The Jews,
and the Jews in England

by  Cobbett (Anthony Ludovici)

Boswell Publishing Company, 1938


VI.
Conclusion



WE HAVE SEEN that there are no reasons, either anthropological or historical, for considering the Jews as other than a definite, highly specialized type of humanity. From their bedouin ancestors they have inherited certain characteristics, of which some have been retained to a notable extent unaltered to this day. Their retention of these ancestral traits has been favoured partly by the circumstances of their history as a people and partly by the original momentum possessed by the traits themselves. Among the more salient of these traits we may name:

(a) The non-territorial sense of nationality and ethnic unity, which makes the Jews prone to disperse by choice and prone to suffer compulsory dispersion kindly. This trait, which has a nomad origin, also makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them ever to feel rooted in an ancestral soil as the territorial national feels.

(b) The inability to grasp or accept an institution of property, in which mutual obligation is implicit, in which privilege is proportionate to responsibility, and in which the contribution of the community, either present or past, has made it impossible to isolate property as a possession to be enjoyed individually or divorced from all ties or limitations. The nomad may know of a family contribution, but not of a communal contribution, to his property, and when he packs up his tent and his household goods, and drives his flock before him to a new pasture or a fresh oasis, he can recognize obligations to no man.

(c) A distaste for those forms of gaining a livelihood, or of sustaining themselves and families, which involve manual or generally physical labour. The bedouin is at bottom the antithesis of the horny-handed son of the soil, and his tastes differ accordingly.

(d) A capacity for hardness both to themselves and others. An individualistic existence like that of the nomad necessarily involves periods of privation, hardship and lonely struggle often against equally individualistic rivals.

(e) A latent tendency to a democratic and liberal outlook, which becomes active and militant when Jews are faced with the problem of establishing themselves among a conservative people. This democratic and liberal tendency has two possible roots -- the habit of individual freedom and of owing obedience to no man in a nomad state; and the recognition by the Jews, when they find themselves faced by a conservative people or a people organized on aristocratic lines, of the usefulness of siding with and supporting all those elements in the land which are undermining the conservative and aristocratic traditions.

(f) A seniority over all those types of mankind which have had a relatively much shorter connexion with civilized and urban life. This has endowed the Jews with a superior shrewdness regarding all the circumstances and problems that are likely to arise in closely herded urban communities. (The psychological insight and the intelligence of the Jews may be merely other aspects of this seniority.) This trait, as we have seen, springs from the Jew's millennial association not only with civilization but also a civilization of trading and urban centres.

Further traits which manifest themselves as the result of the above innate tendencies, when Jews find themselves among a people more recently civilized than themselves or organized on an aristocratic, feudal and mutualistic institution of property, are:

(1) A general intolerance of all the restrictions imposed on a free use of property, on a free use of business shrewdness. For instance, an intolerance of any laws or regulations which may exist against regrating, forward buying, cornering markets, concentrating large fortunes in single hands, etc., all of which practices our Tudor and Stuart sovereigns did their utmost to suppress.

(2) A general intolerance towards all purely hereditary titles, honours or privileges which have their root in custom, ancient usage, above all in the soil, and which cannot be bought. Hence Jewish radicalism.

(3) A tendency to convert a society based on a mutualistic conception of property, and on a system of graded service with protection of the subordinate in return for his obedience, into a society in which the population is atomized, in which each man's interests and hand are against his neighbour's, and which is characterized by a bellum omnium contra omnes -- in fact, modern capitalism.

(4) A general feeling of intolerance towards the territorial national, which, as the result of the phenomenon known as over-compensation, forces their natural will to ascendancy to inordinate levels when they are among territorial nationals.

(5) A late and ultimate tendency to meet the general break-up of capitalism and the society built upon it -- a society which necessarily proves incapable of enduring owing to the faulty foundations on which it rests -- by siding with those elements which desire to hasten and consummate its break-up. The tendency of the Jew in decadent Europe may be due to his recognition of the fact that the system he has created, capitalism, is inevitably doomed, and to his desire to secure himself a modicum of control, if not of leadership, in the new system which is socialism or communism. For it must be remembered that the Jew is congenitally incapable of visualizing or framing a system of gregarious life based on the old ideas of limited property with responsibility and mutuality, and, therefore, when capitalism fails, he can see no other alternative than socialism or communism.

Now, every one of these characteristics, far from having been modified or eradicated, has been rather confirmed and intensified by the events in the Jews' long history, and as throughout this history the Jews have been subjected to a constant process of rigorous selection by which only those who were most true to type have been able to survive, they now represent a highly specialized group of human beings, with all the limitations and all the highly developed gifts imparted to them by their unique destiny.

We have seen that it is not historically correct to regard any of the characteristics by which they are generally recognized as created in them by circumstances comparatively so recent as the treatment they received at the hands of the medieval European peoples, among whom they sojourned after the Roman Dispersion.

We have seen, moreover, that this applies even to their indomitable desire for ascendancy, which is making them strive everywhere for the strategic positions from which modern civilized states may be directed or controlled, and to their notorious predilection in favour of trade, finance and all those occupations which, while being what is known as 'clean', secure those who pursue them a share in the productive labour of others.

Having, moreover, recognized these facts and established them on what appears to be irrefutable data, the question is, what should be the attitude of the territorial nationals in any modern state to the Jews sojourning among them?

From the purely anthropological standpoint, it may be concluded right away that anything in the nature of mixed marriages with the Jews, particularly on the part of English people, cannot fail to introduce into pure English stocks many ethnic elements which are not merely foreign to the English as a people, but the absence of which from English strains constitutes one of the principal claims to the specific character of the English as a particular people in northwestern Europe.

Mixture with the Jews through marriage must, therefore, seriously modify the English strain. And all those who any longer wish those specific elements in civilization which are commonly regarded as English, and which are but the external expression of the English type, to be retained as an essential part of the English nation will, therefore, naturally avoid mixed marriages with the Jew.

As a colonizing people which has come into contact with all sorts and varieties of races and types, and kept singularly free from intermarriage with them, this, to the English, should not be a difficult form of abstention, and apart from the English peerage there is little evidence that mixed English and Jewish marriages are much in favour.

With regard to the attitude of the English to the Jews in social and political life, however, the position is not so simple.

There can be no doubt that, from the standpoint of a strictly conservative attitude, the Jew should be precluded from too much control over our institutions and customs because, as they are not an external expression of his type, his intervention as a power over them cannot fail to modify them in an un-English way.

Prudence would, therefore, seem to dictate a policy of exclusion both of the Jew and his influence from all those departments of English life in which his influence may so alter the character of the nation as to make it lose all its specific qualities.

Thus it would seem hardly needful to state, if we desire to preserve that character and those qualities, that the Jew should be excluded from all those positions in which the chance or opportunity occurs of fundamentally modifying the character and customs of the nation. For, whether intentionally or not, it would seem as if the Jew could not help modifying these national features in a non-Occidental direction.

On the other hand, there are grave logical objections to these apparently obvious policies:

(a) For instance, our data above have shown that ever since 1655 English life has undoubtedly become more and more Judaized -- that is to say, that the people of this country and the life they lead have tended to approach more and more to Jewish standards or to standards under which the Jewish character flourishes.

Would there be any sense in now excluding the ethnic Jew, when his Gentile counterpart, his Gentile pupil and slavish imitator is everywhere enthroned by his side, and in greater numbers than the Jews themselves?

Is there any sense in excluding the creator of a culture if you retain his values?

Modern English life is bristling with evidence of the victory of the Judaized Englishman and of Jewish values. What sense, then, would there be in so empty a gesture as excluding the ethnic Jew and retaining his Gentile understudy? What purpose would be served in excluding the Jew and in continuing to worship at the shrine of his idols?

No exclusion of the Jews from the administrative or cultural life of England, therefore, could be more than a piece of shallow, hysterical patriotism if it did not contemplate and include the far more fundamental but infinitely more difficult task of freeing the country of its wrong values. And all bodies of Englishmen who seriously wish to recover English civilization at this stage cannot be regarded as any more than emotional and hysterical flag-wavers if they do not see the compelling need of that infinitely difficult task -- the task of accompanying any gesture of organized reform by a frontal attack upon the Judaized elements in their kith and kin and their own Judaized values.

(b) In addition to this necessary warning -- the burden of which has been to some extent, though not wholly, overlooked in Germany -- there is a further difficulty that requires stating, and it is a great difficulty which is peculiar to England as the head of a great empire.

The difficulty arises from the complicated problem of administering even by proxy a vast area such as the British Empire, in which scores of different races have to be treated as legitimate British subjects. And it is very questionable whether, at this stage, we can revert to a policy which even the Romans considered injudicious, of withholding full civic rights from any ethnic unit within the length and breadth of the Empire.

To differentiate our policy in this matter according to what kind of people we are dealing with, and to make one adverse exception in the case of the Jews, would hardly be practicable, more particularly as we know from history that the Jews received equal rights in the colonies long before they did in England.

The policy of excluding the Jews from administrative influence and power, therefore, could only prove practicable if it were consistently pursued with regard to all other races and types. But whereas this might have been possible two centuries ago, it is hardly possible now.

The only alternative to the radical exclusion of an ethnic type in an empire like ours, therefore, is a demonetization of all the current values which can definitely be classed as disruptive, decadent and destructive of what is regarded as the essential culture of England. For, just as the Jews have, by the support of values favourable to their existence ever since the seventeenth century (though really much earlier, owing to influences coming from the Continent throughout the centuries following the banishment), helped to modify England and English life and made them both much more adapted to their needs and tastes, at the cost of transforming England, so it is possible by a wholesale demonetization of these values to make English life and England, and possibly even the Empire, adopt a culture and an outlook as different as chalk from cheese from those which we now see about us.

But such a transformation and wholesale demonetization of established values is a stupendous undertaking, and although none other offers any hope, it may be questioned whether at this stage in our history we still possess the energy, the fire and the will which alone could be adequate to carry through such a fundamental and far-reaching change.

If we do not, and if we ourselves cannot move towards a sounder, healthier and saner condition which will restore our ancient institutions and ancient stamina, health and self-esteem, there can be no practical solution of the problem at all. It is essential to set out with a transmutation of existing unsound and corrupt values, especially those which have bedouinized not only our society but also our pure type. And if we wish to be practical, it is to this task that we of this generation will address ourselves with all the energy and resolution at our command.
 

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