The Problem of the Jews
https://evolaasheis.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/presentation-of-the-jewish-problem/
The Jewish Problem: The Spiritual Aspect
In Italy, there is little awareness of the Jewish problem, unlike in other countries, particularly the Germanic countries, where everyone knows it is currently arousing profound antagonisms not only on intellectual grounds but also on social and political grounds. The latest laws recently inspired by Göring in Germany, which state that not only marriages between Jews and non-Jews are forbidden, but also cohabitation with Jews, and that Jews or those who are already married to Jews are permanently banned from any organisation of the National-Socialist State, indicate the extremely high level of these tensions.
The Jewish problem has very ancient, diverse, and in some respects enigmatic origins. Anti-Semitism is a motif that has appeared in almost every stage of Western history. Even as far as Italy is concerned, it may not be devoid of interest to look at the Jewish problem with more than mere curiosity. The fact that the special circumstances which have caused the most direct and thoughtless forms of anti-Semitism in some countries are not present in Italy allows us to consider the problem with greater calm and greater objectivity.
Basically, let us immediately say that anti-Semitism is currently characterised by the lack of a truly general standpoint and of the doctrinal and historical premises which are necessary to really justify, through a deductive procedure, any practical, that is to say, social and political, anti- Semitic policies. As far as we are concerned, we believe that anti-Semitism has every reason to exist. However, the weakness and the confusion of the main ideas advanced by anti-Semites, together with their violent partisan spirit, actually produce the opposite effect, arousing in any impartial observer the suspicion that it can all be reduced to one-sided and arbitrary attitudes dictated less by sound principles than by practical contingent
interests.
In these notes, we intend to examine the real factors according to which an anti-Semitic attitude can be consolidated. It is said that, if there is at the present time a Jewish peril, particularly perceptible in the financial field and in the economic sphere in general, there is also a Jewish peril in the area of ethics. Finally, as far as spirituality, religion and a world-outlook are concerned, everything that is connected with Semitism and, above all, with Jews, appears as peculiarly repulsive to the various peoples of the white race. We will therefore look into the problem in a totalising way and in three writings we will successively consider three aspects: firstly, the spiritual and religious aspect; secondly, the ethical and cultural aspect; and finally, the economic, social and political aspect. Naturally, we will be using the works of German authors who are the most specialised in this area and the most representative of the ‘myth’ they uphold. But we will attempt to discuss all this in the most impersonal way, excluding any element that does not belong to the pure doctrinal plane.
Is there, in general, a typical Jewish world-outlook or view on life and the sacred? The term ‘Semitic’, as everyone knows, implies a far broader concept than the mere term ‘Jewish’. We will deliberately be using it here because we believe that the ‘Jewish’ element cannot be, purely and simply, separated from the general type of civilisation that formerly spread throughout the whole Eastern Mediterranean area from Asia Minor to the borders of Arabia – noteworthy though the differences between Semitic peoples may be. Without an overall study of the Semitic spirit, various essential aspects of the specifically Jewish spirit at work in the most recent times are bound to escape us. Some authors who have gone beyond a purely biological racial theory and have also undertaken to look upon race in terms of a type of civilisation have more or less come to this conclusion, for example, Günther, and more recently, Clauss, regarding what they have called, in general, ‘the culture of the Levantine soul’ (der vorderasiatischen Seele). The peoples possessed of this soul are more or less the Semitic peoples.
What basis do we have for looking upon Semitic spirituality and related religious forms as lower? Here, the ideas of the anti-Semites are far from being clear and unanimous. Indeed, in order to say what is negative about the Semitic spirit, we would need to start by defining what we think of as positive as regards that spirit. But anti-Semites are far more interested in the controversy than in the affirmation, and, in this respect, the very thing in the name of which they deny and condemn is itself often contradictory and uncertain. Thus, some of them call on Catholicism (Möller van den Bruck),
others on Nordic Protestantism (Chamberlain, Wolf) and others again on a suspect paganism (Rosenberg, Reventlow) or on secular-national ideals (Ludendorff). The weakness of such positions results from the fact that all these points of reference constitute historical ideas that date from later than the original Semitic civilisations and are partially influenced by elements deriving from the latter, instead of leading us to an original spiritual pole that is really in a pure state.
The opposition between the Semitic spirit and the Aryan spirit is at the root of any anti-Semitism, naturally. However, to achieve any real insight, we cannot confine ourselves to giving to the term ‘Aryan’ a vague racialist foundation or a solely negative and controversial content, limited to what is not ‘Jewish’ in general. On the contrary, we need to be able to define ‘Aryanity’ as a positive universal idea, to be opposed, when it comes to type of divinity, cults, religiosity and world-outlook, to anything that can be referred to as a Semitic civilisation and, particularly, to that of the Jews. Thus, it is necessary to raise the ideas of the philologists and the historians of the 19th century, particularly those of Max Müller’s school, about a fundamental unity of the civilisations, religions, symbols and myths of the Indo-Germanic stock and civilisation, to a different level from the rather naturalistic one to which they have been applied until now. We must see that these ideas are connected with what Wirth, although often with serious confusions, has more recently attempted to explain regarding a pre-Nordic, we would say Hyperborean, common primordial civilisation as the original stock of the various and more recent Indo-Germanic civilisations. Finally, we should not forget the intuitions of genius of Bachofen on the antagonism between ‘solar’ (Uranic) civilisations and ‘lunar’ (Telluric) civilisations, between societies governed by the virile principle and societies governed by the feminine-motherly principle (gynaecocracy).
It is evident that we cannot repeat here the study which we have already undertaken in one of our previous works (Revolt Against the Modern World). We will confine ourselves to summarising its conclusions, outlining the type of spirituality – which can equally be called ‘Aryan’ or ‘solar’ or ‘virile’ – that, by way of antithesis, must enable us to bring out what is really peculiar to the Semitic spirit.
What was peculiar to the Arya (a Sanskrit word that designates the ‘noblemen’, as a race, not only of the blood, but also and essentially, of the spirit) was an affirmative attitude towards the divine. What was hidden behind their mythological symbols taken from the bright sky was the sense of the ‘incorporeal virility of light’ and of the ‘solar glory’, that is to say a victorious spiritual virility, whereby these races not only believed in the
real existence of a super-humanity, of a race of immortals and of divine heroes, but also often attributed to that race a superiority and an irresistible power over the supernatural forces themselves. In relation to this, the characteristic ideal of the Arya was more royal than sacerdotal, it was more the ideal of the transfiguring affirmation than the priestly ideal of devout religious abandon, more the ethos than the pathos. Originally, the kings were its priests in the sense that they and no others were eminently recognised as being in possession of that mystical force connected not only with the ‘fortune’ of their race, but also with the efficacy of the rites, conceived as real and objective operations on supernatural forces. Thus, the concept of Regnum had a nature which was sacred, and even, more or less potentially, universal; from the enigmatic Indo-Aryan conception of the Cakravarti (‘Universal Master’) to the Aryo-Iranic concept of the universal kingdom of the ‘faithful’ of the ‘God of Light’; from the ‘solar’ basis of the Roman Aeternitas Imperi and finally, to the mediaeval Ghibelline idea of the Sacrum Imperium, the impulse to give a universal material form to the force from above of which the Arya felt themselves to be the eminent bearers has always manifested itself in the Aryan or Aryan-like civilisations.
In the second place, instead of devout and imploring servility, there was the rite, conceived, let us repeat, as a pure compelling operation regarding the divine, and likewise it was to the Heroes, more than to the Saints, among the Arya, that the highest and the most privileged places of immortality opened up: the Nordic Valhalla, the Doric-Achaean Isle of the Blessed, and the Sky of Indra among Indo-Europeans from India. The conquest of immortality and of knowledge would keep its virile features. Adam, in the Semitic myth, is ‘damned’ for having attempted to eat from the divine tree, whereas, in the Aryan myth, experiences of that kind appear to us as successful and rendering immortal heroes such as Hercules, Jason, Mithras, and Sigurd. If, (even higher than the ‘heroic’ world), the supreme Aryan ideal is the ‘Olympian’ ideal of unchanging, perfect essences, removed from the lower world of destiny, bright as the sun and sidereal natures, then the Semitic gods are essentially gods that change, experience birth and passion, are ‘year-gods’ that, like vegetation, are subject to the law of death and rebirth. The Aryan symbol is solar, in the sense of purity that is strength and of strength that is purity. It is of a bright nature that, let us say it again, has light in itself, as opposed to the lunar (feminine) symbol, that is that of a nature which brightens only as it reflects and absorbs a light emanating from a centre that is outside it. Finally, as regards the corresponding ethical principles, what is characteristically Aryan is the principle of freedom and
personality on the one hand, of loyalty and honour on the other hand. The Aryan enjoys independence and difference, and dislikes submergence in a heterogeneous mass, which does not prevent him, however, from obeying in a virile way, acknowledging a leader and being proud to serve him according to a bond that is freely established, his nature being warlike and irreducible to any interest that can be bought and sold or in general expressed in terms of money. Bhakti – as the Aryans from India used to say; fides – as the Romans used to say; fides – as would be said again in the Middle Ages; Trust and Treue, these will be the watchwords of the feudal system. If, in the Mithraic religious communities, the principle of brotherhood particularly showed traces of the virile solidarity between soldiers engaged in the same soldierly struggle (miles referred to a Mithraic initiatic grade), then the Aryans in Ancient Persia already had, (and this would last until the time of Alexander), the ability to dedicate not only themselves and their deeds, but also their very thoughts to their leaders, whom they conceived of as transcendent beings. Among Aryans from India, the very system of castes in its hierarchy was not based on violence, but on a spiritual loyalty – Dharma and Bhakti. The solemn and strict behaviour, free from mysticism and very suspicious of any abandonment of the soul, that used to be peculiar to the relationship between the civis and the pater and his gods, has the same features as the ancient Doric-Achaean ritual, as the ‘royal’ and dominating bearing of the Brahmana or ‘solar caste’ in the early Vedic period, or of the Mazdeian Atharvan. On the whole, it is a classical style of self-control and action, a love of clarity, difference and personality, an ‘Olympian’ ideal of divine and heroic super-humanity, together with an ethos of loyalty and honour, that characterises the Aryan spirit.
In this way, even if briefly, the basic point of reference is given. These fundamentals of an ideal antithesis must be borne in mind. This antithesis must serve as our basis for evaluating all that historical reality and the global state of civilisations often show us in a mixed state. It would be absurd, regarding times that are not absolutely primordial, to want to try and find again the Aryan element or the Semitic element in an absolutely pure state, wherever they might be thought to be.
What characterises the spirituality of Semitic civilisations in general? The destruction of the Aryan synthesis of spirituality and virility. Among Semites, we see, on the one hand, an affirmation of the virile principle that is coarsely material, sensual, or uncouth and ferociously warlike (Assyria), and, on the other hand, an emasculated spirituality, a ‘lunar’ and predominantly sacerdotal relation with the divine, the pathos of sin and
expiation, an impure and uneasy romanticism, combined, as a sort of escapism, with a naturalistic and mathematically-based contemplativeness.
A few points must be clarified. Even in the most remote antiquity, the Aryans, like the Egyptians themselves, whose first civilisation must be considered as a civilisation of ‘Western’ origin, looked upon their kings as ‘peers of the gods’. In Chaldea, however, the king was only a vicar – Patesi – of the gods, conceived of as entities distinct from him (Maspero). There is something yet more typical about that Semitic deviation from the level of a virile spirituality: the yearly humiliation of the kings in Babylonia. The king, dressed as a slave or as a prisoner, would confess all his faults and it is only when, beaten by a priest representing the god, tears were brought to his eyes, that his appointments were confirmed and he could wear the royal emblems. In reality, insofar as the sense of ‘transgression’ and ‘sin’ (almost completely foreign to Aryans) is inborn to Semites and is reflected in a characteristic way in the Old Testament, what is typical of Semitic people in general, closely linked to the types of matriarchal civilisations (Pettazioni), but foreign to patriarchal Aryan societies, is the pathos of the ‘confession of sins’ and of their remission. This is already the ‘complex’ (in a psychoanalytic sense) of the ‘guilty conscience’, which usurps a ‘religious’ value and distorts the calm purity and the ‘Olympian’ superiority of the Aryan aristocratic ideal.
The main characteristic of Semitic-Syriac and Assyrian civilisations is the predominance of feminine deities, of goddesses of life, lunar or telluric, who often have certain impure features in common with hetæræ. The gods, on the contrary, with whom they consort as lovers, have none of the supernatural features of the great Aryan divinities of light and day. They are often natures that are subordinated to the image of the Woman or Divine Mother. These are either ‘passionate’ gods that suffer and change and are born again, or ferocious warlike divinities, hypostases of savage muscular force or of phallic virility. Besides, in ancient Chaldea, the sacerdotal sciences, especially the astronomical ones, represent a lunar and mathematical spirit, an abstract and basically fatalistic contemplativeness, devoid of any interest in the heroic and supernatural affirmation of the personality. Remains of this Semitic spiritual component, secularised and intellectualised, have been at work among the Semites themselves in more recent times. From Maimonides and Spinoza to modern Jewish mathematicians (i.e. Einstein, Levi-Civita and Enriques), there is a characteristic passion for abstract thought and natural law as lifeless numbers. In fact, this can be considered as the best part of the ancient Semitic heredity.
Of course, not to appear one-sided, far broader considerations should be set out here, however that is impossible for reasons of space. Let us just mention that the negative elements we have referred to can be found, not only among Semites, but also in other originally great Indo-Germanic civilisations. However, in the latter, until a certain time, compared to a different prevailing type of spirituality, they appeared as secondary and subordinate elements, which are almost always effects of decay and influences of the substratum of lower races that had been subjugated or had infiltrated into them. It is from the 8th to the 9th century BC that, almost simultaneously, a sort of crisis or climacteric can be witnessed in the greatest ancient civilisations, together with an increasing ascendency of these lower elements. It can be said that in the East, from China to India and Iran, the crisis was overcome by a series of congruous reactions and reforms (Lao-tse, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster). In the West, the dam seems to have broken, the wave seems not to have found any important obstacles to its progressive advance. In Egypt, it is the upsurge of the popular cult of Isis and similar divinities, with their reckless popular mysticism, as opposed to the ancient royal, virile and solar cult of the first dynasties. In Greece, it is the decline of the Achaeo-Dorian civilisation with its heroic and Olympian ideals, the advent of secular, anti-traditional and naturalistic thinking on the one hand and of the Orphic and Orphic- Pythagorean mysticism on the other hand. However, the centre from which the ferment of decomposition above all spread actually seems to have been the group of Eastern Mediterranean Semitic peoples and, ultimately, the Jewish people.
With respect to the civilisation of the latter, to be objective, two periods need to be distinguished that definitively became differentiated from each other exactly in that historical moment of crisis to which we have just referred. If an accusation is to be made positively against the Jews, it is that of having had no particular tradition, of owing to other people, whether they be Semitic or non-Semitic, the positive as well as the negative elements that they were able particularly to develop later on. Thus, if we consider the oldest Jewish religion, or the ancient Philistine cult of Jehovah (the Philistines, besides, seem to have been a non-Jewish group of conquerors), or the stock of king-priests to which Solomon and David belonged, we often find ourselves before forms with purer and greater features. The so-called ‘formalism’ of the rites in that religion was more than likely to have had the same anti-sentimental, active, determinative spirit that, as stated, was the characteristic of the primordial and even Roman, virile, Aryan ritual. The very idea of a ‘chosen people’ destined to rule the world by divine mandate,
leaving aside its naive exaggerations and the questionable right of the Jews to refer it to their race, is, as pointed out, an idea that can also be found in Aryan traditions, particularly among Iranians, just as, among the latter, though with virile and non-passive Messianic features, the type of the future ‘Universal Master’, Saoshyant, a King of Kings, can also be found. It was a moment of crisis connected to the political collapse of the state of the Jewish people that swept away these elements of a positive spirituality that are most likely not derived from the Jewish people themselves, but from the Amorites, whose non-Semitic and Nordic origin is sometimes argued. Prophetism already represented the decomposition of the ancient Jewish civilisation and the direction of further decline. The ‘prophet’ type (nabi), inspired or obsessed with God, who was previously considered almost as a sick man, is substituted for the ‘clairvoyant’ type (roeh). The spiritual centre shifts to him and his apocalypses – it no longer lies in the great priest and in the sacerdotal king ruling in the name of the ‘God of the Armies’, Jehovah Sabaoth. The revolt against the ancient sacred ritualism in the name of a shapeless, reckless, romantic, ‘inner’ spirituality combines with an ever- increasing servility of man towards God, an ever-greater pleasure in self- humiliation and an ever-greater weakening of the heroic principle, up to the decline of the Messiah type into the ‘expiator’, the predestined ‘victim’ type, against the terroristic background of the apocalypses, and, on another level, to that style of deceit, of servile hypocrisy, as well as of devious persistent disintegrating infiltration, that will remain characteristic of the Jewish instinct in general. Penetrating, through the early pre-Catholic forms of Christianity, the Roman Empire which was already filled with all sorts of spurious Asiatic-Semitic cults, the Jewish spirit became, in fact, the leader of a great revolt of the East against the West, of the Sudra against the Arya, of the promiscuous spirituality of the Pelasgian and pre-Hellenic South against the Olympian and Uranic spirituality of the superior conquering races: a clash of forces that repeats the one that took place in a more remote period of the first colonisation of the Mediterranean.
Here, a point has been reached that allows us to discern what the arguments of the anti-Semites come down to in this respect. Let us immediately say that almost none of them are able to rise above this level of understanding. The only one able to do so may be Alfred Rosenberg, who, however, in the recent stands that he has taken, has come to compromise his position almost irreparably with confusions of all kinds, especially with ideologies clearly derived from the so-called enlightenment and racial- nationalism. In the religious field, it is really naive to think of justifying the loathing for the Jewish religion with a selection of biblical excerpts, from
which it would be clear that the Jewish God is a ‘false God’, a ‘humanised’, ‘fallible’, ‘changeable’, ‘cruel’, ‘unjust’, ‘disloyal’ God and so on (it is mainly Fritsch who specialises in such a j’accuse), or by stigmatising this or that dubious development in the morality of the Old Testament (Rosenberg has come to define the Bible as a compendium of “stories of pimps and cattle dealers”). Of course, as a Jew – Spinoza – showed, a prevalent robustness and materialism can be recognised in the Jewish mythological imagination. Aside from this, however, it should be wondered whether the mythologies of pure Nordic-Aryan stock would be considered tolerable themselves, if religions were to be judged on such contingent elements. Since the accusers are Germans, and if we refer to their own mythology, then what are we to think, for example, of Odin-Wotan’s disloyalty towards the pacts made with the ‘giants’, the rebuilders of Asgard, as well as of the ‘morality’ of King Günther who uses Siegfried, in the way that we know, to seduce Brunhilde? We will not stoop so low as to resort to such controversial expedients. All that which, from what we have just said, must be seen as negative in the Jewish religion, must not lead us to ignore the fact that, even though they were taken from elsewhere, elements and symbols of metaphysical and, therefore, universal value, can be found in the Old Testament.
When Günther, Oldenberg and Clauss state that the Semitic-Oriental spirit is characterised by a “fluctuation between the sensual and the spiritual, the mix of sacredness and depravity”, the pleasures of the flesh and at the same time the pleasures of carnal mortification, the opposition between body and spirit (an opposition which is arbitrarily claimed to have been unknown to Aryans), the pleasure of power over enslaved communities and the strong tendency to interfere in the emotional lives of other people; when Wolf states that it is from the Semitic East that all the diseases from which we suffer derive; that it is “from the swamp of Oriental ethnic chaos that imperialism, mammonism and urbanisation of the people along with the destruction of their conjugal and family life, the rationalisation and the mechanisation of religion, the priestly mummified civilisation, the absurd ideal of a divine state embracing a whole broken humanity, was born” – when anti-Semites say such things as these, they provide us with a pot- pourri in which pertinent points are intermingled with rather strange ideas. To realise these confusions, we need only say that, to Wolf, the Romans and Greeks would have had no other merit than that of developing a “flourishing national secular civilisation”. This shows how little the ancient Aryan civilisation serves as a point of reference to this author. He even ends up identifying this spirituality with Protestantism, thus reversing the real
perspectives. The triumph of prophetism over the ancient ritualistic Jewish spirituality seems to him a progress more than a degeneration, because of its analogy with the Lutheran revolt against the ritualism and the principle of authority within the Church. As regards the accusation peculiar to almost all these anti-Semites and racists against the ideal of a sacred universal state that they consider as Jewish and pernicious, it must be observed that, if the Semitic civilisation sometimes espoused such an ideal, the fact is nonetheless that it is not peculiar to it in any way. It can also be found in the ascending cycle of any great traditional civilisation. It is so far from being Jewish in itself that it spurred on the whole Middle Ages, as well as having been the dream of Frederic II and Dante. Thus, strangely enough, Rome comes to be synonymous with Jerusalem in such an anti-Semitic ideology. Rome would not be so much Christian as Jewish and, meanwhile, heir to the heathen empire, which, in its universalism, would itself be, more or less, Jewish (besides, it is de Gobineau who first called Imperial Rome ‘Semitic Rome’). What would, on the contrary, be anti-Jewish? According to Wolf, who manifestly follows in Chamberlain’s footsteps, in the first place, evangelic Christianity, that is to say pre-Catholic Christianity in its individualist, amorphously faithful, anti-dogmatic aspect, which precisely originates from the impure ferment of Jewish prophetism, i.e. not from Judaism alone, but rather from its decline; and ultimately, Luther, the one who, against the ‘Romanity’ of Rome, which he regarded as Satanic, essentially reasserted the Old Testament, so much so that it is not possible to find an anti-Semite… more philosemite than this author. It is true that others, such as Rosenberg, have not hesitated, for this very reason, to dismiss Protestantism, but in order only to jump out of the frying pan into the fire. What we are offered here, as we have said, is an anti-Catholicism of the purely secular type, an ignorance filled with all that stands for supernaturality and rite within Catholicism. Basically, a rationalism – and to racists rationalism is itself a Jewish creature!
Miller, too, contests the right to consider Protestantism as a type of religion purified from the Semitic element and, if he levels an accusation against the Roman Church, it is not only because of the Jewish residues that it preserves (for example, the acknowledgment that Israel was chosen by God), but also because the Church has gradually moved from an intransigent anti-Judaic attitude to a regime of tolerance towards Jews. These are commonly held themes in Germany nowadays, just as the idea that Rome seeks to be the shepherd of a sacerdotal Pharisaism that, like the Jewish one, would aspire, by any means, to world domination. In the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion too, to which we will return, the ideal of a
universal kingdom ruled by a sacred authority is given as Jewish. Then again, things that, on the basis of the above-mentioned principles, should remain distinct join and commingle with each other. If no one thinks of contesting the Asianisation and, therefore, the decline, which the idea of a universal empire underwent in ancient Rome, this still cannot constitute an argument against this idea considered in itself, any more than the fact that Judaism appropriated, to a certain extent, similar ideas. From an ‘Aryan’ standpoint, the Catholic Church is all the more worthy as it has managed to ‘Romanise’ Christianity, resuming hierarchic ideas, traditions, symbols and institutions that are related to a larger heritage, rectifying by means of the Roman spirit the pernicious element that is closely connected to Jewish Messianism and to the anti-virile Syrian mysticism peculiar to the revolution of primitive Christianity. Obviously, there are many non-Aryan residues in the whole institution of Christianity, when closely examined. Nevertheless, in the most recent times, Rome remains the only relatively positive point of reference for any universalistic tendency.
In relation to this, two points are to be borne in mind. As we will better see in the forthcoming chapters, there is at the present time, quite genuinely, a universal Jewish idea that fights against the surviving remnants of the ancient European traditions. However, that idea must be said to be not so much universal as international and represents the materialistic and mammonistic overturning of the ancient sacred idea of a universal Regnum. Besides, the hidden source of Nordic anti-Semitism gives itself away in its anti-universalist and anti-Roman controversialism, in its confusion between universalism as a supranational idea and a universalism which only means this ‘active ferment of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition’ that, to Mommsen, was particularly determined by Judaism in the ancient world too. We would say that what anti-Semitism reveals in this respect is a mere particularism. Now, there is a very curious contradiction in those who, on the one hand, accuse the Jews of having a national God for themselves alone, a morality and a sense of solidarity restricted to their own race alone, a principle of non-solidarity with the rest of the human species, and so on, and, on the other hand, come to follow precisely that Jewish ‘style’ by arguing about the other so-called aspect of the Semitic danger that universalism would be. Indeed, those who proclaim the well-known slogan ‘Gegen Rom und Gegen Judentum’ almost always follow in this the form of nationalism most narrow-minded, most particularistic, most conditioned by blood and therefore by an element completely naturalistic, eventually to manifest, in the attempt to form a strictly German National Church – Deutsche Volkskirche – the same spirit of schism as Gallicanism,
Anglicanism and similar heresies, that hold again, mutatis mutandis, the spirit of religious exclusivism and monopoly of the divine to the benefit of a given race, which had previously been decried as being peculiar to Israel. On this account, it is natural to end up in an avowed anti-Romanity, which, however, amounts, purely and simply, to anti-Aryanity, hybrid thinking, without nerves or clarity or the capacity to discern larger horizons. It will be noted that, in some people, anti-Romanism, far from limiting itself to the Catholic Church, also goes so far as to make them disown the greatest Ghibelline emperors of German stock, precisely because of their universalism!
These considerations have already led us to another aspect, ethical and political, of anti-Semitism, which will be the subject of the subsequent articles. It is now time to briefly conclude this examination of the arguments of anti-Semitism on the religious and spiritual plane. Dühring once wrote that “a Jewish question would exist even if all the Jews had abandoned their religion to join our ruling Churches.” This idea needs to be widened so far as to say that, in this present respect, it is useless to refer to race in the narrow sense in order to speak about a universal Semitism, that is to say, a Semitism as a typical attitude towards the spiritual world. This attitude can be defined in the abstract and can be identified even where, in a civilisation, there is no clear and direct ethnic connection with Semitic races and Jews. Wherever the virile, heroic, triumphant assumption of the Divine vanishes, to give way to the exaltation of the pathos of a slavish, depersonalising, turbidly mystical and Messianic attitude towards spirit, then the original force of Semitism and anti-Aryanity comes back. The sense of ‘sin’, as well as the senses of ‘expiation’ and ‘self-humiliation’, are Semitic. The resentment of ‘God’s slaves’ who do not tolerate any leader and want to become an omnipotent community (Nietzsche) – with all the consequences proceeding from such an anti-hierarchic idea, up to its modern materialisation as Marxism and Communism, is Semitic. Finally, that subterranean spirit of obscure, incessant agitation, of deep contamination and sudden revolt, is Semitic. This is why, according to the Ancients, the mythical serpent Typhon-Seth, the enemy of the solar Egyptian God, would have been the father of the Jews, and Jerome and the Gnostics considered the Jewish god as, precisely, a ‘Typhonian’ creature.
Thus, nowadays, on the spiritual level, the Semitic ferment of decomposition must be recognised both in the essence of the ideologies culminating in the mystique of a slavish collectivised humanity under the sign of the International, the white one as well as the red one, and in the ‘romanticism’ of the modern soul – in the re-emergence of the Messianic
‘climate’ –, in its spiritually destructive activism, in its confused content, in its neurotic restlessness saturated with the most impure and sensualistic forms of ‘life religion’ or of pseudo-spiritualist escapism. To be fully anti- Semitic, we must not content ourselves with half-measures or with ideas that are themselves compromised by the evil against which we fight. We need to be radical. Values must be evoked once again, which can be seriously called ‘Aryan’, and not merely on the basis of vague and one- sided concepts suffused with a sort of biological materialism: values of a solar Olympian spirituality, of a classicism of clarity and controlled force, of a new love for difference and free personality, and, at the same time, for hierarchy and universality that a stock newly possessed of a virile ability to rise from ‘life’ to ‘more-than-life’ can create in contrast to a world torn to shreds, without true principles and without peace. Thus, a real point of reference can only be found by referring to an ideal antithesis, free from ethnic prejudice. Semitism, in this respect, ends up by becoming synonymous with that ‘lower’ element that any great civilisation, and even the Jewish one in its most remote royal phase, subjected just as it fulfilled itself as cosmos against chaos. Even leaving aside the problem of the real common pre-historical origin of the formative and driving ‘solar’ spirituality of the group of the Indo-German civilisations, and limiting ourselves to the West only, what we have already mentioned regarding the spirit of the Eastern Mediterranean civilisations, regarding the crisis undergone by the people of Israel themselves, regarding the connection of the forces at work in that crisis with those that previously altered the Egyptian civilisation, as well as the Dorian one and, finally, in a more generalised onslaught, the Roman one, provides enough data to justify the possibility of an ‘anti-Semitism’ free from prejudices and parochialism, identifying more clearly what must be currently fought in the name of brighter traditions from our past and, at the same time, of a better spiritual future.
The Jewish Problem: The Cultural Aspect
Just as the germinal force of a seed fully manifests itself only when it breaks and its elements go into the surrounding matter, Judaism would have started to universally manifest its destructive and ethically subversive influence only after the political fall of the state of the ‘chosen people’ and their dispersion throughout the world.
The Jews would not have given up their Messianic-hegemonic pretensions, their instinct for universal domination as expressed in these three Biblical sayings: “All the wealth of the world must belong to you” – “They (all the peoples) must serve you” – “You will devour all the peoples that IHVH, your God, will deliver to you”. It is just that this deep-rooted instinct disguised itself, assumed tortuous forms and became occult, subterranean activity. When all means of direct assertion were precluded and the possibility of a victory through a loyal racial struggle was excluded, the Jews instead created, for the fulfilment of their ideal, an inner united front of deception and treason within all nations.
Two main instruments would have been chosen by the Jews for this purpose: money and intelligence. It is not through weapons, but rather through the power of gold on the one hand, and through everything that intelligence can do in terms of spiritual and ethical disintegration, of social and cultural myths generating a revolt against and a subversion of the traditional values and institutions of the Aryan peoples and against everything that is connected with the higher part of the human being, on the other, that the Jews would have endeavoured to conquer the world for centuries. The secret of the political and cultural history of the most recent centuries, particularly after the revolutions of the Third Estate and within the framework of democratic liberalism, would have been exactly the progressive rise of the Jew to the rank of supranational ruler of the West.
Such are, in brief, the fundamental theses of anti-Semitism in terms of historical outlook. The object of the present article and of the following one thus becomes clearer; since Judaism in the cultural world and Judaism in the socio-economic world do correspond to two instruments – intelligence and money – which the presumed Jewish conspiracy would have adopted for its international action.
Here follow a few preliminary observations. Whereas, in the previous article, we have seen that, to define what can be considered in general as the antithesis of the ‘Aryan’ element when it comes to spirituality and
religiosity, we had to speak not so much of Judaism as of Semitism in general, being careful, besides, not to separate Semitism from the influences proper to the Southern Mediterranean pre-Aryan aboriginal races, what comes into view here in the various anti-Semitic standpoints is the Jew as such. But it is easy to see that one aims at the wrong target quite often in this respect: one aims at the Jew, while, in reality, one puts on trial a whole combination of cultural and social phenomena so vast that it would be really superstitious to ascribe them solely to the Jews, even considering those ‘Unknown Superiors’ von Moltke has mentioned and those occult organisations of which judaised Freemasonry would only be the most recent and well-known. The truth is that, here, the Jew often only serves as a pretext, in that the struggle against the Jew often hides a struggle against general structures prevalent throughout modern civilisation, as well as against what can be considered as an anticipation of such structures in the ancient world. It is to this point that we are brought back, if we want to isolate within the anti-Semitic theses a clear and coherent content from what is on the contrary mere emotional and irrational coating.
How would the Jewish spirit have acted within the cultures of the non- Jewish peoples, in a sense, as stated above, of vengeance, hatred and disintegration? Wolf, whose anti-Semitic studies extend back into the most ancient times, mentions here three fundamental elements, namely nomadism, rationalism, mammonism (or materialism).
In the form of their spirit of nomads, of a scattered people, of stateless persons, the Jews would have introduced into the various peoples, starting with the Roman people, the virus of denationalisation, universalism and internationalism of culture. This is an incessant action of erosion of what is qualitative, differentiated, defined by the boundaries of a tradition and of a blood. This is what, in more recent times, we have seen focused mainly on the social plane, in the form of the lever of socialist revolutions, of democratic-Masonic judaised ideology and of their related humanitarian and internationalist myths. Besides, some anti-Semitic theorists dispute the assertion that the Jews are a race; they argue that they are merely a ‘people’ consisting of a chaotic ethnic mix (‘desert’ race, ‘Levantine’ race, ‘Mediterranean’ race, ‘Oriental’ race), therefore incapable of that upright sensitivity and those higher values which, according to such ideology, would be conditioned by the purity of blood. Hitler once said, along the same lines, that what keeps the Jews together is not so much a national and racial awareness as a common interest in damaging the non-Jews, so that, if left to themselves, the Jews would tear each other to pieces.
Mommsen wrote: “The Jew is essentially indifferent towards the state: he
is just as reluctant to give up his national characteristics as he is quick to disguise them under any nationality. Even in the ancient world Judaism was an active ferment of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition”. Indomitable, elusive and stateless aggregate within any fatherland, the Jewish element, to Wolf, is therefore the very principle of anti-race, anti- nation, and likewise of anti-civilisation, not in relation to a given civilisation, but indeed to any civilisation as nationally conditioned.
The second element of disintegration: Rationalism. Proceeding – according to those authors – from a religion in which the relations between man and God were conceived as a self-interested and almost contractual regulation of profit and loss, the Jewish rationalistic germ would have developed through history in a depersonalised, mechanical, anti-racial, anti- qualitative direction, in the direction of internationalism, ending up in the true ‘Enlightenment’ and rationalism of modern times. On the Jewish pattern, man thought that he himself could calculate and determine everything with human reason. With the calculating intellect, men would build a state, juridical and economic life supposed to be ‘in accordance with nature and reason’, meant to be valid for all and to prevail in any place and at any time, upon the ruins of any ethnic, national and traditional articulation. The most significant crowning achievement in this direction is the naturalistic and rationalistic religion peculiar to the universalist Masonic-Encyclopaedic ideology, which is precisely centred on the typical Jewish symbolism of the Temple of Solomon, Grand Master of the Order.
The third element – materialism – has two main aspects: mammonism and pragmatism on the one hand, and, on the other hand, everything that, in modern culture, literature, art and science, owing to the Jews, distorts, mocks, shows as illusory or unfair what, for us, had an ideal value, bringing out, on the contrary, as if it were the sole reality, what is lower, sensual and animal in human nature (Max Wundt). To soil, to make any support and any certainty fail, to instill a sense of spiritual dismay that favours an abandonment to the lowest forces and, finally, gives way to the occult game of the Jew – this would be, in such a field, the tactics of the Semitic conspiracy.
Mammonism: the deification of money and wealth, the transformation of the Temple into a bank, according to the Biblical precept: “For IHVH, your God, has blessed you as He has told you; you will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow; and you will dominate many nations, but they will not dominate you” – would be a Jewish characteristic, acting throughout history as the first cause of the fall of Western traditions into modern materialism, culminating in the omnipotence of a soulless economy and of a stateless
finance. If, on this basis, there is something typically Jewish about the Protestant-Puritan glorification of success and profit, the capitalist spirit in general, the evangelist-preacher-entrepreneur, the businessman and the usurer with the name of God on his lips, the humanitarian and pacifist ideology in the service of the materialistic praxis, and so on (Hartfeld), there are strong grounds for thinking that, as stated by Sombart, America in all of its aspects is a structurally Jewish country and that Americanism “is nothing other than the Jewish spirit distilled” – or, to quote Günther, that those who have transmitted and distributed the so-called modern spirit are mainly Jews – or, finally, to quote Wolf, that the closest connection between Anglo-Saxons and Masons under Jewish auspices is the keystone of Western history of the most recent centuries.
Just as the Jew Karl Marx (whose original family name was Mardochai), along the same lines, undertook to show that money and economic determinism is the only reality and destiny of civilisation, any ideality and spirituality remaining only as an empty ‘superstructure’ (a gospel culminating in the Soviet ideology born of the Bolshevik revolution, whose main leaders, save the Mongol Lenin, were also Jews), a similar action of the intelligence in a sense of materialistic degradation, of reduction of the superior to the inferior or of tumultuous revolt of the latter against the former, can be discerned as a common feature in the most diverse manifestations of the Semitic spirit in modern culture. Heine and Börne, as a matter of fact, with their corrosive irony, were Jewish. Freud and along with him the main representatives of his ‘psychoanalytic’ school, all of whom asserted the primacy of obscure forces of the libido and of the psychic unconscious over everything that is conscious life and self- responsibility, and who reduced any spiritual form to ‘sublimation’ or ‘transpositions’ of sexual instincts, are Jewish. Bergson, who, along the same lines, launched an attack upon the intellect and the validity of its explanatory principles in the name of the ‘religion of life’ and of irrationalism, is Jewish. Nordau, who aimed at reducing civilisation to a convention and a lie, is Jewish, just as Lombroso, who had undertaken to establish sinister equations between genius, epilepsy and criminality, is Jewish. The promoters of those modern ‘sociological’, ‘naturalistic’ and ‘ancestral’ interpretations of religions, which contaminate and obscure progressively more and more of their higher, metaphysical and transcendent content, are Jewish in most cases – to start with Reinach and Durkheim. Einstein, who, after he had dissolved, with the principle of general relativity, any certainty in previous physics, let only the ‘invariance’ of a despiritualised mathematical world, deprived of any sensory intuition and
of any concrete point of reference, is Jewish. Zamenhof, the inventor of the ‘international language’, Esperanto, an attempt to level the very plane of linguistic traditions, is Jewish. Although Richard Wagner had already denounced in 1850 the Jewish peril in music, the Jewish spirit plays a large part in the development of the ironic style of light opera (from the Jews Offenbach and Sullivan), then of the atonal (the Jew Schönberg) and rhythmic-orgiastic music (the Jew Stravinsky), and, finally, of Negro- American syncopated music, which, to many anti-Semitic theorists, seeks to introduce a disintegrating barbaric element into the modern soul, not to mention the fact that the main jazz composers and the musicians themselves are often also Jewish. Then again, it is to a large extent Jewish elements that are responsible for that modern literature and that modern theatre in which sensation is the predominant factor; in which the obsession with eros and its various complications and, in general, everything that is concealed within the depths of the human being, such as intolerance of customs, morbidity, and instinctuality, becomes the central core, combined with tendentious attacks against so-called social injustices, aimed at corroding traditional ethical certainties (Wassermann, Döblin). What is more, anti-Semites think they can discover notable Jewish influences in the development of neo- naturism and in the deviations of sports into purely materialistic forms; in a medical profession that is also of a materialistic nature and especially highly developed in the sexual domain; in works that, while pretending to address science and technology, always focus on the lower aspects of history and customs; finally, in the suffocating banality and the standardisation imposed upon the world by the American cinema, almost entirely dominated by Jews (such Jewish control seems to extend to the companies Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn, United Artists, Universal Pictures, Fox Film). Assuming this to be the case, it is obvious that we must conclude precisely that the development of world culture in recent times, if it is not purely and simply a Jewish phenomenon, is still something that cannot be conceived of without recognising a Jewish influence that is far more important at the present time than in past centuries.
But, at this point, the problem that we mentioned at the beginning reappears, a problem which will crop up again as regards Judaism on the economic and social planes. It is the question of deciding to what extent the Jew can seriously be considered as the determining cause and as the necessary and sufficient element to explain all the disruptions mentioned above, and to what extent the Jew appear on the contrary only as one of the forces at work within a far vaster phenomenon which is impossible to reduce to mere racial relations.
To return to the three aspects that we have already pointed out, the internationalist phenomenon surely goes beyond what can be reasonably attributed to the influence of the Jewish people, which, nomadic as it originally was, scattered and became a sort of international state within many states. If we want to remain at all costs on an ethnic plane, the cause of such a phenomenon can be related, at best, to racial mixing in general, whose effect, however, is what de Gobineau and Chamberlain call ‘ethnic chaos’ only at those historical moments in which any higher spiritually formative force ceases to be present. At the same time, what we have said in the previous chapter about the confusion between universal and international must be repeated, since, even in this respect, some people tend to consider too often as Jewish and pernicious, not just what is international, but also, in general, everything that can constitute a higher principle than a mere limited nationalist-racist particularism. The fact is nonetheless that, in the immediate post-war years and, to a certain extent, even at the present time, most of the representatives of the internationalist tendency in the worst sense originate in Judaism in the field of culture and literature, and to that extent a general anti-Semitic attitude would be justified. However, it would be naive to ignore the fact that internationalism is an effect, so deleterious as to be fatal, of the very structure of modern civilisation and life, and not merely of any ethnic influences as such.
This leads us to the second point. Are rationalism and self-interest Jewish phenomena only? Those who would answer in the affirmative would also be obliged to think that the early anti-traditional, critically minded, anti-religious and ‘scientistic’ upheavals within ancient Greek civilisation were favoured or initiated by Jews; that Socrates was a Jew, along with the mediaeval nominalists and Descartes, Galileo, Bacon, and so on. Indeed, if we want to characterise, analogically, as ‘Semitic’ or ‘Judaic’ the attitude that sets down measure and calculation applied to the domination of matter as ideal instead of the contemplation and the consideration of everything that, in things, is qualitative and irreducible to numbers and despiritualised mathematical laws, should we not call ‘Semitic’ the whole scientistic rationalism and the whole experimental method that gave rise to the modern world of technology and industry itself? Although the passion for lifeless numbers and abstract reason is characteristic of Semites and the Jew has always been depicted in every context as the one who counts and calculates, it appears clear that, in every such field, one can still speak of a disintegrating Jewish spirit expressing itself through rationalism and calculation, ending up in a world of machines, things, money rather than of persons, traditions, lands – but only by using the word ‘Jewish’ in an
analogical sense, without making any literal reference to race. Otherwise, how could we seriously identify Judaism and Americanism? In the concrete process of the development of modern civilisation, the Jews can be considered as a force operating in concert with others in the building of the rationalistic, scientistic and mechanistic ‘civilised’ modern decay, but not as the sole distinct cause of it. It would be stupid to imagine that. The truth is that people prefer to fight personified forces rather than abstract principles or phenomena that are too general to be practically dealt with. This is the reason people have turned against the Jew, to the extent that he seemed to possess as an innate characteristic this trait which, however, turns out to have spread into far wider spheres and, now, throughout the nations that have remained the least affected by Jewish infiltration. Besides, we have already mentioned that Rosenberg and Chamberlain, to fight Catholic supernaturalism, use precisely the most straightforward rationalism, which was already used, mutatis mutandis, in the Masonic and democratic- liberal, secular controversies, and that they take refuge, these champions of pure Aryanism, in the celebration of the murkiest union between the racist idea and the exaltation of the world of technology and of ‘European’ science, which is precisely based on calculation, numbers and abstract intellect.
It is on the economical and social planes, as regards the effective genesis of capitalism as well as of its dialectical opposition, just as corrupting, Marxism, that the anti-Semitic argument is at its most legitimate, but we will have to deal with this in the next chapter. As far as everything that is specifically related to art, a feature that most productions of the Jews unquestionably have in common is a dissolving effect, a Schadenfreude, a wish to degrade, to soil and to debase all that is considered as great and noble, and to unleash at the same time obscure, instinctive, sexual, pre- personal tendencies. The names that anti-Semites gather in a significant whole and are always likely to augment really reflect the facts. Here, however, a further and fundamental problem is posed, which can also be posed regarding the other aspects of a Jewish action that may be established: to what extent can we recognise an intention and a plan as basis and generating principle of such Jewish behaviour? Is that which we are dealing with a substance that manifests a negative action by its own nature, that is to say without specifically intending it, just as it is in the nature of fire to burn, or are there grounds for thinking that we are faced with a sort of conspiracy of the Jewish people aimed at promoting in an occult way a scheme of spiritual destruction as a premise for fulfilment of its aims for vengeance and world domination?
We believe that the first alternative is the most likely. Of course, if we look only at the effects of Judaism in recent times, as normally stressed by anti-Semites, it often seems to us as if the second hypothesis were true, as if there actually were an intelligence – a ‘demonic’, so to speak, intelligence at work in all of those effects, dispersed though they are in space and in time and in the variety of civilisations and outer forms. But if we look in general at all that can be considered as negative and as a fall from the ideals of a spirituality and a civilisation of ‘Aryan’ type (a word to which we have given in the previous pages, not a racial, but a typological sense!), we are then faced with a far more complex reality, and the idea that comes to mind is that of a plan, in which, however, the Jewish, and, in general, Semitic element, only plays a subordinate part, not irrelevant (especially if we take into account the relations that Semitism has with Christianity, as well as with Protestantism and the capitalistic and Masonic West), but still subordinate and probably only instrumental. In other words, far from ascribing to the Jewish people, as too fanciful an anti-Semitic myth has done, the conscious direction of a world plan, we tend to see in a certain Jewish instinct to humiliate, degrade and dissolve, the force that has been used at some historical moments for the weaving of a far broader web, whose guiding threads, to our mind, originate from behind the apparent events, as well as above the plane occupied by the mere ethnic energies.
That is why, in conclusion, we would say that in the cultural field we do not think that anti-Semitism could be purely and simply synonymous with a traditional defence of our civilisation, whereas this is possible to a larger extent on the spiritual plane, that is to say as regards religion and a general world-outlook. Otherwise, taking the part for the whole, we will lose sight of our objective, not only in the part, but also in the whole. In the arts, in the scientific and speculative disciplines, in ethics, in literature, in theatre, anti- Semitism can be legitimate only as a phase of a broader struggle, so that it is not justified in general, but only on an individual basis, practically, to give to the myth of the omnipotence of the Jew through the two weapons of money and disintegrating intelligence more than the value of what is called a ‘working hypothesis’, which, even if it is not entirely true, is still invaluable to coordinate facts and to find one’s bearings towards the whole. Anti- Semitism will therefore only appear as a moment in a totalising attitude, able to be defined in itself, without unilaterally leaning on the racial framework of reference, dealing when necessary with race and acknowledging in it elements that can facilitate the whole study, but not deriving everything from it. Basically, here, people should pay more attention than they usually do to what racists themselves have come to
understand by means of the generalisation of the so-called Mendelian laws (the laws of heredity): such as that, by force of interbreeding, the permanence and the independence of heredities, an anti-Nordic soul may very well be embodied, for example, in a racially Nordic body, and vice- versa. Once again, it is from principles that we must really start: from ideal antitheses, as guides for the definition and integration of any further subordinate antitheses.
In this respect, it is a question of referring essentially to the ideal of a differentiated civilisation, to be integrated, if it ever will be, in a universal way – against internationalist dissolution; to the ideal of personality and quality, against mechanising rationalism, secular illuminism and a world- outlook based on numbers and quantity; to the values of the ancient aristocratic and heroic ethos of the ancient Indo-Europeans, to that style that led the ancient Scandinavian leaders to be described as ‘the enemies of gold’, against pragmatic, mercantilist, socialistic values; to the expression of a new firmness in the Olympian element – namely calm, clarity and self- control from on high, against the contamination of an art, a psychology and a literature that, like the current one, and especially the one that is due specifically to Jewish elements, is so often obsessed with what is related to the erotic, the irrational and the promiscuous, almost to the pathological and the pre-personal in human nature. The real objectives will then be fully accomplished, which go far beyond those that anti-Semitism could ever set out.
The Jewish Problem: The Economic and Social Aspect
In the first chapter of this book, we dealt with Semitism in the religious and spiritual world; comparing Judaism with other civilisations of Semitic stock, studying the features which differentiate that civilisation as regards the concept of the divine and the attitude towards the divine from that which is peculiar to races of Indo-European (‘Aryan’) origin, we have come to justify an anti-Semitic and, indirectly, anti-Jewish attitude on spiritual grounds, particularly as regards the prophetic forms that Jewish religiosity has assumed since the fall of the state of the ‘chosen people’.
In the second chapter, we dealt with Judaism (because it is to Judaism, and not to Semitism in general, that we have had to limit ourselves here) in the cultural world, and we only partially justified the anti-Semitic arguments; while acknowledging the negative action that the Jewish element diffused in the fabric of the various non-Jewish nations has often exerted, either as a disintegrating and debasing ‘intelligence’, or as a germ of rationalism, materialism and internationalism, we found extremely problematic the anti-Semitic argument according to which this action would be consonant with a pre-established plan, a real conspiracy of hatred, rather than a natural effect of certain predominant aspects of the innate Jewish character. If, in relation to the decay of civilisation in recent times, we have to speak of a plan, we have already seen that it must be conceived as a plan in which the Jewish element is only an instrument of ‘influences’ whose real centre lies in a sphere very different from that which is merely conditioned by the ‘souls’ of the races.
Such is the conclusion that we will also come to in this chapter, in which we propose to look at the motives for anti-Semitism in the political and economic field. There are basically two streams here, the first one being extremist and generalised, the other one being essentially practical and nationalist.
It can be said the first one is centred on the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Much has been said on the supposed authenticity of this document, which purportedly was stolen from the archives of an occult Lodge, a sort of headquarters of international Judaism, and illegally disclosed by a person who for this very reason was subsequently assassinated by Jewish emissaries. But, as was quite rightly pointed out by Preziosi, who published this document in Italian, the question of its authenticity is basically of secondary importance for the following reason:
such a document, published before the Great War, sets out a plan whose realisation is often impressively evidenced by recent history. Thus, even if this document were false and the methodically organised conspiracy it speaks of did not exist, the fact is nonetheless that it is as though it really existed, so that the concept of such a conspiracy is likely to be used as a ‘working hypothesis’ to comprehend various social phenomena, events and upheavals, diverse but nonetheless convergent, that have the same collective signification. In his edition, Preziosi gathered various additional documents that reinforce such a point of view.
The plan of the Protocols is the one that we have already mentioned in the previous article: the will-to-power of Israel, which wants to gain control of the Christian world, blindly determined to prove itself elected by God for that purpose. It is just that, now, the motive is given in predominantly political and economic terms. The obstacles encountered by the Jews would have basically been all that made the West a unity of differentiated, monarchical and traditional national societies. It was thus, in the first place, a question of destroying all this, not directly – it would have been impossible for the Jews to do this – but indirectly: by spreading ideologies favouring social revolt; by seeking to tendentiously stress the negative aspects, the abuses and the injustices of the old regimes; by spreading the germs of a critical and rationalistic mentality meant to corrupt the innermost ethical cement of the old hierarchies; by encouraging, for the same purpose, materialism, individualism and the reduction of all interests to economic and financial ones, and, as a more direct practical action: to fuel and to sustain class-warfare, revolutions and even wars. Once Europe was shattered in this way and the idols of anarchic liberalism and gold were introduced into it, the traditional dyke able to create resistance to the Jew was breached and the offensive could be launched, Israel’s rise to power could start. Once the people were reduced to believing only in gold and to obeying the representatives of critical-rationalist culture and of ‘public opinion’, all the Jew had to do was to gain control of these instruments: the press, finance and the intellectual professions. That is how the vital threads of modern society would have invisibly ended up in the hands of Israel. Nations, governments, parliaments, trusts, and so on, without even realising it, become its instruments. It only remains to lead, by hidden means, the peoples, and above all their lower strata, to a state of exasperation and turmoil likely to bring about the final collapse. Israel will then appear as a universal sovereign, heralding truth and justice for peoples reduced to masses without personality, without freedom, without proper tradition.
Such is, in brief, the plan contained in the Protocols. These have exerted
a tremendous influence on anti-Semitism, an influence which, in many respects, has reached Hitler himself. We shall consider the extent to which a vision of this kind contains elements that correspond to reality.
The first thing to be conceded is that the course of the social and political history of modern Europe seems in fact to meet the objectives set out in the Protocols; collapse of the ancient monarchical-aristocratic constitutions, revolutionary illuminism, the doctrine of natural law, the advent of the liberal-democratic bourgeoisie, capitalist oligarchy and the omnipotence of economic forces, and finally, Marxism, and, after the collapse that followed the world war – Bolshevism. But, once again, the problem here is to know to what extent the associates of Judaism can really be considered to be the leading elements of such phenomena, or, at least, as those who have encouraged it. It is natural that those who, like von Moltke, believe in ‘Unknown Superiors’, themselves dependent on a supreme Leader named ‘The Prince of Slavery’, who would not only be obeyed by the main centres of Judaism spread around the world, but would also act through judaising elements, as well as through non-Jewish ones – it is natural that those who believe this can always see the Jew everywhere, for they move back to a field in which no positive study can be decisive any more.
A few points can be clarified though. There is, without question, a connection between the Jewish tradition and Freemasonry. In 1848, the Freemason von Knigge wrote: “The Jews have admitted that Freemasonry was a means to build their secret empire on a solid basis.”1 To formulate an overall opinion on Freemasonry, various elements should be taken into consideration. It seems that, initially, before the French revolution, Freemasonry was above all an initiatory organisation, more or less connected with Rosicrucianism, and, therefore, with spiritual traditions deriving essentially from the high Middle-Ages (the Templars, the Fedeli d’Amore, and so on). It is only subsequently that Freemasonry assumed the militant features and the tendencies known by everyone, by means of a real distortion of the elements it had taken from the spiritual traditions that we have just referred to; and this is how, for example, from a supra-Catholic attitude (such as the Templars supposedly had), an anti-Catholic and, finally, secular and illuministic attitude was arrived at. In this second period, Freemasonry might very well have obeyed Jewish influences. But, although this is not taken note of in all its significance, it is undeniable that Freemasonry in its turn played a part in the theoretical and also, according to some people, material preparation of the French revolution, the first embryo of all subsequent anti-traditional upheaval in Europe.
A second point: Marxism and socialism in general are direct creatures of
the Jews and the Jewish spirit, and the main fathers and apostles of international social-democracy are also Jewish. Firstly, Karl Marx (Mardochai), then Lassalle (Wolfson), Rosa Luxemburg, Landauer, Kautsky, Singer, Elsen, Bernstein, and Trotsky, are all Jewish, in fact. Liberalism, combining with democracy, becomes judaised, and this union between liberalism and democracy has, once again, Jews as exponents, such as Riesler, Jakoley and Simson. The deleterious action of similar ideologies continues in pacifist doctrines, those that tend towards peace at any cost, without caring whether peace might be more dangerous than a defensive war or a war of conquest; doctrines which hold up to ridicule the ideal of a heroic death for the fatherland; whose highest scope and greatest value is a universal fraternity, with the utter subordination of any national and racial interest to the abstract interest of ‘humanity’ (Miller). But this pacifist ideology is itself closely linked to judaised Freemasonry and, basically, the League of Nations exactly reflects its spirit. The Jew Klee once wrote these significant words: “The League of Nations is not so much Wilson’s work as it is a Jewish master-piece, of which we can be proud. The idea of a League of Nations dates back to Israel’s great prophets, their world-outlook full of love for all humanity. In this way, the concept of a League of Nations is a true Jewish heritage.”2 Naturally, the hypocritically humanitarian aspect of the Genevan institute needs to be left aside: the latest events could rather offer to anti-Semites a valuable means to ascertain that what really leads the League of Nations is precisely this capitalistic democratic-liberal-inspired oligarchy in which they recognise the greatest instrument of power of Judaism.
The main thing, in the extremist form of anti-Semitism we are considering here, is the idea that the Jewish influence would assume, depending on the cases and the places, either the one or the other of these forms, forms which, even if they may seemingly be opposed to each other, would still proceed from a single intention and would cooperate in the fulfilment of an identical goal. The Jewish influence would thus develop either through pacifism, or through militarism; either through capitalism, or through Marxism. Frank writes for instance: “The Marxist doctrine does not correspond to reality, but to the spirit and the need of Judaism, which only takes into account material and money matters and mocks any ideal and any spiritual ‘superstructure’. It is a levelling force launched against every racial and blood value.” As to the active forms of Jewish subversive intervention, certain facts remain indisputable, such as the Jewish influence that has accompanied almost all modern revolutions. Jewish Freemasons such as Cremieux and Gambetta were decisive in relation to the 1848
French revolution; the hero of the Spanish revolutionaries was the Jew Ferrer and other Jews appeared on the front line in the 1907 and 1910 Portuguese revolutions. Most of the Young Turks were Jews, and Jewish Freemasonry played an undeniable part in the 1905 Russian revolution, and then in the Bolshevik revolution; except for Lenin, all the most famous leaders of the October revolution, including Trotsky, were Jews, and Bolshevism has subsequently maintained concealed relations with international Jewish-Masonic finance. In the Austrian and Hungarian revolutions, in the 1918 German one and in the following social-democratic German regime, Jewish elements come back on stage, and so on.
To sum up, we see the convergent action of anti-monarchical and anti- traditional revolts on the one hand and of internationalist, pacifist or social- democratic egalitarianism on the other hand. Some anti-Semites even arrive at the view that the Great War itself, which ended with the collapse of the European states that maintained ancient aristocratic-imperial constitutions to the highest degree, obeyed to a large extent the schemes of Judaism and was mainly sponsored by the English and American Jewish banks, and, in this respect, these words of a Jew, Ludwig, are really very significant: “The collapse of these three powers (Tsarist Russia, monarchical Germany and Catholic Austria) in their ancient forms, meant an essential facilitation of the objectives of the Jewish policy. War was waged in order to impose on Central Europe modern political forms, that is to say democratic-liberal ones, which were already in force in neighbouring areas… The defenders of a separate peace (with Russia) could have saved the Tsar as well as the Kaiser and preserved, in this way, an unbearable (sic) Europe.”3 Hitler goes even further: he thinks that the Jews, recognising the fundamental value of blood and race as creators of true civilisation, have proceeded to a systematic project of biological contamination of the non-Jewish races, and particularly of the Aryan Germanic race, in order to dissipate the last strains of pure blood. He even considers the sending of coloured troops to the Rhineland as part of this plan: the sadism of the German people’s hereditary enemy (France) would have combined here with the Jew’s will to contaminate, which would have recognised in Germany the greatest obstacle to its expansion.
In the previous pages we have already mentioned what is real in the idea of the rise to power within the economy of the Jew: the spreading of liberalism and democracy, the destruction of whatever remains of tradition, would have simply been means of facilitating such a rise. Leaving aside the racial question, it is self-evidently nothing but the truth: liberalism and democracy are mere myths: what is fulfilled through them is the change of
power from the hands of ancient aristocracies to those of capitalist oligarchies, industry and high finance. The Jewish element is overwhelmingly represented in positions of power within the worlds of industry and international high finance. This is apparent even from a rigorously positive point of view. Karl Marx himself once wrote: “What is the foundation of the Jew in this world? Practical necessity, private advantage. What is his worldly god? Money. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish fashion not only by acquiring financial power but also through money’s having become (with him or without him) the world power and the spirit of the Jews having become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves to the extent that the Christians have become Jews. The god of the Jews has become secularised and has become the god of the world. The Bill of Exchange is the Jews’ real god.” This observation is extremely interesting, since it shows us the necessity of going beyond the restrictively racial aspect of anti-Semitism. If, as is unfortunately the case, the Christian world has judaised itself in changing its religion to one of practical interest, profit, traffic of gold and usury, what is to be really fought is not so much the real Jew as it is a forma mentis, which, if one wants, can be called by analogy ‘Jewish’, but which can also be found even where not even a drop of Semitic blood is present. This is where the suspicion already expressed in the previous articles arises again, the suspicion that, while pointing out, for convenience or for practical reasons, the Jew, the real target is on the contrary a fundamental aspect of the modern civilisation itself, taken as a whole. The alternative that we have already posed between Jewish instinct and Jewish plan crops up again regarding Judaism in the political and social field, and it seems to us that it should be solved along the same lines: the most likely hypothesis is that the action of the Jewish element in all the phenomena that have just been described may be more instinctive and almost unintentional, and thus uncoordinated, rather than being governed by a unitary idea in accordance with a plan and a well thought-out and predetermined technique.
We shall now turn to the second form of anti-Semitism, the concrete and practical one. It is essentially based on nationalist and racialist grounds, without concern for higher horizons. Here is its basic idea: if not a transcendent conspiracy, there is a sense of solidarity among the Jews scattered throughout the various states; their unity lies in their ethic, opposed to the ethic of the other races; there is a Jewish practice of lies, cunning, hypocrisy, exploitation, a skilfulness in gradually climbing into all the key positions. Here, the grounds for the accusations are found, for the most part, in sentences of the Talmud, according to which “[only] Jews are
designated men and non-Jews rank as animals.” On such a basis, the Jew would have purely and simply the right to take advantage, by means of deceit, of the non-Jew; adultery committed by a Jew with a non-Jew would not be considered as such and any ethical abuse of that kind would not be a sin; it would be claimed that “the property and the goods of the non-Jew are to be considered as free and first comers have rights to them”; that Jews can help each other in order to deceive and exploit the non-Jew, provided that they share the profit afterwards; if they have borrowed money from a non- Jew and he dies, they can appropriate it, as long as nobody knows about it; finally, that it is a duty for the Jewish race to lend money, but not to borrow it. Fritsch in his Handbuch der Judenfrage [Handbook of the Jewish Question] has gleaned these very principles from a set of Jewish texts. According to him, it is such secret maxims that give to the Jewish community the features, not of a religious community, but of a social conspiracy; ‘Aryan’ states, that, unaware of them, fail to defend themselves and thoughtlessly grant Jews equal rights as if they, the Jews, were following the same ethic as that of the Aryans themselves, virtually put themselves in a situation of inferiority and, often without realising it, fall into the hands of this alien, international and anti-national race.
We are thus faced with two prejudicial questions, the first being ethical, and the second socio-political.
Regarding the first point, we are told: there cannot be any relationship between us and a race which is devoid of sense of honour and loyalty and makes use of these two main forces: deceit and money. The ‘Aryan’ social concept would be expressed more or less as follows: “The sincere and righteous man takes pride in deserving the right to live through a fair productive activity. He prefers to die rather than to receive advantages through actions that may dishonour him. The strict idea of honour and of unconditional justice towards other men represents the premise of a heroic life and is safeguarded by the deepest feeling of the soul: the feeling of shame. A people that gives up the sense of honour and shame is unworthy of being called human: it is subhuman.” It is thus absurd, in conclusion, to advocate equal rights for Jews and ‘Aryans’. Measures, both preventive and defensive, need to be taken. To set the Jews ‘free’ – on such premises – would mean to dig our own graves. That is why the liberal democratic ideology is, for good reason, so dear to the Jews; it is the one that contributes best to their game.
Secondly, it is noticeable in practice that Jews, especially in Germanic countries, have climbed to the most important positions, not only in high finance, in the Stock Exchange, in the instruments of formation of public
opinion (the press, as well as radio and cinema), but also in almost all the intellectual professions, particularly in the magistracy, medicine, journalistic criticism and so forth. This is not a question of opinions, but of positive statistical data. In some German cities, the percentage of Jews in such professions reaches 80%, as opposed to not even 20% real Germans, whereas it is exactly the contrary that proves true in other social occupations; at most 5 to 7% of Jews are manual workers or small craftsmen. Statistics show almost the same proportion in Vienna at the time of writing. On the basis of such facts, anti-Semitism levels an accusation of social exploitation: the Jew does not make, does not produce, but only speculates and trades on what others make, on other people’s work, so much so that he grows rich and rules; he sets his sights on the intellectual superstructures of society and leaves to others the lower forms of work.
As everyone knows, National-Socialism has taken precise initiatives to put an end to such a state of affairs. Through the new laws, Jews are banned from any real management in the German state and things are arranged so that their lives are made difficult in any branch of private or professional activity. Many have protested against such measures, seeing in them violence and a fundamental limitation of ‘freedom’. It cannot be denied, however, that these measures are rigorously consistent with the state racial idea and with the conception according to which the Jew is considered to be a heterogeneous element, to whom, at most, can be extended hospitality as a guest, but to whom no admittance in another racial community can be conceded. Nevertheless, even if we do not start from such radical and exclusionist premises, which are, in any case, rather tenuous, since the concept of ‘Aryan’ does not get defined in any way, or at most is defined only in a purely negative way, as anything that is neither ‘Jew’ nor coloured race – it has to be said that anti-Semites, once they have observed so high a percentage of Jews in intellectual professions and in social positions of responsibility, do not trouble themselves about finding an explanation for this state of affairs. As a matter of fact, it cannot be a matter solely of the Jews’ astuteness and schemes and of their money power. If it were, would we not have to recognise Jews as having better intellectual qualities than those that ‘Aryans’ have and care about? This alternative is thus posed: either to come to a humiliating admission of inferiority or to undertake a total revision of values, likely to undermine, in the name of higher ideals, everything that is connected specifically with the pseudo-elites of modern professional intellectuality, in which there are so many Jews. Even assuming that an almost Masonic solidarity exists between all the Jews, we would have to prove that any Jew, in the discharge of a given profession,
either perverts or subordinates it to the aims of domination of his race. If, on the contrary, for example, in the magistracy or in medicine, there were no objective difference between a Jew and an Aryan, there would be no reason why we should be concerned whether the higher percentage of lawyers and doctors may be Jewish or not. In this respect, the ban of Jews by National- Socialists would be devoid of any serious justification, it would mean a mere action of power to peremptorily secure for the members of a non- Jewish state a privilege outside any concurrence or any higher point of reference.4
That is why we have called such a form of anti-Semitism practical: a spirit of solidarity is opposed in it to another spirit of solidarity, but without any reference to a truly ideal antithesis and without being able to give to the ‘Aryan’ ideal another content than that of a ‘myth’, a representation, whose value lies, not in itself, but in its practical efficiency and its suggestive power. This may also be applied to those aspects and measures of practical anti-Semitism that are related to the idea of the defence and purification of the race, of its preservation from the attack that the adulteration of its blood constitutes; as a matter of fact, the very concept of ‘race’ and of its true essence remains just as indeterminate, in such anti-Semitism, as the concept of ‘Aryanity’, ‘race’ has essentially the nature of a ‘myth’, any definition of it in absolute and, thus, spiritual terms, is almost completely lacking, and, furthermore, doctrinal deviation and fanaticism reach so high a degree in some people that it suffices to refer to spirit for them to rise and to think they see a Jewish trap, a Jewish subterfuge directed against their race.
In any case, it seems to us that the main justification of a practical aversion to Judaism lies in seeing in the Jewish element one of the main causes of the increasing depersonalisation and pragmatisation of social life, of the advent of faceless migrant capital, of the monetarisation of economic life, that is to say speculation on values created by others and of which only the least profit remains to others, through interest, limited companies, and loans, no longer between persons but between strangers, all this culminating in a monstrous omnipotent apparatus that sweeps away peoples and conditions destinies.
In that sense, a sense that is admittedly figurative to a great extent, the struggle against the omnipotent Jew can be an effective symbol. But to progress from there to an adequate practice, something very different from racist exclusivism and the drastic solution offered by Fritsch at the end of his Handbook – to deport the Jews from any state and to oblige them to buy some area of the world, in Africa or in Australia, for them to live their life within, to develop their civilisation and their economy, since they certainly
have enough money to do so – is needed. As a matter of fact, the observation that we have just made about Marx’s words is worth repeating, that is that the virus has already passed into the lifestream of ‘Aryan’ peoples, and it is precisely by finance, industry, mechanised work and rationalisation, that many of these peoples childishly and irresponsibly continue to evaluate the criteria of greatness and power. Not extrinsic measures and violent military interventions, but only a profound spiritual change and regeneration and a move from within that would resurrect those values that we have defined in the previous chapters from an essentially supra-biological and supra-racial point of view, in terms of type of civilisation, can lead to a real solution. If this is not done, any change will merely precipitate us from the frying pan into the fire: not just if we only know how to fight capitalism or finance or the Jewish international in such a way that we end up under the control of camouflaged socialistic and plebeian tendencies – which remain such even when they take the form of nationalism or national dictatorship – but also if we are able to wage war against Judaism solely in a Jewish fashion, that is to say in the name of a racist and particularistic exclusivism modelled, unconsciously, on the racism of which Israel has given the most typical example in history.
It is the ‘working hypothesis’ constituted by the very myth corresponding to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that tells us, by evoking its own antithesis, what is really needed. If it is true that, to achieve its plan of world domination, Judaism first had to destroy, above all, monarchical- traditional and heroic Europe, hierarchical, differentiated and spiritual Europe, only the restoration, not artificial, but earnest and vigorous, of such a Europe, to the point of a complete restoration of classical Roman forms, gives the right point of reference to those who want to oppose, not only the various concrete, partial, apparent aspects of the Jewish danger in the cultural, moral, economic and social fields, which are really conditioned by race, but also the larger phenomena of decay shown by modern civilisation in general and originating in an ‘intelligence’ far more concrete than that to which, on the basis of obscure sensations and transpositions, anti-Semitism has referred with its myth of the occult conspiracy of Israel.
Notes:
1 Erich and Mathilde Ludendorff, Die Judenmacht – Ihr Wesen und Ende, Ludendorffs Verlag GmbH, Munich, 1939, p. 62, in Wolfgang Eggert: Israels Geheimvatikan 1, p. 139.
2 We have not been able to find the exact source of this quote. Its authenticity is however beyond doubt, since the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports in a dispatch of February 17, 1926: “A number of nationalistic German newspapers, including the Deutsche Zeitung
and the Schlesische Volkstimme conduct propaganda against Germany’s entry in the league. These papers, reporting a part of the address of Dr. Alfred Klee, in which he stated that the idea of the League of Nations had its origin with the Jewish prophets, declared that, “Dr. Klee has divulged the secret that the League of Nations is a Jewish creation.” Two further statements of the time point in the same direction: “After all, the idea of a League of Nations of the world is a Jewish ideal. Our prophets were the first to formulate it clearly.” (Daily Jewish Courier, August 01, 1919; “The League of Nations, the then president of the executive committee, Nahum Sokolow said at the Zionist Congress in Carlsbad on August 27, 1922, is a Jewish idea. We created it after a fight of 25 years…”
3 See G. J. Nathan, H. L. Mencken, The American Mercury, volume 89, 1959, p. 20.
4 These considerations seem to be inconsistent with the foregoing acknowledgement that the anti-Jewish measures taken by the National-Socialist government in the years following its rise to power “are rigorously consistent with the state racial idea and with the conception according to which the Jew is considered to be a heterogeneous element, to whom, at most, can be extended hospitality as a guest, but to whom no admittance in another racial community can be conceded,” and even seem, especially today, quite provocative to patriots. Yet, sight must not be lost of the fact that the author was far more radical on the plane of principles than the National-Socialist leadership ever was on the social, political and even racial plane. The “serious justification” that is called for here is the “truly general standpoint” which must be reached to be able to really define the “ideal antithesis” between Aryanity and Semitism, whereby, in the practical sphere, it would be easy to see to it, in a racist state, that, for example, a biologically white person solicited to replace a Jew in a given position of leadership does not have a Jewish forma mentis, as would undoubtedly happen in more than one case today, should such a state arise again.