The Sixty Million
The Roots of Zionism, Part 4

2,919 words

Part 4 of 4 & Notes

Anti-Semitism and Jewish ‘Over-Achievement’

Typically a nation appreciates entrepreneurial outsiders if its majority population isn’t generating enough native entrepreneurs to kindle economic growth, even if such outsiders come to dominate the economy. But should they come to dominate the culture as well, that will typically breed resentment amongst the majority. ‘Whose country is this anyways?’ will likely become a strong sentiment. One can think of a few exceptions: perhaps modern-day America, and Hungary prior to an unmistakably Jewish-Communist seizure of power in 1919. However, Germany/Austria was certainly not an exception.

In 1910 Jews made up less than 1 percent of the German population, but were overrepresented in the economic elite by a factor of 33. Yes: 33! In 1907 in the state of Baden, average Jewish income was five times that of Protestants and ten times that of Catholics. “The rise of the Jews in Austria-Hungary may well have been the most sudden, impressive rise of Jews in modern history,” asserts Lindemann. Most of Eastern Europe scarcely had a middle class absent the Jews.

Financial success led to higher education and the professions for Jews far more than for any other group. In Prussia nine times as many Jews as Protestants per capita went to university (16 times for Catholics)! Slezkine remarks upon the Jewishness of the universities, ‘free’ professions, salons, coffeehouses, concert halls, and art galleries in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest. Lindemann depicts one German-Jewish writer who moved to Vienna from Germany circa 1900 as gobsmacked by how “all public life was dominated by Jews. The banks, the press, the theater, literature, social organizations, all lay in the hands of the Jews . . .” Yet Vienna Jews “lived in their own neighborhoods and retained Jewish friends and acquaintances almost exclusively.” Worse, “The complaint that Jewish journalists were vituperatively critical while remaining hypersensitive to criticism themselves was often expressed in Austria.”

Indeed, for Catholics and Protestants in Vienna and Budapest, Jews were not only taking over the economy, their seizure of the culture was already a fait accompli. (Can you even imagine Israel allowing its economy/culture to be gradually taken over by non-Jews?) Jews lived life at a pace that the ethnic/cultural descendants of Mozart and Beethoven and Goethe could not keep up with. Wagner, many of whose associates were Jews, but who viewed German culture as a work in progress that an overly-influential Jewish presence was distorting, remarked that, “The only problem [with the Jews] is that they came to us Germans too soon. We were not strong enough to absorb this element.” Their very success at assimilation made them the spear carriers for modernity and secularism, which were just fine by Jews, but not so fine by Catholics and Protestants who honored their seemingly-eroding Christian and national heritage.

Regarding 19th-century Jewish disabilities in Russia, it wasn’t so much that they were worse than those of the Kirgiz, the Aleut, or indeed the Russian peasants. They weren’t. But this was an energetic high-IQ bunch. It greatly resented the many barriers to a deserved ascent into elite institutions, where Jews would surely shine if allowed the opportunity. The implosion of the Jewish employment niche in the Pale, due to the ending of serfdom for which Jews had served as mediators between rulers and serfs, led to emigration and proletarianization for most. However, this great change also generated proportionately more professional and economic opportunities for Pale Jews than for other ethnic groups, with Jews drawing upon their experience as mediators and middlemen. In Russia, grants Lindemann, “Jews could move about, own land (surely the belief that Jews could not own land ranks as one of the most often heard oversimplifications about their status, both in Russia and elsewhere in Europe), engage in commerce, and attend universities.”

The Pale in fact was only 15 percent Jewish. But the percentages were much higher in parts of the Pale, such as Bialystok: 75 percent, Lithuania: 51 percent, and Odessa: 50 percent. Incredibly, Jews constituted 90 percent of the business class in Russian cities! Yes: 90 percent! Making that possible were half a million Jews living illegally beyond Pale, mainly because the Pale of Settlement hadn’t even been delineated until 1835. In 1859, relates Ferguson, there were communities of Jewish merchants in all the principal Russian cities. That’s because Jewish merchants who were members of the first guild, the highest social rank to which any Russian businessman could aspire, could trade all over Russia. Jewish university graduates and, after 1865, Jewish artisans, could also reside anywhere.

Indeed, the 1860s and 1870s for some Jews in Russia were as upwardly mobile as for their counterparts in Western Europe. Top Jewish merchants and industrialists made fortunes in liquor, railroad construction, sugar, textiles, and tobacco. True, for the rest, a high birth rate and lack of corresponding opportunity meant poverty. But for those who escaped it, continues Ferguson, the late 1800s century presented economic opportunities galore. The Czarist regime set out on the path of agrarian reform and industrialization. Both international and domestic trade flourished. Jews were formally, if not informally, forbidden by law from owning land. Their schooling made them both more literate and more numerate than neighboring Gentiles. The Jews of the Pale were poised to seize upon new business opportunities. By the turn of the century, Jews made up nearly a quarter of all merchants and manufacturers in the part of eastern Russian that once belonged to Poland.

Slezkine confirms that, “The Russian industrialization of the late 19th century opened up new opportunities for Jewish businessmen and benefited tremendously from their financial backing.” While, obviously, Jewish financiers were quite prominent, Arcadius Kahan pointed out that, “There was hardly an area of entrepreneurial activity from which Jewish entrepreneurs were successfully excluded. . .manufacturing in the Pale, oil wells, gold mines, fisheries, shipping, forestry, railroad construction, cotton plantations. . .”

Expands Slezkine: ““The earliest, safest, most profitable, and ultimately the most productive investment was directed toward railroad construction. Benefiting from the example and direct financial backing of the Rothschilds, Pereires, Bleichroders, and Gomperzes (as well as the budgetary munificence of the imperial government, especially the war ministry), some Russian-based Jewish bankers built large fortunes while connecting disparate Russian markets to each other and to the outside world. Consortia of Jewish financiers and contractors built the Warsaw-Vienna, Moscow-Smolensk, Kiev-Brest, and Moscow-Brest lines (among many others), while the “railroad king” Samuil Poliakov founded, constructed, and eventually owned a number of private railroads, including the Kursk-Khakov-Rostov and the Kozlov-Voronezh-Rostov lines.”” According to Howard Sachar, fully three-quarters of the Russian railroad system came into being via Jewish initiatives. By 1914, even in St. Petersburg, a full 37 percent of business owners were Jewish.

Russia might have approximated Hungary by 1914 in the extent of business domination by Jews were it not for restrictions. It’s almost as if Russia’s politically-radical Jews were declaiming that if Jews weren’t allowed to dominate Russia like they dominated Hungary, owning 90 percent of businesses there, then they were going to tear asunder the whole nation and start over — with Jews leading. In any case, by 1914 Russian modernization was going ahead full steam and a Russian-Jewish elite was at its forefront. This was in fact more of a revolution than what Bolshevism would bring, and thanks to Bolshevism this Russian industrial revolution would suffer a lost decade.

Dostoevsky wrote in 1877 that “materialism, the blind, insatiable desire for personal prosperity, the thirst for personal accumulation of money at all costs” was part of human nature “but never before have these desires been proclaimed to be the highest possible principle with as much frankness and insistence as in our 19th century.” Of this mentality Jews were “its truest and most dedicated apostles,” writes Slezkine, with the Russian-born-and-raised Ayn Rand soon to evangelize that mentality in a United States where confidence in the virtues of capitalism would be eroded in the 1930s by the Great Depression.

Because several aspects of their culture predisposed them to modernity, Jews often got there well ahead of the nationals who made a slower transition from their longstanding, entrenched and sentimentalized farming mentality and then found Jews already occupying and controlling the positions they sought. This surely would have been the case in England too, had Edward I not booted out its Jews — until they were welcomed back in by Oliver Cromwell three centuries later. One has to wonder what would have become of Shakespeare in an England financially and culturally dominated by a strong Jewish element.

While Jews, observes Slezkine, were sensationally good at being modern, modernity minus nationalism equals cold capitalism, fine for Jews with their pre-existing high-level solidarity, but not so fine for other conglomerations of peoples groping their way toward a national consciousness. Jews were the very face of the modernity that Europe was having such a hard time coming to terms with. Slezkine adds that Jews had become beacons of Reason and Enlightenment, and championed this ethos. But liberal universalism pre-supposes an inter-changeability of citizens where in fact one set of ethnics in particular was adapting to modernity with a speed and an enthusiasm that left the majority aghast and resentful.

Did the Czars Orchestrate the Pogroms and Push Jews Out of Russia? 

As mentioned above, in 1881 Czar Alexander II was assassinated by a group of revolutionary conspirators including at least one Jew. This provoked pogroms in many areas, the first wave of many to come. However, cautions Lindemann:

The charge that the tsarist authorities actually engaged in a concerted plan, or plot, to foment the riots, believed by many Jews at the time and supported since by many historians, finds little support in the documents or even in what might be termed a plausible explanation of developments at the time. The new tsar and his highest officials were taken aback by the mass violence and feared at first that the assassination and riots were part of a planned revolution . . . The charge of [tsarist] conspiracy gives the tsarist authorities too much credit, since they were not sufficiently in control of the country to plan such a mass uprising. . . The last thing in their minds was to encourage the common people to riot and rampage.

Ferguson cites undermanned police departments as a contributing factor. Slezkine agrees that, “The imperial government did not instigate Jewish pogroms . . .” Of course, its misguided inept policies did little to thwart them.

The following is what Alexander III believed he was doing regarding the pogroms: “The government, while on the one hand doing its best to put down the disturbances and to deliver the Jews from oppression and slaughter, has also on the other hand, thought it a matter of urgency and justice to adopt stringent measures in order to put an end to the oppression practiced by the Jews on the inhabitants, and to free the country from their malpractices, which were, as is known, the cause of the agitation.”

After the 1881 rioting, 3,675 people were arrested and 2,359 tried, not a likely outcome had the riots been officially instigated. In fact, writes Ferguson, from the outset Orthodox Church head Pobedonostesev instructed the clergy to preach against pogroms. And clearly the new Czar, Alexander III deplored these outrages against the social order. Certainly, writes Ferguson, “Jewish organizations portrayed the pogroms as officially instigated, a verdict echoed by more than one generation of scholars.” Indeed, Jews got a century’s worth of mileage out of that propaganda, and one still sees freshly-published references to the pogroms as the product of an official extermination policy. Just as authorities exaggerated role of Jews in revolutionary activity, so the Jews exaggerated the extent of official direction/approval of the pogroms. (Even then, during pogrom-related trials, Jewish testimony was filtered through jaded ears. “Jews themselves joked about how they lied before officialdom,” Lindemann informs us.) In fact, Minister of the Interior Pleve met with Jewish officials to mitigate the situation. In later pogroms, writes Ferguson, Jewish communities often fought rioters with Bundist/Zionist-organized ‘self-defence’ forces and gave back as good as they got. (Bundists pursued the interests of Jews intent on ‘staying put’ in Russia.)

Was it the pogroms that caused the massive Jewish emigration out of the Russian Empire starting in the 1880s? Lindemann suggests that economic concerns overshadowed political ones, and that even prior to Alexander’s assassination, Jewish flight was already underway. The same flight was taking place from Galicia (eastern Poland), where there were no pogroms at all. The text of the book on which Fiddler on the Roof was based portrays kindness from peasants not violence, but the ‘musical’ version needed a pogrom to prod Tevye to set sail for America. Author Aleichem didn’t provide one in the novel, but since pogroms were what post-Jewish-Tragedy American audiences expected, the writers of the musical delivered.

Still, about 600 (!) pogroms did take place between 1903 and 1906. In the Kishinev pogrom in 1906, 45 Jews were reported killed. However, it was mostly a matter of class frustrations being vented along racial lines; aristocratic Germans in Latvia had got pogromed too the previous year.

Yet Another Resurrection of a Long-since-debunked Myth

In Judis’s Genesis (2014), he refers to “Russia’s state-sponsored pogroms.” But as we have just seen, the Russian government was in fact more disposed, if ill-equipped, to stop pogroms than to encourage them. Moreover, this must be placed in a wider context. The Red Terror of 1918, in which Jews were very heavily involved, out-did a century of sporadic pogroms within any given month of its reign, and degenerated into a civil war that would kill several millions. The era of pogroms ended with the ethnic Russian-inspired revolutions of 1905, and February 1917, the latter giving Jews equal rights. In stark and nightmarish contrast, the Red Terror launched a new era of Soviet mass-murder of its own people and eventually a German nemesis that dragged the world into a conflict with a 35-million death toll. In the wake of Communism, one could understand why Russians might not get too teary-eyed over the pogrom era.

The Zionist Outflanking of the U.S. State Department 

The German Kaiser experienced terrible anguish while trying to avoid what became World War I. In sharp contrast, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, absolutely relished the prospect of war. The cartoon Kaiser — out to dominate world — preceded the cartoon Hitler supposedly likewise obsessed. In fact, notes Buchanan, in the century prior to World War I, Germany and Austria were the least militaristic of all the European powers. In 1914, Foreign Minister Edward Grey, Winston Churchill, and Prime Minister Asquith left the Kaiser and the German Chancellor unaware that a war with France would mean war with the British Empire. Unbelievably, the existence of a secret mutual support agreement between England and France was never communicated to the Kaiser and therefore could not serve as a deterrent to war. It was a real-life embodiment of the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, wherein a Soviet attack is undeterred by the West’s new nuclear Armageddon device because the West neglects to inform the Soviets of its existence.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., an equally secretive project was underway, a project that would transform world history. Lawyer Louis Brandeis had already become a Zionist in 1912 Germany. Later, relates Weir, ensconced in America, he became a zealot deploying covert methods to realize his aims. Israeli professor Dr. Sarah Schmidt and former New York Times editor (and Zionist sympathizer) Peter Grose wrote of the elitist secret society called the Parushim (meaning ‘Pharisees’ and ‘separate’) that evolved from the Harvard Menorah Society. Entering into the brotherhood of this secret society promoting Zionism required explicitly prioritizing this aim above the welfare of America. The possibility of charges of a treasonous dual loyalty compelled secrecy. Horace M. Kallen, hired by Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, had actually founded the society. Remarkably for a Zionist promoting ethnic homogeneity in Palestine, Kallen had served intellectually as the ‘father of cultural pluralism’ in America!

Ubiquitous super-banker Jacob Schiff donated the money to create a position for Felix Frankfurter at Harvard University. Brandeis then made newly-minted Harvard Law professor Frankfurter his paid lobbyist. The pair worked together for a quarter century placing their predominantly-Jewish acolytes in positions of influence. This way Brandeis could keep the extent of his agitating hidden. Frankfurter would do likewise when he joined Supreme Court.

The State Department felt that Zionists were trying to utilize the American government in furtherance of strictly Zionist interests. U.S. diplomatic and military experts, remarks Weir, saw it as self-evident that Zionism was contrary to U.S. interests and contradicted American principles. No matter. Zionist interests had already become entrenched in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration.

Writes Grose: “As early as November 1915, a leader of the Parushim went around suggesting that the British might gain some benefit from a formal declaration in support of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine” (my emphases). Given his close friendship with Wilson, Brandeis became a conduit between British Zionists and the president. When Brandeis became a Supreme Court judge in 1916, protocol required he resign from all private clubs and affiliations, but he continued his Zionist work covertly. In 1918 he became a supposedly strictly-“honorary president” of the Zionist Organization of America. But it was a lot more than honorary. And his role in re-shaping the ‘Great War’ by convincing Wilson of the merits of America’s entry was a lot less than honorable.

Notes (Quotes in Order of Appearance)

“We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.” Lindemann, p. 421

Herzl declared that “Jewish persecution is not an aberrant facet of a bigoted society, but a natural reaction to the appearance of a foreign group — the Jews.” alt. source online: The Surreal Reich by Joseph Howard Tyson Bloomington, NY: iUniverse, 2010. p. 206

“The first millennium of Jewish history as presented in the Bible has no empirical foundation whatsoever. It was made up later as a work of the imagination and shaped by doctrinal and political needs.” Cantor p. 51

The few copies of the Torah were spread pretty thin amongst “an illiterate peasant society without an educational system or a standard common language.” Sand p. 124

Mass conversion to Judaism “had produced great Jewish communities around the Mediterranean [but] left almost no trace in the national historiography . . .” Sand p. 188

An atmosphere “of cruelty and deprivation, of fatalism and magic, and of comatose squalor. . .congealed into a suffocating, conservative detritus that shut the Jews off from the technological and intellectual prospects of the modern world . . . [Nonetheless it was a] comfortable closed society . . .” Cantor pp. 222-23

“The bonds of one of the most closed of ‘closed societies’, one of the most totalitarian societies in the whole history of mankind, were snapped.” p. 15 Shahak

The Czar increased the presence of police in Jewish areas so “that it became difficult to murder Jews on the order of their rabbis, whereas in pre-1795 Poland it had been quite easy.” Shahak p. 17

“L]ife in the shtetl was not only materially poor but often cruel and benighted . . . ” Lindemann p. 62

“[A]ll the supposedly ‘Jewish characteristics’ — by which I mean the traits which vulgar so-called intellectuals in the West attribute to ‘the Jew’ — are modern characteristics, quite unknown during most of Jewish history, and appeared only when the totalitarian Jewish community began to lose it power. . .” Shahak p. 18

Religious learning was “in a debased and degenerate state . . . The critical sense. . .was totally absent . . .” p. 18 Shahak

Jewish history was “deceitful, sentimental and ultra-romantic” with “all inconvenient facts . . . expunged.” Shahak p. 16

“The Polish Jews had risen during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to prosperity as well as security by their service functions on behalf of the immensely land-rich Polish nobility, especially with regard to estate management for absentee landlords over the Ukrainian peasants.” This was effective in “instilling endemic hatred among the peasantry toward the Jews as the visible embodiment of their repression and exploitation . . .” Cantor p. 219

“In the countries of east Europe as well as in the Arab world, the Jews were liberated from the tyranny of their own religion and of their own communities by outside forces . . .” (my emphases) Shahak p. 17

“Zionism was part of the last wave of nationalist awakening in Europe, and coincided with the rise of other identity-shaping ideologies on the Continent.” Sand p. 252

“When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat . . . ; when we rise, there rises our terrible power of the purse,” Herzl reminded the Gentiles. Possibly Theodore Herzl’s most quoted utterance, with more than a hundred sources listed online.

“Here, in Palestine, is the force attracting all the scattered cells of the people to unite into one living national organism.” Judis p. 32

The average Western Jew by the early 1900s has “found stability, comfort, and reason in modernity in its cultural and fiscal aspects, and has no desire or motive for going beyond this resting place in the Jewish historical pilgrimage and wants to make it a permanent home . . . There is no need to seek further. Here world history and Jewish history putatively end . . . But other Jews would not let history end. They summoned the radical wrath of the prophets to condemn the bourgeois order as unjust and sought a socialist era to supersede the quiet, secure, rich world of Reform Judaism and Ricardian economics.” Cantor p. 267

Nabokov looks back: “The Russian [legal system] after the Alexander reforms was a magnificent institution, not only on paper. Periodicals of various tendencies and political parties of all possible kinds, legally or illegally, flourished and all parties were represented in the Duma. Public opinion was always liberal and progressive.” Amis p. 42

Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg had declared, “The future [belongs] to Russia, which grows and grows . . .” Ferguson (The Pity of War) p. 98

“[The Jews] have undermined everything, but the spirit of the age supports them. They are at the root of the revolutionary socialist movement and of regicide . . .” Bradbery p. 70

Hasidism “opposed . . . the Jewish enlightenment, which welcomed European science and culture.” Judis p. 21

Asher Ginsberg was the original intellectual of Zionism. “[I]n his conception of Zionism, he retained something of the emotional and cultural kernel of Hasidism.” Judis P. 21

In the Pale, by 1880s, “the intelligentsia was in the grips of an intense messianic expectation of a popular revolution.” Slezkine p. 141

Nikolai Berdiaev depicted socialism as a form of “Jewish religious chiliasm [millennialism], which faces the future with a passionate demand for, and anticipation of, the realization of the millennial Kingdom of God on earth and the coming of Judgment Day, when evil is finally vanquished by good, and injustice and suffering in human [Jewish?] life cease once and for all.” Slezkine p. 91

Stewart Chamberlain referred to the Jews’ “talent for planning impossible socialistic and economic Messianic empires without inquiring whether they thereby destroy the whole of civilization and culture which we have so slowly acquired.” Slezkine p. 58

“By the end of the nineteenth century, the Marxist predictions of a capitalist failure to expand production, of a fall in the rate of profit, a decrease in wages, of increasing proletarian impoverishment and the resulting approach of revolutionary crisis in the industrial countries had all proved false.” Robert Conquest (Reflections) p. 53

Schiff “controlled the Kuhn Loeb banking interests and was totally committed to using his vast wealth to alleviate the persecution of Russian Jewry.” Feingold p. x

“Schiff played a crucial role not only in denying the Russians the bonds they sought in the international market to finance the 1904-1905 war but also even more decisively in providing financial support for Japan, which then so humiliatingly defeated Russia. In Great Britain, Lucien Wolf, joined by the English Rothschilds and, in central Europe, Paul Nathan, led the efforts to isolate Russia both economically and diplomatically.” Lindemann p. 302

“It was a victory for Japan to rival the sinking of the Spanish Armada and the worst defeat ever inflicted on a Western power by an Asian people.” Buchanan p. 5

Schiff “delighted in the way that he and other Jews had been able to contribute to the humbling of the great Russian Empire . . .” Russia had come to understand that “international Jewry is a power after all.” Lindemann p. 302

“Schiff was both supporting the Japanese and financing revolutionary socialist agitation among Russian prisoners of war taken by Japan.” Lindemann p. 303

“Baron Edmund James de Rothschild began investing—about $6 million from 1884 to 1890—in colonies in Palestine.” Judis p. 21

“Many of the colonists . . . [were] sponsored by Baron Edmond Rothschild, Baron Maurice Hirsch, and the Jewish Colonization Association . . . ” Judis P. 33

“Numerous Zionist diary entries, letters and other documents show that they decided to push out these non-Jews—financially, if possible, violently if necessary.” p. 4 Weir

Ahad Ha’am correctly foresaw that if a state preceded the establishment of a spiritual center there, it would merely create yet another ‘problem of the Jews’. Judis p. 24

All that ‘Home’ talk was meant to avoid provoking the Turks, “But everyone understood what was really involved.” Judis p. 30

“Jews came to Israel under Zionist auspices as a people, and this was no idle pretense. To a significant extent, their movement was conspiratorial. Their settlement was largely a collective act, given concrete expression by collective financing and ownership.” This was an emigration unlike any other. Neumann p. 54

“The conflict in Palestine was between a settled population of indigenous Palestinians and not some other people, but a political movement dedicated to establishing an ethnic state in as much of Palestine as they could take.” Neumann p. 62

The Zionist’ objective was “to implant an ethnic sovereignty in what was to them a foreign land, on the basis of a population expressly imported to secure that end.” Neumann p. 62

Yitzhak Epstein at Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905: “[O]ne question outweighs all the others . . . our attitude to the Arabs . . . an entire people . . . has been dwelling there for many centuries and has never considered leaving it.” Judis p. 35

Far from being desolate, impoverished and backward, “Left to their own devices, the Palestinian Arabs [600,000 strong by the early 1880s] might have developed a viable export economy through the port cities on the Mediterranean and a tourist economy around Jerusalem and the other holy sites. It might even have come to rival Lebanon as an Arab financial center and Syria as an oil pipeline route. But the natural development of Arab Palestine was cut short and diverted by the onset of Zionist immigration . . .” p. 41 Judis

“[T]he main Zionist organizations were determined to plant the Jewish flag over Palestine . . . ,” regardless of whether they had to deal with a majority or minority of Arabs. Judis p. 62

“[W]hen the next generation of Jewish settlers, who often acquired land from the Jewish National Fund, began kicking [hired] Arabs off the land and replacing them with Jews, the Arabs resisted.” Judis p. 43

Future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli “depicted a vast and secret power of Jews bent on dominating the world . . . He may have been the most important propagator of the concept of race in the nineteenth century, particularly publicizing the Jews’ alleged taste for power, their sense of superiority, their mysteriousness, their clandestine international connections, and their arrogant pride in being a pure race.” Lindemann p. 77

The first Zionist intellectual, Nathan Birnbaum, trumpeted Disraeli’s vision: “Race is all.” Buchanan P. 402, Sand P. 257

“If this isn’t racism, what is?, Cantor asks rhetorically. Cantor p. 336

Deuteronomy 19, 20’s “various exhortations concerning the extermination of the indigenous peoples of Canaan. . .offer justification . . . for policies of racial extermination.” Lindemann p. 72

Arthur Koestler wrote that, “The Jewish religion, unlike any other, is racially discriminatory, nationally segregative, and socially tension-creating.” Lindemann p. 20

Slezkine cites the text from which Fiddler on the Roof was drawn: “There is no getting around the fact that we Jews are the best and smartest people.” Slezkine p. 326

Franz Oppenheimer observed that in Eastern Europe, Jews could not be Russian or Polish or whatever, because “medieval Jewish culture stands as far above Eastern European barbarism as it is beneath the culture of Western Europe.” Lindemann p. 58

Polish Jews stayed “emphatically apart,” as Lindemann p. 40

Western Jews critiqued Eastern Jews like anti-Semites, “as parasitic and filled with hatred for non-Jews.” Lindemann p. 51

The Hasidim were “boorish, malodorous, and fanatical.” In Hassidic eyes, Western Jews were “cold, formal, and vain.” Lindemann p. 53

1986 poll in Israel had 25 percent of secular Israelis denouncing their Orthodox fellow-citizens as “opportunists, liars, and charlatans.” Lindemann p. 24

Oppression by the Czar “was less fearsome and less omnipresent that many accounts maintain. Even under arch-reactionary Nicholas I (1825–1855), Jews retained most of their privileges, and they were by no means the only nationality or religious group that faced official suspicion and mistreatment.” Lindemann p. 61

There is no shortage of testimony of good relations twixt peasant and Jew in the countryside, writes Lindemann p. 66

“In America, as in Europe, one might more accurately speak of a rising tide against anti-Semitism . . .” Lindemann p. 383

“The rise of the Jews in Austria-Hungary may well have been the most sudden, impressive rise of Jews in modern history . . .” p.189 Lindemann

One German-Jewish writer who moved to Vienna from Germany circa 1900 was struck by how “all public life was dominated by Jews. The banks, the press, the theater, literature, social organizations, all lay in the hands of the Jews . . .” Lindemann p. 189

Yet Vienna Jews “lived in their own neighborhoods and retained Jewish friends and acquaintances almost exclusively.” Lindemann p. 190

“The complaint that Jewish journalists were vituperatively critical while remaining hypersensitive to criticism themselves was often expressed in Austria.” Lindemann p. 193

Wagner: “The only problem [with the Jews] is that they came to us Germans too soon. We were not strong enough to absorb this element.” Lindemann p. 126

In Russia, “Jews could move about, own land (surely the belief that Jews could not own land ranks as one of the most often heard oversimplifications about their status, both in Russia and elsewhere in Europe), engage in commerce, and attend universities.” Lindemann p. 63

“The Russian industrialization of the late nineteenth century opened up new opportunities for Jewish businessmen and benefited tremendously from their financial backing.” Slezkine p. 119

Arcadius Kahan points out that, “There was hardly an area of entrepreneurial activity from which Jewish entrepreneurs were successfully excluded. . .manufacturing in the Pale, oil wells, gold mines, fisheries, shipping, forestry, railroad construction, cotton plantations. . .” Slezkine p. 120

“The earliest, safest, most profitable, and ultimately the most productive investment was directed toward railroad construction. Benefiting from the example and direct financial backing of the Rothschilds, Pereires, Bleichroders, and Gomperzes (as well as the budgetary munificence of the imperial government, especially the war ministry), some Russian-based Jewish bankers built large fortunes while connecting disparate Russian markets to each other and to the outside world. Consortia of Jewish financiers and contractors built the Warsaw-Vienna, Moscow-Smolensk, Kiev-Brest, and Moscow-Brest lines (among many others), while the “railroad king” Samuil Poliakov founded, constructed, and eventually owned a number of private railroads, including the Kursk-Khakov-Rostov and the Kozlov-Voronezh-Rostov lines.”” Slezkine P. 120

Dostoevsky in 1877 wrote that, “materialism, the blind, insatiable desire for personal prosperity, the thirst for personal accumulation of money at all costs” was part of human nature “but never before have these desires been proclaimed to be the highest possible principle with as much frankness and insistence as in our nineteenth century.” Of this mentality Jews were “its truest and most dedicated apostles . . .” Slezkine p. 156

While Jews were sensationally good at being modern, modernity minus nationalism equals cold capitalism. Slezkine p. 99

“The charge that the tsarist authorities actually engaged in a concerted plan, or plot, to foment the riots, believed by many Jews at the time and supported since by many historians, finds little support in the documents or even in what might be termed a plausible explanation of developments at the time. The new tsar and his highest officials were taken aback by the mass violence and feared at first that the assassination and riots were part of a planned revolution . . . The charge of [tsarist] conspiracy gives the tsarist authorities too much credit, since they were not sufficiently in control of the country to plan such a mass uprising. . .The last thing in their minds was to encourage the common people to riot and rampage.” Lindemann p. 67-68

“The imperial government did not instigate Jewish pogroms . . .” Slezkine p. 116

Alexander III believed he was doing regarding the pogroms: “The government, while on the one hand doing its best to put down the disturbances and to deliver the Jews from oppression and slaughter, has also on the other hand, thought it a matter of urgency and justice to adopt stringent measures in order to put an end to the oppression practiced by the Jews on the inhabitants, and to free the country from their malpractices, which were, as is known, the cause of the agitation.” Bradberry pp. 71-72

Certainly “Jewish organizations portrayed the pogroms as officially instigated, a verdict echoed by more than one generation of scholars.” Ferguson p. 68

(Even then, during pogrom-related trials, Jewish testimony was filtered through jaded ears. “Jews themselves joked about how they lied before officialdom . . .”) Lindemann p. 298

In later pogroms, Jewish communities often fought back with Bundist/Zionist-organized ‘self-defence’ forces and gave back as good as they got. Ferguson p. 68,

Economic concerns overshadowed political ones, and even prior to Alexander’s assassination, Jewish flight was already underway. Lindemann p. 67

Israeli professor Dr. Sarah Schmidt and former New York Times editor (and Zionist sympathizer) Peter Grose wrote of the elitist secret society called the Parushim (meaning Pharisees’ and ‘separate’) that evolved from the Harvard Menorah Society. Weir p. 11

S. diplomatic and military experts, remarks Weir, saw it as self-evident that Zionism was contrary to U.S. interests and contradicted American principles. Weir pp. 6, 44-47

Writes Grose: “As early as November 1915, a leader of the Parushim went around suggesting that the British might gain some benefit from a formal declaration in support of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.” Weir pp. 13-14