An example of broader, more long-lasting ethnic animus is the fascinating story of “Amalek: The Perpetual Enemy of the Jewish People” (to quote the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson).
The Amalekites were dwellers in the Sinai who attacked the vulnerable Hebrews during the Exodus. This earned them undying enmity, with later leaders such as Samuel, Saul, and David waging wars of extermination upon these unfortunates. In all, the Amalekites are mentioned in nine separate books of the Old Testament.
Yet the Amalekites were so hard to kill off completely that one survivor pops up centuries later in the Book of Esther as the bad guy Haman, the prime minister of Persia. (Some things never change.) Fortunately, Haman, his ten sons, and 75,000 followers were slaughtered in the counter-pogrom celebrated annually at Purim.
But all that smiting of the Amalekites wasn’t enough. To this day, three of the 613 commandments attested to by Orthodox Jews are:
• To remember the treacheries of the Amalekites.
• To never forget the perfidies of the Amalekites.
• To wipe out the descendants of the Amalekites.
Granted, the Amalekites may have had a very different point of view on these events. But their history hasn’t come down to us. Therefore, nobody cares.
If you want your version of history to be remembered better than that of the Amalekites, you have to recount it over and over again. And it sure doesn’t hurt to suppress dissident accounts.
…For example, in this era of Chaitian ancestral onus, how often is the Jewish role in the slave states recalled?
The first Jewish governor was David Emanuel in 1801 in Georgia. The first Jewish senator was David Levy Yulee in 1845 in Florida. The second was Judah P. Benjamin in 1853 in Louisiana. Benjamin later filled three top cabinet posts in the Confederacy (Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and Attorney General). Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street firm whose bankruptcy in September 2008 set off the Great Financial Crisis, started in the 1850s as a cotton broker in Montgomery, Alabama.
For some reason, this pattern doesn’t come up much.
Yet Jewish participation in American slave economies was not out of character. There was much money to be made off of slavery in the New World, and ethnic Jewish businessmen (whether religious, covert, or irreligious but endogamous) had played an important commercial role for centuries, especially in establishing Brazil‘s slave-powered sugar industry. Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the Jews:
Jews and marranos were particularly active in settling Brazil; the first governor-general, Thomas de Souza, sent out in 1549, was certainly of Jewish origin. They owned most of the sugar plantations.
Far more than cotton, much less tobacco, sugar was the great killer of slaves. (Recall Jim’s fear in Huckleberry Finn of being sold down the river to Louisiana.) With the sugar industry’s constant demand for new slaves to replace those worked to death, it was the main driver of the transatlantic slave trade.
Even post-Civil War immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe were not free of any role in the economic suffering of American blacks. In a famous 1895 speech, Booker T. Washington pleaded with white industrialists to “Cast down your bucket where you are”—in other words, to hire black American citizens. But they were elbowed aside by the vast influx of Ellis Island immigrants.
In Britain the chief impresario of imperialism was Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a master showman who excited the British over painting the map red.
The ensuing Scramble for Africa proved relatively profitless. A major exception was South Africa with its immense deposits of diamonds and gold. By the 1890s, half of the biggest mining companies in Johannesburg were Jewish-owned. According to Johnson:
But Jews had always been involved in precious stones (especially diamonds) and bullion, and they played a notable part both in the South African deep-level mines and in the financial system which raised the capital to sink them. Such men as Alfred Beit, Barney Barnato, Louis Cohen, Lionel Phillips, Julius Wehrner, Solly Joel, Adolf Goertz, George Albu and Abe Bailey turned South Africa into the world’s largest and richest mining economy.
In 1917 South African Ernest Oppenheimer founded the Anglo-American company and soon took over the fabulous De Beers diamond monopoly. The mining interests did oppose apartheid, seeing it as a Boer union conspiracy to raise miners’ wages.
COMMENTS AT TAKIMAG:
* Wiping out Amalek applies only to the enemy nations of the Jewish people who threaten the Jews with annihilation. An example of such genocidal enemies would be the German people during WWII (not anymore, obviously) and many Muslim nations today (judging by the statements of their leaders and imams on TV). It doesn’t apply to petty conspiracy-theorizing Jew-hating individuals like Sailer, Buchanan, et al., or small groups thereof.
In the Old Testament the wiping out of Amalek appears both as a positive commandment and as a promise that God makes to the Jewish people, so it can be interpreted either as something that the Jewish People should do, or as something that will happen even if the Jewish people do not take any action.
That Sailer, Buchanan and their ilk choose to focus on the “Jewish Problem” more than on the 800-lb Islamization-of-the-West gorilla in the living room is unfortunate. That their writings attempt to link indirectly ignorant, liberal, Democrat proclivities of many Jewish-Americans with their Jewish ancestry or the Jewish faith is downright misleading and hypocritical. Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews as a group are staunchly paleo-conservative.
Either way, an examination of history will reveal that Jew-hatred on a national scale is a curse in and of itself. Nations preoccupied with hating their Jews have been too busy with that endeavor to care for the interests of their citizens. It is not Jews who now gang-rape Scandinavian women and threaten the West with subjugation and the imposition of sharia law.
In the post-Biblical period, when did Jews commit or attempt to commit genocide against any people?! Christians and Muslims on the other hand… Israel has nuclear weapons but never used them. Arab Muslims don’t have them, yet, but already issue genocidal threats against Israel of using them once obtained. If Buchanan is not a Jew-hater, who is. Sailer’s Jew-hatred is a side gig, he seems to be obsessed more with IQ and genetics, but since Jews statistically have on average high IQ’s, he can’t disparage them in terms of IQ, so he resorts to the “global Jewish cabal” conspiracy theories of manipulating and weakening the high-IQ indigent White Western societies while at the same time empowering their darker enemies by liberal brainwashing via academia and the media, legal intimidation and supporting immigration from the Third World, thereby increasing crime, displacing indigent White workers and, worst (as far as Sailer is concerned), lowering the collective IQ of Western societies. Buchanan, Sailer, and clearly you, Sir, view Jews as the Trojan Horse, the root cause of all Western social and economic ills, the main force that holds indigent Westerners back from dealing with their problems (e.g., combating degeneracy and immorality, deporting all their belligerent Third World welfare colonists, asserting nationalism and rejecting membership in the EU and U.N., etc.). And when Enoch Powell’s horrific civil war vision of his “Rivers of Blood” speech materializes due to current European inaction, you will blame the Jews all the more earnestly. It is what it is.
