Marc Chagall, “The Rabbi”
919 words
The Race of the Soul in Judaism
The qualities of character reflect a determined style, which differs according to the races of the soul; furthermore, research in this direction can easily reach the more general concept that one cannot be a scholar, warrior, ascetic, merchant, or artist abstractly and in general, but there are distinct manners, conditioned by the internal race, of being a warrior, ascetic, artist, etc. One thus comes to the problem of singling out the various “laws of style,” that is, the forms which are truly suited to the expression of a given significance, or of a given activity or aptitude fundamental to the essence of a given race of the soul.
For example, the Jewish question, as it was considered in [Fascist] Italy, was justly and notably inspired by considerations pertaining more to the second degree of race than the first. The Jew in Italy had been banned not so much on the basis of biological considerations, but instead on the basis of his deeds; not so much because he always shows physical characteristics which are absolutely opposed to those of the Mediterranean races, but especially because of his “style,” his behavior, because of the corrosive and disintegrating action in the social and cultural fields exercised by the Jewish race, often without even knowing it, just as burning is peculiar to fire and poisoning is to the viper.
This style, this Judaism as race of the soul, is recognized by anyone of a different race, by anyone who has not been completely degraded by the “values” of modern, neutral and internationalist civilization.
Quite relevant here is the concept of “honorary Jews.” With that, one hints at those persons who demonstrate a Jewish mentality and racial soul, even when their physical race is apparently in order.
We read in the Talmud about somebody who, while visiting a rabbi, says: “Come, let us unite, let us all become one people,” to which the rabbi answers: “Fine, but we Jews are circumcised, so there is only one way to achieve that – you must also be circumcised.” De Vries de Heekelingen, by reminding us of this anecdote, pointed out quite rightly that in the modern world the exact opposite assimilation has taken place: it is obviously not a matter of physical circumcision, but of a spiritual one. The Jew has been able to progress within the non-Jewish civilization because the non-Jew has often made his own the way of being originally peculiar to the Jew.
Things being so, one can see the utility of racialism of the second degree. It allows anti-Judaism to be coherent, complete, and impartial, giving it the means of singling out and fighting the Jewish mentality, even when it manifests itself without a direct relation to Jewish descent, in individuals who are Judaized in their soul and way of being, while belonging physically to a race derived from Aryan stock.
The Race of the Spirit in Judaism
One can count among the Aryan civilizations ancient Greece, Rome, India, Iran, the Nordic-Thracian, and Danubian groups. In these awoke, for a certain time, the solar race in a heroic appearance, achieved a partial return toward the original purity. It can be said that the Semitic element, and particularly the Jewish element, represented the most precise antithesis of these civilizations. This is because the Jewish element is a sort of condensing agent of the racial and spiritual detritus of the various forces which clashed in the ancient Mediterranean world.
From the point of view of the race of the spirit, while the Jew’s need of “redemption” from the flesh, as well as his mystical-prophetic aspects, seems to make him belong to the Dionysian race, the gross materialism of other aspects of such a people, and the emphasis given to a purely collectivist tie, seem to make the Jew belong to the telluric race; his sensuality, to the Aphroditian race; and finally the rigidly dualistic character of his religiosity is not without relation to the lunar race.
From a spiritual point of view, one should conceive Israel as an essential composite reality. Their “law,” almost in the form of violence, has tried to keep elements which are quite heterogeneous united, and to give them a certain form. This seems to have had a certain success while Israel maintained itself as a sacerdotal type of civilization, but when Judaism started becoming materialized, when the Jew left his own tradition and became modernized, the ferment of decomposition and of chaos, once contained, then exploded and acted by contagion in a disintegrative sense in the world, until it became one of the most precious and valid instruments for the secret front of world subversion.
Detached from his law, which substituted for him the concepts of fatherland and race, the Jew represents the “anti-race” par excellence; he is a dangerous ethnic pariah, whose internationalism is a simple reflection of the shapeless, disintegrated nature of the raw material from which his people was originally formed.
These views make it easy to understand the average type of Jew, who while on the one hand observes for himself and his kind a residual traditionalism and a practical racialism which often becomes almost intransigency, on the other hand lets his other tendencies work regarding non-Jews, and exercises that destructive activity which, as we know, is prescribed by the same Jewish law whenever a Jew has to deal with a non-Jew, a “goy.”
Excerpt from part three of Synthesis of a Doctrine of Race (1941). Translator unknown.