Herzl on the “‘gentile’ question”

In Kevin Macdonald’s latest piece at The Occidental Observer, a review of Eric P. Kaufmann’s “The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America,” he discusses a conspicuous double standard held by one of the most influential Jews of the last century, Israel Zangwill of ‘melting pot’ infamy: he was a proponent of ‘ethnic dissolution’ for non-Jewish peoples while simultaneously promoting the Zionist cause and generally defending the idea of Jewish group survival into the future.

Israel Zangwill, the other Jewish advocate of ethnic dissolution highlighted by Kaufmann, had a strong Jewish identity. Despite marrying a non-Jew and advocating the dissolution of all ethnic groups, Zangwill was a prominent advocate of a Jewish homeland and was active in Jewish politics throughout his life.

[…]
Although Kaufmann represents Zangwill as advocating the melting together of all racial groups, the reality is a bit more subtle. Zangwill’s views on Jewish-gentile intermarriage were ambiguous at best and he detested Christian proselytism to Jews. Zangwill was an ardent Zionist and an admirer of his father’s religious orthodoxy as a model for the preservation of Judaism. He believed Jews were a morally superior race whose moral vision had shaped Christian and Muslim societies and would eventually shape the world, although Christianity remained morally inferior to Judaism. Jews would retain their racial purity if they continued to practice their religion: “So long as Judaism flourishes among Jews there is no need to talk of safeguarding race or nationality; both are automatically preserved by the religion” (Zangwill, quoted in Israel Zangwill, by Joseph Leftowich, 1957, 161).

Kaufmann’s inability to recognise and acknowledge the glaring double standard is itself standard. In an age in which all Western leaders must declare commitment to the Jewish people via their ethnostate at the same time as they must declare willing to blend their own peoples out of existence via race-replacement migration it is not even necessary to question whether Kaufmann’s Jewishness is subconsciously influencing his work; an English or German scholar is just as likely to have avoided the problem.

Remarkably, this double standard was a recognised feature of Zionism from its earliest days and does not appear to have troubled its most influential early activist, Theodor Herzl. From his diary we learn that he considered support for the existence of a specifically Jewish state no moral obstacle to advocacy for the disintegration of all other peoples and their states. From Robert John, Behind the Balfour Declaration (IHR, 1988, p. 29):

In his diary Herzl describes submitting his draft proposals to the Rothschild Family Council, noting: “I bring to the Rothschilds and the big Jews their historical mission. I shall welcome all men of goodwill - we must be united - and crush all those of bad.”[1]

He read his manuscript “Addressed to the Rothschilds” to a friend, Meyer-Cohn, who said,

Up till now I have believed that we are not a nation - but more than a nation. I believed that we have the historic mission of being the exponents of universalism among the nations and therefore were more than a people identified with a specific land.

Herzl replied:

Nothing prevents us from being and remaining the exponents of a united humanity, when we have a country of our own. To fulfill this mission we do not have to remain literally planted among the nations who hate and despite us. If, in our present circumstances, we wanted to bring about the unity of mankind independent of national boundaries, we would have to combat the ideal of patriotism. The latter, however, will prove stronger than we for innumerable years to come.[2]

1. Lowenthal, The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.35
2. Ibid., p.63

Even Herzl, who clearly did not suffer any lack of ambition to remake the world, did not dare to dream that the ‘ideal of patriotism’ would so rapidly come to be seen as a psychological malady (and largely as a result of other influential Jews following his path of preaching one rule for them and quite another for us). How amazed he would be, then, to find that Britons of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been ruled by men who coupled ardent Zionism with a passionate rejection of their own people’s right to maintain or restore an ethnic nationalist equivalent.

No longer do our leaders hate and despise Jews (if they ever did), today they hate and despise us, or at least are compelled to act as though they do.

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Related post: http://songlight-for-dawn.blogspot.com/2009/07/they-need-us-to-be-bad.html

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I quoted from Robert John’s history of Zionism, ‘Behind the Balfour Declaration.’ At the Scribd link you can find the main body of the text, a speech given by John to an IHR conference. I own a copy of the book put out by the IHR which includes an introduction, a poem, and an afterword in addition to the text of the speech. Since the book is out of print and the main text is already available online I’ll put together a PDF which includes the supplementary material and post download info here.