A dozen years ago I published a pair of essays on prescriptive ideologies, the first of which examined the behavioural forms required of us by Judaism and Christianity, stating:

Had I written from a more evolutionary perspective it would, of course, have been a different essay, more given to cause than effect.  This is it, or its first of two parts, at least.

Segment of an illustration from Phillip Medhurst Collection depicting Joshua fighting Amalek (Exodus 17)

An ancient and alien ambition lays over the West, and for its sake a web woven of words have been spun, not for decades or even for centuries but for two-and-a-half thousand years or more.  Today that web lays over the whole spiritual, intellectual and socio-political substance of western life.  In operation, it overlays our very nature, exploiting both our innate love of freedom and our sense of fairness, and consistently defining us as something we are not.  We can call it Judaism.  We can call it Jewish ethnic activism.  But it is a house of many mansions, one of which we think of it as our own system of faith, though it is not our system.  It is an impost inducting us into a life that serves that same ambition.  How, though, did this extraordinary situation come to pass?  What is its meaning for us?

In abstract philosophical terms it is a selective war for universalism conducted against the particularism of Nature.  The starting point in this struggle for the Universal Gentile is unpromising.  The ethnocentric, tribal, endogamous group living alone on its ancestral land is “in” Nature, of course.  But, then, so is the contrary dynamic of human migration for reasons of ecological failure or war or expansion.  The latter is as old as the first wave Out of Africa.  Yet the balance between these forces powerfully favours trait-fitness to environment and, with it, human difference (irrefutably manifesting in our technological age as the gene clusters of population genetics).  Particularism outstrips universalism.  Any engineered attempt to reverse that order necessarily does violence to Man and Nature.  Yet in the west today a battery of universalist moral, religious and political dicta do just that, having held sway since the end of World War Two in some instances and for many centuries longer in others.  In this essay we shall outline the evolutionary and philosophical fundamentals of those dicta, and explain why, even as the politics of the west shifts to the right, they will continue to contest for dominion over our lives.

Let it be acknowledged that there are causal factors for universalism in the advance of modernity and techne and in the phenomenon of empire, the role of money, and trade.  Such considerations bear on the political world in fundamental and formative ways, commending to it a political culture of openness, multiplicity, abstract values, materialism, and so forth.  But, tellingly, they are open to interrogation of their historical and methodological fact, and to the free exchange of academic and lay opinion.  No one is propagandised into the “self-evident truth” that discussing them is just terribly, terribly wrong.  No one is afraid of the social and professional costs of discussing them.  No one is accosted by secretive political activists for doing so, and accused by police of the blood libel of a monstrous, irrational hatred supposedly ever-present in the European heart and ever-ready to burst into terrifying life.  No one is then charged under novel laws that codify that libel, in practise rescinding the presumption for innocence.  No one is put before the kind of judge who finds no such hatred in his own heart yet he does not hesitate to impute it to another’s.  So no one is forced through a judicial process under which a guilty verdict is, for all intents and purposes, inevitable from the outset.  No one is then handed down a prison sentence many a career criminal will never receive.  Yet neither the judge nor the prosecutor nor the police need suffer a moment’s bad conscience.  For that would require a free and informed moral judgement, while all this drab conformity only makes automatons of everyone involved. 

No one suffers a single part of that for proposing that modernity or techne or empire are parents of universalism.  But then there is the Judaic universalism, which abides also in Christianity, and there it is a different story.  Through the Christian influence it becomes formative not only of the political culture but of all culture and of the European mind itself.  Whether we can discuss that without a Jewish political activist seeking to ascribe “hate” to us is a nice question.  But as allegedly free men and as Europeans we must clearly try.  We must make our start-point earlier in this baleful history, however.

In the beginning

In its Judaic origin, universalism does not “save” everyone as per western Christianity’s parallel proposition (only confected during WW1 by the politically necessary excision of eternal damnation from the catechism).  Judaism has no truck with the mawkishly sentimental brotherhood of Man as we might find retailed by the eponymous trendy Anglican vicar with a suburban mind, a ponytail and a guitar … or, indeed, by some sonorous black pastor in Birmingham, AL working his congregation of soulful mamas all got up in their Sunday fruit.  Judaism does not deal in the brotherhood of all men.  It is, firstly, a tribalism dealing in Jewish brotherhood and self-preservation.  But, secondly, it is a form of nationalism dealing with Jewish religious identity and consequently, with Jewish exception.  The more ideological aspects of Judaism go to nationalism.  Exodus 19:5-6 puts it thus, speaking in the voice of G-d, no less:

5 Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine:
6 And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.

The antithesis of Jewish exception, and its corollary and proof, is that other tribes are not just non-Chosen.  We have a reliable indicator of Judaic tradition not just in Torah but in the Talmud (see the English-language Soncino edition, available online).  It instructs us both as to the singular human value (Jalkut Rubeni gadol 12b) and singular fate (Midrasch Talpioth) ascribed to “the gentile” (already a singular, un-differentiating appellation for the rest of humanity).  Non-Chosenness as singularity infers an existential condition of sameness.  But just as Chosenness isn’t readily observed from the moral character of Jewry but is a religious claim, so sameness is not observed among humanity at large and is also only a religious claim.  After all, human evolution does not generate the same genes on either side of Earth’s great mountain, ocean and desert barriers.  Environments are local and differ vastly.  Fitness to environment is likewise local, investing human populations with specificity and difference in body and mind; and thus producing relative superiority and inferiority on every measure.  Peoples of the savannah, of the mountains, of the rain forest, of the arid quarters, of the arctic circle, of the island chains: there goeth Man in the Nature-given inequality of his heritable person; every part of which, be it high or low, great or small, is critical to its possessors and never illegitimate, never bearing false witness to them.  Must not, then, the dictum of non-Chosenness, singularity, therefore sameness bear false witness to Man?

That being the case, the abiding and problematic dichotomy of the Judaic paradigm is inevitably that making a falsehood of that which is true in order to make a truth of that which is false can never be moral, and no means to that end, among which I include Christianity, can be legitimising.

What, then, would explain one small tribe, distracted by its misfortunes as it was, insisting that all is human sameness with the single, crowning exception of itself, as ordained by its deity - which, for that to be “true”, must be the one deity … the deity of all, whose supplanting of the gods of the Other, whose worship by the Other, portends acceptance of Jewish ascendancy?  In answer, it is not my intention to reprise Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy (these days mechanically designated as “hate” despite its dispassionate scholarship).  The briefest of visits to the evolutionary thesis will suffice, which I will decorate with some suppositions of my own.

This serially exiled people underwent critical periods of trait selection not in Nature like peoples of the land, but at times in the captivity of a hostile alien power and at other times under its dominion.  In the ancient world the alien power was Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman, Persian, Arab and, in the modern era, Ottoman, imperial Russian, and German.  It is the ancient dominions which interest us from the evolutionary perspective.  Once the Israelite tribe was subjugated, the land and climate were no longer its primary point of reference for fitness.  There had been a cruel and brutal caesura from Nature, in which the available reference was now the host’s sociobiology, society and culture.  Just as a technological mastery over hostile Nature is the key to survival and continuity for all Out of Africa populations (creating whole regions of increasingly artificial environments of evolutionary adaptiveness, most exemplified by western technological modernity), so mastery over the Israelites’ hostile host was the key to tribal survival and continuity.  It was when the whole endeavour was religionised and ordained by the tribal deity that something beyond mere survival had entered the equation.  It happened early, as the Exodus quote shows.  Scholars calculate that Exodus was written down in or after the ninth century AD.  Its form was repeated, for example in Deuteronomy, which was written down between the 7th and 5th centuries BC.  Verse 7:6 states:

For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

The divine faux pas here is the word “above” (see also the prior quote from Exodus). 

Evolutionarily speaking, gene interests can be defensive or expansive.  Tribes defend their land and women and resources or they aggress against the land of their neighbours to vie for said women and resources.  If the old boy had said “before” it would indicate an ambition of the first order and a defensive evolutionary survival strategy informed by ethnocentrism within customary norms.  However, he said “above”, which would indicate an ambition of the second order and an aggressive strategy necessarily informed by a heightened ethnocentrism.  In human history, aggressive interests and heightened ethnocentrism are a precondition for tribal expansion and national imperialism.  However, Deuteronomy’s “above” establishes the Israelites as the ultimate expansionists in whom, seemingly, not just the seven local tribes are to be the Isrealites’ victims warfare but all humanity is so, which hardly makes any sense at all.  But we shall make sense of it.

For context, the history of northern European peoples’ artificialisation of environment contains both “Turnip” Townsend’s Norfolk four-course system and strip-mining: a fallow-free, soil-protecting system of arable farming and an outright exploitation of the land without thought for the ecological consequences.  Artifice operates on a scale of care for environment from sympathy to indifference.  At every point that care is self-referential – what is good for the in-group.  In the ancient Israelite tribal case, the scale transfers directly to the relationship either with the host-as-environment or the continuing war with neighbouring tribes as such.  In itself, sympathy for an oppressive host or deadly competitor could not have been even a remotely realistic evolutionary survival strategy.  The Israelites were few and not militarily powerful.  “What is good” seems to have translated sympathy into strategies of precaution against too sudden or brazen a movement lest the “environment” perceives the shape of things and takes unwelcome action.  Thus sympathy could become a thing of isolation and secrecy, crypsis and disguise in the wider venture of overthrow.  But under this extraordinary indulgence, indifference for the fate of the oppressor also slips its moorings and builds, first, into a deadly intent towards the Isrealites’ tribal competitors, allowing no genetic line to continue.  Accordingly, Deuteronomy 7 commences with:

1 When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
2 And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
3 Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.
4 For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.
5 But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.

As tribal history Torah may be an antique romance.  But as evolutionary history it describes something that was obviously real and ongoing in the hearts of men yet, to the modern observer, completely unconscionable.  The chapter concludes with some remarkable lines describing the gradualist and unlimited mastery waiting beyond the destruction of the seven tribal competitors:

22 And the Lord thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee.
23 But the Lord thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed.
24 And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them.
25 The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire: thou shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therin: for it is an abomination to the Lord thy God.
26 Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thine house, lest thou be a cursed thing like it: but thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing.

So “above” does indeed infer a grand ascendency over all humanity, as that whole was understood in the ancient world.  But this is a different destruction to the genetic destruction of the seven tribes.  The method is “little by little”, accomplished, we must presume, through the destruction of the kings’ names and the nations’ history and graven idols.  In other words, leadership and social hierarchy, politics, culture, religion, history and wealth are all expunged.  One world emerging from a people populous enough to constitute not a tribe but a nation is replaced with another that is alien and colonial, and no less imperishable and total than the slaughter of the seven tribes.  This returns us to the making of artifice in Man, paralleling the making of artifice in the natural environment.  This, and this alone, would supply a proof of Chosenness for the ancient Israelites and their descendants after the Babylonian captivity, the Jews.  For artifice has self but no tribe nor tribal cause, and self has no executive cause of its own, nor defence, nor effective will.  Self is an inadequate estate and thus the supplier of the true Jewish tribal exception.

How is one to explain it all?  Indeed, does the appearance of a blanket supremacism indicate that the environmental framework fails to account for it?  Well, repeated existential catastrophies could account for it.  Peoples don’t elect catastrophism as a lifestyle.  Resource competition produces existential wars, “them or us” wars, as a matter of course.  Such wars are attended by what psychologists today would term “war psychosis”: the blanket dehumanising of the Other as the precondition for its slaughter.  But warfare is also attended by a greatly heightened sense of “us”.  Neither would quickly disappear in a traumatised population robbed of control over its existence for long periods.  One would expect psychological intensification, which could readily beget a general conviction of virtue, conscience, natural right, etc adhering to the Israelite life, and nothing adhering to the Other that was not “an abomination”.  It is, after all, a commonplace of human beings to find the victim morally superior to the aggressor.  One might then also expect that mate selection in such a dire circumstance would favour those with the most marked attributes (or traits), among which positives such as spirit, durability, confidence, audacity, energy would certainly figure, but also less laudable attributes such as distrust, withholding, moral relativity, zealotry, single-mindedness, an excess of pride, some degree of paranoia, perhaps, or something very like it.  Perhaps on that basis, and over not a very great number of generations, a sense of inhering tribal superiority, even a universal supremacy, could appear as part of a suite of compensating evolutionary survival strategies.  Maybe this is unfair.  But it is certainly difficult to account for that “above” without such driving factors as these.

The whole human tragedy, for that is what it is, reminds us how plighted and fragile is human existence, and how inexorable and how tenacious is human evolution in holding fast to it.  The inexorability and tenacity of the Judaic paradigm speaks to that.  It is no surprise that mastery over Nature should, in the Israelite tribal instance, run to mastery over the mortal foe.  Nor is it a surprise that such mastery should be got by imputing artifice where the foe’s nature and organic culture and relations stand, nor that the whole struggle should, in the deep historical past, have taken on the form of a religious eschatology.  The surprise is that the behaviour does not die away to nothing when all is peace, safety and freedom, and cornucopia attends at every shoulder.  In the America of the last hundred years Jews have been individually honoured and have prospered.  Yet it is not enough.  The paradigm endures, indeed is empowered and enhanced by the personal autonomy and opportunity of American life, brilliantly flowing into every possible place of influence, grasping every available lever, missing nothing, and in the process demonstrating that peace, safety, freedom, individual honour and riches are not enough without tribal mastery.  The natural cultural hegemony of the tribe’s host stands as a barrier.  This is not about individual Jews surmounting the barrier.  The highest measured ethnocentrism holds.  The Judaic ambition holds. There must be no barrier, no salience at all that is not the barrier of Chosenness and the salience of the tribe.

That sorry consistency, then, supplies our confirmation.  This is a group survival strategy per MacDonald, no doubt requiring several tens of generations of stable environmental pressures for a suite of traits, including a high-energy ethnocentrism and matching group competitiveness, to emerge.  MacDonald’s thesis is heavily focussed on the present-day culture of critique, which is so powerful in the life of the west.  That culture is overwhelmingly particular to intellectuals and activists of Ashkenazic origin, who both brought it into being and who advance it.  Occasionally a Sephardi will be found participating, even at the intellectual forefront (Derrida, for instance).  But selection for intelligence is key to it, and in this respect the average Ashkenazic intelligence (especially verbal) is between 12 and 16 points above the European average.  The much lower Mizrahim average comes in at only seven points above their North African host populations and level with their West Asian hosts.  Sephardim likewise exhibit no advantage over their Iberian hosts.

The culture is, of course, heir to the entire Judaic paradigm which preceded it, and is thus no less a permanent force acting on our lives.  It will not relent in and of itself.  It will continue in all spheres of engagement.  In the secular and political sphere one might run it from the publishing of the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867 through to the establishment of the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in 1923, through the feminists, the postmodernists such as Derrida, Levinas, Althusser, Kaye, Shagar, etc, to the anti-racists, the Holocaustians, and immigration activists of the present.  On the latter, I was hoping to be able to link to the “About” page for the activist organisation Support Refugees, since it is such an impressive display of Jewish unanimity on the immigration question.  But searches for the site produced nothing, so I assume it has gone the way of all flesh.  However, some years ago I copied and pasted the words on that page, and still have that on file.  It reads:

Support Refugees was set up and is managed by The Jewish Council for Racial Equality (JCORE) and West London Synagogue of British Jews.

Special thanks to JLGB, who helped get the website off the ground and to the Jewish Social Action Forum, where the idea for such a website first arose.

The website is produced under the auspices of Jewish Communal Taskforce for Refugees, the members of which are:

Board of Deputies
Jewish Council for Racial Equality (JCORE)
Jewish Leadership Council
Liberal Jewish Synagogue Drop-In
Mitzvah Day
Rene Cassin
West London Synagogue
Union of Jewish Students
World Jewish Relief

It is supported across the community, including the following organisations:

Board of Deputies
Liberal Judaism
Masorti Judaism
Movement for Reform Judaism
Office of the Chief Rabbi
United Synagogue

Together all this speaks of an inordinately complex, complete and ardent attention to the reformation of western life.  It always exhibits the same tell-tale direction of universalising ideological travel.  Politically, it is not exclusively “left-wing”.  It will manifest as the Popperian or Randian individualist critique of peoplehood and belonging.  Even aspects of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, in both of which Jewish philosophers have been prominent, lend themselves to it.  The “isms” of Individual Man and Economic Man are as useful to it as the “ism” of Equal Man.  All water the western life with artifice, estranging us from that particular Man we would otherwise be; and in so much as the absence of the particular is the presence of the universal, so is our world shaped accordingly and so are we made.  “Perfected” would be the description by religious Jews who, in their obligations, pursue the temporal mid-19th century invention that is tikkun Olam.

We western Europeans, living at this end point of the liberal epoch, find ourselves greatly constrained in addressing this subject, such is the exploitation in our politics and culture of the racial disaster which was the government of the Third Reich and its barbarous Jewish policy from 1941 to 1945.  That constraint is, of course, placed universally upon us, irrespective of who among us fought who, and who freed Jews in 1945 from the camps.  But the peoples of the ancient world who hosted Jewish populations were not so constrained, and in Part Two we will look at what their writers said, in particular about the early Christians.  We will also trace the greater part of the artifice in our world today as it has derived from the Christian faith.