You Gentiles

You Gentiles:

A Unique Example of Jewish Ethnic Activism

A Foreword by Kevin MacDonald

Maurice Samuel’s You Gentiles was originally published in 1924—the same year that the immigration restriction bill was enacted at the high-water mark of White racial consciousness in America. The 1924 immigration restriction law biased immigration toward the founding peoples of America—northwest Europeans, and away from southern and eastern Europe, the latter with a large Jewish population many of whom wanted to emigrate. It was a time when professors at elite universities and prominent book publishers and magazines promoted the idea that race was a fundamental organizing principle for society. This law was vigorously opposed by the organized Jewish community, which was by far the most important force in opposition to the law.

The older German-Jewish community, while expressing distaste for their rather unrefined immigrant co-ethnics, was instrumental in keeping America’s open immigration system long after immigration from eastern and southern Europe had ceased to be popular in the population at large. Thus Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, leader of the restrictionists, wrote to a friend during the second presidency of Grover Cleveland (1893–1897), Influences on [Cleveland] were used yesterday which I will explain to you when we meet and which were very hard to overcome; to another he said, these other forces represented neither corporations or political factions.¹  Okrent notes that they were almost certainly members of America’s moneyed and influential German Jewish community, such as financier Jacob Schiff who made a personal plea to Grover Cleveland to veto the literacy test.² (Prior to focusing on national origins, immigration restrictionists promoted a literacy test as a means of restricting immigration.)

For a quarter of a century . . . Lodge, the IRL [Immigration Restriction League], and their allies would have to contend with an array of influential organizations dominated by wealthy German Jews. . . . Collectively, they composed a formidable and enduring opposition. . . . The emergence in the 1890s of organized, wealthy, and well-connected Jews working on behalf of the immigrants presented Lodge and his colleagues with an opposition that few Boston Brahmins had encountered.³

Likely because of this influence, immigration was not restricted until the 1920s, even though public opinion had turned against it at least by 1905.⁴  As recounted by Cohen,⁵ the American Jewish Committee’s efforts in opposition to immigration restriction in the early twentieth century constitute a remarkable example of the ability of Jewish organizations to influence public policy—despite being composed of only a thin upper crust of the American Jewish community of the period.

This was the context in which Samuel’s You Gentiles was written. It reeks of hatred and resentment toward the Christian West—even though the title refers to Gentiles in general, Samuel makes clear that his screed is directed at the Christian West. This quote, from Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique, draws on passages from the last chapter of You Gentiles and shows the intense hatred that Jewish activists had for the 1924 law.

The well-known author and prominent Zionist Maurice Samuel, writing partly as a negative reaction to the immigration law of 1924, wrote:

If, then, the struggle between us [i.e., Jews and Gentiles] is ever to be lifted beyond the physical, your democracies will have to alter their demands for racial, spiritual, and cultural homogeneity with the State. But it would be foolish to regard this as a possibility, for the tendency of this civilization is in the opposite direction. There is a steady approach toward the identification of government with race, instead of with the political State. (pg. 109)

Samuel deplored the 1924 legislation as violating his conceptualization of the United States as a purely political entity with no ethnic implications:

We have just witnessed, in America, the repetition, in the peculiar form adapted to this country, of the evil farce to which the experience of many centuries has not yet accustomed us. If America had any meaning at all, it lay in the peculiar attempt to rise above the trend of our present civilization—the identification of race with State. . . . America was therefore the New World in this vital respect—that the State was purely an ideal, and nationality was identical only with acceptance of the ideal. But it seems now that the entire point of view was a mistaken one, that America was incapable of rising above her origins, and the semblance of an ideal-nationalism was only a stage in the proper development of the universal Gentile spirit. . . . Today, with race triumphant over ideal, anti-Semitism uncovers its fangs, and to the heartless refusal of the most elementary human right, the right of asylum, is added cowardly insult. We are not only excluded, but we are told, in the unmistakable language of the immigration laws, that we are an inferior people. Without the moral courage to stand up squarely to its evil instincts, the country prepared itself, through its journalists, by a long draught of vilification of the Jew, and, when sufficiently inspired by the popular and scientific potions, committed the act. (pg. 110–111)

This passage is an excellent early example of what has been a consistent thread of Jewish activism in the succeeding century—that America ought to be built around an ideal of civic nationalism with no ethnic or religious implications. Notice his condemnation is phrased in moral terms and refers to the evil instincts of Gentile Americans. This is another consistent thread of Jewish activism: condemning people who oppose the Jewish interest in diversity and multiculturalism as immoral. Incidentally, the charge that the language of the bill referred to Jews as an ‘inferior’ people is not accurate—indeed, the bill was phrased in terms of preserving the ethnic status quo as of 1890 (future immigration would be based on quotas reflecting the ethnic composition of 1890), but that of course would discriminate against Jewish immigration, since there had been relatively little immigration from eastern Europe prior to that time. And it clearly was an attempt to create cultural homogeneity based around a White, Christian, northwest European core. As a prominent Zionist, Samuel should have realized that a desire for ethnic and cultural homogeneity is a natural impulse and is highly conducive to social harmony.

Samuel is likely correct that the 1924 law was largely directed against Jewish immigration, although the immigration of southern Italians was also an issue. But was it reasonable to limit Jewish immigration? Samuel never discusses this or any other issue that might cast the actions of non-Jews in a more positive light, likely because his profound ethnocentrism precludes any serious examination of the interests of other peoples when they conflict with Jewish interests. In fact, Jews were correctly seen as prone to radical political beliefs and were often supporters of the Soviet Union at a time when the Bolshevik Revolution and its bloody aftermath were on the public mind.⁶ Jews were also seen as unassimilable at a time when recent immigrants were likely to be Orthodox and even Reform rabbis typically refused to officiate at mixed marriages.⁷ Economic competition was also on people’s minds. For example, during this period University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross described Gentile resentment for being obliged to engage in a humiliating and undignified scramble in order to keep his trade or his clients against the Jewish invader⁸—suggesting a rather broad-based concern with Jewish economic competition. Attempts at exclusion in a wide range of areas increased in the 1920s and reached their peak during the difficult economic situation of the Great Depression.⁹ And Jews, despite being only recent arrivals, had already established themselves in the field of entertainment and intellectual life, as demonstrated by Representative Wefald:

I for one am not afraid of the radical ideas that some might bring with them. Ideas you cannot keep out anyway, but the leadership of our intellectual life in many of its phases has come into the hands of these clever newcomers who have no sympathy with our old-time American ideals nor with those of northern Europe, who detect our weaknesses and pander to them and get wealthy through the disservices they render us.

Our whole system of amusements has been taken over by men who came here on the crest of the south and east European immigration. They produce our horrible film stories, they compose and dish out to us our jazz music, they write many of the books we read, and edit our magazines and newspapers.¹⁰

Jewish Otherness

But let’s begin at the beginning. Samuel, despite his intense ethnocentrism and hatred toward the entire non-Jewish world, has some interesting things to say about Jews and about his declared enemies. For Samuel, Jews are a completely different creature than non-Jews—a categorical difference akin to a difference in species:

Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you Gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts, that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you Gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divides all of you from us. (pg. 3)

This way of thinking is intimately linked to Jewish moral particularism—that is, that the moral status of Jews is completely different from that of non-Jews, in the same way, one might say, that a prey species like a deer can make no moral claims on its predator like the wolf. There is a long history of such thinking that carries into the contemporary world. For example, the influential 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.¹¹

Similarly, Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel claimed that everything about us is different; Jews are ontologically exceptional.¹² In Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Shahak and Mezvinsky give several examples from the Gush Emunim and other Jewish fundamentalist sects illustrating a long mainstream Jewish tradition that 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.¹³

Moral particularism in its most aggressive form can be seen among the ultranationalists, such as the Gush Emunim, who hold that Jews are not, and cannot be a normal people:

The eternal uniqueness of the Jews is the result of the Covenant made between God and the Jewish people at Mount Sinai . . . . The implication is that the transcendent imperatives for Jews effectively nullify moral laws that bind the behavior of normal nations. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of Gush Emunim’s most prolific ideologues, argues that the divine commandments to the Jewish people transcend the human notions of national rights. He explains that while God requires other nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness, such laws do not apply to Jews.¹⁴

As Samuel notes, there is an unsounded abyss between us (pg. 7) and:

I do not believe that this primal difference between Gentile and Jew is reconcilable. You and we may come to an understanding, never to a reconciliation. There will be irritation between us as long as we are in intimate contact. (pg. 8)

So we are utterly different and inevitably in conflict. These differences transcend religion—Christianity (the reality, not the credo) is not a variant of Judaism, whatever Christ or his chroniclers may have intended. (pg. 9) The inevitability of Jew-Gentile conflict would seem to be a prescription for either annihilation or expulsion, the latter a solution that has occurred many times over the