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Ethnocentrism and the Semitic Mind
The following
is Chapter 4 in my book "Shattering the Myth of Racism - Volume II" available on
my web site in Microsoft Word format for those who prefer to read a hard
copy. Matt Nuenke, February 2003.
"ETHNOCENTRISM: the feeling that one's group has
a mode of living, values, and patterns of adaptation that are superior to those
of other groups. It is coupled with a generalized contempt for members of other
groups. Ethnocentrism may manifest itself in attitudes of superiority or
sometimes hostility. Violence, discrimination, proselytizing, and verbal
aggressiveness are other means whereby ethnocentrism may be expressed." (The
Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.)
The above definition of
ethnocentrism is as good as any, but one should keep in mind that the concept
itself is highly problematic - few have attempted to link "ethnocentrism" with
actual "behavioral traits." In addition, racism has been used interchangeably
with ethnocentrism. For that reason, I will mix the two terms and treat them as
a singular construct, similar to a behavioral trait such as "extroversion." That
is, I will assume that racism/ethnocentrism are both genetically based and
culturally influenced.
To explore the topic of racism and the Semitic
mind, I will be using primarily Kevin MacDonald's 1994 book, A People That
Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy. This book and
his second book of the trilogy published in 1998, Separation and its
Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, are both
available now at http://www.questia.com//.
I highly recommend this new site with its massive number of on-line books and
journals for about $15 per month. It is designed to help students write term- or
research-papers, as well as providing an encyclopedic wealth of information or
just a cheap way of reading books.
Tom Spears of the Ottawa Sun
(12/21/2002) reports that researchers have found six distinct groups of sperm
whales that speak to each other in different dialects. When these groups of
sperm whales come in contact with each other, they will speak to other groups in
their own dialect, but they do not interbreed. Their distinct dialects keep them
genetically isolated. Could this be some strange form of whale racism?
In
his 2002 book, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of
Society, David Sloan Wilson states that the central thesis of his book is
that, "Around the world and across history, religions have functioned as mighty
engines of collective action for the production of benefits that all people
want." An evolutionist like MacDonald, Wilson recognizes that evolutionary
explanations of human behavior are powerful, robust, and falsifiable (what is
lacking in most social science or religious studies).
In Darwin's
Cathedral, he looks at Judaism along with several other religious examples,
to show that religions that serve the needs of the group can be sustained over
long periods. Judaism has the added uniqueness of a religion with a unique
identity, maintained over thousands of years, and the history has been well
documented. Wilson notes that, "The Ten Commandments are the tip of an iceberg
of commandments that, at least in their intent, regulate the behavior of group
members in minute detail....Two facts stand out about what the People of Israel,
as depicted in the Hebrew Bible, were instructed to do by their religion. First,
they were instructed to be fruitful and multiply. Their religion told them to be
biologically successful. Perhaps cultural evolution strays from biological
evolution in other cases, but not in this case. Second, the People of Israel
were provided with two sets of instructions, one for conduct among themselves
and another for conduct toward members of other groups. That is the basic
concept of the covenant between God and Abraham. Toward each other, the People
of Israel were expected to practice the charity and collective action that we
typically associate with Judaeo-Christian morality...."
This theme is
apparent to any theological scholar: the Old Testament (the Jewish
Tanakh) is a racist screed with the purpose of setting the Jewish race
apart from its neighbors. It preaches that the Jewish god is theirs alone, not
to be shared with anyone else; it preaches that the Jewish race is superior to
all other groups; it preaches that God will reward the Jewish race with earthly
riches if the Jews abide by the collectivist laws; and that eventually the
Jewish race will reign supreme over all other races - God willing of course. It
is an earthly religion that preaches racial separatism and racial
supremacy.
Rush Limbaugh, the syndicated radio talk show host, likes to
talk about the Judeo-Christian culture in the United States, especially since
the "War on Terrorism" has become his focus. However, isn't the Christian God
closer to Islam than Judaism? Both Islam and Christianity worship the same
universalist God, a God that believes in proselytizing, brotherly love, and
racial equality. As a eugenicist of course, I prefer the Jewish God that
preaches, "be fruitful and multiply." Therefore, my critique of racial attitudes
has little to do with morals or what is right, but tries to examine how it came
about that Europeans have been accused of racism while all people of color -
including Jews - have been assumed to be innocent. This is what I seek to
explain.
In Deuteronomy 20:10-18, the Jews' genocidal God instructs this
warrior race (at that time): "When you draw near to a town to fight against it,
offer it terms of peace. If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to
you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not
submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it;
and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males
to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children,
livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the
spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you. Thus you shall
treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not the towns of the
nations here. But as for the towns of these peoples that the LORD your God is
giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain
alive. You shall annihilate them - the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites
and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites - just as the LORD your God
has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things
that they do for their Gods, and you thus sin against the Loan your
God."
Wilson writes, "There is a widespread tendency to regard in-group
morality as hypocritical, leading to a form of moral outrage that becomes
especially intense when applied to Judaism. After all, isn't it the ultimate in
hypocrisy for a religion to simultaneously preach the Golden Rule and instruct
its members to commit genocide? This double standard is indeed hypocritical from
a perspective that envisions all people within the same moral circle. I am being
sincere when I say that this perspective is laudable, important to work toward
in the future, and possible at least in principle to implement. However, it
provides a poor theoretical foundation for understanding the nature of religions
and other moral systems as they exist today and in the past. As we have already
seen, multilevel selection theory is uniquely qualified to predict both the
benign nature of within-group morality and at least three forms of human conduct
that appear immoral from various perspectives: conduct toward other groups, the
enforcement of moral rules within groups, and the self-serving violation of
moral rules within groups. Multilevel selection theory accounts for the double
standard of the Hebrew Bible rather than merely reacting to it as hypocritical.
No other theoretical framework fits the well-known facts of Judaism and other
religions so well, or so I claim.
"Although the double standard of the
Hebrew Bible is typical of religions and ethnic groups in general, Judaism is
more remarkable in other respects. Most cultures and ethnic groups last for mere
centuries before disappearing as recognizable entities by mingling with other
cultures and ethnic groups. In contrast, Judaism has maintained its cultural
identity for thousands of years against the greatest possible odds, as the
religion of a landless people dispersed among many nations. It is easy to
explain the persistence of a culture that is protected by military might or
geographical barriers, but something about Judaism has proved stronger than the
sword or even mountain ranges and oceans. Two questions need to be asked: First,
how did Jewish communities remain culturally isolated within their host nations?
Second, given their cultural isolation, how did Jewish communities survive
despite frequent persecution?"
The Jewish experiment started in Egypt and
then flourished in Babylon. This three-thousand-year-old religion, experimented,
dabbled, and stumbled upon a formula that would sustain them very well indeed at
certain times and in certain places. The Jewish formula was mathematically
worked out by W. D. Hamilton in his 1975 paper, "Innate social attitudes of man:
an approach from evolutionary genetics." Hamilton showed that evolutionary group
strategies are successful when the benefits from altruism towards kin outweigh
the individual's loss, including the ultimate sacrifice of one's life. The
Jewish strategy is easily observed in Hamilton's description of group
evolutionary strategies for both humans and animals.
When the Jews were
in Egypt, they inserted themselves between the ruling class and the masses,
acting as a tight, cohesive, and literate tribe that became wealthy by acting
collectively. When they were exiled to Babylon about 2600 years ago, they
polished up their religious/tribal strategy in religious texts that have been
used since then to produce a religion that is "this worldly." From that time on,
since Babylon, they would become a people that would live amongst others, but
never mixing with them, to keep the tribe cohesive - they would henceforth act
as a group to increase wealth at the expense of other people.
The formula
"be fruitful and multiply," along with universal education or literacy, made the
Jews highly valuable in a world that was illiterate. The small number of Jews in
each community or nation, could make themselves very useful to the nobility by
providing them with services that were unique - they were highly educated and
therefore useful where few others could count, keep books, etc. along with a
willingness to act against those who were subordinated by the ruling class. That
is, the Jews were often times intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled.
With strong altruistic bonds for their own race, they were willing and quite
motivated to take advantage of non-Jews, or even other Jews that were more
genetically distant.
Group evolutionary strategies are not
all-or-nothing. Jews do compete aggressively between themselves, between
families, and between larger Jewish groups. Their ethnocentrism is not clearly
delineated between Jew and gentile. It is a matter of relatedness that is
prevalent in the ethnocentrism we all have. First family, then kin, then nation
and finally the rest of the world. However, the Jewish religion is specifically
designed to encourage tribal loyalty while encouraging hostility towards others.
Moreover, the hostility had to be cloaked and controlled.
If Jews were
going to live amongst others while taking advantage of them, it is obvious that
they would be occasionally persecuted for their behavior, and indeed, they were.
Their entire history is one of spectacular success and growth followed by
persecution and slaughter. The fundamentals of this cycle are played out
repeatedly from the Egyptian Exodus to the Holocaust - Jews seen as immoral,
greedy, and racially different.
This cycle of success followed by
persecutions had another interesting side effect. It was the perfect formula for
a eugenics' program that operated somewhat like this. First, as a people always
on the move, a few would establish themselves in a new region of the world. I
will use Europe as an example. From genetic studies, we now know that about 70
A.D. a small number of Jewish (males mostly) moved into Europe and established
themselves by marrying local females. But quickly the barriers went up, "Once
again, it is important to remember that Judaism, like other major religious
traditions, exists in many specific versions that vary along a spectrum from
extreme separation to extreme accommodation. This spectrum has existed
throughout the history of Judaism in addition to the present day, as I will
describe in more detail in chapters 5 and 6. Nevertheless, the strictest and
strongest versions of Judaism can accurately be described as cultural fortresses
that kept outsiders out and insiders in. The degree to which Jewish communities
were isolated from their host cultures is even reflected at the level of gene
frequencies. Population genetics data allow this fact to be determined with a
high degree of certainty: Jewish populations from around the world are
genetically more similar to each other and to the Middle Eastern population from
which they were derived than to the populations among which they currently
reside (Wilson 2002)."
With these racialist enclaves in place, the Jews
practiced foremost selection for high intelligence. Every male was expected to
excel at learning, and those that excelled the most would be married to
daughters of wealthy men. It was the perfect solution for bringing together the
brightest couples to have ever-increasing intelligent children. Wealthy men were
more intelligent on average, as would be their daughters, and the Jewish males
were just given a life-long intelligence test to pick out the smartest. In
addition, arranged marriages based on a person's good looks were considered
improper.
"Judaism existed before the advent of Christianity and Islam,
which were designed to grow by conversion. It has always been possible to
convert to Judaism (the Hebrew Bible provides numerous examples) but only with
great difficulty. In a sense, this is exactly what Iannaccone would predict for
a church that wants to remain strong by forcing its new members to demonstrate
their commitment. Many religious sects are hard to join. Fraternity rites and
high membership costs for exclusive clubs provide examples for nonreligious
groups. However, these organizations usually seek new members, however demanding
their initiation procedure. In contrast, Jewish communities almost never sought
converts, even though they would accept them. Evidently there are no examples of
Jewish missionaries or texts written to recruit outsiders to the faith. In
addition, Jewish law sometimes accorded inferior status to converts (Wilson
2002)."
So here, we have numerous small Jewish groups living among other
races of people, openly hostile to and keeping separate from them, while
demanding high levels of altruism and community conformity among themselves."
Cooperative groups robustly out-compete less cooperative groups. If Jewish
communities were exceptionally cooperative by virtue of their religion, compared
to the societies with which they interacted, this would give them an advantage
in any endeavor that requires coordinated action. Their survival amidst other
nations - at least in the absence of persecution - would be assured (Wilson
2002)."
Eugenics, as any breeder knows, is a simple matter of
interbreeding for the qualities desired for, and for Jews the two most
outstanding selected traits were intelligence and ethnocentrism.
Conscientiousness was obviously necessary: the grueling hours of studying would
not be tolerated by individuals without it - and the expression of ethnocentrism
may enhanced by high levels of conscientiousness. The development of
conscientiousness is a necessary component of acting collectively for the
benefit of the tribe. Over thousands of years then, this cycle of selecting for
intelligence and ethnocentrism has made the Jews the most intelligent race - but
also the most ethnocentric. The cycles of prosperity (reproductive success) and
persecutions (death or desertion) made sure of that.
Jews have also
practiced a high level of inbreeding, with arranged marriages between nieces and
uncles and between cousins. This type of accelerated eugenic breeding program
can be deleterious as well as beneficial. In fact, the best type of selective
breeding program is inbreeding followed by occasional outbreeding, and then
starting the cycle over again. In this way, the genes for intelligence and
ethnocentrism could be rapidly selected for by inbreeding, with deleterious
recessive gene problems ameliorated through occasional outbreeding with less
closely related Jews.
Of course, any eugenic breeding population, while
selecting for certain traits needs a means of de-selecting also. Antisemitism
has been with the Jews for thousands of years, and it took care of the
de-selection problem. The less intelligent and the less committed (the dumb and
less racist Jews) were either allowed to defect, forced to defect, or were more
easily killed during massacres. That is, the more the Jews were persecuted, the
more they could select for the very traits that made them anathema to those they
lived with.
"I hope it is obvious that these acts are morally
reprehensible, although dismayingly typical of between-group interactions in
general. In the aftermath of World War II, psychologists made it an urgent
priority to understand why people so easily adopt the kind of us/them mentality
that allows atrocities such as the Holocaust to occur. Jewish psychologists such
as Henri Tajfel, himself a Holocaust survivor, were at the forefront of this
movement, which became known as social identity theory. The main conclusion to
emerge was that us/them thinking can be triggered extremely easily in normal
people. The seeds of genocide are within all of us.
"Social identity
theory was developed in the optimistic spirit that science can help improve the
human condition, despite its often sobering conclusions. Multilevel selection
theory is the perfect compliment to social identity theory and needs to be
approached in the same spirit. It provides the deep evolutionary explanation for
why us/them thinking is so easy to invoke in normal people. It reveals the fault
lines of moral reasoning that cause people to commit unspeakable acts with a
clear conscience. These are not pleasant thoughts, but they must be confronted
to discover practical solutions that do, in principle, exist. One purpose of
this book is to argue that cultural evolution is an ongoing process capable of
discovering genuinely new solutions, even out of old parts. When it comes to
evolution, the fact that something hasn't happened before is a poor argument
that it can't happen in the future. Let us now return to the subject of Judaism
in this constructive spirit (Wilson 2002)."
The cycle of Jewish expansion
and contraction took place at many levels, from individuals in a village
(individual selection) to the elimination of entire Jewish populations (group
selection). Nonetheless, when Jews did come under attack, the wealthiest were
more likely to survive than the less wealthy - they could bribe their way out of
harms way. In addition, only the most committed would stay and suffer the many
persecutions - less committed Jews bailed out." The history of Judaism can be
interpreted even more plausibly as a process of ongoing cultural and even
genetic group selection, in which Jewish communities that fail to exhibit
solidarity disappear, leaving the survivors to expand and create new
communities. It would be extraordinary if the tragic persecution of Jewish
communities over the last two thousand years did not result in a form of
group-level selection (Wilson 2002)."
The Jews did not do as well in the
Middle East as they did in Europe. In the Middle East, they were surrounded by
their own kind, the Semitic people who evolved over at least 10,000 years in a
densely populated part of the world, and it resulted in selection for high
levels of ethnocentrism, tribalism or racism. Tribal warfare selected for group
cohesion or racism. (We can see this tribalism at work today in Afghanistan
where nation-building is virtually impossible.) When equally ethnocentric tribes
came into contact with Jews, the Jews were suppressed, and they did not attain
the high level of genetic intelligence as the European Jewish communities. That
is, the Jews in the Middle East did not go through endless cycles of expansion,
oppression and genocide. They were kept in an oppressed state without the
resources available to set up the schools and system of eugenic selection that
was available in Europe. The European Jews (Ashkenazi) have attained today an
average general intelligence of 117, an astounding level considering that the
average throughout the world is about 90 (Lynn & Vanhanen 2002).
Jews
in Europe however did prosper through a strategy that worked quite often, with
occasional setbacks. "Jewish history is not as simple as a displaced people
struggling to survive amidst hostile neighbors. Jewish groups survived and even
prospered through specific activities and relationships with different elements
of their host nations. From a purely actuarial standpoint, periods of prosperity
were required to balance the catastrophic declines caused by persecution. A
common pattern was for Jews to form an alliance with one gentile segment of the
host nation, usually the ruling elite, to exploit another gentile segment, such
as the peasantry (Wilson 2002)."
The above was the pattern in Europe more
than in the Middle East. Europeans evolved over the last 40,000 years in a
sparsely populated and often glaciated environment. This ecological niche made
individualism, universal altruism, and cooperation with neighbors much more
valuable than warfare. As a result, Northern Europeans have exceptionally low
levels of ethnocentrism or innate racism compared to other races. This made the
Jewish exploitation of the Europeans easy, until the hostilities occasionally
boiled over into conflict. Even with low levels of innate racism, Europeans
would eventually rebel against outsiders taking advantage of them.
A
cultural difference also existed between the European Christians and their
Jewish guests, "Even Judaism, the religion from which Christianity is derived,
focuses more on establishing the nation of Israel on earth than on what happens
after death. Belief in a wonderful heaven must therefore be explained by a
different set of principles than a general desire to explain the world and to
obtain scarce resources. In his analysis of Christianity, Stark (1996, 80-81)
emphasizes the secular utility of belief in the afterlife, as an
adaptation to a particular environment, quoting with approval the
following passage from McNeill (1976, 108):'Another advantage Christians enjoyed
over pagans was that the teachings of their faith made life meaningful even amid
sudden and surprising death.... Even a shattered remnant of survivors who had
somehow made it through war or pestilence or both could find warm, immediate and
healing consolation in the vision of a heavenly existence for those missing
relatives and friends.... Christianity was, therefore, a system of thought and
feeling thoroughly adapted to a time of troubles in which hardship, disease, and
violent death commonly prevailed (Wilson 2002).'"
Life for Christians,
under the thumb of feudalism, was tough enough without having the Jews insert
themselves into the mix to gain wealth on the backs of the poor. Is it any
wonder that antisemitism was so enduring for so long? As an earthly religion -
obsessed with wealth, reproduction, and dominance over others - how could Jews
be viewed with tolerance except by the elite who used the Jews to exploit the
poor?
As Hamilton pointed out, the greater the genetic distance between
groups, the greater the competition. Group-hunting carnivores pushed the need
for collective cooperation during "the hunt" - only close kin could be depended
upon. This is true for humans and for animals. Moreover, it is the basis for
ethnocentrism or racism - there is no mechanism in the human species for
universal cooperation. Cooperation has only come about due to language and
culture - those general intelligence abilities that can at times suppress human
group genocides.
An interesting example of group evolutionary strategies
may be unfolding before our very eyes. Clonaid Has just announced the birth of
the first cloned child. Whether this is true or not, this development shows how
groups can be formed and how they can be genetically different from those around
them. Clonaid Is funded by the Raelians, a religion that was formed based on the
belief that humans were put here by aliens, and that by using genetic
engineering it is possible to clone ourselves and to then "transport" our brains
continuously from our aging bodies into our younger cloned bodies.
Overwhelmingly, the public opposes cloning of humans. What this means is, that
there is a real difference in the behavioral traits of the average Raelian and
the rest of society.
As a group then, if the Raelians grow as an earthly
religion like Judaism, and if they desire to live forever because they do not
believe in a religious hear-after, and since genetic engineering requires a
great deal of money, they may be the next successful group that will displace a
more conservative one - or the status quo. It seems to me that these people have
a common set of behavioral traits - they are not afraid of perpetual life, they
desire wealth, pleasure, and technological progress. This formulation is not
unlike that of Judaism. In addition, if the Raelians do find that they have a
lot in common genetically, even though they are not racially exclusive, they
could very well be creating a new race via the founder effect. That is, a small
group of people who are cohesively genetically-different in some meaningful way
from others.
For me, focusing on the Jewish evolutionary strategy has
several purposes. First, it shows that a eugenic religion is possible because we
have one as an example - Judaism. In addition, what is so exciting about it is
how easy it was. Jews used what was common knowledge at the time about races and
the differences between races, they discovered a useful tool - universal
education, and they set down an earthly set of rules for behavior that gave them
an advantage over other groups who they competed with.
Second, there is a
need to show that part of the Jewish strategy has been to manipulate the host
cultures they lived with. That is, as a group that lived off the labor of their
hosts, what we would today call disparate outcomes because the Jews were far
wealthier than the people they lived with, they had to "live the lie." Jews
believe they are superior to all other races, that this superiority was mandated
by God, that their God was only for the Jews, and that the Jews therefore were
the natural born rulers of the earth. That is a racially explosive position to
take, so within Judaism is an intellectual arm of apologia - or a formal defense
or justification for their beliefs and actions.
This strategy, over the
last fifty years, has worked best among Whites. As stated above, we are
virtually defenseless against more ethnocentric groups to the point where Whites
can easily be shamed into yielding to their demands. MacDonald explains this
dilemma: Whites will apply universal moralism - even against their own kin. If
they believe there was a wrong, they will punish their own kin or race even more
than other races. All that has to be done is to make them believe that they have
behaved badly. So today, Whites, not understanding how they are manipulated,
have come to adopt affirmative action, multiculturalism, and egalitarian
positions to the detriment of Whites in general.
Only in the West, do we
invite in and support immigrants from around the world. Only in the West, do we
give preferences to other races over our own. Only in the West, do we go to war
not for profit but for moral causes that have no benefit for us. Only in the
West, are we willing to give up much of our wealth and share it with genetic
strangers. Only in the West, do Whites condemn other Whites for being racists.
Only in the West, do we have Whites who celebrate the day that we will be a
minority in our own land. Only in the West, are White males singled out and
separated from White females as loathsome and despicable racists - Neanderthals
who may have no hope of redemption.
MacDonald has detailed the strategy
used by Jews to turn Whites against themselves, over the last 100 years, in his
third book on Jewish group evolutionary strategies, The Culture of Critique:
An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual
and Political Movements (Praeger press 1998; 1st Books Library
2002). Entering the 20th Century, the American people were influenced
in their opinions by military, religious, and corporate spokespersons. That
slowly changed such that mass-opinion and our values have been molded by
government, academia, and the media - all powerfully influenced by Jewish
interests.
The Jewish race: Exodus (1300 to 1600 B.C.) to
18th Century Enlightenment.
(Unless stated otherwise, all
quotes in the following will be from A People That Shall Dwell Alone by
Kevin MacDonald, 1994.)
A People That Shall Dwell Alone is an
academic book, and was reviewed by a long list of evolutionists, et al. before
publication. For this reason, I will be replacing some scientific terms by more
common terms in [square brackets] to make the quotes more readable. In addition,
I have left the references to sources in, to fully reflect that most of the
material that MacDonald uses is from Jewish sources. Also, since this book is
available on-line at Questia, any deletions, footnotes, or out of context quotes
can be easily checked by merely searching for the words and checking out the
original text.
"This project attempts to develop an understanding of
Judaism based on modern social and biological sciences. It is, broadly speaking,
a successor to the late-19th-century effort to develop ... a scientific
understanding of Judaism. The fundamental paradigm derives from evolutionary
biology, but there will also be a major role for the theory and data derived
from several areas of psychology, including especially the social psychology of
group behavior.
"In the present volume, the basic focus will be the
attempt to adduce evidence relevant to the question of whether Judaism can
reasonably be viewed as a group evolutionary strategy. The basic proposal is
that Judaism can be interpreted as a set of ideological structures and behaviors
that have resulted in the following features: (1) the segregation of the Jewish
gene pool from surrounding gentile societies as a result of active efforts to
prevent the influx of gentile-derived genes; (2) resource and reproductive
competition between Jews and gentiles; (3) high levels of within-group
cooperation and altruism among Jews; and (4) eugenic efforts directed at
producing high intelligence, high-investment parenting, and commitment to group,
rather than individual, goals.
"I believe that there is no sense in which
this book may be considered anti-Semitic. This book and its companion volume are
intended to stand or fall on their merits as scientific works. This implies an
attempt on my part at developing a scientifically valid account of Judaism.
Nevertheless, one cannot read very far in Jewish history without being aware
that historical data do not exist in a theoretically pristine state in which
they lend themselves to only one interpretation. While by no means always the
case, the historiography of Jewish history has to an extraordinary degree been
characterized by apologia [a series of apologies for Jewish behavior] and a
clear sense of personal involvement by both Jews and gentiles, and this has been
the case from the very earliest periods in classical antiquity. There is
therefore considerable controversy about key issues in the history of Judaism
which are of great importance to an evolutionary perspective. Jewish history,
more so than any other area I am familiar with, has been to a considerable
extent a social construction performed by highly interested parties intent on
vindicating very basic moral and philosophical beliefs about the nature of
Judaism, Christianity, and gentile society generally.
"Indeed, I would
suggest that the very fact that the history of Judaism represents such a
minefield for an evolutionary theorist (or any theorist) attempting to
understand Judaism is itself an important fact about this endeavor that is
highly compatible with an evolutionary perspective on Judaism: Theories of
Judaism often reflect the interests of their proponents. These issues are
discussed extensively in the companion volume, Separation and Its
Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (MacDonald
1998). The only point here is to say that, like any other scientific account,
this one is open to rational, logical debate....
"Nevertheless, the
proposal here is that it is possible to provide an account of Judaism that fits
quite well with the idea that Judaism is an evolutionary group strategy and to
do so by relying on a substantial body of scholarly research in the field of
Jewish history, the vast majority of which has been written by Jews
themselves....
"Besides social controls, another theoretically important
feature of the present treatment is the proposal that the religious ideology of
Judaism is essentially a blueprint for a group evolutionary strategy (see
Chapter 3). The point here is that although ideology often rationalizes
evolutionary goals, it is [inconclusive] by evolutionary theory. Ideologies,
like group strategies generally, may be viewed as 'hopeful monsters' whose
adaptiveness is an empirical matter....
"The main reasons for supposing
that ideologies in general are [inconclusive] by evolutionary theory are that
(1) ideologies often characterize an entire society (or, in this case, the
subculture of Judaism), and (2) ideologies are often intimately intertwined with
various social controls. In the case of Judaism, and as described in Chapters
3-6, these social controls act within the Jewish community to enforce the stated
ideological goals of maintaining internal cohesion, preventing marriage with
gentiles, enforcing altruistic behavior toward other Jews, and excluding those
who fail to conform to group goals. To the extent that an ideology characterizes
an entire group, it becomes insensitive to individual self-interest, and to the
extent that it is reinforced by social controls, it is possible that individuals
who do not benefit from adopting the ideology will be socialized to do so. This
is especially important because the thesis here is that Judaism is an altruistic
group strategy in which the interests of individuals are subservient to the
interests of the group (see especially Chapter 6)."
What fascinates me
about the Jewish evolutionary group strategy is that in order to work, several
themes had to be played out over and over again. As will be shown later, the
Jews have a history of several thousand years of logical debate, analysis, and
pondering over great issues and meaningless issues alike. Yet today, when it
comes to issues like intermarriage for example, they have no hesitation in
promoting others doing it while they try to maintain their own racial purity -
what they call the "silent holocaust." That is, in a multicultural society, Jews
are starting to intermarry increasingly, while their co-religionists try to
prevent it.
Another example is the debate over the Black-White
intelligence difference and whether it is partly genetic or not. On the one
hand, the Jews have proclaimed for thousands of years that they are the smartest
and best scholars, and yet now they are at the forefront in denying that general
mental ability is about 80% genetic, as numerous studies have pointed out. In
fact, they have lost this battle of promoting radical environmentalism to the
point that they do not even try to provide research to prove it is the
environment rather than our genes that make us smart, they have had to resort to
calling anyone who discusses it "racist."
It seems to me that the only
way that most Jews can hold so many contradictory positions is simply this -
they have become a race that is low in open-mindedness and high in
authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, and innate paranoia. They literally have no
choice - they must hold numerous contradictions in order to maintain their
positions as they see it for the benefit of the tribe.
Note that I am not
saying that Europeans (Euros) are more rational than Jews, only that at the
highest levels of academia and politics, Euros are far more scientific - far
fewer of them take up Marxist, deconstructionist, egalitarian, and other
indefensible empirical positions. These irreconcilable or unscientific
disciplines are almost entirely of a Jewish nature.
"Thus, for example,
if living as a minority among the Egyptians during the original sojourn
recounted in Genesis and Exodus had resulted in a large increase in wealth and
population, a similar diaspora strategy might be viewed as viable in the future
- a point that we shall return to in Chapter 8 when I attempt to develop an
evolutionary perspective on the origins of Judaism as a group evolutionary
strategy. The success of such a diaspora strategy could not have been foreseen
with certainty, and its success may well not have been known beforehand by its
participants, but given the early indications of success, it would be rational
to continue the strategy.
"An evolutionary group strategy thus may be
conceived, at least partly (see below), as an 'experiment in living,' rather
than as the determinate outcome of natural selection acting on human populations
or the result of ecological contingencies acting on universal human genetic
propensities. Supporting these experiments in living are ideological structures
that explain and rationalize the group strategy, including the social controls
utilized by the strategy.
"Social controls in the service of achieving
internal discipline (such as, for example, preventing exploitation by cheaters
or non-cooperators) are theoretically important for the development of a
successful altruistic group evolutionary strategy (D. S. Wilson 1989; see
below). But there is no reason why an experiment in living must include such
controls. One could perfectly well imagine a group strategy in which there were
no provisions at all to exclude cheaters and exploiters. Such a strategy would
presumably fail in the long run, just as Alexander's (1979) celibate religious
sect failed. But that is not the point. Experiments are experiments: Some are
successful and well designed, and others are not. The evidence reviewed in later
chapters suggests that Judaism has survived as a group evolutionary strategy
(albeit with several important changes) at least since the Babylonian captivity
[2600 years ago]. If this is so, there is the implication that it has been a
well-designed evolutionary strategy."
Simply put, the Jews stumbled upon
a system of laws and behaviors that were so successful first in Egypt and then
in Babylon that they continued to practice it. A racially pure group, living
among other races, they used their solidarity to enrich themselves as a group,
even if some members occasionally suffered at the hands of anti-Semites. To do
this, they had to take up residence in the lands of other nations, in small
enough numbers not to be persecuted by the illiterate masses that saw Jews as
exploiters. This precarious existence or strategy then was not hatched in some
grand plan, it was just stumbled upon and then enhanced as time went on, and
modified as needed to keep the community unified while keeping the lowly Gentile
masses from routinely slaughtering them or expelling them more often than they
already were.
"In summary, Judaism is here considered fundamentally as a
cultural invention that is underdetermined by evolutionary/ecological theory and
whose adaptiveness is an empirical question. However, it does not follow that
there are no biological predispositions at all for developing the type of group
evolutionary strategy represented by Judaism. In Chapter 8, I suggest that the
ancient Israelites were genetically predisposed to be high on a cluster of
psychological traits centering around group allegiance, cultural separatism,
ethnocentrism, concern with [inbreeding], and a collectivist, authoritarian
social structure. Evidence cited there indicates that these tendencies are very
strong among widely dispersed Jewish groups in traditional societies and that
they appear to be more common among other Near Eastern peoples compared to
[Euro] Western societies. Further, it is suggested that Judaism itself resulted
in a 'feed-forward' selection process in which Jewish groups become increasingly
composed of individuals who are genetically and [behaviorally] predisposed to
these traits."
The level of ethnocentrism or racism several thousands of
years ago was a continuum, with the most northerly races in Europe having the
least, and the Semites the most - racism. As populations mixed between these two
extremes then there is a gradual increase in racism from a low level in
Scandinavian races to a high level in the Semitic races. (We need to look at
other races such as Africans and Asians as soon as we can locate the cluster of
behavioral ingredients that make up ethnocentrism from known behavioral traits.)
MacDonald's second point above is that once Judaism was in place, it also had
eugenic consequences that increased the innate levels of racism in Jews over
other races - it became an advantageous genetic quality that improved the
group's cohesiveness while holding hostile and exploitative attitudes towards
outsiders. Having no remorse in exploiting the labors of other people of a
different race can have important economic rewards for the exploiters. Euros in
the United States had slavery, but they were also the ones who ended it. It was
not felt to be morally justifiable and Euros slaughtered each other during the
civil war to end slavery - a race divided upon itself.
"Human plasticity,
which also includes mechanisms such as various forms of learning, provides a
mechanism such that humans can adapt to environmental uncertainty and lack of
recurring structure within a finite range. The point here is that societies and
subcultures are able to take advantage of this plasticity and manipulate their
own environments in order to produce adaptive [behaviors]. In the case of
Judaism, it will be argued in Chapter 7 that both eugenic practices (taking
advantage of human genetic variation) and manipulation of environments (taking
advantage of human plasticity) have been enshrined in religious ideology and
intensively practiced. By manipulating environments in this manner, Judaism has
been able to develop a highly specialized group strategy, which has often been
highly adaptive in resource competition within stratified human
societies....
"At a theoretical level, therefore, a group strategy does
not require a genetic barrier between the strategizing group and the rest of the
population. Group evolutionary strategies may be viewed as ranging from
completely genetically closed (at the extreme end of which there is no
possibility of genetic penetration by surrounding populations) to genetically
open (at the extreme end of which there is completely random mating). In the
case of Sparta, membership in the group of Spartan citizens was hereditary, and
there is no indication of any interbreeding between the Spartans and the Helots
[slaves] (see MacDonald 1988a, 301ff). In the case of Judaism, evidence will be
provided in Chapter 2 that in fact there have been significant genetic barriers
between Jews and gentiles, and in Chapters 3 and 4, it will be shown that these
barriers were actively maintained by a variety of cultural barriers erected by
Jews against significant gentile penetration of the Jewish gene pool. The
evidence provided there indicates that through the vast majority of its history
Judaism has been near the completely genetically closed end of this
continuum."
In short, Judaism could have been a group evolutionary
strategy without its racist policies. That is, if it was a universalist
religion, it could have openly encouraged the most intelligent and committed
people in society to join their group, and they could still have had maybe even
a more successful group strategy - they wouldn't have been perceived as being
different from others. In fact, this is the approach of new eugenic movements
now sprouting up on the Internet. Some are racially exclusive, but most are at
least loosely defined racially. That is, racial purity is not an issue - and
genealogies are only of interest with regards to genetic qualities.
"In
the case of Judaism, the central [Jewish authority] of the system of
self-government in the diaspora provided a powerful mechanism for excluding Jews
(often termed 'informers') who failed to conform to group goals by, for example,
collaborating with gentiles against the interests of the Jewish community or who
engaged in behavior such as dishonest business practices with gentiles that was
likely to lead to anti-Semitism. Moreover, as indicated in Chapters 4 and 6,
there were strong community sanctions on individuals (and their families) who
violated group norms against intermarriage with gentiles, socialized with
gentiles, patronized businesses owned by gentiles, or attempted to bid against
other Jews who owned franchises obtained from gentiles....
"In the case
of Judaism, the material reviewed in Chapters 5-7 indicates that there were
indeed powerful forces that tended to minimize conflict of interest within the
Jewish community, including economic cooperation and patronage and high levels
of charity. Nevertheless, the data do not indicate that Judaism has typically
been characterized by a high degree of social and political egalitarianism.
Rather, the historical record suggests that Judaism for much of its history has
been characterized by the development of a highly competent elite who acted in
the interests of the entire group and whose wealth came ultimately not from
exploiting other Jews, but as a result of economic transactions with the gentile
community."
Gentiles have no equivalent to this group exploitation based
on a religion. I can't think of any mainstream Christian religion that uses a
central authority to make its members buy from each other, while encouraging
their members to exploit other groups. Only Judaism does this and I maintain
that they still do. They no longer have a central authority to enforce
conformity to pursuing group goals, and many of them defect and are secularists
(in fact most), but as a group they are still highly racialist in their
interactions with Gentiles where it counts - such as support for immigration,
hostility to Protestant culture, or support for Israel. Most of them will march
to the collectivist tune rather than feel the wrath of their kin for any
transgressions.
"The strategizing group can engage in intragroup eugenic
practices for traits conducive to the successful pursuit of the ecological role.
(The Spartans practiced infanticide against any weak or sickly children.
Significantly, the decision was made not by the parents, but by the central
authorities - another indication of the privileged position of group interests
over individual interests.)"
Later we will look at Jewish eugenic
practices that today would be called coercive and beyond the pale ethically. And
yet, two of the most successful group evolutionary strategies did just that -
the state decided who would live, marry, and breed for the betterment of the
tribe. (The Spartans through warfare eventually self-destructed from constant
battles, but the strategy was successful in terms of wealth, social control, and
conquest - while it lasted.) It is my contention that eugenics can be coercive
and yet be very successful in terms of improving the betterment of the members'
lives. I will elaborate on how this can be done later on.
"These twelve
statements are related to five theoretically significant independent dimensions
relevant to conceptualizing human group structure in evolutionary terms: (1) a
dimension ranging from complete voluntarism, in which the strategizing group
voluntarily adopts its strategy, at one extreme to complete coercion, in which
the group is forced to adopt significant aspects of its strategy, at the other;
(2) a dimension ranging from complete genetic closure, in which the group is
closed to penetration from other individuals or groups, at one extreme to
complete genetic openness (panmixia), at the other; (3) a dimension ranging from
high levels of within-group altruism and submergence of individual interest to
group interests at one extreme to complete within-group selfishness at the
other; (4) a dimension ranging from high between-group resource and reproductive
competition at one extreme to very little between-group resource and
reproductive competition at the other; and (5) a dimension ranging from high
levels of ecological specialization at one extreme to ecological generalization
at the other. It is proposed that human group evolutionary strategies vary along
all of these dimensions independently.
"Because of the lack of
theoretical strictures on human group evolutionary strategies, the structure of
this volume will reflect the need to provide empirical evidence regarding the
status of Judaism on these five dimensions. Although qualifications to these
propositions will be necessary at various points in the argument, the burden of
this essay will be to show that historical Judaism can be reasonably
conceptualized as follows: (1) Judaism is a self-imposed, non-coerced
evolutionary strategy, although at times anti-Semitic actions have had effects
that dovetailed with Judaism as an evolutionary strategy; (2) Judaism is a
fairly closed group strategy in which much effort has been devoted to resisting
genetic assimilation with surrounding populations, and, moreover, this effort
has been substantially successful; (3) Jews have typically engaged in resource
and reproductive competition with gentile societies, often successfully; (4)
there is a significant (but limited) degree of within-group altruism,
traditionally enforced by powerful social controls and always enshrined in
religious ideology; and (5) there is a significant degree of role
specialization, specifically specialization for a role in society above the
level of primary producer characterized by cultural and eugenic practices
centered around intelligence, the personality trait of conscientiousness,
high-investment parenting, and group allegiance.
"At a fundamental level,
a closed group evolutionary strategy for behavior within a larger human society,
as proposed here for Judaism, may be viewed as pseudospeciation: Creation of a
closed group evolutionary strategy results in a gene pool that becomes
significantly segregated from the gene pool of the surrounding
society."
By pseudospeciation, MacDonald is stating that due to racial
purity, social isolation, and building particular social and economic niches for
themselves - along with eugenics - that the Jews have been and continue to drift
further from the norm of the human species. Many people are fond of saying,
"there is just one race, the human race." Not only is this absurd, but with
genetic engineering and using Judaism as a model, we can readily see that
because of culture, humans can be engaged in socially constructed speciation.
That is, there will most assuredly be more than one human species in the future
as evolution rapidly accelerates through genetic engineering.
"The
present thesis that Judaism is an evolutionary strategy does not rely on the
proposition that Jews represent a distinct race. The minimal requirement for the
present theory of Judaism as a fairly closed group strategy is that there be
genetic gradients between well-defined groups of Jews and gentiles within
particular societies that are maintained by cultural practices. It is the
genetic gradient and the coincident competition between significantly different
gene pools that are of interest to the evolutionist. Clearly, such a proposal is
compatible with some genetic admixture from the surrounding populations.
However, an evolutionary perspective must also consider the hypothesis that
widely dispersed Jewish populations have significantly more genetic commonality
than local Jewish populations have with their gentile co-habitants, since this
hypothesis is relevant to developing an evolutionary theory of the patterns of
altruism and cooperation among widely scattered Jewish populations.
"It
should be noted at the outset that there are good reasons to suppose that there
will be some differentiation of the Jewish gene pool among the different Jewish
groups of the diaspora. These groups were separated, in many cases for two
millennia or more, so that, even in the absence of genetic admixture with
surrounding populations, one would expect that genetic drift as well as natural
selection resulting, for example, from differences in climate or parasites,
would begin to differentiate these populations genetically. Regarding genetic
drift, the high frequencies of recessive disorders among Jewish populations and
the fact that recessive disorders tend to be unique to particular communities
strongly suggest that Jewish populations have been susceptible to founder
effects and genetic drift (Chase & McKusick 1972; Fraikor 1977; Mourant,
Kopec, & Domaniewska-Sobczak 1978). The general picture is that Jewish
communities often originated with a very few families who married within the
group, typically with high levels of inbreeding (see Chapters 4 and
8).
"There is also evidence that selection within the diaspora
environment has been important in differentiating Jewish populations. Thus,
Motulsky (1977b, 425) proposes that, given the clear evidence for the genetic
distinctiveness of the Ashkenazi gene pool, the resemblance in physical
characteristics and the ABO blood group between the Ashkenazim and the gentile
European population is due to convergent selection (see also below). Lenz (1931,
667-668) suggests that the phenotypic resemblance of Jews to the local gentile
population may arise from natural and sexual selection for individuals who
resembled the local population, just as different species of butterflies may
come to resemble each other. It is thus theoretically possible that a fairly
small set of genes promoting phenotypic similarity could be amplified via
natural selection within Jewish populations without precluding a large overall
genetic distance between Jewish and gentile gene pools.
"Selective
processes within far-flung Jewish communities might also lead to genetic
divergence between them. For example, in Chapter 7, data are discussed
indicating a great deal of assortative mating for traits related to
intelligence, high-investment parenting, and group cohesion within Jewish
communities. Although eugenic selection for a common [behavior or appearance]
may result in selection for the same genes, this certainly need not be the case,
since different Jewish populations may accrue different genetic mutations
related to intelligence as well as different genes resulting from low levels of
genetic admixture with local gentile populations. Supporting this possibility,
Eldridge (1970; see also Eldridge & Koerber 1977) suggests that a gene
causing primary torsion dystonia, which occurs at high levels among Ashkenazi
Jews, may have a heterozygote advantage because of beneficial effects on
intelligence. Further supporting the importance of selective processes, eight of
the 11 genetic diseases found predominantly among Ashkenazi Jews involve the
central nervous system, and three are closely related in their biochemical
effects (see Goodman 1979, 463)....
"The data reviewed in Chapter 4
indicate that in fact there have been low levels of gentile proselytism to
Judaism over the centuries, and Patai and Patai (1989) suggest that the rape of
Jewish women by gentiles as well as the illicit affairs of Jewish women with
gentile men may also have influenced the representation of gentile genes in the
Jewish gene pool. It is possible that even this relatively small genetic
admixture from surrounding populations could be adaptive for a strategizing
group because the group would benefit from new genetic combinations."
The
above is the long version of a simple system in evolution. Let us assume that we
have a closed population group or race that lives separate from other races.
Selection produces a certain type of race, but every so often a few genes from
neighboring races (outbreeding) does occur, but at a very low rate (Wolpoff
& Caspari 1997). An even easier example to explain the above phenomena goes
something like this. I am a dog breeder of purebred attack dogs - Doberman
pinschers. My neighbor also breeds Doberman pinschers, but of the friendlier
temperament for a family pet - still a good watchdog but not as vicious as the
attack dogs. Every once in a while, one of the attack Dobermans interbreeds with
one of the neighbor's dogs, passing the attack dog genes to the friendly dog
breed. The breeder, not knowing what has happened, may get a litter of Dobermans
that are more aggressive than normal, but also they seem to have a very black,
shiny coat, and also are a little less intelligent. The breeder then proceeds to
breed the friendlier Doberman, but now has some new genes to play with - a very
shiny black coat. Eventually the more aggressive genes are selected against
(bred out) but the shiny black coat genes are kept.
In the case of
Eastern Jews and Euros, the same thing can happen. A few Euro genes enter the
Jewish gene pool every so often. The Jews can then selectively continue to breed
for high intelligence (selecting against the less intelligent Euro genes) while
selecting for traits like straight hair or lighter skin - that is looking more
European. Maintaining high intelligence and a high level of ethnocentrism, while
breeding to look more like the host population when you are of a race that lives
off lesser people has a great deal of advantage - especially during times of
genocide against Jews. The more intelligent Jews that look less like the typical
Jew and more like the typical Euro would have had a far better chance of
slipping away to safety or hiding out as a Gentile - eugenics at work in all of
its various forms.
"Evidence in favor of this hypothesis would be that
Jewish proselytism, while highly limited and restricted (see Chapter 4), has
been far more successful among wealthy, intelligent, and talented individuals
and that this pattern was actively encouraged by the Jewish community. Accounts
of proselytes (see, e.g., Patai & Patai 1989) indicate that proselytism was
more common among talented and wealthy people. For example, Patai and Patai
(1989, 83), in describing proselytes in Germany, note that '[o]nce again history
records only the conversions of those few proselytes in Germany who were
exceptional among the many converts to Judaism because they were of high status
in Gentile society prior to their conversion, or because they achieved renown
after they had become Jewish....'
"Moreover, as might be expected, given
the strong emphasis on elitism within the Jewish community, there is evidence
that Jewish apostates tended disproportionately to be poor and obscure Jews, at
least into the 19th century: Lea (1906-07, 1:111, 139) notes that prior to the
forced conversions of 1391 in Spain, the converts to Christianity had been
mostly of humble status, and prior to the expulsion of 1492, only the lowest
classes of the remaining Jews converted to Christianity. Similarly, Weinryb
(1972, 94) notes that, although voluntary conversions of Jews to Christianity in
traditional Poland were small in number, they mostly involved poor and obscure
Jews. Moreover, Kaplan (1983, 275) shows that poor Jewish girls who could not
afford an adequate dowry were forced to marry gentiles as a last resort. Pullan
(1983, 294ff) finds 12 cases of Jewish apostasy in 16th-century Venice, of whom
9 were poor Jews attempting to better their economic conditions. All three of
the wealthy individuals apostatized in order to marry or have sexual intercourse
with gentile females and/or obtain property, and in at least two of the cases,
the conversions themselves appear to have been insincere. This trend for
apostates to be disproportionately of humble status was altered beginning with
the trend toward emancipation, but the reverse trend did not occur even then.
During this period, Jewish apostates included many individuals hoping to advance
their career options, but, as Katz (1986, 54) points out, the apostates did not
differ economically or in terms of education or social success from those who
remained Jews.
"If in fact poor and obscure Jews were disproportionately
abandoning Judaism, there is no reason whatever to suppose that poor and obscure
gentiles were even proportionately represented as proselytes to Judaism.
Similarly, recent surveys in the United States indicate that more highly
educated Jews and those with higher socioeconomic status are more likely to
marry [only kin] (Eliman 1987), again suggesting a greater identification with
Judaism among elite individuals. These findings are highly compatible with the
idea that the few proselytes in traditional societies who did convert to Judaism
were in fact disproportionately drawn from among the talented, educated, and
wealthy."
To allow a few talented Gentiles to convert to Judaism, while
allowing the lesser Jews to leave the tribe served two purposes - eugenics and
apologia. With regards to eugenics, it allowed the less intelligent and less
ethnocentric Jews to leave the breeding collective, while allowing some
exceptional Gentile genes into the tribe - genes that may be of benefit if they
were absent among Jews. In addition, and primarily I suspect because the
eugenics of the Jews was not that overt, they allowed some Gentiles to convert
so that they could claim they were not a closed racial group. They could point
to a few high profile Gentiles who had converted to Judaism, without really
discussing the closed genetic barriers in place between Jews and Gentiles. This
was propaganda at its best.
I came across another form of this apologia
by Jews on the Internet while debating conversions, and it was the reason I
reread A People That Shall Dwell Alone. The reason stated for not trying
to convert Gentiles to Judaism was due to the fact that "under Judaism, Jews do
not believe that only Jews are going to heaven. That is, there was no need to
convert others because we were all going to heaven - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, you
name it." Yup, that was it! No racism in Judaism. And I thought I had heard all
of the arguments before, but they seem to be endless and shifting to meet the
current needs of the tribe.
Understand that I do not condemn Jews for
their racism as much as I condemn Euros for being so easily duped and so
universally moral. After all, it was the Indo-Europeans that went into India
many thousands of years ago and set up the caste system to prevent race mixing
once they conquered the natives. Unfortunately, under the ecological
circumstances, the elite clans in India practiced female infanticide to the
extent that they rarely had any female children, making inbreeding impossible
between the elite (Hrdy 1999, pg. 326-7). They had to bring females up from the
lower classes to marry their male heirs (though this form of control of wealth
may not have persisted for that many generations - and then only in certain
parts of India).
"This chapter has three purposes. The first is to show
that the Tanakh (the Jewish term for what Christians refer to as the Old
Testament) shows a strong concern for reproductive success and control of
resources. The second purpose is to show that there is also a pronounced
tendency toward idealizing [inbreeding] and racial purity in these writings.
Finally, it is argued that the ideology of Judaism as an evolutionary strategy
for maintaining genetic and cultural segregation in a diaspora context is
apparent in these writings....
"Baron (1952a) notes that Judaism is often
referred to as a 'this-worldly' religion. While there is very little concern
with an afterlife, '[b]oth early and later Judaism ... continuously emphasized a
firm belief in the survival of the group and in the 'eternal' life of the Jewish
people down to, and beyond, the messianic age' (Baron 1952a, 9). Throughout the
long history of Jewish writings, there is a strong emphasis on 'the duty of
marriage and the increase of family' (p. 12) and 'a religious inclination toward
[improving the status] of family and nation' (p. 31), as seen, for example, by
numerous Biblical injunctions to 'be fruitful and multiply' and injunctions to
the effect that one will obtain reproductive success by following the precepts
of Judaism....
"There is an extremely strong concern for endogamy (i.e.,
marriage within the group) throughout the [Jewish Old Testament]. From an
evolutionary perspective, [marrying only kin] results in a relatively high
average degree of genetic relatedness within the group as a whole, with
implications for the expected degree of within-group cooperation and altruism
(see Chapter 6). To the extent that a group prevents gene flow from outside the
group, the fitness of individuals becomes increasingly correlated with the
success of the entire group, and this is especially the case if the group has a
high level of inbreeding to begin with. At the extreme, consanguineous marriage
(i.e., marriage with biological relatives) results in the offspring being
closely related to parents and each other, again with theoretical implications
for familial and within-group solidarity. It is an extremely important thesis of
this volume that Judaism has, at least until very recently, been immensely
concerned with [marriage with kin] - what is often referred to as racial purity;
moreover, Judaism has shown relatively pronounced tendencies toward [uncle-niece
marriages and cousins marrying], especially in comparison with Western societies
(see Chapter 8)....
"The importance of [marrying kin], at least from the
standpoint of later [authors], can be seen in the treatment of the conquered
peoples whom the Israelites displace after the Exodus (see also Hartung 1992,
n.d.). The policy described in the Books of Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua is
to commit genocide rather than permitting intermarriage with the conquered
peoples in the zone of settlement. The chronicler of Deuteronomy states as a
general policy regarding the displaced peoples that the Israelites 'shalt
utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto
them; neither shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not
give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son' (Deut.
7:3).
"As recorded in the Book of Joshua, this policy is then
scrupulously followed when the Israelites cross the Jordan and eradicate the
peoples there. Moreover, the emphasis on the need to exterminate other peoples
in order to avoid intermarriage is repeated: 'Else if ye do in any wise go back,
and cleave unto the remnant of these nations, even these that remain among you,
and make marriages with them, and go in unto them, and they to you; know for a
certainty that the LORD your God will no more drive these nations from out of
your sight; but they shall be a snare and a trap unto you, and a scourge in your
sides, and pricks in your eyes, until ye perish from off this good land which
the LORD your God hath given you' (Josh. 23:12-13). These instructions are
carried out: 'So Joshua smote all the land, the hill-country, and the South, and
the Lowland, and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining; but he
utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD, the God of Israel, commanded'
(Josh. 10:40)."
It is amazing how we continuously write our own history
to fit the current politically correct ethos. Nevertheless, a close reading of
the Old Testament could be an exceptionally good manual for a eugenic religion.
It has all of the essential ingredients and much more. Genocide is perfectly all
right in order to get rid of lesser races that may be in the group's way, or may
have resources to steal. Racial purity is maintained at all costs, and anyone
who deviates from it is going against the eugenicists' God. In fact, there is
only one real code, the group grows and prospers at the expense of all other
races, which are really just lesser human beings anyway. This God wants its
people to prosper at the expense of other races. The Old Testament is a book
that Genghis Khan could embrace!
"Sexual relationships with the women of
the surrounding peoples are invoked as a major source of evil within Israelite
society. Thus, Moses orders the execution of Israelite men who consort with
Moabite women (Num. 25:1-13). The men are executed and God also sends a plague
because of the offense. Later, the Israelites are said to be living among a
variety of peoples, 'and they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave
their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods' (Judg. 3:6). As a
result of these practices, the Israelites were said to be dominated by the
Mesopotamians for eight years.
"The origination of the Samaritans as a
separate Jewish sect was also the result of a general abhorrence of [marrying
outside the pure Jewish race]. When the northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians
and its elite were taken away, the remnant intermarried with the new settlers,
creating a 'mixed race' (Schurer (1885) 1979, 17). The intermarriage with aliens
meant that 'the Samaritans were not ethnically what they claimed to be'
(Purvis 1989, 590), the Pharisees going so far as to refer to them as
kutim (i.e., colonists from Mesopotamia). Their racial impurity was then
'used to deny the Samaritans their original Israelite heritage. From that point
onwards, their claim to be part of the chosen people . . . was never again
acknowledged by the Jews' (Johnson 1987, 71). The returning exiles rejected
the offer of the Samaritans to help in rebuilding the Temple (Ezra 4:1-5), and
intermarriage with the Samaritans was regarded with horror. Thus, Nehemiah
comments on the marriage of the son of the high priest Eliashib to the daughter
of the Samaritan Sanballat: 'Therefore I chased him from me' (Neh.
13:28).
"The [deification] of the abhorrence of [marrying outside the
Jewish race] appears in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah which recount events and
attitudes in the early post-exilic period. The officials are said to complain
that 'the people of Israel, and the priests and the Levites, have not separated
themselves from the peoples of the lands, doing according to their
abominations.... For they have taken of their daughters for themselves and for
their sons; so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the peoples of
the lands' (Ezra 9:2).
"The use of the phrase 'holy seed' is particularly
striking - a rather unvarnished statement of the religious significance of
genetic material and the religious obligation to keep that genetic material pure
and untainted. The result was a vigorous campaign of what Purvis (1989, 595)
refers to as 'ethnic purification.' Nehemiah states, "In those days also I saw
the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab; and their
children spoke half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews'
language, but according to the language of each people. And I contended with
them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear
by God: 'Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their
daughters for your sons, or for yourselves' (Neh. 13:23-25).
"All who
have intermarried are urged to confess their guilt and give up their foreign
wives and children. Ezra provides a list of 107 men who renounced their foreign
wives and their children by these women. These books also refer to genealogies
that were used to deny access to the priesthood to some of the returnees from
the Babylonian exile because there was a question regarding the racial
purity of their marriages. The result was a hierarchy of purity of blood, at
the top of which were those who could prove their status by providing
genealogical records."
Now that Senator Joseph Lieberman has thrown his
hat in the ring for the presidential race in 2004, and considering that he is an
Orthodox Jew, will he be asked to answer if he still believes in the superiority
of the Jewish race, does he still believe in maintaining Jewish racial purity,
is not in fact the Jewish religion one that is based on racial supremacy? Of
course, this will be discussed on the Internet, but will it get into the
mainstream press? Actually, this may be the time to get it out in the open - do
Jews have a double standard in calling all White males racists, while pretending
to be of a higher moral character? After all, the Old Testament is the Jewish
bible, and as an Orthodox Jew, Lieberman follows the law as the Jewish God
proscribes - and it is a God for only the Jews. How will he be able to explain
that the Jewish God and the Christian God are not the same. One stands for
Jewish supremacy and intolerance towards any human "seed" that is impure. The
Christian God is a universalist and tolerant God, inclusive of all.
"For
the Israelites, there was really only one purpose for God - to represent the
idea of kinship, ingroup membership, and separateness from others. Supporting
this view of Israelite monotheism, there is evidence that monotheism became more
important in the exilic period - precisely the period in which barriers between
Jews and gentiles were being created and enhanced....
"Significantly,
Ezra, whose abhorrence of intermarriage was a major influence on subsequent
generations and who was revered among the Israelites as 'a virtual second Moses'
(McCullough 1975, 49), views intermarriage as a 'great sin against Israel's God'
(McCullough 1975, 48), a comment indicating the close connection between ethnic
purity and the Israelite concept of God. In a very real sense, one may say that
the Jewish god is really neither more nor less than Ezra's 'holy seed' - the
genetic material of the upper-class Israelites who were exiled to
Babylon."
It seems that today, looking at religions that are the most
similar, that the World Church of the Creator headed up by Matt Hale, who was
just arrested for planning the murder of a federal judge, is closer to Judaism
than any other religion. Before his arrest, I could never understand the WCOTC's
stance. Why not just call themselves a new sect of Jew, follow the Old Testament
rules against race mixing, declare themselves superior to other Jewish sects,
and compete with Jews by practicing eugenics. Love of one's own kind is the flip
side of hatred of one's enemies - ethnocentrism is a losing strategy for most
Whites who just do not have enough kinship allegiance to be able to win against
more racially aware group strategies. Maybe the best we can do is be like the
insular Hasidim, and live in our gated communities.
"Worshiping other
gods is like having sexual relations with an alien - a point of view that makes
excellent sense on the assumption that the Israelite god represents the racially
pure Israelite gene pool....
"[Marrying outside the Jewish race] is a
crime against God - a belief that makes sense if indeed, as argued above, God
simply is another way of denoting an inbreeding, unitary ethnic group - the holy
seed of Israel....
"This phenomenon can also be seen in the modern world.
For example, Meyer (1988, 338) notes that the response of liberal Reform Jews to
the increased anti-Semitism of the Hitler years in Germany was increased
identification with Judaism, increased synagogue attendance, a return to more
traditional observance (including a reintroduction of Hebrew), and acceptance of
Zionism. Following World War II, there were upsurges of religious observance
and/or ethnic identification among American Jews in response to the Nazi
holocaust and as a reaction to crises in Israel. The response to persecution is
therefore a tendency to stress a unique Jewish identity, rather than to
assimilate....
"Unlike the Christian conception of an afterlife of
happiness, the Tanakh makes clear that the rewards of keeping the faith and
obeying religious regulations will be a high level of reproductive success, a
return to power and prosperity in Israel, and the destruction and/or enslavement
of Israel's enemies...."
In a multicultural society, where Whites are
about seventy percent of the population and Jews only about 2 percent, it will
be harder and harder for most Jews to interbreed. There is a strong attraction
for successful Jewish men to marry beautiful White (or Asian) women, because the
selection is so much higher. This imbalance is common throughout modernity.
Women can now go to work, be successful, and no longer need a man for support.
Many of these successful women, of higher intelligence, are only attracted to
men with a higher status, and unless they are ravishing beauties, there are far
fewer men to choose from.
On the flip side, the highly intelligent males,
having success, can choose from a large pool of women based on their looks, and
only moderately on the women's intelligence. This "bimbo effect" acts against
assortative mating, and it is also dysgenic. It is a dilemma not only for Jewish
racial purity, but also for any eugenic program that relies strictly on matching
intelligent men with intelligent women - the pool to select from is unbalanced
because of what women desire in men and what men desire in women.
It is
safe to assume that Jewish supremacy may die faster than the White gene pool
will be anialated by miscegentaion, as the Jews have far fewer numbers to
sustain itself. Whites still associate primarily with other Whites, and it will
be a very long time before we cease to exist. But on both sides there is a real
ironly. Let's say that Whites did intermarry in large numbers with Asians,
Blacks, Semites, etc. What would happen is that we would lose our individualism,
our universal moralism, and our lack of racism - the Jews would have essentially
an even more hostile majority to deal with. In that world, if they
maintained their advantage in wealth, power, education and status - there would
be a new affirmative action directed against the Jews instead of
Whites.
"Among the factors facilitating separation of Jews and gentiles
over historical time have been religious practice and beliefs, language and
mannerisms, physical appearance and clothing, customs (especially the dietary
laws), occupations, and living in physically separated areas, which were
administered by Jews according to Jewish civil and criminal law. All of these
practices can be found at very early stages of the diaspora, and in the ancient
world, a Mitzvoth of 613 commandments evolved, including prohibitions
that very directly limited social contacts between Jews and gentiles, such as
the ban on drinking wine touched by gentiles and the undesirability of bantering
with gentiles on the day of a pagan festival....
"During the period of
Greek hegemony, the Jewish religion was unique in forcibly resisting Hellenizing
influences (Schurer (1885) 1973, 146), and the Jewish struggle with Rome was the
most prolonged and violent of any of the peoples in the Empire. Indeed, one of
the major results of the development of the Roman Republic and Empire was that
the great diversity of ethnic groups, which characterized Italy and the rest of
the Mediterranean region, was largely assimilated. For example, in Italy during
the fifth century B.C., Etruscans, Samnites, Umbrians, Latins, Romans, and a
variety of other groups were assimilated into a larger culture in which these
ethnic divisions disappeared. The Jews were the only ethnic group to survive
intact after the upheavals that occurred at the end of antiquity."
And
here is another lesson for neoeugenicists. All around us we see degeneracy,
crime, and the indoctrination of our children by the State. Like the Jews did in
the past, it is time we set up our own communities to place some distance
between us and the "the other." A lot of White separtists feel they have to move
to the North West to flee from alien life forms, but the Jews maintained their
separtism easily for three thousand years, and it was primarily in the more
populated centers where commerce and money was readily available. Hate crime
laws, directed at Whites, makes interactions between Whites and other races
highly problematic - a simple altercation over a parking spot could end up
sending one to jail if the wrong word slipped out. The only solution for such
draconian measures directed against Whites is separation. Except at work, where
you might have to interact with minorities, all other activities should be
directed at separation. Children should not be taught by the state to hate
themselves - home schooling or our own private schools should separate them.
From kindergarten through college, Euros are taught to hate themselves while
celebrating diversity and racial solidarity for all races except their own. Yes,
we can learn a lot about how the Jews have maintained their race while living
among hostile people. And now, Whites are the ones in danger of constant abuse
and disregard of our rights.
"The issue of Jewish proselytism in the
ancient world has received a great deal of attention from historians of Judaism,
and often there is a clear apologetic tone in these writings. Several
discussions of proselytism by Jewish historians, beginning with the studies of
Bamberger ([1939] 1968) and Braude (1940), have developed a revisionist
perspective, which attempts to show that Judaism has been a universalist
religion at least since the Biblical period. However, they argue that, as a
result of the hegemonic actions of governments or other religions (see also
Eichorn 1965a; Raisin 1953; Segal 1988), Judaism failed to attract sufficient
converts.
"From an evolutionary perspective, the implicit argument would
then be that the result of these hegemonic actions of other religions was an
unintended genetic and cultural segregation from other peoples. Jewish actions
facilitating this segregation were necessary in order to preserve a purely
religious/ethical integrity whose correlation with genetic segregation was
unintended and purely coincidental.
"The idea that Jewish separatism
fundamentally derives from a moral, even altruistic, stance has been common
throughout Jewish history. Baron (1952a, 12) notes that an integral aspect of
the ideology of Judaism has been that 'segregation is necessary to preserve at
least one exemplary group from mixing with the masses of others' who are viewed
as morally inferior. Separatism not only is motivated by ethical reasons, but
involves altruism: In being Jews, they were 'living the hard life of an
exemplar.' And by serving as a morally pure exemplar, 'they were being Jews
for all men' (italics in text).
"This sense that Judaism
represents a moral ideal to the rest of mankind - 'a light of the nations' (Isa.
42:6) - has been common throughout Jewish intellectual history, reflected, for
example, in Philo, who depicts Israel 'as a nation destined to pray for the
world so that the world might be delivered from evil and participate in what
is good' (see McKnight 1991, 39); or 'the Jewish nation is to the whole
world what the priest is to the state' (McKnight 1991, 46). This theme also
emerged as a prominent aspect of the 19th-century Jewish Reform movement and
remains prominent among modern Jewish secular intellectuals (see below). Moore
(1927-30, 1:229) notes that in the ancient world the ideology contained the
thought that 'Israel is not only the prophet of the true religion but its
martyr, its witness in suffering; it bears uncomplaining the penalty that others
deserved, and when its day of vindication comes and God greatly exalts it, the
nations which despised it in the time of its humiliation will confess in
amazement that through its sufferings they were saved.
"The implicit
argument would then be that, even though the Jewish religion ended up denoting
a...genetically segregated kinship group in which there was a great deal of
within-group altruism and cooperation, combined oftentimes with successful
competition with gentiles for resources (and sometimes with exploitation of
gentiles; see Chapter 5), this fact is simply a consequence of its failure,
despite its best efforts, to attract adherents, perhaps in conjunction with
normative human tendencies for resource competition.
"Apart from the
difficult empirical question of whether Judaism was really self-consciously
racialist and nationalistic in the ancient world (see below), the
anti-voluntarist perspective is problematic from an evolutionary perspective. If
indeed the present perspective that historical Judaism has often involved
successful resource and reproductive competition with host population gene pools
is correct (see Chapter 5), it is certainly reasonable to suppose that this
behavior conforms to evolutionary expectations that humans often attempt to
maximize biological fitness (reproductive success). One must then suppose that,
even though historical Judaism often coincided with what one might reasonably
suppose to be individual (and group) genetic self-interest, this result was a
major departure from the original intention, since the original intention was to
develop not only a religion that was theologically universalist, but also one in
which ethnicity was theoretically irrelevant and in which there was an eager
attempt to foster genetic assimilation with surrounding
populations....
"From an evolutionary perspective, in the absence of
actual genetic assimilation one is left to conclude that this Jewish sense of
moral and religious idealism, which results in genetic segregation, is in fact a
mask for a self-interested evolutionary strategy aimed at promoting the
interests of a kinship group that maintains its genetic integrity during a
diaspora."
Well that was then - how about now? Most Jews, far more than
any other Western race of people, are secularists. Does that mean they no longer
believe that Jews are morally superior to all other races, that they are no
longer the natural leaders of all peoples and of all nations? If you have been
following the interactions between the different players leading up to the
conflict with Iraq (January 2003 as I write), you will notice that the most
vocal advocates for war are the neoconservatives, who are dominated by Jews. It
seems that nothing has changed with regards to Jewish supremacy - whether
secular or religious. They still consider themselves morally, intellectually,
and racially superior to all other races. Because of this, the neoconservatives
feel that they can control US foreign policy, and that we can help to dismantle
any Arab country that may be a threat to Israel or US hegemony. Actually, from
my perspective, there are four forces leading us to war: to protect Israel from
its Arab neighbors, to help Bush win the presidency in 2004, to use those
wonderful weapons we have (kids with toys), and force democracy on the Islamic
world since they can't do it themselves (or the neoconservative
agenda).
"There appeared a large apologetic literature intended to
present Jewish life, and particularly Jewish separatism, in a positive light and
to present Jews as morally superior to gentiles by, for example, extolling their
family life: 'Most of the works which have been regarded as propaganda
literature show little interest in proselytizing, but show a desire to share and
be accepted in the more philosophically sophisticated strata of Hellenistic
culture. Salvation is seldom restricted to membership of the Jewish people' (J.
J. Collins 1985, 169).
"Modern psychological research indicates that
portraying Judaism as open to conversion would have important effects on gentile
conceptions of Judaism. Consistent with the results of social identity research
(e.g., Hogg & Abrams 1987), portraying Judaism as open to conversions would
be expected to result in the perception among gentiles that Judaism is a
permeable group, and this latter perception would be expected to reduce gentile
hostility and perceptions of conflict of interest with Judaism. The perception
that Judaism is a permeable group would also be expected to reduce the ability
of gentiles to act in a collective manner in opposition to Judaism.
"In
fact, beginning with Hecataeus of Abdera (early third century B.C.) and
culminating with Tacitus and others, Jewish intellectuals were confronted with a
great many Greco-Roman writers whose basic criticisms centered around Jewish
separatism, xenophobia, and misanthropy. Given this context, there was a felt
need among Jewish intellectuals to present Judaism as a universal
religion."
Ergo, nothing has changed about the Jews in over two thousand
years. Now we debate on the Internet about why they don't want anyone to join
their religion. Nevertheless, the debate and the excuses are
perennial.
"One might therefore reformulate the ideal strategy for
Judaism as a fairly closed group evolutionary strategy as follows: Allow
converts and intermarriage at a formal theoretical level, but minimize them in
practice. This de facto minimization could occur as a result of failing
to make strenuous, organized efforts to obtain converts or to encourage
intermarriage; erecting imposing cultural barriers that would minimize social
intercourse between Jews and gentiles and thus prevent the types of social
contacts that would be the normal precursors of conversion and intermarriage;
engaging in cultural practices that result in anti-Semitism, with the result
that gentiles would be less likely to convert to a stigmatized religion; the
existence of special Jewish taxes, such as the fiscus Judaicus imposed by
the Romans; maintaining hostile and/or ambivalent attitudes to conversion, as
well as hostile and/or ambivalent attitudes toward converts after they were
admitted to Judaism, within a significant portion of the rabbinic leadership, as
well as among the Jewish community as a whole; making the procedures of
conversion highly unpleasant and demeaning (by, e.g., including requirements for
the physically painful and dangerous rite of circumcision); reminding the
convert of the dangers of being a Jew; relegating the convert to a lowered
status within the community and giving the convert fewer rights than other Jews;
making these disabilities continue for a number of subsequent generations before
the convert's descendants could expect to attain full Jewish status; continuing
the practices of [inbreeding] among elite groups within the Jewish community and
strictly keeping genealogies among these groups to ensure racial purity so that
converts would be aware that marriage into these families would never occur,
despite its theoretical possibility, even after many generations; continuing
vestiges of Jewish national sovereignty, as represented by the existence of
families that were reputed to be descended from the priests and kings of Israel
and that retained prestige and authority among diaspora Jews; and keeping the
messianic hope of a return to political power in a particular
geographical area."
Of course, Judaism is always changing, and many of
the above items are now only strictly practiced by the more religious of Jews,
while the secularists have become more like the Gentiles they are around. But
have they given up on "messianic hope of a return to political power?" I would
contend that they can't, given their eugenic history of breeding a race of
people who are far more intelligent, conscientious, and authoritarian than any
other group I am aware of. They have been breeding for dominance - and one
cannot give up their nature with an epiphany of the contradictions in one's
perspective. We all live our lives as our primitive brains direct us, then we
make excuses for why we do what we do (see The Illusion of Conscious Will
by Wegner, 2002). Jews are no different - their desire for power and control is
no different from anybody else's, just far more extreme as will be shown below
in the discussion on behavioral traits.
"As indicated in Chapters 3 and
8, the Jewish tendency toward [marrying biological relatives] is of considerable
theoretical importance. During the Second Commonwealth, the Pharisees attached
special spiritual significance to marriages with nieces. Uncle-niece marriage
was common during the Second Commonwealth (Epstein 1942, 250ff; Mitterauer 1991;
Jeremias 1969, 218). While marriage to nieces was essentially tolerated by the
Levitical rules, later it came to be viewed as desirable by the more devout,
including priestly families whose concern with purity of blood and genealogy is
a recurrent theme of this volume. Uncle-niece marriage was idealized in the
Talmud: 'One who married his sister's daughter - on him the Bible says: 'They
thou will call and G-d will answer'' (b. Yeb 62b). The Shulhan Arukh, an
authoritative legal compilation dating from the 16th century, also idealized
uncle-niece marriage....
"Maimonides notes that the rules of the Torah
and the Sages are fairly lenient regarding intercourse with a slave woman. He
states, however, '[n]evertheless, let not this transgression be esteemed lightly
in your eyes, just because the Torah does not prescribe a flogging, for this
also causes a man's son to depart from following after the Lord, since the
bondswoman's son is likewise a slave, and is not of Israel' (p. 83). The
offspring of a concubine/slave is thus not admitted to the community, and,
indeed, intercourse with such a woman is compared to sodomy, citing Deuteronomy
23:18. Conversion of the bondswoman removes these difficulties, but Maimonides
reiterates the general distrust of proselytes typical of the ancient world,
citing the Talmudic dictum that '[p]roselytes are as hard to bear for Israel as
a scab upon the skin,' since the majority of them become proselytes for ulterior
motives and subsequently lead Israel astray, and once they become proselytes it
is a difficult matter to separate from them' (p. 91). The latter comment
indicates that the community would attempt to remain separate from
proselytes....
"It should be noted that the Sephardic sense of
exclusivity and superiority is legendary even among the other branches of
Judaism (e.g., Patai 1977, 381-383; Chapter 8). After the expulsion, the
Sephardim continued to use a dialect of archaic Spanish (Ladino) in their
communities in other parts of the world, so that in the 19th century most
Sephardic Jews living in the Turkish Empire could understand neither Turkish or
other local languages such as Greek and Romanian. In Morocco, the Sephardic Jews
continued to speak a Castilian dialect which differed from Ladino until the 19th
century.
"Benardete (1953) emphasizes that, in addition to this
'secretive language for communication among coreligionists' (p. 59), there was a
wide variety of other religious customs, gestures, celebrations, and culinary
laws that separated them from gentiles and even other Jews living among them.
Benardete cites observations indicating that the Sephardim in the United States
considered themselves 'a people apart' with 'hermetic groupings' and superior to
Ashkenazi Jews, even though they were of lower social class than the latter
(whom they referred to with the derogatory term tedesco) (1953, 145-146;
see also Patai 1977, 381-383; Sachar 1992, 63; Baron 1973, 36). In Morocco, the
Sephardim remained separate for the most part from the native Jews for whom they
used the disdainful term forasteros (aliens) (Patai
1986)."
Abhorrence of the other, what some would call racism, what
behaviorists call ethnocentrism, and what I would prefer to call tribalism
because it fits in better with an evolutionary explanation of behavioral
differences between races, is the underpinning uniqueness of the "chosen ones."
Jews are not a singular race or even a defined group of races. Races rather are
any group of people who differ - and the groupings can be subdivided down to
identical twins (by splitters) or lumped into the four or five major races by
lumpers (Jensen 1998). Jews likewise, with their high levels of racialism, will
easily fight amongst themselves. Different Jewish groups do not speak with one
voice, nor could there be a "Jewish conspiracy" to control or take over the
world. Rather, it is made up of a race of individuals who feel especially
entitled. That is, the ethnocentrism or xenophobia is carried by the individual,
but its intensity is expressed as concentric circles from the closest kin
towards the reviled outer ring of Gentiles.
"Regarding attitudes, the
Jews viewed themselves as separate even from the land: Many rabbis viewed Poland
itself as defiled and unclean, and not the permanent habitat of the Jews
(Weinryb 1972). Reflecting this sense of sojourning, the burial service in
traditional Ashkenazi shtetl communities included depositing a small amount of
soil from Palestine under the head of the deceased (Zborowski & Herzog
1952). Katz (1961a) notes that Jews were conscious of being only temporary
resident aliens and were considered in this manner by gentiles. There was also a
powerful sense of separation from gentiles. Katz (1961a, 26ff) describes the
common philosophical belief among Jews that Judaism and Christianity differed
not merely in matters of ritual and belief, but also in essence. Moreover, this
essential difference was often viewed as ultimately the result of racial
differences, with Jews descending from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while the
gentiles descended from Esau....
"There are indications that when Jews
converted to Christianity, they were able to rapidly intermarry with Poles,
indicating that the barriers to intermarriage were mainly erected by the
Jews....
"Moreover, from the present perspective, the precise meaning of
assimilation is important. Barriers such as clothing and language are important
to viewing Judaism as a fairly closed group evolutionary strategy only insofar
as they are means toward the end of genetic segregation. However, it is quite
possible that these barriers could fall, but that genetic segregation (as well
as resource and reproductive competition between ethnic groups) could continue.
Indeed, Lichten (1986) notes the broad range of Jewish assimilationist positions
in Poland from the late 19th century to the pre-World War II period, the vast
majority of which were consistent with continued genetic segregation and
resource competition."
Is it any wonder then that the Polish people had
as much antagonism as the Nazis for the Jews in their presence, especially when
there were so many more Jews in Poland than in Germany as a percent of the
population?
"It is not an overstatement to claim that the European
Enlightenment has been the most traumatic event in the history of Judaism as a
group evolutionary strategy. We have seen that in traditional societies over
nearly two millennia the separation between Jews and gentiles was more or less
complete, with the result that 'nobody would have doubted at the end of the
eighteenth century that the Jews were an ethnic unit, separate from the local
inhabitants in any place where they may have built a community. Similarly, the
unity of these communities all over the world was also taken for granted' (Katz
1986b, 90). The barriers erected to restrict the normal intercourse among
individuals were very high indeed, and Jews generally organized themselves as a
state within the larger gentile political organization.
"However, with
the Enlightenment all this changed. Jews were expected to take their place as
citizens like any other in nation-states, and the powerful centralized Jewish
governments disappeared as a condition of Jewish citizenship. Judaism was forced
to come to grips with the fact that the intense cultural separatism
characteristic of Jews in traditional societies was widely viewed as
incompatible with life in a modern nation-state. Judaism of necessity became a
voluntary association, and there was no way for any central authority to prevent
intermarriage or complete defection from Judaism.
"The problem, then, was
whether separation could be maintained in this radically new environment. Jews
were forced to walk a very fine line between two unacceptable alternatives: On
the one hand Jews were strongly motivated to avoid the traditional hermetic
Jewish separatism because of its perceived incompatibility with citizenship in a
modern state and its tendency to provoke anti-Semitism. On the other hand, there
was a powerful fear that abandoning these traditional practices would result in
true assimilation into gentile society and the end of Judaism as fundamentally a
cohesive national/ethnic entity."
So, who are the real racists? Whites
opened up to the Jews, on the condition that they would fully assimilate, not
just change their outward appearances. That meant coming to grips with racist
attitudes towards those they lived with, taking on the allegiances of the
nations they were part of, and giving up their tribalism. Much like the Gypsies
(Roma), they were a people that chose separation - would they now become part of
the nations via crypto-Judaism? It seems so. The Euros are constantly condemned
for not intermarrying more with other races. Failure to do so say the academic
egalitarians, dominated by Jews, shows that Whites are racists. However, at the
same time, within Jewish culture, there are efforts to prevent intermarriage
else, Judaism dies. What about European's culture and race? This double standard
is seen by more and more people who do not accept the therapeutic state's
message that Whites must be cured of their racism, while Jews are merely
preserving their tribe by not breeding with other races. The hypocrisy is so
obvious, that the only way it is refuted is not with arguing the obvious, but by
calling anyone who questions Jewish separatism an antisemite.
"In the
period following the riots of 1391, Jews who had been forcibly converted
'continued to maintain the hold of their class and race on trading and capital'
(Kamen 1965, 7). Johnson (1987), Roth (1974), and Salomon (1974) write of the
conflict between the Spanish masses and the Conversos that developed when the
latter had entered Spanish society in the 15th century, 'quickly penetrating the
ranks of the Castilian middle and upper classes and occupying the most prominent
positions in the royal administration and the Church hierarchy' (Salomon 1974,
ix). The economic progress of the Conversos and their descendants was
'phenomenally rapid.... The law, the administration, the army, the universities,
the Church itself, were all overrun by recent converts of more or less
questionable sincerity, or by their immediate descendents. They thronged the
financial administration, for which they had a natural aptitude, protest being
now impossible. They pushed their way into the municipal councils, into the
legislatures, into the judiciary. They all but dominated Spanish life. The
wealthier amongst them intermarried with the highest nobility of the land' (Roth
1974, 21).
"Indeed, Walsh (1940, 144) describes a common belief during
the period that the New Christians [Jews] 'were planning to rule Spain, enslave
the Christians, and establish a New Jerusalem in the West.' These beliefs were
abetted by two tracts written by the Converso Selemoh ha-Levi, formerly a highly
respected rabbi, but later the Bishop of Burgos, in which he declared that the
Jews were attempting to rule Spain. Another common belief was that the Conversos
had infiltrated both the aristocracy and the Church and were attempting to
destroy Spanish society from within (H. Kamen 1985)."
This sounds like
the same accusations made against Jews today. Hollywood Jews put out movie after
movie on the Holocaust to place guilt on Whites, while they ignore the 100
million deaths from the Red Holocaust that they participated in
under Communism. Not one movie that I am aware of has been made to show the
magnitude of this horror in the West (in the East, The Killing Fields was
one of the few movies made showing the Khmer Rouge's atrocities). The Jewish
strategy has always been to try and weaken the cohesiveness of the nations they
live in, to make it safer for Jews to operate without being noticed. The more
mixed up a nation is with different races, cultures, and competing value
systems, the easier it is to distract the masses with endless debates about
abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, racial profiling, ad
infinitum.
"Mosse (1987, 204) estimates that despite representing less
than 1 percent of the population, Jews controlled 20 percent of the commercial
activity in Germany in the period from 1819 to 1935, as indicated by percentages
of Jews among the economic elite. Moreover, Jewish involvement in the largest
companies was even more substantial than this figure might indicate. For
example, Mosse (1987, 273-274) finds that in 1907 Jews had a dominant position
in 33 of the 100 largest companies and in 9 of the 13 companies with share
capital over 100 million marks. Jews occupied a similar position through the
Weimar period (pp. 357-358). In some areas where Jews were concentrated, the
overrepresentation of Jews was far higher. Thus, in the capital of Berlin, Jews
accounted for nearly 45 percent of the official government Kommerzienrat
awards given to outstanding businessmen, and in Prussia in 1911 44 percent of
the 25 richest millionaires were Jews, as were 27.5 percent of the 200 richest
millionaires and 23.7 percent of the 800 richest. In Berlin, as in the
Hesse-Nassau area, 12 of the 20 wealthiest taxpayers were
Jews....
"However, the largest overrepresentation of Jews in Germany
during this period was in the media: the theater, arts, film, and journalism. In
Berlin in 1930, fully 80 percent of the theater directors were Jewish, and Jews
wrote 75 percent of the plays produced. Jews edited leading newspapers and were
vastly overrepresented among journalists (Gordon 1984; see also Laqueur 1974).
Not surprisingly, average Jewish income was considerably higher than average
gentile income, with tax return data suggesting that the Jewish/gentile income
ratio was at least 2 to 1, and more probably in the range of 4 to
1.21."
Of course this scenario is played out wherever Jews operate freely
without being oppressed. The same situation is happening in the United States,
but here the class struggle has been refocused on the disparity between Blacks
and Whites, as the Jews have slid into the White category with regards to the
census, but not with regards to being labeled as racists. Now the question is
always asked, if Jews as a minority continue to emerge in country after country
with most of the wealth and power, what is the reason? In the past it has been
either labeled as greed or it has been admitted that they are more intelligent
than other races and they cooperate together to make money. That is, they are
not really greedy or nefarious in their buisness dealings, but they cooperate
with their Jewish kin to take advantage of business opportunities.
"In
Russia, restrictions on Jews were justified by the authorities because they
feared that the Slavic peasants could not compete with the Jews in the newly
industrializing economy - fears made more intense because of the tremendous
growth in Jewish population in the 19th century (Lindemann 1991, 135-137). Jews
were viewed as more intelligent, more educated, and more able to compete
economically than the mass of Russians by a broad range of political opinion,
with the result that the authorities viewed completely free economic competition
with considerable trepidation. 'There was, in short, a rather widespread
consensus in Russia that Jews were a separate, somehow superior race, stubbornly
resisting assimilation, and steadily working to dominate those among whom they
lived' (Lindemann 1991, 138-139)...."
"Before concluding this section, it
is worth making a brief comment on Jewish-gentile competition in the United
States in the early 20th century. As noted above in the case of France, there
was concern that Jews would 'overrun' prestigious private universities if
intellectual merit were the only criterion (Sachar 1992, 328). As a result,
quota systems were developed to restrict Jewish competition not only in private
universities, but also in professional schools, although in most cases the
percentage of Jewish students was still well above their representation in the
population. As expected, the diminished resources available during the Great
Depression exacerbated these attempts to limit Jewish access to elite schools
and high-status professions, or indeed other jobs. Numerical quotas in the
professions became more restrictive, and employment advertisements carried an
unprecedented number of restrictions on Jews. These quotas were lifted following
World War II, and by 1952, Jews constituted 24 percent of the students at
Harvard, 23 percent at Cornell, 20 percent at Princeton, and 13 percent at Yale
despite constituting only 3 percent of the population (Sachar 1992,
755).
"There are a number of other indications that Jews very rapidly
achieved a highly disproportionate representation in several key areas of
American society in the post-World War II era, and especially after 1960.
Rothman and Lichter (1982) summarize data on the extraordinary representation of
Jews in the American academy in the 1960s and 1970s. A 1968 survey found that 20
percent of the faculty at prestigious schools were Jewish, and there was a
strong concentration in the social sciences, with fully 30 percent of the most
productive faculty in social science departments at elite universities being
Jewish. Similarly, Jews constituted 20 percent of the legal profession during
this period and represented fully 38 percent of the faculty at elite law
schools. Sachar (1992, 755) notes that in 1957, Jews constituted 32 of the 70
most eminent intellectuals in a list compiled by Public Interest, and in
1973, Jews were overrepresented by 70 percent in the Directory of American
Scholars.
"More informally, Patai and Patai (1989) found that in
1972, 6.5 percent of a sample from Who's Who in America were Jewish
although, they represented only 2.7 percent of the population. Similarly, Weyl
(1989, 21), using the Jewish last name method, found Jews overrepresented on
several indices of achievement, including Who's Who in America, American Men
and Women of Science, Frontier Science and Technology, Poor's Directory of
Directors, Who's Who in Finance and Industry, Directory of Medical
Specialists, and Who's Who in American Law.
"Rothman and
Lichter (1982) note that academic social science departments are an important
source of social influence, and this disproportionate Jewish influence on
society extended also to the media during this period. A quarter of the
Washington press corps were found to be Jewish in a 1976 study, and 58 percent
of the television news producers and editors at the ABC television network in a
1973 study were Jewish. A 1979 study found that Jewish background was
characteristic of 27 percent of the staff at the most influential news media.
During this period, half of prime-time television writers were Jewish, and 32
percent of influential media critics were Jewish.
"Jewish representation
in academia and the media may well have increased in recent times. Ginsberg
(1993, 1) notes that as of 1993 the percentages of Jewish representation at
elite academic institutions were undoubtedly higher than in the late 1960s.
Ginsberg also states that despite the fact that Jews comprised only 2 percent of
the population, almost half of American billionaires were Jews as were
approximately 10 percent of the members of the U. S. Congress. Jewish
overrepresentation continues to be apparent in the media. Kotkin (1993, 61)
notes that '[t]he role of Jews within Hollywood and the related entertainment
field remains pervasive.' Ginsberg (1993, 1) notes that the owners of the
largest newspaper chain and the most influential newspaper (The New York
Times) are Jews, as are the chief executive officers of the three major
television networks and the four largest film studios. Rothman and Lichter's
(1982, 98) conclusion would appear to be accurate: 'Americans of Jewish
background have become an elite group in American society, with a cultural and
intellectual influence far beyond their numbers.'"
The patterns emerge
everywhere in Western nations where Jews are present in any significant numbers
- including a fraction of a percent. However, there is no mystery to this
phenomenon, it is merely a pattern that emerges due to the innate intelligence
of Jews and their innate behavioral traits. The same situation of evolutionary
strategies holds in much of South Asia, where East Asians dominate - or Asian
Indians in Africa. A more intelligent race can dominate over the majority but
less intelligent race.
In the United States, the dominance would hold
between Whites and Blacks if it were not for aggressive quota systems and
massive amounts of wealth transferred from Whites to Blacks. Whites have an
average IQ of about 100 and Blacks 85. Whenever the gap in intelligence is more
than a few points, one race will dominate another in a free and open
society.
This is one of the reasons that there is so much effort put into
calling anyone who points out racial disparities in intelligence - a racist,
because ad hominem attacks are the only arguments left. If innate intelligence
is understood to be the cause of economic disparity, then Euros will not only be
able to use the same arguments against Jews to equalize economic inequality, but
they will no longer be so easily demonized by the Left. There are good reasons
in a merit-based society for different races to have different economic success
as groups. If this was openly accepted, the Jewish strategy would have to
reinvent itself with a whole new dogma - "Whites are not the racists they have
been made out to be - it was racial differences all the time."
A new
strategy of honesty about race would not really impact Jews in my opinion. I
think many of us on the eugenics/nationalist Right would accept Jewish apologies
for their attacks on our culture and move on - but I just can't see that
happening. Instead, as the genetic and psychometric data comes in validating
Jensenism, the therapeutic state will make all discussions of innate differences
between races a criminal offense, as it is in much of the West
already.
"Thus, unlike universalist religions such as Christianity and
Islam, Judaism over its history has fundamentally been a large kinship community
in which the threshold for altruistic behavior toward group members was markedly
lower than for altruistic behavior toward outgroup members.
"In addition,
the degree of biological relatedness within the many small and scattered Jewish
diaspora communities was undoubtedly much higher than the degree of biological
relatedness characteristic of the Jewish population as a whole. This is
especially so since these communities were often founded by a very few families,
so that the actual level of biological relatedness within particular Jewish
communities may well have been very high indeed. Several authors (e.g. Chase
& McKusick 1972; Fraikor 1977; Mourant, Kopec, & Domaniewska-Sobczak
1978) have emphasized the importance of founder effects and inbreeding in the
population genetic history of the Jews, stemming ultimately from the fact that
Jewish communities were often founded by very few individuals who [inbred],
including relatively high levels of uncle-niece and first cousin marriage (see
also below). The point here is that this phenomenon would also have increased
the level of biological relatedness within Jewish communities and lowered the
threshold for altruism. Moreover, as indicated below, immigration from other
Jewish communities was often strongly discouraged by the Jewish community
itself. Such a policy would also have the effect of keeping the level of
biological relatedness within the Jewish community relatively
high....
"The diaspora situation itself also facilitated within-group
cooperation among Jews. The diaspora resulted in Judaism being essentially a
large kinship group in which internal divisions were de-emphasized and in which
the major division was between Jews and gentiles, rather than within the Jewish
community. As discussed below, by shifting to a diaspora context, economic
oppression of Jews by other Jews was minimized, and Judaism itself developed a
relatively homogeneous set of interests. Economic cooperation within the
community was maximized and economic exploitation minimized, but conflict and
competition with the gentile societies among whom they lived remained.
"A
principal theme of this volume is that Judaism is a collectivist culture in the
sense of Triandis (1990, 1991; see also Chapters 7 and 8). Collectivist cultures
(and Triandis [1990, 57] explicitly includes Judaism in this category) place a
much greater emphasis on the goals and needs of the ingroup than on individual
rights and interests. Ingroup norms and the duty to cooperate and submerge
individual goals to the needs of the group are paramount. 'Collectivists are
concerned about the results of their actions on others, share material and
nonmaterial resources with group members, are concerned about their presentation
to others, believe in the correspondence of outcomes of self and ingroup, and
feel involved in the contributions and share in the lives of ingroup members'
(Triandis 1990, 54). Collectivist cultures develop an 'unquestioned attachment'
to the ingroup, including 'the perception that ingroup norms are universally
valid (a form of ethnocentrism), automatic obedience to ingroup authorities, and
willingness to fight and die for the ingroup. These characteristics are usually
associated with distrust of and unwillingness to cooperate with outgroups' (p.
55). Each of the ingroup members is viewed as responsible for every other
member, and relations with outgroup members are 'distant, distrustful, and even
hostile' (Triandis 1991, 80). In collectivist cultures, morality is
conceptualized as that which benefits the group, and aggression and exploitation
of outgroups are acceptable (Triandis 1990, 90). These themes will be apparent
in the following."
It will be interesting to see how these innate
differences in the Jewish gene pool will change now that more Jews are marrying
Gentiles, with some estimates up to 50% in the United States. If the Jews who
marry Gentiles are those who are less tribal or racist than those who marry
Jews, then we would expect there to be an increase in these already exaggerated
traits. This is interesting because many eugenic detractors claim that because
there are so many genes that are involved in behavioral traits, they cannot be
selected for, and yet we can see that they have been in the past - Jews
differ in remarkable ways from Gentiles (as we will see
later).
"Communication was also an element of Jewish economic
cooperation. Katz (1961a, 151) emphasizes the fact that Jewish economic unity in
the face of dispersion was important for its economic success: 'The possibility
of constant communication with people living in other countries, with whom there
existed a kinship of language and culture, gave an economic advantage to the
Jews, who were scattered over many lands.' For example, writing of the Court
Jews during the period from 1640 to 1740 in Europe, Stern (1950, 18-19) notes
that 'the Jew seemed to be better qualified for the position of war commissary
than the Christian. He was in close contact with his coreligionists throughout
Europe. He was therefore able to maintain agents and correspondents in all
countries and could receive through them necessary goods and important
news.'
"Stern (1950, 137) also notes that Jews were also ideally suited
to function as financial agents to gentile princes because of their contacts
with foreign banking firms. Ties of language were especially advantageous, since
Jews from widely dispersed areas could easily communicate with each other. Shaw
(1991, 94) also describes a system of bills of exchange that were honored by
other Jewish traders and bankers and that gave Jewish traders a competitive
advantage over Christian and Muslim traders."
This "kinship in every
land" is an excellent strategy even today. It is also one that could be used
effectively by eugenicists. If eugenicists are to be a ruling elite in
competition with Jews, then we will no doubt be few in number and will not be
located in one area, but will be dispersed everywhere in the world. Breeding
programs will be coordinated globally, as we are seeing the Raelians doing now
with their attempts to clone humans. With resources, communications, and will,
the new eugenics' programs can adopt many of the successful programs that have
been used by Jews - and we know they work.
"Despite the Talmudic
injunction regarding the obligation to provide dowries for poor girls, the
Ashkenazim consistently regulated the marriages of the lower classes (Hyman
1986; Katz 1961a; Weinryb 1972), and Hundert (1986b) notes that the marriages of
poor and indigent Jews came under special scrutiny by community officials. (The
poor were also prevented from voting in Kehilla elections [Katz 1961a]).
For example, it was common for the Jewish communities of Poland to have a quota
of marriages of individuals with less than a certain dowry. Hundert cites a
community regulation of 1595 to the effect that 'no betrothal may take place in
which the bride gives under 150 zlotys before there has been an investigation
establishing that they will not become a burden on the community' (p. 23). In
1632 a couple was allowed to marry on condition that they not receive any
community support for five years, and in 1679 and 1681 in Poznan a regulation
was passed prohibiting no more than six marriages in which the dowry was less
than 400 zlotys. Other communities had a lottery for poor girls allowed to
marry...."
There are numerous arguments against coercive eugenic
practices, but the above shows how the Jews enforced the less gifted to forego
marriage and reproduction. It was by any standard rather severe - if you were of
lesser quality (on average) than other Jews, you would not be allowed to
reproduce. The same program could be instituted today by a nation-state or by a
eugenic religious group. Only the most fit would reproduce, and the less fit
would forego reproduction (but now they could still marry and have sex thanks to
birth control or sterilization). I find nothing wrong for example, of requiring
anyone who wants to live off the state's welfare to be required to be sterilized
first. It is voluntary and fair. What is unfair is an underclass that
perpetuates itself year after year, living off the state, and never provides any
goods or services in return. We need to separate the idea that people some times
need a hand through hard times from the masses of people who are simply unfit
for a technological society.
History also teaches us that there are no
ethical or moral standards, and that coercive eugenics has been used many times
in the past. I see nothing harsh in preventing people from having children. I
come across too many happy couples that have decided to not have children
because their lives are so rich in other ways. The drive to have children is far
less than the sexual drive - so it can't be that much of a burden to ask those
who are social parasites not to continue their genetic failures by having more
children. As an evolutionary group strategy, it is perfectly legitimate to put
group goals ahead of individual self-interest.
"The material summarized
in this chapter indicates that historical Judaism can be characterized as a
group evolutionary strategy in which individual self-interest was significantly
submerged in the interests of group goals. This group orientation does not imply
the absence of competition within the Jewish community. On the contrary; in the
following chapter, it will be shown that competition for social and economic
status within the Jewish community (and its correlative reproductive success)
was intense. However, the data reviewed here indicate that this intense
competition within the group was not allowed to compromise group goals. From the
standpoint of the group, it was always more important to maximize the total
resource flow from the gentile community to the Jewish community, rather than to
allow individual Jews to maximize their interests at the expense of the Jewish
community. Within the Jewish community, however, there was a significant
redistribution of wealth, so that in the end decrements to individual interests
resulting from these community social controls were minimized.
"As
throughout this volume, in order for a particular practice to be considered an
aspect of an evolutionary strategy, there must be evidence of a conscious
purpose, rather than passive imposition. The proposal here is that Judaism
represents an ecologically specialized group evolutionary strategy. The data
presented in Chapter 5 indicate that Jews have competed with gentiles in a very
wide range of economic activity and aspects of social status, ranging from
artisan guilds to positions of influence with the government. These findings
make generalization difficult. However, one very common feature of Jewish
economic activity, noted, e.g., by Lindemann (1991, 146) is that Jews have often
been overrepresented among middlemen as conduits for gentile primary production,
as well as in relationships of manager over gentiles or employer to gentiles. We
have also noted a strong tendency for Jews to compete successfully for positions
that require education, literacy, and intelligence. In ecological terms, the
generalization is that Jews tended to concentrate at the top of the human energy
pyramid in prototypical societies throughout their history.
"In this
regard, Jews are typical of several other 'middleman minorities' that have
occupied a similar ecological role in a variety of human societies (e.g., the
Chinese in Southeast Asia; see Sowell 1993; Zenner 1991). The point here is that
Jews, and undoubtedly other middleman minorities as well, tend to have a suite
of traits that enable them to attain this ecological position above other groups
in the society, the most important being intelligence and certain traits related
to what personality psychologists refer to as 'conscientiousness.'
"The
purpose of this chapter is to show that Judaism as an evolutionary strategy has
emphasized education and high-investment parenting, as well as eugenic practices
and cultural supports related to intelligence and resource acquisition ability.
In addition, however, there is evidence for the development of traits conducive
to the group cohesion that is so essential to Judaism as a group evolutionary
strategy."
Dawkins dealt with what he termed the extended
phenotype - where a species interacts with other species to form niches (see
my article Maladaptive Altruism). The Jews just like the Gypsies, have formed a
niche based on their innate intelligence and behavioral type (the Gypsies niche
is that of a bottom-feeder that is also tribal, living off begging, stealing and
other socially deviant behaviors). The question is then how should other races
react to manipulation by parasites like Gypsies and Jews. Both have been
unwelcome visitors, but in the West, both have been protected by a universal
moralism that is not in the interests of the majority or in the interests of
other less able minorities.
"There is evidence in the ancient world for
an intense interest in education among the Jews. The Jewish religious law was
incredibly elaborated in the first centuries of the Christian era, culminating
with the writing of the Mishnah and the Palestinian (Yerushalmi) and Babylonian
(Bavli) Talmuds. These documents not only contain an extraordinary amount of
sheer information, but also are presented in an extremely complex rhetorical
style, so that thorough mastering of Jewish law requires an extremely high level
of literacy, the retention of voluminous detail, and the ability to follow
highly abstract arguments.
"The proposal here is that Torah study as the
[greatest virtue] within the Jewish community had four important benefits
relevant to the present perspective on Judaism as an evolutionary strategy: (1)
Most obviously, scholarly study resulted in knowledge of an incredibly wide
ranging set of laws and customs, which constituted an important source of the
barriers between Jews and gentiles and therefore was important for facilitating
genetic and cultural segregation. There is also a long scholarly tradition that
holds that the Pharisees and their successors utilized their knowledge and
practice of the law to separate themselves from the [lower-class Jews] (Sanders
1992, 428; see discussion below). (2) Training in the Jewish law would result in
a relatively high level of education for the Jewish population as a whole
compared to surrounding populations. This training would then be useful in
resource competition with surrounding populations. (3) However, apart from the
general level of Jewish education compared to surrounding populations, the
educational system was geared to producing a highly educated elite. We have seen
that the prosperity of the Jewish community in traditional societies often
depended on the actions of a highly educated, wealthy elite of courtiers,
capitalists, and lessees who in turn employed other Jews and thereby advanced
the fortunes of the entire Jewish community. (4) Scholarly study became an
important arena of natural selection for intelligence by serving as a
vehicle of upward mobility within the Jewish community, as well as providing
access to resources and reproductive success.
"It should be noted that
knowledge of barriers between Jews and gentiles could be obtained by means of
oral communication of the law to the masses. As emphasized by Bickerman (1988,
170), if the only goal were to ensure that the people were aware of the large
number of segregative rituals, there would be no need to develop a highly
educated elite or to emphasize universal education for a high level of literacy
within the Jewish community as a whole. Nor would it be necessary to develop a
system that resulted in a large overlap among intelligence, education, resource
control, and reproductive success. However, beginning around 200 B.C., perhaps
with the writings of Ben Sira (Bickerman 1988, 170), there was an attempt to
develop an intelligentsia separate from the priestly clans in which wisdom was
identified with knowledge of the Torah and there was a concomitant effort to
make some level of education available to the entire community of
Jews....
"This suggests that the Jewish response was self-consciously
motivated by a need to develop an educated intelligentsia able to compete in the
Greek world. Indeed, Bickerman suggests that being a sage or a student of a sage
was a necessary preparation for success in the Greek world, and by the end of
the second century the author of pseudo-Aristeas could say that the ideal Jew
not only was learned in the Torah, but also could impress Greek philosophers,
with the result that 'the myth of Jewish intellectual superiority began to take
shape in Jewish thought' (p. 175)....
"In the language of modern research
on intelligence, there is a strong emphasis in the traditional Jewish curriculum
on verbal knowledge, rote memory, verbal concept formation, and comprehension of
abstract ideas (Levinson 1958, 284).
"It is important to note that the
vast literature of the Mishnah, the Yerushalmi and Bavli, Midrashic collections,
and subsequent commentary actually 'contributed relatively little to the
fundamentals of Judaism. All the essentials had been laid down by the Pharisaic
scribes with an astounding finality, and Talmudic Jewry adhered to them with
unswerving fidelity' (Baron 1952b, 310). Although there was a definite need for
a body of civil and business law and other aspects of life as a self-governing
community in the diaspora covered by the Mishnah and Talmuds, evidence provided
here indicates that these documents contain a vast amount of material for which
there are no practical functions at all. The incredible elaboration of Jewish
religious law in these writings suggests that this mass of material is the
result of intense intellectual competition within the Jewish community and that
the resulting Torah then provided an arena for intellectual competition within
the Jewish community.
"To begin with, these writings are extremely
difficult to understand without a great deal of study. There is no attempt to
develop an easily comprehensible code of law or religious ideology that would be
comprehensible to an individual who did not have an extraordinary degree of
education and commitment to study.
"'What is said in the Mishnah is
simple. How it is said is arcane.... Its deep structure of syntax and
grammatical forms shapes what is said into an essentially secret and private
language. It takes many years to master the difficult argot ....' (Neusner
1988b, xxv; italics in text).
"Neusner notes that although the Mishnah
may be described as a law code, a schoolbook, and a corpus of tradition, it is
best described as a work of philosophy in the Aristotelian tradition. The
Aristotelian nature of much of this work is well illustrated by Neusner's
(1988a, 111:204-205) analysis of Tractate Terumot, a tractate concerned with
designating a portion of agricultural crops for heave-offering for priests,
which is an expansion of six verses from the Book of Numbers (18:8-13). The
tractate contains extremely complex discussions of the classification of
mixtures and things that fall into different classes. The differences between
potential and actual and between intentional and unintentional are important for
classification, and the tractate discusses cases that involve several principles
of classification. 'I cannot imagine a more profoundly philosophical reading of
a topic that, in itself, bears no philosophical interest whatever' (Neusner
1988a, 111:205).
"Many of the problems appear to involve intellectual
disputation for its own sake. The Mishnah is thus not constructed in order to
produce a logically organized, easily grasped set of laws for purity and legal
codes for self-government during the exile. Rather, '[t]he Mishnah begins
nowhere. It ends abruptly. There is no predicting where it will commence or
explaining why it is done. Where, when, why the document is laid out and set
forth are questions not deemed urgent and not answered' (Neusner 1987, 87-88).
Sanders (1992, 471) says simply that the Mishnah 'does not consist of set rules
that governed society. It consists of debates.'
"Yet the Mishnah is 'the
initial and definitive statement of Judaism' (Neusner 1988a, 1:5) - an integral
part of Jewish canon. Moreover, and this is the point, the mastery of this canon
was the [greatest virtue] of a religion whose elite were not a group of celibate
intellectuals, but rather a group of individuals with a great deal of social
status and control of resources and whose first religious obligation was to 'be
fruitful and multiply.'
"This massive set of writings is therefore
substantially unnecessary in terms of fulfilling any purely religious or
practical legal need. Although, as indicated above, much of the Mishnah itself
appears to exist only for the sake of intellectual disputation, this is even
more true of the massive set of later writings. Neusner (1986a) shows that the
majority of the material in the Yerushalmi and the Bavli is [analysis],
including a great deal of expansion, of the Mishnah. Thus, it is common to
generalize from the Mishnaic rules and to raise further questions, or establish
entirely new lines of inquiry within the overall framework of the Mishnaic
tractate. The consistency of rules from the Mishnah (and sometimes between the
Mishnah and Tosefta) is explored.
"Research on psychometric intelligence
clearly shows that there is a strong general component to intelligence
(Spearman's g factor). Being able to master this vast mass of writings is
thus an excellent indication of a high level of general intelligence,
and, as indicated below, especially verbal IQ.
"One need not suppose that
there was a conscious intent on the part of the rabbis to develop a Torah that
could serve as a forum for high-stakes intellectual competition. Once
scholarship was established as the [greatest virtue] and the key to social
status, resource control, and reproductive success within the Jewish community,
there would be intense competition to develop an intellectual reputation. The
writings produced as a result of this competition therefore become increasingly
complex and inaccessible to those with less intellectual ability. Within a
fairly short time, one could not hope to enter the arena without a very long
period of preparation, a firm dedication, and persistence, as well as (I would
suppose) native intellectual ability....
"Viewed in this manner, the
development of this massive corpus of material is more a consequence of the
development of the strategy than a consciously intended aspect of the
strategy.
"Despite the logical veneer, the point was not to make a
rational, scholarly argument. A great deal of intelligence was required, but
ultimately there was no attempt to seek truth, religious or otherwise. These
writings are thus ultimately irrational. And as is inevitable with irrational
undertakings, acceptance of the Jewish canon was essentially an act of
authoritarian submission.
"On the other hand, an illiterate [lower-class
Jews]... was at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy, despised as not really a
complete Jew. Zborowski and Herzog (1952, 152) show that the dichotomy
intellectual/non-intellectual was more or less coincident with Jew/non-Jew, and
persons without intellectual ability were constantly confronted by the social
superiority of those who had intellectual ability. Persons without intellectual
ability were also morally suspect - suspected of being more likely to beat their
wives and engaging in other horrible deeds (p. 82). Parents scolded their
recalcitrant children with the prospect that if they continued to fail to excel
at scholarship, they would descend to the depths of being [a lower-class
Jew]."
In the book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why
We're Afraid to Talk About it by Jon Entine, he describes a tribe in East
Africa that has exceptional long distance running abilities, resulting in
numerous marathon wins for a small racial group. How did they do it? They were
cattle rustlers, and after stealing they would run with their booty - the slower
runners were caught and were killed or worse. So goes human unnatural selection
from niche building (see my review of Taboo. Entine is a Jew, and the
Tribe came down hard on him for this glimpse into racial realism).
We
could speculate on other examples of culturally driven selection, like
sub-Saharan African's dancing ability (ritual war dances) or Europeans artistic
ability (cave drawings 40,000 years ago). Almost any culturally driven arms
race can be stumbled upon that results in increasing a naturally occurring
trait or skill to higher and higher levels. What MacDonald is describing above
is such an arms race, stumbled upon by the Jews thousands of years ago -
those male scholars who were more intelligent and more dedicated rose to the
top, married the wealthiest female daughters of the elite, and had more children
than their lesser peers.
As the competition increased of course, the
testing material had to become more difficult. This phenomenon is well known in
intelligence testing - the tests test best when they are matched to the group
being tested. For intelligence tests, they are more accurate when used to
determine people around the norm of 100. When testing people with an IQ of over
150 however, they become less reliable because they are not developed to discern
differences between the super smart. Likewise, as the Jewish eugenics' program
continued on over time, and as scholars became brilliant in verbal intelligence,
they developed written material that became increasingly difficult to analyze
and master over years of study. This was necessary, just like intelligence tests
are normed for the average, the average Jewish verbal intelligence rose to an
average of 127 (while performance intelligence remained closer to the norm). The
Jewish brain was evolving asymmetrically towards a very specific cluster of
skills, still seen today in the Ashkenazi gene pool.
The other obvious
fact is that among Jews, religious or secular, they know they are different and
far superior to those around them. It is obvious to them from their first
contact with Gentiles - "we have a superior intellect than the Gentiles." It is
easy to see that this was accepted as fact by the Jewish religion, but as more
and more Jews became secular, how did they reconcile this with their desire to
deny that races were different? Jewish dogma today is to either not discuss
their superior intellect, or try to make excuses for why they just seem to be so
smart.
With the rise of antisemitism at the beginning of the 20th
Century, and starting with the Boasian school of anthropology, racial
differences had to be denied. If the Jews really were genetically superior in
intellect to all other races, they would be in extreme danger of oppression.
Therefore, a program of racial egalitarianism took hold and is still firmly
entrenched in Western culture. Any assertion that one race is more intelligent
than another race must be vehemently denied, and the only way remaining to deny
this fact is by censoring those who present the scientific evidence. The
egalitarians have no empirical evidence to show that there could be
environmental causes for the Jews having an average intelligence of 117, while
the average intelligence of sub-Saharan Africans is only 70. It is not that the
Jews feel badly about being so smart as any reading of their history will show,
they feel threatened by it if it should become known.
Note how the Jews
have natural allies in suppressing the known disparity in innate racial
intelligence - neither Blacks or any other racial group is willing to accept
that they are genetically less intelligent than another, so the dogma is
accepted by most people for obvious reasons of pride (allowing for the
exceptional empiricist that is). I have seen too many White supremacists on the
Internet who will argue that Blacks are stupid, but when it comes to Jews, they
are just tricky and deceitful. No amount of evidence is going make these Whites
believe they are any less intelligent on average than Jews.
So, do the
Jews present one set of facts to the Gentiles while believing a different set of
facts among themselves? This dilemma reminds me of the Saturday Night
Live skit where there is a bus filled with Whites, and a lone Black male
gets on. All the Whites sit quietly, reading their papers, looking out the
window, nothing out of the ordinary going on. After a few stops, the Black man
gets off, and the party resumes: the Whites are handing out money to each other,
partying, and having a gay old time. This is absurd of course, but humans are
naturally prone to believing conspiracies where none exists.
So how do so
many Jews, especially in academia, hold such obviously cognitive dissonant
perspectives on racial differences? I think the evidence points to a selection
process that along with intelligence, also increased authoritarian submission
that makes the Jewish mind naturally anxious when their belief systems are
contradictory. With that anxiety comes an extreme need to rationalize away these
conflicts, using the very skills of debate that MacDonald describes above. This
is the same sort of legal mind that can defend a criminal with such
resoluteness, because the facts are less important than the argument -
argumentation exists aside from facts or truths. Arguments are meant to produce
results, truth. This rationalization process is a very human response to
unpleasant situations or thoughts.
This also explains why Jews dominate
in genres such as Marxism, social sciences, deconstructionism, postmodernism,
messianism, neoconservatism, politics, etc. They are all anti-empirical in that
they start with an objective (quite often Anglophobic) and construct their
realities from whole cloth - the exact antithesis of the European mind of
science. (Of course, I am talking in terms of average racial differences in
behavioral traits - there are exceptions on both sides.)
"Eugenicists
such as Hughes (1928) and Weyl (1963, 1989) have long emphasized Jewish eugenic
practices as resulting in high levels of intelligence among Jews. Although there
are major differences between an evolutionary perspective and a eugenics
perspective on Judaism, the evolutionary perspective is highly compatible with
the supposition that eugenic practices have been an important aspect of Judaism
as an evolutionary strategy. From this perspective, not only did the Jewish
canon perform an educational function, but also there is evidence that the
Talmudic academy often functioned as an arena of natural selection for
intelligence.
"The first major eugenic effect occurred when the
Babylonian exiles returned to Israel (now a part of the Persian Empire) in the
fifth century B.C. The Babylonian exiles were disproportionately wealthy
compared to the Israelites left behind, and in Chapter 3 data were presented
indicating that these relatively wealthy and aristocratic exiles returning from
Babylon refused to intermarry or associate with the "people of the land" -
[lower-class Jews] - both the Samaritan remnants of the northern kingdom and the
former Israelites of the southern kingdom. The main reason given for this
exclusion was that these groups had not preserved their ethnic purity, but
Ezra's policy of removing all individuals of foreign taint from the Israelite
community would also have had a eugenic effect.
"Dating the origins of
eugenics as a conscious policy among Jews is difficult. The evidence described
in this chapter indicates that concern with education originated at least by the
second century B.C., and there is evidence for social, economic, and genetic
discrimination against the less educated classes at least from the period
following the Second Commonwealth (70 A.D.). Moore (1927-30, II:157ff; see also
Alon 1977; Safrai 1968) suggests that, following the destruction of the Temple
in 70 A.D., the new class division was between an educated, religiously
observant elite called 'associates'... and the [lower-class Jews], who were
either characterized by a withdrawal from Torah education and knowledge or
suspected of being careless in the performance of the religious
law....
"These comments indicate that the policies of the haverim
would have had negative economic effects on the [lower-class Jews], and the
social discrimination might reasonably be supposed to result in defections of
the [lower-class Jews] from Judaism. Of particular interest here is that
'marriage between the two classes was condemned in terms of abhorrence' (Moore
1927-30, 11:159-160). Thus, the Talmud states that: 'A Jew must not marry a
daughter of [lower-class Jews], because they are unclean animals [sheqes] and
their women forbidden reptiles [sheres] and with respect to their daughters the
Scripture writes: "Cursed be he that lieth with any manner of beast [Deut.
27:21]! ... Said R. Eleazar: one may butcher a [lower-class Jew] on a Day of
Atonement that happens to fall on a Sabbath [when any kind of work constitutes a
violation of a double prohibition]. His disciples said to him: Master, say
'slaughter' [instead of the vile word, butcher]. But he replied "slaughtering
requires a benediction, butchering does not require a benediction."' (b.
Pesachim 49b)
"The Talmuds show a strong concern with eugenics. Marriage
with a scholar or his children is highly recommended: 'For marriage, a scholar
was regarded ... as more eligible than the wealthy descendent of a noble
family.' The Tannaim did not tire of reiterating the advice that 'under all
circumstances should a man sell everything he possesses in order to marry the
daughter of a scholar, as well as to give his daughter to a scholar in
marriage.... Never should he marry the daughter of an illiterate man' (Baron
1952b, 235).
"Feldman (1939) shows that the authors of the Talmud, like
the other ancients, believed that heredity made an important contribution to
individual differences in a wide variety of traits, including physical traits
(e.g., height), personality (but not moral character), and, as indicated by the
above quotations from the Talmud, scholarly ability. 'Every care was taken to
prevent the birth of undesirables by a process of selective mating' (p. 32).
Individuals contemplating marriage are enjoined to attend to the family history
of the future spouse: 'A girl with a good pedigree, even if she be poor and an
orphan, is worthy to become wife of a king' (Midra Num. R.i, 5; quoted in
Feldman 1939, 34). A prospective wife should be scrutinized for the presence in
her family of diseases believed to be inherited (e.g., epilepsy), and also the
character of her brothers should be examined, suggesting an awareness of the
importance of sex-linked factors. Physical appearance was not to be a critical
resource for a woman: 'For "false is grace and beauty is vain." Pay regard to
good breeding, for the object of marriage is to have children' (Taanith 26b and
31a; quoted in Feldman 1939, 35).
"Feldman interprets the
k'tsitsah (severance) ceremony, described in b. Kethuboth 28b, as
intended to show the extreme care the rabbis took to ostracize anyone who had
contracted a marriage not made according to eugenic principles. A barrel of
fruit was broken in the market place in order to call attention to the event,
and the following words spoken: 'Listen ye our brethren! A. B. married an
unworthy wife, and we fear lest his offspring mingle with ours; take ye
therefore an example for generations to come that his offspring may never mix
with ours....'
"There is also very clear evidence for eugenic practices
among the 19th-century Ashkenazim. Etkes (1989) finds that, although a variety
of traits were important in the choice of sons-in-law, including appearance,
health, and temperament, particular value was placed on the perceived potential
for Torah study. In other words, marriage with the daughter of a wealthy man and
consequent support of study during the years of adolescence (the kest period) were conditioned primarily
on scholarly ability, and, indeed, the prospective father-in-law would give the
future son-in-law an examination prior to agreeing to the marriage. The
father-in-law would then support the couple for a specified period of years and
provide a large dowry, which would secure the financial future of the
couple....
"Beginning in the ancient world, wealthy men would marry their
daughters to promising scholars and support the couple until adulthood (Baron
1952b, 221). This practice became a religiously sanctioned policy and persisted
among both the Ashkenazim (Katz 1961 a) and the Sephardim (Neuman 1969). Katz
(1961 a) notes that this pattern of early marriage, and the associated period of
prolonged dependency on adults (the kest period referred to above), was
assured only to the wealthy: 'Only members of the upper class who were
outstanding in both wealth and learning could afford the luxury of an early
match without lessening their prospects. They were assured of a "good match" by
their very position' (p. 142). The poor, even when allowed to marry, would be
forced to marry later, and there was a group of both sexes that was forced to
remain unmarried - a clear marker of sexual competition within the Jewish
community. On the other hand, upwardly mobile individuals would often defer
marriage until they had obtained status, whether in the business world or by
developing a reputation as a scholar....
"As in all traditional European
societies (see, e.g., Herlihy & Klapische-Zuber 1985), Hundert (1992) finds
that there was a positive association between wealth and numbers of children in
Jewish households in the 18th century, and Weinryb (1972) notes that there were
marked differences in fertility among Jews, with successful business leaders,
prominent rabbis, and community leaders having a large number of children
reaching adulthood, while families of the poor were small. Vogel and Motulsky
(1986, 609) note that in mid-18th-century Poland prominent Jews had 4-9
surviving children, while poorer Jewish families had 1.2-2.4 surviving children.
As is typical in pre-industrial societies, wealthy families also benefited from
having adequate food and were better able to avoid epidemics. Similarly, Goitein
(1971, 140) notes that the families of wealthy Jews in the Medieval Islamic
world were much larger than those of poor Jews."
Today, most Jews deny
that eugenics is a valid practice - even that it is possible. It has been
declared a pseudoscience - the false hope of racists. But when eugenics was at
its intellectual zenith (if not its practical zenith as shown by Jews, Sparta,
and numerous other culturally driven selectionist niches), it was accepted by
Jews and Gentiles alike, and both socialists and conservatives. It was not until
after the beginning of the Boasian era circa 1930 did eugenics become anathema
first to Jews worried about National Socialism, then to the rest of the Western
world as it was made to suffer the guilt of incorrect thought.
Again,
just like the difference in the average intelligence between races, how could
any Jewish scholar be unaware of the Jewish obsession with good breeding? It is
threaded throughout Jewish writings; clearly, it must have been stumbled across
over and over again. However, just like racial intelligence differences,
eugenics had to be denied because they were the practitioners of eugenics, just
as they were eugenics' greatest success story.
"Given these phenomena, it
is expected that Jews will tend to exceed gentiles in intellectual ability, and
particularly in what psychologists term verbal intelligence. As Levinson (1958,
284) notes, traditional Jewish education emphasizes verbal knowledge, verbal
concept formation, and ability to understand abstract ideas - exactly the
abilities tapped by modern measures of verbal intelligence.
"The belief
in the superiority of Jewish intelligence has been common among Jews and
gentiles alike. Patai and Patai (1989, 146ff) review data indicating that Jewish
intellectual superiority was a common belief among many 19th-century and early
20th-century scholars, including some for whom the belief in Jewish intellectual
superiority had anti-Semitic overtones: Galton and Pearson believed that Jews
had developed into a parasitic race which used its superior intelligence to prey
on gentiles. Castro (1954, 473) shows that both scholars and the populace agreed
that the Jews of Spain had superior intelligence, and, indeed, Patai (1977)
summarizes data suggesting that, during the medieval period in Spain, Jews were
overrepresented among outstanding scientists by a factor of 18.
"Data
reviewed in Chapter 5 indicate a general Jewish overrepresentation in a wide
range of fields in the modern world, including business, science, social
science, literature, and the arts. At the pinnacle of achievement, Jewish
overrepresentation is particularly striking. Patai and Patai (1989, 159) show
that Jews received a highly disproportionate number of Nobel prizes in all
categories from 1901 to 1985, including 11 percent for literature, 12.7 percent
for chemistry, 20.2 percent for physics, 35.2 percent for physiology and
medicine, and 26.1 percent for economics. Moreover, the extent of
overrepresentation has increased since World War II, since Jews were awarded
twice the number of prizes in the years 1943-1972 compared to 1901-1930. In
Germany, Jews received 10 of 32 Nobel prizes awarded to German citizens between
1905 and 1931 despite constituting less than 1 percent of the population during
this period (Gordon 1984, 14).
"Studies of gifted children are of
particular interest because IQs in the gifted range are unlikely to result from
environmental influences acting on individuals whose genetic potential is near
the population mean. Terman's (1926) classic study found twice as many Jewish
gifted children as expected on the basis of their representation in the
population, although the true representation of Jews in this group may have been
higher because some may have concealed their Jewish identity. These subjects had
IQs ranging from 135 to 200 with a mean of 151. One of Terman's Jewish subjects
had an IQ of 184 when tested at age seven. His close relatives included a chief
rabbi from Moscow, a prominent lawyer, a self-made millionaire, a concert
pianist, a writer, and a prominent Polish scientist. His maternal
great-grandfather was a rabbi famous for his compilation of a Jewish calendar
spanning over 400 years, and the rabbi's descendants (the boy's cousins) had IQs
of 156, 150, 130, and 122.
"Research suggests an average IQ of Ashkenazi
Jewish children in the range of 117. In two studies of representative samples of
Jewish children, Bachman (1970) and Vincent (1966) found an average IQ of 117
and 117.8, respectively, although Vincent's results are said to be an
underestimate because they excluded a large percentage of an elite group of
Jewish children attending fee-paying schools.
"There is good evidence
that Jewish children's Verbal IQ is considerably higher than their Performance
IQ. Brown (1944) found several sub-test differences compatible with the
hypothesis that Jewish children are higher on verbal abilities, while
Scandinavian children are higher on visuo-spatial abilities. Lesser, Fifer, and
Clark (1965) found large differences favoring Jewish children over
Chinese-American children on verbal ability, but insignificant differences in
favor of Chinese-American children on visuo-spatial abilities. And Backman
(1972) found that Jewish subjects were significantly higher than non-Jewish
Caucasians on a measure of verbal knowledge but were significantly lower on
visuo-spatial reasoning.
"Large verbal/performance IQ differences have
been found within Jewish populations. Levinson (1958) studied a representative
sample of yeshiva students and found an average Verbal IQ of 125.6, an
average Performance IQ of 105.3, and an average Full Scale IQ of 117.86,
although he suggests that there may have been a ceiling effect for some students
on the verbal portion. Whereas in the general population there was a correlation
of 0.77 between Verbal and Performance IQs, among Jewish children it was only
0.31. Finally, Levinson (1960b) found that a sample of Jewish boys (age 10-13)
with an average Verbal IQ of 117 had a Performance IQ of 98, while Irish and
Italian samples matched for Full Scale IQ had Verbal/Performance differences of
only approximately 5 points (approximately 110-105). Levinson (1959) provides
evidence that the Verbal/Performance difference for Jewish children increases
from pre-school to young adulthood. When children were matched on the basis of
full-scale Wechsler IQ, pre-school children showed a small (3-point) difference
between Performance and Verbal IQ, while elementary school-age and college
student subjects showed a difference of approximately 20 points.
"Taken
together, the data suggest a mean IQ in the 117 range for Ashkenazi Jewish
children, with a Verbal IQ in the range of 125 and a Performance IQ in the
average range. These results, if correct, would indicate a difference of almost
two standard deviations from the Caucasian mean in Verbal IQ - exactly the type
of intellectual ability that has been the focus of Jewish education and eugenic
practices. While precise numerical estimates remain somewhat doubtful, there can
be no doubt about the general superiority of the Ashkenazi Jewish children on
measures of verbal intelligence (see also Patai & Patai 1989,
149)....
"Within this high pressure, relatively homogeneous Jewish
environment, individual differences are most likely due to genetic variation.
(This is a general principle of behavioral genetics: As one diminishes the
environmental variation, the only remaining source of variation must be
genetic.) As a result, eugenic marriage practices are assured of being based
overwhelmingly on genetic variation, rather than environmental variation. As a
result, one can be assured that by marrying a relatively intelligent Jew, one is
marrying someone with a relatively high genetic potential for intelligence,
rather than simply one who came from a relatively favorable
environment."
What MacDonald is saying above is similar to the cattle
rustlers described in Taboo, they are very good at long distance running,
but not sprinting. Differences in athletic abilities between races have not been
studied to any great degree of course - not to the degree and for the number of
years that psychometricians have been studying mental ability. Nonetheless, the
analogy will do. In order to be so genetically asymmetrical in terms of
intelligence, an asymmetry not seen in any other race, means that the Jewish
brain has been molded very differently from the norm. It also means that the
high average intelligence of Jews could not be due to environmental influences
for this simple reason: even secular Jews, those who no longer immerse
themselves in Talmudic studies, show the same asymmetry - a verbal IQ of 125, an
average IQ of 117, and a fairly normal performance IQ. General intelligence or
g is a hierarchical construct where two lower factors make up
overall intelligence: performance and verbal intelligence.
This fact
alone should be sufficient to show that genetic differences within races are
also responsible for the genetic differences between races. The Ashkenazi Jews
as a race have a far higher average IQ than any other race, and the asymmetry
proves that it has to be genetic, because it occurs in all Jews - secular or
religious. Culture plays no part therefore in the Jewish excellence in academic
achievement. Even Jensenists have missed this point, preferring to compare
primarily Asians, Whites and Blacks to prove that genetic differences between
races account for their average intelligence differences. Note, that this
asymmetry is not universal among Jews. Many Jewish groups, such as those from
Yemen, do not show either high intelligence or a higher verbal over performance
IQ due to the impoverishment and suppression under Islam. There are many Jewish
groups who have been separated for thousands of years, and they evolved under
differing ecologies, with differing results.
"The personality system of
conscientiousness is a biological system that underlies attention to detail,
neatness, orderliness, striving for achievement, persistence toward goals in the
face of difficulty, and the ability to focus attention and delay gratification
(Digman 1990). At the extreme, such a person is obsessive/compulsive and
guilt-ridden (e.g., Widiger & Trull 1992). There is a strong positive
association between conscientiousness and academic success (r = 0.50) (Digman
& Takemoto-Chock 1981). The scales of neat, careful (of own work),
persevering, and planful load positively on this dimension, while
irresponsible and careless (of property) load negatively (Digman
& Takemoto-Chock 1981; Digman & Inouye 1986). Correlations between high
school grades and assessments of this factor performed six years previously were
in the 0.50 range. Similar correlations occurred for occupational status
assessed when subjects were in their mid-20s. Eugenic practices related to
ability in Jewish religious studies would clearly influence this
trait.
"Studies of conscientiousness also indicate that this dimension
includes items such as 'trustworthy,' 'reliable,' 'dependable,' and
'responsible' which comprise what one might call 'social conscientiousness'
(e.g., Costa & McCrae 1992). Social conscientiousness appears to be a sort
of 'don't let down the group' trait, originally proposed by Darwin (1871) as the
basis of group allegiance. As Goldberg (1981, 161) states, '[m]y knowledge of
the status of a person X on the trait of Conscientiousness answers the question
"Can I count on X?"' Because of the importance of a sense of obligation to the
group for Judaism throughout its history, there is reason to suppose social
conscientiousness may be of particular importance to Judaism as a group
evolutionary strategy.
"Individuals high on this trait would be expected
to feel intense guilt for having failed to fulfill their obligations to the
group. Moreover, given the importance of conformity to group norms for Judaism,
it would be expected that individuals who were low on this trait would be
disproportionately inclined to abandon Judaism, while successful Jews who were
the pillars of the community and thus epitomized the group ethic of Judaism
would be disproportionately likely to be high on group conformity and also
likely to be reproductively successful. The result is that there would be strong
selection pressures toward high levels of social conscientiousness within the
Jewish community. And since social conscientiousness is psychometrically (and
presumably biologically) linked to the other aspects of conscientiousness, these
pressures would also result in a general trend toward higher levels of all
aspects of conscientiousness within the Jewish community.
"For example,
Jordan (1989, 138) notes that Jews who defected during the Middle Ages (and
sometimes persecuted their former co-religionists) tended to be people who were
'unable to sustain the demands of [the] elders for conformity.' This trend may
well have accelerated since the Enlightenment because the costs of defection
became lower. Israel (1985, 254) notes that after the Enlightenment defections
from Judaism due ultimately to negative attitudes regarding the restrictive
Jewish community life were common enough to have a negative demographic effect
on the Jewish community. Moreover, in Chapter 4, it was noted that there was
discrimination within the Jewish community such that the families of individuals
who had apostatized or engaged in other major breaches of approved behavior had
lessened prospects for marriage. To the extent that there is heritable variation
for such non-conformity (and all personality traits are heritable [e.g., Rowe
1993]), such practices imply that there will be strong selection pressures
concentrating genes for group loyalty and social conformity within the Jewish
gene pool....
"Thus, a child reared in a traditional Jewish home would
have been strongly socialized to continually monitor his/her behavior to ensure
compliance with a vast number of restrictions - exactly the sorts of influences
expected to strengthen the conscientiousness system. Indeed, the popular
conception of the talmid khokhem (scholar) among the wider community of
Eastern European shtetl Jews and especially among the Hasidim was that he was
pre-occupied with endless rituals and consumed with anxiety that he had
neglected some regulation (Zborowski & Herzog 1952, 140). Zborowski and
Herzog (1952, 202) also describe individuals who are consumed with anxiety lest
they omit opportunities to help others, since failure to take advantage of such
an opportunity was a violation of a commandment. One function of the Hasidic
rabbi was to reassure people who were anxiety-ridden because of fear that they
had violated one of the myriad regulations of rabbinical Judaism (p.
179)...."
Conscientiousness and/or group conscientiousness is only one of
the Big-Five personality factors that dominates the field of personality
traits research - the others being extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and
openness. Conscientiousness has been shown to be second only to intelligence for
success, so it is not a unusual that Jews are dominant not only in intelligence,
but in the motivation to excel in academic and other cognitively demanding tasks
or professions. It is therefore not surprising that they are more successful as
individuals in anything they strive to do. Eugenics works better than natural
selection.
What is worrisome however is that social conscientiousness,
when it is tribal rather than universal, leads to ingroup/outgroup conflict. How
are Euros when it comes to conscientiousness? Without having extensive data
between races on this personality trait, it is hard to tell. However, Europeans
seem to also have moderate to high levels of conscientiousness, especially when
it comes to being or acting proper and being held accountable for their actions,
and they are also heavily guilt laden even when they are not guilty. Told that
they are racists they now go about beating up on their own race because they
feel they have committed a moral transgression - rather than understanding they
have merely been indoctrinated into a belief system foisted upon them by others.
Having low levels of ethnocentrism, Euros are prime targets by other groups for
moral extortion.
"Modern psychological research is highly compatible with
the idea that parent-child relationships may indeed be characterized by intense
affection combined with hostility (i.e., ambivalence, as in ambivalent
attachment), since these emotions are associated with two independent biological
systems (MacDonald 1992a). The ability to form close family relationships and
engage in high-investment parenting is clearly an extremely important aspect of
Judaism as an evolutionary strategy, but it is reasonable to suppose that being
able to compartmentalize one's relationships is also a highly important skill
(MacDonald 1992a). Being able to engage in close family relationships would thus
be highly compatible with engaging in purely instrumental behavior toward other
individuals outside one's group, including behavior of a hostile, exploitative
nature. This type of flexibility would appear to be a general feature of human
evolved psychology and thus common among all human groups (MacDonald 1992a), but
the literary and ethnographic evidence suggests that Jewish family relationships
very strongly facilitate both the affectional system and the ability to engage
in aggressive and hostile interactions with others....
"The common
perception of Jewish and gentile psychiatric workers from the late 19th century
until at least the end of the 1920s was that compared to gentiles, Jews (and
especially male Jews), had relatively sensitive, highly reactive nervous
systems, thus making them more prone to the diagnoses of hysteria,
manic-depression, and neurasthenia [chronic fatigue, weakness, loss of memory,
and generalized aches and pains] (Gershon & Liebowitz 1977; Gilman 1993
92ff). Consistent with these early findings, Gershon and Liebowitz (1977) find
that Jews had a higher rate of hospitalization for affective disorder than did
non-Jews in New York. Strongly suggestive of a genetic basis for the greater
prevalence of affective disorder [disturbance in moods] among Jews is their
finding that among Jews bipolar affective disorder constituted a higher
percentage of all affective disorder than was the case in gentile populations in
the United States or Sweden. Individuals with bipolar affective disorder have
periods of intense euphoria or paranoid-anger as well as periods of despondency,
worry, and hopelessness - exactly the traits expected to characterize
individuals who are extreme on affect intensity.
"There is some
indication that Jews tend to be extreme on all personality systems. Patai (1977,
391) provides a long list of personality traits which appear to be more
pronounced among American Jews. Although this type of data must be evaluated
with caution, the traits involved appear to include items from all of the
Five-Factor Personality Dimensions (see Digman 1990), including items suggesting
a strong tendency toward neuroticism (e.g., 'is more neurotic'; 'anxious') and
extraversion (e.g., 'greater extraversion'). Indeed, this pattern would be
expected given the supposition that Jews are higher on affect intensity. Affect
intensity is related to all personality systems with a strong emotional
component (Larsen & Diener 1987) and may be viewed as a behavioral
energizing system that can be directed toward behavioral approach (related to
extraversion) as well as behavioral avoidance and attention to danger (related
to neuroticism and conscientiousness) (MacDonald n.d.). Individuals high on
affect intensity are thus highly motivated to intensive interaction with the
environment and often have conflicting goals because both behavioral approach
and behavioral avoidance systems are prone to activation. Thus, the proposal is
that a critical component in Jewish adaptation has been the elaboration of
affect intensity as a personality system.
"The suggestion is that via
processes of cultural and natural selection Jews have developed an extremely
powerful set of psychological systems that are intensely reactive to
environmental contingencies. Personality systems underlie a set of adaptive
interactions with the environment (see MacDonald 1988a, 1991, 1992a, 1992b,
n.d.). Behavioral approach systems direct us toward active, highly motivated
involvement in the world, risk-taking, and the acquisition of resources and
stimulation. On the other hand, behavioral avoidance, including the
conscientiousness system, underlies the ability to react intensely to
anticipated danger, defer gratification, persevere in unpleasant tasks, and be
dependable and orderly.
"Another personality system influenced by affect
intensity is the affectional system (often termed agreeableness, warmth, or love
in personality research). This system underlies the ability not only to form
close, intimate relationships related to high investment-parenting (MacDonald
1992a; see above), but also other types of long-term relationships of
reciprocity, trust, and sympathy (Buss 1991; Wiggins & Broughton 1985). Such
a trait would appear to be critical to membership in a cohesive, cooperative
group such as Judaism. In this regard, it is of interest that Jews exhibit low
levels of anti-social personality disorder (Levav et al. 1993), a disorder
linked to being low on the agreeableness system (MacDonald 1992a; Widiger &
Trull 1992).
"Evolution, like a good engineer, designed people with a
good engine (the behavioral approach systems) and a good set of brakes
(behavioral avoidance and conscientiousness). Individuals who are very high in
all of these systems are likely to have a great deal of inner conflict (also
noted by Patai [1977, 391] as a trait of American Jews), since they are pulled
in different directions by these biologically and psychometrically independent
systems (MacDonald n.d.). Exemplars would be the sort of fictional characters
who populate Woody Allen movies: individuals who have very powerful drives
toward resource acquisition, social dominance, and sensual gratification, but
who also have a high level of anxiety, guilt, and inhibitory
tendencies.
"All personality systems are adaptively important, and being
high on all of them provides the ability to be flexibly (and, indeed, intensely)
responsive to environmental contingencies. An individual who was high on both
the behavioral approach systems and the conscientiousness systems would be
strongly motivated to engage in highly rewarding approach behaviors, including
extraverted behavior related to resource acquisition, social dominance, and
sensual gratification (aspects of behavioral approach), but would also show an
ability to react intensely to threatened danger, delay gratification, persevere
in the face of difficulty, and be dependable and orderly (aspects of behavioral
avoidance and conscientiousness)."
MacDonald covers the other four
personality traits (of the Big-Five) above besides conscientiousness:
neuroticism, agreeableness, openness, and extroversion. He points out that as
well as being highly conscientious, Jews are high on neuroticism, extroversion
and agreeableness. What really makes Europeans different from the Semites
however is not so much differences in neuroticism, conscietiousness and
extroversion, but differences in aggreableness and openess. Euros are
individualistic, low on ethnocentrism, and when they interact with other people
they will tend to feel the same shame or guilt whether the other person is a
family member, another European, or someone from another race - at least in
degrees compared to Semites.
The Semitic mind, as MacDonald points out,
feels no remorse in treating others badly outside of the tribe. It seems to be
easy for Jews more than for Euros to view "the other" as a mere tool for gaining
or acquiring what they want - others are instruments to their needs.
Ethnocentric people are those that will cut in front of someone in a line, are
pushy at the grocery store, or overbearing and demanding. Do we see Jews behave
like this? No, because a wise person knows when to be pushy and when to be
hostile to others - perhaps in business dealings rather than cutting in front of
someone in a line. Blacks are more likely to cut into a line for example, while
a wise Jew would more likely be a slum lord - a wise form of
exploitation.
This ethnocentrism may in fact be an innate characteristic
in most races, but relatively absent in Euros because of our unique evolutionary
past - but we will only know this when we study other races with regards to
personality profiles. But where does this leave open-mindedness? Euros seem to
have a slight monopoly on this behavioral trait - MacDonald does not mention it
specifically other than alluding to the fact that Jews are high on this trait
also. However, I would question this assumption based on Europeans' dominance in
science and innovation, results that seem to have a strong connection with
openess. As a people, I do not know of any other race that would open its
borders like we have, letting in third world immigrants who are prone to
criminal activity, low intelligence, and thus requiring welfare assistance,
while expecting nothing in return. In fact, many Whites believe it is their
moral duty to help everyone in the world (our maladaptive universal moralism)
and to attack any Whites who disagree.
For clarification, MacDonald is
really discussing two different behavioral trait systems above (remember, this
is an academic book). One is the five factor system or OCEAN
(Neuroticism versus stability; Extroversion versus
introversion; Openness to experience or intellect, imagination, or
culture; Agreeableness versus antagonism; and
Conscientiousness or will to achieve). It is the most commonly
accepted number of factors for describing behavioral traits. Another is a three
factor system that seems more reflective of an evolutionary system in all
animals:
Affectional system - animals care for their young and
take care of their own.
Behavioral approach - animals have to explore
for food and mates like rats in maze.
Behavioral avoidance - animals
have to be careful not to get eaten or killed.
There are numerous systems
in psychometrics for describing personalities, and if they are valid systems
they can be transposed from one to the other, or are intercheangable. They vary
more on the descriptions they use than on what they actually mean in terms of
human behavior.
"A permanent sense of imminent threat appears to be
common among Jews. Writing on the clinical profile of Jewish families, Herz and
Rosen (1982) note that for Jewish families a 'sense of persecution (or its
imminence) is part of a cultural heritage and is usually assumed with pride.
Suffering is even a form of sharing with one's fellow-Jews. It binds Jews with
their heritage - with the suffering of Jews throughout
history....'
"Woocher (1986) shows that Jewish survival in a threatening
world is a theme of Judaism as a civil religion in contemporary America. Within
this world view, the gentile world is viewed as fundamentally hostile, with
Jewish life always on the verge of ceasing to exist entirely....
"To
conclude: Judaism as a group strategy has developed a wide range of practices
that serve to cement allegiance to the group and the submergence of individual
goals to the overall aims of the group. Eugenic practices and the development of
intensive cultural supports for group identification have resulted in a very
powerful group orientation among Jews.
"'[Ethnocentrism is] a schismatic
in-group/out-group differentiation, in which internal cohesion, relative peace,
solidarity, loyalty and devotion to the in-group, and the glorification of the
"sociocentric-sacred" (one's own cosmology, ideology, social myth, or
Weltanschauung; one's own "god-given" social order) are correlated with a
state of hostility or permanent quasi-war (status hostilis) towards
out-groups, which are often perceived as inferior, sub-human, and/or the
incorporation of evil. Ethnocentrism results in a dualistic, Manichaean morality
which evaluates violence within the in-group as negative, and violence against
the out-group as positive, even desirable and heroic.' (van der Dennen 1987,
1)
"I believe that the area of psychological research most relevant to
conceptualizing Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy is that of research on
individualism/collectivism (see Triandis 1990, 1991 for reviews). Collectivist
cultures (and Triandis [1990, 57] explicitly includes Judaism in this category)
place a great emphasis on the goals and needs of the ingroup, rather than on
individual rights and interests. Ingroup norms and the duty to cooperate and
submerge individual goals to the needs of the group are paramount. Collectivist
cultures develop an 'unquestioned attachment' to the ingroup, including 'the
perception that ingroup norms are universally valid (a form of ethnocentrism),
automatic obedience to ingroup authorities, and willingness to fight and die for
the ingroup. These characteristics are usually associated with distrust of and
unwillingness to cooperate with outgroups' (p. 55).
"As indicated in
Chapter 7, socialization in collectivist cultures stresses group harmony,
conformity, obedient submission to hierarchical authority, the honoring of
parents and elders. There is also a major stress on ingroup loyalty, as well as
trust and cooperation within the ingroup. Each of the ingroup members is viewed
as responsible for every other member. However, relations with outgroup members
are 'distant, distrustful, and even hostile' (Triandis 1991, 80). In
collectivist cultures, morality is conceptualized as that which benefits the
group, and aggression and exploitation of outgroups are acceptable (Triandis
1990, 90).
"People in individualist cultures, on the other hand, show
little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are paramount, and
socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, independence,
individual responsibility, and 'finding yourself' (Triandis 1991, 82).
Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup
members and are more likely to behave in a pro-social, altruistic manner to
strangers. People in individualist cultures are less aware of ingroup/outgroup
boundaries and thus do not have highly negative attitudes toward outgroup
members (1991, 80). They often disagree with ingroup policy, show little
emotional commitment or loyalty to ingroups, and do not have a sense of common
fate with other ingroup members. Opposition to outgroups occurs in individualist
societies, but the opposition is more 'rational' in the sense that there is less
of a tendency to suppose that all of the outgroup members are culpable.
Individualists form mild attachments to many groups, while collectivists have an
intense attachment and identification to a few ingroups (1990, 61).
"The
expectation is that individualists living in the presence of collectivist
subcultures will tend to be less predisposed to outgroup hostility and more
likely to view any offensive behavior by outgroup members as resulting from
transgressions by individuals, rather than being stereotypically true of all
outgroup members. On the other hand, collectivists living in an individualist
society would be more likely to view ingroup/outgroup distinctions as extremely
salient and to develop stereotypically negative views about
outgroups.
"Like the Essenes and other Jewish extremist groups,
contemporary haredim are also deeply concerned about issues of racial purity.
Indeed, the resurgence of Orthodox Judaism and ultra-Orthodox Jewish
fundamentalism may well result in a schism of the Jewish people along the lines
of racial purity. As indicated in Chapter 4, genealogy is an extremely important
aspect of status in the Hasidic community. Moreover, Landau (1993, 291 ff)
describes the opposition of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities to
intermarriage and to procedures that facilitate conversion to Judaism. Orthodox
Jews and certainly the haredim do not recognize conversions performed by Reform
or Conservative rabbis. Nor do they recognize the recent change in traditional
Jewish law by the Reform movement that allows individuals to trace their
genealogical Jewishness through the father, rather than the mother. Rabbi Aharon
Soloveitchik of Yeshiva University stated that the result of the proposed policy
would be that "mamzerut [bastardy] will be escalated to a maximum" (quoted in
Landau 1993, 320). From the perspective of the Orthodox and the fundamentalists,
the rest of Jewry is highly contaminated with non-marriageable individuals whose
taint derives from their genetic ancestry."
The mystery of Jewish success
and antisemitism all falls into place once we understand that in order to
protect themselves, and because they are a hyper racialist race, the Jews have
managed as a highly ethnocentric/collectivist tribe to convince the
tolerant/individualist European majority that "Euros" are the racists. That is,
as a highly intelligent tribe, with extreme behavioral attributes for
aggression, hostility towards others, and censorship among themselves when it
comes to those who would deviate, they have managed to make Euros feel guilty -
even though we are the least tribal of any race. This is not a statement of
moral outrage toward the Jews as much as it is a sad statement on the weakness
of the Euro mind amidst collectivist cultures. The Jews are typical; Euros are
atypical.
Let's take Blacks as another example, even though in the United
States they vary greatly in the amount of White genes that any individual Black
may have, as a group they are every bit as tribal it seems as Jews are. They
censor anyone who deviates from being a fellow Afrocentric brother (Ward
Connerly, Clarence Thomas, etc.). They call all Whites racist while they are
intolerant of and hostile towards Whites themselves. They violently attack
Whites far more than Whites attack them based on race. Overall, they are hostile
to Whites while Whites have strived to give them far more than they could have
produced by themselves in Africa. It seems to me that the major difference
between Jews and Blacks is that the Jews are a highly intelligent tribe and have
been able therefore to hold high positions in academia, the media, and
government where they have been able to indoctrinate Euros into believing in the
racism myth. Moreover, we have swallowed the message so well that liberal Euros
have now taken up the cause and will severely punish any European that claims
that we have the same right of self-preservation as do other races.
While
doing research on ethnocentrism, I stumbled across The California Psychological
Inventory (CPI) in Testing and Assessment in Counseling Practice edited
by Watkins Jr. and Campbell, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates publishers, 2000 (also
available at Questia online). In an extremely simple synopsis of what they have
to say about authoritarianism/ethnocentrism it is attributed to Alpha type
personalities - those people who have very low ego strength, are extroverted,
and rule-following. It also states that intolerant or prejudiced people tend to
be Gamma type personalities - those people who have very low ego strength, are
extroverted, and rule-breaking. Notice that only "rule-breaking" is different,
but of the four personality types, intolerance and ethnocentrism fall into
separate categories.
What is interesting about the above robust
personality inventory, the CPI, is that extroversion and low ego strength are
associated with intolerance, ethnocentrism, and/or authoritarianism. Are most
Euros extroverted and low on ego strength? It hardly seems like the behavioral
traits usually attributed to Euros. In fact, it is extremely hard to find much
information at all on ethnocentrism/collectivism and its relationship to
personality types, even though it is part of neo-Darwinism and the general
principles are discussed at length for all animals, not just humans. So why do
we live in a society that talks so much about racism, but virtually no research
has been done to correlate what racism IS based on behavioral traits?
Frankly, that would not be in the Jews best interest, and they dominate the
academic disciplines of psychology, social science, and cultural anthropology.
Research therefore on racial differences in the levels of ethnocentrism are not
just ignored, they are prohibited.
TABLE 1: CONTRASTS BETWEEN EUROPEAN
AND JEWISH CULTURAL FORMS, from page xxxi of The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis
of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political
Movements by Kevin MacDonald, 2002 edition published by 1st Books
Library.
|
|
European Cultural Origins |
Jewish Cultural Origins |
|
Evolutionary History |
||
|
Kinship System |
Bilateral;
Weakly Patricentric |
Unilineal;
Strongly Patricentric |
|
Family System |
Simple Household |
Extended Family; Joint
Household |
|
Marriage Practices |
[Outbreeding]; Monogamous |
[inbreeding], Polygynous |
|
Marriage Psychology |
Companionate; Based on Mutual Consent
and Affection |
Utilitarian; Based on Family Strategizing
and Control of kinship Group |
|
Position of Women |
Relatively High |
Relatively Low |
|
Social Structure |
Individualistic; Republican;
Democratic |
Collectivistic; Authoritarian; Charismatic
Leaders |
|
Ethnocentrism |
Weakly Ethnocentric/ Xenophobic |
Strongly Ethnocentric/ Xenophobic |
|
Socialization |
Stresses Independence,
Self-Reliance |
Stresses Ingroup Identification;
Obligations to Kinship Group |
|
Intellectual Stance |
Reason; Science |
Dogmatism; Charismatic Leaders (e.g., Freud, Boas); Submission to
Ingroup Authority |
|
Moral Stance |
Moral Universalism: Morality is
Independent of Group Affiliation |
Moral Particularism; Ingroup/Outgroup
Morality |
"Alexander and Borgia (1978) suggested that two characteristics of hominid groups would have favored group selection: rapid increases in group differences in adaptiveness caused by cultural innovations such as the invention of weapons, and the ability and incentive for groups to function as effective units, both by constraining within-group selfishness and dissent and fostering collective action. As discussed earlier, our ancestors probably formed cooperative groups to enhance hunting and defense; these groups may have competed against one another in war, thereby increasing their susceptibility to rapid extinction. Groups with high levels of solidarity may have defeated groups with high levels of individualistic selfishness at relatively little cost, and high-solidarity groups may have weeded out their selfish individualists by killing them off or ostracizing them.
"As Alexander (1987), Axelrod and Hamilton (1981), and other theorists have emphasized, the costs of investment in groups may be mitigated considerably when the groups are composed of kin. However, social-psychological research on group formation (e.g., Tajfel, 1982) has found that humans form coalitions on the basis of virtually any commonality of interest, and they change alliances quickly when interests diverge. Krebs and Denton (1997) adduced evidence that cognitive structures have evolved in humans that induce them to categorize others as members of ingroups or outgroups (Devine, 1989), and to process information about ingroup members in systematically more favorable ways than they process information about outgroup members (Linville, Fischer, & Salovey, 1989)."
"When it is considered that authoritarianism, as measured by the Californian F (Fascist) scale, correlates positively with rigidity and the possession of obsessive traits, a personality type emerges which is remarkably similar to traditional descriptions of the military mind. (The F scale measures anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, political and economic conservatism, and implicit anti-democratic trends or potentiality for Fascism.) In its most extreme form such a person would be conventional, conforming, rigid, and possessed of a closed mind. He would also be one who is orderly, obstinate, and unimaginative. Finally he would be the sort of individual who believes in force and toughness, is lacking in compassion, and is prone to stereotype out groups (i.e. the enemy) as less gifted than himself."
"In the strong value-expressive condition, participants received the Thielen-Marsh Ethnocentrism Scale ( Marsh & Thielen, 1993). The scale was designed to arouse a feeling that participants are not quite living up to their values opposing racism and sexism and discrimination, values found to be important in our population. The first page contains questions that ask students to provide some personal information (e.g., "describe your personal ethnic identity," and "I have dated an ... Hispanic, African-American, Asian, Caucasian"). The next six questions deal with the individual's specific behaviors toward members of other groups. For example, participants are asked whether they have ever laughed at racial or ethnic jokes, or whether they would be frightened if they were walking alone at night and were approached by a group of individuals of another race. The next section involves indicating their agreement with a series of four belief statements based on items from earlier prejudice scales (e.g., Adorno, Levinson, Frenkel-Brunswik, & Sanford, 1950). For example, one item states that "the minority problem is so general and deep that democratic methods can never solve it." The final set of questions are social distance items for which participants indicate how comfortable they feel with various situations such as, "If a brother/sister/member of my family married a person of another race, I would feel...." Participants were then told that for them to get a true feel for the entire scale, they...."
"The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to a system that degrades them.
"The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in U.S. society.
"The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a predictor of behavior will lead to its collapse.
"Race Traitor aims to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race. It will encourage dissent from the conformity that maintains it and popularize examples of defection from its ranks, analyze the forces that hold it together and those that promise to tear it apart. Part of its task will be to promote debate among abolitionists. When possible, it will support practical measures, guided by the principle, Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.
"Does Laissez-Faire Racism Differ from Symbolic Racism?
We are not the first or only analysts to attempt to conceptualize the changing character of whites' attitudes toward blacks. One important line of research is that concerning symbolic racism. Although defined and ultimately measured in a variety of ways, the concept of symbolic racism proposes that a new form of antiblack prejudice has arisen in the United States. It is said to involve a blend of early learned social values, such as the Protestant ethic and antiblack fears and apprehensions. In a context where segregationist and biological racism are less in evidence, according to the symbolic racism researchers, it is this modern symbolic racism that plays a more formidable role ( Sears & Kinder 1971; McConahay & Hough 1976)."[8]