Kevin MacDonald on Hellenism cf. Judaism, and the Jewish Role in the 60s Counterculture & New Left.
Selections by Peter Myers; my comments are shown {thus}, June 4, 2001; update July 26, 2007.
Write to me at contact.html.
You are at http://mailstar.net/macdonald.html.
Suppose the 50s be called Thesis, and the 60s Counterculture called Antithesis, then I advocate Synthesis, whereas MacDonald advocates a return to Thesis. But his books are cogently argued and deserve debate.
(1) Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (2) Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique
(1) Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (Praeger, Westport, CT, 1994):
{p. 58} From an evolutionary perspective, the uniqueness of the Jews lies in their being the only people to successfully remain intact and resist normal assimilative processes after living for very long periods as a minority in other societies. This unique resistance to assimilation dates from the period of the Babylonian exile and perhaps even the Egyptian sojourn described in Genesis. Bickerman (1988, 38; see also Cohen 1987) points out that in the ancient world there were voluntary diasporas of Greek, Aramaic, and Phoenician peoples, which eventually became assimilated into the surrounding societies. Moreover, it was a common practice of the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians to displace the peoples whom they had conquered, just as the Jews were displaced during the Babylonian exile. For considerable periods, it was common for these displaced peoples to live in separate communities and to continue to identify with the ethnic group and the religion that were left behind: "It could hardly be otherwise: the tribal organization of oriental peoples blocked the road to assimilation" (Bickerman 1988, 38). However, in the long run, these displaced peoples became assimilated, while the Jews did not.
{p. 59} During the period of Greek hegemony, the Jewish religion was unique in forcibly resisting Hellenizing influences (Schurer [1885] 1973, 146), and the Jewish struggle with Rome was the most prolonged and violent of any of the peoples in the Empire. Indeed, one of the major results of the development of the Roman Republic and Empire was that the great diversity of ethnic groups, which characterized Italy and the rest of the Mediterranean region, was largely assimilated. For example, in Italy during the fiflh century B.C., Etruscans Samnites, Umbrians, Latins, Romans, and a variety of other groups were assimilated into a larger culture in which these ethnic divisions disappeared
The Jews were the only ethnic group to survive intact after the upheavals that occurred at the end of antiquity. After the barbarian invasions and the collapse of the Roman Empire, there were further assimilative processes. The agricultural peoples of the Middle East, with the exception of the Jews, lost their identities in the early Islamic period (Goitein 1974). Moreover, Christianity steadily disappeared in parts of the Arab empire, but flourishing Jewish communities remained even after Jews were relegated to a subservient, humiliated status. Similarly, Lea (1906-07, 139ff) notes the existence of Ostragoths, Visigoths, Celt-Iberians, and Romans in seventh-century Spain, but only the Jews survived as an independent ethnic group - the others presumably becoming completely assimilated via intermarriage. In general, after the barbarian invasions, Western Europe was a mixture of Roman and Germanic peoples whose ethnic identities, with the exception of the Jews, were eventually lost (e.g., Brundage 1987, Geaty 1988). And there were a variety of national groups in medieval and post-medieval Poland besides the Poles and the Jews, particularly Scots, Germans, Armenians, and Tatars. Hundert (1986a) notes that by the end of the 18th century, these other groups had become assimilated and there were the beginnings of a Catholic bourgeoisie resulting from the amalgamation of these groups. The Jews, however, remained separate.
JEWISH CULTURAL SEPARATISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
[The rulers of Alexandria] set apart for them a particular place, that they might live without being polluted [by the gentiles]. (Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews. 2:487-488)
There is excellent evidence indicating that Jews actively maintained cultural separatism in the ancient world and that this cultural separatism acted to prevent exogamy. The following passage from 1 Maccabees (second century B.C.) illustrates the perceived connection between assimilation and intermarriage:
At that time there appeared in Israel a group of renegade Jews, who incited the people. 'Let us enter into a covenant with the Gentiles round about,' they
{p. 60} said, 'because disaster upon disaster has overtaken us since we segregated ourselves from them.' The people thought this a good argument, and some of them in their enthusiasm went to the king and received authority to introduce non-Jewish laws and customs. They built a sport stadium in the gentile style in Jerusalem. They removed their marks of circumcision and repudiated the holy covenant. They intemarried with Gentiles, and abandoned themselves to evil ways. (1 Macc. 1:11-15)
Assimilation was thus beginning to lead to intermarriage. However, the result of the Hasmonean victory and the end of Greek domination "was to set up anew walls of separation between Hebrew and heathen" (Epstein 1942, 168). The Book of Jubilees, written during this period, shows an extreme concem for intermarriage. "If there is any man in Israel who wishes to give his daughter or his sister to any man who is of the stock of the gentiles, he shall surely die, and they shall stone him with stones ... and they shall bum the woman with fire because she hath dishonored the name of the house of her father and she shall be rooted out of Israel" (Jub. 30:7). A variety of separatist practices derive from this period, including prohibitions on feasting with gentiles, using wine or oil from gentiles, and having any kind of sexual contact with gentiles. Although Epstein (1942, 170) notes that the racialism of Ezra was replaced by religious nationalism as the basis for erecting barriers against intermarriage, it goes without saying that the end result was the same from an evolutionary perspective: genetic segregation of the Jewish gene pool from the surrounding peoples. ...
{p. 231} Later, during the Roman period, Jews alone of all the subject peoples in the Roman Empire engaged in prolonged, even suicidal wars against the government in order to attain national sovereignty. Baron (1952b) notes that Titus's victory was the result of a very difficult campaign. Even after this, the Jews remained defiant and unassimilable, and there were two other rebellions: in Alexandria and other areas in Egypt, Cyprus, Cyrenaica, Libya, and possibly Mesopotamia and Judaea during the reign of Trajan (115-117 A.D.) and in Judaea during the reign of Hadrian (131-135 A.D.) under Simon Bar Kocheba. The latter held out for over three years against the best of Hadrian's generals, with many dying as martyrs. There were also rebellions during Constantine's rein in 326 and under Patricius in 351. There were also several very bloody revolts against Byzantine authority in Palestine during the fifth and sixth centuries (Avi-Yonah 1984, 251, 254; Bachrach 1984).
The Jews were by far the most vehement in their objection to Roman rule, compared to any of the many peoples of the Empire. Alon ([1980, 1984] 1989, 698) notes "the long, drawn-out stubborn refusal of the Jews to come to any kind of terms with Roman rule" and the fact that even after the thaw Jews never completely submitted to "the wicked kingdom" (p. 698). Many authors have noted the religious fanaticism of the Jews in the ancient world and their willingness to die rather than tolerate offenses to Israel or live under foreign
{p. 232} domination. For example, Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian and apologist, stated that
[We face] death on behalf of our laws with a courage which no other nation can equal. (Against Apion, 2:234)
And from these laws of ours nothing has had power to deflect us, neither fear of our masters, nor envy of the institutions esteemed by other nations. (Against Apion, 2:271 )
Although not all Jews were willing to die rather than betray the law, "story after story reveals that this generalization is true" (Sanders 1992, 42). "No other nation can be shown to have fought so often in defence of its own way of life, and the readiness of Jews to die for their cause is proved by example after example" (Sanders 1992, 239). Crossan (1991,103ff) shows that Jewish political activity against the Romans often included threats of martyrdom if external signs of Roman domination were not removed from Jerusalem and the Temple. Only the Jews, of all of Rome's subject peoples, were exempted from having to sacrifice to the Empire's gods, and they were the only group that was allowed to have their own courts and an ex officio government under the Patriarchate/Sanhedrin.
{p. 238} Bickerman (1988) notes the relatively greater sense of ethnic exclusiveness ong the Near Eastern peoples than was apparent in the Greek world of antiquity. The Greek view of cities in the ancient world was that they were open to any person and that any person who adopted the language and customs of these cities could feel at home. Indeed, there is considerable scholarly agreement that Greek anti-Semitism in the ancient world derived from the fact that Jews wanted political rights, but unwilling to adopt a common language and set of customs with the Greeks (see SAID, ch. 2). On the other hand, "[o]riental civilizations had no concept of naturalization and were averse to acculturation" (Bickerman 1987, 80). This general contrast is also compatible with Johnson's (1987, 134) point that the Greek conceptualization of a multi-racial, multi-national society strongly conflicted with Jewlsh separatism and unwillingness to respect the deities and practices of other peoples.
The Romans are generally viewed as being derived from an ethnically mixed group of Italians and other groups (McDonald 1966). Moreover, the long-term trend in the Roman Empire was for gradually increasing conferral of citizenship, culminating in the granting of virtually universal citizenship in 212 A.D. by Caracalla. There was also a gradual representation of provincials in the senate
{p. 239} and equestrian order, and provincials replaced Italians as emperors by the third century (Garnsey & Saller 1987, 9). Jordan (1989, 111) notes the general tolerance of "alien" groups in Roman society and the idealization of this tolerance in Roman jurisprudence.
Indeed, as Schurer (1885] 1986,132) notes, the Roman imperial government tended to protect the Jews from repeated outbreaks of hostility in cities throughout the Empire. And the Roman government repeatedly confirmed the right of Jews (unique among the subject peoples) to their own religious communities and their exemption from sacrifiing to the imperial cults and from service in the military. As a result, a major source of popular anti-Semitism in the ancient world derived from the Jewish unwillinness to participate in a homogeneous, assimilative culture: "Precisely at the time when through Roman world-rule and the levelling effect of Hellenism there was a general tendency for local cultures either to be submerged or to be absorbed in the overall Graeco-Roman culture, it must have been felt as doubly frustrating that only the Jews were unwilling to be thought of as taking part in the process of amalgamation" (Schurer [1885] 1986, 152-153; see also SAID, ch. 2).
The Greek and Roman pattern of conquest and empire-building, unlike that of the Israelites described in the Tanakh, did not involve genocide followed by the creation of an ethnically exclusive state that dominated the remnants of the conquered peoples (the Nethinim) and never assimilated them even after many centuries. Rather, the tendency was for conquest to be followed in the long run by genetic and cultural assimilation.
The paradigm for such assimilative behavior is Alexander the Great's intention of building a universalist state in which there would be complete genetic and cultural assimilation with the conquered peoples - the dream of a universal world-state based on universal brotherhood and partnership and on cooperation between conquerors and conquered (see Hegermann 1989). Alexander adopted many Persian cultural practices (e.g., type of dress and court ceremonies), and he married an Iranian princess and forced his men to do the same. In contrast, the whole point of historical Judaism has been to resist alien cultures. Moreover, Israelites who married foreign women in the period of conquest after the Exodus and in the resettlement after the Babylonian exile were condemned and excluded, and Joshua "destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD, the God of Israel, commanded" (Josh. 10:40).
Similarly, the Germanic conquerors of the Roman Empire in the fifth century took their places among their new subjects largely without displacing the former citizens of the Empire, so that in some areas people were quite unaware that they were no longer members of the Empire (see Geary 1988). Eventually, there was complete cultural and genetic assimilation among the conquerors and their new subjects.
{p. 241} The Christian Church, despite its obvious Jewish origins, is from an evolutionary perspective fundamentally opposed to Judaism in matters of interest to an evolutionist. Boyarin (1993, 6) contrasts the basic Jewish concern with sexuality, reproduction, genealogy, and a concept of historical peoplehood based on genetic relatedness with the denial of the importance of these quaiities in Christianity. Early Christian thinkers criticized the Jewish tendency to take these Biblical themes literally, while they themselves tended to allegorize these Biblical themes and created new cultural symbols such as the virgin birth and the cultural ideal of celibacy, which were diametrically opposed to these Jewish themes. ...
Moreover, while collectivist societies emphasize genealogy and degree of genetic relatedness in marriage, individualist societies tend to emphasize personal attraction (e.g., romantic love, common interests) (Triandis 1990). ...
{end of quotes}
(2) Kevin MacDonald, THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Praeger, Westport, CT, 1998).
{p. 1 Chapter 1} {quote} For 1,500 years Jewish society had been designed to produce intellectuals. ... Jewish society was geared to support them.... Rich merchants married sages' daughters; . . . Quite suddenly, around the year 1800, this ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals began to shift its output. Instead of pouring all its products into the closed circuit of rabbinical studies, . . . it unleashed a significant and ever-growing proportion of them into secular life. This was an event of shattering importance in world history. {end quote} (A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson 1988, 340-341)
An important theme of Separation and Its Discontents (hereafter SAID) {volume 2 in this trilogy} was the manipulation of ideology in the service of rationalizing specific forms of Judaism, interpreting history, and combating anti-Semitism. The present volume is in many ways an extension of these phenomena. However, the intellectual movements and political activity discussed in this volume have typically occurred in the wider intellectual and political world and have not been designed to rationalize specific forms of Judaism. Rather, they may be characterized in the broadest sense as efforts at cultural criticism and at times as attempts to influence the wider culture of the society in a manner that conforms to specific Jewish interests.
There is no implication here of a unified Jewish "conspiracy" to undermine gentile culture, as portrayed in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Since the Enlightenment, Judaism has never been a unified, monolithic movement, and there has clearly been a great deal of disagreement among Jews as to how to protect themselves and attain their interests during this period. The movements discussed in this volume (Boasian anthropology, political radicalism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals) were advanced by relatively few individuals
{p. 8} Anti-Semitism among university professors during the Weimar period was partially fueled by the perception that "the Jew represented the critical or 'negative' aspects of modern thought, the acids of analysis and skepticism that helped to dissolve the moral certainties, patriotic commitment, and social cohesion of modern states" (Ringer 1983, 7). Reflecting this perception, National Socialist propaganda during the period claimed that Jews attempted to undermine the social cohesion of gentile society while remaining committed to a highly cohesive group themselves -- an intellectual double standard in which the basis of social cohesion among gentiles was subjected to intense criticism while the Jews "would retain their international cohesiveness, blood ties, and spiritual unity" (Aschheim 1985, 239). Viewed from this perspective an important goal of Jewish intellectual effort may be understood as attempting to undermine cohesive gentile group strategies while continuing to engage in their own highly cohesive group strategy. This issue re-emerges in the discussion of Jewish involvement in radical political movements and the Frankfurt School of Social Research in Chapters 3 and 5.
This phenomenon was not restricted to Germany. Gilson (1962, 31-32), in discussing his Jewish professors at the turn of the century in France, states:
The doctrines of these university professors were really quite different from one another. Even the personal philosophy of Levy-Bruhl did not coincide exactly with that of Durkheim, while Frederic Rauh was going his own way.... The only element common to their doctrines is a negative one, but nonetheless real and very active in its own order. One might describe it as a radical defiance of all that which is social conceived as a constraint from which to be liberated. Spinoza and Bmnschvieg achieved this liberation through metaphysics. Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl through science and sociology, Bergson through intuition.
Jews have also been at the forefront of the adversarial culture in the United States, England, and France since the mid-1960s, especially as defenders of the adversary culture in the media and the academic world (Ginsberg 1993 125ff; Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 66 67).4 Stein (1979, 28; see also Lichter et al. 1994; Powers et al. 1996) shows that his sample of predominantly Jewish writers and producers of television shows in the 1970s had very negative attitudes toward what they viewed as a gentile-dominated cultural establishment, although their most negative comments were elicited in informal conversation rather than during formal interviews. Television portrayals of gentile establishment figures in business and the military tended to be very negative. For example, "the writers clearly thought of military men as clean-shaven blond, and of completely WASP background. In the minds of a few of the people I interviewed, these blond officers were always a hair's breadth away from becoming National Socialists. They were thought of as part of an Aryan
{p. 9} ruling class that actually or potentially repressed those of different ethnic backgrounds" (pp. 55-56).
Indeed, Glazer and Moynihan (1963/1970) credit the emergence of the adversary culture in the United States as a triumph of the New York Jewish cultural-political perspective. Jewish writers and visual artists (including E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller,5 Frederick Wiseman, and Norman Lear) were disproportionately involved in attempts to portray American society as "sick" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 120). A common technique of cultural subversion "involves an attack upon genuine inequities or irrationalities. Since all societies abound in both, there is never an absence of targets. However, the attack is generally not directed at the particular inequity or irrationality per se. Rather, such inequities or irrationalities are used as a means for achieving a larger purpose: the general weakening of the social order itself" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 120).
In this volume I will concentrate on Jewish involvement in movements opposed to evolutionary, biological, and genetic findings in the social sciences, radical political ideology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals. These movements are not specifically Jewish in the sense that they are not intended to rationalize specific aspects of Judaism such as cultural and genetic separatism. A major point will be that Jews were vastly overrepresented in these movements, that a strong sense of Jewish identity characterized the great majority of these individuals, and that all involved alienation from and rejection of gentile culture.
The discussion therefore reflects Sorkin's (1985, 102) description of nineteenth-century German-Jewish intellectuals as constituting an "invisible community of acculturating German Jews who perpetuated distinct cultural forms within the majority culture." The Jewish cultural contribution to the wider gentile culture was therefore accomplished from a highly particularistic perspective in which Jewish group identity continued to be of paramount importance despite its "invisibility." Even Berthold Auerbach (b. 1812), the exemplar of the assimilated Jewish intellectual, "manipulate[d] elements of the majority culture in a way peculiar to the German-Jewish minority" (Sorkin 1985, 107). Auerbach became a model, for secular Jewish intellectuals, of the assimilated Jew who did not renounce his Judaism. For the most part, these secular Jewish intellectuals socialized exclusively with other secular Jews and viewed their contribution to German culture as a secular form of Judaism - thus the "invisible community" of strongly identified Jewish intellectuals. This cultural manipulation in the service of group interests was a common theme of anti-Semitic writings. Thus, Heinrich Heine's critique of German culture was viewed as directed at the pursuit of power for his group at the expense of the cohesiveness of gentile society (see Mosse 1970, 52).
In several of the movements discussed in the following chapters it is of considerable importance that their propagators have attempted to clothe their rhetoric in the garb of science - the modem arbiter of truth and intellectual
{p. 10} respectability. As White (1966, 2) notes with respect to the Boasian school of anthropology. the aura of science is deceptive: "They would make it appear and would have everyone believe that their choice of premises and goals has been detelmined by scientific considerations. This is definitely not the case.... They are obviously sincere. Their sincerity and group loyalty tend, however, to persuade and consequently to deceive."
The comment is an excellent illustration of Robert Trivers's (1985) evolutionary theory of self-deception: The best deceivers are those who are self-deceived. At times the deception becomes conscious. Charles Liebman (1973, 213 ) describes his unselfconscious acceptance of universalist ideologies (behaviorism and liberalism) in his work as a social scientist and suggests that he was engaged in self-deception regarding the role of Jewish identification in his beliefs: "As a behaviorist (and a liberal) I can testify to having been quite unselfconscious about my academic methodology, but I suspect that this would have to be the case. Otherwise I would be defeating the very universalism I espouse."
CONCEPTUALIZING THE JEWISH RADICAL CRITICISM OF GENTILE SOCIETY
The foregoing has documented a general tendency for Jewish intellectuals in a variety of periods to be involved with social criticism, and I have hinted at an analysis in terms of social identity theory. More formally, two quite different types of reasons explain why Jews might be expected to advocate ideologies and political movements aimed at undermining the existing gentile social order.
First, such ideologies and movements may be directed at benefiting Jews economically or socially. Clearly one of the themes of post-Enlightenment Judaism has been the rapid upward mobility of Jews and attempts by gentile power structures to limit Jewish access to power and social status. Given this rather conspicuous reality, practical reasons of economic and political selfinterest would result in Jews being attracted to movements that criticized the gentile power structure or even advocated overthrowing it entirely.
Thus the czarist government of Russia enforced restrictions on Jews mainly out of fear that Jews would overwhelm gentile Russians in free economic competition (Lindemann 1991; SAID, Ch. 2). These czarist restrictions on Jews were a prominent rallying point for Jews around the world, and it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that Jewish participation in radical movements in Russia was motivated by perceived Jewish interest in overthrowing the czarist regime. Indeed, Arthur Liebman (1979, 29ff) notes that Jewish political radicalism in czarist Russia must be understood as resulting from economic restrictions on Jews that were enforced by the government in the context of considerable Jewish poverty and a very rapid Jewish demographic increase. Similarly, well into the 1930s the Jewish socialist labor movement in the
{p. 11} United States aimed at bettering the working conditions of its predominantly Jewish membership (Liebman 1979, 267).
Another practical goal of Jewish political and intellectual movements has been to combat anti-Semitism. For example, Jewish attraction to socialism in many countries in the 1930s was motivated partly by communist opposition to fascism and anti-Semitism (Lipset 1988, 383; Marcus 1983). The general association between anti-Semitism and conservative political views has often been advanced as an explanation for Jewish involvement with the left, including the leftist tendencies of many wealthy Jews (e.g., Lipset 1988, 375ff). Combating anti-Semitism also became a prime goal of Jewish radicals in the United States after Jews had predominantly moved into the middle class (Levin 1977, 211). Rising anti-Semitism and consequent restrictions on Jewish upward mobility during the 1930s also resulted in an attraction of Jews to the left (Liebman 1979, 420ff, 507).
It will be apparent in Chapter 2 that the cultural determinism of the Boasian school of anthropology functioned to combat anti-Semitism by combating racialist thinking and eugenic programs advocated mainly by gentiles. Psychoanalysis (Ch. 4) and the Frankfurt School (Ch. 5) have also been instrumental in developing and propagating theories of anti-Semitism which attribute anti-Semitism to irrational projections of gentiles. In the case of the Frankfurt School, the theory also functioned to pathologize gentile group allegiances as a symptom of a psychiatric disorder while ignoring Jewish group cohesion.
Second, Jewish involvement in social criticism may be influenced by social identity processes independent of any practical goal such as ending antiSemitism. Research in social identity processes finds a tendency for displacement of ingroup views away from outgroup norms (Hogg & Abrams 1988). In the case of Jewish-gentile contact, these outgroup norms would paradigmatically represent the consensus views of the gentile society. Moreover, individuals who identify themselves as Jews would be expected to develop negative attributions regarding the outgroup, and for Jews the most salient outgroup is the gentile power structure and indeed the gentile-dominated social structure generally.
Jewish ingroup status vis-a-vis the gentile world as an outgroup would be expected to lead to a generalized negative conceptualization of the gentile outgroup and a tendency to overemphasize the negative aspects of gentile society and social structure. From the social identity perspective, the Jewish tendency to subvert the social order is thus expected to extend beyond developing ideologies and social programs that satisfy specific Jewish economic and social interests and extend to a general devaluation and critique of gentile culture - "the sheer destructive power of Jewish rationalism once it escaped the restraints of the traditional community" (Johnson 1988, 291-292).
The social identity perspective also pledicts that such negative attributions are especially likely if the gentile power stluchlre is anti-Semitic or perceived
{p. 14} affiliation (i.e., group identity) rather than from individual effort: "In the sixteenth century the scale of values became ever more unbalanced, resulting in the concept that it was more important to establish who the person was rather than evaluate his capacity for work or thought" (Castro 1971, 581; italics in text). The ideology of individual merit as the basis of value promoted by the Converso intellectuals may thus be seen as an instance of combating categories of social identity in which one is devalued.9
The other side of the coin is that Jews have often reacted quite negatively to Jewish writers who portray Jewish characters as having negative or disapproved traits. For example, Philip Roth has been extensively criticized by Jews and Jewish organizations for portraying such characters, or at least for portraying such characters in America, where his work could be read by anti-Semites (see Roth 1963). While the ostensible reason for this concern was the possibility that such portrayals might lead to anti-Semitism, Roth (1963, 452) suggests also that "what is really objected to, what is immediately painful . . . is its direct effect upon certain Jews. 'You have hurt a lot of people's feelings because you have revealed something they are ashamed of.'" The implication of Roth's critics is that the ingroup should be portrayed in positive terms; and indeed, the most common type of Jewish literary activity has portrayed Jews as having positive traits (Alter 1965, 72). The quote also reflects the discussion of Jewish self-deception in SAID (Ch. 8): The shame resulting from awareness of actual Jewish behavior is only half-conscious, and any challenge to this self-deception results in a great deal of psychological conflict.
The importance of social identity processes in Jewish intellectual activity was recognized some time ago by Thorstein Veblen (1934). Veblen described the preeminence of Jewish scholars and scientists in Europe and noted their tendency to be iconoclasts. He noted that the Enlightenment had destroyed the ability of Jewish intellectuals to find comfort in the identity provided by religion, but they do not therefore simply accept uncritically the intellectual structures of gentile society. By engaging in iconoclasm, Veblen suggests, Jews are in fact subjecting to criticism the basic social categorization system of the gentile world - a categorization system with which the gentile, but not the Jew, is comfortable. The Jew "is not . . . invested with the gentile's peculiar heritage of conventional preconceptions which have stood over, by inertia of habit, out of the gentile past, which go, on the one hand, to make the safe and sane gentile conservative and complacent, and which conduce also, on the other hand, to blur the safe and sane gentile's intellectual vision, and to leave him intellectually sessile" (Veblen 1934, 229).10
Indeed, Jewish social scientists have at least sometimes been aware of these linkages: Peter Gay (1987, 137) quotes the following from a 1926 letter written by Sigmund Freud, whose antipathy to Western culture is described in Chapter 4: "Because I was a Jew, I found myself free from many prejudices which limited others in the employment of their intellects, and as a Jew I was prepared to go into opposition and to do without the agreement of the
{p. 15} 'compact majority.'" In a later letter, Freud stated that to accept psychoanalysis "called for a certain measure of readiness to accept a situation of solitary opposition - a situation with which nobody is more familiar than a Jew" (in Gay 1987, 146).11
There is a sense of alienation vis-a-vis the surrounding society. The Jewish intellectual, in the words of New York Intellectual and political radical Irving Howe, tends "to feel at some distance from society; to assume, almost as a birthright, a critical stance toward received dogmas, to recognize oneself as not quite at home in the world" (1978, 106).
From Solomon Maimon to Normon Podhoretz, from Rachel Varnhagen to Cynthia Ozick, from Marx and Lassalle to Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, from Herzl and Ereud to Harold Laski and Lionel Trilling, from Moses Mendelssohn to J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, and Reich I and 11 (Wilhelm and Charles), one dominating structure of an identical predicament and a shared fate imposes itself upon the consciousness and behavior of the Jewish intellectual in Galut [exile]: with the advent of Jewish Emancipation, when ghetto walls crumble and the shtetlach [small Jewish towns] begin to dissolve, Jewry - like some wide-eyed anthropologist - enters upon a strange world, to explore a strange people observing a strange halakah (code). They examine this world in dismay, with wonder, anger, and punitive objectivity. This wonder, this anger, and the vindictive objectivity of the marginal nonmember are recidivist; they continue unabated into our own time because Jewish Emancipation continues into our own time. (Cuddihy l974, 68)
Although intellectual criticism resulting from social identity processes need not be functional in attaining any concrete goal of Judaism, this body of theory is highly compatible with supposing that Jewish intellectual activity may be directed at influencing social categorization processes in a manner that benefits Jews. Evidence will be provided in later chapters that Jewish intellectual movements have advocated universalist ideologies for the entire society in which the Jew-gentile social category is reduced in salience and is of no theoretical importance. Thus, for example, within a Marxist analysis social conflict is theorized to result solely from economically based conflict between social classes in which resource competition between ethnic groups is irrelevant. Social identity research predicts that the acceptance of such a theory would lessen anti-Semitism because within the universalist ideology the Jew-gentile social categorization is not salient.
Finally, there is good reason to suppose that minority perspectives are able to have a strong influence on the attitudes of the majority (e.g., Perez & Mugny 1990). Social identity research indicates that a minority viewpoint, especially when possessing a high degree of internal consistency, is able to have an impact
because it introduces the possibility of an alternative tO the taken-for-granted, unquestioned, consensual majority perspective. Suddenly people can discern cracks in the facade of majority consensus. New issues, problems, and questions arise which
{p. 16} demand attention. The status quo is no longer passively accepted as an immutable and stable entity which is the sole legitimate arbiter of the nature of things. People are free to change their beliefs, views, customs, and so forth. And where do they turn? One direction is to the active minority. It (by definition and design) furnishes a conceptually coherent and elegantly simple resolution of the very issues which, due to its activitics, now plague the public consciousness. In the language of 'ideology' . . ., active minorities seek to replace the dominant ideology with a new one. (Hogg & Abrams 1988, 181)
A critical component of minority group influence is intellectual consistency (Moscovici 1976), and an important theme in the following will be that Jewish-dominated intellectual movements have had a high degree of internal group cohesion and have often been typified by high levels of ingroup-outgroup thinking - a traditional aspect of Judaism. However, because these movements were intended to appeal to gentiles, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that Jewish group identity or Jewish group interests were important to the participants.
Such a result is also highly compatible with social identity theory: The extent to which individuals are willing to be influenced depends on their willingness to accept the social category from which the divergent opinion derives. For Jews intent on influencing the wider society, overt Jewish group identity and overtly stated Jewish interests could only detract from the ability of these movements to influence their intended targets. As a result, Jewish involvement in these movements was often actively concealed, and the intellectual structures themselves were phrased in universalist terms to minimize the importance of the social category of Jew-gentile.
Moreover, since one's willingness to accept influence depends on one's willingness to identify with the stereotypical qualities of an ingroup, the movements not only were conceptualized in universalist terms, rather than Jewish particularist terms; they were also depicted as motivated only by the highest moral and ethical standards. As Cuddihy (1974, 66n) notes, Jewish intellectuals developed a sense that Judaism had a "mission to the West" in which corrupt Western civilization would be confronted by a specifically Jewish sense of morality. To a considerable extent these movements constitute concrete examples of the ancient and recurrent Jewish self-conceptualization as a "light of the nations," reviewed extensively in S~ID (Ch. 7). This rhetoric of moral condemnation of the outgroup thus represents a secular version of the central pose of post-Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals that Judaism represents a moral beacon to the rest of humanity. But to exert their influence, they ¥vere forced to deny the importance of specifically Jewish identity and interests at the heart of the movement.
The high degree of internal group cohesion characteristic of the movements considered in this volume was accompanied by the development of theories that not only possessed a great deal of internal intellectual consistency but also, as in the case of psychoanalysis and radical political theory, could take
{p. 17} the form of hermeneutic systems able to accommodate any and all events into their interpretive schemas. And although these movements sought the veneer of science, they inevitably controverted the fimdamental principles of science as an individualistic inquiry into the nature of reality (see Ch. 6). Although the extent to which these intellectual and political movements influenced gentile society cannot be assessed with certainty, the material presented in the following chapters is highly compatible with supposing that Jewish-dominated intellectual movements were a critical factor (necessary condition) for the triumph of the intellectual left in late twentieth-century Western societies.
No evolutionist should be surprised at the implicit theory in all this, namely, that intellectual activities of all types may at bottom involve ethnic warfare, any more than one should be surprised at the fact that political and religious ideologies typically reflect the interests of those holding them. The truly doubtful proposition for an evolutionist is whether real social science as a disinterested attempt to understand human behavior is at all possible.
This does not imply that all strongly identified Jewish social scientists participated in the movements discussed in the following chapters. It implies only that Jewish identification and perceived Jewish interests were a powerful motivating force among those who led these movements and among many of their followers. These scientist-activists had very strong Jewish identities. They were very concerned with anti-Semitism and self-consciously developed theories aimed at showing that Jewish behavior was irrelevant to antiSemitism while at same time (in the case of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School) showing that gentile ethnocentrism and participation in cohesive antiSemitic movements were indications of psychopathology.
Collectively, these movements have called into question the fundamental moral, political, cultural, and economic foundations of Western society. It will be apparent that these movements have also served various Jewish interests quite well. It will also become apparent, however, that these movements have often conflicted with the cultural and ultimately genetic interests of important sectors of the non-Jewish, European-derived peoples of late-twentieth-century European and North American societies.
NOTES
1. As indicated in SAID (p. 261), the AJCommittee's endeavor to portray Jews as not overrepresented in radical movcments involved deception and perhaps selfdeception. Thc AJCommittec cngaged in intensive efforts to changc opinion within the Jewish community to attcmpt to show that Jewish intcrests werc morc compatiblc with advocating Amcrican democracy than Sovict communism (e.g.. emphasizing Soviet anti-Scmitism and So~ iet support of nations opposed to lsracl in the period after World War 11) (Cohen 1972, 347ff).
{p. 18} 2. A similar phenomenon is apparent in the American movie industry, where anecdotal evidence indicates that gentiles sometimes attempt to present themselves as Jews in order to advance their careers in a Jewish-dominated environment (see Cash 1994).
3. As anti-Semitism increased during the Weimar period, Jewish-owned liberal newspapers began to suffer economic hardship because of public hostility to the ethnic composition of the editorial boards and staffs (Mosse 1987, 371). The response of Hans Lachman-Mosse was to "depoliticize his newspapers by firing large numbers of Jewish editors and correspondents. Eksteins ( 1975, 229) suggests that the response was an attempt to deflect right-wing categorizations of his newspapers as part of the Judenpresse.
4. A recent, perhaps trivial, example of this type of intellectual ethnic warfare is the popular movie Addams Family Values (released in November 1993), produced by Scott Rudin, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and written by Paul Rudnick. The bad guys in the movie are virtually anyone with blond hair (the exception being an overweight child), and the good guys include two Jewish children wearing yarmulkes. (Indeed, having blond hair is viewed as a pathology, so that when the dark-haired Addams baby temporarily becomes blond, there is a family crisis.) The featured Jewish child has dark hair, wears glasses, and is physically frail and nonathletic. He often makes precociously intelligent comments, and he is severely punished by the blond-haired counselors for reading a highly intellectual book. The evil gentile children are the opposite: blond, athletic, and unintellectual. Together with other assorted dark-haired children from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and white gentile children rejected by their peers (for being overweight, etc.), the Jewish boy and the Addams family children lead a very violent movement that succeeds in destroying the blond enemy. The movie is a parable illustrating the general thrust of Jewish intellectual and political activity relating to immigration and multi-culturalism in Western societies (see Ch. 7). It is also consistent with the general thrust of Hollywood movies. SAID (Ch. 2) reviews data indicating Jewish domination of the entertainment industry in the United States. Powers, Rothman and Rothman (1996, 207) characterize television as promoting liberal, cosmopolitan values, and Lichter, Lichter and Rothman (1994, 251) find that television portrays cultural pluralism in positive terms and as easily achieved apart from the activities of a few ignorant or bigoted miscreants.
5. Heller combines social criticism with a strong Jewish identity. In a talk described in The Economist (March 18, 1995, p. 92), Heller is quoted as saying that "being Jewish informs everything I do. My books are getting more and more Jewish."
6. The ellipsis is as follows: "Destruction of the Semitic principle, extirpation of the Jewish religion, whether in the Mosaic or in the Christian form, the natural equality of man and the abrogation of property, are proclaimed by the secret societies who form, provisional governments, and men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them." Rather (1986) notes that anti-Semites who believed in Jewish conspiracies often cited this passage as well as the Protocols in support of their theories. He also points out, citing Roberts (1972), that Disraeli's view that events were controlled by vast international conspiracies was commonplace in the nineteenth century. Rather links these beliefs with the secret society at the center of the psychoanalytic movement (see Ch. 4) as well as with a secret society named "the sons of Moshe" organized by the Zionist Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsberg) whose work is discussed in SAID (Ch. 5).
7. This passage was invoked by Lucien Wolf, secretary of the Conjoint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, to rationalize Jewish support for Russian revolutionary movementts (see Szajkowski 1967, 9).
{p. 19} 8. The New Christian ideology implies that members of a highly cohesive, economically successful group are seeking to be judged as individuals rather than as members of a group by the surrounding society. It is of interest that the moral imperative of judging on the basis of individual merit was also a theme in the work of nineteenth-century Jewish writer Michael Beer (see Kahn 1985, 122) and is a major theme of the contemporary neoconservative movement of Jewish intellectuals. Beer was forced to disguise the identity of his protagonist (as a lower-caste Hindu) because his audience was unlikely to view an explicitly Jewish protagonist positively.
9. Castro's thesis is that economic and intellectual backwardness was the heavy price Spain paid for its successful resistance to the ideology of individual merit. As noted in SAID (Ch. 1), maladaptive ideologies can develop in the context of group conflict because they provide a positive social identity in opposition to an outgroup. Thus Spain was unlikely to move toward an individualist, post-Enlightenment society when the advocates of individualism were viewed as covertly having allegiance to a highly cohesive group.
10. Paul Johnson (1988, 408) takes the view that Jewish iconoclasm simply speeded up "changes that were coming anyway. The Jews were natural iconoclasts. Like the prophets, they set about smiting and overturning all the idols of the conventional modes with skill and ferocious glee." Because it essentially trivializes the ultimate effects of Jewish intellectual efforts, such a view is inconsistent with Johnson's claim that the emergence of Jews into the mainstream of Western intellectual discourse was "an event of shattering importance to world history" (pp. 340-341). Johnson offers no evidence for his view that the changes advocated by Jewish intellectuals were inevitable. Surely traditional Judaism did not encourage iconoclasm within the Jewish community (witness Spinoza's fate and the generally authoritarian nature of community controls in traditional Jewish society [PTSDA Ch. 8]). Nor did traditional Jewish scholarship eneourage iconoclasm. Although Talmudic studies definitely encouraged argumentation (pilpul; see PTSDA Ch. 7), these diseussions were performed within a very narrowly prescribed range in whieh the basic assumptions were not questioned. In the post-Enlightenment world, Jewish iconoclasm has clearly been much more directed at gentile culture than at Judaism, and evidence provided here and in the following chapters indicates that the iconoclasm was often motivated by hostility toward gentile culture. By Johnson's own account, both Marxism and psychoanalysis are unlikely to have arisen from gentiles, since they both contain strong overtones of Jewish religious thinking, and I would argue that psychoanalysis especially is unlikely to have arisen except as a tool in the war on gentile culture. The results are much more plausibly due to the generally higher verbal IQ among Jews and their ability to form cohesive groups now directed at critiquing gentile culture rather than at comprehending the Torah and thereby achieving good marriages, financial success, and status within the Jewish community.
11. The comment referring to "solitary opposition" is disingenuous, since psychoanalysis from its origins was characterized by a strong group consciousness emanating from a committed core of members. Psychoanalysis itself energetically cultivated the image of Freud as a solitary hero-scientist battling for truth against a biased intellectual establishment. See Chapter 4.
{More of MacDonald's Culture of Critique: the Jewish Communists of Poland}
{p. 69 Chater 3 Jews and the Left} Radicalism and Jewish Identification in the United States and England
From the origins of the movement in the late nineteenth century, a strong sense of Jewish identification also characterized American Jewish radicals (e.g., the Union of Hebrew Trades and the Jewish Socialist Federation; see Levin 1977; Liebman 1979). In Sorin's (1985) study of Jewish radicals who immigrated to the United States early in the twentieth century, only 7 percent were hostile to any form of Jewish separatism. Over 70 percent "were imbued with positive Jewish consciousness. The great majority were significantly caught up in a web of overlapping institutions, affiliations, and Jewish social formations" (p. 119). Moreover, "at the very most" 26 of 95 radicals were in Sorin's "hostile, ambivalent, or assimilationist" categories, but "in some if not all of the cases, these were persons struggling, often creatively, to synthesize new identities" (p. 115). A major theme of this chapter is that a great many avowedly "de-racinated" Jewish radicals had self-deceptive images of their lack of Jewish identification.
The following comment about a very prominent American Jewish radical, Emma Goldman, illustrates the general trend:
The pages of the magazine Mother Earth that Emma Goldman edited from 1906 to 1917 are filled with Yiddish stories, tales from the Talmud, and translations of Morris Rosenfeld's poetry. Moreover, her commitment to anarchism did not divert her from speaking and writing, openly and frequently, about the parficular burdens Jews faced in a world in which antisemitism was a living enemy. Apparently, Emma Goldman's faith in anarchism, with its emphasis on universalism, did not result from and was not dependent on a casting off of Jewish identity. (Sorin 1985, 8; italics in text)
Twentieth-century American Jewish radicalism was a specifically Jewish subculture, or "contraculture" to use Arthur Liebman's (1979, 37) term. The American Jewish left never removed itself from the wider Jewish community, and, indeed, membership of Jews in the movement fluctuated depending on whether these movements clashed with specifically Jewish interests.
Fundamentally, the Jewish Old Left, including the unions, the leftist press, and the leftist fraternal orders (which were often associated with a synagogue [Liebman 1979, 284]), were part of the wider Jewish community, and when the Jewish working class declined, specifically Jewish concerns and identity gained increasing prominence as the importance of radical political beliefs declined. This tendency for Jewish members of leftist organizations to concern themselves with specifically Jewish affairs increased after 1930 primarily because of recurring gaps between specific Jewish interests and universalist
{p. 70} leftist causes at that time. This phenomenon occurred within the entire spectrum of leftist organizations, including organizations such as the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, whose membership also included gentiles (Liebman 1979, 267ff).
Jewish separatism in leftist movements was facilitated by a very traditional aspect of Jewish separatism - the use of an ingroup language. Yiddish eventually became highly valued for its unifying effect on the Jewish labor movement and its ability to cement ties to the wider Jewish community (Levin 1977, 210; Liebman 1979, 259-260). "The landsmanshaften [Jewish social clubs], the Yiddish press and theatre, East Side socialist cafes, literary societies and fereyns, which were so much a part of Jewish socialist culture, created an unmistakable Jewish milieu, which the shop, union, or Socialist party could not possibly duplicate. Even the class enemy - the Jewish employer - spoke Yiddish" (Levin 1977, 210).
Indeed, the socialist educational program of the Workman's Circle (the largest Jewish labor fraternal order in the early twentieth century) failed at first (prior to 1916) because of the absence of Yiddish and Jewish content: "Even radical Jewish parents wanted their children to learn Yiddish and know something about their people" (Liebman 1979, 292). These schools succeeded when they began including a Jewish curriculum with a stress on Jewish peoplehood. They persisted through the 940s as Jewish schools with a socialist ideology which stressed the idea that a concern for social justice was the key to Jewish survival in the modern world. Clearly, socialism and liberal politics had become a form of secular Judaism. The organization had been transformed over its history "from a radical labor fraternal order with Jewish members into a Jewish fraternal order with liberal sentiments and a socialist heritage" (Liebman 1979, 295).
Similarly, the communist-oriented Jewish subculture, including organizations such as the International Workers Order (IWO), included Yiddishspeaking sections. One such section, the Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order (JPFO), was an affiliate of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) and was listed as a subversive organization by the U.S. Attorney General. The JPFO had 50,000 members and was the financial and organizational "bulwark" of the CPUSA after World War II; it also provided critical funding for the Daily Worker and the Morning Freiheit (Svonkin 1997, 166). Consistent with the present emphasis on the compatibility of communism-radicalism and Jewish identity, it funded children's educational programs that promulgated a strong relationship between Jewish identity and radical concerns. The IWO Yiddish schools and summer camps, which continued into the 1960s, stressed Jewish culture and even reinterpreted Marxism not as a theory of class struggle but as a theory of struggle for Jewish freedom from oppression. Although the AJCongress eventually severed its ties with the JPFO during the cold war period and stated that communism was a threat, it was "at best a reluctant and unenthusiastic participant" (Svonkin 1997, 132) in the Jewish
{p. 71} effort to develop a public image of anti-communism - a position reflecting the sympathies of many among its predominantly second- and third-generation Eastern European immigrant membership. David Horowitz (1997, 42) describes the world of his parents who had joined a "shul" run by the CPUSA in which Jewish holidays were given a political interpretation. Psychologically these people might as well have been in eighteenth-century Poland:
What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto. There was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe, the same dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of moral superiority toward the stronger and more numerous goyim outside. And there was the same fear of expulsion for heretical thoughts, which was the fear that riveted the chosen to the faith.
A strong sense of Jewish peoplehood was also characteristic of the leftist Yiddish press. Thus a letter writer to the radical Jewish Daily Forward complained that his nonreligious parents were upset because he wanted to marry a non-Jew. "He wrote to the Forward on the presumption that he would find sympathy, only to discover that the socialist and freethinking editors of the paper insisted . . . that it was imperative that he marry a Jew and that he continue to identify with the Jewish community.... [T]hose who read the Forward knew that the commitment of Jews to remain Jewish was beyond question and discussion" (Hertzberg 1989, 211-212). The Forward had the largest circulation of any Jewish periodical in the world into the 1930s and maintained close ties to the Socialist Party. Werner Cohn (1958, 621) describes the general milieu of the immigrant Jewish community from 1886 to 1920 as "one big radical debating society":
By 1886 the Jewish community in New York had become conspicuous for its support of the third-party (United Labor) candidacy of Henry George, the theoretician of the Smgle Tax. Erom then on Jewish districts in New York and elsewhere were famous for their radical voting habits. The Lower East Side repeatedly picked as its congressman Meyer London, the only New York Socialist ever to be elected to Congress And many Socialists went to the State Assembly in Albany from Jewish districts In the 1917 mayoralty campaign in New York City, the Socialist and anti-war candidacy of Morris Hillquit was supported by the most authoritative voices of the Jewish Lower East Side: The United Hebrew Trades, the Intemational Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and most importantly, the very popular Yiddish Daily Forward This was the period in which extreme radicals - like Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman - were giants in the Jewish community, and when almost all the Jewish giants - among them Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, and the young Morris R Cohen - were radicals Even Samuel Gompers, when speaking before Jewish audiences, felt it necessary to use radical phrases.
{p. 72} In addition, The Freiheit, which was an unofficial organ of the Communist Party from the 1920s to the 1950s, "stood at the center of Yiddish proletarian institutions and subculture . . . [which offered] identity, meaning, friendship, and understanding" (Liebman 1979, 349 350). The newspaper lost considerable support in the Jewish community in 1929 when it took the Communist Party position in opposition to Zionism, and by the 1950s it essentially had to choose between satisfying its Jewish soul or its status as a communist organ. Choosing the former, by the late 1960s it was justifying not returning the Israeli-occupied territories in opposition to the line of the CPUSA.
The relationship of Jews and the CPUSA is particularly interesting because the party often adopted anti-Jewish positions, especially because of its close association with the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1920s Jews played a very prominent role in the CPUSA (Klehr 1978, 37ff). Merely citing percentages of Jewish leaders does not adequately indicate the extent of Jewish influence, however, because it fails to take account of the personal characteristics of Jewish radicals as a talented, educated and ambitious group (see pp. 5, 95-96), but also because efforts were made to recruit gentiles as "window dressing" to conceal the extent of Jewish dominance (Klehr 1978, 40; Rothman & Lichter 1982, 99). Lyons (1982, 81) quotes a gentile Communist who said that many working-class gentiles felt that they were recruited in order to "diversify the Party's ethnic composition." The informant recounts his experience as a gentile representative at a communist-sponsored youth conference:
It became increasingly apparent to most partic!pants that virtually all of the speakers were Jewish New Yorkers. Speakers with thick New York accents would identify themselves as "the delegate from the Lower East Side" or "the comrade from Brownsville." Finally the national leadership called a recess to discuss what was becoming an embarrassment. How could a supposedly national student organization bc so totally dominated by New York Jews? Finally, they resolved to intervene and remedy the situation by asking the New York caucus to give "out-of-towners" a chance to speak. The convention was held in Wisconsin.
Klehr (1978, 40) estimates that from 1921 to 1961, Jews constituted 33.5 percent of the Central Committee members, and the representation of Jews was often above 40 percent (Klehr 1978, 46). Jews were the only native-bom ethnic group from which the party was able to recruit. Glazer (1969, 129) states that at least half of the CPUSA membership of around 50,000 were Jews into the 1950s and that the rate of turnover was very high; thus perhaps ten times that number of individuals were involved in the party and there were "an equal or larger number who were Socialists of one kind or another." Writing of the 1920s, Buhle (1980, 89) notes that "most of those favorable to the party and the Freiheit simply did not join - no more than a few thousand out of a following of a hundred times that large."
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, exemplify the powerful sense of Jewish identification among many
{p. 73} Jews on the left. Svonkin (1997, 158) shows that they viewed themselves as Jewish martyrs. Like many other Jewish leftists, they perceived a strong link between Judaism and their communist sympathies. Their prison correspondence, in the words of one reviewer, was filled with a "continual display of Judaism and Jewishness," including the comment that "in a couple of days, the Passover celebration of our people's search for freedom will be here. This cultural heritage has an added meaning for us, who are imprisoned away from each other and our loved ones by the modern Pharaohs" (pp. 158-159). (Embarrassed by the self-perceptions of the Rosenbergs as Jewish martyrs, the Anti-Defamation League [ADL] interpreted Julius Rosenberg's professions of Jewishness as an attempt to obtain "every possible shred of advantage from the faith that he had repudiated" [Svonkin 1997, 159] - another example of the many revisionist attempts, some recounted in this chapter, to render incompatible Jewish identification and political radicalism and thus completely obscure an important chapter of Jewish history.)
As in the case of the Soviet Union in the early years, the CPUSA had separate sections for different ethnic groups, including a Yiddish-speaking Jewish Federation. When these were abolished in 1925 in the interests of developing a party that would appeal to native Americans (who tended to have a low level of ethnic consciousness), there was a mass exodus of Jews from the party, and many of those who remained continued to participate in an unofficial Yiddish subculture within the party.
In the following years Jewish support for the CPUSA rose and fell depending on party support for specific Jewish issues. During the 1930s the CPUSA changed its position and took great pains to appeal to specific Jewish interests, including a primary focus against anti-Semitism, supporting Zionism and eventually Israel, and advocating the importance of maintaining Jewish cultural traditions. As in Poland during this period, "The American radical movement glorified the development of Jewish life in the Soviet Union.... The Soviet Union was living proof that under socialism the Jewish question could be solved" (Kann 1981, 152-153). Communism was thus perceived as "good for Jews." Despite temporary problems caused by the Soviet-German nonaggression pact of 1939, the result was an end to the CPUSA's isolation from the Jewish community during World War II and the immediate postwar years .
Interestingly, the Jews who remained within the party during the period of the nonaggression pact faced a difficult conflict between divided loyalties, indicating that Jewish identity was still important to these individuals. The nonaggression pact provoked a great deal of rationalization on the part of Jewish CPUSA members, often involving an attempt to interpret the Soviet Union's actions as actually benefiting Jewish interests - clearly an indication that these individuals had not given up their Jewish identities. 1l Others continued to be members but silently opposed the party's line because of their Jewish loyalties. Of great concem for all of these individuals was that the
{p. 74} nonaggression pact was destroying their relationship with the wider Jewish community.
At the time of the creation of Israel in 1948, part of the CPUSA's appeal to Jews was due to its support for Israel at a time when Truman was waffling on the issue. In 1945 the CPUSA even adopted a resolution advocating the continuation of the Jewish people as an ethnic entity within socialist societies. Arthur Liebman describes CPUSA members during the perioc' as being elated because of the congruity of their Jewish interests and membership in the party. Feelings of commonality with the wider Jewish community were expressed, and there was an enhanced feeling of Jewishness resulting from interactions with other Jews within the CPUSA: During the postwar period "Communist Jews were expected and encouraged to be Jews, to relate to Jews, and to think of the Jewish people and the Jewish culture in a positive light. At the same time, non-Communist Jews, with some notable exceptions [in the noncommunist Jewish left] . . . accepted their Jewish credentials and agreed to work with them in an all-Jewish context" (Liebman 1979, 514). As has happened so often in Jewish history, this upsurge in Jewish self-identity was facilitated by the persecution of Jews, in this case the Holocaust.
This period of easy compatibility of Jewish interests with CPUSA interests evaporated after 1948, especially because of the altered Soviet position on Israel and revelations of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many Jews abandoned the CPUSA as a result. Once again, those who remained in the CPUSA tended to rationalize Soviet antiSemitism in a way that allowed them to maintain their Jewish identification. Some viewed the persecutions as an aberration and the result of individual pathology rather than the fault of the communist system itself. Or the West was blamed as being indirectly responsible. Moreover, the reasons for remaining in the CPUSA appear to have typically involved a desire to remain in the self-contained Yiddish communist subculture. Liebman (1979, 522) describes an individual who finally resigned when the evidence on Soviet anti-Semitism became overwhelming: "In 1958, after more than 25 years with the Communist party, this leader resigned and developed a strong Jewish identity which encompassed a fierce loyalty to Israel." Alternatively, Jewish CPUSA members simply failed to adopt the Soviet party line, as occurred on the issue of support for Israel during the 1967 and 1973 wars. Eventually, there was virtually a complete severing of Jews from the CPUSA.
Lyons's (1982, 180) description of a Jewish-Communist club in Philadelphia reveals the ambivalence and self-deception that occurred when Jewish interests clashed with communist sympathies.
The club . . . faced rising tension over Jewishness, especially as it related to Israel. In the mid-sixties conflict erupted over the club's decision to criticize Soviet treatment of Jews. Some orthodox pro-Soviet club members resigned; others disagrccd but staved. Meanwhile the club continued to change, becoming less Marxist and morc Zionist. During the 1967 Middle East War, "we got dogmatic, for one week" as Ben Green, a
{p. 75} club leader, puts it. They allowed no discussion on the merits of supporting Israel, but simply raised funds to show their full support. Nevertheless, several members insist that the club is not Zionist and engages in "critical support" of Israel.
As in the case of Poland, there is every reason to suppose that American Jewish Communists regarded the USSR as generally satisfying Jewish interests at least until well into the post-World War II era. Beginning in the 1920s the CPUSA was financially supported by the Soviet Union, adhered closely to its positions, and engaged in a successful espionage effort against the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union, including stealing atomic secrets (Klehr, Haynes & Firsov 1995) 12 In the 1930s Jews "constituted a substantial majority of known members of the Soviet underground in the United States" and almost half of the individuals prosecuted under the Smith Act of 1947 (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 100).
Although all party functionaries may not have known the details of the special relationship with the Soviet Union, 'special work' [i.e., espionage] was part and parcel of the Communist mission in the United States, and this was well known and discussed openly in the CPUSA's Political Bureau.... [I]t was these ordinary Communists whose lives demonstrate that some rank-and-file members were willing to serve the USSR by spying on their own country. There but for the grace of not being asked went other American Communists. The CPUSA showered hosannas on the USSR as the promised land. In Communist propaganda the survival of the Soviet Union as the one bright, shining star of humankind was a constant refrain, as in the 1934 American Communist poem that described the Soviet Union as "a heaven . . . brought to earth in Russia." (Klehr et al. 1995, 324)
Klehr et al. (1995, 325) suggest that the CPUSA had important effects on U.S. history. Without excusing the excesses of the anti-communist movement, they note that "the peculiar and particular edge to American anticommunism cannot be severed from the CPUSA's allegiance to the Soviet Union; the belief that American communists were disloyal is what made the communist issue so powerful and at times poisonous."
Communists lied to and deceived the New Dealers with whom they were allied. Those liberals who believed the denials then denounced as mudslingers those anti-Communists who complained of concealed Communist activity. Furious at denials of what they knew to be true, anti-Communists then suspected that those who denied the Communist presence were themselves dishonest. The Communists' duplicity poisoned normal political relationships and contributed to the harshness of the anti-Communist reaction of the late 1940s and 1950s. (Klehr et al. 1995, 106)
The liberal defense of communism during the Cold War era also raises issues related to this volume. Nicholas von Hoffman ( 1996) notes the role of the liberal defenders of communism during this period, such as the editors of The Ne~ Repl(blic and Harvard historian Richard Hofstadter (1965) who attributed
{p. 76} the contemporary concem with communist infiltration of the U.S. government to the "paranoid style of American politics." (Rothman and Lichter [1982, 105] include The New Republic as among a group of liberal and radical publications with a large presence of Jewish writers and editors.) The official liberal version was that American Communists were sui generis and unconnected to the Soviet Union, so there was no domestic communist threat. The liberals had seized the intellectual and moral high ground during this period. Supporters of McCarthy were viewed as intellectual and cultural primitives: "In the ongoing kulturkampf dividing the society, the elites of Hollywood, Cambridge and liberal thank-tankery had little sympathy for bow-legged men with their American Legion caps and their fat wives, their yapping about Yalta and the Katyn Forest. Catholic and kitsch, looking out of their picture windows at their flock of pink plastic flamingos, the lower middles and their foreign policy anguish were too infra dig to be taken seriously" (von Hoffman 1996, C2).
However, besides poisoning the atmosphere of domestic politics, communist espionage had effects on foreign policy as well:
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Soviet atomic espionage in shaping the history of the Cold War. World War Il had ended with Americans confident that the atomic bomb gave them a monopoly on the ultimate weapon, a monopoly expected to last ten to twenty years. The Soviet explosion of a nuclear bomb in 1949 destroyed this sense of physical security. America had fought in two world wars without suffering serious civilian deaths or destruction. Now it faced an enemy led by a ruthless dictator who could wipe out any American city with a single bomb. Had the American nuclear monopoly lasted longer, Stalin might have refused to allow North Korean Communists to launch the Korean War, or the Chinese Communists might have hesitated to intervene in the war. Had the American nuclear monopoly lasted until Stalin's death, the restraint on Soviet aggressiveness might have alleviated the most dangerous years of the Cold War. (Klehr et al. 1995, 106)
The Jewish "contraculture" continued to sustain a radical, specifically Jewish subculture into the 1950s - long after the great majority of Jews were no longer in the working class (Liebman 1979, 206, 289ff). The fundamentally Jewish institutions and families that constituted the Old Left then fed into the New Left (Liebman 1979, 536ff). The original impetus of the 1960s student protest movement "almost necessanly began with the scions of the relatively well-to-do, liberal-to-left, disproportionately Jewish intelligentsia the largest pool of those ideologically disposed to sympathize with radical student action in the population" (Lipset 1971, 83; see also Glazer 1969). Flacks (1967, 64) found that 45 percent of students involved in a protest at the University of Chicago were Jewish, but his original sample was "'adjusted' to obtain better balance" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 82). Jews constituted 80 percent of the students signing a petition to end ROTC at Harvard and 30-50 percent of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) - the central organization of student
{p. 77} radicals. Adelson (1972) found that 90 percent of his sample of radical students at the University of Michigan were Jewish, and it would appear that a similar rate of participation is likely to have occurred at other schools, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota. Braungart (1979) found that 43 percent of the SDS membership in his sample of ten universities had at least one Jewish parent and an additional 20 percent had no religious affiliation. The latter are most likely to be predominantly Jewish: Rothrnan and Lichter (1982, 82) found that the "overwhelming majority" of the radical students who claimed that their parents were atheists had Jewish backgrounds.
Jews also tended to be the most publicized leaders of campus protests (Sachar 1992, 804). Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Rennie Davis achieved national fame as members of the "Chicago Seven" group convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Cuddlhy (1974, 193ff) notes the overtly ethnic subplot of the trial, particularly the infighting between defendant Abbie Hoffman and Judge Julius Hoffman, the former representing the children of the Eastern European immigrant generation that tended toward political radicalism, and the latter representing the older, more assimilated German-Jewish establishment. During the trial Abbie Hoffman ridiculed Judge Hoffman in Yiddish as "Shande fur de Goyim" (disgrace for the gentiles) - translated by Abbie Hoffman as "Front man for the WASP power elite." Clearly Hoffman and Rubin (who spent time on a Kibbutz in Israel) had strong Jewish identifications and antipathy to the white Protestant establishment. Cuddihy (1974, 191-192) also credits the origins of the Yippie movement to the activities of the underground journalist Paul Krassner (publisher of The Realist, a "daring, scatological, curiously apolitical" journal of "irreverent satire and impolite reportage") and the countercultural sensibility of comedian Lenny Bruce. As a group, radical students came from relatively well-to-do families, whereas conservative students tended to come from less affluent families (Gottfried 1993, 53). The movement was therefore initiated and led by an elite, but it was not aimed at advancing the interests of the unionized lower middle class. Indeed, the New Left regarded the working class as "fat, contented, and conservative, and their trade unions reflected them" (Glazer 1969, 123).
Moreover, although mild forms of Jewish anti-Semitism and rebellion against parental hypocrisy did occur among Jewish New Left radicals, the predominant pattern was a continuity with parental ideology (Flacks 1967; Glazer 1969, 12; Lipset 1988, 393; Rothman & Lichter 1982, 82). (Similarly, during the Weimar period the Frankfurt School radicals rejected their parents' commercial values but did not personally reject their family. Indeed, their families tended to provide moral and financial support for them in their radical political activities [Cuddihy 1974, 154].) Many of these "red diaper babies" came from "families which around the breakfast table, day after day in Scarsdale~ Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an
{p. 78} awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is. Many Jewish parents live in the lily-white suburbs, go to Miami Beach in the winter, belong to expensive country clubs, arrange Bar Mitzvahs costing thousands of dollars - all the while espousing a left-liberal ideology" (Lipset 1988, 393). As indicated above, Glazer (1969) estimates that approximately 1 million Jews were members of the CPUSA or were socialists prior to 1950. The result was that among Jews there was "a substantial reservoir of present-day parents for whose children to be radical is not something shocking and strange but may well be seen as a means of fulfilling the best drives of their parents" (Glazer 1969, 129).
Moreover, the "American Jewish establishment never really distanced itself from these young Jews" (Hertzberg 1989, 369). Indeed, establishment Jewish organizations, including the AJCongress, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (a lay Reform group), and the Synagogue Council of America (Winston 1978), were prominent early opponents of the war in Vietnam. The anti-war attitudes of official Jewish organizations may have resulted in some anti-Semitism. President Lyndon Johnson was reported to be "disturbed by the lack of support for the Vietnam war in the American Jewish community at a time when he is taking new steps to aid Israel" (in Winston 1978, 198), and the ADL took steps to deal with an anti-Jewish backlash they expected to occur as a result of Jews tending to be hawks on military matters related to Israel and doves on military matters related to Vietnam (Winston 1978).
As with the Old Left, many of the Jewish New Left strongly identified as Jews (Liebman 1979, 536ff). Chanukah services were held and the "Hatikvah" (the Israeli national anthem) was sung during an important sit-in at Berkeley (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 81). The New Left lost Jewish members when it advocated positions incompatible with specific Jewish interests (especially regarding Israel) and attracted members when its positions coincided with these interests (Liebman 1979, 527ff). Leaders often spent time at Kibbutzim in Israel, and there is some indication that New Leftists consciously attempted to minimize the more overt signs of Jewish identity and to minimize discussion of issues on which Jewish and non-Jewish New Leftists would disagree, particularly Israel. Eventually the incompatibility of Jewish interests and the New Left resulted in most Jews abandoning the New Left, with many going to Israel to join kibbutzim, becoming involved in more traditional Jewish religious observances, or becoming involved in leftist organizations with a specifically Jewish identity. After the 1967 Six-Day War, the most important issue for the Jewish New Left was Israel, but the movement also worked on behalf of Soviet Jews and demanded Jewish studies programs at universities (Shapiro 1992, 225). As SDS activist, Jay Rosenberg, wrote, "From this point on I shali join no movement that does not accept and support my people's struggle. If I must choose between the Jewish cause and a 'progressive' anti-Israel SDS, I shall choose the Jewish cause. If barricades are erected, I will fight as a Jew" (in Sachar 1992, 808).
{p. 79} Jews were also a critical component of the public acceptance of the New Left. Jews were overrepresented among radicals and their supporters in the media, the university, and the wider intellectual community, and Jewish leftist social scientists were instrumental in conducting research that portrayed student radicalism in a positive light (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 104). However, in their recent review of the literature on the New Left, Rothman and Lichter ( 1996, ix, xiii) note a continuing tendency to ignore the role of Jews in the movement and that when the Jewish role is mentioned, it is attributed to Jewish idealism or other positively valued traits. Cuddihy (1974, 194n) notes that the media almost completely ignored the Jewish infighting that occurred during the Chicago Seven trial. He also describes several evaluations of the trial written by Jews in the media (New York Times, New York Post, Village Voice) that excused the behavior of the defendants and praised their radical Jewish lawyer, William Kunstler.
Finally, a similar ebb and flow of Jewish attraction to communism depending on its convergence with specifically Jewish interests occurred also in England. During the 1930s the Communist Party appealed to Jews partly because it was the only political movement that was stridently anti-fascist. There was no conflict at all between a strong Jewish ethnic identity and being a member of the Communist Party: "Communist sympathy among Jews of that generation had about it some of the qualities of a group identification, a means, perhaps, of ethnic self-assertion" (Alderrnan 1992, 317-318). In the post-World War II period, virtually all the successful communist political candidates represented Jewish wards. However, Jewish support for communism declined with the revelation of Stalin's anti-Semitism, and many Jews left the Communist Party after the Middle East crisis of 1967 when the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel (Alderrnan 1983, 162).
The conclusion must be that Jewish identity was generally perceived to be highly compatible with radical politics. When radical politics came in conflict with specific Jewish interests, Jews eventually ceased being radical, although there were often instances of ambivalence and rationalization.
SOCIAL IDENTITY PROCESSES, PERCEIVED JEWISH GROUP INTERESTS, AND JEWISH RADICALISM
One view of Jewish radicalism emphasizes the moral basis of Judaism. This is yet another example of the attempt to portray Judaism as a universalist, morally superior movement - the "light of the nations" theme that has repeatedly emerged as an aspect of Jewish self-identity since antiquity and especially since the Enlightenment (S~ID, Ch. 7). Thus Fuchs (1956, 190 191) suggests that the Jewish involvement in liberal causes stems from the unique moral nature of Judaism in inculcating charity towards the poor and needy. Involvement in these causes is viewed as simply an extension of traditional Jewish religious practices. Similarly, Hertzberg (1985, 22) writes of "the echo of a
{p. 80} unique moral sensibility, a willingness to act in disregard of economic interest when the cause seems just." {Yet Benjamin Ginsberg writes in The Fatal Embrace, "That fully three-fourths of America's foreign aid budget is devoted to Israel's security interests is a tribute in considerable measure to the lobbying prowess of AIPAC and the importance of the Jewish community in American politics" (p. 2). Jews are either deceiving themselves about their unique moral sensibility, or deceiving Gentiles.}
As indicated in PTSDA (Chs. 5, 6), there is every indication that traditional Jewish concern for the poor and needy was confined within Jewish groups, and in fact Jews have often served oppressive ruling elites in traditional societies and in post-World War II Eastern Europe. Ginsberg (1993, 140) describes these putative humanistic motivations as "a bit fanciful," and notes that in different contexts (notably in the postrevolutionary Soviet Union) Jews have organized "ruthless agencies of coercion and terror," including especially a very prominent involvement in the Soviet secret police from the postrevolutionary period into the 1930s (see also Baron 1975, 170; Lincoln 1989; Rapoport 1990, 30-31). Similarly, we have seen that Jews were very prominent in the domestic security forces in Poland (see Schatz 1991, 223-228) and Hungary (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 89).
Pipes (1993, 112) theorizes that although it is "undeniable" that Jews were overrepresented in the Bolshevik party and the early Soviet government as well as communist revolutionary activities in Hungary, Germany, and Austria in the period from 1918 to 1923, Jews were also overrepresented in a variety of other areas, including business, art, literature, and science. As a result, Pipes argues that their disproportionate representation in communist political movements should not be an issue. Pipes couples this argument with the assertion that Jewish Bolsheviks did not identify as Jews - an issue that, as we have seen, is questionable at best.
However, even assuming that these ethnically Jewish communists did not identify as Jews, such an argument fails to explain why such "de-ethnicized" Jews (as well as Jewish businessmen, artists, writers and scientists) should have typically been overrepresented in leftist movements and underrepresented in nationalist, populist, and other types of rightist political movements: Even if nationalist movements are anti-Semitic, as has often been the case, anti-Semitism should be irrelevant if these individuals are indeed completely deethnicized as Pipes proposes. Jewish prominence in occupations requiring high intelligence is no argument for understanding their very prominent role in communist and other leftist movements and their relative underrepresentation in nationalist movements.
Social identity theory provides a quite different perspective on Jewish radicalism. It stresses that perceived Jewish group interests are fundamental to Jewish political behavior, and that these perceived group interests are importantly influenced by social identity processes. If indeed radical politics resulted in a strong sense of identification with a Jewish ingroup, then Jewish involvement in these movements would be associated with very negative and exaggerated conceptions of the wider gentile society, and particularly the most powerful elements of that society, as an outgroup. In conformity with this expectation, Liebman (1979, 26) uses the term "contraculture" to describe the American Jewish left because "conflict with or antagonism toward society is a
{p. 81} central feature of this subculture and . . . many of its values and cultural patterns are contradictions of those existing in the surrounding society." For example, the New Left was fundamentally involved in radical social criticism in which all elements that contributed to the cohesive social fabric of midcentury America were regarded as oppressive and in need of radical alteration.
The emphasis here on social identity processes is compatible with Jewish radicalism serving particular perceived Jewish group interests. Anti-Semitism and Jewish economic interests were undoubtedly important motivating factors for Jewish leftism in czarist Russia. Jewish leaders in Western societies, many of whom were wealthy capitalists, proudly acknowledged Jewish overrepresentation in the Russian revolutionary movement; they also provided financial and political support for these movements by, for example, attempting to influence U.S. foreign policy (Szajkowski 1967). Representative of this attitude is financier Jacob Schiff's statement that "the claim that among the ranks of those who in Russia are seeking to undermine governmental authority there are a considerable number of Jews may perhaps be true. In fact, it would be rather surprising if some of those so terribly afflicted by persecution and exceptional laws should not at last have turned against their merciless oppressors" (in Szajkowski 1967, 10).
Indeed, at the risk of oversimplification, one might note that anti-Semitism and economic adversity combined with the Jewish demographic explosion in Eastern Europe were of critical importance for producing the sheer numbers of disaffected Jewish radicals and therefore the ultimate influence of Jewish radicalism in Europe and its spillover into the United States. Jewish populations in Eastern Europe had the highest rate of natural increase of any European population in the nineteenth century, with a natural increase of 120,000 per year in the 1880s and an overall increase within the Russian Empire from 1 to 6 million in the course of the nineteenth century (Alderman 1992, 112; Frankel 1981, 103; Lindemann 1991, 28-29, 133-135). Despite the emigration of close to 2 million Jews to the United States and elsewhere, many Eastern European Jews were impoverished at least in part because of czarist anti-Jewish policies that prevented Jewish upward mobility.
As a result, a great many Jews were attracted to radical political solutions that would transform the economic and political basis of society and would also be consistent with the continuity of Judaism. Within Russian Jewish communities, the acceptance of radical political ideology often coexisted with messianic forms of Zionism as well as intense commitment to Jewish nationalism and religious and cultural separatism, and many individuals held various and often rapidly changing combinations of these ideas (see Frankel 1981).
Religious fanaticism and messianic expectations have been a typical Jewish response to anti-Semitic persecutions throughout history (e.g., Scholem 1971; PTSD~, Ch. 3). Indeed, one might propose that messianic forms of political radicalism may be viewed as secular forms of this Jewish response to persecution, different from traditional forms only in that they also promise a utopian
{p. 84} Even successful Jewish capitalists have tended to adopt political beliefs to the left of the beliefs of their gentile counterparts. For example, German-Jewish capitalists in the nineteenth century "tended to take up positions distinctly to the 'left' of their Gentile peers and thus to place themselves in isolation from them" (Mosse 1989, 225). Although as a group they tended to be to the right of the Jewish population as a whole, a few even supported the Social Democratic Party and its socialist program. Among the plausible reasons for this state of affairs suggested by Mosse is that anti-Semitism tended to be associated with the German Right. Consistent with social identity theory, Jewish capitalists did not identify with groups that perceived them negatively and identified with groups that opposed an outgroup perceived as hostile. Social identity processes and their influence on perception of ethnic (group) interests rather than economic self-interest appears to be paramount here.
The association between Jews and liberal political attitudes is therefore independent of the usual demographic associations. In a passage that shows that Jewish cultural and ethnic estrangement supersedes economic interests in explaining Jewish political behavior, Silberman (1985, 347-348) comments on the attraction of Jews to "the Democratic party . . . with its traditional hospitality to non-WASP ethnic groups.... A distinguished economist who strongly disagreed with [presidential candidate Walter] Mondale's economic policies voted for him nonetheless. 'I watched the conventions on television,' he explained, 'and the Republicans did not look like my kind of people.' That same reaction led many Jews to vote for Carter in 1980 despite their dislike of him; 'I'd rather live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than by those I saw at the Republican convention,' a well-known author told me."
The suggestion is that in general Jewish political motivation is influenced by non-economic issues related to perceived Jewish group interests, the latter influenced by social identity processes. Similarly in the politically charged area of cultural attitudes, Silberman (1985, 350) notes "American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief - one firmly rooted in history - that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to endorse 'gay rights' and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called 'social' issues." A perceived Jewish group interest in cultural pluralism transcends negative personal attitudes regarding the behavior in question.
Silberman's comment that Jewish attitudes are "firmly rooted in history" is particularly relevant: A consistent tendency has been for Jews to be persecuted as a minority group within a culturally or ethnically homogeneous society. A discussion of the politlcal, religious, and cultural pluralism as a very rational motivation for American Jews will be highlighted in Chapter 7, which dis-
{p. 85} cusses Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy. The point here is that the perceived Jewish group interest in developing a pluralistic society is of far more importance than mere economic self-interest in determining Jewish political behavior. Similarly Earl Raab ( 1996, 44) explains Jewish political behavior in terms of security issues related in part to a long memory of the Republican Party as linked to Christian fundamentalism and its history of being "resolutely nativist and anti-immigrant." The pattern of supporting the Democratic Party is therefore an aspect of ethnic conflict between Jews and sectors of the European-derived Caucasian population in the United States, not economic issues. Indeed, economic issues appear to have no relevance at all, since support for the Democratic Party among Jews does not differ by social status (Raab 1996, 45).
Nevertheless, there is evidence that recent Jewish voting behavior increasingly separates the traditional economic left-liberalism from issues related to cultural pluralism, immigration, and church-state separation. Recent polls and data on Jewish voting patterns indicate that Jews continue to view the right wing of the Republican Party as "a threat to American cosmopolitanism" because it is perceived as advocating a homogeneous Christian culture and is opposed to immigration (Beinart 1997, 25). However, Jewish voters were more supportive of conservative fiscal policies and less supportive of government attempts to redistribute wealth than either African Americans or other white Americans. Recent Jewish political behavior is thus self-interested both economically and in its opposition to the ethnic interests of white Americans to develop an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society.
In addition to the pursuit of specific group interests, however, social identity processes appear to make an independent contribution to explaining Jewish political behavior. Social identity processes appear to be necessary for explaining why the Jewish labor movement was far more radical than the rest of the American labor movement. In a passage that indicates Jewish radicals' profound sense of Jewish identity and separatism as well as complete antipathy to the entire gentile social order, Levin (1977, 213) notes that "their socialist ideas . . . created a gulf between themselves and other American workers who were not interested in radical changes in the social order. Although Jewish trade unions joined the AFL, they never felt ideologically at home there, for the AFL did not seek a radical transformation of society, nor was it internationalist in outlook." We have also noted that the New Left completely abandoned the aims and interests of the lower middle working class once that group had essentially achieved its social aims with the success of the trade union movement.
Again, there is the strong suggestion that social criticism and feelings of cultural estrangement among Jews have deep psychological roots that reach far beyond particular economic or political interests. As indicated in Chapter 1, one critical psychological component appears to involve a very deep antipathy to the entire gentile-dominated social order, which is viewed as anti-
{p. 86} Semitic - the desire for "malignant vengeance" that Disraeli asserted made many Jews "odious and so hostile to mankind." Recall Lipset's (1988, 393) description of the many Jewish "families which around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is." These families clearly perceive themselves as separate from the wider culture of the United States; they also view conservative forces as attempting to maintain this malignant culture. As in the case of traditional Judaism vis-a-vis gentile society, the traditional culture of the United States - and particularly the political basis of cultural conservatism that has historically been associated with anti-Semitism - is perceived as a manifestation of a negatively evaluated outgroup.
This antipathy toward gentile-dominated society was often accompanied by a powerful desire to avenge the evils of the old social order. For many Jewish New Leftists "the revolution promises to avenge the sufferings and to right the wrongs which have, for so long, been inflicted on Jews with the permission or encouragement, or even at the command of, the authorities in prerevolutionary societies" (Cohen 1980, 208). Interviews with New Left Jewish radicals revealed that many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in "humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors" (Cohen 1980, 208) combined with the belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a nonoppressive social order - findings that are reminiscent of the motivating role of revenge for anti-Semitism among the Jewish-dominated security forces in communist Poland discussed above. These findings are also entirely consistent with my experience among Jewish New Left activists at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s (see note 13).
The social identity perspective predicts that generalized negative attributions of the outgroup would be accompanied by positive attributions regarding the Jewish ingroup. Both Jewish communists in Poland and Jewish New Left radicals had a powerful feeling of cultural superiority that was continuous with traditional Jewish conceptions of the superiority of their ingroup (Cohen 1980, 212; Schatz 1991, 119). Jewish self-conceptualizations of their activity in developing an adversarial culture in the United States tended to emphasize either the Jew as the historical victim of gentile anti-Semitism or the Jew as moral hero, but "in both cases the portrait is the obverse of that of the antiSemite. Jews lack warts. Their motives are pure, their idealism genuine" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 112). Studies of Jewish radicals by Jewish social scientists have tended to gratuitously attribute Jewish radicalism to a "free choice of a gifted minority" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 118) when economic explanations failed - yet another example where Jewish group status appears to affect social science research in a manner that serves Jewish group interests.
Moreover, a universalist utopian ideology such as Marxism is an ideal vehicle for serving Jewish attempts to develop a positive self-identity while still retaining their positive identity as Jews and their negative evaluation of gentile
{p. 87} power structures. First, the utopian nature of radical ideology in contrast to existing gentile-dominated social systems (which are inevitably less than perfect) facilitates development of a positive identity for the ingroup. Radical ideology thus facilitates positive group identity and a sense of moral rectitude because of its advocacy of universalist ethical principles. Psychologists have found that a sense of moral rectitude is an important component of self-esteem (e.g., Harter 1983), and self-esteem has been proposed as a motivating factor in social identity processes (SAID, Ch. 1).
As was also true of psychoanalysis, leftist political movements developed redemptive-messianic overtones highly conducive to ingroup pride and loyalty. Members of the Russian Jewish Bund and their progeny in the United States had intense personal pride and a powerful sense that they were "part of a moral and political vanguard for great historical change. They had a mission that inspired them and people who believed in them" (Liebman 1979, 133).
This sense of ingroup pride and messianic fervor is undoubtedly a critical ingredient of Judaism in all historical eras. As Schatz (1991, 105) notes in his description of the underground Jewish communist revolutionaries in Poland during the interwar period, "The movement was ... part of a worldwide, international struggle for nothing less than the fundamental change of the very foundations of human society. The joint effect of this situation was a specific sense of revolutionary loneliness and mission, an intense cohesion, a feeling of brotherhood, and a readiness for personal sacrifice on the altar of struggle." What distinguished Jewish communists from other communists was not only their desire for a postrevolutionary world without anti-Semitism, but also their "distinct [emotional] intensity with roots in messianic longings" (Schatz 1991, 140). As one respondent said, "I believed in Stalin and in the party as my father believed in the Messiah" (in Schatz 1991, 140).
Reflecting traditional Jewish social structure, these Jewish radical groups were hierarchical and highly authoritarian, and they developed their own private language (Schatz 1991, 109-112). As in traditional Judaism, continuing study and self-education were viewed as very important features of the movement: "To study was a point of honor and an obligation" (p. 117). The discussions replicated the traditional methods of Torah study: memorization of long passages of text combined with analysis and interpretation carried out in an atmosphere of intense intellectual competition quite analogous to the traditional pilpul. In the words of a novice to these discussions, "We behaved like yeshiva bukhers [students] and they [the more experienced intellectual mentors] like rabbis" (p. 139).
As expected on the basis of social identity theory, there was also a high level of ingroup-outgroup thinking characterized by a lofty sense of moral rectitude among the ingroup combined with an implacable hostility and rejection of the outgroup. In the period after World War II, for example, the Polish-Jewish communists viewed the new economic plan in truly mystical terms. [It was] a scientifically conceived, infallible scheme that would totally
{p. 88} restructure societal relations and prepare the country for socialism" (Schatz 1991, 249). The economic difficulties that befell the population merely resulted in transferring their hopes to the future, while at the same time they developed "an uncompromising attitude toward those who might not be willing to accept the hardships of the present and a merciless hostility toward those perceived as the enemy. Thus the burning will to produce general harmony and happiness was married to distrust and suspiciousness regarding its objects and a hatred toward its actual, potential, or imagined opponents" (p. 250).
Clearly, to be a communist revolutionary was to develop an intense commitment to a cohesive authoritarian group that valued intellectual accomplishments and exhibited intense hatred against enemies and outgroups while having very positive feelings toward an ingroup viewed as morally and intellectually superior. These groups operated as embattled minorities that viewed the surrounding society as hostile and threatening. Being a member of such a group required a great deal of personal sacrifice and even altruism. All these attributes can be found as defining features of more traditional Jewish groups.
Further evidence of the importance of social identity processes may be found in Charles Liebman's (1973, 153ff) suggestion that leftist universalist ideology allows Jews to subvert traditional social categorizations in which Jews are viewed in negative terms. The adoption of such ideologies by Jews is an attempt to overcome Jewish feelings of alienation "from the roots and the traditions of [gentile] society" (p. 153). "The Jew continues his search for an ethic or ethos which is not only universal or capable of universality, but which provides a cutting edge against the older traditions of the society, a search whose intensity is compounded and reinforced by the Gentile's treatment of the Jew" (Liebman 1973, 157). Such attempts at subverting negative social categorizations imposed by an outgroup are a central aspect of social identity theory (Hogg & Abrams 1988; see SAID, Ch. 1).
The universalist ideology thus functions as a secular form of Judaism. Sectarian forms of Judaism are rejected as "a survival strategy" (Liebman 1973, 157) because of their tendency to produce anti-Semitism, their lack of intellectual appeal in the post-Enlightenment world, and their ineffectiveness in appealing to gentiles and thereby altering the gentile social world in a manner that furthers Jewish group interests. Indeed, while the universalist ideology is formally congruent with Enlightenment ideals, the retention of traditional Jewish separatism and patterns of association among those espousing the ideology suggest an element of deception or self-deception:
{quote} Jews prefer to get together with other Jews to promote ostensibly non-Jewish enterprises (which assist Jewish acceptance), and then to pretend the whole matter has nothing to do with being Jewish But this type of activity is most prevalent among Jews who are the most estranged from their own traditions and hence most concerned with finding a value that supports Jewish acceptance without overtly destroying Jewish group ties. (Liebman 1973, 159) {endquote}
{p. 89} The universalist ideology therefore allows Jews to escape their alienation or estrangement from gentile society while nevertheless allowing for the retention of a strong Jewish identity. Institutions that promote group ties among gentiles (such as nationalism and traditional gentile religious associations) are actively opposed and subverted, while the structural integrity of Jewish separatism is maintained. A consistent thread of radical theorizing since Marx has been a fear that nationalism could serve as a social cement that would result in a compromise between the social classes and result in a highly unified social order based on hierarchical but harmonious relationships between existing social classes. This is only this type of highly cohesive gentile social organization that is fundamentally at odds with Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy (see Chs. 5, 7, 8). Both the Old Left and the New Left, as noted, actively attempted to subvert the cohesiveness of gentile social structure, including especially the modus viveni achieved between business and labor by the 1960s {Trotskyists branded this "Capitalism", and instead promoted Free Trade}. And we have seen that the Jewish-dominated Polish communist government campaigned actively against Polish nationalism, and they campaigned against the political and cultural power of the Catholic Church, the main force of social cohesion in traditional Polish society.
Finally, as emphasized by Rothman and Lichter (1982, 119), Marxism is particularly attractive as the basis for an ideology that subverts the negative social categorizations of the gentile outgroup because within such an ideology the Jewish-gentile categorization becomes less salient while Jewish group cohesion and separatism may nevertheless persist: "By adopting variants of Marxist ideology, Jews deny the reality of cultural or religious differences between Jews and Christians. These differences become 'epiphenomenal,' compared to the more fundamental opposition of workers and capitalists. Thus Jews and non-Jews are really brothers under the skin. Even when not adopting a Marxist position, many Jews have tended toward radical environmentalist positions which serve a similar function" (p. 119).
Such a strategy makes excellent sense from the standpoint of social identity theory: A consistent finding in research on intergroup contact is that making the social categories that define groups less salient would lessen intergroup differentiation and would facilitate positive social interactions between members from different groups (Brewer & Miller 1984; Doise & Sinclair 1973; Miller, Brewer & Edwards 1985). At the extreme, acceptance of a universalist ideology by gentiles would result in gentiles not perceiving Jews as in a different social category at all, while nonetheless Jews would be able to maintain a strong personal identity as Jews.
These features of Jewish radicalism together constitute a very compelling analysis of the role of social identity processes in this phenomenon. The last mechanism is particularly interesting as an analysis of both the tendency for Jewish political overrepresentation in radical causes and the Jewish tendency to adopt radical environmentalist ideologies noted as a common characteristic of Jewish social scientists in Chapter 2. The analysis implies that the Jews
{p. 90} involved in these intellectual movements are engaged in a subtle process of deception of gentiles (and, perhaps, self-deception), and that these movements essentially function as a form of crypto-Judaism.
In the language of social identity theory, an ideology is created in which the social categorization of Jew-gentile is minimized in importance, and there are no negative attributions regarding Jewish group membership. The importance of ethnic group membership is minimized as a social category, and, because of its lack of importance, ethnic self-interest among gentiles is analyzed as fundamentally misguided because it does not recognize the priority of class conflict between gentiles. Jews can remain Jews because being a Jew is no longer important. At the same time, traditional institutions of social cohesiveness within gentile society are subverted and gentile society itself is viewed as permeated by conflicts of interest between social classes rather than by commonalities of interest and feelings of social solidarity among different social classes {and the sexes}.
Rothman and Lichter (p. I 19ff) support their argument by noting that the adoption of universalist ideologies is a common technique among minority groups in a wide range of cultures around the world. Despite the veneer of universalism, these movements are most definitely not assimilationist, and in fact Rothman and Lichter view assimilation, defined as complete absorption and loss of minority group identity, as an alternative to the adoption of universalist political movements. Universalist ideologies may be smoke screens that actually facilitate the continued existence of group strategies while promoting the denial of their importance by ingroup and outgroup members alike. Judaism as a cohesive, ethnically based group strategy is able to continue to exist but in a cryptic or semi-cryptic state.
Corroborating this perspective, Levin (1977, 105) states, "Marx's analysis [of Judaism as a caste] gave socialist thinkers an easy way out - to ignore or minimize the Jewish problem." In Poland, the Jewish-dominated Communist Party decried worker and peasant participation in anti-Semitic pogroms during the 1930s because such individuals were not acting on behalf of their class interests (Schatz 1991, 99), an interpretation in which ethnic conflicts result from capitalism and will end after the communist revolution. One reason little anti-Semitism existed within the Social Democratic movement in late-nineteenth-century Germany was that Marxist theory explained all social phenomena; Social Democrats "did not need anti-Semitism, another allembracing theory, to explain the events of their lives" (Dawidowicz 1975, 42). The Social Democrats (and Marx) never analyzed Judaism as a nation or as an ethnic group but as a religious and economic community (Pulzer 1964, 269).
In theory, therefore, anti-Semitism and other ethnic conflicts would disappear with the advent of a socialist society. It is possible that such an interpretation actually served to lower anti-Semitism in some cases. Levy (1975, 190) suggests that anti-Semitism was minimized among the gentile working-class constituency of the German Social Democrats by the activities of party leaders
{p. 91} and socialist theoreticians who framed the political and economic problems of this group in terrns of class conflict rather than Jewish-gentile conflict and actively opposed any cooperation with anti-Semitic parties.
Trotsky and other Jews in the Russian Socialist Democratic Labor Party considered themselves as representing the Jewish proletariat within the wider socialist movement (see note 4), but they were opposed to the separatist, nationalist program of the Russian Jewish Bund. Arthur Liebman (1979, 122 123) suggests that these assimilationist socialists consciously conceptualized a postrevolutionary society in which Judaism would exist, but with a lessened social salience: "For them, the ultimate solution of the Jewish problem would be an internationalist socialist society that paid no heed to distinctions between Jews and non-Jews. To hasten the establishment of such a society, it became necessary, in the view of these assimilationist socialists, for Jews to consider ethnic and religious distinctions between them and non-Jews as irrelevant."
Similarly, after the revolution, "Having abandoned their own origins and identity, yet not finding, or sharing, or being fully admitted to Russian life (except in the world of the party), the Jewish Bolsheviks found their ideological home in revolutionary universalism. They dreamt of a classless and stateless society supported by Marxist faith and doctrine that transcended the particularities and burdens of Jewish existence" (Levin 1988, 49). These individuals, along with many highly nationalist ex-Bundists, ended up administrating programs related to Jewish national life in the Soviet Union. Apparently, although they rejected the radical Jewish separatism of either the Bundists or the Zionists, they envisioned the continuity of secular Jewish national life in the Soviet Union (e.g., Levin 1988, 52).
This belief in the invisibility of Judaism in a socialist society can also be found among American Jewish radicals. American Jewish socialists of the 1890s, for example, envisioned a society in which race played no part (Rogoff 1930, 1l5), apparently a proposal in which Jews and non-Jews would remain in their separate spheres in a class-based workers movement. In the event, even this level of assimilation was not attained; these organizers worked in a completely Jewish milieu and retained strong ties with the Jewish community. "Their actions continued to be at variance with their ideology. The more deeply they moved into the field of organizing Jewish workers, the more loudly they insisted on their socialist universalism" (Liebman 1979, 256 257).
The gap between rhetoric and reality strongly suggests the importance of deception and self-deception in these phenomena. Indeed, these socialist labor organizers never abandoned their universalistic rhetoric, but actively resisted incorporating their unions into the wider American labor movement even after the decline of Yiddish among their members left them without any excuses for failing to do so. Within the unions they engaged in ethnic politics aimed at keeping their own ethnic group in power (Liebman 1979, 270ff), actions obviously at odds with socialist rhetoric. In the end, the attachment of many of
{p. 92} these individuals to socialism declined and was replaced by a strong sense of Jewish ethnicity and peoplehood (Liebman 1979, 270).
The result was that the veneer or universalism covered up a continued separatism of radical Jewish intellectuals and political organizers:
[Gentile intellectuals] really are not totally accepted into even the secularist humanist liberal company of their quondam Jewish friends. Jews continue to insist in indirect and often inexplicable ways on their own uniqueness. Jewish universalism in relations between Jews and non-Jews has an empty ring.... Still, we have the anomaly of Jewish secularists and atheists writing their own prayer books. We find Jewish political reformers breaking with their local parties which stress an ethnic style of politics, and ostensibly pressing for universal political goals - while organizing their own political clubs which are so Jewish in style and manner that non-Jews often feel unwelcome. (Liebman 1973, 158)
Universalism may thus be viewed as a mechanism for Jewish continuity via crypsis or semi-crypsis. The Jewish radical is invisible to the gentile as a Jew and thereby avoids anti-Semitism while at the same time covertly retains his or her Jewish identity. Lyons (1982, 73) finds that "most Jewish Communists wear their Jewishness very casually but experience it deeply. It is not a religious or even an institutional Jewishness for most; nevertheless, it is rooted in a subculture of identity, style, language, and social network.... In fact, this second-generation Jewishness was antiethnic and yet the height of ethnicity. The emperor believed that he was clothed in transethnic, American garb, but Gentiles saw the nuances and details of his naked ethnicity."
These remarks indicate an element of crypsis - a self-deceptive disjunction between private and public personas - "a dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe" (Horowitz 1997, 42). But this pose has a cost. As Albert Memmi (1966, 236), notes, "The Jew-of-the-Left must pay for this protection by his modesty and anonymity, his apparent lack of concern for all that relates to his own people.... Like the poor man who enters a middle-class family, they demand that he at least have the good taste to make himself invisible." Because of the nature of their own ideology, Jews on the left were forced to deemphasize specifically Jewish issues, such as the Holocaust and Israel, despite their strong identification as Jews (Wisse 1987). It is precisely this feature of the Jewish leftist intellectual movements that are most repellent to ethnically committed Jews (see, e.g., Wisse 1987). Ethnic identification was often unconscious, suggesting self-deception. Lyons ( 1982, 74) finds that among his sample of Jewish American communists,
evidence of the importance of ethnicity in general and Jewishness in particular permeates the available record. Many Communists, for example, state that they could never have married a spouse who was not a leftist. When Jews were asked if they could have married Gentiles, many hesitated, surprised by the question, and found it difficult to answer. Upon reflection, many concluded that they had always taken marriage to
{p. 93} someone Jewish for granted The alternative was never really considered, particularly among Jewish men.
Moreover, there were conscious attempts at deception directed at making Jewish involvement in radical political movements invisible by placing an American face on what was in reality largely a Jewish movement (Liebman 1979, 527ff). Both the Socialist Party and the CPUSA took pains to have , and the CPUSA actively encouraged Jewish members to take gentile-sounding names. (This phenomenon also occurred in Poland jsee above] and the Soviet Union [see p. 97].) Despite representing over half the membership in both the Socialist Party and the CPUSA during some periods, neither party ever had Jews as presidential candidates and no Jew held the top position in the CPUSA after 1929. Gentiles were brought from long distances and given highly visible staff positions in Jewish-dominated socialist organizations in New York. Jewish domination of these organizations not uncommonly led gentiles to leave when they realized their role as window dressing in a fundamentally Jewish organization.
Liebman (1979, 561) notes that New Left radicals often took pains to ignore Jewish issues entirely. The New Left deemphasized ethnicity and religion in its ideology while emphasizing social categories and political issues such as the Vietnam War and discrimination against blacks which were very divisive for white gentiles but for which Jewish identity was irrelevant; moreover, these issues did not threaten Jewish middle-class interests, especially Zionism. Jewish identity, though salient to the participants, was publicly submerged. And as noted above, when the New Left began adopting positions incompatible with Jewish interests, Jews tended to sever their ties with the movement.
In a remarkable illustration of the perceived invisibility of the group dynamics of Jewish involvement in radical political movements, Liebman (1979, 167) describes 1960s student activists as completely unaware that their actions could lead to anti-Semitism because Jews were overrepresented among the activists. (Liebman shows that in fact other Jews were concerned that their actions would lead to anti-Semitism.) From their own perspective, they were successfully engaging in crypsis: They supposed that their Jewishness was completely invisible to the outside world while at the same time it retained a great deal of subjective salience to themselves. At a theoretical level, this is a classic case of self-deception, considered in SAID (Ch. 8) as an essential feature of Jewish religious ideology and reactions to anti-Semitism.
In the event, the deception appears to have generally failed, if not for the New Left, at least for the Old Left. There was a general lack of rapport between Jewish radical intellectuals and non-Jewish intellectuals within Old Left radical organizations (C. Liebman 1973, 158 159). Some gentile intellectuals found the movement attractive because of its Jewish dominance, but for the most part the essentially Jewish milieu was a barrier (Liebman 1979, 530ff).
{p. 110 (Chapter 4: Jewish Involvement in the Psychoanalytic Movement)} In addition to constituting the core of the leadership and the intellectual vanguard of the movement, Jews have also constituted the majority of the movement's members. In 1906 all 17 members of the movement were Jewish, and they strongly identified as Jews (Klein 1981). In a 1971 study, Henry, Sims and Spray found that 62.1 percent of their sample of American psychoanalysts identified themselves as having a Jewish cultural affinity, compared with only 16.7 percent indicating a Protestant affinity and 2.6 percent a Catholic affinity. An additional 18.6 percent indicated no cultural affinity, a percentage considerably higher than the other categories of mental health professional and suggesting that the percentage of psychoanalysts with a Jewish background was even higher than 62 percent (Henry, Sims & Spray 1971,27)
We have seen that a common component of Jewish intellectual activity since the Enlightenment has been to criticize gentile culture. Freud's ideas have often been labeled as subversive. Indeed, "[Freud] was convinced that it was in the very nature of psychoanalytic doctrine to appear shocking and subversive. On board ship to America he did not feel that he was bringing that country a new panacea. With his typically dry wit he told his traveling companions, 'We are bringing them the plague' " (Mannoni 1971,168).
Peter Gay labels Freud's work generally as "subversive" (1987, 140), his sexual ideology in particular as "deeply subversive for his time" (p. 148), and he describes his Totem and Taboo as containing "subversive conjectures" (p. 327) in its analysis of culture. "While the implications of Darwin's views were threatening and unsettling, they were not quite so directly abrasive, not quite so unrespectable, as Freud's views on infantile sexuality, the ubiquity of perversions, and the dynamic power of unconscious urges" (Gay 1987, 144).
There was a general perception among many anti-Semites that Jewish intellectuals were subverting German culture in the period prior to 1933 (SAID, Ch. 2), and psychoanalysis was one aspect of this concern. A great deal of hostility to psychoanalysis centered around the perceived threat of psychoanalysis to Christian sexual ethics, including the acceptance of masturbation and premarital sex (Kurzweil 1989, 18). Psychoanalysis became a target of gentiles decrying the Jewish subversion of culture - "the decadent influence of Judaism," as one writer termed it (see Klein 1981, 144). In 1928 Carl Christian Clemen, a professor of ethnology at the University of Bonn, reacted strongly to The Future of an Illusion, Freud's analysis of religious belief in terms of infantile needs. Clemen decried the psychoanalytic tendency to find sex everywhere, a tendency he attributed to the Jewish composition of the movement: "One could explain this by the particular circles from which its advocates and perhaps, too, the patients it treats, principally hail" (in Gay 1988, 537). Freud's books were burned in the May 1933 book burnings in Germany, and when the Nazis entered Vienna in 1938, they ordered Freud to leave and abolished the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
{p. 111} In the United States, by the second decade of the twentieth century Freud was firmly associated with the movement for sexual freedom and social reform, and had become the target of social conservatives (Torrey 1992 16ff). As late as 1956 a psychiatrist writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry complained, "Is it possible that we are developing the equivalent of a secular church, supported by government monies, staffed by a genital-level apostolate unwittingly dispensing a broth of existential atheism, hedonism, and other dubious religio-philosophical ingredients?" (Johnson 1956, 40).
Although he rejected religion, Freud himself had a very strong Jewish identity. In a 1931 letter he described himself as "a fanatical Jew," and on another occasion he wrote that he found "the attraction of Judaism and of Jews so irresistible, many dark emotional powers, all the mightier the less they let themselves be grasped in words, as well as the clear consciousness of inner identity, the secrecy of the same mental construction" (in Gay 1988, 601). On another occasion he wrote of "strange secret longings" related to his Jewish identity (in Gay 1988, 601). At least by 1930 Freud also became strongly sympathetic with Zionism. His son Ernest was also a Zionist, and none of Freud's children converted to Christianity or married gentiles. As expected by social identity theory, Freud's strong sense of Jewish identity involved a deep estrangement from gentiles. Yerushalmi (1991, 39) notes "We find in Freud a sense of otherness vis-a-vis non-Jews which cannot be explained merely as a reaction to anti-Semitism. Though anti-Semitism would periodically reinforce or modify it, this feeling seems to have been primal, inherited from his family and early milieu, and it remained with him throughout his life."
In a revealing comment, Freud stated "I have often felt as though I inherited all the obstinacy and all the passions of our ancestors when they defended their temple, as though I could throw away my life with joy for a great moment" (in Gay 1988, 604). His identity as a Jew was thus associated with a self-concept in which he selflessly does battle with the enemies of the group, dying in an act of heroic altruism defending group interests - a mirror-image Jewish version of the grand finale of Wagner's Nibelungenlied that was an ingredient in Nazi ideology (see SAID, Ch. 5). In terms of social identity theory, Freud thus had a very powerful sense of group membership and a sense of duty to work altruistically for the interests of the group.
Gay (1988, 601) interprets Freud as having the belief that his identity as a Jew was the result of his phylogenetic heritage. As Yerushalmi (1991, 30) notes, his psycho-Lamarckianism was "neither casual nor circumstantial." Freud grasped what Yerushalmi (1991, 31) terms the "subjective dimension" of Larmarckianism, that is, the feeling of a powerful tie to the Jewish past as shaped by Jewish culture, the feeling that one can not escape being a Jew, and "that often what one feels most deeply and obscurely is a trilling wire in the blood."
{p. 116} Hannibal, the Semitic combatant against Rome; Cromwell, who allowed the Jews to enter England; and Napoleon, who gave Jews civil rights. Early on he described himself as a "conquistador" rather than as a man of science.
This type of messianic thought was common in fin de siecle Vienna among Jewish intellectuals who were attempting to bring about a "supranational, supraethnic world" (Klein 1981, 29) {Klein, D. B., Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement}, a characterization that, as seen in Chapter 3, would also apply to Jewish involvement in radical political movements. These intellectuals "frequently expressed their humanitarianism in terms of their renewed Jewish self-conception.... [They had] a shared belief that Jews were responsible for the fate of humanity in the twentieth century" (p. 31).
Many early proponents viewed psychoanalysis as a redemptive messianic movement that would end anti-Semitism by freeing the world of neuroses produced by sexually repressive Western civilization. Klein shows that some of Freud's closest associates had a very clearly articulated conception of psychoanalysis as a Jewish mission to the gentiles - what one might view as a uniquely modern version of the ancient "light of the nations" theme of Jewish religious thought very common among intellectual apologists of Reform Judaism during the same period.
Thus for Otto Rank, who developed a close father-son relationship with Freud, Jews were uniquely qualified to cure neurosis and act as the healers of humanity (Klein 1981, 129). Developing a variant of the perspective Freud used in Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents, Rank argued that whereas other human cultures had repressed their primitive sexuality in the ascent to civilization, "Jews possessed special creative powers since they had been able to maintain a direct relation to 'nature,' to primitive sexuality" (Klein 1981, 129). Within this perspective, anti-Semitism results from the denial of sexuality, and the role of the Jewish mission of psychoanalysis was to end anti-Semitism by freeing humanity of its sexual repressions. A theoretical basis for this perspective was provided by Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which aggression was linked with the frustration of drives.
Klein shows that this conceptualization of psychoanalysis as a redemptive "light of the nations" was common among other Jewish intimates of Freud. Thus Fritz Wittels advocated complete freedom of sexual expression and wrote "Some of us believed that psychoanalysis would change the surface of the earth . . . [and introduce] a golden age in which there would be no room for neuroses any more. We felt like great men.... Some people have a mission in life" (in Klein 1981, 138-139). Jews were viewed as having the responsibility to lead the gentiles toward truth and nobility of behavior. "The tendency to place the Jew and the non-Jew in a relationship of fundamental opposition imbued even the expressions of redemption with an adversary quality" (Klein 1981, 142). Gentile culture was something to be conquered in battle by the morally superior, redemptive Jew: "The spirit of the Jews will conquer the world" (Wittels; in Klein 1981, 142). Coincident with Wittels's
{p. 117} belief in the mission of psychoanalysis was a positive Jewish self-identity; he described the convert Jew as characterized by the "psychological disability of hypocrisy" (Klein 1981, 139).
The cure for the aggression characteristic of anti-Semitism was therefore believed to lie in freeing gentiles from their sexual repressions. Although Freud himself eventually developed the idea of a death instinct to explain aggression, a consistent theme of the Freudian critique of Western culture, as exemplified for example by Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich, has been that the liberation of sexual repressions would lead to lowered aggression and usher in an era of universal love.
It is therefore of interest that when Jung and Alfred Adler were expelled from the movement for heresy, the issue that appears to have been most important to Freud was their rejection of the interrelated ideas of the sexual etiology of neurosis, the Oedipal complex, and childhood sexuality. Sexual repression in Western societies during this period was highly salient and undeniable. Freud's theory may thus be viewed as an invention whose utility in the assault on Western culture derived from the intuitive plausibility of supposing that the suppression of sexual urges would result in major changes in behavior that could possibly have psychotherapeutic effects. Moreover, the Oedipal complex idea proved to be critical to Freud's thesis for the centrality of sexual repression in Totem and Taboo - what Gay (1988, 329) terms some of Freud's "most subversive conjectures" and discussed in more detail below.
This belief in the curative powers of sexual freedom coincided with a leftist political agenda common to the vast majority of Jewish intellectuals of the period and reviewed throughout this book. This leftist political agenda proved to be a recurrent theme throughout the history of psychoanalysis. Support of radical and Marxist ideals was common among Freud's early followers, and leftist attitudes were common in later years among psychoanalysts (Hale 1995, 31; Kurzweil 1989, 36, 46 47, 284; Torrey 1992, 33, 93ff, 122-123), as well as in Freudian inspired offshoots such as Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich (see below) and Alfred Adler. (Kurzweil [1989, 287] terms Adler the leader of "far left" psychoanalysis, noting that Adler wanted to immediately politicize teachers as radicals rather than wait for the perfection of psychoanalysis to do so.) The apex of the association between Marxism and psychoanalysis came in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, where all the top psychoanalysts were Bolsheviks, Trotsky supporters, and among the most powerful political figures in the country (see Chamberlain 1995). (Trotsky himself was an ardent enthusiast of psychoanalysis.) This group organized a government-sponsored State Psychoanalytical Institute and developed a program of "pedology" aimed at producing the "new Soviet man" on the basis of psychoanalytic principles applied to the education of children. The program, which encouraged sexual precocity in children, was put into practice in state-run schools.
There is also evidence that Freud conceptualized himself as a leader in a war on gentile culture. We have seen that Freud had a great deal of hostility to
{p. 118} Western culture, especially the Catholic Church and its ally, the Austrian Habsburg monarchy (Gay 1988; McGrath 1974; Rothman & Isenberg 1974a).6 In a remarkable passage from the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud, in attempting to understand why he has been unable to set foot in Rome, proposes that he has been retracing the footsteps of Hannibal, the Semitic leader of Carthage against Rome during the Punic wars.
Hannibal ... had been the favourite hero of my later school days.... And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race . . . the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organisation of the Catholic Church. (Freud, Inferpretation of Dreams; in Kothman & Isenberg 1974a, 64)
The passage clearly indicates that Freud was self-identified as a member of "an alien race" at war with Rome and its daughter institution, the Catholic Church, a central institution of Western culture. Gay (1988, 132) states, "A charged and ambivalent symbol, Rome stood for Freud's most potent concealed erotic, and only slightly less concealed aggressive wishes."7 Rome was "a supreme prize and incomprehensible menace" (Gay 1988, 132). Freud himself described this "Hannibal fantasy" as "one of the driving forces of [my] mental life" (in McGrath 1974, 35).
A strong connection exists between anti-Semitism and Freud's hostility to Rome. Freud's conscious identification with Hannibal occurred following an anti-Semitic incident involving his father in which his father behaved passively. Freud's response to the incident was to visualize "the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had . . . a place in my phantasies" (in McGrath 1974, 35). "Rome was the center of Christian civilization. To conquer Rome would certainly be to avenge his father and his people" (Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 62). Cuddihy (1974, 54) makes the same point: "Like Hamilcar's son Hannibal, he will storm Rome seeking vengeance. He will control his anger, as his father had done, but he will use it to probe relentlessly beneath the beautiful surface of the diaspora to the murderous rage and lust coiled beneath its so-called civilities."
Rothman and Isenberg ( 1974) convincingly argue that Freud actually viewed the Interpretation of Dreams as a victory against the Catholic Church and that he viewed Totem and Taboo as a successful attempt to analyze the Christian religion in terms of defense mechanisms and primitive drives. Regarding Totem and Taboo, Freud told a colleague that it would "serve to make a sharp division between us and all Aryan religiosity" (in Rothman & Isenberg 1974, 63; see also Gay 1988, 326). They also suggest that Freud consciously attempted to conceal his subversive motivation: A central aspect of Freud's theory of dreams is that rebellion against a powerful authority must often be carried on with deception: "According to the strength . . . of the
{p. 119} censorship, [the authority-defying individual] finds himself compelled . . . to speak in allusions . . . or he must conceal his objection beneath some apparently innocent disguise" (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams; in Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 64).
The bizarre argument of Freud's (1939) Moses and Monotheism is quite clearly an attempt to show the moral superiority of Judaism compared to Christianity. Freud's hostility to the Catholic Church is apparent in this work: "The Catholic Church, which so far has been the implacable enemy of all freedom of thought and has resolutely opposed any idea of this world being governed by advance towards the recognition of truth!" (p. 67). Freud also reiterates his conviction that religion is nothing more than neurotic symptomatology - a view first developed in his Totem and Taboo (1912).
All religions may be symptoms of neurosis, but Freud clearly believed that Judaism is an ethically and intellectually superior form of neurosis: According to Freud, the Jewish religion "formed their [the Jews'] character for good through the disdaining of magic and mysticism and encouraging them to progress in spirituality and sublimations. The people, happy in their conviction of possessing the truth, overcome by the consciousness of being the chosen, came to value highly all intellectual and ethical achievements" (Freud 1939, 109). In contrast, "The Christian religion did not keep to the lofty heights of spirituality to which the Jewish religion had soared" (Freud 1939, 112). Freud argues that in Judaism the repressed memory of killing the Mosaic father figure lifts Judaism to a very high ethical level, whereas in Christianity the unrepressed memory of killing a father figure eventually results in a reversion to Egyptian paganism. Indeed,
Freud's formulation of Judaism might even be termed reactionary, since it retains the traditional idea of Jews as a chosen people (Yerushalmi 1991, 34). Freud's psychoanalytic reinterpretation may be viewed as an attempt to reinterpret Judaism in a "scientific" manner: the creation of a secular, "scientific" Jewish theology. The only substantial difference from the traditional account is that Moses replaces God as the central figure of Jewish history. In this regard, it is interesting that from an early period Freud strongly identified with Moses (Klein 1981, 94; Rice 1990, 123ff), suggesting an identification in which he viewed himself as a leader who would guide his people through a dangerous time. Given Freud's intense identification with Moses, the following passage from Moses and Monotheism, ostensibly referring to the ancient prophets who followed Moses, may be taken to apply to Freud himself: "Monotheism had failed to take root in Egypt. The same thing might have happened in Israel after the people had thrown off the inconvenient and pretentious religion imposed on them. From the mass of the Jewish people, however, there arose again and again men who lent new colour to the fading tradition, renewed the admonishments and demands of Moses, and did not rest until the lost cause was once more regained" (pp. 141 142). Moses and Monotheism also links monotheism with the superiority of Jewish ethics,
{p. 138} males, this system underlies a low-investment style of mating behavior in which the male's role is simply to inseminate females rather than provide continuing investment in the children. Many human societies have been characterized by intense sexual competition among males to control large numbers of females (e.g., Betzig 1986; Dickemann 1979; MacDonald 1983). This male pursuit of large numbers of mates and sexual relationships has nothing to do with love. It is the defining characteristic of Western culture to have significantly inhibited this male tendency while at the same time providing cultural supports for pair bonding and companionate marriage. The result has been a relatively egalitarian, high-investment mating system.
The psychoanalytic emphasis on legitimizing sexuality and premarital sex is therefore fundamentally a program that promotes low-investment parenting styles. Low-investment parenting is associated with precocious sexuality, early reproduction, lack of impulse control, and unstable pair bonds (Belsky, Steinberg & Draper 1991). Ecologically, high-investment parenting is associated with the need to produce competitive offspring, and we have seen that one aspect of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy has been a strong emphasis on high-investment parenting (PTSDA, Ch. 7). Applied to gentile culture, the subversive program of psychoanalysis would have the expected effect of resulting in less-competitive children {as a result migrant children, from unaffected countries, do better}; in the long term, gentile culture would be increasingly characterized by low-investment parenting, and, as indicated below, there is evidence that the sexual revolution inaugurated, or at least greatly facilitated, by psychoanalysis has indeed had this effect.
In this regard, it is interesting to note that an important aspect of the social imposition of monogamy in Western Europe has been the development of companionate marriage. One of the peculiar features of Western marriage is that there has been a trend toward companionate marriage based on affection and consent between partners (e.g., Brundage 1987; Hanawalt 1986, MacFarlane 1986; Stone 1977, 1990; Westermarck 1922). Although dating this affective revolution in the various social strata remains controversial (Phillips 1988), several historians have noted the prevalence and psychological importance of affectionate parent-child and husband-wife relations in Western Europe since the Middle Ages (Hanawalt 1986; MacFarlane 1986, Pollack 1983), or at least since the seventeenth century (e.g., Phillips 1988; Stone 1977, 1990). Stone (1990) notes that by the end of the eighteenth century "even in great aristocratic households mutual affection was regarded as the essential prerequisite for matrimony" (p. 60).
In view of Freud's animosity toward Westem culture and the Catholic Church in particular, it is interesting that the Church's policy on marriage included a largely successful attempt to emphasize consent and affection between partners as normative features of marriage (Brundage 1975, 1987 Duby 1983; Hanawalt 1986; Herlihy 1985; MacFarlane 1986; Noonan 1967, 1973; Quaife 1979; Rouche 1987; Sheehan 1978). Anti-hedonism and the idealization of romantic love as the basis of monogamous marriage have also
{p. 139} periodically characterized Western secular intellectual movements (Brundage 1987), such as the Stoics of late antiquity (e.g., P. Brown 1987; Veyne 1987) and nineteenth-century Romanticism (e.g., Corbin 1990; Porter 1982).
From an evolutionary perspective, consent frees individuals to pursue their own interests in marriage, among which may be compatibility and conjugal affection. Although affection can certainly occur in the context of arranged marriages (and this has been emphasized by some historians of Republican Rome [e.g., Dixon 1985]), all things being equal, free consent to marriage is more likely to result in affection being one criterion of importance.
Indeed, one sees in these findings a fundamental difference between Judaism as a collectivist group strategy, in which individual decisions are submerged to the interests of the group, versus Western institutions based on individualism. Recall the material reviewed in PTSDA (Ch. 7) indicating that until after World War I arranged marriages were the rule among Jews because the economic basis of marriage was too important to leave to the vagaries of romantic love (Hyman 1989). Although high-investment parenting was an important aspect of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, conjugal affection was not viewed as central to marriage with the result that, as Cuddihy (1974) notes, a long line of Jewish intellectuals regarded it as a highly suspect product of an alien culture. Jews also continued to practice consanguineous marriages - a practice that highlights the fundamentally biological agenda of Judaism (see PTSDA, Ch. 8) - well into the twentieth century whereas, as we have seen, the Church successfully countered consanguinity as a basis of marriage beginning in the Middle Ages. Judaism thus continued to emphasize the collectivist mechanism of the social control of individual behavior in conformity to family and group interests centuries after the control of marriage in the West passed from family and clan to individuals. In contrast to Jewish emphasis on group mechanisms, Western culture has thus uniquely emphasized individualist mechanisms of personal attraction and free consent (see PTSDA, Ch. 8).
I conclude that Western religious and secular institutions have resulted in a highly egalitarian mating system that is associated with high-investment parenting. These institutions provided a central role for pair bonding, conjugality, and companionship as the basis of marriage. However, when these institutions were subjected to the radical critique presented by psychoanalysis, they came to be seen as engendering neurosis, and Western society itself was viewed as pathogenic. Freud's writings on this issue (see Kurzweil 1989, 85 and passim) are replete with assertions on the need for greater sexual freedom to overcome debilitating neurosis. As we shall see, later psychoanalytic critiques of gentile culture pointed to the repression of sexuality as leading to anti-Semitism and a host of other modern ills.
[p. 148} group identity while at the same time a principle source of gentile identity - religion and its concomitant supports for high-investment parenting - would be conceptualized as an infantile aberration. The universalist ideologies of Marxism and psychoanalysis thus were highly compatible with the continuation of Jewish particularism.
Besides these functions, the cultural influence of psychoanalysis may actually have benefited Judaism by increasing Jewish-gentile differences in resource competition ability, although there is no reason to suppose that this was consciously intended by the leaders of the movement. Given the very large mean differences between Jews and gentiles in intelligence and tendencies toward high-investment parenting, there is every reason to suppose that Jews and gentiles have very different interests in the construction of culture. Jews suffer to a lesser extent than gentiles from the erosion of cultural supports for high-investment parenting, and Jews benefit by the decline in religious belief among gentiles. As Podhoretz (1995, 30) notes, it is in fact the case that Jewish intellectuals, Jewish organizations like the AJCongress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (see note 2) have ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the public strength of Christianity, and have led the fight for unrestricted pornography. The evidence of this chapter indicates that psychoanalysis as a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement is a central component of this war on gentile cultural supports for high-investment parenting.
It is interesting in this regard that Freud held the view that Judaism as a religion was no longer necessary because it had already performed its function of creating the intellectually, spiritually, and morally superior Jewish character: "Having forged the character of the Jews, Judaism as a religion had performed its vital task and could now be dispensed with" (Yerushalmi 1991, 52). The data summarized in this chapter indicate that Freud viewed Jewish ethical, spiritual, and intellectual superiority as genetically determined and that gentiles were genetically prone to being slaves of their senses and prone to brutality. The superior Jewish character was genetically determined via Lamarckian inheritance acting for generations as a result of the unique Jewish experience. The data reviewed in PTSDA (Ch. 7) indicate that there is indeed very good evidence for the view that there is a genetic basis for Jewish-gentile differences in IQ and high-investment parenting brought about ultimately by Jewish religious practices over historical time (but via eugenic practices, not via Lamarckian inheritance).
Given that the differences between Jews and gentiles are genetically mediated, Jews would not be as dependent on the preservation of cultural supports for high-investment parenting as would be the case among gentiles. Freud's war on gentile culture through facilitation of the pursuit of sexual gratification, low-investment parenting, and elimination of social controls on sexual behavior may therefore be expected to affect Jews and gentiles differently, with the result that the competitive difference between Jews and gentiles, already
{p. 149} significant on the basis of the material reviewed in PTSDA (Chs. 5, 7), would be exacerbated. There is evidence, for example, that more intelligent, affluent, and educated adolescents mature sexually at a relatively slow rate (Belsky et al. 1991; Rushton 1995). Such adolescents are more likely to abstain from sexual intercourse, so that sexual freedom and the legitimization of nonmarital sex are less likely to result in early marriage, single-parenting, and other types of low-investment parenting in this group. Greater intelligence is also associated with later age of marriage, lower levels of illegitimacy, and lower levels of divorce (Herrnstein & Murray 1994). Hyman (1989) notes that Jewish families in contemporary America have a lower divorce rate (see also Cohen 1986; Waxman 1989), later age of first marriage, and greater investment in education than non-Jewish families. Recent findings indicate that the age of first sexual intercourse for Jewish adolescents is higher and the rate of unwed teenage pregnancy lower than for any other ethnic or religious group in the United States. Moreover, since Jews are disproportionately economically affluent, the negative effects of divorce and single-parenting on children are undoubtedly much attenuated among Jews because of the economic stresses typically accompanying divorce and single-parenting are much lessened (McLanahan & Booth 1989; Wallerstein & Kelly 1980).
These data indicate that Jews have been relatively insulated from the trends toward low-investment parenting characteristic of American society generally since the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s. This finding is compatible with data reviewed by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) indicating overwhelming evidence that the negative effects of the shifts that have taken place in Western practices related to sex and marriage in the last 30 years have been disproportionately felt at the bottom of the IQ and socioeconomic class distributions and have therefore included relatively few Jews. For example, only 2 percent of the white women in Herrnstein and Murray's top category of cognitive ability (IQ minimum of 125) and 4 percent of the white women in the second category of cognitive ability (IQ between 110 and 125) gave birth to illegitimate children, compared to 23 percent in the 4th class of cognitive ability (IQ between 75 and 90) and 42 percent in the fifth class of cognitive ability (IQ less than 75). Even controlling for poverty fails to remove the influence of IQ: High-IQ women living in poverty are seven times less likely to give birth to an illegitimate child than are low-IQ women living in poverty. Moreover, in the period from 1960 to 1991, illegitimacy among blacks rose from 24 percent to 68 percent, while illegitimacy among whites rose from 2 percent to 18 percent. Since the mean Jewish IQ in the United States is approximately 117 and verbal IQ even higher (see PTSDA, Ch. 7), this finding is compatible with supposing that only a very small percentage of Jewish women are giving birth to illegitimate babies, and those who do are undoubtedly much more likely to be wealthy, intelligent, and nurturing than the typical single mother from the lower cognitive classes.
{p. 150} The sexual revolution has thus had little effect on parental investment among people in the highest categories of cognitive ability. These results are highly compatible with the findings of Dunne et al. (1997) that the heritability of age of first sexual intercourse has increased since the 1960s. In their younger cohort (born between 1952 and 1965) genetic factors accounted for 49 percent of the variance among females and 72 percent of the variance among males, and there were no shared environmental influences. In the older cohort (born between 1922 and 1952) genetic influences accounted for 32 percent of the variance for females and none of the variance among males, and there was a significant shared environmental component for both sexes. These data indicate that the erosion of traditional Western controls on sexuality have had far more effect on those who are genetically inclined toward precocious sexuality and, in conjunction with the data presented above, indicate gentiles have been far more affected by these changes than have Jews.
Although other factors are undoubtedly involved, it is remarkable that the increasing trend toward low-investment parenting in the United States largely coincides with the triumph of the psychoanalytic and radical critiques of American culture represented by the political and cultural success of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. Since 1970 the rate of single-parenting has increased from one in ten families to one in three families (Norton & Miller 1992), and there have been dramatic increases in teenage sexual activity and teenage childbearing without marriage (Furstenberg 1991). There is excellent evidence for an association among teenage single-parenting, poverty, lack of education, and poor developmental outcomes for children (e.g., Dornbusch & Gray 1988; Furstenberg & Brooks-Gunn 1989; McLanahan & Booth 1989; J. Q. Wilson 1993b).
Indeed, all the negative trends related to the family show very large increases that developed in the mid-1960s (Herrnstein & Murray 1994, 168ff; see also Bennett 1994; Kaus 1995; Magnet 1993), including increases in trends toward lower levels of marriage, "cataclysmic" increases in divorce rates (p. 172), and rates of illegitimacy. In the case of divorce and illegitimacy rates, the data indicate a major shift upward during the 1960s from previously existing trend lines, with the upward trend lines established during that period continuing into the present. The 1960s was thus a watershed period in American cultural history, a view that is compatible with Rothman and Lichter's (1996, xviiiff) interpretation of the shift during the 1960s in the direction of "expressive individualism" among cultural elites and the decline of external controls on behavior that had been the cornerstone of the formerly dominant Protestant culture. They note the influence of the New Left in producing these changes, and I have emphasized here the close connections between psychoanalysis and the New Left. Both movements were led and dominated by Jews.
The sexual revolution is "the most obvious culprit" underlying the decline in the importance of marriage (Herrnstein & Murray 1994, 544) and its concomitant increase in low-investment parenting:
{p. 151} What is striking about the 1960s "sexual revolution," as it has properly been called, is how revolutionary it was, in sensibility as well as reality. In 1965, 69 percent of American women and 65 percent of men under the age of thirty said that premarital sex was always or almost always wrong; by 1972, these figures had plummeted to 24 percent and 21 percent.... ln 1990, only 6 percent of British men and women under the age of thirty-four believed that it was always or almost always wrong. (Himmelfarb 1995, 236)
Although there is little reason to suppose that the battle for sexual freedom so central to psychoanalysis had the intention of benefiting the average resource competition ability of Jews vis-a-vis gentiles, the psychoanalytic intellectual war on gentile culture may indeed have resulted in an increased competitive advantage for Jews beyond merely lessening the theoretical importance of the Jew-gentile distinction and providing a "scientific" rationale for pathologizing anti-Semitism. It is also a war that has resulted in a society increasingly split between a disproportionately Jewish "cognitive elite" and a growing mass of individuals who are intellectually incompetent, irresponsible as parents, prone to requiring public assistance, and prone to criminal behavior, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse.
Although psychoanalysis is in decline now, especially in the United States, the historical record suggests that other ideological structures will attempt to accomplish some of the same goals psychoanalysis attempted to achieve. As it has done throughout its history, Judaism continues to show extraordinary ideological flexibility in achieving the goal of legitimizing the continuation of Jewish group identity and genetic separatism. As indicated in Chapter 2, many Jewish social scientists continue to fashion a social science that serves the interests of Judaism and to develop powerful critiques of theories perceived as antithetical to those interests. The incipient demise of psychoanalysis as a weapon in these battles will be of little long-term importance in this effort.
NOTES
1. The ethnic composition of the editorial board of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly is overwhelmingly Jewish, indicating that psychoanalysis remains fundamentally an ethnic movement. The editor, six of seven associate editors, and 20 of 27 editorial board members ofthe 1997 volume have Jewish surnames.
2. The continuing role of psychoanalysis in the movement toward sexual liberation can be seen in a recent debate over teenage sexuality. An article in the Los Angeles Times (Feb. 15, 1994, Al, A16) noted the opposition of the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood to a school program that advocated teenage celibacy. Sheldon Zablow, a psychiatrist and spokesperson for this perspective, stated "Repeated studies show that if you try to repress sexual feelings, they may come out later in far more dangerous ways - sexual abuse, rape" (p Al6). This psychoanalytic fantasy was compounded by Zablow's claim that sexual abstinence has never worked in all of human history - a claim that indicates his unawareness of historical data on sexual behavior in the West (including Jewish sexual behavior), at least from the Middle Ages
{p. 158 (Chapter 5: The Frankfurt School of Social Research and the Pathologization of Gentile Group Allegiances} part of the current Horkheimer-Adorno line: "[Fromm] takes the easy way out with the concept of authority, without which, after all, neither Lenin's avantgarde nor dictatorship can be conceived of. I would strongly advise him to read Lenin.... I must tell you that I see a real threat in this article to the line which the journal takes" (Adorno, in Wiggershaus 1994, 266).
Fromm was excised from the Institute despite the fact that his position was among the most radically leftist to emerge from the psychoanalytic camp. Throughout his career, Fromm remained the embodiment of the psychoanalytic left and its view that bourgeois-capitalist society and fascism resulted from (and reliably reproduced) gross distortions of human nature (see Ch. 4). Similarly, Herbert Marcuse was excluded when his orthodox Marxist views began to diverge from the evolving ideology of Adorno and Horkheimer (see Wiggershaus 1994, 391-392).2
These exclusionary trends are also apparent in the aborted plans to reinstitute the Institute's journal in the 1950s. It was decided that there were too few contributors with the Horkheimer-Adorno line to support a journal and the plans foundered (Wiggershaus 1994, 471). Throughout its history, to be a member of the Institute was to adopt a certain view and to submit to heavy editing and even censorship of one's works to ensure conformity to a clearly articulated ideological position.
As might be expected from a highly authoritarian political movement, the result was a speculative, philosophical body of work that ultimately had no influence on empirically oriented sociology, although, as indicated below, it has had a profound influence on theory in the humanities. (TheA~uthoritarian Personality is not included in this statement; it was very influential but had an empirical basis of sorts.) This body of work does not qualify as science because of its rejection of experimentation, quantification, and verification, and because of the priority of moral and political concerns over the investigation of the nature of human social psychology.
The priority of the moral and political agenda of Critical Theory is essential to understanding the Frankfurt School and its influence. Horkheimer and Adorno eventually rejected the classical Marxist perspective on the importance of class struggle for the development of fascism in favor of a perspective in which both fascism and capitalism were fundamentally conceptualized as involving domination and authoritarianism. Further, they developed the theory that disturbed parent-child relations involving the suppression of human nature were a necessary condition for domination and authoritarianism.
Obviously, this is a perspective that is highly compatible with psychoanalytic theory, and indeed psychoanalysis was a basic influence on their thinking. Virtually from the beginning, psychoanalysis had a respected position within the Institute for Social Research, particularly under the influence of Erich Fromm. Fromm held positions at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute as well as at the fnstitute for Social Research, and along with other "left-Freudians" such as Wilhelm Reich and eventually Marcuse, he developed
{p. 159} theories that incorporated both Marxism and psychoanalysis essentially by developing a theoretical link between the repression of instincts in the context of family relationships (or, as in the case of Fromm, the development of sadomasochistic and anal personality traits within the family) and the development of oppressive social and economic structures.
It is interesting that although the Horkheimer group developed a very strong hostility to empirical science and the positivistic philosophy of science, they felt no need to abandon psychoanalysis. Indeed, psychoanalysis was "a central factor in giving Horkheimer and the most important of his fellow theoreticians the sense that important insights could also be achieved - or even better achieved - by skipping over the specialized disciplines" (Wiggershaus ]994, 186). We shall see that psychoanalysis as a nonempirically based hermeneutic structure (which nevertheless masqueraded as a science) turned out to be an infinitely plastic tool in the hands of those constructing a theory aimed at achieving purely political objectives.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, the fundamental shift from the sociological to the psychological level that occurred during the 1940s was motivated by the fact that in Germany the proletariat had succumbed to fascism and in the Soviet Union socialism had not prevented the development of an authoritarian government {both reactions to Jewish dominance} that failed to guarantee individual autonomy or Jewish group interests (Tar 1977, 80; Wiggershaus 1994, 137ff, 391ff). Within the new perspective, authoritarianism was viewed as the fundamental problem, its origin traceable to family interactions and ultimately to the suppression of human nature (Tar 1977, 87-88). Nevertheless, the formal outline of the theory can be seen in philosophical form in the earlier work Studies on Authority and the Family of 1936, a work that presented Fromm's psychoanalytic theory of authoritarian "sado-masochistic" family relationships and their putative linkages with bourgeois capitalism and fascism.
This philosophical-speculative approach to anti-Semitism was refined in the chapter on anti-Semitism in Horkheimer and Adorno's (1944/1990) Dialectic of Enlightenment.3 In addition to being highly abstract and written in what might be termed a Hegelian manner, the style of writing is assertional: Statements about anti-Semitism are simply asserted with no attempt to provide any empirical justification.4 As Jacob Katz (1983, 40) notes, the Frankfurt School has "not been notable for the accuracy of its evaluation of the Jewish situation either before the advent of Nazism or afterward." However, many of the ideas simply asserted there in a philosophical, speculative manner are identical to the theories of anti-Semitism contained in The Authoritarian Personality. Indeed, the authors viewed the chapter on anti-Semitism as a theoretical study for their anticipated empirical study of anti-Semitism (Wiggershaus 1994, 324). The Authoritarian Personality may thus be viewed as an attempt to provide these philosophical theories of anti-Semitism with empirical support, but the theory itself was fundamentally an a priori philosophical theory and was not viewed by its authors as subject to either verification or falsification:
{p. 162} Forbidden actions underlain by powerful instincts are thus turned into aggression, which is then projected onto victims in the external world, with the result that "he attacks other individuals in envy or persecution just as the repressed bestialist hunts or torments an animal" (p. 192). A later passage decries the "suppression of animal nature into scientific methods of controlling nature" (p. 193). Domination of nature, viewed as central to Christianity and fascism, thus derives ultimately from suppressing our animal nature.
Horkheimer and Adorno then attempt to explain the role of conformity in fascism. They argue that cohesive gentile group strategies are fundamentally based on a distortion of human nature - a central theme of The Authoritarian Personality. They posit a natural, nonconforming, reflective self in opposition to society that has been corrupted by capitalism or fascism. The development of large industrial interests and the culture industry of late capitalism have destroyed in most people the inner-directed, reflective power that can produce "self-comprehending guilt" (p. 198), which could oppose the forces leading to anti-Semitism. This inner directed reflection was "emancipated" from society and even directed against society (p. 198), but under the above-mentioned forces, it conforms blindly to the values of the external society.
Thus humans are portrayed as naturally opposed to the conformity demanded by a highly cohesive society. As indicated below, a consistent theme of The Authoritarian Personality is the idea that gentile participation in cohesive groups with high levels of social conformity is pathological, whereas similar behavior of Jews with respect to the group cohesiveness characteristic of Judaism is ignored: Indeed, we have seen that Judaism is portrayed in The Dialectic of Enlightenment as morally superior to Christianity.
The gentile elite is then said to take advantage of the situation by directing the projected hostility of the masses into anti-Semitism. Jews are an ideal target for this projected hostility because they represent all that is antithetical to totalitarianism: "Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe as long as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil" (p. 199).
The conclusion is that if the rulers in fact allowed the ruled to be like the Jews, there would be a fundamental turning point of history:
By overcoming that sickness of the mind which thrives on the ground of self-assertion untainted by reflective thought, mankind would develop from a set of opposing races to the species which, even in nature, is more than mere nature. Individual and social emancipation from domination is the countermovement to false projectlon, and no Jew would then resemble the senseless evil visited upon him as upon all persecuted beings be they animals or men. (p. 200)
The end of anti-Semitism is thus viewed as a precondition for the development of a utopian society and the liberation of humanity - perhaps the closest
{p. 163} that the Frankfurt School ever came to defining utopia.7 The envisioned utopian society is one in which Judaism can continue as a cohesive group but in which cohesive, nationalistic, corporate gentile groups based on conformity to group norms have been abolished as manifestations of psychopathology. Horkheimer and Adorno developed the view that the unique role of Judaism in world history was to vindicate the concept of difference against the homogenizing forces thought to represent the essence of Western civilization: "The Jews became the metaphoric equivalent of that remnant of society preserving negation and the non-identical" (Jay 1980, 148). Judaism thus represents the antithesis of Western universalism. The continuation and acceptance of Jewish particularism becomes a precondition for the development of a utopian society of the future.
Within this perspective, the roots of anti-Semitism are therefore to be sought in individual psychopathology, not in the behavior of Jews. Nevertheless, there is some acknowledgment that the actual characteristics of Jews may be involved in historical anti-Semitism, but Horkheimer and Adorno theorize that the Jewish characteristics that have led to anti-Semitism were forced on Jews. Jews are said to have incurred the wrath of the lower classes because Jews were the originators of capitalism: "For the sake of economic progress which is now proving their downfall, the Jews were always a thorn in the side of the craftsmen and peasants who were declassed by capitalism. They are now experiencing to their own cost the exclusive, particularist character of capitalism" (p. 175). However, this Jewish role is viewed as forced on the Jews who were completely dependent on gentile elites for their rights even into the nineteenth century. Under these circumstances, "Commerce is not their vocation, it is their fate" (p. 175) {why, then, continue it now?}. The success of the Jews then constituted a trauma to the gentile bourgeoisie, "who had to pretend to be creative" (p. 175); their anti-Semitism is thus "self-hatred, the bad conscience of the parasite" (p. 176).
There are indications that the original anti-Semitism project envisioned a more elaborate discussion of "Jewish character traits" that led to anti-Semitism along with suggested methods for overcoming them. However, "The topic never became part of the Institute's programme, perhaps partly out of consideration for the sensitivity of most Jews towards this topic, and partly to avoid exposing the Institute to the accusation that it was turning the problem of anti-Semitism into a Jewish problem" (Wiggershaus 1994, 366). Indeed, the Institute was well aware of a 1945 Jewish Labor Committee survey of working-class Americans in which the latter complained of Jewish behaviors related to the types of actual dealings working-class individuals would be likely to have with Jews (see SAID, p. 50). Adorno appears to have believed that these attitudes were "less irrational" than the anti-Semitism of other classes (see Wiggershaus 1994, 369).
{p. 198} "cultural revolution to destroy the Christian West" (Wiggershaus 1994, 657). "The inseparability of concepts such as Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and neo-Marxism indicates that, from the 1930's onwards, theoretically productive left-wing ideas in German-speaking countries had focused on Horkheimer, Adorno and the Institute of Social Research" (Wiggershaus 1994, 658).
However, the influence of the Frankfurt School has gone well beyond the German-speaking world, and not only with The Authoritarian Personality studies, the writings of Erich Fromm, and the enormously influential work of Herbert Marcuse as a countercultural guru to the New Left. In the contemporary intellectual world, there are several joumals devoted to this legacy, including New German Critique, Cultural Critique, and Theory, Culture and Society: Explorations in Critical Social Science. The influence of the Frankfurt School increased greatly following the success of the New Left countercultural movement of the 1960s (Piccone 1993, xii). Reflecting its current influence in the humanities, the Frankfurt School retains pride of place as a major inspiration at the meetings of the notoriously postmodern Modern Language Association held in December 1994. Kramer and Kimball (1995) describe the large number of laudatory references to Adorno, Horkheimer, and especially Walter Benjamin, who had the honor of being the most-referred-to scholar at the convention.33 Marxism and psychoanalysis were also major influences at the conference. One bright spot occurred when the radical Marxist Richard Ohmann acknowledged that the humanities had been revolutionized by the "critical legacy of the Sixties" (p. 12) - a point of view, Kramer and Kimball note, often denied by the academic left but commonplace in conservative publications like The New Criterion and central to the perspective developed here.
Reflecting the congruence between the Frankfurt School and contemporary postmodemism, the enormously influential postmodernist Michel Foucault stated, "If I had known about the Frankfurt School in time, I would have been saved a great deal of work. I would not have said a certain amount of nonsense and would not have taken so many false trails trying not to get lost, when the Frankfurt School had already cleared the way" (in Wiggershaus 1994, 4). Whereas the strategy of the Frankfurt School was to deconstruct universalist, scientific thinking by the use of "critical reason," postmodernism has opted for complete relativism and the lack of objective standards of any kind in the interests of preventing any general theories of society or universally valid philosophical or moral systems (Norris 1993, 287ff).34
Contemporary postmodernism and multiculturalist ideology (see, e.g., Gless & Herrnstein Smith 1992) have adopted several central pillars of the Frankfurt School: the fundamental priority of ethics and values in approaching education and the social sciences; empirical science as oppressive and an aspect of social domination; a rejection of the possibility of shared values or any sense of universalism or national culture (see also Jacoby's [1995, 35] discussion of "post-colonial theory" - another intellectual descendant of the Frankfurt
{p. 199} School); a "hermeneutics of suspicion" in which any attempt to construct such universals or a national culture is energetically resisted and "deconstructed" - essentially the same activity termed by Adorno "negative dialectics." There is an implicit acceptance of a Balkanized model of society in which certain groups and their interests have a priori moral value and there is no possibility of developing a scientific, rational theory of any particular group, much less a theory of pan-human universals. Both the Frankfurt School and postmodernism implicitly accept a model in which there is competition among antagonistic groups and no rational way of reaching consensus, although there is also an implicit double standard in which cohesive groups formed by majorities are viewed as pathological and subject to radical criticism.
It is immensely ironic that this onslaught against Western universalism effectively rationalizes minority group ethnocentrism while undercutting the intellectual basis of ethnocentrism. Intellectually one wonders how one could be a postmodernist and a committed Jew at the same time. Intellectual consistency would seem to require that all personal identifications be subjected to the same deconstructing logic, unless, of course, personal identity itseif involves deep ambiguities, deception, and self-deception. This in fact appears to be the case for Jacques Derrida, the premier philosopher of deconstruction, whose philosophy shows the deep connections between the intellectual agendas of postmodernism and the Frankfurt School.35 Derrida has a complex and ambiguous Jewish identity despite being "a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist" (Caputo 1997, xxiii). Derrida was born into a Sephardic Jewish family that immigrated to Algeria from Spain in the nineteenth century. His family were thus crypto-Jews who retained their religious-ethnic identity for 400 years in Spain during the period of the Inquisition.
Derrida identifies himself as a crypto-Jew - "Marranos that we are, Marranos in any case whether we want to be or not, whether we know it or not" (Derrida 1993a, 81) - a confession perhaps of the complexity, ambivalence, and self-deception often involved in post-Enlightenment forms of Jewish identity. In his notebooks, Derrida (1993b, 70) writes of the centrality that Jewish issues have held in his writing: "Circumcision, that's all I've ever talked about." In the same passage he writes that he has always taken "the most careful account, in anamnesis, of the fact that in my family and among the Algerian Jews, one scarcely ever said 'circumcision' but 'baptism,' not Bar Mitzvah but 'communion,' with the consequences of softening, dulling, through fearful acculturation, that I've always suffered from more or less consciously" (1993b, 72-73) - an allusion to the continuation of cryptoJewish practices among the Algerian Jews and a clear indication that Jewish identification and the need to hide it have remained psychologically salient to Derrida. Significantly, he identifies his mother as Esther (1993b, 73), the biblical heroine who "had not made known her people nor her kindred" (Est. 2:10) and who was an inspiration to generations of crypto-Jews. Derrida was deeply attached to his mother and states as she nears death, "I can be sure that
{p. 200} you will not understand much of what you will nonetheless have dictated to me, inspired me with, asked of me, ordered from me." Like his mother (who spoke of baptism and communion rather than circumcision and Bar Mitzvah), Derrida thus has an inward Jewish identity while outwardly assimilating to the French Catholic culture of Algeria. For Derrida, however, there are indications of ambivalence for both identities (Caputo 1997, 304): "I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts" (Derrida 1993b, 170).
Derrida's experience with anti-Semitism during World War II in Algeria was traumatic and inevitably resulted in a deep consciousness of his own Jewishness. Derrida was expelled from school at age 13 under the Vichy government because of the numerus clausus, a self-described "little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it, to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason, neither his parents nor his friends" (Derrida 1993b, 58).
The persecutions, which were unlike those of Europe, were all the same unleashed in the absence of any German occupier.... It is an experience that leaves nothing intact, an atmosphere that one goes on breathing forever. Jewish children expulsed from school. The principal's office: You are going to go home, your parents will explain. Then the Allies landed, it was the period of the so-called two-headed government (de Gaulle-Giraud): racial laws maintained for almost six months, under a "free" French government. Friends who no longer knew you, insults, the Jewish high school with its expulsed teachers and never a whisper of protest from their colleagues.... From that moment, I felt - how to put it? - just as out-of-place in a closed Jewish community as I did on the other side (we called them "the Catholics"). In France, the suffering subsided. I naively thought that anti-Semitism had disappeared.... But during adolescence, it was the tragedy, it was present in everything else.... Paradoxical effect, perhaps, of this brutalization: a desire for integration in the non-Jewish community, a fascinated but painful and suspicious desire, nervously vigilant, an exhausting aptitude to detect signs of racism, in its most discreet configurations or its noisiest disavowals. (Derrida 1995a, 12~121; italics in text)
Bennington (1993, 326) proposes that the expulsion from school and its aftermath were "no doubt . . . the years during which the singular character of J.D.'s 'belonging' to Judaism is imprinted on him: wound, certainly, painful and practiced sensitivity to antisemitism and any racism, 'raw' response to xenophobia, but also impatience with gregarious identification, with the militancy of belonging in general, even if it is Jewish.... I believe that this difficulty with belonging, one would almost say of identification, affects the whole of J.D.'s oeuvre, and it seems to me that 'the deconstruction of the proper' is the very thought of this, its thinking affection." Indeed, Derrida says as much. He recalls that just before his Bar Mitzvah (which he again notes was termed 'communion' by the Algerian Jewish community), when the Vichy government expelled him from school and withdrew his citizenship, "I became the outside, try as they might to come close to me they'll never touch me again.... I did my 'communion' by
{p. 201} fleeing the prison of all languages, the sacred one they tried to lock me up in without opening me to it [i.e., Hebrew], the secular [i.e., French] they made clear would never be mine" (Derrida 1993b, 289).
As with many Jews seeking a semi-cryptic pose in a largely non-Jewish environment, Derrida altered his name to Jacques. "By choosing what was in some way, to be sure, a semi-pseudonym but also very French, Christian, simple, I must have erased more things than I could say in a few words (one would have to analyze the conditions in which a certain community - the Jewish community in Algeria - in the '30s sometimes chose American names)" (Derrida 1995a, 344). Changing his name is thus a form of crypsis as practiced by the Algerian Jewish community, a way of outwardly conforming to the French, Christian culture while secretly remaining Jewish. Derrida's Jewish political agenda is identical to that of the Frankfurt School:
The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue.... The idea is to disarm the bombs . . . of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants, . . . all of whom . . . are wholly other. Contrary to the claims of Derrida's more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida's democracy is a radically pluralistlc polity that resists the terror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual unity, of the natural, native bonds of the nation (natus, natio), which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus (Geschlecht). He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativist closure, of a community without identity, of a non-identical community that cannot say I or we, for, after all, the very idea of a community is to fortify (munis, muneris) ourselves in common against the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, of the spirit of the "we" of "Christian Europe," or of a "Christian politics," lethal compounds that spell death of Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other. The heaving and sighing of this Christian European spirit is a lethal air for Jews and Arabs, for all les juifs [i.e., Jews as prototypical others], even if they go back to father Abraham, a way of gassing them according to both the letter and the spirit. (Caputo 1997, 231-232)
Derrida has recently published a pamphlet advocating immigration of non-Europeans into France (see Lilla 1998). As with the Frankfurt School, the radical skepticism of the deconstructionist movement is in the service of preventing the development of hegemonic, universalist ideologies and other foundations of gentile group allegiance in the name of the tout autre, i.e., the "wholly other." Caputo ascribes Derrida's motivation for his deconstruction of Hegel to the latter's conceptualization of Judaism as morally and spiritually inferior to Christianity because of its legalism and tribalistic exclusivism, whereas Christianity is the religion of love and assimilation, a product of the Greek, not the Jewish spirit. These Hegelian interpretations are remarkably
{p. 202} congruent with Christian self-conceptualizations and Christian conceptions of Judaism originating in antiquity (see SAID, Ch. 3), and such a conceptualization fits well with the evolutionary analysis developed in PTSDA. Reinterpretations and refutations of Hegel were common among nineteenth century Jewish intellectuals (see SAID, Ch. 6), and we have seen that in Negative Dialectics Adorno was concerned to refute the Hegelian idea universal history for similar reasons. "Hegel's searing, hateful portrait of the Jew . . . seem[s] to haunt all of Derrida's work; . . . by presenting in the most loyal and literal way just what Hegel says, Derrida shows . . . that Hegel's denunciations of the Jew's castrated heart is a heartless, hateful castration of the other" (Caputo 1994, 234, 243). As with the Frankfurt School, Derrida posits that the messianic future is unknown because to say otherwise would lead to the possibility of imposed uniformity, "a systematic whole with infinite warrant" (Caputo 1994, 246), a triumphal and dangerous truth in which Jews as exemplars of the tout autre would necessarily suffer. The human condition is conceptualized as "a blindness that cannot be remedied, a radical, structural condition in virtue of which everyone is blind from birth" (Caputo 1994, 313).
As with the Frankfurt School, the exemplars of otherness have a priori moral value. "In deconstruction love is extricated from the polemic against the Jews by being re-thought in terms of the other, of les juifs.... If this organic Hegelian Christian-European community is defined as making a common (com) defense (munis) against the other, Derrida advances the idea of laying down his arms, rendre les armes, surrendering to the other" (p. 248). From this perspective, acknowledging the possibility of truth is dangerous because of the possibility that truth could be used against the other. The best strategy, therefore, is to open up "a salutary competition among interpretations, a certain salutary radical hermeneuticizing, in which we dream with passion of something unforeseeable and impossible" (Caputo 1994, 277). To the conflicting views of differing religions and ideologies, Derrida "opposes a community, if it is one, of the blind[;] . . . of the blind leading the blind. Blindness makes for good communities, provided we all admit that we do not see {This has similarities to the second of Thomas Aquinas's Three Ways of Knowing God, the Negative Way}, that in the crucial matters we are all stone blind and without privileged access, adrift in the same boat without a lighthouse to show the other shore" (Caputo 1997, 313-314) {Why then pay more attention to Derrida than to anyone else?}. Such a world is safe for Judaism, the prototypical other, and provides no warrant for the universalizing tendencies of Western civilization (Caputo 1997, 335) - what one might term deconstruction as de-Hellenizatlon or de-Westernization. Minority group ethnic consciousness is thus validated not in the sense that it is known to be based on some sort of psychological truth, but in the sense that it can't be proved untrue. On the other hand, the cultural and ethnic interests of majorities are "hermeneuticized" and thus rendered impotent - impotent because they cannot serve as the basis for a mass ethnic movement that would conflict with the interests of other groups. Ironically from the standpoint of the theory of Judaism developed here, Derrida (who has thought a great deal about his own circumcision in his
{p. 203} Circonfession [Derrida 1993b]) realizes that circumcision, which he likens to a shibboleth because of its usefulness as a mechanism of ingroup demarcation (i.e., as a mark of Jewish exclusiveness and "otherness"), is a two-edged sword. Commenting on the work of Holocaust poet Paul Celan, Derrida (1994, 67) states, "the mark of a covenant or alliance, it also intervenes, it interdicts, it signifies the sentence of exclusion, of discrimination, indeed of extermination. One may, thanks to the shibboleth, recognize and be recognized by one's own, for better and for worse, in the cleaving of partaking: on the one hand, for the sake of the partaking and the ring of the covenant, but also, on the other hand, for the purpose of denying the other, of denying him passage or life.... Because of the shibboleth and exactly to the extent that one may make use of it, one may see it turned against oneself: then it is the circumcised who are proscribed or held at the border, excluded from the community, put to death, or reduced to ashes" (Derrida 1994, 67-68; italics in text). Despite the dangers of circumcision as a two-edged sword, Derrida (1994, 68) concludes that "there must be circumcision," a conclusion that Caputo (1997, 252) interprets as an assertion of an irreducible and undeniable human demand "for a differentiating mark, for a mark of difference." Derrida thus subscribes to the inevitability (innateness?) of group demarcations, but, amazingly and apologetically, he manages to conceptualize circumcision not as a sign of tribal exclusivism, but as "the cut that opens the space for the incoming of the tout autre" (Caputo 1994, 250) - a remarkable move because, as we have seen, Derrida seems quite aware that circumcision results in separatism, the erection of ingroup-outgroup barriers, and the possibility of between-group conflict and even extermination. But in Derrida's gloss, "spiritually we are all Jews, all called and chosen to welcome the other" (Caputo 1994, 262), so that Judaism turns out to be a universalist ideology where marks of separatism are interpreted as openness to the other. In Derrida's view, "if circumcision is Jewish it is only in the sense that all poets are Jews.... Everyone ought to have a circumcised heart; this ought to form a universal religion" (Caputo 1994, 262). Similarly in a discussion of James Joyce, Derrida contrasts Joyce and Hegel (as prototypical Western thinkers) who "close the circle of the same" with "Abrahamic [i.e., Jewish] circumcision, which cuts the cord of the same in order to be open to the other, circumcision as saying yes . . . to the other" (Caputo 1997, 257). Thus in the end, Derrida develops yet another in the age-old conceptualizations of Judaism as a morally superior group while ideologies of sameness and universality that might underlie ideologies of social homogeneity and group consciousness among European gentiles are deconstmcted and rendered as morally inferior.
NOTES
1 Part of this balancing act was a conscious practice of self-censorship in an effort to remove Marxist language from their publications so that, for example, "Marxism'
{p. 228 (Chapter 6 The Jewish Criticism of Gentile Culture: A reprise)} Strauss complains of the assimilatory tendencies in liberal society and its tendencies to break down the group loyalty so central to Judaism and to replace it with "membership in a nonexistent universal human society" (Tarcov & Pangle 1987, 909). Strauss's political philosophy of democratic liberalism was fashioned as an instrument of achieving Jewish group survival in the post-Enlightenment political world (see Tarcov & Pangle 1987, 909-910). Prior to their conversion, Goldberg (1996, 160) notes that the future neoconservatives were disciples of Trotskyist theoretician Max Shachtman, also a Jew and a prominent member of the New York Intellectuals (see also Irving Kristol's [1983] "Memoirs of a Trotskyist").
In the cases of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School, and to a lesser extent Boasian anthropology, we have seen that these cohesive groups typically had strong overtones of authoritarianism, and like traditional Judaism itself, they were highly exclusionary and intolerant of dissent. Cuddihy (1974, 106) points out that Wilhelm Reich had the distinction of being expelled from both the German Communist Party (for his "incorrect" view of the causes of fascism) and psychoanalysis (for his political fanaticism): "Reich's attempt to 'marry' two of the Diaspora ideologues, Freud and Marx, ended in his separation from the two movements speaking in their names." Recall also David Horowitz's ( 1997, 42) description of the world of his parents who had joined a "shul" run by the CPUSA. Note the ingroup-outgroup mentality, the sense of moral superiority, the sense of being a minority persecuted by the goyim, and the powerful overtones of authoritarianism and intolerance of dissent:
What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto. There was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe, the same dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of moral superiority toward the stronger and more numerous goyim outside. And there was the same fear of expulsion for heretical thoughts, which was the fear that riveted the chosen to the faith.
An ingroup-outgroup orientation, noted above as a characteristic of the PR coterie, was apparent also in leftist political groups which were also predominantly Jewish during this period. In the words of PR {Partisan Review} editor William Phillips (1983, 41), "The Communists were experts at maintaining a fraternal atmosphere that distinguished sharply between insider and outsider. One couldn't just leave; one had to be expelled. And expulsion from the tribe brought into motion a machinery calculated to make the expelled one a complete pariah. Party members were forbidden to talk to the ex-Communist {this happens with Jehovah Witnesses too}, and a campaign of vilification was unleashed whose intensity varied according to the importance of the expelled person." We have seen that psychoanalysis dealt with its dissenters in a similar manner.
These movements tended to center around a charismatic leader (Boas, Freud, or Horkheimer) with a powerful moral, intellectual, and social vision
{p. 229} and the followers of these leaders had an intense devotion toward them. There was an intense psychological sense of missionary zeal and, as we have seen, moral fervor. This phenomenon occurred in the case of psychoanalysis and the Boasian movement, and (with massive irony) this was also the case with Critical Theory: "The theory which filled Adorno and Marcuse with a sense of mission both before and after the war was a theory of a special sort: in the midst of doubts it was still inspiring, in the midst of pessimism it still spurred them on towards a kind of salvation through knowledge and discovery. The promise was neither fulfilled nor betrayed - it was kept alive" (Wiggershaus 1994, 6). Like Freud, Horkheimer inspired intense loyalty combined with personal insecurity (at least partly because of his control over the Institute's budget [Wiggershaus 1994, 161-162]), so that his underlings at the Institute, like Adorno, became fixated on him and intensely jealous of their rivals for their master's favors. Adorno "was prepared to identify himself completely with the great cause of the Institute, measuring everything by that standard" (Wiggershaus 1994, 160). When fellow institute member Leo Lowenthal complained that "Adorno showed a sense of zealousness not far removed from a sense of resentment," Horkheimer commented that this is what he valued in Adorno: "For [Horkheimer], all that mattered was that [Adorno's] zealous aggressiveness, which was able to detect concessions to the bourgeois academic system in the work of Lowenthal, Marcuse, Fromm, and even more so in the work of others, should be channeled along the right lines, namely those with significance for social theory" (Wiggershaus 1994,163).
Rallying around charismatic leaders (Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg) has also been apparent among Jewish radicals (see Ch. 3). The New York Intellectuals may be an exception because they were relatively de-centralized and quite querulous and competitive with each other, with no one rising to the preeminent status of a Freud or Boas. However, like many Jewish leftists, they tended to idolize Trotsky, and, as we have seen, Sidney Hook played a decisive leadership role in the group (Jumonville l991, 28). They also constituted a distinct coterie centered around the "little magazines" whose editors wielded great power and influence over the careers of would-be group members. Elliot Cohen, despite his lack of presence as a writer, had a charismatic influence on those who wrote for him as editor of Menorah Journal and Commentary. Lional Trilling labeled him a "tormented 'genius'" (in Jumonville 1991, 117), a leader who influenced many, including Trilling in their journey from Stalinism to anti-Stalinism and finally toward the beginnings of neoconservatism. Prospective members of the ingroup typically idolized ingroup members as cultural icons. Norman Podhoretz (1967, 147) writes of his "wide-eyed worshipful fascination" with the PR crowd at the beginning of his career. Ingroup members paid "rapt attention" to others in the group (Cooney 1986, 249). Like different branches of psychoanalysis, there were offshoots of these magazines initiated by people with somewhat different aesthetic or political
{p. 230} visions, such as the circle around Dissent whose central figure was Irving Howe.
This tendency to rally around a charismatic leader is also a characteristic of traditional Jewish groups. These groups are extremely collectivist in Triandis's (1990, 1991) sense. The authoritarian nature of these groups and the central role of a charismatic rabbi are particularly striking: "A haredi . . . will consult his rabbi or hasidic rebbe on every aspect of his life, and will obey the advice he receives as though it were an halachic ruling" (Landau 1993, 47). "The haredim's blind obeisance to rabbis is one of the most striking characteristics of haredism in the eyes of the outside world, both Jewish and Gentile" (Landau 1993, 45). Famous rebbes are revered in an almost godlike manner (tzaddikism, or cult of personality), and indeed there was a recent controversy over whether the Lubavitcher Rebbe Schneerson claimed to be the Messiah. Many of his followers believed that he was; Mintz (1992, 348ff) points out that it is common for Hasidic Jews to view their rebbe as the Messiah.
This intensity of group feeling centered around a charismatic leader is reminiscent of that found among traditional Eastern European Jews who were the immediate ancestors of many of these intellectuals. Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin (1971, 69) recounts his visit to a synagogue in Galicia (Poland) in 1903:
There were no benches, and several thousand Jews were standing closely packed together, swaying in prayer like the corn in the wind. When the rabbi appeared the service began. Everybody tried to get as close to him as possible. The rabbi led the prayers in a thin, weeping voice. It seemed to arouse a sort of ecstasy in the listeners. They closed their eyes, violently swaying. The loud praying sounded like a gale. Anyone seeing these Jews in prayer would have concluded that they were the most religious people on earth.
Later those closest to the rabbi were intensely eager to eat any food touched by the rabbi, and the fish bones were preserved by his followers as relics.
As expected on the basis of social identity theory, all these movements appear to have a strong sense of belonging to an ingroup viewed as intellectually and morally superior and fighting against outgroups seen as morally depraved and as intellectually inferior (e.g., Horkheimer's constant admonition that they were among the "chosen few" destined to develop Critical Theory). Within the ingroup, disagreement was channeled into a narrowly confined intellectual space, and those who overstepped the boundaries were simply excised from the movement. The comments of Eugen Bleuler to Freud when he left the psychoanalytic movement in 1911 are worth quoting again because they describe a central feature of psychoanalysis and the other movements reviewed in this volume: "[T]his 'who is not for us is against us,' this 'all or nothing,' is necessary for religious communities and useful for political parties. I can therefore understand the principle as such, but for science I consider it harmful" (in Gay 1987, 144-145). All these features are central to
{p. 231} traditional Judaism as well and are compatible with proposing that a basic feature of all manifestations of Judaism is a proneness to developing highly collectivist social structures with a strong sense of ingroup-outgroup barriers (see PTSDA, Ch. 8).
Another important theme is that psychoanalysis and the Authoritarian Personalitu studies showed strong overtones of indoctrination. Theories were developed in which behavior that did not conform to politically acceptable standards was conceptualized as an indication of psychopathology. This is apparent in the tendency for psychoanalysis to attribute rejection of psychoanalysis itself to various forms of psychopathology, as well as in its general perspective that a pathology-inducing gentile culture was the source of all forms of psychiatric diagnosis and that anti-Semitism was the sign of a disturbed personality. The Authoritarian Personality studies built on this tradition with its "discovery" that the failure to develop a "liberal personality" and to deeply and sincerely accept liberal political beliefs was a sign of psychopathology.
Indeed, one might note that a common theme of all these movements of cultural criticism is that gentile-dominated social structures are pathogenic. From the psychoanalytic perspective, including the Frankfurt School, human societies fail to meet human needs that are rooted in human nature with the result that humans develop a variety of psychiatric disorders as a response to our fall from naturalness and harmony with nature {I accept that viewpoint; it's quite Taoist}. Or humans are seen as a blank slate on which Western capitalist culture has written greed, gentile ethnocentrism, and other supposed psychiatric disorders (Marxism, Boasian anthropology).
Group cohesion can also be seen in the support these movements have obtained from the wider Jewish community. In Chapter 5 I noted the importance Jewish radicals placed on maintaining ties with the wider Jewish community. The wider Jewish community provided economic support for psychoanalysis as the preferred form of psychotherapy among Jews (Glazer & Moynihan 1963); it also provided philanthropic support for institutes of psychoanalysis. Jews also provided the great majority of the financial support of the University of Frankfurt as a haven for German-Jewish intellectuals beginning in the Wilhelmine period (see W. E. Mosse 1989, 318ff), and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt was established by a Jewish millionaire, Felix Weil, with a specific intellectual-political mission that eventually developed into Critical Theory (Wiggershaus 1994). In the United States foundations such as the Stern Family Fund, the Rabinowitz Fund, and the Rubin Foundation provided money for radical underground publicatiOns during the 1960s (Sachar 1992, 804). Much earlier, American Jewish capital ists like Jacob Schiff financed Russian radical movements directed at over throwing the Czar and may well have had considerable impact (GOIdStein 1990, 26-27: Szajkowski 1967).
{p. 232} Moreover, Jewish influence in the popular media was an important source of favorable coverage of Jewish intellectual movements, particularly psychoanalysis and 1960s political radicalism (Rothman & Lichter 1982). Favorable media depictions of psychoanalysis were common during the 1950s peaking in the mid-sixties when psychoanalysis was at the apex of its influence in the United States (Hale 1995, 289). "Popular images of Freud revealed him as a painstaking observer, a tenacious worker, a great healer, a truly original explorer, a paragon of domestic virtue, the discover of personal energy, and a genius" (p. 289). Psychiatrists were portrayed in movies as "humane and effective. The number of Hollywood stars, directors, and producers who were 'in analysis' was legion" (p. 289). An important aspect of this process has been the establishment of journals directed not only at a closed community of academic specialists but also at a wide audience of educated readers and other consumers of the counterculture.
The support of the wider Jewish community can also be seen in the association between Jewish-owned publishing houses and these intellectual movements, as in the case of the association between the Frankfurt School and the Hirschfeld Publishing Company (Wiggershaus 1994, 2). Similarly the Straussian neoconservative movement developed access to the mainstream intellectual media. Disciples of Leo Strauss have developed their own publishing and reviewing network, including neoconservative publications, Basic Books, and the university presses at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Chicago (Gottfried 1993, 73).
These ideologies were promulgated by the most prestigious institutions of the society, and especially by elite universities and the mainstream media, as the essence of scientific objectivity. The New York Intellectuals, for example, developed ties with elite universities, particularly Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the University of California-Berkeley, while psychoanalysis and Boasian anthropology became well entrenched throughout academia. The moral and intellectual elite established by these movements dominated intellectual discourse during a critical period after World War II and leading into the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. These movements dominated intellectual discourse by the time of the sea change in immigration policy in the 1960s (see Ch. 7). The implication is that individuals receiving a college education during this period were powerfully socialized to adopt liberal-radical cultural and political beliefs. The ideology that ethnocentrism was a form of psychopathology was promulgated by a group that over its long history had arguably been the most ethnocentric group among all the cultures of the world. This ideology was promulgated by strongly identified members of a group whose right to continue to exist as a cohesive, genetically impermeable group ideally suited to maximizing its own political, economic, and cuitural power was never a subject of discussion. However, the failure to adopt these beliefs on the part of gentiles was viewed as an admission of personal
{p. 233} inadequacy and an acknowledgment that one was suffering from a condition that would benefit from psychiatric counseling.
Scientific and intellectual respectability was thus a critical feature of the movements reviewed here. Nevertheless, these intellectual movements have been fundamentally irrational - an irrationality that is most apparent in the entire conduct of psychoanalysis as an authoritarian, quasi-scientific enterprise and in the explicit depiction of science as an instrument of social domination by the Frankfurt School. It is also apparent in the structure of psychoanalysis and radical political ideology, which are, like traditional Jewish religious ideology, essentially hermeneutic theories in the sense that the theory is derived in an a priori manner and is constructed so that any event is interpretable within the theory. The paradigm is shifted from a scientific perspective that emphasizes the selective retention of theoretical variants (Campbell 1987; Hull 1988; Popper 1963) to a hermeneutic exercise in which any and all events can be interpreted within the context of the theory. In the case of Critical Theory, and to a considerable extent, psychoanalysis, the actual content of the theory continually changed and there was divergence among its practitioners, but the goal of the theory as a tool of leftist social criticism remained intact.
Despite the fundamental irrationality of these movements, they have often masqueraded as the essence of scientific or philosophical objectivity. They have all sought the aura of science. Hollinger (1996, 160), in describing what he terms "a secular, increasingly Jewish, decidedly left-of-center intelligentsia based largely but not exclusively in the disciplinary communities of philosophy and the social sciences," notes that "science offered itself to [Harvard historian Richard] Hofstadter and to many of his secular contemporaries as a magnificent ideological resource. Or, to put the point more sharply, these men and women selected from the available inventory those images of science most useful to them, those serving to connect the adjective scientific with public rather than private knowledge, with open rather than closed discourses, with universal rather than local standards of warrant, with democratic rather than aristocratic models of authority." Harvard Sociologist Nathan Glazer included himself and the other New York Intellectuals in his statement that "Sociology is still for many socialists and sociologists the pursuit of politics through academic means (in Jumonville 1991, 89). Jumonville (1991, 90) comments that "Part of the impact of the New York group on American intellectual life is that they dignified that outlook of political pursuit. They were never embarrassed to admit the political content of their work, and in fact brought into the intellectual mainstream the idea that all strong work had ideological and political overtones."
Even the Frankfurt School, which developed an ideology in which science, politics, and morality were systematically conflated, presented The Authoritarian Personality as a scientifically based, empirically grounded study of human behavior because of a perceived need to appeal to an American audience of empirically oriented social scientists.
{p. 238} As we have seen in SAID (Ch. 7), Jewish religious ideology was an infinitely plastic set of propositions that could rationalize and interpret any event in a manner compatible with serving the interests of the community. Authority within the Jewish intellectual community was always understood to be based entirely on what recognized (i.e., consensual) scholars had said. It never occurred to the members of this discourse community to seek confirmation of their views from outside the community of intellectual discourse itself, either from other (gentile) discourse communities or by trying to understand the nature of reality itself. Reality was whatever the group decided it should be, and any dissent from this socially constructed reality would have to be performed within a narrow intellectual space that would not endanger the overall goals of the group.
Acceptance of the Jewish canon, like membership in the intellectual movements reviewed here, was essentially an act of authoritarian submission. The basic genius of the Jewish intellectual activity reviewed in these chapters is the realization that hermeneutic communities based solely on intellectual consensus within a committed group are possible even within the post-Enlightenment world of intellectual discourse and may even be successfully disseminated wtthm the wider gentile community to facilitate specific Jewish political interests.
The difference from the pre-Enlightenment world, of course, is that these intellectual dlscourses were forced to develop a facade of science in order to appeal to gentiles. Or, in the case of the skeptical thrust of Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction and the Frankfurt School (but not involvement in activities such as The Authoritarian Personality), it was necessary to defend the viability of philosophical skepticism. The scientific veneer and philosophical respectability sought by these movements then functioned to portray these intellectual movements as the result of individualistic free choice based on rational appraisals of the evidence. This in turn necessitated that great efforts were required to mask Jewish involvement and domination of the movements as well as the extent to which the movements sought to attain specific Jewish pohtlcal interests.
Such efforts at deemphasizing Jewish involvement have been most apparent in radical political movements and psychoanalysis, but they are also apparent in Boasian anthropology. Although the Jewish political agenda of the Frankfurt School was far less camouflaged, even here an important aspect of the program was the development of a body of theory applicable to any universalist conception of society and not in any way dependent on the articulation of a specifically Jewish political agenda. As a result, this ideological perspective and its postmodern descendants have been enthusiastically embraced by non-Jewish minority group intellectuals with their own political agendas.
{p. 239} The phenomenon is a good example of the susceptibility of Western individualist societies to invasion by cohesive collectivist groups of any kind. I have noted a strong historical tendency for Judaism to prosper in Western individualist societies and to decline in Eastern or Western collectivist societies (see SAID, Chs. 3 5: PTSD,4, Ch. 8). Jews benefit greatly from open, individualistic societies in which barriers to upward mobility are removed and in which intellectual discourse is not prescribed by gentile-dominated institutions like the Catholic Church. But, as Charles Liebman (1973, 157) points out, Jews "sought the options of the Enlightenment but rejected its consequences" by (in my terms) retaining a strong sense of group identity in a society nominally committed to individualism. Individualist societies develop republican political institutions and institutions of scientific inquiry that assume that groups are maximally permeable and highly subject to defection when individual needs are not being met. Individualists have little loyalty to ingroups and tend not to see the world in terms of ingroups and outgroups. There is a strong tendency to see others as individuals and evaluate them as individuals even when the others are acting as part of a collectivist group (Iriandis 1995).
As a result, intellectual movements that are highly collectivist may come to be regarded by outsiders in individualistic societies as the result of individualistic, rational choice of free agents. Evidence suggests that Jews have been concerned to portray Jewish intellectual movements as the result of enlightened free choice. Thus Jewish social scientists were instrumental in portraying Jewish involvement in radical political causes as "the free choice of a gifted minority" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 118), and I have noted the role of the media in portraying Freud as a tireless seeker of truth. Yet because of their collective highly focused efforts and energy, these groups can be much more influential than the atomized, fragmented efforts of individuals {as a Taoist, I maintain that in the long run this is false: action produces reaction, as Benjamin Ginsberg shows in his book The Fatal Embrace; this is another reason why resistance to Judaism should not take the form of imitation of Judaism}. The efforts of individualists can easily be ignored, marginalized, or placed under anathema; in contrast, the collectivity continues to dominate intellectual discourse because of its cohesiveness and its control of the means of intellectual production. In the long run, however, there is reason to believe that the Western commitment to individualism depends on the absence of powerful and cohesive collectivist groups acting within society (SAID, Chs. 3-5).
It is of some importance that none of these post-Enlightenment intellectual movements reviewed here developed a specific positive rationale for continued Jewish identification. The material reviewed in this volume indicates that such an ideological rationale will not be forthcoming because, in a very basic sense, Judaism represents the antithesis of the Enlightenment values of individualism and its correlative scientific intellectual discourse. In the economic and social sphere, Judaism represents the possibility of a powerful, cohesive group ethnic strategy that provokes anti-individualist reactions in gentile outgroups and threatens the viability of individualist political and soclal institutions. In the intellectual sphere Judaism has resulted in collectivist
{p. 240} enterprises that have systematically impeded inquiry in the social sciences in the interests of developing and disseminating theories directed at achieving specific political and social interests {this is my finding too}.
{p. 312 Conclusion} Western ideals of objectivity, universalism, individualism, rationality, and the scientific method are rejected because of their ethnic origins. Asante accepts a naive racialist theory in which Africans (the "sun people") are viewed as superior to Europeans (the "ice people").
Such movements mirror similar Jewish ideologies that rationalize a powerful concern with Jewish ethnicity and attempt to produce feelings of ethnic superiority within the group. These ideologies have been common throughout Jewish intellectual history, the most enduring embodied in the idea of chosenness and the "light of the nations" concept. SAID (Ch. 7) reviewed evidence indicating that Jewish historians and intellectuals, beginning in the ancient world, have often attempted to show that gentile cultural influences have had specifically Jewish precedents or even that various gentile philosophers and artists were actually Jews. This tradition has been carried on recently by two Sephardic Jews, Martin Bernal (1987) in his Black Athena {with which I agree} and Jose Faur (1992) in his In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity.
Indeed, there may well be a general trend since the Enlightenment in which Jewish intellectuals have been at the vanguard of secular political movements, such as the movement for cultural pluralism, intended to serve Jewish interests as well as appeal to segments of the gentile population. Also apparent is a trend such that eventually these movements fractionate, the result of antiSemitism within the very segment of the gentile population to which the ideology attempts to appeal, and Jews abandon these movements and seek to pursue their interests by other means.
Thus it has been noted here that Jews have played a prominent role in the political left in this century. We have also seen that as a result of anti-Semitism among gentiles on the left and on the part of Communist governments, eventually Jews either abandoned the left or they developed their own brand of leftism in which leftist universalism was compatible with the primacy of Jewish identity and interests. Gore Vidal (1986) is a prominent example of a gentile leftist intellectual who has been highly critical of the role of neoconservative Jews in facilitating the U.S. military buildup of the 1980s and allying themselves with conservative political forces to aid Israel - charges interpreted as implying anti-Semitism because of the implication that American Jews place the interests of Israel above American interests (Podhoretz 1986). Vidal also suggests that neoconservatism is motivated by the desire of Jews to make an alliance with gentile elites as a defense against possible anti-Semitic movements emerging during times of economic crisis.
Indeed, fear of anti-Semitism on the left has been the major impetus for founding the neoconservative movement (see Gottfried 1993, 80) - the final resting point of many of the New York Intellectuals whose intellectual and
{p. 313} political evolution was discussed in Chapter 6. As Gottfried points out, the cumulative effect of neoconservatism and its current hegemony over the conservative political movement in the United States (achieved partly by its large influence on the media and among foundations) has been to shift the conservative movement toward the center and, in effect, to define the limits of conservative legitimacy. Clearly, these limits of conservative legitimacy are defined by whether they conflict with specifically Jewish group interests in a minimally restrictive immigration policy, support for Israel, global democracy, opposition to quotas and affirmative action, and so on.
As indicated in William F. Buckley's (1992) In Search of Anti-Semitism, however, the alliance between gentile paleoconservatives and Jewish neoconservatives in the United States is fragile, with several accusations of antiSemitism among the paleoconservatives. Much of the difficulty derives from the tension between the nationalist tendencies of an important segment of U.S. conservatism and the perceptions of at least some gentile conservatives that Jewish neoconservatism is essentially a device for pursuing narrow Jewish sectarian interests, particularly with regard to Israel, church-state separation, and affirmative action. Moreover, the neoconservative commitment to many aspects of the conservative social agenda is half-hearted at best (Gottfried 1993). Most importantly, neoconservatives pursue what is essentially an ethnic agenda regarding immigration while opposing the ethnocentric interests of the paleoconservatives in retaining their ethnic hegemony. The ethnic agenda of neoconservatism can also be seen in their promotion of the idea that the United States should pursue a highly interventionist foreign policy aimed at global democracy and the interests of Israel rather than aimed at the specific national interests of the United States (Gottfried 1993). Neoconservatism has also provided a Jewish influence on the American conservative movement to counterbalance the strong tendency for Jews to support liberal and leftist political candidates. Jewish ethnic interests are best served by influencing both major parties toward a consensus on Jewish issues, and, as indicated above, neoconservatism has served to define the limits of conservative legitimacy in a manner that conforms to Jewish interests.
As anti-Semitism develops, Jews begin to abandon the very movements for which they originally provided the intellectual impetus. This phenomenon may also occur in the case of multiculturalism. Indeed, many of the most prominent opponents of multiculturalism are Jewish neoconservatives, as well as organizations such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS), which have a large Jewish membership. (The NAS is an organization of academics opposed to some of the more egregious excesses of feminism and multiculturalism in the university.) It may well be the case, therefore, that the Jewish attempt to link up with secular political ideologies that appeal to gentiles is doomed in the long run. Ginsberg (1993, 224ff) essentially makes this point when he notes that there is increasing evidence for anti-Semitism among American liberals, conservatives, and populist radicals.
{p. 314} The case of multiculturalism is particularly problematic as a Jewish strategy. In this case one might say that Jews want to have their cake and eat it too. "Jews are often caught between fervent affirmation of the Enlightenment and criticism of it. Many Jews believe that the replacement of the Enlightenment ideal of universalism with a politics of difference and a fragmented 'multiculture' would constitute a threat to Jewish achievement. At the same time, they recognize the dangers of a homogeneous 'monoculture' for Jewish particularity.... [Jews] seek to rescue the virtues of the Enlightenment from the shards of its failures and salvage an inclusive vision from multiculturalism, where fragmentation and divisiveness now reign" (Biale, Galchinsky, & Heschel 1998, 7). Multicultural societies with their consequent fragmentation and chronic ethnic tension are unlikely to meet Jewish needs in the long run even if they do ultimately subvert the demographic and cultural dominance of the peoples of European origin in lands where they have been dominant.
This in turn suggests a fundamental and irresolvable friction between Judaism and prototypical Western political and social structure. Certainly the very long history of anti-Semitism in Westem societies and its recurrence time and again after periods of latency suggests such a view. The incompatibility of Judaism and Western culture can also be seen in the tendency for individualistic Western cultures to break down Jewish group cohesiveness. As Arthur Ruppin (1934, 339) noted earlier in the century, all modern manifestations of Judaism, from neo-Orthodoxy to Zionism, are responses to the Enlightenment's corrosive effects on Judaism - a set of defensive structures erected against "the destructive influence of European civilization." And at a theoretical level, there is a very clear rationale for supposing that Western individualism is incompatible with group-based resource conflict that has been the consistent consequence of the emergence of a powerful Judaism in Western societies (see SAID, Chs. 3-5).
One aspect of this friction is well articulated in Alan Ryan's (1994, 11) discussion of the "latent contradiction" in the politics of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the authors of the highly controversial volume The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Ryan states, "Herrnstein essentially wants the world in which clever Jewish kids or their equivalent make their way out of their humble backgrounds and end up running Goldman Sachs or the Harvard physics department, while Murray wants the Midwest in which he grew up a world in which the local mechanic didn't care two cents whether he was or wasn't brighter than the local math teacher. The trouble is that the first world subverts the second, while the second feels claustrophobic to the beneficiaries of the first."
The social structure whose acceptance is here attributed to Murray envisions a moderately individualistic society, a society that is meritocratic and hierarchical but also cohesive and culturally and ethnically homogeneous. It is a society with harmony among the social classes and with social controls on extreme individualism among the elite.
{p. 315} There has been a powerful Western tendency to develop such societies, beginning at least in the Middle Ages, but also present, I believe, in the classical Roman civilization of the Republic. The ideal of hierarchic harmony is central to the social program of the Catholic Church beginning during the late Roman Empire and reaching its pinnacle during the High Middle Ages (MacDonald 1995c; SAID, Ch. 5). This ideal is apparent also in a powerful strand of German intellectual history beginning with Herder in the eighteenth century. A very central feature of this prototypical Western hierarchical harmony has been the social imposition of monogamy as a form of reproductive leveling that dampens the association between wealth and reproductive success. From an evolutionary perspective, Western societies achieve their cohesion because hierarchical social relationships are significantly divorced from reproductive consequences.
Such a world is threatened from above by the domination of an individualistic elite without commitment to responsible lower-status individuals who may have lesser intellectual ability, talent, or financial resources. It is threatened from within by the development of a society constituted by a set of ethnically divided, chronically competing, highly impermeable groups as represented historically by Judaism and currently envisioned as the model for society by the proponents of multiculturalism. And it is threatened from below by an increasing underclass of people with the attributes described by Herrnstein and Murray: intellectually incompetent and insufficiently conscientious to hold most kinds of job; irresponsible and incompetent as parents; prone to requiring public assistance; prone to criminal behavior, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse; and prone to rapid demographic increase. Such people are incapable of contributing economically, socially, or culturally to a late-twentieth-century society or, indeed, to any human civilization characterized by a substantial degree of reciprocity, voluntarism and democracy.
Given that the continued existence of Judaism implies that the society will be composed of competing, more or less impermeable groups, the neoconservative condemnation of multiculturalism must be viewed as lacking in intellectual consistency. The neoconservative prescription for society embraces a particular brand of multiculturalism in which the society as a whole will be culturally fragmented and socially atomistic. These social attributes not only allow Jewish upward mobility, but also are incompatible with the development of highly cohesive, anti-Semitic groups of gentiles; they are also incompatible with group-based entitlements and affirmative action programs that would necessarily discriminate against Jews. As Horowitz (1993, 86) notes, "High levels of cultural fragmentation coupled with religious options are likely to find relatively benign forms of anti-Semitism coupled with a stable Jewish condition. Presumed Jewish cleverness or brilliance readily emerges under such pluralistic conditions, and such cleverness readily dissolves with equal suddenness under politically monistic or totalitarian conditions."
{p. 318} hierarchic harmony is threatened by the development of an underclass whose membership consists disproportionately of racial and ethnic minority members and which has also resulted in intense group-based conflict. In particular, it is the large disproportion of African Americans in the American underclass that makes any political solution to this threat to hierarchic harmony problematic.
I have suggested that there is a fundamental and irresolvable friction between Judaism and prototypical Western political and social structure. The present political situation in the United States (and several other Western countries) is so dangerous because of the very real possibility that the Western European tendency toward hierarchic harmony has a biological basis. The greatest mistake of the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements described in this volume is that they have attempted to establish the moral superiority of societies that embody a preconceived moral ideal (compatible with the continuation of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy) rather than advocate social structures based on the ethical possibilities of naturally occurring types. In the twentieth century many millions of people have been killed in the attempt to establish Marxist societies based on the ideal of complete economic and social leveling, and many more millions of people have been killed as a result of the failure of Jewish assimilation into European societies. Although many intellectuals continue to attempt to alter fundamental Western tendencies toward assimilation, muted individualism, and hierarchic harmony, there is a real possibility that these Western ideals are not only more achievable but also profoundly ethical. Uniquely among all stratified cultures of the world, prototypical Western societies have provided the combination of a genuine sense of belonging, a large measure of access to reproductive opportunities, and the political participation of all social classes combined with the possibilities of meritocratic upward social mobility.
As an evolutionist, one must ask what the likely genetic consequences of this sea change in American culture are likely to be. An important consequence - and one likely to have been an underlying motivating factor in the countercultural revolution - may well be to facilitate the continued genetic distinctiveness of the Jewish gene pool in the United States. The ideology of multiculturalism may be expected to increasingly compartmentalize groups in American society, with long-term beneficial consequences on continuation of the essential features of traditional Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. There is increasing consensus among Jewish activists that traditional forms of Judaism are far more effective in ensuring long-term group continuity than semi-assimilationist, semi-cryptic strategies such as Reform Judaism or secular Judaism. Reform Judaism is becoming steadily more conservative, and there is a major effort within all segments of the Jewish community to prevent intermarriage (e.g., Abrams 1997; Dershowitz 1997; see pp. 244-245). Moreover, as discussed in several parts of this book, Jews typically perceive themselves to benefit from a nonhomogeneous culture in which they appear as
{p. 319} only one among many ethnic groups where there is no possibility of the development of a homogeneous national culture that might exclude Jews.
In addition, there may well be negative genetic consequences for the European-derived peoples of the United States and especially for the "common people of the South and West" (Higham 1984, 49) - that is, for lower-middle-class Caucasians derived from Northern and Western Europe - whose representatives desperately battled against the present immigration policy. Indeed we have seen that a prominent theme of the New York Intellectuals as well as the Authoritarian Personality studies was the intellectual and moral inferiority of traditional American culture, particularly rural American culture. James Webb (1995) notes that it is the descendants of the WASPS who settled the West and South who "by and large did the most to lay out the infrastructure of this country, quite often suffering educational and professional regression as they tamed the wilderness, built the towns, roads and schools, and initiated a democratic way of life that later white cultures were able to take advantage of without paying the price of pioneering. Today they have the least, socioeconomically, to show for these contributions. And if one would care to check a map, they are from the areas now evincing the greatest resistance to government practices." The war goes on, but it is easy to see who is losing.
The demographic rise of the underclass resulting from the triumph of the 1960s counter-cultural revolution implies that European-derived genes and gene frequencies will become less common compared to those derived from the African and the Latin American gene pools. On the other end of the IQ reproductive strategy distribution, immigrants from East Asian countries are outcompeting whites in gaining admission to universities and in prestigious high-income jobs. The long-term result will be that the entire white population (not including Jews) is likely to suffer a social status decline as these new imnmigrants become more numerous. (Jews are unlikely to suffer a decline in social status not only because their mean IQ is well above that of the East Asians but, more importantly, because Jewish IQ is skewed toward excelling in verbal skills. The high IQ of East Asians is skewed toward performance IQ which makes them powerful competitors in engineering and technology. See PTSDA, [Ch. 7] and Lynn [1987] Jews and East Asians are thus likely to occupy different niches in contemporary societies.) Presently white gentiles are the most underrepresented group at Harvard, accounting for approximately 25 percent of the students, while Asians and Jews constitute at least half of the student body while constituting no more than five percent of the population (Unz 1998). The United States is well on the road to being dominated by an Asian technocratic elite and a Jewish business, professional, and media elite.
{Comment - Peter M.: Is the decline of white Gentiles caused by their genes, or the abandonment of "future preference" via the 60s Counterculture? - surely the latter. Why did that Counterculture affect Jews differently - were they perhaps immune to its destructiveness because they saw it as serving their interest, or at least tried to manipulate it so it would (c/- Bob Dylan, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, & Allen Ginsberg)?}
Moreover, the shift to multiculturalism has coincided with an enormous growth of immigration from non-European-derived peoples beginning with the Immigration Act of 1965, which favored immigrants from non-European countries (see Auster 1990; Brimelow 1995). Many of these immigrants come from non-Western countries where cultural and genetic segregation are the
{p. 320} norm, and within the context of multicultural America, they are encouraged to retain their own languages and religions and encouraged to marry within the group.
{p. 321} It is also noteworthy that whereas Jews have been on the forefront of movements to separate church and state in the United States and often protested lack of religious freedom in the Soviet Union, the Orthodox rabbinical control of religious affeirs in Israel has received only belated and half-hearted opposition by American Jewish organizations (Cohen 1972, 317) and has not prevented the all-out support of Israel by American Jews, despite the fact that Israel's policy is opposite to the policies that Jewish organizations have successfully pursued in Western democracies. ...
{p. 322} At present the interests of non-European-derived peoples to expand demographically and politically in the United States are widely perceived as a moral imperative, whereas the attempts of the European-derived peoples to retain demographic, political, and cultural control is represented as "racist," immoral, and an indication of psychiatric disorder. From the perspective of these European-derived peoples, the prevailing ethnic morality is altruistic and self-sacrificial. It is unlikely to be viable in the long run, even in an individualistic society. As we have seen, the viability of a morality of self-sacrifice is especially problematic in the context of a multicultural society in which everyone is conscious of group membership and there is between-group competition for resources.
Consider from an evolutionary perspective the status of the argument that all peoples should be allowed to immigrate to the United States. One might assert that any opposition to such a principle should not interest an evolutionist because human group genetic differences are trivial, so any psychological adaptations that make one resist such a principle are anachronisms without function in the contemporary world (much like one's appendix). A Jew maintaining this argument should, to retain intellectual consistency, agree that the traditional Jewish concern with endogamy and consanguinity has been irrational. Moreover, such a person should also believe that Jews ought not attempt to retain political power in Israel because there is no rational reason to suppose that any particular group should have power anywhere. Nor should Jews attempt to influence the political process in the United States in such a manner as to disadvantage another group or benefit their own. And to be logically consistent, one should also apply this argument to all those who promote immnigration of their own ethnic groups, the mirror image of group-based opposition to such immigration.
Indeed, if this chain of logic is pursued to its conclusion, it is irrational for anyone to claim any group interests at all. And if one also rejects the notion of individual genetic differences, it is also irrational to attempt to further individual interests, for example, by seeking to immigrate as an individual. Indeed, if one accepts these assumptions, the notion of genetic consequences and thus of the possibility of human evolution past and present becomes irrational; the idea that it is rational is merely an illusion produced perhaps by psychological adaptations that are without any meaningful evolutionary function in the contemporary world. One might note that this ideology is the final conclusion of the anti-evolutionary ideologies reviewed in this volume. These intellectual movements have asserted that scientific research shows that any important ethnic differences or individual differences are the result of environmental variation, and that genetic differences are trivial.
But there is an enorrnous irony in all of this: If life is truly without any evolutionary meaning, why have advocates propagated these ideologies so
[p. 323} intensely and with such self-consciously political methods? Why have many of these same people strongly identified with their own ethnic group and its interests, and why have many of them insisted on cultural pluralism and its validation of minority group ethnocentrism as moral absolutes? By their own assumptions, it is just a meaningless game. Nobody should care who wins or loses. Of course, deception and self-deception may be involved. I have noted (p. 195) that a fundamental agenda has been to make the European-derived peoples of the United States view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology.
If one accepts that both within-group and between-group genetic variation remains and is non-trivial (i.e., if evolution is an ongoing process), then the principle of relatively unrestricted immigration, at least under the conditions obtaining in late twentieth-century Western societies, clearly involves altruism by some individuals and established groups. Nevertheless, although the success of the intellectual movements reviewed in this volume is an indication that people can be induced to be altruistic toward other groups, I rather doubt such altruism will continue if there are obvious signs that the status and political power of European-derived groups is decreasing while the power of other groups increases. The prediction, both on theoretical grounds and on the basis of social identity research, is that as other groups become increasingly powerful and salient in a multicultural society, the European-derived peoples of the United States will become increasingly unified; among these peoples, contemporary divisive influences, such as issues related to gender and sexual orientation, social class differences, or religious differences, will be increasingly perceived as unimportant. Eventually these groups will develop a united front and a collectivist political orientation vis-a-vis the other ethnic groups. Other groups will be expelled if possible or partitions will be created, and Western societies will undergo another period of medievalism.
Jewish interests in immigration policy are an example of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles over the construction of culture. This conflict of interests extends well beyond immigration policy. There is a growing realization that the countercultural revolution of the 1960s is a watershed event in the history of the United States. Such a conceptualization is compatible with the work of Roger Smith (1988), who shows that until the triumph of the cultural pluralist model with the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, there were three competing models of American identity: the "liberal" individualist legacy of the Enlightenment based on "natural rights"; the "republican" ideal of a cohesive, socially homogeneous society (what I have identified as the prototypical Western social organization of hierarchic harmony); the "ethnocultural" strand emphasizing the importance of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity in the development and preservation of American cultural forms.
{p. 326} First Amendment freedom of speech (deriving from the Enlightenment liberal strand of American identity) have clearly facilitated specifically Jewish interests in the construction of culture, interests that conflict with the possibility of constructing a cohesive society built around high-investment parenting. Given that the popular media and the current intellectual environment of universities thrive on the freedom of elites to produce socially destructive messages, the political movements attempting to restore the traditional Western cultural supports for high-investment parenting will undoubtedly be forced to restrict some traditional American freedoms (see, e.g., Bork 1996). Cultural supports for high-investment parenting act as external forces of social control that maximize high-investment parenting among all segments of the population, even those who for genetic or environmental reasons are relatively disinclined to engage in such practices (MacDonald 1997, 1998b). Without such cultural controls, it is absolutely predictable that social disorganization will increase and the society as a whole will continue to decline.
Nevertheless, the continuity of peculiarly Western forms of social organization will remain a salient concern even if one ignores issues of ethnic competition entirely. I have emphasized that there is an inherent conflict between multiculturalism and Western universalism and individualism {but Hellenism surely was a synthesis of these?}. Even were Western universalism to regain its moral imperative, whether all of humanity is willing or able to participate in this type of culture remains an open question. Universalism is a European creation, and it is unknown whether such a culture can be continued over a long period of time in a society that is not predominantly ethnically European. When not explicitly advocating multiculturalism, the rhetoric in favor of immigration has typically assumed a radical environmentalism in which all humans are portrayed as having the same potentials and as being equally moldable into functioning members of Western universalist and individualist societies {was this not also the premise of Hellenism?}. This premise is highly questionable. Indeed, one might say that the present volume in conjunction with PTSDA and SAID is testimony to the extremely ingrained anti-Western tendencies that occur among human groups. Given that a great many human cultures bear a strong resemblance to the collectivist, anti-assimilatory tendencies present in Jewish culture, it is highly likely that many of our present immigrants are similarly unable or unwilling to accept the fundamental premises of a universalistic, culturally homogeneous, individualistic society.
Indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that Western tendencies toward individualism are unique and based on evolved psychological adaptations (see PTSDA, Ch. 8). This genetic perspective proposes that individualism, like many other phenotypes of interest to evolutionists (MacDonald 1991), shows genetic variation. In PTSDA (Ch. 8) I speculated that the progenitors of Western populations evolved in isolated groups with low population density. Such groups would have been common in northern areas characterized by harsh ecological conditions, such as those that occurred during the ice age (see Lenz 1931, 657).
{p. 327} Another critical component of the evolutionary basis of individualism is the elaboration of the human affectional system as an individualistic pair-bonding system, the system that seemed so strange that it was theorized to be a thin veneer overlaying a deep psychopathology to a generation of Jewish intellectuals emerging from the ghetto (Cuddihy 1974, 71). This system is individualistic in the sense that it is based not on external, group-based social controls or familial dictate but, rather, on the intrinsically motivated role of romantic love in cementing reproductive relationships (see pp. 136-139). The issue is important because Western cultures are typically characterized as relatively individualistic compared to other societies (Triandis 1995), and there is reason to suppose that the affectional system is conceptually linked to individualism; that is, it is a system that tends toward nuclear rather than extended family organization. Triandis (1990) finds that individualistic societies emphasize romantic love to a greater extent than do collectivist societies, and Western cultures have indeed emphasized romantic love more than other cultures (see PTSDA, 236 245; MacDonald 1995b,c; Money 1980). This system is highly elaborated in Western cultures in both men and women, and it is psychometrically linked with empathy, altruism, and nurturance {but traditional extended-family societies are also nurturing, perhaps moreso}. Individuals who are very high on this system - predominantly females - are pathologically prone to altruistic, nurturant and dependent behavior (see MacDonald 1995a). On an evolutionary account, the relatively greater elaboration of this system in females is to be expected, given the greater female role in nurturance and as a discriminating mechanism in relationships of pair bonding. Such a perspective also accounts for the much-commented-on gender gap in political behavior in which females are more prone to voting for political candidates favoring liberal positions on social issues.
{p. 330} If the analysis of anti-Semitism presented in SAID is correct, the expected reaction will emulate aspects of Judaism by adopting group-serving, collectivist ideologies and social organizations. The theoretically underdetermined nature of human group processes (PTSDA, Ch. I; MacDonald 1995b) disallows detailed prediction of whether the reactive strategy will be sufficient to stabilize or reverse the present decline of European peoples in the New World and, indeed, in their ancestral homelands; whether the process will degenerate into a self-destructive reactionary movement as occurred with the Spanish Inquisition; or whether it will initiate a moderate and permanent turning away from radical individualism toward a sustainable group strategy. What is certain is that the ancient dialectic between Judaism and the West will continue into the foreseeable future. It will be ironic that, whatever anti-Semitic rhetoric may be adopted by the leaders of these defensive movements, they will be constrained to emulate key elements of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Such strategic mimicry will, once again, lead to a "Judaization" of Western societies not only in the sense that their social organization will become more group-oriented but also in the sense that they will be more aware of themselves as a positively evaluated ingroup and more aware of other human groups as competing, negatively evaluated outgroups. In this sense, whether the decline of the European peoples continues unabated or is arrested, it will constitute a profound impact of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy on the development of Westem societies.
This book is the final volume in the series on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. A future comparative book, tentatively titled Diaspora Peoples, extends the focus to groups other than Jews and European peoples - the Romany, Assyrians, overseas Chinese, Parsis, and Sikhs, among others. It will test the extent to which the concepts and analyses employed in this series expand our understanding of group interaction, cooperation, and competition, and therefore human evolution in general.
NOTES
1. Similarly, L. C. Pogrebin (1991) describes her involvement as a major figure in the early feminist movement and her eventual disenchantment resulting from the blatant anti-Semitism of "third world" women, which was apparent at international conferences, and the lack of zeal on the part of Western feminists in condemning these outbursts. As did many Jewish leftists, Pogrebin eventually developed a hybrid in which feminist ideas were combined with a deep commitment to Jewish culture. {end of selections}
More of MacDonald's The Culture of Critique: the Jewish Communists of Poland
The new Preface to MacDonald's Culture of Critique is at
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/Preface.htm.
The Frankfurt School of Social Research by Kevin MacDonald
http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/frankfurt_resed.html.
Unlike MacDonald, I believe that religion is the bond uniting atheistic Jews (a non-theistic version of the Jewish religion): philos.html.
MacDonald's website: http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/.
To buy MacDonald's books from GSG Books: http://www.matriots.com/books/store/
To order from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0275961133/qid=989284499/sr=1-3/ref=sc_b_4/t/107-5533543-0908517
Write to me at contact.html.