, p.8 - THE JEWISH QUESTION

We have doubtless attained preeminence in finance, because medieval conditions drove us to it. The same process is now being repeated. Modern conditions force us again into finance, now the stock-exchange, by keeping us out of all other branches of industry. Being on the stock-exchange, we are therefore again considered contemptible. At the same time we continue to produce an abundance of mediocre intellects which finds no outlet, and this endangers our social position as much as does our increasing wealth. Educated Jews without means are now fast becoming Socialists. Hence we are certain to suffer very severely in the struggle between classes, because we stand in the most exposed position in the camps of both Socialists and capitalists.

The counter-answer as given by Herzl is that you don’t have to be Jewish to be acceptably good at finance. You just have to be barred from all other trades.

TIJ starts off in a not unforeseen manner by describing how the Jew gives rise to antisemitism wherever he appears. It is one of those reversal of argument that I guess we all are capable of, but with its utter irrationality flies in the face. Like saying we don’t hit people, it is them who walk into our fists.

Civilised people are prone to panic attacks. We all are. Bank runs are textbook behaviour.

Stop and give thought to why a successful businessman like Henry Ford would even waste a second on thoughts such as “circumstantial evidence” which really means he has no idea what came first, Jews or antisemites. A successful and busy man like Ford?

One answer is that the very daily struggles he goes through is permeated with a conflict against a different business culture. Something must have caused friction regularly. Perhaps struggles with banks, perhaps he daily witnessed innovative businesses being suffocated by unrelenting instalments on mortgages.

TIJ is setting the stage quickly. The order of cause and effect notwithstanding, at least we see what the talk is about:

Finance is international, speculative, meaning it is the cause of poverty among the poor, and the culprits are those who control the institutions of finance. Suspiciously, capitalism does not entail Henry Ford.

Unpacking the idea is easy:

• Finance cheats in the great game of life: Competition. Instead of letting nature take its course on the free market, an ethnical brotherhood of super-capitalists band together and orchestrate as they see fit.
• Unions are superfluous. The real problem was Jews driving salaries down and consumer expenses up.
• Since Marxism is based on a false conception, its purpose cannot be to improve worker’s conditions. As is well known, most company owners share goals with the proletariat.
• Fix the Jewish Problem first, and the rest is easy.

His notion is that the Jews in biblical times were protected from succumbing to baser drives by the Jubilee and the law of the stranger.

In the days of Eden

With the bible in hand, they use the Old Testament to argue that the Jew is flawed in character since the diaspora began. However, even in the days of Israel it started going bad.

The story evolves like this:

TIJ expresses some odd form of modern industrialist social awareness. The old Israel was home to a competition-driven laissez-faire economy with monetary systems supporting innovation through zero-interest loans.

If one gets the feeling of the authors back-projecting Adam Smith on biblical times, it is warranted.

Parenthetically, one should not forget that Adam Smith actually had the interests of the worker in mind. Liberalism was once a social movement with the intention of improving conditions for the average man. Conservatism was the formalisation of the philosophy of the ruling classes. Its intention was the preservation of the favourable conditions of the average man.

On religion

TIJ’s religious views are odd at best. Frankly, the topic seems of no interest to the authors. Likely they simply plucked a bit from the bible and the little they remember from Sunday sermons when they said:

We have the odd situation where Jews infringe on Christians when they appropriate, as it were, the Old Testament to form their own nationalist narrative.

If you want a conversation about theology, don’t talk with industrialists who define power as horsepower.

Original sin

What the Israelites did not know is what Dearborn Independent could have told them: Refrain from taking slaves. Focus on development of industry and pureness of mentality.

I find these waters difficult to navigate. The American (and German) industrialists are exactly what then in comparison to these Jews who seemingly lost their spiritual leadership?

Is the accusation levelled against Jews that their realm is material (like the industrialists’) or that their main interest is not material (being in the financial world)?

Perhaps a remnant of the “iron will” mentality shows up here. The admiration for the strong man who out of sheer personal strength builds a country (materially) from nothing. I believe the nazi party was also infatuated with that dream. It may ring like a worker’s dream, but the will-to-power overtones betray it.

This is the frail weakness of ideas like “materialism” versus “idealism”. Those elastic terms designates nothing that remains stable across contexts.

Herzl oddly enough reveals no need to enslave the surrounding people but to find a place where they can be left alone.

What happened in biblical times may have precious little to do with neither the modern capitalist or the modern Jew.

Coming from “manifest destiny”, slave-trading America the Dearborn’s articles can’t help sounding involuntarily bizarre.

There also seem to be blurred boundaries between whether they discuss the Jew’s own myths or they discuss shared understandings, that is our myths. Why is the Jew condemned to be discriminated against? Because of the origin story in the bible. Is that their conception or ours?

Business savviness

For all TIJ’s back projecting of their ideas of Jews, the core belief is still that the Jews excel in business. They are crafty at erecting them and driving them.

Let us ignore the projected rationalisation from biblical times for a while. Dearborn Independent perhaps should consider whether the bible is a credible source for historical data.

I can of course find none of these claims confirmed anywhere. The Song dynasty in China seems to have the oldest use of paper bills. The promissory note seems have a forerunner in the Code of Hammurabi. The Dutch East India Company comes up as the first use of a bearer instrument.

Compare with Herzl:

THEODOR HERZL - A JEWISH STATE, p.9-10 - CAUSES OF ANTI-SEMITISM?

Nothing effectual can really be done to our injury. In old days our jewels were seized. How is our movable property to be got hold of now? It is comprised in printed papers which are scattered over the world, locked up maybe in the coffers of Christians. It is of course possible to get at shares and debentures in railways, banks and industrial concerns of all descriptions, by taxation, and where the progressive income-tax is in force, all our realized property can eventually be laid hold of.

This time the same mentality has a human face.

There is no end to their bad character. When they were looted, they used their payable to bearer instruments to quickly become rich again.

How sinful!

Wouldn’t the reader of these pages in TIJ think to himself that he was doing exactly the same thing? In 1920 most American readers were using money bills, checks, taking loans etc.

Why “accuse” the Jews of inventing the stock exchange when large swaths of Americans were buying stocks themselves?

Perhaps this is where I need to stop and give pause. Maybe I miss the greater point here: The Jew is accused of doing something many Americans would have no qualms about themselves, but the key is: The Jew ought to have been aloof, given his spiritually higher position. Perhaps the whole point is that the Jews to us were once a priesthood but they betrayed that calling.

Cannot confirm. Early stock exchanges were described by a Jew, Joseph de la Vega, but not necessarily invented by one.

I haven’t investigated further. It may be correct, but as Herzl would say, completely in line with the fact that Jews had garnered proficiency in the only trade they were allowed to do. It is a bit like complaining that black slaves in the rural South were particularly good at picking cotton which was unfair advantage. Someone ought to solve the Black Cotton-picker problem.

Nevertheless, unless the Dearborn Independent is lying, there is good reason to think they are in good faith.

At least Theodor Herzl expresses awareness of their past history in finance (the quote from page 8).

The moving part in the picture is of course if there is anything in particular about Jews that make them excel. Imagine another ethnically group living as a diaspora, barred from taking up any trade controlled by a guild. Wouldn’t they end up excelling at what was left?

Work

TIJ really latches on to this mental image of a tightly knit Jewish society who show aversion for hard labour and help each other into business. Compare with Herzl.

Herzl’s entire plan is based on the unpaid work of especially Russian and Romanian Jews coming to Palestine first, living under poor conditions and building housing for the future arrivals.

5th October

A lot of the material in TIJ seems like free fancy.

But a lot of it mirrors Herzl’s own descriptions, except of course that the whole human aspect has simply been removed.

Could that be the real harmful part? The strange mental construction called “race”, endowed with traits that collectively are harmful to their surroundings?

Herzl’s forced necessity becomes Ford’s compulsory behaviour?

A simple refusal to know them on a personal basis?

No, I still don’t think it suffices.

PARADISE LOST