From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Whatever factors one invokes (persecution, valorization of intellectual work), the consensus result is that the Jews are on average more intelligent than the Gentiles, and therefore well suited for holding power over them. “Superior Jewish intelligence is part of the Jewish self-stereotype,” writes Raphael Patai, a Hungarian Jew who taught in Israel before emigrating to the United States, in his book The Jewish Mind (1977). “The same rumor is mooted by Gentiles as well. Those of them who are free of the taint of anti-Semitism simply refer to it as a fact, without any emotional overtones, unless it be a twinge of envy or a note of grudging admiration. The anti-Semite will find it possible to speak of Jewish intelligence only in terms of negative connotations such as shrewdness, sharpness, craftiness, cunning, slyness, and the like. […] All people who know Jews, whatever their reaction to them otherwise, subscribe to the rumor of their intelligence.” The rumor is based on fact: studies have shown that Jews have, on average, an IQ well above 100 (the general average), especially, but not exclusively, in the field of “verbal intelligence” (as opposed to “performance intelligence”). Among common Darwinian explanations, Patai mentions the well-known contrast between the Christian tradition of clerical celibacy versus the strong competitiveness of Talmudic scholars in the matrimonial market. In the Middle Ages, intellectually superior men were deprived of progeny if they were Christians, but obtained wives of choice and a large number of descendants if they were Jews.642

  The assumed intellectual superiority of the Jews acts as a Darwinian filter in the cultural sphere, which tends to Judaize itself almost automatically through co-optation. Andre Gide noted this phenomenon with some irritation in his diary in 1914: “It seems to me that this tendency to constantly emphasize the Jew, preferring him and taking a special interest in him, this predisposition to recognizing in him talent, even genius, stems from the fact that a Jew is particularly sensitive to Jewish qualities.”643 And thus are mediocre thinkers and creators, even plagiarists, raised atop Mt. Parnassus, their works immortalized, canonized, and deemed mandatory reading. They, in their turn—convinced that genius comes more naturally to Jews—lionize and favor their Jewish brethren.

  Blood, Race, and Genes

  The term “group solidarity,” mentioned by Larine, refers to what Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871): “A tribe including many members who, possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, who were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”644 This principle, called “group selection,” introduces an internal contradiction in Darwin’s theory: insofar as individuals who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the group have less chance of survival, altruism should not be transmitted as a genetic trait in the group. This contradiction does not concern us, since the validity of the Darwinian theory of the evolution of species is irrelevant here. We are interested only in Darwinian mechanisms capable of explaining the superiority of the Jews in their competitive relations with the Gentiles.

  Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning Richard Dawkins’s effort to resolve the contradiction of “group selection” in his best-selling book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins believes he can do it by taking the standpoint of the “gene,” defined as “any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.” From that standpoint, “we and all other animals, are machines created by our genes,” allowing them to replicate indefinitely.645 This view seems to correspond fairly well to the Deuteronomic ideology. The insistence of the Jewish tradition on the law of endogamy from the Bible to the present day makes it possible to consider Judaism as a strategy of preservation, even improvement, of a genetic heritage. It is better understood by reading what Benzion Netanyahu, father of the Israeli prime minister, writes about transgressions against endogamy: “Only by intermarriage can a person uproot himself from a nation, and then only in so far as his descendants are concerned. His individuality, which is an extract and an example of the qualities of his nation, may then be lost in future generations, dominated by qualities of other nations. Quitting a nation is, therefore, even from a biological point of view, an act of suicide.”646 Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, found a more modern formulation: “To marry a non-Jew is to join the six million [exterminated Jews].”647 Indeed, in Jewish Orthodox communities, the Jew who marries a goy is considered dead, and even given a symbolic funeral by his family.

  This obsession with endogamy is the central theme of the book of Ezra, which lists the genealogies of the pure lines worthy of reproduction. These lines obviously refer to an elite class rather than a people. And still today, within the Jewish community, endogamy is all the more valued as one moves up the social hierarchy. The almost caricatural illustration of this principle is the Rothschild dynasty: the most powerful Jewish family in the world is also the most endogamous. Of the 58 marriages contracted by the descendants of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, half were between cousins. In the space of a little more than a hundred years, they married each other 18 times, 16 times between first cousins.648 The rule, written down by Mayer Amschel in his last will, is for Rothschild boys to marry Rothschild girls, while also admitting a few handpicked goyish aristocrats to the lineage. Such unions enrich the Rothschild gene pool, since their offspring are Jewish on the principle that Jewishness is transmitted through the mother.649

  In the world of the Jewish super-rich, genetic heritage and financial heritage are closely intertwined. Corporate mergers are consecrated by marriages: Solomon Loeb and Abraham Kuhn of Kuhn Bank, Loeb & Co (founded in 1867) married each other’s sisters, while Jacob Schiff married the daughter of Solomon Loeb to become boss of the bank in 1875. Similarly, the two Sachs sons married two Goldman daughters, forming the bank Goldman Sachs (founded in 1869). Conversely, marriages with non-Jews, amounting to genetic defections, are most frequent among the less well-off sections of the Jewish community—a phenomenon that, from the Judeo-Darwinian point of view, is tantamount to expelling the weak from the group.

  We have shown in chapter 3 that the core teaching of the Hebrew Bible deprives the individual of any other life after death than through his progeny. Man’s only destiny beyond his earthly life is the survival of his people. It is as if the Jewishness in each Jew were a piece of a collective soul. Therefore renouncing Jewishness, for a Jew, is like tearing away part of his soul. In his Essay on the Jewish Soul (1929), Isaac Kadmi-Cohen described Judaism as “the spiritualized deification of the race,” and his God as “the exaltation of the entity represented by the race.”650 This may be why many Jews who seemed detached from their community, even critical of it, suddenly begin to feel late in life—at the age when ordinary Christians begin to ponder the hereafter and the salvation of their souls—to become intensely Jewish, as if their only perspective beyond their earthly existence was to join their souls to that of the chosen people, adding another stone to the edifice. The power of this tribal rootedness is well summed up by the Jewish proverb: “You can take the boy out of Israel, but you can’t take Israel out of the boy.”651

  This Jewish focus on genetic heritage, which is tantamount to creating a tribal psyche or group soul, also explains why we often see people who seem unconcerned with their Jewish origins suddenly becoming fervent defenders of the Jewish community. At the raising of the slightest alarm, involving any perceived criticism or threat to the community, they react as if, deep down inside, they themselves were gravely and personally threatened. An ethnic ego—an anima judaica that had been asleep inside them—suddenly seizes control of their being. A good example is the Hollywood scriptwriter Ben Hecht, son of Jewish immigrants, who recounts in his autobiography A Child of the Century (1954) how, after writing the 1931 bestseller A Jew in Love deemed insulting to Jews, he “turned into a Jew” in 1939: “The Germ
an mass murder of the Jews, recently begun, had brought my Jewishness to the surface.” He then became a fervent Zionist and converted the gangster Mickey Cohen to the cause of the Irgun, whose terrorism against the British he supported in his May 1947 letter to the New York Post entitled “Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine”: “My Brave Friends, The Jews of America are for you [. . .] Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.”652

  The Hebrew Bible itself is the most striking achievement of this special collective genius of the Jewish people, capable of working “as one person” (Ezra 3:1). For the Bible is not the work of an individual genius, but of several lines of priests whose contributions are spread over centuries. No other known literary work has such a collective character. It is this supra-individual origin that gives the Bible a superhuman aura and justifies its sacred character, helping make the biblical Yahweh the collective soul of the Jewish people. We can say almost as much of the Talmud, which is the result of an accumulation of comments by generations of rabbis. Zionism provides another illustration of the Jews’ ability to link their individual destinies to the collective destiny of their people. No other people, it seems to me, are capable of such perseverance toward a single and unwavering goal, pursued step by step over several generations—even over a hundred generations if we trace the Zionist project back to the period of Exile.

  The national orientation of the Jewish soul infuses all collective action with a spiritual force that no other community can compete with. It is this spiritual or animistic connection that explains the exceptional capacity of the Jews to work in networks. Their absolute loyalty to the national goals they set makes these networks frighteningly effective, because they are based on a tacit confidence that requires no written contract. We see this type of network at work throughout history. Neoconservatives have recently demonstrated the formidable effectiveness of this esprit de corps: in two generations, a network of a few hundred people penetrated the nerve centers of the American state with the precise aim of seizing the levers of its foreign and military policies.

  In an article in The Jewish World Review of June 7, 1999, the neoconservative Michael Ledeen, disciple of Leo Strauss and founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), assumes that Machiavelli, the son of a papal financier, must have been a “secret Jew,” since “if you listen to his political philosophy you will hear Jewish music.”653 The affinity between Judaism and Machiavellianism can be understood by reading Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli. Strauss believes Machiavelli is a patriot of the highest degree because he understood that only the nation is immortal and has a soul, and that the best leaders are those who have no fear of damning their individual soul, since they have none.654 One understands better modern Zionism of the neoconservative kind when one has grasped this affinity between Judaism and Machiavellianism: Judaism, like Machiavellian politics, is seen as a superior kind of patriotism, because it totally subordinates the immortality of the individual to that of the nation.

  On a more pragmatic level, the esprit de corps that characterizes the Jewish community and gives it this extraordinary capacity to move as a single person, sometimes scattering like a school of fish and then reconstituting itself, rests on a profound internalization of discipline and submission to the authority of the elites—in the last instance, to Yahweh, the soul of the group. Although theoretically devoid of central authority since the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish community is organically structured in concentric circles. This was noted in the 1970s by Daniel Elazar (Community and Polity: Organizational Dynamics of American Jewry, 1976): in the center is the core 5–8 percent for whom Jewishness is a permanent concern; on the periphery are Jews who are totally assimilated and who play an important role in public relations while remaining mobilizable under the banner of the fight against anti-Semitism.655 There are currently about 300 national Jewish organizations in the United States, with an annual budget of $6 billion. These organizations do not all share the same sensibilities, yet the most important ones speak with one voice through the 52 members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.656

  Nomads and Refugees

  An often-advanced explanation of the specificity of the Jewish people is their supposed nomadic origin. This is the thesis of Yuri Slezkine, who notes, for example, that “All service nomads are endogamous, and many of them observe dietary restrictions that make fraternizing with their neighbors/clients impossible.” Or that “All nomads defined themselves in genealogical terms; most ‘service nomads’ persisted in doing so in the midst of dominant agrarian societies that sacralized space. They were people wedded to time, not land.” The sedentary peasant is rooted in the land, while the nomadic pastoralist is rooted in his genealogy. Ask a peasant where he comes from, and he will name his village; ask a nomad and he will name his tribe.657 There is exaggeration and reductionism in such stereotypes. Do they apply to the Indians of the American plains, for example? We may doubt it, and find many other counterexamples.

  As early as 1929 Isaac Kadmi-Cohen explained Jewish tribalism by nomadic origin. He saw in Judaism the purest product of nomadism. “If nomadism has been the precious guardian of the unity of the race, it is because it has preserved it from lengthy contact with the same land, from a continuous fixation on the same soil, a sedentary rootedness which inevitably transforms, through adaption and selection, the variegated products of the wild meadow into a wheat field. It detaches man from the earth.” Kadmi-Cohen also attributes the Jews’ utilitarian spirit to their nomadic heritage. The peasant gains his subsistence from the earth, but his relation to the earth is transgenerational: he belongs to the earth more than the earth belongs to him. Love of the land is the basis of peasants’ patriotism, unlike the nomad; “In the (nomadic) Jew, patriotism for the homeland, like its microcosmic expression in the love of a parcel of earth, does not exist.” Consequently, land is not seen as an end in itself, but “through the prism of self-interest, through the advantage that can be derived from it.”658

  There may be some truth in this explanation of the Jewish character by primordial nomadism. But it has its weaknesses. Kadmi-Cohen applies it to all the Semites, dividing them into two branches, Arabs and Jews. But he does not address the question of what distinguishes Arabs from Jews. He confines himself to this remark: “Of the two main branches of the Semitic tree, only the Jewish branch has preserved its original purity.”659 But the Arab Bedouins have remained nomadic much longer than the Jews, making it difficult to see how their nomadism could be less pure. Moreover, the nomadism of the first Hebrews is not as obvious as it seems. Genesis does not describe them as functional nomads whose migrations were regulated by the seasons, the need for game or pasture, or trade. The Hebrews, obviously, were perpetually in search of a land where they could settle permanently. As we have seen, the etymology of “Hebrew” (habiru) reminds us that they were originally refugees—migrants rather than nomads.

  These considerations help us better understand the paradoxical character of Hebrew “nomadism.” “Unlike sedentary peoples, the nomad did not pay homage to the land,” writes Kadmi-Cohen. But how can we describe the Jews’ attachment to their Promised Land? And especially their peculiar way of appropriating it? Most conquering peoples borrow the place-names of the people they have conquered. Even the European pioneers of the New World adopted the Amerindian names of many of the rivers, mountains, and territories of the American continent. Not so the Israelis who, from 1947 onward, erased the Arab names of bulldozed villages, renaming them in Hebrew. The ideology of the “Redemption of the Earth” demanded no less.660 Here is the expression of an odd sort of possessiveness, radically different from the nomad’s freedom from attachment to the soil.

 
This brings us to another paradoxical aspect of the “nomadism” of the Jews: their relationship to property. The Jew, like the nomad, is not interested in landed property. But no other nomadic people has developed an interest in movable property comparable to that of Diaspora Jews. An ancient example is the theft of gold from the Egyptians before the flight from Egypt. The looting of precious metals also featured in the conquest of Canaan: “All the silver and all the gold, everything made of bronze or iron, will be consecrated to Yahweh and put in his treasury” (Joshua 6:19). Moreover, the Jews were undoubtedly the first to have regarded money not as a means of exchanging goods, but as a commodity. We can see, with Jacques Attali, the increasing dematerialization of money as the triumph of nomadism (that is, of the Jewish type by Darwinian selection). But we must recognize that such “nomadism” has little to do with the normal anthropological use of the term.

  In conclusion, the explanation of Judaism by nomadism is not entirely convincing. The Jewish people have never defined themselves as nomads, but rather as wanderers. And their forty years of wandering in the desert are hardly a paradise lost. Jews’ obsession with the Promised Land, and their taste for mobile, transportable property, have little to do with the freedom of the nomad exalted by Kadmi-Cohen. The Jew, moreover, is atavistically urban. Let us not confuse nomadism and cosmopolitanism.

  Assimilation, Dissimulation

  Keeping in mind that we are talking about cultural not genetic transmission, the Darwinian dialectic remains enlightening in understanding the mechanisms by which the Jewish community ensures its survival as a group and its competitiveness among other human groups.