From The Nation Sept. 6, 1922:
There is unanimous agreement in this group that a college education is more than a matter of “academic knowledge,” rather, it consists of “social, intellectual, and athletic achievement. Admission to the college cannot be based on mere knowledge”; “personality must be taken into account.” “Were it only a matter of scholarship, there would be no objections to Jews at all.” But “they do not mix. They destroy the unity of the college. They are distasteful to the men who have made Harvard what it is today, and if we do not look out, these men will not send their sons to Harvard.”
This argument reminds me of the 1940 essay “The Reasoned Case Against Semitism” by Australian nationalist P.R. Stephensen:
Essentially, Jews are a minority, self-differentiated as such, a Race Apart not only from the rest of mankind, speaking generally, but also from any particular community in the midst of which they may reside. This fact makes the usual postulates of political discussion—namely, universal humanitarianism, or, alternately, the welfare of a National Unit, considered as a Whole—inapplicable to the Jewish Question. It is absurd for Jews to preach (as many of them do) that men are all of one Kind, while this preachment is belied by the fact that the Jews themselves, by their own Choice, remain a different Kind from all other kinds of men. Similarly it would be absurd for Jews to preach the welfare and advancement of any one nation as a paramount political consideration, while holding themselves racially apart from the majority in that nation. It can never be true that “all men are brothers,” either within one nation or in the world at large, while Jews continue to practice an extreme form of biological differentiation through rigid selective breeding.
Jews cannot “have it both ways.” They cannot expect to be listened-to with respect when they preach to Gentiles the Universal Oneness of Mankind, while at the same time they, as Jews, remain a Race Apart. It is when this discrepancy between their words and their actions is recognized, that Jews become disliked by non-Jews. Nobody likes to be humbugged, either by financial confidence-tricks, or by metaphysical and political verbal play. In brief, if Jews are going to persist in keeping themselves racially apart from the rest of mankind or from a particular nation, then they should also keep themselves politically apart. The Antisemite brings this point of view to the fore. He starts from the same premise as the Jews themselves—namely that the Jews, by their deliberate practice of Racialism, are differentiated from non-Jews. But, as soon as this differentiation is accepted as an unalterable fact, and is brought to the full consciousness of non-Jews, a prejudice is created against Jews, in the minds of non-Jews, which makes a further dispassionate or detached discussion of the entire topic virtually impossible. The implication of the Jewish practice of Racialism is unmistakably Themselves First—Themselves versus the Rest. Once understood, that constitutes a challenge to the Rest of Us which cannot conscientiously be disregarded.
The discussion, then, comes down to prejudice versus prejudice, the result of a clash of interests which cannot be resolved by any form of words. Carried further, this means propaganda versus propaganda—a process termed, by both sides, “enlightenment.” The most honest thing to do is to avow the prejudice, and stand on it. As a non-Jew, I avow that my prejudices are non-Jewish; and this means that, in any conflict of interests between Jews, on the one hand, and non-Jews on the other, my instincts place me naturally in the non-Jewish camp. When I see an organized minority of Jews, actuated by their self-interest, engaging in operations for their own sectional self-aggrandizement as against the interests of the community-as-a-whole or of the non-Jewish majority in it, then, as a non-Jew, I claim the same right to organize non-Jews as the Jews have claimed and obtained to organize themselves. The political validity of Antisemitism is thus on a plane no higher, or no lower, than that of Antisemitism; for, if there were no Semitism, there would be no need of Antisemitism to counteract it. While organized Semitism operates as a political activity in Australia, there can surely be no logical objection, among “Liberal” political thinkers, to the existence of the counteracting, or counter-balancing, activity of Antisemitism—provided always that the antidote is merely of sufficient strength to neutralize the irritant, and does not in itself become toxic.
