(Mondoweiss) -- by Philip Weiss --
Here is an important exchange. Recently Jerry Muller, a Jewish professor of history at the Catholic University in D.C., published a splendid book called Capitalism and the Jews. Muller argues that Jews are great at commerce because of cultural training, family habits and dedication to texts, as well as from the tradition of filling a marginalized role in Europe, as usurers. Then capitalism became the defining order of European society in the 19th century, Muller says, and nationalism rose hand in hand with capitalism, because capitalism required literacy and education and nations could provide the structure for such development; and Jews became elevated within those nations as the professionals, and anti-Semitism was the response of people who lost status or who were in competition with Jews. It is a vital argument because it understands anti-Semitism as a real if hateful response to real sociological shifts, including the role of Jews as intermediaries between landowners and peasants in Eastern Europe (a hobbyhorse of mine) and follows along in the work of Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, and Albert Lindemann--Esau’s Tears, which also “explained” anti-Semitism in terms of the rise of the Jews.
Now what is the exchange I began by referring to? At Amazon, the book was reviewed positively by Ira Stoll, the neoconservative former editor of the New York Sun. (I think this is the sage who said that those of us who demonstrated against the Iraq war in February 2003 should be investigated for “treason.”) But Stoll takes exception to some of Muller's analysis:
Mr. Muller gets out onto the thinnest ice when he blames Jewish involvement in revolutionary activity and communism for inflaming European anti-Semitism. Sometimes, he frames this claim cautiously: "To be sure, in much of eastern Europe anti-Semitism long antedated the Bolshevik Revolution, and would have been a substantial factor in interwar politics even without the prominence of Jews in the Communist movement."I.e., they hate us because we are who we are, they hate us no matter what we do. When actually Muller shows that Jews were drawn both to capitalism and anti-capitalism, and that revolutionary ideology clearly played a role in the Nazi stigmatization of Jews in the 30s. But no, any theory that seeks to associate anti-Jewish hatred and crime with an actual grievance must be expunged.
Other times he is more assertive: "In Germany, where political anti-Semitism had been on the wane before 1914, the role of the Jews in the postwar revolutions was the key element in the revival of anti-Semitism on the right."
That the Jews were being denounced as greedy capitalists at just the same time as they were being denounced as dangerous Communists suggests to me that the denunciations were, at bottom, more about hating Jews than about hating either capitalists or communists.
This is in the end a war over Jewish identity right now. If nothing we do has anything to do with the resentment against us, we can continue to run the Israel lobby in American foreign affairs and colonize and ethnically-cleanse Palestinian lands and, when Obama demurs, insist on having out the disagreement behind closed doors, because the goyim will hate us anyway and the lobby is the only power we have.
But if we actually have an effect on our own reputation we can be mindful of our presence in a multicultural world. And I would state, as Muller does historically, that we have tended to be a privileged group...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:
The neocon Stoll recites a common Zionist trope with this argument:
"That the Jews were being denounced as greedy capitalists at just the same time as they were being denounced as dangerous Communists suggests to me that the denunciations were, at bottom, more about hating Jews than about hating either capitalists or communists."
This ignores the fact that both Communism and hyper Capitalism (as opposed to free enterprise) are antithetical to Christian moral authority and Western harmony -- which is a major reason many Jews are drawn to each. In both cases, the goal of these Jewish subversives is to tear down a society that penalizes their ethnic collectivism and racketeering, and replace it with a construct advantageous to themselves and their ways. True, Soviet Communism eventually turned on the Jews when the Jewish Bolsheviks became too powerful and were basically on the cusp of turning the entire enterprise into a mere Zionist (Jewish supremacist) front (just as they have done with American hyper-Capitalism). But it must be remembered that Jewish supremacism was probably the primary original motivation and secret intent of many of the Jewish intellectuals who invented Communism to begin with -- either consciously or sub-consciously.
Also, note how the neocons speak out of both sides of their mouth depending on who they're talking to. On the one hand, when addressing gentile audiences and issues, they preach the sanctity of the "Judeo-Christian civilization," and hold forth on how we're joined-at-the-hip-allies embarking on a common cause with common values in the War on Terror and clash of civilizations war on Islamic extremism. On the other hand, when addressing Jewish questions and issues, they go on and on about how Western civilization has always hated and persecuted Jews simply for being Jews, with no rational basis whatsoever.
So which is it, Judeo-Christian Western civilization or anti-Semitic Western civilization? Their tenacious support and intrigue on behalf of Zionism indicate which the neocons truly believe, hence I would argue that the last person a gentile Westerner would ever want to be in a fox hole with is a Jew with mixed emotions and conflicting attitudes about whether or not he even wants to defend the innately "anti-Semitic" gentile next to him. In fact, the a gentile may be under as serious a threat from the Christian-hating Jew at his side as he is from the enemy trying to gun him down from the front.
The entire mindset is reminiscent of Netanyahu giving speeches in Israel on the indispensability of Zionism to the survival the Jewish people because of the virulent, irrational and irascible anti-Semitism of the gentile world on one day, and then lecturing that same gentile world on how it should shower ever more Judeophile welfare on the Jewish state, and fight ever more Judeophile wars for the Jewish state, the next day.
Chutzpah, thy name is Jewish supremacy!
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