Kratak osvrt na djelo "Marxa antisemita" Kevina MacDonalda (v. na engleskoj wikipediji o djelima, dostupna su i na libgen i drugdje), koga bih knjige o antisemitizmu preporučio svakomu, kao primjer tendencioznih iskrivljavanja i opskurantizma pomiješanih s točnim uvidima.
I’ve already said that most MacDonald’s claims were bogus.
To analyze most of his specific claims is as useless & boring as are most of his grand assertions.
He says that Jews “follow group evolutionary strategy”. He didn’t prove that such a strategy exists at all, apart from a trivial observation that any human collective wants to preserve its identity & to thrive. No “strategy” in such a behavior.
Also, the author’s description of “Jewish movements” is non-verifiable & actually difficult to describe. From what I know of Marxism, psychoanalysis or Leninism- these were not “Jewish” movements, neither in intellectual genesis nor with regard to their proponents.
What about other intellectual currents, prominent in the 20th & 21st C? Do these movements or cultural currents qualify as “Jewish”: anarchism, free-love leftism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, German phenomenology in philosophy, cultural critique (Derrida & Foucault following Heidegger), New Left with its post-1968 ideology, multiculturalism as ideology, Jungian archetypal psychology, New Age ideologies, radical Feminism, “New Atheism”, evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, various schools of economics (Austrian, Chicago,..), structuralism in humanities, ..?
What about areas where ethnic Jews are over-represented in the 20th & 21st fields: theoretical physics, all branches of mathematics, chess masters, computer science, violin virtuosi, philanthropists in arts & curators of museums, film directors & producers, ..? Are these areas somehow driven by Jewish interests, whether conscious or not? How can we ascertain this?
Although I admire MacDonald’s work in demolition of maudlin myth the core American Jewish community has over time built about themselves (eternal victims & universal humanitarians), I don’t see his work as dispassionate analysis that would be close to even such a non-exact “science” as evolutionary psychology claims to be. With its broad sweep of generalizations, MacDonald’s work on historical traits of Judaism (as cultural-historical identity) is not unlike other historiosophies, similar to St. Augustine, Gioacchino da Fiore, Hegel, Marx or Spengler.
There are insights in these works- but they are basically an imaginative construction, not more.
Jews are ethnic religious tribalists who had, many of them, lived in Europe for more than 2000 years. Somewhere during Nero’s rule, they constituted 5-10% of the Roman Empire, i.e. 5-6 million people. Had they had an opportunity for natural growth, there would have been ca. 250-400 million of them now. But, most of them assimilated, vanished into greater Pagan & then Christian communities. So much for stubborn insistence of religious-ethnic pride.
There is no “group evolutionary strategy”, only if it stands for something trivial: any ethnic-national group wants to exist ad infinitum & prosper. This applies to every single human community.
As for Jews being particularly ethno-centric, this may be the truth in comparison with some other groups, but they didn’t differ from Zoroastrian Iranians or Hindu Brahmins; there is no way to empirically verify whether their ethnocentrism is rooted in ancient religious texts older than 1500 years (Babylonian Talmud, 250-600 AD) or something else. No causal connection can be made & all this is bogus.
With regard to MacDonald’s thesis that Jews are culturally-genetically predisposed to domination in host societies, this is an easily refutable canard: they lived harmoniously, peacefully & productively during Parthian, Zoroastrian, Abbasid empires, Cordoba caliphate, Ottoman Empire…as well as in the 17th-18th C Netherlands or the 18th C Prussia. They tried (and to a larger degree succeeded) to assimilate into British & German Empires, from the beginning to the end.
MacDonald’s theses are very simple & cannot pass the test of any rational & empirical investigation.
Jews are, according to him, essentially, due to a compound of genes, history, religious ideology,… eternal enemy of the “white race”. Not real. They lived among Europeans for almost 2 millennia & had virtually always been at the receiving end. After their Enlightenment at the end of the 18th C, they avidly secularized themselves & were literally hungry for the riches of high European culture (arts, sciences, technology, ..), trying to assimilate as fast as they could. No “evolutionary group strategy” here, not anything that would preserve them as an alien dominant cultural-biological ethnicity..
Jews are far from a monolith existing in MacDonald fantasy. It is true they, those of them who still possess Jewish identity, try to help their co-religionists if they are in trouble (which is a perfectly normal behavior). But, their primary loyalty is to their host societies, which can be seen from German Jewish behavior during WW1, when their military deaths were higher than their percentage in the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judenzählung French Jews fought for France, British for Britain etc.
According to MacDonald, Jews are basically destructive to a host society, like a group of pathogen bacteria swarming & sucking life out of their host-victim. They’re, actually, not unlike cancer. Another example of dehumanization & antisemitic nonsense. What does he say about the good they’ve done to their host societies, in culture, wealth, inventions, development of commerce, journalism, agriculture, arts,..
Persistent MacDonald’s myth is about their extraordinarily high levels of endogamous practice. In reality, Catholic and Protestants didn’t mix much until the 20th C, and Jews (not converts) have been in mixed marriages with German Christians at the rate of 30-40%, during 1933 (Hitler’s rise to power); now, more than 50-60% of Jews outmarry and more than 80-90% of them do so in Russia. Where is this MacDonald’s grand “evolutionary strategy”?
Then, he is tendentious. MacDonald presents Spanish conversos/Marranos from the 15th and 16th C as ethnically-racially homogeneous groups. A part of them must have stayed that way- it is perfectly natural that forcibly converted people (who had already possessed their written culture & rituals) will adopt chameleon-like behavior. So did Moriscos, forcibly converted Muslim Arabs. So, it’s not about specific Jewish traits; it is about religious violence & natural resistance of people who had found themselves on the receiving end of pressure for religious conformity. MacDonald implies that many, perhaps most Marranos succeeded in surviving the Inquisition in the next 2-3 centuries. True, some Marranos have succeeded to retain their identity & emigrate later to the Netherlands or Ottoman empire, but most of them vanished into broader Iberian societies.
Conspicuously, MacDonald has glossed over the fact that most Jewish Germans in the 19th C had been assimilated with a high percentage of intermarriage. Marranos in the 16th C did-at least a part of them-tried to retain their separate identity. Not so in early 19th C Germany, where many Jews had voluntarily been baptized & completely assimilated into German society-no Jewish separatism & tribal behavior. No “Jewish Christian” secret societies, clannish behavior, endogamous marriages…
The Mendelssohn family simply disappeared among other Germans.
How so if they’re an eternally alien ethnic group? Where can I see that famous survival strategy? This “strategy”, it seems, leads only to obliteration of a separate national identity.
Or, after all, Einstein (whose descendants are not Jews) was right: If it were not for antisemitism, Jews wou kold have dispersed like leaves in the wind.