Gottfried

A Race Apart. Paul Gottfried: Chronicles, June 2000, 27-29.
Kevin MacDonald's study of the Jewish people in sociobiological perspective will not likely help his career, for reasons having nothing to do with the author's scholarship or his accumulation of pertinent evidence. While treating his subjects respectfully, attributing to Ashkenazic Jews a mean I.Q. one standard deviation higher than that of white gentiles, he commits the indiscretion of describing Jewish behavioral characteristics noted as well by anti-Semites: for example, an aggressive demeanor toward the core cultures of host peoples in combination with the practice of ritually and socially prescribed separation from gentiles, which he ascribes to a form of collective consciousness that may be inborn as well as culturally acquired. MacDonald presents this consciousness as endemic to a group that has worked strenuously to preserve its genotypal identity....
    Since Jews supposedly have acquired a cognitive advantage over most other groups through careful eugenic practices, competition yields them remarkable success. In the past, their group performance was hindered by the host people's possession of a degree of ethnic consciousness comparable to their own. In these circumstances'medieval Europe, say, or 20th-century Russia'Jews have been limited in their collective and individual ambitions. As MacDonald explains in the second two volumes of his trilogy, such obstacles forced them to adopt daring strategies, most fatefully the embrace of revolutionary ideologies and programs. As an embattled out-group, Jews supported and led revolutionary movements in vast disproportion to their numbers. And while tensions have existed over the last 200 years between Rabbinic and revolutionary Jews, MacDonald is correct in suggesting that the conflict has not been as sharp as is commonly believed....

    MacDonald shows how persistent the issue of open borders has been for his subjects. Jews have combined intervention on behalf of immigration and the demonization of immigration restrictionists with the promotion of "diversity education." ... MacDonald does not present such advocacy as the misguided humanitarian design of those whose ancestors suffered dispersion and who are therefore receptive to later strangers. Instead he locates Jewish support for multiculturalism in the context of an already venerable strategy: "De-ethnicizing" the once majority population while insisting on the right of Jews as righteous victims to persist as an ethnic cluster.... My guess from reading Chilton Williamson, Peter Brimelow, and Lawrence Auster is that the reassessment of immigration, especially from the Third World, was part of a general cultural change that beset Western societies and was pushed by the managerial state. While Jews contributed to cultural change and immigrationism energetically and disproportionately, they were far from constituting a sufficient cause....

    The "culture of critique" has done best among those whom James Kurth (himself a Presbyterian) calls "progressively deformed" Protestant peoples. Starting with the theologically based individualistic and anti-hierarchical bias of classical Protestantism, this deformation of Reformationist thought has expressed itself in various late-modernist obsessions, most of them linked to Protestant sources but without the sobering notions of Original Sin and divine redemption. These Protestant variants emphasize moral subjectivity and self-esteem, while replacing the concept of sin with that of social guilt.

    Fits of self-rejection are also characteristic of deformed Protestants, and in the United States, Canada, Germany, and England, Protestant clergy have been in the forefront of those demanding atonement for racism, antisemitism, sexism, and homophobia....

    For me, the most engrossing part of MacDonald's trilogy is a long, learned section in the third volume on the Pathologization [of Gentile Group Allegiances].... The pivotal themes in The Authoritarian Personality, as emphasized by MacDonald, were nothing new to those who assisted in the project: Rather, they represented the same complaints directed against Western'and not only German'society by the youthful radicals grouped around Adorno at the University of Frankfurt in the early 30's. From Frankfurt, these "anti-Nazis" emigrated to the United States; later they reestablished their ideas in postwar Germany in the context of Allied denazification. Little attention was paid to the fact that the proposed antidotes for Nazism were not exactly disease-specific: They targeted anything that gave cohesion to middle-class families and societies.

    MacDonald argues that the "pathologization" of normal gentile society in The Authoritarian Personality foreshadows today's coerced political correctness.... The plea for resocialization in 1950 continued to resonate among Jewish "social scientists" who shared Adorno's fears; both it and the rhetoric in which it was couched live on in the efforts of Jewish organizations to identify traditional Christian values with incipient "fascism."

Kevin MacDonald Replies to Paul Gottfried's Review
(An abbreviated version of this reply appeared in Chronicles, [September, 2000, pp. 4-5] along with a rejoinder by Gottfried)

I thank Paul Gottfried for his generally accurate and positive review of my book, The Culture of Critique. Nevertheless, there are a few issues that bear discussion, the most important of which is the role of Jewish organizations and intellectuals with strong Jewish identifications as agents of change in the cultural transformations that have occurred in Western societies over the last 50 years. In general, my position is that Jewish intellectual and political movements were a necessary condition for these changes, not a sufficient condition as suggested by Gottfried. In the case of the reversal in U.S. immigration policy, there simply were no other pressure groups that were pushing for liberalized, multi-racial immigration during the period under consideration (up to 1965).

Gottfried attributes the sea change in immigration to 'a general cultural change that beset Western societies and was pushed by the managerial state.' I agree that multi-ethnic immigration resulted from a general cultural shift, but we still must develop theories for the origin of this shift, and in my view the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed The Culture of Critique were a necessary condition for this transformation. Fundamental to this transformation was the decline of ethnic consciousness among European peoples. It is fascinating to contrast the immigration debates of the 1920's with those of the 1950's and 1960's. The restrictionists of the 1920's unabashedly asserted the right of European-derived peoples to the land they had conquered and settled. While expressions of racial superiority were rare, it was commonly asserted that the people who colonized and created the political and economic culture of the country had a right to maintain it as their possession.

Consider the following statement from Representative William N. Vaile of Colorado, one of the most prominent restrictionists:

Let me emphasize here that the restrictionists of Congress do not claim that the 'Nordic' race, or even the Anglo-Saxon race, is the best race in the world. Let us concede, in all fairness that the Czech is a more sturdy laborer, with a very low percentage of crime and insanity, that the Jew is the best businessman in the world, and that the Italian has a spiritual grasp and an artistic sense which have greatly enriched the world and which have, indeed, enriched us, a spiritual exaltation and an artistic creative sense which the Nordic rarely attains. Nordics need not be vain about their own qualifica-tions. It well behooves them to be humble. What we do claim is that the northern European, and particularly Anglo-Saxons made this country. Oh, yes; the others helped. But that is the full statement of the case. They came to this country because it was already made as an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. They added to it, they often enriched it, but they did not make it, and they have not yet greatly changed it. We are determined that they shall not. It is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something different. If there is any changing to be done, we will do it ourselves. (Congressional Record, April 8, 1924, 5922)

By the 1950's and certainly by the 1960's it was impossible to make such assertions without being deemed not only a racist but an intellectual Neanderthal. Such assertions conflicted with the Boasian wisdom that genetic differences between peoples were trivial and irrelevant; they conflicted with the Marxist belief in the equality of all peoples and the Marxist belief that nationalism and assertions of ethnic interests were reactionary; such assertions were deemed a sure sign of psychopathology within the frameworks of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School; and they would have been regarded as the babblings of country bumpkins by the New York Intellectuals and by the Neo-Conservatives who spouted variants of all of these ideologies from the most prestigious academic and media institutions in the society. There may indeed have been other forces that relegated such a mindset to the political and intellectual fringe'Gottfried mentions liberal Protestantism and the managerial state, but it is difficult to understand the effectiveness of either of these influences in the absence of the Jewish movements I describe. The rise of a de-ethnicized gentile managerial elite that rejects traditional cultural institutions'as exemplified by Bill Clinton'and interwoven with a critical mass of ethnically conscious Jews and other ethnic minorities is an enormously important fact of our current political life. My claim that Jewish intellectual and political activities were a necessary condition for the rise of such an elite, while obviously difficult to verify conclusively (as any other causal hypothesis would be), is also compatible with the work of others, most notably D. A. Hollinger's Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) It should be emphasized that the rise of such an elite is hardly an inevitable consequence of modernization or any other force I am aware of. Such de-ethnicized managerial elites are unique to European and European-derived societies; they are not found elsewhere in the world, including highly developed nations such as Japan and Israel and the undeveloped nations of Africa and elsewhere.

There is little doubt that there is something about European cultures that makes them susceptible to the movements I discuss. I think there is real value in Gottfried's suggestion that Protestant culture'particularly its emphasis on social guilt'provides a uniquely fertile ground for the types of intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique. My discussion of these issues focused mainly on a proposed nexus of individualism, relative lack of ethnocentrism, and moral universalism'all features that are entirely foreign to Judaism'as the critical features of Western societies that have made them fertile ground for the movements I discuss. As discussed in several places in all three of my books on Judaism, I develop the view that Europeans are relatively less ethnocentric than other peoples and relatively prone to individualism as opposed to the ethnocentric collectivist social structures that have historically been far more characteristic of most other human groups, including'relevant to this discussion'Jewish groups. This perspective is based on the research of Harry C. Triandis (e.g., Individualism and Collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press., 1995), but I regard this as a relatively speculative part of my theory. It is noteworthy that the cultural shifts under consideration have also occurred in traditionally Catholic countries like France and Italy where Protestantism has not been a factor. France in particular has been very open to non-European immigration and its intellectual life has been deeply influenced by the movements discussed in The Culture of Critique. Conversely, there are many examples where Protestantism has peacefully co-existed with or even rationalized nationalism and ethnocentrism. I think that developing theories of why Western cultures provide such fertile ground for the theories and movements discussed in The Culture of Critique is a very useful area for future research.

There are a few other minor issues one might quarrel with. Gottfried claims that intermarriage occurred frequently in pre-Rabbinic Judaism and that my views on Jewish rejection of exogamy are inappropriate generalizations from restrictions on the Kohanim (i.e., the priestly caste). It is true that Solomon and other Israelite kings had children by foreign concubines. However, the offspring of these relationships (as well as other groups such as the Nethinim descended from the peoples originally conquered by the Israelites) had a separate status within Israelite society below the pure Israelite stock even into Rabbinic times (L. M. Epstein [1942], Marriage Laws in the Bible and the Talmud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). This phenomenon attests to the importance of blood lines throughout Jewish history. While the marriage practices of the Kohanim are indeed stricter than for other Jews, there is no question that marriage into the Jewish gene pool was very infrequent until quite recently. There is little doubt that the continuity of endogamous marriage was mainly the result of Jewish practices, and the effects of these practices are confirmed by modern population genetic studies showing very little genetic admixture between Jews and surrounding populations. These data are described in my book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), and they have been confirmed by recent population genetic studies of Jews.
     This is a link to a recent New York Times article on Jewish population
     genetics. The article is based on a study of genetic distance between
     Jewish and non-Jewish groups titled, "Jewish and Middle Eastern
     non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic
     haplotypes," by M. F. Hammer, et al. Proceedings of the National
     Academy of Sciences, May 9, 2000.
    This page includes a figure from the Hammer et al. article showing genetic
    distances between various Jewish and and non-Jewish populations.

I discuss current Jewish intermarriage in Western societies in my book, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998). Briefly, I conclude that current rates of intermarriage may be a highly questionable indicator of the long-term prospects of Jewish continuity as an endogamous ethnic group. First, Judaism may well end up retaining its ethnic coherence even in the face of high levels of intermarriage if, as appears to be the case, a high percentage of the children and grandchildren of intermarriage eventually leave Judaism either because they become completely assimilated or because they feel unwelcome in the Jewish community. Secondly, despite the current high rates of intermarriage, there is clearly a core of highly committed individuals in all the major sects of Judaism for whom genetic or cultural assimilation is anathema. Intense commitment to ethnocentrism and endogamy continue to be characteristic of the increasingly numerous, prolific, and influential Jewish Orthodox and fundamentalist movements, and conversion and intermarriage remain controversial even within the most liberal sectors of the Jewish community. Third, the Jewish community has engaged in a high profile effort to prevent intermarriage. This effort has occurred throughout the entire Jewish religious spectrum, but especially in the more liberal sects where the vast majority of intermarriage has occurred.

Finally, Gottfried rejects my proposal in A People that Shall Dwell Alone that the high levels of IQ found among Ashkenazi Jews and some historical Sephardic populations indicate a higher genetic potential for intelligence among these Jewish groups. From what we know about the heritability of IQ it seems very likely that whatever cultural pushes there have been for IQ within Jewish groups, there is also a strong genetic component. Current research suggests a maximum of 10 IQ points for environmental manipulations like adoption. Gottfried is correct in noting that different groups have waxed and waned in importance throughout history, but Jewish groups have repeatedly assumed a very high degree of social and economic importance. By the start of the fourth century in the Roman Empire Jews seem to have been an economically dominant group. Ashkenazi Jews have shown extraordinary economic and cultural success throughout their history except when prevented by anti-Semitic movements, as, for example, during the Middle Ages when they were expelled from most of Western Europe after attaining considerable economic success. The rise of the Spanish Jews in the 14th and 15th centuries before and after many of them converted to Christianity in 1391 is virtually unparalleled and is certainly on a par with the rise of Ashkenazi Jews in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and the U.S.

Nevertheless, some Jewish populations have undistinguished IQ's. The Sephardic Jews are interesting because the Jews that did not convert in the 14th and 15th centuries tended to come from the lower social classes and it is this group that eventually left Spain in 1492 and became the descendants of contemporary Sephardic communities. The upwardly mobile Jews who converted to Christianity suffered the wrath of the Inquisition and eventually either became absorbed into Spanish society or they developed their own distinctive culture in the trading centers of the world. (For example, they were a major force behind the rise of Amsterdam and the Dutch as a world power.) This separation of the Sephardic elite could account for the undistinguished IQ of contemporary Sephardic populations. In other cases, particularly in the Muslim world where the bulk of the Sephardic population ended up, the rise of intense anti-Semitism after an initial period in which Jews were welcomed undoubtedly resulted in a failure to build a highly literate culture; in effect, the clear mandate in Jewish religious writings to develop such a culture was not carried out. This could have had dysgenic consequences. In any case, it seems likely that genetic differences are an important factor in explaining the extraordinary rise of Jewish populations repeatedly throughout history.

Dr. Gotffried Replies:

My differences with Kevin MacDonald are ones of emphasis more than of
substance. Like him, I recognize the existence of a double standard in
the way American and other Jews stress ethnic solidarity for themselves
but the moral necessity of multiculturalism for white Christians. This
double standard offers the hermeneutic key to the comments of Slate
editor Judy Shulevitz (May 2). In response to a complaint that American
Jews denounced Bob Jones University for discouraging interracial dating
but stubbornly practice tribalism in their own group, Shulevitz
contrasted white Christian "racism" to the "ethnic chauvinism"
characteristic of blacks and Jews. Because of their "historical
burdens," the distaste for outsiders felt by Jews and blacks is
excusable and not to be compared to the "reprehensible" objection of a
white Southerner contemplating his child's marriage to a black.
(Shulevitz's critic happens to be Jewish.) American Christians with
mainstream journalistic respectability do not choose to raise
embarrassing questions about Jewish claims to ethnic exceptionalism,
despite the fact that Jews have risen far in the United States,
encountering on the whole less discrimination than most ethnic
Catholics.

Where I do disagree with MacDonald is on the importance assigned to
Jewish efforts to "deethnicize" Western Christian societies. Although
both the Frankfurt School and Boasian anthropologists have pushed for an
engineered and misnamed "open" society, as have the Anti-Defamation
League and the American Jewish Congress, such groups do not provide a
sufficient or even "necessary" cause for the changes in question.
Between the 1920's, when immigration into the United States was
restricted, and the watershed immigration act of 1965, there were
political and cultural developments that strongly shaped the present
attitudes toward diversity as a civil religion. The two most critical of
these developments were the consolidation of a managerial state
committed to broad social reconstruction and, ultimately, the
eradication of national loyalties, and the collapse of WASPdom into its
present culture of self mortification. MacDonald rightly notes that
Jewish intellectuals and organizations worked to advance both trends,
but that point does not provide a comprehensive explanation of what
happened. Vast social engineering occurred in Scandinavia before it
reached the United States and unfolded there largely in the absence of
Jews. Moreover, as amply demonstrated by Ray Honeyford, Claus
Nordbruch, and René Girard, Christian clergy in Europe have tirelessly
endorsed the multicultural agenda long identified here with Jews and
liberal Protestants. Indeed, the radicalizing function attributed to
Jews has been effectively incarnated by different minorities in
different places at different times: Huguenots in France, Old Believers
in Russia, and Irish Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants in England
have all stirred the pot of social discontent because of their sense of
marginalization. Today in Canada, ethnic Catholics support the left as
enthusiastically and one-sidedly as do the descendants of Eastern
European Jews.

MacDonald's insistence that Ashkenazic Jews are naturally more
intelligent than other EuropeanAmericans gives me pause. If true, that
might justify (certainly from the standpoint of racial nationalists who
seem to accept this cognitive disparity) the social subordination of
white gentiles to a Jewish master race. In this view, Jewish domination
of relatively dullwitted goyim should be hailed as an intellectual step
forward, particularly if white gentiles, as measured by IQ tests, are
somewhere midway between Jews and American blacks. What is hard to
figure out is why racialists assume they have a right to control less
intelligent races but that whites should not be subject to cognitively
superior Jews. For all I know, MacDonald may be right about the genetic
advantages of my ethnic kin in relation to his, but there is another
explanation for the observed disparities in achievements. Jews, like
Asians, try harder than most WASPs to succeed on standardized tests, as
well as in professions. The striking feature is not how well others do,
but how totally WASPdom has collapsed. In One Nation Under God (1993),
authors Barry A. Kosmin and S.P. Lachman demonstrate that even the
highest WASP group achievers, Episcopalians and Presbyterians, now lag
behind white Catholics as well as Jews in educational advancement and
family income. Until convinced by further evidence, I assume that the
reason for this lag is cultural. Protestants who wallow in social guilt
and have lost the Puritan virtues are headed for self destruction. But
they have certainly not been cognitively shortchanged. Nor have the
other scions of a rich European civilization, which has been
indispensable for the intellectual and artistic enrichment of Jews and
other groups. A final point: To my knowledge, there was no social
stigma attached to ancient Jewish royalty born of intermarriage,
although MacDonald may have other sources of information.

MacDonald replies: (The following is unpublished. Chronicles does not continue debates of this kind.)

Shulevitz's comments justifying Jewish exceptionalism are excellent examples of rationalization and presumably self-deception. I record many other examples in Separation and Its Discontents, Chapters 7 and 8. My view is that Jewish endogamy is fundamental to thinking about Judaism and anti-Semitism, and I view the advocacy of the de-ethnicization of Europeans'a common sentiment in the movements I discuss in The Culture of Critique'as a strategic move against peoples regarded as historical enemies. There is a long list of similar double standards, especially with regard to the policies pursued by Israel versus the policies Jewish organizations have pursued in the U.S., including issues of church-state separation and immigration policies favoring the dominant ethnic groups.

This double standard is fairly pervasive. I was recently struck by the following letters that appeared in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles (September 15, 2000):

     As a longtime reader of your newspaper, I was appalled to read Teresa
     Strasser's most recent article and to see the accompanying picture of her
     mother and new husband. I consider myself a very unprejudiced person, but I thought
     that it was very inappropriate to see the large photograph of a Jewish
     woman in the arms of a Black man (her new husband) published in our Jewish
     newspaper. You should be setting a better example for our young Jewish
     people who might be reading Ms Strasser's column. I hope that in the future
     you will consider the effects upon your readers of what you publish.

     So Teresa Strasser has a new Black stepfather ("Shotgun Wedding," Sept. 1).
     Are we supposed to wish her Mazel Tov? What was her purpose in writing such
     an article in an Anglo Jewish Newspaper? Is The Jewish Journal trying to
     promote intermarriage?

Such attitudes are practically unthinkable in media directed at European-Americans, except in media characterized as hateful and extremist.

Gottfried may be correct that other groups have had a radicalizing role in different times and places. The question is whether I am right in my assessment of the role of Jewish intellectual movements and Jewish organizations in the transformation of the U.S. I agree that "between the 1920's, when immigration into the United States was restricted, and the watershed immigration act of 1965, there were political and cultural developments that strongly shaped the present attitudes toward diversity as a civil religion. The two most critical of these developments were the consolidation of a managerial state committed to broad social reconstruction and, ultimately, the eradication of national loyalties, and the collapse of WASPdom into its present culture of self mortification." However, Gottfried once again fails to provide any evidence that these events were the result of internal WASP developments rather than the movements I focus on. For example, regarding immigration there is simply no evidence that any other group had the funding, the organization, or the persistence to overcome the enormous barriers to change erected by the WASPS in 1924 and 1952. There is no evidence for internal WASP self-destruction, but a great deal of evidence that their active resistance was overcome by the movements I discuss in my book.

A recent book, The Jewish Threat (Bendersky, 2000), is interesting in this regard. Bendersky paints a vanished world of Northern Europeans as a proud and confident people self-consciously intent on retaining control of the U.S. Bendersky's sense of intellectual and moral superiority and his hatred for his Northern European subjects ooze from every page. It is a triumphalist history, written by a member of a group that won the intellectual and political wars of the 20th century. But he does show that the natives put up a spirited defense of their culture and way of life, at least well into the post-World War II era.

And in the end, the only reason the 1965 law passed was because it was advertized as nothing more than a moral gesture that would have no long-term impact on the ethnic balance of the U.S. In other words, the WASPS did not actively pursue their own destruction, as supposed by Gottfried; they were deceived into supposing that the immigration law would have no real effect but that its passage would absolve them of the incessant (and false) charges that the North-Western European bias of the older U.S. policy implied a theory of Nordic racial superiority. Finally, it is surely of critical importance that the Jewish intellectuals and political operatives described in The Culture of Critique did not lose their national/ethnic loyalties. The broad trends toward de-ethnicizing somehow occurred among the WASPs but spared the Jews.

I do think that my account would benefit from discussing the acceptance of Jews by the Protestant establishment after World War II. However, what I have seen thus far suggests Jewish involvement in the dramatic changes in Protestant sensibilities. Recently I have become aware of John Murray Cuddigy's book, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York: Seabury Press, 1978). The chapter on Reinhold Niebuhr is particularly interesting in thinking about how to account for the acceptance of Jews and Judaism by the WASP establishment after W.W.II. Cuddihy focuses on the importance of Judaism being one of the "big three' U.S. religions to the point that a rabbi officiates at the presidential inauguration even though Jews constitute approximately 2-3% of the population. As Cuddihy notes, this religious surface served as a protective coloring and led to a sort of Marranoism among Jews in which their ethnic identities were submerged in order to make them appear civilized to the goyim. I guess what I found amazing was that Niebuhr acknowledged 'the stubborn will to live of the Jews as a peculiar people''an acknowledgement by an important Protestant leader that the Jews could remain a people with a surface veneer of religion. Both sides gave up something in this bargain. The Jews' posturing as a religion left them open to large scale defection via intermarriage to the extent that they took seriously the idea that Judaism was akin to Protestantism, and to some extent this did occur. But recently Jews have been mending the fences. There is an upsurge of more traditional forms of Judaism, an open rejection of intermarriage even among the most liberal wings, etc. Ironically, perhaps, people like Alan Dershowitz are now saying that only the conservative religious forms of Judaism can reproduce Judaism as an ethnic entity. I think that in the future the conservative religious forms of Judaism will be triumphant in the Diaspora and there will be a self-conscious ethnic aspect to Jewish religiosity.

What the Protestants gave up was far more important because I think it has led to more or less irreversible ethnic changes in the U.S. and elsewhere. Jews became accepted as an religion unconditionally even with its ethnic core. It conformed outwardly to the religious norms of the U.S., but it also continued to play ethnic hardball, especially with regard to issues like immigration policy, church-state separation, and a whole range of other changes inaugurated by Jewish political and intellectual activism. I suppose that Niebuhr thought that he was only giving up the prospect of converting Jews, but the implicit downgrading of the ethnic character of Judaism provided an invaluable tool in furthering Jewish ethnic aims in the U.S. The downgrading of the ethnic aspect of Judaism essentially allowed them to win the ethnic war without anyone even being able to acknowledge that it was an ethnic war. For example, during the immigration debates Jews were termed by themselves and others as 'people of the Jewish faith'. They were simply another religion in an officially pluralistic religious society, and part of Jewish posturing was a claim to a unique universalistic moral-religious vision that could only be achieved by enacting legislation that in fact furthered their ethnic aims. And the beauty of it is that the universalistic moral-religious vision promoted by Jewish activists really amounted to taking the Protestants at their own word'by insisting that every last shred of ethnic identity among Protestants be given up while Jews were implicitly allowed to keep theirs if they only promised to behave civilly.

The evidence provided by Cuddihy suggests that Niebuhr was socialized by the Jewish milieu of New York into taking the positions that he did'that in order to get ahead and become important he essentially had to come to a modus vivendi with Jews. Niebuhr's behavior is therefore more an indication of Jewish power and the ability of Jews to recruit gentiles sympathetic to their causes than an indication of Protestant self-destruction. One cannot underestimate the importance of Jewish power in intellectual circles in New York at the time of Niebuhr's pronouncements (see The Culture of Critique). For example, Leslie Fiedler (1948, 873) noted that 'the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels ... the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.'

Gottfried errs in supposing that a higher IQ necessarily leads to domination of lower races or rationalizes such domination. In my view, anti-Semitism has always involved opposition to an intellectually and economically superior Jewish population, and it has sometimes been quite successful. Goldwin Smith (1894/1972, 261) made the point a century ago:

A community has a right to defend its territory and its national integrity against an invader whether his weapon be the sword or foreclosure. In the territories of the Italian Republics the Jews might so far as we see, have bought land and taken to farming had they pleased. But before this they had thoroughly taken to trade. Under the falling Empire they were the great slave-traders, buying captives from barbarian invaders and probably acting as general brokers of spoils at the same time. They entered England in the train of the Norman conqueror. There was, no doubt, a perpetual struggle between their craft and the brute force of the feudal populations. But what moral prerogative has craft over force? Mr. Arnold White tells the Russians that, if they would let Jewish intelligence have free course, Jews would soon fill all high employments and places of power to the exclusion of the natives, who now hold them. Russians are bidden to acquiesce and rather to rejoice in this by philosophers, who would perhaps not relish the cup if it were commended to their own lips. The law of evolution, it is said, prescribes the survival of the fittest. To which the Russian boor may reply, that if his force beats the fine intelligence of the Jew the fittest will survive and the law of evolution will be fulfilled. It was force rather than fine intelligence which decided on the field of Zama that the Latin, not the Semite, should rule the ancient and mould the modern world. (Godwin Smith (1894). Essays on Questions of the Day, 2nd ed. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press. (Reprinted in 1972.)

Having said this, I do not think that the decline of European-Americans is being caused simply by their having a lower average IQ than Jews. In fact, if one considers the disparity in numbers between Jews and gentiles, there are undoubtedly many more gentiles at the higher ranges of the IQ distribution in the United States than Jews even though the mean IQ favors Jews. I attribute Jewish success to a higher IQ in conjunction with a much greater ability to develop cohesive groups able to influence intellectual and political life. As I say repeatedly in The Culture of Critique, the success of these groups depended on being able to recruit many like-minded people, focus their energies, and exclude dissenters. Jewish intellectuals have formed highly cohesive groups whose influence derives to great extent from the solidarity and cohesiveness of the group. Intellectual activity is like any other human endeavor: Cohesive groups outcompete individualist strategies. Indeed, the fundamental truth of this axiom has been central to the success of Judaism throughout its history. I give many examples throughout The Culture of Critique, especially Chapter 6.

Finally, the reference for my claim that there was social stigma attached to the descendants of Solomon's foreign wives is L. M. Epstein, Marriage Laws in the Bible and the Talmud. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942). There are a great many other references to the racialism of early Jewish society as well, summarized in A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Chapters 3 and 4. One of my favorites is the following:

Up to the present, it has not been sufficiently recognized that from a social point of view the whole community of Judaism at the time of Jesus was dominated by the fundamental idea of the maintenance of racial purity. Not only did the priests, as the consecrated leaders of the people, watch anxiously over the legitimacy of priestly families, and weed out all priestly descendants born of an illegitimate union ... ; but the entire population itself, in the theory and practice of religious legislation at the time of Jesus, was classified according to purity of descent. All families in which some racial impurity could be established were excluded from the pure seed of the community. (Jeremias, J. (1969). Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic and Social Conditions During the New Testament Period, trans. F. H. Cave & C. H. Cave (based on an earlier draft of a translation by M. E. Dahl). Philadelphia: Fortress Press, p. 270).

Among those discriminated against were converts, the descendants of Solomon's foreign wives, people with doubtful genealogies, and the Nethinim (the descendants of the peoples conquered by the Israelites after the Exodus from Egypt). The racial barriers that originated well over a millenium previously remained in place.

Bendersky, J. (2000). The Jewish Threat. New York: Basic Books.

Fiedler, L. A. (1948). The state of American writing. Partisan Review 15:870-875.

Contact Information: