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Understanding Jewish Influence I:

Background Traits for Jewish Activism

Kevin MacDonald

Abstract

Beginning in the ancient world, Jewish populations have repeatedly attained a position of power and

influence within Western societies. I will discuss Jewish background traits conducive to influence:

ethnocentrism, intelligence and wealth, psychological intensity, aggressiveness, with most of the focus on

ethnocentrism. I discuss Jewish ethnocentrism in its historical, anthropological, and evolutionary context

and in its relation to three critical psychological processes: moral particularism, self-deception, and the

powerful Jewish tendency to coalesce into exclusionary, authoritarian groups under conditions of

perceived threat.

Jewish populations have always had enormous effects on the societies in which they reside because of several

qualities that are central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: First and foremost, Jews are ethnocentric

and able to cooperate in highly organized, cohesive, and effective groups. Also important is high intelligence,

including the usefulness of intelligence in attaining wealth, prominence in the media, and eminence in the

academic world and the legal profession. I will also discuss two other qualities that have received less attention:

psychological intensity and aggressiveness.

The four background traits of ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness result in

Jews being able to produce formidable, effective groups—groups able to have powerful, transformative effects

on the peoples they live among. In the modern world, these traits influence the academic world and the world of

mainstream and elite media, thus amplifying Jewish effectiveness compared with traditional societies. However,

Jews have repeatedly become an elite and powerful group in societies in which they reside in sufficient

numbers. It is remarkable that Jews, usually as a tiny minority, have been central to a long list of historical

events. Jews were much on the mind of the Church Fathers in the fourth century during the formative years of

Christian dominance in the West. Indeed, I have proposed that the powerful anti-Jewish attitudes and legislation

of the fourth-century Church must be understood as a defensive reaction against Jewish economic power and

enslavement of non-Jews. 1 Jews who had nominally converted to Christianity but maintained their ethnic ties in

marriage and commerce were the focus of the 250-year Inquisition in Spain, Portugal, and the Spanish colonies

in the New World. Fundamentally, the Inquisition should be seen as a defensive reaction to the economic and

political domination of these “New Christians.” 2

Jews have also been central to all the important events of the twentieth century. Jews were a necessary

component of the Bolshevik revolution that created the Soviet Union, and they remained an elite group in the

Soviet Union until at least the post-World War II era. They were an important focus of National Socialism in

Germany, and they have been prime movers of the post-1965 cultural and ethnic revolution in the United States,

including the encouragement of massive non-white immigration to countries of European origins. 3 In the

contemporary world, organized American Jewish lobbying groups and deeply committed Jews in the Bush

administration and the media are behind the pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy that is leading to war against virtually

the entire Arab world.

How can such a tiny minority have such huge effects on the history of the West? This article is the first of a

three-part series on Jewish influence which seeks to answer that question. This first paper in the series provides

an introduction to Jewish ethnocentrism and other background traits that influence Jewish success. The second

article discusses Zionism as the quintessential example of twentieth-century Jewish ethnocentrism and as an

example of a highly influential Jewish intellectual/political movement. A broader aim will be to discuss a

generalization about Jewish history: that in the long run the more extreme elements of the Jewish community

win out and determine the direction of the entire group. As Jonathan Sacks points out, it is the committed

core—made up now especially of highly influential and vigorous Jewish activist organizations in the United

States and hypernationalist elements in Israel—that determines the future direction of the community. 4 The third

and final article will discuss neoconservatism as a Jewish intellectual and political movement. Although I

touched on neoconservatism in my trilogy on Jews, 5 the present influence of this movement on U.S. foreign

policy necessitates a much fuller treatment.

Figure 1: Understanding Jewish Activism

Figure 1 provides an overview of the sources of Jewish influence. The four background traits—discussed in more

detail below—are ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness. These traits are seen

as underlying Jewish success in producing focused, effective groups able to influence the political process and

the wider culture. In the modern world, Jewish influence on politics and culture is channeled through the media

and through elite academic institutions into an almost bewildering array of areas—far too many to consider here.

I. Jews are Hyperethnocentric

Elsewhere I have argued that Jewish hyperethnocentrism can be traced back to their Middle Eastern origins. 6

Traditional Jewish culture has a number of features identifying Jews with the ancestral cultures of the area. The

most important of these is that Jews and other Middle Eastern cultures evolved under circumstances that

favored large groups dominated by males. 7 These groups were basically extended families with high levels of

endogamy (i.e., marriage within the kinship group) and consanguineous marriage (i.e., marriage to blood

relatives), including the uncle-niece marriage sanctioned in the Old Testament. These features are exactly the

opposite of Western European tendencies (See Table 1). 8

Table 1: Contrasts between European and Jewish Cultural Forms.

European Cultural Origins

Jewish Cultural Origins

Evolutionary History

Northern Hunter-Gatherers

Middle Old World

Pastoralists (Herders)

Kinship System

Bilateral;

Weakly Patricentric

Unilineal;

Strongly Patricentric

Family System

Simple Household;

Extended Family;

Joint Household

Marriage Practices

Exogamous

Monogamous

Endogamous;

Consanguineous;

Polygynous

Marriage Psychology

Companionate; Based on Mutual

Consent and Affection

Utilitarian; Based on

Family Strategizing and

Control of Kinship Group

Position of Women

Relatively High

Relatively Low

Social Structure

Individualistic;

Republican;

Democratic;

Collectivistic;

Authoritarian;

Charismatic Leaders

Ethnocentrism

Relatively Low

Relatively High; "Hyper-

ethnocentrism"

Xenophobia

Relatively Low

Relatively High; "Hyper-

xenophobia"

Socialization

Stresses Independence,

Self-Reliance

Stresses Ingroup

Identification, Obligations

to Kinship Group

Intellectual Stance

Reason;

Science

Dogmatism; Submission to

Ingroup Authority and

Charismatic Leaders

Moral Stance

Moral Universalism:

Morality Is Independent of

Group Affiliation

Moral Particularism;

Ingroup/Outgroup Morality;

"Good is what is good for the Jews"

Whereas Western societies tend toward individualism, the basic Jewish cultural form is collectivism, in which

there is a strong sense of group identity and group boundaries. Middle Eastern societies are characterized by

anthropologists as “segmentary societies” organized into relatively impermeable, kinship-based groups. 9 Group

boundaries are often reinforced through external markers such as hair style or clothing, as Jews have often done

throughout their history. Different groups settle in different areas where they retain their homogeneity alongside

other homogeneous groups, as illustrated by the following account from Carleton Coon:

There the ideal was to emphasize not the uniformity of the citizens of a country as a whole but a

uniformity within each special segment, and the greatest possible contrast between segments. The

members of each ethnic unit feel the need to identify themselves by some configuration of symbols. If by

virtue of their history they possess some racial peculiarity, this they will enhance by special haircuts and

the like; in any case they will wear distinctive garments and behave in a distinctive fashion. 10

These societies are by no means blissful paradises of multiculturalism. Between-group conflict often lurks just

beneath the surface. For example, in nineteenth-century Turkey, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in a sort

of superficial harmony, and even inhabited the same areas, “but the slightest spark sufficed to ignite the fuse.” 11

Jews are at the extreme of this Middle Eastern tendency toward hypercollectivism and hyperethnocentrism. I

give many examples of Jewish hyperethnocentrism in my trilogy on Judaism and have suggested in several

places that Jewish hyperethnocentrism is biologically based. 12 Middle Eastern ethnocentrism and fanaticism has

struck a good many people as extreme, including William Hamilton, perhaps the most important evolutionary

biologist of the twentieth century. Hamilton writes:

I am sure I am not the first to have wondered what it is about that part of the world that feeds such diverse

and intense senses of rectitude as has created three of the worlds’ most persuasive and yet most divisive

and mutually incompatible religions. It is hard to discern the root in the place where I usually look for

roots of our strong emotions, the part deepest in us, our biology and evolution. 13

Referring to my first two books on Judaism, Hamilton then notes that “even a recent treatise on this subject,

much as I agree with its general theme, seems to me hardly to reach to this point of the discussion.” If I failed to

go far enough in describing or analyzing Jewish ethnocentrism, it is perhaps because the subject seems almost

mind-bogglingly deep, with psychological ramifications everywhere. As a pan-humanist, Hamilton was acutely

aware of the ramifications of human ethnocentrism and especially of the Jewish variety. Likening Judaism to

the creation of a new human species, Hamilton noted that

from a humanist point of view, were those "species" the Martian thought to see in the towns and villages a

millennium or so ago a good thing? Should we have let their crystals grow; do we retrospectively approve

them? As by growth in numbers by land annexation, by the heroizing of a recent mass murderer of Arabs

[i.e., Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Arabs, including children, at the Patriarch’s Cave in Hebron in

1994], and by the honorific burial accorded to a publishing magnate [Robert Maxwell], who had enriched

Israel partly by his swindling of his employees, most of them certainly not Jews, some Israelis seem to

favour a "racewise" and unrestrained competition, just as did the ancient Israelites and Nazi Germans. In

proportion to the size of the country and the degree to which the eyes of the world are watching, the acts

themselves that betray this trend of reversion from panhumanism may seem small as yet, but the spirit

behind them, to this observer, seems virtually identical to trends that have long predated them both in

humans and animals. 14

A good start for thinking about Jewish ethnocentrism is the work of Israel Shahak, most notably his co-authored

Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel . 15 Present-day fundamentalists attempt to re-create the life of Jewish

communities before the Enlightenment (i.e., prior to about 1750). During this period the great majority of Jews

believed in Cabbala—Jewish mysticism. Influential Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem ignored the obvious

racialist, exclusivist material in the Cabbala by using words like “men,” “human beings,” and “cosmic” to suggest

the Cabbala has a universalist message. The actual text says salvation is only for Jews, while non-Jews have

“Satanic souls.” 16

The ethnocentrism apparent in such statements was not only the norm in traditional Jewish society, but remains

a powerful current of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism, with important implications for Israeli politics. For

example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, describing the difference between Jews

and non-Jews:

We do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have

a case of…a totally different species…. The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from

the body of [members] of all nations of the world…. The difference of the inner quality [of the body]…is so

great that the bodies would be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the

Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to

the bodies of Jews]: “their bodies are in vain”…. An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul.

Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish

soul stems from holiness. 17

This claim of Jewish uniqueness echoes Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel’s claim that “everything about us is

different.” Jews are “ontologically” exceptional. 18

The Gush Emunim and other Jewish fundamentalist sects described by Shahak and Mezvinsky are thus part of a

long mainstream Jewish tradition which considers Jews and non-Jews completely different species, with Jews

absolutely superior to non-Jews and subject to a radically different moral code. Moral universalism is thus

antithetical to the Jewish tradition in which the survival and interests of the Jewish people are the most

important ethical goal:

Many Jews, especially religious Jews today in Israel and their supporters abroad, continue to adhere to

traditional Jewish ethics that other Jews would like to ignore or explain away. For example, Rabbi Yitzhak

Ginzburg of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus/Shechem, after several of his students were remanded on suspicion

of murdering a teenage Arab girl: “Jewish blood is not the same as the blood of a goy.” Rabbi Ido Elba:

“According to the Torah, we are in a situation of pikuah nefesh (saving a life) in time of war, and in such a

situation one may kill any Gentile.” Rabbi Yisrael Ariel writes in 1982 that “Beirut is part of the Land of

Israel. [This is a reference to the boundaries of Israel as stated in the Covenant between God and Abraham

in Genesis 15: 18–20 and Joshua 1 3–4]…our leaders should have entered Lebanon and Beirut without

hesitation, and killed every single one of them. Not a memory should have remained.” It is usually yeshiva

students who chant “Death to the Arabs” on CNN. The stealing and corruption by religious leaders that has

recently been documented in trials in Israel and abroad continues to raise the question of the relationship

between Judaism and ethics. 19

Moral particularism in its most aggressive form can be seen among the ultranationalists, such as the Gush

Emunim, who hold that

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