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Notes -
How implausible is this actually?
For several thousand years Jews lived in a relative state of internal exile in dozens of host societies that spanned almost the entirety of the old world, from Portugal to India. In those societies they performed a variety of functions. At times they were treated well, at others poorly. In some cases and at some times they became influential and respected figures, in others they were reviled, expelled or killed. Through much of this period assimilation was relatively rare. The Jews kept their customs, and often moved rather than assimilated. They did not - the occasional cult aside - attempt to resettle (let alone conquer) their ancestral homeland, and instead believed that it would be delivered to them by providence during or after the coming of their messiah. They were embittered, in many cases, by their treatment at the hands of gentile populations, but this almost never spurred them to take up arms; the religious perspective, in most of these cases, was that this treatment was a test and/or punishment of God.
While there were Jewish figures of note in this era, as Murray notes in Human Accomplishment Jews were not hugely overrepresented in intellectual achievements for the vast majority of this period. What intellectual talent the Jewish race possessed, if any, was locked away in rabbinical studies, in interpretation of the Talmud, or in activities performed for gentile authorities, like accounting. Nevertheless, the economic niches by which this population provided for itself served to effect a curious and rare process of genetic selection that resulted in a population perhaps one standard deviation more intelligent than the average of the surrounding gentile communities.
In the 18th century, European society began to change. While one Jew, Spinoza in Amsterdam, had some minor impact on this development, it was otherwise an almost entirely gentile movement, itself the product of a series of intellectual and religious movements set off by the reformation or, even earlier, the Renaissance. The ideas of universality, the equality of man, and a kind of eschatological vision of civilizational progress that would one day be turned into the foundation for our own sociopolitical culture. True, the European civilization of the time was very different to our own, and still involved many of the decidedly non-universalist ideas around identity of the age. But the seeds were sown.
It is hardly surprising that Jews embraced these ideas in large numbers, since they meant for them the opportunity to take, increasingly, part in the wider societies in which they found themselves. This much is not disputed by antisemitic dissident rightists (I think), but they argue that for Jews this was an underhanded deal, an attempt to have their cake and eat it, to preserve particularity for themselves but to end it for others. I disagree. Many, in increasing numbers, bought into it wholeheartedly.
Indeed the alternative to your argument, that Jews engaged in these movements as part of an insidious plan to destroy their host civilizations in service of an ancient hatred and/or fear is equally implausible. Extremely high, sometimes exceeding 70%+ intermarriage rates for secular Jews (which almost all the relevant figures were) in the US and Soviet Union speak to a sincere desire for assimilation or at least a fading of strong ethnic identity. Strong tribal loyalty demands, at the least, endogamy. Secular Jews eschewed this in ever increasing numbers. At the height of the British Empire, many of the most elite Jewish families, most prominently the Rothschilds, intermarried to the extent that the younger generations are now neither religiously nor culturally Jewish. The same is increasingly true in the US, where many of the most prominent Jews, from Mark Zuckerberg to Anthony Blinken, have gentile wives and so will not raise Jewish children. This is not the behavior of a people trying to preserve the in-group at all costs; tribal loyalty begins and ends at the point of continuation; the Jews who do practice high-fecundity endogamy are deeply culturally and politically detached from those in positions of power in Western societies.
The basic explanation for the ideology of Jewish progressives and leftists is that most have genuinely bought into the ideas they preach. That is why many of them are increasingly hostile towards the actual, extant Jewish ethnostate, despite tribal loyalty being very hard to break (see nth-generation Turkish Germans, Irish Americans during the Troubles and so on). Of course hypocrisy is always present, as it is in every people. But that is not enough to claim that their views are not motivated by a sincere belief in the same universal trend towards equality and liberty that motivated many of the gentile writers of the enlightenment and its successor movements.
I don’t mean to persuade you, I respect your posting on this topic enough to know I’m not going to convince you of anything. Still, given you mentioned me, I felt I should restate my point for anyone reading.
The reason it is implausible is because there is a bunch of documentation proving the resentment and antipathy these intellectual figures had towards the culture and values in question, the very same they were consciously challenging with their work. They did not like them, they did not want to associate with them. None of them claimed that they were motivated by an adoption of 18th century liberalism, but all of them were influenced by their Jewish identification and concern over issues like anti-Semitism.
Franz Boas, the Frankfurt school, they were all motivated by opposition to German National Socialism and HBD/race ideology (well, except for that one race ideology...)
Freud is one of the most stark examples, where he just outright says he perceives his work as waging war on Gentiles. But Jewish comic book writers defining "Americanism" as fighting Nazis with the creation of their heroes are engaging in the same behavior. Literally none of them were motivated by 18th century liberal ideas, and they were all motivated by their Jewish identity which they retained even as atheists.
I think you're thinking in too blurry terms here. There is a documented heavy and ongoing debate among the Jewish diaspora as to how much they should integrate into their respective cultures.
Consider the case of modern French politician Eric Zemmour, a tribesman himself, who loves to quote Clermond-Tonnerre's phrase: "Everything must be refused of the Jews as a nation, everything must be tolerated of the Jews as individuals" as he exhorts typical assimilationist talking points.
One may make infinite criticisms of the man, but there is little reason to think he, as a person, despises ethnic French people, especially as he is one of their few defenders on specifically ethnic grounds. You don't write that many books about how shameful their purported demise is if you have a shred of antipathy for them.
Now sure, people like that were probably few and far between in American comic book writer rooms. But were they really insignificant to the degree that you can brush off the debate and put all Jews under a single banner altogether? Especially under the cold war? I think that's far from established.
And it seems especially facile to be this broad when we're talking about the far rights' own particular Jews.
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