Now Let Us Praise Great Jewish Violinists

Itzhak Perlman

2,223 words

Nothing can divide white people more than the presence of non-whites: blacks and Jews, especially. It seems that whites just can’t agree on what to do with them — other than to fight over them. One side will identify with the non-whites’ supposed outsider status and remain in thrall of their charms and talents. The other side will, well, see them for what they are.

I was reminded of this state of affairs regarding Jews when reading another brief essay by Kim du Toit. This one is entitled “Remembering” [1] and it struck a chord with me because, if anything, it reminded me of me. I also find du Toit’s take on the Jewish Question to be highly instructive, largely because it involves classical music.

After watching a documentary about Jewish violinist Itzhak Perlman, du Toit reveals how impressed he was with Perlman’s music.

Then Itzhak Perlman came to the stage, painfully hobbling along on his crutches, his polio-ravaged legs waving helplessly as he made his way to the First Violinist’s chair. He sat down, rearranged his legs with his hands, then waited while the CSO began playing Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D major, which is characterized by a lengthy introduction before the lead violinist plays a note. Then it came time for Perlman to play. . . and the CSO took off like a fighter jet. In other words, one man’s playing grabbed the already-magnificent orchestra and literally propelled them into a performance of unbelievable virtuosity. The standing ovation from the audience lasted nearly as long as the performance itself, and several of the orchestra’s violinists dabbed at their eyes with tissues, so moved were they by the experience.

Itzhak Perlman was and is a force of nature.

Then, after commenting on what a mensch Perlman is, du Toit reminds us that Perlman is Jewish and proclaims himself a stalwart and indefatigable white knight for the Jewish people.

But, of course, he’s Jewish.

And this would make him a target for all the assholes in the world: the Muslims, the alt-Right, the academe and intellectuals (especially in Europe) and people like the loathsome Labour politician Jeremy Corbyn who are infected with their foul brands of anti-Semitism.

Make no mistake: to these people — think of Hitler and his Nazis as just the extreme embodiment — this man Perlman, this extraordinary, wonderful man who has been one of the greatest gifts to civilization ever, would be just another Jew to harass in the street, another Jewboy to kick and spit on, and just another Untermensch to load onto a train to be sent to Auschwitz.

Yes, these goy philo-Semites really do believe that things are this black and white. I know, because to some extent, I used to feel this way myself. Having been raised in the lugubrious school of Jewish history (as it seems du Toit has been) my default was to assume that historically Jews were innocent victims of irrational xenophobia and bigotry at the hands of white gentiles. The very idea that the nefarious and self-serving behavior of Jews may have brought such extreme reactions down upon them was dismissed outright because I was so starry-eyed about all the good things Jews do.

You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here [2].

And one of these things is music. In the classical music world, Jews are disproportionately represented among the great virtuosos — and especially among violinists. [1] [3] It’s true. There must have been something about the peculiar way Ashkenazi Jews have evolved that makes them the very best at the violin — at least as far as the twentieth century goes.

This classical-music.com list of the twenty greatest violinists of all time [4] was compiled by asking 100 leading violinists who their favorites were. Of the twenty, only six are still living (including Perlman), only one is female (Ginette Neveu), and a whopping twelve, or sixty percent, are Jewish. Make that sixty-five percent if you count Gidon Kremer who is half-Jewish. Jews also occupy nine of the top ten slots, and five of the top five.

Presumably, the democratic nature of the classical-music.com list rules out most bias. But who can say for sure? Regardless, other lists seem to have other biases: towards living, non-Jewish, or female violinists, especially. But even these cannot ignore the five-hundred-pound rabbi in the room. One such list from Classic FM produces twenty-four names [5], eight of which are Jewish, plus two half-Jews (Kremer and Joshua Bell) and four modern names that I’m unsure about. Connolly Music’s nine-name list [6] produces five Jews. In 2010, Listverse [7] gave us ten names and is clearly biased towards historical, pre-twentieth-century figures (Corelli, Vivaldi, Paganini), and still included five Jews. You can look anywhere, and the results will be similar. Jewish maestros such as Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Yehudi Menuhin, Nathan Milstein, David Oistrakh, Perlman, Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman, and others will always appear.

And I’m not just wiki-listing here. I have a personal experience similar to the one du Toit describes. As I have stated before [8],

I never knew what Brahms’ Violin Concerto was supposed to sound like until I heard Jascha Heifetz’s 1959 recording of it with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner conducting.

For classical music lovers, this is a big deal. Trying to impress MacDonald-esque counter-Semitism on such people is quite the hard sell [9] — even if they are somewhat “woke” on the Jewish Question. [2] [10] Jews are simply that prominent in classical music circles. Keep in mind that the names listed above are only the tip of the iceberg. For every Heifetz or Kreisler, we can safely assume there are dozens of professional Jewish musicians who aren’t (or weren’t) as accomplished. And this says nothing of all the Jewish impresarios, record label executives, salesmen, agents, and enthusiasts who keep the business of classical music moving at a tolerable clip long after the music itself fell from the mainstream. [3] [11]

So, if all this is true, does that mean that Kim du Toit is correct? Well, not so fast.

Yes, Jews as a group deserve credit for their contributions to classical music and many other fields (with medicine probably rising to the top of the list). But du Toit makes the same mistakes that all philo-Semites make. [4] [12] First, he makes bold generalizations about the positive qualities of Jews while NAXALTing away their negative qualities. To be fair, du Toit does mention both, and admits that many Jews are “socialists, communists, progressives, one-worlders.” But compare how he does it.

The positive:

Pound for pound, the Jews have contributed as much or more to Western civilization than any other group — it’s even called the “Judeo-Christian tradition”, FFS — and to discount this contribution deliberately, to me, shows a shallow intellect at best.

Versus the negative:

And the liberal Israelis have camp-followers all over the world: in Europe, Britain, the United States and anywhere that Jews can be found in any numbers. Does that mean “conspiracy”? Sure, if you’re a moron, because there are many, many Jews who are conservative, too — but somehow, the Conspiracy seems to have passed them by? Not credible.

See the pattern? Things come together for the positive (when he speaks only of “the Jews”) and things fall apart for the negative (when he speaks of good Jews versus bad Jews). The fact that he refuses to generalize for the negative as he does for the positive reveals a pro-Jewish bias in his thought. And why, exactly, are these so-called conservative Jews always being overshadowed by their left-wing brethren, anyway? Could it be that left-wing Jews greatly outnumber the conservative ones? Du Toit doesn’t say.

Secondly, he assumes the absolute worst from gentiles who are critical of Jews, as if generalizing about the negative qualities of Jews will somehow turn one into a pogromist. Can he find anything in the writings of Kevin MacDonald that encourages people to harass or “kick and spit on” Jews on the street, let alone physically disabled ones like Perlman? The idea is so ridiculous to become offensive. Dissidents like MacDonald see Jews (the Jewish diaspora elite, especially) as demographic enemies who are quite open and racist about opposing white civilization and whites themselves. But neither he, nor I, nor any writer at Counter-Currents or The Occidental Observer advocate for violence. Greg Johnson explicitly [13] condemns it [14]. We just hope to change the metapolitical landscape so that whites have the proper attitude to save their civilization from the nation-killing, anti-white Left without violence. And viewing Jews as they really are — taking the negative along with the positive — is one key way of doing that.

Finally, du Toit fails to realize that the Holocaust had a precedent. He, like many liberals (I know he will hate me for calling him that), will look to the Nazis as the source of evil rather than a reaction to a much greater evil [15]: that of genocidal Jewish Bolshevism. One can start with chapter two of Kevin MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections, entitled “Stalin’s Willing Executioners,” [16] and then move to various articles from the Unz Review (such as this one [17] which discusses the twenty million souls the Soviets snuffed out in the 1920s and 1930s). The Jewish role in the gulag system [18] is also well documented. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn covers Jewish Bolshevism nicely in several chapters of his still-unpublished in English 200 Years Together [19]. Even some Jewish [20] sources [21] admit the disproportionately Jewish role in the early Soviet atrocities, such as those committed by Genrikh Yagoda and Naftaly Frenkel.

Vladimir Lenin himself stated the October Revolution would not have been successful without the Jews. Here he is quoted in Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century [ellipses Slezkine’s]:

The fact that there were many Jewish intelligentsia members in the Russian cities was of great importance to the revolution. They put an end to the general sabotage that we were confronted with after the October Revolution. . . The Jewish elements were mobilized. . . and thus saved the revolution at a difficult time. It was only thanks to this pool of a rational and literate labor force that we succeeded in taking over the state apparatus.

I wish conservatives would understand this crucial context before bashing anyone who dares to take an overtly counter-Semitic position. If they can just do this, then perhaps rapprochement between the Dissident and mainstream Right can actually happen. If so, we may just end up getting an edge on the Left after all. . . while still enjoying the music of Itzhak Perlman.

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Notes

[1] [23] The famous story [24] ascribing Jewish violin virtuosity to the smallness of the instrument, which made it easy to carry off when escaping pogroms, is complete nonsense — unless one can imagine people like Vladimir Ashkenazi, Vladimir Horowitz, and Artur Rubinstein fleeing their shtetls with grand pianos strapped to their backs. In fact, Horowitz once claimed that there were only three kinds of pianists: gay ones, Jewish ones, and bad ones. That Glenn Gould was none of these may have partly accounted for the rather frosty relationship these two musicians shared.

[2] [25] I’m reminded of this line from Fordham T. Smith’s review of The Karl Muck Scandal [26] about the great German conductor who, after outrageous treatment at the hands of the Americans during World War I, ended up aligning himself with the Nazis in the 1930s:

Even before Hitler came to power, Muck was not shy about blacklisting or simply not hiring Jewish musicians. Afterwards, he fired them at Hitler’s request and claimed that only the under the most extreme circumstance would he ever bite from “the Jewish sour apple.”

[3] [27] One story that highlights Jewish dominance of the classical music business is that of the great Spanish classical guitarist Andrés Segovia. When he was living in South America in the 1940s, he found himself completely blackballed in the United States because many of the most influential American impresarios at the time were Jews who opposed his pro-Franco attitudes during the Spanish Civil War.

[4] [28] I almost didn’t write this article. I devoted perhaps two days of thought to a handful of paragraphs that du Toit probably dashed off in twenty minutes. I also remember how mad he got [29] at me the first time I wrote about him [30]. But his inclusion of “the alt-Right” in his list of violent anti-Semites is what forced my hand. He’s being downright libelous here, not to mention wrong. I identify closely with the Alt-Right — or Dissident Right, as it is called these days — and I would never countenance the kind of behavior he rather vindictively ascribes to people like me. I take his prejudiced assertions somewhat personally. But I also think that Kim du Toit is worth having serious discussions with. I admire him greatly and find his knowledge of guns, gun rights, and gun politics to be second to none. Gun rights, as I have said before [31], are crucial for the future of white people, and anyone who supports them as adamantly as Kim du Toit does deserve respect. If the Dissident Right and the Gun Right can reach at least some sort of understanding, especially regarding the Jewish Question, the Right will be a mighty force indeed.