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Notes -
MacDonald demonstrates the obvious double-standard that you are appealing to here. You are placing on MacDonald an isolated demand for rigor, demanding that he debunks some Alternative History that was absent these Jewish influences but led to similar outcomes. He doesn't venture to do that, nor should he.
Creating Alternative History is so insanely arbitrary. You could just say that Protestantism without Jewish influence would have led to Wokeism x 10 and the Jews have reigned them in! You could also say that without Jews the Grantians would have won the immigration question and America today would be 95% Nordic and America would have fought on Germany's side in the Second World War. It's not MacDonald's job to debunk your alternative history, it's his job to establish the motivations behind intellectual movements which are universally regarded as influential in the cultural developments of the past century. He's not supposed to speculate on intellectual movements on some alternative historical timeline, which is completely impossible. Obviously his opponents are motivated to try to place that burden on him because then that becomes the arena of pure speculation, rather than simply observing the evidence for what has actually transpired in this historical timeline.
When it comes to building models to explain anti-Semitism, one thing MacDonald points out is that academics never even consider the behavior of Jews to be in the hypothesis space for explaining anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism question from their perspective always revolves around trying to explain the pathologies of Gentiles. Your criticism of MacDonald is another example of that. If we want to accept that Jews were influential in twentieth century intellectual movements, and in significant part motivated by their Jewish identities, it's not enough to prove that, you also have to disprove some alternative historical timeline that would have similar outcomes without Jews. It's an absurd demand for rigor, and to me it basically shows that there's not a great argument against MacDonald's core observations.
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