Joel Kovel http://www.joelkovel.org on the bad conscience of zionism (tikkun magazine --------------  H G Wells: The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939), The New World Order (1940) The Jewish Influence H.G. Wells  ---------- Indoctrination and Group Evolutionary Strategies: The Case of Judaism by Kevin MacDonald in "Indoctrinability, Ideology, and Warfare: An Evolutionary Perspective" edited by Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Frank Kemp Salter, 1998.  --------------  did wells have some prejudices? u.arizona.edu/~gmcmilla/wellsbad.html ------------ Ancient Judaism (from bartleby.com books online via ancienthistory.com via google) ------------------- blackelectorate.com offers a deeper look: A Jewish Rabbi Challenges Whether Ancient History Supports The Biblical Account Of The Exodus And Why Blacks In America Should Be Interested In The Controversy (Part 4) ================  Zionism's Bad Conscience Joel Kovel Let me begin with some blunt questions, the harshness of which matches the situation in Israel/ Palestine. How have the Jews, immemorially associated with suffering and high moral purpose, become identified with a nation-state loathed around the world for its oppressiveness toward a subjugated indigenous people? Why have a substantial majority of Jews chosen to flaunt world opinion in order to rally about a state that essentially has turned its occupied lands into a huge concentration camp and driven its occupied peoples to such gruesome expedients as suicide bombing? Why does the Zionist community, in raging against terrorism, forget that three of its prime ministers within the last twenty years—Begin, Shamir and Sharon—are openly recognized to have been world-class terrorists and mass murderers? And why will these words just written—and the words of other Jews critical of Israel—be greeted with hatred and bitter denunciation by Zionists and called "self-hating" and "anti-Semitic"? Why do Zionists not see, or to be more exact, why do they see yet deny, the brutal reality that this state has wrought? The use of the notion of denial here suggests a psychological treatment of the Zionist community. But in matters of this sort, psychology is only one aspect of a greater whole that includes obdurate facts like forceful occupation of land claimed by and once inhabited by others. The phenomena of conscience are of course processed subjectively. But they neither originate within the mind nor remain limited to thoughts and feelings. Conscience is objective, too, and linked to notions like justice and law that exist outside of any individual will. It is also collective, and pertains to what is done by the group in whose membership identity is formed. These group phenomena are, we might say, organized into "moral universes," in which history, mythology, and individual moral behaviors are brought together and made into a larger whole. Such universes may themselves be universalizing, wherein that whole is inclusive of others, who are seen as parts of a common humanity (or for non-human creatures, nature). Or, as all too often happens, they may be unified only by splitting apart of the moral faculties. Now, the situation prevailing in Israel/Palestine is that common humanity is denied, the Other is not recognized, and the double standard prevails. In such conceptions, which have stained history since the beginning and comprise one of the chief impediments to the making of a better world, talion law reigns, violence toward the Other is condoned, and violence from the Other is demonized. Like the realms of matter and anti-matter, each such moral universe is paired with that of its adversary. But such mirroring does not imply moral equivalence; that is settled according to the rules of justice. In this instance there should be no doubt that those who have dispossessed others and illegally occupy their national lands have to bear prime culpability. This is not meant to excuse such Palestinian or Arab wrongdoings as have arisen in the course of the struggle—which would be a denial of moral agency—but it provides context for understanding the conflict at a deeper level and obliges us to look with special care at the curious situation of the Jews. Despite the innumerable variations between different fractions of Judaism, here certain unique historical forces have shaped a common dilemma and played a crucial role in the unfolding of Zionism. Jews were supposed to know better, to be better. Suffering persecution and being eternally on the margins of Europe were supposed to have made Jews more morally developed. I speak from first-hand experience, having been made to feel as a boy that I had inherited a two-fold superiority, by belonging to a people both cleverer and more highly moral than the non-Jews who surrounded us. We Jews were history's exceptions. A myth made this belief coherent over the ages and shaped Jewish identity: A "covenant" existed, a kind of special treaty and promise between Jews and God. How Odd of God, ran the title of a book from my boyhood Yeshiva days, to Choose the Jews. There was an unmistakable lift one got from feeling endowed by the Supreme Being and made superior to the mere "goyim." The morally dubious implications of this attitude and the hateful contempt that often accompanied it—indeed, one could almost hear the sputum striking the ground as the word, "goyim," was spoken—was mitigated by the fact that Jews were speaking from the position of victim. Jewish exceptionalism was a kind of payback that nullified the centuries of being forced into ghettos, being denied ordinary rights such as land-holding, and being kicked around, massacred, and expelled, not to mention being constantly in the cross-hairs of the reigning racist system of anti-Semitism. Living with anti-Semitism, even when its overt violence was latent, contributed to the heightened self-consciousness of the Jewish character and also to its thin skin. Few Jews are able completely to avoid the visceral fear integral to the legacy of Judaism: a drumbeat of blame, with its intimations of the pogrom to follow. The Jew still lives with the fact that his/her people have been scapegoated for centuries by Christian Europe—we still hear in our heads that Jews were the killers of Christ, hence responsible for the failures of Christianity; Jews were the usurers who destroyed the medieval community, not the landlords/barons; Jews were responsible for the misery of the Russian masses, not the Czar. In ways too numerous to list here, Jews were made to pay for the crimes of the West, and the betrayal of its ideals. The peculiar exaltation of believing oneself the chosen people is both the effect and, to a degree, the cause of anti-Semitic persecution: They hate us, but we are better than them; and then, they hate us because we are better than them. Exceptionalism reinforced the tribalism imposed upon the Jews; and tribalism played into the hands of anti-Semitism even as it defended against it. Within this matrix a great variety of ways of being Jewish arose. These included, especially for Jews in the Western European Diaspora, the possibility of assimilating or remaining apart from the societies they inhabited. Some Jews, of course, embraced the protection of tribal ways as a defense against a harsh and accusing world. Others embraced the calculating pecuniary skills which had been foisted upon Judaism long before capitalism became the dominant order, and developed these to become masters of finance once capital moved to the center of the stage. In the West, some Jews saw in the great ideals of universality and enlightenment a means to transcend the stifling tribal role that had been imposed upon them. Having been persecuted, brutally denied the elementary rights of self-determination given to others, Jews of this type adopted the ideals of universal human rights that arose with the Enlightenment, and championed the cause of emancipation. Then, toward the close of the nineteenth century, the ancient promise of the Covenant took the shape of a real Promised Land. Israel gave European Jews a material opportunity to balance the tensions between tribalism and enlightenment. Driven by the upswelling of anti-Semitism that preceded and gave its horrific stimulus to the Third Reich, Israel became the home of the tribe, the safe place where Jews could be Jews. At the same time, it offered Jews identifying with the enlightenment a chance to demonstrate their competence in western liberal ways (including socialism). In this way, a project arose that sought to combine and synthesize both advanced Western democratic and ancient tribal values. The Zionists took from the West the values of liberal democracy, but also the goals, tactics, and mentality of imperialism that often accompanied these. The convergence between tribalism and imperialism seemed, on the surface, to be a successful alignment of the various impulses of the Zionist project. From the first Jewish settlements in Palestine an imperialist mentality enabled Zionists to readily rationalize their displacement of indigenous Palestinians under the notion of a civilizing mission, embroidered with a full repertoire of Orientalist prejudices. Zionism's allegiance to modernity also gave Zionism a high degree of technological prowess and organizational ability. During the years of the Yishuv, or settlement, this was evidenced by the degree to which Zionists would consistently out-produce and out-perform the indigenous peoples despite the great numerical superiority of the latter. Later, in the period of the wars leading up to the state of Israel, as well as the wars carried out by this state, superior organizational ability combined with superior weaponry made Israel into a regional juggernaut—one, moreover, driven by the talion law of tribalism and the racist reduction of one's adversary. It was for some time easy to sympathize with a Jewish state and to overlook its imperialist tendencies, especially in the crucial period of the mid- to late 1940s, when evidence of the Holocaust surfaced as a diabolic reminder of Jewish vulnerability to the malignancies of so-called Western Civilization. I remember well as a youth of twelve the rush of joy and hope as it became increasingly clear that we were at last going to have "our state," and I know full well how deeply the Jews around me shared that feeling. But neither understanding nor sympathy can nullify the judgment that in proceeding down this path, Zionism set the stage, as surely as could an Aeschylus or Euripides, for the present hellish outcome. And this has a great deal to do with the fact that the notion of a democratic Jewish state, despite its allure, is a logical impossibility and a trap. It is remarkable that so sophisticated a people should have so much trouble grasping the impossibility inherent in their notion of a Promised Land: a democracy that is only to be for a certain people cannot exist, for the elementary reason that the modern democratic state is defined by its claims of universality. Modern nation-states are uneasy syntheses of the two terms: the nation, which embodies the lived, sensuous, territorial, and mythologized history of a people; and the state, which is the superordinate agency regulating a society and having the capacity, as Max Weber put it, to wield legitimate violence. In its pre-modern, non-democratic form, the nation-state could embrace directly the will of a particular national body. Under these circumstances, state power was held by those who controlled the nation. In practice, these were a mixture of kings and aristocrats who exerted direct territorial dominion, along with the theocrats of the priest class who controlled symbolic and mythopoetic production. Between the divine right of kings and the territorial powers of priests, the legality of pre-modern states took shape. The democratic nation-state was a mutation of this arrangement, forged to accommodate the power of the newly emerging capitalist classes, but also to advance the notion of an universal human right—the stirring ideal that all human beings are created equally free before the law. The subsequent history of this political formation reveals, in all its fragility, the tensions inherent in the fitful development of human rights. But there should be no mistaking that our hopes for a world beyond tribalist revenge and the arbitrary power of rulers depend on strengthening and advancing the notion of universal human right. The legitimacy of modern nation-states—the legitimacy of justice itself—rests upon this right. Of course, not all democratic nation-states are just in practice, nor have they necessarily come into being in ways consonant with the universal human rights they assert. The United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa are just a few of the many examples of democratic nation-states that have come into existence through violence. The various horrors that have marked the history of these countries, however, have not prevented them from offering full participation in the polity to those who had been enslaved, expelled, and/or exterminated as the nation-state came into existence. Thus Ben Nighthorse Campbell, an American Indian, sits in the U.S. Senate, while Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, descendents of enslaved Africans, run U.S. foreign policy (needless to add, very cordially to Israel), and may someday be president. None of this denies the racism that blocks the modern democratic state from keeping its promise. But there is a big difference between a state that fails to live up to its social contract because of a history saturated with racism, and one where the contract itself generates racism, as has been the case for a settler-colonial Israel which claims to be both a democracy and an ethnocracy organized by and for the Jewish people. Under such circumstances, racism is not an historical atavism, but an entirely normal, and constantly growing, feature of the political landscape. To have a state created expressly for one people constantly eats away and mocks the democratic-emancipatory aspects of Zionism. Zionism, in short, is built on an impossibility, and to live in it and be of it is to live a lie. In other instances of post settler-colonial states, the democratic promise, however compromised, confers legitimacy. In the case of Israel, the logic of the ethnocratic state rules out an authentic democracy and denies legitimacy. All the propaganda about Israel being the "only democracy in the Middle East" and so forth, is false at its core, no matter how many fine institutions are built there, or how many crumbs are thrown to the Arabs who are allowed to live within its bounds. This can be shown any number of ways, none more telling than the inability of Israel to write a Constitution with a Bill of Rights. As we well know, there are many states in the modern world that proclaim themselves for a given people and are in many respects more unpleasant places than Israel, including some of the Islamic states, such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. But none of these assert extravagant claims for embodying the benefits of democratic modernity as does Israel. Thus one expects nothing from Pakistan or Saudi Arabia in the way of democratic right, and gets it; whereas Israel groans under the contradictions imposed by incorporating features of Western liberal democracy within a fundamentally pre-modern, tribalist mission. In Israel, Jewish exceptionalism becomes the catalyst of a terrible splitting of the moral faculties, and, by extension, of the whole moral universe that polarizes Zionist thought. For God's chosen people, with their hard-earned identity of high-mindedness, by definition cannot sink into racist violence. "It can't be us," says the Zionist, when in fact it is precisely Zionists who are doing these things. The inevitable result becomes a splitting of the psyche that drives responsibility for one's acts out of the picture. Subjectively this means that the various faculties of conscience, desire, and agency dis-integrate and undergo separate paths of development. As a result, Zionism experiences no internal dialectic, no possibilities of correction, beneath its facade of exceptionalist virtue. The Covenant becomes a license giving the right to dominate instead of an obligation to moral development. Zionism therefore cannot grow; it can only repeat its crimes and degenerate further. Only a people that aspires to be so high can fall so low. We may sum these effects as the presence of a "bad conscience" within Zionism. Here, badness refers to the effects of hatred, which is the primary affect that grows out of the splitting between the exalted standards of divine promise and the imperatives of tribalism and imperialism. A phenomenally thin skin and denial of responsibility are the inevitable results. The inability to regard Palestinians as full human beings with equivalent human rights pricks the conscience, but the pain is turned on its head and pours out as hatred against those who would remind of betrayal: the Palestinians themselves and those others, especially Jews, who would call attention to Zionism's contradictions. Unable to tolerate criticism, the bad conscience immediately turns denial into projection. "It can't be us," becomes "it must be them," and this only worsens racism, violence, and the severity of the double standard. Thus the "self-hating Jew" is a mirror-image of a Zionism that cannot recognize itself. It is the screen upon which bad conscience can be projected. It is a guilt that cannot be transcended to become conscientiousness or real atonement, and which returns as persecutory accusation and renewed aggression. The bad conscience of Zionism cannot distinguish between authentic criticism and the mirrored delusions of anti-Semitism lying ready-made in the swamps of our civilization and awakened by the current crisis. Both are threats, though the progressive critique is more telling, as it contests the concrete reality of Israel and points toward self-transformation by differentiating Jewishness from Zionism; while anti-Semitism regards the Jew abstractly and in a demonic form, as "Jewish money" or "Jewish conspiracies," and misses the real mark. Indeed, Zionism makes instrumental use of anti-Semitism, as a garbage pail into which all opposition can be thrown, and a germinator of fearfulness around which to rally Jews. This is not to discount the menace posed by anti-Semitism nor the need to struggle vigorously against it. But the greater need is to develop a genuinely critical perspective, and not be bullied into confusing critique of Israel with anti-Semitism. One cannot in conscience condemn anti-Semitism by rallying around Israel, when it is Israel that needs to be fundamentally changed if the world is to awaken from this nightmare. This is not the place to explore what such change would look like. But the guiding principle can be fairly directly stated. By forming Israel as a refuge and homeland for Jews from centuries of persecution, and especially by making the Faustian bargain with imperialism, those Jews who opted for Zionism negated their past sufferings, and turned their weakness into strength. But such strength, grounded in the domination, oppression, and expulsion of others, is worthless. Zionism negated what had been done to the Jews but failed to negate the negation itself, and thereby repeated the past with a different set of masks. If one doubts this, look at the set of oppressions forced upon Jews by Christendom—being forced into ghettos, denied ordinary rights such as land-holding, kicked around, massacred, expelled, and subjected to a racist system by the oppressors—and ask yourself whether the same have not been imposed upon Palestinians by the Zionist, with the only distinction worth noting being the terms of the racism? It is never too late to remedy this state, and a sizable minority of people of good will are already moving in this direction, against great odds. But it would be irresponsible to gloss over the grim finding that the journey is conditioned by the fact that the core of the problem lies in Zionism itself, with its assumption that there can be a democratic state for one particular people. So long as this notion is held, poisonous contradictions will continue to spill forth from the ancient land variously called Palestine or Israel. And as a frankly non-democratic, or even fascist, Israel can scarcely be imagined as an improvement, we are led to the sober conclusion that a basic rethinking of Jewish exceptionalism must be the ground of any lasting or just peace in the region. The implications are many, and need to be worked out. But the time has come for the Jewish people to resume their striving toward universality. Joel Kovel teaches at Bard College and is the author, most recently, of The Enemy of Nature, just released by Palgrave (Zed Books, London). For more information: www.joelkovel.org. WE WANT TO HEAR from you! Use our direct link to share your views. Or write to "Letters," Tikkun Magazine, 2107 Van Ness Ave., Suite 302, San Francisco, CA 94109; Fax: (415) 575-1434. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. ------------- H G Wells: The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939), The New World Order (1940) The Jewish Influence H.G. Wells ---- Complete chapter, unaltered except for numbering of notes. HTML Rae West. ---- FIRSTLY BECAUSE OF its illuminating quality, we must consider the progressive segregation of the Jewish community. It has diverted, wasted and sterilised an amount of ability and moral energy that mankind at large can ill spare. In the previous chapter we have shown how naturally it arose out of the state of world affairs of the centuries before and after the Christian era, and how the realistic genius of Saint Paul sought an escape from its perilous limitations. From the very beginning, there must have been men of vision among the Jews who realised and rebelled against the moral isolation to which they were being condemned, there must have been a continual seeping-away of individuals to the larger opportunities of the outer world, but the uncompromising tradition carried by the old Bible and the associated writings which grew into the Talmud has been sufficient to hold together a core of inassimilable and aggressive orthodoxy to this day clinging obstinately to every detail of ritual, behaviour and avoidance that emphasised the central legend of a Chosen People. It is this orthodox remnant and its behaviour and influence, the repercussions it evokes and the dangers to which it has exposed the whole Jewish community, which constitute the Jewish problem. There would be no distinctive Jewish question at all were it not for this remnant and its activities. The whole question turns upon the Chosen People idea, which this remnant cherishes and sustains, which it is the "mission" of this remnant to cherish and sustain. It is difficult not to regard that idea as a conspiracy against the rest of the world. It is essentially a bad tradition, and the fact that for two thousand years the Jews on the whole have been very roughly treated by the rest of mankind does not make it any the less bad. Almost every community with which the orthodox Jews have come into contact has sooner or later developed and acted upon that conspiracy idea. A careful reading of the Bible does nothing to correct it; there indeed you have the conspiracy plain and clear. It is not simply the defensive conspiracy of a nice harmless people anxious to keep up their dear, quaint old customs that we are dealing with. It is an aggressive and vindictive conspiracy. People are apt to catch up and repeat phrases about the nobility of the Book of Isaiah on the strength of a few chance quotations torn from their context. But let the reader take that book and read it for himself straightforwardly, and note the setting of these fragments. Much of it is ferocious; extraordinarily like the rantings of some Nazi propagandist. The best the poor Gentile can expect is to play the part of a Gibeonite a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for the restored elect. It is upon that and the like matter that the children of the orthodox have been fed. It is undeniable. There are the books for everyone to read. It is not tolerance but stupidity to shut our eyes to their quality. It is difficult to imagine how minds brought up under the influence of such teaching can be expected to refrain from preferential and exclusive dealings. Because, since they are born to it, it will seem to any but the more thoughtful among them to be in the nature of things. This, they learn, is how God has ordered the world, and they behave accordingly. They do not feel they are being cunning about it, they feel they are doing right about it. That is the common charge against the practising Jews and it is brought against them in every locality and in every industry in which they are numerous. And their Sacred Book with its supplementary accumulation, the Talmud, substantiates these charges and more than accounts for such behaviour. Every sort of man is disposed to get together with his own sort of people and prefer them to strangers. That is the natural disposition of our species, fair-play to the outsider is one of the last and least assured triumphs of civilisation, but the indictment against the Jewish community is that their religion of a Chosen People takes this universal human vice, justifies it and stimulates it to the form of a persistent organised attitude of self-exclusion from the common fellowship of the world. Everywhere the same reaction occurs and everywhere the Jew expresses his astonishment. Not only Christians but Turks have resorted to pogroms. In contact with the Arab, the Koran-taught Arab from the desert, who shares the Jew's cosmogony, who practises similar dietetic taboos, who is equally free from Trinitarian theology and sacrificial bloodshed, and has indeed a much stronger claim to be called Semitic, the angry reaction to the theory and practice of a Chosen People, to the practice much more than the theory, is just as violent as it is in any other part of the world. It is this Chosen People tradition, and still more the habit of mind which betrays itself in those who have come under its influence, which is the ever-recurrent cause of the trouble. It seems to me beside the mark to look for any other.[1] Estimates of the number of Jews in the world vary between fourteen and sixteen million. The latter figure is given by Louis Golding in The Jewish Problem and by Lewis Browne in the careful and scholarly work he has entitled so flippantly, How Odd of God. ("How odd of God to choose the Jews!"—W. N. Ewer.) This is not a very great total. They have and always have had abundant and well-cared-for families. Probably outside the range of definitely associated Jews, there has always been a much larger world of sympathetic kin, sharing and affected by the feelings of the stricter core, capable of co-operating with it and responding to modifications of the central idea, but gradually slipping away beyond recall. As we have noted in chapter 11 (and see also Note 11B) most of us probably have a more or less considerable proportion of "Jewish" blood in our veins, using "Jewish" in the larger sense.[2] But orthodox Judaism has always been a narrower and intenser strain. It has passed through phases of leakage and recovery. The Protestant Reformation was a phase of leakage. Browne doubts whether there were half a million Jews in Europe in 1600, "fewer than were to be found in Castile alone four hundred years earlier." Of the sixteen million Jews to-day, Browne estimates that there cannot be more than four million who are strict adherents to and observers of the Law and that perhaps another six million are what he calls semi-observant; they are lax about food and drink and the Sabbath, but when it comes to celebrating marriages, funerals, taking an oath and so forth they follow the ancient formulae, they attend the main annual feasts, they pay their pew rents and do their full duty by the Jewish charities. They are very much like the Anglicans who don't go to Church very much but would never dream of being married in a registry office. Then comes another three million who have become entirely indifferent to the Law. They do not attack it, but they put it aside. Yet they cling as nationalists to the solidarity it has preserved through the ages. They are Reform Jews or Radical Nationalists, like the Law—disregarding young Jews of Palestine. Mr. Browne is himself a Reform Rabbi and he can write incidentally: "There are certain writers who become tremulously nostalgic and tender when describing the life of those pietist Jews. Ensconced in laurel-embowered English cottages, or seated in cafes on Montparnasse, such writers will wax ecstatic as they discourse on the effulgent mysticism en-haloing the ghetto hovels. But that, I fear, is because they have never entered those hovels. Had they done so they would in all likelihood realise—unless sentimentality had too thickly blurred their sight—that life in them is not bathed in the lambent light of unearthly wisdom: that instead it is dark and scabrous with superstition." Yet he can still make a case for the Jews holding together against mankind at large, as we shall see. The remaining three of these sixteen million Jews are rapidly ceasing to be Jews at all. Mostly they are becoming Communists, and he notes with a sort of calm amazement that "a cult which had lasted for centuries could be shattered in a decade." The younger generation has been given equality in the U.S.S.R. excellent schools and a new and exciting creed. Nominally they remain Jews, and their language, Yiddish, is one of the national languages recognised by the Union. But Hebrew has vanished—the Law, the Promise and Jehovah! And at this point Browne and I part company. Judaism may vanish in Russia under Communism, he has to admit, but it will live on elsewhere not by virtue of its own quality but because of Gentile intolerance. He argues that Gentile intolerance makes the Jews and keeps them together. I argue that the Jews make themselves and that Gentile intolerance is a response to the cult of the Chosen People. To get down to ultimate things, we are in substantial agreement, I find, in that we desire a world enlightened, scientifically administered, free, a world-wide new civilisation open to everyone, where there will be neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free. Nevertheless we differ diametrically in our interpretation of the root cause of the Jewish problem, and as a consequence upon the question where the tentative for denationalisation should begin. Thirteen million Jews—at least—still make the implacable Gentile the justification for their own persistence. They still hold to that hard core of national separatism in spite of the steady evaporation of every traditional religious justification. Yet they have a world-wide organisation for calling off that attitude and the Gentiles have no corresponding representative network to speak for them to the same extent. The Holy See has recently condemned racialism very clearly and definitely. So has the White House. But let me go on with what I believe is the truer version of the Jewish story, and the reader, with a glance at the notes at the end whenever he needs confirmation, must judge between me and the defenders of persistent Jewish nationalism.[3] The hostile reaction to the cult of the Chosen People is spreading about the entire world to-day. In the past the Jews have been subjected to much resentful treatment and much atrocious cruelty and injustice, now here, now there, but there has never been such a world-wide—I will not use the word anti-Semitism because of the Arab—I will say anti-Judaism. Now, because of the physical unification of the world, the resentment against the theory and practice of a Chosen People is much quicker and more contagious than it used to be; it is becoming world-wide and simultaneous. The idea is becoming everywhere more and more intolerable than it has ever been before. The cultivated, exaggerated, national egotism of the Chosen People has never been so conspicuous as it has been in the present century and particularly since 1918. As their spiritualism has weakened their nationalism has increased. I recall a conference that took place in '19 or '20 in a room in the House of Commons. A number of French writers had deputed Madame Madeleine Marx to discuss with various English men and women of letters the possibilities of concerted action and possibly organisation in the cause of world peace and world understanding. In those days Israel Zangwill had adopted the role of Champion of the downtrodden and suffering Jewish race, and more particularly of that section of it which was to be found in the wealthier mansions of West Kensington and Tyburnia, en route from the East End to the House of Lords. He sustained its racial pride, if indeed that needed sustaining. He insisted upon Israel's distinction and its inappeasable hunger for restoration to the land of the protracted Promise. He told them of the Dreamers of the Ghetto. He reminded them of their origins with humour and emotion. He helped them to "feel different", as the American car salesmen say, and mystically better. They were, he persuaded them, not really having the good time they seemed to be having; behind the brave face they put upon things they were weeping by the waters of Babylon. The true voice of Israel was to be heard not in the West End of London but when it went off for a trip to Palestine and, following the customary routine, wailed at the Wailing Wall. Always he spoke of "My people". He brought his championship to our deliberations. We various British authors had had our trivial shares in the "war to end war", and we were very willing to fall in with any proposals that would help to rationalise the heated and punitive atmosphere of the Versailles peace. We felt that a peace that would indeed end war was slipping away from us. But we found this conference dominated by the communist dogmatism of Madame Marx, against which Bernard Shaw protested, and Zangwill's preoccupation with "his people". The world's necessity, it seemed, was Israel's opportunity. He laid down the conditions that would satisfy their needs; he insisted on what would satisfy them, what would make them willing to help us, and the difficulties an offended Jewry could create for us. So far as I could grasp his drift he was dealing with us as the British Empire. We were not the British Empire, but it was vain to protest. Zangwill was a very resolute character and that was the drama he had in mind. Just as in our private disputes he would insist on treating me as a devout Christian. Then he could say: "But your Saviour was a Jew!" Useless to plead that I was not a Christian, and that there might be considerable prepotency in the Holy Ghost. Zangwill was being the captive nation making his terms with the oppressor. It is the drama so many people still have in mind when discussing this question. Miss Rebecca West has a rough and caustic wit. She is eminently free from racial prejudices but she had listened with a growing impatience to these demands, and suddenly she was inspired to a concentrated expression of our general impatience. "Mr. Chairman", she said, "should I be in order if I moved a pogrom?" In those days we in the victorious allied countries were all ready to believe that the world was really recovering from the War and entering upon a phase of comparative freedom and hope. We did our best not to think too much about the state of affairs in Germany. Everybody was talking of reconstruction and rationalisation, and it was possible to deal jestingly with things that have now become intolerably grim. The Zionist movement was the crowning expression of what I, in flat contradiction to Mr. Browne, hold to be the obdurate insistence of orthodox and semi-orthodox Jewry upon their peculiarity. In the years immediately following the War, there was a lull even in the normal persecutions in Eastern Europe to which the orthodox were subjected. They suffered indeed during the civil disorders that preceded the consolidation of the Bolshevik government; Whites, Reds and Greens were alike guilty of pogroms of varying degrees of virulence, and there was in consequence a certain exodus westward, but as the new law and order were established in Russia these outrages ceased and the process of rapid assimilation, to which reference has already been made, began. But already the champions of Judaism were advertising to the whole world how implacably they insisted upon their eternal essential foreignness. They had demanded a national home, so that elsewhere they could be for ever foreigners. They might within limits accept the advantages of citizenship of the country they lived in, but essentially they would not belong. They would vote, hold office, rule, but always with Zion in their hearts. They ignored the manifest fact that the day of small sovereign states is drawing to an end, and that, in a world of ever-growing violence, to plant themselves massively in any particular area was to invite a wholesale disaster. To many people of a more flexible disposition, a certain habit of insistence upon the strict letter of a bond, in spite of unforeseen contingencies, is uncongenial. The Bible-trained Jew, one must realise, has had a very legalistic training. Esau made a bad bargain and was held to it. That was the beginning of the Arab trouble. Shylock is how Shakespeare saw this unrelenting trait. The Jews dun Jehovah still, at the Wailing Wall and elsewhere, for a Promise he perpetually evades. And now they are dunning the poor old British government for the bright hopefulness of the Balfour Declaration, irrespective of its other quite contradictory entanglements. They are, the Zionists are, taking no thought for the common dangers and the common welfare of the race. The rest of the world may go hang. In these matters these Zionists are not showing themselves citizens of the world. They are behaving like infuriated creditors. Here are the promise and the declaration, and covenants are the breath of life to them. They express their indignation by rioting, by throwing bombs, and it does not dawn upon them that the Gentile world, which is always being bilked and making the best of it and going off to something else, and which is now in a state of increasing tension and danger, may be very disagreeably affected by this single-minded debt-collecting. They make such a pother about it that it becomes almost impossible to think about the greater issues of the time. To-day, when the whole world is being subtly pervaded with anti-Jewish feeling, and when the restraints upon the predatory and persecuting impulses in the human animal are being rapidly weakened, these implacable nationalists are still conspicuously seeking suitable regions where they can go on being a people by themselves, where, pursuing an ancient and irrational ritual so far as it suits them, they can sustain a solidarity foreign and uncongenial to all the people about them. No country wants them on such conditions. Why should any country want these inassimilable aliens bent on preserving their distinctness? Palestine is an object lesson. Until they are prepared to assimilate and abandon the Chosen People idea altogether, their troubles are bound to intensify. No one can help them while even a die-hard minority—a minority that the general body of them does not disavow, a nucleus about which habit and association and sentiment gather very readily and to which it is easy for lost sheep to return—prefers these exasperating pretensions of a special right and claim to becoming frankly and of their own accord common citizens of the world. These are the elementary facts of the quandary to which the Chosen People have come, the more relentless dragging the doubters and half-hearted with them. They are facts that have to be stated, even though matters are now coming to a complexion which gives a flavour of ruthlessness to their bare statement. In the last two paragraphs of chapter 5, the essential facts of the present rapid dislocation of social order have been stated. Social disintegration is now a world-wide reality, it is a convulsive breaking-down everywhere of long-established systems of law and order, an almost cataclysmal dissolution. It is a process far vaster than this Jewish question we are discussing and it arises from causes that have no special connection with that trouble. But it catches up the Jewish question in its swirling eddies and spins it about so that its fluctuations become indicative of the character of the entire process. The Jewish question is already something very different from what it was a score of years ago when Zangwill championed and threw that glamour of racial romance and Maccabean heroism about the ancient ways. Those were tolerant days. At that time it was easy for people to fall away from the old observances if they chose and become Christians or unconforming sceptics. Now, and it is the most ominous aspect of the new phase, in many parts of the world the doors of escape from orthodox Jewry are being closed. These doors are not being closed from the inside; there is no way of closing them from the inside. They are being closed from the outside. Those who are disposed to apostasy are being turned back by the outer world. Nothing of this sort was happening twenty years ago. A number of people, and some of them are very sinister people indeed, are beginning to say, "You insisted upon being Jews. Jews you shall be." The operating causes in those wide alternations between social confidence, a sense of stability and a prevailing lawfulness and tolerance, and phases of insecurity, fear, dishonesty and general unrighteousness, which have manifestly occurred in the human story, have still to receive anything but the most casual attention from the historian. Those happier periods, when the social machine was running smoothly, men were able to move about freely and almost fearlessly, to work with a sense of fair reward, when there was something definite and reasonably satisfactory and hopeful for most of the young men to do, have been by far the less frequent and the least secure. Order and peace have been precarious always in the growing human societies of the last four or five thousand years. There have been constantly recurrent phases of mutual pressure, expansion and that dislocation without which readjustment is impossible. Then doubt and suspicion invade men's minds. They lose that feeling that they are being properly taken care of; there is no confidence that services will be rewarded or debts paid; mutual trust gives way to suspicion. Social behaviour deteriorates. The strong and cunning no longer feel that the weak will be protected. The suspicious look for scapegoats to blame, for evil-doers who have offended the gods, for conspirators. Particularly for conspirators.[4] We do know and we have already stated in general terms the forces that have produced the particular phase of violent social disintegration that is going on to-day. They are worldwide and unprecedented. Socially they are more destructive than anything our species has ever faced before. The disintegrating changes in the social order of the past were probably due to much more localised and quite different influences: to unrecorded fluctuations in the relative welfare of classes, to the social shifting due to new economic processes, to the influence of groups of bad people in positions of authority, to the infiltration of foreign ideas and practices, to foreign pressure, to epidemics—no history can be complete without a proper study of the social sequelae of plague, the Black Death and the like—to sustained bad weather, drought for example, over a number of years, to a stimulating and disorganising influx of gold such as happened after the discovery of America. These and a thousand other disturbing forces have been enough to tilt the always unstable and insecure social balance back to general distrust and convulsive, self-protective dishonesty. The adaptive culture fails. Things go to pieces. Man reverts to his more natural state of a fear-and-desire-driven beast. In the history of any social system such periods of disorganisation display almost parallel phenomena of demoralised mass action. The strong are looking for the weak not only individually but collectively in order to gratify their craving for power, the crowd is seeking the furtive enemies of the state, the fearful are looking for the strange wickedness and secret mischiefs that have brought about the discomforts of the time. In such an atmosphere any marked kind of people are liable to be set upon, are liable to be ringed about for victimisation and punitive plunder. Such a convergence of hostility has by no means been confined to the Jews. The Albigenses, for example, in the south of France, had no very special relationship to the Jewish community. They were a Christian sect with certain heretical ideas derived by way of Bulgaria from the Gnostics and Manichaeans. They were charged, by their exterminators, to whom we owe most of the knowledge we have of their beliefs, with abnormal sexual practices. What is more certain is that they protested vigorously against the corruptions of the Church and were markedly anti-sacerdotal. They spread throughout Provence and prospered throughout the twelfth century. Their movement was in several respects an anticipation of the Protestant Reformation. Whereupon the Church invoked the harder, ruthless and more Catholic north, and preached a Crusade against them. Moral and religious indignation and the prospect of loot implemented their destruction. Here we cannot tell the tale of massacres, burnings alive—two hundred in one auto-da-fe—the sadistic terrorism and blackmail of the Holy Inquisition. The Armenians again are another much massacred, non-Jewish but distinctive people. But it is the Jews who have generally been the marked people throughout the realms of Christendom and Islam. They have generally "got it first". And repeatedly the door has been slammed upon Jews who have been seeking to get away or were actually getting away from the threats that darkened over them. Lewis Browne gives a compact and effective account of the fate of the Marranos in Spain and Portugal. He tells of the forcible baptism and conversion of the Jews in 1391 in the face of a storm of popular hostility. The government, because of their financial and administrative usefulness, opened a door of escape for them. They were given the choice between exile and massacre or Christianisation. A great majority chose the latter, and since all the synagogues were closed and the practice of the Jewish law sedulously suppressed, within three or four generations most of these baptized Jews became just as good or better Catholics than their neighbours. This from the outset was a huge disappointment for those neighbours who had been whetting the knife, so to speak, for an orgy of murder and plunder. It seemed to them the meanest trick conceivable. They called these desperate converts the New Christians or more familiarly swine (= Marranos), and set as rigid a bar as possible on any intercourse with them. As Jews they had been "dogs" but now they were "swine." "Conversion indeed" they said. "You don't get away with that." In complete good faith the majority of the Marranos in the next generation or so were Catholics. "These hapless creatures", says Browne, "took no pride in their past. On the contrary they were through and through ashamed of it and groaned that it be forgotten." That did not help them in the least. Massacre and detailed persecution closed in on them. The tale is fully told in Mr. Cecil Roth's History of the Marranos. It is a frightful story, but from the point of view of the present discussion it is almost the same story, Inquisition and all, as that of the Albigenses, who were not Jews at all. An entirely parallel treatment has been meted out in the last decade to the Christian Jews in Germany. They have been herded back upon their orthodox brethren, in the same spirit and for the same reason that the Marranos were kept apart for destruction. We are witnessing now a swifter and vaster repetition of that Marrano tragedy. A time has come when a multitude of men and women of more than average intelligence, men and women who in reality have no essential racial difference from the average European, are finding themselves with no foothold whatever upon the earth, dispossessed and hunted from country to country, marooned in impossible regions, deprived of the normal protection of the law, beaten up by anyone who chooses to beat them up, outraged, tortured, sterilised, stripped of everything, ill-treated in every possible way. They seek escape from one country to another, and the countries where they would take refuge, suffering now from the fast-spreading economic and social malaise of this current phase in human history are more and more chary of receiving them even as assimilable individuals. Everywhere employment is dislocated. Everywhere they encounter the protest: "We have our own unemployed!"[5] A great book, a book of victims with thousands of authenticated cases, could be filled already with the tale of forced suicides, murders and abominations done upon these refugees, and there is no reasonable prospect of surcease. From the narrower point of view the compilation might be called The Jewish Book of Martyrs but from another it could be entitled The Natural Man, because its broader interest lies in the clear demonstration of what the inherent brute in man can do when the grip of law and order relaxes. It is a horrible recrudescence of primordial human reactions, but that is no reason why we should shut our eyes to the role of the alien nationalism of the Chosen People in exposing them first and foremost before any other people to this accumulating outbreak of hatred, cruelty, bestiality and every sort of human ugliness. They are the first to suffer in the social dissolution of our epoch, because they have stood out most conspicuously. They are the most obvious "murderees" and "plunderees". They come first. But they are only the first. I have enlarged upon their case because it is not only conspicuously challenging at the present time but because it brings into the picture most of the elements of the present human situation, the general disposition of any established community to adhere to forms and traditions of living long after their survival value has disappeared, the normal blindness of human beings to the onset of novel and more exacting conditions until disaster actually supervenes, the swiftness with which social balance can now be overturned. I can see no other destiny for orthodox Judaism and those who are involved in its obloquy, unless that enormous effort to reconstruct human mentality for which I have been pleading arrives in time to arrest their march to destruction. That, if it is to save our species, must be a reconstruction so bold and wide, an amnesty so fundamental, that it will sweep the religion of the Chosen People and this age-long feud of Juif and anti-Juif out of the living interests of mankind altogether. Notes by Wells (Renumbered. One of the notes is a short passage from Wells's previous chapter. Note [1] [..Chosen people.. ever-recurrent cause of the trouble..]: Some of those who, in spite of much subsequent enlightenment, still cling, out of natural affection and association, to traditions of their home and upbringing that have become a dear and necessary part of themselves, take refuge, I know, in the plea that the idea of the Chosen People has become altogether spiritualised, that they are now segregated not for an ultimate conquest but for a mission. Their mission is to serve and exalt all mankind. They are just a little vague about the nature of that service. None of the Bible story, they assert, means what it plainly means. But for all that they still propose to remain distinctive and hang together. They want to get together in a land of their own, revive their ancient Hebrew learning, and consolidate their drama, literature, learning and so forth, so as to be able to sally forth, refreshed, and with a strengthened mutual understanding, to take control of the intellectual life of the world out of incompetent Gentile hands. The stimulating, organising and purifying activities which have given us the contemporary cinema are also to pervade and dominate the dramatic world, publishing, criticism, the world of art in an ever-intensified degree. It is difficult for a stiff-necked Gentile to respond to those generous intentions with an adequate gratitude. There is moreover another line of sublimation with a bolder appeal, and that is the line taken by that great neglected genius; David Lubin, the founder of the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome. His Israel was indeed an Israel with a mission, but then he claimed everyone who participated in constructive work as one of the elect. To Lubin I was an honorary Israelite. "But why then call it Israel?" I protested. This sort of transfiguration of the objectives of the Chosen People is all very well in apologetic discussion, but there is nothing to sustain it in the normal ceremony and practice and teaching of the cult, which remains a narrow and troublesome nationalism. Let these sublimators repudiate the Bible and the Promise and say what they mean plainly. Then we shall be better able to believe in their assertions of an exalted inaggressive modernisation. Note [2] [..Jewish "blood"]: During the course of these conquests there was naturally a great intermingling of blood. The subjugated Semitic and pre-Semitic peoples were certainly in the majority in the Latin, Greek, Persian and Macedonian empires; history records no general ban upon intermarriage, and we can hardly doubt that the actual blood of the ruling Aryan-speaker was the smaller factor in that continually stirred-up mixture which is now the European and Europeanised world of to-day. Note [3] [.. persistent Jewish nationalism]: Louis Golding (in The Jewish Problem) argues that anti-Judaism is due to the fact that the Jews cried "Crucify him" when Jesus came before Pilate. Jesus, as everybody knows, was crucified (a particularly Roman method of execution) not by the Jews but by the Roman Pontius Pilate. Countless people who criticise the Jews to-day are extremely impartial about the Crucifixion, and I find it difficult to believe that Mr. Golding, who, I presume, is himself a product of orthodox Jewish education, is so entirely unaware of the effect of this Chosen People cult upon the outside world as he seems to be. He ignores it absolutely. Browne also, refusing to face that primary issue, accounts for the unpopularity of the Jewish community in an entirely different manner. He theorises brilliantly about Jews being urban while non-Jews are rustic. Certainly the Semitic-speakers were prevalently urban in the first century B.C. The balance, says he, must be corrected and all will be well. So the Jew, he decides (1935) had better go to Palestine and dig himself out of his troubles. Both writers then launch out into an account of the great intellectual superiority of Jews to Gentiles, wholesome rather than ingratiating reading for a puffed up Gentile, and cite a string of names, Sigmund Freud, for instance, and Einstein and so on, who are as a matter of fact no more orthodox Jews than I am. They are citizens of the world, they work for all mankind. Even now Freud is busy, he tells me, in a patient analysis of the legend of Moses. Moses, he concludes, was an Egyptian! His monotheism was Akhnaton's sun-worship. (Moses and Monotheism). Both Golding and Browne are typical of a vast literature on the Jewish question. There is no need to multiply instances. Neither, I think, realises quite clearly what it is that encompasses them, because they are themselves enveloped in it. They accept this taught and cultivated idea system, this ex-religious bias, this artificial solidarity I am arraigning as though it was in the nature of things and could not be prevented and thence they wander off into a limitless jungle of controversial irrelevancies, of the rights and wrongs of ancient hates,—misunderstandings, persecutions and reprisals, to which there can be no conclusion But the eloquent and emotional Mr. Josef Kastein, who dedicates his History and Destiny of the Jews quite incongruously to the entirely unorthodox Einstein, concludes his Jews in Germany with the real irreconcilable note: "... we were once in Egypt. Already we have compelled a Pharaoh to set us free. We have outlasted the Pyramids. We shall outlast the denials of all those who surround us." As a matter of fact the Pyramids were there a long time before the Jews. I reiterate that the whole scheme and purport of this book is to insist upon the supreme decisive importance of what in chapter 4 I have called the mental superstructure of the human animal. The reconstruction of its idea system is its only practicable method of adaptation, and here is an idea system that resists and evades reconstruction very obstinately. In chapters 8 and 9 I have assembled and summarised the nature of the great intellectual effort which is needed if our species is to adjust itself to the terrific new conditions that have risen about it. The Jewish conflict disregards this, cuts athwart it, arrests and prevents it, like a noisy quarrel in a laboratory. All the countervailing evil in the world cannot make a bad tradition a good one. Killing or ill-treating a man does not put him in the wrong, but also, we have to remember, and that is not so easy for the liberal-minded, it does not put him in the right. The idea of the solidarity of the Chosen People, evade it or not, remains the fundamental Jewish idea, and this fundamental Jewish idea like any other nationalism, is an offence against the unity of mankind. Note [4] [.. conspirators.]: Persecution mania is a well-known form of insanity. With certain variations of phrase and form, due to the current ideas of the period, it presents an almost stereotyped pattern through the ages. Formerly it was usually witches and warlocks who were supposed to be at the root of the matter. Anyone odd, anyone different, came under suspicion, old crones and afflicted and odd-looking men were distrusted, and very often the suspects caught a touch of the infection and tried doing the things they learnt were so potent. Multitudes of sorcerers have confessed, under no great duress, to impossible crimes. They brewed potions, stuck pins in wax images, cast spells, sent familiar spirits to gibber and creep and whisper in the night. Madness like everything else moves with the times; it clothes itself in new fashions while remaining essentially the same. Nowadays the witches have become "Occult Powers". They use hypnotism, electricity, infections (Pah!), they radio voices making threats and evil suggestions. Every prominent publicist continually gets letters from sufferers with this type of obsession. Such delusions may easily make the patient a danger to himself and others, and then he is "certified" and taken care of. But in times of social movement and stress this disorder may become contagious, witness the witch mania of the early seventeenth century. It is then more difficult to deal with. Like a dark shadow to the rational objections that can be made to the in-and-out double nationalism of the Jews, there is a sustained campaign of sinister suggestion with a considerable literature of its own. Some years ago four or five books written by Mrs. Nesta Webster attracted considerable attention. She is a very competent writer and so sound a Christian, of a faith so uncritical, that she is quite unable to understand that many honest people find a vast amount of Christian doctrine impossible. How impossible, I have sought to show in chapters 13 and 14. To her there is nothing good except in Christianity, and this is so obvious to her that any objection to the faith seems necessarily part of some diabolically hatched conspiracy. She has set herself with the greatest industry to trace and link together the long-drawn succession of Cabalists, Gnostics, Manichaeans, the Old Man of the Mountains, Knight Templars, Satanists, Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Freemasons, Rousseau, Voltaire, Cagliostro, Madame Blavatsky, Mrs. Besant, Trade Unions, Anarchists, Socialists, Theosophists, Communists, Those Bolsheviks, a frightful horde all plotting and getting hold of power and handing it on and doing down Christianity and the Christian life. Her books are written with conviction enough to make one look under the bed at nights. She has never quite committed herself to those famous forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion which were published as the articles of association so to speak of that world conspiracy, but she stoutly maintains that though that book may not be genuine, it nevertheless shows the sort of thing of which the Jews are capable. Her book Secret Societies and Subversive Movements concludes "For behind the concrete forces of revolution-whether Pan-German, Judaic or Illuminist—beyond that invisible secret circle which perhaps directs them all, is there not yet another force, still more potent, that must be taken into account? In looking back over the centuries at the dark episodes that have marked the history of the human race from its earliest origins—strange and horrible cults, waves of witchcraft, blasphemies and desecrations—how is it possible to ignore the existence of an occult Power at work in the world? Individuals, sects, or races fired with the desire of world domination, have provided the fighting forces of destruction, but behind them are the veritable powers of darkness in eternal conflict with the powers of light." I should describe Mrs. Nesta Webster as a perfectly sane and capable person with insane ideas so widely do I disagree with her. I believe her influence has spread far beyond the circle of her actual readers. Milder forms of the same intellectual malaise at any rate are now very prevalent throughout the more prosperous classes in Great Britain and America. It is the only way to account for the behaviour of Mr. Neville Chamberlain, for example, or old Lord Rothermere, the British newspaper proprietor, towards the Jews, towards Russia, during the past decade. Mr. William Teeling again, to whom I refer in chapter 13, is another case. A tepid passive Christianity is becoming an aggressive Pro-Christianity under the stresses of the time. Note [5]: [.. we have our own unemployed:] Sir Norman Angell and Mrs. Dorothy Frances Buxton, in a very clear and almost pressingly persuasive book, You and the Refugee (Penguin Books, 1939), argue for a practically unrestrained admission of these outcasts. They show in particular how beneficial a large refugee immigration might be to the British Empire. It would bring in new trades, new skill, find fresh work for the unemployed, and in Great Britain arrest the approaching decline in population—if that is desirable. Their plea for a more generous treatment of refugees, so far as assimilable individuals are concerned, is unanswerable. But our authors' arguments for an inassimilable immigration en bloc are less convincing. That would only renew the trouble at a later date. There is no time to begin that old history again in new regions and among fresh difficulties. Disaster is advancing too rapidly upon our entire species. Jewish nationalism like every other nationalism must end and end soon. And even though the plea of existing unemployment is an irrational social barrier to assimilable immigrants, it is, in a country where the sense of social insecurity is growing, where confidence in the intelligence and good faith of the government is diminishing, and where large masses of the population, and especially the accumulation of untrained and unemployed young men, see no clear prospect of a tolerable life ahead, none the less a barrier. Implicitly the British authorities admit "We do not know how to handle our own people, we are getting more and more bothered—by everything—and if these people come into our muddle there is bound to be serious trouble". And so in effect they give them up to destruction, not outrageously and openly as the Germans do, but by looking in the opposite direction, and delaying action. In a scientifically organised, forward-looking social order, there will be no people unemployed and there will be no difficulty whatever in the movement of population from point to point. The whole world will be everyman's and the fullness thereof. The bare possibility of such a rational order sustains whatever hope there is for mankind in this present survey of the human outlook. But this world we are living in is not a rational world and the harsh reality we have to face when we cast the Jewish horoscope is this closing-up of the avenues of escape. Already in the past year or so, a multitude, scores and possibly hundreds of thousands, must have been done to death. And still it goes on. ... In You and the Refugee, however, I came upon one passage that affected me very disagreeably and I think I ought to say a word about it here. It is too germane to this discussion to omit: "Not all Jews are Zionists, but all Jews will resent the letting down of Zionists, the surrender of Zionists to Arab terrorism. And their resentment will be world-wide. We do not perhaps realise the possible repercussions. "For nearly a century the relations of Great Britain and the United States were bedevilled and rendered difficult by the attitude which the Irish element in America took towards any move of Anglo-American rapprochement. Again and again the influence of the Irish vote, of Irish politicians, Irish newspaper owners, blocked opportunities of Anglo-American co-operation. Englishmen have never disguised the political importance for the Empire, for world peace, for the future of Anglo Saxon civilisation, of a close co-operation of the two great English-speaking peoples. Are the obstacles thereto that Irish mistrust and hatred erected to be followed by Jewish mistrust and hatred? The Jews have not less influence in the United States to-day than the Irish have had yesterday. "The power of world Jewry is moral—the power of journalists, writers, dramatists, scientists. It is worth while for an Empire as gravely menaced as the British to have that power on its side." ... That is a threat and a very evil and embittering threat. Happily it is not made by Jews but by two over-officious Gentile champions on their behalf. I do not see things from the Imperialist standpoint of these authors. I think the British Empire has outlived its usefulness. But the consolidation of the English-speaking people as the vehicle of a world civilisation is quite another matter, and a matter of great urgency. Yet unless the British government does what it is told in Palestine, the Chosen People we are told will devote themselves to preventing that consolidation. They will do all the mischief they can to the growing Gentile understanding. The unification of the world, it seems, will prove a small matter in face of the offended God of Israel. The wrongs and the revenge of Israel are to take precedence. Israel, the immortal and the unforgetting, will sit triumphant among the ruins still muttering "We have outlasted the Pyramids". I think that it is a very unhappy suggestion indeed. It does no justice to the intellectual quality of Israel. I doubt if any representative Jewish writer could be quoted in support of it. But it is exactly what the Jews are accused of doing by their worst enemies. My first reaction to it, until I realised that this dream of vindictive sabotage was a purely Gentile invention, was acute resentment and anger. I believe these two authors would be wise to take that tactless and unjustifiable passage out of any further editions of their well-intentioned book. -------------------------------- Indoctrination and Group Evolutionary Strategies: The Case of Judaism by Kevin MacDonald in "Indoctrinability, Ideology, and Warfare: An Evolutionary Perspective" edited by Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Frank Kemp Salter, 1998. Indoctrination is a phenomenon that occurs within groups and, as a result, raises fundamental evolutionary questions regarding the relationship between the individual and the group. It has long been apparent to evolutionists that highly cohesive, altruistic groups would outcompete concatenations of individualists. The purpose of this chapter will be to develop the idea of a group evolutionary strategy and to support the contention that indoctrinability is an adaptation that facilitates the development of such groups. With few exceptions, the data relevant to these theoretical interests will be drawn from historical and contemporary Jewish communities. For purposes of this chapter, a group is defined as a discrete set of individuals that is identifiably separate from other individuals (who themselves may or may not be members of groups). Groups become interesting to an evolutionist when there are

active attempts to segregate the group from the surrounding peoples, a situation that results in what Erikson termed "cultural pseudospeciation". Creating a group evolutionary strategy results in the possibility of cultural group selection resulting from between-group competition in which the groups are defined by culturally produced in-group markings. Theoretically, group strategies are underdetermined and unnecessary. A group evolutionary strategy may be conceived as an "experiment in living" rather than the outcome of natural selection acting on human populations or the result of ecological contingencies acting on universal human genetic propensities. In the case of Jews, in traditional societies there was a wide range of actively sought marks of separateness from surrounding peoples. Factors facilitating separation of Jews and Gentiles have included religious practice and beliefs; distinctive languages, such as Yiddish, Hebrew, and Ladino; mannerisms (e.g., gestures); physical appearance (hair styles) and clothing; customs (especially the dietary laws); occupations that were dominated by the group; and living in physically separated areas that were administered by Jews according to Jewish civil and criminal law. All of these practices can be found at early stages of the diaspora, and in the ancient world there were a large number of prohibitions that directly limited social contacts between Jews and Gentiles, such as the ban on drinking wine touched by Gentiles or the undesirability of bantering with Gentiles on the day of a pagan festival in the Greco-Roman world of antiquity. Perhaps the most basic badges of group membership and separateness, appearing in the Pentateuch, are circumcision and the practice of the Sabbath. Given this actively sought separation, there is the possibility that there will be genetic differences between Jewish and Gentile populations that are maintained over long stretches of historical time. There is considerable evidence for gene frequency differences between Jewish populations and populations they have lived among for centuries. Moreover, there is little doubt that over long stretches of historical time there was little genetic admixture, due to the functioning of the segregative mechanisms described previously but also due to negative attitudes regarding intermarriage and proselytism. A dispersed group that actively maintains genetic and cultural segregation from surrounding societies must develop methods to ensure social cohesion and prevent defection. Fundamental to Jewish group integrity over historical time have been social controls and ideologies that depend ultimately on human abilities to monitor and enforce group goals, to create ideological structures that rationalize group aims both to group members and to outsiders, and to indoctrinate group members to identify with the group and its aims. Social controls on group members are central to group evolutionary strategies. Social controls can range from subtle effects of group pressure on modes of dressing to laws or social practices that result in large penalties to violators. Recently Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson have shown that punishment can result in the stability of altruism or any other group attribute. In the case of human groups, punishment that effectively promotes altruism and inhibits nonconformity to group goals can be effectively carried out as the result of culturally invented social controls on the behavior of group members. Thus, while it may well be that group-level evolution is relatively uncommon among animals due to their limited abilities to prevent cheating, human groups are able to regulate themselves via social controls so that theoretical possibilities regarding invasion by selfish types from surrounding human groups or from within can be eliminated or substantially reduced. Facilitating altruism by punishing nonaltruists can be viewed as a special case of the general principle that social controls can act to promote group interests that are in opposition to individual self-interest. Group strategies must typically defend themselves against "cheaters" who benefit from group membership but fail to conform to group goals. Human societies are able to institute a wide range of social controls that effectively channel individual behavior, punish potential cheaters and defectors, and coerce individuals to be altruistic. Besides social controls, group strategies also are typically characterized by elaborate ideological structures that rationalize group goals and behavior within the group and to out-group members. By far the most important form of such ideology in human history is what we term religion, and in the following it will be apparent that indoctrination into Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy involved the inculcation of religious beliefs that rationalized behavior essential to the group strategy. Indoctrination into the Group Ethic of Judaism Judaism has been able to retain a high level of group cohesion and within-group altruism over a long period of historical time, at least partly because of social controls acting within the group that served to penalize nonaltruists and noncooperators, while cooperative altruists were ensured a high level of social prestige. Nevertheless, social controls do not appear to be the whole story. If only social controls were involved, Judaism or any similar group evolutionary strategy would be a sort of police state in which the only motivations for socially prescribed behavior would be fear of the negative consequences of noncompliance. However, it is difficult to imagine that such a group would long endure, and, in any case, a salient feature of historical Judaism has been the indoctrination of individuals into psychological acceptance of group aims. One area of psychological research relevant to conceptualizing the role of indoctrination in group evolutionary strategies such as traditional Judaism is that of research on individualism/collectivism. Collectivist cultures place a high emphasis on the goals and needs of the in-group rather than on individual rights and interests. In-group norms and the duty to cooperate and submerge individual goals to the needs of the group are paramount. Collectivist cultures develop an "unquestioned attachment" to the in-group, including "the perception that in-group norms are universally valid (a form of ethnocentrism), automatic obedience to in-group authorities, and willingness to fight and die for the in-group. These characteristics are usually associated with distrust of and unwillingness to cooperate with out-groups". Socialization in collectivist cultures stresses group harmony, conformity, obedient submission to hierarchical authority, and honoring parents and elders. There is also a major stress on ingroup loyalty as well as trust and cooperation within the in-group. Each of the in-group members is viewed as responsible for every other member. However, relations with out-group members tend to be "distant, distrustful, and even hostile". In collectivist cultures morality is conceptualized as that which benefits the in-group, and aggression towards and exploitation of outgroups are acceptable. As with all collectivist cultures, Judaism depends on inculcating a powerful sense of group identification. Triandis proposes that identification with an in-group is increased under the following circumstances: membership is rewarding to the individual; in-groups are separated by signs of distinctiveness; there is a sense of common fate; socialization emphasizes in-group membership; in-group membership is small; the in-group has distinctive norms and values. In addition, evolutionists have emphasized that socialization for in-group membership often includes an emphasis on the triggering of kin recognition mechanisms (such as references to the kinship nature of the group; e.g., "fatherland"; "the Jewish people") and phenotypic similarity (such as similar dress and mannerisms). Operant and classical conditioning are often used, as when individuals are publicly rewarded for group allegiance and altruism. All of these mechanisms have undoubtedly been present within historical Jewish communities. I have noted the prevalence of external signs of separateness from Gentiles among Jews in traditional societies, including language, clothing, and mannerisms. In the present context, these signs serve to enhance the phenotypic similarity of the in-group and mark off a distinctive set of in-group norms and values. Moreover, the goal of education in traditional societies was to promote the consciousness of separateness from out-groups and a sense of common fate among widely dispersed Jewish groups stretching forward and backward in historical time. These trends can be seen clearly in historical Jewish communities as well as among contemporary Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish groups. Kamen notes that the Hasidim are concerned about contamination from the secular culture and work very hard to minimize their children's contact with or even awareness of the wider culture. Similar to all Jewish societies prior to the Enlightenment, there are a great many markers of in-group status, including speaking a Jewish language (in this case, Yiddish), distinctive modes of dress, and distinctive Jewish names. A young Hasidic man commented that "I call my clothing a personal weapon because if I am tempted to do something which by law is not right, one look at myself, my hat, my coat, my tstitsis reminds me who I am. Nobody is there to see except me, and believe me that's enough". The last part of the quote is particularly significant: this individual is clearly following the law not because of fear of negative sanctions by the community, but because he completely accepts the psychological desirability of doing so. Education is of course extremely important, but a major goal in the Hasidic community is group enculturation rather than imparting subject matter. Television and other means of integrating with the wider culture are forbidden so that the child is simply not exposed to these influences. In addition, there are numerous holidays that are utilized in the school curriculum as a means of discussing particular events important in Jewish history or religious practice. Critical to Jewish indoctrination have been practices whereby, from a very early age, individuals are placed in situations where group activities involve positive experiences of great emotional intensity. These experiences are perhaps analogous to the phenomenon of "love-bombing" as an aspect of indoctrination in religious cults, except that this type of indoctrination begins at an early age and continues throughout life. In the traditional shtetl communities of Eastern Europe, beginning at birth children were socialized not simply as an individual or as a family member but as a member of the entire community. The child's birth was celebrated by the entire community, and there were special roles for children in a variety of religious events. Thus at the Passover celebration, the youngest child asks the Passover questions, "quivering with excitement". The elaborate ceremony functions to make the child very aware of the intimate connection of the child to the family and the family to the wider group of Jews extending backward in historical time. Another holiday, Lag ba Omer, is given over entirely to the pleasures of children, and a prominent part of Hanukkah is when children go around to relatives to receive money. The boy's bar mitzvah is fundamentally a ceremony marking the child's new relationship to the group. Positive group experiences continue into adulthood. Among the Hasidim studied by Kamen, group meetings and positively valanced social events are common. There are weekly meetings of the males (the tish) at which the children participate in group singing. After the singing, there is a discourse on the Torah, followed by singing and dancing. Group dancing by males is particularly striking and also occurs at weddings and other social events. The men join arms and dance together in an atmosphere of great joy and excitement -- a clear indication of the powerful, positive affective forces joining together members of the group. At these social events children are introduced in a very positive manner to group membership. Synagogue services were also a positive group experience in traditional Jewish society. Zborowski and Herzog note the swaying and communal chanting as a prominent aspect of synagogue services in the traditional European shtetl communities: "The whole room is a swaying mass of black and white, filled with a tangle of murmur and low chantings, above which the vibrant voice of the cantor rises and falls, implores and exults, elaborating the traditional melodies with repetitions and modulations that are his own. The congregation prays as one, while within that unity each man as an individual speaks directly to God." In addition to positive experiences that foster extremely positive attitudes toward the group, there are also negative sanctions on failure to conform to group goals. Conformity to group attitudes and behavior is an important aspect of social control in traditional Jewish communities. "A sense of correct behavior, Hasidishe behavior, takes precedence over individual deviations. Indulgence in contrary behavior is not tolerated by the group; the majority acts quickly to reprimand any member whose demeanor reflects negatively on his comrades". Mayer also describes elaborate mechanisms of social control within the Orthodox community that spring into action to oppose any sign of nonconformity, such as a yarmulke that is too small or too brightly colored or a hemline that is too high. Zborowski and Herzog, writing of traditional European shtetl societies, also document elaborate mechanisms that ensure conformity within the community. People are greatly concerned about the good opinions of others. Everyone knows everything there is to know about everyone else, and withdrawal and secrecy are seen as intolerable. Indoctrination also involves negatively valanced procedures akin to hazing as emphasized in Salter's chapter in this volume. After bar mitzvah and for approximately seven years until marriage, the boys spend 16 hours per day with their peer group, including communal breakfast, communal ritual baths, communal studying and prayer. At this age, studying itself is done with a great deal of emotion. Accounts indicate considerable sleep deprivation and a great deal of pressure to perform well within the peer group. The boys/men of this age are expected to relate primarily to the peer group, and if a child spends too much time at home, his behavior reflects poorly on himself and his family. Efforts to socialize children and adults to the group are also apparent in much less traditional Jewish groups. Judaism in contemporary American society is best viewed as a civil religion, and, perhaps because of the lessening prevalence of many of the traditional segregating mechanisms that have facilitated group cohesion over the centuries, the civil religion goes to great lengths to prevent group defection, especially by attempting to strengthen Jewish education. Those who do defect are simply written off, and group continuity and integrity are maintained by a central core of highly committed individuals. Because of the assimilatory pressures from the surrounding society, great importance is placed on "the recognition of Jewish education as the most vital element in the preservation of the Jewish people". Jewish identification is actively facilitated by encouraging trips to Israel by high school and college students, and, indeed, Elazar terms Israel "the central focus of American Jewish educational effort". Woocher notes that the trips to Israel are often overlaid with "mythic" overtones from Jewish history (e.g., visits to Holocaust memorials), and have as their goal increased commitment to a Jewish identification on the part of the visitors. The retreats function as a sort of religious experience that attempts to effect attitude change by removing participants from their normal lives; by emphasizing group-oriented activities and a sense of community, nostalgia and "specialness"; and by renewing commitment to group identification and group goals. Social Identity Consequences of Indoctrination As a prelude to developing an evolutionary theory of indoctrinability, I will first consider the expected consequences of the indoctrination practices described above in terms of social identity theory. Social identity theory proposes that individuals engage in a process whereby they place themselves and others in social categories. Clearly a major effect of the indoctrination procedures described above is to highlight the salience of in-group membership to those being indoctrinated. From the standpoint of social identity theory, there are several important consequences of this process. The social categorization process results in discontinuities such that individuals exaggerate the similarities of individuals within each category (the accentuation effect). Thus, there is a psychological basis for supposing that, given the highly salient cultural separatism characteristic of Judaism, both Jews and Gentiles would sort others into the category "Jew" or "Gentile" and would exaggerate the similarity of members within each category. By this mechanism, people reconceptualize continuous distributions as sharply discontinuous; the effect is particularly strong if the dimension is of importance to the categorizer. In the case of intergroup conflict, the dimensions are in fact likely to be imbued with great subjective importance. Moreover, the individual also places himself or herself into one of the categories (an in-group), with the result that similarities between self and in-group are exaggerated and dissimilarities with out-group members are exaggerated. An important result of this self-categorization process is that individuals adopt behavior and beliefs congruent with the stereotype of the in-group. Social identity research indicates that the stereotypic behavior and attitudes of the in-group are positively valued, while out-group behavior and attitudes are negatively valued. Thus, the homogenization of the behavior of in-groups and out-groups has strong affective overtones, and individuals develop favorable attitudes toward in-group members and unfavorable attitudes toward out-group members. In-group and out-group members are both expected to develop highly negative attitudes regarding the behavior of members of the other group and generally to fail to attend to individual variation among members of the other group. The in-group develops a positive distinctness, a positive social identity, and increased self-esteem as a result of this process. Within the group there is a great deal of cohesiveness, positive affective regard, and camaraderie, while relationships outside the group can be hostile and distrustful. Social identity theorists propose that the primary affective mechanism involved in social identity processes is self-esteem and that, indeed, the need to achieve a positive self-evaluation via this social categorization process functions as a theoretical primitive. Individuals maximize the differences between in-group and out-group in a manner that accentuates the positive characteristics of the in-group. They do so precisely because of this (theoretically) primitive need to categorize themselves as a member of a group with characteristics that reflect well on the group as a whole and therefore on themselves individually. For example, Gitelman , describing Jewish identity processes in the former Soviet Union, noted that Jews developed a great curiosity about Jewish history "not merely from a thirst for historical knowledge, but from a need to locate oneself within a group, its achievements, and its fate. It is as if the individual's own status, at least in his own eyes, will be defined by the accomplishments of others who carry the same label. 'If Einstein was a Jew, and I am a Jew, it does not quite follow that I am an Einstein, but...." Further, people easily adopt negative stereotypes about out-groups, and these stereotypes possess a great deal of inertia (i.e., they are slow to change and are resistant to countervailing examples). Resistance to change is especially robust if the category is one that is important to the positive evaluation of the in-group or the negative evaluation of the out-group. It would be expected that people would be more likely to change their categorization of the hair color of out-group members on the basis of counterexamples of a stereotype than they would change their categorization of out-group members as stupid or lazy or dishonest. The results of these categorization processes are group behavior that involves discrimination against the out-group and in favor of the in-group; beliefs in the superiority of the in-group and inferiority of the out-group; and positive affective preference for the in-group and negative affect directed toward the out-group. Although groups may be originally dichotomized on only one dimension (e.g., Jew/Gentile), there is a tendency to expand the number of dimensions on which the individuals in the groups are categorized and to do so in an evaluative manner. Thus a Jew would be expected not only to sharply distinguish between Jews and Gentiles, but to come to view Gentiles as characterized by a number of negative traits (e.g., stupidity, drunkenness), while Jews would be viewed as characterized by corresponding positive traits (e.g., intelligence, sobriety). A series of contrasts is set up in the mind of the shtetl child, who grows up to regard certain behavior as characteristic of Jews, and its opposite as characteristic of Gentiles. Among Jews he expects to find emphasis on intellect, a sense of moderation, cherishing of spiritual values, cultivation of rational, goal-directed activities, a "beautiful" family life. Among Gentiles he looks for the opposite of each item: emphasis on the body, excess, blind instinct, sexual license, and ruthless force. The first list is ticketed in his mind as Jewish, the second as goyish. As expected, Zborowski and Herzog find that this world view was then confirmed by examples of Gentile behavior that conformed to the stereotype, as when Gentiles suddenly rose up and engaged in a murderous pogrom against the Jews. There was also a clear sense that the attributes of the in-group are superior qualities, and those of the out-group are inferior. Jews valued highly the attributes on which they rated themselves highly and viewed the characteristics of Gentiles in a negative manner. There was a general air of superiority to Gentiles. Jews returning from Sabbath services "pity the barefoot goyim, deprived of the Covenant, the Law, and the joy of Sabbath ...' We thought they were very unfortunate. They had no enjoyment ... no Sabbath ... no holidays ... no fun ...' 'They'd drink a lot and you couldn't blame them, their lives were so miserable."' The negative attitudes were fully reciprocated. Thorowski and Herzog note that both Jews and Gentiles referred to the other with imagery of specific animals, implying that the other was subhuman. When a member of the other group dies, the word used is the word for the death of an animal. Each would say of one's own group that they "eat," while members of the other group "gobble." "The peasant will say, 'That's not a man, it's a Jew.' And the Jew will say, 'That's not a man, it's a goy"'. There was thus a powerful tendency toward reciprocity of negative attitudes and stereotypes. Stories about the other group would recount instances of deception, and everyday transactions would be carried on with a subtext of mutual suspicion. "There is beyond this surface dealing, however, an underlying sense of difference and danger. Secretly each [Jewish merchant and Gentile peasant] feels superior to the other, the Jew in intellect and spirit, the 'goy' in physical force -- his own and that of his group. By the same token each feels at a disadvantage opposite the other, the peasant uneasy at the intellectuality he attributes to the Jew, the Jew oppressed by the physical power he attributes to the goy". While the documentation is not always as explicit as that provided in the case of Poland, there is a convincingly large body of evidence across numerous societies indicating that reciprocal hostility between Jew and Gentile tends to arise for most or perhaps all combinations of Judaism and Gentile socioreligious tradition (for Sephardic and Romaniote Jews, see Shaw 1991; for Sephardic Jews in Spain prior to the expulsion, see Neuman 1969/1942; for contemporary fundamentalist Judaism, see Heilman 1992). An Evolutionary Interpretation of Social Identity Processes and Collectivism The empirical results of social identity research are highly compatible with an evolutionary basis for group behavior. Vine notes that the evidence supports the universality of the tendency to view one's own group as superior. Moreover, social identity processes occur very early in life, prior to explicit knowledge about the out-group. An evolutionary interpretation of these findings is also supported by results indicating that social identity processes occur among advanced animal species such as chimpanzees. Van der Dennen proposes, on the basis of his review of the literature on human and animal conflict, that advanced species have "extra-strong group delimitations" based on affective mechanisms. Among humans, one affective mechanism may well be the self-esteem mechanism central to social identity theory. Another positive emotion revealed by research on religious cults is the profound sense of relief that individuals experience when they join these highly collectivist, authoritarian groups. However, successful socialization into a highly cohesive group would also be expected to lead to feelings of guilt at the possibility of failure to conform to group goals. These latter mechanisms, although not considered by social identity theorists, would result in strong positive feelings associated with group membership and feelings of guilt and distress at the prospect of defecting from the group. The powerful affective components involved in social identity processes are difficult to explain except as an aspect of the evolved machinery of the human mind. I have noted the powerful tendency to seek self-esteem via social identity processes as a theoretical primitive in the system. As Hogg and Abrams note, this result cannot be explained in terms of purely cognitive processes, and a learning theory seems hopelessly ad hoc and gratuitous. The tendencies for humans to place themselves in social categories and for these categories to assume immense affective and evaluative overtones involving the emotions of self-esteem, relief, distress, and guilt are the best candidates for the biological underpinnings of participation in highly cohesive collectivist groups. Also, the fact that social identity processes and tendencies toward collectivism increase during times of resource competition and threat to the group suggests that these processes involve facultative mechanisms that emerged as a result of selection at the level of the group. As emphasized by evolutionists, external threat tends to reduce internal divisions and maximize perceptions of common interest among group members. This perspective is compatible with Wilson and Sober's proposal of group-selected psychological mechanisms that facilitate group goals on a facultative basis, i.e., in response to specific contingencies. Under conditions of external threat, there is an increase in cooperative and even altruistic behavior. I propose that external threat is a situation that elicits an evolved facultative tendency to identify more strongly with the group and to submerge individual interests to group interests. (As Wilson and Sober 1994 emphasize, such mechanisms do not imply conflict between individual and group goals: individuals engaging in altruistic or other types of group-oriented behavior may continue to monitor their individual self-interest. The point is that the group becomes the unit of selection.) This perspective implies that the awareness of anti-Semitism would tend to foster a sense of group identity and social cohesion in the face of threat -- the "common fate" or "shared enemy" syndrome studied by psychologists. Feldman finds robust tendencies toward heightened Jewish identification and rejection of Gentile culture consequent to anti-Semitism at the very beginnings of Judaism in the ancient world and throughout Jewish history. Historically, anti-Semitism and the perception of anti-Semitism have been potent tools for rallying group commitment and for legitimizing the continuity of Judaism. A permanent sense of imminent threat appears to be common among Jews, and, as indicated above, such a threat would be expected to enhance commitment to the group. Writing on the clinical profile of Jewish families, Herz and Rosen note that for Jewish families a "sense of persecution (or its imminence) is part of a cultural heritage and is usually assumed with pride. Suffering is even a form of sharing with one's fellow Jews. It binds Jews with their heritage -- with the suffering of Jews throughout history." This comment indicates once again the importance of a sense of common fate and historical continuity to Jewish identification. Zborowski and Herzog note that the homes of wealthy Jews in traditional Eastern European shtetl communities often had secret passages for use in times of anti-Semitic pogroms, and that their existence was "part of the imagery of the children who played around them, just as the half-effaced memory was part of every Jew's mental equipment." This evolved response to external threat is often manipulated by authorities attempting to inculcate a stronger sense of group identification. Thus Heller notes that a prominent feature of Soviet propaganda throughout its history was the inculcation of the belief that the Soviet Union was a "besieged fortress." "In a besieged fortress it is essential to fear and to hate the external enemy, who has surrounded the stronghold, is undermining the walls and threatening your 'home' and your life." The inculcation of a siege mentality also appears to be an aspect of contemporary Judaism. Within this world-view, the Gentile world is conceptualized as fundamentally hostile, with Jewish life always on the verge of ceasing to exist entirely. "Like many other generations of Jews who have felt similarly, the leaders of the polity who fear that the end may be near have transformed this concern into a survivalist weapon". Thus, for example, Woocher notes that there has been a major effort since the 1960s to have American Jews visit Israel in an effort to strengthen Jewish identification, with a prominent aspect of the visit being a trip to a border outpost "where the ongoing threat to Israel's security is palpable". Indeed, Jewish religious consciousness centers to a remarkable extent around the memory of persecution, including the holidays of Passover, Hanukkah, Purim, and Yom Kippur. Lipset and Raab note that Jews learn about the Middle Ages as a period of persecution in Christian Europe, culminating in the expulsions and the Inquisitions. There is also a strong awareness of the persecutions in Eastern Europe, including especially the Czarist persecutions. And recently, the Holocaust has assumed a pre-eminent role in Jewish self-conceptualization. Given the importance of external threat in cementing group ties, complete acceptance by the Gentile community may be viewed negatively, or at least with ambivalence, by those interested in maintaining group cohesion. One hears quite often of Jewish leaders in contemporary America expressing concern about being "loved to death," since complete acceptance may lead to intermarriage and a loss of Jewish identity. Perhaps as a result, American Jews tend to overestimate the actual amount of anti-Semitism. For example, Lipset and Raab describe survey results from 1985 indicating that one-third of a sample of affiliated Jews in the San Francisco area stated that a Jew could not be elected to Congress at a time when three of the four congressional representatives from the area were "well-identified" Jews, as were the two state senators and the mayor of San Francisco. Survey results from 1990 indicated eight out of 10 American Jews had serious concerns about anti-Semitism, and significant percentages believed anti-Semitism was growing even though there was no evidence for this, while at the same time 90 percent of Gentiles viewed anti-Semitism as residual and vanishing. Also compatible with the proposal that individuals are more prone to submerge themselves in cohesive groups during times of external threat, there is evidence that the collectivist tendencies of Jewish communities became even more pronounced during periods of group conflict. For example, as was typical of traditional Jewish communities, there was an extreme level of conformity and thought control among Jews in the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. The community regulated precisely every aspect of life, including the shape and length of beards, all aspects of dress in public and private, the amount of charity required of members, the numbers of people at social gatherings, the appearance of graves and gravestones, the precise behavior on Sabbath, the precise form of conversations, the order of precedence at all social gatherings, etc. The rules were enforced "with a kind of police surveillance," and failure to abide by the rules could result in imprisonment in community prisons, or, at the extreme, in excommunication. Although these practices occurred during a period of economic prosperity, these hyperconformist tendencies became even more extreme during a subsequent period of persecution and economic decline. While the above presents a static picture of the mechanisms related to group commitment, there may also be selection within the Jewish community over historical time for traits related to social identity and collectivism. As conceptualized by Triandis, individualism / collectivism is an individual-differences dimension, and it would appear that there are quite a few cases of individuals who are extreme on such a dimension to the point where defecting from the group is not an option. Especially striking has been the phenomenon of individuals who undergo martyrdom or commit suicide rather than abandon the group. We see examples periodically in modem times (such as the Jonestown massacre), and there are many historical examples, ranging from Christian martyrs in ancient times to a great many instances of Jewish martyrs over a 2,000-year period. Recently there has developed a fairly large literature on religious cults with characteristics that illustrate the importance of social identity processes and that clearly place them on the extreme collectivist end of the individualism/collectivism dimension. These charismatic groups are highly cohesive, collectivist, and authoritarian. Within the group there is a great deal of harmony and positive regard for group members combined with negative perceptions of outsiders. Psychological well-being increases when the person joins the group, and individuals who disaffiliate experience psychological distress. This affective motivation may be increased by personal feelings of threat prior to joining the cult. Many individuals who join cults are not satisfied with their lives and feel personally threatened -- a finding that I interpret as resulting from the triggering of collectivist mechanisms in a facultative manner as a response to external threat or simply from feelings of "not doing well" in life. Indeed, Galanter found that the individuals who experienced the greatest relief upon joining cults were those who were most distressed prior to joining, and case study material indicates that many of these individuals were experiencing economic, social, and/or psychological stresses (e.g., change of residence, being fired from a job, illness of relatives [1989a, 92]). Sirkin and Grellong found similar associations in their sample of cult members from Jewish families. Jewish martyrdom and the extreme intensity of Jewish group commitment have long been apparent to historians. Johnson calls the Jews "the most tenacious people in history," but even this judgment seems inadequate. Jewish groups have persisted for centuries even though they have been isolated from other Jewish groups and subjected to persecutions, and even under circumstances where they were forced to engage in crypsis for many generations. The suggestion is that among Jews there is a significant critical mass for whom deserting the group is not an option no matter what the consequences to the individual. Consider, for example, the behavior of groups of Ashkenazi Jews in response to demands made to convert during the disturbances surrounding the First Crusade in Germany in 1096. Jewish behavior in this instance was truly remarkable. When given the choice of conversion or death, a contemporary Jewish chronicler noted that Jews "stretched forth their necks, so that their heads might be cut off in the Name of their Creator.... Indeed fathers also fell with their children, for they were slaughtered together. They slaughtered brethren, relatives, wives, and children. Bridegrooms [slaughtered] their intended and merciful mothers their only children". It is unlikely that such people have an  algorithm that calculates individual fitness payoffs by balancing the tendency to desert the group with anticipated benefits of continued group membership. The obvious interpretation of such a phenomenon is that these people feel obligated to remain in the group no matter what, i.e., that there are no conceivable circumstances that would cause them to abandon the group, go their own way, and become assimilated to the out-group. As indicated above, selection at the level of the group need not imply that organisms do not attend to the individual costs of group membership. Nevertheless, the suggestion here is that many fully committed members of highly cohesive groups do not in fact have an algorithm that assesses the individual costs and benefits of group membership. Via indoctrination and/or selection processes for genes that predispose individuals to such behavior, it appears to be possible to produce extreme self-sacrifice in human groups. While I do not suppose that such an extreme level of self-sacrifice is a panhuman psychological adaptation, it may well be the case that a significant proportion of Jews are extremely attracted to group membership to the point that they do not calculate the individual payoffs involved. The proposed model is that over historical time average group standing on the trait of collectivism has increased among Jews because individuals low on this trait (in this case, individuals who do not conform to expected standards of group behavior) are more likely to defect voluntarily from the group or be forcibly excluded. It has often been observed among historians of Judaism that the most committed members of the group have determined the direction of the group, and such individuals are likely to receive a disproportionate amount of the rewards of group membership. Moreover, Jordan notes that Jews who defected during the Middle Ages (and sometimes persecuted their former coreligionists) tended to be people who were "unable to sustain the demands of [the] elders for conformity." (The Sephardic philosopher Baruch Spinoza is a famous example of a nonconformist who was expelled from the Jewish community.) This trend may well have accelerated since the Enlightenment because the costs of defection became lower. Israel notes that after the Enlightenment, defections from Judaism due ultimately to negative attitudes regarding the restrictive Jewish community life were common enough to have a negative demographic effect on the Jewish community. Moreover, in traditional societies there was discrimination within the Jewish community such that the families of individuals who had apostatized or engaged in other major breaches of approved behavior had lessened prospects for marriage. Writing of thirteenth-century Spain, Neuman notes that measures were taken to protect converts to Christianity from abuse by their former coreligionists. The interesting thing is that conversion was a blot on the family. The disgrace of one convert in a family was enough cause to warrant the disruption of the wedding engagement of an innocent relative. His former brethren regarded him as a renegade and ostracized him. This type of social control in which individuals were punished on account of their relatives' contravention of group norms was common throughout Jewish history. Coitein, writing of medieval Islamic times, notes that the responsibility of the extended family was recognized by public opinion, although it was not a formal part of Jewish law. Hundert notes that in traditional Ashkenazi society the son of a convert was ostracized and ridiculed because of his father's apostasy, indicating that conversion had negative effects on the entire family even beyond the immediate generation. And Deshen describes a nineteenth-century Moroccan case in which a man was allowed to break an engagement with a woman whose aunt had given birth out of wedlock. The decision was based on a precedent in which a man was allowed to break an engagement with a woman whose sister had converted to Islam. To the extent that there is heritable variation for such nonconformity (and all personality traits are heritable [e.g., Digman 1990]), such practices imply that there will be strong selection pressures concentrating genes for group loyalty and social conformity within the Jewish gene pool. There has probably always been cultural selection such that people who have difficulty submerging their interests to those of the group have been disproportionately likely to defect from Judaism. Such individuals would have chaffed at the myriad regulations that governed every aspect of life in traditional Jewish society. In Triandis's terms, these individuals are "idiocentric" people living in a collectivist culture, i.e., they are people who are less group oriented and less willing to put group interests above their own. It is therefore likely that there has been within-group selection for genes predisposing people to collectivism to the point that they are simply incapable of acting selfishly based on estimates of individual payoffs of group membership. This hypothesis is supported by the finding that Jews have been overrepresented among non-Jewish religious cults. Galanter finds that 21 percent of the Divine Light commune, organized by Maharaj Ji, were Jewish despite the fact that Jews represented only 2 percent of the U.S. population. Moreover, 8 percent of Galanter 's sample of members of the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon were Jewish. This confirms the hypothesis that Jews have a stronger tendency toward collectivism in general. In addition, a large percentage of Jews are involved in specifically Jewish groups (including, I would suppose, the haredim, Orthodox Jews, and Conservative Jews in the contemporary world) characterized by many of the features (cohesion, collectivism, and authoritarianism) ascribed to religious cults. The milieu selecting for such characteristics was traditional diaspora Judaism, which was Orthodox. It is interesting in this regard that highly committed Jews appear to seek out relatively small synagogues of relative ethnic homogeneity where there is a deep sense of group identification. The main purpose of these smaller synagogues seems to be to satisfy the need for close feelings of group identification -- what Mayer terms a "we-feeling" of shared intimacy in a group. Mayer describes a trend whereby those trained in Orthodox yeshivas seek out Hasidic synagogues as adults because of their greater feelings of group intimacy. Further, Sirkin and Grellong found that cult members from Jewish families had a higher number of highly religious relatives than contrast Jewish families. This occurred despite the fact that the contrast Jewish families were actually more religiously observant than the families of cult members. These findings offer further confirmation of the hypothesis that cult membership is influenced by genetic variation: Jewish cult members come disproportionately from relatively unobservant families who nevertheless have a strong familial predisposition toward membership in highly collectivist groups. The relative lack of religious observance among these cult-involved families may have resulted from their greater tendency toward intellectual, cultural, and political activities that were seen as incompatible with traditional religious observance. However, these cultural activities failed to provide the psychological sense of intense group involvement desired by the children, with the result that they were prone to join religious cults Conclusion A clear message of the foregoing is that indoctrinability is a critical human adaptation that enables the formation of highly cohesive groups. Group strategies are very powerful in competition with individual strategies within a society, as has been the case with Judaism. The power of the Jewish group strategy has derived from the following: (1) Judaism has been characterized by cultural and eugenic practices that produced a highly talented and educated elite that was able to improve the fortunes of the entire group; (2) universal Jewish education resulted in an average resource acquisition ability that was above that of the rest of the society; and (3) there were high levels of within-group altruism and cooperation. Given the presence of a powerful group strategy within a society, there is the expectation that dynamic processes will develop between the strategizing group and the rest of the population. In particular, as a group strategy such as Judaism comes to be increasingly salient and powerful within a society, out-group members are expected to be increasingly likely to join highly cohesive groups in an effort to further their own interests. The theory and data discussed in this chapter, therefore, not only provide a perspective on evolutionary strategies such as Judaism, but also provide a tool for understanding the development of antithetical group strategies, as represented historically by anti-Semitic movements. External threat results in a higher sense of group cohesion among Jews, but the same processes occurring among Gentiles imply that they would be increasingly likely to join cohesive, relatively altruistic groups when they perceive themselves as engaged in resource competition and threatened by a highly cohesive group. From the perspective of Gentiles, the social identity processes summarized above imply that the presence of a cohesive, distinctive out-group (i.e., the Jews) would result in a heightened salience of in-group (i.e., Gentile) identification and corresponding devaluation of the out-group. In situations of external threat, group members close ranks and there is an increase in cohesiveness, solidarity, and the acceptance of collectivist rather than individualist social norms. Negative stereotypes regarding the out-group are developed, and there are cognitive biases such that negative information about the out-group is preferentially attended to and points of disagreement highlighted. My suggestion is that in the long run highly successful group strategies spawn mirror images of themselves as nongroup members increasingly perceive a need to organize against the group strategy. The result is a fascinating historical dynamic in which the individualistic tendencies of prototypical Western societies have been punctuated in critical historical eras by the development of highly collectivist Western societies with powerful overtones of anti-Semitism (late Roman and medieval Western Christianity, Nazism). However, these issues lead well beyond the present chapter. --------------- DID WELLS HAVE SOME PREJUDICES? A recent biography by Michael Coren, the author states that Wells had some bigotries of his own. Lest we hastily set up any shrines to Wells as someone who saw through ALL the idiocies and hypocrisies of his day, we should note some instances of Wells' own narrowness. On the Jews: Wells was no respecter of any kind of nationalism. He opposed the fascist nationalists in 1930s Europe, but was less-than-kind to anyone who placed hope in nationalism. This included the Jewish people who espoused a national homeland called Israel for their people. Israel Zangwill, a noted Jewish playwright, was Wells' friend for years but they split over Wells intransigent belief that all would be better for the Jews and all other groups if they gave up such special pleadings for one group, such as Zionism. The author Michael Coren points out a conversation that Wells had with a Jewish man (one he often told of) in the late 1930s, The man asked what he (Wells) thought would happen to the Jews of Europe. Wells told the man that he would rather be asked "What is going to happen to mankind?" "But my people. . . ." "That," he interrupted, "is exactly what's the matter with them." (Coren p. 217) Israel Zangwill became frustrated with this attitude of Wells' and accused him of a "conscious prejudice against Jews and an unconscious prejudice in favor of Christianity." That latter part of this accusation has little evidence for justification, because Wells saw how systems of religion appeared to be falling into line with nationalisms and fascist parties all over Europe. He was highly critical of religion in and before World War II. The Catholic Church and other religions in Europe have yet to give a full accounting of the level of involvement of clergy in fascist governments in the 1930s, so it is difficult to say whether Wells' criticisms were exaggerated. As long as such data remain suppressed, there is no way to know. What appears from these quotations and the surmises of the author Michael Coren is that here is a man who saw dangers in structures and systems, he saw people unable to think for themselves because of the ways in which traditional values were being manipulated by rightist politicians and clergy. He lashed out too often and too conclusively against all the adherents of traditional values (nationalisms, religions). The context of the times must be thoroughly studied to understand why Wells said what he did. But in any assessment of a writer who takes on social themes and issues, one should always be wary of a "one correct point of view" position. At times, Wells, in his reforming zeal, showed evidence of allowing for no shades of gray, allowing for no cases where the facts called for some other way than his program. To read the full account of where Wells may have erred in allowing his system analysis to blind him to notable exceptions that should have been considered, see _THE INVISIBLE MAN: The Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells_. by Michael Coren. London: Bloomsbury Press, 1993. In the meanwhile, this second book has appeared to answer Mr. Coren's biography. _HG: THE HISTORY OF MR. WELLS_ by Michael Foot. ISBN 1-887178-04-X New York: Counterpoint, 1995. IN _HG_, the author states that it is only through OMISSION of important citations that Mr. Coren is able to construct such a negative profile of Wells. Here's one example of Foot's refutations of the charges that HG Wells was anti-Semitic. He asks if an anti-Semite would ever write: "I really do not understand the exceptional attitude that people take against the Jews. The Jew is mentally and physically precocious and he ages and dies sooner than the average European; but in that and in a certain disingenuousness he is simply on all fours with the short, dark Welsh. He foregathers with those of his own nation and favors them against the stranger, but so do the Scotch. I see nothing in this curious, dispersed nationality to dread or dislike. He is a remnant and legacy of Medievalism, a sentimentalist, perhaps, but no furtive plotter against progress of things. He was the Medieval Liberal; his persistent existence gave lie to the Catholic pretensions all through the days of their ascendendency, and today he gives lie to all our 'yapping nationalisms', and sketches in his dispersed sympathies the coming of the world state. Much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die." (from _Anticipations_, 1901, the book that Coren quotes to "prove" that Wells was an anti-semite.) On Eugenics, p. 61, footnote. "When he saw that some critics were interpreting what he had written in _Anticipations_ in what might be called 'racist' terms despite his disavowel -- he took precautions in _A Modern Utopia_ to guard against such a misplaced and even malicious interpretation. . ." On the British hatred of education and suppression of colonial peoples, p. 48 He describes the rebuffs felt by educated Indians when they try to add their voices to British literature. "The Hindoo who is at pains to learn and use English encounters something like hatred disguised in a facetious form. He will certainly read little about himself that is not grossly contemptuous to reward him for his labor." On his differences from centralizing tendencies of many socialists. p. 88 "The secular development of administrative socialism gives the world over to a bureaucratic mandarinate, self-satisfied, interfering and unteachable, with whom wisdom would die. And yet we Socialists can produce in our plans no absolute bar to these possibilities." (He goes on to suggest some alternatives and general ideas to avoid such centralizing tendencies...) This raises some general questions in my mind and, I hope, in yours. * How can we as readers tell when a biographer is using selective quoting to make an author look one way or another? * Can any one source be said to provide the "truth" about its subject? * How can we allow for the human failings of the subject of biography without allowing for any kind of one-sided presentation. What can we do in our own essays to present the subject as best we can? ------------------------------ Ancient Judaism (from bartleby.com books online) Previous 1 2 Ramses Son of Light Review of the first volume of a fictional biography of the pharaoh thought to have been alive during Moses' stint in Egypt. Two Kingdoms In disobedience to Yahweh, the Hebrews insisted on having kings, but the single rulers soon led to a North-South split of the kingdom into Israel, with its capital at Samaria, in the North and Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem, in the south. Early History of the Jews From H.G. Wells' A Short History of the World, chapter 21 explains the significance of the Jews for world history, their beginnings until the Babylonians. Chapter 22 Priests and Prophets in Judea continues the story. AND now we can tell of the Hebrews, a Semitic people, not so important in their own time as in their influence upon the later history of the world. They were settled in Judea long before 1000 B.C., and their capital city after that time was Jerusalem. Their story is interwoven with that of the great empires on either side of them, Egypt to the south and the changing empires of Syria, Assyria and Babylon to the north. Their country was an inevitable high road between these latter powers and Egypt. 1 Their importance in the world is due to the fact that they produced a written literature, a world history, a collection of laws, chronicles, psalms, books of wisdom, poetry and fiction and political utterances which became at last what Christians know as the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. This literature appears in history in the fourth or fifth century B.C. 2 Probably this literature was first put together in Babylon. We have already told how the Pharaoh, Necho II, invaded the Assyrian Empire while Assyria was fighting for life against Medes, Persians and Chaldeans. Josiah King of Judah opposed him, and was defeated and slain at Megiddo (608 B.C.). Judah became a tributary to Egypt, and when Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the new Chaldean king in Babylon, rolled back Necho into Egypt, he attempted to manage Judah by setting up puppet kings in Jerusalem. The experiment failed, the people massacred his Babylonian officials, and he then determined to break up this little state altogether, which had long been playing off Egypt against the northern empire. Jerusalem was sacked and burnt, and the remnant of the people was carried off captive to Babylon. 3 There they remained until Cyrus took Babylon (538 B.C.). He then collected them together and sent them back to resettle their country and rebuild the walls and temple of Jerusalem. 4 Before that time the Jews do not seem to have been a very civilized or united people. Probably only a very few of them could read or write. In their own history one never hears of the early books of the Bible being read; the first mention of a book is in the time of Josiah. The Babylonian captivity civilized them and consolidated them. They returned aware of their own literature, an acutely self-conscious and political people. 5 Their Bible at that time seems to have consisted only of the Pentateuch, that is to say the first five books of the Old Testament as we know it. In addition, as separate books they already had many of the other books that have since been incorporated with the Pentateuch into the present Hebrew Bible, Chronicles, the Psalms and Proverbs for example. 6 The accounts of the Creation of the World, of Adam and Eve and of the Flood, with which the Bible begins, run closely parallel with similar Babylonian legends; they seem to have been part of the common beliefs of all the Semetic peoples. So too the stories of Moses and of Samson have Sumerian and Babylonian parallels. But with the story of Abraham and onward begins something more special to the Jewish race. 7 Abraham may have lived as early as the days of Hammurabi in Babylon. He was a patriarchal Semitic nomad. To the book of Genesis the reader must go for the story of his wanderings and for the stories of his sons and grandchildren and how they became captive in the Land of Egypt. He travelled through Canaan, and the God of Abraham, says the Bible story, promised this smiling land of prosperous cities to him and to his children. 8 And after a long sojourn in Egypt and after fifty years of wandering in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses, the children of Abraham, grown now to a host of twelve tribes, invaded the land of Canaan from the Arabian deserts to the East. They may have done this somewhen between 1600 B.C. and 1300 B.C.; there are no Egyptian records of Moses nor of Canaan at this time to help out the story. But at any rate they did not succeed in conquering any more than the hilly backgrounds of the promised land. The coast was now in the hands, not of the Canaanites but of newcomers, those Ægean peoples, the Philistines; and their cities, Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon and Joppa successfully withstood the Hebrew attack. For many generations the children of Abraham remained an obscure people of the hilly back country engaged in incessant bickerings with the Philistines and with the kindred tribes about them, the Moabites, the Midianites and so forth. The reader will find in the book of Judges a record of their struggles and disasters during this period. For very largely it is a record of disasters and failures frankly told. 9 For most of this period the Hebrews were ruled, so far as there was any rule among them, by priestly judges selected by the elders of the people, but at last somewhen towards 1000 B.C. they chose themselves a king, Saul, to lead them in battle. But Saul’s leading was no great improvement upon the leading of the Judges; he perished under the hail of Philistine arrows at the battle of Mount Gilboa, his armour went into the temple of the Philistine Venus, and his body was nailed to the walls of Beth-shan. 10 His successor David was more successful and more politic. With David dawned the only period of prosperity the Hebrew peoples were ever to know. It was based on a close alliance with the Phoenician city of Tyre, whose King Hiram seems to have been a man of very great intelligence and enterprise. He wished to secure a trade route to the Red Sea through the Hebrew hill country. Normally Phœnician trade went to the Red Sea by Egypt, but Egypt was in a state of profound disorder at this time; there may have been other obstructions to Phœnician trade along this line, and at any rate Hiram established the very closest relations both with David and with his son and successor Solomon. Under Hiram’s auspices the walls, palace and temple of Jerusalem arose, and in return Hiram built and launched his ships on the Red Sea. A very considerable trade passed northward and southward through Jerusalem. And Solomon achieved a prosperity and magnificence unprecedented in the experience of his people. He was even given a daughter of Pharaoh in marriage. 11 But it is well to keep the proportion of things in mind. At the climax of his glories Solomon was only a little subordinate king in a little city. His power was so transitory that within a few years of his death, Shishak the first Pharaoh of the twenty-second dynasty, had taken Jerusalem and looted most of his splendours. The account of Solomon’s magnificence given in the books of Kings and Chronicles is questioned by many critics. They say that it was added to and exaggerated by the patriotic pride of later writers. But the Bible account read carefully is not so overwhelming as it appears at the first reading. Solomon’s temple, if one works out the measurements, would go inside a small suburban church, and his fourteen hundred chariots cease to impress us when we learn from an Assyrian monument that his successor Ahab sent a contingent of two thousand to the Assyrian army. It is also plainly manifest from the Bible narrative that Solomon spent himself in display and overtaxed and overworked his people. At his death the northern part of his kingdom broke off from Jerusalem and became the independent kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem remained the capital city of Judah. 12 The prosperity of the Hebrew people was short-lived. Hiram died, and the help of Tyre ceased to strengthen Jerusalem. Egypt grew strong again. The history of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah becomes a history of two little states ground between, first, Syria, then Assyria and then Babylon to the north and Egypt to the south. It is a tale of disasters and of deliverances that only delayed disaster. It is a tale of barbaric kings ruling a barbaric people. In 721 B.C. the kingdom of Israel was swept away into captivity by the Assyrians and its people utterly lost to history. Judah struggled on until in 604 B.C., as we have told, it shared the fate of Israel. There may be details open to criticism in the Bible story of Hebrew history from the days of the Judges onward, but on the whole it is evidently a true story which squares with all that has been learnt in the excavation of Egypt and Assyria and Babylon during the past century. 13 It was in Babylon that the Hebrew people got their history together and evolved their tradition. The people who came back to Jerusalem at the command of Cyrus were a very different people in spirit and knowledge from those who had gone into captivity. They had learnt civilization. In the development of their peculiar character a very great part was played by certain men, a new sort of men, the Prophets, to whom we must now direct our attention. These Prophets mark the appearance of new and remarkable forces in the steady development of human society. 14 XXI. The Early History of the Jews ---------- A Jewish Rabbi Challenges Whether Ancient History Supports The Biblical Account Of The Exodus And Why Blacks In America Should Be Interested In The Controversy (Part 4) Next week we will get into the aspects of the conspiracy against the Children Of Israel. Now, think over something from Minister Jabril Muhammad's This Is The One now available in E-Book form. On page 111 he writes: "Consider the following: 'of the life and career of Moses there is no Egyptian record at all; there is no account of any plagues of Egypt or of any pharaoh who was drowned in the Red Sea.'(The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, Vol. I page 206.) "By no means was H.G. Wells the only white scholar to point out that the Jews did not serve in Egypt 400 years as slaves. Read the argument of Jesus against their claim to be Abraham's seed in the 8th chapter of John." We will follow Minister Jabril Muhammad's advice by looking at part of the 8th Chapter of John from a few different translations. Here from the NIV translation: John 8 31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." 33 They answered him, "We are Abraham's descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free From the King James version: 8:31 Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; 8:32 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. 8:33 They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou *, Ye shall be made free? From The New American Standard: John 8:31 So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, "If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; John 8:32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." John 8:33 They answered Him, "We are Abraham's descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it that You say, 'You will become free'?" From The Revised Standard Version: John 8 31 Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." 33 They answered him, "We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How is it that you say, 'You will be made free'?" We end with question : Does the response of the Jews, to Jesus, that they were never enslaved provide evidence that helps to verify Rabbi David Wolpe's opinion that there is no evidence that the Jews fulfilled Genesis 15:13-14 by living what was written in the book of Exodus. What of what H.G. Wells wrote, which was quoted in the book This Is The One? How should Black pastors, who preach in the name of Jesus handle this? Finally, consider this from a recent article in The Philadelphia Inquirer: Leading a mission to alter Bible phrase that can hurt Local man finds the portrayal of the Jewish people offensive. Irvin J. Borowsky said New Testament depictions of Jews surprised him. By David O'Reilly INQUIRER STAFF WRITER "So, because Jesus was doing [healings] on the Sabbath, the Jews persecuted him. . . . For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him." John 5:16-18 (New International Version) The Jews. It is a term that appears 195 times in the New Testament. And ever since the early Christian era, Jews striving to comprehend their persecution by Crusaders, Cossacks, Nazis or village thugs have lamented their New Testament portrait as Christ-killers. "After this, Jesus traveled in Galilee, since He did not want to travel in Judea because the Jews were trying to kill Him." (John 7:1, Holman Christian Standard Bible). But unlike the millions who have shrugged off - or suffered under - the New Testament image of "the Jews," Irvin J. Borowsky is on a campaign to rid the Good Book of its dark depiction of his people. A retired magazine publisher and founder of the Liberty Museum in Old City, Borowsky has for 19 years been urging Bible publishers to find other ways to translate the Greek hoi Ioudaioi - literally, "the Jews." The New Testament was written in Greek. Hoi Ioudaioi (pronounced hoy yu-dye-yoy) appears 151 times in John and Acts, often referring to enemies of Jesus. "The New Testament has led to the murder of one out of two Jews in history, all based on the idea that Jews killed Jesus," said Borowsky, 76. "But Jesus was a Jew. His disciples were Jews, and so were all his early followers." Borowsky began his campaign in 1982 after finding a Gideon Bible in the dresser of a Chicago hotel room. Leafing through its New Testament, he encountered images of Jews that he said left him "rather shocked." Though not a particularly observant Jew, he soon created the American Interfaith Institute, dedicated to "rethinking relationships among Protestants, Catholics and Jews." Through books, international symposiums, and a scholarly newsletter, the institute, based at the Liberty Museum, proposes that hoi Ioudaioi be translated not as "the Jews" but with equivalents drawn from the scriptural context, such as "the people" or "the religious leaders" or "some Jews." Read the entire article over and think deeply into how it connects with what we have been writing in this series Cedric Muhammad Sunday, August 12, 2001