Repost from the old site.
Astute commenter James Schipper comments on the Statement on Jews and Antisemitism post:
Another intellectual flaw of anti-Semites is overgeneralization. Jews live in dozens of different countries and Judaism varies from superorthodoxy to reformism, but they see all Jews as the same. That’s only possible if Jews are seen as a race and if their race explains their behavior.I don’t think that Jews created modernity. It is the other way around: modernity created the post-ghetto Jew. Starting with revolutionary France, Jews in Europe were emancipated, that is, their separate legal status was abolished and they became ordinary citizens.
Since they still were outsiders to some extent, most of them were attracted to leftism, which, being the ideology of change, obviously would be preferred by outsiders. Conservativism is the ideology of those who are well-integrated in and happy with the status quo.
The fact that Jews are overrepresented among leftists has nothing to do with Judaism but everything with their minority status and their historical situation as often persecuted outsiders. We need sociological, not theological or biological explanations for Jewish behavior.
Biology explains only Jewish over-representation in intellectually demanding professions because there is every reason to assume that Jews have on average more innate intelligence than Gentiles.
My view is that Jews in Palestine were not smarter than the people around them, but that it was the smartest ones that in Roman times were expelled from or left Palestine in disproportionate numbers. Those that stayed behind were eventually assimilated.
Surely there is nothing in the genes of the Jew that creates “the Jew”. When you delve into anti-Semitism, pretty soon, you find that most rightwing White racialist anti-Semites believe that the evils of the Jew are located in the genes. I consider this to be nonsense, but we shall await the findings of modern genetics. I doubt if anything will turn up.
Hyperethnocentrism along with tendencies towards insularity, clannishness, xenophobia, paranoia and and even racism tend to occur across all types of Jews. I feel this is due to culture. As evidence, I note that many converts to Judaism quickly develop all of these characteristics, often in spades. That seems to seal the case for cultural Jewishness right there.
Schipper neatly sums up why the Jews have been attracted to the Left. In all this time, I have never heard anyone say it quite so succinctly. Outsiders are attracted to the Left, so Blacks and Hispanics in the US vote Democratic. Those satisfied with the status quo are conservative, hence Whites in the US are conservative.
Schipper’s analysis also probably explains the new emergence of a considerable movement in the US of conservative Jews. Antisemitism in the US has been reduced to a shadow of itself, and Jews are more successful than any other ethnic group.
When they were still getting barred from country clubs, and when signs said, “No Jews or dogs allowed,” Jews had a great reason to vote liberal, whatever their economic fortunes. Now that they’ve got life dicked here in the US, a number of them are well-integrated in and happy with the status quo and the phenomenon of the rightwing Jew has appeared.
I doubt if the Jews who left Palestine were any smarter than the ones who stayed, but I don’t have a lot of proof.
I suspect that Talmudic culture, which developed in Europe after 900 with the solidification of the Babylonian Talmud, with its emphasis on learning (Jewish men who could not learn the Talmud left the ghetto and converted to Christianity), along with the smartest Jewish men being seen as the best marriage partners for Jewish women, had a lot to do with selection for intelligence and high Ashkenazi IQ, though I realize that this ought to also predict high IQ in Mizrachi Jews, and their IQ is not notably high.
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We should thinking Ashkenazi jews(the smart ones) came directly from Palestine. I have a hunch that most Ashkenazis are converted Anatolians because Judaism was a proselytizing religion in that region during the Greek era. If Ashkenazis were really from Palestine, they would be genetically closest to other Levantine peoples today such as Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians. Instead, they are closest to Anatolian Turks, Kurds, and Armenians: peoples directly to the north of Levantine Arabs.
They are not from Palestine, LOL. Well maybe at some point. They are Babylonian Jews (Iraqi Jews) who went to Europe after 60 AD or so. That’s why their genes look “Kurdish” etc. Ashkenazim are from Iraq.
Some white nationalists are saying that the Khazars were Anatolians, and Jews being close to Kurds proves this. What’s your take?
Lying bastards.
Anatolian DNA looks a lot different from Khazarian DNA. I talked to Kevin Brook about that, and he’s one of the world’s experts on the Khazars.
Were the Khazars Mongoloid? And are the Kurds in Turkey the same as Anatolian Turks with the exception of language?
I’m not precisely sure what they looked like. One Jewish guy said his DNA looked “Uzbek” and he thought he was related to the Khazars. So maybe they looked sort of like Uzbeks. It’s hard to say, and I’m not an expert on them. Kevin Brook is the expert. but he’s a Jew, so watch out.
Kurds, Turks, Armenians have DNA that looks similar. They’re related.
” … they see all Jews as the same. That’s only possible if Jews are seen as a race and if their race explains their behavior.I don’t think that Jews created modernity.”
No, I can’t agree with that. Except of course if you’re talking about the sort of dumb racists that post on stormfront and the like – they probably do see jews as all the same, without ever thinking about what that means.
Jews are NOT a race but are distinguished by several things, which make it possible to identify them as jews – if there was nothing you could say about them all, then the label would be meaningless: descent, beliefs, and economic practices. Many jews by descent cease to be jews by outmarriage and not holding the beliefs or participating in the economic practices. Those that remain, to pass on jewishness to another generation, tend to hold to at least the core belief that jews are descended in a direct line from wherever, and will probably at least observe some minimal forms of the religious tradition even though next to none of them are religious, including the rabbis. This is important because the rabbis are also related to the economic practice – they serve as grass-roots political organisers for the jewish elite financier class.
What is the economic practice? Well, simply it’s ‘ jews first’! Keeping business in the family if possible, then in the ‘tribe’. There’s nothing unusual in this, and nothing racist about noting it. Slezkine’s ‘the Jewish Century’ lists many other economic groups, like the overseas Chinese, the Tutsi, castes in India, many others… whose ethnicity is linked to an economic niche. In the UK, since the influx of Ugandan Asians, when Idi Amin threw them out in the ’60s, nearly ALL the small grocery shops and newsagents in the UK are run by Asians. Just try getting a British lefty to admit that this is racist!
But more about the economic practice. It’s not that jews are cleverer; it’s that they have trade and financial networks world-wide, built over thousands of years of experience. Robert said above ” maybe the cleverest jews left Palestine…” Well, read Finkelstein and Silberman’s ‘the Bible Unearthed’. A main function of the Judean State was controlling the caravan trade between the Red Sea and the Phoenician Mediterranean coastal cities of Tyre and Sidon. Also there is evidence that there were diplomatic links, and eventually marriage links – see the Biblical story of Jezebel and Omri – between the Judean and Phoenician elites. The Red Sea trade brought goods from India and Sheba (Yemen) and the Horn of Africa, the Judeans brought them across to the Phoenicians, who traded them all over the world. Next time the Judeans show up in historical writing, they are all over the Mediterranean and known for being stinking rich. How did this happen? Well, it’s not hard to figure; close links with the Phoenician ruling class would have opened the door for Judeans to charter and maybe own their own ships, and set up their own trading posts around the Phoenician and (their colony) Carthaginian worlds. It is known that powerful guilds were a big feature of Phoenician society. I imagine that the Judeans had their own guild, holding its own politically the way it usually works – knowing who to bribe. And this would have continued when the Greeks took over the Phoenician World, and when the Romans took over the Greek and Carthaginian worlds. This may actually have privileged the Judeans, since they could pass themselves off as such rather than official enemies like the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. Many of the latter may have found it helped then to convert to Judeanism (since Judaism didn’t exist at this time). It is know that there was a lot of conversion throughout all these periods – entry to a very successful trading guild was probably a big stimulus.
And so into medieval history – the jewish traders come first, then the jewish communities. This is a generalisation that is quite valid to make. These international trading networks have been the strength of the jews, and their definining characteristic- their reason to be. And so they were well placed to implement the innovations in banking and finance that accompanied the expansion of European imperialism, and the Industrial Revolution. And so to the modern day, when they have really got a bit out of hand, but that’s another story. So there you have it. The jews are a supra-national guild; ALL jews that function in any real way as jews have a relationship with this ‘guild’ (if just supporting the rabbi or some charity), because that is what it means to function as a jew.
The Ashkenazis are another matter again. I’m pretty sure they are Khazars. Kevin Brook knows he will never work again if he says this, so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t. And I don’t trust any of these zionist-funded DNA studies – they’ll find anything you want if you pay them enough. And all this obsession with descent is frankly vile anyway.
I admit though that it’s hard to see how the Khazars would fit into the model of jewish behaviour I described above. Their history seems to have a bit missing – driven out of Khazaria, show up as plantation-overseers next-door in Ukraine, Chelmynicki massacre (yes I know it wasn’t aimed solely at jews), next they show up next-door in Poland sort-of beached, become an anachronism as the gentiles take over their economic niches – that seems to be the standard jewish Marxist analysis of how they came to be living in ghettos in Poland, eating herring, playing the fiddle, studying the Cabalah, telling Yiddish ghost stories…. Then we know the rest – they become communists, find a new niche as party apparatchiks or get massacred by Hitler’s nazis, and then somehow they show up fifty years later running America. Something seems to be missing from this picture. But another time for that – I’m as bored with it as you are.