Jewish (Comparative) Underrepresentation Among the Leadership of Far-Right Movements

I pointed out that there is only one major white nationalist organization in the USA that is not explicitly anti-Semitic, namely, American Renaissance, founded in 1990 (Cofnas, 2021, p. 1341). In the early days, many of its most prominent supporters were Jews. But Jewish support declined as anti-Semitism crept in among the rank and file. A 2008 article published in The Occidental Observer—a journal edited by MacDonald—reported that “The ‘Jewish question’ surfaced in one guise or another in almost all of the speeches that were given at this year’s American Renaissance Conference. It is a source of increasing tension.” The article concluded that “You do not pull the eleventh chair up to a table set for ten,” referring to a Jew trying to participate in a white nationalist movement from which he ought to be excluded (Pyke, 2008).

MacDonald (2022) does not dispute my claim that American Renaissance is the only major white nationalist organization that is not explicitly anti-Semitic. Nor does he deny that, despite the official policy, many Jews have been driven out by anti-Semitism. Although he asserts that “there is a history of Jews attempting to influence white advocacy movements in a manner compatible with Jewish interests at the expense of developing a reasonable sense of white ethnic interests,” he has not claimed—let alone provided evidence—that this happened at American Renaissance. So, I will assume that he accepts my contention that the one white nationalist movement that is not officially anti-Semitic lost much of its Jewish support because of widespread anti-Semitism among its members. It seems that the default hypothesis has no trouble explaining why Jews are underrepresented among prominent white nationalists. As I previously put it, “We…do not need to posit a group evolutionary strategy to explain why Jews tend to be less well represented in political movements that are anti-Jewish, which call for Jews to be second-class citizens, expelled, or killed” (Cofnas, 2021, p. 1332).

(To be clear, I am commenting on this from a neutral scientific perspective. I am not suggesting that Jews ought to support white nationalism. The scientific question is whether the default hypothesis provides a reasonable explanation for why Jews are less overrepresented in the leadership of far-right nationalist movements compared to liberal–leftist movements.)

Historically, Jews have been heavily involved in the leadership of nationalist movements when they were welcomed. Perhaps most notably, Jews were among the primary architects of Italian fascism. The political, financial, and strategic support of one particular Jew was probably a necessary condition for the political success of Benito Mussolini.

According to Michaelis (1978, p. 11), Mussolini’s Jewish associates in the period around 1914 to 1915—which included Giuseppe Pontremoli, Ermanno Jarach, Elio Jona, and Cesare Sarfatti—helped to bring about the “conversion of the future Duce to intervention and nationalism.” However, like many historians, Michaelis neglects the by-far most important Jewish fascist, Margherita Sarfatti (wife of the aforementioned Cesare).

Sarfatti’s influence defies summary. She played key roles at every stage in the formulation of fascist philosophy and Mussolini’s rise to power (Cannistraro & Sullivan, 1993). She is sometimes described simply as Mussolini’s “mistress,” which she was (while she was married to Cesare). But for many years she was his intellectual mentor, benefactor, and closest advisor. In her roles as biographer, ghostwriter, journalist, newspaper editor—including editor of Gerachia, the “semi-official” newspaper of the fascist regime (ibid., p. 286)—and leading cultural figure in Italy, she was arguably the most important propagandist for the strong-arm nationalist movement. It was she who urged Mussolini for months to undertake the March on Rome that led him to be appointed Prime Minister in 1922 (ibid., p. 256). She also provided the fascists with their first martyr. The Sarfattis’ young son, Roberto, a fervent Italian nationalist, enlisted to fight in World War I (initially using a fake identity because he was underage) and was killed. Mussolini “used Roberto’s heroic death to justify Fascist violence. Soon the Fascists would gain other ‘martyrs’ in their battles with the Socialists. But Mussolini had appropriated Roberto—admittedly with his parents’ blessing—as the first” (ibid., p. 238). Besides being an Italian nationalist, Sarfatti was a white nationalist in something like the modern sense, expressing concern about “White Civilization” (ibid., p. 523) and the birthrate of Whites relative to those of Africans and Asians (ibid., p. 457).

Why have you probably never heard of Margherita Sarfatti? At the time, her influence was no secret. In 1938 the New York Mirror described her as a “titian-haired Jewess who was the guiding star of Premier Mussolini’s rise to power” (ibid., p. 520). Nevertheless, she got written out of history, I suspect because it was in no one’s interest to recognize her. After the fascists turned anti-Semitic, they did their best to bury her story. According to Cannistraro and Sullivan:

Not only did Mussolini try to deny Sarfatti’s part in the creation of Fascism, but after he had made his alliance with Hitler, he could not tolerate public knowledge that a woman and a Jew had done so much as she had to build the Fascist regime. (ibid., p. 7)

Jews themselves had no interest in giving credit for fascism—which ended in disaster for everyone, especially Jews—to one of their own. And although Sarfatti was surely one of the most influential women of the twentieth century, feminists are unlikely to take much pride in her. For these reasons the influence of individuals like Sarfatti is not part of the standard history curriculum, let alone the cartoon version of history that we absorb from popular media and Twitter.

Besides the Sarfatti family, Jews—who were just one tenth of one percent of the Italian population (Lindemann, 1997, p. 475)—played prominent roles in the fascist regime at many levels. Italian Jews leaned conservative and nationalist, and the Jewish establishment generally supported Mussolini. Although there were undercurrents of anti-Semitism in the fascist movement from the beginning (Michaelis, 1978, pp. 7–8) and a few high-profile Jew-baiters in the fascist government—most notably Roberto Farinacci—Jewish–gentile relations initially improved under fascism. Eventually even antifascists stopped accusing Mussolini of anti-Semitism (ibid., pp. 6, 28). Adolf Dresler—the first Nazi to write a biography of Mussolini—deemed fascism a “Jewish movement, utterly dissimilar to anti-Jewish Hitlerism” (ibid., p. 37). Citing some bizarre rumors, Dresler speculated that Mussolini might be Jewish himself—an immigrant from Poland with the real name of “Mausler.” Far-right Nazis frequently smeared Mussolini as a “Jewish hireling” (Judenknecht) based on his real (and sometimes imagined) Jewish associations and supporters (ibid., p. 39).

Mussolini repeatedly—and apparently sincerely—denounced Nazi-style race science (Cannistraro & Sullivan, 1993, p. 517; Michaelis, 1978, pp. 28–29, 35, 130). In 1932 he published a manifesto on fascist philosophy in which he defined nationhood in explicitly nonracial terms: “Not a race, nor geographically defined region, but a people, historically perpetuating itself….” (Michaelis, 1978, p. 29). The same year he told the Austrian fascist Prince Starhemberg that “There are many [Jews] in the Fascist Party, and they are good Fascists and good Italians” (ibid., p. 56). He reiterated this sentiment many times in both public and private. His true feelings may have been a bit more ambivalent, as indicated by another statement he made to Starhemberg: “I have no love for the Jews, but they have great influence everywhere. It is better to leave them alone. His anti-Semitism has already brought Hitler more enemies than is necessary” (ibid., p. 30). But he did not harbor serious hostility to Jews, and he accepted many as valued friends, allies, and lovers. As the second comment to Starhemberg suggests, his stance on Jews was partly motivated by his belief in the power of international Jewry, with which he did not want to come into conflict (ibid., pp. 29–30).

Yet, in 1936, Mussolini turned against the Jews. First, for complicated reasons connected with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War, he became committed to an alliance with Hitler (Michaelis, 1978, pp. 99–100). To cement his friendship with the Nazis, he affirmed their racial ideology (Cannistraro & Sullivan, 1993, p. 497; Michaelis, 1978, pp. 119–120, 154). Second, given what Hitler had been able to get away with, he came to believe that he had overestimated Jewish power. He decided that strengthening his bonds with the Nazis promised a higher payoff than maintaining good relations with the Jews (Michaelis, 1978, p. 118).

As a prelude to his anti-Semitic campaign, in September 1936 Mussolini unleashed Farinacci to publish the following indictment of Italian Jews, which is amazingly empty of content:

We must admit that in Italy the Jews who are a very small minority and who have schemed in a thousand different ways to grab...high posts in finance, industry, and education did not offer any resistance to our revolutionary march. We must admit that they have always paid their taxes, obeyed the laws and done their duty in war as well. Unfortunately, however, they manifest a passive attitude which is apt to arouse suspicion. Why have they never said one word which would convince all Italians that they perform their duty as citizens out of love rather than out of fear or expediency? Why do they do nothing concrete to split their responsibility from all the other Jews in the world, the ones whose only goal is the triumph of the Jewish International? Why have they not yet risen against their co-religionists who are perpetrators of massacres, destroyers of churches, sowers of discord, audacious and evil killers of Christians?...There is a growing feeling that all Europe will soon be the scene of a war of religion. Are they not aware of this? We are certain that many will proclaim: we are Jewish Fascists. That is not enough. They must prove with facts to be first Fascists and then Jews. (ibid., pp. 108–109)

That was the best that the Jew-baiter-in-chief of the fascist regime could do. Yes, Jews appear to be good citizens and fascists, but they are overrepresented in prominent positions and maybe they do not have enough love in their hearts, or they do not protest enough against Jews in other countries. In other words, they had not actually done anything wrong. In 1937 Mussolini began to make it explicit that the problem was “Jewish blood” and that Jews should be opposed regardless of their actions or beliefs (ibid., p. 114). In 1938 he instituted anti-Semitic laws modeled after those in Nazi Germany. When his sister Edvige “begged [him] to relent, and reminded him of his former love for Margherita[,] Mussolini agreed that any notion of Italian racial purity was nonsense and that there was no Jewish peril. It was all a matter of politics to please his new German partners” (Cannistraro & Sullivan, 1993, p. 517). He told his son-in-law Ciano that (in Michaelis’ words) the “anti-Jewish measures would serve to widen the gulf between Italy and the democracies and to toughen the soft-hearted Italians” (Michaelis, 1978, pp. 151–152). There is no question that Mussolini’s anti-Semitism was pure treachery on his part, and not a response to anything real or even imagined that the Jews had done.

So Jews played an outsize role in one of history’s two successful fascist movements, and might have done the same thing in the other if they had not been deliberately driven away. According to Hitler, the only thing that kept Jews out of his movement was anti-Semitism. He told Hermann Rauschning:

Jews have been ready to help me in my political struggle. At the outset of our movement some Jews actually gave financial assistance. If I had but held out my little finger I would have had the whole lot crowding around me. (quoted in Lindemann, 1997, p. 493)

Various experiences throughout the twentieth century—including their betrayal by Mussolini—have presumably taught Jews a lesson about how they can expect to be treated after nationalists take power even when they play by the nationalists’ rules. Even Margherita Sarfatti was forced to flee Italy in 1938, while her sister and brother-in-law were killed in the Italian holocaust (Cannistraro & Sullivan, 1993, p. 539).

Despite the fact that many pre-Nazi eugenicists in Germany were Nordic supremacists and anti-Semites, Jews were prominently represented among leading supporters and spokesmen for eugenics (Anomaly, 2022, p. 156). The half-Jewish Wilhelm Weinberg (of Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium fame) was chair of the Stuttgart Racial Hygiene Society. The famous Jewish geneticist Richard Goldschmidt was an important advocate of eugenics (Weindling, 2010, p. 319). Alfred Ploetz, a gentile who founded the Racial Hygiene Society, considered Jews to be a “civilized race,” and he predicted that anti-Semitism would wane with the advance of democracy and science (ibid., pp. 318–319). According to Weindling, “[i]n its early years, it appeared immaterial whether a member of the Racial Hygiene Society was Jewish” (ibid., p. 319). However, Ploetz “began noting who among recruits to the nascent racial hygiene movement was Jewish, and he sought allies to curb putative Jewish influence” (loc. cit.), indicating that Jewish influence was (at least perceived to be) significant. After the Nazis took power, the anti-Semitic wing of the eugenics movement, which emphasized the superiority of the Nordic race and advocated segregation vis-à-vis Jews, won out, thus providing another lesson in how things can go wrong for Jews who support European nationalism, especially of the race-based variety.

MacDonald (2022, p. 26) writes: “My view is that Jews should be allowed to join [white nationalist] movements if they acknowledge the role and the power of the Jewish community in transforming America contrary to white interests and direct their efforts at converting the Jewish community to pro-white advocacy.” The question of whether MacDonald is an anti-Semite is irrelevant to the truth of his scientific theories about Judaism. But it is relevant to testing the default hypothesis with respect to Jewish underrepresentation in contemporary American white nationalist movements in which he is arguably the most influential thought leader (Cofnas, 2018, pp. 136–137). Can MacDonald be considered an “anti-Semite”?

Commenting on his own intellectual development, MacDonald (1998/2002, p. lxvii) says that “the main point is that I came to see Jewish groups as competitors with the European majority of the U.S.” Thus he draws a distinction between Jews and white gentiles, seeing Jews as competitors. He reports that he has “come to the point of seeing [his] subjects [i.e., Jews] in a less than flattering light” (ibid., p. lxviii).

Regarding his current views, let us consider some statements he made in an interview in November 2021. One of the interviewers said: “To me there are no good Jews, nor can they be good….I think ultimately deep down they are badly motivated, and that they can never be trusted. And from my point of view there are no good ones.” MacDonald replied: “That’s probably a good rule of thumb” (MacDonald, 2021, 37:17–38:01). When an interviewer said that “the only relation that we could have with [Jews] is that they serve us instead of us serving them,” MacDonald replied: “Right. We have to be in the leadership position” (ibid., 39:20–39:28). When asked what he thinks of Hitler, the Third Reich, and National Socialism, he had almost nothing bad to say, and did not mention the Nazi’s treatment of Jews at all:

I think there were a lot of positive aspects to the Third Reich....[I]t was a very cohesive society....And yeah, the entire world ganged up on them. I do think Hitler made some disastrous mistakes, I don’t think he should have been so aggressive, and should have tried to...continue to build the Third Reich up to be a shining example for all of Europe and all of humanity. (ibid., 27:37–28:15)

When asked about the Holocaust he said:

I’ve sort of stayed clear of that. But lately I have posted articles by Thomas Dalton, who I regard as a serious scholar about the Holocaust. And he has severe doubts about it....When I publish something on my website—The Occidental Observer or The Occidental Quarterly—I don’t necessarily agree with everything. But at the same time I don’t violently disagree with it either....So I’ve gotten more and more open to it [i.e., Holocaust denial]. (ibid., 29:27–30:53)

The article by Dalton (2021) says that “the latest gaff gives us a chance to shine a light on the on-going fraud that is the Holocaust.” He is referring to false claims about atrocities committed at the Jasenovac concentration camp in what is now Croatia. But these claims about Jasenovac have been promoted for political reasons mainly by non-Jewish Serbs, and are rejected by mainstream Holocaust scholars (Goldman, 2021). Dalton (2021) himself notes that “Serbia, of course, has an incentive to promote high numbers of victims, and especially high numbers of Serbs, because it enhances their victimhood status and promotes their nationalist agenda.”

Here is a passage from a recent, representative article published in The Occidental Observer:

He’s Jugly, as you might say: that is, he’s ugly in a characteristically Jewish way. I agree with a fascinating article at [the neo-Nazi magazine] National Vanguard arguing that “Jews themselves are an unattractive and, on average, ugly people” and that “Jews, as a group, oppose beauty.”...And why are Jews and leftists “on average, ugly people”?...And ugly Jewish brains have consistently created ugly ideologies that war on the “indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness.” (Langdon, 2021)

So MacDonald thinks that “there are no good Jews, nor can they be good” is a “good rule of thumb.” He says that Jews should be forbidden from occupying leadership positions in white nationalist movements, agreeing that the only proper role for Jews is to “serve” white gentiles. He has mainly positive things to say about Hitler and Nazism. He promotes Holocaust denial, and justifies his skepticism about the Holocaust by attacking claims that are promulgated mainly by gentiles and rejected by mainstream Holocaust scholars. As editor of The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly he regularly publishes nasty, scientifically baseless screeds against Jews. In addition, he is closely associated with open anti-Semites such as Richard Spencer, who dreams of a Jew-free white ethnostate (Cofnas, 2021, p. 1342), and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, on whose radio show MacDonald has regularly appeared and whom he endorsed for political office (MacDonald, 2016a, b). And, if I am right, he has spent the last three decades developing and promoting a pseudoscientific theory based on misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts that portrays Jews as uniquely pernicious. MacDonald (2019) says that he does not “like to call [his] work ‘anti-Semitic,’” preferring the label “Judeo-critical.” Whether you call him “Judeo-critical” or “anti-Semitic,” I do not think you need to postulate a group evolutionary strategy to explain why so few Jews have volunteered to accept dhimmitude in his political movement.

Anti-Semitism and the Appeal of the Anti-Jewish Narrative

Commenting on opposition to hereditarian explanations of race differences, Sesardić (2010, p. 436) observes that some people will think it is praiseworthy to “focus…just on the arguments and avoid…political imputations.” But, he says,

this approach will sometimes make important aspects of a scientific controversy completely unintelligible. Trying to understand the dynamics of contemporary discussions about heritability, race and IQ without mentioning politics is very much like attempting to understand the debate about Intelligent Design by focusing only on biological complexity, fine details of the bacterial flagellum and intricacies of probability reasoning, but completely ignoring the religious context.

The same is true with respect to the controversy over whether Jews undermine gentile civilization to advance their own evolutionary interests. This is a scientific proposition, the correctness of which should be determined using scientific methods. It is also true that important aspects of the debate make no sense if we ignore the sociopolitical context—specifically, the fact that there is a millennia-old tradition of Jew hatred in the West.

Jews are the most enduringly disliked group in the world. Anti-Semitism first reached genocidal intensity in ancient times (Nirenberg, 2013, chapter 1). Since their expulsion from Israel by the Romans in the second century—and even before that—Jews have frequently come into conflict with the gentiles among whom they lived. Some of the same complaints have been repeatedly made: Jews are arrogant exploiters, they exercise secret power to advance their interests, and so on (Lindemann, 1997, pp. xv–xvi). Could it be that the accusations are true? If “anti-Semitism” were a response to actual Jewish wrongdoing, it would be misleading for the default hypothesis to invoke it as an independent force that explains Jewish political behavior.

I cannot undertake a detailed analysis of the long and complicated history of tensions between Jews and gentiles. But I will propose that anti-Semitism has a fairly straightforward explanation. It is not that Jews really are a race of criminals. Rather, anti-Semitism is largely explained by the same factors that explain other ethnic hatreds (cf. Lindemann, 1997, pp. xv–xviii). The qualifying word “largely” is important, since there are some sui generis elements to anti-Semitism. What makes Jew hatred unique is, in turn, largely a consequence of the special (often in a bad way) status of Jews in the world’s two most popular religions. This explanation of anti-Semitism does not imply that Jews have never done anything wrong, either individually or collectively, or that such wrongdoing does not explain some instances of anti-Jewish sentiment. The default assumption—which I think is probably correct—should be that Jews are not significantly better or worse than other people. Group conflicts are sometimes triggered by wrongdoing on one or both sides, and there is no reason to think that Jews are always in the right. In this respect Jews are no different from anyone else.

To begin with what makes anti-Semitism different from other kinds of prejudice, most people in the world follow a religion based on Judaism, namely, Christianity or Islam. In both of these offshoot religions Jews have an ambivalent status that can easily inspire hostility.

Many contemporary Christians emphasize the philo-Semitic side of the religion. There is a strong tradition of philo-Semitism among Old Testament-oriented American Christians, starting with the Puritans who identified with the ancient Israelites (Lindemann, 1997, p. 258). However, parts of the New Testament can be read as supporting a more sinister attitude toward Jews. Some passages seem to hold Jews collectively responsible for killing Jesus, and to portray them as the enemies of God and of humanity in general (Nirenberg, 2013, chapter 2). Nirenberg notes that Paul could have adopted the strategy of some other early followers of Jesus and simply rejected the Hebrew scripture as false. Had he done so, ancient Christians might have come to regard Judaism as just another spiritually irrelevant identity (ibid., pp. 56–57). But instead Paul built a new approach to “scriptural interpretation…built on a foundation of questions about the believer’s relationship to ‘Judaism’” (ibid., p. 57). Thus, Christian identity was originally constructed in large part based on an adversarial relationship to Jews and Judaism.

Unlike Jesus and his early disciples, the Church Fathers who formulated what became Christian orthodoxy did not work in a Jewish milieu. Christianity came to be dominated by people of non-Jewish descent, and Jews themselves became scattered and powerless.

Yet the logic of Jewish enmity and the killing carnality of the Jews only grew stronger, driven now not so much by conflict with real Jews, but because it proved ever more generally useful for thinking about God, the world, and the nature of the texts and powers that mediate between them. (ibid., p. 85).

Jews were seen as representing flesh, the letter, and the law in verses such as “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6 NKJV). Christians often attacked their (Christian) theological opponents as “Jews” (Nirenberg, 2013, chapter 3). In the fourth century, when Jews were not in a position to persecute anyone, Eusebius lobbed the following petard to discredit a group of rivals called the Montanists: “Is there anyone among the Montanists who has been persecuted by the Jews or killed by the lawless?” (ibid., p. 93). Anti-Jewish rhetoric reached a crescendo in the year 386 when John of Antioch—also known as Saint John Chrysostom—delivered a series of eight sermons against the Jews. The saint’s message was as follows: “Although such beasts are not fit for work, they are fit for killing….This is why Christ said: ‘But as for my enemies, who did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and slay them’” (quoted in ibid., p. 113).Footnote 4 Augustine—who as far as historians know only encountered a single Jew in his entire life—invoked the less genocidal but still ominous Psalm 59: “Slay them not, but scatter them in your might, lest your people forget your law” (ibid., p. 131).

Like Jesus, Mohammed claimed to be the true heir to the Jewish prophetic tradition, so Jews were destined to have a special status in his religion. Islam borrowed elements of Christianity’s anti-Judaism to serve similar theological purposes (ibid., p. 149). Since Mohammed rejected the authenticity of parts of Jewish scripture, Jews had to be regarded as frauds who falsified religion for nefarious purposes. Sensitive about the relationship between Judaism and Islam, early Muslims would, like Christians, sometimes accuse each other of being “Jewish” or influenced by Jews. Jewish opposition to Islamic ideas and practices is a perennial theme in Islam, especially in the extra-Quranic literature (ibid., chapter 4). Mohammed himself engaged in violence against Jews, and, according to one tradition, his last words called for war against Jews as well as Christians: “May God fight the Jews and the Christians!…Two religions will not remain in the land of the Arabs” (ibid., p. 163). According to a widely accepted Islamic tradition, Jesus will return at the end of days to kill all the Jews (ibid., p. 164).

The religious motive for anti-Semitism was to some extent an accident of history. If Europe and the Middle East had remained pagan, or if Christianity and Islam had rejected Judaism wholesale, Jews would not have been perceived as having any profound and potentially negative cosmic significance. But by claiming (more or less) continuity with the Jewish tradition, Christianity and Islam had to construct identities based in part on opposition to Jews and Judaism. For many centuries this was—and to some extent it still is—a powerful source of prejudice against Jews.

Although Christian anti-Semitism left an indelible mark on our culture, religion has been on the wane for centuries in the West and no longer appears to be the primary source of hostility toward Jews. In fact, philo-Semitic interpretations of Christianity have become highly influential. But there are at least three nonreligious forces that have been extremely important in promoting hatred of Jews, as well as other minorities in similar situations.

First, as Chua (2003, chapter 5) notes, “market-dominant minorities” are always subjected to the same calumny: they are cheaters, exploiters, conspirators, and so on. (Minorities in turn often resent more successful majorities, though they usually cannot act on these feelings.) Hostility to prosperous groups (and individuals) is often motivated by a false theory of economics that assumes that the wealth of one must come at the expense of another. Overseas Chinese who dominate the economies of Southeast Asia have been subject to intense prejudice, discrimination, and large-scale violence (ibid., chapter 1). As recently as 1998 there were deadly pogroms targeting ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, which were precipitated by an economic recession. In 1972 Idi Amin expelled Asians—primarily Indians—from Uganda. As the BBC reported, “resentment against [Asians] has been building up within Uganda’s black majority. Amin has called the Asians ‘bloodsuckers’ and accused them of milking the economy of its wealth” (BBC, 1972). Was Amin’s accusation justified? Without the Indian “bloodsuckers” Uganda’s economy quickly tanked. Similarly, after President Robert Mugabe promised to “strike fear in the heart of the white man—our real enemy” and then confiscated the land of Whites who controlled most of the country’s farming industry, average Zimbabweans became far poorer than before (Chua, 2003, chapter 5). Needless to say, Jews have often been conspicuously economically successful (Lindemann, 1997; Muller, 2010). Prominent gentile thinkers, perhaps most famously Mark Twain (1899/1992), have highlighted the economic motive for anti-Semitism.

Sowell (2005, chapter 2) argues that minorities tend to be most despised when they occupy the widely misunderstood economic niche of “middleman.” According to him, “truly wealthy people have seldom provoked the kind of rage and bitterness directed at middleman minorities” (ibid., p. 69). These minorities are not hated for their wealth but for the way they acquire it. Making a profit by moving money or goods around without physically producing anything strikes many people as parasitic, in contrast to making tangible things with your hands (ibid., p. 70). It is plausible that anti-Semitism is partly explained by the particular economic roles that Jews have often played. However, this does not seem to be the whole story. Sowell makes some offhand comments noting that “middleman minorities” often branch out into non-middleman roles, yet may continue to be resented:

Where middleman minorities have gone into manufacturing, clothing has been a favorite specialty....Clothing and textiles are just two of many occupations, professions, and industries that middleman minorities have gone into, after they have achieved success in traditional retailing and money-lending enterprises....[L]ater generations have tended to move not only into manufacturing, transport, publishing, and other industries, but also into professions requiring advanced education. (ibid., pp. 84, 86)

He claims that a failure to appreciate the middleman’s economic function remains “at the core of animosities that have endured even after most members of middleman minorities have moved onto professional careers in medicine, law, and other fields” (ibid., p. 70). But if “middleman minorities” are disliked even when they stop being middlemen, this seems to support Chua’s (2003) thesis that minorities’ conspicuous economic success per se often triggers hostility. I mentioned the example of Whites in Zimbabwe who were strongly resented for their success in farming.

Second, ethnic hatred is often cultivated for political advantage. Given their double minority status—being different ethnically and religiously—combined with their high socioeconomic position, it is unsurprising that Jews have been a favorite scapegoat for political leaders looking to deflect blame and rally support. Karl Lueger, the influential anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910 and role model for Hitler, made a remarkable statement to another Austrian politician that “anti-Semitism is a good means of agitation, in order to get ahead in politics, but once one gets up there, one doesn’t need it any more, for it is a sport for the common people” (quoted in Lindemann, 1997, p. 346). Although Hitler’s anti-Semitism was undoubtedly sincere, it also served a political function. When asked by Rauschning whether he intended to “destroy the Jew,” he replied, “No. We should then have to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one” (quoted in ibid., p. 493). In Mein Kampf he writes:

The soul of the people can only be won if along with carrying on a positive struggle for our own aims, we destroy the opponent of these aims. The people at all times see the proof of their own right in ruthless attack on a foe. (Hitler, 1925/1999, p. 338)

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was an important anti-Semitic theorist and major influence on Hitler, nevertheless recognized the attraction of irrational Jew hatred and lamented the “revolting tendency to make the Jew the scapegoat of all the vices of the time” (quoted in Lindemann, 1997, p. 353).

Third, because there is a principle of psychology that “bad is stronger than good” (Baumeister et al., 2001), we are often miffed by our enemies more than we appreciate our allies. If, for the reasons mentioned above, you are already primed to regard Jews with suspicion, and Jews are overrepresented in the leadership of practically every (non-anti-Semitic) political movement, Jews on the side you oppose may be more psychologically salient. Thus, communists attack Jews for being capitalists and vice versa. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—arguably the most influential anti-Semitic text of modern times—refers to the “successes of Darwinism, Marxism, and Nietzscheism…[that were] engineered by” Jews, and also portrays Jews as rapacious promoters of capitalism who control the gold supply (Nilus, 1905). Hitler (1925/1999, p. 57) asked rhetorically: “Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?” The answer to Hitler’s question may well be “no.” But, on reflection, it should be obvious that the presence of “at least one” member of a group in every activity one dislikes is not a reasonable basis for drawing conclusions about the character or social consequences of the group as a whole. (Not that Hitler did not have other complaints against the Jews, but this is still a revealing statement.)

In the same vein, ignoring the role that we and our own group have played in bringing about a situation we do not like comes naturally to us. For example, suppose you are unhappy about mass immigration. Here is a list of the nine official “resettlement agencies” in the USA that receive funding from the Department of State: (a) Church World Service, (b) Episcopal Migration Ministries, (c) Ethiopian Community Development Council, (d) Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, (e) International Rescue Committee, (f) Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, (g) US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, (h) United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, (i) World Relief Corporation (UNHCR, 2021). The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which is a Jewish organization, gets an inordinate amount of attention from the far right. The Tree of Life Synagogue shooter famously complained about HIAS “bring[ing] invaders [i.e., immigrants]” (Jordan, 2018). But the eight non-Jewish resettlement agencies are ignored. (Also ignored is the fact that HIAS has a branch in Israel working to grant refugee status to non-Jewish Africans.)

This is the context in which MacDonald has promulgated his theory that Jews undermine gentile civilization to advance their own evolutionary interests. To reiterate, his theory should be assessed based on its scientific merits, not on the motives of the man who devised it or of the people who came to accept it. But the eager reception with which MacDonald’s ideas have been received in some quarters is an interesting sociological phenomenon, which can itself be subject to scientific analysis.