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NON AU RACISME
NON À LA VIOLENCE
NON AUX NÉGATIONNISMES
NON À L'IGNORANCE
OUI AU SAVOIR ET À L'ÉTUDE
Henry Ford and the Jews:
The Mass Production of Hate
Neil Baldwin
New York: Public Affairs, 2001, 416 pp.
The International Jew:
The World's Foremost Problem
Henry Ford, Dearborn, MI: Dearborn
Independent, 1920-1921
416 pp.
Part I: The Education of
a Midwestern Industrialist
Neil Baldwin's book on Henry Ford
begins by sketching the "McGuffeyland" world of Ford's
childhood - a world of courageous, honest, abstemious, hard-working
boys. Ford's beloved mother read the McGuffey readers to her favorite
son, and in his adult life Ford became an avid collector not only
of McGuffey first editions but of other Americana as well. This
bespeaks Ford's strong identification with the mid-western culture
of his youth, and, in Baldwin's view, that is a big part of the
problem, because part of that mid-western culture was a subtle
anti-Semitism. The McGuffey readers contained passages from The
Merchant of Venice in which Shylock is described as an "inhuman
wretch, incapable of pity," a man filled with irrational
hatred for the Christian Antonio. Baldwin implies that given such
a culture, it is a small step to Ford's "mass production
of hate."
Beginning in 1881, this perceived idyllic Anglo-Saxon culture
of Ford's youth began to be invaded by a wave of Eastern European
Jewish immigrants. This provided an additional impetus to anti-Jewish
feelings, culminating in the immigration restriction legislation
of 1924. In Baldwin's view, the nativism and xenophobia of the
period were the results of the compulsion to find a "stereotyped
other" against whom endangered Christians could measure themselves.
In the strange, nervous netherworld blurring the end of one century
and the beginning of the next, with the American economy continuing
to suffer bewildering fluctuations and booms followed by depressions,
there was a vague sense that unseen, hidden, and irrational 'market
forces' were determining the course of personal destiny.
Christian identity was under siege in the rapidly changing modern
Promised Land. "The Jew was conveniently at hand," enabling
the character of early-modern racism in America to be formed on
the notion that people who were "different" could be
actual instruments of change and therefore could be held accountable
for otherwise inexplicable trends in the culture of modernity.
Once that blame was affixed, antisemites had latched upon a real
reason to criticize, contain, or even control the Jews. (pp. 34-35)
Baldwin thus proposes that Ford's anti-Jewish animus derives from
the need for a scapegoat upon which to blame all disapproved forms
of modernism. As is typical of writing on such topics these days,
there is no honest assessment of the extent to which Jews were
in fact responsible for the changes deplored by Ford and his ilk.
Instead, Baldwin traces the anti-Jewish tenor of the series of
newspaper articles on Jewish issues sponsored by Ford and published
as The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem,
solely to "a thousand-year continuum of Jew hatred, thick
taproots sunk deep into the archetypal, richly poisoned soil of
medievalism. " (p. 106)
Medieval, religious Jew-hatred evolved into modern anti-semitism
. . . They should be recognized as different factors within the
same tradition. Both passions are infused with a pathological
requisite to find someone to resent (p. 107).
As we shall see, this is neither a fair nor an accurate description
or analysis of the contents of The International Jew.
Ford is presented as an assimilationist, not a racialist.
He eagerly sought immigrant labor for his automobile factories,
but also wanted a culturally homogeneous citizenry, seeking "to
impress upon these men that they are, or should be, Americans,
and that their former racial, national, and linguistic differences
are to be forgotten" (p. 41; emphasis in text). In the
early part of the century, Ford workers from a wide range of Eastern
and Southern European countries (including 12,000 Jews recruited
to work in the automobile industry in Detroit) were required to
attend Americanization schools aimed at impressing upon them a
common American culture. In a 1919 column in the Dearborn Independent,
the writer complained,
The problem [with the melting pot] is not . . . with the pot so much as it is with the base metal. Some metals cannot be assimilated, refuse to mix with the molten mass of citizenship, but remain ugly, indissoluble lumps. How did this base metal get in? . . . What about those aliens who have given us so much trouble, these Bolsheviki messing up our industries and disturbing our civil life? (p. 80; emphasis in text)
Baldwin terms this a "disturbing
euphemism" (p. 80).
A major intellectual influence on Ford was David Starr Jordan,
first president of Stanford University and a prolific writer on
racial and cultural issues. (Louis Marshall, president of the
American Jewish Congress, considered Jordan to be the main source
of Ford's "insane prejudice" [p. 50].) Jordan was a
eugenicist who advocated peace for racialist reasons-that war
decimated strong people from the gene pool. Jordan, writing in
1912, also developed the view that financial manipulators, mainly
Jews, were driving Europeans to war. (Ford became a leader of
the peace movement during World War I, stating to another peace
activist that the "German-Jewish bankers caused the war"
[p. 59].) Jordan (1912) described an "unseen empire"
of international finance, largely composed of Jewish banking firms
originating with the Rothschilds. Behind these firms were Jewish
families "allied to one another by so many close ties of
blood, marriage, and business" (pp. 19-20), including Bischoffheim
(France), Bleichröder (Germany), Camondo (Italy), Goldschmid
and Stern (England, Portugal), Günzberg (Russia), Hirsch
and Wertheimer (Austria), Cassell (Europe, Egypt), Sassoon ("Rothschilds
of the Orient), Mendelssohn and Montefiore (Australia).
According to Jordan, because of massive national debts, the financiers
effectively controlled the countries they operated in, either
by threatening to withhold loans or by making conditions on loans.
Ultimately Jordan blamed the borrowers for their profligacy and
shortsightedness. As a pacifist, Jordan was deeply concerned that
the military spending of his day would bring about an Armageddon.
In general, he saw the financiers as eager to loan money for weaponry
but opposed to actual war. His clear message, however, is that
this unseen empire of finance has a very large influence on the
ability of governments to wage war. He presented several examples
where wars ended because financiers refused to loan any more money
for the effort. Given this intellectual environment, and given
the gruesome reality of what was then called simply "the
Great War," Ford presumably inferred that Jewish financiers
must at least have allowed it to happen, and indeed this is the
argument made in The International Jew
(TIJ).
It is noteworthy that ideas of eugenics, racially motivated pacifism,
and belief in the power of international financiers were entirely
respectable at the time. Baldwin recounts Ford's journey to the
West Coast in 1915 to attend a "Race-Betterment Conference"
in San Francisco. Speakers included Luther Burbank, the renowned
plant breeder; Jordan; and Charles Eliot, president of Harvard.
Attendees included Thomas Edison, and millionaires like John Harvey
Kellogg (of the cereal company) and Harvey Firestone (of the tire
company). Edison had fairly moderate views on Jews: Jews held
to a very clannish social structure that separated them from other
peoples; they were also very intelligent, keen businessmen with
a penchant for becoming wealthy, and this sometimes provoked hostility.
There was considerable intellectual interaction going on among
nativists during the post-World War I period, including some of
the military intelligence figures portrayed in Joseph Bendersky's
"The Jewish Threat": Anti-Semitic Politics of the
U.S. Army. For example, Houghton Harris, a military physician,
worked closely with Boris Brasol, the Russian refugee from Bolshevism,
in producing an English version of the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion. In turn, Brasol impressed himself on the editors
of The Dearborn Independent, Ford's newspaper, which published
an article by Brasol depicting the horror of the Bolshevik takeover
of Russia.
The two people who actually wrote TIJ were Ernest Liebold
and Billy Cameron. Liebold was a college-educated bank president
before he became Ford's personal secretary and alter-ego. Cameron
was a journalist who subscribed to an early version of the Christian
identity movement, which holds to the view that the Anglo-Saxons
descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. The British were
therefore the true Chosen People, destined by God to rule the
world, and Great Britain and the U.S. were Holy Lands given by
God to his Chosen People. (The corollary that today's Jews are
not really descended from the people described in the Bible appears
in TIJ. "The Jews are not the Old Testament People...
They are a Talmudical people" [3/12/1921].) The main force
behind the articles, then, besides Ford, was Liebold, but he was
careful to give credit to Cameron as the person who compiled the
data and actually wrote the articles.
Typical of the period, the Jewish response to the series of articles
appearing in The Dearborn Independent was formulated by
prominent and wealthy Jewish activists associated with the American
Jewish Committee: Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, and Cyrus Adler.
Schiff, the consummate Jewish activist of the period, had carried
on a personal campaign against the tsarist government for years,
including financing the Japanese war effort against Russia in
1905, financing anti-tsarist revolutionaries, and supporting Germany
in World War I until the tsar was overthrown in the spring of
1917. Schiff worried that waging a high-profile attack on TIJ
might backfire: "If we get into a controversy we shall light
a fire, which no one can foretell how it will become extinguished,
and I would strongly advise therefore that no notice be taken
of [the articles] and the attack will soon be forgotten"
(p. 112). However, Schiff's death on September 25, 1920, signaled
a change to a more proactive stance, led by Louis Marshall.
In an event reminiscent of the pressure exerted on St. Martin's
Press to rescind publication of David Irving's biography of Goebbels,
Baldwin recounts the pressure by Louis Marshall to rescind publication
of The Cause of World Unrest, a commentary on the Protocols
that had originally appeared in the London Morning Post.
The publisher, Major George Haven Putnam, caved in after originally
arguing in favor of publication on the basis of free speech, the
book's opposition to Bolshevism, and prior publication by a respectable
British publisher. At the same time, the American Jewish Committee
purchased copies of John Spargo's book attacking Ford, The
Jew and American Ideals, "in lots of 10,000" (p.
150). Spargo, who was not Jewish, was a well-known socialist and
advocate on labor issues who had developed a reputation as a muckraking
journalist. Spargo also composed a statement titled The Perils
of Racial Prejudice and solicited signatures from over 100
prominent "citizens of Gentile extraction and Christian faith,"
including presidents (Taft, Wilson, Harding), secretaries of state,
ecclesiastical dignitaries, businessmen, and writers. Among the
signatories was David Starr Jordan, whose writings on the "unseen
world" of Jewish international finance had been a major influence
on Ford. The Perils of Racial Prejudice was published in
newspapers across the country on January 16, 1921 with the headline
"President Wilson Heads Protest Against Anti-Semitism."
In early 1922, Ford, while not disowning them, abruptly put a
stop to the articles. His reasons for doing so remain mysterious.
Baldwin suggests that Ford was concerned about negative repercussions
of TIJ on his auto business and that he harbored political
ambitions that would be compromised by the series. In any case,
there was no change in Ford's attitudes, and anti-Jewish references
and articles continued to appear occasionally in the Dearborn
Independent. For example, Julius Rosenwald, chairman of Sears,
Roebuck, was criticized for encouraging black migration from the
south to Chicago by providing inexpensive land and housing. This
linkage between "Jewish money and 'the Negro problem' "
resulted in "corrupting the neighborhood, driving away older
owners, and leading to the race riots of 1919" (p. 201).
Ford eventually apologized for TIJ in conjunction with
settlement of a libel suit brought by Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish activist
on farming issues, who was the subject of several articles in
1924. (The first article was titled, "Jewish Exploitation
of Farmers' Organizations-Monopoly Traps Operate Under Guise of
'Marketing Associations.'") In 1927, after a mistrial had
been declared because of allegations that a juror had been bribed
by a Jew, Ford declared an end to The Dearborn Independent
and settled his lawsuit with Sapiro. Again, the reasons
for this sudden change remain uncertain, although Baldwin suggests
that it was motivated by the upcoming introduction of the Ford
Model A prompted by lagging sales of the Model T. It seems unlikely
that the prospect of losing a libel verdict for a relatively trifling
sum to an immensely wealthy man would be sufficient motivation
for so abrupt a move, especially since the article was not part
of the original International Jew series. According to
Gerald L. K. Smith, the anti-Jewish political organizer, Ford
himself claimed that he did it "because of an attempt by
New York Jews . . . to take over the Ford Motor Company"
(p. 306). A similar claim was also published in 1927 by the Völkischer
Beobachter, Hitler's newspaper, edited by Theodore Fritsch
(see Reznikoff, 1957, p. 387), but there is no independent corroboration
for this theory.
Ford signed an apology for the articles that had been drafted
by Louis Marshall in which he issued a complete retraction and
asked for forgiveness. The apology also stated that he "was
fully aware of the virtues of the Jewish people as a whole, of
what they and their ancestors have done for civilization and to
mankind and toward the development of commerce and industry, of
their sobriety and diligence, their benevolence and their unselfish
interest in the public welfare" (p. 239). Ford signed the
letter without reading it, and there can be little doubt that
he did not change his mind about Jewish issues. (In his letters,
Marshall recounts a personal meeting in 1928 with Ford in which
Ford "showed that he sincerely repented. He expressed his
readiness to do anything that I might at any time suggest to enable
him to minimize the evil that had been done." Marshall also
wrote that Ford told him that Cameron was "out of a job and
had indicated his willingness to write on the Jewish side of the
subject. I replied that we did not need his help" [in Reznikoff
1957, 388]. )
In 1938, Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle and
kept it despite a wave of protest from the Jewish press. (Another
recipient was Charles Lindbergh, whose conversations with Ford
dealt mainly with Jewish issues.) Ford later provided financial
support for Gerald L. K. Smith, who continued publishing TIJ
well into the post-World War II period. After the closure of the
Dearborn Independent, Ernest Liebold, Ford's alter ego,
fed information on Jewish issues to Charles Coughlin, the Catholic
priest whose radio broadcasts and publications during the 1930s
carried on many of the themes of TIJ.
After Ford died, his company distanced itself from his anti-Jewish
writings. The Ford Motor Company became a generous supporter of
Jewish charities and the state of Israel, and in 1997 the Ford
Motor Company sponsored a commercial-free telecast of Stephen
Spielberg's Schindler's List.
Baldwin discusses how he started writing the biography of Ford
as an aspect of his own awakening Jewish identity. The book shows
a strong emotional engagement between the writer and his material,
and there is an apologetic stance regarding anti-Jewish attitudes.
For example, Baldwin notes that early in the series, TIJ
claimed that the behavior of the Jews had given rise to
the Jewish Question, but not once is there any reference to a
single, well-defined question. By invoking "the Jewish Question"
in this reactive manner, without defining it-or for that matter,
asking it-the Dearborn Independent took another giant step
into antisemitic rhetorical tradition (p. 130).
This is an exaggeration at best. As described below, TIJ
discusses a great many Jewish issues in considerable detail. Indeed,
a reader of Baldwin's book would have almost no idea of what TIJ
actually claimed about Jews or about the quality of the evidence
used to support the claims. Instead, Baldwin quotes a Yiddish
newspaper which had the following analysis of Jewish activism:
One hears from Jewish leaders in every movement because they are
the most talented; therefore one hears from Jewish activists in
every new trend because they are the more feeling, idealistic,
and-purer. And precisely because of this, they hate us. Only
because of this!!! (p. 132; emphasis added).
The comment is completely in line with Baldwin's implicit analysis
throughout: There are no conflicts of interest between Jews and
non-Jews. Indeed, Jews have no interests at all; they are completely
divided among themselves and unable to act coherently on any issue.
When they do act, they act out of purely idealistic motives, for
the good of all. Anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior must therefore
be completely irrational.
Amazingly, Baldwin argues against the idea that Jews were unified
by showing dissension within the American Jewish Committee (AJC)
on how to respond to TIJ: Should the AJC distribute copies
of a recent book titled Jewish Contributions to Civilization?
Advocate a consumer boycott of Ford products? Compile a dossier
of anti-Jewish incidents possibly instigated by the series? But
the broader issue of Jewish influence and whether Jews are unified
on certain issues is much more complicated than suggested by Baldwin.
TIJ does indeed overestimate the extent to which the Jewish
community was unified at the time, particularly in its discussions
of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in which Jews are
portrayed as consciously seeking to subjugate the non-Jewish world
with a very detailed plan of conquest. However, the Protocols
are only one aspect of TIJ. There are a great many
areas where TIJ documents a great deal of unanimity within
the Jewish community, as in campaigns to remove public displays
of Christianity or language suggesting the United States is a
Christian nation, withdrawing literature and other cultural artifacts
deemed anti-Jewish (e.g., the campaign to remove The Merchant
of Venice from the high school curriculum), open immigration,
U.S. foreign policy toward countries perceived as anti-Jewish
(e.g., toward Russia prior to the fall of the Czar and the Bolshevik
Revolution; toward Poland and Romania after World War I). These
remain areas of broad Jewish consensus in the contemporary United
States (Goldberg, 1996; MacDonald, 1998b, Ch. 8). Moreover, the
issue of Jewish influence is not dependent on Jewish unanimity.
For example, even though there was a split in the Jewish community
of the period over the issue of Communism and support for the
Soviet Union, this does not imply that Jewish Communists were
not critically important to the success of Bolshevism, nor does
it imply that Jewish Communists were not typically motivated by
their Jewish identity, as indeed they were (MacDonald, 1998b,
Ch. 3).
TIJ makes its case for Jewish unity primarily by citing
Jewish sources advocating the need for Jewish organization on
Jewish issues and by arguing that during this period the New York
Jewish community was organized as a Kehilla, the traditional
form of Jewish social structure in the Diaspora. As TIJ notes,
the Kehillah was organized in response to the comment by General
Bingham, the chief of police of New York City, that Jews were
responsible for 50% of the crime in the city. TIJ states
that "The Kehillah is a perfect answer to the statement that
the Jews are so divided among themselves as to render a concert
of action impossible" (2/26/1921). TIJ shows that
the Kehillah had strong links to the main national Jewish organization,
the American Jewish Committee, and had representatives from a
wide range of Jewish organizations. The membership of the Kehillah
consisted of all gradations of Jewish religious observance, from
Orthodox to secular leftists. The Kehillah divided the city into
eighteen districts comprising one hundred Jewish neighborhoods.
In addition to attempting to prevent Jewish crime, the Kehillah
served as an activist organization in advancing Jewish causes.
For example, the Kehillah was a prominent force in the attempt
to remove Christian symbolism from public places-a major irritant
in the eyes of TIJ.
In general, the less said of Baldwin's book the better. It is
an apologetic work with a depressingly familiar and predictable
take on the anti-Jewish attitudes of the period. Baldwin writes
that TIJ descends into the "antisemitic rhetorical
tradition," but his book descends into another tradition,
a tradition in which the anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior of
earlier generations are ascribed entirely to irrational pathologies
having nothing to do with Jewish behavior. It is a tradition based
on caricature, exaggerations, and misrepresentations of what these
people actually believed.
This review will be continued with "Part II: the Dearborn
Independent Series in Perspective" in the Winter 2002
issue of The Occidental Quarterly.
Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology, California State University - Long Beach, and the author of a trilogy on Judaism as an evolutionary strategy: A People that Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998), all published by Praeger 1994-1998.
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Part II: Henry Ford and the
Jewish Question
The Occidental Quarterly 2(4), Winter 2002/2003: 53-77
So what is one to make of Henry Ford's series of writings on Jews?
TIJ is an amalgam of dark speculations on Jewish conspiracy
combined with some interesting and, on the whole, accurate information
on Jews and perceptions of Jews during the period. The weekly
articles, which were compiled into a 4-volume book version that
was never copyrighted and has thus been in the public domain for
over 80 years, merit a fair and accurate summary.
Jewish Economic Influence
The general view of TIJ is that Jews have achieved a great
deal of economic, political, and cultural domination in the U.S.
and European societies. At times, TIJ writes as though
the United States economy was completely dominated by Jews:
"In America alone most of the big business, the trusts and the banks, the natural resources and the chief agricultural products, especially tobacco, cotton and sugar, are in the control of Jewish financiers or their agents" (5/22/1920).
This undoubtedly exaggerated view of the
overarching power of Jewish finance contrasts with discussions
of a great many areas describing the extent to which Jews control
specific areas of the economy and culture. A later article (6/05/1920)
claims several other important industries are under Jewish control
in the U.S.: The motion picture industry, 50% of the meat packing
industry, "upwards of 60% of the shoemaking industry,"
the clothing industry, distribution and selling of music, jewelry,
grain, the Colorado smelting industry, magazine writing, news
distribution, the liquor business, and the loan business, "only
to name the industries with national and international sweep."
While overly inclined to see Jewish domination of the U.S. economy
resulting from Jewish overrepresentation in investment banking,
TIJ was essentially correct when it pointed to particular
industries that were dominated by Jews. Data from the 1930s indicated
that Jews had disproportionate influence in retailing, the garment
industry, cosmetics, entertainment, mass media and publishing,
investment banking, and the professions (Editors of Fortune
1936; Sachar 1992, 341). All of these, with the exception
of Jewish involvement in the professions were foci of TIJ,
although TIJ did discuss Jewish influence in journalism
and the academic world, particularly economics. TIJ is
careful to distinguish between investment banking, where Jews
had a very strong position, from retail banking, where they did
not --a distinction also noted by Editors of Fortune (1936).
All of these industries are given detailed treatment in various
places in TIJ (e.g., the liquor business was the focus
of in three articles appearing in late 1921). In general, TIJ
takes a balanced, nuanced approach to Jewish influence in particular
areas. For example, in the financial area, TIJ describes
a conflict between a nascent Jewish group and a non-Jewish group
bent on preventing Jewish influence.
"At one time [Jewish influence] threatened to be [paramount], but American financiers have always been silently aware of the International Jewish Financier, and have endeavored quietly to block his game" (11/13/1920).
However, while presently thwarted, TIJ notes that Jewish influence on the stock exchange is increasing rapidly because Jews are willing to pay the highest prices for seats on the New York Stock Exchange as they become available, and no Jew ever sells his seat to a non-Jew.
"One outstanding characteristic of the Jewish race is its persistence. What it cannot attain this generation, it will attain next. Defeat it today, it does not remain defeated; its conquerors die, but Jewry goes on, never forgetting, never deviating from its ancient aim of world control in one form or another" (11/13/1920).
TIJ gives
figures for Jewish membership of the NYSE as 60/1009 in 1872,
rising to 106 in 1893 to 276 in 1919. Jewish control "is
struggling to go higher, but has thus far been estopped"
(11/13/1920).
Noting the importance of the theater as part of the plan outlined
in the Protocols, TIJ provides detailed accounts
in a series of five articles on Jewish domination of the theater
and motion picture industry.
"Not only the 'legitimate' stage, so-called, but the motion picture industry --the fifth greatest of all the great industries-- is also Jew-controlled, not in spots only, not 50 per cent merely, but entirely; with the natural consequence that the world is in arms against the trivializing and demoralizing influences of that form of entertainment as at present managed. As soon as the Jew got control of American Liquor, we had a liquor problem with drastic consequences. As soon as the Jew gained control of the 'movies,' we had a movie problem, the consequences of which are not yet visible. It is the genius of the race to create problems in whatever business they achieve a majority... Millions of Americans every day place themselves voluntarily within range of Jewish ideas of life, love and labor; within range of Jewish propaganda, sometimes cleverly, sometimes cunningly concealed" (1/01/1921). "Frivolity, sensuality, indecency, appalling illiteracy and endless platitude are the marks of the American State as it approaches its degeneracy under Jewish control" (1/01/1920).
TIJ claims that Jewish producers stage plays that provide
positive images of Jews and that most of these are not successful
despite massive publicity and endorsement by public officialdom.
Ben Hur is given as a prominent exception, its 19-year run explained
by the fact that "it is the most successful of all the vehicles
for pro-Semitism now on the stage" (1/08/1921).
TIJ describes the rise during the 1890s of the Jewish-dominated
Theatrical Trust which eclipsed the previous non-Jewish theatrical
producers and agents. TIJ states that the Theatrical Trust
blacklisted critics who "opposed its methods or pointed out
the inferior, coarse and degrading character of the Trust productions."
TIJ claims that critics were fired by newspapers threatened
by the Trust with loss of advertising revenue (1/08/1921). In
turn, the Theatrical Trust became overshadowed by the Shubert
family, another Jewish company (1/22/1921).
Regarding the movies, TIJ reports that 90% of the production
is in the hands of a few large companies, 85% of which "are
in the hands of Jews" (2/12/1921). The article appearing
on 2/19/1921 discusses the Jews behind the major motion picture
companies of the era, going over much the same information as
presented in Neal Gabler's (1988) An Empire of Their Own: How
the Jews Invented Hollywood. TIJ is careful to note
that its concerns with the moral messages in movies are not idiosyncratic
but part of a larger kulturkampf between the movie industry
and large segments of the American public:
"In almost every state there are movie censorship bills pending, with the old 'wet' and gambling elements against them, and the awakened part of the decent population in favor of them; always, the Jewish producing firms constituting the silent pressure behind the opposition" (2/12/1921).
Indeed, the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America, headed by Will H. Hays, was created in
1922 in response to movements in over thirty state legislatures
to enact strict censorship laws, and the Production Code Administration,
headed by Joseph I. Breen, was launched in response to a campaign
by the Catholic Legion of Decency (Gabler 1988). TIJ's
reservations about the moral content of movies was indeed widely
shared among the American public.
TIJ attributes the moral sensibility of the movie industry
to the fact that it is dominated by Jews --the contrast between
the "Oriental ideal" for culture and the "Anglo
Saxon, the American ideal." The Oriental ideal is "'If
you can't go as far as you like, go as far as you can.' It gravitates
naturally to the flesh and its exposure; its natural psychic habitat
is among the more sensual emotions."
According to TIJ, "Here lies the whole secret of the movies' moral failure: they are not American and their producers are racially unqualified to reproduce the American atmosphere. An influence which is racially, morally and idealistically foreign to America, has been given the powerful projecting force of the motion picture business, and the consequences are what we see" (2/12/1921).
However, TIJ notes that to advocate
censorship is construed as anti-Semitism: "Reader, beware!
if you so much as resent the filth of the mass of the movies,
you will fall under the judgment of anti-Semitism" (2/12/1921).
TIJ claims that the movies are biased in favor of Judaism
and against Christianity. TIJ quotes from a letter from
non-Jewish movie production company submitted during Congressional
hearings, stating that Christian plays, such as Life of the
Savior, have not been produced in order to not offend Jewish
sensibilities (2/12/1921).
You never see a Jewish rabbi depicted on the screen in any but
a most honorable attitude. He is clothed with all the dignity
of the office and he is made as impressive as can be. Christian
clergymen, as any movie fan will readily recall, were subjected
to all sorts of misrepresentations, from the comic to the criminal.
Now, this attitude is distinctly Jewish. Like many unlabeled influences
in our life, whose sources lead back to Jewish groups, the object
is to break down as far as possible all respectful or considerate
thought about the clergy. The Catholic clergy very soon made themselves
felt in opposition to this abuse of their priestly dignity. You
never see a priest made light of on the screen. But the Protestant
clergyman is still the elongated, sniveling, bilious hypocrite
of anti-Christian caricature... You may not depict a Hebrew as
owner of a sweatshop-though all sweatshop owners are Hebrews;
but you may make a Christian clergyman everything from a seducer
to a safe-cracker and get away with it.
TIJ quotes a movie poster of the period: "'I refuse to live with you any longer. I denounce you as my wife --I will go to HER --my free-lover.' Thus speaks the Rev. Frank Gordon in the greatest of all free-love dramas" (2/19/1921).
TIJ then notes pointedly but tentatively,
"There may be no connection whatever, but behold what is done, and remembering what is written in the Protocols, a question arises. It is written: 'We have misled, stupefied and demoralized the youth of the Gentiles by means of education in principles and theories, patently false to us, but which we have inspired.' Protocol 9 'We have taken good care long ago to discredit the Gentile clergy' Protocol 17 (2/19/1921).
This typifies the manner in which TIJ refers to the Protocols (see also below): Actual events that can be reasonably shown to be due to Jewish influence are shown to fit with the conspiratorial master plan outlined in the Protocols. Despite the paranoid logic, the assertions of TIJ are congruent with recent studies indicating that Jews remain in control of the movie industry and that the movies generally portray Christians and Christianity negatively and Jews and Judaism positively (e.g., Medved, 1992/1993; MacDonald, 2002a).
Finally, there is little doubt that TIJ
is correct in its assessment that Jews dominated the music industry
in the U.S. As Kenneth Kantor notes:
Both as a business and as an expression of talent and creative
artistry, American popular music was in large part shaped and
formed by Jews, many of them immigrant newcomers to the American
scene... Virtually all the great names that come to mind when
one considers popular music -- Rogers and Hammerstein, Irving
Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, George and Ida Gershwin, Irving
Caesar, and Charles Harris, for instance, are Jewish names. Jews
wrote the songs, Jews sang the songs, and Jews made sure that
the songs were circulated to every corner of the country, for
they founded and built America's publishing industry. Among the
vanguard publishers were M. Witmark, Charles K. Harris, Joseph
Stern, Shapiro and Bernstein, Harry von Tilzer, Leo Feist, T.
B. Harms, and Irving Berlin [born Israel Baline]. Collectively
their publishing firms came to be known as 'Tin Pan Alley' ...
It was the Tin Pan Alley ethos, combining the commercial with
the aesthetic, that gave our popular music its distinctive character.
(Kanter, p. ix)
Jewish Political Activism Aimed at Shaping the United States
Besides the cultural influences described above, TIJ devotes
a great deal of attention to the Jewish political campaigns against
public expressions of Christianity and for official recognition
of the Jewish religion (e.g., recognizing Jewish holidays).
"The St. Louis Charity Fair in 1908 planned to remain open on Friday evening; a great outcry; did the managers of that fair mean to insult the Jews; didn't they know that the Jewish Sabbath began on Friday night?" (6/04/1921).
TIJ presents a history of Jewish activism against public expressions of Christianity based on Kehillah records, beginning with an attempt in 1899-1900 to remove the word "Christian" from the Virginia Bill of Rights and culminating in 1919-1920:
"In this year the Kehillah was so successful in its New York campaign that it was possible for a Jewish advertiser in New York to say that he wanted Jewish help, but it was not possible for a non-Jewish advertiser to state his non-Jewish preference. This is a sidelight both on Jewish reasonableness and Jewish power" (3/12/1920).
"The Jews' interference with the religion of the others, and the Jews' determination to wipe out of public life every sign of the predominant Christian character of the United States is the only active form of religious intolerance in the country today" (3/21/1920).
Another aspect of Jewish power during the period was the ability
to prevent public discussion of Jewish issues as such-an important
source of Jewish power with continuing relevance in contemporary
times (MacDonald, 2002a; Sobran, 1996).
There is a vague feeling that even to openly use the word 'Jew,'
or to expose it nakedly to print, is somehow improper... There
is extreme sensitiveness about the public discussion of the Jewish
Question on the part of Gentiles. They would prefer to keep it
in the hazy borderlands of their thought, shrouded in silence...
The principal public Gentile pronouncements upon the Jewish Question
are in the manner of the truckling politician or the pleasant
after-dinner speaker; the great Jewish names in philosophy, medicine,
literature, music and finance are named over, the energy, ability
and thrift of the race are dwelt upon, and everyone goes home
feeling that a difficult place has been rather neatly negotiated.
(6/12/1920)
Anyone who essays to discuss the Jewish Question in the United
States or anywhere else must be fully prepared to be regarded
as an Anti-Semite, in high-brow language, or in low-brow-language,
a Jew-baiter... The press in general is open at this time to fulsome
editorials in favor of everything Jewish ... while the Jewish
press, which is fairly numerous in the United States, takes care
of the vituperative end. (6/19/1920)
According to TIJ, Jews have succeeded in engaging in ethnic
warfare without either side publicly acknowledging that there
is indeed a war:
"Yes, let it be agreed; if the Jewish idea is the stronger, if the Jewish ability is the greater, let them conquer; let the Anglo-Saxon principles and Anglo-Saxon power go down in ruins before the Tribe of Judah. But first let the two ideas struggle under their own banners; let it be a fair struggle" (5/21/1921; emphasis in TIJ).
Based on pronouncements of Jewish organizations and intellectuals,
TIJ makes the important point that Jews promote "one
of the dangerous doctrines being preached today" that "the
United States is not any definite thing as yet, but that it is
yet to be made, and it is still the prey of whatever power can
seize it and mold it to its liking. It is a favorite Jewish view
that the United States is a great unshapen mass of potentiality,
of no particular character which is yet to be given its definite
form... We are not making Americans; we are permitting foreigners
to be educated in the theory that America is a free-for-all, the
prize of whatever fantastic foreign political theory may seize
it" (3/05/1921). This comment on Jewish attitudes fits well
with a great deal of evidence that Jews have consistently opposed
the notion that the U.S. has any ethnic overtones or that it is
a European or Christian civilization (see MacDonald, 1998/2002,
Ch. 7). TIJ also cites a tendency for Jews to be very enthusiastic
about the U.S. because of the potential of the U.S. to serve Jewish
interests. As Zionist activist Israel Zangwill noted, "Next
to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate
for [Eastern European Jews] than to be together in a land of civil
and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms
no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee
them against future persecution." (in Ross 1914, 144)
A critical component of Jewish attempts to change the U.S. in
conformity with Jewish interests is advocacy of unrestricted immigration.
TIJ was well aware that Jewish groups were the main force
advocating unrestricted immigration to the U.S. The article for
March 5, 1921 claims that one part of the Jewish program for America
is unrestricted Jewish immigration from any part of the world
--a comment that fits well with the findings of other scholars
(MacDonald, 1998/2002; Neuringer, 1980). "American Jews have
never cared what kind of human riffraff filled the country as
long as the Jewish flood was not hindered" (3/21/1921). TIJ
notes that the Kehillah yearbook for 1913-1914 stated that the
energy of Jewish activists was focused on "preventing the
United States from changing the immigration laws in a manner to
protect the country from undesirable aliens" (3/21/1920).
An important technique in opposition to restrictive immigration
laws was organizing mass meetings in large cities. TIJ
states that the Kehillah is able to organize mass meetings "on
a day's notice" in all the major U.S. cities.
"It was by Mass Meetings that Congress was coerced into breaking off our commercial treaty with Russia. It was by Mass Meetings that the literacy test [as a criterion for immigration] was defeated. It was by Mass Meetings that every attempt to restrict immigration has been defeated" (3/19/1921).
TIJ places a great deal of emphasis on Jewish power in
the media as a tool of Jewish political activism. TIJ recounts
an incident when a professor returned from Russia with a magazine
article on the Jewish question in that country. The editor was
"deeply impressed with all he learned-but said he could not
print the article. The same interest and examination occurred
with other magazine editors of the first rank" (6/26/1920).
Although Jews had make strides in ownership of the press during
this period, TIJ states that ownership of the press is
not critical because Jews are able to exert pressure by withholding
advertising. A newspaper that reprinted an excerpt of an article
on Jews from the Dearborn Independent lost a number of Jewish
advertising accounts the next day (9/11/1920).
TIJ also presents an interesting account of resistance
to Jewish pressure by James Gordon Bennett, a non-Jew who owned
the New York Herald, the most prestigious newspaper in
the city until he died in 1918. According to TIJ, the Jewish
owners of department stores threatened the city's newspapers with
loss of advertising if they failed to back a Jewish candidate
for mayor. Bennett published the threatening letter and managed
to survive the loss of Jewish advertising. Despite Bennett's victory,
Jewish power in journalism increased in New York. The Herald
died with Bennett, and "Adolph S. Ochs, a Philadelphia Jew,
acquired the [New York] Times. He soon made it into a great
newspaper, but one whose bias is to serve the Jews" (2/05/1921).
In fact, this assessment of the New York Times is quite
reasonable (see discussion in MacDonald 2002a).
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) also receives some attention
from TIJ. The ADL is portrayed as organizing boycotts to
achieve its ends, often through its ability to control advertising
in newspapers placed by Jewish department store owners. The ADL
pressures newspapers to remove negative references to people identified
as Jews. This pressure has resulted in Jews with negative press
being referred to as Russians or as Englishmen, but never as Jews
(3/19/1921; 7/03/1920). TIJ also points to a double standard
in this regard: "A Jewish paper may shriek to the skies that
Professor So-and-So, or Judge So-and-So, or Senator So-and-So
is a Jew; but the secular newspaper that should do that would
be visited by an indignant committee bearing threats" (9/11/1920).
TIJ also reports that in 1919, the ADL claimed success in getting
150 U.S. cities to exclude The Merchant of Venice from
public schools.
Jewish Influence on Foreign Policy
TIJ describes in some detail the 1911 Jewish campaign to abrogate
the Russian trade agreement. TIJ was partly motivated out
of pique at former President Taft who was president at the time
of the abrogation and who had been recruited by the ADL to denounce
TIJ. On November 1, 1920, Taft released his statement condemning
TIJ "as a foolish pronouncement" (1/15/21). TIJ's
account of Taft's role in the abrogation of the Russian trade
agreement agrees with other accounts of the events but adds some
interesting personal details. The source of the problem was that
the Russian government restricted the freedom of its Jewish citizens
to travel and settle within Russia to the so-called Pale of Settlement,
an area in Western Russia with a large Jewish population which
had been annexed by Russia from Poland at the end of the 18th
century. (Jews had traditionally been banned from Russia.) Some
Jews were getting around these laws by going to the U.S., becoming
naturalized citizens, and then returning to Russia as U.S. citizens.
Russia regarded this as a subterfuge. It continued to view these
people as subject to its travel and residence restrictions. The
Jewish campaign favored formulations in which the problem was
couched as a general American problem rather than as a specific
problem for American Jews. But the difficulties for American Jews
were only a pretext for a larger campaign directed at exerting
pressure on Russia to end the Pale of Settlement and thereby change
the status of Russian Jews.
A delegation of prominent American Jews, including Jacob Schiff,
visited President Taft to discuss this issue as well as the use
of literacy tests for immigrants-another important Jewish concern.
Taft rebuffed the Jewish delegation on the trade embargo issue,
basing his decision on his interpretation of the best interests
of the United States, and he also presented the Jewish delegation
with a letter from the U.S. Ambassador in Russia giving the Russian
point of view on their Jewish subjects and the need to restrict
their movements. TIJ does not discuss the contents of this
letter, but the official Russian view was that emancipation had
resulted in Jews economically dominating and exploiting the Slavic
peasants (Judge 1992, 9, 11); Jews in Russia "were viewed
by the authorities and by much of the rest of population as a
foreign, separate, exploitative, and distressingly prolific nation"
(Lindemann 1991, 17).
Taft's behavior angered the Jewish delegation and particularly
Jacob Schiff who refused to shake the President's hand. The American
Jewish Committee began an intense campaign which resulted in victory
when, a mere 10 months later, "both houses of Congress ordered
President Taft to notify Russia that the treaty with Russia would
be terminated... Whether this had anything to do with the fact
that William Howard Taft became that unusual figure --a one-term
President-- this chronicle does not undertake to say" (1/15/1921).
TIJ also presents an interesting account of various descriptions
of the anti-Jewish actions in Poland in 1919. The article of November
6, 1920 compares several accounts of the situation in Poland and
notes that a very pro-Jewish account by Sir Stuart Samuel, the
Jewish head of the British mission to Poland, was widely publicized,
including being placed as advertisements in newspapers. On the
other hand, accounts by Henry Morganthau Sr. (also Jewish and
former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey) and Captain P. Wright (a member
of the British mission to Poland) that were less flattering to
Jews disappeared from public awareness to the point that copies
of them were difficult to obtain.
TIJ emphasizes Jewish sympathy for communism as an important
issue in Polish anti-Semitism: "Whenever Bolshevik Red armies
swept across Poland, the Jews met them with welcomes. This is
no longer denied, even in the United States: it is explained by
the statement that the Bolsheviki are more friendly to the Jews
than are the Poles" (11/06/1921). The report by Wright emphasized
the successful Jewish demands for group political and legal rights
at the Versailles Peace Conference:
If the Jews of England-after multiplying their numbers by twenty
or thirty-demanded that the Jewish Board of Guardians should have
extensive powers, including the right to tax for purposes of emigration,
and that a separate number of seats should be set aside in the
London County Council, the Manchester Town Council, the House
of Commons, and the House of Lords, to be occupied only by Jews
chosen by Jews; that the president of the board of education should
hand over yearly to the Jews sums proportionate to their numbers;
if some were to demand the right to have separate Jewish law courts,
or at least to be allowed to use Yiddish as well as English in
the King's Bench and Chancery Division; if the most advanced even
looked forward to a time when Bank of England notes were to be
printed in Yiddish as well as in English, then they might well
find public opinion, even in England, less well disposed to them.
TIJ notes the large degree of Jewish influence on Woodrow Wilson:
"They formed a solid ring around him." Commenting on
the special access to Wilson held by the Jewish journalist David
Lawrence, TIJ states, "There was a time when he communicated
to the country through no one but a Jew" (12/04/1920). TIJ
provides examples of Jews who were involved in corruption during
W.W.I, attributing the crimes to the immense power of Jewish financier
Bernard Baruch who controlled the War Industries Board.
TIJ states that Simon Wolf, Jewish lobbyist in Washington,
suggested that a Jew be appointed ambassador to Spain "to
show Spain that the United States does not approve Spain's act
of expulsion back in the fifteenth century. Jews are also suggesting
to President Harding that a Jew be appointed Ambassador to Germany
to rebuke the Germans' resentment against Jewish control of finance,
industry and politics" (3/19/1921). The request for a Jewish
ambassador to Spain to protest the expulsion of 1492 is truly
remarkable but not at all surprising. It is yet another indication
of the intensity and persistence of Jewish memories of anti-Semitism
(MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 6; 2002a). TIJ also claims that American
and British Jews with a Zionist agenda are crowding diplomatic
posts in the Middle East, "so that the whole mid-Orient is
now under Jewish control, and the Mohammedan World is given to
understand that the Jews are merely coming back from their conquest
of the white races" (3/19/1921).
All of this paints a picture of enormous Jewish power during this
period. However, the limits of Jewish power at the time were also
apparent during this period, particularly in the battle over immigration.
Unlike the abrogation of the Russian Trade Agreement, immigration
aroused intense passions among non-Jews as well, and Jews were
on the losing side in the immigration restriction legislation
of 1921 and 1924. It was not until 1965 that this immigration
policy was overturned despite continued intense Jewish pressure
on this issue over the ensuing decades (MacDonald, 1998b, Ch.
7).
Are Jews a Race?
TIJ takes the view that Jews are a race and understand themselves
to be a race but have successfully lobbied to ensure that public
references to Judaism refer to it as a religion. (The TIJ
usage of the term 'race' reflects the fact that during this period
there was no distinction between the major human races and small
descent groups, the latter termed 'ethnic groups' in today's parlance.)
In 1909, Jews successfully pressured Congress to reject a recommendation
of the U.S. Census Bureau to have the category of 'Jew' for recording
immigrants. Jewish lobbyists insisted that Jews were a religion,
not a race, despite heated arguments to the contrary in the U.S.
Senate, including prominent immigration restrictionist Henry Cabot
Lodge. As a result, "there are 46 other classifications [of
racial/ethnic groups], but none for the Jew," and TIJ
quotes a government report stating that classification "by
race or people" "is acceptable to the people of the
United States with one exception" (10/09/1920; emphasis in
TIJ).
TIJ notes that there is "at least one indication has
appeared in which the Jew has one view to present to the Gentiles,
and another which he cherishes among his own people, on this question
of Race," i.e., that Jews view themselves as a race but wish
non-Jews to regard them only as a religion (10/09/1920). To buttress
its claims that Jews are a race-a view that agrees with the results
of modern studies of population genetics (MacDonald 1994/2002,
Ch. 2), TIJ cites comments from a number of Jewish scholars
and prominent Jews. It quotes a Jewish scholar, Leon Simon, that
"The idea that Jews are a religious sect, precisely parallel
to Catholics and Protestants, is nonsense" (10/16/1920).
TIJ also quotes the influential proto-Zionist theorist,
Moses Hess, that the Jew "belongs to a race; he belongs to
a nation; he seeks a kingdom to come on this earth, a kingdom
which shall be over all kingdoms, with Jerusalem the ruling city
of the world" (10/16/1920).
Given the abundant signs of "the rise of the Jews,"
to use Lindemann's [1998] phrase, it must have seemed ominous
to TIJ to be reminded of the prediction of Jewish world
supremacy contained not only in ancient Jewish religious writings
but also repeated by an influential Jewish intellectual of the
modern era.) In the same passage, TIJ also quotes Supreme
Court Justice and Zionist Louis Brandeis that "the percentage
of foreign blood in the Jews of today is very low. Probably no
important European race is as pure." TIJ also cites
Jewish scholar Israel Friedlander's statement that the Jewish
idea of racial purity stems from the rejection of the Samaritans
as Jews recorded in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Old
Testament, a view that is common among scholars today (see MacDonald
1994/2002, Ch. 3). Friedlander writes that "it is enough
for us to know that the Jews have always felt themselves to be
a separate race, sharply marked off from the rest of mankind"
(10/16/1020).
TIJ also points out the irony of Jews claiming to be a
religion in the U.S. while claiming to be a nationality in Eastern
Europe. Jewish groups, including some based in the U.S., successfully
lobbied the post-W.W.I Peace Conferences to achieve nationality
status in Poland and other Eastern European countries after World
War I. As several scholars have noted, religious forms of Judaism
have acted as a "protective coloring" (Elazar 1980,
9) adopted because "it is a legitimate way to maintain differences
when organic ways [i.e., assertions of ethnic peoplehood] are
suspect" (Elazar 1980, 23). As Katz (1986, 32) notes, "The
definition of the Jewish community as a purely religious unit
was, of course, a sham from the time of its conception."
Cuddihy (1978) discusses the rise of Judaism to the level of being
considered one of the three major U.S. religions along with Protestants
and Catholics despite constituting only 2-3% of the population.
TIJ on Anti-Semitism
TIJ takes the view that anti-Semitism results mainly from
Jewish behavior and that it can be rationally understood by adducing
appropriate evidence. TIJ's view is that non-Jews who attempt
to understand anti-Semitism by attributing blame to the Jews should
therefore not be classified as anti-Semites:
It would seem to be necessary for our Jewish citizens to enlarge
their classification of Gentiles to include the class which recognizes
the existence of a Jewish Question and still is not anti-Semitic...
Anti-Semitism is a term which is bandied about too loosely. It
ought to be reserved to denote the real anti-Jewish temper of
violent prejudice... Nor is it anti-Semitism to say that the
suspicion is abroad in every capital of civilization and the certainty
is held by a number of important men that there is active in the
world a plan to control the world ... by control of the machinery
of commerce and exchange. It is not anti-Semitism to say that,
nor to present the evidence which supports that, nor to bring
proof of that. (June 19, 1920)
Anti-Semitism throughout history "has never accomplished
anything in behalf of those who used it, and it has never taught
anything to the Jews against whom it was used" (6/19/1920).
Anti-Semitism "has sometimes broken into murderous violence
... There is, of course, no excuse for these outbreaks, but there
is sufficient explanation of them" (6/19/1920). Jews tend
to over-attribute the Christian religious basis of anti-Semitism:
"There is no hesitation in stating that there is no prejudice
whatever in the Christian churches against the Jew on account
of his religion" (6/19/1920). (Baldwin, who finds the roots
of Ford's anti-Jewish attitudes in medieval religious attitudes,
would have benefited by reading this passage.)
A common technique of those attempting to criticize Jews is to
find Jewish authors who reflect their views. TIJ does this
quite often, as in the July 10, 1920 installment where Theodore
Herzl is used as a reference supporting the idea that Jews are
nation. "He said, 'We are a people -- One people." "Herzl's
words are being proved to be true-'when we sink, we become a revolutionary
proletariat, the subordinate officers of the revolutionary party"
(7/10/1920). The entire passage is quoted as an epigram in the
article for July 17, 1920: "We are a people -- One people
... When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate
officers of a revolutionary party; when we rise, there rises also
our terrible power of the purse." TIJ quotes an article
by Lord Eustace Perry, republished "apparently with approval"
in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, as follows:
Liberalism and Nationalism, with a flourish of trumpets, threw
open the doors of the ghetto and offered equal citizenship to
the Jew. The Jew passed out into the Western World, saw the power
and the glory of it, used it and enjoyed it, laid his hand indeed
upon the nerve centers of civilization, guided, directed and exploited
it, and then-refused the offer ... Moreover-and this is the remarkable
thing-the Europe of nationalism and liberalism, of scientific
government and democratic equality is more intolerable to him
than the old oppressions and persecutions of despotism... In a
world of completely organized territorial sovereignties, he [the
Jew] has only two possible cities of refuge: he must either pull
down the pillars of the whole national state system or he must
create a territorial sovereignty of his own. In this perhaps lies
the explanation both of Jewish Bolshevism and Zionism, for at
the moment Western Jewry seems to hover uncertainly between the
two. In Eastern Europe Bolshevism and Zionism often seem to grow
side by side, just as Jewish influence molded Republicanism and
Socialist thought throughout the nineteenth century -- not
because the Jew cares for the positive side of radical philosophy,
not because he desires to be a partaker in Gentile nationalism
or Gentile democracy, but because no existing Gentile system of
government is ever anything but distasteful to him."
(7/10/1920; emphasis in text)
TIJ comments: "All that is true, and Jewish thinkers
of the more fearless type always recognize it as true. The Jew
is against the Gentile scheme of things." (7/10/1920; emphasis
in text). The passage quoted is in fact remarkably similar to
the writings of prominent Zionist Maurice Samuel, especially his
You Gentiles (Samuel 1924).
Characteristics of Jews
Apart from TIJ's flights into conspiracy theories, especially
as in the case of the Protocols, its view of Judaism is reasonably
congruent with my account (MacDonald 1994/2002). Jews are a highly
talented group: the explanation of their success is in their "vigor,
resourcefulness and special proclivities" (5/22/1920). Jews
are an aggressive group. According to TIJ, from Biblical
times they have endeavored to enslave and dominate other peoples,
even in disobedience of divine command, quoting the Old Testament,
"And it came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put
the Canaanites to tribute, and did not utterly drive them out."
Throughout history Jews have tended to be unpopular with the people
while they have made alliances with elites (see also MacDonald
1994/2002, 1998a): "What cared the Jew if the people gnashed
their teeth against him, so long as the king and the court were
his friends?" Jews have eschewed friendships with non-Jews
because of a feeling of racial superiority, and indeed, "the
Jew who reflects upon the disparity between his people's numbers
and their power may be pardoned if he sees in that fact a proof
of their racial superiority" (6/5/1920).
Jews in America separate themselves from others and do not assimilate;
"he cultivates by his exclusiveness the feeling that he does
not 'belong' " (6/5/1920). "The international Jew ...
rules not because he is rich, but because in a most marked degree
he possesses the commercial and masterful genius of his race,
and avails himself of a racial loyalty and solidarity the like
of which exists in no other human group" (6/12/1920). There
is considerable evidence that Jews are indeed highly ethnocentric,
what one may even term "'hyperethnocentric" (MacDonald
1998a, Ch. 1; 2002a). "The contention of certain modernists
notwithstanding, the world will go on thinking of the Jew as a
member of a race, a race whose persistence has defeated the utmost
efforts made for its extermination, a race that has preserved
itself in virility and power by the observance of those natural
laws the violation of which has mongrelized so many nations ...
And he will always have the right to feel that to be a Jew is
to belong to a superior race" (6/12/1920).
Jews are intent on remaining resolutely separate in America: To
love a Christian maiden is sinful; this is the theme of all sorts
of stories, sketches and editorials appearing these days. But
[playwright] James Gibbons Huneker, in a sketch extravagantly
praised by Jewish critics, shows how deep this idea of separateness
is when he makes [his character] Yaankely Ostrowicz say: "As
a child I trembled at the sound of music and was taught to put
my finger in my ears when profane music, Goy music, was
played." This is the root idea: All Gentile life and institutions
are "profane." It is the Jews' unceasing consciousness
of the Goy that constitutes the disease of Judaism, this century-long
tradition of separateness... A study of Jewish publications, books,
pamphlets, declarations, constitutions and charters, as well as
a study of organized Jewish action in this and other countries,
indicates that there is a tremendous amount of anti-Goyism, or
anti-Gentilism. (3/12/1921)
TIJ sees Jews as suffering from moral particularism --a
tendency to confuse morality with what is good for the Jews (see
also MacDonald 2002a). According to TIJ, Jews have a pronounced
sense of ingroup-outgroup morality-"the ethics of the stranger,"
the classic being "unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon
usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury"
(5/22/1920). But, according to TIJ, Jewish moral particularism
goes beyond that to an inability to see things from the perspective
of the other: "Truly, these people are a paradox. They are
not fair. They are constituted so that they cannot see the other
side of anything. . . . Non-Jews are fair. They are willing to
see the other people's point of view. When it was said to us the
"Merchant of Venice" was a cruelty upon Jewish school
pupils, we said, without investigation, 'Out goes the Merchant,
then!'" (6/04/1921).
TIJ implores Jews to end their moral particularism and
become a full participant in society: "The Jew has been too
long accustomed to think of himself as exclusively the claimant
on the humanitarianism of society; society has a large claim against
him that he cease his exclusiveness, that he cease exploiting
the world, that he cease making Jewish groups the end of all of
his gains, and that he begin to fulfill, in a sense his exclusiveness
has never yet enabled him to fulfill, the ancient prophecy that
through him all nations of the earth should be blessed."
TIJ
sees Jews as ruthless fanatics who will oppress others if given
the chance. The main examples in the contemporary world are said
to be Bolshevism and the Jabotinskiists, the fanatic and violent
Zionist terrorists in Palestine. However, TIJ also provides
a brief history of Jewish violence against Christians and others
during antiquity, including the events in Jerusalem in 614 a.d.
in which 60,000 Palestinian Christians were massacred by Jews
after being purchased as war booty from the conquering Persians.
This is indeed an event worth noting. "The Israeli archaeologist
Ronny Reich writes: 'They were probably sold to the highest bidder.
According to some sources, the Christian captives at Mamilla Pond
were bought by Jews and were then slain on the spot.' An eyewitness,
Strategius of St. Sabas, was more vivid: 'Jews ransomed the Christians
from the hands of the Persian soldiers for good money, and slaughtered
them with great joy at Mamilla Pool, and it ran with blood.' Jews
massacred 60,000 Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem alone (Shamir
2001)." TIJ also includes the famous quote from 18th-century
British historian Edward Gibbon on Jews in the ancient world:
From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered
a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly
broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity
is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed
in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt
in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives; and we
are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised
by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics, whose dire
and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable
enemies not only of the Roman government, but of human kind. The
enthusiasm of the Jews was supported ... by the flattering promise
which they derived from their ancient oracles, that a conquering
Messiah would soon arise, destined to break their fetters and
to invest the favourites of heaven with the empire of the earth.
(Gibbon, 1909; as quoted in TIJ, 8/27/1921)
Zionism
TIJ describes a propaganda campaign in the U.S. media in
favor of Zionism. TIJ quotes an article from the Atlantic
Monthly warning that "the information we receive in America
comes through the Jewish Telegraph Agency and Zionist Propaganda.
'The latter . . . with its harrowing stories of pogroms in Europe,
and its misrepresentations of the situation in the Near East,
has been able to awaken not a little sympathy for the Zionist
propaganda.' This propaganda of pogroms-'thousands upon thousands
of Jews killed'-amounts to nothing except as it illustrates the
gullibility of the press. No one believes this propaganda, and
governments regularly disprove it" (5/28/1921).
Commenting on Zionist riots against the natives of Palestine ("the
'persecuted' turned persecutor"), TIJ notes that the
High Commissioner of Palestine is Sir Herbert Samuel, a Jew, and
that all the ministers of the commission are Jews. The British
government sentenced militant Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky to 15 years
in prison for leading riots against the natives, but "he
was released immediately upon the arrival of Sir Herbert Samuel,
and is now traveling in state, and is talked of as a possible
successor to Sir Herbert, although he is originally one of the
Russian Bolsheviki come down to practice the gentle arts of that
tribe in Palestine." TIJ takes the view that the long
term intention of Zionism is to establish Israel as a world power:
"It begins to be very clear that Jewish nationalism will
develop along the line of enmity to the rest of the world... [T]he
Jews are thinking of elevating themselves into the military power
that shall stand between East and West on that most strategic
strip of ground in the world" (5/28/1921). In a comment foreshadowing
the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and reminiscent of recent
comments by U.S. and Israeli politicians on the status of the
West Bank, TIJ quotes Zionist activist Israel Zangwill
stating, "Let [the natives] get out! We must gently persuade
them to 'trek.' After all, they have all Arabia with its million
square miles, and Israel has not a square inch. There is no particular
reason for the Arabs to cling to those few kilometers" (5/28/1921).
Jews and Political Radicalism
TIJ takes the view that contemporary Communism is an extension
of traditional Jewish collectivism: "The traditional Jewish
Kahal [i.e., Jewish self-government] is really the same
as the modern Soviet: Under the Kahal or ancient Soviet,
the Jews lived by themselves and governed themselves ... It was
communism in a more drastic form than has been seen in the world
outside Russia. Education, taxes, domestic affairs, all were under
the absolute control of a few men who constituted the ruling board...
All property was in common, which did not prevent the leaders
becoming rich" (8/28/1920). (This last statement is not accurate.
Property was not held in common in traditional Jewish communities.)
As was common during the period, TIJ points to the very
prominent role of Jews in the Bolshevik government in the USSR
(9/25/1920) and in Bela Kun's short-lived communist revolution
in Hungary (8/28/1920). TIJ notes the continuation of Hebrew
schools in the Soviet Union --an aspect of the Soviet government's
well-known encouragement of secular Jewish culture during this
period (Evsektsiya). TIJ provides a list which claimed
that 17 of the 22 members of the "Council of the Commissaries
of the People" are Jews. TIJ does not cite its source
except to say that it was "smuggled out of the Soviet Union."
There were many such lists circulating during the period and it
is impossible to find a consensus on their authenticity or accuracy.
Nevertheless, it is certainly true that Jews had a privileged
position in the early years of the Soviet government and were
a critical part of the ruling elite (Lindeman, 1998; MacDonald,
1998b, Ch. 3).
TIJ states that Jews hailed the victory of Bolshevism at
first. "There was no concealment whatever in the early days
of the new regime as to the part which Jewry had in it. Public
meetings, interviews, special articles poured forth in which very
valuable elements of truth were mingled. There was no attempt
at concealment of names. Then the horror of the thing began to
take hold upon the world, and for just a breathing space Jewish
opinion fell silent. There was a spasmodic denial or two. Then
a new burst of glorification. The glorification continues within
Judaism itself, but it now carries on the Gentile side of its
face a very sad expression labeled 'persecution.' We have lived
to see the day when to denounce Bolshevism is to 'persecute the
Jews'" (9/25/1920).
TIJ points to an article from The American Hebrew of
9/10/1920 which claimed that "That achievement [referring
to the overthrow of the Czar] ... was largely the outcome of Jewish
thinking, of Jewish discontent, of Jewish effort to reconstruct.
This rapid emergence of the Russian revolution from the destructive
phase and its entrance into the constructive phase is a conspicuous
genius of Jewish discontent... What Jewish idealism and Jewish
discontent have so powerfully contributed to accomplish in Russia,
the same historic qualities of the Jewish mind and heart ARE TENDING
TO PROMOTE IN OTHER COUNTRIES" (9/25/1920; emphasis provided
by TIJ). TIJ comments, "Why are 'Jewish idealism'
and 'Jewish discontent' always linked together?" Jewish writers
have often fancifully linked Jewish radicalism to idealism and
moral superiority (see MacDonald, 1998b, Ch. 3), but linking it
at the same time to Jewish discontent would indeed seem to be
the height of self-deception.
TIJ also cites an article in the Jewish Chronicle
of London from 1919 stating, "There is much in the fact of
Bolshevism itself, in the fact that so many Jews are Bolsheviks,
in the fact that the ideals of Bolshevism at many points are consonant
with the finest ideals of Judaism" (10/2/1920). The same
paper contained an article in 1920 by Israel Zangwill praising
"the race which has produced a Beaconsfield [i.e., Disraeli],
a Montagu, a Klotz, a Kurt Eisner [leader of the short-lived Communist
government in Bavaria], a Trotsky" (emphasis in TIJ).
TIJ also reproduces part of an article from the newspaper,
the Communist, stating, "Without exaggeration, it may be
said that the great Russian social revolution was indeed accomplished
by the hands of the Jews. Would the dark, oppressed masses of
the Russian workmen and peasants have been able to throw off the
yoke of the bourgeoisie by themselves? No, it was precisely the
Jews who led the Russian proletariat to the dawn of the Internationale
and not only have led, but are now leading the Soviet cause which
remains in their safe hands. . . . It is not without reason that
during the elections to all Soviet institutions the Jews are winning
by an overwhelming majority" (9/25/1920; emphasis by TIJ).
TIJ attributes most of the Jewish support for Bolshevism
in the U.S. to the Jewish trade unions in the garment industry
(4/23/1921). TIJ describes the radicalism of the union
leaders but also emphasizes their links with the wider Jewish
community and particularly their membership in the Kehillah and
the links between the Kehillah and the American Jewish Committee.
For example, "another big union which makes part of the New
York Kehillah is the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America,
whose membership is about 200,000. It is officered by Russian
Jews whose pronounced Bolshevism has been widely reported in the
Jewish press of New York" (4/23/1921).
Such linkages between radical groups and mainstream Jewish organizations
were indeed common at least until the 1950s. For example, the
50,000-member Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order was an affiliate
of the American Jewish Congress and also listed as a subversive
organization by the U. S. Attorney General. The JPFO was the financial
and organizational "bulwark" of the CPUSA after World
War II and also funded the Daily Worker and the Morning Freiheit
(Svonkin 1997, 166). Although the American Jewish Congress severed
its ties with the JPFO and stated that communism was a threat,
it was "at best a reluctant and unenthusiastic participant"
(Svonkin 1997, 132) in the Jewish effort to develop a public image
of anti-communism-a position reflecting the sympathies of many
among its predominantly second- and third-generation Eastern European
immigrant membership.
Jews and the Federal Reserve System
TIJ is deeply suspicious of the Federal Reserve System enacted
into law in 1913 after being proposed originally by Paul Warburg,
a German-Jewish immigrant and partner in the Kuhn, Loeb &
Co. investment banking firm. Baldwin's account hardly does justice
to TIJ's treatment, stating only that TIJ "mistakenly
[accuses] Warburg of advocating only one central bank, when in
fact he had pushed from the beginning that the core be tied to
diversified branches" (pp. 213-214). TIJ acknowledges
that the system is tied to various branches but provides a quotation
from Warburg suggesting that this formal structure could be overcome
administratively, and it provides data indicating that a vastly
disproportionate amount of loans were being made through the New
York branch-that the New York branch had become primus inter pares.
TIJ agreed that it was a good idea to have a centralized
banking system, but complained that the system actually functioned
to funnel money away from agriculture areas, where credit remained
tight, to New York it was used to further the interests of Jewish
financiers who were international in outlook and concerned to
promote Jewish interests rather than concerned mainly with the
interests of United States. The main suspicion was directed at
the Kuhn, Loeb, & Co. because of Warburg's role in creating
the Federal Reserve System and because Warburg had become director
of the Federal Reserve Board. TIJ noted that the members
of Kuhn, Loeb, & Co. had international ties by business and
blood to other Jewish banking firms in Europe.
TIJ provides several examples of the international focus
of Kuhn, Loeb, & Co. For example, TIJ recounts the
well-known fact that Jacob Schiff, a Jewish activist and partner
in the firm of Kuhn, Loeb, & Co., had financed the Japanese
war effort against the Russian Empire in 1905 and had also provided
financial support to revolutionary movements within Russia that
eventually led to the overthrow of the Czar. TIJ also noted
that Schiff hated the Czarist Russian government because of its
treatment of its Jewish citizens-certainly an accurate assessment.
In other words, TIJ is suggesting that the Federal Reserve
might be used to promote the international ethnic interests of
Jews rather than the interests of the United States.
TIJ also points to the internationalism of Paul Warburg's
connections by quoting Otto Kahn, another partner in Kuhn, Loeb,
& Co., to the effect that American money should be put to
use in helping build up the French Empire, particularly Syria.
(In the same passage, TIJ notes the role of international
Jewish organizations in getting the French to guarantee Jewish
interests in Syria.) Moreover, TIJ asserts that Max Warburg,
of the German branch of the banking family, was implicated in
a U.S. government document as financing Trotsky's campaign against
Russia. TIJ also supports its claim of the internationalism
of Jewish bankers by noting that the German Warburgs also made
a loan to the city of Paris during W.W.I. "(T)he international
financiers have been so engrossed in world money that the sense
of national responsibility sometimes becomes blurred in their
minds" (7/09/21).
TIJ cites figures indicating that the great majority of
loans and money are funneled through the New York Fed rather than
the 11 other branches located around the country. "The money
is in New York. Go out through the agricultural states, and you
will not find it. Go into the districts of silent factories and
you will not find it. It is in New York. The Warburg Federal Reserve
has deflated the country.. The Federal Reserve Idea was doubtless
right; if it had not been, it could not have been established.
But it has been manipulated... Kuhn, Loeb & Company, the Speyers
and the other Jewish money-lenders have money for Mexico, Norway,
Germany, and all sorts of commercial companies being organized
to do business overseas, and it is American money. The Warburg
Federal Reserve System has been badly misused, badly manipulated,
and the country is suffering from it" (7/16/1921).
The Protocols
The discussion of the Protocols and references to them
throughout the work is definitely the low point of TIJ.
Since the Protocols were exposed as fraudulent, it has
been very easy to discredit the entire enterprise of TIJ
because of its extensive use of them, and that is exactly what
Baldwin does. TIJ was well aware of claims that the Protocols
had been claimed to be forgeries, but rejected them, stating,
for example,
"This makes the sixth 'final' and 'complete' exposure that the Jews have put forth for public consumption. The Jews have still time to repent and tell the truth. Suppose they make the seventh the whole truth with a true repudiation of the Protocols" (10/8/1921).
The Protocols presents a "theory"
in which absolutely every aspect of modernism is explained as
the result of a single, centuries-old overarching Jewish conspiracy
to subjugate non-Jews. To be charitable, TIJ always presents
the Protocols as only tentatively authentic. TIJ argues
repeatedly that the best evidence for the authenticity of the
Protocols is that events that have transpired since the
Protocols were written conform to its predictions. And TIJ
acknowledges that, even granted that the predictions have come
true, one must also provide actual evidence that Jews have been
behind the events forecast by the Protocols.
The difficulty is that, while some of the statements from the
Protocols discussed in TIJ seem fairly straightforward,
many are not falsifiable. Moreover, TIJ often fails to
provide evidence that Jews are actually behind the events supposedly
forecast by the Protocols. A general problem with the Protocols
is that there is too much of a tendency to see any and all
actions of Jews as aiming for a common purpose of subjugating
non-Jews. While authors like Baldwin apologetically deny any group
cohesion to Jews, the Protocols err on the opposite side
by fitting everything Jews do into an overarching Jewish conspiracy.
The Protocols is written in such a way that virtually anything
that happens-even anti-Jewish actions-can be seen as part of a
Jewish conspiracy. For example, according the Protocols
and TIJ (7/31/1920), the fact that Jews head labor unions
and are prominent capitalists does not show real differences among
Jews but only that all the forces of society are run by Jews for
a common purpose to subjugate non-Jews. TIJ approves of
Protocol Nine which states that "At the present time, if
any government raises a protest against us, it is only for the
sake of form, it is under our control and it is done by our direction,
for their anti-Semitism is necessary for keeping in order our
lesser brothers" (9/18/1920). The following is intended to
give a flavor of TIJ' use of the Protocols.
TIJ claims that the "World Program" outlined
by the Protocols has several aspects: financial control;
political control; control of education; "trivializing the
public mind through a most complete system of allurement";
and "sowing the seeds of disruption everywhere-not the seeds
of progress, but of economic fallacies and revolutionary temper"
(9/18/1920). TIJ takes the view that acceptance of the
Protocols is not to be at face value but only as the result
of evidence, "if reliable" (7/17/1920). "Whether
the method laid down by the Protocols is worth considering
or not depends entirely on whether it can be found in actual affairs
today" (9/18/1920).The Protocols is regarded as the
"theory of Jewish World Power rather than the actual operation
of that power in the world today," the latter to be discovered
by compiling evidence (7/24/1920). For example, "whether
the Protocols are of Jewish origin or not, whether they
present Jewish interests or not, this [i.e., religious and race
hatreds] is exactly the state of the world, of the Gentile world,
today" (7/31/1920).
TIJ argues that the idea of a common Jewish plot to rule
the world would not be expected to be known by the average Jew
and that such a proposal is really no more surprising than to
suppose that the Jewish nation has a foreign policy: "There
can be little doubt ... as to the existence of what may be called
a 'foreign policy,' that is, a definite point of view and plan
of action with reference to the Gentile world. The Jew feels that
he is in the midst of enemies, but he also feels that he is a
member of a people --"one people" [quoting Zionist pioneer
Theodore Herzl]. He must have some policy with regard to the outer
world." TIJ states that, "If, in looking about
the world, it is possible to see both the established conditions
and the strong tendencies to which these Protocols allude, it
will not be strange if interest in a mere literary curiosity gives
way to something like alertness, and it may be alarm" (8/7/1920).
In the long run, the goal of the Jews is international control:
The Protocols: "Then our international rights will
eliminate national rights in the narrow sense, and we will govern
the governments as they govern their subjects" (8/7/1920).
The Protocols and TIJ yearn for a world without
division and dissension, presumably a reflection of the traditional
Russian society whose ideals the Protocols reflect. Both
the Protocols and TIJ yearn for a world without
confusion, where everyone has similar beliefs. Every departure
from this homogeneity is seen as the work of the Jews intended
to subjugate non-Jews. From the Protocols: "People
of all opinions and of all doctrines are at our service, restorers
of monarchy, demagogues, Socialists, communists, and other Utopians.
We have put them all to work" (7/31/1920). All theories,
including scientific theories, are part of the plan: There is
a "'Jewish' plan to split society by 'ideas'" (8/14/1920).
Protocols: Let those theories of life which we have induced
them to regard as the dictates of science play the most important
role for them... Note the successes we have arranged in Darwinism,
Marxism, and Nietzscheism" (7/31/1920). Racial strife and
class antagonism are part of the plan, and TIJ sees the latter
fulfilled in Russia where there is "the spectacle of a Gentile
lower class led by Jewish leaders against a Gentile upper class!"
(7/31/1920). "The whole outlook of these Protocols
upon the world is that the idea may be made a most potent poison"
(7/31/1920). "We create courts." "We have taken
good care long ago to discredit the Gentile clergy and thereby
to destroy their mission" (7/31/1920).
Jews use their influence to corrupt non-Jews, and especially non-Jewish
youth. Protocols: "To prevent them from really thinking
out anything themselves, we shall deflect their attention to amusements,
games, pastimes, excitements and people's palaces." TIJ
interprets the following as a fulfillment of the Protocols:
"Every influence that leads to lightness and looseness in
Gentile youth today heads up in a Jewish source" (8/7/1920).
"While a certain percentage of the Jewish youth itself is
overcome by this social poison, the percentage is almost nothing
compared with the results among the youth of the Gentiles"
(8/7/1920). Protocols: "To destroy Gentile industry,
we shall, as an incentive to this speculation, encourage among
the Gentiles a strong demand for luxuries-all enticing luxuries"
(8/7/1920).
Corresponding to this attempt to corrupt non-Jews, the Protocols
has a very low estimate of non-Jewish human nature: The Protocols:
"People in the masses and people of the masses are guided
by exceptionally shallow passions, beliefs, customs, traditions,
and sentimental theories and are included toward party division,
a fact which prevents any form of agreement, even when this is
founded on a thoroughly logical basis... Our triumph has also
been made easier because, in our relations with the people necessary
to us, we have always played upon the most sensitive strings of
the human mind-on calculation, greed, and the insatiable material
desires of men" (7/31/1920). Reflecting the Protocols'
tendency to see everything working together to suit Jewish ends,
TIJ notes,
"Distrust and division are everywhere. And in the midst of the confusion everyone is dimly aware that there is a higher group that is not divided at all, but is getting exactly what it wants by means of the confusion that obtains all around" (7/31/1920).
Conclusion
TIJ is far from ideal as an analysis of Jewish issues.
However, apart from its immersion in the Protocols, the
great majority of its major claims about Jews are correct and
have been corroborated by later scholarship. Jews are indeed an
ethnically closed group that has vigorously sought to remain separate
from the peoples they have lived among throughout its history.
They are a very talented group, adept equally at building businesses
and lobbying Congress. They have shown a penchant for being able
to influence the media, both via ownership but also via economic
pressure and by overrepresentation among journalists, writers,
and producers of media content. Jews were indeed deeply involved
in political radicalism during the 1920s and thereafter, and TIJ
was quite correct to emphasize the importance of Zionism to the
later history of Jews and to the world in general.
What strikes the reader of TIJ is its portrayal of Jewish
intensity and aggressiveness in asserting its interests. Jews
were unique as an American immigrant group in their hostility
toward American Christian culture and in their energetic efforts
to change that culture (see also MacDonald 1998b, 2002b). From
the perspective of TIJ, the United States had imported
around 3,500,000 mainly Yiddish speaking, intensely Jewish immigrants
over the previous 40 years. In that very short period, Jews had
had enormous effect on American society.
It is instructive to compare the Jews with the Overseas Chinese
who originated in the last 200 years as immigrant groups in several
Southeast Asian countries. Both he Jews and the Overseas Chinese
have often been seen as minority ethnic groups dominating the
people they live among. Both the Overseas Chinese and the Jews
are highly intelligent and prone to high-investment parenting.
Both have been utilized by alien or indigenous elites as economic
middlemen under essentially oppressive conditions. Regarding Jews,
beginning in the ancient world and extending down to the 20th
century in Eastern Europe, the role of Jews as willing agents
of princely exploitation was a common theme of anti-Semitism (see
MacDonald 1994/2002, Ch. 5; MacDonald, 1998a, Ch. 2).
However, there is a major difference between the Jews and the
Overseas Chinese. TIJ as well as mainstream scholarship shows
that the arrival of large numbers of immigrant Jews had a very
large influence on the media, on the creation of culture, on information
in the social sciences and humanities, and on the political process
in the United States (MacDonald, 1998b/2002). This has not happened
with the Chinese in Southeast Asia. The Chinese have not formed
a hostile cultural elite in Southeast Asian countries, and have
not been concentrated in media ownership or in the construction
of culture. We do not read of Chinese cultural movements disseminated
in the major universities and media outlets that subject the traditional
culture of Southeast Asians and anti-Chinese sentiment to radical
critique.
As Peter Novick (1999, 12) notes regarding the importance of the
Holocaust in contemporary American life, We [i.e., Jews] are not
just "the people of the book," but the people of the
Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine
article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic
symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became
widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role
that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not
only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout
the culture at large.
The following passage describing the political attitudes of the
Overseas Chinese in Thailand could never have applied to Jews
in Western societies since the Enlightenment:
"But few seem to know or indeed to care about the restrictions on citizenship, nationality rights, and political activities in general, nor are these restrictions given much publicity in the Chinese press. This merely points up the fact, recognized by all observers, that the overseas Chinese are primarily concerned with making a living, or amassing a fortune, and thus take only a passive interest in the formal political life of the country in which they live" (Coughlin 1960, 169).
On the contrary, for Jews, any manifestation
of anti-Jewish attitudes or behavior is to be met with an all
out effort at eradication: "There is no such thing as overreaction
to an anti-Semitic incident, no such thing as exaggerating the
omnipresent danger. Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there
were dangerous portents in American society hadn't learned 'the
lesson of the Holocaust' " (Novick 1999, 178). In reading
TIJ one is struck by the intense activism Jewish immigrants
exerted in an effort to assert economic and political rights,
as well as shape the wider culture (e.g., removing public displays
of Christianity). This compares to the situation in Indonesia
where not only have the Chinese not attempted to remove public
displays of symbols of Indonesian nationalism and religion, they
have not seriously attempted to change laws in place since the
1960s mandating that there be no public displays of Chinese culture
(see MacDonald, 2002b).
Mainstream scholarship supports the following contentions of TIJ
regarding Jewish influence on the U.S. as of the early 1920s:
1. Jews had achieved a great deal of economic success, even to
the point of dominating certain important U.S. industries.
2. Jewish organizations had launched highly successful campaigns
to remove references to Christianity from U.S. public culture
and to legitimize Judaism as a religion on a par with Protestantism
and Catholicism.
3. Jewish organizations had been able to impose their ethnic interests
on certain key areas of domestic policy. As TIJ noted,
Jews were the main force behind maintaining the policy of unrestricted
immigration; by 1920, unrestricted immigration policy had continued
nearly 20 years after U.S. public opinion had turned against it
(see MacDonald 1998b, Ch. 7). Jews had also shown the ability
to have a great deal of influence in the executive branch of the
U.S. government, as indicated by their influence in the Wilson
administration.
4. Jews had also been able to impose their ethnic interests in
the area of foreign policy despite widespread feelings among the
political establishment that the policies advocated by the Jewish
community were often not in the best interests of the United States.
The main examples highlighted by TIJ were the abrogation
of the Russian trade agreement in 1911 and post-W.W.I policy toward
Eastern Europe where Jewish attitudes were entirely dictated by
their perceptions of the interests of foreign Jews rather than
the economic or political interests of the U.S. Jews achieved
their goals on these issues despite the views of the Taft Administration
on the Russian Trade Agreement and the views of a wide range of
military and diplomatic figures that the U.S. should support post-W.W.I
Poland as a bulwark against Bolshevism and that Jewish complaints
against Poland were exaggerated (see Bendersky 2000).
5. Jews had been a major force behind the success of Bolshevism
and its incredibly bloody rein of terror in the Soviet Union and
in the abortive Communist revolutions in Hungary by Kun and Germany
by Eisner.
6. Jews were the main component and by far the most energetic
component of the radical left in the United States, a movement
that advocated a massive political, economic, and cultural transformation
of the U.S.
7. Jews had attained a substantial influence over the U.S. media
via a virtual monopoly on the movie production business, domination
of the theater and music businesses, their influence in journalism,
ownership of some newspapers, and their ability to apply economic
pressure on newspapers because of their importance as advertisers.
In turn, the ability of Jews to pressure non-Jewish newspapers
depended on Jewish ownership of department stores in major cities.
Jews used this media influence to advance their domestic and foreign
policy agendas, portray Jews and Judaism positively while portraying
Christianity negatively, and promote a sexual morality at odds
with the traditional culture of the United States.
In turn, these consequences stemmed from critical features of
Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy (MacDonald 1994/2002)
that was well recognized, if crudely stated, by TIJ: Jews
are highly intelligent, and Jews are intensely ethnocentric:
"The international Jew ... rules not because he is rich, but because in a most marked degree he possesses the commercial and masterful genius of his race, and avails himself of a racial loyalty and solidarity the like of which exists in no other human group" (6/12/1920).
TIJ reported some success in having Jewish issues discussed
publicly. For example, the July 17, 1920 article stated that "A
great unloosening of speech with reference to the Jewish Question
and the Jewish program for world power has occurred in this country
since the beginning of this series of articles." The article
goes on to quote articles and editorials on Jewish radicalism,
including an article in the Chicago Tribune ("Trotsky
leads Jew-Radicals to World Rule. Bolshevism only a Tool for His
Scheme") and a Christian Science Monitor editorial
giving credence to the "Jewish peril."
Nevertheless, despite this upsurge in discussion of Jewish issues
as a result of the publication of TIJ, public discussions
of Jewish issues have remained more or less taboo. Father Charles
Coughlin discussed Jewish issues in his widely disseminated radio
broadcasts in the 1930s until being effectively shut down in 1940
as a result of a decision by the National Association of Broadcasters
to forbid selling airtime to "spokesmen of controversial
public issues" (Marcus 1973, 176; see also Warren 1996)-a
regulation that was explicitly aimed at keeping Coughlin off the
air. In September 1941, Charles Lindbergh had few, if any, defenders
in the media when he was subjected to a torrent of abuse for stating
a simple fact, that Jews were one of three groups advocating U.S.
involvement in W.W.II against Germany (the others being Britain
and the Roosevelt Administration). In the long run, the TIJ
was simply a blip in a long-term trend that continues into the
present.
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http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/HenryFord-2.htm