Racism & Anti-Semitism

5,868 words

Trans. anonymous

Earlier in this book [Il mito del sangue (The myth of blood), Evola’s survey and exposition of racial theories first published in 1937], we have often encountered anti-Semitic ideas. In contemporary forms of racism these ideas have taken an increasingly definite form, but have also at times given rise to an ambiguity: some people believe that racism and anti-Semitism are the same thing, and that it therefore be sufficient to be neither a Jew nor a person of color to belong to the “Aryan” race. Although the less thoughtful forms of racism have in fact maintained this sort of confusion, we must insist on the fact that anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism are subordinate to the theory of race: they draw their principles from it, but can certainly not be identified with it.

We propose to clarify the main points of view with regard to the Jewish question and the controversy that surrounds it. We will refer to the opinions of some foreign anti-Semites but we will argue the views of Italian anti-Judaism, especially those of represented by Giovanni Preziosi and his magazine La Vita Italiana, since these views often offer a complete character.

Let us first briefly allude to the Jewish question from an ethnic and racial (properly speaking) point of view. According to racial theory, Jews are not a race in the true sense, but a people of mixed race (Fritsch, Günther). The Semitic peoples, to which Jews belong, are considered by Gobineau to already be a mixed race derived from a cross between the white race and the black race. Often it is viewed as a mix between the desert (or orientaloid) race and the Levantine (or Armenoid) race: in the particular case of the Jews, this mixture would have been further complicated by other racial elements, varying with different lineages, either of ancient or still existing races (the Mediterranean race and the Alpine race). Moreover, the Bible already spoke of the seven nations that have contributed to the formation of the blood and “seed” of the Jews, besides the Hamitic (Egyptian) and philistine influences. . . . At the time of the Diaspora and the last prophecies, other residual elements of Mediterranean ethnic and spiritual decadence coagulated into Judaism.

If Israel is not a race but a mixture of races, one wonders to what it owes its indisputable unity, how it extracted a clearly recognizable type from such a mixture, a type that moreover has had the strength to endure through the centuries under the most adverse conditions, and in which the feeling of racial solidarity and loyalty to one’s blood are so keen, that the Jewish people stands out as one of the most racist peoples in all of history.

The basis for such unity cannot to be sought in the race in the strict sense, but in the force exerted by a formative idea and tradition. It was a Jew, James Darmesteter, who wrote that “The Jew has been formed, if not manufactured, by his books and rites. As Adam was made by Jehovah, he emerges from the hands of his rabbis.” It was the Law, the Torah, that created the Jewish type and Jewish unity: for Jews, this law is a substitute for the homeland, the soil, the nation, for blood itself. This law acted upon a chaotic, detrital racial mixture and imposed a form on it, developed instincts and attitudes of a special type, which over the centuries became hereditary.

We say “over the centuries”, since anti-Semites have rightly pointed out that it is a mistake to believe that after the Old Testament and since the arrival of Christianity, the influence of Jewish law has been neutralized and almost suspended, so to speak. The opposite is true. The old law, the Torah, already completed by Misnah (“repetition,” “repeated law”), that is to say, by a diverse tradition, first oral and then, around the 3rd century, fixed in writing, developed in the rabbinic literature collected in the Gemara, which means “completion” and is commonly called the Talmud, and also in developments particular to the Kabbalah and the formulations of the Shulchan Aruch. All of these elements must be understood as a whole, as a perfect continuity through the centuries before and after Christianity, up until today. In addition, post-Christian, Talmudic formulations of Jewish law, are the ones that most of all reinforced and shaped the Jewish way of being and the Jewish instinct, especially in their dealings with non-Jews.

The Aryan racist front views Judaism as a destructive force for all races and cultures. Let us examine the evidence supporting this idea and, specifically, the ways in which the actual destructive character of Judaism manifests itself. The predominant view in anti-Semitism is that, just as the germinating force of a seed only develops when it breaks and then begins to act on surrounding material, Judaism only began to have a deleterious influence after the crisis of the ancient Jewish national tradition, with the consequent political collapse and the dispersion throughout the world of the chosen people.

First, one must consider the influence of chaotic and impure ethnic elements, previously restrained by the law, when they are released and pass into a free state. Guénon rightly noted that the relations between the Jew and his tradition differ from those normally observed in other races. For the non-Jew who breaks away from his tradition as religious law, there still remain other points of support: soil, blood, and homeland. But in Judaism, the law takes over the function of all of those principles. To the point that if the Jews are liberated from the law, they automatically become a factor of dissolution. Thus, themselves without race, Jews then become the anti-race; themselves without a nation, they become the anti-nation. Mommsen wrote: “Already in the ancient world, Judaism was a ferment of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition.” An elusive, evasive, and rootless substance within any country, Wolf sees in the Hebrew element the principle of anti-race, anti-tradition, anti-culture: not the antithesis of a particular culture, but the antithesis of all culture that is racially and nationally determined. In the Jewish composite, the desert or orientaloid part reinforces this influence: through their nomadic and nationless spirit, Jews have injected into different nations — starting with the Romans — the virus of anti-nationalism, universalism, and cultural internationalism. They exert an unceasing corrosive force on everything that is differentiated, qualitative, bound to blood and tradition: in politics, this culminates in the Judaizing Masonic ideology, with the consequent social and internationalist humanitarian myths.

The second element in the destructive influences of Judaism depends on the part played in Israel by the race of the Levantine (Armenoid) man, the ”man of redemption,” and his psychological structure, described by Günther and especially by Clauss. This man is characterized by the dualism of body and mind. The body is now only the instrumentalized expression of the spirit, but understood as “flesh,” as guilt-ridden materiality, from which one must be redeemed. This confused striving towards “redemption” can fail: then this type of man, falling back, sinks into matter, takes pleasure in it and is intoxicated, as if to forget his true nature. He then will tend to contaminate everything towards which he once strove, all the higher values he was unable to reach. He takes delight in every crisis where he can see a reflection of his own inner crisis. He takes pleasure in everything that expresses the omnipotence of this filthy and oblique materiality into which he fell back. He uses that omnipotence as an alibi, as a justification. Thus the Hebrew element, as we shall see in a moment, has always manifested itself in a conscious or unconscious activity of contamination and degradation of all higher values.

One must consider, as the third point, the particular effect that the basic themes of the Law have had on the formation of instincts and basic behaviors, resulting in the secular, materialistic, and mechanical form in which these instincts manifest themselves in the persecuted Jews of the Diaspora. As is known, the central theme of the old law is that Israel is the “chosen people” destined to dominate all the nations, all the lands and riches of the world, so that all kingdoms shall obey it. These are the themes of the Mosaic religion:

• “The Lord shall make thee the head and not the tail; you will always be above only and thou shalt not be beneath” (Deuteronomy, 28, 13).
• “And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods” (Deuteronomy, 7, 16).

These are also the themes of the prophetic literature:

• “And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven will be given to the people of the saints of the Most High: his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all powers shall serve and obey Him” (Daniel, 7, 27).
• “The foreigner’s son shall build your walls, and their kings will serve you” (Isaiah 60, 10).
• “But you shall be named the priests of Yahweh; shall call you ‘ministers of our God’; you shall eat the wealth of nations, and in their riches you will boast” (Isaiah 61: 6).

Now think of the feelings of resentment that this assurance of universal domination was bound to inspire in Israel when it ceased to exist as a political power. Think of the people that continued, after the triumph of Christianity, to feel “chosen,” but was identified with the lowest of the peoples, a cursed lineage of deicides, deserving every persecution, condemned to servitude as the consequence of just punishment. The potential generated by this idea of the law was bound to result in a deep and boundless hatred for all non-Jews and express itself in “serpentine” behavior, so to speak. This is shown by the further, Talmudic development of the old Law. Here are some Talmudic passages recalled by Preziosi and De Vries Heekelingen:

• “What is Har Sinai? This is the Mount from which Sina descended, that is to say, hatred against the peoples of the world.”
• “You, Jews, you are called men, while the nations of the world do not deserve the name of men, but cattle.”
• “Gentiles’ flesh is as the flesh of asses and whose issue is like the issue of horses”
• “Even the best of the goyim should be killed.”
• “Away with him, pressing his jaws that he does not cry.”
• “What is a prostitute? Any woman who is not Jewish.”

And so on. The terms contained in a prayer that every Orthodox Jew had to recite daily in the Shemoneh Esrei are “May apostates lose all hope, may the Nazarenes and the Christians perish under blows, they are removed from the book of life and are not counted among the righteous. ”

In modern times, when the religious justification for these feelings has fallen away, they effectively survived as an instinct, an innate aptitude. And we can say the same today with regard to the original Jewish belief Israel and the other nations have nothing in common, making it absurd to adopt the same standards of conduct with the Jews and the Gentiles, the latter being inferior beings whose only value consists in being exploited like livestock. The Talmudic precepts are clear: they formulate two moralities, one that applies to one’s “neighbor,” that is to say to other Jews, and another to be applied to relations with the Goyim, non-Jews; and any action that is criminal or unworthy according to the first morality ceases to be such according to the second. Thus the Talmud and the Shulchan Aruch authorize:

• the defrauding of non-Jews;
• adultery committed with non-Jewish women is not considered to be such;
• usury is viewed not only a right, but almost a duty;
• they command Jews not to testify, or else giving false testimony, in lawsuits between Jews and non-Jews;
• they say that “the inheritance and property of non-Jews should be considered the property without an owner and the first to arrive has a right to them,” only stating that if several Jews carry out a fraud, they are required to share the fruits equitably among themselves;
• they urge the lending of money, while never borrowing;
• they do not require Jews to keep their word with regard to non-Jews, and so on.

The anti-Semitic controversy has brought a whole series of such maxims to light, while demonstrating their orthodox character. Besides, if we also read in the Talmud that “a goy who studies the Talmud and a Jew who helps him, must be put to death”; specifying that to “communicate anything to a goy of our law, amounts to a massacre of all Jews, for if the goyim knew what we teach concerning them, they would have no doubt exterminate us”; reading words like this, we have a precise confirmation of the awareness that the Jews had of the double standards contained in their own orthodox texts.

But here, usually it is objected that these are ancient texts, practically fallen into disuse. That is a mistake. As we have said, for centuries these ideas, these precepts have shaped the Jewish forma mentis and have left their indelible mark. The will to power, the hatred and finally, the double morality of the Talmud, have lost their initial justification, which was religious and messianic: but all the instincts and behaviors which, on a secularized and practical level, simply manifest themselves as a way of being, as a hereditary quality of the race, with its own autonomous existence, so to speak, have been preserved. That is why the religious element is not a part of the Jewish problem as modern racism has formulated it. Dühring has written: “The Jewish question would exist even if all the Jews had abandoned their religion to join our dominant churches.” This is the point of view of modern anti-Semitism, concordant with views of most Jews but not, however, with that of the old Catholic anti-Semitism. “A converted or baptized Japanese or negro is still Japanese or a negro. In the same sense, a baptized Jew remains a Jew [. . .] Converted in good faith or not, baptized Jews continue to be Jews, to feel Jewish and to be considered Jews by their former coreligionists” (De Vries Heekelingen).

In a Talmudic text, we read: “Wherever the Jews settle, they must become bosses; and as long as they will not have absolute power, they will consider themselves exiles, prisoners . . . as long as they do not dominate entirely, they ought never to stop crying: What torment! how unworthy!” Once again, that is a theme of the Law, derived from the ancient Promise that, once its religious justification had been forgotten, left its trace in the form of a revolutionary instinct acting independently as a ferment of agitation and continuous subversion. Thus the Jews were well represented in all modern revolutionary subversive movements, without exception, particularly in communism and socialism, the main representatives of which are Jewish: Karl Marx, Lassalle, Rosa Luxemburg, Kautsky, Trotsky . . . As for the structure of the particular state that is to be destroyed, it is of little significance: “In a monarchy, Jews are Republicans; in a conservative republic, they will be socialist; in a socialist republic, they will be communists. All this amounts to the same, provided they destroy the existing state. They will oppose the existing society as long as it still has a non-Jewish basis.” Again, this is an instinct that subsists as an inheritance, the distant and unconscious origin of which is the idea that any system which does not yet meet the promise of domination vested in the chosen people is an unfair system, illegitimate and usurped.

In modern Judaism, beside the revolutionary front, we find the apparently opposed front of capitalism and international finance. It must be remembered that the “reign” of the Jewish Promise was not conceived in mystical and supernatural terms, but as one that has gathered all the riches of the earth. “Your God wants you rich” and “thou shalt lend money to many nations, but thou shalt not borrow from anyone” are already Biblical maxims; if we add the inclination of the Semitic peoples (especially the desert nomads) to view wealth as essentially wandering and nomadic (i.e., as money), we will little by little distinguish the inclinations that, increasingly taking a materialized and “secularized” form, have given rise to the typically Jewish forms of capitalism, culminating in the omnipotence of a spiritless economy and nationless finance. These are the modernized forms in which the ancient Jewish will to power delights either in the direct exercise of power, or in the destruction and the debasement of all values that this power carries with it.

Other Jewish traits — according to Halfeld — are the deification of money, the transformation of the temple into a bank, the puritanical glorification of success and profit, the preacher-entrepreneur, the businessman and usurer with the name of God always on his lips, humanitarian and pacifist ideologies at the service of materialism . . . Here we might recall Sombart’s saying that America is really a Jewish country and that Americanism nothing but the “Jewish spirit distilled”; or that of Günther, according to which the representatives and diffusors of the so-called modern spirit are predominantly Jewish; or finally that of Wolf, for whom the close link between Anglo-Saxons and Freemasons under the influence of the Jews is the key to understanding Western history in recent times. Besides, Karl Marx himself wrote the following:

• “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”
• “The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.”
• “The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew.”

In the activity of modern Judaism, the power of money has its counterpart in the power of intelligence as a revolutionary force. We are referring here to a ferment of subversion that is not limited to the social domain, but that acts on the spiritual and cultural plane in the most varied forms. Its source is the previously described character of the carnalized ”man of redemption.” Indisputably, in the field of culture, literature, arts, and even science, Jewish contributions directly or indirectly always tend to converge towards a single end: that of falsifying and ridiculing all the ideals of the Aryan peoples, making them appear unjust and deceptive, tendentiously pushing to the fore everything in human nature that conceals within itself something sensual, inferior, dirty, and animalistic. To defile all that is sacred, to shake every point of support and every certainty, to inspire a sense of spiritual unease that will encourage self-abandonment to the vilest forces: in all of this the activity of the Jew manifests itself, an activity that is essentially instinctive, natural, proceeding from the Jewish essence, from the Jewish “inner race,” just as it is in the nature of fire to burn and of acid to corrode.

• The relativism of the Jew Einstein, making the layman believe that science had confirmed the non-existence of any solid reference point, while on the other hand delivering the coup de grâce to a concrete type of physical knowledge and substituting for it a purely formal system of mathematics and algebraic data;
• Bergson, with his theory that exalts life in its immediacy, in its irreducibility to intellectual certainties, in its incoercible becoming, in its antithesis to all that which was the classical world of “Being”;
• Freud, Adler, and the other Jewish psychoanalysts, who have uncovered the murky world of the unconscious and who tried to demonstrate the omnipotence of this unconscious — made up of wild atavistic instincts, of the primordial libido and the famous “complexes” – over the faculties and inclinations of the waking ego;
• the so-called Jewish school of sociology, which began to interpret the religions and mythologies not on the basis of a transcendent element, but as mere “social” and purely human creations;
• the Jew Lombroso, who, besides establishing aberrant relationships between genius and the abnormal, considers criminals to be residual and still pure examples of a “race” from which we have all evolved;
• Max Nordau, determined to unmask “the conventional lies of our culture,” just as a number of Jewish novelists, beginning with Wassermann, specialized in the discovery of the injustices and inadequacies of the fundamental ideas of modern society;
• the historical materialism of Karl Marx, which presents brute economic processes as the sole creative force of history, reducing the rest to a mere “superstructure” (hence Franck’s judgment: “The Marxist doctrine does not correspond to reality, but to the spirit and the needs of Judaism, which takes into consideration only issues of materiality and money and scorns any ideal and any spiritual form. It is a leveling force launched against all the values of race and blood”);
• the activity of the so-called experts in sexual matters, largely Jewish, beginning with the famous Magnus Hirschfeld, who was intent on making eroticism into a real obsession, and by means of pseudo-scientific publications and popularizations to draw attention to all of the most abnormal and degenerate forms of sexuality;
• the “discovery” of the mentality of “primitives” by the Jews Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim, along with the activities of a large concentration of Jews in the field of ultra-modern art, where again the formless, the primitivistic, the element of pure sensation dominate — and so on:

these are the specific and easily multiplied examples of an activity with a thousand faces but with one single effect: to disintegrate, degrade and subvert. It is “Schadenfreude“: taking pleasure in degrading, corrupting, dirtying, sensualizing, opening the doors to the “underground” of the human soul, in order to unleash it and satisfy it. The Schadenfreude characteristic of the Judaico-Levantine soul, that once was the soul of the “man of redemption.”

Anti-Semitic extremists tend to see this convergence of effects as intentional. However, the prevailing, and more prudent view, is that it is not the result of a plan or specific intention, but of an instinct, a natural and spontaneous way of being. The convergence is the result of an affinity between Jews in instinct and inspiration. In such cases, one cannot even speak of any real responsibility: the Jew can’t help it, just as acid can’t help but corrode. That is his way of being, determined by the atavistic and racial causes previously alluded to. So one must not so much hate them as take the measures necessary to limit and neutralize their activity — so they will not be able to do any more harm.

Anti-Semitism also sees the persistence, in modernized forms, of the ancient Jewish solidarity cemented by double standards, to the point that the Jewish community, says Fritsch, has less the characteristics of a religious community than of a social conspiracy: and the Aryan states, oblivious to this double standard and not defending themselves, indiscriminately bestow equal rights on Jews as if the latter respected their morality, virtually placing themselves in a position of inferiority, placing their fate in the hands of the people that they had welcomed, in the hands of an alien, international and antinational race. Once one has recognized this, one must react in two ways: one moral, the other political.

There can be no ties, anti-Semites say, between “Aryans” and a “race that lacks any sense of honor and loyalty,” one that acts through two primary channels: deception and money. The “Aryan” social concept is, according to this view: “the sincere and conscientious man bases his feeling of pride on having made himself worthy of existence through loyal action and honest, productive labor. He would rather perish than obtain benefits through dishonorable actions. The strict idea of honor and justice towards other men is the foundation of any heroic life and is rooted in a profound element of the soul: in the sense of shame. A people that renounces the sense of honor and shame is no longer worthy of being considered human: it is a sub-humanity” (Fritsch). It is absurd — he concludes — to pretend that the same laws can apply to Jews and Aryans. Defensive, prophylactic measures are required. To give full freedom to the Jews — according to Frisch — just means that they will use us and deceive us. And that is why Jews have been such strong supporters of the liberal, individualistic, and democratic ideology.

Hence the need for political action, i.e., the measures taken by various states that have accepted the arguments of anti-Jewish racism, removing Jewish elements from commanding positions in political, economic, and intellectual life, positions that had been seized by Jews recently in a kind of grand offensive. Anti-Semitic controversy has brought to light the fact that in business, trafficking, and generally in positions of power and influence, the Jewish element was indeed predominant, while the same element was considerably less present in subordinate occupations, among workers and farmers. There the percentage of Jews was almost negligible compared to the number of non-Jews. In all this, anti-Semitism saw a phenomenon of parasitism, not unrelated to the hereditary Jewish instinct to “drink the milk of the people, and to suck the breasts of kings” to “devour the nations that God has delivered to them” (in the words of the old expressions of the Law). The Jew does not make, does not produce, but speculates and traffics in what others make, gets rich at their expense, and dominates. The Jew aims straight for intellectual occupations and positions of leadership. From there, he can exert an often dubious and perverting influence, while leaving the lower forms of work to others, to the “Aryans.”

Hence, the political measures adopted to banish the Jews from public office and to limit their presence in each of the professions. Handbook of the Jewish Question, edited by Fritsch, concludes with these revealing words:

Jews are dangerous not only economically, but also spiritually and morally. According to rabbinic law, the Jew is tied to a particular State, which includes all the world’s Jews. It is therefore impossible for him to sincerely be a member of another State. Every nation that values its freedom and honor and intends to defend itself against attacks on its rights and moral degeneration will in the future not be able to tolerate Jews in its midst. Where do they go then? That is only their concern. Certainly not anywhere where would force farmers and craftsmen to abandon their property and their homes. Moreover, they have enough money to buy a whole country, either in Australia or in Africa. There they can live in peace according to their customs and prove to the world that they are capable of creating a civilization on their own. For us, the abolition of the emancipation of the Jews is a necessity.

And De Vries Heekelingen writes: “We do not blame the Jews for working for the greatness of their race. We even admire the tenacity with which they pursue the realization of their goal. We cannot, however, comprehend the blindness of so many non-Jews who do not show a similar enthusiasm and tenacity in defending their most sacred interests.” Through these considerations, the essentially “racial,” and not only political or social, side of the Jewish problem has been highlighted: “racial” not in the sense of a pure race, but in the sense of instincts that have become, so to speak, an organic inheritance that can manifest itself in various forms, but never disappears completely.

We must now say something about a book that has sparked all kinds of discussions and had a fundamental role in the anti-Jewish polemic: the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Since we have already dealt with this question in our Introduction to the latest Italian edition of the Protocols, we will limit ourselves here to a short sketch, since it is impossible to discuss the Jewish question without an elucidation of this matter.

The Protocols were published in their current form in Russia in 1904, edited by a certain Sergei Nilus some who presented them as a document obtained from a mysterious Judaeo-Masonic organization. In actual fact, it has been proven that some of these texts had been previously disclosed, and even Bismarck himself was aware of them. The central ideas of the Protocols are:

• That the various events and the different ideologies that have led traditional, Aryan and Christian Europe into decline are not incidental, but obey a precise plan of destruction.
• That this plan of destruction was developed in its every detail by an occult organisation, while at the same time studying, on the basis of knowledge of the precise laws that bind the causes to effects, the methods of its progressive realization.
• This organisation mainly works through people who do not realize that they are being used by it. It acts on three different planes. First, ideologically: ideologies are spread, ideologies that the Elders of Zion themselves do not believe in, which they consider to be nonsense, but that they use in a Machiavellian fashion to spread subversion and disintegrate societies and states: liberalism, rationalism, internationalism, democracy. Second, it ensures that the main manufacturing centers of “public opinion,” i.e., the international press, are under its control. Third, the objective is to control the largest possible share of the wealth of the world, i.e., international finance.
• Acting through these three powerful instruments, their goal is to spread the ferment of subversion everywhere, to spiritually and socially uproot men, transforming them into a formless material, a mass without country, tradition, inner strength or personality; true revolutions (which will have their starting point in Russia — note that the Protocols were made public in 1904) and shrewdly instigated wars will push the crisis of Western man to the point that in the end, he will be reduced to a passive object in the hands of invisible rulers. Then they will reveal themselves and assume universal power. At their head, there will be a king of Jewish race.

Now that we know what the Protocols contain, one naturally wonders if they are “real,” “authentic.” This question is meaningless since, as Guénon remarked, “no truly, seriously secret organisation, whatever its nature, leaves behind written documents.” Thus, rather than of “authenticity,” we should speak of “veracity.” The veracity of the document in question should be judged according to a criterion similar to that used in modern positive sciences, that is to say, as a working hypothesis that guides an inductive process. The hypothesis can be confirmed by revealing the inner connections and the unifying law of a collection of facts.

From such a perspective, one can say that even if the Protocols are not authentic, it is as though they were authentic, for two reasons:

1. Because events following their publication confirm them. Hugo Wast wrote, “The Protocols may be fake; but they are being realized wonderfully”; and Henry Ford said, “The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on. They are sixteen years old and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now.”
2. Because the fundamental ideas they draw from are identical to those of international Jewry, so that even if the Protocols are fabricated, the author simply wrote what every Jew faithful to his tradition and the deepest will of Israel and conscious of his instincts would have written.

With regard the first and second points, the Italian edition of the Protocols provides an ample and convincing demonstration. If the problem is considered in this way, the question of “plagiarism,” which led to the old Bern trial, appears, in the end, frivolous. There are no doubt elements from earlier works in the Protocols, especially parts of a brochure written in 1865 by a revolutionary Freemason, Joly. But the Protocols do not belong to the field of literature, where plagiarism discredits a work. A strategist can make use of things revealed by others, even preserving their literal wording, if they fit into his plan, without diminishing the significance of the latter.

Considerably more serious and decisive is the fact that a number of antecedents to the Protocols exist, antecedents that lead far into the past and that in more or less fictional or mythological forms express the obscure presentiment of this double truth:

1. That all the main events of history are not coincidental, but have a logic and follow a certain intention.
2. That there is a hidden center of the world.

What is most characteristic in the Protocols is a particular formulation of the following two general themes: that the history of modern subversion follows a certain plan and has a direction — and hence, that the hidden center of the world is of a shadowy nature, that it is the center of evil forces intent on the destruction of traditional Europe. This particular notion is the effect of a kind of reversal or counterfeit of an existing tradition that in itself is neither Jewish or Masonic; the reader can persuade himself of this by reading the last part of our book The Mystery of the Grail.

In any case, the reader will ask himself if at the center of this destructive plan announced by the Protocols and verified, often with striking accuracy, by successive events, we really find the Jews. The Protocols refer at times to Jews and at other times to Freemasons, which is not quite the same thing. . . . For our part, we think it is more prudent to only use the expression “the secret leaders world subversion.” It is indisputable that many Jewish elements have been used by these anonymous leaders, since because of their instincts and the deformation of their traditional ideas, the Jews seemed to be the most qualified and suitable instruments. But it is unwise to generalize this beyond certain limits.

One must, however, take another point into account: we cannot make Jews the sole and sufficient cause of all global subversion — as some extremists would — except by acknowledging our humiliating inferiority to them. The Jews would then be more powerful than the Aryan world, which is supposedly “in order” and in full possession of its faculties? This is nonsense. Jewish subversion was only possible because non-Jewish humanity had already developed processes of degeneration and disintegration: the Jewish element was grafted onto these processes, with the spirit, instincts and methods that are typical of it. The Jewish element merely accelerated those degenerative processes to the point of exasperation, taking them to a point they would not have achieved as quickly on their own.

But, true to our purpose, which is one of pure exposition, we do not wish to further try to establish the limits of validity of anti-Semitic theses, also because we have already treated of the subject elsewhere.